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Hitler

Titel: Hitler Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Ian Kershaw
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channel disappointment and depression into outright aggression. Open opposition to the hated Papen government was now proclaimed. The shadow-boxing of the summer was over.
    Within days, Hitler had an opportunity to turn attention away from the debacle of his audience with Hindenburg. On 10 August, a group of SA men had murdered an unemployed labourer and Communist sympathizer in the Silesian village of Potempa. The murder was carriedout with extraordinary savagery, and in front of the victim’s mother and brother. As so often, personal and political motives intermingled. Horrifically brutal though the killing was, it is an indication of how far public order had collapsed that the event was in itself little more than a routine act of terror in the awful summer of 1932, symptomatic of the climate of violence in near-civil war conditions. No one took particular notice of it at first. Given a list of three dozen acts of political violence recorded in a single day and night around the time, the Potempa incident did not stand out. However, the murder had been committed an hour and a half after the Papen government’s emergency decree to combat terrorism had come into effect. This prescribed the death penalty for premeditated political murder and set up special courts to provide swift justice for cases arising under the decree. The trial took place at Beuthen in a tense atmosphere and amid great publicity between 19 and 22 August, ending with the pronouncement of the death penalty on five of the accused. To inflame feelings in the Nazi camp still further, two Reichsbanner men were given relatively light sentences on the very same day for killing two SA men during disturbances in Ohlau in July. These murders had not been premeditated, and had taken place before Papen’s emergency decree. But such differences naturally did not weigh among Hitler’s supporters. The Potempa murderers were portrayed as martyrs. The local SA leader, Heines, threatened an uprising if the death sentences were to be carried out. His rabble-rousing tirade incited the crowd to break the windows of Jewish-owned shops in Beuthen and attack the offices of the local SPD newspaper. In this heated atmosphere, Goöring praised the condemned men and provided money for their families. Röhm was dispatched to visit them in jail. On 23 August, Hitler himself sent the telegram that caused a sensation. ‘My comrades!’ he wrote, ‘in view of this most monstrous verdict in blood, I feel tied to you in unbounded loyalty. Your freedom is from this moment on a question of our honour. The struggle against a government under which this was possible is our duty!’ The head of Germany’s largest political party was publicly expressing solidarity with convicted murderers. It was a scandal Hitler had to take on board. Not to have sympathized with the Potempa murders would have risked alienating his SA in a particularly sensitive area, Silesia, and at a time when it was vitally important to keep the restless stormtroopers on the leash.
    The next day, Hitler put out a proclamation castigating the Papencabinet, and taking the opportunity to turn the events of 13 August on their head by claiming his own refusal to participate in a government capable of such sentences. ‘Those of you who possess a feel for the struggle for the honour and freedom of the nation will understand why I refused to enter this bourgeois government,’ he declared. ‘With this deed, our attitude towards this national cabinet is prescribed once and for all.’
    In the event, Papen, acting in his capacity as Reich Commissar in Prussia, backed down and had the death sentences for the Potempa murderers commuted into life imprisonment – a decision which Papen himself acknowledged was political rather than legal. The murderers were freed under a Nazi amnesty as early as March 1933.
    The Potempa affair had cast glaring light, at precisely the juncture where the power-brokers were still examining ways and means of incorporating Hitler in government, on Nazi attitudes towards the law. But such unmistakable indications of what a Hitler government would mean for the rule of law in Germany posed no deterrent to those who still thought the only way out of the crisis was somehow to involve the Nazis in the responsibility of public office.
    Hitler’s rejection of anything less than the office of Chancellor had not only created difficulties for the NSDAP. The problems for the government were now acute.

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