Chapters 10–13 of Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris — a Chancellor slapping a dissolution order on a table and walking out, a telegram to five convicted murderers, a Dutchman with a box of matches, a camp announced at a press conference, an oath sworn before a corpse was cold, and a civil servant explaining in a routine speech how the whole thing worked. Read from
RAW/books/Ian Kershaw-Hitler Hubris.md. One full archaeology pass per chapter, sweeping all seven dimensions in every run.Siblings: Part 1 — Reflecting on Hitler and Chapters 1–3 · Part 2 — Chapters 4–6 · Part 3 — Chapters 7–9 · What Runs Through All of It. See Part 1's banner for the note on chapter boundaries in this file.
Source ingest: Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris
The chapter carries three epigraphs, all from the last days of January 1933, and between them they contain the whole argument.
Papen: we've hired him. Hugenberg: we're boxing Hitler in. And Ludendorff, writing to Hindenburg: I solemnly prophesy that this accursed man will cast our Reich into the abyss and bring our nation to inconceivable misery. Future generations will damn you in your grave for what you have done.1
Who held power in the autumn of 1932 is a short list — Papen, Schleicher, Hindenburg — with big business, estate-owners and the army behind them.2 The chapter is careful to say these were not a solid ruling class and did not act in unison. They were divided on economic interest and on strategy. What united them was wanting an end to the party system, the breaking of Marxism and the unions, and a reversion to some form of authoritarian rule. Beyond that they agreed on nothing, including how to get there without him.
The dilemma is stated symmetrically. Every non-Nazi looking for an authoritarian solution had to work out how to have one without Hitler. Hitler, having mobilised the masses, had to work out how to get power if the people holding it refused to hand it over. His own contribution to breaking that deadlock was, apart from constant agitation, exactly one thing: holding out for the Chancellorship and refusing every compromise.3 What the ruling groups thought they were dealing with is the chapter's real subject, and the phrase for it is precise: an underestimation of and contempt for Hitler corresponding to an ingrained over-confidence in the ability of the natural governing classes to control the upstarts. Then a murder happened, and it exposed what everyone was actually negotiating with.
On 10 August 1932, in a Silesian village called Potempa, a group of SA men killed an unemployed labourer with extraordinary savagery, in front of his mother and brother.4 The chapter is blunt that this was in itself routine — a list of three dozen acts of political violence was recorded in a single day and night around that time, and nobody noticed this one at first.
What made it a case was the clock. The killing came an hour and a half after an emergency decree prescribing the death penalty for premeditated political murder had come into force. Five men were sentenced to death.
Hitler sent them a telegram addressing them as my comrades, and put out a proclamation the next day claiming his refusal to join the government had been because of the sentences.5 Göring praised them and sent money to their families. Röhm visited them in jail. The local SA leader threatened an uprising and incited a crowd to break the windows of Jewish shops. The party newspaper then explained what the decree would have looked like under a National Socialist government: immediate arrest and sentencing of all Communist and Social Democrat functionaries, the concentrated smoking out of the murder areas, and the internment of those under suspicion and intellectual inciters in concentration camps.6 Rosenberg added that the judgement showed one Polish Communist weighed the same as five German front soldiers in bourgeois justice — and that for National Socialism there is no law as such, because one soul does not equal another, one person not another.
Papen commuted the sentences to life imprisonment, in a decision he himself acknowledged was political rather than legal.7 The men were freed under a Nazi amnesty in March 1933. Everything about the next six months is in that sequence, and it was in print in August.
The most theatrical scene in the chapter is a parliamentary sitting. On 12 September the Reichstag's agenda was a government statement on finance. A Communist deputy moved to change the order of business and couple a repeal of two emergency decrees with a no-confidence vote.8 A single objection would have killed it. Nobody objected.
Papen had not even brought the dissolution order into the chamber and had to send to the Chancellery for it. When the house reassembled he tried to speak and Göring, in the president's chair, looked deliberately away to the left. Papen tried again. Göring said the vote had begun. Papen walked to the platform, slapped the dissolution order down on Göring's table and left with his cabinet to howls of derision — and Göring pushed the paper aside and read the result.
Five hundred and twelve to forty-two. There had never been a parliamentary defeat like it. The technical point went the other way: the dissolution had been formally valid and the no-confidence motion therefore had no standing, so the government stayed in office. Which changed nothing about what had been shown.
