Reporting on Hitler Read online

  ‘What have they done with our Germany?’ Hitler would scream emotionally at the crowds, tears forming as his voice rose. ‘What have they done with that beautiful, flourishing, blossoming land?’ Hitler made no reference to problems caused by Germany’s devastating defeat in the war. To listen to him you would not realise there had been a war, Reynolds reflected. The Weimar politicians were to blame.184

  Reynolds was impressed by Hitler’s electioneering energy and endurance, but not the ‘stupidity’ of the voters he encountered. They ‘applauded without discrimination whatever he said, good or bad, true or manifestly false’.185 His emotional speeches seemed to overpower them. ‘The sobs and indignation in Hitler’s voice seemed to paralyse the reason of those who listened to him and to obliterate the most bitter recollections of want and suffering from their minds.’186 At one rally Reynolds turned to a man behind him who was applauding vigorously and asked him what Hitler had said. ‘I did not hear,’ replied the man, continuing to clap.187

  Yet this detail did not make it into the account that appeared in the Daily Mail. ‘Hitler will go down in history as the man who has revived Germany’s faith in herself,’ Reynolds wrote in a page-lead article headlined ‘Hitler’s Triumphal Tour of East Prussia’.188 A triumph it turned out to be. The July election of 1932 was another breakthrough moment for the Nazi Party. They won 230 seats, more than double their haul in the 1930 election. It made Hitler, who just a decade earlier had been a nonentity, the leader of the largest party in the Reichstag. A dictatorship in all but name already existed in Prussia, where von Papen had named himself Reich Commissioner to restore order after the invocation of Article 48. With Hitler firmly in the ascendant, it was a sign of things to come.

  Chancellor Papen, who by this point had left the Centre Party, proved unable to rule with parliamentary support and ruled by emergency decree with Hindenburg’s blessing. But with few members of the Reichstag supporting him, it was a short-lived tenure. Hindenburg recognised the situation was unsustainable and yet another election was called. The president was in an awkward position. The biggest party in the Reichstag was the National Socialists, whose leader was far too radical and extreme for the position of Chancellor. Hindenburg agonised over how to reflect the apparent will of the people and also provide a working government. Reynolds reported on the quandary facing not only Hindenburg, but the average German voter.

  ‘Numbers of Germans – and this is a strange feature of this election – are at a loss to know how to vote. Formerly they voted for one of the moderate parties, and now that these have become powerless and are almost extinguished, they do not know what party to support.’ There was also a fear, Reynolds reported, that many of those who voted for the Nazis in the summer would be ‘disheartened’ that they had not done anything with their power, and vote instead for the communists.189

  The election did not clarify matters. The Nazis won a third of the vote and remained the biggest party, despite winning thirty-four fewer seats. Hindenburg named an adviser, Kurt von Schleicher, Chancellor at the start of December. Unattached to any party, the former army staff officer had played a quiet but influential role behind the scenes in Weimar Germany. Hindenburg was running out of options, but von Schleicher was widely seen as a good choice. ‘One of the cleverest politicians in Germany,’ was Reynolds’s verdict in a profile introducing him to British readers. ‘He has earned the reputation of being a man who pulls the strings behind the scenes. That is why many people will be glad to see him forced into the open and obliged to justify his policy.’190

  The new Chancellor faced the same struggle to attract enough support in the Reichstag. Thrust into the limelight, von Schleicher was exposed. His actions in power displeased Hindenburg. ‘The clique around Hindenburg began to think that this General whom they had placed in power was a dangerous man. He was making concessions to the Catholics and to the socialists. He would have to go,’ Reynolds wrote.191 In the background, Hitler moved against him by forming an unlikely partnership with von Papen, who agreed to serve under him as Vice-Chancellor. His agreement to do so was a crucial element in Hitler’s bid for the chancellorship; faced with the plan, Hindenburg caved in. He saw von Schleicher’s rule as unsustainable in the long term, and now Hitler, who had a popular mandate, was backed by a politician seemingly of the mainstream. He was sure that if Hitler, as many anticipated, attempted extreme measures as Chancellor he could be restrained or even ejected, as so many of his predecessors had been. The stage was set for Hitler to realise his dream of taking power in Germany.

