PROLOGUE What to make of Hitler and the Nazis? Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of the German Republic at 11.30 a.m. on 30 January 1933. The brief ceremony took place in the office of the German President, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, on the second floor of the Reich Chancellery. In contrast to the political odyssey that had brought him to this point, Hitler did not have far to travel to get there. Since the previous February he had been staying at a plush hotel nearby. His presence was well known to Berliners and despite the cold weather for several days an atmosphere of expectancy drew people to the scene. Three days earlier, Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher had resigned after just a few weeks in office. There was confusion over who would replace him. Would it be Franz von Papen, his immediate predecessor, whom he had toppled? Or would it be Adolf Hitler, who led the largest party in the Reichstag (the German parliament)? Hitler was a relative newcomer to national politics who had never held high office; indeed, his entire career had so far amounted to very little. Certainly he commanded the biggest phalanx of Reichstag deputies, but was it credible that this outsider, only recently a marginal and derided figure, could assume the helm of state? The French Ambassador, André François-Poncet, observed developments. Hitler ‘had settled at the Kaiserhof Hotel, his usual residence in the capital, a few steps from the Chancellery and from the Palace of the President. A considerable throng filled the square, watching the comings and goings whenever Hitler appeared.’ What they could not see was the peculiar sequence of events unfolding in the presidential suite. Hindenburg had sworn in the new minister of defence, Werner von Blomberg, even before Hitler. Speed was essential because Schleicher had combined control of the army with the chancellorship and had not surrendered the former role. There were rumours that he was planning a coup. Hindenburg and his political advisers had to deprive him of his last power base and, crucially, ensure that the new government directed the armed forces. Hitler arrived later, using a back route. He was accompanied by his retinue, including the only two members of his party who would serve in the cabinet with him. Other ministers-to-be, from various parties, arrived individually, gathering in a ground-floor office in the Reich Chancellery before being taken upstairs to meet President Hindenburg for their formal swearing-in just after quarter past eleven in the morning. The whole process had the feel of a last-minute improvisation. By midday special editions of the Berlin newspapers were carrying news of Hitler’s appointment, detailing the new coalition government. At nightfall the victors held a torchlight parade through central Berlin, converging on the Brandenburg Gate in the heart of the government district. First came thousands of brown-uniformed men of the Nazi Party militia, the Sturmabteilung (SA, storm troop units). They were followed by members of the Stahlhelm (the steel helmets), a paramilitary association of war veterans that was allied with the Nazis. They marched past the presidential palace, where Hindenburg watched from one window, Hitler from another. François-Poncet was also watching. ‘In massive columns, flanked by bands that played martial airs to the muffled beat of their big drums, they emerged from the depth of the Tiergarten [a park] and passed under the triumphal arch of the Brandenburg Gate. The torches they brandished formed a river of fire, a river with hastening, unquenchable waves, a river sweeping with a sovereign rush over the very heart of the city. From these brown-shirted, booted men, as they marched by in perfect discipline and alignment, their well-pitched voices bawling warlike songs, there rose an enthusiasm and dynamism that were extraordinary.’ Events had moved so rapidly during the day that no one had thought to film the parade. Rather like Mussolini’s fabled ‘March on Rome’, which had inspired Hitler in his abortive bid for power a decade earlier, it had to be restaged the next day for the benefit of newsreel cameras. But what did the change of government signify? As a condition for accepting the chancellorship Hitler insisted that Hindenburg dissolve the Reichstag and call new elections. This could reinforce the NSDAP, which was already the biggest party in parliament, and give him an even stronger mandate. However, he conceded the demands from Hindenburg’s advisers to preserve the conservative complexion of the outgoing cabinet and limit the number of Nazi Party ministers to two. This pair were ‘old fighters’ who had been side by side with Hitler since the early days of the movement. Wilhelm Frick was appointed Reich minister of the interior while Hermann Göring became a minister without portfolio. Göring was also made interior minister of Prussia, which meant that he controlled the police force of the largest state in Germany. Yet they were outnumbered eight to three by the non-Nazi members of the government. As his reward for orchestrating the downfall of Schleicher and to ensure that Hitler was held in rein, Papen, the Catholic conservative who served as chancellor in 1932, was vice chancellor. The foreign minister, Baron Konstantin von Neurath, the postmaster general, and minister of transport, Paul von Eltz-Rübenach, and the defence minister, Blomberg, were also familiar faces. They were old-fashioned conservatives. The post of minister for commerce and agriculture went to Alfred Hugenberg, a press baron who led the right-wing German National People’s Party, with which the Nazis were loosely allied. Franz Seldte, the Stahlhelm leader, assumed responsibility for labour affairs. The minister for justice, Franz Gürtner, and Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, minister of finance, were also traditional conservatives. To outward appearances, then, little had changed except that Germany at last seemed to have a government that rested securely on the dominant faction in the Reichstag. It was difficult even for diplomats and seasoned political observers to figure out what might happen next. One who had a better claim than most to sharp analysis was Leopold Schwarzschild. Since 1922 he had edited Das Tage-Buch, one of Germany’s most respected periodicals, which boasted a galaxy of political commentators as well as cultural stars. Schwarzschild’s acute antennae were sensitized by his own background. He came from a Jewish family that had dwelled in the German lands for hundreds of years and become totally assimilated into German life. Schwarzschild had studied politics, economics and history at university before serving in the German army during the Great War. He welcomed the overthrow of the Kaiser following Germany’s defeat and the creation of the German Republic (known as the Weimar Republic after the town where the new constitution was promulgated). In every issue of his magazine he championed the values enshrined in the new republic: democracy, equality, individual freedom. Yet he greeted the appointment of a sworn enemy of parliamentary democracy as chancellor with caution rather than foreboding. In an article published on 4 February 1933, Schwarzschild noted that prior to entering office Hitler’s political strength was ebbing. In the last parliamentary elections, in November 1932, the Nazi Party had lost two million votes. The Nazis might stage victory parades, but the victory was a myth. They had not won power, it was given to them. ‘Hitler was already a defeated man when victory was gifted to him. His play for power had already failed when he was offered the opportunity to gain it by the back door. It wasn’t a march on Berlin that brought the German Mussolini to power, but a piece of chicanery by the camarilla of Prussian Junkers and Westphalian industrialists.’ Schwarzschild spotted that the clique advising President Hindenburg saved the Nazi Party, ‘which was threatened with bankruptcy, which was tearing itself apart with factionalism and mutiny, and which was bound automatically to revert to being a harmless, petit-bourgeois anti-semitic party as soon as an upturn in the economy drained off the support which desperation had driven to Hitler’. He believed that the party was still doomed and predicted that the left-leaning element would revolt against an alliance with conservatives. Meanwhile, the fortunes of democrats, the socialists, and the working classes might revive. In any case, he regarded these elements as ‘strong enough to prevent extreme excesses on the part of the new regime’. If Hitler failed to provide food and jobs for the masses he would quickly be turfed out of power. A similar prognosis was transmitted to the Foreign Office in London by the British Ambassador, Sir Horace Rumbold. He had arrived in Berlin in October 1928 as the culmination of an exemplary diplomatic career. From the moment the Nazis made their electoral breakthrough in September 1930 Rumbold sent back a stream of incisive dispatches dissecting their programme and Hitler’s performance. While Rumbold had some sympathy for National Socialist aspirations, and certainly shared their dislike of Jews, he clearly saw the limit of their appeal. When the Nazi Party gained 37 per cent of the vote in the parliamentary elections of July 1932, winning 230 seats in the Reichstag, he did not share the widespread belief that final success was imminent and inevitable. Instead, he reported to the Foreign Office that Hitler ‘seems now to have exhausted his reserves’. On 27 January 1933, Rumbold had dinner with Otto Meissner, President Hindenburg’s chief of staff and one of the ‘camarilla’ that plotted Schleicher’s downfall. Rumbold relayed to London Meissner’s conviction that ‘Hitler had shown signs of late of moderation and had realized that his policy of negation was leading nowhere’. Instead of demanding complete power, he was now willing to share it. The soothing conclusion was that ‘a government under Hitler which included a proportion of ministers who were not Nazis would be unable to embark on dangerous experiments’. Georges Simenon, the Belgian journalist and crime writer, put things more pithily. He was staying in the Kaiserhof while covering the German political drama for the journal Voilà. On at least one occasion he found himself sharing the elevator with Hitler and frequently overheard conversations amongst his entourage as well as groups of politicians passing through the hotel lobby. Hitler, they said, was ‘Papen’s man . . . Hugenberg’s man . . . He is a puppet.’ German Jews made their own assessment of ‘the Hitler experiment’. The CV-Zeitung, the journal of the Centralverein, the central association of German Jews (a representative body that also carried out Jewish defence work), had long kept an eye on Hitler and the Nazi Party. In the last issue before Hitler’s appointment it, too, noted the crisis in his ranks. After he was installed at the Chancellery it reflected the general uncertainty about Hitler’s prospects. Had he ‘triumphed or been tamed’? Would his government last any longer than its predecessors? The fact that it was the legitimate authority obligated Jews to moderate their opposition; but the editors were convinced that ‘no one will dare to touch our constitutional rights’. Der Israelit, the newspaper of Orthodox Jews, expressed a cautious optimism. Now Hitler was in government he would be held in check by his coalition partners and President Hindenburg. Leadership of a front-rank nation would, by itself, oblige him to act responsibly. It might actually be worse for the Jews if the new government failed, unleashing the search for a scapegoat. If it held on without being able to achieve anything, though, it might launch a ‘cold pogrom’ as a safety valve for popular discontent. Much would then depend on how the civil service and the police behaved; would they adhere to the old standards now they were commanded by the Nazis? There was also the danger of fresh elections strengthening the far right and threatening the constitutional order, with its checks and balances. ‘Only time will reveal whether these questions are justified.’ German Zionists showed little anxiety at the turn of events. Zionist leaders like Robert Weltsch, editor of the Zionist weekly Jüdische Rundschau, had consistently drawn attention to the dangers of anti-Semitism because it validated their ideological position that Jewish life in the diaspora was untenable. Notwithstanding his professional pessimism, though, even Weltsch could not conceal astonishment at how things in Germany had turned out. ‘Overnight the event that no-one wanted to believe would happen has become fact; Hitler is Chancellor of the German Reich.’ Although he was no Jewish nationalist (and frequently compared Zionists to Nazis), the Austrian writer and journalist Joseph Roth sensed the worst. From his hotel room in Paris he wrote to his friend Stefan Zweig, the bestselling author, ‘we are headed for a new war. I wouldn’t give a heller [coin of little value] for our prospects. The barbarians have taken over. Do not deceive yourself. Hell reigns.’ Yet that was not how it seemed to Jews across Germany. A few years later, Ernst Marcus, a Jewish lawyer then living in Breslau, recalled that 30 January 1933 was ‘relatively calm. Broad circles of the middle class, including us and our Jewish friends, believed that things “will not be so bad”.’ His wife was so relaxed that she went on holiday to Bavaria. In Hamburg, at first it seemed to Jews as if nothing changed at all. On 6 February, Jewish ex-servicemen held their annual memorial ceremony in the presence of city and federal representatives. They were doubtless reassured when state senator Curt Platen used the occasion to condemn anti-Jewish prejudice. For Jews, as for the rest of the population, the month following the advent of Hitler was a period of transition. The government had altered but almost everything else remained the same. There were certainly incidents of abuse and violence against Jews, usually perpetrated by gangs of SA men swaggering around the streets of towns and cities, enjoying their new legitimacy. But such assaults had been common before 1933 and notwithstanding the new chancellor they remained illegal. While the country plunged into another election, punctuated by violence and political drama, Jews entered a ‘twilight period’, during which they tried to comprehend the implications of what was happening around them and formulate appropriate responses. That involved thinking fast about their community’s history, their identity, and their options, as well as evaluating Hitler’s career and the possible trajectory of the Nazi Party. What seemed obvious a few months or years later, and what has acquired the aura of inevitability in most personal or historical accounts since 1945, was not at all self-evident at the time. The Jews of Germany The self-identifying Jewish population of the German Republic numbered roughly 525,000 of whom about 100,000 were recent immigrants from eastern Europe, universally (and derisively) known as Ostjuden. Most German-born Jews traced their roots back centuries and were well integrated into German society. Outside a few islands of modern Orthodoxy, the practice of Judaism was heavily diluted. Every December the typical German Jewish family lit candles to celebrate the Jewish festival of Chanukkah and had a Christmas tree at home. Rates of intermarriage for men reached 25 per cent, while 16 per cent of Jewish women married out of the faith. The children in these mixed marriages were almost invariably raised as Christians. At an individual level, whether they were members of the Jewish community or declined to associate with it, German Jews were barely distinguishable from other Germans. Yet there were certain demographic, geographic, social and economic discrepancies that enabled Judeophobes to single them out. Whereas half the German population lived in small towns and villages, over two thirds of German Jews lived in cities. A third of the entire Jewish population (144,000) was concentrated in Berlin, where they made up 4 per cent of the capital’s inhabitants. Within Berlin, as within other cities, there were certain residential districts that were densely populated by Jews. Often these were the most prosperous parts of town. The average Jewish household income was three times that of the average Gentile family. Although there was a significant stratum of poor Jews, which placed a heavy burden on Jewish welfare bodies and drained wealth from the better-off, the majority of Jews were comfortably middle class. As well as being geographically concentrated, Jews favoured a rather narrow range of occupations. Three quarters earned their living from trade, commerce, finance and the professions as against only one quarter of the non-Jewish population. While nearly a third of Germans worked on the land, barely 2 per cent of Jews were farmers. However, 25 per cent of wholesalers in the agricultural sector were Jewish. The Jewish grain merchant and cattle dealer was ubiquitous in rural areas such as Hesse. Jews were even more numerous in the textile and clothing sectors. They owned 40 per cent of wholesale textile firms and fully two thirds of wholesale and retail clothing outlets. Berlin’s fashion district was virtually a Jewish district. Although department stores accounted for a relatively modest slice of the retail sector, nearly 80 per cent of turnover came from emporiums that were Jewish-owned, such as Hertie, KaDeWe and Wertheim, retail palaces that loomed over city-centre thoroughfares. Jews dominated the publishing industry: two houses, Ullstein and Mosse, were pacesetters for the production of books, magazines and newspapers. Non-Jews were also likely to meet Jews in key professional roles. Jews supplied 11 per cent of Germany’s doctors, 13 per cent of attorneys and 16 per cent of lawyers. These proportions were not evenly spread across the country, though. There was massive bunching in the big cities where most Jews lived, notably Berlin, Frankfurt-am-Main, Hamburg, and Breslau. The most concentrated and visible segment of the Jewish population were the Ostjuden. They comprised a quarter of Berlin’s Jewish inhabitants and actually outnumbered German-born Jews in Leipzig and Dresden. Ostjuden lacked German citizenship, spoke Yiddish and were religiously Orthodox, although their children rapidly assimilated into German society. By contrast to the German Jews, they were to be found in the more run-down inner-city districts, like the Scheunenviertel in Berlin. Large numbers were self-employed in artisanal trades or manual labour. Ironically, the success of the department stores made it ever harder for these Jewish shopkeepers, cobblers and tailors to make a living. They were hard hit by the Depression and often depended on relief from Jewish charities. This endeared them even less to German Jews, who blamed them for rising levels of anti-Jewish feeling. In the wake of the Great War, German federal and state authorities had tried to stop Jews entering the country across the eastern border. The Prussian authorities rounded up and deported some 4,000 Jewish illegal immigrants between 1918 and 1921. These measures were a continuation of long-established practices to check unwanted immigration from the east, but the attacks on Ostjuden acquired added venom after the Russian Revolution. Conservative and nationalist Germans had for a long time falsely accused the eastern Jews of importing crime, vice and disease; to that list was added the contagion of revolutionary ideas. The Jews who confronted Nazi anti-Semitism, especially those active in politics or in anti-defamation organizations, were hardly naive or ignorant about the challenge they faced. The oldest members of the community could recall a time when Jews were not even equal citizens. Max Liebermann, head of the Prussian Academy of Arts and Germany’s most esteemed living painter, was born in 1847, a year before the revolutions that made Jews citizens in several German states. Full equality only came with the completion of German unification in 1870. Emancipation, the achievement of civic equality, was no sooner won than it was under threat. A deep depression in trade and agricultural prices in the early and