Source: K. D. Bracher, The German Dictatorship (London, 1971), pp.228-247.
Apologists maintain to this day that Hitler's real plans were unknown at that time, that his call for a revision of Versailles had been a legitimate demand, and that at any rate the Army had preserved greater independence than other institutions. In fact, however, at least at the top military level, there could have been little doubt about Hitler's designs for expansion and conquest. Even if one did not put much credence in what he had to say in Mein Kampf , copies of which were now being disseminated by the millions, Hitler had made himself unmistakably clear at his very first meeting with the military leadership. Any possible misgivings about the bellicose expansion plans the Chancellor revealed on February 3, 1933, before the Army and Navy command, only four days after his appointment, were dispelled by his simultaneous promises for the expansion and independence of the armed forces and the national defence in the New State. Seeckt's narrow, one-sided autonomy ideal was too deeply rooted to permit the development of any serious resistance to the new course and the dual National Socialist take over strategy. Almost the only exception was Hammerstein's resignation at the end of 1933, but it had no further consequences. And moreover, there was a widespread feeling that with Hindenburg heading both state and Army, Army political veto could if needed be exercised. But above all, the mutuality of interests with Army regime dedicated to military (and pseudo-military) values continued to grow. Thus, contrary to the legend of an Army 'above politics,' co operation with the new regime, emphatically called for by Blomberg, met with far less resistance than had co operation with the Republic.
This collaborative course with all its delusions and illusions of a presumably equal partnership of Army and National Socialist reached its zenith when Hitler used the differences with the SA leadership seemingly to satisfy the interest of the Army, but in truth to make his monopoly position formally untouchable. The bloody purge of June 30, 1934, and the tacit complicity of the Army, together with Hindenburg's death, presented Hitler with the unique opportunity of realising the idea of the total leader state much more fully than was the case in Italy. What motivated the momentous collaboration of the Army command at this decisive turning point was the belief that the power struggle among the National Socialist leaders would do away with the military rivalry of the SA together with Roehm's power pretensions and assure the Army of the monopoly Hitler had promised. The old tensions between SA and party leadership, exacerbated by the rivalry between SA and Army, came to a head once more in the spring of 1934. It was consciously played up by various quarters, and particularly by Goering and Himmler. The myth of an imminent Roehm putsch against Hitler played a vital part in this. But the fact of the matter is that tolerance of the Army that promoted a conflict. Although Roehm himself repeatedly affirmed his loyalty to Hitler and finally, to calm things down, ordered a general vacation for the SA, the party and SS leadership managed through deceptive manoeuvres to heighten the impression that a second revolution of the SA was in the offing. To this day, it still is unclear how the alarm to the Munich SA and the rumours of an alleged imminent overthrow of the Government came to be circulated.
At any rate, these rumours were used to persuade Hitler, who possibly may still have wavered, to break off a scheduled trip ΓÇô probably undertaken from camouflage purposes ΓÇô to Bad Godesberg at 1:00 A.M. on June 30, 1934, and have him appear unexpectedly in Munich three lto 'settle accounts' with the SA leaders, to have Roehm and other SA leaders called out from their beds in Bad Wiessee and have six of them executed summarily that very same day in Munich. Roehm was executed the next day by Theodor Eicke and Michael Lippert, the commandants of the Dachau concentration camp. In addition to the charge of treason, the homosexuality of the victims was offered as justification for their deaths, even though their preferences had been know for years (and moreover homosexuals were among the executioners). More victims were added, also outside of the SA. Among them were such old adversaries of Hitler's as Kahr in Munich, Papen's associates Herbert von Bose and Edgar Jung (who were under Goering's direction in Berlin), and most important, General von Schleicher and his wife, General von Bredow, and Gregor Strasser.
With Roehm and Strasser, Hitler rid himself of his oldest military and political collaborators; with Schleicher, of his predecessor as Chancellor. Papen, the confident overseer of the Hitler Cabinet, who two weeks earlier had criticised the totalitarian trend in a speech in Marburg inspired by his adviser Edgar Jung, was put under house arrest. Later, after the murder of his friends, he gladly exchanged the post of Vice Chancellor for the office of special personal envoy of Hitler and went to Vienna to prepare Austria's annexation. This was typical both of the character of a man who so flaunted his Christianity and of the disastrous role played since 1932 by this irresponsible pacemaker of dictatorship.
