NAZISM IN POWER
1933-4 THE EARLY YEARS OF NAZI DOMINATION

THE PRACTICE OF COUNTER-REVOLUTION

The NSDAP's counter-revolutionary zeal did not diminish once Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933. On 1 March Göring claimed that "to exterminate Communism... will be my noblest task," while Göbbels vowed that 1933 would strike the French revolutionary year of 1789 out of history. In May Hitler said: "I regard it as my task before posterity to destroy Marxism, and that is no empty phrase but a solemn oath which I shall perform as long as I live." By New Year 1934 he claimed: "The great life-task which I had set before myself was completed in barely six months! Marxism was destroyed and Communism laid in the dust. Fourteen years long have I preached the necessity of conquering this doctrine of madness."

On the international scale there have been many examples of dictatorships attacking and destroying labour movements. In the strict sense of the term, many such dictatorships are not fascist though they may use violent methods popularly identified with fascism. The manner by which the suppression of the labour movement was accomplished in Germany revealed the unique nature of fascism - it was carried out with a thoroughness in both breadth and depth which set it apart from almost any other counter-revolutionary process. This was due to the Nazi party's mass roots, its millions of supporters and huge activist core.

Direct repression involved the destruction of the KPD, SPD and trade unions. At the opening of the first official concentration camp at Dachau Himmler explained that it was designed for "the entire Communist and - if necessary - Reichsbanner and Marxist functionary group". Parallel to this was the process called Gleichschaltung. This is an untranslatable word, but is often rendered in English as "co-ordination". "Nazification" might be more appropriate. Looked at superficially, Gleichschaltung appears to have been directed at bringing under full Nazi control all sectors of society outside of itself - whether local government, social institutions or rival political groups.

In appointing Hitler the conservative elite around Papen and Hindenburg had planned to co-opt his supporters in order to stabilise their rule and, through controlled counter-revolutionary action, to tilt the social balance still further against the working class. To this limited end, Nazis received just three posts in an 11-strong coalition Cabinet - Chancellor (Hitler), Minister of the Interior (Frick) and Minister without Portfolio (Göring). Key posts such as Foreign Minister and Defence Minister (with control of the army) were given to Hindenburg's own nominees - von Neurath and von Blomberg. The main economic post was handed to Hugenberg of the DNVP. Papen boasted that "It is we who engaged him... In two months we'll have pushed Hitler so far into the corner that he'll squeal." This proved entirely wrong. Hugenberg later admitted that participation in Hitler's Cabinet was "the greatest stupidity of my life."

The swift establishment of the Nazi monopoly of power has been portrayed as almost a historical accident, the result of duplicity by Nazis and weak characters like Papen. It is true that: "Hitler and his supporters were to demonstrate a cynicism and lack of scruple - qualities on which his partners particularly prided themselves - which left Papen and Hugenberg gasping for breath," but it is mistaken to conclude from this that: "the history of National Socialism from beginning to end is the history of its underestimation". Though personalities played a role, the problem lay with deeper social forces.

Taylor's eloquent analogy explains the process rather better:

In January 1933 the German upper classes imagined that they had taken Hitler prisoner. They were mistaken. They soon found that they were in the position of a factory owner who employs a gang of roughs to break up a strike: he deplores the violence, is sorry for his workpeople who are being beaten up, and intensely dislikes the bad manners of the gangster leader whom he has called in. All the same, he pays the price and discovers, soon enough, that if he does not pay the price (later, even if he does) he will be shot in the back. The gangster chief sits in the managing director's office, smokes his cigars, finally takes over the concern himself.

It was the counter-revolution that side-lined Papen and Hugenberg. The wiping out of all rivals to Nazism was a necessary by-product since total political subordination to the Nazi project was essential to its success.

The first thing to go would be the last vestiges of democracy. Göring, as Reichstag President declared that the 5 March election was "bound to be the last in ten years, and presumably in a hundred." The campaign itself was bloody, with 69 political murders taking place. The neutering of the Reichstag by the Enabling Act immediately deprived the electoralist parties of their principle field of activity. The way it was passed was typical of the Nazi's style. The deputies (minus the outlawed KPD) had to push their way through crowds of SS men to reach the chamber. When they arrived they were confronted by a platform draped with a huge swastika flag and a gallery filled with stormtroopers. As the debate proceeded Nazis outside could be heard chanting "We want the Bill - or fire and murder".

