Gleichschaltung, or the Nazification of Germany, was the process by which the Nazi Party established a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society from 1933 to 1934.
History[]
The formation of Germany's right-wing coalition
In January 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg, backed by the Army and the conservatives, made Adolf Hitler Chancellor of Germany. However, Hitler's great political power was shared with three rival sources of authority which were distrustful of his national socialist movement, and he immediately prioritized eliminating the conservative forces from the driver's seat, making the Nazi Party the exclusive master of the state, and establishing an authoritarian government whose police would carry out the Nazi revolution.
Five hours after assuming office on 30 January 1933, Hitler ordered Hermann Goering to reach out to the German Center Party for political support, as the NSDAP-DNVP government held only 247 of the Reichstag's 583 seats and thus lacked a majority, and needed the support of the 70 Catholic MPs. The Center demanded unacceptable concessions, and Goering therefore proposed that the Reichstag be dissolved ane new elections be held. Hindenburg also opposed bringing the Center into a coalition, but feared that a new election would allow the Nazis to win an absolute majority and thus be in a position to dispense with his conservative party. While Hindenburg proposed simply suppressing the communist KPD and elimianting its 100 seats, Hitler would not yet go so far, and he instead persuaded the DNVP to agree to calling new elections after promising them that he would retain his existing coalition cabinet after the election.
In the last relatively free election Germany was to have until 1949, the Nazi Party employed all the vast resources of the government to win votes, such as the radio and press, manipulated by Joseph Goebbels. The big businessmen, pleased with the right-wing coalition government, met with Hitler, Hermann Goering, and Hjalmar Schacht at the Reichstag President's Palace on 20 February 1933, and Hitler promised the business magnates that he would eliminate the Marxists, rearm the military (which would benefit Krupp, United Steel, and I.G. Farben), and demanded "financial sacrifices" to ensure a right-wing electoral victory. That same month, the Nazis banned all communist meetings and shut down the communist press, and SPD rallies were either forbidden or broken up by the SA and their newspapers continually suspended. The leader of the Catholic Trade Unions, Stegerwald, was beaten by Brownshirts while addressing a meeting, and the Center Party's leader Heinrich Bruening was obliged to seek police protection at another rally. 51 anti-Nazis were murdered during the electoral campaign, while 18 Nazis were killed.
Goering, exercising his powers as Interior Minister of Prussia, removed hundreds of republican officials and replaced them with Nazis, mostly SA and SS officers. He also ordered that the police avoid "at all costs" hostility to the SA, SS, and Stahlhelm while showing no mercy to anti-state elements. He also called on the police to make use of firearms and warned that those who wouldn't would be punished, outright calling for them to shoot down all who opposed Hitler. On 22 February, Goering established an auxiliary police force of 50,000 men, of whom 40,000 were SS and SA men, and the remaining 10,000 from the Stahlhelm. At the same time, however, the Bolshevik revolution which Hitler and his lieutenants were looking for failed to "burst into flames". On 24 February 1933, Goering's police raided the Communist headquarters in Berlin, the Karl Liebknecht Haus, and found it to be abandoned, while confiscating piles of propaganda pamphlets and using them to claim that the KPD was about to launch a revolution.
The Reichstag burning
On the evening of 27 February 1933, on the eve of the 5 March 1933 election, the Reichstag caught fire, and the Reichstag fire was blamed on the Communists, with the Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe being arrested. Goering exclaimed to the Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels that a communist revolution was beginning, and that the Gestapo should shoot every communist official and string up every communist deputy. Nearly all of those who knew the truth about the Reichstag fire would be slain by Hitler in the months that followed, and it was speculated that the Nazis planned the arson of the Reichstag and carried it out for their own political ends. It was theorized that Berlin SA leader Karl Ernst had led a small detachment of Brownshirts that night to scatter gasoline and self-igniting chemicals before making their way back to the President's Palace through an underground passage, after which the half-witted Van der Lubbe had made his way into the large Reichstag and set some small fires of his own due to his pyromania. Van der Lubbe was arrested, having been overheard by the SA bragging about his plans to burn the Reichstag a few days before the fire had broken out. The KPD's parliamentary leader Ernst Torgler gave himself up to the police when he heard that Goering had implicated him, and he was followed by future Prime Minister of Bulgaria Georgi Dimitrov and two other Bulgarian communists. Their trial embarrassed Goering, who later secretly boasted to Franz Halder that he had burned down the Reichstag, as Van der Lubbe was seen as a dimwit incapable of such a crime.
