JANUARY 30, 1933

    On January 30, 1933, the dottering German president von Hindenburg, fed on fears of a communist uprising, appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany. Hitler was appointed on the basis of Article 48 of the Weimar constitution, which gave the president authority to invoke dictatorial powers to protect the democratic order (from Communist overthrow). The night of Hitler's seizure of power the Nazi SA, or brown shirts, staged a torch lit parade through the streets of Berlin and passed beneath the porch of the Reich chancellery where Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, and other Nazis exulted in the first moments of power. An elderly Jewish man, a veteran of the German army unable to believe that Hitler represented the German people, told his frightened daughter (who heard the music and wanted to march like a good German), "This won't last one hundred days."

NAZI TERROR

    In November 1933, Hitler said, "I did not become Chancellor in order to act otherwise than I have preached for fourteen long years." To quote the historian Fest: "Now that it had conquered power, the regime set about conquering people."

    With the power of the state behind it, the Nazis unleashed their terror. The police, from the role of protecting people, now became instruments of suppression. The SA, or brown shirts, immediately went after their political opponents in the Social Democratic and Communist parties. The SA established interrogation and torture chambers in basements of regular apartment buildings throughout Berlin. Hitler achieved power under the pretense of legality, but the movement had always been driven by violence and as soon as the Nazis crossed the threshold the terror exploded.

    Hitler's corpulent, ruthless underling, Hermann Goering, later to lead the German air force (the Luftwaffe) to victory and disaster, established the secret state police known as the Gestapo, or Geheime Staatspolizei, which ruthlessly tracked down political opponents of the regime and no less ruthlessly penetrated the lives of ordinary Germans to the degree that fear and distrust were the governing principles of life. Heinrich Himmler established the Schutzstaffel, or SS, meaning Defense Corps. Originally Hitler's body guard, the fanatic SS saw themselves as the racial elite of the nation and later served as the chief executioners of the Jewish people. A standard lecture for the SS in the years before the war: "The Jew is a parasite. Wherever he flourishes, the people die...elimination of the Jew from our community is to be regarded as an emergency defense measure."

REICHSTAG FIRE

    Less than a month after the Nazis came to power, the Reichstag (or parliament building) in Berlin was torched. Goering arrived on the scene with alacrity and cried out, "This is the beginning of the communist uprising. Now they are going to strike. Not a minute must be lost!"

    A mentally handicapped Dutchmen (a communist, of course) was charged with burning the Reichstag and executed, but it was certainly possible (one might say without a doubt) that the Nazis themselves were behind the Reichstag fire. Hitler certainly took advantage of the excitement to promulgate a law that established the basis for his dictatorship: the Emergency Decree "for the protection of the people and the state." The decree, as a measure to ward off "communist acts of violence endangering the state," suspended freedom of speech, press, assembly, freedom from invasion of privacy, and from house search without a warrant. It gave the federal government the power to take over the state governments to restore public security. It imposed the death penalty for "treason," an ambiguous term which would include the opponents of the Nazi regime.