The smoothness with which the murders of June 30 were carried out is eloquent proof that no Roehm putsch was imminent. There was no resistance encountered anywhere, not even among the armed elite formations of the SA; many victims unsuspectingly surrendered of their own accord, having faith in their 'Fuehrer' and in the eventual clarification of an obvious mistake. The only shots fired were those of the executioners; often enough the SS commandos were thereby also settling private feuds. The number of victims, officially set at 77, is estimated to have been between 150 and 200.
The main significance of the purge does not lie in the disputed number of its victims but in its methods and in its consequences. The population may have accepted it by saying that the revolution consumes its children, but the fact was that any possible opposition within the party as well as in the national conservative camp was being nipped in the bud. Moreover, the arbitrary power of the Fuehrer was formally turned into a principle. Within a month, Hitler's total dictatorship was further institutionalised when the Army took the oath of loyalty to Hitler personally and tolerated his usurpation of the Presidential Office. These decisive acts rested on the mutuality of interest between Hitler and the Army, which permitted itself to be made an accomplice of Hitler's deeds.
One aspect was the legalisation of the terror, which more clearly than anything else revealed the true nature of the take over and what the future held in store. Hitler quite openly now claimed the 'right' to rid himself of his opponents without either legal investigation or trial. If earlier terror acts, especially by the SA, had been accepted in the belief that they were inevitable albeit temporary by-products of a revolution, murder, carried out by the Government, now became a part and parcel of official policy. Considering the lack of resistance, the Government could not possibly claim to be acting in 'self-defence.' But this was precisely how it justified itself in the formal 'legalisation' of the crimes after the event. This was done with the law of July 3, 1934, which contained only this one terse paragraph 'The measures taken on June 30 and July 1 and 2 to strike down the treasonous attacks are justifiable acts of self-defence by the state.' The law was as grotesque as it was typical: a simple assertion in place of judicial investigation (although in the case of Schleicher's murder an investigation was begun but immediately cut off). By appointing itself judge in its own case, and turning violation of law into law through a pseudo-legal sham law, the Government also forced the courts to sanction the regime, or at least prevented them from instigating any moves against the murderers. The loudly proclaimed 'lawful state of National Socialism' 15 was quite clearly a state of injustice, arbitrary rule, and government by crime.
Thus the internal consequences of this revolution from above go far beyond its power-political aspects. The Government's official condonation of crimes and the elevation of murder to a legal official act were tantamount to the formal erosion of the legal system and its subjugation to the will of a rule who appointed himself 'Supreme Judge of the German people' (speech by Hitler before the Reichstag, July 13, 1934). The legalisation of crime in the name of the state was further underscored by the praise and rewards bestowed on Hitler's accomplices in murder. This was the beginning of the rise of Himmler and his SS, which by decree of July 20, 1934, replaced the SA as an independent organisation and was given the right to organise armed combat troops. Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD) and SS chieftains who had taken part in the crimes of the week of June 30, among them Sepp Dietrich, Christian Weber, and Emil Maurice, were promoted. Other henchmen were decorated by Himmler on July 4. Murder officially sanctioned and lauded became the norm for the smooth future annihilation of political enemies, Jews, and 'inferiors.' Later Himmler himself ΓÇô at an SS leader conference at Poznan on October 4, 1943 ΓÇô specifically made the connection between June 30, 1934, and the policy of annihilation and confirmed the continuity a still widespread tendency to divide National Socialist rule into 'constructive' and 'degenerate' (wartime) periods.
