This challenge was directed chiefly against the Communists. Not only were they the main enemy; they also would hold the balance in the next Reichstag. Three days after the formation of the cabinet, Göring had already banned all Communist meetings in Prussia in response to the Communist Party’s call for a general strike and demonstrations. Nevertheless, the muffled civil war continued; in the first few days of February there were clashes costing fifteen lives and ten times that number of wounded. On February 24 the police made a large-scale raid on the Communist Party headquarters, Karl Liebknccht House on Bülow Platz in Berlin. It had long since been abandoned by the Communist Party leadership, but the very next day the press and radio reported sensational finds of “tons of treasonous materials.” Subsequently these documents—which were never published—provided Nazi electioneering with atrocity stories of a projected Communist revolution: “The populace is to be terrified and cowed by preliminary measures involving murderous attacks etc. upon leaders of the nation and government, assaults upon vital factories and public buildings, poisoning of entire groups of especially feared persons, the taking of hostages, the kidnapping of wives and children of prominent men,” the police report stated. Nevertheless, the Communist Party was not banned, for that might have driven its voters into the arms of the Social Democratic Party.
The Nazis intensified their propaganda to make this campaign the noisiest and wildest of all the electoral battles of recent years. Hitler himself, who again made the greatest impact, had opened the campaign with a major speech in the Berlin Sportpalast. In it he verbosely repeated the old cry of fourteen years of shame and misery, the old denunciations of the November criminals and the parties of the “system,” and the old formulas for salvation. He ended on a pseudoreligious note. He had, he cried, the “rock-hard conviction that sooner or later the hour will come in which the millions who hate us today will stand behind us and together with us will hail what we have jointly created, toilsomely struggled for, bitterly paid for: the new German Reich of greatness and honor and power and glory and justice. Amen!”
Once again all technical media were utilized—this time with the prestige and support of the government. The country was inundated with appeals, slogans, parades, displays of banners. Once again Hitler was flying over Germany. Goebbels had hit on a new propaganda tool—radio. “Our opponents did not know what to do with its possibilities,” the propaganda chief wrote. “We must learn all the better how to handle it.” As Hitler visited city after city, the local radio station was to report on his appearance. “We will have our broadcasts held in the midst of the people and so give the listener a vivid picture of what goes on at our meetings. For each of the FUhrer’s speeches I myself will give an introduction in which I mean to try to convey to the listener the magic and the atmosphere of our mass demonstrations.”
A considerable portion of the expenses for the election campaign was obtained at an affair in the palace of the Reichstag President, to which Göring invited a number of leading businessmen on February 20. Among the participants were Hjalmar Schacht, Krupp von Bohlen, Albert Vogler of Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel), Georg von Schnitzler of I. G. Farben, the banker Kurt von Schroder, and other representatives of heavy industry, mining, and banking. In his speech to these notables Hitler once again emphasized the difference between the authoritarian ideology of employers and the democratic Constitution, which he derided as the political expression of weakness and decadence. He hailed the tightly organized ideological state as the sole possible means for combating the Communist menace, and lauded the supreme right of the great individual. He had refused to be merely tolerated by the Center, he continued. Hugenberg and the German Nationalists were only holding him back. To vanquish the enemy once and for all, he must have full control of the state. In language that abandoned even the sham of legality, he called upon his listeners for financial assistance: “We now are facing the last election. Whatever its outcome, there is no going backward…. One way or another, if the election does not decide, the decision will have to be taken in another way.” Göring followed up the appeal with a few remarks. The contribution, he said, “would surely come all the more easily to industry if it knew that the election on March 5 would surely be the last for ten years, or even for a hundred years.” Thereupon Schacht turned to the company, saying, “And now, gentlemen, to the cashier!” He proposed the creation of an “election fund” and promptly collected from the leading industrial firms at least 3 million marks, possibly more.1
In his campaign speeches, too, Hitler abandoned a good deal of his restraint. “The period of international babble, the promise of reconciliation among nations, is over and done with; its place will be taken by the German People’s Community,” he declared in Kassel. In Stuttgart he promised to “burn out the symptoms of rottenness and eliminate the poison.” He was determined, he said, “under no circumstances to let Germany fall back into the past regime.” He carefully avoided defining his program in detail (“We do not want to lie and we do not want to deceive… and give cheap promises”); his only specific statement was his pledge “never, never… to depart from the task of exterminating Marxism and everything connected with it” in Germany. The “first point” in his program would be to notify the adversary: “Away with all illusions!” Four years hence he would give the German people another chance to vote for him, but he would give no such opportunity to the parties of disintegration. Then let the German people judge, he exclaimed, falling into that messianic tone to which he was so prone at that period. He would admit no other judge, but “for my part the people may crucify me if they think that I have not done my duty.”2
One of the stratagems of legal revolution was not to openly crush the adversary, but instead to provoke him to acts of violence so that he himself provided the pretext for legal measures of repression. Goebbels described these tactics in a diary note dated January 31: “For the present we intend to refrain from direct countermeasures [against the Communists], First the Bolshevist attempt at revolution must flare up. Then we will strike at the proper moment.” This was Hitler’s old dream: to be called in at the climax of a Communist uprising, and annihilate the great foe in a single dramatic clash. Then he would be hailed by the nation as the restorer of order and granted legitimacy and respect. As early as the first cabinet meeting of January 30, therefore, he had dismissed Hugenberg’s proposal that the Communist Party be banned outright, its seats in the Reichstag withdrawn, thus assuring a parliamentary majority by doing away with the need for new elections.
He was worried, however, that the Communists might be in no position for a full-scale, vigorous act of rebellion. At various times he had expressed doubts of their revolutionary impetus—which, incidentally, Goebbels had also done early in 1932 when he said he could no longer see them as a danger. As a matter of fact, Nazi propaganda had to work hard to create the necessary bogey man. The revelations about the tons of seditious material found in Communist Party headquarters served this purpose along with a flock of rumors, obviously inspired by the Nazis themselves from the middle of February on, concerning a plan to assassinate Hitler. Rosa Luxemburg’s vain question of 1918, “Where is the German proletariat?” remained unanswered this time as well. To be sure, a few street battles occurred during the early weeks of February, but these were all local clashes. There was no sign of a centrally directed attempt at a major uprising of the sort that could stimulate full-blown anxiety complexes. Partly, the reason for this was the Depression and the depleted energies of the working class. But the principal reason was the grotesque error of the Communist leadership in its estimate of the historical situation. In spite of persecution and torture, the flight of many comrades and the mass defections of their followers, the Communists clung to their doctrine that the real enemy was Social Democracy, that there was nothing to choose between Fascism and parliamentary democracy, and that Hitler was merely a puppet whose installation in power was only bringing the victory of Communism closer. In this stage of history, the Communist leaders preached, patience was the supreme revolutionary virtue.