Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Berlin, the evening of Monday, February 27th, 1933. Putzi Hamstengel, the Nazi press chief, is having a lie down. He should have been at Joseph Goebbels' apartment tonight, dining with Adolf Hitler. But, felled by a touch of flu, he snuggled up in his temporary quarters within Hermann Goering's official residence, the palace of the Reichstag president. At 9.30pm, Hamstengel is rudely awakened. It's the housekeeper.
It takes a moment for his fog to clear, but there can be no mistaking her words. "The Reichstag!" she's shrieking. "It's on fire!" Hamstengel staggers to the window. To the south of the silhouettes of the capital's grand buildings. The Foreign Ministry. The Rococo splendor of the Reich Chancellery. The great frame of the Brandenburg Gate. But to the west, just across the way, the sky is aglow.
Angry flames are licking at the great glass dome of the German parliament building. A pall of black smoke billows into the night, with sirens rising in the background. Hamstangle scrambles for the phone. He reaches Goebbels and splutters out the news. Goebbels dresses Puzzi down. The pair often prank each other. This is not the time. He hangs up. Hamstangle tries again. "If you don't believe me," he snaps, "then you'd better get over there and see for yourself."
Goebbels and Hitler had been chilling out, listening to records, putting the world to Nazi rights. But within minutes, they're in the Mercedes, hurtling up Wilhelmstrasse at 60 miles per hour. Hitler seems curiously happy. Now, he declares, I have them. From Neuser, this is the Hitler story. And this is Real Dictators. Let's rewind a little. It's the morning after Hitler's appointment as Chancellor.
Hitler takes breakfast in his suite at the Kaiserhof Hotel, de facto HQ of the Nazi party in Berlin. There's a knock at the door. A visitor. Mrs. Magda Goebbels. Frau Goebbels carries in a big bouquet of blooms for her Fuhrer. Hitler is charm itself. "These are the first flowers and you are the first woman to congratulate me," he tells her, though truthfully, over the last twenty-four hours they've been lobbing posies at Adolf non-stop.
So devoted is Frau Goebbels to Hitler that she will later kill herself and her six young children in his honour. But we'll come to that in due course. Hitler's path to the Chancellery has been tortuous. In 1932, despite a commanding Nazi parliamentary majority, the powers that be did everything they could to keep the upstart Austrian out of office. Then, just as the Nazis seemed to have peaked, the greybeards threw in the towel.
Ground down into submission, alternatives exhausted, President Hindenburg had finally, begrudgingly, caved. Yesterday, January 30th, just before noon, Adolf Hitler, the Bohemian corporal, was sworn in. He is the brand new Chancellor of the Weimar Republic. The appointment has come with strings attached. Hitler's government is not yet a full-blooded Nazi regime. It is, officially, a coalition.
A cabinet of national salvation. An alliance of right-wing groups. Even as Chancellor, Hitler is unable to act unilaterally. He must be chaperoned by the venerable Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen, who knows the political ropes. With Germany rattling through general elections like there's no tomorrow, Hitler's tenure, it's anticipated, will be very short-lived. Papen has been heard bragging to some of his baronial pals,
Within two months, we will have pushed Hitler so far in the corner, he'll squeak. But, more foolpappen, Adolf Hitler has no time for these stuffed suits, no time for niceties. He certainly has no time for finding his feet, or political honeymoons. Dr. Paul Moore.
What seems to be happening in the first weeks and months of 1933 is that Hitler is very much able to seize the initiative. He's often going further and faster than the conservatives would have liked. But because what he seems to be doing seems to be bearing fruit, there's a sense in which he's kind of left alone. So there's a certain indulgence of what Hitler's doing on the part of leaders like von Papen. They're rather effectively outmaneuvered and rather quickly by the Nazi leader.
Things are about to move so violently and so fast that Germany, the world, won't know what's hit it. A mere five hours after attaining office, Hitler had summoned his cabinet. Their first act, he declared, should be to dissolve parliament. In his radio address, his proclamation to the German people, Hitler announced that new elections will be set for March the 5th.
