Propaganda and the press

Goebbels, newspaper bans, radio and staged events.

68 days

Day 1 Monday 30 January 1933

Hindenburg appoints Hitler Reich Chancellor at the head of a coalition cabinet

Reich President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler Reich Chancellor of a cabinet in which only two other National Socialists sat. That evening SA, SS and Stahlhelm columns carried torches through the government quarter, and late that night a police officer and an SA man were shot dead in Charlottenburg. Elsewhere in Berlin a flu epidemic was closing school classes and the police caught two long-sought robbers.
Day 3 Wednesday 1 February 1933

Reichstag dissolved and Hitler asks the nation for four years in his first radio address

At Hitler’s request Hindenburg dissolved the Reichstag and set new elections for 5 March. The cabinet agreed to make life harder for new parties, and at 22:00 every German station broadcast the government’s “Appeal to the German People”, read by Hitler. In Berlin a damp spell drove the flu epidemic higher, a new bus route opened to Lankwitz, and a landlord collecting rents in Pankow was shot dead by car-borne robbers.
Day 5 Friday 3 February 1933

Hitler tells the army chiefs of “living space in the East” as the Vorwärts is banned

At a dinner in the army commander’s residence in the Bendlerstraße, Hitler spoke for two and a half hours to the generals and admirals, naming rearmament, conscription and perhaps the conquest of “living space in the East” as his aims. The Berlin police banned the Social Democratic Vorwärts for four days, and the cabinet approved its emergency decree. Two new films opened, one a Frederick the Great epic, the other a Berlin underworld comedy by Richard Oswald.
Day 6 Saturday 4 February 1933

Hindenburg signs a decree allowing bans on newspapers and political meetings

Hindenburg signed the “Decree for the Protection of the German People”, which let the authorities ban political meetings and newspapers and hold suspects in police custody for up to three months. The Prussian Landtag refused to dissolve itself, and the Reich’s commissioners in Prussia dissolved every municipal council instead. Two young Communists were shot dead in Berlin overnight, and that evening the Social Democratic mayor of Staßfurt was shot in front of his house. In Berlin, new flu cases passed a thousand a day.
Day 7 Sunday 5 February 1933

A state funeral in Berlin Cathedral for an SA leader and a police officer

Hitler and Göring attended a state funeral in Berlin Cathedral for the SA leader Hans Maikowski and police officer Josef Zauritz, killed on the night of 30 January; the radio carried the ceremony. That night SA men raided a Communist pub in Friedenau and shot its landlady, Anna Röder, dead, and in Staßfurt the mayor Hermann Kasten died of his wounds. Berliners saw the first motor-paced cycle races in the Sportpalast.
Day 10 Wednesday 8 February 1933

Hitler tells the cabinet rearmament comes first: “everything for the armed forces”

In cabinet Hitler declared that rearmament must come first in every public works decision for the coming years, and advised ministers to say nothing specific about economic policy before the election. A decree sharply raised the duties on imported livestock, meat and lard. In Staßfurt thousands of workers downed tools to bury their murdered mayor. Berlin’s six-day cycle race was postponed because of the election, and the motoring clubs cancelled their rally to the motor show.
Day 11 Thursday 9 February 1933

Hitler wants the job-creation programme to serve as cover for rearmament

In the cabinet’s work-creation committee Hitler declared that Germany’s future depended solely on rebuilding the armed forces and that public works money should help to disguise rearmament; the committee gave the army the largest single share. Württemberg protested at party rallies being broadcast as government programmes. On Berlin’s radio a spokesman for the German cities argued that the unemployed should be left wholly to the municipalities, and new flu cases began to fall.
Day 12 Friday 10 February 1933

Hitler’s Sportpalast speech goes out on every German radio station

Hitler opened the NSDAP’s election campaign in the Berlin Sportpalast, and every German station carried the speech, introduced by Goebbels, as a government broadcast. Tens of thousands attended the funeral of three murdered Communist workers at Friedrichsfelde, though the police banned the procession. Thomas Mann gave his last lecture in Munich, the former Prussian culture minister Carl Heinrich Becker died in Berlin, and a gasholder exploded in Neunkirchen in the Saar, killing dozens.
Day 13 Saturday 11 February 1933

Hitler opens the Berlin motor show, promising tax relief and a road-building plan

Walking past ranks of SA men, Hitler opened the International Automobile and Motorcycle Exhibition at the Kaiserdamm, the first Chancellor, the industry noted, ever to do so, and promised motorists lower taxes, a great road-building plan and support for motor sport. That evening the radio carried Hugenberg’s speech to the new German Nationalist and Stahlhelm alliance in the Sportpalast. In a Berlin dairy shop, a milkman told a customer that half the street was living on potatoes.
Day 14 Sunday 12 February 1933

“Bloody Sunday” in Eisleben: SA and SS storm Communist premises, killing three

In the mining town of Eisleben, in Prussian Saxony, some 600 SA and SS men on a “propaganda march” stormed the local Communist headquarters and a workers’ sports hall, killing three Communists; an SS man also died. In Berlin about 5,000 officials of the Iron Front heard the trade union leader Peter Graßmann warn that a war of annihilation had been declared on the Republic. Sunday crowds of 65,000 filled the motor show, and the radio carried Leipzig’s commemoration of Richard Wagner.
Day 17 Wednesday 15 February 1933

