I

Revolutionary rhetoric and unbridled violence on the streets were not exactly what Papen and Hitler’s other cabinet allies had been expecting when they had agreed to Hitler’s becoming Reich Chancellor two months before, for all their approval of the police crackdown on the left. They had rather expected that bringing the Nazis into government would put a stop to all this. For worried conservatives and traditionalists, including Reich President Hindenburg, who after all still possessed at least the formal power to sack Hitler and replace him with someone else, the Nazis therefore staged a reassuring ceremony to mark the state opening of the newly elected Reichstag. Given the unavailability of the gutted and ruined Reichstag building, the ceremony had to take place elsewhere. Hitler and his conservative allies agreed to hold it in the garrison church at Potsdam, the symbolic locus of the Prussian monarchy, on 21 March 1933, the exact anniversary of the day on which the inaugural Reichstag had met after Bismarck’s founding of the Second Reich. The elaborate ceremony was planned down to the last detail by Goebbels as a propaganda demonstration of the unity of the old Reich and the new. Hindenburg stood next to the Kaiser’s vacant throne, dressed in the uniform of a Prussian Field-Marshal, to receive the obeisance of the frock-coated Hitler, who bowed and shook his hand. The Reich Chancellor gave a speech notable for its studied moderation, praising Hindenburg for his historical role in entrusting the fate of Germany to a new generation. Wreaths were laid on the tombs of the Prussian kings, and Hindenburg then reviewed a massive parade of the paramilitaries and the army.

The ritual was more important for the visual images it conveyed than for the speeches that were delivered. Here was Hitler appearing as a soberly dressed civilian statesman, humbly acknowledging the supremacy of the Prussian military tradition. Here were flags in the imperial colours of black, white and red, that had already officially replaced the black, red and gold of the Weimar Republic on 12 March. Here were the Prussian military grandees in their sometimes outlandish uniforms redolent of monarchist tradition. Here was the Protestant church, implicitly reasserting its supremacy alongside that of the army and the throne. Here was the restoration of the old Germany, wiping history clean of the tainted memory of Weimar democracy.¹⁰⁷ Not surprisingly, the Social Democrats declined the invitation to attend. In a further piece of symbolism, Hitler for his part refused to go to a service at the Catholic parish church in Potsdam on the grounds that Catholic priests, still loyal to the Centre Party and critical of what they regarded as the Nazis’ godless ways, had barred some leading Nazis from receiving the sacraments. This was a clear warning to the Church that it was time to fall into line.¹⁰⁸

Two days later, in the Kroll Opera House, designated as the temporary home of the Reichstag, Hitler, now dressed, like the other Nazi deputies, in a brownshirt paramilitary uniform, spoke to the Reichstag in a very different atmosphere. Standing beneath a huge swastika banner, he introduced the long-planned measure that would enable the Reich Chancellor to prepare laws that deviated from the constitution without the approval of the Reichstag and without reference to the President. This ‘Enabling Act’ would have to be renewed after four years, and the existence of the Reichstag itself, the upper legislative chamber representing the federated states, and the position of the Reich President, was not to be affected. What it meant, however, was that the Weimar constitution would be a dead letter, and the Reichstag would be shut out of the legislative process altogether. The passage of the Enabling Act was by no means assured: 94 out of the 120 elected Social Democrats were still able to vote - of those absent, some were in prison, some were ill, and some stayed away because they feared for their lives. Hitler knew in any case that he would not get the Social Democrats’ support. An amendment of the Weimar constitution required both a two-thirds quorum and a two-thirds majority of those present. Hermann Goring, as the Reichstag’s presiding officer, reduced the quorum from 432 to 378 by not counting the Communist deputies, even though they had all been legally elected. This was a high-handed decision that had no legitimacy in law whatsoever.¹⁰⁹ Yet even after this illegal manoeuvre, the Nazis still needed the votes of the Centre Party to push the measure through.

By this point in its history, the party had long since ceased to be a supporter of democracy. Following the general trend of political Catholicism in interwar Europe, it had come to support the principles of authoritarianism and dictatorship out of fear of Bolshevism and revolution. True, what seemed to be shaping up in Germany was not quite the kind of ‘clerico-fascist’ regime to which Catholic politicians were soon to lend their support in Austria and Spain. But in 1929 the Catholic Church had safeguarded its position in Italy through a Concordat with Mussolini, and the prospect of a similar arrangement was now held out to it in Germany as well. The escalating terror to which Catholics and their political representatives, newspapers, speakers and local officials had been subjected since the middle of February made the Centre Party look anxiously for guarantees that the Church would survive. Now, under stronger clerical influence than ever before, and led by a Catholic priest, Prelate Ludwig Kaas, the party was reassured in two days of discussions with Hitler that the rights of the Church would not be affected by the Enabling Act. The doubts of Heinrich Brüning and his close advisers were assuaged. The federated states, bastions of Catholicism in the south, would remain intact, despite their takeover by Reich Commissioners appointed from Berlin, and the judiciary would stay independent. These promises, combined with heavy pressure from the Vatican, proved sufficient to win the Centre Party deputies over to supporting the measure that in the long run was bound to mean their own political demise.¹¹⁰

