9
BREAKTHROUGH

‘I had lost all I possessed through adverse economic conditions. And so, early in 1930,I joined the National Socialist Party.’

An unskilled labourer,
newly won over to the Hitler Movement

‘How many look to him in touching faith as the helper, saviour, the redeemer from overgreat distress. To him, who rescues the Prussian prince, the scholar, the clergyman, the peasant, the worker, the unemployed.’

Luise Solmitz, a schoolteacher,
on hearing Hitler speak in Hamburg, April 1932

The terrible burden of the breakdown threatened to bring all economic life to a standstill. Thousands of factories closed their doors. Hunger was the daily companion of the German working man. Added to this was the artificial whip of scarcity, wielded by the Jews, which sent working men scurrying from their homes to beg for food from the farmers… The government carried its measures against the public so far that many an honest working man had to resort to theft to obtain food… Burglaries, too, became daily occurrences, and the police had their hands full protecting the citizens’ property. All fellow citizens, with the exception of the Communists, yearned for better times. As for me, like many another, I had lost all I possessed through adverse economic conditions. And so, early in 1930, I joined the National Socialist Party.¹

This was one individual’s story of how he became a Nazi. Another recounted:

When we consider that on the one hand the policies of the Red government, particularly the inflation and taxes, deprived me of all means of livelihood, while on the other hand we soldiers of the front were being ruled by a gang of exploiters ready to stoop to any means to seize the starvation wages of our suffering, duped comrades, it will become clear why a number of us welcomed the activities of patriotic groups, particularly those of the Hitler movement. The combination of patriotic aims along with social reform led many an old soldier and idealist under the banner of the National Socialist Workers’ Party.²

These two new recruits were won over to the NSDAP as the economic crisis began to grip Germany. Neither the first, an unskilled labourer in his early thirties, nor the second, a small trader of around the same age who had been forced to sell up his bakery in 1926 for a low price (which he blamed on Jewish creditors) and eke out a living thereafter as a pedlar, were exact fits for the abstract sociological model of a typical Nazi supporter.³ But their short accounts offer a glimpse of the type of psychology and motivation that were beginning to drive thousands – predominantly male, and for the most part young – to join the Hitler Movement as the storm-clouds gathered over Germany in 1930. In each case the personal bitterness and loss of self-esteem found a simple explanation in policies of the ‘Red’ government and a ready scapegoat in the Jews. The sense of betrayal and exploitation was acute. And it was not just a feeling that a change of government was needed. Among those drawn in increasing numbers from a wide variety of motives to the NSDAP in 1930 there was a common feeling of elemental, visceral hatred for the Weimar state itself, for the ‘system’ as it was so often called. Hatred, as Hitler had recognized, was among the most powerful of emotions. That was what he consciously appealed to. That is what drove so many of his followers. But there was idealism, too – misplaced, certainly, but idealism none the less: hopes of a new society, of a ‘national community’ that would transcend all existing social divides. There would, recruits to the Nazi Party believed, be no return to the class-ridden, hierarchical society of the past, resting on status, privilege, and the wealth of the few at the expense of the many. The new society would be fair without destroying talent, flair, ability, initiative, creativity in the way they saw threatened by the social egalitarianism preached by the Marxists. It would be one in which achievement, not status, would gain recognition, where the high-and-mighty would be deprived of their seeming God-given rights to lord it over the humble and lowly, where sweeping social reform would ensure that those who deserved it would gain their just rewards, where the ‘little man’ would no longer be exploited by big capital or threatened by organized labour, where Marxist internationalism would be crushed and replaced by loyal devotion to the German people. Discriminatory feelings were built into the idealism. Those who did not belong in the ‘national community’ – ‘shirkers’, ‘spongers’, ‘parasites’, and, of course, those deemed not to be German at all, notably Jews – would be ruthlessly suppressed. But for true ‘comrades of the people’ (Volksgenossen) – the term the Nazis invented to replace ‘citizen’ (Bürger) for those who did belong – the new society would be a genuine ‘community’, where the rights of the individual were subordinated to the common good of the whole, and where duty preceded any rights. Only on this basis could the German nation become strong again, recover its pride, cast aside the shackles unfairly imposed on it by its enemies in the Versailles Treaty. But only through complete destruction of the hated, divisive democratic system could the ‘national community’ be accomplished at all.

In this crude but powerful imagery that attracted many who found their way to the NSDAP, nationalism and socialism were not seen as opposites; they went together, were part of the same Utopian dream of a reborn nation, strong and united. Many who, as the crisis set in during 1930, came to vote for the NSDAP or even to join the party had never encountered Hitler personally and were often becoming interested in him for the first time. Usually, they were already predisposed to the Nazi message. Its ideology did not in itself distinguish the Nazi Party from its rivals on the Right. Nationalism and anti-Marxism were, in different shadings, common currency in all but the parties of the Left. Antisemitism was far from the preserve of the NSDAP. What set Hitler’s movement apart was above all its image of activism, dynamism, élan, youthfulness, vigour. To many, it marked the future, ‘the new Germany’, born out of a complete break with the present, but resting on the true values – as they saw it – of the Teutonic past. Hitler encapsulated their hopes of a ruthless showdown with their enemies and exploiters, and embodied their dreams of a reborn Germany. ‘Any true German,’ declared another new member around this time, ‘in his soul longed for a German saviour, and sought to raise his eyes in trust and confidence to a truly great leader.’⁴

Economic crises frequently unseat governments. It is much rarer for them to destroy systems of government. Even the extreme severity of the Depression of the early 1930s was compatible in some countries with the survival of democracy – where democracy was already firmly anchored, and not undermined by a lost war. The terrible privations that accompanied mass unemployment and economic collapse in the US A and Britain brought turbulence but no serious challenge to the democratic state. Democracy could emerge intact, perhaps strengthened. Even France, where democracy had a much more flimsy base, survived with some scares. But in Germany, the ‘system’ itself, the very nature of the state, was at stake from the beginning of the crisis. Hitler and his party were the beneficiaries of this systemic crisis of the Weimar state. They were not its primary cause. Even in its ‘golden’ years, Weimar democracy had never won the hearts and minds of large numbers of Germans. And even in those years, powerful sectors of society – business, the army, big landowners, leading civil servants in charge of government administration, academics, many intellectuals and opinion-leaders – had tolerated rather than actively supported the Republic. Not a few among the power élites were awaiting the opportunity to discard the democracy they detested so much. Now, as the crisis started to unfold, such groups began to show their true colours at the same time as the masses began to desert the Republic in droves. In Britain and America, the élites backed the existing, and long-established, democratic system, deeply embedded constitutionally, because it continued to serve their interests. In Germany, where the roots of democracy were far more shallow, they looked to change a system which, they felt, less and less upheld their interests, and to move to authoritarian rule. (For most of them this did not mean, at the time, Nazi rule.) In Britain and America the masses were, despite misery and discontent, faced with little alternative to the existing, well-established political parties. Nor, with few exceptions, did they look for any. In Germany, ‘political space’ was opened up for the Nazi breakthrough by the prior fragmentation of support for the parties of the centre and Right.⁵ In Germany, therefore, the economic crisis ushered in from the beginning a fundamental crisis of the state. The battleground was, from the outset, the state itself. That was what Hitler wanted.

I

The Nazi leadership did not immediately recognize the significance of the American stock-market crash in October 1929. The Völkischer Beobachter did not even mention Wall Street’s ‘Black Friday’.⁶ But Germany was soon reverberating under its shock-waves. Its dependence upon American short-term loans ensured that the impact would be extraordinarily severe. Industrial output, prices, and wages began the steep drop that would reach its calamitous low-point in 1932.⁷ The agricultural crisis that had already been radicalizing Germany’s farmers in 1928 and 1929 was sharply intensified. By January 1930, the labour exchanges recorded 3,218,000 unemployed – some 14 per cent of the ‘working-age’ population. The true figure, taking in those on short-time, has been estimated as over 41/2 million.⁸

The protest of ordinary people who took the view that democracy had failed them, that ‘the system’ should be swept away, became shriller on both Left and Right. Nazi advances in regional elections reflected the growing radicalization of the mood of the electorate. The Young Plan plebiscite had given the party much-needed publicity in the widely read Hugenberg press. Its value, said Hitler, was that it had provided ‘the occasion for a propaganda wave the like of which had never been seen in Germany before’.⁹ It had allowed the NSDAP to project itself as the most radical voice of the Right, a protest-movement par excellence that had never been tarnished with any involvement in Weimar government. In the Baden state elections on 27 October 1929, the NSDAP won 7 per cent of the vote. In the Lübeck city elections a fortnight or so later, the percentage was 8.1. Even in the Berlin council elections on 17 November, the party almost quadrupled its vote of 1928, though its 5.8 per cent was still marginal, compared with over 50 per cent that went to the two left-wing parties. Most significantly of all, in the Thuringian state elections held on 8 December, the NSDAP trebled its vote of 1928 and broke the 10 per cent barrier for the first time, recording 11.3 per cent of the votes cast. The Nazi votes were won mainly at the expense of the DVP, the DNVP, and the Landbund. In many of the small towns and villages of the Thüringer Wald, where the craftsmen producing toys and Christmas-tree decorations had been hard hit by the onset of the Depression, the Nazis were able to increase their vote five-fold. The six seats (from fifty-three) that the NSDAP won in the Landtag left the construction of a Thuringian anti-Marxist coalition government in the hands of the Nazis.¹⁰ Should the Nazi Party exploit the situation by agreeing to enter government for the first time but run the risk of courting unpopularity through its participation in an increasingly discredited system? Hitler decided the NSDAP had to enter government. Had he refused, he said, it would have come to new elections and voters could have turned away from the NSDAP.¹¹ What happened gives an indication of the way at this time the ‘seizure of power’ in the Reich itself was envisaged.¹²

