BOOK REVIEW – FEBRUARY 1933
February 1933: The Winter of Literature
By Uwe Wittstock
This book starkly lays out a story about the suppression of free speech in the literary world of the Weimar Republic devoted to truth and side-by-side a parallel story about the ruthless consolidation of power by the Nazis in their takeover of the German state in a six-week period in February-March 1933. The day-by-day narrative describes the specific steps the Nazis took in the crushing of literary voices because those voices were seen as potentially the most articulate of the dissenting voices. Uncontrolled voices are a grave threat to autocratic power. With the Nazi capture of the state’s police power on the first day, the Nazi consolidation of all state power went quickly and was deadly thorough across the society.
For the Nazis, culture was a target from the beginning. Why writers? Because they articulate dissent and put wind in the pages of the daily press. Why artists? Because images are powerful and the Nazis had a modern-media-level appreciation of the role of images in propaganda. The Nazis aimed to control all voices. All the voices of state propaganda would sing in harmony.
The two control tools of the Nazi state were draconian terror-based police repression and the pervasive use of propaganda to shape public opinion. This book explains how quickly the Nazis took control of both in Germany in February 1933. The suddenness itself was a shock phenomenon. How does it work? The visible state terror grips the public with fear. What to do? Follow the state propaganda and believe what the state tells you to believe. Save your own skin first. The German experience of 1933-45 testifies to this approach’s effectiveness.
A recurrent theme in the narrative was the Nazi party’s use of self-organized street militias, principally the brownshirt SA but also others. Before taking government power, the party used the street militias to intimidate other political parties through violence including murder. After taking power, the party allowed or encouraged the street militias to launch campaigns of political terror and atrocity against all perceived political enemies. Street militias were more than a bunch of uniformed guys with colorful flags having a rowdy good time. Political violence was an intentional tool, not an accidental byproduct.
Wittstock’s book proceeds on two tracks: one is the brutal politics of the Nazi consolidation of power and the other is the almost tempest-in-a-tea kettle purging of dissidents from the Prussian Academy of Arts, a major cultural arbiter. Why did an intellectual conclave get such prompt attention? Nazi propaganda was being built around celebrating the German people—the volk—and their soon-to-be-constructed set of new values. The German people—and celebrating its “folk-ness”—were the principal propaganda frame of Nazi propaganda. In particular, recurring themes blared out by the propaganda were about keeping the race “pure” and restoring “cleanliness.” Hitler spoke incessantly about the German people in the runup to the parliamentary elections scheduled for March 5, 1933, which were called shortly after the Nazis came to power. Hitler wanted to win a “majority,” the majority of the voting public that had eluded him on his rise to power before January 30, 1933. Hitler came to power by the legitimate call to office by President Paul von Hindenburg, but he did not come with an electoral majority. At first it was a minority government, a situation arising where a willful minority had come to sit at the head of the cabinet table without a Reichstag majority but upon President von Hindenburg’s call. Nevertheless, the other chairs at the cabinet table were quickly reduced to servitude.
The story kicks off in 1931 when famous German writer Heinrich Mann, brother of the even more famous Thomas Mann, and writer Wilhelm Herzog spoke with the state secretary of the Prussian ministry of interior, Wilhelm Abegg, about their fears arising from a recent speech by Adolf Hitler. The Nazi leader had proclaimed his desire to come to power as chancellor by legal means and then afterwards establish the mechanisms of a national tribunal that would settle scores and make “heads roll,” a technique of intimidation used by autocrats on their march to power—the threat of later payback. We’ll remember who was with us and who wasn’t.
Heinrich Mann, in 1931 now famous, had written a novel of the Berlin bohemian nightlife upon which the successful movie Blue Angel starring Marlene Dietrich was based. William Herzog was a noted Jewish writer who had already established his exile in Sanary-sur-Mer east of Marseille because he perspicaciously saw the intensity of the Nazi hatred and assumed the jack boots would eventually come to power. He grasped that everything would change then—and quickly. Understanding how quickly things would change was the life-saving perception that saved many and cost others their lives.
The Nazi formula was the constitutionally legal accession to power followed by use of the state power of appointment from the cabinet table to consolidate the police power under political control. Then would start the non-constitutional abrogation of rights under the color of state authority to purge both political and cultural adversaries. The police power would be used to destroy the rights-based rule of law. The terror on the streets perpetrated by the SA brownshirts would be transmuted into institutionalized state terror against all perceived adversaries.