mid-1870s fomented discontent amongst Germany’s small businessmen, artisans and farmers. Their discomfort was aggravated by the emergence of organized labour and the mass-based Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or SPD). The SPD espoused hard-core Marxist doctrines, deepened the antagonism between workers and employers, and preached the elimination of private property. So where could the ‘little man’ turn? During the 1880s, a crop of middle-class political agitators found they could win an audience amongst farmers, shop owners and small manufacturers by blaming Jewish bankers for the slump and attacking Jewish middlemen in the rural economy. Other agitators who wanted to deflect workers away from Marxism preached varieties of Christian Socialism that usually boiled down to using Jews as a scapegoat for economic and social ills. For a while in the 1890s a number of avowedly anti-Semitic parties achieved success in state elections and also managed to get deputies into the Reichstag. The right-wing German Conservative Party was so alarmed that it threw the antisemites a bone by including in its 1892 programme a reference to curbing the ‘decomposing Jewish influence in our national life’. This only gave respectability to the anti-Semites. They won over 340,000 votes in the 1893 Reichstag elections and gained sixteen deputies. Yet, while the Conservatives toyed with anti-Jewish slogans, they condemned ‘excesses’. The German state never succumbed to the sort of anti-Jewish frenzy that gripped French institutions during the Dreyfus affair. The 1893 national elections marked the high-water mark for the anti-Semitic movement; from then on their parties splintered and foundered. By 1912, they attracted just 130,000 votes and elected only six deputies. The failure of political anti-Semitism did not signify a waning of anti-Jewish prejudice. If anything, the controversies stoked by the anti-Semites made people more ‘Jew conscious’. Amongst conservative-minded Germans who were uneasy with rapid urbanization and mass culture it became a nostrum that Jews, who seemed to have benefited disproportionately from these developments, had too much influence in culture, society and the economy. Liberals disparaged religious prejudice and racism, but precisely for these reasons expressed bemusement that Jews did not intermarry and clung to their ‘clannish’ ways. Nationalists tended to see Jews as irredeemably alien, incapable of genuine loyalty to the Reich. Racial anti-Semites, known as völkisch because of their belief in the existence of a racially distinctive German people or folk, argued that Jews were unassimilable and constituted a threat to the German people. And, all the while, traditional forms of religious prejudice against Jews and Judaism persisted amongst churchgoing Catholics and Protestants. They thought of Germany as a Christian state. If so, how could Jews belong in it? The Social Democrats scorned such beliefs and were the most consistent opponents of anti-Semitism, but some were not averse to identifying Jews with capitalism and exploitation of the working class. Even as the Reichstag proved barren ground for anti-Semites seeking to revoke Jewish emancipation and segregate Jews by law, anti-Semitism spread as a ‘cultural code’, an attitudinal marker separating Jews from non-Jews. However, if Jews in 1933 could recall the sordid history of prejudice they also had an inspiring model of Jewish defence. Forty years earlier German Jews had formed the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (the central association of German citizens of the Jewish faith) to combat the lies propagated by anti-Semites and oppose them when they stood for election. Over the next two decades, the CV proved quite effective: suing rabble rousers for defamation, funding candidates pledged to contest anti-Semitism, producing voluminous amounts of educational material about Judaism and Jewish life, and coordinating the activity of sympathetic non-Jews ashamed of prejudice within their communities. The CV also fostered a sense of Jewish pride and German patriotism, asserting the synthesis of Jewish and German identity. To patriotic German Jews the outbreak of war in 1914 offered the chance to demonstrate their love for the Fatherland. The Kaiser announced a truce in civic conflicts and declared that Germany recognized no confessional divide. Jews responded enthusiastically. The number that served in the armed forces was approximately their proportion of the population as a whole. Others, like the industrialist Walther Rathenau and the scientist Fritz Haber, made a huge contribution to the German war effort. Sadly, when German success on the battlefield faltered the army looked for someone to blame. In 1916, the Prussian War Ministry, possibly egged on by völkisch-minded generals in the high command, demanded an inquiry into the number and status of Jews in the military. The results of the census, known crudely as the Judenzählung (the Jew-count), were never made public but suspicion lingered that Jews had shirked their duty. Although 12,000 Jews died in combat while thousands more were maimed (again in proportion to their numbers in the population), the war did more to divide than unite Jews and non-Jews. The disastrous impact of the Great War The way the war ended and its aftermath were a disastrous turning point in Jewish–Gentile relations. Despite massive territorial gains in the east, the German high command was unable to achieve a decisive victory on the western front. Instead, the British naval blockade led to ever worse food shortages and civilian unrest at home, while the entry of the United States on the Allied side tipped the military balance. By August 1918, the German army was being pushed back inexorably. Civilian morale began to crack, resulting in food riots and demonstrations calling for peace. This unrest was led by the Independent Socialists, militants who broke with the SPD over its support for the war. Several of their leaders, like Rosa Luxemburg, were Jewish. Mutinies broke out amongst sailors and soldiers inspired by the example of the Bolshevik Revolution. It did not escape the notice of conservatives that many leading Bolsheviks were of Jewish origin too, and that one of the most prominent, Leon Trotsky, was calling for revolution in Germany. In September the army told the Kaiser that the war was lost, but the efforts of the civilian leadership to wind down the conflict and preserve the fabric of the old order were swept away by revolutionary unrest. Germany was forced to sue for peace and on 9 November 1918 the deputy leader of the socialist party in the Reichstag, Philipp Scheidemann, announced that Germany was now a republic. A national assembly was elected to meet in Weimar and draw up a constitution. Its guiding light was Hugo Preuss, a politician of Jewish origin. To monarchists and everyone else who mourned the end of the German Empire, it looked as if it was overthrown by Jewish subversives. Many in the armed forces felt this even more keenly. Germany had capitulated before the Allied forces actually reached German territory and the front line was never broken. To those who could not accept that the army failed in the test of arms, the only explanation for defeat was treachery. Over the next few weeks socialist politicians, led by the new chancellor, Friedrich Ebert, struggled to prevent the upheaval running to extremes. Ebert promised the army that the socialists would head off a Bolshevik-style revolution if the army put its troops at the disposal of Germany’s new republican rulers. His moderation led to a definitive split in the left, with the formation in December of the German Communist Party (KPD). Many of its leading lights, notably Luxemburg, were Jewish. While Berlin descended into chaos, a left-wing government took power in Bavaria, led by the Jewish journalist Kurt Eisner. It lurched further and further leftward until a Soviet state was proclaimed. Several ‘commissars’ of Red Bavaria, including Ernst Toller, Gustav Landauer, and Eugen Leviné, were Jewish-born. In order to shore up the federal government, Ebert and his colleagues had recourse not only to the army but to volunteer units of officers and NCOs who had no possibility of a career in the shrunken peace-time army but could not adapt to civilian life. The embittered and battle-hardened men who filled these units, known as Freikorps, were fanatically anti-Bolshevik and usually anti-Semitic. They were responsible for a wave of murders, assassinations and savage campaigns to repress working-class insurrections. They also fought on Germany’s eastern border in the Baltic and against the Poles. In the minds of the Freikorps and outraged nationalists, the ‘November criminals’ who betrayed Germany, the Bolsheviks, the Jews, and the Poles were all cut from the same cloth. The Versailles Treaty, accepted by the German National Assembly under duress in June 1919, deprived Germany of territory including Alsace-Lorraine and Silesia. It forced Germany to accept guilt for starting the Great War and imposed a huge burden of reparations. The humiliating terms of the treaty outraged the population and in years to come every single German politician, from the left to the right, pledged to revise it. To republicans the treaty was like a curse. The birth of parliamentary democracy was forever associated with defeat and dishonour. The memory of chaos and a feeling of national shame tainted the constitution promulgated at Weimar, overshadowing its democratic and progressive spirit. The Weimar Republic gave its Jewish citizens equal rights and protection by the courts, but to the far-right and anti-Semites this only served to damn it. The years between 1919 and 1923 were horrendous for Germans, with German Jews suffering as much from political instability and economic turmoil as everyone else. During 1920 the government in Berlin faced a coup attempt from the right and the left, as well as workers’ uprisings in the Ruhr industrial area. Communist-inspired unrest persisted throughout 1921, culminating in the ‘Marsh action’ in Saxony. Meanwhile, the government courted disaster with the Allied powers by