Then the party lost an election, and the reasons are worth having because they are about its own coalition. In November it dropped 2 million voters, from 37.4 to 33.1 per cent, and from 230 seats to 196.9 The internal analysis blamed lack of funds, and then went deeper: people had said they would not vote again for a man who had turned down the chance of joining the government and stayed as far from power as ever. Members were quoted saying they had had enough of a party whose leader does not know what he wants and has no programme. The other cause was the Berlin transport strike, which the party supported alongside the Communists days before the poll. Goebbels understood the trade exactly: many bourgeois circles are frightened off, but those circles can be won back later — if we'd once lost the workers, they'd have been lost for ever.10
Luise Solmitz, who had waited two and a half hours in the sun in April, voted for the German Nationalists in November, disappointed and without enthusiasm. Above all, she wrote, his approval of the transport strike had cost him thousands of voters at the last moment. For him, it's not a matter of Germany, but of power. Why has Hitler deserted us after showing us a future that we could welcome. Hitler awake!11
Two months later the mini-state of Lippe-Detmold, population 173,000, held an election that would normally have been beneath notice. The party spent everything it had. He gave seventeen speeches in eleven days.12 The vote went from 34.7 to 39.5 per cent.
The real figure was less impressive — support there still lagged 3,000 votes behind the July result. That was overlooked. The optical impression was what mattered, and it was used in every conversation that followed.
The rest is a series of meetings in private houses. Papen and Hitler in a Cologne banker's home on 4 January, entered through the back door, photographed getting out of a taxi.13 A second meeting at Ribbentrop's house on the night of 10–11 January that produced nothing. A third on 18 January where Hitler demanded the Chancellorship outright and, when Papen demurred, broke off talks. Then a two-hour conversation with the President's son on the evening of 22 January.
On 27 January he was, in Ribbentrop's account, practically incapable of rational deliberation — beside himself with anger, having to be calmed by Göring, dissuaded from leaving Berlin.14 I have never seen Hitler in such a state.
What broke the deadlock was a telephone round. Papen rang several former ministers whom Hindenburg trusted and asked whether they would serve. All said they would work in a Hitler cabinet with Papen as Vice-Chancellor — and none would work in a Papen–Hugenberg cabinet of struggle.15 That impressed the President. So did what he took for moderation in Hitler's demands. For the first time he was amenable.
The cabinet agreed the next morning gave the Nazis two posts out of twelve besides the Chancellorship.16 Everything else went to conservatives. The one that mattered was buried in a compensation deal: Göring would serve nominally as Papen's deputy at the Prussian Ministry of the Interior — which handed the Nazis the police in a state covering two-thirds of the Reich.
The chapter's verdict on how the Republic ended is not about him at all. Democracy was surrendered without a fight, most notably when the grand coalition collapsed in 1930 and again when there was no resistance to the coup against Prussia in July 1932.17 During the Depression it was less surrendered than deliberately undermined by élite groups serving their own ends — not pre-industrial leftovers but modern lobbies working an authoritarian system for their interests.
And the masses had played their part. By 1932 the only supporters of democracy left were a weakened SPD, parts of the Zentrum, and a handful of liberals. The Republic was dead. What remained open was which kind of authoritarian system would replace it.
The working class was cowed and broken, but the ruling groups had no mass support of their own with which to finish it off. Hitler was brought in to do the job for them.18 That he might do more than that, outlast every prediction and expand his power at their expense, either did not occur to them or was thought exceedingly unlikely.
Read: lines 3692–4110.
The speed is the finding, and the chapter lists it as a timetable.19 Within a month, civil liberties extinguished. Within two, the Reichstag surrendering its powers. Within four, the trade unions dissolved. In less than six, every opposition party suppressed or in voluntary liquidation.
And the second finding is that almost none of it had to be ordered. Remarkable in the upheavals of 1933–4 was not how much but how little the new Chancellor needed to do. As the representative figure of national renewal he could function as activator and enabler, authorising and legitimating what others were already rushing to do in what they took to be his wishes.
Reactions on 30 January divided along lines the whole book has been describing. Luise Solmitz, in Hamburg: Hitler is Reich Chancellor! And what a cabinet!!! ... It is so unimaginably wonderful... What an achievement by Hindenburg!20 The Social Democrat Julius Leber, beaten up by Nazi thugs and taken into custody that same night: we know their aims. Nobody knows what their next measures will be... We don't fear these men.
His party colleague Kurt Schumacher got it exactly wrong, in the way the whole Left did: the cabinet is called after Adolf Hitler. But the cabinet is really Alfred Hugenberg's. The Communist proclamation, for all its rhetoric, was closer.
Most ordinary people were simply apathetic. The British ambassador reported that people throughout the country took the news phlegmatically.21 Some thought he would not last as long as Schleicher.
