This moderate and dignified rejoinder threw Hitler into a fury. Violently thrusting aside Papen, who tried to restrain him, he mounted the platform for the second time. Pointing directly at the Social Democratic leader, he began: “You come late, but still you come![10] The pretty theories you have just proclaimed here, Mr. Deputy, are being communicated to world history just a bit too late.” In growing agitation, he declared that Social Democracy had no right to claim any common goals in foreign policy, that the Social Democrats had no feeling for national honor, no sense of justice. Then, repeatedly interrupted by stormy applause, he continued with even greater fervor:
You talk about persecutions. I think there are only a few of us here who did not have to suffer persecutions from your side in prison…. You seem to have forgotten completely that for years our shirts were ripped off our backs because you did not like the color…. We have outgrown your persecutions!
You say furthermore that criticism is salutary. Certainly, those who love Germany may criticize us; but those who worship an International cannot criticize us. Here, too, insight comes to you very late indeed, Mr. Deputy. You should have recognized the salutariness of criticism during the time we were in the opposition…. In those days our press was forbidden and forbidden and again forbidden, our meetings were forbidden, and we were forbidden to speak and I was forbidden to speak, for years on end. And now you say: criticism is salutary!
At this point the Social Democrats began to shout loudly in protest. The Reichstag President’s bell rang, and Göring called out into the ebbing din: “Stop talking nonsense now and listen to this!” Hitler continued:
You say: “Now they want to shunt aside the Reichstag in order to continue the revolution.” Gentlemen, if that had been our purpose we would not have needed… to have this bill presented. By God, we would have had the courage to deal with you differently!
You also say that not even we can abolish Social Democracy because it was the first to open these seats here to the common people, to the working men and women, and not just to barons and counts. In all that, Mr. Deputy, you have come too late. Why didn’t you, while there was still time, make your principles known to your friend Grzesinski,[11] or your other friends Braun* and Severing,* who for years kept saying that I was after all only a housepainter! For years you asserted that on your posters. [Interjection by Göring: “Now the Chancellor is settling accounts!”] And finally you even threatened to drive me out of Germany with a dog whip.
From now on we National Socialists will make it possible for the German worker to attain what he is able to demand and insist on. We National Socialists will be his intercessors. You, gentlemen, are no longer needed!… And don’t confound us with the bourgeois world. You think that your star may rise again. Gentlemen, the star of Germany will rise and yours will sink…. In the life of nations, what is rotten, old and feeble passes and does not come again.
With the revealing remark that he was appealing only “on account of justice” and for psychological reasons “to the German Reichstag to grant us what in any case we could have taken,” Hitler fired his parting shot. Turning to the Social Democrats, he cried:
My feeling is that you are not voting for this bill because by the very nature of your mentality you cannot comprehend the intentions that animate us in asking for it… and I can only tell you: I do not want you to vote for it! Germany shall be free, but not through you!
The minutes noted after these sentences: “Prolonged, stormy shouts of Heil, furious applause among the National Socialists and in the galleries. Hand-clapping among the German Nationalists. Stormy applause and shouts of Heil starting up repeatedly.”
Hitler’s reply has generally been considered an outstanding example of his gift for impromptu speaking. Thus it is worth knowing that the preceding speech by Otto Weis had been released to the newspapers beforehand, and evidently Hitler was already acquainted with it. Goebbels saw the enemy’s “fur flying” and rejoiced: “Never has anyone been so thrown to the ground and given such a brushing off as was done here.” In its bravura crudity and zest for crushing an opponent, the speech recalled that early performance of September, 1919, when a professorial speaker at a discussion first opened the sluices of Hitlerian oratory, to the astonished admiration of sober Anton Drexler. Now it was Hugenberg who at the cabinet meeting on the following day thanked Hitler “in the name of the other cabinet members… for so brilliantly putting the Marxist leader Weis in his place.”
When the storm of applause after Hitler’s speech had subsided, the representatives of the other parties took the floor. One after another they gave their reasons for consenting. Kaas, however, spoke with some embarrassment, and only after Frick, in response to another inquiry, had “solemnly assured him that the messenger had already delivered Hitler’s letter to his office in the Kroll Opera House.” The requisite three readings of the bill took only a few minutes. The result of the vote was 441 to 94; only the Social Democrats stuck to their nays. That was far more than the required two-thirds majority; it would have been sufficient even if the 81 Communist and the 26 Social Democratic deputies who had been detained by arrest, flight, or sickness had likewise voted no. As soon as Göring announced the result, the Nazis rushed to the fore. Arms raised in the Hitler salute, they gathered in front of the government bench and began singing the Horst Wessel song. That same evening the bill passed the already “co-ordinated” Reichsrat by unanimous vote. The promised letter from Hitler never reached any member of the Center.
With the passage of the “Law for the Removal of the Distress of People and Reich,” as the Enabling Act was officially called, the Reichstag was eliminated from any active role in German politics, and the administration had won unlimited freedom of action. The infamy lay not in the fact that the parties of the Center capitulated to a stronger opponent and bowed to a more unscrupulous will but that they actually collaborated to bring about their own exclusion from government. To be sure, the bourgeois parties were not altogether wrong when they pointed out that the so-called Reichstag fire decree of February 28 had decisively opened the way to dictatorship and that the Enabling Act was actually only a formality, the seizure of power having taken place already. But even so, the vote offered them a chance to bear witness to their objections by a memorable gesture. Instead, they chose to set the seal of legality upon the revolutionary actions of those weeks. If the decree of February 28 represented the actual downfall of the Weimar Republic, the Enabling Act meant its moral collapse. The act sealed the process of abdication by the political parties, a process that had started in 1930 when the Great Coalition was shattered.
The Enabling Act concluded the first phase of the seizure of power. It made Hitler independent of the alliance with his conservative partners. That in itself thwarted any chance for an organized power struggle against the new regime. The Völkische Beobachter was completely right when it commented: “A historic day. The parliamentary system has capitulated to the new Germany. For four years Hitler will be able to do everything he considers necessary: negatively, the extermination of all the corrupting forces of Marxism; positively, the establishment of a new people’s community. The great undertaking is begun. The day of the Third Reich has come!”
11
Albert Grzesinski, police commissioner of Berlin; Otto Braun, Premier of Prussia; Carl Severing, Prussian Minister of the Interior; all Social Democrats.