  - CHAPTER VII -

  HITLER TAKES OVER

  It was 1933 – a time before dictators had begun to spoil the English weekend, as Ian Colvin, one of Reynolds’s contemporaries in Berlin, later wrote.192 After weeks of political chicanery, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on 30 January. Reynolds observed the dramatic scene as thousands of storm troopers and steel helmets – the latter being Himmler’s feared Schutzstaffel (SS) – held aloft banners and waved flaming torches as they marched down Pariser Platz in the heart of Berlin.

  Flags emblazoned with swastikas hang from the front of the Reich Treasury building in 1937. (PA-1456 Thomas Neumann, The National Archives of Norway)

  They strode in time to the warlike music of their bands. The national anthem, ‘Deutschland über alles’, was repeatedly played. Hindenburg stood at the window of his palace to take the applause of the multitude below. Undaunted by the cold conditions, the young crowds cheered and cheered at the old man who had put their leader in power.

  They marched on towards the Chancellery, where Hitler stood on a balcony in his brown party uniform, lit up by a spotlight. He held his arm aloft in a triumphal Nazi salute. At just forty-three years of age, he had taken a huge step towards his goal of becoming Germany’s ultimate leader. Hindenburg and his associates thought they had his measure. ‘Hitler has been well wrapped up in cotton wool,’ one of them told Reynolds.193 One of his German friends was similarly nonchalant. ‘We shall wait and see what they can do, and if we don’t like them, then there will be a little putsch and we shall get rid of them.’194

  For Sefton Delmer of the Express, Hitler’s election seemed to vindicate the efforts he had made to spend time with the Nazi leadership. ‘I must confess that I was even a little pleased at the way things turned out. I felt the satisfaction of a prophet of doom who sees his promised catastrophe come true.’ His colleagues in the press pack did not see it this way.195

  The stock market reacted well to the move. Businessmen saw Hitler as a leader who would be able to keep the communists and more volatile elements of the working classes in check. Yet the tone of life in Germany seemed to blacken as soon as the Nazis took power. One episode was a chilling harbinger of the horrors awaiting the country’s Jewish population. Reynolds was on the Unter den Linden during a parade of schoolchildren organised to celebrate Hitler’s triumph. Every few yards along the procession stood Nazi supporters who called out ‘Judah!’ to which the children responded ‘Verrecke’ – in effect calling for their death.

  The children were instructed to reply Verrecke, but the effect was no less sinister. At one point a group of ten- and eleven-year-old girls stopped before Reynolds and shouted the word ‘in a thin treble with the glee of children who are allowed to make a noise, and were clearly unconscious of the meaning of what they said’. He was shaken by the experience.196

  On 1 February another election was called for early the following month. It was the German electorate’s chance to have their say on a Hitler chancellorship. Would they support Hindenburg’s move or would the election precipitate another change? The build-up was fraught with more violence as storm troopers marauded the streets. Anti-Jewish sentiment rose. Ordinary citizens were forced by officials attached to the new regime to join demonstrations against the Jewish population. Reynolds was amazed to witness one such rally on a cold winter day. ‘There they were, standing in thousands on the quay and yelling as ferociously as if they in
tended to rush through Berlin, murdering every Jew in the capital, instead of going home to eat cold sausage and to grumble at having been forced to tramp for miles in the cold.’197 Reynolds did not think the vast majority of Germans bore any hatred towards Jews. He harshly attributed their convincing display of hatred to a lack of character. ‘They were exhibiting themselves in a repulsive and barbarous demonstration, because their souls were the souls of serfs and they had not the courage to refuse to do an evil deed.’198 It was not just the Jews who were targeted. Meetings of Social Democrat and Centre Party supporters were violently broken up by gangs of brownshirts.

