Foreign reaction, and what was happening elsewhere at the same time.
53 days
Day 2 Tuesday 31 January 1933
Hitler met the leaders of the Catholic Centre Party, failed to win their consent to a year-long adjournment of the Reichstag, and told his cabinet that new elections were unavoidable; he promised that they would be the last. A presidential decree handed Papen the Reich’s powers over Prussia. In Berlin the flu epidemic accelerated, and Ufa’s U-boat film Morgenrot had its premiere in Essen.
Day 4 Thursday 2 February 1933
Göring banned all Communist demonstrations in Prussia, and the cabinet discussed a sweeping emergency decree against the press and public meetings. In the Reichsrat, the chamber of the states, a Prussian official answered Hitler’s first address by reminding him of his oath to the constitution. Berliners paid sharply more for potatoes, and Ufa’s U-boat film Morgenrot opened at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo before an audience full of officers.
Day 11 Thursday 9 February 1933
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 16 Tuesday 14 February 1933
The cabinet approved, and Hindenburg signed, a decree stopping forced auctions of farms until the end of October. In the Reichstag, Nazi members drove the chairman of the committee that guarded parliament’s rights from his seat and Julius Streicher struck a People’s Party deputy; that evening the political police searched Communist rooms in the building. Neunkirchen in the Saar buried the victims of the gas-holder explosion, Göring opened a show of modern Italian painting and the geneticist Carl Correns died in Dahlem.
Day 17 Wednesday 15 February 1933
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
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 26 Friday 24 February 1933
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
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
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 31 Wednesday 1 March 1933
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 33 Friday 3 March 1933
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
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 35 Sunday 5 March 1933
On a grey, rainy Sunday nearly 89 per cent of Germany’s voters went to the polls in an election held under the emergency decree, with Communist leaders in prison or in hiding and the left-wing press silenced. The NSDAP won 43.9 per cent, short of an absolute majority, but with the nationalist ‘Combat Front Black-White-Red’ the government had a majority of seats; the Social Democrats held 18.3 per cent and the Communists 12.3. That night the Reich interior minister ordered Hamburg’s police handed to a Nazi, and SA men raised the swastika on town halls. In Hamburg, Altona 93 won the city football championship in the rain.
Day 36 Monday 6 March 1933
On the day after the election the Reich began taking over the states that the Nazis did not yet control. Frick used the Reichstag Fire Decree to seize police powers in Bremen and Hesse, where SA men occupied ministries and the homes of the Social Democratic state president and interior minister overnight; in Lübeck the Social Democratic senators were pushed out, and Thuringia banned the Central Association of German Jews. In Altona a 20-year-old bystander was shot dead during an SA torchlight parade. In Hamburg Karl Muck conducted Also sprach Zarathustra, and in Washington Roosevelt closed every bank in the country.
Day 37 Tuesday 7 March 1933
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 39 Thursday 9 March 1933
After a day of pressure in Munich from Röhm, Gauleiter Wagner and Himmler, and with the Bavarian government refusing their demands, the Reich used the Reichstag Fire Decree to hand the powers of Bavaria’s government to General Ritter von Epp; Württemberg protested to Hindenburg against the same treatment. In Berlin the Reich Chancellery, on Hitler’s behalf, asked Frick to prepare ‘völkisch’ laws against Eastern European Jews. In Washington Roosevelt signed the Emergency Banking Act. Dresden’s opera, its music director just driven out, staged Graener’s Friedemann Bach.
Day 40 Friday 10 March 1933
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
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
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
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
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
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 46 Thursday 16 March 1933
Hans Luther resigned as president of the Reichsbank and its General Council unanimously elected Hjalmar Schacht in his place. In Leipzig the police, on the orders of Saxony’s Interior Ministry, forbade the conductor Bruno Walter’s Gewandhaus concert that evening. In Berlin Max Ophüls’s film Liebelei opened at the Atrium and the Titania-Palast, and Hitler promised the organisers of the 1936 Olympic Games his support.
Day 47 Friday 17 March 1933
Julius Lippert, the Nazi state commissioner for Berlin, ordered that the contracts of doctors denounced as ‘Jewish Communists and Social Democrats’ be terminated at the city’s hospitals. Hugenberg suspended Ernst Wagemann, head of the Statistical Reich Office, and the decrees creating the Propaganda Ministry and the double flag were published. That evening Kurt Gerron’s comedy Heut’ kommt’s drauf an, starring Hans Albers, had its premiere at the Gloria-Palast.