The rival middle class parties were not allowed to wither away peacefully. They would no longer be tolerated so, to ensure there would be no space for any resistance to Nazism the DNVP, DVP, DDP and Centre were lent upon by the SA. It might be argued that these parties perished because the Nazis feared them as rivals for state power; there may be some truth in this. However, in 'normal' parliamentary politics there is often intense rivalry between competing parties, but elimination of individual contenders is not the result. As Broszat points out it was as a by-product of wiping out the left (i.e. counter-revolution) that the middle class parties succumbed:

the violent elimination of the left would inevitably give expression to the superior numerical and physical power of the Nazi movement over against the remaining middle and right-wing parties and so prepare their capitulation.

The smashing of the left immediately preceded demise of the old right. The main blows against the KPD followed the Reichstag fire of 27 February. In the next two and a half weeks there were 7,784 arrests under emergency laws in the main districts of Prussia alone. 95% of these were Communists. On 20 March Himmler announced that the SS was opening the first official concentration camp at Dachau. "Wild" concentration camps in the cellars and basements of buildings had been operated from the very first by the stormtroopers. On 31 March hanging was restored for "crimes against public security". On 4 April this became applicable to "political crimes". On 8 March SA and SS occupied SPD and union buildings. Göring seized all of the SPD's assets on 10 May and by 22 June it was officially obliterated. We have already seen the destruction of the ADGB unions on 2 May. They were replaced by the German Workers' Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront - DAF). 20 June saw collective bargaining declared defunct and 4 days later the Christian trade unions were terminated.

No sooner was the labour movement destroyed than the other political parties came under pressure, though, in stark contrast to the labour movement, they dissolved themselves voluntarily. The former DDP began the process on 28 June, the DVP following the next day. At the same time the DNVP, after vain attempts to bolster its position by identifying itself with the "national movement", declared a "pact of friendship" with the Nazis which involved self-dissolution; members entered the NSDAP "with full and equal rights and were recognised as part of the common struggle for German nationalism". At the same time the DNVP's paramilitary allies, the Stahlhelm (Steel Helmets) was gradually absorbed into the SA. The Centre Party was the last to succumb, deciding on its own dissolution on 5 July. Its position had become untenable when the Pope began negotiating a Concordat with the Nazis which would protect Church property but which also agreed to "remove priests from party politics". On 14 July Germany officially became a one-party state and anyone who contemplated forming an alternative to the NSDAP would face 3 years in prison.

The process of coordination was not limited to political parties. Institutions were to be purged as well. A civil service decree of 11 April required the sacking of all Communists or with Jewish connections. One month later the prohibition was extended to judges, notaries, school and university teachers and the police. Communists and Jews had already been excluded from law and, medicine, journalism, dentistry and so on.

Gleichschaltung was applied to the local state governments which, under Weimar, enjoyed some degree of autonomy. For the Nazis there could be no crack in the state edifice that might offer any space for opposition, because any opposition could quickly assume a class form. Repression must be monolithic and inescapable. Within state institutions the grip of counter-revolution must be absolute. The nature and purpose of coordination was expressed by Württemberg's freshly installed dictator: "The government will brutally beat down all who oppose it. We do not say an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. No, he who knocks out one of our eyes will get his head chopped off, and he who knocks out one of our teeth will get his jaw bashed in."

There has been much debate about whether the Nazi Party swallowed up the state machine or, conversely, whether the state machine swallowed up the Nazis. Both viewpoints are largely misplaced. The key issue was that all the repressive powers at the disposal of the state and the Nazi Party (as a mass movement) were now committed to the cause of unbridled counter-revolution. Ideological resources - the media and newspapers - were also coordinated. Interestingly, some newspapers were allowed to continue because the Nazis did not wish to interfere with private property (although, naturally, such considerations did not apply to the left-wing press). However, even this press was extensively purged. Attempts to coordinate the Churches proved problematical. While a Protestant Reich Church was set up, a minority Confessional Church led by Martin Niemöller put up resistance. The Catholic Church could not be destroyed or coordinated, but was largely neutralised by the July 1933 Concordat with the Pope.

