Final point and Prelude 1933: The Anti-Marxist Seizure of Power in Germany

Chapter 1

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This below is Chapter 1:

Final point and Prelude 1933: The Anti-Marxist Seizure of Power in Germany.

The story of the National Socialist takeover of power can be written as a story of intrigues and crimes: There Adolf Hitler, the leader of a weakened party in inexorable decline, is "brought to power" by the deceitfulness of the former Reich Chancellor von Papen, in the interest of the agrarians threatened by the East aid scandal, by threats against the son of the Reich President von Hindenburg, or by the intervention of heavy industrial circles, and he consolidates this power by having his political opponents arrested and finally by having the Reichstag set on fire In this context, conversations in the house of the Koln banker von Schroder, in the Dahlem villa of the von Ribbentrop family and people like Werner von Alvensleben, play a major role, while Ernst Thalmann's name does not appear in general, as in most memoirs of the participating contemporaries.

If the historian withdraws from this all too close proximity to the greatest possible distance, a different picture emerges. Since the Reichstag elections on July 31, 1932, the NSDAP had become by far the strongest party, after an unprecedented rise in German parliamentary history with 230 seats and almost 38% of the votes. If one party is considerably stronger than the others in the parliamentary system, a coalition of all or almost all of the other parties can be formed against them. This is not in accordance with the nature of the system and is difficult to maintain in the long run, but it can be necessary if the party concerned is anti-constitutional. Then the most important task must be to protect the majority of the people from a mass minority, which is presumably characterized by particularly strong convictions and has a particularly high level of energy. If, however, the majority is unable to form such a coalition, the government, as the trustee of the popular majority, has only two options: to openly fight this large party or to try to decisively weaken and perhaps split it. The open struggle inevitably arises when the party takes to the streets and calls for the overthrow of the government. This was the situation at the turn of the year 1918/19, when the Council of People's Deputies had to use military force against the almost overwhelming mass minority in the capital, which wanted to prevent the elections to the Constituent National Assembly.  However, although the National Socialists did not infrequently threaten to seize power by force, they did not carry out the threat and persisted with their legalistic tactics.  Thus, on August 13, 1932, Reich President von Hindenburg refused the leader of the strongest party the government leadership he had undoubtedly been entitled to claim if he had not, according to the official account, demanded all the power.  He himself denied having made such a claim; but hadn't Alfred Rosenberg insisted on June 1st in the Volkischer Beobachter “All power to Adolf Hitler,” and weren't all of the party's rallies filled with the most violent attacks against the system? The struggle could only be waged as an appeal to the people and in fact the National Socialists lost no less than two million votes in the Reichstag elections of November 1932.

But with 196 seats, they were still by far the strongest party.  Chancellor von Papen now called for a renewed dissolution of the Reichstag and for a non-partisan government of national dictatorship, which, however, received little support from the electorate. But Hindenburg refused to take this route because he feared a civil war would break out. So he entrusted the government to the previous Reichswehrminister von Schleicher, who seemed to know a peaceful way out, the way out of a split in the NSDAP with the help of the second man in the party, Gregor Strasser, and a new kind of coalition formation with the support of the trade unions. But after only a few weeks this plan had failed as a result of the machinations of Hitler and the Social Democratic Party, and there was no longer a third possible solution; Hitler had to get the job if he could prove that he was not striving for full power and was content to be the chancellor of a cabinet in which his supporters were only a minority and in which he himself was virtually placed under guardianship by a quite unusual provision, namely the provision that he was only allowed to lecture the Reich President in the presence of Vice-Chancellor von Papen. If anything was illegal in this government formation, then it was an illegality, or at least an irregularity, which was directed against Hitler. The tamed or framed Hitler meant the imperative slogan in an unprecedented crisis.