Hitler demanded the two posts he saw as most important in the Thuringian government: the Ministry of the Interior, controlling the civil service and police; and the Ministry of Education, overseeing culture as well as policy for school and university. ‘He who controls both these ministries and ruthlessly and persistently exploits his power in them can achieve extraordinary things,’ wrote Hitler.¹³ When his nominee for both ministries, Wilhelm Frick, was rejected – the DVP claimed it could not work with a man who (for his part in the Beerhall Putsch) had been convicted of high treason – Hitler went himself to Weimar and imposed an ultimatum. If within three days Frick were not accepted, the NSDAP would bring about new elections. Industrialists from the region, lobbied by Hitler, put heavy pressure on the DVP – the party of big business – and Hitler’s demands were finally accepted. Frick was given the task of purging the civil service, police, and teachers of revolutionary, Marxist, and democratic tendencies and bringing education in line with National Socialist ideas. A first step would be to appoint Dr Hans Günther, a race-theory ‘expert’, to a new chair of Racial Questions and Racial Knowledge (Rassenfragen und Rassenkunde) at the University of Jena.¹⁴

The first Nazi experiment in government was anything but successful. Frick’s attempts to reconstruct educational and cultural policy on a basis of ideological racism were not well received, and moves to nazify the police and civil service were blocked by the Reich Ministry of the Interior. After only a year, Frick was removed from office following a vote of no-confidence supported by the NSDAP’s coalition partners.¹⁵ The strategy – to prove so fateful in 1933 – of including Nazis in government in the expectation that they would prove incompetent and lose support was, on the basis of the Thuringian experiment, by no means absurd.

In his letter of 2 February 1930 to an overseas party supporter outlining the developments that led to participation in the Thuringian government, Hitler pointed to the rapid advances the party was making in gaining support. By the time he was writing, party membership officially numbered 200,000 (though the actual figures were somewhat lower).¹⁶ The Nazis were starting to make their presence felt in places where they had been scarcely noticed earlier.

In Northeim, a small town in Lower Saxony, divided along class lines but otherwise a fairly balanced and economically by no means deprived community, the NSDAP had been wholly insignificant before 1929. In the 1928 elections, the party had won only 2.3 per cent of the vote; the SPD’s share was almost 45 per cent.¹⁷ But local activists began to revitalize the party the following year. They peppered the town with propaganda in early 1930. Despite the fact that the town was at first relatively unaffected by the looming Depression, its middle class and the farmers in the adjacent countryside already felt aggrieved by levels of taxation, problems of credit, and economic competition. They blamed the government, which they saw as in the hands of Marxists. Nazi propaganda, makingfull play of well-chosen speakers, started to make inroads. Though attendance was still small, the image of the party was one of unparalleled vitality, drive, and youthful vigour. ‘There was a. feeling of restless energy about the Nazis,’ was one housewife’s comment. ‘You constantly saw the swastika painted on the sidewalks or found them littered by pamphlets put out by the Nazis. I was drawn by the feeling of strength about the party, even though there was much in it which was highly questionable.’¹⁸ Image was crucial to the spread of Nazi success. The NSDAP was known predominantly in Northeim as a vehemently anti-Marxist – that is, anti-SPD – party, and one that was avidly nationalist and militarist. The NSDAP had no special purchase on such ‘ideas’. Image counted for more. That was what distinguished them from rival parties with a not dissimilar message and ideology. Manipulation of nationalist and religious symbols helped to win middle-class support. Important, too, was the example set by well-respected figures in the town. That the popular and well-regarded local bookseller in Northeim, a local worthy, pillar of the Protestant Church in the town, was a member of the party made others take note. ‘If he’s in it, it must be all right,’ was what they said.¹⁹ Antisemitism was relatively unimportant as a drawing-card. It did not deter the townspeople from supporting the NSDAP. But it was seldom the prime reason for doing so.²⁰ Few, if any, of the local inhabitants had seen Hitler in person by the time they started to find the NSDAP attractive. Again it was image – what Hitler was said to stand for, as relayed in innumerable propaganda meetings – that was important.

What was happening in Northeim was happening in countless other towns and villages the length and breadth of Germany. Since the Young Campaign the previous autumn, rejecting the plan for long-term repayment of reparations, the NSDAP had been building up to around a hundred propaganda meetings a day.²¹ This would reach a crescendo during the Reichstag election campaign later in the summer. Many of the speakers were now of good quality, hand-picked, well-trained, centrally controlled but able to latch on to and exploit local issues as well as putting across the unchanging basic message of Nazi agitation. The National Socialists were increasingly forcing themselves on to the front pages of newspapers, forming more and more the talking-point around the Stammtisch.They began to penetrate the network of clubs and associations (Vereine) that were the social framework of so many provincial communities. Where local leaders, enjoying respectability and influence, were won over, further converts often rapidly followed.²² In the relatively homogeneous villages in Schleswig-Holstein, where feelings about the Weimar ‘system’ were, as we have seen, running high on account of the agrarian crisis, the push from one or two farmers’ leaders could result in a local landslide to the NSDAP.²³Other non-Marxist parties seemed, in the gathering crisis, to be increasingly weak, ineffectual and discredited, or to relate, like the Zentrum (the Catholic party), to only one particular sector of the population. Their disarray could only enhance the appeal of a large, expanding, dynamic and national party, seen more and more to offer the best chance of combating the Left, and increasingly regarded as the only party capable of representing the interests of each section of society in a united ‘national community’. And as increasing numbers joined the party, paid their entry fees to the growing number of Nazi meetings, or threw their Marks into the collection boxes, so the funds grew that enabled still further propaganda activity to unfold.²⁴ The tireless activism was, then, alreadyshowing signs of success even in the early months of 1930. The extraordinary breakthrough of the September Reichstag election did not come out of thin air.

Encouraged by his party’s advances, Hitler felt bold enough, in the private letter he wrote in early February 1930, to ‘prophesy’ that the Nazi Movement would get to power within two and a half to three years.²⁵ This was typical Hitler bravado. He saw the tide turning in his favour. But his conviction of an inexorable path to triumph was simple ‘gut feeling’, not based on rational calculation. As NSDAP leaders recognized, agitation had so far been based on little more than negative propaganda: attacking the Weimar Republic.²⁶ The party’s programme, in Gregor Strasser’s eyes, was purely ideological, not constructive. Its creators, he claimed, had no idea how they would implement it, given the chance. The party was committed to a fight for power without knowing what to do with it once attained.²⁷ Planning for the future had only just begun in the party, and remained vague and ill-thought-out.²⁸ Hitler himself was little interested in such notions. He remained fixated on propaganda and mobilization. Everything was targeted on the fight for power.²⁹ But how to get power remained unclear. No cogent strategy was developed.

Electoral gains were extremely important. But they did not translate directly into power. At the Reich level, elections were not due until 1932. At provincial level, the Thuringian elections had opened up a new possible avenue of gaining power through infiltrating state government. But Nazi participation in the Thuringian government was soon to prove that this route was unlikely to yield positive results, and guaranteed to bring a fall in support for the NSDAP. Even with the deepening Depression and every prospect of increasing National Socialist electoral gains, the road to power was blocked. Only crass errors by the country’s rulers could open up a path. And only a blatant disregard by Germany’s power élites for safeguarding democracy – in fact, the hope that economic crisis could be used as a vehicle to bring about democracy’s demise and replace it by a form of authoritarianism – could induce such errors. Precisely this is what happened in March 1930.

II

The fall of the Social Democrat Chancellor Hermann Müller and his replacement by Heinrich Brüning of the Zentrum was the first unnecessary step on the suicidal road of the Weimar Republic. Without the self-destructiveness of the democratic state, without the wish to undermine democracy of those who were meant to uphold it, Hitler, whatever his talents as an agitator, could not have come close to power.