That fated night, as he was driven back to the Kaiserhof Hotel, through rapturous crowds, Sieg heiling themselves senseless, Hitler was already scheming. He'd stayed up into the early hours, rambling away to his inner sanctum, making big noises, thinking big thoughts. He even has plans for a redesign of the Chancellery building. Its pokey offices aren't fit for purpose, he says. It's no more than a cigar box. On day four,
Thursday, February the 3rd. Hitler is a dinner guest again, this time at the home of Army Chief General Kurt von Hammerstein-Eckworth. A known anti-Nazi, Hammerstein's soiree could prove tricky, especially when Hitler hears that the general has invited a dozen or so of the military top brass. Hitler is polite. He eats his peas and minds his cues. But in an after-dinner speech to the assembled, he gives them the full Hitler hairdryer.
The policy of rearmament is essential and will be pursued rigorously, he barks. As too will the conquest of the East and its ruthless Germanization. For anyone familiar with his book, Mein Kampf, such things should come as no surprise. But to translate those musings into deeds, and so soon. Some of the guests splutter into their schnapps. Plenty of leading officers are openly contemptuous of this operty, a tap and shrine.
Hitler of all people should know, the apocalypse of 1914 to 1918 is a cautionary tale to anyone bent on initiating military conflict. Wars never go according to plan. Nonetheless, among these liquored up gentlemen in field grey, there is a buzz, a muttering of support. The German armed forces were kicked when they were down, humiliated. Now they are being invited to play a crucial part in this German rebirth.
Hitler's inaugural speech as Chancellor is given on February the 10th. It's a bombastic outpouring about how Germany will rise again. There are wry smiles among the political old guard, the ones who think they've got him in their pocket. Hot air is just hot air. As a further measure, the Nazis have been restricted to just two of ten cabinet posts. Wilhelm Frick as Minister of the Interior and Hermann Goering as Minister Without Portfolio.
But, as ever, Hitler has outflanked them. Almost as a throwaway, he has asked that Göring's brief extend to becoming Interior Minister of Prussia. It seems an insignificant request. There is little objection. But Hitler knows that the Prussian post includes responsibility for that state's policing, including Berlin. Prussia has a population of 42 million and comprises 60% of German territory.
In the blink of an eye, two-thirds of Germans are now under the auspices of a Nazi-run security apparatus. Goering, right away, sets about establishing a special unit. It's called the Secret State Police, the Geheimer Staatspolizei. Quite a mouthful. They'll be known, simply, as the Gestapo. Dr. Chris Dillon.
For communists, socialists, trade unionists, male homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and particularly, of course, Jews, the Gestapo was a permanent and tangible menace. For the great mass of Germans, the Gestapo were a latent concern, but not something that otherwise greatly affected daily life.
For many ordinary Germans, the presence of these agencies were in fact a welcome manifestation of a strong state in contrast to the supposed weakness of the Weimar Republic. As a fighter ace who flew with the legendary Red Baron, Hermann Göring is a scattergun kind of chap, not one for the finer points of law enforcement. On February the 24th,
Goering sets his attack dogs on Karl Liebknecht House, the headquarters of the German Communist Party, seizing documents and arresting its leaders. There is predictable outrage. Of the many young leftists aggrieved is a 24-year-old Dutchman. His name is Marinus van der Lubbe. Young Marinus is about to play a cameo role, a tragic one, in the Nazi consolidation of power. Marinus van der Lubbe is something of a vagrant.