    Reichstag elections were held on March 5, 1933. Despite the propagandistic efforts and the reign of terror, the German people did not give the Nazis a majority of delegates. On March 21, 1933, the new Reichstag opened with a ceremony at Garrison Church in nearby Potsdam, spiritual home of the recently departed Prussian kaiser. The leftist Social Democrats and Communists, on the run, in exile, or murdered, did not partake of the inauguration ceremonies, but the representatives of the old Germany, Field Marshall von Hindenburg and the army officers, etc., and the representatives of the new Germany, Hitler dressed in an uncharacteristic black tie and tails with his similarly attired satraps, met, shook hands, and, symbolized by the famous photograph of the occasion, established a bond that paved the way for Germany's later ruin. Hitler paid tribute to Hindenburg and to his "great hearted decision" that made possible the union "between the symbols of old greatness and youthful strength." Two days later, on March 23, 1933, Hitler had the Reichstag pass the Enabling Act which gave him four years of dictatorship rule. Hitler had accomplished a "legal" revolution. He struck with terror and annihilated his opponents. Simultaneously, Himmler opened the first concentration camp at Dachau, a suburb of Munich, to concentrate "all communist and...social democrat officials...[who] cannot be allowed to remain free as they continue to agitate and to cause unrest." The Nazis were in firm control of Germany, the nation that the Jewish people admired most of all. Violence struck the Jews in German cities. In Breslau, SA men attacked a Jewish department store. When the police intervened, the SA broke into the courts and brutalized Jewish judges and lawyers who were then dragged through the streets. It was evident to the Nazi leadership that the violence against the Jews had to be controlled and directed by the state. The Nazi leadership was not interested in a traditional pogrom that left a few Jews beaten, a few Jewish women raped. It was interested in a orderly, systematic process of expropriation and murder that left no Jew standing.

NAZI BOYCOTT

    The Nazis launched their public campaign against the German Jews on April 1, 1933. This was the first day of the Nazi boycott of Jewish stores. It lasted three days. Armed SA and SS guards stood at the doors of Jewish businesses and offices with signs that said, "Germans! Do not buy at the Jew's! Jews get out!" This was an effort to intimidate foreign Jews who demanded a world wide boycott of Nazi Germany, and, on the domestic front, to cut the ties between the German populace and their Jewish neighbors. It was also an effort to reward the rank and file of the Nazi movement by letting it taste the joys of Jew-baiting. Germans who defied the Nazi presence at the door and entered a Jewish store had their names taken down, a very intimidating set of circumstances for anyone.

JEWS DISMISSED

    The first steps against the Jews were small. The first steps were incremental. On April 7, 1933, the Reichstag passed the Law for Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. This law, the first of some four hundred laws or decrees against the Jews, authorized the elimination of Jews and Nazi political opponents from the civil service. "Civil servants of non-Aryan descent must resign," the law stated. The list included judges, lawyers, clerks, state prosecutors, civil servants, teachers, and university professors. In appreciation of the nostalgic feelings of President von Hindenburg, who complained to Hitler of the Nazis' unfriendly treatment of Jews who had been front line soldiers during the Great War, the new law allowed exceptions for World War veterans, those who lost their sons or fathers at the front, or those who were already employed before August 1, 1914. This step turned out to be a shrewd one for the Nazis because it divided German Jewry between those who had the modicum of privilege and those who had none. Ultimately, those who had the modicum of privilege were simply the last to be sent to a death camp in Poland.

    On April 11, 1933, to clarify the matter, the Nazis issued the so-called Aryan paragraph ("arierparagraph") which defined a non-Aryan: namely, anyone "descended from a non-Aryan, especially Jewish parents or grandparents." A person was considered non-Aryan even if only one parent or grandparent was non-Aryan, especially "if one parent or grandparent was of Jewish faith."

As Holocaust historian Lucy Dawidowicz has written, "The Nazi definition was simple: a Jew is a Jew is a Jew - that is, down to the third generation."

    On April 25, 1933, the Reichstag passed a Law Against Overcrowding of German Schools and Institutions of Higher Learning, the purpose of which was to limit the number of Jewish students in German schools.

    Shrewdly, the Nazi declared May 1, or May Day, the traditional holiday of workers (and a prominent communist holiday), as a national celebration glorifying not workers but the Nazi party as the party of workers. The next day, Nazi thugs smashed the offices of labor unions and forced all German workers to join a single labor union under the control of the Nazis. Hitler would not allow the labor strife that characterized the Weimar Republic to beset the new Germany. Many Germans, the industrialists foremost, praised the absence of labor strife, but others recognized that with the destruction of the labor unions, the German worker had lost all independence. That summer Jewish writers and journalists were forbidden to publish their work.