The Müller administration eventually came to grief, on 27 March 1930, over the question of whether employer contributions to unemployment insurance should be raised, as from 30 June 1930, from 3.5 to 4 per cent of the gross wage.³⁰ The issue had polarized the ill-matched coalition partners, the SPD and DVP, since the previous autumn. If the will had been there, a compromise would have been found. But by the end of 1929, in the context of the increasing economic difficulties of the Republic, the DVP had – in company with the other ‘bourgeois’ parties – moved sharply to the right. Stresemann’s death had removed a strong force for pragmatism and common sense. Now, the DVP, with its close links with big business and anxious about the demands on employers’ social contributions in the context of rapidly rising unemployment, launched a general attack on the Weimar welfare-state. For the DVP, and for other ‘bourgeois’ parties of the Right, this was more or less synonymous with an attack on the Weimar ‘party state’ itself. The SPD was for its part increasingly intransigent. It was unwilling to allow Müller any room for compromise on the unemployment insurance issue.³¹

Even with the stalemate between the coalition partners, the fall of government could have been avoided. Reich President Hindenburg could have used his powers to enable Müller to resolve the issue of unemployment contributions by presidential decree. Ebert had supported Stresemann with this device during the 1923 crisis. Hindenburg was to extend it to each of Müller’s successors – completely undermining parliamentary government in the process. But in early 1930 use of Article 48 was denied to Müller.³² With no way out of the government crisis, the Chancellor tendered his resignation on 27 March. It marked the beginning of the end for the Weimar Republic.

The fall of Müller had in fact been planned long beforehand. The Reich President had spoken to the former leader and chairman of the DNVP’s parliamentary delegation Graf Westarp as early as March 1929 about the necessity of ruling without the Social Democrats. The following August, Major-General Kurt von Schleicher, protégé of Defence Minster Groener and head of the newly created Ministerial Bureau (Ministeramt) in the Defence Ministry, already with the ear of the Reich President, let Heinrich Brüning – a cautious, conscientious but somewhat desiccated figure, aloof and ascetic, on the right of the Zentrum and the party’s expert on finance policy – know of Hindenburg’s readiness to use Article 48 to ‘send the Reichstag home for a while’ and rule by emergency decree.³³ In December, Brüning, by now parliamentary leader of the Zentrum, learnt that Hindenburg was determined to oust Müller as soon as the Young Plan had been accepted. Brüning himself was earmarked to take over as Chancellor, backed where necessary by the President’s powers under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. Soundings were taken in January about the willingness of the DNVP to support such an administration. A ‘government crisis on account of financial reform’ was expected in February or March, it was said in confidence. The Reich President was anxious not to miss the chance of creating an ‘anti-parliamentary and anti-Marxist’ government and afraid of being forced to retain a Social Democrat administration.³⁴

Brüning was appointed Chancellor on 30 March 1930. His problems soon became apparent. Under the Weimar Constitution, even making full use of emergency decrees, he could not completely dispense with the support of the Reichstag. Should presidential decrees under Article 48 fail to gain the necessary majority, the President could dissolve the Reichstag. But new elections had then to be held within sixty days. By June, Brüning was running into serious difficulties in his attempts to reduce public spending through emergency decrees. On 16 July, his wide-ranging finance bill – aimed at reforming state finances through a stringent deflationary policy of cuts in public expenditure and higher taxes – was rejected by the Reichstag. Brüning had made no serious effort to explore all possibilities of securing a Reichstag majority. He now resorted to emergency decree to make the bill law – the first time this had happened for a bill rejected by the Reichstag, and a step of doubtful legality. When an SPD motion, supported by the NSDAP, to withdraw the decree was passed by the Reichstag, Brüning sought and received, on 18 July 1930, the Reich President’s dissolution of parliament.³⁵ The temptation to seek a dissolution rather than undergo wearisome negotiations to arrive at a Reichstag majority had proved irresistible. New elections were set for 14 September. For democracy’s prospects in Germany, they were a catastrophe. They were to bring the Hitler Movement’s electoral breakthrough.

The decision to dissolve the Reichstag was one of breathtaking irresponsibility. Brüning evidently took a sizeable vote for the Nazis on board in his calculations.³⁶ After all, the NSDAP had won 14.4 per cent of the vote only a few weeks earlier in the Saxon regional election.³⁷ But in his determination to override parliamentary government by a more authoritarian system run by presidential decree, Brüning had greatly underestimated the extent of anger and frustration in the country, grossly miscalculating the effect of the deep alienation and dangerous levels of popular protest. The Nazis could hardly believe their luck. Under the direction of their newly appointed propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, they prepared feverishly for a summer of unprecedented agitation.³⁸

III

In the meantime, internal conflict within the NSDAP only demonstrated the extent to which Hitler now dominated the Movement, how far it had become, over the previous five years, a ‘leader party’. The dispute, when it came to a head, crystallized once more around the issue of whether there could be any separation of the ‘idea’ from the Leader.

Otto Strasser, Gregor’s younger brother, had continued to use the publications of the Kampfverlag, the Berlin publishing house which he controlled, as a vehicle for his own version of National Socialism.³⁹ This was a vague and heady brew of radical mystical nationalism, strident anti-capitalism, social reformism, and anti-Westernism. Rejection of bourgeois society produced admiration for the radical anti-capitalism of the Bolsheviks. Otto shared his doctrinaire national-revolutionary ideas with a group of theorists who used the Kampfverlag as the outlet for their views. As long as such notions neither harmed the party nor impinged on his own position, Hitler took little notice of them. He was even aware, without taking any action, that Otto Strasser had talked of founding a new party. By early 1930, however, the quasi-independent line of Otto Strasser had grown shriller as Hitler had sought since the previous year to exploit closer association with the bourgeois Right. A showdown came closer when the Kampfverlag continued to support striking metal-workers in Saxony in April 1930, despite Hitler’s ban, under pressure from industrialists, on any backing of the strike by the party.⁴⁰

Goebbels had by this time for weeks been venting his own spleen to Hitler about the Strasser brothers, whose newspapers were in rivalry to his own Angriff.⁴¹ Hitler promised to support Goebbels. ‘He can’t stand the Strassers and passes the hardest judgement on this salon socialism,’ wrote the Berlin party boss.⁴² But Hitler did nothing.⁴³ His hesitancy and reluctance to act frustrated and annoyed Goebbels. Already angered in February at Hitler’s refusal to attend the funeral of Horst Wessel – a Berlin SA leader, shot in his apartment by Communists after his landlady had complained to them that he was refusing to pay his rent, and converted by Goebbels into a martyr for the movement, savagely murdered by its political enemies – he threatened to resign as Gauleiter of Berlin if Hitler did not act against the Strassers.⁴⁴ But he thought Hitler, as usual, would not intervene.⁴⁵‘Munich, incl. Chief, has lost all credit with me,’ he bitterly noted in mid-March. ‘I don’t believe anything from them any longer. Hitler has – for whatever reasons, they don’t matter – broken his word to me five times. That’s bitter to realize, and I inwardly draw my conclusions. Hitler keeps to himself (verbirgt sich), he takes no decisions, he doesn’t lead any more but lets things happen.’⁴⁶

Hitler was stirred into action in early April by the publication in the Strasser press, against his orders, of his decision to break with Hugenberg and leave the Reich Committee against the Young Plan. ‘Hitler is in a stinking rage,’ noted Goebbels.⁴⁷ ‘He is ready to act against this literati tendency, since he is himself threatened by it,’ he added.⁴⁸ In a two-hour speech to a meeting in Munich on 27 April, to which all top party leaders had been expressly summoned, Hitler tore into the Kampfverlag and its ‘salon bolsheviks’.⁴⁹ At the end of the meeting, he announced Goebbels’s appointment as Propaganda Leader of the party. The Berlin Gauleiter was triumphant. ‘Hitler leads again, thank God,’ he wrote.⁵⁰ But still Hitler was reluctant to bring matters to a head.