So far this description of the building of the Nazi dictatorship has been one-sided because it has concentrated on action being taken at the top of the state. However, the secret of the Nazis' effectiveness lay in the fact that moves from the top were matched by violence from below. The takeover of local states was a good example. On 7 April Nazi Reich Governors were installed at the head of all Germany's 18 states: "Developments in Württemburg, Baden, Saxony, Hesse, Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck followed a similar pattern. Threats of violence (from below) and telegraphic intervention by Frick [Nazi Interior Minister] intermeshed, until governments were replaced." Key to this had been the "auxiliary police" established on 22 February - 50,000 brown- and blackshirts who had donned white armbands to enforce official "law and order" by means of the street thuggery they knew so well.

It was this combination that enabled the coordination to take place at the molecular level in a way that no exclusively state-sponsored repression could have done. To appreciate this point it is necessary to look at detailed local examples of the process. The best account has been given by Allen for the town he calls Northeim. He describes the process of coordination from the moment that power was seized:

Control of the city government was one thing; absolute power in the town was another.... It involved control over the local police. But that was not enough. The Nazis had to prove in the first months after the appointment of Hitler as chancellor that they were willing to use the power apparatus in a ruthless and effective way [so that] Northeimers came to believe implicitly that they might expect no mercy from their new Nazi rulers.

One means of terrorising the population was the threat of the nearby Moringen concentration camp which was quickly filled to bursting point. A Communist-led hunger strike was broken by turning off the water and force feeding the leaders. Arrest could be for the slightest of reasons, such as the odd oppositional comment. Rumours of a Nazi hit list abounded. The secrecy of the Gestapo led people to imagine there were agents everywhere, when Northeim had only one. Socialists were sacked and those that were not arrested were offered back-breaking work in a stone quarry. The completeness of the Nazi takeover reduced the left to: "Poverty, terror... social isolation [and] what might have been the most significant factor of all: the sense of futility."

Alongside repression in Northeim came mass propaganda and activity. The Nazi movement did not just include the young thugs of the SA. Respectable middle class citizens staged public events, sang Nazi songs, celebrated Hitler's birthday and so on. Northeim had a "major celebration" every three weeks: "Thus in the first six months of the Nazi regime, Northeim was subjected to a veritable barrage of propaganda. While the NSDAP took the lead, all the various nationalistic and militaristic elements in the town were brought into play to support and generalize the Nazi appeal."

As campaigns began against Jews:

the Nazis undertook their most Herculean task: the atomization of the community at large. Though the methods differed, the result was the same, and by the summer of 1933 individual Northeimers were as cut off from effective intercourse with one another as the Jews had been from the rest of the townspeople... Eventually no independent groups were to exist.

The lengths that the Nazis went were extraordinary. The chess club was "coordinated" and renamed the National Socialist Chess Club with a Nazi in charge. The same happened to the bowling club. The public library followed, one quarter of its books being burned as "un-German".

The town Allen describes did not have a particularly strong working class presence. Offenbach, on the other hand was a place where the unity of employed and unemployed had generated exceptionally strong resistance to Nazism before 1933. A left-wing activist returning to the town reported:

I could not recognise the town. Offenbach under the swastika! Swastika flags everywhere... They were hanging so thick in the narrow Biergrund that it was almost impossible to get through. And that was the main stronghold of the KPD.

Allen explains the corrosive effect of Nazi rule:

people began to distrust one another. What was the value of getting together with others to talk if you had to be careful about what you said? Thus to a great extent the individual was atomized. By the process of Gleichschaltung individuals had a choice: solitude or mass relationship via some Nazi organisation.

In his conclusion Allen notes that in this process:

the critical figures were the local Nazi leaders. Hitler, Göbbels, and the other Nazi leaders provided the political decisions, ideology, national propaganda, and, later, the control over the government that made the revolution possible... But it was in the hundreds of localities like Northeim all over Germany that the revolution was made actual. They formed the foundation of the Third Reich.

While taking issue with the use of the word "revolution" in this context it is clear that major changes in the structure of political and daily life were occurring at this time. So far, however, what has been discussed has been no more than an open counter-revolution with the necessary political and institutional adjustments required to make it thoroughly effective. The working class could not be atomised without atomising the middle class too.