On the day following the fire, however, Hitler prevailed on President Hindenburg to sign the Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspended the seven sections of the Constitution which guaranteed individual and civil liberties. The decree restricted personal liberty, the right of free expression of opinion (including freedom of the press), on the rights of assembly and asociation, the privacy of postal and telephonic communications, limitations on house searches, property rights, and other freedoms, transforming Germany into a police state. The Reich government was also enabled to take over complete power in the federal states when necessary and imposedthe death sentence for "serious disturbances of the peace" by armed persons. Hitler was thus able to make the trumped-up Communist threat "official", throwing millions of the middle-class and peasantry into a frenzy of fear and motivating them to vote fo rthe NSDAP. 4,000 Communist officials and many Social Democratic and liberal leaders, including previously immune members of the Reichstag, were arrested, and truckloads of stormtroopers roared through the streets of Germany, broke into homes, rounded up victims, and carted them off to SA barracks to be tortured and beaten. Only the Nazis and their DNVP allies were permitted to campaign unmolested, and the Nazis also bedecked the streets with swastika flags, held mass rallies and torchlight parades, plastered billboards with flamboyant Nazi posters, lit bonfires on the hills, and promised a German paradise to the electorate while spreading a brown terror on the streets.
On 5 March 1933, the Nazis led the polling with 17,277,180 votes (an increase of 5.5 million votes, and 44% of the total vote). The Center Party inrceased its vote from 4,230,600 votes to 4,424,900, and the Center Party and the Bavarian People's Party won a total of 5.5 million votes. The Social Democrats held their position as the second largest party with 7,181,629 votes (a drop of only 70,000), while the Communists lost a million supporters and still polled 4,848,058 votes and the DNVP made a net gain of a mere 200,000 votes to win 3,136,760 votes (just 8%). The Nationalists' 52 seats, added to the 288 of the Nazis, gave the conservative coalition a majority of 16 seats in the Reichstag, though it was far short of the two-thirds majority which Hitler needed to carry out a new, bold plan to establish his dictatorship by consent of Parliament.
On 15 March 1933, Hitler ordered a cabinet meeting to discuss how to pass an "Enabling Act" conferring on his cabinet exclusive legislative powers for four years, and turning over the Parliament's constitutional functions to Hitler. Part of the problem was solved by the "absence" of the 81 KPD members of the Reichstag, and Goering also planne to refuse admittance to a few Social Democrats. In order to win the support of the national conservatives, Hitler opened the new Reichstag in the Garrison Church at Potsdam, the great shrine of Prussian militarism, on 21 March 1933, the anniversary of the opening of the first Reichstag of the German Empire in 1871.
News of the formation of the Gestapo
On 23 March 1933, the Reichstag convened at the Kroll Opera House in Berlin, and the Enabling Act was officially called, taking the power of legislation (including control of the Reich budget, approval of foreign treaties, and the initiation of constitutional amendments) away from the Parliament and handing it over to the Reich cabinet for a period of four years. SPD leader Otto Wells protested and demanded that the Reichstag retain its full powers, causing Hitler to angrily respond that he did not want the Socialists' votes: "You come late, but yet you come!...You are no longer needed...The star of Germany will rise and yours will sink. Your death knell has sounded...I do not want your votes. Germany will be free, but not through you!" Meanwhile, the Center Party voted for the bill in spite of Hitler's refusal to grant them a written promise that he would respect the President's power of veto, and the vote saw the Reichstag vote 441-84 in favor of the Enabling Act, with only the Social Democrats opposing. From 23 March 1933 on, Hitler was the dictator of the Reich, freed of any restraint by Parliament.
News of the appointment of new Nazi governors
On 31 March 1933, Hitler and Wilhelm Frick used the Enabling Act to dissolve the diets of all states except Prussia and ordered them reconstituted on the basis of the votes cast in the last Reichstag election. Communist seats were not to be filled. On 7 April 1933, Hitler appointed Reich Governors in all the states and empowered them to appoint and remove local governments, dissolve the diets, and appoint and dismiss state officials and judges. Hitler was thus able to abolsih the separate powers of the historic states and centralized power around himself. On 30 January 1934, the Law for the Reconstruction of the Reich saw "popular assemblies" of the states be abolished, while the sovereign powers of the states were transferred to the Reich, all state governments were placed under the Reich government, and the state governors were put under the administration of Interior Minister Frick.
