Hitler becomes Führer

At around nine in the morning on 2 August 1934, the 86-year-old Reich President Paul von Hindenburg died at his estate of Neudeck in East Prussia, today Ogrodzieniec near Kwidzyn. That same day a law was promulgated that the government had passed the day before in anticipation of his death: the office of President was merged with that of Chancellor, and all the President’s powers passed to the “Führer and Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler”. Adolf Hitler, head of the government for a year and a half, thus also became head of state and supreme commander of the armed forces. The last office of the Weimar Republic that derived from a popular election, and that could in theory have dismissed him, disappeared. From that day on there was no one left in Germany to whom Hitler had to answer.

The last obstacle

After his appointment as Chancellor on 30 January 1933, Hitler had within little more than a year removed almost all the checks laid down in the Weimar constitution. The decree issued after the Reichstag fire suspended civil liberties, the Enabling Act of March 1933 gave the government the right to make laws without parliament, the trade unions were broken up, and in July 1933 the NSDAP became the only legal party. In January 1934 the autonomy of the German states was abolished, and in February so was the second chamber that represented them, the Reichsrat.

Only the presidency remained untouched. Under the constitution it was the President who appointed and dismissed the Chancellor, and Article 47 gave him supreme command of all the armed forces of the Reich. The Enabling Act itself stipulated in Article 2 that “the rights of the Reich President remain unaffected”. Hindenburg, elected by popular vote in 1925 and again in 1932, was in the eyes of the army, the conservatives and a large part of society the last authority standing above the parties. Although he had long since ceased to oppose Hitler in anything of importance, he could formally dismiss him, and the Reichswehr obeyed the field marshal, not the Chancellor.

Hitler knew that the old President would not live long. According to most historians, those around Hitler had assumed since 1933 that the offices would be merged on Hindenburg’s death, and by the spring of 1934 the state of the President’s health was known to the country’s leaders. The problem lay with the army and the conservatives, some of whom hoped that Hindenburg would be followed by a restoration of the monarchy, or at least by a new president from outside the NSDAP. The matter was settled in blood by the Night of the Long Knives at the turn of June and July 1934. Hitler had the leadership of the SA, which wanted to replace the Reichswehr with a party militia, murdered, and with them conservative critics from the circle of Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen and the former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher. The generals, pleased to see the SA broken, accepted this in silence, and the Reichswehr Minister Werner von Blomberg publicly thanked Hitler. In this way the army reconciled itself in advance to Hitler becoming Hindenburg’s successor.

The law of 1 August

At the end of July Hindenburg’s condition deteriorated sharply. On 1 August Hitler flew to East Prussia and visited the dying man at Neudeck. According to those around him, the President, by then only half conscious, addressed the Chancellor as “Majestät” – the form once used for the Kaiser. That same day the Reich government in Berlin, using the Enabling Act, passed a short Law Concerning the Head of State of the German Reich. Its first section read: “The office of Reich President is merged with that of Reich Chancellor. The existing powers of the Reich President consequently pass to the Führer and Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler. He appoints his deputy.” The second section provided that the law would come into force at the moment of Hindenburg’s death.

The law was signed by Hitler and every minister in his cabinet: from Papen, the Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath and the Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, through Blomberg, to Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels and Rudolf Hess. The conservative ministers who in January 1933 were supposed to “tame” Hitler put their names to an act that handed him all power in the state.

The law broke even the regime’s own rules. Besides ignoring the proviso in the Enabling Act, it disregarded the constitutional amendment of December 1932, under which, if the office of President fell vacant, its duties were to be taken over provisionally by the President of the Reich Court – at that time Erwin Bumke – until new elections were held. No one raised the point.

2 August: the President’s death

Hindenburg died at around nine in the morning on 2 August. The law was published in the official gazette with the date of 1 August, but by the time it appeared, the condition on which its entry into force depended had already been met. Hitler assumed the President’s powers at once. In a letter to the Interior Minister Frick dated 2 August, he declared that the title of Reich President was “inseparably linked with the name of the great deceased” and directed that in official and private matters he should continue to be addressed as “Führer and Reich Chancellor”. The word “Führer”, leader, had until then been the title of the party leader. Now it became the name of the office of head of state.

In the same letter Hitler demanded that the merging of the offices be approved by the nation in a vote, and on 3 August he formally ordered one. It was a purely propaganda exercise, since the law was already in force and Hitler was already exercising the President’s powers. Also on 2 August, on Blomberg’s orders, Reichswehr soldiers in garrisons throughout Germany swore an oath of unconditional obedience not to the constitution or the state but personally to “the Führer of the German Reich and People, Adolf Hitler”. Formal command of the armed forces, which the constitution had vested in the President, passed to Hitler together with his office. The oath made him something more: the army’s personal master.