THE LIMITS OF CHANGE WRITTEN IN BLOOD

By the summer of 1933 the "National" element within National Socialism had largely obliterated the internationalist enemy. Was the path now clear for the "Socialist" element to come to the fore? Was the brown revolution (as opposed to the counter-revolution) about to begin?

The takeover had given a sense of empowerment to hundreds of thousands of ordinary Nazis. They had not only been allowed to indulge their hatred of the labour movement, but had occupied public buildings, expelled state and local governments, and seized control of the full gamut of social and recreational bodies. While anti-Marxism had been a motivating force it was thoroughly mixed in with expectations deriving from the Party propaganda that had been pumped out over the previous years. The middle class shopkeeper hoped to see the end of the department store, the debtor the abolition of the "slavery of interest", the NSBO supporter the introduction of "German socialism" and so on. If Hitler's victory was to amount to more than a maintenance of the existing system through counter-revolution, it would arise from carrying out these promises.

The fact that millions of middle class people shared a collective hope does not make it any less a collective delusion. Individual members of the middle class might have the chance for personal advancement by becoming tin-pot dictators through Gleichschaltung; as a class there was none.

The clash between the Nazi leadership and its supporters reached its symbolic climax in the blood purge of 1934, the so-called "Night of the Long Knives". During this the SS eliminated the leaders of the SA, but the trend was evident earlier. One of the first signs was Göring's defence of non-Nazi civil servants. He rebuked Nazi zealots and "gave his full approval to those civil servants who because of their character and sense of decency had certain inhibitions about joining the Party at this particular moment." These were preferred to Party members who "threatened gradually to undermine and shatter the authority of the State." Thus relatively few individuals were purged from the civil service in what was "a cosmetic rather than a surgical operation". If the Nazis were truly interested in revolution rather than counter-revolution, why did they draw back from pressing their advantage at the most favourable moment?

The same reticence to drive through full coordination applied to the key organisation of industrialists, the RDI. Changes here have also been described as "cosmetic". Jewish members had to resign "but it escaped a long-term presence of Nazi commissars." Hitler's views on industrialists were identical to Göring's on civil servants: "We must therefore not dismiss a business man if he is a good business man, even if he is not yet a National Socialist; and especially not if the National Socialist who is to take his place knows nothing about business." The proposition that Nazism was primarily a racial revolution rather than a counter-revolution is also thrown into doubt by a curious debate in the Cabinet shortly before the 5 March election. Hugenberg, DNVP leader and Reich Economics Minister proposed hitting Jews by a special tax on department stores. On this occasion Hitler's desire to draw the line at smashing the left and thus protecting property took precedence over his anti-semitism. He rebuked Hugenberg for going too far.

The same generosity was not extended to the shopfloor. As mentioned above, the destruction of the trade unions led to the creation of a new body,the DAF, under Robert Ley. At first sight this seems a strange development. The Nazis already had the NSBO which had been preparing for years to fulfil precisely this role, with leaders skilled in appealing to workers and a mission to "be the framework for all other trade unions". Ley himself admitted: "I was a greenhorn when I arrived on the scene and was probably more surprised than anyone else as to why I was given this job... I simply got an order from the Führer to take control of the unions, and then I had to work out what to do next."

The NSBO's claims were overlooked because it had taken Nazi propaganda too seriously in some places, blocking the closure of a mine, threatening a director with the concentration camp, and so on. Göbbels accused the NSBO of having been infiltrated by Marxists. In April Hess banned NSBO demonstrations "against any economic enterprise, industrial firm, bank or union without the Party's permission." The NSBO was then swallowed up by the DAF. To assist "Hitler's first priority in social and economic policy [which] was to forbid any interference with private ownership" employers were invited to join the DAF to ensure its internal balance was not favourable to the NSBO.

On 19 May an important law on the organisation of German Labour was introduced, one of its functions being to transfer responsibility for setting wages away out of the reach of the NSBO and into the hands of 12 "Trustees of Labour" who were "largely a mixture of officials from the federal states and lawyers associated with employers' organizations". In 1934 one Trustee reported his work in the early phase of the Nazi dictatorship:

I rarely met a workers' leader who did not demand the arrest of his employer right at the start of negotiations, the moment after he had greeted me. During night-long negotiations in the Ruhr area I often had to threaten the NSBO agents and works council chairman with the Gestapo in order to achieve peace and order in the labour sphere.

