The Third Reich 1023

Communists under arrest after the Reichstag fire of 1933.

decimated. Strikes were illegal. Hitler dissolved the state parliaments and

took away the remaining autonomy of the individual German states,

appointing Nazis to take over state governments. A new law empowered

officials to dismiss subordinates whom they considered potentially disloyal

to the Nazis, or who could not prove that they were of pure 44Aryan” racial

stock. In October, the first concentration camp began operation at Dachau

near Munich for the incarceration of political prisoners.

Despite Nazi rhetoric about a racially pure community of Germans, Hitler

was far from envisioning social equality, which he associated with socialism

and communism. Still, for some Germans, the Nazi Party, and particularly

the S.S. (Schutzstaffel, security units that guarded Hitler), provided a means

of social mobility; military trappings conveyed the respectability many

Germans associated with a uniform. Although the Nazis drew support from

all social classes (although proportionately less support from workers), the

Depression in particular drove desperate middle-class Germans into the

Nazi fold.

Hitler needed the loyalty of Germany’s army. But many German officers
were becoming increasingly wary of the S.A., which was now almost 3 mil­
lion strong and which seemed out of control. Its members openly competed
with Nazi officials for appointments and influence. Rohm announced that
henceforth members of his force could not be tried by courts and that they
were not subject to police authority. Believing that Hitler would betray the
party’s radicalism, he foolishly bragged that he would free Hitler from his
“stupid and dangerous” advisers.
The S.S. and the Gestapo (the Nazi secret police) crushed the S.A. on
June 30, 1934. They killed at least eighty people, including Rohm. The