Käthe Kollwitz and Heinrich Mann forced out of the Prussian Academy of Arts

Under threat that the Academy would be dissolved, Käthe Kollwitz and Heinrich Mann left the Prussian Academy of Arts, and the Prussian commissioners confirmed a sweeping purge of police chiefs, naming a retired rear admiral as police president of Berlin. Vorwärts and the 8-Uhr-Abendblatt were banned for a week, and in Stuttgart someone cut the cable carrying Hitler’s speech to the radio. Abroad, Thomas Mann lectured on Wagner in Brussels and an assassin fired on Franklin D. Roosevelt in Miami.
Day 18 Thursday 16 February 1933

The states protest in the Reichsrat as Göring vows no Social Democrat will stay in office

In the Reichsrat Bavaria and the southern states protested against Prussia being represented by Göring’s and Papen’s appointees and voted to limit the chamber to urgent business until the constitutional court had ruled. That evening Göring told journalists that no Social Democrat would be tolerated in the Prussian administration. The Reichsgericht lifted an earlier ban on Vorwärts, and the cabinet discussed taking away the court’s power to do so. At the Sportpalast the American ice hockey team beat Germany 7–2.
Day 19 Friday 17 February 1933

Göring orders the Prussian police to shoot and promises to cover them

Göring sent all Prussian police authorities a circular telling them to cooperate with the SA, SS and Stahlhelm, to act against “enemies of the state” with the harshest means and to use their firearms without hesitation, promising to cover any officer who did. The Bavarian People’s Party leader Fritz Schäffer warned Hindenburg against Reich commissioners in the states, and uniformed students broke up an examination at the State Art School in Schöneberg. In the evening 4,000 people watched boxing at the Sportpalast.
Day 20 Saturday 18 February 1933

Kurt Weill’s Der Silbersee opens in three cities as the Centre’s Germania is banned

Hindenburg signed a decree softening the 1932 cuts to war-disability and insurance pensions, and the government published steep new duties on farm produce, fish and timber. Berlin’s police president banned Germania, the leading Centre Party daily, for three issues. In Leipzig, Magdeburg and Erfurt, Kurt Weill and Georg Kaiser’s play with music Der Silbersee had its premiere, the German ice hockey team opened the World Championship in Prague with a 6–0 win, and Prussia warned against eating undercooked duck eggs.
Day 21 Sunday 19 February 1933

Police break up the “Free Word” congress at the Kroll Opera

More than a thousand writers, scholars and politicians met at the Kroll Opera to defend freedom of speech, the press, assembly and art; police dissolved the meeting when the former Prussian minister Wolfgang Heine mocked the regime. Frick told a Dresden rally that the government would not give up power even without a majority, Hitler spoke against the Centre Party in Cologne and the Reichsbanner marched in the Lustgarten. Berliners took sledges and skis to the snowbound Grunewald.
Day 22 Monday 20 February 1933

Hitler and Göring ask leading industrialists to pay for the election

At Göring’s official residence opposite the Reichstag, Hitler told about two dozen leading industrialists and bankers that private enterprise could not survive in a democracy; Göring added that the coming election would surely be the last for ten years, perhaps a hundred, and Hjalmar Schacht proposed a three-million-mark election fund. The same day the Prussian press service released Göring’s “shooting decree”. Göring also banned the sale of spirits on polling days, and the perjury trial of a former Berlin transport director in the Sklarek scandal opened to packed public benches.
Day 25 Thursday 23 February 1933

Police search the Communist headquarters and break up the KPD’s Sportpalast rally

In the afternoon the political police occupied and searched the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus, the Communist Party’s headquarters; in the evening a police officer dissolved the KPD’s rally in the Sportpalast while Wilhelm Pieck was speaking. Overnight men in Nazi uniform had shot a Reichsbanner leader in Großbeeren and burned down the poorhouse where he lived. Göring ordered tougher action against the opposition press. In Berlin the motor show closed after more than 400,000 visits, and Prussia relaxed its rules on men’s bathing trunks.
Day 26 Friday 24 February 1933

The Karl-Liebknecht-Haus is closed and the auxiliary police decree made public

The police closed the Communist headquarters, the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus, “until further notice”, and the official Prussian press service released Göring’s decree creating an auxiliary police. Rudolf Diels took charge of the political police with its own new strike squads, and the jurist Robert Kempner was removed from the Prussian Interior Ministry. Hitler spoke to a huge crowd in Munich on the anniversary of the party programme. In Geneva the League of Nations condemned Japan’s actions in Manchuria and the Japanese delegation walked out; Max Ophüls’s Liebelei opened in Vienna.
Day 27 Saturday 25 February 1933

Police claim to find tunnels and treasonable leaflets under the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus

Diels’s political police announced that the closed Communist headquarters had yielded secret cellars, a tunnel and hundredweights of leaflets calling for armed revolt. The Reichsgericht lifted or shortened a series of newspaper bans, Adenauer settled his protest over Göring’s police decrees in a meeting with Göring, and Rust ordered that the secular schools take no new pupils. Berlin learned from a League of Nations report how much weight its unemployed had lost, and the Sklarek perjury trial ended with a year’s prison for the former transport director Fritz Brolat.
Day 28 Sunday 26 February 1933

Uniformed police wear swastika armbands at a Nazi rally in the Lustgarten

On the last Sunday of February uniformed Berlin police officers marched with swastika armbands at the first mass rally of the National Socialist factory cells in the Lustgarten, while police president Levetzow looked in to cheers. Police broke up a Social Democratic cultural rally in Neukölln and led the speaker Friedrich Stampfer away to the station; across the Reich, election marches ended in shootings and stabbings. Berliners went tobogganing on a second snowy Sunday, and in Prague the United States took the ice hockey world title from Canada for the first time.
Day 29 Monday 27 February 1933

The Reichstag burns, and the Nazi leadership blames a Communist uprising

On the evening of Monday 27 February the Reichstag building in Berlin was set alight; a young Dutchman, Marinus van der Lubbe, was arrested inside, and before the night was out Göring had declared the fire the signal for a Communist revolt, banned the left-wing press in Prussia and ordered arrests. Earlier that day the cabinet had approved a harsh new decree against ‘treason’, and SA men had fired into the flat of a Social Democratic deputy in Neukölln. In Cologne the Rosenmontag carnival procession went ahead in the sunshine.
Day 30 Tuesday 28 February 1933

The Reichstag Fire Decree suspends basic rights ‘until further notice’

The morning after the fire the cabinet met twice, and by the end of the day Hindenburg had signed and the government had published the decree ‘for the protection of people and state’, which suspended the Weimar constitution’s guarantees of personal liberty, free speech, a free press and assembly. Across Prussia the police and their SA auxiliaries arrested Communists and left-wing intellectuals, among them Carl von Ossietzky and Hans Litten, and the SA hoisted the swastika over the Communist headquarters. It was Shrove Tuesday: Cologne’s carnival corps paraded once more, while in Berlin Göring had the museums closed.
Day 31 Wednesday 1 March 1933

Göring promises to ‘exterminate’ Communism as the treason decree is published

On Ash Wednesday the decree against ‘treason against the German people’ appeared in the Reichsgesetzblatt, Frick asked every state to ban the Communist press and meetings, and the Prussian press service claimed that at least ten men had set the Reichstag fire. Göring told radio listeners that the government’s aim was the extermination of Communism, Hitler spoke to some 20,000 people in Breslau, and Cardinal Bertram begged Hindenburg to protect the freedom of the vote. In Berlin, Leopold Jessner bade farewell to the State Theatre with Billinger’s Rosse, while Max Reinhardt reopened the Deutsches Theater with Hofmannsthal’s Great Theatre of the World.
Day 32 Thursday 2 March 1933

Cabinet picks Potsdam’s Garrison Church for the opening of the new Reichstag

With the Reichstag a burnt shell, the cabinet agreed that the new parliament should be opened in the Garrison Church at Potsdam, the germ of the ‘Day of Potsdam’. Göring told ministers of an alleged Communist plan of attack and complained of foreign papers accusing him of the fire; Hitler said the outcry would have died if the arsonist had been hanged at once. To win votes, the cabinet agreed to hand out cheap bread and butter to the unemployed in distressed areas. That evening Hitler spoke in the Sportpalast before members of the diplomatic corps, while in Bremen a Reichsbanner man died after a night of shooting.
Day 33 Friday 3 March 1933

Ernst Thälmann is arrested in Berlin; Göring vows ‘to destroy and exterminate’

The Communist party’s leader, Ernst Thälmann, was arrested in a flat in Charlottenburg on Friday afternoon; he never regained his freedom. In Frankfurt Göring told a mass meeting that his measures would not be hampered by legal scruples, and in Hamburg the Social Democratic senators left the city government rather than ban their party’s newspaper. In Berlin tens of thousands queued in the pouring rain, between lines of SA men, to look at the burnt-out Reichstag chamber, and a Jewish weekly urged every Jewish voter to go to the polls on Sunday.
Day 34 Saturday 4 March 1933

Election eve: Hitler speaks from Königsberg and Otto Braun leaves for Switzerland

On the eve of the election the Nazi party staged its ‘Day of the Awakening Nation’: Hitler flew to Königsberg and spoke there in a broadcast relayed to marching columns and loudspeakers across Germany. Otto Braun, the Social Democrat who had governed Prussia for most of the Weimar years, crossed the Swiss border that afternoon and did not come back. In Hamburg the Nazis demanded control of the police, in Vienna all three presidents of the Austrian parliament resigned, and in Washington Franklin D. Roosevelt took office. Hamburg’s port saw the season’s first Mediterranean cruise sail.
Day 37 Tuesday 7 March 1933

Hitler tells the cabinet the election was a ‘revolution’ and calls for an Enabling Act