After further inaction, he travelled to Berlin on 21 May and invited Otto Strasser to his hotel for lengthy discussions. Hitler preferred even then to avoid a breach. His tactic was to remove the problem of the Kampfverlag – which remained in serious financial difficulties – by buying it out.⁵¹ He even offered to make Otto Strasser his press chief.⁵² But Strasser was obdurate. Hitler turned from blandishments to threats. He wanted an immediate decision. Otherwise he would take steps within days to have the Kampfverlag banned.⁵³ Undeterred, Strasser moved the discussion on to ideological issues. According to his published account – the only one that exists, though it rings true and was not denied by Hitler – the key points were leadership and socialism.⁵⁴ ‘A Leader must serve the Idea. To this alone can we devote ourselves entirely, since it is eternal whereas the Leader passes and can make mistakes,’ claimed Strasser. ‘What you are saying is outrageous nonsense (ein unerhörter Unsinn),’ retorted Hitler. ‘That’s the most revolting democracy that we want nothing more to do with. For us, the Leader is the Idea, and each party member has to obey only the Leader.’⁵⁵ Strasser accused Hitler of trying to destroy the Kampfverlag because he wanted ‘to strangle’ the ‘social revolution’ through a strategy of legality and collaboration with the bourgeois Right. Hitler angrily denounced Strasser’s socialism as ‘nothing but Marxism’. The mass of the working class, he went on, wanted only bread and circuses, and would never understand the meaning of an ideal. ‘There is only one possible kind of revolution, and it is not economic or political or social, but racial,’ he avowed.⁵⁶ Pushed on his attitude towards big business, Hitler made plain that there could be no question for him of socialization or worker control. The only priority was for a strong state to ensure that production was carried out in the national interest.⁵⁷

The meeting broke up. Hitler’s mood was black. ‘An intellectual white Jew, totally incapable of organization, a Marxist of the purest ilk’, was his withering assessment of Otto Strasser. ‘Hitler is full of rage,’ added Goebbels, somewhat superfluously.⁵⁸ Gregor Strasser noted a few weeks later that after this discussion it was impossible for his brother to remain in the party.⁵⁹ But Hitler still took no action. And, though he promised Goebbels that he would deal with Otto Strasser after the Saxony elections,⁶⁰ he did nothing until late June. When he did finally act, it was following pressure from Göring and Walter Buch as well as Goebbels, and only after Otto Strasser had effectively left him little choice by publicizing his account of their discussions in Berlin in May.⁶¹ On the eve of the Saxony election, Hitler again promised Goebbels he would purge the Strasser faction.⁶² But three days later, on 25 June, following a telephone conversation with Hitler, the party’s propaganda boss felt: ‘Chief wants me to throw out the little ones, but doesn’t touch the big-shots. That’s so typically Hitler. In Plauen high on his horse, today he pulls back again… He makes promises, and doesn’t keep them.’⁶³ By 28 June, Goebbels was even more critical. Hitler ‘backs away from the decision. So everything is turned upside down again. I’m certain he won’t come on Monday [to Berlin] to save himself from having to make decisions. That’s the old Hitler. The waverer! For ever putting things off!’⁶⁴ As Goebbels predicted, Hitler – taken up with coalition negotiations in Saxony – cancelled his planned speech to the Berlin Gau meeting on 3 July.⁶⁵ The propaganda chief was not consoled by a message from Göring that Walter Buch would read out a letter written by Hitler attacking the Strasser clique.⁶⁶ However, when he saw the letter, its aggressive tone pleased him. It gave Goebbels backing for the ‘ruthless purge’ of the Berlin party.⁶⁷ Strasser and twenty-five supporters had, in fact, already anticipated their expulsion, and publicly announced on 4 July that ‘the socialists are leaving the NSDAP’.⁶⁸ The rebels had in effect purged themselves. ‘The whole thing ends in a great declaration of loyalty to the Movement, Hitler, and me,’ wrote Goebbels.⁶⁹ ‘Berlin is in order… The air is cleared,’ he added shortly afterwards.⁷⁰‘The entire revolt of the literati reveals itself to be a storm in a teacup. Otto Strasser has lost completely.’⁷¹ Goebbels’s confidence in Hitler was still not completely restored. ‘Hitler acts from anxiety,’ he noted in his diary on 16 July 1930. ‘He is not in the least free in his decisions any longer.’⁷²

Within two days, little of this seemed to matter any longer. Brüning declared the Reichstag dissolved. Goebbels was thrown headlong into the preparations for the election campaign. He was shown the lavish offices being built for him in the newly purchased ‘Brown House’ headquarters in Munich, provided with a flat in the city, and given massive financial backing for his propaganda department.⁷³ ‘Hitler listens to me completely. It’s good like that,’ he commented.⁷⁴ Disappointments of the early summer forgotten, he was Hitler’s man again.

Goebbels’s account, one-sided though it was, of the crisis provoked by Otto Strasser is revealing for its repeated criticism of Hitler’s indecision. Tactics – the proximity of the Saxon elections, the wait for the most opportune moment when Strasser would provide the occasion to strike at him – obviously played their part in Hitler’s dilatory behaviour. Hitler plainly wanted to wait until the elections in Saxony, where Strasser had some support, before acting against him.⁷⁵ And it was only after Strasser had effectively decided to force the break by publishing his version of the discussion with Hitler that the latter felt compelled to intervene. But Goebbels plainly recognized the trait in Hitler’s character that other Nazi leaders were also well aware of: his instinctive tendency to put off tough decisions and his chronic wavering in a crisis. Not visible to outsiders, this trait would be apparent in so many of the major crises during the Third Reich itself. If it was a weakness, however, it was a strange one. There was never any suggestion that Hitler might be bypassed or ignored, that anyone but he could make a key decision. And, once he finally decided to act, Hitler did so, as on this occasion, with ruthlessness. Such dilatoriness followed by boldness was a feature of Hitler as party leader, then later as dictator.

The Strasser crisis showed, above all, the strength of Hitler’s position. Otto Strasser had not, in fact, been a popular member of the party. And his influence was less extensive than it had seemed. Once outside the NSDAP, he lost all significance. No major leader followed him; there were no repercussions; the rebellion fizzled out overnight.⁷⁶ Gregor Strasser broke completely with his brother.⁷⁷ He dissociated himself from Otto’s views and described his continued agitation against the party as ‘total lunacy’ (heller Wahnsinn).⁷⁸ Otto’s ‘Union of Revolutionary National Socialists’, subsequently the ‘Black Front’, emerged as no more than a tiny oppositional right-wing sect.⁷⁹ With the elimination of the Strasser clique, any lingering ideological dispute in the party was over. Things had changed drastically since 1925 and the days of the ‘Working Community’. Now it was clear: Leader and Idea were one and the same.

IV

During the summer of 1930, the election campaign built up to fever pitch. The campaign was centrally organized by Goebbels, under broad guidelines laid down by Hitler. A wide array of different techniques was available to local party branches. Lists were circulated of over a hundred Reich speakers with expertise capable of appealing to different interest groups – farmers, civil servants, workers, and so on. The overriding theme was an attack on the disintegration of German political life into a ‘heap of special interests’ (Haufen von Interessenten).⁸⁰

Two years earlier, the press had largely ignored the NSDAP. Now, the Brownshirts forced themselves on to the front pages.⁸¹ It was impossible to ignore them. The high level of agitation – spiced with street violence – put them on the political map in a big way. Their political opponents provided confirmation of the maxim that all publicity is good publicity. In the Ruhr, one of the toughest areas for the NSDAP, given the strength of support for the Socialists, Communists and Zentrum, a hostile Dortmund newspaper did not let up in its fierce attacks on the Nazis. But it had to acknowledge the dynamism of the party’s propaganda. ‘Here one can only accord the strongest recognition to the organization, activity, and will to power which inspires the National Socialists,’ the newspaper commented. ‘For years, the flag-bearers of the party have not avoided going into the most outlying villages and casting their slogans to the masses in at least a hundred meetings a day in Germany.’⁸² The energy and drive of the National Socialist agitation were truly astonishing. No fewer than 1,000 meetings saturated Upper and Middle Franconia during the campaign.⁸³ The authorities in the area expected big Nazi gains, noting the attractiveness of their agitation rooted in disaffection at the ‘inability of parliaments to regulate the finances’ and corresponding sympathy for a ‘fundamental alteration of the state of political affairs’.⁸⁴ In Germany as a whole, as many as 34,000 meetings were planned for the last four weeks of the campaign.⁸⁵ No other party remotely matched the scale of the NSDAP’s effort.

Hitler himself gave twenty big speeches in the six weeks running up to polling-day.⁸⁶ The attendances were massive. At least 16,000 came to listen to him in the Sportpalast in Berlin on 10 September.⁸⁷ Two days later, in Breslau, as many as 20–25,000 thronged into the Jahrhunderthalle, while a further 5–6,000 were forced to listen to the speech on loudspeakers outside.⁸⁸ In the early 1920s, Hitler’s speeches had been dominated by vicious attacks on the Jews. In the later 1920s, the question of ‘living-space’ became the central theme. In the election campaign of 1930, Hitler seldom spoke explicitly of the Jews. The crude tirades of the early 1920s were missing altogether. ‘Living-space’ figured more prominently, posed against the alternative international competition for markets. But it was not omnipresent as it had been in 1927–8. The key theme now was the collapse of Germany under parliamentary democracy and party government into a divided people with separate and conflicting interests, which only the NSDAP could overcome by creating a new unity of the nation, transcending class, estate and profession. Where the Weimar parties represented only specific interest groups, asserted Hitler, the National Socialist Movement alone stood for the nation as a whole.⁸⁹ In speech after speech, Hitler hammered this message home. Again and again he pilloried the Weimar system, not now crudely and simply as the regime of the ‘November criminals’, but for its failed promises on tax reductions, financial management and employment. All parties were blamed. They were all part of the same party system that had ruined Germany. All had had their part in the policies that had led from Versailles through the reparations terms agreed under the Dawes Plan to their settlement under the Young Plan. Lack of leadership had led to the misery felt by all sections of society. Democracy, pacifism, and internationalism had produced powerlessness and weakness – a great nation brought to its knees. It was time to clear out the rot.⁹⁰

