Free Gestapo by Edward Crankshaw Page A

Communists were proscribed. And by a judicious mixture of blatant forceand flattery of the aged President and the Nationalists, Hitler managed to pass by constitutional means (a majority of two-thirds), on March 21st, 1933, a law which in effect did away with the Constitution. This was the basic Enabling Act (Law for Removing the Distress of People and Reich) which gave the Government power for four years to enact laws without the co-operation of the Reichstag, to deviate from the Constitution. It gave the Chancellor personally the power to draft such laws, to come into effect the day after publication.
    The Revolution had now started in earnest. It was called the
Gleichschaltung
, the process of bringing the totality of German society under direct Nazi control. First Hitler had to do for the various
Laender
what Goering had done for Prussia. On March 9th, aided by Himmler and Heydrich, Ritter von Epp, on instructions from Berlin, carried out a
Putsch
against the Bavarian Government—and Himmler became Chief of Bavarian Police. A few days later Frick, at the Reichs Ministry of the Interior, appointed Reich Police Commissioners in Baden, Wuertem-burg, and Saxony, who promptly turned out the existing governments. On March 31st Hitler, through Frick, decreed the dissolution of the Diets of all other
Laender
, and a week later appointed a
Reichstatthaiter
to every State with the power to appoint and remove governments, promulgate State laws, appoint and dismiss State officials.
    Then it was the turn of the Trade Unions. Through March and April the S.A. ran wild and looted the Trade Union branch offices. On the second day of May the offices were formally occupied by the S.A. and the S.S., officials were arrested and sent to concentration camps, and the Unions were merged into the New Labor Front under Robert Ley.
    Finally came the dissolution of the opposition parties. On May 10th Goering occupied the buildings and newspaper offices of the great Social Democratic Party and ordered the confiscation of its funds. On June 19th what remained of the Party was put under a ban. On May 26th the assets and property of the Communist Party were confiscated. On June 14th all parties were officially banned and the National Socialist German Workers Party was declared “the only political Party in Germany.” It becamean offense to seek to maintain existing parties or to start new ones—an offense punishable with up to three years’ penal servitude or imprisonment, “provided the action is not subject to a greater penalty under other regulations.”
    In all this tumult the new Gestapo played only a small part. The youth of Germany, alive and ardent after years of frustration and apathy, stood behind the man who at last seemed able to do something active and bold to rehabilitate their shabby lives, and marched to the rhythm of
“Sieg Heil,”
intoxicated by a new sense of power which found its natural expression in revolutionary violence. The liberals, the sober thinkers, the balanced sceptics had failed, and Germany was still sunk in resentful chaos. The liberals now tried to block the new drive led by the magician Hitler which held the first real promise for many weary years. They had to go. They had nothing to offer but the infinite negative. If they would not go of their own accord they had to be trampled underfoot. And so they were. And so also were the Communists, who, instructed by the tortuous crassness of Stalin in Moscow, had made it clear that they would do nothing to support the liberals and the socialists in face of the new menace—because they believed that their own way to power led through the swift rise and fall of Hitler.
    The conspiratorial leadership of the Nazi Party and the thugs who took to violence for the sake of violence were reinforced and upheld by the genuine revolutionary enthusiasm which Hitler had evoked and by the distrust of the Communists aroused by their own dreary methods.