It can be assumed that the first view is too much attached to the superficial appearance and the moralistic impulse of condemnation of persons or groups. There is no doubt that the other interpretation is too deterministic and distant in character. But it is obvious that the situation in Germany was particularly difficult. There were even, according to official statistics, more than six million unemployed, who had to live to no small extent on the tiny support provided by public welfare, and if the United States was hit even harder by the world economic crisis, there were no anti-constitutional parties there, although criticism of the capitalist system was gaining more and more strength, especially among the intellectuals of the East Coast. In Germany, however, not only was there the anti-constitutional party of the National Socialists, which directed its propaganda primarily against the Weimar parliamentarism and the Versailles system, but alongside it and even before it was the Communist Party, which agitated for the overthrow of capitalism as a whole and, as a section of the Communist International, wanted to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat through an armed uprising, following the example of the Russian Revolution. This party was the only one that had consistently won the four Reichstag elections since 1928, so that it had risen from 54 seats in May 1928 to 100 seats in November 1932. It is true that there were voices claiming that the KPD was predominantly a protest party of the unemployed and that its everyday threats were nothing more than revolutionary rhetoric that emerged from a feeling of powerlessness. But why then shouldn't Hitler's announcements on January 30th, that he would destroy Marxism and even the other parties, be taken for propaganda or encouraging phrases?

In any case, Hugenberg and Papen had good reason to believe that Hitler would quickly come to his senses and work soberly in a cabinet where, apart from him, only two other National Socialists held a seat and whose most important positions - the Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of the Reich Armed Forces - had been filled directly by the Reich President. But they had hardly expected the cheering and excitement that broke out across Germany at the news of Hitler's appointment. Never before had any cabinet from the Weimar period been welcomed and cheered by large crowds. But then, even in small towns in the most distant province, torchlight processions were formed, numerous spectators stood on the side enthusiastically, huge columns streamed through the streets in Berlin without needing police protection, surrounded by the sympathy of the spectators, and they marched through the Brandenburg Gate with their torches, in uniforms and in military order, past the offices of the Reich President and the new Reich Chancellor. This torchlight procession soon became a legend and a favorite subject for literature and film, but as certainly as it was organized and then stylized, the descriptions of Nazi contemporaries reveal much of the spontaneity, moods, and interpretations that also characterized the evening of January 30.:

“They did not say that Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich; they just said: Hitler. They said it to one another in the street, in front of the shops, at the counter, called it to one another on the subway, on the bus. It jumped from person to person like an electric spark, igniting a whole huge city, igniting millions of hearts ... It was like the year [19]14, when the pulse of an entire people was pounding... Alarm! It jumped from street to street. The SA, the SS rushed into their rooms. The steel helmets gathered: Torchlight procession ... It took four hours.. New cohorts, always new ... then the first steel helmet in field gray: the face of the German Front ... They did not speak it out and they all knew it: What they experienced today on this burning night was the awakening of the nation, was the counter-revolution, was the price paid for November 9th. "

The 30th of January was actually and initially perceived as: the day of the national uprising, the answer to the shame of the collapse of 1918 - by no means by all Germans, but by the nation OF Germany, which considered the August days of 1914 as the final breakthrough to the truth of the nation and believed only in the victories that followed, but not in the defeats, not in the gradually spreading war fatigue among the people and certainly not in the "Fourteen Points" of the American Wilson.. This national Germany, however, potentially reached down into the hearts of most Germans, because the enthusiasm of the August days had indeed been as good as general, and if the Social Democrats had striven for a peace of understanding in the early days, it was precisely the Social Democratic Reich Minister President Scheidemann who, in 1919, preferred to see his hand withered rather than the unjust Treaty of Versailles signed.  What won on January 30 was initially not so much Hitler, but it was the conception of history, the historical legend of national Germany with all the persuasive power that belongs to the very simple and the very emotional. The first call of the new Reich government on February 1st was tuned to this tone, and there is no reason to believe that Hitler merely hyped and did not sympathize with these very conservative and generally national trends.