Two days after the election Hitler told his ministers that 5 March had been a revolution, that Marxism would disappear and that an Enabling Act with a two-thirds majority was needed; he and Frick demanded that van der Lubbe be hanged, retroactively if need be. At Hindenburg’s residence the Reichstag’s opening in Potsdam’s Garrison Church was planned in detail. In Dresden, Nazi supporters whistled the conductor Fritz Busch off the podium of the State Opera. Abroad, Dollfuss began governing Austria without parliament, and the Netherlands reinforced its border against German refugees.
Day 40 Friday 10 March 1933

Munich SA parade a Jewish lawyer barefoot; Göring will not protect ‘Jewish stores’

In Munich SA auxiliary police beat the Jewish lawyer Michael Siegel, who had come to complain about a client’s arrest, and marched him barefoot through the streets with a placard round his neck. In Essen Göring declared that he would not let the police become ‘a protective force for Jewish department stores’, and SA men forced department stores to close in Mönchengladbach. Hitler told the SA and SS that the ‘national uprising’ was now to be directed from above and that harassment and disruption of business must stop. The trade unions appealed to Hindenburg. In Frankfurt, Edith Frank and her daughters had their picture taken in a department-store photo booth.
Day 41 Saturday 11 March 1933

Cabinet agrees a propaganda ministry; SA drive Jewish lawyers from Breslau’s courts

At Hitler’s insistence the cabinet agreed to create a Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, expected to go to Goebbels. On the eve of Remembrance Day and the Prussian local elections, SA men and crowds forced department stores and chain stores to close in Hamburg, Breslau, Frankfurt and other cities, and in Breslau SA men ordered Jewish judges and lawyers out of the courts. Magdeburg’s mayor and union leaders in Bochum were taken into ‘protective custody’ (Schutzhaft, imprisonment without trial). Hitler spoke at a rally broadcast from Berlin, and in Cologne a play about front-line soldiers had its first local performance.
Day 42 Sunday 12 March 1933

Hindenburg puts the swastika beside black-white-red; Hitler orders ‘blindest discipline’

On Remembrance Day, with black-white-red flags at half-mast, Hindenburg decreed that from the next day the old imperial flag and the swastika flag were to be flown together on public buildings. Hitler announced the decree on the radio and told the SA and SS that the struggle to ‘cleanse’ the Reich would now be directed from above and that all individual actions must stop. Hindenburg and Hitler attended the Volksbund ceremony in the State Opera in Berlin. In Prussia’s municipal and provincial elections the government parties won majorities in most places, including Berlin. In Washington Roosevelt gave his first fireside chat.
Day 43 Monday 13 March 1933

Goebbels appointed Reich Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda

Hindenburg signed the decree creating a Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda and appointed Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Party’s propaganda chief, as its minister. In Prussia, Göring suspended the mayors of Cologne, Frankfurt, Magdeburg, Altona and Kiel and several Berlin city councillors. In Berlin the manslaughter trial of a banker accused of shooting his wife, the soprano Gertrud Bindernagel, opened before packed public benches.
Day 44 Tuesday 14 March 1933

The Weltbühne banned for six months as Goebbels is sworn in

Berlin’s police president banned the left-wing weekly Die Weltbühne for half a year, Munich banned Das Tage-Buch, and the ban on the Social Democratic press in Prussia was extended overnight. Hindenburg swore in Goebbels as Propaganda Minister, while the Berlin papers reported that Theodor Wolff and Rudolf Olden had left for Paris. The Reichsbahn announced spring track work for some 90,000 men, and in London the Hamburg-born operetta star Anny Ahlers died after a fall.
Day 45 Wednesday 15 March 1933

Cabinet plans the Enabling Act; police and SA raid Berlin’s artists’ colony

The cabinet discussed how to pass an enabling law: Interior Minister Frick counted the deputies needed for a two-thirds majority and suggested that Communists might be put in labour camps. Police and SA auxiliaries sealed off the artists’ colony in Wilmersdorf, searched flats and arrested fourteen people, while Goebbels told the press that its task was to ‘instruct’. In the auction rooms, Kändler’s Meissen porcelain birds went under the hammer at what a reporter called crisis prices.
Day 48 Saturday 18 March 1933

Emergency decrees speed up treason trials and withdraw the four-pfennig coin

Hindenburg signed two emergency decrees: one shortened procedure in treason cases, the other bundled financial, economic and legal measures, including a reform of the coinage that withdrew the four-pfennig piece. Goebbels opened the exhibition ‘Die Frau’ at the Kaiserdamm halls, Schacht spoke on the radio as the new Reichsbank president, and Frick banned the Soviet papers Izvestia and Pravda. Berlin and Potsdam were declared closed airspace for the day of the Reichstag’s opening.
Day 49 Sunday 19 March 1933

Germany and France draw 3–3 before 45,000 in Berlin’s Grunewald stadium

On a sunny Sunday some 45,000 spectators, French supporters among them, watched Germany let slip a 3–1 lead against France in the Deutsches Stadion. In Wilmersdorf Fritz Höger’s new brick church on Hohenzollernplatz was consecrated. The same weekend Jewish judges were withdrawn from administrative posts at Berlin’s central district court, and SA auxiliary police raided the Berlin office of the exiled pacifist Professor Foerster.
Day 51 Tuesday 21 March 1933