Funeral and testament

The regime turned Hindenburg’s death into a great spectacle. National mourning was declared, and on 6 August a memorial session of parliament was held in the Kroll Opera House, where the Reichstag had sat since the fire. Contrary to the wishes of the deceased, who had wanted to be laid to rest beside his wife in Hanover, he was buried on 7 August in the Tannenberg Memorial near Olsztynek (Hohenstein), on the site of his most famous victory in 1914. Hitler ended his funeral oration with the words: “Dead warlord, now enter Valhalla!” The memorial was later rebuilt as the Hindenburg Mausoleum.

On 15 August, four days before the vote, the President’s political testament, which Papen had handed to Hitler, was published. In it Hindenburg spoke approvingly of the “national revival” under the Chancellor’s leadership. It has long been disputed whether the President also left a separate document recommending the restoration of the monarchy, which was then supposedly suppressed. There is no proof of this, and the testament in its published form suited Hitler very well. On the eve of the vote the dead man’s son, Colonel Oskar von Hindenburg, spoke on the radio and gave assurances that his father had seen Hitler as his successor.

The plebiscite of 19 August

The vote was set for Sunday 19 August 1934, a mere seventeen days after the President’s death. The ballot paper carried the first section of the law and asked whether the German man and the German woman approved of this arrangement. There was no campaign against it, nor could there be: all parties other than the NSDAP had been dissolved, the press was under Goebbels’s control and opponents were in prisons and camps. The radio broadcast short campaign slogans four times a day, Hitler spoke in Hamburg on 17 August, and the SA and party organisations marched people to the polling stations in columns. In many places there were no voting booths, or simply stepping into one looked suspicious. There was fraud: blank and spoilt ballots were counted as “yes” votes, and in some towns the names of those who had voted against were posted up the following day.

According to the official figures, 95.7 per cent of those eligible voted. Some 38.4 million votes, or 89.9 per cent of valid votes, were cast for “yes” and some 4.3 million for “no”, while more than 870,000 ballots were declared invalid. The result was lower than in the plebiscite of November 1933 on leaving the League of Nations, when the regime had announced more than 95 per cent support. The largest “no” votes came in the big cities and in former strongholds of the left and of the Catholic Centre Party: around a fifth in Hamburg and around 18 per cent in Berlin, while in Aachen and in the Berlin districts of Wilmersdorf and Charlottenburg the “yes” votes amounted to less than 70 per cent of all those eligible. Goebbels noted in his diary that he had expected more. Victor Klemperer, a Dresden scholar of Romance languages of Jewish descent who had voted “no” together with his wife, wrote that a third had voted “yes” out of fear, a third out of intoxication and a third out of fear and intoxication, and that Hitler was nonetheless the “undisputed victor”.

The British historian Ian Kershaw judges that even allowing for pressure and manipulation, the result showed that Hitler had the support – much of it enthusiastic – of the overwhelming majority of Germans. The government did not subsequently promulgate the result as a legal act, and the disappointed regime held no further plebiscite until the annexation of Austria in 1938.

A leader without limits

After 2 August 1934 Hitler combined in his own hands the offices of head of state, head of government, leader of the sole party and supreme commander of the armed forces. He appointed and dismissed ministers, and called cabinet meetings less and less often; the last was held in February 1938. Laws were issued by the government, which in practice meant by Hitler himself; the Reichstag met only to applaud him, and the courts recognised the Leader’s will as a source of law. From then on the regime’s lawyers wrote of a “Führer power” that did not derive from the constitution but stood above it. Hitler no longer needed to ask anyone for a signature, and the only man who could lawfully have dismissed him was dead and had no successor.

Abroad, few people grasped the significance of the change. In those days Europe’s attention was taken up by the failed Nazi putsch in Austria of 25 July and the murder of Chancellor Dollfuss, and many commentators treated Hindenburg’s death as the end of an era rather than the beginning of a new one.

Significance

The merging of the offices completed the construction of the dictatorship that Hitler had begun on 30 January 1933. From August 1934 no institution in Germany could stop him: there was no longer a president who could dismiss him, a parliament that could withhold its consent, or an army that saw itself as guardian of the state independent of the Chancellor. He took the successive decisions that led to war himself, often against the advice of generals and diplomats: the reintroduction of universal military service in March 1935, the remilitarisation of the Rhineland in 1936, the annexation of Austria and the Sudeten crisis in 1938, and finally the attack on Poland on 1 September 1939. In February 1938, after Blomberg’s removal, he personally took command of the entire Wehrmacht, and in December 1941 of the Army as well.

Hindenburg’s death also showed how little was left of the Republic. The President who had handed Hitler the government in 1933 was supposed to guarantee that the Chancellor would not overstep certain limits. When he died, the guarantee turned out to be worthless: his office vanished overnight, and the nation that was told to approve this overwhelmingly agreed. For the next eleven years the title “Führer” was synonymous with absolute power. Hitler held it until his suicide in April 1945, and in his testament he named separate successors to the posts of Reich President and Chancellor, as if conceding that the office of Leader had existed only for him.