An Honourable Defeat Read Online Free PDF Page A

grounds, or for active Resistance. [14] Further comment is superfluous.
    Of the other parties still with a notional say in the Reichstag, only the Social Democrats raised their voice against the Enabling Act. Loudly supported by his followers, and just as loudly shouted down by the Nazis, the stocky moustachioed figure of Otto Wels, the SPD leader, spoke strongly and eloquently:
    No Enabling Act gives you the power to destroy ideas which are invincible and everlasting. You yourselves [the Nazis] have demonstrated your recognition of the principles of Socialism...Social Democracy will not be beaten by persecution, but draw new strength from it. We greet those of our colleagues who have already been persecuted and oppressed. We salute our friends in the Reich. Your steadfastness and loyalty deserve our admiration. Your courage and your unshakeable confidence [National Socialist laughter; Social Democrat cheers] guarantee a brighter future.
    But early in June the SPD was banned. Otto Wels was among those who set up the SPD in exile (SOPADE), initially in Prague. By the end of July there was only one Party in Germany, and that was the ruling National Socialist German Workers’ Party: the Nazis.
    It was not long after this that Hitler turned his attention to the Jews. Anti-Semitism was nothing new in Germany, or indeed in Europe, nor was it uncommon, although no one in 1933 had an inkling of the horror the Nazis would soon unleash. The Jews made up a small proportion of Germany’s population, but their contribution to the country was very high in proportion to their numbers. Pro rata, there were more leading Jewish doctors, lawyers and bankers than from any other group. In the First World War, again pro rata, more Jews had given their lives for Germany and received high decorations for bravery. The contribution of Jewish Germans to twentieth-century art and science is famous. Most Jewish Germans were assimilated, saw themselves as Germans first and Jews second, and were deeply patriotic. Their sense of patriotism proved fatal for many, because they would not try to leave until it was too late.
    Resentment of the Jews persisted and thrived in periods of economic stress and high unemployment. No matter that the Jews in Germany suffered just as much from poverty and unemployment as their fellow countrymen; this, too, was nothing new. In the fourteenth century people believed that the Jews were responsible for the Black Death, though just as many Jews died from it as did others. But the nineteenth century had seen a fresh spawning of anti-Semitic literature, and the young Hitler had fed on this greedily. Out of the ruin of the First World War, in which he had fought bravely as a corporal (earning the Iron Cross, First Class — a rare honour for an NCO), and the collapse of Imperial Germany, he spun the myth of a world Marxist-Jewish conspiracy, a myth in which he believed passionately and relentlessly right up until his final hour.
    It was still too early for him to root the Jews out of Germany. At first he had no plans to kill them: he would have been content to expel them, if any other country had been prepared to take them, and for a time a plan to convert the island of Madagascar, which would have been conquered for the purpose, into a vast Jewish ghetto, was on the Nazi table. In the early thirties he still needed the infrastructure of business the Jews ran. Jewish factories made SA uniforms and swastika flags; Jewish investment aided the German economy — and rearmament cost money. Even so, the Führer evidently needed to make an early stand, and his ability to recognise and exploit the worst aspects of human nature led him to the conclusion that the Germans needed a scapegoat, convenient and recognisable, for their woes. His own obsessive hatred, coupled with his confused ideas of racial ‘purity’, led him immediately to the Jews. [15]
    The first of April 1933 was declared National Boycott Day. SA men, their uniforms