The Day of Potsdam: the new Reichstag opens in the Garrison Church

The new Reichstag was opened with a state ceremony in Potsdam’s Garrison Church, where Hindenburg and Hitler spoke above the tombs of the Prussian kings. In the afternoon the deputies met in Berlin’s Kroll Opera House and re-elected Göring as president, and in the evening a torchlight procession filled the city centre while Wagner’s Meistersinger was performed at the State Opera. The same day Hindenburg signed decrees creating special courts, punishing ‘malicious’ criticism of the government and amnestying crimes committed for the ‘national uprising’.
Day 52 Wednesday 22 March 1933

First prisoners arrive at Dachau as the new Prussian Landtag meets

The first transports of prisoners reached the new concentration camp at Dachau, set up on the grounds of a disused powder and munitions factory. In Berlin the Prussian Landtag opened under its 84-year-old Nazi senior member, who called it ‘the Landtag of the Hitler spring’, and a Reichstag committee changed the rules so that absent deputies could be counted as present. The decrees on ‘malicious attacks’ and special courts were published, and the Deutschlandsender began using the Garrison Church carillon as its interval signal.
Day 55 Saturday 25 March 1933

Goebbels tells the radio chiefs that broadcasting now belongs to the government

At the Haus des Rundfunks in Berlin, Goebbels told the heads of all German radio companies that radio was the most important instrument for influencing the masses and that the government would give it its instructions. Göring told the foreign press that reports of atrocities were lies and blamed Jews and Marxists abroad. Berlin’s fire chief was suspended, a Berlin court upheld a Nazi defendant’s objection to a Jewish judge, and the plaque recalling the Weimar constitution was removed from the theatre in Weimar.
Day 56 Sunday 26 March 1933

Berlin’s newly elected city council is installed at the Rathaus with Nazi salutes

On a fine spring Sunday Berlin’s newly elected city council was sworn in at the Rathaus after church services, with the black-white-red flag and the swastika flying; the Nazi group answered with three ‘Heils’ for Hitler and the Horst Wessel song. The Zionist Federation repeated its rejection of foreign ‘atrocity’ reports, Der Angriff threatened ‘traitors’, and the radio refused to carry a German National call for the monarchy. Germany beat France at hockey in Berlin.
Day 57 Monday 27 March 1933

New York rallies against Nazi antisemitism; Berlin gives the party a free hand

In New York more than 20,000 people packed Madison Square Garden, with tens of thousands more in the streets outside, to protest against the persecution of Jews in Germany. In Berlin the government let it be known that it would not obstruct the Nazi party’s planned ‘defence’ against foreign ‘atrocity propaganda’, and named a boycott of Jewish shops as one of its means. Meanwhile Kruckenberg’s rebuilt rail Zeppelin glided into Berlin and shoppers were warned about dearer margarine.
Day 58 Tuesday 28 March 1933

Nazi party orders a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses from 1 April

From Munich the Nazi party leadership published its call for a boycott of Jewish shops, goods, doctors and lawyers, to begin ‘at a stroke’ on Saturday 1 April at 10:00 under a central committee led by Julius Streicher. The Catholic bishops withdrew their warnings against the Nazi movement, and Albert Einstein, landing in Belgium, broke with Prussia. In Berlin Goebbels told the film industry which films he admired.
Day 60 Thursday 30 March 1933

Streicher’s committee issues its boycott orders; SPD leader Wels quits the International

In Munich Julius Streicher’s boycott committee met for the first time and sent out its orders to local branches, while Nazi deputies in Prussia demanded that all Jewish teachers be removed from schools. Hindenburg received Hitler and Papen, the nationalist Ernst Oberfohren gave up his Reichstag seat and Otto Wels left the bureau of the Socialist International. Prussia tightened its rules for dance halls, and the government confirmed a national census for June.
Day 61 Friday 31 March 1933

First coordination law dissolves state parliaments; SA drives Jewish judges from courts

The Reich government enacted the provisional law to ‘coordinate’ the states with the Reich, dissolving every state parliament except Prussia’s and refilling them by the Reichstag vote without new elections. In Berlin crowds and SA men forced Jewish judges and lawyers out of the courts, and that evening Kerrl ordered Jewish judges in Prussia to take leave. Goebbels announced that the boycott would start next morning. In the cinemas Lamprecht’s Spione am Werk opened, and Erich Pommer left Ufa.
Day 62 Saturday 1 April 1933

Nazi boycott of Jewish shops, doctors and lawyers: SA pickets stand across Germany

At 10:00 SA and SS men took up posts outside Jewish-owned shops, department stores, surgeries and law offices throughout Germany, carrying placards reading ‘Germans! Defend yourselves! Don’t buy from Jews!’. In Berlin some 60,000 to 70,000 SA men were deployed; Tietz, Wertheim and Israel shut their doors, and only a small quota of Jewish lawyers was readmitted to the courts. In Kiel the Jewish lawyer Friedrich Schumm was murdered in police custody. The flags also flew for Bismarck’s birthday, and Viktoria 89 won a football final.
Day 65 Tuesday 4 April 1933