But this national Germany had long since excluded a large part of those who had agreed with it in August 1914: not only the Social Democrats, but also the Catholics and the Liberals who had participated in the 1917 peace resolution of the Reichstag, i.e. all of these establishment parties that had supported the Weimar Republic. Even under the already irregular conditions of the Reichstag election of March 5, 1933, these parties received not very much less votes than the NSDAP, and if the Communists had been allowed to be added to them, it would have been about half of the people.  Why did this half remain so passive and hardly make itself felt?  It was only the enthusiasm of the national Germany that had caused so much paralysis and immobility; but the Germany of the turn of 1932/33 was more violently shaken by the consequences of the great crisis of the world economy than any other nation. In such a situation, every event that falls out of everyday routine is greeted with hope or at least with the willingness to give it a chance. Many unemployed people who voted in protest and desperation for the PCF in November now want to assume that Hitler might know a way out after all. The farmers, whose hopes were threatened by the foreclosure auction, the artisans whose order backlog had continued to decline, the small traders who didn't know how to meet their payment obligations: none of them put any more trust in the stimulus measures or the tax vouchers from Papen and Schleicher , nor had they yet been persuaded by Thalmann's radical proposals, which for better or worse would have to bind Germany to the Soviet Union. So they trusted the one who was full of determination and yet refused the revolutionary measures, the consequences of which would be incalculable, ,and even if they remained merely passive, they crippled those who called for a resistance that would lead to a complete overthrow. 

The fear that such an overthrow was possible and that it would be sought for by strong forces was probably the most powerful driving force behind the national uprising that so quickly turned into the “National Socialist Revolution”. Even more fundamental than the enthusiasm for national Germany and the hopes of the population shaken by the crisis was the fear of bourgeois Germany of an imminent communist revolution. In fact, the PCF was the strongest party in the capital of the Reich, and throughout February the air was full of rumors about the communists' preparations for civil war, about secret arms shipments, and even about plans to set fire to German churches and museums. It is hard to doubt that Hitler shared the widespread worries and fears. Although the executive committee of the Social Democratic Party rejected the communists' proposal to call a joint general strike as early as january 30, which was not surprising given the mutual hostility, a number of serious clashes took place throughout the Reich, and the national socialists were not always the aggressors. During the march back from the torchlight procession on January 30, the leader of the notorious Communist murder storm 33, Eberhard Maikowski, was shot, and a little later, according to a report by the Red Flag, armed workers dominated the street during a 24-hour general strike in Lubeck. From the beginning there could be no doubt about the determination of Hitler and Goring, who now had the power of command over the Prussian police, to assert himself by all means. The fire in the Reichstag on February 27 accelerated the development, but it by no means brought it about. The lists on the basis of which almost all Communist members of the Reichstag and Landtag as well as numerous other functionaries were arrested had already been prepared by the police during the last Weimar years, and Goring's shooting decree was dated February 17.

An opportunity to declare a state of emergency would certainly have been found if the emergency decree of the President of the Reich for the protection of the people and the state had not already been issued on February 28.  Presumably, without the Reichstag fire, Hitler's government would not have received an absolute majority in the elections of March 5, but even without a majority of seats, it was able to put the newly elected Reichstag under such pressure that it passed the Enabling Act with a two-thirds majority, and with it its self-disempowerment, as the deputies actually did on March 23, under the impression of the marching SA, but even more so in view of the expectations of the public. The still unanswered question about the originator (s) of the Reichstag fire is only important in connection with the overarching question of whether genuine emotions existed on the part of the ruling National Socialists or whether cynical people in power did not even shy away from an extremely risky crime in order to establish sole rule that they otherwise could not have won. Everything speaks for the fact that the leading National Socialists were dominated by convictions and emotions that made such a crime unnecessary, whatever the specific process may have been. The strongest of these convictions and emotions now all related to November 1918 in Germany and to the revolution in Russia; they were anti-Bolshevik emotions, and they saw themselves as anti-Marxist so naturally that they were obviously rooted in bourgeois sentiments, but nonetheless went beyond them.