  ‘In less than a month Germans had lost freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly,’ Reynolds later wrote. People quickly became fearful of discussing sensitive issues on the phone in case they were eavesdropped by the newly formed secret police unit, the Gestapo.199 Germans would surely not respond to these restraints, bullying and intimidation by giving the regime further support in the election. But Hitler had another card to play.

  It was the evening of 27 February and Reynolds was in a back room of his flat listening to the radio. His building lay on the Schiffbauerdamm, a road on the northern bank of the River Spree. It followed the bend of the river and many residents, including Reynolds, had views of the great glass dome of the Reichstag on the other side of the water. He was disturbed by a phone call from a friend. She had bumped into her hairdresser in the street and been told the Reichstag was on fire. This friend thought Reynolds might be interested to know. He dashed to the front window. ‘Great flames were darting up from the roof of the Reichstag,’ he observed. ‘It was a terrifying and magnificent spectacle.’

  He rang London at once to speak to his friend Douglas Crawford, the Daily Mail’s foreign editor. ‘So they’ve done it another way,’ was the Scotsman’s response. Reynolds had previously told him the Nazis may orchestrate a bogus attempt on Hitler’s life as a desperate act of election propaganda. After the call he went to the window to see the flames rise still higher, despite the efforts of the firemen present. He left to get a closer look but met a cordon of police. They would not let him through despite his press card. ‘We are not even allowing members of the Reichstag to approach,’ they said. ‘There is a danger of the building collapsing.’200

  Other correspondents had dashed to the scene. Delmer of the Express had been tipped off slightly earlier than Reynolds; he received news of the fire from one of the petrol station attendants near the Reichstag. His journalistic initiative had paid off; Delmer had given his card to several attendants and asked them to ring if anything interesting happened. He arrived at 9.45 p.m. and quickly ran into Douglas Reed of The Times, who had managed to get inside the building before being thrown out again by Hermann Göring, one of Hitler’s closest allies. ‘Beaten by that staid old slow coach, The Times!’ Delmer thought bitterly.201

  As fire engines continued to arrive, Delmer was making his way around the perimeter, taking down eyewitness accounts from bystanders. Suddenly a pair of large black Mercedes cars pulled up at the scene. His luck was in. Hitler swiftly disembarked from one of them and marched through the cordon towards the burning building. Delmer glided behind in his slipstream. ‘Without a doubt this is the work of communists, Herr Chancellor,’ Göring remarked to Hitler. ‘A number of communist deputies were here in the Reichstag twenty minutes before the fire broke out. We have succeeded in arresting one of the incendiaries.’202

  Hitler did not need to hear any more than that. He turned to Delmer: ‘You see this building, you see how it is aflame? If the communists got hold of Europe and had control of it for but six months – what am I saying! – two months – the whole continent would be aflame like this building.’203 His narrative for the outside world was established. ‘If this is the work of communists,’ Hitler warned Reynolds, ‘they shall be crushed.’ Sure enough, a young Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe was found to be responsible.

  Reynolds’s first report on the fire was published the next day and named van der Lubbe as the alleged perpetrator. After the accused had been taken to the police station, Reynolds had stayed at the Reichstag and interviewed the policeman who had arrested him. Apparently van der Lubbe had been found wearing only his trousers and immediately confessed to starting the fire.

  In the days that followed, theories spread that the fire had in fact been the work of the Nazis. It seemed almost too convenient for Hitler’s party that the communists should so clumsily undermine themselves in the eyes of the electorate just six days before the election. Hitler’s campaign played on fears of communism, which grew after the attack. He was furious at suggestions of a Nazi plot and called Delmer in. ‘I could have that communist who was caught in the Reichstag hanged from the nearest tree!’ he screamed. ‘That would dispose forever of this vile slander that he was an agent of ours.’204 Almost a century on, his guilt has still not been proven. Writing in 1939, Reynolds was sure that van der Lubbe, who was guillotined for the crime in 1934, was not responsible. He called it a cock-and-bull story.205 Delmer, writing in his 1968 memoir, thought van der Lubbe alone was responsible – but that his fanaticism was so great it would be unfair to blame this on the wider communist movement.