Boycott called off; Hindenburg asks Hitler to spare Jewish war veterans

The government announced that the boycott would not be resumed, claiming it had silenced the foreign ‘agitation’. Hindenburg wrote to Hitler that Jewish judges and lawyers who had been wounded in the war should not be dismissed, and the cabinet adopted a law extending the death penalty for political violence and a ban on slaughter without stunning. Police sealed off Berlin’s Jewish Scheunenviertel; the Jüdische Rundschau told its readers to wear the ‘yellow badge’ with pride. The rail Zeppelin ran to Hamburg at 130 km/h.
Day 67 Thursday 6 April 1933

Hitler tells doctors’ leaders he will purge ‘alien influence’ from Germany’s professions

Receiving the newly ‘coordinated’ leadership of the medical profession, Hitler spoke of removing the ‘excess’ of Jewish intellectuals from German cultural life. In the evening he and Goebbels addressed the foreign press, with the papal nuncio at the head of the diplomatic corps. The civil servants’ federation dissolved itself and the Protestant church protested at Kube’s remarks to the German Christians. Duelling was legalised again in Prussia, and the Propaganda Ministry warned against ‘patriotic kitsch’.
Day 68 Friday 7 April 1933

Civil Service law purges Jews and opponents; Reich governors take over the states

In a cabinet session lasting into the night, Hitler’s government adopted the law ‘for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service’, which forced officials ‘not of Aryan descent’ into retirement and allowed political opponents to be dismissed, and a second coordination law placing Reich governors over the states. Berlin’s new Special Court gave its first sentence, a year in prison for a Jewish market trader. Unemployment was reported down by 337,000 in a fortnight, and Berlin radio chose a Nazi fighting song for its interval signal.
Day 69 Saturday 8 April 1933

Hitler addresses the SA in the Sportpalast; the clairvoyant Hanussen is found shot dead

Before almost 18,000 SA and SS men in the Sportpalast, and by radio to the rest of the country, Hitler called the storm troopers the unshakeable fighting troop of the ‘national revolution’. The Civil Service law came into force, and Berlin’s bar commissioner published the list of only 35 Jewish lawyers still allowed into the city’s courts. The body found near Baruth was identified as that of the clairvoyant Erik Jan Hanussen, and the publisher of the Berliner Tageblatt gave up the running of the Mosse house.
Day 70 Sunday 9 April 1933

Göring tells 20,000 Nazi factory-cell members it is a ‘National Socialist revolution’

At the first general meeting of the Nazi factory cell organisation in Greater Berlin, Göring insisted that the upheaval be called a ‘National Socialist’, not merely a ‘national’, revolution; that afternoon he flew to Rome, his appointment as Prussian premier now said to be settled. The Reichstag deputy Sprenger was made Reich commissioner to ‘coordinate’ the civil servants’ associations. Hindenburg attended a Palm Sunday confirmation, and an aircraft crashed into spectators at a Nazi youth flying display in Staaken, killing two.
Day 72 Tuesday 11 April 1933

Police and SA search and seal the Bauhaus in Berlin-Steglitz

Police and SA searched the Bauhaus school in its converted telephone factory in Berlin-Steglitz, sealed the building and arrested 32 students; the school never taught there again. The first implementing ordinance of the Civil Service law defined anyone with a single Jewish grandparent as ‘non-Aryan’, Göring was named Prussian Minister President, and the SS took over the Dachau camp. Newspapers printed Goebbels’s reply to the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, who had objected to artists such as Bruno Walter being driven from the platform, and most Jewish members of the Berlin club Tennis Borussia left it.
Day 74 Thursday 13 April 1933

Students post the twelve theses ‘against the un-German spirit’; first professors suspended

From Maundy Thursday the German Student Union began posting its twelve theses ‘against the un-German spirit’, which declared the Jew the most dangerous enemy and demanded that Jewish writers publish only in Hebrew. Prussia suspended sixteen university teachers, among them Kelsen, Tillich, Horkheimer and Mannheim, and the main Jewish organisations founded a joint committee for help and reconstruction. In the House of Commons, Austen Chamberlain attacked the new regime, while restaurants learned they would have to post notices declaring whether they cooked with margarine.
Day 75 Friday 14 April 1933

Good Friday: Berlin protests to London over the Commons debate on Germany

On Good Friday the government instructed its ambassador in London to protest ‘most emphatically’ against the previous day’s Commons debate, while at noon Germany’s attachés laid a wreath at the Cenotaph. The Nazi ‘Fighting League for German Culture’ founded a national theatre-goers’ association with ministers as its founders, and Prussia ruled that only Nazi organisations and the Stahlhelm counted as ‘national associations’ for shortened law exams. With matches banned almost everywhere for the holy day, 6,000 people in Cologne watched Grasshoppers Zürich, and a balloon set off from Gelsenkirchen for Africa.
Day 77 Sunday 16 April 1933