But his speeches were not simply negative, not just an attack on the existing system. He presented a vision, a utopia, an ideal: national liberation through strength and unity. He did not propose alternative policies, built into specific election promises. He offered ‘a programme, a gigantic new programme behind which must stand not the new government, but a new German people that has ceased to be a mixture of classes, professions, estates’. It would be, he declared, with his usual stress on stark alternatives (and, as it turned out, prophetically) ‘a community of a people which, beyond all differences, will rescue the common strength of the nation, or will take it to ruin’.⁹¹ Only a ‘high ideal’ could overcome the social divisions, he stated.⁹² It was to be found, he claimed, in National Socialism, which placed the nation, the people as a whole, above any individual sector of society. In place of the decayed, the old, a new Reich had to be built on racial values, selection of the best on the basis of achievement, strength, will, struggle, freeing the genius of the individual personality, and re-establishing Germany’s power and strength as a nation.⁹³ Only National Socialism could bring this about. The NSDAP was not about day-to-day policies like other parties. It could not tread the path of other parties. ‘What we promise,’ Hitler proclaimed to storms of frenetic cheers from his massive audience in the Sportpalast on 10 September, ‘is not material improvement for the individual estate (Stand), but increase in the strength of the nation, because only this indicates the way to power and with it to the liberation of the entire people.’⁹⁴ It was not a conventional political programme. It was a political crusade. It was not about a change of government. It was a message of national redemption. In a climate of deepening economic gloom and social misery, anxiety, and division, amid perceptions of the failure and ineptitude of seemingly puny parliamentary politicians, the appeal was a powerful one.

‘This idea has no idea and no principle, and will therefore be unable to live,’ pronounced Carl von Ossietzky, pacifist and outspoken defender of democracy, in the Weltbühne, the radical journal he edited, shortly before the election. ‘No National Socialist is in a position to define the “socialism” of his party… So nothing remains but the rather peculiar dogma of the calling of Adolf Hitler to save the German nation,’ he continued. ‘The belief in the personality called to leadership is the only thing at all that has developed into a sort of theory of National Socialism. But that is mysticism, and with mysticism it’s possible to pull the wool over people’s eyes for a while, but you can’t fill their stomachs with it.’⁹⁵ As an intellectual analysis of Nazi ideology, this showed notable insight. But politically, the judgement was less astute. Ossietzky joined the army of those premature in their obituaries of National Socialism, grossly underestimating the missionary appeal, emotive force, and potential for mobilization of Hitler’s message of national salvation, to be attained through the strength of social unity and solidarity.

The message appealed not least to the idealism of a younger generation, not old enough to have fought in the war, but not too young to have experienced at first hand little but crisis, conflict, and national decline. Many from this generation, born between about 1900 and 1910, coming from middle-class families, no longer rooted in the monarchical tradition of the pre-war years, outrightly rejecting socialism and Communism, but alienated by the political, economic, social, and ideological strife of the Weimar era, were on the search for something new.⁹⁶ Laden with all the emotive baggage that belonged to the German notions of ‘Volk’ (ethnic people) and ‘Gemeinschaff (community), the aim of a ‘national community’ which would overcome class divisions seemed a highly positive one.⁹⁷ That the notion of ‘national community’ gained its definition by those it excluded from it, and that social harmony was to be established through racial purity and homogeneity, was taken for granted if not explicitly lauded. It would become clear, once the Third Reich was established, that discriminatory policies directed at those groups to be excluded were easier to bring about than was the reality of a harmonious ‘national community’.

In the absence of opinion surveys, the motivating factors behind support of the NSDAP cannot be established with precision. But an indication – even if the sample cannot be regarded as a representative one – is provided by the life stories of 581 ordinary members of the NSDAP, collected in 1934, most of whom joined before Hitler gained power and a majority even by 1930.⁹⁸ In almost a third of the cases, the social solidarity of the ‘national community’ was the most dominant ideological theme. A further third were prompted mainly by nationalist, revanchist, super-patriotic, and German-romantic notions. In only about an eighth of the cases was antisemitism the prime ideological concern (though two-thirds of the biographies revealed some form of dislike of Jews). Almost a fifth were motivated by the Hitler cult alone. From a different angle, ranked by chief object of hostility, two-thirds of the party members were predominantly anti-Marxists, while over a half of the respondents looked forward to a ‘nation reborn’ and free of ‘the system’.⁹⁹ The figures are no more than suggestive. But they are sufficient to show again that the appeal of Hitler and his Movement was not based on any distinctive doctrine.¹⁰⁰ It was a pastiche of different ideas drawn from the ideological baggage mainly of pan-Germanism and neo-conservatism, blended with an amalgam of varying phobias, resentments, and prejudice. All were represented, in some form, by other political parties and movements. But none of these had National Socialism’s image of strength and dynamism, the missionary drive of the national crusade. And Hitler was simply better than anyone else at tapping the rich vein of raw anger, barely concealed in the 1920s and now opened up by the perceived failure of democracy amid mounting crisis. In addition, and something contemporaries could easily overlook in their scornful dismissal of the poverty of Nazism’s intellectual offerings, the Hitler Movement alone on the Right offered an idealistic vision of a new society in a reborn Germany. This, it is clear, was the leading attraction for many.

Though the NSDAP claimed to be above sectional interest, it was, in fact, as the crisis gripped ever more tightly, better than any other party in tapping a whole panoply of mainly middle-class interest-groups through the sub-organizations it built up. From the ‘Agrarian Apparatus’ set up under R. Walther Darre, the party’s ‘Blood and Soil’ (Blut und Boden) theorist, in August 1930, through organizations to cope with the special interests of workers, civil servants, lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, teachers, university lecturers, students, women, youth, small traders, even coal dealers, the party erected – mainly from 1930 onwards – a framework of affiliations that enabled it at one and the same time to speak to those specific interests but claim best to represent them by incorporating them in an appeal to the overriding interest of the nation.¹⁰¹ In this sense, the NSDAP came to function increasingly as a ‘super-interest-party’. The rhetoric of the ‘national community’ and the Führer cult stood for a rebirth for Germany in which allthe various interests would have a new deal. As the economic and political situation deteriorated, the rationality of voting for a small and weak interest party rather than a massive and strong national party – upholding interests but transcending them – was less and less compelling. A vote for the Nazis could easily seem like common sense. In this way, the NSDAP started to penetrate and destroy the support of interest-parties such as the Bayerischer Bauernbund (Bavarian Peasants’ League) and seriously to erode the hold of the traditional parties such as the DNVP in rural areas.¹⁰² This process was only in its early stages in summer 1930. But it would make rapid advances following the Nazi triumph of 14 September 1930.

V

What happened on that day was a political earthquake. In the most remarkable result in German parliamentary history, the NSDAP advanced at one stroke from the twelve seats and mere 2.6 per cent of the vote gained in the 1928 Reichstag election, to 107 seats and 18.3 per cent, making it the second largest party in the Reichstag. Almost 61/2 million Germans now voted for Hitler’s party – eight times as many as two years earlier.¹⁰³ The Nazi bandwagon was rolling.

The party leadership had expected big gains. The run of successes in the regional elections, the last of them the 14.4 per cent won in Saxony as recently as June, pointed to that conclusion.¹⁰⁴ Goebbels had reckoned in April with about forty seats when it looked as if there would be a dissolution of the Reichstag at that time.¹⁰⁵ A week before polling-day in September he expected ‘a massive success’ (einen Riesenerfolg).¹⁰⁶ Hitler later claimed he had thought 100 seats were possible.¹⁰⁷ In reality, as Goebbels admitted, the size of the victory took all in the party by surprise. No one had expected 107 seats.¹⁰⁸ Hitler was beside himself with joy.¹⁰⁹

The political landscape had dramatically changed overnight. Alongside the Nazis, the Communists had increased their support, now to 13.1 per cent of the vote. Though still the largest party, the SPD had lost ground as, marginally, did the Zentrum. But the biggest losers were the bourgeois parties of the centre and Right. The DNVP had dropped in successive elections since 1924 from 20.5 to only 7.0 per cent, the DVP from 10.1 to 4.7 per cent.¹¹⁰ The Nazis were the main profiteers. One in three former DNVP voters, it has been estimated, now turned to the NSDAP, as did one in four former supporters of the liberal parties. Smaller, but still significant gains, were made from all other parties. These included the SPD, KPD, and Zentrum/BVP, though the working-class milieus dominated by the parties of the Left and, above all, the Catholic sub-culture remained, as they would continue to be, relatively unyielding terrain for the NSDAP.¹¹¹ The increased turn-out – up from 75.6 to 82 per cent – also benefited the Nazis, though less so than has often been presumed.¹¹²

The landslide was greatest in the Protestant countryside of northern and eastern Germany. With the exception of rural parts of Franconia, piously Protestant, the largely Catholic Bavarian electoral districts now for the first time lagged behind the national average. The same was true of most Catholic regions. In big cities and industrial areas – though there were some notable exceptions, such as Breslau and Chemnitz-Zwickau – the Nazi gains, though still spectacular, were also below average. But in Schleswig-Holstein, the NSDAP vote had rocketed from 4 per cent in 1928 to 27 per cent. East Prussia, Pomerania, Hanover, and Mecklenburg were among the other regions where Nazi support was now over 20 per cent.¹¹³ At least three-quarters of Nazi voters were Protestants (or, at any rate, non-Catholics).¹¹⁴ Significantly more men than women voted Nazi (though this was to alter between 1930 and 1933).¹¹⁵ At least two-fifths of Nazi support came from the middle classes. But a quarter was drawn from the working class (though the unemployed were more likely to vote for Thälmann’s party, the KPD, than Hitler’s).¹¹⁶ The middle classes were indeed over-represented among Nazi voters. But the NSDAP was no mere middle-class party, as used to be thought.¹¹⁷ Though not in equal proportions, the Hitler Movement could reasonably claim to have won support from all sections of society. No other party throughout the Weimar Republic could claim the same.

