Propaganda

William L. Shirer recalls how, when attending the annual Nuremberg Rallies, there would be hawkers selling postcards showing four portraits: Frederick the Great, Bismarck, Hindenburg and Hitler. The inscription underneath read: ‘What the King conquered, the Prince formed, the Field Marshal defended, the Soldier saved and unified. It was an emotional pull, Hitler was shown not just as the saviour and unifier, but as the end of a lineage of great Germans. This sense of continuity in German history was also quite deliberately depicted in the term: ‘Third Reich’. The First Reich had been the medieval Holy Roman Empire, the Second Reich had been formed by Bismarck after Prussia’s defeat of France in 1871, the Third Reich was restoring Germany’s great name (after the Weimar Republic had so sullied it) and was taking it to new heights.

I want to pick up on this appeal to the glories of Germany past. I am going to look at what came to be known as the ‘Day of Potsdam’. It marked the opening of the new Reichstag after the March election of 1933 but it needs to be put into a slightly wider context. The election had been a violent affair with Nazi thugs let loose on opposition parties. But it was affected even more by the setting on fire of the Reichstag by a rogue communist and the decree which immediately followed: the Decree for the Protection of People and State which curtailed the rights of Germans (and would do until the end of the Nazi period). But Hitler wanted to change the constitution to allow him to rule without the Reichstag and without Presidential decrees. To do this he needed a two-thirds majority in the Reichstag (the reason for the March election) but he didn’t get it. What to do?

The day after the election, March 6th, the Communist Party was banned and so its eighty-one delegates could be discounted from the number Hitler needed for his two-thirds majority, though he was still short of it. Meanwhile the violence on the streets not only continued but intensified, and the Social Democrats and the trade unions were to feel its force. As had happened to the Communists, party offices were attacked, local leading officials were arrested so that the local party organisations, in desperate acts of self-protection, closed themselves down. A number of national leaders fled the country. And nothing of this was reported as Social Democrat newspapers were banned.

Such was the scale of the Nazis move against the two parties – those taken numbered in the tens of thousands (the most conservative estimate put those detained for political reasons in 1933 at over 100,000) – that, starting with Dachau just outside Munich, the Nazis opened concentration camps to house their victims (Dachau was opened on March 10th) . This wasn’t a knee-jerk reaction either, it had long been planned. The camps were put under the control of the SS and quickly became what Richard Evans describes as ‘a world without regulations or rules.’¹ The violence was brutal, not sophisticated psychological violence, but the violence of the fist, the boot, the truncheon; and the gun. And what is more, the conditions in the camps was given wide publicity. The Nazis wanted their enemies, real or potential, to know what awaited them if they dared oppose the ‘national revolution’.

And most Germans accepted it. They had been conditioned to violence throughout Weimar. It had been an almost ever-present part of political life in Germany: the German Revolution the Spartacist Uprising, the Freikorps and finally the multiplicity of paramilitary groups. The Reichstag fire and the Nazi’s claim that it was intended to herald the start of a Communist revolution, was enough to convince most of those who mattered to Hitler that such extreme measures were necessary. After all, hadn’t Hindenburg signed the Reichstag Fire emergency decree? And if Social Democrats were included in the round-up of victims, well weren’t they Marxists too?

They may or may not have been reassured by Hitler’s pronouncement on March 10th, the same day that Dachau opened, that ‘The national uprising will continue to be carried out methodically and under control from above.’ But his angry repost to criticisms of the level of violence, voiced by his Nationalist partners in the coalition including Papen, raging against the ‘weakness and cowardice of our bourgeois world in proceeding with kid gloves instead of the iron fist’², might lead to more concern from amongst the elites and, too, the law abiding middle classes.

So, for the time being at least, Hitler had to keep the traditional conservative elites as well as the middle classes on board. Hindenburg could, after all, sack him. The answer was to be a display of pomp and ceremony, a day of unity, a day of “Germaness”: the ‘Day of Potsdam’.

The Day of Potsdam, March 21st, as we have noted, marked the opening of the new Reichstag following the elections and was held in the Garrison Church of the Prussian army. It would normally have taken place in the Reichstag building itself but, of course, it had been burnt down. Josef Goebbels, the Nazi’s Head of Propaganda, saw the immense symbolic potential of the setting. The Church had been built by Frederick William I in 1735 and the tombs of the ‘soldier king’ and his son, Frederick the Great lay side-by-side in the crypt. The Church had been designed to display Prussian military greatness: trumpets, flags and cannon decorated the stone of the chancel, the weather vane on the church tower held the initials FWR and featured a Prussian eagle soaring up towards the sun.

Goebbels, having been made Minister of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda on March 13th, took personal control of the preparations, maximising the full potential of the day, even choosing the date, March 21st, the first day of spring and the date of the opening of the first German Reichstag by Bismarck following the creation of the German Empire in January 1871. The whole thing was aimed at gaining the confidence of the Old Order but also aligning the New Order, the Nazis, with it.

The streets of Potsdam (an old town just outside Berlin) were decked with German Imperial, Prussian and swastika flags (missing was the flag of Weimar Germany). The streets were also lined with ranks of Reichswehr troops and brown-shirted paramilitaries, their arms raised in salute. Veterans of the Wars of Unification were present as were the old field marshalls, generals and admirals of imperial times (the Crown Prince too), and the flags of the most renowned Prussian regiments were placed in prominent positions. Wreaths were laid on the tombs of the Prussian kings, Hindenburg paused to salute the empty throne of Kaiser Wilhelm II, a choir sang and a battery of guns fired off a salute. There was the symbolic handshake between President and Chancellor, and of course, there were speeches. Both Hindenburg and Hitler made reference to the greatness of Prussia: Hindenburg referred to Prussia’s ‘never-failing courage and love of fatherland’; Hitler paid homage to Hindenburg and to ‘the greatest of kings’: Frederick William I and Frederick the Great. And both Hindenburg and Hitler looked forward to a renewed Germany. Hitler talked of the ‘old greatness and the new strength…’ It was a great German occasion, it was a great day for the National Socialists; just as Goebbels had planned it.³

The ‘Day of Potsdam,’ as it quickly came to be known, signified the “happy marriage” between the old Germany of the Prussian Junker symbolised by President Hindenburg weighed down by age and his military regalia, and the new Germany, Nazi Germany, represented by Hitler wearing a suit rather than his Party paramilitary uniform, a safe pair of hands. But Potsdam too signified the utter hypocrisy of the old and the new regimes. Represented by Hindenburg’s solemn acknowledgement (with a flourish of his marshal’s baton) of the empty throne of King and Emperor. And Hitler’s public display of respect for the old order, particularly of Hindenburg. The handshake with bowed head; the words, giving thanks to ‘Providence’ that had given Germany the benefit of the great warlord’s leadership at the moment of Germany’s renewal.

And two days after the ‘Day of Potsdam’ the Reichstag met for its first session in its temporary knew home, the Kroll Opera House and, in an atmosphere of intense intimidation, Hitler would get his Enabling Act.

1 Richard J. Evans, The Coming Of The Third Reich, p. 345

2 Quoted in Richard J. Evans, p. 348

3 Quotes from Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom, pp 656-7 + William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 197