  Irrespective of culpability, the Reichstag fire sowed seeds of doubt in German minds. Their mounting distrust of Hitler and the ugly behaviour of his supporters was totally overshadowed by renewed fears of the communist threat. The Nazis responded by persuading Hindenburg to sign a decree permitting martial law in Germany. ‘The police are given the right to raid every home in Germany,’ Reynolds reported. ‘The postal and telephone services are no longer secret, and scores of other public rights are withdrawn.’206 Many Germans were frightened by this development, but felt that perhaps it was necessary. Maybe Hitler was in fact the man needed to restore order and prosperity in Germany. In the election on 5 March, support for the Nazis rose. The party won 288 seats and 44 per cent of the vote.

  The Daily Mail welcomed the result in an editorial. ‘In Germany the elections have brought some relaxation of tension in the Fatherland. Herr Hitler has won his majority cleverly. If he uses it prudently and peacefully, no one here will shed any tears over the disappearance of German democracy.’207

  With the Reichstag building a burnt-out shell, Germany’s politicians convened after the election at the Kroll Opera House. ‘It was the most beautiful of the modern theatres of Berlin, with panels of polished wood and a pale roof with touches of colour in a fantastic pattern,’ observed Reynolds, who had thought the old Parliament building ugly. He was present as Hitler and other leading Nazis took their seats in the new Parliament for the first time, shortly after the fire. It felt an odd experience. ‘It was strange to be in this theatre, which one had thought of as a place where the cares of the day could be forgotten, for so grave a business as a meeting of legislators.’208 A huge red banner emblazoned with a Nazi swastika dominated the stage. Hitler, wearing his familiar khaki shirt and breeches, entered and exchanged salutes with his fellow party members. At this stage the Nazi salute was performed only by members of the party, but it would soon be pressed onto the German population as a general greeting.

  A couple of days after this meeting the new Parliament met again and the ruinous Enabling Act was passed. The legislation allowed Hitler and his government to make and pass laws without any input from the Reichstag. Hitler needed a two-thirds majority of votes to pass the law and packed the Kroll Opera House with Nazi guards and supporters to intimidate those present. It was a fevered and unpleasant atmosphere. Reynolds was sitting in the fourth or fifth row of the stalls for the momentous occasion.

  ‘When I arrived to attend this sitting, I found the Kroll Theatre more like a barracks than a parliament-house,’ Reynolds later recorded. ‘In the hall, on the staircase, in the foyer and corridors were posted Nazi Black Guards.’ Before entering the building he had been patted down by security men, a practice he was not used to. Their greatest fear was an ‘
assassin with a bomb or a revolver in my pocket,’ Reynolds said.209

  Also present was Vernon Bartlett, a British journalist who had done some work for the BBC. Later in 1933 he started working in Berlin as a correspondent for the liberal News Chronicle newspaper. ‘The orchestra stalls were crowded with Nazi deputies in uniform, with a block of sullen, dark-coated socialists on their right,’ he wrote. ‘At one moment during the debate Hitler looked up as though he were listening intently to some faint noise. I wondered if he could hear – as I could in my faint gallery – the shouts of thousands of young Nazis who were waiting outside. “We want full powers for the Government,” they yelled.’210

  The communists were virtually banned from the meeting, but the Social Democrats and Centre Party could have formed enough opposition to put down the motion. The latter party was persuaded not to by concessions on religious interests granted by Hitler. ‘The Centre Party had to look at the question before them from every point of view,’ Reynolds later wrote. ‘And its leader did not know, as Mr Chamberlain should have known six years later, that Herr Hitler was a liar.’211

  The motion passed and Hitler was now poised to dominate Germany. ‘The German parliament, guardian of the liberties of the German people, ceased to exist,’ Reynolds recalled.212 The one man who could have blocked the law, President Hindenburg, did not. He was elderly, hidden away in his East Prussia country estate, too feeble and reliant on poor advice from his courtiers to obstruct Hitler’s path.