Three days later he addressed the army leaders in a private house, and what he said there is on record.22 Internally: complete reversal, no tolerance of opposition, those unwilling to be converted must be crushed, extermination of Marxism root and branch, removal of the damaging cancer of democracy. For them: conscription back, the armed forces the most important institution in the state, kept out of politics and above party, with the internal struggle left to the party's own organisations. Then, having already dismissed exports as a solution, he offered his alternative for what political power should be used for: perhaps — and probably better — conquest of new living-space in the east and its ruthless Germanization.
The reception is the point. General Beck later claimed he had immediately forgotten the content. One general thought he talked nonsense for an hour before getting to army matters. Another said a businessman with a good product does not need to shout like a market seller. Nobody opposed anything, and Admiral Raeder found the speech extraordinarily satisfying — because what was on offer was rearmament, expansion, and protection from any part in a civil war.
Reichenau put the bargain in four sentences at a meeting of commanders while Göring's police terror was running in Prussia: it has to be recognized that we are in a revolution. What is rotten in the state has to go, and that can only happen through terror. The party will ruthlessly proceed against Marxism. Task of the armed forces: stand at ease. No support if those persecuted seek refuge with the troops.23 One officer present protested and lost his command.
Then, on 27 February, a twenty-four-year-old Dutchman set fire to the Reichstag. Marinus van der Lubbe was intelligent, solitary, unconnected with any political group, had broken with the Communist Party in 1931, and wanted one spectacular act of protest to galvanise the working class.24 He had failed three times on 25 February in other buildings. He succeeded at the fourth attempt. He was arrested immediately and confessed at once, proclaiming his protest. The first policemen to interrogate him had no doubt he had acted alone.
It made no difference. Göring, whose first reaction on arriving was concern for the tapestries, took little convincing that it was a Communist plot.25 Hitler arrived an hour later and was persuaded within minutes: this is a God-given signal, Herr Vice-Chancellor! If this fire, as I believe, is the work of the Communists, then we must crush out this murderous pest with an iron fist.
By the next morning the decree existed, and the chapter's description of it is exact. With one brief paragraph, the personal liberties enshrined in the Weimar Constitution — freedom of speech, of association, of the press, privacy of post and telephone — were suspended indefinitely.26 With another, the autonomy of the individual states was overridden. The hastily constructed emergency decree amounted to the charter of the Third Reich. By April, 25,000 people were in protective custody in Prussia alone.
What the public was told rested on a police raid three days earlier that had actually found nothing of note, and on Göring's press statement claiming discoveries of planned assassinations and murders of officials' families. No evidence was ever made public.27
It was believed anyway. An alpine Bavarian paper welcomed the decree for finally getting to the centre of the German disease. And Luise Solmitz swallowed Göring's account whole: they wanted to send armed gangs into the villages to murder and start fires... Poison, boiling water, all tools from the most refined to the most primitive, were to be used as weapons. It sounds like a robbers' tale.28 She voted for him. His fame rises to the stars, he is the saviour of a wicked, sad German world.
Even so, the election of 5 March gave the party 43.9 per cent — a majority only with the conservative partners, which meant he would not be rid of them while Hindenburg lived.29 Under a terror campaign, the KPD still took 12.3 per cent and the SPD 18.3.
What followed the election is the clearest instance in the book of the mechanism the last chapter is named for. Hitler needed to do little; party activists needed no encouragement to undertake the spontaneous actions that strengthened his power.30 The pattern repeated itself state by state between 5 and 9 March: pressure to put a Nazi in charge of the police, threatening SA marches, the swastika raised on town halls, elected governments capitulating with scarcely any resistance, a Reich Commissar imposed to restore order. The emergency decree gave no justification for any of it, because there were no communist acts of violence to defend against. The only such acts were those of the Nazis themselves.
The first camp opened just outside Dachau on 22 March, in a former powder mill. Himmler had held a press conference two days earlier to announce it.31 It began with 200 prisoners and its capacity was given as 5,000. Its establishment was in the newspapers. Keep quiet or you'll end up in Dachau soon joined common parlance. And the middle-class townspeople of Dachau watched a column of their own Communist fellow-citizens marched out of the town, and thought them troublemakers — a class apart, simply not part of their world.
The day after that announcement, the regime put on its other face. At Potsdam on 21 March, in a church founded by the Hohenzollerns where Frederick the Great lay in the crypt, Hindenburg appeared in the uniform of a Prussian field-marshal and raised his baton to the empty throne of the exiled Kaiser.32 Hitler wore not a party uniform but a dark morning suit, played the humble servant, and bowed deeply. One non-Nazi observer, impressed by the moderation of the speech, wrote: it can't be denied, he has grown. Out of the demagogue and party leader, the fanatic and agitator, the true statesman seems — for his opponents surprisingly enough — to be developing. Two days later he was in a brown shirt again in the Kroll Opera House, with a giant swastika over the chamber and armed men from the SA, SS and Stahlhelm at every exit, proposing the Enabling Act.