He's drifted across Germany from his home in Leiden, in the southern Netherlands, living hand-to-mouth from labouring jobs. Big and brawny, he remains half-blind from a building site accident when some industrial lime got splashed in his face. Life for the Dutchman is hard. His membership of the Communist Party has been a constant for a sense of belonging as much as anything else. He's not the brightest, and he's easily led. On February the 27th,
Three days after Göring's raid, van der Lubbe goes into a grocer's shop and buys four packets of fire lighters. That night, he sets out for the Reichstag. Later that same evening, the 27th, Hitler and Goebbels pull up at the burning building just after 10 o'clock. The fire brigade are doing well to contain the blaze. The main damage is restricted to the central chamber, whose vast dome has since collapsed. Efforts now turn to the salvaging of artefacts.
But such things are of little interest to Hitler. The Reichstag is just a symbol of everything he detests. "Good riddance," he scoffs, "to that trashy old shack." "This is a God-given signal," he rants. "If this fire, as I believe, turns out to be the handiwork of Communists, then there is nothing that shall stop us now crushing out this murder pest with an iron fist." At one point Hitler is pulled out of harm's way, in the nick of time, as a chandelier comes crashing down.
Another sliding doors moment. Goering was first on the scene, declaring too that this is clearly an act of arson, the work of the Reds. He's urging his underlings to make arrests, to summarily hang people if necessary. There's great excitement when the police chief approaches around midnight. He declares that a perpetrator has been apprehended. Most certainly it is arson, he confirms. What's more, the arsonist is a card-carrying commie.
Van der Looep has been found wandering shirtless in the smoldering ruins. He'd broken a window to get in. The place wasn't even guarded. He freely admits that he set the fire. In his words, as a protest against the recent anti-communist actions. He made no attempt to flee. Given his poor eyesight, plus the smoke and the dark, he can barely see. Van der Looep suits the Nazi narrative.
However, the question of him acting as a lone wolf does not, and outraged Goering swears that there were at least twenty others involved. Incendiary devices were placed in key locations, he insists. This detail seems plucked from thin air, but it's enough for Hitler to have the police's version of events quashed. Hitler contacts the Völkischer Beobachter newspaper personally, and pushes the official line, the one that will be repeated as copper-bottomed truth.
that the Reichstag fire is part of a wider communist plot, possibly an international one, no matter what anyone might be hearing. The next day Hitler convenes a cabinet meeting and demands immediate punitive legislation. It's clear the fire will have a far-reaching impact. Professor Thomas Weber: It was an act of arson. To the present day we don't know whether it was genuinely this guy, but either way the Nazis used the fire extremely well.
And in fact, Hitler's key to success was his ability to respond often to unforeseen situations. His real talent was to exploit those moments. They actually then say, look, because of this fire, because of this communist attack, the state is under attack. Germany is under attack. The Reichstag fire decree will suspend the right to assembly and freedom of speech. It will remove the judicial break on police powers.
It will give the regime the right to incarcerate political opponents without charge, dissolve political organizations, and confiscate private property. It will also provide for the government to overrule any state or local laws. The Cabinet of National Salvation waves the proposals through, without so much as a "by your leave." It's signed off by a half-asleep Hindenburg.
Within weeks, Hitler has really proven to the world that he kind of had fooled everyone. He is through ruthless use of force now very much in the driver's seat.
In theory, Hindenburg, the president, can actually still say, "Look, I've had enough of you. I'll dismiss you." I mean, this becomes less and less likely for the simple reason that Hindenburg is now really, really old and frail. Even when, for instance, emergency decrees are being pushed through parliament in 1933, Hindenburg is kind of happy because he just doesn't really have to deal with the tedious task of looking at all these laws and decrees that he has to sign.
Within less than a month of coming to office, in the move to put down a non-existent communist uprising, Hitler has made a huge stride towards a dictatorship. Across Germany, units of the SA and SS rush to help the police. Over two weeks, there will be 10,000 arrested. By April, the number taken into custody will reach 25,000. Not just communists now, but anyone the Nazis don't like. Writers, doctors, lawyers.