resisting the payment of reparations. The German economy simply could not generate the kind of sums the French, especially, were demanding and in November 1922 the government announced it was defaulting. The French responded by sending troops to occupy the Ruhr and oversee confiscation of what they felt was due to them. In reply, the government in Berlin called on the population to engage in passive resistance and printed money to pay striking workers. The result was runaway inflation that turned the life savings of millions of Germans into worthless paper. While some smart businessmen profited from the hyperinflation, for ordinary Germans it was a catastrophe. They knew that politicians had allowed them to become innocent victims of the financial crisis; their belief in traditional values, the virtues of parliamentary democracy, law and order never recovered. Large clusters of angry citizens crystallized in associations that rejected the republic. They cultivated a sense of themselves as a wronged and victimized people, a Volk at odds with its own state; and sometimes they nurtured murderous fantasies of revenge. There was, however, a singular dimension to the Jewish experience: during these troubled years anti-Semitism metastasized. Anti-Semitic groups moved from the margins of German society into the mainstream. One of the first symptoms of this development was the formation of the Deutschvölkischer Schutzund Trutzbund (German People’s Defence and Protection League) in February 1919. Intended as a rallying point for anti-Semitic groups, the league dedicated itself to bringing down the Weimar Republic and fighting the alleged influence of the Jews, who it blamed for Germany’s defeat. Its membership reached 180,000 by 1923, whereupon it was banned by the government because of its constant incitement to violence. Millions joined associations that represented Germans who had left the areas awarded to Poland by the Versailles Treaty or devoted themselves to securing their return. The Verein für Deutsche im Ausland and the Deutscher Ostbund each boasted a million members. As a corollary to campaigning on behalf of the ethnic Germans marooned in Poland these associations spewed hate towards the eastern Jews who had settled in Germany. The composition of the Reichstag in the first years of the republic reflected these currents. The Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP, German National People’s Party), launched in 1918, brought together the old conservative and nationalist parties in opposition to the Weimar Republic. The DNVP was unthinkingly, unsystematically anti-Semitic. In the 1924 Reichstag elections, at the peak of its popularity, the party won 21 per cent of the vote. For these völkisch groups and parties, anti-Semitism was as much about contempt for the Weimar Republic, its constitution and laws as it was about dislike of Jews. Attacking the Jews verbally or physically became a trial of strength with those who upheld the ‘November constitution’. Most shockingly for German Jews, hateful thoughts and violent speech turned into physical assaults and murder. Jewish politicians were the favoured targets of right-wing assassins. Rosa Luxemburg, a leading figure in the German Communist Party, Kurt Eisner, premier of Bavaria, and, most prominently, Walther Rathenau, the foreign minister, fell to the bullets of killers who were celebrated as heroes in right-wing, völkisch circles. When the Freikorps suppressed the Soviet regime in Bavaria they tortured and shot Jewish activists who fell into their hands. In November 1923, at the height of the hyperinflation, when a loaf of bread cost 200,000 million Reichsmarks, a food riot in central Berlin turned into a pogrom. Thousands of hungry, resentful Berliners invaded the Scheunenviertel, where they smashed and looted Jewish shops for several hours. There were attacks on Ostjuden in other cities, too. Members of the most visible and vulnerable segment of the Jewish population were ‘the first real victims of a brutalised German anti-semitism’. Then, almost as suddenly as it had come, the hyperinflation disappeared. The new chancellor, Gustav Stresemann, ended the practice of printing money to cover the deficit and stopped subsidizing resistance in the Ruhr. Stresemann introduced a new currency, the Rentenmark, pegged to the dollar, and, instead of trying to prove that reparations were unfeasible, resumed negotiations with the Allies. The following year, Stresemann, now serving as foreign minister, concluded a practical reparations plan. By August 1924, the nightmare had ended. German Jews did not observe these developments passively. The Centralverein engaged in vigorous anti-defamation work, distributing 50,000 handbills and 10,000 pamphlets on one day alone. Its membership soared as Jewish citizens threw themselves into the task of defending the good name of their community. Jewish ex-servicemen were particularly energetic. The Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten (Reich association of Jewish combat veterans, RjF) organized Jewish veterans across the country to ensure that the sacrifice made by Jews in the trenches was not overlooked. They fiercely contested efforts to traduce the loyalty of Jews to the Fatherland and drew on ties of comradeship forged in the ranks to bring non-Jews into the struggle against anti-Semitism. The Jüdischer Abwehr Dienst (Jewish defence service) provided physical security in times of tension. During the Scheunenviertel riots members of the Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten, took up weapons and patrolled the streets. Rather less heroically, communal leaders enjoined Jewish citizens to avoid ‘provocation’ by ostentatious behaviour or involvement with political extremism. For some nationalist Jews, like Max Naumann, this self-policing took the form of relentlessly criticizing the Ostjuden. ‘Whoever comes from “half Asia” is a dangerous guest’, he opined. Naumann suggested that German Jews should show their commitment to Germanness by demanding the expulsion of Jewish immigrants. In January 1933, then, German Jews were neither naive nor passive spectators of events. Their assessments of the ‘experiment’ with Hitler were not made just on the strength of recent events, the products of short-sightedness or momentary delusion. The conviction that Hitler had been appointed at a moment of weakness and might fall at any time rested on knowledge about the trajectory of his ‘rise’ and his curious career. He was placed in the context of previous political instability and waves of anti-Semitism, their ebb and flow. This awareness applied also to the range of Nazi policies, not least their attitude towards and plans for the Jews. So what did Germans, Jews and non-Jews, and the rest of the world know about Adolf Hitler and the Nazis? Who was Adolf Hitler and what did he want? Adolf Hitler only became a national political figure in the late 1920s and did not represent a significant political force until September 1930. Until then, only professional students of politics bothered to pay him much attention. Jews, like Alfred Wiener and Hans Reichmann, who were involved in anti-defamation work for the Centralverein naturally monitored the Nazis and reported on their activities. From the party’s inception its members were infamous for their extreme hatred of Jews and willingness to extend verbal violence to physical assault. But most Jews, like most other Germans in areas where the Nazi Party was weak or absent, knew little about it or its leader. The majority scrambled for information after the party had made its first big parliamentary gains in 1930. Consequently, Hitler was in the public eye for a mere two years before he became chancellor and during that time he behaved with consummate moderation. His rhetoric was toned down, he chose positive themes for his speeches, and his public attacks on the Jews diminished to vanishing point. Furthermore, Hitler and his propaganda machine carefully controlled his image. His autobiography and statement of political beliefs, Mein Kampf, was a key text. In the first part, which is essentially biographical, Hitler depicts himself as a man of humble origins who experienced hardship and poverty in his youth. He describes his political awakening, when he perceived the malign influence of socialism and the Jews, and summarizes what he learned as an autodidact in those years. Hitler reiterates his belief in the centrality of blood and race to human history and his adhesion to the guiding principles of Social Darwinism and eugenics. The vividly written passages about the years he spent in the army portray him as an ordinary front-line soldier who shared the discomforts and made the same sacrifices as millions of others. He repeats the widespread belief that Germany was stabbed in the back in 1918 and blames Jews for the defeat, but rather more unusually suggests that if a few thousand had been killed by poison gas Germany might not have lost the war. The biographical section of Mein Kampf concludes with his entry into politics after the war and the foundation of the Nazi Party. The second part covers the early history of the party and Hitler’s leading role, commingled with explanations of its philosophy, its aspirations, and practical thoughts on organization, propaganda and tactics. However, Mein Kampf was published in 1925–6 (originally, the first and second parts appeared separately). A great deal had changed between then and January 1933. Hitler now presented himself as more moderate than his tract suggested, as a responsible politician. He had second thoughts about publishing a further volume in 1928 precisely because he realized that his words might hang around his neck like a political albatross. So, a perusal of Mein Kampf gave the reader in 1933 a sense of who Hitler was and the intensity of his hostility to Jews, but how reliable was it as a guide to his current thinking or future action? In October 1930, Sir Horace Rumbold summed up the Nazi programme as ‘striving for a greater, better, cleaner and less corrupt Germany’. His successor, Sir Eric Phipps, doubted that Hitler would adhere to positions ‘expressed with such