Hitler as a charismatic figure who was presented through propaganda as bringing hope for the future and his appointment as chancellor was initially supported with euphoric optimism among the German population as a result of the preceding fourteen years of nearly continuous political and economic crises. Generating support for the regime that pledged to supposedly restore the country as a great European power by reasserting national pride under the leadership of a self-styled national saviour consequently led to encouragement and commitment to the NSDAP while any dissent was not tolerated. Parallel associations were established to existing ones, such as professors’ and women’s organisations, and farmers put their interests under united under National Socialist leadership, and small business owners and artisans were forced into similar national socialist organisations. Only church organisations refused to be dissolved. In order to acquire support among Catholics, Hitler concluded a Concordat with the Vatican, by which he promised to leave the Catholic Germany in Germany unmolested if the Catholics abstained from political activity outside the NSDAP, while the Vatican distanced itself from politicised Catholicism. The Lutheran church as the predominant Protestant denomination in Germany was divided. A minority that was in favour of the regime proceeded to integrate protestant communities into the national socialist state as the “German Christian” movement. However, another minority criticised this policy and formed the Bekennende Kirche, the Professing Church, with Pastor Martin Niemöller as its leader, which remained a source of criticism and resistance against the enforced conformity of all facets of society under the principles of National Socialism, with Hitler at the head of a newly established national “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft), which permeated all facets of society to prescribe to this vision, once the NSDAP consolidated power through legislation, beginning with the Reichstag Fire decree, which Hitler persuaded Hindenburg was necessary to deal with the alleged threats from communists. This decree granted full autonomy to the national cabinet, and take any necessary actions to safeguard public order, which was fundamental to Hitler consolidating political power.
The coordinated nazification of society through enforced conformity, or so-called “synchronisation,” or Gleichschaltung, thus took place in subsequent stages, which precluded nationwide opposition by forwarding the claim that they were taking pre-emptive strikes against the suspicion of a communist revolt as an artificially created crisis, which led to untrammelled attacks on all forms of opposition. Authority was likewise established in workplaces through superseding the earlier corporate councils with the leadership principle of command and obedience that followed the abolition of the trade unions, along with confiscating their funds and arresting organised labour leaders. A German Labour Front as a superficial new form of trade unionism was instituted in their place on 2 May 1933, which composed enforcing the national conformity of organised labour through replacing all trade union officials with NSDAP representatives. Various economic controls were imposed on workforces by illegalising strike and freezing salaries. All non-national socialist organisational life was then gradually eliminated to bring the national population into conformity under the central authority of the NSDAP. As a result, the majority of the population appeared to be amenable to the state of affairs while sacrificing the development of freedoms associated with those found in a liberal democracy in exchange for alleviating crime that included political violence among rival political parties to induce persuasion for political support, witnessing a return to prosperity, and what appeared to be positive aspects of the newly established dictatorship, especially overcoming the effects of the Great Depression before all of the other industrialised nations.
The Reichsrat, the upper chamber of parliament, was abolished on 30 January 1934, ending the federal system altogether. The final major constitutional change followed on 1 August 1934, with the cabinet passing the “Law Concerning the Highest State Office of the Reich.” Hitler thus amalgamated the offices of Chancellor and President in his own person as Führer and Reichskanzler on the same day, upon President Hindenburg’s death, as the leading source of unconditional state authority, which was later enacted on 18 August. Rudolf Hess was appointed Deputy-Führer and cabinet minister without portfolio, and was reduced in his earlier importance in the NSDAP to the role of giving remarkable eloquent speeches at political rallies that repeatedly cultivated the cult of Hitler as a national leader and saviour, while not being engaged in Hitler’s plans for waging war in the foreseeable future. General von Blomberg and General von Fritsch, the commander-in-chief of the Reichswehr, agreed on 2 August 1934 that all officers and troops swear an oath of personal allegiance to Adolf Hitler as leader of the German Reich and supreme commander of the armed forces. Removing the military as a conservative entity posing potential threat to the NSDAP, marking the final step to consolidate the establishment of the Hitler’s absolute power over the state that the military tolerated in exchange for disposing of the threat of the volatile SA mobs extending the National Socialist social upheaval, and threatening the inviolable status of the army as the sole national armed force. He accordingly took personal command of the armed forces that swore and oath of allegiance to him. The Wehrmacht was hereafter abused as a political power factor. The German people had lost its symbolic figure who was required to stand outside and above politics. Meanwhile, in spite of many warnings from inside and outside the country and against the better judgement of the individual members of German officer corps remained adhering by their oath to the head of state, including when that oath had eventually to be taken again to Hitler that paralysed military opposition on the strength of the force of individual conscience.
