Actually, Hitler had needed less than three months to outmaneuver his partners and checkmate almost all the opposing forces. To realize the swiftness of the process we must keep in mind that Mussolini in Italy took seven years to accumulate approximately as much power. Hitler’s purposefulness and his feeling for the statesmanlike style had made their impression on Hindenburg from the start and soon prompted the President to drop his former reservations. The affirmative vote in the Reichstag now reinforced him in his change of attitude. The cold, self-centered old man ignored the persecutions which, after all, affected a good many of his own former voters. Hindenburg felt that at last he was once more in the right camp. If Hitler was doing away with that “wretched undisciplined party nonsense,” wasn’t that to his credit?
Only two days after the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor, Ludendorff had written to the aged field marshal reproaching him for having “delivered the country to one of the greatest demagogues of all time.” The man who had marched with Hitler in 1923 added: “I solemnly prophesy to you that this damnable man will plunge our Reich into the abyss and bring inconceivable misery down upon our nation. Coming generations will curse you in your grave because of this action.”11 But Hindenburg appeared to be well pleased with his decision. He had “taken the leap over the hurdle and would now have peace for a considerable time.” As part of his program for withdrawing personally from the business of government, he had State Secretary Meissner explain, during the cabinet conference on the Enabling Act, that presidential collaboration on the laws issued as a result of this Enabling Act would be “not requisite.” He was glad to be relieved of the responsibility that had long been oppressive to him.
Papen’s insistence on attending all meetings between the President and the Chancellor was soon dropped. Hindenburg himself asked Papen “not to insult” Hitler, as he put it. And when Prime Minister Held of Bavaria came to the presidential palace to protest against the terrorism and violations of the Constitution committed by the Nazis, the doddering old man told him to speak to Hitler himself. In the cabinet, too, Goebbels noted, “the authority of the Führer has now been wholly established. Votes are no longer taken. The Führer decides. All this is going much faster than we dared to hope.”
For the time being the slogans and open challenges of the Nazis were almost all directed against the Marxists, but the thrust was aimed equally at their German Nationalist partner in the government. In their own shortsighted zeal against the Left, Papen, Hugenberg, and their following entirely overlooked the fact that elimination of the Left would leave Hitler in command of the means to liquidate them also. Instead, Carl Goerdeler, the conservative mayor of Leipzig, cheerfully asserted that they would soon be sending Hitler back to his hobby of architecture and resume the conduct of the state themselves. Hitler himself, his old resentments again aroused, called his bourgeois coalition partners “ghosts” and declared: “The reactionaries think they have put me on a leash. They are going to set traps for me, as many as they can. But we will not wait until they act…. We are ruthless. I have no bourgeois scruples! They think I am uncultured, a barbarian. Yes, we are barbarians! We want to be. That is an honorable epithet. We are the ones who will rejuvenate the world. This old world is done for….”12
But leverage against both the Left and Right was not all of the profit Hitler derived from the Enabling Act. By virtue of the act, the entire apparatus of the government bureaucracy was at Hitler’s disposal. This included the judiciary, which was indispensable to his far-reaching plans. The act offered a basis that satisfied both the consciences and the craving for security of the bureaucrats. Most government officials were pleased to note the legal nature of this revolution, which in spite of the many isolated outrages contrasted so favorably with the chaos of 1918. This legality, even more than the antidemocratic traditions of the civil service made them ready to co-operate. Moreover, a special decree had been issued, which made no acquiescent civil servants liable to punishment. What is more, resistance would have equaled illegal action.
There are those who to this day maintain that there was no definite break, that the parliamentary republic glided by degrees into totalitarian dictatorship. But examination of all the facts reveals that within the process of the legal revolution the revolutionary elements far outweighed the legal ones. The public was duped by the brilliant trick of having the change of scene take place on the uncurtained stage, so to speak. But the real drama consisted in a revolutionary seizure of power confirmed by the Enabling Act. As the act itself provided, it was formally extended in 1937, 1941, and once again in 1943. But it remained an emergency measure promulgated in a state of emergency. Nor did the language of the regime attempt to hide its revolutionary intentions. Even in his speech on the Enabling Act Hitler constantly spoke of “national revolution” when he might have used the safer euphemism of “national rising.” And two weeks later Göring in a speech explicitly repudiated this formula, replacing it by the concept “national socialist revolution.”
There remained only a rounding off of power positions already achieved. Within a few weeks the centralist Gleichschaltung of the states had been completed, and in tandem with that action the complete shattering of all political groups and associations. The collapse of the Communists took place almost silently, in an atmosphere of muffled terrorism. Some members of the Communist Party retreated into the underground; others opportunistically deserted to the National Socialists. The Nazis then turned upon the unions, which had already exposed their dismay and weakness during the early March days. They seemed to think they could buy off the impending doom by a series of placating gestures. Although the harassment and arrests of leading union members were steadily increasing throughout the Reich and the SA was staging a series of raids on local union offices, on March 20 the labor federation’s executive committee addressed a kind of declaration of loyalty to Hitler. It spoke of the purely social tasks of the unions, “no matter what the nature of the political regime.” When Hitler took over an old demand of the labor movement and declared May 1 a national holiday, the union leadership called upon the rank and file to participate in the demonstrations. Everywhere, thereupon, the unionized blue-collar and white-collar workers marched under alien banners in huge holiday parades. They listened bitterly to the speeches of Nazi functionaries but were nevertheless forced to applaud, and found themselves suddenly lined up in the very ranks they had so recently faced with fierce enmity. This confusing experience contributed more than anything else to shattering the will to resist of a movement numbering millions of workers. And while the labor-union paper, following the line of the union leadership, hailed May 1 as a “day of victory,” on May 2 the SA and SS occupied union headquarters throughout Germany. They also took over the businesses and the banks belonging to the labor federation, arrested the leading officials, and shipped a good many of them off to concentration camps. The unions went ingloriously down to destruction.