Mindful that he still had a way to go to achieve a full dictatorship, Hitler now worked to convince his conservative allies that he needed additional powers to avert a possible leftist resurgence. On March 21 he stood next to President Hindenburg during an elaborate ceremony at Potsdam’s Garrison Church, vowing to uphold the traditions of Prussian honor and discipline that the church symbolized. For this occasion Hitler put aside his Nazi uniform for a top hat and tails. Hindenburg was so moved he cried.
This pompous travesty, brilliantly orchestrated by Goebbels, was meant as psychological preparation for a crucial vote by the new Reichstag on an Enabling Act that would allow the regime to dispense entirely with constitutional limitations over the next four years. The fateful session took place on March 23 in the Kroll Opera House. To ensure that the deputies did the right thing, SA men stood outside chanting “We demand the Enabling Act, or there will be hell to pay!” Although the SPD refused to cave in, support from the Center Party allowed the Nazis and their allies to gain the needed two-thirds majority. (All the KPD delegates and some of the Socialists were prevented from attending the vote.) Hitler was now officially dictator of Germany, “created by democracy and appointed by parliament.” No wonder Berlin wits began calling the Reichstag, which continued to meet at the Kroll Opera, “the most expensive choral society in the world.”
Backed by emergency decrees and armed with police-auxiliary status, Berlin’s SA forces now turned the streets of the capital into a hunting ground for their political and personal enemies. They focused on the working-class districts, where in the past they had often gotten back as much as they had dished out. They ranged through the massive Mietskasernen, grabbing “subversives” and bundling them off to their various district headquarters, which they converted into ad hoc prisons and torture chambers. The most prominent of these hellholes were the SA barracks in Hedemannstrasse (Kreuzberg) and the SA Field Police post in General-Pappe-Strasse (Tempelhof). Another “wild concentration camp” was located in a squat brick water tower in the district of Prenzlauer Berg. It now bears a plaque attesting to its former function, blithely ignored by the patrons of the hip cafés that have sprouted up around the tower since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Rudolf Diels, the first head of the Gestapo, recalled in his memoirs a visit to the SA barracks in Hedemannstrasse, where he saw men with their faces beaten in and their arms and legs broken. They lay on dirty straw mats, he reported, like “big clumps of mud, funny dolls with dead eyes and wobbly heads.”
While the SA was rounding up Communists and Socialists and throwing them in makeshift prisons, the Nazi leadership made a strenuous effort to depict the party as the true protector of the working classes. On May 1, 1933, the workers’ traditional day of celebration, Berlin was festooned in swastika banners and signs saying “Only a Strong Germany Can Provide Work for the German Workman.” Workers from all over the country were brought to the capital to attend a mass rally in Tem-pelhof Field, where they heard Hitler promise a war on unemployment through public works and the reduction of interest payments. He also announced a plan for compulsory labor service, whereby every German would be obliged “to gain some experience of manual labor.” According to British ambassador Sir Horace Rumbold, who witnessed the speech, Hitler’s address generated little enthusiasm among the masses.
In the Berlin region the Nazi terror campaign reached its bloody peak during the infamous Köpenicker Blutwoche (Köpenick Blood Week) in June 1933. In revenge for an anti-Nazi demonstration in that district, Brownshirt gangs rounded up over 500 Communist and Socialist functionaries and threw them into SA prisons. During the following days, ninety-one prisoners were shot or tortured to death. Their mangled corpses were sewn into sacks and dumped into the Havel River, on whose banks they washed up over the course of the summer. The Brownshirts’ rival, the SS, also lost no time in imposing itself on the capital. In April 1933 it took control of all the German police forces, including Göring’s Berlin-based Secret State Police, or Gestapo. This agency moved into a former applied arts school at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8, while the SS command established its headquarters next door at the Prinz Albrecht Hotel.