The two writers’ conversation with the state secretary was reported by Abegg’s secretary to her friend, Rudolf Diels, who was soon to become Göring’s head of the Berlin political police in 1933. The two writers were already on a list so to speak—and lists became death warrants in 1933.
On the last Saturday night of January 1933, the annual Press Ball was held in Berlin, the last dance of the republic so to speak. Unease circled in the background with the resignation of the chancellor, General Kurt von Schleicher, in the air. Famed antiwar writer Erich Maria Remarque attended the ball, spent the night in his hotel, and then early the next morning departed for his villa in Switzerland, leaving behind him a Germany he found more and more alien. Later a young journalist, close in appearance to Remarque, was found murdered in a ditch near the estate. Heinrich Mann’s brother, the even more famous Thomas Mann, read the account while in Paris and surmised it was not an accident but a mistaken assassination.
Mann had been on a short European tour speaking about the composer Richard Wagner in Munich, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Paris. During the year before, he had made clear that he thought National Socialism was the defrauding of an entire people by a party attempting to lie its way to revolution and power. He himself had become a target for an aggressive, marginalizing nationalism. Thomas Mann decided to stay in Paris at the end of his tour. Later he and his wife moved to Switzerland. His children brought his unfinished manuscripts from Munich. A life in exile had begun. Others were not so lucky.
Returning to the politics of early 1933, Göring was the key figure in the Nazi consolidation of state power. Hitler was the absolute authority in both the party and then the state, but Göring was the executive authority of the state takeover. Göring and the other top lieutenants never contested Hitler’s authority either during the rise to power or afterwards. Those that had were ruthlessly eliminated during the period 1933-34.
Göring had been elected President of the Reichstag on August 30, 1932 after the previous parliamentary elections when the Nazis came out as the largest party but not the majority party in the German parliament. On Sunday evening, January 29, 1933, Goring himself, acting on well-founded rumors, had hastened to Hindenburg’s residence and warned the president of a pending military coup. The Hindenburg entourage arranged for General von Blomberg, then at Geneva, to come straight to the president’s office the following morning upon his arrival in Berlin to be sworn in as defense minister and forestall any coup planned by the army general staff that would prevent Hitler being named chancellor later that day. Göring was certainly present at the creation—and all that followed.
On January 30, 1933, Hitler was called to power and named chancellor by Hindenburg. The call to Hitler came about from scheming by Hindenburg and Papen to oust General Kurt von Schleicher, the army favorite, from the chancellorship; Schleicher himself was a master intriguer. Only two other Nazis were named to the new cabinet. Wilhelm Frick was appointed the minister of interior, which was essentially powerless since the police were the responsibility of the states. The other ministry appointment went to Göring as minister without portfolio, an innocuous-looking position with seemingly no authority. Former chancellor Franz von Papen became the vice chancellor. Hindenburg and Papen thought that although they had given the Nazis the chancellorship they had boxed Hitler in with a non-Nazi cabinet and with an understanding that Hindenburg would not talk with Hitler without Papen being present.
Or had they? Göring had also been named minister of the interior for the giant state of Prussia which oversaw the Berlin police. On February 9, an emergency decree signed by Hindenburg dissolved the Prussian parliament and allowed Göring as provisional Prussian minister of the interior to take charge of the Berlin police. There was nothing “provisional” about the subsequent charges wrought. Wholesale personnel changes were made at the top. Göring consolidated and took direct charge of the police. The police state was established. “Provisional” had quickly become absolute. Would-be autocrats know how to use the color of authority.
What had made the two writers suspicious in 1931? Before 1933, Heinrich Mann had seen that violence was the weapon of the Nazis, who had mobilized tens of thousands of storm troopers to destabilize democratic government across Germany before the power grab. Using a non-state, political street militia to wage street terror against political adversaries was the Nazis’ big weapon.
What had the writers understood about the Nazis’ method of using street violence and institutional police power? The Nazis understood how to orchestrate the use of a party-based, nongovernmental, volunteer street militia with the complementary power of a politically controlled police to disrupt and then exert absolute control over a society. The two went hand-in-hand: the street militia and the official police power.
On the culture war front, the writers grasped that the state would turn predator rather than protector, that published writers and known artists would became just well-known names on a list—lists that could quickly become arrest if not kill lists. Many writers and dissidents in February and March were not even arrested, they just “disappeared” to an undocumented fate. Some naïve writers and artists articulated brave words and speeches before the purges but had not realized that words not backed up by a rule of law enforced by a constitutional government would become warrants for arrest leading to a merciless death. And the Nazis did merciless death well.