Many who were not Jews or had leftist political orientations were satisfied with the National Socialist regime, especially after the world economy began recovering in the second half of 1932. However, political resistance proved to be nearly impossible. Hermann Göring as the Prussian minister of the interior set up an efficient political secret police force, the Geheime Staatspolizei, or Gestapo, on 26 April 1933, by absorbing the pre-existing Prussian state police political section that was responsible for dealing with agitators and extremists. This newly re-created force that initially was composed of police officers who were experienced in identifying any potential threats became independent, and ultimately functioned as an instrument of his personal power, as it became increasingly radicalised through Nazi recruits who operated a ruthless and independent instrument of repression against any form of hostility to the dictatorship regime and maintain its unconditional authority functioning as an instrument of suppression. This political secret police force would ultimately have a penetrative presence into every branch of public life, private institutions, as well as the private lives of individuals through secretive underground methods, and supported by informers who would denounce others to this organisation, which cultivated a widespread climate of fear throughout the population to enforce a form of civilian self-policing as a tenet of totalitarian control political apparatus to suppress any form of opposition, while the SA brutally enforced the authority of the NSDAP through physical means, while the Gestapo, the SS and the SA were empowered with taking anyone suspected of political opposition to the regime to be indiscriminately taken into “protective custody.”
As the NSDAP exercised the only legal executive and legislative authority, the Gestapo functioned as an autonomous instrument of political will that was perceived as being omnipresent became a legal apparatus that was aimed at generating uncertainty and prevailing fear of opposing the regime while it operated outside the scope of conventional judicial controls. Reporting any illicit activity against the state were encouraged as a form of contributing to protecting the “national community,” whether through correspondence or verbal reports at police stations, or communicating through NSDAP organisations, which took place either from political convictions, or personal conflicts as acts of malicious hostility against the victims of these denunciations. In view of the lack of any legal guarantees to individual citizens, such as the right to legal defence and the right to privacy, Gestapo operatives had free rein to arrest, interrogate and detain critics indefinitely and harshly enough to deter the rest of the population from taking action against the regime. They could also acquire support from any random individuals who could denounce others for any statements or actions that could be ambiguously interpreted as subversive acts against the regime, as National Socialist legislated nullified the rule of law that was no longer seen to work, and stifled organised resistance when the population was instilled with a common prevailing sense of fear.
Heinrich Himmler had been establishing this force as an elite formation since assuming command over it in 1929, and his deputy Reinhard Heydrich, who was also the head of the National Socialist Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD) established in June 1931 as a separate organisation to purge opposition within the NSDAP and its affiliated organisations as the party’s secret police force, while it was necessary to vet personnel, as both the SS and the SA increased in numbers with the onset of the Great Depression that drew unemployed individuals into the Nazi movement. Himmler thus set up the SD as an independent apparatus with the SS as an intelligence agency gathering information on political opposition to the NSDAP, as well as its own membership, and thereby consolidated his own power base therein.
Himmler was initially the head of the Bavarian political police, and eventually took over control over the police forces in all of the German states, with the exception of Prussia, until Hitler had Göring hand jurisdiction over the Gestapo to him as the head of the SS, acquiring oversight as its inspector on 17 April 1934. Göring in conjunction with Goebbels orchestrated Himmler to be appointed head of all of the police forces of the German states to counter Röhm’s influence as the head of the NSDAP military arm composed of two million SA troops, and responsibility as a cabinet minister over internal affairs, and conspired to eliminate him, along with any other individuals precluding their advancement, to establish their own ambitions to occupy leading positions in the regime. Göring, who sought to become the political leader of Prussia and the head of the armed forces, was determined to destroy the military status of the SA, and cultivated support among military leaders who were opposed to its continued presence as a military force. Goebbels also reinforced opposition against Röhm among military leaders by pledging to offer them civilian governorships throughout Germany, along with garnering support from the civilian NSDAP governorships, to ensure their support from Hitler. Göring then reinforced the isolation of the SA leadership by having Himmler inform Hitler that a widespread plot to disrupt the NSDAP led by the SA and certain military leaders was discovered through Gestapo investigations, and that Röhm intended to use the SA to seize the NSDAP provincial governments. Göring and Goebbels ultimately succeeded in persuading Hitler to pacify SA’s acts of random violence that threatened to undermine the popularity of the regime, in addition to calling out Röhm’s personal deviancy that they claimed tarnished the image of the regime, and his military leadership aspirations as threats to the continued integrity of the state.
The SA as a private paramilitary army of thugs was a potential centre of resistance during this time while it was a cause of acute conflict with the Reichswehr that it greatly outnumbered, as Röhm intended to extend the Nazi political revolution, which had excluded the military from the synchronization process of all elements of state and society. Their violence had enabled the NSDAP to become a mass movement and consolidation of power possible through staging political violence and intimidation in the forms of killing in street battles or detaining political opponents in hastily constructed concentration camps, with the first of which being Dachau and Oranienburg opened on 20 March, and the first political prisoner inmates being incarcerated there on the following day. Depending on them for these purposes subsided in the spring of 1933, while police powers were firmly in national socialist control. Göring issued a decree in August 1933 that ordered the dismissal the auxiliary police officers who had been recruited from the SA, and Hitler added to their alienation from the state by ordering on 29 May 1934 that were to suspend military exercises.