incredible violence in a work written in a Bavarian prison ten years ago’. Both men believed that Hitler was consistent about the Jews although they were equally convinced that in general he had moderated his views. Hence, Hitler’s early life and career were not necessarily predictors of what he would do once he was in a position of power. In any case, as historians have shown, the Hitler depicted in Mein Kampf or the hagiographies published by the party or his friends bore little relationship to the facts of his life. Hitler was born in 1889 in a small town close to the border between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Imperial Germany, but grew up in Linz. His father, a customs official, died when Adolf was fourteen years old. His mother supported his ambitions to become an artist and in 1907 he applied unsuccessfully to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, the year his mother died. Hitler returned to Vienna, spending half a decade as an impecunious, aspiring artist. He sold paintings to Jewish art dealers and according to the available evidence he had no inhibitions about interacting with them. Nor is there any record of him voicing anti-Jewish sentiments. There were signs, though, of his hatred for Marxism. In 1913 he moved to Munich, a cosmopolitan city with a flourishing artistic milieu. For a little over a year he sold his paintings and enjoyed cafe society. The outbreak of war changed the course of his life. In Vienna, Hitler had become a fervent German nationalist. He also read a great deal of popular Social Darwinist literature that extolled struggle as a way of life. According to these tracts the struggle between nations and ‘races’ found its supreme expression in war. Combat was also the testing ground for an individual’s worthiness to live. Hitler felt invigorated by the prospect and enrolled in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. This was a poor-quality unit filled with over-age reservists, few of whom were as enthusiastic as him. Hitler served as a regimental dispatch runner, a job that involved considerable risk. He displayed genuine valour and was awarded the Iron Cross, second class and first class (the latter thanks to the recommendation of a Jewish officer). Despite the image he later fostered, though, Hitler was not really one of the lads. He was quartered with the regimental staff well back from the front line and was a bit of a loner. In October 1918 he was temporarily blinded by a British gas attack near Ypres and evacuated to a military hospital. He learned of Germany’s capitulation while he was still recovering from his wounds: the news came as a terrific shock. Having been insulated from the crumbling morale of the ordinary infantrymen he was only too ready to believe the myth that the army had suffered a ‘stab in the back’, that Germany was brought down by subversion, by enemies within. Hitler remained in the army for two more years, based in Munich. He showed no inclination to quit even when his unit came under the authority of the short-lived revolutionary regime in Bavaria. Throughout this period he operated as a field agent for military intelligence, collecting evidence on radical and rebellious groups. To assist his work he was given training as an education officer, took courses in politics at Munich University, and was briefed about the range of subversive ideologies. His mentors were right-wing army officers – extreme nationalists who were anti-Marxist and anti-Semitic. Under their tutelage Hitler began to write and speak about the Jews as a dangerous ‘race’ who were enemies of the German people. Sent by the army to infiltrate the right-wing, anti-Semitic German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, DAP), he ended up joining it. In February 1920 he participated in drafting the party’s twenty-five-point programme and renaming it the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP) to distinguish it from Marxist groups. Thanks to the army, Hitler discovered a talent for oratory and propaganda. His ability to draw and hold large audiences on the beer-hall circuit propelled him to ascendancy over his party comrades. He left the military and began to live as a professional political agitator, circulating in the far-right, racist and nationalist milieu in Munich that thrived on the bitterness of defeat and economic disruption. The Nazis, as the National Socialists quickly became known, were just one of several völkisch groups in Bavaria. Hitler was only distinguished by his extremism, his energy, his oratorical skills and his messianic self-belief. By July 1921 he had established the principle that he alone could lead the party and decide policy: the Führerprinzip. His experience in the trenches and his memory of a Germany united by a patriotic and self-sacrificing ethos guided him throughout his political journey. Under his direction the party took on a paramilitary hue. It acquired its own militia in October 1921 when an ex-army captain, Ernst Röhm, set up the Sturmabteilung (SA) to protect Nazi meetings from disruption. The storm troops took their name and inspiration from the assault units that led German attacks on the western front. Violence of language and the readiness to use force set the Nazis apart from the völkisch pack and attracted others to their ranks. A year later, Julius Streicher led his völkisch group into the NSDAP. Streicher, a Nuremberg teacher with a strong war record, was a pathological anti-Semite. He founded a paper, Der Stürmer, to promote National Socialism and disseminate a particularly vicious and sex-obsessed brand of Jew-hatred. By early 1923, NSDAP membership had risen from 20,000 to 55,000. Hitler had now gathered around himself a core of loyal and effective acolytes. They included Hermann Göring, a former fighter ace; Rudolf Hess, a veteran of the trenches and the Freikorps; Alfred Rosenberg, an ethnic German from Estonia who had trained as an engineer but had a gift for writing; and Max Amann, previously the NCO commanding Hitler’s section in the 16th Bavarian Infantry. These men had complete faith in his political vision and offered him virtually unconditional obedience; they would remain his closest, most trusted lieutenants. It looked as if the tide was running their way. The French occupation of the Ruhr, hyperinflation, and communist activity in several German states energized the far right. Munich was a snakepit of anti-republican plotters. Alarmed by what they perceived as the drift to the left, Bavarian state officials planned to topple the government in Berlin and restore order. Hitler was now cooperating with several völkisch groups and in October 1923 it looked like a coalition comprising the Bavarian government, the NSDAP and other parties would march on Berlin to suppress parliamentary democracy, much as Mussolini had marched on Rome the year before. At the last minute, however, the Bavarian leadership pulled back. Hitler, desperate to keep up the momentum, hoped he could bounce them into action by staging his own coup in Munich. He made his move on the night of 8 November 1923, but by that time the army high command in Berlin had rallied to the central government and there was little chance that the Bavarian ministers would risk a showdown. Despite being joined by General Ludendorff, a hero of the Great War, the Nazis found themselves more or less alone. Undaunted, the next morning Hitler led his followers towards the Bavarian Defence Ministry; but when the insurgents reached the Odeonsplatz in central Munich the police opened fire. Several National Socialists were shot dead, Göring was badly wounded, and Hitler injured his arm when he was pulled to the ground. The putsch dissolved and within the next few hours the leading conspirators were rounded up. In February 1924 Hitler stood trial alongside Ludendorff – who was only too happy to let the ex-corporal take credit for the abortive coup. Hitler used the proceedings to set out his beliefs with skill and passion, winning the sympathy of the right-wing judges. He was sentenced to five years in Landsberg fortress, but before he left the court the judges indicated that they hoped he would serve even less time. Hitler emerged from the trial as a martyr and hero. The press coverage of the trial enhanced Hitler’s status in far-right circles. His centrality was underlined by the factionalism that tore apart the NSDAP in his absence, although the far right as a whole went into decline thanks to the stability that finally settled over Germany. Hitler filled his time in prison writing and dictating Mein Kampf to Rudolf Hess, his personal assistant. When he emerged in 1925 he had a fully formed ideology and an ever-stronger sense of mission, but power seemed a distant goal. He was not allowed to speak in public until 1927, in some German states not until 1928. Yet these were hardly wasted, wilderness years. During the late 1920s the Nazi Party perfected the techniques and the appeal that would attract more and more Germans to its ranks. In February 1925 Hitler relaunched the NSDAP. He renounced the strategy of the coup and pledged to follow a parliamentary course. This did not mean eschewing violence or abandoning his determination to bring down the republic. Anti-Semitism remained at the core of the party’s ideology, crucial for both its internal coherence and its external operations. However, the NSDAP was not merely a negative force. It put down roots in local communities, offering help to hard-pressed citizens. Unlike the parliamentary parties of the right that became increasingly remote from ordinary people, the Nazis paid attention to interest groups and regional questions. Above all, they offered a positive social vision. Hitler promised to restore the sense of unity and purpose that had animated the nation in 1914–18; he painted a future of social harmony, equality and mutual respect. While he was always vague about detailed policy, he was able to mobilize the idealism of young people especially, and groups that felt left out of politics. Women and new voters were drawn in by the Nazis’ concern for ordinary folk, their willingness to address the plight of the homeless and