On Monday morning, January 30, Lieutenant General Werner von Blomberg stepped off the night train from Geneva at Anhalter Bahnhof in Berlin. He was summoned from the international disarmament conference in Geneva by a telegram from Hindenburg the day before. On the arrival platform, Blomberg ignored a similar summons from army chief of staff General von Hamerstein in favor of going with Oskar von Hindenburg, son of the Reich President and head of state. Hindenburg immediately swore Blomberg in as the new defense minister even though Hitler and the cabinet had yet to be installed. The German army never offered any further resistance to the Nazi police state; Hindenburg’s turn on Schleicher disarmed them.
Shortly after 11:15 in the morning, Hindenburg administered the oath of office as chancellor to Adolf Hitler and members of his cabinet. The ceremony was over by twelve o’clock.
That evening, the accession to power was celebrated with torchlight parades across Berlin. Among the marching units was SA unit Sturm 33, which had a reputation for being one of the worst collections of Nazi street brawlers, tough brownshirts who had already killed communists during street battles. They were masters of street terror and viewed Monday night’s torchlight parade as a starting point for even greater violence, a march into one of the red districts, a known communist stronghold, of Charlottenburg, a sprawling Berlin working-class neighborhood.
The SA toughs marched into the neighborhood screaming insults and were met in turn by residents who knew them and hated them. A communist self-defense force confronted them. Shots were fired and one of the SA leaders, Hans Maikowski, went down as did a Berlin police officer who had been surveilling the group, Sergeant Josef Zuritz. Both died shortly afterward in the hospital. The other leader of Sturm 33, Fritz Hahn, went later that night and briefed Nazi leader Josef Goebbels on the two deaths. The exhausted Goebbels listened and then decided to sleep on the information.
The shooting of Maikowski and Zuritz occurred outside an apartment at Wallstrasse 24, one of whose residents was Rudi Carius, a communist operative. He had immediately gone to ground. Nevertheless, the police were searching for him as a witness. Carius had a relationship with Nelly Kroger, a hostess at a nightclub who was also the mistress to the much older Heinrich Mann. She was a living exemplar of Mann’s blue angel, the floozy chanteuse played in the movie by Marlene Dietrich.
Surprisingly, Heinrich Mann knew all about Rudi and sometimes met the younger man in Nelly’s flat and enjoyed talking politics with him. Rudi gave him a feel for the rough street politics of the communist world of Berlin. It was a window into another world fascinating to the bourgeois Mann.
The following day Goebbels collected his thoughts and decided to make a national celebration of the two men’s deaths, portraying them as martyrs in the ascendant Nazi cause. A huge memorial service would be staged at Berlin Cathedral. It will be a propaganda triumph reasoned the Nazi party leader. Goring and Hitler would attend, pulling up to the cathedral in open Mercedes before adoring crowds.
But Fritz Hahn had not been Maikowski’s comrade in arms. This was not a tribute to a fallen hero but rather payback to a potential traitor. Hahn was close to Goebbels. He had been informing on his SA colleagues. In late 1932 and early 1933, many of the SA street leaders became convinced that after years of doing the dirty work of street fighting, the senior Nazi leadership would throw them over upon taking power. In a big meeting of SA leaders just after Christmas, the anxious SA leaders expressed their disgust and more importantly their belief that Goebbels would be capable of just such a dirty scheme. Maikowski roared that if that were the case, he would take it upon himself to kill Goebbels.
Hahn reported the dissidence to Goebbels and it was decided that at an opportune time to strike first. Hahn knew another SA street fighter, Alfred Buske, who would take on the job of disposing of Maikowski efficiently for good money, there being no honor among these scorpions of the street. The threat would be removed while a surreptitious warning would be served out to other SA leaders—don’t mess with Goebbels. On the night of the SA march, Buske shot Maikowski and also took out the only possible witness, the nearby Berlin police sergeant.
The memorial ceremony was held at 1 p.m. Sunday, February 5 in the Berlin Cathedral. Hitler and Göring both laid wreaths. Goebbels had smoothly transmuted a back alley intrigue into a major spectacle of state theater. Later on March 11 Goebbels received his reward with appointment as Reich Minister for Propaganda in charge of all German media and culture; the orchestra leader had arrived who would ensure the harmony of voices.