Although there were plans to incorporate the SA into the army, many SA members were opposed to this possibility, since they had fought to create a new society. Many held radical visions for Germany’s future, such as aggravating terrorising Jews, which risked raising foreign and domestic public opposition. Many wanted true national socialism, such as the socialization of industry, but the regime was on good terms with the industrialists and did not have any interest in upsetting this relationship, particularly not at a time of recovery after the worst economic crisis in Germany’s history. Röhm as the chief of the SA, as well as minister without portfolio and Reichsleiter, the second highest political office in the NSDAP, had expected to come to power through revolution, rather than through parliamentary elections, and institute socialist measures, which would entail executing “a second revolution.” In addition to the opposition to the SA in the military, conservatives employed in the vice-chancellery, including some of them who contributed to drafting a speech that Papen delivered at Marburg University on 17 June 1934 condemned discussion of a second revolution that would lead in a communist bloodbath, as well as sharply criticising the national socialists’ hostility to the churches and suppressing political opposition.
Röhm escalated the conflict between the army and the SA street fighters, who were also in competition with the SS. The numbers of the SA increased from approximately one hundred thousand in 1930 to nearly approximately four and a half million in 1934. He argued that the SA was to take a leading role in the German army and infuse the professional military with the National Socialist spirit as a question of army reform by amalgamating the Reichswehr as a people’s militia, and pledged to wage an anti-capitalist revolution. In contrast, the numbers of SS recruits increased from two hundred and eighty in 1928 to approximately 52,000 in 1933 led by Heinrich Himmler, and were selected on the basis of pseudo “Aryan” criteria, and inculcated with National Socialist ideology. Hitler considered how the SA threatened the movement he had created as a possible attempt to take over the government that had allied itself with industrial interests, while there were persistent rumours that Röhm would stage an attempt to seize power with the thugs at his disposal who vastly outnumbered the professional military. This view was also in contrast with the military who resented this proposal of being subject to the leadership of common street fighters. Hitler hoped for a war of revenge to destroy the Versailles system and to conquer “living space” in eastern Europe, which required the cooperation of the general staff and a highly disciplined Reichswehr as an efficient fighting force to enable pursuing an aggressive foreign policy. The continued life expectancy of Hindenburg was another pressing matter of concern regarding Hitler taking over the presidency, and assuming the supreme command of the army, which also required depending on the general staff’s support. General von Blomberg, the new Reichswehr minister, and Walther Reichenau, the chief of the ministerial office, were fully prepared to cooperate with Hitler, who did not have any intention of taking Röhm’s side against the army leaders who would only support Hitler’s claim to the presidency on the condition of pacifying Röhm and maintaining their status. When Göring, Himmler and Heydrich presented a fabricated SA plot to Hitler about Röhm using the SA to stage a revolt to depose the NSDAP dictatorship, Hitler chose to turn against the SA by forming an alliance with the army as the regime’s only military force by disposing of the SA leadership, which was presented as quelling a threat to the regime from an independent organisation and imposing order. The general staff would thus accept Hitler as commander-in-chief of the German military who would supersede the aging and ailing Hindenburg.
Hitler and the NSDAP had seized power through a combination of political terror, populist propaganda during a time of severe economic distress and political deadlock, with incessantly repetitive messaging appealing to emotions rather than rational thought, aimed at swaying the population while necessarily castigating imaginary enemies, which became increasingly ubiquitous following the seizure of political power. The consolidation of power was then established through NSDAP control of the civil service, prior to ultimately acquiring the support of the military to be deployed for future aggressive foreign policy aims. The SA had therefore outlived its usefulness, and had become more of a liability than a useful asset for establishing control over the state. SS units used the weapons and logistical support of the army to kill the SA senior commanders on 30 June 1934, the “Night of the Long Knives,” to destroy the NSDAP’s own supposedly revolutionary wing that was suspected to be a centre of popular resistance, supposedly to quell its expected mutiny to establish a socialist state, as well as conservative enemies, and thereby consolidate Hitler’s personal power. At least 1,400 victims were killed, and not less than 7,000 others were imprisoned in concentration camps.
Hitler feared that the SA could potentially threaten his authority, just as any opposition to the NSDAP was to be quelled. In addition, eliminating the SA leadership was also an opportunity to eliminate those who could tarnish the reputation of the NSDAP, and therefore undermine garnering further popular support, and more specifically with the military that could be depended on for armed intervention. Hence, the SA paramilitary organisation had outlived its usefulness as a result of Hitler having had achieved unconditional political power, which included the official armed forces of the state under his direct control, whereas the military resented the presence of the SA challenging its own authority and functions as a rival force. In contrast, the SS (Schutzstaffel) composing Hitler’s bodyguard force did not represent a threat to the image of the NSDAP, and was deployed to further consolidate its power against the final armed force that could challenge its authority.