The deputies arrived at the Kroll Opera House in an atmosphere heavy with violence and intimidation. The Social Democrat Wilhelm Hoegner remembered:

Wild chants greeted us: ‘We want the Enabling Law!’ Young lads with the swastika on their chests looked us cheekily up and down, virtually barring the way for us. They quite made us run the gauntlet, and shouted insults at us like ‘Centrist pig’, ‘Marxist sow’. In the Kroll Opera it was swarming with armed SA and SS ... The debating chamber was decorated with swastikas and similar ornaments ... When we Social Democrats had taken our places on the far left, SA and SS men placed themselves by the exits and along the walls behind us in a half-circle. Their attitude did not bode well for us.¹¹¹

Hitler began his speech with his usual diatribes against the ‘November criminals’ of 1918 and boasted of his removal of the threat of Communism. He repeated his promise to protect the interests of the Churches, particularly in the schools, a major bone of contention under the Weimar Republic. He ended, however, with an unmistakeable threat of violent repression should the measure be rejected. The ‘government of the nationalist uprising’, he declared, was ‘determined and ready to deal with the announcement that the Act has been rejected and with it that resistance has been declared. May you, gentlemen, now take the decision yourselves as to whether it is to be peace or war.’ This did not fail to have an effect on wavering Centre Party deputies such as Heinrich Brüning, who now decided to vote for the Act. ‘They fear’, as Joseph Wirth, one of the party’s leading figures and a former Reich Chancellor himself, told the Social Democrats in private, ‘that if the Act is rejected, the Nazi revolution will break out and there will be bloody anarchy’.¹¹²

In the face of such threats, the Social Democrats had decided that their chairman, Otto Wels, should adopt a moderate, even conciliatory tone in his speech for the opposition, fearing that otherwise he might be shot down or beaten up by the brownshirts who were standing threateningly round the edge of the chamber, or arrested as he went out. What he had to say, however, was dramatic enough. He defended the achievements of the Weimar Republic in bringing about equality of opportunity, social welfare and the return of Germany to the international community. ‘Freedom and life can be taken from us, but not honour.’ Wels was not exaggerating: several prominent Social Democrats had already been killed by the Nazis, and he himself was carrying a cyanide capsule in his waist pocket as he spoke, ready to swallow should he be arrested and tortured by the brownshirts after delivering his speech. His voice choking with emotion, he ended with an appeal to the future:

In this historic hour, we German Social Democrats solemnly profess our allegiance to the basic principles of humanity and justice, freedom and socialism. No Enabling Law gives you the right to annihilate ideas that are eternal and indestructible. The Anti-Socialist Law did not annihilate the Social Democrats. Social Democracy can also draw new strength from fresh persecutions. We greet the persecuted and the hard-pressed. Their steadfastness and loyalty deserve admiration. The courage of their convictions, their unbroken confidence, vouch for a brighter future.

Wels’s peroration was greeted with uproar in the chamber, the mocking, raucous laughter of the Nazi deputies drowning out the applause from his own benches.

Hitler’s response was contemptuous. The Social Democrats had sent the speech to the press in advance of the session, and Hitler’s staff had obtained a copy on which to base the Chancellor’s reply. He knew that he did not need their votes. ‘You think’, he said, to thunderous applause from the uniformed ranks of Nazi deputies, ‘that your star could rise again! Gentlemen, Germany’s star will rise and yours will sink .’.. Germany shall be free, but not through you!’ After brief speeches by the leaders of the other parties, the deputies voted 444 in favour and 94 against. The once proud German liberals, now represented through the German State Party, were amongst the bill’s supporters. Only the Social Democrats voted against. So great was the majority that the bill would have passed even had all 120 Social Democratic and all 81 Communist deputies been present, making the total number of seats 647 instead of 566, and all of them had voted ‘no’.¹¹³

With the Enabling Act now in force, the Reichstag could be effectively dispensed with. From this point on, Hitler and his cabinet ruled by decree, either using President Hindenburg as a rubber stamp, or bypassing him entirely, as the Act allowed them to. Nobody believed that when the four years of the Act’s duration had elapsed, the Reichstag would be in a position to object to its renewal, nor was it. As with the Reichstag fire decree, a temporary piece of emergency legislation with some limited precedents in the Weimar period now became the legal, or pseudo-legal basis for the permanent removal of civil rights and democratic liberties. Renewed in 1937 and again in 1939, it was made permanent by decree in 1943. The brownshirt terror on the streets was already comprehensive enough to make it quite clear what was now about to happen. Wels was right to predict that Germany would soon become a one-party state.¹¹⁴