THE BOOK BURNINGS

    On May 10, 1933, at about midnight, thousands of German students marched down the main thoroughfare of Berlin, the Unter den Linden, and staged a book burning in the square opposite Berlin University. The Nazi propaganda chief Goebbels directed the ritual and declared, "The soul of the German people can again express itself. These flames not only illuminate the final end of an old era; they also light up the new." The book burning ceremony also occurred in other German cities. The books thrown into the bon-fires were by authors of world reputation, including German writers: Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Jakob Wassermann, Arnold and Stefan Zweig, Erich Maria Remarque, Walther Rathenau, Albert Einstein, Alfred Kerr and Hugo Preuss, the last named being the author of the despised Weimar constitution. The works of foreign writers were also tossed into the flames: Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Helen Keller, Margaret Sanger, H. G. Wells, Havelock Ellis, Arthur Schnitzler, Freud, Gide, Zola, and Proust. The implications of the book burning were ominous, as it suggested a complete lack of tolerance for a different point of view.

"Where they burn books," said the prophetic German philosopher of an earlier time, "they will later burn people."

DEATH OF HINDENBURG

    On August 2, 1934, President von Hindenburg died. Long prepared for this day, Hitler promptly declared himself fuhrer, or leader, of the German people, and changed the army oath of allegiance from a pledge to the "nation and fatherland" to an oath of unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler personally. This oath was taken very seriously by the German people, and it impeded the army officers who later disagreed with Hitler, not so much on the Jewish issue but as a result of the military set-backs in Russia, and dallied with the idea of killing him. Many felt they had to be loyal to him until the end because they had given their word as German soldiers. This was a prime example of how Hitler seized upon a virtue and exploited it to his ends. The oath of allegiance sealed the pact between Hitler and the German military, and in this way the German military became the servant of a criminal regime and fully implicated in the destruction of the Jews.

NUREMBERG LAWS

    In September of each year, the Nazis held their annual party congress in Nuremberg, a medieval city in southern Germany. SA, SS, Hitler Youth, and German Maiden groups from around the country descended on Nuremberg for a week of parades, rallies, and endless speeches, the most important of course being the one by the loquacious fuehrer.

    At the party congress in September 1935, Hitler instituted a set of anti-Jewish laws titled "Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor" but known more simply as the Nuremberg Laws. The laws were drafted at the last minute by an official from the Interior Ministry, Dr. Barnhard Loessner, a career civil servant who had no experience in Jewish matters. Hitler's decision to create the new racial laws was so sudden that Loesener was completely unprepared for it; he ran out of paper while writing the citizenship law and requisitioned some old menu cards to finish the assignment. The Nuremberg Laws, as they became known, represented an immensely foreboding step against the German Jews: to destroy a people, the people first had to be defined. That was not an easy task. Intermarriage and conversion complicated the matter. The Nuremberg Laws simplified it, and defined who was a Jew: anyone with a Jewish parent or grandparent.

Every German had to submit seven documents to the authorities: his or her own birth or baptismal certificates, the same of both parents and all four grandparents. The documents came from the Christian churches, which, as Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg has written, were "drawn into the administration of very first measure of the destruction process."

REARMAMENT

    The Nazis found devoted friends among German industrialists, this following the decision to reintroduce compulsory conscription and to rearm the German armed forces, hitherto restricted in size by the Treaty of Versailles. In March 1935, Hitler unveiled the infant Wehrmacht, or German armed forces. The German industrialists delighted at the prospects of new contracts and big profits, and the German people themselves (not unnaturally) felt a measure in pride in this reappearance of German military might and the defiance of the hated Versailles Treaty. The signatories of the treaty, sitting in western capitals, reacted to this development with the usual angry protests. Many people in the west believed that the restrictions placed on Germany had been onerous in the first place. Many believed that Hitler was the necessary bulwark against communism in the form of Soviet Russia.

"Better Hitler than Stalin," said not a few.

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