The SS and Gestapo personnel executed this purge of the SA led by Himmler, Göring, with able assistance from Reinhard Heydrich, with weapons and transport supplied by the Reichswehr in accordance with an agreement between Himmler and Reichenau. Himmler and Göring, who had long resented Röhm’s debouched homosexuality and military command ambitions, demanded his execution, which led to Hitler deciding on 1 July to allow Röhm to commit suicide as a sign of mercy due to their friendship dating back to 1919. Röhm was killed while pledging his loyalty to Hitler. The killings continued until 2 July. Apart from the SA leadership, Hitler’s older nationalist enemies, such as Gustav von Kahr, the Bavarian state commissioner who had thwarted Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch, Schleicher and his wife, and Schleicher’s assistant at the Reichswehr minister, General von Bredow, and two of Papen’s advisors who had criticised the Nazi terror and had planned to stage a military coup to depose Hitler were among the roughly four hundred victims who were murdered. In addition to imposing legislation that imposed complete control over the nation’s population, these events signified how all forms of opposition were subject to ruthless retaliation, and could have enhanced Hitler’s own image for attaining national interests through his personal ruthlessness.
The SA continued operating as a mass organisation that became devoid of political significance, with a reliable ex-Reichswehr officer being appointed as its new chief of staff, when it remained neutralised as a threat to Hitler’s autocratic power. The German communist party (KPD) remained willing to offer armed resistance insofar as that could yet be possible in a totalitarian state, especially after the night of the Reichstag fire, when four thousand communist party members were immediate arrested, and others were subjected immediate ruthless persecution. Various forms of resistance to the Nazi regime to different degrees, such as minor acts of sabotage and subversive propaganda, would remain operating in different forms at great personal risk. The churches remained the only mass organisations that could not be altogether destroyed while being antagonised, within which there were significantly few individuals who asserted their beliefs about preserving the ideals of humanity.
The SS and the Gestapo hereafter took precedence over the security apparatus of the regime, which remained pledging unconditional personal loyalty to Hitler. Heydrich, the head of the SD, was appointed by Himmler as the head of the Gestapo on 22 April, which became a national secret police organisation. Himmler later completely merged the Gestapo into the SS in 1935, upon Hermann Göring’s appointment as the commander-in-chief of the restored German air force, the Luftwaffe, that was officially declared to be in existence on 8 March 1935, as Hitler claimed defensive parity with other European countries. Hitler altogether repudiated the arms clauses of the Versailles Treaty a week later. Himmler later acquired operational control over all of the German state police forces on 17 June 1936, which hereafter made the Gestapo a national secret police agency at the core of the totalitarian system of internal repression that was responsible for investigating and arresting anyone considered to be a threat to the regime, operating autonomously with nearly unlimited powers, including judicial authority, in addition to enforcing political legislation that eliminated the rule of law. As the leader of the SS, Himmler would also use his position as the national chief of law enforcement functions in national socialist Germany to continue shifting this organisation from Hitler’s personal bodyguard to an increasingly larger paramilitary organisation, in addition to militarising the police forces and imbue them with national socialist ideology by placing them under the jurisdiction of the SS.
The army retained its independence from NSDAP interference, since its complicity in Hitler’s appointment as chancellor gave it greater independence with regard to the party than other institutions, while military authorities were content with how the Nazis had dealt forcefully with any communist challenges to their authority and pledged to intensify rearmament that had begun from 1933. The military’s independence was enhanced in 1934 to maintain its further support, which Hitler needed for his aggressive foreign policy plans, when the army forced Hitler to eliminate the SA as a rival military organisation with its one and a half million members, which Röhm had begun further consolidating as a separate professional army by forming special aviation, motor, engineer, intelligence and medical units, and had established an SA Ministeramt and a press bureau. While President von Hindenburg was on the verge of death, Hitler sought to acquire the army’s support by pledging to reduce Röhm’s influence, and concentrate on rebuilding Germany’s military. In return for the army supporting Hitler as Hindenburg’s successor to fulfill foreign policy ambitions, he promised he would destroy the Versailles treaty and restore the army to its former strength, as well as purge the SA as a replacement for the army. Moreover, Hindenburg and von Papen warned Hitler that if he did not restrain the powerful and undisciplined SA, he would order the implementation of martial law, which would allow the military to take control of the state.