Even after June 30, it was still possible to find intellectual helpers willing to lend their influential names to the brutal rule. Carl Schmitt headed this list. In the Deutsche Juristenzeitung (German Law Journal) of August 1, 1934 (pp. 945-50) he proclaimed the quintessence of his years of undermining the legal state and the arbitrariness of the total state in a cynical article entitle 'The Fuehrer Protects the Law.' Schmitt praised mass murder as the 'justice of the Fuehrer' meting out 'direct justice,' as 'genuine administration of justice' and the 'highest law: of the new order. Thus, more or less clever theories of authoritarianism and dictatorship merged with the crude sanctioning of the National Socialist claim to the total manipulation of society, state, and law. 'The idea of law became simply a word for force.' 16 It also spelled the opportunistic capitulation before the legalisation comedy which Hitler performed on the stage of the Reichstag on July 13, when Goering in his role of President of the Reichstag ended Hitler's two-hour report to the nation with the dictum: 'All of us always approve what the Fuehrer does.' 17 The mechanism of the legalisation ended with the order for the burning 'of all files connected with the acts of the last few days.' 18 The abortive Reichstag fire show trial in the autumn of 1933, apparently did not evoke any desire for a repeat performance. When, after the collapse of the regime, attempts were made to track down specific cases it was found that almost all proofs had been destroyed.
The final stages of the seizure of power were incompatible with even the most generous view of the 'legal revolution.' Its terrorism was revealed also by the broader aspects in which the bloody events took place. The institutional consolidation of the Fuehrer dictatorship brought down the barriers which the partners of January 30, 1933, had thought would protect them against National Socialist autocratic rule. Papen was pushed off the stage, which he had so confidently mounted with Hitler. The last wraps fell off the national revolution, the conservative frame around National Socialism, the aristocratic-authoritarian nationalism surround its plebeian-totaliman was destroyed. Hindenburg, the symbol of this illusion, was eighty-six years old, remote from political reality, and surrounded by advisers beholden to Hitler. Since the Day of Potsdam, he had been nothing more than a respectable front for the dictatorship, his last service in this capacity being the proclamation for a proclamation for a national plebiscite in November, 133. His death brought a timely solution to a number of problems. On his deathbed in Neudeck, where he had been brought at the beginning of June, 1934, Hindenburg lent himself to one final service to the regime which he had so carelessly installed in power: On July 2, Hindenburg, probably at the instigation of his son and Meissner, sent Hitler and Goering a wire of congratulations on their handling of the events of June 30.
The highest sanctioning of the murders introduced a macabre drama, in which the highest offices of the state were merged in the person of the 'Fuehrer and Reich Chancellor' who was above all controls. Even before Hindenburg's death on the morning of August 2, 1934, the Cabinet passed a law ('signed' by the absent Papen) merging the offices of President and Chancellor, thereby once and for all smashing the hopes for a restoration of the monarchy voiced in Hindenburg's disputed last will and testaments. This 'legal' act also resembled a coup d'etat , for it violated the restrictions of the Enabling Act on which the Government continued to base itself. The legality claim thus was shown up once again, however strongly later news and decrees sought to buttress the new construction. A plebiscite was to bring the 'express sanction of the German people,' even though the re-organisation had been designated as 'constitutionally valid' prior to any such vote. This platonic act of approbation was explained by Hitler in the voice of the confirmed democrat: He was 'convinced through and through that all state power must emanate from the people and [be] confirmed by them in free, secret elections.' In explaining his new title, he followed the pseudo-democratic camouflage of his usurpation with the pathetic contention that Hindenburg had given 'the title of Reich President unique significance' 19 and thus it should thenceforth not be used. Hence the usurpation of merging the offices of President and Chancellor: a constitutional somersault, which numerous German legal theorist obediently parroted. The oath of loyalty to the dictator sworn by every German solider on August 2, 1934, the Army's confirmation of its alliance with Hitler, was equally significant. Perhaps not all officers acquiesced in this new course as spinelessly as Blomberg and Reichenau. But together with the satisfaction over rearmament and the dismantling of the SA, Hitler's repeated assurances that the party and the Army were to be the two sole pillars of the National Socialist State proved effective. And so the illusions on which then now broken alliance of the 'national revolution' had been based lived on. The precipitate loyalty oath of the Army also was the result of coup like manipulation. It was administered with dispatch, without benefit of special legislation, merely by command of Blomberg, an order, which unquestionably exceeded his authority. Only eighteen days later, after the plebiscite of August 19, was a law passed sanctioning the coup. The oath was irregular also because existing laws provided for the swearing-in only of new recruits; a new oath by the entire Army would have required a change in the Constitution. But even more serious than these formal violations were the wording and circumstances of the oath. The new text was tailored to Hitler personally, ignoring and allegiance to Constitution, legal institutions, and superiors. And the 'sacred oath' sworn 'before God' was linked up with the duty for 'unconditional obedience'.