Read: lines 4111–4681.
By the end of 1933 two obstacles were left, and they were tied together.33 The SA had outlived its purpose, which had been to win power — what it was for afterwards had never been worked out — and its politics of hooliganism were now a force for disruption, above all in Röhm's ambitions towards the army. And Hindenburg was old and frail, which put the succession in play and left the army with a rival source of loyalty. Hitler did not act before he was compelled to do so.34 The pressure from the army leadership and the machinations of Göring, Himmler and Heydrich brought it to a head.
There is a sentence overheard after an enforced handshake between Röhm and the Defence Minister, and it settled Röhm's fate: what the ridiculous corporal declared doesn't apply to us. Hitler has no loyalty and has at least to be sent on leave. If not with, then we'll manage the thing without Hitler.35 The man who overheard it and reported it was made SA chief afterwards.
The night itself was improvised on rumours. There was, in fact, no putsch attempt at all — but SA men who had heard the stories were going on the rampage, and three thousand of them marched through Munich in the early hours shouting that the Führer is against us, the Reichswehr is against us, SA out on the streets.36 He flew in at dawn, called it the blackest day of his life, and decided not to wait.
At half past six in the morning, three cars pulled up outside a hotel on the Tegernsee where the SA leaders were sleeping off a night's drinking. He went up to Röhm's room with a pistol in his hand and declared him under arrest. A lorry then arrived from Munich with more of Röhm's staff for the conference that had been called. He stepped out and told them he had taken over the leadership of the SA himself and ordered them back. They obeyed without demur.
Then he told the Reichstag what he had done, and this is where the chapter's central claim about the state gets made. If I am reproached with not turning to the law-courts for sentence, I can only say: in this hour, I was responsible for the fate of the German nation and so the supreme judge of the German people. I gave the order to shoot those most guilty of this treason.37 Thirteen of the men murdered had been members of that Reichstag. Armed SS men flanked the rostrum while he spoke.
What the country made of it is the harder finding. The public knew nothing of the intrigues and saw the removal of a scourge — the strutting, the daily disturbances, the constant unruliness of the stormtroopers had been an affront to a sense of order well beyond the middle classes.38 Instead of being shocked at shooting without trial, most people acclaimed it. A report from a small north-eastern Bavarian town where the Communists had once done well: the Führer is not only admired; he is deified. And the phrase if only the Führer knew was already in people's mouths, excusing him from everything felt to be bad.
The Social Democrats in Prague put their finger on why, and it is the sharpest observation in the chapter. It was not only detestation of the SA. It was the adaptation to violence which had systematically undermined a sense of legal norms since the start of the regime, and which had paved the way for strong sympathies for summary justice.39
Nobody objected from anywhere. Both churches stayed silent, though the Catholic Action leader had been among the dead. Two generals had been murdered; a few officers momentarily thought there should be an investigation, and most were too busy clinking champagne glasses at the destruction of the SA. Blomberg forbade officers to attend Schleicher's funeral, and exactly one disobeyed.40 And the country's foremost legal theorist, Carl Schmitt, published an article on the speech. Its title was: The Führer Protects the Law.
Five weeks later Hindenburg was dying. On 1 August, while he was still alive, every minister signed a law combining the office of Reich President with that of Chancellor on his death.41 He died the next morning. The oath is the part that shows who was doing what to whom. Blomberg later made clear that it was without any request by Hitler, and without consulting him, that he and Reichenau devised an oath of unconditional loyalty to the person of the Führer — taken by every officer and soldier in ceremonies across the country on 2 August, almost before Hindenburg's corpse had gone cold.42
They thought they were binding him to them. Blomberg's own account of the intention: we swore the oath on the flag to Hitler as Führer of the German people, not as head of the National Socialist Party. The hope was a special relationship that would separate him from his party and confirm the army as the regime's power-house.
The effect was the exact opposite. The oath erased the distinction between loyalty to the state and loyalty to a man, made opposition harder, and later gave those hesitating about a conspiracy their excuse. General Beck's reaction: the darkest day of my life. Guderian's: a momentous oath. Pray God that both sides hold to it with the same loyalty for the good of Germany. Most spent little time reflecting on it.
On 19 August the arrangement got its plebiscite, and 89.9 per cent approved.43 The Nazi leadership found the figure disappointing.