Day 49 Sunday 19 March 1933
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 52 Wednesday 22 March 1933
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 53 Thursday 23 March 1933
In the Kroll Opera House, ringed by the SS and watched from inside by armed SA men, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, giving Hitler’s government the power to make laws without parliament. Otto Wels explained the Social Democrats’ ‘no’; the Centre and the smaller middle parties voted yes. The former Prussian interior minister Karl Severing was arrested on his way into the building, and the Reichsrat gave its consent that evening.
Day 55 Saturday 25 March 1933
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 57 Monday 27 March 1933
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 60 Thursday 30 March 1933
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 62 Saturday 1 April 1933
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
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 69 Saturday 8 April 1933
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
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 71 Monday 10 April 1933
Hitler, Frick and Goebbels signed a law making 1 May, the labour movement’s own day, a public holiday under state control, while the official gazette published the law allowing Jewish lawyers to be struck off. Franz Ritter von Epp was appointed Reich governor of Bavaria, and in Rome Papen met Cardinal Pacelli and Mussolini as Göring flew in. On a rainy Monday in Berlin, radio listeners could hear Furtwängler conduct the Eroica, and the theatre director Viktor Barnowsky left the Komödienhaus.
Day 73 Wednesday 12 April 1933
On the second day of SS control at Dachau, guards led away four Jewish prisoners and shot them: Rudolf Benario, Ernst Goldmann and Arthur Kahn died, Erwin Kahn survived for four days. The same day the German Student Union opened its month-long ‘Action against the Un-German Spirit’, Prussia ruled that only students of ‘German descent’ could belong to the student body, and Theodor Lewald stood down as head of German sport. In cinemas, Frank Wisbar’s film Anna und Elisabeth had its premiere.
Day 74 Thursday 13 April 1933
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
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 76 Saturday 15 April 1933
On Easter Saturday the German chargé d’affaires delivered the Reich’s protest against the Commons debate to the duty official at the Foreign Office, as the Prime Minister sailed for Washington and The Times called the protest ‘absurd’. In Austria the government restored compulsory religious exercises in schools and declared an Easter amnesty, and Hamburg’s Senate placed state commissioners in the Chamber of Commerce. German radio carried the third act of Parsifal from the Berlin State Opera, and Hamburger SV drew 2–2 with the Vienna professionals WAC.
Day 77 Sunday 16 April 1933
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 78 Monday 17 April 1933
On Easter Monday the physicist James Franck, a Nobel laureate protected from dismissal as a front-line veteran, asked to be released from his chair at Göttingen in protest at the treatment of Jewish Germans. In Berlin three directors of the Reichsbahn’s transport credit bank were arrested at home. At Tempelhof, holiday crowds at the Easter air show watched Ernst Udet’s aerobatics and then, unexpectedly, the aviator Hans Bertram landing at the end of his flight home from the Dutch East Indies, after his rescue in northern Australia the previous July.
Day 79 Tuesday 18 April 1933
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
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
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 82 Friday 21 April 1933
A Reich law banning the slaughter of animals without prior stunning, and with it Jewish ritual slaughter, was signed and published, and Hitler named Rudolf Hess his deputy in the NSDAP. In Berlin the Reichskanzlerplatz became Adolf-Hitler-Platz, the university’s rector objected to the students’ anti-Jewish theses, and police officials put the number of Communists in custody at 18,000; in Freiburg, Heidegger was elected rector. On the Rot-Weiss courts the visiting King of Sweden played doubles with Daniel Prenn, Germany’s leading player, whom the press already expected to be replaced in the Davis Cup team.
Day 83 Saturday 22 April 1933
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
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 90 Saturday 29 April 1933
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 94 Wednesday 3 May 1933
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 96 Friday 5 May 1933
On Hitler’s proposal Hindenburg appointed seven Reich governors (Reichsstatthalter), all of them Nazi leaders, for Württemberg, Baden, Saxony, Hesse, Bremen and Oldenburg, Anhalt and Brunswick, and Thuringia. The cabinet passed laws on tax advisers, sales premiums and a six-month freeze on new shops, and in Moscow Germany and the Soviet Union brought the extension of the Berlin Treaty into force. On the Avus the French racing driver Count Czaykowski set a world one-hour record of 213.8 km/h; Berlin’s Jewish community bulletin reported hundreds seeking help every day.
Day 99 Monday 8 May 1933
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
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
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.