Like the NSBO, the SA was one of the Nazi organisations closer to the working class than most; many of its members were duped into thinking that the Party stood for something more than counter-revolution. In 1934 the leadership of the SA was butchered to teach it that, in Hitler's words: "The purpose of a revolution can be only... to crush resistance..." He added that "recurrent revolution must lead to the destruction of the life of the people, and of the State, and also of economic life." Therefore, "in the next thousand years there will be no other revolution in Germany."

The Chancellor claimed that the Night of the Long Knives was a preventative strike against "the outbreak of a second revolution". This is doubtful. We have seen that the SA was capable of very radical rhetoric before 1933, and the feeling of power gained in the excesses of counter-revolution strengthened that mood. A speech at an SA meeting illustrates the point: "Our revolution... has only begun. They talk about a national government, a national awakening... What is all that? What matters is the socialist part of our programme... We have only one more enemy to conquer: the bourgeoisie!"

However, the hollowness of Nazi "left" rhetoric should also not be forgotten. Until 1933 it had been a tool in the hands of the Nazi leadership, but if it became an obstacle, it would be dispensed with along with those credulous enough to believe in it. This did not appear to be an easy matter. By the summer of 1934 fear and opportunism had swollen SA membership to nearly 4 million, and its leader Röhm was impatient to record some real gains. He hoped to convert his paramilitary force into a proper army. A merger between the SA and the 100,000-strong Reichswehr would, in effect, mean the former swallowing the latter. When Hitler objected Röhm declared:

Adolf is rotten. He's betraying all of us. He only goes around with reactionaries. His old comrades aren't good enough for him. So he brings in these East Prussian generals. They're the ones he pals around with now... Where the hell is the revolutionary spirit to come from afterwards?

Hitler saw things differently. Nazism's counter-revolutionary content would have to be made abundantly clear. After the Night of the Long Knives he admitted that: "It had not simply been a matter of snuffing out the Revolt... but instead to make it clear to every single leader and SA man that he risked his neck if he conspired in any way whatsoever against the existing regime."The preparations for the blood purge were carefully disguised. First, Hitler wrote to Röhm to thank him "for the imperishable services which you have rendered to the National Socialist Movement and the German people, and to assure you how very grateful I am to Fate that I am able to call such men as you my friends and fellow-combatants." Then, in April 1934 Hitler met military leaders to assure them that he put their interests before those of his own supporters. Soon Himmler's SS were involved in plotting the downfall of their brownshirted comrades and death lists were drawn up.

On June 4 Hitler asked the SA to stand down and take a "holiday". Between 30 June and 2 July the blood purge was carried out. The SS hunted down Röhm and his SA allies as they slept in their Bad Wiessee hotel retreat. Elsewhere they settled old scores with Kahr (for opposing the Beer Hall Putsch, 1923), Schleicher (for blocking Hitler's path to the Chancellorship) Father Stempfle (for the crime of "knowing too much"; he had ghost written Mein Kampf) and various other individuals.

The SA offered no resistance, succumbing incredibly easily and quickly. Exact numbers of those killed (both SA leaders and others) have never been established. At the time it was believed to be around 400. The smashing of the left had been a staged operation lasting five months with mass arrests, torture and murder. The battle to crush any resurgence of the labour movement would occupy the authorities until the very end of the regime. While the brutality of the Night of the Long Knives was real, the removal of a few dozen key figures completely broke the SA which henceforth served only ceremonial functions. After Hindenburg died on 2 August Hitler combined the roles of Chancellor and President. In gratitude for preserving their independence from the SA, the generals had their troops swear a personal oath of allegiance and "unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German nation and people [and] Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces".

The purge completed the establishment of the Nazi system. It had accomplished a counter-revolution but ensured, by persuasion, pressure and ultimately murder, that not only was it free from any obligation to its supporters. The list of those who received official protection from the demands of rank and file Nazis - businessmen, department store owners, media bosses, senior civil servants and army generals - is highly indicative. The sole victims of Nazi oppression to be found amongst the elite were either Jewish or found in the political field where they might obstruct the engine of counter-revolution from carrying out its gruesome task.