The social structure of the party’s membership points to the same conclusion.¹¹⁸ A massive influx of members followed the September election. The party recruited, if not evenly, from all sections of society. The membership was overwhelmingly male, and only the KPD was as youthful in its membership profile. The Protestant middle classes were, as among voters, over-represented. But there was also a sizeable working-class presence, even more pronounced in the SA and the Hitler Youth than in the party itself.¹¹⁹ At the same time, the political breakthrough meant that ‘respectable’ local citizens now felt ready to join the party.¹²⁰ Teachers, civil servants, even some Protestant pastors were among the ‘respectable’ groups altering the party’s social standing in the provinces. In Franconia, for example, the NSDAP already had the appearance by 1930 of a ‘civil service party’.¹²¹ The penetration by the party of the social networks of provincial towns and villages now began to intensify notably.¹²²

There are times – they mark the danger point for a political system – when politicians can no longer communicate, when they stop understanding the language of the people they are supposed to be representing. The politicians of Weimar’s parties were well on the way to reaching that point in 1930. Hitler had the advantage of being undamaged by participation in unpopular government, and of unwavering radicalism in his hostility to the Republic. He could speak in language more and more Germans understood – the language of bitter protest at a discredited system, the language of national renewal and rebirth. Those not firmly anchored in an alternative political ideology, social milieu, or denominational sub-culture found such language increasingly intoxicating.

The results of what the Frankfurter Zeitung called the ‘bitterness election’ – seeing the electorate partly motivated by the desire to upturn the current political system, but largely stirred by protest at economic misery – were a sensation.¹²³ The immediate reaction in some quarters was fear of a bloody takeover of power by the National Socialists.¹²⁴ Herbert Blank, one of Otto Strasser’s associates, spoke of a ‘suitcase-packing mood’ in Berlin editorial offices, and of stock-market shares being packed into a descending paternoster-lift.¹²⁵ The hysteria soon calmed. But democracy had certainly been dealt a heavy blow. The Nazis had moved at one fell swoop from the fringe of the political scene, outside the power-equation, to its heart. Before the election, commented Blank sardonically, the word ‘Nazis’ had immediately prompted thoughts of the madhouse. But no longer.¹²⁶Brüning could now cope with the Reichstag only through the ‘toleration’ of the SPD, which saw him as the lesser evil.¹²⁷ The Social Democrats entered their policy of ‘toleration’ with heavy hearts but a deep sense of responsibility. As their leading theoretician, Rudolf Hilferding, put it, support for a government that had moved so far to the right amounted to a sacrifice comprehensible only ‘as necessary defence of democracy in a parliament with an anti-parliamentary majority’.¹²⁸ As for Hitler, whether he was seen in a positive or a negative sense – and there was little about him that left people neutral or indifferent – his name was now on everyone’s lips. He was a factor to be reckoned with. He could no longer be ignored.

But he could still be grossly underrated. The anarchist revolutionary writer Erich Mühsam, a veteran of the Munich Räterepublik, saw Hitler’s victory as a ‘true blessing’ for the working class. All that was needed was to give the Nazis some ministerial responsibility, and their true reactionary colours would alienate workers more rapidly than the Social Democrats in power had done. The real danger, in Mühsam’s crass misjudgement, was the leadership of the DNVP, especially Hugenberg, ‘the true leader of the fascist movement in Germany’.¹²⁹ Another writer with similar revolutionary credentials, Ernst Toller, was an exception on the Left in regarding the danger as acute. In an article in the Weltbühne entitled ‘Reich Chancellor Hitler’, he signalled that ‘the clock shows one minute to twelve’.¹³⁰ Among ‘bourgeois’ writers, Thomas Mann provided a thoughtful analysis of the dangers following the Nazi landslide in his ‘German Address’ (Deutsche Ansprache), a lecture in Berlin on 17 October that was much interrupted by Nazi hecklers.¹³¹ But his cultural pessimism, his dismay at the collapse of the humanistic and idealistic values of the nineteenth century into the wild and raw, crude and primitive, emotions of mass society, led him also to a simplistic assessment of the NSDAP’s breakthrough. National Socialism offered, for him, merely ‘politics in the grotesque style with salvation-army attractions (Allüren), mass fits, showground-stall bell-ringing, hallelujah, and dervish-like repetition of monotonous slogans till everyone is foaming at the mouth’.¹³²

After the September elections, not just Germany but the world outside had to take notice of Hitler. He was now sought after for interviews by the foreign press.¹³³ One newspaper he was more than ready to talk to was the British conservative organ the Daily Mail, whose owner, Lord Rothermere, had publicly greeted the election result as ‘the rebirth of Germany as a nation’ and welcomed the prospect of the National Socialists taking power as a bulwark against Bolshevism.¹³⁴ Hitler’s interviewer, Rothay Reynolds, was won over. ‘Hitler spoke with great simplicity and with great earnestness. There was not a trace in his manner of those arts which political leaders are apt to employ when they wish to impress. I was conscious that I was talking to a man whose power lies not, as many still think, in his eloquence and in his ability to hold the attention of the mob, but in his conviction. He is not a robust-looking man. He is slight in figure, and last night, after an exhausting day in the law-courts – where he stood for over two hours while giving evidence – followed by a conference, he looked exhausted and his face was dead white. But the moment he spoke I realized that there was in him a burning spirit that could triumph over bodily weariness. He speaks very rapidly, and in his voice there is a nervous energy that makes one feel the intense conviction behind his words.’¹³⁵

Hitler’s ‘exhausting day in the law-courts’ had, in fact, been another well-exploited propaganda opportunity to allay suspicions of a putsch and to emphasize his commitment to a legal takeover of power. Hitler had throughout 1930, and especially during the election campaign, repeatedly stressed that he would win power legally.¹³⁶ In the immediate aftermath of his electoral triumph, the trial of three young Reichswehr officers from a regiment stationed in Ulm, whose Nazi sympathies saw them accused of ‘Preparing to Commit High Treason’ (Vorbereitung zum Hochverrat)through working towards a military putsch with the NSDAP and breaching regulations banning members of the Reichswehr from activities aimed at altering the constitution, gave Hitler the chance, now with the eyes of the world’s press on him, of underlining his party’s commitment to legality. The trial of the officers, Hanns Ludin, Richard Scheringer, and Hans Friedrich Wendt, began on 23 September. On the first day, Wendt’s defence counsel, Hans Frank, was given permission to summon Hitler as a witness. Two days later, huge crowds demonstrated outside the court building in favour of Hitler as the leader of the Reichstag’s second largest party went into the witness-box to face the red-robed judges of the highest court in the land.¹³⁷

Once more he was allowed to use a court of law for propaganda purposes. The judge even warned him on one occasion, as he heatedly denied any intention of undermining the Reichswehr, to avoid turning his testimony into a propaganda speech. It was to little avail. Hitler emphasized that his movement would take power by legal means and that the Reichswehr – again becoming ‘a great German people’s army’ – would be ‘the basis for the German future’.¹³⁸ He declared that he had never wanted to pursue his ideals by illegal measures. He used the exclusion of Otto Strasser to dissociate himself from those in the movement who ‘played with the term “revolution”‘. But he assured the presiding judge: ‘If our movement is victorious in its legal struggle, then there will be a German State Court and November 1918 will find its atonement, and heads will roll.’¹³⁹ This brought cheers and cries of ‘bravo’ from onlookers in the courtroom – and an immediate admonishment from the court president, reminding them that they were ‘neither in the theatre nor in a political meeting’.¹⁴⁰ He expected, Hitler continued, that the NSDAP would win a majority following two or three further elections. ‘Then it must come to a National Socialist rising (Erhebung), and we will shape the state as we want to have it.’¹⁴¹When asked how he envisaged the erection of the Third Reich, Hitler replied: ‘The National Socialist Movement will seek to attain its aim in this state by constitutional means. The constitution shows us only the methods, not the goal. In this constitutional way, we will try to gain decisive majorities in the legislative bodies in order, in the moment this is successful, to pour the state into the mould that matches our ideas.’ He repeated that this would only be done constitutionally.¹⁴² He was finally sworn in on oath to the truth of his testimony.¹⁴³ Goebbels told Scheringer, one of the defendants, that Hitler’s oath was ‘a brilliant move’. ‘Now we are strictly legal,’ he is said to have exclaimed.¹⁴⁴ The propaganda boss was delighted at the ‘fabulous’ press reportage.¹⁴⁵ Hitler’s newly appointed Foreign Press Chief, Putzi Hanfstaengl, saw to it that there was wide coverage of the trial abroad. He also placed three articles by Hitler on the aims of the movement in the Hearst press, the powerful American media concern, at a handsome fee of 1,000 Marks for each. Hitler said it was what he needed to be able now to stay at the Kaiserhof Hotel – plush, well situated near the heart of government, and his headquarters in the capital until 1933 – when he went to Berlin.¹⁴⁶

