The word the regime used for what it did between the summer of 1933 and the summer of 1934 was Gleichschaltung — a piece of electrical-engineering jargon meaning "to switch into the same phase". The metaphor was the rectification of three-phase alternating current: the new German state, like a properly tuned generator, was to have every independent organisation, every association, every league, every choir, every kennel club, every veterans' lodge, every gardeners' society, every fishing club, every professional federation, every religious order, every state government, every legal jurisdiction running on the same political phase. The principle was applied with bureaucratic literalness. Between April 1933 and the end of 1934, every formally organised institution in German civil society — including those whose membership ran into hundreds and which had been founded in the eighteen-fifties to keep canaries — received a model constitutional amendment from the relevant ministry mandating an "Aryan paragraph", a leadership principle (Führerprinzip), and an obligation to align activities with the goals of the National Socialist Workers' Party.
Three sweeps
The first sweep was administrative. The Civil Service Law of the 7th of April 1933 — short title, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service — authorised the dismissal of "non-Aryan" civil servants and of those whose "previous political activity offers no guarantee that they will at all times unreservedly support the national state". The application was thorough. By the end of 1934 approximately 12 per cent of the German civil service had been dismissed, the highest proportion in the heavily Jewish-staffed legal, medical, and academic professions. Of the 26 German Nobel laureates of the 1900–1933 period, eleven would emigrate; of the German university professoriate, about 1,700 of roughly 7,000 active scholars were dismissed by April 1935.
The second sweep was associational. Each profession — physicians, lawyers, journalists, teachers, engineers, architects, even chimney-sweeps — had its own pre-existing professional federation, and each of these federations was assigned to a Reich Chamber: the Reich Chamber of Physicians, the Chamber of Culture (subdivided into film, theatre, music, the press, the visual arts, literature, and broadcasting, each with a chamber of its own), the Chamber of Economy. Membership of the relevant Reich Chamber was compulsory in order to practise the profession; expulsion meant unemployment. The Chambers each had an "Aryan paragraph", reducing the question of who was a German Jew to an administrative matter for which the Interior Ministry's Office for Race Research was the only competent authority.
The third sweep was federal. The Weimar Republic had been a federation of seventeen states, each with its own parliament, prime minister, ministries and police forces. The 31st of March 1933 had dissolved the state legislatures and the 7th of April had appointed Reich Governors (Reichsstatthalter) with the authority to override state cabinets. The Law for the Reconstruction of the Reich of the 30th of January 1934 went one step further: it abolished the state legislatures formally, transferred state sovereignty to the Reich, and converted the Reichsstatthalter into administrative agents of the central government. Bavaria, Württemberg, Saxony, Prussia and the rest ceased to be federal states and became, in legal substance, provinces. The Reichsrat — the federal upper house — was dissolved on the 14th of February 1934. After more than four hundred years of substantively federal politics, the German lands were a unitary state.
The SA problem
By the autumn of 1933, the only organised force in the country whose autonomy still mattered, and which the cabinet could not simply legislate away, was the Sturmabteilung — the SA, the brown-shirted street-fighting wing of the NSDAP, which had grown from 400,000 in January 1933 to roughly 3 million by the summer of 1934. Its chief of staff was Ernst Röhm, a stocky and indiscreet First World War officer with a scarred face and a loud preference for the men he had served with in the Bavarian alpine units. The SA expected, in late 1933, that the takeover of Germany would now be followed by the takeover of the German army — that the Reichswehr's 100,000 professional soldiers would be absorbed into a "people's army" of three million SA, commanded by Röhm under Hitler, with the Junker officer class either retired or subordinated. Röhm wrote in Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte in the summer of 1933 that the "second revolution" was overdue.
The Reichswehr would not accept this. Werner von Blomberg, the war minister, and Werner von Fritsch, the army commander, made it clear to Hitler at meetings on the warship Deutschland in April 1934, and again at the Bendlerstrasse on the 4th of June, that the army would not tolerate its absorption by the SA. President Hindenburg, in increasingly poor health and effectively the army's last constitutional patron, told Hitler at Neudeck on the 21st of June that unless the SA were brought under control the army would declare martial law. The Reichswehr had been Hitler's eventual route to total power — it would deliver the merger of the chancellorship and presidency on Hindenburg's death — and he could not afford to lose it. Röhm could be sacrificed.