Even the HQ of the Social Democratic Party is occupied. Ernst Thalmann, leader of the Communist Party, till recently one of Hitler's chief political rivals, will spend 11 years in solitary confinement before being hauled off to Buchenwald and shot on Hitler's personal orders in 1944. The German press is now muzzled. But foreign correspondents in Berlin labour under no such restrictions. Not yet.
In their watering holes, the inevitable questions are asked. The Reichstag fires gifted Hitler the ability to implement such swinging restrictions. Perhaps the Nazis started the fire themselves? Even if van der Lug did strike the match, was he not just a patsy? Goering's part in the affair provokes deep suspicion. Hitler assures the foreign journalists, "When the communist menace is stamped out, the normal order of things shall return."
But normality will never return to this Germany. There are still those elections to come. But this brings the Reichstag fire into further question. The Nazis will be going to the polls as the thwartes of a communist uprising, and with their opposition by law now severely hobbled. Goebbels declares Election Day, March 5th, 1933, to be the day of national awakening, billed as a chance to pay tribute to Hitler, the people's chancellor.
But with political opposition banned from campaigning, this is a contest neither free nor fair. There will not be a multi-party election in a united Germany for another 57 years. On the ground, the stormtroopers run a mass campaign of interference, picketing the polling stations and intimidating voters.
Given the circumstances, when the results are announced, it's incredible that the Nazis take only 43.9% of the vote, and with 2.5 million fewer ballots than at their peak a year before. Against impossible odds, the parties of the left are still backed by over a third of the electorate. But, shored up by other nationalist groupings, it's a victory for the Nazis all the same. With five new Nazi cabinet posts into the bargain,
This is now a government with a guaranteed Nazi majority. On March the 21st, for the initiation of the regime, Hitler stages a grand ceremony at the Potsdam Garrison Church. It contains the crypts of Frederick the Great and Wilhelm I. The Garrison Church is about as Prussian and militaristic as you could possibly get, a necessary backdrop for the next charade. Giant Hindenburg shuffles to the church in full military regalia.
Humble Hitler, in his civilian suit, follows in his shadow. Hindenburg makes a faltering speech about old Prussian glories. Modest Adolf eulogises his master. "We consider it a blessing," he tells the president, "to have your consent to the work of the German rising." He bows his head subserviently in the symbolic photo-op handshake. Two days later, Parliament convenes. In the wake of the fire,
Proceedings have been relocated to the nearby Kroll Opera House. This venue used to be full of music lovers and their evening finery. Now the aisles are lined with SA and SS men. A huge swastika flag hangs. Hitler is no longer dressed in a suit, but costumed as a brown shirt. The red Nazi armband strapped around his bicep. A single tentative Sieg Heil issues from the benches. The cries of it are soon thundering at ear-splitting volume.
Hitler insists he will promote peace and brotherly love. But there's something they need to do first to reach this blissful state of affairs. They must extend the Reichstag fire decree. They must do so by passing an enabling act. Given the ongoing threat that exists from hostile quarters, barks Hitler, it will be necessary to suspend Parliament again, this time with executive power vested not in the President but in the Chancellor.
in himself. There are the inevitable objections from the few Social Democrats who were able to make it into the chamber. The Communist deputies have all been barred, but with a sham parliament in place and a Nazi majority cabinet, it's a shoe-in. The Enabling Act is passed by 441 votes to 94. It's taken just seven weeks.
Germany, with legal sanction, is now a one-party, one-person state. If you assume that's it, you've got another thing coming. Hitler is just getting into his goose-stepping stride. He declares May the 1st to be a day of national labor, the annual holiday that the trade unions have always craved. The very next day, his stormtroopers raid trade union offices throughout the nation. Union leaders are arrested.