What Hitler said in the Leipzig Reichswehr trial – which ended on 4 October in eighteen-month custodial sentences on each of the three Reichswehr officers and the cashiering from the army of Ludin and Scheringer – was nothing new. As we have noted, he had been anxious for months to emphasize his ‘legal’ path to power. But the massive publicity surrounding the trial ensured that his declaration now made maximum impact. As Hans Frank later commented, the avowal of legality dispelled the fears of many that Hitler intended a violent takeover.¹⁴⁷ The belief that Hitler had broken with his revolutionary past helped to win him further support in ‘respectable’ circles.¹⁴⁸

There were those who encouraged Brüning after the election to take the NSDAP into a coalition government, arguing that government responsibility would put the Nazis to the test and limit their agitation. Brüning rejected such a notion out of hand, though he did not rule out cooperation at some future date should the party hold by the principle of legality. After deflecting Hitler’s request for an audience immediately after the election, Brüning did arrange to see him – as he did the leaders of the other parties – in early October.¹⁴⁹ The Chancellor was hoping to reach an arrangement whereby Hitler would engage in ‘loyal opposition’ and moderate his clamour for an immediate end to reparations payments while delicate negotiations for an international loan of $125,000,000, seen as indispensable to prevent economic collapse, were under way. Their meeting on 5 October, which took place to avoid publicity in the apartment of Reich Minister Treviranus, established, however, that there was no prospect of cooperation. A chasm separated them. After Brüning’s careful statement of the government’s foreign policy – a delicate strategy aimed at acquiring a breathing-space leading to the ultimate removal of reparations – Hitler responded with an hour-long monologue. He simply ignored the issues Brüning had raised. Evidently, he did not understand the intricacies of the financial strategy that the Chancellor had outlined. Instead, starting so hesitantly that Brüning and Treviranus initially felt a little sorry for him and made remarks to encourage him, he was soon in full stride. Regular march-pasts of a singing SA troop, clearly prearranged though the meeting was meant to be a secret one, seemed to spur Hitler on. He was soon haranguing the four persons present – Frick and Gregor Strasser were there as well as Brüning and Treviranus – as if he were addressing a mass rally. Brüning was struck by the number of times Hitler used the word ‘annihilate’ (vernichten). He was going to ‘annihilate’ the KPD, the SPD, ‘the Reaction’, France as Germany’s arch-enemy, and Russia as the home of Bolshevism. It was plain to the Chancellor, so Brüning later remarked, that Hitler’s basic principle would always be: ‘First power, then politics.’¹⁵⁰

There was a telling aftermath. Despite giving his word to Brüning that the discussion of government strategy on foreign policy was absolutely confidential, Hitler immediately dictated a resumé of what had been said, and his Foreign Press Chief Hanfstaengl leaked it to the American Ambassador.¹⁵¹

Brüning clearly saw Hitler as a fanatic – unsophisticated, but dangerous. Though they parted amicably enough, Hitler formed a deep loathing towards Brüning, taking on manic proportions and permeating the whole party. According to Albert Krebs, it stemmed from his strong inferiority complex towards the Chancellor during their meeting.¹⁵²

Hitler was left to continue his relentless, unbridled opposition to a system whose symbolic hate-figure was now Chancellor Brüning. Continuing the agitation was, in any case, what Hitler, like Goebbels, preferred.¹⁵³ That was his instinct. ‘Don’t write “victory” on your banners any longer,’ Hitler had told his supporters immediately after the election. ‘Write the word in its place that suits us better: “struggle!”‘¹⁵⁴ In any case, it was the only option available. As one contemporary put it, the Nazis followed the maxim: ‘“After a victory, fasten on the helmet more tightly”… Following the election victory they arranged 70,000 meetings. Again an “avalanche” passed through the Reich… Town after town, village after village is stormed.’¹⁵⁵ The election victory made this continued high level of agitation possible. The new interest in the party meant a vast influx of new members bringing new funds that could be used for the organization of still further propaganda and new activists to carry it out.¹⁵⁶ Success bred success. But the structure of the party’s support was changing in some ways. Many of the recent converts were not the fanatics of the early years, prepared to sacrifice everything for their beliefs. Their support was in some ways conditional, dependent upon success.¹⁵⁷ Many left the party as quickly as they had joined. The turnover in membership was considerable.¹⁵⁸ They could not be held together by specific policies – which would immediately have alienated part of the heterogeneous following – but only by common denominator slogans: ‘national community’, national rebirth, ‘power, glory, and prosperity’.¹⁵⁹ Above all, the prospect of victory now presented itself as a real one. Everything had to be subordinated to this single goal. The massive but shallow, organizationally somewhat ramshackle, protest movement – a loose amalgam of different interests bonded by the politics of utopia – could be sustained only by the NSDAP coming to power within a relatively short time, probably something like the space of two or three years. This was to create mounting pressure on Hitler. All he could do for the present was what he had always done best: step up the agitation still further.

VI

Behind the public persona, the private individual was difficult to locate. Politics had increasingly consumed Hitler since 1919. There was an extraordinary gulf between his political effectiveness, the magnetism not just felt by ecstatic crowds in mass rallies but by those who were frequently in his company, and the emptiness of what was left of an existence outside politics. Those who knew Hitler personally around this time found him an enigma. ‘In my recollection, there is no rounded image of Hitler’s personality,’ reflected Putzi Hanfstaengl many years later. ‘Rather, there are a number of images and shapes, all called Adolf Hitler and which were all Adolf Hitler, that can only with difficulty be brought together in overall relation to each other. He could be charming and then a little later utter opinions that hinted at a horrifying abyss. He could develop grand ideas and be primitive to the point of banality. He could fill millions with the conviction that only his will and strength of character guaranteed victory. And at the same time, even as Chancellor, he could remain a bohemian whose unreliability drove his colleagues to despair.’¹⁶⁰

For Franz Pfeffer von Salomon, the head of the SA until his dismissal in August 1930, Hitler combined the qualities of common soldier and artist. ‘A trooper with gypsy blood’ was, given Nazi racial thinking, Pfeffer’s reported extraordinary characterization. He thought Hitler had something like a sixth sense in politics, ‘a supernatural talent’. But he wondered whether he was at bottom only a type of Freikorps leader, a revolutionary who might have difficulty in becoming a statesman after the movement had taken power.¹⁶¹Pfeffer took Hitler to be a genius, something the world might experience only once in a thousand years. But the human side of Hitler, in his view, was deficient. Pfeffer, torn between adulation and criticism, saw him as a split personality, full of personal inhibitions in conflict with the ‘genius’ inside him, arising from his upbringing and education, and consuming him.¹⁶² Gregor Strasser, retaining his own critical distance from the fully-blown Führer cult, was nevertheless also, Otto Wagener recounted, prepared to see ‘genius’ of a kind in Hitler.¹⁶³ ‘Whatever there is about him that is unpleasant,’ Otto Erbersdobler, Gauleiter of Lower Bavaria, later recalled Gregor Strasser saying, ‘the man has a prophetic talent for reading great political problems correctly and doing the right thing at the opportune moment despite apparently insuperable difficulties.’¹⁶⁴ Such unusual talent as Strasser was ready to grant Hitler lay, however, as he saw it, in instinct rather than in any ability to systematize ideas.¹⁶⁵

Otto Wagener, who had been made SA Chief of Staff in 1929, was among those totally entranced by Hitler. His captivation by this ‘rare personality’¹⁶⁶ had still not deserted him many years later when he compiled his memoirs in British captivity. But he, too, was unsure what to make of Hitler. After hearing him one day in such a towering rage – it was a row with Pfeffer about the relations between the SA and SS – that his voice reverberated through the entire party headquarters, Wagener thought there was something in him resembling ‘an Asiatic will for destruction’ (a term still betraying after the war Wagener’s entrenchment in Nazi racial stereotypes). ‘Not genius, but hatred; not overriding greatness, but rage born of an inferiority complex; not Germanic heroism, but the Hun’s thirst for revenge’ was how, many years later, using Nazi-style parlance in describing Hitler’s alleged descent from the Huns, he summarized his impressions.¹⁶⁷ In his incomprehension – a mixture of sycophantic admiration and awestruck fear – Wagener was reduced to seeing in Hitler’s character something ‘foreign’ (fremdartig) and ‘diabolical’. Hitler remained for him altogether a puzzle.¹⁶⁸