Easter: Erwin Kahn dies of his Dachau wounds; Munich publishes its attack on Thomas Mann

Early on Easter Sunday Erwin Kahn, the one survivor of the Dachau shootings of 12 April, died under guard in a Munich clinic, killed by force to his larynx. The Easter edition of the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten carried the ‘Protest of the Richard Wagner City of Munich’ against Thomas Mann, signed by more than forty people including Richard Strauss, and the satirical weekly Simplicissimus was brought into line. Protestant pulpits in Prussia read out a message welcoming the ‘new Germany’; in Berlin, burglars cleared out the C&A store on Königstraße, and a gusty wind troubled the Easter air show at Tempelhof.
Day 79 Tuesday 18 April 1933

Bavaria reports 5,400 people taken into ‘protective custody’ since 9 March

A semi-official statement from Munich put the number of people taken into ‘protective custody’ (imprisonment without trial) in Bavaria since 9 March at about 5,400, of whom some 1,630 had been released, partly after Cardinal Faulhaber asked for fathers to be freed for Easter. In Rome, Göring spoke at a broadcast celebration of Hitler’s coming birthday held in his and Papen’s honour, and in Lugano Thomas Mann received the Munich ‘protest’ that settled his decision not to return. The deaths were announced of Albrecht von Graefe, a former völkisch member of the Reichstag, and of Count Dietlof von Arnim-Boitzenburg, the last president of the Prussian House of Lords.
Day 80 Wednesday 19 April 1933

Munich rally demands ‘Out with the Jews from the administration of justice’

In Munich’s Circus Krone the justice ministers of Bavaria and Prussia, Hans Frank and Hanns Kerrl, spoke with Julius Streicher at a rally under the slogan ‘Out with the Jews from the administration of justice’, as Bavaria issued its rules for removing Jewish lawyers. Hindenburg received the Stahlhelm leader Seldte to hear about plans to ‘coordinate’ (gleichschalten, bring into line) the Stahlhelm with the SA. Abroad, Britain banned most Soviet imports after the Moscow engineers’ verdict and Roosevelt took the dollar off gold; at home the government threatened to act against the flood of ‘national kitsch’, from Horst Wessel pencils to swastika ice-cream parlours.
Day 81 Thursday 20 April 1933

Hitler’s 44th birthday: flags across Berlin and the premiere of Johst’s ‘Schlageter’

For Hitler’s 44th birthday Berlin put out flags almost as for the Day of Potsdam, a flag parade marched past the Interior Ministry on Unter den Linden, and Bavaria made Hindenburg, Hitler, Epp and Röhm honorary citizens; Hitler himself stayed in Bavaria. Prussia marked the day by turning three cadet schools into ‘national-political education institutes’ and by withdrawing Theodor Lessing’s research post, while the party announced a ban on new members from 1 May. That evening the State Theatre gave the premiere of Hanns Johst’s Nazi drama ‘Schlageter’ before Goebbels, Frick and Rust.
Day 83 Saturday 22 April 1933

Decree ends ‘non-Aryan’ doctors’ insurance practice; student law adopts ‘German descent’

Labour Minister Seldte signed a decree ending the work of ‘non-Aryan’ and Communist panel doctors with the health insurance funds, and the cabinet passed a Reich law limiting university student bodies to students of ‘German descent and mother tongue’, a law excluding Jews from the patent bar and a tenants’ protection law for farmers. Bavaria’s justice minister, Frank, was proposed as Reich Commissioner for bringing justice in the states into line. After the meeting Hitler and Goebbels flew to Munich for the party leaders’ conference, while in Berlin the Davis Cup candidates trained in cold rain and London counted the cost of a great fire in its docks.
Day 84 Sunday 23 April 1933

Tennis federation bars ‘non-Aryans’ from national teams, shutting out Daniel Prenn

After the Davis Cup trials in Berlin, the board of the German Tennis Federation resolved that ‘non-Aryans’ (the regime’s term for people of Jewish descent) could no longer be picked for the Davis Cup or other representative teams and that Jews should leave club boards, which shut out the Jewish player Daniel Prenn. In the plenary hall of the Prussian Landtag, the Nazi press chief Otto Dietrich told journalists the press must become a ‘sharply honed weapon’ of German politics, and Protestant leaders announced work on a new constitution for a single German Evangelical Church. Max Planck turned 75, and in Monaco Achille Varzi won the Grand Prix in record time.
Day 87 Wednesday 26 April 1933

Göring’s Prussia creates the Secret State Police Office, the Gestapo

A Prussian law dated 26 April set up the Secret State Police Office (Geheimes Staatspolizeiamt, Gestapa) under Göring as interior minister, separating political policing from the ordinary administration; Rudolf Diels led it. The same day the Social Democrats held a Reich conference in their group’s rooms in the Reichstag building and elected Otto Wels and Hans Vogel as chairmen. Goebbels toured the Ufa film studios at Neubabelsberg, and in Munich Arno Penzias, a future Nobel laureate, was born into a Jewish family.
Day 88 Thursday 27 April 1933