The tide of Nazi activity flowed in one direction only - towards the and devastation of the labour movement. As soon as there were signs it might reverse direction it was dammed up.

THE BACKGROUND TO THE HOLOCAUST

The organised mass murder of civilians and prisoners of war carried out by Nazism during WWII is rightly counted as the greatest single crime against humanity in history. It included two elements in a hitherto unique combination, the decision to "kill off as completely as possible, a particular group of humans, including old people, women, children, and infants..." and elimination "on an assembly-line basis", using the most advanced scientific and organisational methods available. The enormous scope and coldly calculated prosecution of the barbaric plan seem almost to defy rational analysis. However, we cannot limit our reaction to expressions of horror and revulsion. To prevent a repetition the gruesome event must be understood.

This account will not dignify with a lengthy discussion the lies of so-called "historians" who deny the fact of the Holocaust, or like David Irving, pretend that Hitler was ignorant of what was happening. When the absolute dictator declared that "The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that has taken place in the world" and "We shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jew" it is not necessary to have a signed decree authorising mass murder. Eichmann, the chief administrator of the extermination process reported under interrogation: "I never saw a written order... All I know is that Heydrich said to me 'The Führer has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews'." As for the evidence, the murder of millions is all too present in the blighted families, the memories of survivors and the camps themselves. To give just one example: the six storerooms (out of 35), that the Nazis failed to destroy at Auschwitz disgorged 368,820 men's suits, 836,255 women's coats and dresses, while in the tannery 7 tons of human hair were found. Eichmann put a rough figure of 6 million Jewish non-combatant victims of genocide. These were part of the larger process of the Holocaust to which must be added some 10 million others:

Greeks, Poles, Yugoslavs, Czechs Russians, and men women and children of a dozen other nationalities, all of them civilians who had taken no part in military action... Among those murdered were as many as a quarter of a million Gypsies, tens of thousands of homosexuals, and tens of thousands of "mental defectives". Also murdered, often after the cruelties of torture, were several million Soviet prisoners-of-war...

Alongside those who, against all the facts, deny the Holocaust, there are more "respectable" and "eminent" figures who accept it occurred but try to explain it away.

There is the perspective which argues Hitler merely responded to the wishes of ordinary people: "German society... enthusiastically pursued genocide because of a culture-wide phobia against touching Jewish flesh." Goldhagen argues in a similar vein: "Germans' antisemitic beliefs about Jews were the central causal agent of the Holocaust."

Is there evidence for this?

The early days of the Third Reich were characterised by SA mass terror in which Communists were the main victims. Although Jews also suffered, in April 1933 there were less than 100 Jews out of the 1,000 strong inmate population of the first concentration camp - Dachau. During that first year up to 45 Jews were beaten to death in so-called "wild actions". At first the regime was happy to unleash the SA to smash left-wing opposition, drive through Gleichschaltung (coordination) and generally atomise society. Anti-semitism played its part in this. However, as we have seen, once the bloodhounds had served their purpose they were reined in, and during the Night of the Long Knives, neutralised. The same applied to their uncontrolled anti-semitic violence.

The 1 April 1933 boycott of Jewish businesses was the first centrally organised anti-semitic action of the government, but it did more than serve the fanatical hatred of leading Nazis. It was above all designed to placate the Nazis radicals in the SA by showing state commitment to their cause. It also channelled their excesses in a centrally controlled and "safer" direction. This was necessary to avoid damaging international reaction, and to calm fears of the elite and middle class regarding uncontrolled grass roots rowdyism. Thus anti-semitic policy had both an ideological and functional role.

If the causes of the 1 April boycott were complex it was not a response to the pressure of the mass of German people. Bankier writes:

Not only did sizable parts of the population severely condemn the persecution, but even Nazi sympathizers did not fully endorse it. Sometimes there were animated discussions in front of Jewish shops and fighting broke out between the public and party men. Even generals wearing medals came to stores owned by Jews in Berlin to demonstrate their disapproval of the Nazi policy.

