In February, Hindenburg agreed to curtail free speech and assembly, cracking down on leftist parties. On the 20th, Göring hosted a meeting between Hitler and twenty-two industrial tycoons, led by Gustav Krupp, chief of the armaments dynasty favoured by Wilhelm II, now a convinced Nazi, who contributed a million of the total three million Reichsmarks raised from business magnates to fund the election that would deliver the votes to seize absolute power. On 28 February, a fire at the Reichstag, lit by a Communist lunatic, provided the excited Hitler with the excuse to crush and ban the Communists. In March, Hindenburg ordered the Nazi insignia, the swastika, to become the official flag alongside the old imperial banner, while the SS commander Himmler and his sidekick Reinhard Heydrich, from a well-off musical and intellectual family that had lost its standing (he himself was an ex-naval officer cashiered for immorality), moved from Munich to create Hitler’s security organs, founding the first concentration camp, Dachau. In April, Göring, Prussian police minister, formed the Gestapo –
Two days later, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act that made Hitler dictator – and a week later he ordered a boycott of Jewish businesses and embarked on antisemitic legislation that excluded ‘non-Aryans’ (defined as those with one Jewish grandparent or more) from the civil service, culminating in the 1935 Nuremberg Laws that removed German citizenship from Jews and banned them from relationships with Aryans. Hindenburg agreed, provided Jewish veterans were excluded. From the start, Hitler looked abroad to destroy Versailles, renouncing membership of the League of Nations, and planned to reunite the German peoples, starting with his own homeland, Austria, where democracy was already compromised. Of the new nations of Versailles, Hitler particularly hated Poland and Czechoslovakia. But his interest in Austria clashed with the ambitions of his early hero, Mussolini.
When the two met in Venice, Il Duce was unimpressed by Der Führer – ‘more mule-headed than intelligent’, Mussolini believed. But Hitler’s first Austrian move failed when local Nazis attempted a coup that collapsed. Mussolini was furious, but he was busy building up his forces in Eritrea and Somaliland to attack Ethiopia. Hitler meanwhile reduced unemployment by spending profusely on autobahns and other big projects, but the economic miracle could not last. When Krupp expelled Jews from the Reich Industrial Board, his wife Bertha was dubious. ‘The Führer’s always right,’ replied Krupp. Hitler appointed him Führer of Industry.
In June, Papen, finally glimpsing reality, denounced Hitler. When Goebbels refused to report the speech, Papen complained to Hindenburg, who suddenly threatened to dismiss Hitler: he could have done so. The industrialists and generals feared the SA, whose chieftain Röhm hoped to supplant the army and nationalize industry. Krupp appealed to Hitler, who in June 1934 visited the Krupp factories. The Prussian generals now backed Hitler. They were essential, the SA dispensable.
Hitler agonized at his vertiginous eyrie on the Obersalzberg. It was his self-fulfilling belief that made his speeches so alluring and his personality so compelling. Inscrutable and secretive – his codename for himself was Wolf – Hitler was ruled by a conviction that he might die young, often reflecting, ‘When I’m no longer here …’ He was a reckless gambler whose dreams defied conventional sense: ‘I go the way that providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker.’
Two heroes particularly inspired him as warlord-cum-artist, Frederick the Great and Wagner. Portraits of Frederick hung in all his offices; his stays with the Wagners at Bayreuth were sacred. All politicians exist twice – as individuals representing just their personal qualities and as phenomena representing something more: the magic lies in the fusion of the two. Capable both of insinuating charm and of foam-flecked rages, Hitler played many roles, joking that he was ‘the greatest actor in Europe’. As performer and manipulator, he was capable of overawing and co-opting aristocrats and workers, Germans and foreigners, while also skilled in balancing his intimate ‘familial’ court of devoted henchmen in what his architect Albert Speer called ‘a carefully balanced system of mutual enmity’.
