407. Goebbels convinced Hitler to make May 1, 1933, a paid holiday (“Germany honors labor”). As workers marched from factories through the capital to the parade grounds at Tempelhof, airplanes flew in formation overhead, and radio loudspeakers broadcast songs about miners, farmers, and soldiers. In the evening, Hitler addressed workers as patriots responsible for Germany’s industrial might. “The biggest demonstration of all times,” noted the Berliner Morgenpost, a leftist newspaper. The grandiose Nazi initiative had elicited the support of the socialist Free Trade Unions, but on May 2 Nazi storm troopers assaulted them. Fritzsche, Life and Death, 46–7. A decade later Goebbels would reminisce that “only then was the National Socialist state on stable foundations.” Fröhlich, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, teil II, VIII: 197 (May 2, 1943).
408. Davies and Wheatcroft, Years of Hunger, 207–9.
409. Pravda, Feb. 18, 1933; Danilov et al., Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, III: 21. Rees, Iron Lazar, 113. At the gathering land commissar Yakovlev painted a more truthful, grim picture of collective farm operation from observations in Odessa province. Pravda, Feb. 19, 1933. Kaganovich had returned to the North Caucasus in late Jan. 1933, and reported cases of cannibalism but also of feigned starvation and “vicious terror” against the regime. He would go to his grave without acknowledging the tragedy. Danilov et al., Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, III: 639 (RGASPI, f. 81, op. 3, d. 215, l. 74); “Dve besedy s L. M. Kaganovichem.”
410. Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s”ezd kolkhoznikov-udarnikov, 66–7.
411. Pravda, Feb. 23, 1933, Sochineniia, XIII: 236–56 (at 251–2).
412. Sochineniia, XIII: 246–7. Oja, “From Krestianka to Udarnitsa.” Officially, only 15.25 million households were collectivized as late as mid-1933. Kolkhozy vo vtoroi, 1.
413. The arsonist confessed and claimed to have acted alone. German Communists alleged the Nazis had set him to the task to justify a premeditated anti-Communist repression. In fact, Nazi higher-ups appear to have been panicked the night of the fire. Mommsen, “Reichstag Fire,” 129–222; Kershaw, Hitler: 1889–1936, 456–8, 731–2. There is one eyewitness account, by a journalist of the London Daily Express: Delmer, “Reichstag Fire.”
414. Kershaw, “Hitler Myth,” 52–3. The Communists, despite the terror, still won 12.3 percent, but Hitler now banned the party by decree. The Social Democrats won 18.3 percent. Turnout was a record 88.8 percent.
415. Germany’s constitutional court accepted the validity of the Enabling Act. Bracher, German Dictatorship, 224. See also Broszat, Der Staat Hitlers, 117.
416. Mommsen, “Der Reichstagbrand.” See also Kershaw, “Hitler Myth,” 54–6.
417. The consul had just seen the body of a man flayed alive. Larson, In the Garden of Beasts, 5 (citing the Messersmith Papers).
418. “Germany,” he had warned in Mein Kampf, in his typical inversion, “is the next great objective of Bolshevism.” Hitler, Mein Kampf, 750–1. See also Thies, Architekt der Weltherrschaft.
419. Hitler had not tried to block a special bridge credit of 140 million reichsmarks by Dresdner and Deutsche banks (Feb. 23, 1933). The refinancing alleviated pressure on the Soviets, who owed Germany 1.2 billion marks, of which 700 million was due. (By Dec. 1934, the debt would amount to 250 million.) Hilger and Meyer, Incompatible Allies, 283–7. Hitler also submitted the 1931 protocol extending the 1926 Berlin Treaty to the Reichstag for ratification on May 5, 1933. DGFP, series C, I: 91–3n7, 355–8 (April 28), 385–9 (May 5); von Dirksen, Moscow, Tokyo, London, 122; Niclauss, Die Sowjetunion, 87–8.
420. Between April 30 and May 4, 1933, the editor of the semiofficial Gazeta Połska, Bogusław Miedziński, visited Moscow as a back channel contact; Radek reciprocated to Warsaw, July 6–22, under the pretext of visiting his mother. Radek’s report: “Polish-Soviet Rapprochement” (July 26, 1933): AVP RF, f. 010, op. 7, d. 12, l. 71–81. The Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg traveled to Britain in May 1933 to gin up support against the Communist menace, Kommunisticheskii Internatsional, 1933, no. 12: 14–20.
