The banning of parties in Germany

Within two weeks, between 21 June and 5 July 1933, every party except the NSDAP vanished from the German political scene. On 21 June, in the Berlin district of Köpenick, SA squads began a manhunt for Social Democrats, communists and other opponents, later known as the Köpenick week of blood, and the authorities dissolved the youth and paramilitary organisations of the German National People’s Party, Adolf Hitler’s own ally. On 22 June the Reich Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, banned all activity by the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Over the following days, under the pressure of terror and threats, the middle-class parties dissolved themselves: the nationalists, the liberals, the Bavarian People’s Party and finally the Catholic Centre. When on 14 July the government declared the NSDAP the only party in Germany, it merely confirmed an accomplished fact.

The dates

Many chronicles state under 21 June 1933 that on that day “all parties except the Nazi party were banned”. That is not what happened. There was no single act outlawing all the parties at once. On 21 June the terror in Köpenick began and the auxiliary organisations of Hugenberg’s party were dissolved; on 22 June the SPD was banned; and the remaining parties announced their dissolution between 27 June and 5 July. The communist KPD, already shattered after the Reichstag fire, was never banned by a separate law. 21 June was thus only the start of those two weeks.

The parties after the March elections

In the elections of 5 March 1933, held in an atmosphere of terror after the Reichstag fire, the NSDAP won 43.9 per cent of the vote and 288 seats. For a majority it needed the 52 seats of its coalition partner, the nationalists of Alfred Hugenberg. Other parties, however, still existed: the Social Democrats with 120 deputies, the communists with 81, the Centre with 73, the Bavarian People’s Party with 19, and a handful of liberals.

The first to fall was the Communist Party of Germany. Under the Reichstag Fire Decree thousands of communists were arrested, and their leader, Ernst Thälmann, was detained on 3 March. The elected KPD deputies could not take their seats in the Reichstag; at the end of March the communists lost their seats in the parliaments of the German states, and a law of 26 May 1933 allowed the party’s assets to be confiscated. The KPD went underground and its leadership fled abroad.

On 23 March the Enabling Act was passed by 444 votes to 94. Only the Social Democrats voted against, and the chairman of their parliamentary group, Otto Wels, said in the last free speech in the Reichstag that “freedom and life can be taken from us, but not our honour”. The Centre, the Bavarian People’s Party and the liberals voted in favour, relying on Hitler’s verbal promises. From then on the government could pass laws without parliament, and the existence of other parties ceased to have any practical significance. In the spring the Nazis smashed the trade unions, which had been the SPD’s mainstay.

The end of the SPD

Social democracy tried to survive. On 10 May a court seized its assets, buildings and printing works. Part of the leadership, including Wels, left for Prague, where an executive in exile, later known as Sopade, was set up. Those who stayed in Berlin tried not to give the Nazis a pretext. On 17 May the SPD deputies present in the Reichstag, under threat, voted for Hitler’s peace declaration on foreign policy, which the émigrés regarded as capitulation. On 18 June the first issue of the émigré paper Neuer Vorwärts, calling for the overthrow of the dictatorship, appeared in Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary). A conference of activists in Berlin on 19 June elected a new leadership headed by the former President of the Reichstag, Paul Löbe, and distanced itself from Prague, but by then it made no difference.

On 22 June Frick, citing the appeals of the executive in exile, declared the SPD “an organisation hostile to the nation and the state”. He banned all its activity, meetings and press, and instructed the German states to strip its deputies of their seats. According to German studies, some three thousand party activists were arrested at that time. Löbe too was arrested at the end of June. A decree issued by Frick on 7 July annulled all Social Democratic seats in the Reichstag, the state parliaments and the municipal councils. The party that had founded the Republic in 1919 ceased to exist legally.

The Köpenick week of blood

The ban was accompanied by terror. On 21 June in Köpenick, on the eastern edge of Berlin, the local SA under Herbert Gehrke began dragging well-known Social Democrats, communists, members of the republican Reichsbanner organisation, Jews and even members of the youth organisation of Hugenberg’s party from their homes. By 26 June the SA had abducted up to five hundred people to its premises, where they were beaten and tortured. When in the first days of the manhunt the stormtroopers burst at night into the home of a young Social Democrat, Anton Schmaus, he shot two of them dead in self-defence, while a third was hit by accident by another SA man. Schmaus, later shot in custody, died in January 1934. His father was found hanged.

The number killed in Köpenick is disputed. Literature from the GDR, and following it some West German studies, gave a figure of 91 victims, but more recent research regards this number as unverified and speaks of at least 24 dead. Among those murdered was the former Prime Minister of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, the Social Democrat Johannes Stelling, whose body, sewn into a sack, was fished out of the River Dahme. Köpenick was not an exception, merely the best-known example of the violence that swept across the whole of Germany in the summer of 1933. The perpetrators were covered by an amnesty issued by the Reich Minister of Justice on 25 July 1933. Some of them were tried only after the war.

The other parties dissolve themselves

Hitler’s coalition partner, too, no longer had a future. In May the German National People’s Party renamed itself the German National Front (Deutschnationale Front), but its deputies were defecting to the NSDAP. Hugenberg, the Minister of Economics and Agriculture, discredited himself in June at the World Economic Conference in London with a memorandum demanding colonies and land in the east, which did not suit Hitler, who was then assuring the world of his desire for peace. When on 21 June the authorities dissolved the party’s youth and paramilitary organisations, on the pretext that they had been infiltrated by communists and Social Democrats, the party had nothing left to defend itself with. On 27 June Hugenberg resigned. The same day his party announced its dissolution, and its deputies joined the NSDAP group.

A day later, on 28 June, the left-liberal German State Party, formerly the German Democratic Party, dissolved itself. The executive of the right-liberal German People’s Party, the party of the late Gustav Stresemann, resolved to dissolve on 27 June, and its chairman announced the decision on 4 July. In Bavaria at the end of June, Heinrich Himmler’s political police arrested many Bavarian People’s Party activists and Catholic priests. On 4 July the party dissolved itself.

The last was the Catholic Centre Party, which had shared in governing Germany for almost the entire Weimar Republic. Its chairman, Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, had left for Rome in April, where he took part in the negotiations on a concordat between the Holy See and the Reich. At the beginning of May the former Chancellor Heinrich Brüning took over the party leadership. When it became clear that the Vatican, in order to obtain guarantees for the Church and for Catholic organisations, was prepared to accept the withdrawal of the clergy from politics, the party lost its last support. On 5 July 1933 the Centre announced its dissolution. Three days later the concordat was initialled in Rome.

Significance

In July 1933, five months after coming to power, Hitler ruled a one-party state. All the parties that had made up the Weimar Republic for fourteen years had been dissolved or banned, and their leaders were in camps, had emigrated or had withdrawn from public life. There were no protests or strikes. The middle-class parties dissolved themselves, and some of their politicians and voters concluded that it was better to serve the “national revival” in the ranks of the NSDAP than to risk persecution. On 6 July Hitler told the Reich Governors that revolution could not be a permanent state and must now be channelled into the calm riverbed of evolution.

Without an opposition, a free press or a parliament, no one in Germany could any longer publicly challenge the policies that over the following years led to war: the withdrawal from the League of Nations, open rearmament, the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, the annexation of Austria and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. The Social Democrats, communists and Centre politicians who survived worked underground or in exile. Some of them, such as the Social Democrat Julius Leber, were among the conspirators of 20 July 1944. Many others, like Thälmann, did not live to see the end of the war.