News of the banning of the political opposition
On 19 May 1933, the remaining SPD politicians in the Reichstag voted to approve Hitler's foreign policy, attempting to appease Hitler by denouncing their comrades abroad who were attacking Hitler. On 19 June 1933 the SPD elected a new party committee, but, three days later, Frick banned the SPD as a subversive organization inimical to the state.Its surviving leader Paul Lobe and several of his party members were arrested. This left only the middle-class parties, but the Bavarian People's Party, whose government had been kicked out of office by Franz Ritter von Epp on 9 March 1933, announced its own dissolution on 4 July, followed by the Center Party the next day. The German People's Party did so on 4 July, a week after the German Democratic Party. The DNVP's offices were taken over by police and stormtroopers on 21 June, and, on 29 June, Alfred Hugenberg resigned from the government, while his aides dissolved the party. On 14 July 1933, a law decreed that the NSDAP constituted the only political party in Germany.
On 2 May 1933, the day after "May Day", the trade union headquarters throughout the country were occupied, union funds confiscated, the unions dissolved, and their leaders arrested, and Trade Union Confederation chairmen Theodor Leipart and Peter Grassmann pledged themselves to cooperate with the Nazi regime, only to be arrested as well. Hitler assigned the Cologne party boss Robert Ley to take over the unions and establish the German Labor Front, assuring the workers that their rights would be protected, and that their institutions were sacred to the national socialists. However, within three weeks, Hitler brought an end to collective bargaining and appointed "labor trustees" to "regulate labor contracts" and maintain "labor peace".
At the same time, however, the businessmen who had supported the smashing of the troublesome albor unions found that left-wing Nazis, who really believed in the party's socialism, were trying to take over the employers' associations, destroy the big department stores, and nationalize industry. Thousands of Nazi officials descended on the business houses of those who had not supported Hitler and either threatened to seize them or demanded well-paying jobs in the management. Gottfried Feder called for the NSDAP to nationalize big business, implement profit sharing, and abolish unearned incomes and "interest slavery", frightening the businessmen. Agriculture Minister Walther Darre also promised a big reduction in the capital debts of the farmers and a cut in the interest rate on what remained to 2%, frightening the German bankers. Hitler fired Reichsbank president Hans Luther and replaced him with Hjalmar Schacht, with the conservative Luther being sent to Washington DC as ambassador.
News of the Four-Power Pact
By the summer of 1933, Hitler was forced to deal with the problems of preventing a second revolution, settling the uneasy relations between the SA and Reichswehr, getting the country out of its economic morass and finding jobs for the 6 million unemployed, rearming Germany, and deciding who should succeed Hindenburg when he died. SA chief Ernst Rohm demanded a "second revolution", and he was initially supported by Joseph Goebbels. This was opposed by the German right, consisting of big business and finance, the aristocracy, the Junker landlords, and the Prussian generals who continued to command the army. The SA's 2 million stormtroopers outnumbered the conservative-dominated military by twenty times, and, in June 1933, Rohm called for the ending of the national revolution and the start of a national socialist one. However, Hitler believed that the Nazi socialist slogans had been merely propaganda meant to win over the masses on his way to power, and he was uninterested in them now that he intended to win over the establishment of Germany and protect the German economy.
In response to calls for a second revolution, Hitler dismissed a number of Nazi radicals who had tried to seize control of the employers' associations and dissolved the Combat League of Middle-Class Tradespeople. Many rank-and-file Nazis, especially the SA core of Hitler's mass movement, grew disillusioned, as they were anti-capitalist through experience and believed that their revolution of brawling would bring them loot and good jobs. At the same time, Hitler and Rohm's quarrel about the position and purpose of the SA cropped up again, as Hitler believed that the SA should be a political force and not a military one, while Rohm called for the SA to become the nucleus of the future revolutionary army which would sweep away the reactionary Prussian generals and form a people's army led by himself and his tough street-fighting aides. From the summer of 1933 to 30 June 1934, the formerly close Hitler and Rohm engaged in a power struggle.