The SA purge led to the SS becoming a leading independent political formation of the NSDAP on 20 July 1934, which further consolidated its power through assuming security and policing functions throughout Germany, while Hitler prepared for waging war abroad. Public funding, rather than from membership dues, further extended its independence, while also being empowered with making arbitrary arrests in coordination with the Gestapo, which hereafter held the sole authority to taking individuals under suspicion of opposition to the state into “protective custody” without any actual offence having been committed and without legal recourse to the administration of justice. This arbitrary authority would lead to arresting six hundred thousand communists, and two thousand were killed in SS administered concentration camps, by 1935, which eliminated the most concentrated source of opposition to the regime. Other victims of political suppression included Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, Freemasons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses as marginalised elements of society who were to be removed from the National Socialist “people’s community.”
The SA was largely reduced to organising sports activities along with supplementing NSDAP functions. The SS also generated its own financial support through engaging in various types of business enterprises. The Gestapo, which was independent of judicial and administrative control that was not subject to court review or any form of legal accountability, was officially merged with this force along with the conventional uniformed police in February 1936, under the leadership of Heinrich Müller as an expert on surveillance and political police work. Police control as a means of coercing the population into conformity to the regime was thus concentrated into a single organisation that was independent of any administrative jurisdiction. Individual citizens were devoid of any legal protections, as the Gestapo was empowered with defining what constituted a political crime, which superseded the jurisdiction of the administration of justice. Himmler assumed the title of Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, officiating over these separate security organisations.
An armed, Waffen SS, was also created on the pretext of having a political armed force to maintain internal security as a separate branch of the armed forces, while Hitler remained mistrustful of the conventional military authorities, who could yet compose a source of opposition to his personal authority. The first of such units was the Adolf Hitler Leibstandarte, or regiment, in 1933 led by Joseph Dietrich, as the nucleus of creating elite Nazi troops who would receive preferential treatment in terms of being equipped with the most modern equipment, and would later seek to demonstrate their loyalty to the regime by demonstrating practically reckless rather than estimated audacity during the Second World War. This process of creating these alternative Waffen SS units, which were administered separately from Reichswehr regular army formations, would continue after the Night of the Long Knives. These included the next two such units created in 1935 as the SS Standarten Deutschland and Germania. Himmler then set upon creating separate SS functions that would conform to a National Socialist outlook, and therefore consider themselves to be political soldiers of the regime. The first were the special purpose troops that would become full time military forces as separate Waffen SS formations. Another formation were the guard units, that were later called Death’s Head detachments, which administered the concentration camps in which any perceived enemies of the regime were imprisoned and forced to work, and conducted security missions. A third was the General SS mainly performing political duties.
As power was consolidated within the National Socialist regime, the international situation was reasonably favourable to Germany when Hitler came to power. The foreign policy of the Weimar Republic had succeeded in alleviating the severe conditions of the Versailles Treaty and reinforcing Germany’s international position, including ending the reparations payments in 1932 with the promulgation of the Hoover Moratorium. Of all the European powers, only Poland remained hostile, and relations with France remained uneasy. Nevertheless, the general public did not appreciate the Weimar Republic’s foreign policy successes, whereas Hitler’s foreign policy aims, which were outlined in Mein Kampf, could appeal to conservative interests, before they would inevitably lead to waging war. These aims consisted of revising the Treaty of Versailles, incorporating Austria, transforming Czechoslovakia and Poland into satellite states, confronting France before turning to invade Russia, and ultimately establishing world domination with the possibility of an alliance with Great Britain. Hitler’s substantial foreign policy successes that were achieved through diplomatic means during a time when the European powers were grievously weakened by the economic depression, became increasingly more popular, which increased his political prestige and silenced his critics Hitler’s ultimate foreign political aims remained undisclosed, and far more aggressive than his conservative allies and most Germans could have envisaged, while primarily supporting further alleviating the burdensome impositions of Treaty of Versailles. These included conquering living space in eastern Europe and the “removal” of the Jews, beginning with political intimidation since 1933, and then their segregation according to the Nuremberg Laws of 15 September 1935 that defined who was to be considered a German citizen according to their definition of their “Aryan” descent, supposedly to ensure “racial purity,” with corresponding “racial” definition of the extent of one’s Jewish identity.
The Jews as a whole were accused of having been at the root cause of the nation’s previous ills, and consisted of an imaginary enemy to which public outrage could be channelled as a vital underlying element of further consolidating a totalitarian state apparatus. The Nazi seizure of power led to the promulgation of approximately four hundred decrees and regulations that restricted all aspect of Jews’ public and private lives, which subsequently were followed by the Nuremburg laws that introduced a complex series of classifications were set forth to determine the degree of their ancestral “racial” heritage to different defined degrees, regardless of their religious beliefs, which defined their citizenship status, and established their segregation from the so-called “Aryan race,” which was further reinforced by various form of propaganda, including from contents in the Der Stürmer, a weekly German tabloid newspaper, operated by Julius Streicher, the Gauleiter of Franconia, as well as state sponsored contents issued through the Propaganda Ministry in the forms of posters, placards, anti-Semitic films, radio broadcasts and press releases. Opposition would be countered with harassment or be taken into custody by the Gestapo, which encouraged widely prevailing bystander apathy when individuals lacked the courage to take initiatives to protect Jewish interests.
