Over the following months and years the tendrils of Nazi control reached into every area of life in Hamburg. Books that displeased the Nazis were burned on the Kaiser-Friedrich-Ufer, and works by ostracized artists, such as Ernst Barlach, were removed from Hamburg’s public collections. People in positions of power or influence were replaced with Nazi sympathizers, not only in the city parliament but in police stations, hospitals, schools, and even private businesses. During the course of 1933, 10 per cent of commissioned police officers were dismissed for political reasons. ¹⁰

To ensure that the Nazi message was spread as widely as possible, organizations were set up to cover every area of German life. To replace the banned trade unions, the Nazis set up their own equivalent, the Deutsche Arbeitsfront. Weekend holidays and acceptable cultural activities were organized for the people by Kraft durch Freude (‘Strength through Joy’). Boys were encouraged to join the Hitler Youth, and girls to join the League of German Girls. While membership of those organizations was supposedly voluntary, it effectively became compulsory as the years went on.

The brave new world of Nazism was felt most keenly perhaps in schools and colleges. Wiebke Stammers, who was a schoolgirl in Hamburg at the time, remembers vividly the changes that took place: ‘We no longer had religious lessons. They disappeared from the timetable… And we had instead what was laughingly called Lebenskunde, which was all about the party and the history of the Nazi Party, the life story of Hitler, all the people in the party, where they came from, what they’d done. It was terribly boring.’ ¹¹Gradually her schoolbooks were replaced with new editions that complied with Nazi ideology: history books propagated the ‘stab in the back’ myth of the First World War, geography textbooks described Germany’s need for Lebensraumby expanding her borders, and biology textbooks emphasized the ideas of racial purity, struggle for survival, and self-sacrifice for the good of the race. ¹²When her headmistress refused to join the Nazi Party, she was sacked and replaced with somebody more compliant to the regime. Likewise, two of her teachers were fired after being denounced by pupils for making anti-Nazi comments in class. Two of her classmates were expelled because they did not join in with the denunciation. What happened to all those people in later years is unknown, but it is certain that, at the very least, they would have been watched carefully by the authorities.

Underlying the actions was the unspoken threat of violence against anyone who did not agree with Nazi ideology. Those who did not fit into the standard Aryan mould were in particular danger. Committed Christians, handicapped people, Gypsies, homosexuals, foreigners: in a cosmopolitan city like Hamburg there were seemingly endless targets for persecution. Even teenage jazz enthusiasts found themselves on the wrong side of the authorities. When American phonograph records were banned early in the war, scores of swing fans in Hamburg were rounded up and sent to the youth concentration camp at Moringen. Their crimes? Sexual promiscuity, dancing ‘like wild creatures’ to ‘Negro music’, and deliberately speaking English, which was also banned at the beginning of the war. ¹³

The first people to suffer, however, were undoubtedly the city’s Jews. Shortly after the Nazis came to power a national boycott of Jewish businesses was declared. Despite intimidation from Nazi vigilantes, many Hamburgers defied the boycott – but the message was clear nevertheless. Six days later, on 7 April 1933, a law was passed banning Jews from the civil service. This was soon followed by similar laws prohibiting them from working in the legal and medical professions, the media, the performing arts and the army. In 1935 the infamous Nuremberg Race Laws were passed, depriving Jews of citizenship and forbidding marriage between Aryan Germans and Jews. ¹⁴Once again, the background to this anti-Semitism was one of constant low-level violence. Random acts of brutality against Jews in and around Hamburg accumulated, and there were incidences of policemen standing by while Jewish shopkeepers were assaulted. The net result was a culture of fear and helplessness in much of the city, but particularly among Hamburg’s Jewish community. They could sense what was coming: those Jews who could afford it, and were able to gain visas, fled to other countries. Within two years of the Nazis coming to power a quarter of the city’s Jews had emigrated.

For those who stayed behind the final proof of their helplessness was not long in coming. On the night of 7 November 1938, in response to the murder of a German diplomat by an expatriate Jew, Joseph Goebbels orchestrated the nationwide pogrom that came to be known as Kristallnacht. During the course of just twenty-four hours more than a thousand synagogues across the country were either vandalized or burned to the ground. Jewish cemeteries, like that at Altona, were vandalized, Jewish homes were set alight, thousands of Jewish shops were looted and their windows smashed, and nearly a hundred people were murdered. Approximately thirty thousand Jewish men were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Afterwards, in a final absurd insult, Germany’s Jews were ordered to pay a collective bill of one billion Reichsmarks to the government to cover the cost of the damage to their own property. ¹⁵

While most Germans were shocked by the pogrom, few dared to speak out against it. Hamburg, to its credit, was one of the only places where such vandalism was openly condemned. In their ‘Reports on Germany’, the exiled Social Democrats claimed that:

The broad mass of people has not condoned the destruction, but we should nevertheless not overlook the fact that there are people among the working class who do not defend the Jews… If there has been any speaking out in the Reich against the Jewish pogroms, the excesses of arson and looting, it has been in Hamburg and the neighbouring Elbe district. ¹⁶

Those who spoke out against the Kristallnacht pogrom were taking their lives into their hands: the judicial authorities in Hamburg were notoriously harsh when judging political dissidents. ¹⁷However, while Hamburgers might have been unusually vocal about the atrocities they had seen, few people translated their outrage into action. As one Hamburg woman wrote in her diary shortly afterwards, while the persecution of the Jews had ‘inflamed all decent people with anger’, there was depressingly little that any of them did about it:

For me nothing was more devastating than the fact that nobody, not even those who opposed the régime most vehemently, stood up against this, but remained passive and weak. I cannot stress these facts too strongly. It was as if we were caught in a stranglehold. And, worst of all, one even gets used to being half throttled; what at first appeared to be unbearable pressure becomes a habit, becomes easier to tolerate; hate and desperation are diluted with time. ¹⁸

Once the battle against the enemy within was under way, Hitler turned his attention to the enemy without. The treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War had considerably reduced Germany’s power, and imposed severe restrictions on its armed forces, and limited rights to defend its borders. As the main architects of the treaty, Britain and France were considered responsible for Germany’s humiliating status, although the whole League of Nations was implicated. One of Hitler’s first actions on the international stage, therefore, was to pull out of the Geneva Peace Conference, in October 1933, and withdraw from the League of Nations.

In direct violation of the Versailles treaty, Germany now embarked on expansion of its armed forces. In March 1935 the German government shocked the world by revealing the existence of the Luftwaffe, a branch of the Wehrmacht (armed services) that had hitherto been banned. A year later Hitler broke the terms of Versailles once again by marching his troops into the Rhineland on the border with France. His borders secure, he now reintroduced the conscription of men into the army, and embarked on a huge four-year plan of rearmament. It was becoming increasingly difficult to believe that such measures were meant only for Germany’s defence, and many suspected that Hitler was actually inviting a reaction from the rest of the world. In the words of Hermann Goering, Hitler was ‘preparing the German economy for total war’. ¹⁹