On February 10th hitler spoke at the Berlin Sportpalast. Above the lectern the sentence could be read in large letters: “Marxism must die.” And the whole speech revolved around this motto, the central sentences of which were as follows: “Marxism means the perpetual tearing apart of the nation..outwardly pacifist, inwardly terrorist - only in this way alone could this worldview of destruction and eternal negation assert itself...Either Marxism triumphs or the German people, and Germany will triumph.” On March 2nd, he gave another speech in the Sportpalast, and this time there was no statesmanlike caution holding him back, but instead he looked beyond the German borders: “Has this Marxism eliminated misery where it has won one hundred percent, where it really and invariably rules, in Russia?  The reality here speaks a shocking language.  Millions of people have starved to death in a country that could have been a granary for the whole world...You say brotherhood.  We know this brotherhood.  Hundreds of thousands of people, even millions, had to be shot in the name of this brotherhood and as a result of the Great Gluck...They go on to say that capitalism has been overcome by it...The capitalist world has to come up with its credits, supply the machines and set up the factories, provide the engineers, the foremen, everything has to be done by this other world.  You cannot deny that.  And I would only recommend the work system in the Siberian woodlands for a week to those who rave about this principle in Germany ... If a weak bourgeoisie surrendered to this madness - we take up the fight against this madness”

In the same issue of the Volkischer Beobachter there was a large advertisement in which 22 workers who had returned from Russia called for the election of Adolf Hitler, arguing that Soviet Russia was hell for the workers and peasants because they had to endure miserable starvation while working hard.  

Again and again in Hitler's speeches during these months the one basic demand appears, to destroy Marxism, to exterminate it consistently and mercilessly.  But this demand is not infrequently linked with the memory of the rucksack Spartacists of 1918, and when Hermann Goring declared on March 3 that he had only to destroy and exterminate, he turned a few days later to his opponents with the passionate accusation: "When we came back from the front 14 years ago, they kicked our hats and badges of honor, they kicked us into the dirt, they burned the flags that victoriously defied a world.  You have abused our deepest hearts, and then you trampled it, as you have trampled Germany.”

In fact, his question to the communists was justified: "What had they done when they had conquered power in our place? They had made us a head shorter without much thought.”

The social democratic President of the Reichstag, Paul Lobe, had expressed the same meaning in 1929, but he had credited his party with preventing the mutual annihilation of the two extreme parties. And Hitler, too, in the speech of March 2, had so strongly distinguished the alleged wretchedness of dismissed Social Democratic police chiefs, now fearing for their pensions, from the determination and bloodthirstiness of the Communists that it seemed almost incomprehensible how two such different phenomena could be brought under the same concept of Marxism.  But it was precisely this anti-Marxism that was the main characteristic of National Socialist ideology, and it was precisely for this reason that it turned against the bourgeoisie, whose emotions it so largely shared, and it was precisely for this reason that it extended itself once again to the whole of modern history, as when Rudolf Hess, for example, turned against SA outcries in July with the following justification: "The Jewish-Bolshevik Russian revolution echoes with millionfold cries from Chekist blood cellars.  No revolution in the world was as disciplined as the National Socialist one...Everyone must know that we are far from treating the enemy with leniency.  He must know that every murder committed by Communists or Marxists against a National Socialist will be punished tenfold by us against Communist or Maxist leaders...But every National Socialist must also be aware that mistreatment of opponents corresponds to Judaeo-Bolshevist sentiments and is unworthy of National Socialism.."

But what was the positive thing that you could hold onto when you saw so many negative things? Most likely it was the unity and health of the people secured against all dangers, which, of course, could only be achieved by a long road. Far from all of the former officers and hardly even the majority of the German national citizens, not even all of the Nazi old fighters wanted to go with them, but they could not easily resist the consequences with which all parties were dissolved step by step by July or were forced to dissolve themselves, with which the Aryan principle was enforced and the law for the prevention of hereditary offspring was passed. If the national uprising wanted to be consistently anti-Marxist, then it had to become a National Socialist revolution, and the National Socialist revolution in turn had to be declared over by Adolf Hitler in the summer of 1933 because it only wanted to be a political upheaval in which all power was held laid the hand of one party and its leader, but not an economic overthrow along the lines of the Russian model, which had by no means been disastrous only in Hitler's eyes even in the country of origin and would have even worse consequences in the industrialized countries of the world.  For Hitler and all the champions of national uprising, the Soviet Union in 1933 was entirely a horror.  But was it not nevertheless to some extent a model in the National Socialist revolution?