In September he was back at Nuremberg, and Leni Riefenstahl made the film. The title was devised by Hitler himself: Triumph of the Will.44 The chapter's last line on it is that his triumph owed only a little to will, and far more to the people who, in the power-struggles of that summer, had much to gain — or thought they had — by placing the German state at his disposal.
Read: lines 4682–4939.
On 21 February 1934, a State Secretary in the Prussian Agriculture Ministry named Werner Willikens gave a routine speech to officials from the state agriculture ministries, and explained how the whole system worked without meaning to.45
Everyone with opportunity to observe it knows that the Führer can only with great difficulty order from above everything that he intends to carry out sooner or later. On the contrary, until now everyone has best worked in his place in the new Germany if, so to speak, he works towards the Führer... it is the duty of every single person to attempt, in the spirit of the Führer, to work towards him. Anyone making mistakes will come to notice it soon enough. But the one who works correctly towards the Führer along his lines and towards his aim will in future as previously have the finest reward of one day suddenly attaining the legal confirmation of his work.
That is a job description for a whole civil service, and it was delivered as an administrative housekeeping note.
What it produced was competition. The route to power and advancement lay in anticipating what was wanted and taking initiatives without waiting for directives.46 Initiatives were taken, pressures created, legislation instigated — all falling into line with what were taken to be his aims, without the dictator necessarily having to dictate.
And the phrase reached past officials. Ordinary citizens denouncing neighbours to the Gestapo, often turning private animosity into a political accusation. Businessmen using anti-Jewish legislation to be rid of competitors.
Meanwhile the man at the centre stopped governing in any recognisable sense. His adjutant Fritz Wiedemann — who had been his immediate superior in the war — described the collapse of the routine.47 In 1935 there was still a shape to the mornings. Then it went. Later on, he appeared as a rule only just before lunch, quickly read the press summaries, then went to eat. On the Obersalzberg it was worse: out of his room around two, lunch, a walk in the afternoon, films after the evening meal.
It became ever more difficult for the two men whose job it was to obtain the decisions that only a head of state could take. The Agriculture Minister spent over two years trying to get an audience about a worsening farm crisis and never got one.
What filled the gap was money. Posts were found for old fighters; architects and builders were lavishly rewarded; leading figures drew enormous salaries with tax relief and took gifts and bribes.48 The Labour Front boss used bank funds to buy back a bodyguard commander's villa at twice its price. Corruption on a massive scale ensured loyalty, and the regime developed into a modern variant of a feudal system resting on personal allegiance rewarded by private fiefdoms. He was himself a millionaire on book sales, living a publicly spartan life in food and clothing inside an enormous one.
The Nuremberg Laws show the mechanism producing law, and the chronology is the evidence. Through the summer of 1935 a wave of anti-Jewish violence ran across the country; he was preoccupied with foreign policy and only sporadically involved.49 His own later account of the period: with regard to the Jews, too, I had for long to remain inactive. The inactivity was tactical, not temperamental — there's no point in artificially creating additional difficulties, the more cleverly you proceed the better. There was little for him to do. All that was required was backing for the radicals, or less than that — doing nothing to hinder them until the activism became counter-productive, and then introducing the legislation their agitation had prompted.
By 8 August the violence was damaging the economy and he banned individual actions, which put state authorities in the position of repressing party members for doing what they knew he wanted.50 Out of the need to reconcile the radicals and the conservatives, the laws emerged.
They were drafted overnight, at a party rally, by civil servants summoned at no notice. A ministry official arrived on the morning of 14 September to be told to prepare a marriage law.51 The first versions were rejected as too mild. Around midnight the order came back for four versions of the Blood Law, varying in severity, plus a Citizenship Law. The Citizenship Law was drawn up in half an hour, and though almost devoid of content it provided the frame for the mass of decrees that would push German Jews to the outer fringes of society.
Approval came at half past two in the morning. The drafters learned which of the four versions had been chosen only when the Reichstag assembled. The gap between the public position and what everybody understood is captured in a line of reported opinion from Hessen in March 1936: the Führer had for outward appearances to ban individual actions against the Jews in consideration of foreign policy, but in reality was wholly in agreement that each individual should continue on his own initiative the fight against Jewry in the most rigorous and radical form.52
The foreign triumphs are what fed the rest, and the Rhineland was the largest. It would have been on the agenda of any German nationalist government; the army thought it essential, the Foreign Ministry expected it to be negotiated in a year or two, and the French were already reckoning on a fait accompli.53 What was his was the timing and the method.
The motive was substantially domestic, and the Foreign Minister said so. Hitler felt the deterioration of mood in favour of the regime and was looking for a new national slogan to fire the masses again.54 The winter had brought a food crisis and an escalating quarrel with the churches. A step that patient diplomacy would have won within a year or two was taken with all the risk and drama of a military coup, in part for the propaganda.