Union newspapers are shut down. From now on there will be only one union permitted, a Nazi one, the German Labour Front. The Social Democratic Party, the once dominant force in German politics, is officially outlawed. For all this, Hindenburg is still president. The Reichstag, in name at least, still exists. Hitler's rapid overhaul of German politics is not immediately obvious, not to the folks in the towns and the villages,
And to be honest, they're not much bothered. There are no more street battles. Order has been restored. The economy seems to be on the up. The construction of a new sprawling motorway system, the Autobahns, will provide 600,000 jobs. Professor Helen Roche
There was already a beginning to the economic upswing at the end of 1932, beginning of 1933. But because Hitler came into power, he was able to claim all of that economic rise as the Nazis doing as his personal achievement, things like
Schleichers Zollfortprogramme, which had poured millions of Reichsmarks into unemployment schemes. Even the Autobahn, the first stretch had been inaugurated by Konrad Adenauer, who was then the mayor of Cologne in 1932. But Hitler was able to kind of take that and pretend that, no, no, this idea for the Autobahn, this is really all a Nazi project. Joseph Goebbels in Seventh Heaven.
Installed as Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Professor Nicholas of Shaughnessy
The critical thing was the interpenetration of the German language to the extent that they rewrote the meaning of the German language. They gave old words new meaning. So you have a word like fanatic, fanatician German, which is a word of disapprobation, very obviously. You turn it into the highest source of praise so that the nicest thing you could say about someone in Nazi Germany was to call him a fanatic.
So this word Führer, for example, you'd even have a cycling club speaking of Führer of the cycling club. It was a sort of total interpenetration. It meant that every time you open your mouth, you're engaging in propaganda. Hitler's birthday, April the 20th, is celebrated across the land. Historic streets are renamed in his honour.
Brand Hitler is so big that by May Goebbels bans the use of the Führer's image on commercial products. In the new collective frenzy, Heil Hitler becomes an everyday greeting. It's a genius ploy. Fail to use it and the authorities know exactly who you are. It was very clear that if you followed the rules, no harm would come to you.
But if you deviated, then that was a different story. They had so many genuine converts that they didn't need actually a huge Gestapo because they knew that neighbors would denounce people. There was even a case of a man who denounced himself, which is one of those stories from the Third Reich, which you can scarcely believe happened, which apparently did happen.
So it's this policehood, if you like, of all believers. Everyone's a policeman in Nazi Germany. By mid-1933, the Nazis are the only permitted political party. Goebbels establishes a chamber of culture, the Kulturkammer. Writer Ernst Bertram composes the fire song. As the music plays, books by authors like his friend Thomas Mann are burned, shoveled gleefully onto the bonfire.
As the poet Heinrich Heine puts it: "Those who burn books will, in the end, burn people." With his long leather coat, pince-nez spectacles and severely cropped hair, Heinrich Himmler is the very caricature of a Hollywood Nazi. Hailing from a middle-class family in Munich, Himmler had ended up as a chicken farmer before throwing in his lot with Hitler. Too young to see active service in the Great War,
He is another man keen to find a release for his sadistic impulses. He had, if you remember, been a lowly functionary of the SS at their inception as a personal bodyguard of the Führer. But under Himmler's leadership, the SS has since been elevated to the status of a sort of Praetorian Guard, an elite corps. Soon, Göring will gift the chicken farmer the overlordship of the Gestapo too. Under Himmler,
The SS number will rise from a mere 300 to around 1 million men. Its military offshoot, the Armed or Waffen-SS, will become a byword for terror, from the Bay of Biscay to the Russian steppes. Himmler's entire career can be understood as an attempt to manifest what he took to be the soldierly values of toughness and comradeship.
There's nothing soldierly or imposing about him, but this kind of aspiration to soldiering says a lot about the way he operated within the Nazi state and the way he wanted his SS men to be perceived. He hopes to turn it into a racial aristocracy. So Hitler introduces minimum height criteria for joining the SS. He introduces a so-called marriage order that
that requires SS men to get permission from him personally, initially, before marrying. And for SS men, this involves looking back through their own family tree and that of the proposed bride to ensure there's no supposedly Jewish or otherwise deficient blood in their family trees. Himmler is driven by a cod racial science. He's another with mystical leanings. He believes that there is a lost Nazi civilization living somewhere in Tibet.
