— from Jens Kruse —
Peter Fritzsche, the W.D. & Sarah E. Trowbridge Professor of History at the University of Illinois, has written an important and timely book. It makes a good companion volume to Benjamin Carter Hett’s The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic, which I reviewed for these pages in September of 2018.
While Hett opens his account with the Reichstag fire which the Nazis used to issue an emergency degree that opened the door wide to the coming dictatorship, Fritsche’s opening scene depicts the meeting, shortly before 11:00 a.m. on Monday, January 30, 1933, of powerful conservative and right wing politicians, including Adolf Hitler, in the antechamber of President Paul von Hindenburg’s offices. Fritzsche is clear about the purpose of the meeting: “The men in the room were determined: they would destroy the republic and establish a dictatorship powerful enough to bend back the influence of political parties and break the socialists”(1). They had some differences of opinion about the details: would Hitler be the Chancellor of the new government or not, would there be new election to the Reichstag soon or not? But by 11:15 that morning their overwhelming desire to destroy the republic had produced an agreement. If they could persuade the hesitant President, Hitler would be appointed Chancellor and there would be new elections soon. In one of the most catastrophic
political miscalculation of all time the conservatives in the group thought that they could use Hitler and his Nazi-Party as a tool for their agenda, that they could control him.
While Fritzsche starts with the conspiratorial meeting of men of great power and, throughout his book, traces the decisions and actions of the Nazi-led government at the highest levels of state power, one of the strengths of his book is that he also traces the psychological mechanisms and social tools with which the Nazis bent even that roughly half of the population that were not supporters into willing participants in the new fascist state that gets established during these 100 days. On the basis of letters and diaries of ordinary people, and even the narratives of contemporary novels, Fritzsche gives us a multifaceted account that makes clear that – in addition to the brutal SA terror against social democrats and communists, the beatings, killings, and concentration camps, the domination of the public sphere with marches, speeches, and campaign rallies – ordinary Germans were made to buy into a mythical narrative that persuaded them to join the “New Germany” of the Nazi state in a way that made coercion seem like consent. An abrupt decision at quarter past eleven on that fateful January 30, 1933 “led, in only one hundred days, to the Thousand-Year Reich” (8).
To give you, dear reader, a glimpse of how the Nazis turned a democracy into a dictatorship in just 100 days, I think I could do worse than allowing you to follow along with Fritzsche’s narrative by giving you a few selected quotes:
Executive power passed almost completely into the hands of the Nazis after the Reichstag fire on February 27, 1933. (…) The communists were the first targets, but all independent political organizations were eliminated or coordinated in the months to come. (121)
The emergency legislation on February 28 established the foundations for the Enabling Act of March 23 and for the Nazi dictatorship, transforming the “constitutional and temporary dictatorship” into an “unconstitutional and permanent dictatorship.” (122)
The Weimar Republic was finished off in a sequence of events over just a week or two in March 1933. The Nazis claimed public spaces, tenement buildings, and private apartments and made life-and-death judgments on the people who inhabited them. The violent actions began with the occupation of space and ended with the seizure of bodies and the incarceration of thousands of Germans in concentration camps. (137)
Thus terror in 1933 expanded into the terror of Reichskristallnacht in 1938 and the terror of the deportations in 1941. Violence was Volkssache, a “matter of the people.” (154)
The cumulative effect of the boycott and the civil service law closed off Germans (or “Aryans”) from Jews, who were designated as both alien and dangerous. (230)
The lesson of spring and summer 1933, from the boycott to the ritual humiliation, was a simple one: the remaking of Germany required the unmaking of Jews. German life meant Jewish death. (262)
The simultaneity of the Nazis’ administrative innovations –the priority of federal power, the one-party state, the leadership principle in civic affairs, community service, sterilization, the exclusion of Jews – added to the legitimacy of each. (265)
What National Socialist leaders, from Hitler to the local SA Sturmmann, announced in summer of 1933 was nothing less than a biological engineering project that would affect the lives of millions of Germans and pave the way to global war and genocide. (271-2)
The Nazis advanced on an astonishing number of fronts in March in order to destroy Communists, attack Jews, occupy city halls, dismantle the parties, expand their support beyond the “52 percent” in a frenzy of national festivity, and identify biologically unworthy Germans. (288)
The great achievement of the Third Reich was getting Germans to see themselves as the Nazis did: as an imperiled people who had created for themselves a new lease on collective life. (354)
This was the new world after one hundred days. At the heart of the tyranny of Nazism was the tyranny of the story the Germans came to tell about themselves. (355)
In my review of Benjamin Hett’s book, mentioned at the beginning of this book review, I had summarized some of the questions he posed as follows:
“How could a state that was in many ways the most modern and most exemplary of European democracies descend into dictatorship? The German Republic that had emerged from the
post- World War I chaos into the mid- and late 20s had some of the world’s most advanced social systems, led the world in its art, music, film and literature, was unrivaled in its reputation in science and scholarship. How could a people capable of such achievements follow a dictator into war and genocide?”
Hett’s book gives compelling answers to these questions. Fritzsche’s account, gives further granularity and perspectives to the answers for at least three reasons: its exploration of the reactions and calculations of ordinary Germans during this time, its discussion of the complex interplay of coercion and consent, and by employing the focusing lens of the 100 days.
Together these two studies, published in 2018 and 2020, constitute, at least for now, the definitive accounts of that period in German history that – alas – has recently acquired urgent interest beyond the purely historical.
I have requested that the Orcas Library acquire Hitler’s First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich (New York: Basic Books, 2020), but of course the library is closed now. It can be ordered through Darvill’s Books.