In November 1933, a single-party Nazi slate was elected to the Reichstag, finalizing Nazism's takeover of Germany. By 1934, however, the continued clamor of radical party and SA leaders for the "second revolution", the rivalry of the SA and Army, and the question of the succession for Hindenburg threatened to explode. The SA swole to 2.5 million members, and, in February 1934, Rohm demanded that the SA be made the foundation of a new People's Army, and that the army, SA, and SS be merged under the Ministry of Defense (over which he would preside). The army was revolted by this proposal, and the generals were shocked by the tales of the corruption and debauchery of the homosexual clique around Rohm. By 21 February 1934, Hitler told British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden that he was prepared to reduce the SA by two-thirds and ensure that the remaining third receive neither military training nor arms. This incensed Rohm after news of this plan leaked.
By April 1934, Hitler learned that Hindenburg's days were numbered, and he decided on making a bold stroke with the support of the officer corps. On 16 May 1934, Hitler made a pact with the Army and Navy at Bad Nauheim, under which Hitler would become Hindenburg's successor with military support, in exchange for the Army and Navy serving as the sole bearers of arms in the Third Reich, as well as the drastic reduction of the SA and the immense expansion of the Army and Navy. At the same time, Goering and Heinrich Himmler united against Rohm, and General Kurt von Schleicher secretly offered his support for Rohm and Gregor Strasser's revolution if he would become vice-chancellor in place of his old enemy Franz von Papen. Schleicher's plan also included Rohm becoming Defense Minister, Bruening serving as Foreign Minister, and Strasser serving as Economics Minister. Goering decided that the Gestapo should not only purge the SA, but also opponents on the Left and Right.
At the beginning of June, Hitler and Rohm had one last five-hour argument, with Hitler imploring Rohm to stop the madness of "preparing a national Bolshevist action that could bring nothing but untold misfortune to Germany." Rohm promised to put things right, but Hitler later claimed that Rohm began preparations to eliminate him personally. Hitler bade the SA go on leave for the entire month of July, during which the storm troopers were prohibited from wearing uniforms or engaging in parades or exercises. On June, Rohm decided to go on sick leave, while insisting that the SA remained the destiny of Germany. On 30 June, Rohm invited Hitler to confer with the SA leadership at the Bavarian resort town of Wiessee, and Hitler agreed, though he planned to betray and kill Rohm. In addition, a 17 June 1934 speech by Papen at the University of Marburg, during which he called for an end of the revolution, the termination of Nazi terror, the restoration of normal decencies, and the return of freedom of the press resulted in Hitler adding Papen's speechwriters Edgar Jung, Herbert von Bose, and Erich Klausener to his list of targets. In the last week of June, Goering and Himmler delivered their long lists of past enemies to Hitler and convinced him that there was a plot against him by both revolutionaries and reactionaries. Hitler ordered Himmler to put down the putsch in Bavaria as Goering did so in Berlin. On 25 June, General Werner von Fritsch put the Army in a state of alert, confining the Army's troops to barracks. On 28 June, Rohm was expelled from the German Officers' League, and, on 29 June, Werner von Blomberg proclaimed that the Army stood behind Hitler.
On 30 June, Rohm and his lieutenants, including the murderer Edmund Heines, were arrested at the Hanslbauer Hotel at Wiessee, as Rohm had left his staff guards in Munich. Rohm was executed in his cell after refusing to commit suicide, and Goering's Gestapo and Himmler's SS executed 150 SA leaders by firing squad against a wall of the Cadet School in Lichterfelde; one of them was Karl Ernst. Additionally, Von Schleicher was shot dead at his villa, as was his wife. Schleicher's friend, General Ferdinand von Bredow, was executed in a simmilar manner that same evening, and Gregor Strasser was arrested and executed in his cell. Franz von Papen escaped with his life, but his secretary Bose was shot at his desk, his collaborator Edgar Jung murdered in prison,and Erich Klausener killed at his office. On 13 July 1934, Hitler announced the shooting of 61 people (including 19 SA leaders), that 13 more died resisting arrest, and that 3 committed suicide. However, the Munich trial in 1957 theorized that more than 1,000 people were purged. Hitler's old enemy Gustav von Kahr was hacked to death by pickaxes and dumped in the forest of Harlaching near Munich, with Emil Maurice leading the murder gang. Three other SA men, possibly the ones who set the Reichstag on fire, were also executed. By 1 July, the purge was over, and, on 26 July, the SS was made independent of the SS, and the Army was confirmed as the sole bearer of arm son 13 July. Hindenburg died on 2 August, and Hitler consolidated the offices of Chancellor and President into Fuehrer, his new title.