Further measures involved boycotting Jewish-owned businesses, with a nationwide boycott staged by SA thugs on 1 April 1933 who vandalised these shops and intimidated customers to prevent them from entering them, which the regime called off at the end of the day as a result of fearing international economic sanctions. National legislation removed them from the civil service on 7 April in the law for the restoration of the professional civil service, which stated that any civil servant of “non-Aryan heritage,” having at least one Jewish grandparent, was to dismissed from the positions, including the judiciary, university faculty positions, and state schoolteachers, as well as all governmental institutions. Further legislation then excluded them from various separate other occupations, including jurists, physicians, journalists and actors.
The Nuremburg laws declared anyone who was three-quarters or wholly Jewish were designated as being “race enemies” who were deprived of their citizenship and protections under legal provisions, making them merely subjects of the state as legal outsiders, and were prohibited from marrying or having extramarital relations with individuals of German or related “Aryan descent that were codified in the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour,” which also facilitated divorce proceedings for those already married to a Jew. An association on non-Aryan Christians was formed to attempt to protect Jews from further persecution, which proved to be ineffective in view of the totalitarian state conditions that had been established, and enabled increasing systematic violence against them that was characterised by evident persecution and segregation between Jews and those who associated with them, which would be followed by over a thousand further anti-Semitic legislative measures. Persecution of Jews became increasingly more commonplace in the face of ubiquitous anti-Jewish propaganda and institutionalised discrimination at a time when: “the pessimists left; the optimists stayed.”
The most vital international matter at the beginning of the National Socialist regime beginning preparations for rearmament almost immediately after taking power, and increasing military expenditures. Hitler pledged in his first public address on foreign policy in the Reichstag on 17 May 1933 to respect all international treaties and obligations, and called for a peaceful revision of the Versailles treaty. The international system of maintaining peaceful relations under the auspices of the League of Nations proved to be unable to cope with Hitler’s aggressive foreign policy concerning revising the Versailles Treaty terms, while Hitler renounced this organisation that was created to promote peace, international relations and security, which was inexorably incompatible of using force to execute German foreign policy. Germany was thus withdrawn from the League of Nations on 14 October 1933, on the pretext of the refusal of the western powers, specifically France, to disarm to the same level as Germany.
Britain and the United States were not prepared to intervene in national socialist Germany’s internal affairs, while France lacked sufficient power to take such action. Since the western powers, especially France, were unwilling to give German equality in armaments, Hitler withdrew from the Disarmament Conference in Geneva and also the League of Nations on 23 October 1933, with an eighty-eight percent approval in a plebiscite vote, as Hitler persuaded the German population that the purpose of the disarmament negotiations was keeping Germany subjugated to external powers who would not agree to disarm unilaterally to the same extent as Germany. Meanwhile, Hitler professed to prefer bilateral agreements to securing peace through multilateral treaties while rearmament was underway and not yet completed, and thereby reduced the risk of a potential attack, as well as concealing aggressive foreign policy aims before this process could be completed. Regardless of anti-communist rhetoric, a credit agreement was signed with the Soviet Union on 25 February 1933, followed by a friendship and non-aggression treaty on 4 April. The Polish-German Non-aggression Pact of 5 May 1934, which marked a departure from the pro-Soviet and anti-Polish policy of the Weimar Republic since Rapallo, particularly by maintaining the German-Polish borders. This agreement gave Germany the twofold advantage of reducing tensions on the eastern frontier and reducing the importance of the French alliance system, since this meant Poland would not assist in France attacking Germany. This agreement was to prove to be highly advantageous four years later when Hitler could move against Austria and Czechoslovakia without fear of Polish intervention, while Poland’s motives were mainly suspicions about the Soviet Union’s foreign policy aims.
One of Hitler’s foreign policy successes was the return of the Saar district that had been separated from Germany for fifteen years by the Versailles Treaty, to be followed by a plebiscite that would then decide its future. This district reverted to Germany in January 1935 following an overwhelming plebiscite vote for return to Germany, which reflected and increased Hitler’s popularity among Germans. Hitler’s next move to renounce the Versailles Treaty was instructing Göring to create an air force under his leadership, which was officially announced on 15 March 1935. The introduction of universal military service was announced on the following day, making hitherto secret rearmament overt for the first time by increasing the size of the army that had been limited to 100,000 that was to be increased to 550,000 through conscription, which Hitler claimed would compensate for the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles. This vast rearmament programme was combined with public works schemes, including road building and land drainage, which considerably reduced unemployment from over 6 million in January 1933 to less than 2 million in July 1935, when industrial production and employment returned to their 1928 levels. Meanwhile, government spending on armaments consumed a steadily increasing share of the national budget that beset the national economy owing to the excessive government expenditure for this purpose.