This religiously sanctioned formula tied the Army absolutely to Hitler, though in his letter thanking Blomberg dated August 21, Hitler renewed his pledge to preserve the mutual-interest alliance and the relationship of mutual loyalty ushered in by the oath. Hitler for his part took on the obligation 'to defend the existence and the inviolability of the Wehrmacht', and 'to secure the Army as the sole weapons bearer of the nation.' 20 But even after it became obvious that Hitler was ignoring these guarantees ΓÇô as he also ignored those of the concordat with the Catholic Church ΓÇô the oath continued to tie the Army to Hitler, a one-sided arrangement with dire consequences that continued to the very last day of the Third Reich. All charges of 'breach of oath' raised against the military resistance movement ignore Hitler's own repeated breaches of his promises, by which he forfeited his claim to loyalty and obedience long before the revolt of July 20, 1944, sought to dissolve this misused relationship.
But ever since June 30, 1934, the National Socialist leadership, and above all Hitler, knew 'what he could ask of the officer corps so long as he took care to avoid a public scandal.' 21 The Army, be accepting the assassination of two generals without protest, by becoming the accomplice of the SS, and finally by rendering the oath on the day of Hindenburg's death, tied itself firmly to the National Socialist regime, 'to which it felt committed in some dark manner.' 22 Without the assistance of the Army, at first through its toleration and later through its active co-operation, the country's rapid and final restructuring into the total leader state could not have come about. While making the military co-responsible for his murders and coups, Hitler at the same time undermined the monopoly he had promised the Army by building up the SS. Barely four years later, the fall of Blomberg and Fritsch, the resignation of Beck, and the continuing rise of the SS were to show which side had profited from the 'second revolution'. To be sure, in the interval, continued rearmament, universal military service, the remilitarization of the Rhineland, and finally the annexation of Austria stilled most doubts and further cemented the Army-Hitler alliance. The road to war made this alliance irrevocable up to the very end; after 1938, only a small minority of the officer corps planned and dared to offer the resistance which, in fatal mis-judgement of the new regime and their own position, they had failed to offer in 1934. The role of the Army in consolidating National Socialist autocracy cannot be overestimated. By comparison, the plebiscite of August 19, 1934, was nothing more than the final farce of the pseudo-legal revolution. The voter was given no genuine choice, either then or in the plebiscites of 1936 and 1938. The vote of August 19 was an act of confirmation without any alternative and without constitutional or political significance. Nonetheless the acclamation was not an unqualified success. Even a new wave of propaganda and psychological coercion, of intimidation and terror, of interference in the electoral process and fraud could not bring the votes up to the 99 per cent to which the plebiscitary acclamations of dictatorial regimes generally aspire. Taking into account the conditions of the elections, a disproportionately high number of no votes were cast, particularly in Hamburg and Berlin, were only 72.6 and 74.2 per cent, respectively, of the qualified voters cast affirmative ballots 23 . Let us keep in mind that in totalitarian 'elections' non-voters and invalid ballots generally should be considered as an opposition voice. As in November Catholics capitulated, following the support given by the church fathers to their concordat partner Hitler, the number of not votes in some Catholic regions increased in 1934 ΓÇô clear evidence of a beginning disillusionment in that quarter.
