In order to place the complete control of the machinery of Government in the hands of the Nazi leaders, a series of laws and decrees were passed which reduced the powers of regional and local governments throughout Germany, transforming them into subordinate divisions of the Government of the Reich. Representative assemblies in the Laender were abolished, and with them all local elections. The Government then proceeded to secure control of the Civil Service. This was achieved by a process of centralization, and by a careful sifting of the whole Civil Service administration. By a law of 7 April it was provided that officials “who were of non-Aryan descent” should be retired; and it was also decreed that “officials who because of their previous political activity do not offer security that they will exert themselves for the national state without reservation shall be discharged.” The law of 11 April 1933 provided for the discharge of “all civil servants who belong to the Communist Party.” Similarly, the judiciary was subjected to control. Judges were removed from the bench for political or racial reasons. They were spied upon and made subject to the strongest pressure to join the Nazi Party as an alternative to being dismissed. When the Supreme Court acquitted three of the four defendants charged with complicity in the Reichstag fire, its jurisdiction in cases of treason was thereafter taken away and given to a newly established “People’s Court” consisting of two judges and five officials of the Party. Special courts were set up to try political crimes and only party members were appointed as judges. Persons were arrested by the SS for political reasons, and detained in prisons and concentration camps; and the judges were without power to intervene in any way. Pardons were granted to members of the Party who had been sentenced by the judges for proved offenses. In 1935 several officials of the Hohenstein concentration camp were convicted of inflicting brutal treatment upon the inmates. High Nazi officials tried to influence the Court, and after the officials had been convicted, Hitler pardoned them all. In 1942 “judges’ letters” were sent to all German judges by the Government, instructing them as to the “general lines” that they must follow.
In their determination to remove all sources of opposition, the NSDAP leaders turned their attention to the trade unions, the churches, and the Jews. In April 1933 Hitler ordered the late Defendant Ley, who was then staff director of the political organization of the NSDAP, “to take over the trade unions.” Most of the trade unions of Germany were joined together in two large federations, the “Free Trade Unions” and the “Christian Trade Unions.” Unions outside these two large federations contained only 15 percent of the total union membership. On 21 April 1933 Ley issued an NSDAP directive announcing a “coordination action” to be carried out on 2 May against the Free Trade Unions. The directive ordered that SA and SS men were to be employed in the planned “occupation of trade union properties and for the taking into protective custody of personalities who come into question.” At the conclusion of the action the official NSDAP press service reported that the National Socialist Factory Cells Organization had “eliminated the old leadership of Free Trade Unions” and taken over the leadership themselves. Similarly, on 3 May 1933 the NSDAP press service announced that the Christian trade unions “have unconditionally subordinated themselves to the leadership of Adolf Hitler.” In place of the trade unions the Nazi Government set up a Deutsche Arbeits Front (DAF), controlled by the NSDAP, and which, in practice, all workers in Germany were compelled to join. The chairmen of the unions were taken into custody and were subjected to ill-treatment, ranging from assault and battery to murder.
In their effort to combat the influence of the Christian churches, whose doctrines were fundamentally at variance with National Socialist philosophy and practice, the Nazi Government proceeded more slowly. The extreme step of banning the practice of the Christian religion was not taken, but year by year efforts were made to limit the influence of Christianity on the German people, since, in the words used by the Defendant Bormann to the Defendant Rosenberg in an official letter, “the Christian religion and National Socialist doctrines are not compatible.” In the month of June 1941 the Defendant Bormann issued a secret decree on the relation of Christianity and National Socialism. The decree stated that:
“For the first time in German history the Führer consciously and completely has the leadership in his own hand. With the Party, its components and attached units, the Führer has created for himself and thereby the German Reich Leadership, an instrument which makes him independent of the Treaty . . . . More and more the people must be separated from the churches and their organs, the pastor . . . . Never again must an influence on leadership of the people be yielded to the churches. This influence must be broken completely and finally. Only the Reich Government and by its direction the Party, its components and attached units, have a right to leadership of the people.”
From the earliest days of the NSDAP, anti-Semitism had occupied a prominent place in National Socialist thought and propaganda. The Jews, who were considered to have no right to German citizenship, were held to have been largely responsible for the troubles with which the Nation was afflicted following on the war of 1914-18. Furthermore, the antipathy to the Jews was intensified by the insistence which was laid upon the superiority of the Germanic race and blood. The second chapter of Book 1 of Mein Kampf is dedicated to what may be called the “Master Race” theory, the doctrine of Aryan superiority over all other races, and the right of Germans in virtue of this superiority to dominate and use other peoples for their own ends. With the coming of the Nazis into power in 1933, persecution of the Jews became official state policy. On 1 April 1933, a boycott of Jewish enterprises was approved by the Nazi Reich Cabinet, and during the following years a series of anti-Semitic laws was passed, restricting the activities of Jews in the civil service, in the legal profession, in journalism and in the armed forces. In September 1935, the so-called Nuremberg Laws were passed, the most important effect of which was to deprive Jews of German citizenship. In this way the influence of Jewish elements on the affairs of Germany was extinguished, and one more potential source of opposition to Nazi policy was rendered powerless.
In any consideration of the crushing of opposition, the massacre of 30 June 1934 must not be forgotten. It has become known as the “Röhm Purge” or “the blood bath”, and revealed the methods which Hitler and his immediate associates, including the Defendant Göring, were ready to employ to strike down all opposition and consolidate their power. On that day Röhm, the Chief of Staff of the SA since 1931, was murdered by Hitler’s orders, and the “Old Guard” of the SA was massacred without trial and without warning. The opportunity was taken to murder a large number of people who at one time or another had opposed Hitler.
The ostensible ground for the murder of Röhm was that he was plotting to overthrow Hitler, and the Defendant Göring gave evidence that knowledge of such a plot had come to his ears. Whether this was so or not it is not necessary to determine.
On 3 July the Cabinet approved Hitler’s action and described it as “legitimate self-defense by the State.”
Shortly afterwards Hindenburg died, and Hitler became both Reich President and Chancellor. At the Nazi-dominated plebiscite, which followed, 38 million Germans expressed their approval, and with the Reichswehr taking the oath of allegiance to the Führer, full power was now in Hitler’s hands.
Germany had accepted the dictatorship with all its methods of terror, and its cynical and open denial of the rule of law.