What needed to be understood was that Göring was the leader of the extremist wing of the Nazi party and even Hitler had to be wary of his reach, which is why Himmler’s SS was his personal body guard. Hitler was always careful about his security. Göring used his power as Prussian minister of interior to launch a thorough, ruthless, and brutal suppression of rule of law and democracy while consolidating all the police power of the state. It was the former ace fighter pilot’s fingerprints that were all over the coming reign of terror; he was not the jovial figure of the newsreels.
On February 13, Wilhelm Herzog gave his final lecture in Berlin. As mentioned earlier, he had already rented several years before a small house on the French Riviera at Sanary-sur-Mer, east of Marseille. He planned to leave for France the following day. In his speech, Herzog made the parallels between the anti-Semitic French military officers who tried to crucify Captain Dreyfus and the generals of the Weimar Republic. Afterwards, a Reichstag deputy approached and urged Herzog to flee that very night. Herzog also urged Heinrich Mann to flee with him. Mann demurred and said that Herzog always saw the black side of everything. Herzog demurred, “I don’t know if I see black, but I do see brown.” Herzog headed for the train station that night and made it to France.
In Berlin on February 15, Goring named Nazi politician Magnus von Levetzow as police superintendent. Other top level changes were made. On February 17 Goring issued his famous “shoot-to-kill” directive to Prussian police to assist the SA and SS in their confrontations against other political groups. Vigilantism took hold in Germany.
On Sunday, February 19, what turned out to be a last reception for many writers in Berlin took place. Abegg, the now former state secretary of the Prussian ministry of interior, attended and warned that blacklists had been prepared and a systematic program of murders would take place. The Nazis would strike sometime around the March 5 parliamentary elections. Heinrich Mann belatedly plotted his escape and surreptitiously left by train soon after. His apartment was ransacked by the SA the following day. He had not waited a day too long.
Wednesday, February 22. Heinrich Mann walked across the bridge over the Rhine River and entered France. He had just barely made it. He met Wilhelm Herzog in Toulon later that evening. In Berlin, leading Prussian ministry of interior officials were replaced. Goring deputized by decree 40,000 SA and SS men and other right-wing paramilitaries as auxiliary police officers. The vigilantism was now official. The coming savagery and brutality of the SA and SS were stomach turning.
In Germany, Carl von Ossietzky, the editor of a leading leftist newspaper, presented a speech on press freedom and ended stating “to remain true to ourselves and to stand up with our body and our lives for what we have believed in and fought for.” An admirer urged him to flee, stressing he was too important to stay. Ossietzky replied, “I’m staying. Let them come and take me away. I have thought about it for a long while. I’m staying.” The fate of Ossietzky was a terrible cautionary tale.
Early in the morning of Tuesday, February 28, the arrests started. Ossietzky was arrested around 3:30 a.m. in his flat. His brave words would be paid for by the cruelest of incarcerations in some of the worst concentration camps in the police state. He was awarded the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize but was lot allowed to accept; his now wrecked body itself a living testament to his maltreatment. He was eventually discharged to a Berlin hospital with tuberculosis and his wife was allowed to nurse him through his final broken days. He died in 1938 aged forty-eight.
The night before Ossietzky’s arrest, on the evening of Monday, February 27, the Reichstag fire was perpetrated. On Tuesday afternoon, February 28, the cabinet agreed Hitler’s Fire Decrees and Hindenburg signed them. The constitutional state was abolished. Dictatorship had arrived. It had only taken four weeks.
The election was held Sunday, March 5 and the Nazis and their allies won around 51 percent, a majority, in an election marred by violence and intimidation. The 81 Communist seats were annulled on March 8 but as Reich Interior Minister Frick sneered at a rally all the Communists were already in concentration camps. The Nazis then broke the power of the Social Democrats. There was no more opposition.
Soon harrowing accounts of sadistic brutality inside “wild” prisons came out; there were more than a hundred in Berlin, supervised by the out-of-control street militias, principally the SA. These were places without justice or law—or any trace of mercy at all. Terrible screams rent the neighborhoods, chilling the spirits of all hurriedly passing by. Police who eventually were allowed to clear these sites out were rendered speechless by the barbarity they encountered.
Many writers and artists got out of Germany; some did not. Complete repression came quickly. The worlds of free-speaking politics and free-thinking arts ended at the same time.
This book graphically describes how autocracy deconstructed freedom brick-by-brick in Germany in 1933 and in so doing so describes how it is done everywhere and across time. The lessons are universal. It is a classical tale of how democracy ends in a modern nation state despite the presence of a freedom-enriched high culture. When the dark tides come, they can be all engulfing. One lets rule of law go at one’s peril.
Myersbooks History 