This does not mean that racist attitudes were absent in the population, but that aggressive tactics were disapproved of. This is an important consideration when it comes to the genocide which was qualitatively different in its effect to the "normal" racism in societies. Reprehensible though the latter is, it does not produce the organised violence of fascism.

A barrage of measures followed the 1 April boycott, such as the previously mentioned ban on Jewish civil servants (11 April). The next targets were 'non-Aryan doctors'(22nd), school and college students (25th), assistant judges (28th) and so on. The vindictive spiral of discrimination continued over the years. It was directed at separating Jews from the rest of the population, not exterminating them.

The infamous Nuremberg decrees of 1935 have been seen as a dramatic escalation in the Nazi leadership's drive towards extermination. These laws for the "Protection of German Blood and Honour" of 1935 made important decisions in terms of excluding Jews from citizenship, defining who was a Jew and banning sexual relationships between Jews and "Aryans". Yet these laws were inspired by the same motives that animated the April 1933 boycott. Even the most rabid anti-Semite of all, Streicher, argued: "We don't smash any windows and we don't smash any Jews. We don't have to do that. Whoever engages in single actions of that kind is an enemy of the state, a provocateur, or even a Jew." It may be the case that "the vast majority of the population approved of the Nuremberg Laws because they identified with the racialist policy," but they also welcomed the laws as providing a framework "that would end the reign of terror and set precise limits to antisemitic activities."

The intense anti-semitism of the leading Nazis was moulded by political considerations:

That Hitler was able to contain the rivalries and maintain his position at the top of this tangled and shifting hierarchy, is testimony to his political acuity and charismatic power. It was the Jew who helped hold Hitler's system together - on the practical as well as the ideological level. The Jew allowed Hitler to ignore the long list of economic and social promises he had made to the SA, the lower party apparatus, and the lower middle classes. By steering the attention of these groups away from their more genuine grievances and towards the Jew, Hitler succeeded in blunting the edge of their revolutionary wrath, leaving him freer to pursue his own non-ideological goals of power and cooperation with those whose influence he had once promised to weaken or even destroy.

In 1938 came the anti-semitic pogrom of Kristallnacht (night of broken glass). On 9-10 November an orgy of violence was unleashed in which 100 Jews died. The American Consul described events in Leipzig as:

a barrage of Nazi ferocity as had had no equal hitherto in Germany, or very likely anywhere else in the world since savagery began. Jewish buildings were smashed into and contents demolished or looted. In one of the Jewish sections an eighteen-year-old boy was hurled from a three-story window to land with both legs broken on a street littered with burning beds and other household furniture... Ferocious as was the violation of property, the most hideous phase of the so-called 'spontaneous' action has been the wholesale arrest and transportation to concentration camps of male German Jews...

Kristallnacht was not the result of popular hatred, nor even a concerted government policy. The pretext for the pogrom was the assassination by a Jew of a German diplomat in Paris, yet a similar assassination in 1936 produced no such reaction. Although authorised by Göbbels, Hitler himself appears to have been ignorant of the intended pogrom. Göbbels planned it as a means of enhancing his influence in the power struggle of the various Nazi factions. He was roundly attacked by his competitors. Himmler denounced his "craving for power" and "empty-headedness"; the Economic Minister asked: "Are you crazy, Göbbels? To make such a mess of things;" Göring said, "I have had enough of these demonstrations! It is not the Jew they harm but myself, as the final authority for coordinating the German economy."

Kristallnacht was supposed to be a spontaneous popular protest but, as a secret party report admitted, Göbbels' "oral instructions" were "that the Party should not appear outwardly as the originator of the demonstrations but that it reality it should organize them and carry them out." Ordinary Germans were not fooled:

For the first time, all Germans were personally confronted with antisemitic violence. For this reason there is no trace of indifference. All sections of the population reacted with deep shock. The public was polarized on the handling of the Jewish question: party circles and their periphery gave full support, while the large majority condemned it.

Loud arguments occurred between brownshirts and ordinary people who tore up their leaflets and working people demonstratively shopped in Jewish businesses. It is significant that Kristallnacht was the very last occasion that the Nazis attempted a public demonstration of violence against Jews within Germany. The "final solution" was therefore clothed in euphemisms and secrecy.