Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

478 DER FUEHRERally. Hitler and his sub-leaders had openly assured the Brown People'sArmy that on the day of their seizure of power they would 'clean thestreets' (Strasser); that they would 'reckon with their enemies, an eye foran eye and a tooth for a tooth' (Rohm); a few thousand Marxists 'wouldmeet their doom' (Frick). Many had again hoped for a decisive electionvictory, had expected election day to be the day of the knife. InKonigsberg the SA. threw bombs into a Social Democratic newspaperbuilding on election day, and a raging Brown-shirted band shot downtwo Communists in the street. Goebbels wrote in his diary: 'This is theonly means of bringing the Reds to reason; nothing else impresses themany more.'To invent, to stir up and then to shoot down the 'red peril' was thesimple secret of power for him who sets out to become dictator bydemocracy; as Louis Bonaparte, later Napoleon III, had shown eightyyears before. After becoming President of the French Republic by'outwardly legal means' (as Scheubner Richter later put it), he hadsecured the favor of the generals, telling them that they 'were the hopeand salvation of menaced society'; he had placed his creatures in the keypositions of power; accused his opponents of arming to occupy thepolice and administration buildings. When the Chamber rejected a lawhe had proposed, he declared it dissolved on December 2, 1851 — andthis was exactly Hitler's plan: 'If the Reichstag rejects an enabling lawdemanded by Der Fuhrer, it will be sent home,' writes Goebbels. Inorder that he might prove that he was saving his country from a greatdanger, Louis Bonaparte had sent thirty thousand soldiers through thecapital, had them fire on the people — and now local revolts did flareup in a few departments. The dictator proclaimed that this was 'Communistrevolution,' declared a state of emergency, had some twentyseventhousand people arrested, ten thousand deported to Africa, a fewhundred to Cayenne, and had others interned or banished. Then hestaged a plebiscite; of 8.12 million voters, 7.48 confirmed him aspresident — dictator — for ten years. The Wise Men of Zion had thiscoup in mind when they said that the people admires great acts ofvillainy.On August 5, Hitler went to Berlin, talked with Schleicher, de-