In an interview with a German diplomat, Foreign Minister Litvinov is reported to have said that the Soviet Union understands that Germany treats its communists as the Soviet Union treated its enemies of the state. In any case, harsh measures against communists and the communist press were one of the main characteristics of the National Socialist regime from the very first day, and Goring's shooting decree of February 17 and the establishment of an auxiliary police consisting of SA and SS on February 22 were directed against the communists:  Even now, "ruthless use of the gun" was being made, and prisoners were already being "shot on the run." But terror can only be talked about after the Reichstag fire, and it immediately spread far beyond the ranks of the communists, even though the ordinance on the protection of people and state was only intended to “ward off communist acts of violence that endanger the state”. Social democrats and some bourgeois politicians were also taken into protective custody and sent to the concentration camps that were sprouting up everywhere- only a few of which were state-run, but most of which were set up and run by SA or SS departments under their own direction.   Apart from the Dachau camp near Munich, which was after all nominally state-run, unauthorized [wilde] camps such as the Columbia Haus in Berlin, Oranienburg, Kemna in Wuppertal and others became particularly well known. Their main characteristics were improvisation and the often personal, but in any case concrete, hatred that emerged in the behavior of the guards towards the prisoners. The Oranienburg camp was built in a factory that had originally been a brewery, and the prisoners' bedrooms were in the former bottled beer cellar, where at first only straw sacks were available. Kemna, too, was an abandoned factory, and it took a long time to create the necessary conditions for the accommodation of a considerable number of prisoners. Everywhere, however, there was a harsh and one-sided confrontation between political opponents who knew each other only too well, especially in small camps, and who a few weeks or months ago had faced bitter battles on the streets. So political and private bills were settled in large numbers, and several hundred prisoners lost their lives during the first few years under the beatings and sometimes sadistic tortures. Abuses were soon publicly complained about and remedial promises were made, but initially the judiciary rarely succeeded in freeing victims or bringing those responsible to justice. There were around 30,000 prisoners in custody in 1933, and anyone released from a camp had to undertake in writing not to reveal anything about their experiences.  Nevertheless, rumors soon began to circulate and the first authentic reports appeared in 1934 of escaped prisoners, such as that of Gerhart Seger, who had been a member of the Reichstag for the SPD for many years, at Oranienburg.

Here, in a credible manner, which carefully avoided exaggerations and smears, were reports of  the torture chamber in the interrogation room, where prisoners were beaten so terribly that several of them died of the consequences, about the humiliations, to which especially prominent prisoners were locked up for days and nights as in standing stone coffins, if they had violated the camp rules.   But Seger also knew of the continuing hatred between the communist and social democratic prisoners, which led the communists to applause when the commandant announced the imminent arrival of new “Social Democratic Bigwigs”, and he altered an old dislike when he stated that that the punishment exercise at the Prussian commissioner was a humane institution "if one compares it" with the meanness of the corresponding SA events. " These concentration camps were, so to speak, the end of a civil war in which the victorious party displayed extraordinary brutality and cruelty precisely because they had the impression that they themselves were nearly defeated. It was not incomprehensible that the prisoners, who in the beginning had been transported to Dachau under the supervision of the police, sometimes singing the International and shouting cheers for the KPD, were informed in the camp that they were now being treated according to their own recipe but it was nevertheless a symptomatic step forward when the first commandant of Dachau, Hilmar Wackerle, expressly demanded of his SS men that they should become for Germany what the Cheka was for Russia.  

