Hitler with President Hindenburg at the “Day of Potsdam,” March 21, 1933
Backed by emergency decrees and armed with police-auxiliary status, Berlin’s SA forces now turned the streets of the capital into a hunting ground for their political and personal enemies. They focused on the working-class districts, where in the past they had often gotten back as much as they had dished out. They ranged through the massive Mietskasernen, grabbing “subversives” and bundling them off to their various district headquarters, which they converted into ad hoc prisons and torture chambers. The most prominent of these hellholes were the SA barracks in Hedemannstrasse (Kreuzberg) and the SA Field Police post in General-Pappe-Strasse (Tempelhof). Another “wild concentration camp” was located in a squat brick water tower in the district of Prenzlauer Berg. It now bears a plaque attesting to its former function, blithely ignored by the patrons of the hip cafés that have sprouted up around the tower since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Rudolf Diels, the first head of the Gestapo, recalled in his memoirs a visit to the SA barracks in Hedemannstrasse, where he saw men with their faces beaten in and their arms and legs broken. They lay on dirty straw mats, he reported, like “big clumps of mud, funny dolls with dead eyes and wobbly heads.”
While the SA was rounding up Communists and Socialists and throwing them in makeshift prisons, the Nazi leadership made a strenuous effort to depict the party as the true protector of the working classes. On May 1, 1933, the workers’ traditional day of celebration, Berlin was festooned in swastika banners and signs saying “Only a Strong Germany Can Provide Work for the German Workman.” Workers from all over the country were brought to the capital to attend a mass rally in Tem-pelhof Field, where they heard Hitler promise a war on unemployment through public works and the reduction of interest payments. He also announced a plan for compulsory labor service, whereby every German would be obliged “to gain some experience of manual labor.” According to British ambassador Sir Horace Rumbold, who witnessed the speech, Hitler’s address generated little enthusiasm among the masses.
In the Berlin region the Nazi terror campaign reached its bloody peak during the infamous Köpenicker Blutwoche (Köpenick Blood Week) in June 1933. In revenge for an anti-Nazi demonstration in that district, Brownshirt gangs rounded up over 500 Communist and Socialist functionaries and threw them into SA prisons. During the following days, ninety-one prisoners were shot or tortured to death. Their mangled corpses were sewn into sacks and dumped into the Havel River, on whose banks they washed up over the course of the summer. The Brownshirts’ rival, the SS, also lost no time in imposing itself on the capital. In April 1933 it took control of all the German police forces, including Göring’s Berlin-based Secret State Police, or Gestapo. This agency moved into a former applied arts school at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8, while the SS command established its headquarters next door at the Prinz Albrecht Hotel.
Soon the basement of the Gestapo building was so full of political prisoners that a new jail was opened in a former military prison at Tempelhof Airport called “Columbia-Haus.” When this facility was exposed in the foreign press as a site of systematic torture and murder, the SS admitted that a few “excesses” might have occurred there, but attributed these to the guards’ “bitterness over the crimes committed by the Communists in the wake of the national revolution.” As a step toward systematizing the terror campaign, the SS began establishing regular concentration camps around the country, including the Sachsenhausen camp in the northern Berlin suburb of Oranienburg. To counter charges in the foreign press that atrocities were being committed in this place as well, the regime published a picture book on 264 Sachsenhausen showing rows of orderly barracks and fit-looking prisoners. A Berlin SA leader named Karl Ernst claimed in his foreword to the book that the new concentration camp system was already achieving great successes in “helping misdirected citizens to turn around politically and recover the work-ethic.”
While Nazi paramilitary units were seizing control of Berlin’s streets, party officials were systematically purging the city’s bureaucratic and political institutions. A national “Law for the Reconstitution of the Professional Civil Service,” passed on April 7, 1933, provided legal cover for the dismissal of racially or politically objectionable officials. In Berlin the purge cleaned out about one-third of the municipal bureaucracy. Meanwhile, Communist and Social Democratic representatives were barred from taking their places in the new city assembly, which began meeting on April 1, 1933. The then mayor, Heinrich Sahm (Deutschnationale Volkspartei, DNVP), who had been elected in 1931, was allowed for the time being to keep his post because he was a close confidant of Hindenburg’s. Like many of his conservative colleagues, Sahm thought he could exercise a restraining influence on the Nazis. Instead he found himself countersigning orders for the dismissal and forced retirement of municipal officials. In November 1933 he presided over a ceremony making Adolf Hitler an honorary citizen of Berlin. On this occasion Sahm insisted that the capital stood behind its Führer “in unconditional loyalty and iron solidarity.” Two years later, tiring of his role as a glorified notary, Sahm resigned his office.
While Sahm was useful as a conservative figurehead, the official actually in charge of the administrative purge in Berlin was Dr. Julius Lippert, chairman of the Nazi delegation in the Berlin city assembly. On March 14 he was appointed Reich commissioner of the city of Berlin to help consolidate the regime’s control over a capital that, Mayor Sahm’s declaration notwithstanding, seemed to be inadequately committed to the new order. Following Sahm’s resignation, Lippert folded the functions of mayor into his office as Reich Commissioner, which he held until 1940. The special controls imposed by the new government on Berlin were a testament to the Nazis’ distrust of the Spree metropolis.
Despite its dictatorial powers in Berlin and across the Reich, the Nazi leadership continued to feel somewhat uneasy in the saddle. The nation’s military, while accepting the change in government, was not yet integrated into the new order. Moreover, Vice-chancellor Papen and some of his conservative friends, having come to realize that they had failed to “tame” Hitler, were demanding a return to constitutional government. On June 17, 1934, Papen delivered a speech at Marburg University in which he accused the Nazis of leading a “revolution against order, law, and church.” Papen’s initiative convinced Hitler that his efforts to win over the army and the conservative establishment were being undermined by the SA, which was demanding that it, not the Reichswehr, become the primary source of military muscle for the Third Reich. The Führer decided that it was time to discipline the SA. The result of this decision was an orgy of bloodletting known as the Night of the Long Knives.
On June 28, 1934, Hitler ordered Rohm and other top SA leaders to gather at Bad Wiessee, a resort town south of Munich, for a meeting. Two days later, as the SA men frolicked in their hotel, Hitler arrived with a unit of SS guards and placed all the Brownshirts under arrest. The charge was plotting a putsch against the Nazi government. Some of the alleged plotters were killed on the spot. The rest were transported to Munich’s Stadelheim prison, where more executions took place. In consideration of their old friendship, Hitler ordered that Rohm be allowed to commit suicide. When the captain refused to do so, he, too, was executed. Later, Goebbels spread the rumor that the SA leader had been captured in bed with a young boy.
Although much of the Long Knives killing took place in Bad Wiessee and Munich, Berlin was also an important stage for this grisly spectacle. Here the targets included leaders of the local SA as well as prominent conservatives. SA Obergrup-penflihrer Karl Ernst, who liked to brag that he “owned Berlin,” was about to embark on a honeymoon cruise when he was arrested by the Gestapo in Bremer-haven and flown back to Berlin. Upon arrival at Tempelhof he demanded to be taken to his “good friend,” Göring. Instead he was driven to the Lichterfelde Cadet School and promptly shot. His execution was followed in quick succession by that of many other Berlin SA figures, none of whom seemed to understand what they had done to deserve such a fate.