In Europe

approximately 25,000 such arrests were made, and throughout the country at least another 100,000 dissidents were roughed up and terrorised.
    One month after Hitler was appointed chancellor, the Reichstag burned down. Marinus van der Lubbe had, more or less by accident, set fire to the building's most vulnerable spots, the huge curtain at the back of the meeting hall and the bone dry oak panelling behind. Within minutes, the papers reported the next day, the giant hall was ‘an inferno of burning benches and lecterns’.
    Van der Lubbe could have done his opponents no greater favour.
    Although Van der Lubbe had no ties with the German communists, the new chancellor demanded that all KPD parliamentarians be hanged immediately. In addition, Hitler had now been given an excuse to issue a whole series of decrees, to restrict civil liberties even further and to lock up countless political and journalistic heavyweights. In this way, the movements of the left were robbed of their leadership at a single blow, and that was not all. The wave of arrests also established a new norm: after that, anyone who rocked the boat could be spirited off to a concentration camp at a moment's notice. An estimated 100,000 communists or alleged communists were killed during the Third Reich. Many times that number spent shorter or longer periods in concentration camps.
    Yet ‘the good Nazi years of 1935–7’ – a period generally ignored these days – really did exist. During that time, Hitler achieved two goals no one had ever thought possible: the six million unemployed of 1933 were all working by 1937, and Germany was once again considered a power to reckon with.
    It was not the war industry, however, that served as the motor to the German economy in the early years. That change came later. At first, the country's economy was stimulated largely by huge infrastructural projects: the building of harbours and roads that did not compete with existing industry, but provided new jobs and new welfare for millions of working families. The policy was an extremely daring one in those days – somewhat comparable to the New Deal in the United States – and successful to boot. In 1938 German unemployment had fallen to three per cent, as compared with thirteen per cent in Britain and twenty-five per cent in the Netherlands.
    For the first time in history, the Germans were not only farmers, workers, mothers and soldiers, but also consumers. Hitler won over the German masses with a degree of luxury they had never before experienced. The
Volksempfänger
, a household radio, was soon affordable for almost everyone. The first Volkswagens rolled off the production lines. During the 1936 Olympics, the
Reichspost
experimented with live television broadcasts: a world first. A kind of inexpensive, mass tourism – unique in those days – was developed by the Nazi organisation Kraft durch Freude (KdF) and offered weekend trips to Munich, train trips to Lake Garda and cruises to Madeira that were affordable even for factory workers. Millions of Germans took advantage of this: KdF ships such as the
Robert Ley
and the
Wilhelm Gustloff
soon became household words. The birth rate, the most reliable parameter of confidence in the future, rose by almost twenty-five per cent within a year after Hitler came to power.
    This breathtaking series of successes swept away almost all of the modern Germans’ reservations. Untold numbers of those who had voted liberal, social democrat, Christian or communist in 1933 were transformed from the mid-1930s into enthusiastic adepts of the führer. Even the concentration camps filled many Germans with a certain sense of well-being: the ‘antisocial’, the ‘parasites’, the ‘criminals’, the ‘do-nothings’ and ‘foreign elements’ were off the streets at last.
    This also explains why the huge sterilisation campaign that began in summer 1933 met with no real protest to speak of. The fact that some 400,000 ‘recidivists’ and ‘degenerates’ were sterilised under coercion was anything but a secret: countless newspaper articles, pamphlets, public information meetings and even films were dedicated to this ‘recovery ofour racial purity’. Beggars, psychiatric patients, prostitutes, homosexuals and Gypsies could be taken off the street without due process of law for ‘isolation’ or ‘re-education’. Government policy papers appeared, dealing with ‘Combating the Gypsy Plague’ and granting considerable attention