Economic development was restored through Hjalmar Schacht as the Reichsbank President and the new economy minister, who was charged with reducing unemployment, establishing a high degree of rearmament, and resolving the national balance of payments crisis while imports remained outweighing exports, in addition to managing public debts while reparations payments were repudiated altogether. Schacht introduced a New Plan to restore economic conditions, involving: 1. hidden deficit spending; 2. wage controls; 3. price controls; 4. quotas; 5. selective debt defaults; 6. capital controls; 7. export subsidies; 8. personal capital controls. Massive public works, such as building highways, were financed through loans from the public to active unused idle industrial resources, which was followed by massive military spending that was concealed from international observers through a shell company called the Metallurgical Research Company, which would place orders with German industries that were paid in MEFO bills, which Schacht claimed could be converted through the central bank as part of the scheme of deficit spending, which greatly reduced unemployment. Wage controls were imposed to prevent them from increasing, and therefore remaining stagnant, while public spending fuelled rearmament. Price controls were imposed to limit spending by a nearly fully employed national workforce to restrain inflation, albeit leading to shortages of imported goods as a result of reduced demand while price increases were outlawed. Quotas of allocated imported resources were imposed to supply requirements for prioritised industries, such as those generating steel and coal, in the face of shortages and fixed prices. International debt payments, mainly owed to the U.S., the U.K, the Netherlands and Switzerland, were defaulted on in order to deal with the problem of a negative balance of payments. The resulting sanctions on German exports would lead to establishing certain international trade agreements with selected countries as a partial solution, while the U.S. maintained its protective tariffs. The imposition of capital controls prevented importers from accessing foreign reserves to purchase goods abroad, as the state completely controlled all imports. Exporters were subsidised at the government’s expense in order to deal with balance of payments in the face of devalued foreign currencies, while the German national currency was maintained to impose control over inflation. While persecuted Jews were intimidated into emigrating, any potential emigrants were only permitted to take 50 thousand RM out of Germany. An underlying factor was exploiting all available resources on deficit spending, for which Hitler planned to compensate for by forcible seizing assets abroad through military invasions, which needed to be launched while Germany possessed wartime preparedness.
Britain, France and Italy protested against Germany’s military conscription that was announced on 9 March 1935 to build a peacetime army of 550,000 troops, which further reduced unemployment in Germany. The newly antagonised western allies met at Stresa on 14 April to form a united front, a so-called Stresa Front, in combination with the League of Nations to emphasise respect for treaties, which upheld the 1925 Locarno treaty, and contemplated imposing sanctions against Germany. France also concluded a Mutual Assistance Pact with the Soviet Union on 2 May 1935, and the Soviet Union thereafter joined the League of Nations that the Russian perceived as an anti-fascist coalition. The Soviet Union then entered an alliance with Czechoslovakia on 16 May in the interest of containing Hitler’s Germany, and come to its assistance in the event of an invasion, in coordination with France. In spite of what began to appear as Germany’s isolation by a European coalition, the sanctions were not put into effect, and the Stresa Front did not take any action. Hitler also achieved further success with another bilateral alliance with Britain, which exposed the discord between the western powers, and encouraged Hitler to continue pressing for further revisions of the Versailles Treaty. While French policy toward Germany in the 1930s continued to revolve around the issue of Versailles and concentrated on building defensive fortifications along the eastern frontier to constitute the Maginot Line that stopped at the Ardennes forest on the Belgian frontier, Germany sought revisions, and the British were willing to tolerate a rise in German power to improve Europe’s social and economic conditions, provided that there was no immediate danger to British interests and creating a stable situation in Europe, in which Germany would check the influence of the Soviet Union. Stalin meanwhile entered the Soviet Union into League of Nations in reaction to increasing German power, and formed a defensive alliance with Czechoslovakia, in which he pledged armed assistance in the event of an attack, subject to initial western intervention in coming to its defence. British authorities considered that France’s fears were essentially exaggerated, and that German resentment was justified to some degree, and was therefore content to pacify Germany in order to avoid armed conflicts. Hitler continued preparing for an inevitable war through the promulgation of a secret Reich Defense Law on 21 May 1935, which centralised power in Hitler as Führer and Reich Chancellor, transformed the Reichswehr into the Wehrmacht, appointed the Minister of War as commander-in-chief, and established the legal framework for mobilisation and war economy, and effectively dismantled Treaty of Versailles limitations. An additional provision stated that the Minister of War was authorised to raise a popular mass levy from among the civilian population during a time of national emergency, which marked an additional preparation for total war.
