HITLER AND THE FUNCTIONING OF THE THIRD REICH

Abstract

On the evening of 30 January 1933, Joseph Goebbels exhilaratingly recorded in his diary: “It seems like a dream… the Wilhelmstrasse1 is ours… the Fuhrer is appointed Chancellor… Germany is at a turning-point in her history … like a fairy tale … Germany has awakened!”2 Over the course of approximately the next year-and-a-half, an astonishingly rapid transformation engulfed Germany. Beginning on this momentous eve-marked by a mesmerizing torchlight parade and iconic pageantry that symbolized both the Nazi movement’s revolutionary vigor as well as regime change-and followed shortly by measures calculated to consolidate and extend Hitler’s authority and the influence of the NSDAP (German National Socialist Workers’ Party, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), sweeping changes were set in motion that established the dictatorship. Hitler, as leader of a political “movement” rather than a political “party,” projected himself as a messianic visionary pursuing a vital mission, and had written in Mein Kampf 3 that only he and his movement possessed the necessary ideological convictions, and were “alone capable not only of halting the decline of the German people, but of creating the granite foundation upon which some day a state will rest which represents, not an alien mechanism of economic concerns and interests, but a national organism: A Germanic State of the German Nation.” Hitler had no reservations about his goal to restructure the German state under his per-sonal leadership, and in 1933, he began to implement the plan that he long envisioned, beginning with his manipulation and utter rejection of the republic’s constitutional limitations. In 1923, he had already proclaimed that “the volkisch state must free all leadership and especially the highest-that is, the political leadership-entirely from the parliamentary principle of majority rule-in other words, mass rule-and instead absolutely guarantee the right of the personality.” Now, with political power in hand, he embarked on a path that jettisoned the constraints of democratic parliamentary government and created instead a system defined by his own increased personal authority and by a struggle for influence and power among those close to him. This ultimately would have far-reaching consequences in the implementation of Nazi policies that were so deeply rooted in racial ideology. Immediately following his appointment, Hitler convinced President Paul von Hindenburgto dissolve the Reichstag and call for new elections for 5 March 1933, expecting to receive a majority of seats in the new parliament. For the next 7 weeks, the nation was governed via emergency decrees. On his second day in office, Hitler delivered a radio address to the German people wherein he vowed to raise the nation from what he characterized as 14 years of “decay” and “ruin” under the Weimar government, a system he castigated as beingstrongly influenced by Marxism. Foreshadowing the campaign against leftist parties that followed in the coming weeks, he warned of the continued threat of Bolshevism, promising to “declare a merciless war” against what he defined as “political nihilism.” He promised that his government would rebuild the Reich, and asked the German people to “give us four years’ time and then put us on trial and judge us.”4 A swift and pronounced repression of political opponents soon followed, and although the Nazis claimed that they had effected a legal, bloodless revolution, in fact, considerable violence accompanied the Nazi takeover of power. From spring to summer of 1933, about 27,000 political prisoners were interned in concentration camps and subjected to inhumane treatment and physical abuse, so that by the fall of that year some 600 had perished.5