He wavered until the last week. On 27 February, over lunch, Goebbels wrote still somewhat too early. On the 28th, undecided. On the train to Munich, still wavering. On 29 February, still not made up his mind. Then on 1 March, in spring weather, he arrived at Goebbels's hotel in a good mood: it's another critical moment, but now is the time for action. Fortune favours the brave.55
The force sent in numbered 30,000 regulars with police units. Three thousand men penetrated deep into the zone, with orders to be ready to withdraw within an hour if the French looked like fighting.56
They did not. French military leaders had ruled out retaliation in advance. French intelligence, counting SA, SS and other party formations as soldiers, had arrived at a figure of 295,000 German troops in the Rhineland. In reality one French division would have sufficed to end it.
In Cologne, thousands packed the banks of the Rhine. Women strewed flowers. Catholic priests blessed the soldiers, and Cardinal Schulte offered praise for sending back our army. The church quarrel was temporarily forgotten.57
An American correspondent watched the Reichstag deputies hear the announcement: they spring, yelling and crying, to their feet... their hands raised in slavish salute, their faces now contorted with hysteria, their mouths wide open, shouting, their eyes burning with fanaticism, glued on the new god, the Messiah. The Messiah plays his role superbly.58
The risk had been moderate and the reward was not. He had outwitted the major powers, and he had beaten the caution of his own army and Foreign Office for the second time in a year. His contempt for the professionals deepened. His boundless egomania gained another massive boost.59 A week later he gave the sentence that describes what he had come to think he was: I go with the certainty of a sleepwalker along the path laid out for me by Providence.60
Read: lines 4940–5604.
Everything from here down is speculative by design. Above the line, every claim carries a footnote and a line range. Below it, the writing is allowed to weigh alternatives, run counterfactuals and hand the decision to advisors from other traditions — because that is the job of these sections.
[SPECULATIVE]Paradigm-obvious, and reading any of it as personal distinctiveness is the biographer's error. Refusing to serve under anyone else. Any party leader with a third of the vote holds out for the top job, and the Zentrum and the DNVP were doing the same arithmetic in the same months. Calling an election immediately after taking office. Papen and Schleicher had both wanted dissolutions; Hindenburg had granted one to Papen and refused one to Schleicher four days before granting it to Hitler.
Using an arson attack for emergency powers. The decree Frick produced on 28 February was drawn from drafts already prepared under Papen in July 1932 and during the army's December war-games. The instrument existed; the fire supplied the occasion.
Rearming and remilitarising the Rhineland. The army had planned for it since December 1933, the Foreign Ministry expected it, and the French were budgeting for it. It would have been on the agenda of any nationalist government. Taking Hindenburg's powers on his death. Combining the offices was the obvious move for any Chancellor in that position, and every minister signed it without difficulty. Paradigm-breaking, and the cost is what marks it.
The Potempa telegram. Every calculation in August 1932 pointed the other way — he was negotiating for office, and publicly embracing five men convicted of a savage murder cost him respectability at the worst moment. He did it anyway, and the party press followed with a statement that there is no law as such. This is the single clearest instance in the book of a decision that damaged him and that he made deliberately, and the reason it is not usually read that way is that it worked out.
Ordering shootings without trial and then explaining to a parliament that he was the supreme judge. Other regimes have murdered opponents; what has no obvious precedent in this material is doing it in public, before a chamber containing the friends of the dead, and claiming the theory openly. The cost was carried by nobody — which is itself the finding.
Refusing to wait for the French Senate. Every adviser wanted the delay: Neurath, Hassell, Fritsch, Beck, Goebbels. He took the earlier date, for domestic propaganda, on a schedule nobody else supported.
Choosing his own three thousand men and giving them an order to withdraw within an hour. That is not a bluff by a man who believes his own myth. It is a bluff by a man who has calculated the downside precisely — and it sits awkwardly with the sleepwalker sentence a week later.
[SPECULATIVE]A live alternative, held by almost everybody with power and stated in four words. We're boxing Hitler in. The taming strategy was not a fringe view; it was the common assumption of Papen, Hugenberg, Hindenburg's circle, and the leadership of political Catholicism, one of whom told the President that he was well disposed to Hitler personally and that the danger lay in those around him who could be controlled by counterweights in the cabinet.
The arithmetic looked sound. Two Nazis in twelve posts. Conservatives at Foreign Affairs, Finance, Economics, Defence. A Vice-Chancellor with the right of access to the President.