Most importantly, in some areas assent to the total Leader State remained significantly below the vote of the preceding 'elections.' November, 1933, had brought 87.8 per cent yes votes, while in August 1934, these totalled only 84.6 per cent: the over-all vote also fell below that of 1933. The falling-off in the yes vote in Schleswig-Holstein, where the NSDAP had scored its greatest result the year before, and as early as 1932 had won an absolute majority, is particularly striking (84.1 and 80.3 per cent in 1933 and 1934, respectively). The smallest 'assent' was won in some boroughs of Berlin (Wilmersdorf, 68.8 per cent), and Aachen (65.7 per cent, as compared to 80.6 per cent in 1933), and in Ahaus in Westphalia (69.9 per cent, as compared to 88.3 per cent in 1933). 'Unfavourable' election returns were also reported from Herford, Bielefeld, Bremerhaven, Luebeck, Iserlohn, Leipzig, Breslau, and rural districts of Muenster and Olpe. This was the last time that traditional electoral patterns were discernible in the resistance of Socialist and Catholic voters, before the totalitarian perfecting of the plebiscitary method resulted in the meaningless monotony of 99-per cent election results. The true feeling about the regime, particularly among the workers, were made evident in the shop-steward elections of April, 1935; the results were not made public, but on the basis of available evidence it seems that frequently no more than 30-40 per cent of a plant voted for the single Nazi slate 24 . At issue here were not the great national acclamations of 1933, 1934, 1936, and 1938 connected with a specific political purpose, but the concrete reality of the system. Yet there can be no doubt that the majority of the population was no longer able or willing to resist the noise of the acclamatory propaganda.
Stronger than any reservations was the pull of power and apparent success, the impression of order an unity, the recollection of the pre democratic authoritarian state, and the belief in the unlimited promises of the regime. And where manipulation failed to bring the desired results, as in the case of the shop-steward elections, facts were shelved and assertions substituted, as, for example, Robert Ley's, that 'far more than 80 per cent of German industrial workers' had voted for National Socialism. Hence, a still-doubting citizen might ask himself, what purpose could be served by a risky opposition at the ballot box? Thus, even under the still imperfect results of 1933 and 1934, the plebiscite was nothing more than one of many methods for the mobilisation and manipulation of the population. It served the same ends as parades, demonstrations, mass rallies to listen to radio broadcasts, and collection campaigns ΓÇô to create the atmosphere of 'voluntary' compulsion, of manipulated consensus, of the un-political politicisation to distract from the reality of the coercive system.
The Army, seemingly an independent power in the system, also saw this mobilisation as contributing to its strengthening and rearmament. The fact that democracy and free elections were abolished together with the unlamented Weimar Republic after all spoke in favour of the new regime, even though one might have preferred a traditionally authoritarian, conservative monarchy. Thus it should come as no surprise that the notes on a conference in the Defence Ministry in the spring of 1934, at which possible moves against the SA were hinted at, mention that the following point met with great approbation: 'New elections will be so phrased that everyone will have to say yes.' The only thing that will not be changed is the position of the Army.' 25 The history of the German Army since 1918 is a history of self-delusion. What led them into the unequal alliance with Hitler, into war and catastrophe, was not the 'nemesis of power,' as John Wheeler-Bennett asserts in his book by that title (1954), but political ineptitude and un-political arrogance.
As early as August 20, 1934, Hitler was able to proclaim the victorious conclusion of his fifteen-year fight for power: 'Beginning with the highest office of the Reich, through the entire administration down to the leadership of the smallest village, the German Reich today is in the hands of the National Socialist Party.' And in fact what mattered was not so much a taking over of all positions, for this was not invariably the case: there was an astonishing degree of continuity, beginning with non-National Socialists in the Government to the civil service and judiciary to economic and cultural life, and above all in the 'independent' Army. But state and society were nonetheless completely in the hands of the National Socialists, subject to their control and manipulation, serving a regime focused entirely on the one Leader; for the rest, it brought anything but order and security, but rather arbitrariness and frequently internal chaos. Hitler himself tailored his proclamation of August 20 to his dual aspect of the consolidation of power: 'The fight for governmental power has ceased as of this day. But the fight for our precious people continues.' 26 This melodramatic sentence meant nothing more than that only after the last remnants of pre- and non-National Socialist power had been eliminated could the total gathering-in of the nation, the instrumentalisation in the service of Hitlerian goals, be fully realised.