The Night of the Long Knives
Between Friday the 29th and Monday the 2nd of July 1934 — known in retrospect as the Night of the Long Knives, although the operation lasted several days — the SS murdered approximately 85 known victims and an unknown additional number of less prominent ones, in a co-ordinated operation across the Reich. The dead included Röhm; his deputy Edmund Heines; a dozen senior SA regional commanders; the former chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and his wife Elisabeth, shot at their suburban Berlin home; Schleicher's collaborator Ferdinand von Bredow; the conservative editor Edgar Jung, who had ghostwritten Papen's 17th of June 1934 Marburg speech mildly criticising the regime; the Catholic Action leader Erich Klausener; the Bavarian general Gustav Ritter von Kahr, who had suppressed the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 and was now beaten to death with a pickaxe at the Dachau camp; and Gregor Strasser, the former NSDAP organisational chief and Schleicher's brief 1932 negotiating partner.
Hitler personally arrested Röhm at the Hanselbauer hotel in Bad Wiessee on the morning of the 30th of June. (The pretext for the operation was that the SA was planning a coup; no contemporary or post-war evidence supports this, though Röhm and several others were indiscreet about wanting one.) Röhm was driven to Stadelheim prison in Munich, offered a pistol in his cell to shoot himself, refused, and was shot through the cell door on the 1st of July by SS-Gruppenführer Theodor Eicke. The operation across the rest of the Reich was directed by Göring from Berlin and by Himmler and Heydrich from Munich.
The cabinet on the 3rd of July adopted the Law Concerning Measures of State Self-Defence, retroactively authorising the killings as "emergency defence of the state". Hitler explained the operation in a Reichstag speech on the 13th of July, claiming the SA had been planning a coup and accepting personal responsibility ("In this hour I was the supreme judge of the German people"). The Reichstag passed the law unanimously; the cabinet's surviving conservatives, including Papen — whose own collaborators Jung, Klausener and others had been among the victims and whose office staff had been arrested with him under house arrest for four days — voted yes.
The death of Hindenburg
Paul von Hindenburg died at Neudeck on the morning of the 2nd of August 1934, aged eighty-six, of lung cancer. The cabinet had passed, the day before, a Law Concerning the Head of State, merging the offices of Reich President and Reich Chancellor in a single office to be held by Hitler. The law took effect at Hindenburg's death. From the 2nd of August onward Hitler held both offices — formally as "Führer and Reich Chancellor" — and was, simultaneously, head of state, head of government and commander-in-chief of the armed forces.
The same day, on Blomberg's instructions, every officer and other rank of the Reichswehr was assembled and made to swear the new oath of allegiance: not, as before 1934, an oath to the Weimar Constitution, but an oath to "Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, supreme commander of the armed forces". The oath was the regime's reward to the Reichswehr for its acquiescence in the Röhm purge — Blomberg had assisted in the planning — and it was the regime's binding of the army. The oath would matter, eleven years later, when officers conscience-bound to Hitler personally hesitated to act against him; it would be invoked in defence at the Nuremberg trials.
The plebiscite of the 19th of August 1934 ratified the merger of the presidency with the chancellorship by 88 per cent of the vote — held under the conditions of the racial and political-prisoner legislation, with the SS overseeing polling, but the result is generally accepted by historians as broadly representing the German public's view of Hitler in the summer of 1934, six weeks after the Röhm purge had eliminated what was widely (and incorrectly) feared as an imminent second revolution. The dictator was popular, the army was bound, the parties were dissolved, the trade unions were gone, the press was co-ordinated, the federal states were extinct, the constitution was suspended, and the SA — the great street-fighting army that had brought everything about — had been broken and reduced to a ceremonial role.
The state that emerged in the autumn of 1934 was the Third Reich. It is the state whose history occupies the next seven chapters.
End of Chapter III