the unemployed, distressed farmers, struggling small businessmen and underpaid civil servants. Because the parties of the left, the SPD and KPD, spoke the language of class and threatened those with property, the NSDAP was able to channel the discontent of the large middle class – and a fair number of disgruntled workers, too. It imitated the Marxist parties in terms of its relentless search for new members, ceaselessly building a mass base, and the discipline of those who joined its ranks. Activism and violence were essential to the party’s message. Parades and rallies, accompanied by banners and bands, allowed the Nazis to occupy the streets symbolically. In small towns and villages, particularly on key days in the Nazi and the national calendar, large numbers of SA men and party members would virtually take over the public spaces. At the same time as speakers denounced the ‘November criminals’, the Weimar Republic, the Versailles Treaty, reparations, and ‘the Jews’ who were responsible for all these ills, the brown-shirted militia presented a physical challenge to the constitution and the law. When they insulted Jews or damaged Jewish-owned property they issued a challenge to the republic. If the police force intervened it placed the forces of law and order on the side of a despised republic and an unloved minority. Violence also illustrated in the most brutal terms who was a part of the nation and who was an outsider. By forcing an identification of interests between the republic and the victims of intimidation, the Nazis suggested that both were opposed to the true Germans, the people of the racial-national community, the Volksgemeinschaft, that were as yet excluded from power. Still, the party remained a ‘fringe irritant’. In the parliamentary elections of 1928 the Nazis received just 2.6 per cent of the vote and won only twelve seats. Membership stood at around 130,000. Hitler gained some valuable publicity and a new degree of respectability by joining forces with Alfred Hugenberg and the DNVP in opposition to a new deal for reparations, the Young Plan, but the NSDAP was very much the junior partner. The paramilitary Stahlhelm was far larger than the SA and while it indirectly reinforced the Nazi message the effect was masked as long as it supported the DNVP and was loyal to Hindenburg (whom it did much to elect as President of the republic in the national election of 1925). On the tenth anniversary of the Weimar Constitution, Leopold Schwarzschild sounded a celebratory note. It was undeniable that 35 per cent of voters still chose parties that wanted the republic to fail: ‘But there are welcome signs that the position of the individual is being strengthened, and more than elsewhere. We have fewer regulations, fewer prohibitions, but also greater guarantees of personal liberty than almost any other country on this ravaged continent.’ Hitler’s bumpy road to power Within just a few weeks such optimism wilted under the effect of the Wall Street Crash. In 1929 the German economy was already in trouble, out of balance and unable to generate enough jobs to match the growing population. When American banks started calling in loans made to German financial institutions and enterprises they tipped Germany into a catastrophic deflationary spiral. Banks stopped advancing credit and demanded repayment of loans they had made; businesses responded by laying off workers and cutting wages. When they could not release sufficient capital that way, they went bankrupt. As spending power was reduced, industry and agriculture that depended on domestic consumption suffered accordingly. Tax revenue plummeted while welfare expenditure soared. The state and federal governments now made deep cuts too, throwing more out of work and inflicting short time or reduced wages on the large public sector. The political system could not cope. In March 1930 the ‘Grand Coalition’ government of Social Democrats, German Democrats, German People’s Party, and the Catholic Centre Party collapsed over an increase of the social contributions. Now the weaknesses of the Weimar Constitution came into play. The constitution granted considerable power to the president, but the ageing Hindenburg was increasingly manipulated by men in his entourage and the army leadership with whom they were closely connected. At their suggestion Hindenburg appointed the Catholic Centre politician Heinrich Brüning as chancellor. Brüning had no significant support in parliament. Knowing that he could not secure legislation to balance the budget he fell back on Article 48 of the constitution that allowed the president to rule by decree with the consent of the Reichstag. Intended as an emergency clause, Article 48 became the routine basis of governance. In July 1930, Brüning sought to break the opposition of the left-wing parties by calling elections. The result, declared on 14 September, was a ‘political earthquake’. The middle-class parties collapsed while both the extreme left and the far right gained tremendously. The NSDAP achieved 18.3 per cent of the vote, winning 107 seats. They were now the second largest party after the socialists. Brüning, who brought this result on his own head by a disastrous miscalculation, was kept in power by the president, the SPD, and the Centre Party, which preferred him to the alternatives. A month after the results were declared, the Jewish socialite and gossip columnist Bella Fromm noted ‘a touch of panic in certain quarters. Should we leave Germany and wait outside and see what happens?’ Fromm grew up in a well-off assimilated family in Bavaria but straitened financial times forced her to take up journalism. As a writer for the liberal Ullstein press, she thought the Nazis were ‘noisy roughnecks’. She was dismayed that conservative newspapers treated Hitler’s electoral breakthrough with gravity, even more so when establishment figures like Hjalmar Schacht, the president of the Reichsbank, suggested giving the Nazis a chance in government. Fromm probably composed her ‘diary’ after she had emigrated from Germany to the USA in 1938, but she nevertheless captured the confusion evoked by the unfamiliar political landscape. The Nazis had succeeded thanks to a clever and well-organized campaign that built on their previous steady, if unspectacular, success at the grass roots and in local elections. Their message was simple and attractive. Parliamentary democracy had brought nothing but conflict and misery; only Hitler could unite the country; only the NSDAP could thwart the rise of the communists. Hitler barely mentioned Jews in his major speeches, although to many Germans his attacks on Marxism and his criticism of modern society were understood as coded references to Jewish influence. If anything, it was the idealism and sincerity which the Nazis projected that brought Germans to acceptance of anti-Semitism rather than the other way round. Indeed, Hitler reiterated his commitment to achieving power by peaceful and legitimate means. He sought to reassure the international press that the Nazis ‘had nothing against decent Jews’. His minions, on the other hand, paid little heed to these tactical declarations. The day that the new parliament assembled, 13 October 1930, Nazi gangs vandalized the Wertheim and Teitz department stores in Berlin and attacked Jewish shops along the Kurfürstendamm, the main shopping street of central Berlin. Jubilant Nazis installed themselves in towns and villages across Germany, signifying their presence with banners, flags and parades. Wherever they gained a foothold they incited local people to cease buying from Jewish shops or dealing with Jews. On the eve of the Jewish New Year, 12 September 1931, 1,000 storm troopers again rioted along the Kurfürstendamm, assaulting anyone who they thought looked Jewish. Similar violence took place in Nuremberg and Würzburg. The police could barely cope with organized violence on this scale. During 1931, Brüning pursued a dangerous game of using the economic crisis to force the British, French and Americans to cancel, or at least lighten, the burden of reparations. Threats to suspend the repayment of foreign debt only increased the flight of capital from Germany. Although Brüning eventually managed to get reparations suspended this did nothing to ameliorate the disastrous situation: unemployment continued to climb. By the end of the year one fifth of the workforce was unemployed. There were 600,000 jobless in Berlin alone. The Nazi Party now became a ‘catch-all party of discontent’, stacking up votes in a series of state elections. Mainstream politicians and figures from business and industry, men like Hjalmar Schacht and the steel magnate Fritz Thyssen, sought meetings with Hitler to explore how serious he was about the ‘socialist’ elements of the party programme. Early in 1932, Fromm observed that ‘Society slowly gets accustomed to the originally plebeian National Socialist movement. People from the upper crust are turning to Hitler.’ Not that it was a smooth run for the Nazi leadership. The swelling ranks of the SA were chafing at the bit to seize power. Hitler was forced to replace their leadership and recall Ernst Röhm (who had gone to South America in pursuit of other opportunities) to bring them into line. He also faced a scandal when his girlfriend, Geli Raubal, who was also his half-niece, committed suicide in his Munich apartment. In a bid to keep up the political momentum, Hitler and his advisers considered whether he should run as a candidate against Hindenburg, whose presidential term was coming to an end. There was a danger that in so doing Hitler would appear anti-patriotic, plus there was the minor problem that he was not even a German citizen. To get around the latter, NSDAP officials in Braunschweig appointed him as a government councillor, a post that brought with it German citizenship. In March 1932, Hitler launched himself into another election, posing as the youthful alternative to the respected field marshal. The campaign was brilliantly conducted by Joseph Goebbels, a journalist whom Hitler had appointed party boss of Berlin in 1926. Goebbels came from a humble Catholic background in the Rhineland and had put himself through university with the help of Catholic charities. Due to a deformity of the right foot he had not served in the war, but he was a pugnacious intellectual with a belligerent world view. As a youth he was drawn to conservative völkisch ideas that he spiced with a hatred of capitalism and the bourgeoisie. Thanks to coverage of the putsch trial he discovered Hitler and came to regard him as a messianic figure. Goebbels began writing for the völkisch press and in 1925 published ‘The National Socialist’s Little ABC’. Soon he had become one of the party’s most effective speakers and propagandists. For a while his association with the left wing of National Socialism hindered his progress, but after Goebbels abandoned it Hitler posted him to Berlin with a mission to win over the capital’s working-class population. Goebbels was well suited to the challenge and over the following years honed his propaganda techniques. He played on themes of sacrifice and redemption, used ceremony and invented rituals, and latched on to the possibilities of modern media. In particular he saw the utility of film and radio. His genius for publicity coalesced in his orchestration of Hitler’s bid in 1932 to become head of state. In the first round Hitler won 30.1 per cent of the vote, as against 49.6 per cent for Hindenburg, and thereby forced a second poll. To emphasize Hitler’s youth and dynamism, as against the staid, ancient field marshal, Goebbels, by now the party’s propaganda chief, arranged for Hitler to fly from city to city addressing mass rallies. Between 22 March and 9 April, the leader spoke twenty-three times before mass audiences in twenty-one locations, directly reaching one million people with his message. Even more people saw newsreel reports of ‘Hitler over Germany’. The result revealed that Hindenburg had scored 52 per cent of the vote, while Hitler had pushed his share up to 36.8 per cent. The doddering president had become the last refuge for defenders of the Weimar Republic, while Hitler was on the way to co-opting the entire völkisch-nationalist electorate. Even so, Jews and supporters of the republic did not see this as cause for alarm. Schwarzschild actually argued that it was time to ‘let him have a go’, reasoning that the longer Hitler was kept out of power the more his support would accumulate, until the Nazis received enough votes to form a government independently of other parties. Since the economy was bound to deteriorate, it made sense to let the Nazi Party take office while its vote hovered below 40 per cent. Crucially, Schwarzschild added that ‘As long as the democratic mechanism continues to function, even the maximum extension of Hitlerism will always remain within a limit which will mean that the slightest counter current will send it tumbling back into a minority.’ In April 1932 it seemed perfectly credible to argue, ‘Let him govern, but with the proviso that no change can be made to the constitutional framework.’ No sooner was the presidential race over than campaigning began in a slew of elections for state legislatures. In an attempt to curb the violence that now routinely accompanied electioneering and to peg back the National Socialists, Carl Severing, the Prussian minister of the interior, ordered raids on party headquarters, while Wilhelm Groener, the interior minister, banned the SA and the SS. The fightback came too late. The Nazis won 36 per cent of the vote in Prussia, 32 per cent in Bavaria and a remarkable 40 per cent in Anhalt. They were able to form administrations in Oldenburg, Mecklenburg-Schwerin and Thuringia. In such circumstances it was increasingly difficult to treat them as pariahs. But the resistance to Nazism was also being undermined from within. At the same time as Brüning was getting tough with the Nazis, Kurt von Schleicher, a former general staff officer who headed the liaison office between the army and Hindenburg’s office, began exploring ways to bring them into government. He lined up Franz von Papen, an old friend who was an ex-diplomat and Catholic politician, as the man to lead an administration open to the National Socialists. Then he persuaded men in the president’s circle that the plan was viable. Unable to secure a governing majority in the Reichstag and deserted by Hindenburg, Brüning resigned on 30 May 1932. Schleicher had discussed the transition in several secret meetings with Hitler and his advisers. In return for their compliance, Hitler and Goebbels demanded the unbanning of the SA and the SS plus fresh parliamentary elections. They were convinced that if they could push up their vote they could demand the right to form a government on their own. Schleicher’s plan misfired. Papen was made chancellor and began to construct a cabinet, but the dissolution of parliament and the announcement of elections unleashed a fresh tide of violence. The SA and SS were permitted back onto the streets and resumed battle with the Social Democratic Party militia and the communists. On one day alone, eighteen people were killed in the northern port city of Altona. Regardless of the chaos, Papen and Schleicher ploughed on with their agenda to form a right-wing regime. On 20 July 1932 they deposed the SPD government in Prussia, appointing commissioners in its place. Ten days later the elections gave the NSDAP 37.4 per cent of the vote, netting it 230 seats in the Reichstag. In accordance with his grand manoeuvre, Schleicher, who was now army minister, met Hitler to induce him into joining the government under Papen. But with 230 Reichstag delegates in his pocket Hitler felt emboldened to demand nothing less than the chancellorship. Schleicher was prepared to swallow that, but Hindenburg refused to contemplate a ‘Bohemian corporal’ serving as chancellor. On 13 August, Hindenburg met privately with Hitler and asked him to enter government as a junior partner. Hitler refused, demanding instead ‘full powers’. Hindenburg was equally implacable, so the talks ended. The presidential palace subsequently issued a statement implying that Hitler was power-hungry and put party before country. This rebuff left the Nazis looking bad and, indeed, they were in a sticky position. The party was short of funds after the succession of costly election campaigns; its activists were exhausted; and the SA was losing patience with the democratic route to power. There were rumblings of discontent with the party leadership. For the first time, the Nazi vote dipped in local elections. Meanwhile, Schleicher and Papen intended to dissolve the Reichstag, postpone elections until they could ensure a favourable outcome, and rule by decree as a ‘presidential cabinet’. In a chaotic session of the Reichstag, however, Papen was stampeded into a dissolution without obtaining a postponement. The elections had little chance of breaking the deadlock, but were potentially disastrous for the cash-strapped, battle-weary NSDAP. In the national ballot on 6 November 1932, the Nazis lost 2 million votes, 34 Reichstag seats, and saw their share of the poll fall to 33.1 per cent. To many it seemed that the republic had been saved. Instead, thanks to the machinations of Papen, Schleicher, and the coterie around the president, it lurched into another crisis. Following the elections Papen resigned but Hindenburg asked him to form a new government. The president again requested Hitler to serve under Papen, and Hitler again refused – this time to the alarm of his entourage and the despair of his followers. But none of the other parties could be induced to support Papen either. Schleicher now lost patience with his friend and convinced himself that with the backing of the army he could do better. He persuaded Hindenburg to withdraw his support for the chancellor, compelling Papen to resign for a second time. The next day, 3 December 1932, Schleicher assumed the chancellorship. Although he lacked any parliamentary or party base, Schleicher had a vision of an authoritarian regime that could win popular support through measures to benefit the working class. He opened talks with trade unionists and, after Hitler spurned his advances, courted the left wing of the Nazi Party, led by Gregor Strasser. When Strasser responded favourably it looked as if the Nazi Party was going to implode. Party workers and supporters were fed up with fighting campaigns that led nowhere; they could not understand why their leader shied away from high office. Hitler had to move nimbly to quell this unrest and crush the ‘Strasserites’. Even so, his prospects looked bleak. At the turn of the year, Leopold Schwarzschild detected ‘a break in the clouds’. He believed that a fascist takeover had been averted. There were signs of economic recovery while ‘the political tide has changed direction and lost some of its violence’. The nationalist camp was falling apart, the Nazis were crumbling, and Schleicher was beginning to improve things for ordinary people. Schwarzschild did not know that the embittered Papen was conspiring to bring down Schleicher and put Hitler in his place. On 4 January 1933 the two men met secretly in Cologne and agreed to seek a change of government without new elections. News of the conclave leaked out and immediately boosted Hitler’s standing. The Nazi Party received another fillip when it won nearly 40 per cent of the vote in the state of Lippe. Even though it was a tiny electorate and the Nazis had poured in resources, the victory gave the impression that they were on the march again. The success strengthened Hitler sufficiently to face down dissent amongst senior party men who warned that he could not play a waiting game much longer. According to an internal report the party was going to haemorrhage support unless it achieved a decisive success. At this juncture Joachim von Ribbentrop, a well-connected wine merchant from the Rhineland with a military and diplomatic background, who had been attracted to Hitler’s cause, offered to act as an intermediary between Hitler and Papen. While Schleicher tried vainly to shore up his position, Hitler bargained with Papen over the shape of a new cabinet. Initially the talks went badly because Hitler insisted on the chancellorship. Fortunately for him, Oskar von Hindenburg, the president’s son, disliked Schleicher even more than the prospect of a government led by Adolf Hitler. Oskar von Hindenburg and Hindenburg’s chief of staff, Otto Meissner, joined the discussions and helped steer them towards the formation of a cabinet with Hitler as chancellor and Papen as his deputy – on the assumption that the president and the vice chancellor could contain Hitler. A few days later Papen proposed this solution to Hindenburg. The old man baulked yet again, but he was equally unwilling to let Schleicher call fresh elections before the Reichstag reconvened and, inevitably, voted down his government. In desperation Schleicher intimated that the army might have to take control, raising the prospect of civil war. The previous day, 15,000 SA men had smashed their way into the headquarters of the Communist Party before marching to hear Hitler address them at a rally. As they marched they shouted, ‘We shit on the Jew republic . . . We shit on freedom.’ Things were spiralling out of control and the army was not even certain that it could keep the contesting sides apart. Finally, Schleicher ran out of options. On 28 January he told the cabinet that he would seek permission to dissolve the Reichstag, put off elections indefinitely, and govern in the interim as a ‘presidential cabinet’. If Hindenburg refused, he would resign. Although Hindenburg had previously permitted the constitution to be bent, this time he stood on principle and refused to let Schleicher sidestep the legislature and rule by decree: he was fed up with the chancellor and his advisers were worried by several of Schleicher’s pro-labour measures. Ironically, one of the last of these was a massive public works scheme worth RM500 million that would eventually put two million Germans back to work, but under Hitler. With Schleicher’s resignation it remained for Papen to persuade Hindenburg to swallow Hitler’s appointment as chancellor and construct a new government in such a way as to reassure the field marshal that the Nazi Party would not run rampant. The prospect of a ‘nationalist front’ induced Franz Seldte, leader of the Stahlhelm, to join, while Papen gained the adhesion of Hugenberg by offering two important ministries to the DNVP. The choice of two traditional conservatives, Werner von Blomberg and Konstantin von Neurath, as respectively army minister and foreign minister, further placated Hindenburg. Hitler asked for just two portfolios. Wilhelm Frick, a lawyer and former civil servant, got the Interior Ministry. Hermann Göring, who had been president of the Reichstag since July 1932 as a reflection of the Nazi ascendancy, joined as a minister without portfolio and Prussian minister of the interior. Papen himself took the role of commissioner for Prussia as well as vice chancellor, which, on paper, put him in a strong position. When a conservative Prussian aristocrat who knew Papen expressed alarm at the prospect of Hitler in power, Papen told him to calm down. ‘You’re mistaken. We’ve hired him.’ Judgements and misjudgements in January 1933 Contemporary assessments of Nazism varied widely and this variation is itself telling. No one in January 1933 could accurately assess the nature of the new regime, let alone how it would develop in the future or what it would deliver. Of course many Jews were now fully apprised of the Nazi Party’s rabid attitude towards the Jewish people and felt a sense of foreboding. Three weeks prior to the Nazis entering the national government the Jüdische Rundschau reflected that things had come to a sorry pass when Jews were relieved that a right-wing government led by the head of the army had managed to keep Hitler out of the Chancellery. Even that relief evaporated at the end of the month. However, other Jews saw nothing ominous in Hitler’s rise. In September 1930 Siegmund Warburg, a well-connected and well-informed member of the Hamburg banking dynasty, asserted to his Swedish father-in-law that ‘Once they are in government they will immediately become, first, more sensible and, secondly, once again less popular.’ After all, there were precedents for this transformation: ‘Our Social Democrats were also once irresponsible demagogues and have today nearly all become bourgeois and willing to compromise.’ Warburg was not alone amongst the Jewish elite of Weimar Germany. During the course of 1932, Rudolf Hilferding, a leading SPD politician, Hans Schäffer, the managing director of the Ullstein publishing concern, the banker Oscar Wassermann, and Warburg’s colleague Carl Melchior all advocated giving the Nazis a stab at government. Like Schwarzschild they were convinced that power would tame rather than inflame the Nazis and that Hitler was as likely to fail as to succeed. These Jews were not gullible or prey to wishful thinking derived from a pitiful desire to be accepted as Germans. Walther Karsch, a fearless opponent of fascism who wrote for the radical weekly Die Weltbühne, opined in September 1930 that ‘Anyone who believes that these people will now make a serious attempt to implement their anti-semitic ideas may be reassured. There is absolutely no reason to start applying for passports and packing your bags. In order to get back at the Jews there would need to be a change to the constitution. Where is the necessary two thirds majority?’ To Karsch, ‘anti-semitism is no more than an advertising slogan’. Proximity to events did not necessarily alter perceptions. The young Joachim Fest, growing up in a Catholic household in Berlin dominated by his anti-Nazi father, later remarked that ‘the continuation of the familiar blurred any sense of a break’. Curt Riess, a Jewish journalist working for a left-liberal newspaper, remembered sub-editing a headline announcing that Hitler had become chancellor ‘without the slightest feeling, without any concern that it might affect me’. Yet a few weeks later he was an exile in Paris and in 1941 made his way to New York, where he published numerous anti-Nazi tracts. Experienced diplomats reached diametrically opposed conclusions about Hitler, based on their own observations and soundings amongst knowledgeable Germans. Without any caveat Sir Horace Rumbold transmitted to the Foreign Office Papen’s belief that ‘a government under Hitler including a proportion of ministers who were not Nazis would be unable to embark on dangerous experiments’. A week later he echoed the line advanced by the German foreign minister, Neurath, that ‘The Hitler experiment had to be made sometime or other.’ When he met Hitler for the first time, Rumbold found him ‘simple and unaffected’ although his words and actions were ‘more calculated to appeal to the mob than to the critical faculty’. Yet the American James G. McDonald saw the Nazis in a different light. McDonald was a tall, blond Midwesterner who had gained a PhD in political science at Harvard and won notice in Germany for his critique of Allied atrocity propaganda during the Great War. Between 1919 and 1933 he was chairman of the American organization supporting the League of Nations which metamorphosed into the Foreign Policy Association (FPA). It was as a representative of the FPA that he travelled to Germany in autumn 1932 and met with Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl, Hitler’s American-educated publicist. Hanfstaengl got McDonald into a key rally at the Berlin Sportpalast on 1 September 1932 at which Hitler steadied the nerve of his followers. The next day he lunched with Hanfstaengl and asked him about Hitler and the Jewish question. In a report to the FPA he wrote that ‘Immediately his eyes lighted up, took on a fanatical look, and he launched into a tirade against the Jews. He would not admit that any Jew could be a good patriot in Germany.’ To McDonald, ‘It was clear that he and, I presume, many of the Nazis really believe all these charges against the Jews.’ Ordinary Germans greeted the new government in myriad ways depending on their political orientation, their religious affiliation, where they lived, whether they had jobs or not and a host of other variables. Many embraced National Socialism out of youthful idealism, a longing for change, and in a frenzy of hope rather than hate. Luise Solmitz, a Hamburg housewife, was married to a war veteran who had converted from Judaism to Protestantism. They were conservatively minded and fervent German nationalists who had supported the DNVP through its years of stagnation. In her diary on 30 January 1933 she expressed the relief and optimism of millions of others who were not Nazis: ‘Hitler Chancellor! And what a government! A government we hardly dared to dream of last July. Hitler, Hugenberg, Seldte, Papen!! On every one of them rest my hopes for Germany. National Socialist vitality, German national prudence, the party independent Stahlhelm and the never to be forgotten Papen . . .’ Melita Maschmann was one of those who watched the Nazi victory parade that evening in central Berlin. Aged fifteen she was taken to see history in the making by her anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi parents. Melita was enraptured by the spectacle and what she believed it portended. ‘For hours the columns marched by. Again and again amongst them we saw groups of boys and girls scarcely older than ourselves.’ At one point a spectator was assaulted but this did not deter her. ‘The horror it inspired in me was almost imperceptibly spiced with an intoxicating joy . . . I wanted to escape from my childish, narrow life and I wanted to attach myself to something that was great and fundamental.’ National Socialism promised that ‘people of all classes would live together like brothers and sisters’. Hitler’s route to power was paved by idealism, the desire for strong communities, and love of Germany. For some Germans anti-Semitism helped to define the nation and the community, with Jews embodying everything that was false, corrupt, alien and wrong. But Hitler was not made Chancellor of Germany because of anti-Semitism. It was obviously central to his world view and it was essential to the core activists of the Nazi Party, yet on 30 January 1933 this gave no indication of what lay in store for the Jews of Germany.