A constructed alternative, and the chapter supplies the material for it. The strategy had already been tested in Thuringia in 1930, where Nazis entered a state government, Frick's attempts to nazify the police and civil service were blocked from Berlin, and he was removed within a year by a no-confidence vote his own coalition partners supported. On that evidence the taming strategy was not absurd. It had a working precedent.
What made 1933 different is one appointment, and it was made as a consolation prize. Göring took the Prussian Ministry of the Interior as nominal deputy to Papen, in compensation for Papen keeping the Reich Commissarship. That gave the party the police in two-thirds of the Reich, and the police is what the whole of February was executed with — the raids, the protective custody, the 25,000 in Prussia by April.
The scope condition, and it is the transferable part. Containment by portfolio count fails wherever one of the portfolios is the police. Ministries are not interchangeable units of influence; a coalition partner who holds the instrument of coercion holds a different kind of thing from one who holds the exchequer, and the difference does not appear in a cabinet table. The men doing the counting in January 1933 counted correctly and were counting the wrong objects.
[SPECULATIVE]Take 28 February 1933. A cabinet containing nine conservatives and three Nazis meets the morning after a fire, and passes in one sitting a decree suspending every personal liberty in the constitution indefinitely and overriding the autonomy of the states.
An advisor working from the dichotomy of control would go at the conservatives in the room rather than at the men who drafted the text. What they controlled was one vote each on a document put in front of them that morning. What they did not control was the fire, the panic, or the public mood. They behaved as though the second category settled the first — as though a crisis had removed the choice — and the chapter records that the alternative was available, because the draft could have placed emergency executive power in the hands of the army instead, which would have limited Hitler's power considerably. The counsel is that an emergency does not decide anything; it only makes the deciding feel involuntary. Nine men had a vote and used it in the register of people who had none.
An advisor working from deniable power would look at the same morning and see something the panic reading misses. The instrument was not improvised. Its components had been drafted under Papen in July 1932 and refined in the army's December planning, and Göring had asked for the press-and-custody decree on 1 February — four weeks before the fire, with no fire to point at. What the arson supplied was not the power but the permission. The counsel here is about a general shape: where the machinery of an emergency has already been built, the emergency itself becomes the least important variable, because any sufficiently frightening event will do and one will eventually occur.
They do not converge, and the spread is worth keeping. The first reading says nine men made a real choice badly. The second says the choice had been narrowed months earlier by people drafting precautionary papers for reasons of their own. What both agree on is the finding that survives either way: the decree was passed by a cabinet in which its authors were a minority, and it was never repealed.
A third voice, from conviction contagion, is about Luise Solmitz and is the one with predictive value. She had voted against him in November, writing that for him it was not a matter of Germany but of power. Within a week of the fire she was repeating Göring's account of poison and boiling water almost verbatim, and calling him the saviour of a wicked, sad German world. No new evidence reached her, because none was ever published. What reached her was that everyone around her had changed position at once, including an acquaintance who had never supported the party, and who now told her it was important to support what he was doing with every means. The transferable part is the sequence: the reversal was social before it was evidential, and the evidence never arrived at all.
[SPECULATIVE]Decision type: governing by published intention rather than by instruction.
Willikens described it in 1934 in a routine speech and the description is better than anything written about it since. The leader cannot order everything he intends. So the duty is to work towards him. Anyone making mistakes will notice soon enough. Anyone working correctly along his lines will one day suddenly attain the legal confirmation of his work.
The mechanism has four parts and they are all visible in the Nuremberg Laws. First, a broadly stated aim, repeated often and never specified. Second, no instruction — the summer of 1935 ran on party violence he neither ordered nor stopped. Third, competition, because the way to advancement is to guess right ahead of a rival. Fourth, ratification after the fact: the law arrives when the agitation has made it look like a restoration of order, drafted overnight by officials who had no written instructions and who did not know which version had been chosen until it was read out.
Scope conditions, and these are what make it more than a horror story. This works where the leader's aims are known but undefined, where the cost of guessing wrong is career damage rather than ruin, where there is no procedure with standing to say no, and where somebody eventually ratifies. Remove ratification and it collapses into freelancing that gets punished. The August 1935 ban on individual actions is the system correcting itself — the radicals had gone past what was useful, and the state authorities were briefly put to work repressing party members for doing what they knew was wanted.
The general form, stated about the material and not about anybody's situation. An organisation whose leader signals direction and refuses to specify has not become vague as a result. It has moved the work of specification downward, to people with a career incentive to be more extreme than the last person who guessed — because nobody was ever punished for over-shooting an unstated aim and plenty were passed over for under-shooting one. The direction of drift is not neutral: it runs toward whatever reading is most radical, because that reading is the one that cannot be shown to have been too cautious. Modern equivalent: any organisation where objectives are set as aspirations, no one has authority to refuse an initiative, and results are ratified retrospectively by whoever is proved right.