Remnants of a Nordic culture that was destroyed when a rogue moon crashed into the earth. He will soon send a mission to the Himalayas to investigate. This fascination with the origins of the Aryan race, measuring skulls, going to Tibet is pure Raiders of the Lost Ark, actually. And one can find more and more loopy things. It's again in the realm of fantasy.
For all his eccentricities, Heinrich Himmler is fully in sync with Hitler's philosophies and, in some regards, already one step ahead. Just outside Munich, twelve miles to the northwest, lies the pleasant, sleepy commuter town of Dachau. On its outskirts sits an old abandoned munitions works. It's an ideal spot to house arrested political opponents.
The perfect place for a bit of hard work, discipline and re-education. "Work", as they say, "sets you free". "Arbeit macht frei". The slogan which will soon hang on the entrances to all such establishments.
Dachau is the first major camp and this is set up in March 1933, so it's only six to seven weeks into Hitler's chancellorship. What's interesting in how the press cover that is that the term concentration camp is used in the headlines, it's used in the press reports without ever being explained. So there's a sense that the German public are already expected to be familiar with the idea of a concentration camp. And more than that, that this is a natural part of the armory of a radical right-wing government.
When we think about the camps, we tend to think of something like Auschwitz, you know, a large purpose-built structure. That's not what the camps looked like in 1933. The Nazis are using pre-existing buildings, often located within residential areas. So this is happening in plain sight of the population very often. To many, the camp seems harmless. Across Germany, there are around 200,000 people currently in custody: communists, journalists, and liberal academics.
Hardly the kind to elicit public sympathy. They've got to be housed somewhere. For the newsreel cameras, the inmates pose in their street clothes. Not yet the infamous striped pyjamas. They peel potatoes, play leapfrog, all looking rather sheepish.
Once the prisoners are inside, they're often subjected to propaganda lectures, re-education lessons, Nazi songs, Nazi slogans. This is a real intention behind the camps, is to try to remake these dangerous communists into useful members of the community and people sympathetic to the Nazi cause. The locals come to Gorb. In Dachau, the local newspaper has to post warnings to keep away.
But soon, with the identities of the incarcerated seeping out, the camp's real function becomes apparent, and the prospect that anyone can end up in one.
Most of the first prisoners in the camps are treated harshly, but not in the lethal way that prisoners are treated in the concentration camps of the wartime or of the Holocaust. Though Nazi guards at Dachau, for example, did kill prisoners whom they knew from beforehand, so from experience of street fighting in the Weimar Republic.
Twelve prisoners at Dachau are shot or murdered in the first two months of its opening. Jewish inmates who weren't at this stage in prison because they were Jews were especially vulnerable to being killed if they were known to guards. After 1933, the concentration camps become more of a rationalized and bureaucratic system with a centralized inspectorate in Berlin overseeing half a dozen camps located across Germany, these new citadels of terror.
Dakar will be the foundation stone in a chain of death camps, a means of industrialized extermination, and there is no mistaking who will be their main intake. In Breslau, a theater director, Paul Barnet, is stripped naked, beaten with truncheons, and bundled into a car. This elicits general bemusement more than anything else. If they'd had mobile phones back then, they'd have taken selfies.
Then the great Albert Einstein's bank deposits are seized after an SS search of his house turns up a bread knife construed as a lethal weapon. To many, it just seems a bit of fun. But on April 1st, Hitler institutes a cultural boycott of Jewish businesses. SA goons are posted on shop doors. A week later, he decrees that all Jews should be removed from the civil service and ripped out of the legal profession.
He brings in a law against overcrowding in German schools and universities, which severely limits Jewish access to education. Very quickly after Hitler's coming to power in 1933, anti-Semitic violence erupted in Germany. But it was not just violence, it was also really anti-Semitic legislation.
