The Reich which Adolf Hitler said would last a thousand years is ten years old this week. In one decade it has all but spanned a life's cycle, from depression's depths to a pinnacle of power on which it is now tottering. With 990 years to go, the Nazi Reich this week told its people: "We must keep cool. The situation is critical. We are facing an enemy superior in numbers, in everything. . . ."
Death of a Republic. On the evening of Jan. 30, 1933, the boots of the brown-clad Storm Troops beat like thudding drums along the Wilhelmstrasse beneath a flaming canopy of torches. Leaning far out over the Reich's Chancellery balcony, Adolf Hitler, with sparkling eyes, watched them march past. Battalion after battalion swung by, bands crashing out the song Die Fahne Hoch. ... In a nearby window, a rocklike silhouette, Reich President Paul von Hindenburg gazed on the parade with age-dimmed eyes.
The Weimar Republic fell. In the Nazi-packed Reichstag, on March 23, 1933, Hitler called for the Enabling Act, which emasculated the German Constitution, took the ground from under the feet of opposition parties. Tall, husky, greying Otto Wels, president of the Social Democratic Party, strode to the dais to protest the bill. "We are defenseless, but not without honor!" he cried. "If you really wanted social reconstruction, you would need no such bill as this!" Hitler spoke next: "You're too late! We don't need you any longer!" The bill was passed.
Social Democracy died; Otto Wels fled to Prague. Naziism rolled on. In June 1934, Hitler purged his Party ranks of dissidents, linked arms with big business and the military to give his government greater power. Hindenburg died; the Dictator became President. Wehrfreiheit was proclaimed—freedom to arm. A year after the new Wehrmacht was born, on March 7, 1936, a thin column of field-grey troops followed a blaring band across the Rhine to reoccupy the territories under French guard since Versailles. The officers carried in their pockets sealed orders to retreat if France resisted. France did not resist. In the Quai d'Orsay and in Whitehall the policy of appeasement was born.
The German Tragedy. In a book on Germany, The Silent War, published this week, Stefan Weyl and Jon B. Jansen, two young men of the Social Democratic underground movement, write: "The charge that has to be made against the German people is not that they never rose against the Hitler dictatorship. . . . That would have been expecting the impossible. . . . The tragedy for Germany and the world is that the German people, and especially the leaders of the Weimar Republic, were not politically mature enough to recognize what National Socialism really meant. . . . Nor is it an excuse for the Germans that for a long time leading people in the democratic countries did not understand the real nature of National Socialism either."