Seldte joins the Nazi Party; ex-deputy Albert Funk dies in police custody

In an evening radio address the Stahlhelm leader and Reich Labour Minister Franz Seldte announced that he was joining the Nazi Party and placing himself under Hitler. In Recklinghausen the Communist former Reichstag deputy Albert Funk died after interrogation and abuse at police headquarters. Hitler asked towns to stop renaming historic streets after him, and at Berlin Zoo a small boy lost his forearm to a bear.
Day 90 Saturday 29 April 1933

Hindenburg watches Göring christen the giant Junkers airliner at Tempelhof

In bright sunshine at Tempelhof airport, Göring christened a new four-engined Junkers airliner “Generalfeldmarschall von Hindenburg” in front of the President, on his first visit to the airport. The Interior Ministry ordered German merchant ships to fly the swastika flag from 1 May, the new Secret State Police Office took over the power to ban Berlin newspapers, and Göring founded an Air Defence League. Goebbels inspected the stands going up on the Tempelhofer Feld for Monday’s rally.
Day 92 Monday 1 May 1933

The “Day of National Labour”: Hitler addresses a vast crowd on the Tempelhofer Feld

For the first time 1 May was a paid public holiday, renamed by the regime the “Day of National Labour”. Hindenburg spoke to schoolchildren and youth groups in the Lustgarten, workers’ delegations flown in from across Germany and Austria were received at the Reich Chancellery, and in the evening Hitler announced compulsory labour service to a crowd on the Tempelhofer Feld put at one to one and a half million. Fireworks, a torchlight march and Göring’s midnight speech in the Lustgarten closed a day of spring sunshine, while Robert Ley’s committee prepared the next morning’s seizure of the trade unions.
Day 94 Wednesday 3 May 1933

The remaining union federations submit to Hitler; Göring defines the Gestapo’s powers

Ley announced that the Christian trade unions, the Hirsch-Duncker union ring and other employees’ federations had placed themselves unconditionally under Hitler and his action committee. A circular from Göring set out the new Secret State Police Office’s tasks and its headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Straße 8, and the Berlin daily Tägliche Rundschau was banned until the end of May. The German National People’s Party renamed itself the “German National Front”. In Berlin a football play-off ended 3–3 after extra time.
Day 95 Thursday 4 May 1933

Purge extended to public employees; SPD leaders decide to set up an office abroad

A second ordinance under the civil service law told public employers to give “non-Aryan” salaried employees and workers one month’s notice. At its first and last full meeting the new SPD executive decided to send Otto Wels, Hans Vogel and other members abroad to build an office in exile. Ley’s committee declared that the “German Labour Front” now stood, Hitler called for a foundation for the families of workers killed at work, and an ADGB leader escaped from “protective custody”.
Day 97 Saturday 6 May 1933

Students ransack Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science

On Saturday morning about a hundred students of the Berlin College of Physical Education, with a brass band and SA students, occupied and wrecked Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science and carted off its books and archives for burning. Student squads went on to purge Berlin’s public lending libraries. The Centre Party elected the former Chancellor Brüning as its leader in place of Prelate Kaas, and the censors passed the Joseph Schmidt film “Ein Lied geht um die Welt”.
Day 99 Monday 8 May 1933

Goebbels tells Germany’s theatre directors what the “revolution” expects of the stage

In the evening Goebbels spoke to theatre directors and actors from across Germany at the Hotel Kaiserhof, with Göring present; the upheaval, he said, was not only political but reached into every area of public life. In Breslau the left-wing lawyer Ernst Eckstein was murdered in the Dürrgoy concentration camp, and in Halle booksellers gave their “word of honour” not to sell blacklisted authors. The Reich Sports Commissioner spoke on all German radio stations, a gas explosion wrecked a house in Zehlendorf, and Gandhi began a three-week fast.
Day 100 Tuesday 9 May 1933

Frick tells the states that schools must form “the political human being”

At a meeting of the states’ education ministers in the Reich Interior Ministry, Frick set out the principles of future school policy: schools were to teach race studies, warn against mixing German with “alien”, above all Jewish, blood, and prepare the young for military service. Rust handed sex education back to parents and stopped grants to Jewish trainee teachers. The Berlin guard troops mounted their first guard at the war memorial on Unter den Linden, two convicted murderers were executed at Plötzensee, Joseph Schmidt’s film “Ein Lied geht um die Welt” had its premiere, and from France Klaus Mann wrote to Gottfried Benn.
Epilogue Wednesday 10 May 1933

Books burn on the Opernplatz as the German Labour Front is founded

Late on Wednesday evening Berlin students burned an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 books on the Opernplatz, in pouring rain and in front of newsreel cameras; the works of Marx, Heinrich Mann, Kästner, Remarque, Tucholsky, Ossietzky and many others went into the fire, and Goebbels declared the age of “Jewish intellectualism” over. Books were burned in 21 other university towns the same night. That afternoon Hitler had addressed the first congress of the German Labour Front, which took the place of the destroyed trade unions under Robert Ley, and it was announced that the assets of the SPD, its newspapers and the Reichsbanner had been seized.