Regardless of the consternation of French political authorities about Britain abandoning the Versailles Treaty terms and disarmament, Britain signed a Naval Agreement with Germany on 18 June 1935, which set the surface tonnage strengths of the British and German fleets in a ratio of 100 to 35, with a vague pledge not to build more than sixty percent of submarines that the British possessed, and thus formally annulled the naval power restrictions that were imposed on Germany in the Versailles Treaty. Thus, Britain tacitly accepted German rearmament, which included gradually building warships according to Admiral Raeder’s naval expansion program that he had forwarded in March 1934, without consulting France, while its naval power supremacy remained unchallenged. British statesmen believed that peace in Europe could be preserved by appeasing Hitler with concessions amid the pressure of world events, particularly in east Asia in the face of Japanese aggression in China and Mussolini’s ambitions in the Mediterranean, and were therefore willing to grant concessions by avoiding any confrontation with Germany to reduce the possibility of a three-power alliance against British interests worldwide and averting a renewed naval arms race. This development also showed the British that Germany was not interested in posing a threat to British naval supremacy, while Hitler hoped that the naval agreement might become a step toward an alliance with Britain as a secondary power in a common bulwark against communism.
The ineffectual nature of the Stresa Front became clearer when Mussolini attacked Ethiopia in 1935 from the Italian colonies of Eritrea and Somalia. Harmless economic sanctions were imposed on Italy through the League of Nations by Britain and France, but since they were concerned about German rearmament, they could afford to alienate Mussolini as a potential partner and therefore did not take harsher action to protect the sovereignty of Ethiopia as a member of the League of Nations. Meanwhile, Hitler gave diplomatic support to Mussolini while also secretly providing arms to the Ethiopian resistance to prolong the conflict and further alienate Mussolini from the western powers. The reluctance to take punitive action against Italy undermined all confidence in the League of Nations, which proved unable to protect the sovereignty of a member state, and the sanctions also alienated Italy and led to closer ties with Germany while the Stresa front was broken. By the time Abyssinia was annexed in 1936, the relationship between Italy and Germany was consolidated. Germany helped Italy by providing raw materials, and therefore Mussolini was willing to reduce his opposition to Hitler’s designs for Austria.
Relations between fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were further consolidated by their close cooperation in the Spanish Civil War that broke out in July 1936, as both intervened with providing support for Franco and the insurgents, which assured victory over the Republicans who were supported by the Soviet Union. Further weakness in the international order that has been envisaged at Versailles was further undermined when German troops entered the hitherto demilitarised Rhineland on 7 March 1936, without any action being taken against this violation of the Versailles Treaty by the League of Nations, whereas the French government made ineffective protests. In addition to rearmament that had been taking place, Hitler began planning for placing Germany itself on a war footing by instituting a second Four Year Plan on 18 October 1936 to alleviate unemployment and rescue farming communities under Göring’s leadership as its director. A higher priority was inducing reinforced rearmament that was to enable the German economy to be capable to sustain a war effort through acquiring sufficient amounts of raw material by 1940. The new economic programme entailed stockpiling rubber and oil resources, including producing them through synthetic means, rather than importing them through militarily threatened sea trade routes, in addition to controls on international trade, foreign currency, price controls and investments, to achieve national economic autonomy. The acquisition of resources that Germany remained lacking while engaging rapid rearmament would inevitably lead to the outbreak of war. The Molotov-Ribbentrop, or Mutual Non-Aggression Pact, between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed on 23 August 1939 would be a fundamental underlying factor in Hitler’s intention to wage war, along with securing vital economic materials for sustaining a prolonged war effort, which would supersede the interests of the national population.
The popularity of the regime made resistance an extremely dangerous cause when the superficially material economic recovery and spectacular foreign policy successes. Many people denounced others who were allegedly or actually hostile to the regime at a time when terror helped uphold solidarity with the regime. Any organised opposition to the regime was at a standstill by 1934-1935. Besides, there were not any apparent and convincing alternatives to National Socialism while democracy had become discredited at a time when Hitler was the most popular politician in Germany, especially as economic recovery continued through instituting public works programmes in accordance with the first Four Year Plan instituted on 24 August 1934, which would lead to achieving full employment by 1938 with workers engaged in various construction projects for highways, bridges and housing, automobile manufacturing for the People’s Car, (or Volkswagen that only became affordable for average income level consumers during the 1950s), and most particularly on rearmament that would compose and estimated twenty percent of the gross domestic product. He was therefore credited with bringing political and economic stability, which appealed greatly to the average citizen who received a greater nominal degree of financial security. State financial planning was also undertaken with prejudice to the Jewish population who remained subjected to humiliating economic as well as social distress. These measures had initially begun with encouraging Jewish emigration to Palestine from 1933, in exchange for abandoning most of their assets, whereas others would have to secure immigration visas as refugees to countries who could admit them during the economic depression, if they had the necessary financial means, transferrable skills, as well as foreign language abilities and personal courage to leave one’s homeland when necessary.
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