By the summer of 1933, Jews of Eastern European origin lost their German citizenship. Even in 1933, he would actually make comments in semi-private settings that would suggest that he was still committed to eliminating Jews from Germany with whatever means was possible.
With whatever means is possible is absolutely central here because Hitler for a long time just didn't think that it was possible to kill all the Jews. But once it becomes possible to kill them, you jump at it. There's maybe a more direct line between what's happening in 1933 and the Holocaust. On July the 20th, Pope Pius XI signs a concordat between the Vatican and Hitler. Papen scurries off to Rome to thank his holiness in person.
Racial hygiene must be upheld at all costs. To stop undesirables from breeding, hereditary disease must be eliminated, it's decreed. On July 14th, 1933, the Sterilization Law comes in. It marks the beginning of an official state eugenics policy. Those with physical and mental disabilities are rounded up and forcibly sterilized.
Within months, the process will extend to mixed-race Germans, members of the Roma community, homosexuals, alcoholics, habitual criminals, and more. 400,000 will be rendered childless between now and 1945. A further 300,000 psychiatric patients will be euthanized, given a so-called "mercy death". In the summer of 1933, Hitler goes off on his holidays.
zipping into the countryside in his chauffeur-driven Mercedes. The events of this year thus far have been beyond his wildest dreams. Who'd have thought it would be so simple? Hitler retires to the mountains and the Berghof. Just eight years ago, he was roaming these hills, contemplating life as an ex-jailbird and an ex-patriot. Not long before that, he was living a vagrant's existence, all in all not much different to Marinus van der Loo,
Now, he is the formidable leader of Germany. Hitler invites the Hamstengels along to take the Alpine air. Hermann Göring joins them. They sit on the terrace, admiring the view, laughing and joking. Göring breaks off occasionally to sign death warrants. So in the ascendancy is Hitler that his childhood haunts have become places of pilgrimage.
Across the Alps, near his mother's old house in Spital, Austria, cows graze with swastikas daubed enthusiastically upon them. His home here in the Obersalzburg is attracting attention too. Thoughtful Goebbels puts traffic restrictions in place and issues bans on binoculars to give his fuhrer some privacy. In the mountains, Hitler prepares for the next stage of his program, his autumn offensive. It goes without saying,
that abroad alarm bells are starting to ring the speed and brutality of nazi rule in the west hitler does still have supporters in the highest of places ones who turned a blind eye to the anti-semitism in light of his anti-communist stance but all this on the shore of lake geneva stands a grand palace it's the home of an international organization the league of nations
The League marks the first serious attempt to uphold international law by way of collective security and conflict resolution. By the mid-1930s, it boasts 58 member states. Germany joined the League in 1926. Unfortunately, not all in Germany agree with the League's terms. It's seen by many on the right as a byproduct of the hated Treaty of Versailles,
A league of victors, its goal to keep Germany down. Japan, a country with similar nationalist ambitions to Germany, already left the league in March 1933.
There is a sense that while things had started to look bright for a number of years, now everything is going downhill again. And worse still, there is fear that this ultimately might lead the world to war. At the same time, Hitler is also doing a lot of PR stunts at that time, telling the world, "Look, we're only arming to be strong. We're only arming to keep the peace. A strong Germany will actually preserve the peace."
On October 14th, Hitler takes to the airwaves and formally announces his ambition to withdraw from the League of Nations. This sends shockwaves. Despite Hindenburg's rare reservations, Hitler plows on. The decision is put to a public vote, a plebiscite. It's timed emotionally for Sunday, November 12th, Armistice weekend. The move is approved by a staggering 95% of votes. There is another vote staged simultaneously,
A farcical one. The new Reichstag elections feature just one party on the ballot. A Nazi party, of course. They sweep 661 of the 661 Reichstag seats. Even the inmates of Dachau vote for Hitler. Across late 1933 there are talks between ambassadors and negotiators, chiefly from Britain and France. But Hitler's word is no longer his bond. On the quiet, France puts out feelers.
