scraped together enough votes when the Reichstag opened to
see the all-important Enabling Act, which would give him dic-
tatorial powers, passed by votes to . (The opposition came
mainly from the Social Democrats, who alone braved Göring’s
boisterous threats thundered at them from the speaker’s chair:
“Quiet! Or the chancellor will deal with you!”) “Weimar,”
Göring declared flatly, “is finally dead!”
For a while he turned to domestic issues, of which law and
order had become the most urgent. On February , two weeks
before the election, he had set up an auxiliary police force
(Hilfspolizei) of fifty thousand men drawn largely from the SA
and the SS, and these “auxiliaries” had done everything possible
to steer the voters in the right direction; the most dangerous
opponents had been steered straight into two “concentration
camps” that Göring had set up at Oranienburg and Papenburg.
His original intention, he later explained, had been to use these
camps to rehabilitate political delinquents, but now that the
elections were over, the terror system gained a momentum of its
own as the hordes of rootless and unemployed SA men ran wild
and even set up concentration camps of their own.
For a while Göring lost control, that is clear. “You can’t
make an omelet,” he would philosophize under interrogation,
“without breaking eggs.” Typical of the casualties was Otto Eg-
gerstedt, forty-six, who had been the left-wing police chief of
Altona City. Arrested and thrown into Papenburg, he would be
“shot while trying to escape” in October . By that time, ac-
cording to the estimate of Gestapo Chief Rudolf Diels, no fewer
than seven hundred opponents of the Nazis had been bludg-
eoned or otherwise done to death in the “wildcat” concentration
camps set up by the SA. Occasionally very occasionally
Göring intervened. That summer he had Ernst Thälmann, the
imprisoned national leader of the German Communist party,