And the atrocities often took on a character that, even with the most generous interpretation, shook the basis on which even the sharpest and one-sided civil war terror must still stand: the basis for preserving one's own identity. It was not a fugitive opponent, but the Reich Minister of Justice, Dr. Gurtner, who in 1935 wrote the following about the events in the savage concentration camps before their dissolution at the beginning of 1934: "In the concentration camp Hohnstein in Saxony, prisoners had to stand under a drip apparatus specially constructed for this purpose until their scalps showed severe purulent injuries from the drops of water falling at regular intervals.  In a concentration camp in Hamburg, four prisoners were tied to a grate in the shape of a cross for days - once for three days and nights, once for five days and nights - without interruption, and were fed so meagerly with dry bread that they almost starved to death.  These few examples show such a degree of cruelty that makes a mockery of every German sensibility that it is impossible to consider them here.

And there is yet another fact that makes it impossible to regard the SA terror of the first year merely as the excessive final phase of a civil war that had only just begun, and which after a number of months was either stopped or at least brought under control by the state authorities. Although the first head of the Secret State Police Office, Rudolf Diels, founded at the end of April 1933, was later able to report with pride that he had succeeded, in cooperation with other authorities, in reducing the number of protective custody prisoners to 2800 and replacing the 50 or so wild concentration camps with a few state institutions, it was precisely the largest of the camps, Dachau, remained under the rule of the SS, which, by means of the skilful tactics of its Reichsfuhrer, took over ever greater police powers in the wake of Himmler's position as Political Police Commander of Bavaria, so that the terror was reduced in quantity but also systematized and continued to elude effective control by the judiciary. On the other hand, in some camps so-called Judenkompanien had been formed, which were subjected to a particularly harsh regiment. It is true that these too were political opponents, communists and social democrats, and apparently no Jew was admitted as a Jew, but after the arrest Jews were identified and were treated differently. Thus the transition was made to punishment for being and not for doing, and this transition was also carried out at the same time in other forms, which were not punitive or terrorist in the strict sense, but still had to be regarded as acts of persecution or oppression.  First and foremost, the "Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums" (Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service) of April 7, 1933, stipulated in its third paragraph: "Civil servants of non-Aryan descent are to be retired.  Insofar as they are honorary civil servants, they are to be dismissed from office." Thus, into a law which, according to its title, was directed against party civil service, a completely different principle was introduced, the principle of group membership or race, which could at most be justified as a proportionality requirement, but which nevertheless necessarily had to appear as a measure of religious persecution, since no other criterion than that of membership in the "Mosaic religion" existed.

It was therefore not surprising that the persecution of the Jews immediately came to the fore in the reports of the foreign press, and presumably no special facts were needed for this, for it was the first time in world history that a party came to power in a large state which already emphatically declared itself to be anti-Semitic in its program. The reports published in the foreign press were to a large extent undoubtedly exaggerated, for example when the Herald Tribune reported as early as March 3 that the "mass murder of German Jews" was imminent, or when the Daily Herald published an article from the "Land of the Slaughterers of the Jews" at the end of April.  Equally questionable was the confluence of anti-fascist and pro-Jewish propaganda, which made it possible to carry Hitler dolls hanging from the gallows in public demonstrations.  It was not much different with the movement to boycott German goods, which was set in motion only a few weeks after the seizure of power.  But in all this was reflected, albeit in an exaggerated or anticipatory way, only the fact that in Germany had begun something that was unprecedented in the world: the fight against and disenfranchisement of the Jews as Jews in a modern state in which their emancipation, i.e. the legal and de facto equality with the other citizens of the state, had been completed for some time. 