This was also the framework within which the NSDAP was assigned its position and function as the ideological and ruling force above and within the conquered stated. In the summer of 1933, it had become the only existing party and was entrusted with the task of educating a new elite. Rudolf Hess opened the Reich party congress of 1934 by stating that 'the law of totality' was to be the guiding principle of all future National Socialist policy. Hitler ceremoniously recalled the epoch of the 'final consolidation of National Socialist power in Germany.' Since the summer of 1933, he said, they had, fighting a battle, 'broken through and taken one enemy position after the other.' Now, as already a year earlier, he declared 'the National Socialist revolution . . . as revolutionary power process is closed.' Beginning now is the evolution, and since the leadership 'in Germany today has the power to do everything,' its actions in the future 'cannot be inhibited by anything, except through impulses of a tactical, personal, and hence temporary nature.' 27 But herein lay problems. What did the declaration that the 'final' conquest of Germany would be followed by 'the realisation of the National Socialist program directed from above' mean if that program was anything but clear and consistent, while Hitler's aims were directed toward the outside, toward race and Lebensraum policies, toward expansion and hegemony? When Hitler prophesied that in the next thousand years there will be no revolution in Germany,' this bombastic dictum was in direct keeping with the slogan of the Thousand-Year Reich of Goering's promise that the next hundred years there probably would not be any election. History did not heed these prophecies. But the wrapping-up of the seizure of power opened up an area in which the consolidation of totalitarian rule could progress and the policy of expansion and domination in Europe, the essence of National Socialism, being. National Socialist power and rule did not rest on a consistent political philosophy or even a detailed master plan. The thinking and conduct of this 'movement' was eclectic and opportunistic, its ideas of power politics vulgarly Machiavellian. And yet it would be a mistake to see the spread and imposition of totalitarian rule as mere improvisation and response to favourable opportunities. Alone the pace of the power seizure, so much more rapid and more completely successful than that in Fascist Italy, bespeaks the purposeful logic of the Nazi power ideology. It was given its inner content by the immovable consistency with which Hitler had clung to his Weltanschauung since his Vienna years: above all, anti-Semitism and anti-Slavism. They formed the basis of the two primary aims toward which the consolidation and application of the power he had won were directed: annihilation of the Jews and eastward expansion.
References:
15.In the eyes of Carl Schmitt, the 'National Socialist state without doubt was an exemplary constitutional state, perhaps even more so than most countries in the world.' For documentation, see Gottfried Dietze, 'Rechtsstaat und Staatsrecht,' in Die moderne Demokratie und ihr Recht , II (Tuebingen, 1966), 37 f.
16.Karl Dietrich Erdmann, Die Zeit der Weltkriege (3rd ed.; Stuttgart, 1963), p. 198.
17. Verhandlungen des Reichstags , CEDLVIII (July 13, 1934), 32.
18.Otto Meissner, Staatssekretaer unter Ebert-Hindenburg-Hitler (Hamburg, 1960), p. 370.
19. Reichsgesetzblatt I , 1934, pp. 747ΓÇô51.
20. Voelkischer Beobachter , August 21, 1934, p. 1.
21.Wolfgang Sauer, in K. D. Bracher, W. Sauer, and G. Schulz, Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung (2nd ed.; Cologne and Opladen, 1962), p. 965.
22.Hermann Mau, 'Die zweite Revolution,' in Vierteljahreshefte fuer Zeitgeschichte , I (1953), p. 136.
23.Election analyses in Bracher, Sauer, and Schulz, op. cit. , pp. 95 ff., 350 ff.
24.Theodor Eschenburg, 'Dokumentation,' in VfZG, No. 3 (1955), pp. 314 ff.
25.Conference notes of Major Henrici, in Zeugenschrifttum des Instituts fuer Zeitgeschichte (Munich).
26.Gerd Ruehle, Das Dritte Reich (Berlin, 1935), p. 278.
27. Der Kongress zu Nuernberg vom 5.ΓÇô6. September 1934 (Munich, 1934), pp. 18, 22ΓÇô24.