The cost side is worth stating too, because it is what the last chapter documents. The same arrangement that produced radicalisation produced paralysis in everything else. A minister could not get an audience about an agricultural crisis for two years. The head of state appeared just before lunch and read a press summary. A government that can only act where somebody has guessed the leader's wishes cannot act at all on anything he has not thought about, and the volume of things he had not thought about grew every year.
[SPECULATIVE]Decision type: mistaking vulgarity for weakness. This runs through all four chapters and it is the book's own thread, so it is worth stating as a mechanism. From the Bavarian court that thought a light sentence sufficient given the motives, to Papen's we've hired him, to Hugenberg's we're boxing Hitler in, to Blomberg and Reichenau devising an oath to bind him closer to the army, to the French general staff counting 295,000 men who were not there — the same error appears in institution after institution, made by people who were not stupid and who had the relevant information.
The common feature is not underestimation of his aims. Those were published and were mostly believed. It is underestimation of his competence, derived almost entirely from social judgement: the corporal, the upstart, the man whose use of a knife and fork betrayed his background, the market seller shouting about a good product. Each of those observations was accurate and none of them was load-bearing.
Scope conditions. This bites where the assessing institution has a strong internal culture of manners and formation, where the assessed party's competence lies in a domain that culture does not respect, and where the assessment is never tested before it is acted on. All three held for the German officer corps, the Bavarian judiciary, the Foreign Ministry, and the national-conservative political class — and the chapter notes that misreading him was not confined to mavericks on the Right but extended into the leadership of political Catholicism.
The general form, stated about the material. A class that recruits and promotes on formation will read the absence of formation as the absence of capability, and will be systematically wrong about anyone whose capability is of a kind it does not train for. The error is not snobbery in the ordinary sense; it is a measurement instrument being used outside its range. Modern equivalent: any institution assessing an outsider using proxies calibrated on insiders — where the proxies are genuinely informative about insiders and carry no information at all about the person in front of them.
Read from RAW/books/Ian Kershaw-Hitler Hubris.md, lines 3692–5604: ch. 10 (3692–4110), ch. 11 (4111–4681), ch. 12 (4682–4939), ch. 13 (4940–5604).
The strongest documentation in this part, and it is now overwhelmingly official, because the subject is running a state that keeps records. Cabinet minutes from 30 January 1933 onward, quoted for individual ministers' positions. The Reichstag division of 12 September 1932, with the figures. The text and effect of the emergency decree of 28 February 1933. Election returns throughout, including Lippe. The Reichstag speech of 13 July 1934 accepting responsibility for the killings. The Law on the Head of State of 1 August 1934 and the plebiscite figure. Willikens's speech of 21 February 1934. Wiedemann's account of the daily routine. Lösener's account of drafting the Nuremberg Laws, hour by hour, from inside the Interior Ministry. The Rhineland troop numbers and the standing withdrawal order. Goebbels's diary throughout, which is the closest thing to a day-by-day record of the decisions. And Luise Solmitz, still writing, across every one of the four chapters.
Where the evidence is memoir by participants with reasons. Papen and Ribbentrop on the January negotiations, both writing to place themselves well. Blomberg on the oath, written after a war his own initiative helped make possible. Hans Frank again. Lutze on the overheard remark that condemned Röhm, reported by the man who was rewarded with Röhm's job. All are used above at that weight, and where an account is self-serving in a way that changes the finding, it is said so.
Where the reasoning is the source's rather than the record's. That the Rhineland timing was driven substantially by domestic considerations — this rests on Neurath's and Hassell's reading of a motive, plus the plebiscite called immediately afterwards, and not on a document stating the intention. That the underestimation of Hitler was the leitmotiv of the January intrigues rather than one factor among several. And the counterfactual that one French division would have sufficed in March 1936, which is supported by the troop numbers and the withdrawal order but remains a judgement about what an untaken action would have achieved.
A note on the source's own position, and this part is where the book's argument comes together. The claim is not that he was weak but that his power was made by other people, and the four chapters are constructed to demonstrate it at four scales: the élites who levered him in and thought they had hired him; a party membership that carried out the state takeovers in March without instructions; an army that wrote its own oath; and a civil service that was told to guess. The risk in that argument is that it can make every decision look like a reaction, and the report above has separated the places where the record supports it from the places where it does not — the Potempa telegram, the July 1934 speech and the Rhineland timing all being decisions taken against advice, at cost, by one man. Bounded absence. No claim is made about material outside lines 3692–5604.