The extent to which this was about the contrast between the taking off National Socialist revolution and the national uprising was made clear by a book published on May 15, 1933 by Jakow Trachtenberg's publishing house, which had become known for the publication of anti-Bolshevik literature . It contains a number of statements by Jewish organizations and personalities, which are directed against the foreign "atrocity propaganda". Most of them are worded carefully, as was to be expected in view of the pressure exerted by the National Socialists; they mention "mistreatment", "riot" or "excess" but reject the news of genuine atrocities. But at various points it becomes obvious how much the largest organizations and some of the most important men were national-German and bourgeois. The Reichsbund of Jewish Front-Line Soldiers pulled back with great swiftness from the “irresponsible agitation” which “is being carried out against Germany by so-called Jewish intellectuals abroad,” the Honorary Chairman of the Association of National German Jews, Dr. Max Naumann sees in the atrocity propaganda “nothing more than a new edition of the war agitation against Germany and its allies of yore,” and the chairman of the German Rabbis Association, Leo Baeck, explains the main program points of the national German revolution, namely the overcoming of Bolshevism and the Renewal of Germany are also goals of the German Jews, which are not so deeply and so lively connected with any other country in Europe as with Germany. Trachtenberg himself speaks in his preface that the agitation because of the alleged atrocities in Germany could ultimately lead to actual atrocities, as the unscrupulous authors of the Lugen Campaign wanted to "evoke a new war." If the National Socialists had been nothing more than German nationalists or mere anti-communists, they would have obviously been able to communicate easily with a large part of the German Jews.

Most foreign press organs interpreted Hitler's takeover as the triumph of a new German nationalism, even if the news about the persecution of the Jews was given a lot of space.  The Manchester Guardian feared and hated above all "Junkers and reactionaries," seeing in Hitler merely an instrument of these people, and the Times did not believe that Hitler would outplay his allies in the Mussolini manner because he lacked the “extraordinary skills” of the Italian dictator. The French, too, feared the Reichswehr or the Crown Prince far more than Hitler, who was often compared disparagingly to General Boulanger. So in both countries the left and the right agreed that they did not see anything really new in Hitler, but still believed they were confronted with the reactionaries or the militarists against whom they had to fight so hard in the World War. Only Lord Rothermere's Daily Mail saw Hitler primarily as an anti-communist, and in October it was able to give space to a highly prominent author for the thesis that communism must follow suit if Hitler failed, namely the wartime Prime Minister Lloyd George. Comparisons with the Russian Revolution were quite rare, but at the review of the “Brown Book on Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror” on September 8, Berlingske Tidende remarked that much more appalling things were happening where communists were in power. Even rarer were remarks such as that Hitler was not really an anti-Communist and just as little a conservative.   If there was considerable anxiety and a wide variety of opinions, none of the foreign newspapers interpreted Hitler's seizure of power as an event that would have world-historical consequences.  

Not only did their contemporaries deal superficially with Hitler and National Socialism. The innermost tendency of science [tr. wissenschaft] can lead to a similar result after more than half a century. The more carefully the individual processes that immediately preceded or followed the seizure of power are investigated, the less clear or conventional the background can become, and the greater the scope for entirely subjective assessments of the authors. Anyone who tries to follow the political events in their daily course and in all their complexity will be easily inclined to regard ideological statements, which he only occasionally comes across, as irrelevant, and whoever viewed Hermann Goring primarily from the point of view of drug addiction, will presumably dismiss the sentence that the revolutionaries of 1918 had “crushed the heart” of him and his kind as a sentimental phrase. Those familiar with parliamentary politics may declare the communists to be hooligans who only occasionally made themselves noticeable through making noise and unrealistic motions. Those who have focused their attention on the Hitler-Stalin Pact will probably see in Hitler's speech of March 2 a disingenuous and demagogic agitation.  But from time to time, out of a scientific spirit, this innermost tendency of science, the tendency to ever-advancing specialization, must be countered, however great the risk. If the various statements of Hitler at the time of his takeover and the different tendencies of the National Socialist movement are to be brought into a hierarchy of the central and the marginal, the genuine impulses and tactical aids, the deeper and the less deep motives, if much-used terms such as a long look back is required, and this look back should not only extend to the World War and the German November Revolution, but also explicitly and with characteristic details to the Russian Revolution, to which Hitler and the Volkischer Beobachter and numerous others referred Party leaders referred so often. Only then will it become clear to what extent the National Socialist takeover of power was a final point, the final point of the Weimar period, to which almost no one wanted to return in 1933, and to what extent it could at the same time be a prelude to the most revolutionary events in world history, although even the most intelligent among contemporaries considered it a mere episode.