The Soviet Union, Poland and Czechoslovakia are sounded out as allies in a new security arrangement, an anti-Nazi bloc. In the closing months of 1933, the Führer is becoming distracted. On September 21st, in Leipzig, the Reichstag fire trial begins. Broadcast live daily on the radio, it will become something of a soap opera, gripping the nation.
Alongside Marinus van der Lubbe, four alleged co-conspirators are being prosecuted, three of them Bulgarian. Adding to the Nazi insistence that the fire was part of an international plot, no one expects them to be found anything other than guilty. But the judges evidently have not read the script. On December 23rd, the court finds that de Lubbe acted alone.
He and no one else is guilty of the charge, arson and attempting to overthrow the government. The others are acquitted due to lack of evidence. One of the defendants, Georgi Dimitrov, later to be Bulgaria's prime minister, rails against Nazi rule. He runs rings around witnesses, including Goebbels and especially Goering, the puffed-up golden pheasant who's made to look quite foolish.
As Dimitrov is freed, Göring yells at him from the benches: "You wait until we get you outside this court, you scoundrel!" The Völkischer Beobachter slams the trial as a miscarriage of justice. It gives Hitler another excuse to increase his stranglehold on the legal system. De Lube, meanwhile, chained, manacled, near sightless, is led away to be executed. The statutory term should have been life imprisonment, but Hitler has rewritten the law retrospectively.
In a Leipzig prison yard, three days before his 25th birthday, Marinus van der Loep is dispatched by guillotine. For added theatricality, the executioner is dressed in top hat and tails. One of the defendants, Ernst Torgler, will claim to his dying day that Hermann Göring was behind the Reichstag fire. Torgler says he was tipped off while in jail. In 1942, in a jocular remark, Göring will even allude to his own part in the proceedings.
The discovery of a tunnel leading from Göring's offices straight into the Reichstag will provide yet more fuel for the conspiracy theories. However, after the war, at the Nuremberg trials, Göring will recant, insisting he had nothing to do with the fire whatsoever. Given that he's already up on a charge of crimes against humanity, there seems little to be gained from the denial. The fact that Dimitrov and co. are later revealed as Soviet agents also muddies the waters.
Many Germans at the time, very understandably, believed the Nazis had started the fire themselves. And some historians do still argue that this is the case. What is certain is that the Reichstag fire was a decisive event on the path to the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship. The Reichstag fire decree creates a state of emergency which obtains throughout the remaining 12 years of the so-called Third Reich. Whoever was the perpetrator
it doesn't make much difference. For the Nazis, the Reichstag fire is manna from heaven. News reaches Hitler that French diplomats have been sounding out potential allies against Nazi Germany. The Fuhrer is, as usual, incensed. For Hitler, even more than France, it is Poland that is the true enemy. The Polish Corridor, created by Versailles, is a festering saw. Carved across German territory, this strip of land gives Poland access to the Baltic Sea.
it has severed East Prussia from the rest of Germany entirely. If Poland is to be primed for conquest, if it is to be pulled away from the French, it must be enveloped within the loving Nazi embrace. On January 26th, 1934, Hitler concludes an utterly worthless non-aggression pact with the Warsaw government. But the prospect of a military coalition building against him is troubling all the same. Hitler must seek out a friend,
Someone like-minded. Someone with whom Germany can forge its own alliance. He must go and call on Mussolini. Next time on Real Dictators: It's the final part of Hitler's rise to power. To ward off the Western Allies, Hitler takes a trip to Venice to visit Il Duce. At home meanwhile, the Sturmabteilung, the SA, Hitler's vast brown-shirt army are growing restless.
In a final savage act, the mother of all purges, Hitler will liquidate anyone who has ever wronged him. Hitler will secure his role as the unassailable German Fuhrer, leader of the Third Reich. That's next time on Real Dictators.