At last the police arrived, with emergency medics, and cleared everyone out. While the crowd outside was being dispersed, the victorious Nazis regrouped on the banks of a nearby river, and congratulated themselves on a job well done: they were convinced that they had won the fight because they had the stronger ideology, and therefore the stronger will, the greater strength, the wilder courage. They eventually marched, singing and celebrating long into the night. The battle they had just fought would soon pass into Nazi myth as a vital stepping-stone in the party’s long struggle to win power in the city.

While this beer-hall brawl in fact had little or no significance in the Nazis’ rise to power in Hamburg, the episode says a great deal about how they saw themselves. From the very beginning, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) was imbued with a sense of struggle against a hostile world. They saw the Communists as a particular threat because they were one of the few groups that actively fought against them, but they could also see other more subtle dangers. Practising Christians exercised an insidious control over the minds of the German people because they respected the passive virtues of humbleness and forgiveness. Foreign immigrants polluted German blood, just as Communists polluted German minds, and the Jews threatened to enslave the ordinary German worker in perpetual bondage to capitalism. All of this was not only tolerated but encouraged by corrupt and spineless politicians, who were little more than puppets to foreign governments and a sinister conspiracy of world Jewry. The Nazis believed themselves besieged on all sides, much as they had been that night in the Am Stadtpark pub, and the only way to save themselves, and Germany, was through violence.

The beer-hall battle was one of the most common images seen in Nazi propaganda. It was a microcosm of what they believed was necessary throughout the whole of Germany: a violent bloodletting to dispatch the myriad enemies of the people, and to purge the nation of weaklings. That the Nazis were almost always outnumbered in such stories was an important part of the myth, and reflected a fundamental flaw that would eventually lead to their downfall. In the years to come senior Nazis came to believe that they would alwaystriumph, no matter what the odds against them, provided they maintained a fanatical belief in the strength of their cause.

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At the beginning of the 1930s the NSDAP had already done far better than most people ever thought possible. For more than a decade it had been a minority party, with little appeal to anyone outside its core fanatical audience. But with Germany reeling in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash, the Nazis began to appeal to a much wider spectrum of people. The country now had over six million unemployed workers – 121,000 in Hamburg alone, or almost 40 per cent of the working population ³– and an increasingly desperate electorate cast about for someone to blame. The Nazi Party was there to provide the answer. Its long list of scapegoats began with its enemies inside the country – Communists, Jews, liberals – and ended with the international community who had crushed Germany beneath the heel of the Versailles treaty at the end of the First World War. Hitler’s invective against all these groups, which had seemed petulant when the country was in recovery, now attracted enormous popular interest.

The success of the party in Hamburg was perhaps most surprising of all. For decades the city had been a stronghold of left-wing politics, with the most serious challenge to the moderate Social Democrats coming from the German Communist Party (KPD). In fact, in 1928 Hitler’s NSDAP had just three seats on the city council, representing only a tiny proportion of the vote. But Hamburg was hit particularly hard by the stock-market crash. The city had borrowed heavily from America during the 1920s, and when American banks called in their debts a host of companies was forced into bankruptcy. Those that survived suffered terribly at the fall in international trade. With unemployment so high, the city’s expenditure on welfare also spiralled out of control.

A disillusioned electorate turned away from anyone associated with the administration that had got them into such a mess. The party they turned to was the Nazis, whose three seats on the city council grew to forty-three in under three years. By 1932 they had fifty-one seats, which made them the strongest voice on the council. ⁴What was happening all over Germany was also happening in Hamburg: a switch in the balance of power so rapid it was breathtaking. As Victor Klemperer, a university professor in Dresden, wrote in 1933:

it’s astounding how easily everything collapses… Day after day commissioners appointed, provincial governments trampled underfoot, flags raised, buildings taken over, people shot, newspapers banned, etc. etc …. And all opposing forces as if vanished from the face of the earth. It is this utter collapse of a power only recently present – no, its complete disappearance (just as in 1918) – which I find so staggering. ⁵

There is a strong view that Hamburg never truly supported the Nazis, despite their victory. The Nazi vote was always several points below the national average, and the other main parties remained strong until the bitter end. ⁶However, if general voters in Hamburg did not take to Hitler in quite the same way as they did elsewhere, those who supported the Nazis were particularly zealous. Actual membership of the Nazi Party was much higher here than the national average, ⁷and brawls like those in the Winterhude beer hall were relatively common. It was as if the very strength of the opposition served only to increase the Nazi Party’s siege mentality.

As Hitler’s power grew, Hamburg won something of a reputation for fanaticism, especially when it came to persecuting other political parties. Even before the Nazis had come to power, storm troopers had already murdered one of the KPD councillors – Ernst Robert Henning was shot in 1931. When civil liberties were suspended in February 1933, Hamburg was one of the first authorities to round up Communist Party functionaries and throw them into prison. This was soon followed by the arrest of Social Democrats, trade-unionists and other opponents of National Socialism, many of whom were later either executed or sent to concentration camps. In the coming years 1,417 men, women and teenagers from Hamburg would be executed for political reasons – twenty of them former members of the city parliament. ⁸Even members of the Nazi Party were not safe. In June 1934, during the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, dozens of Hitler’s political opponents within the local Nazi Party were murdered as part of a nationwide purge. The violence of the Hamburg beer hall had expanded to a concerted campaign of brutal control on a national level.

Hitler gained overall control of the national parliament after the elections of 5 March 1933, when the NSDAP seized 44 per cent of the vote. He was quick to consolidate power. With many of his opponents already under arrest, within three weeks of his election victory he had bullied the Reichstag into passing the ‘Enabling Act’. This infamous piece of legislation, officially entitled the ‘Law for the Lifting of Misery from the People and Reich’, ⁹gave him the right to bring in emergency legislation whenever he felt it necessary, without having to refer to Parliament. This effectively granted him absolute power.

Over the next four months he systematically dismantled all opposition to Nazi rule. All other political parties were dissolved, and a law was passed making their re-formation illegal. Trade unions associated with the SPD were banned in May. Newspapers and radio stations that did not agree with the Nazi position were banned, and replaced with Nazi propaganda organs. In Hamburg, which had more newspapers than any other city in Germany, this had a substantial effect: on 29 April the Hamburger Echowas put out of business, quickly followed by the Hamburger Nachrichtenand the Hamburgische Correspondent. Even though the Hamburg city council had complied enthusiastically with almost everything the national government had asked of it, the Bürgerschaft itself was dissolved on 14 October. From that day until the end of the war, absolute power over the whole city passed to the hands of the Nazi gauleiter and Reich governor Karl Kaufmann.