Even for leading figures in the Nazi movement such as Pfeffer and Wagener, Hitler was a remote figure. He had moved in 1929 from his shabby flat in Thierschstraße to a luxury apartment in Prinzregentenplatz in Munich’s fashionable Bogenhausen.¹⁶⁹ It matched the change from the beerhall rabble-rouser to politician cavorting with the conservative establishment. He seldom had guests, or entertained. When he did, the atmosphere was always stiff and formal.¹⁷⁰ Obsessives rarely make good or interesting company, except in the eyes of those who share the obsession or those in awe of or dependent upon such an unbalanced personality. Hitler preferred, as he always had done, the usual afternoon round in Café Heck, where cronies and admirers would listen – fawningly, attentively, or with concealed boredom – to his monologues on the party’s early history for the umpteenth time, or tales of the war, ‘his inexhaustible favourite theme’.¹⁷¹

Only with very few people was he on the familiar ‘Du’ terms. He would address most Nazi leaders by their surname alone. ‘Mein Führer’ had not yet fully established itself, as it would do after 1933, as their normal mode of address to him. For those in his entourage he was known simply as ‘the boss’ (der Chef). Some, like Hanfstaengl or ‘court’ photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, insisted on a simple ‘Herr Hitler’.¹⁷² The remoteness of his personality was complemented by the need to avoid the familiarity which could have brought with it contempt for his position as supreme Leader. The aura around him dared not be sullied in any way. Along with the remoteness went distrust. Important matters were discussed only with small – and changing – groups or individuals. That way, Hitler remained in full control, never bound by any advice of formal bodies, never needing to adjudicate on disagreements between his paladins. With his fixed views and dominant personality, he was able, as Gregor Strasser pointed out, to overwhelm any individual in his presence, even those initially sceptical.¹⁷³ This in turn strengthened his self-confidence, his feeling of infallibility.¹⁷⁴ In contrast, he felt uncomfortable with those who posed awkward questions or counter-arguments. Since his ‘intuition’ – by which, between the lines, Strasser meant his ideological dogmatism coupled with tactical flexibility and opportunism – could not in itself be combated by logical argument, the party’s organizational leader went on, Hitler invariably dismissed any objections as coming from small-minded know-alls. But he registered who the critics were. Sooner or later, they would fall from grace.¹⁷⁵

Some of the most important matters he discussed, if at all, only with those in his close circle – the group of adjutants, chauffeurs, and longstanding cronies such as Julius Schaub (his general factotum), Heinrich Hoffmann (his photographer) and Sepp Dietrich (later head of his SS bodyguard).¹⁷⁶Distrust – and vanity – went hand in hand with his type of leadership, in Gregor Strasser’s view. The danger, he pointed out with reference to the dismissal of Pfeffer, was the self-selection of what Hitler wanted to hear and the negative reaction towards the bearer of bad tidings. There was something other-worldly about Hitler, thought Strasser; a lack of knowledge of human beings, and with it a lack of sound judgement of them. Hitler lived without any bonds to another human being, Strasser went on. ‘He doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t drink, he eats almost nothing but greenstuff, he doesn’t touch any woman! How are we supposed to understand him to put him across to other people?’¹⁷⁷

Hitler contributed as good as nothing to the running and organization of the massively expanded Nazi Movement. His ‘work-style’ (if it could be called such) was unchanged from the days when the NSDAP was a tiny, insignificant völkisch sect. He was incapable of systematic work and took no interest in it.¹⁷⁸ He was as chaotic and dilettante as ever. He had found the role where he could fully indulge the unordered, indisciplined, and indolent lifestyle that had never altered since his pampered youth in Linz and drop-out years in Vienna. He had a huge ‘work-room’ (Arbeitszimmer)in the new ‘Brown House’ – a building of tasteless grandiosity that he was singularly proud of. Pictures of Frederick the Great and a heroic scene of the List Regiment’s first battle in Flanders in 1914 adorned the walls. A monumental bust of Mussolini stood beside the outsized furniture. Smoking was forbidden.¹⁷⁹ To call it Hitler’s ‘work-room’ was a nice euphemism. Hitler rarely did any work there. Hanfstaengl, who had his own room in the building, had few memories of Hitler’s room since he had seen the party leader there so seldom. Even the big painting of Frederick the Great, noted the former foreign press chief, could not motivate Hitler to follow the example of the Prussian king in diligent attention to duty. He had no regular working hours. Appointments were there to be broken. Hanfstaengl had often to chase through Munich looking for the party leader to make sure he kept appointments with journalists. He could invariably find him at four o’clock in the afternoon, surrounded by his admirers, holding forth in the Café Heck.¹⁸⁰ Party workers at headquarters were no more favoured. They could never find a fixed time to see Hitler, even about extremely important business. If they managed, clutching their files, to catch him when he entered the Brown House, he would as often as not be called to the telephone and then apologize that he had to leave immediately and would be back the next day. Should they manage to have their business attended to, it was normally dispatched with little attention to detail. Hitler would in his usual manner turn the point at issue into a matter on which, pacing up and down the room, he would pontificate for an hour in a lengthy monologue.¹⁸¹ Often he would completely ignore something brought to his attention, deviating at a tangent into some current whim. ‘If Hitler gets a cue to something he is interested in – but that’s something different every day,’ Pfeffer is reported to have told Wagener in 1930, ‘then he takes over the conversation and the point of the discussion is shelved.’¹⁸² On matters he did not understand, or where a decision was awkward, he simply avoided discussion.¹⁸³

This extraordinary way of operating was certainly built into Hitler’s personality. Masterful and domineering, but uncertain and hesitant; unwilling to take decisions, yet then prepared to take decisions bolder than anyone else could contemplate; and refusal, once made, to take back any decision: these are part of the puzzle of Hitler’s strange personality. If the domineering traits were signs of a deep inner uncertainty, the overbearing features the reflection of an underlying inferiority complex, then the hidden personality disorder must have been one of monumental proportions.¹⁸⁴ To ascribe the problem to such a cause redescribes it rather than explains it. In any case, Hitler’s peculiar leadership style was more than just a matter of personality, or instinctive social-Darwinist inclination to let the winner emerge after a process of struggle. It reflected too the unceasing necessity to protect his position as leader. Acting out the leader’s role could never be halted. The famous handshake and steely blue eyes were part of the act. Even leading figures in the party never ceased to be impressed with the apparent sincerity and bond of loyalty and comradeship that they thought accompanied Hitler’s unusually long handshake and unblinking stare into their eyes.¹⁸⁵ They were too much in awe of Hitler to realize what an elementary theatrical trick it was. The greater became the nimbus of the infallible leader, the less the ‘human’ Hitler, capable of mistakes and misjudgements, could be allowed on view. The ‘person’ Hitler was disappearing more and more into the ‘role’ of the almighty and omniscient Leader.

Very occasionally, the mask slipped. Albert Krebs related a scene from early 1932 that reminded him of a French comedy. From the corridor of the elegant Hotel Atlantik in Hamburg he could hear Hitler plaintively shouting: ‘My soup, [I want] my soup.’ Krebs found him minutes later hunched over a round table in his room, slurping his vegetable soup, looking anything other than a hero of the people. He appeared tired and depressed. He ignored the copy of his speech the previous night that Krebs had brought him, and to the Gauleiter’s astonishment asked him instead what he thought of a vegetarian diet. Fully in character, Hitler launched, not waiting for an answer, into a lengthy discourse on vegetarianism. It struck Krebs as a cranky outburst, aimed at overpowering, not persuading, the listener. But what imprinted the scene on Krebs’s memory was how Hitler revealed himself as an acute hypochondriac to one to whom he had presented himself up to then ‘only as the political leader, never as a human being (Mensch)’. Krebs did not presume that Hitler was suddenly regarding him as a confidant. He took it rather as a sign of the party leader’s ‘inner instability’. It was an unexpected show of human weakness which, Krebs plausibly speculated, was overcompensated by an unquenchable thirst for power and resort to violence. According to Krebs, Hitler explained that a variety of worrying symptoms – outbreaks of sweating, nervous tension, trembling of muscles, and stomach cramps – had persuaded him to become a vegetarian.¹⁸⁶ He took the stomach cramps to be the beginnings of cancer, leaving him only a few years to complete ‘the gigantic tasks’ he had set himself. ‘I must come to power before long… I must, I must,’ Krebs has him shouting. But with this, he gained control of himself again. His body-language showed he was over his temporary depression. His attendants were suddenly called, orders were given out, telephone calls booked, meetings arranged. ‘The human being Hitler had been transformed back into the “Leader”.’¹⁸⁷ The mask was in place again.

Hitler’s style of leadership functioned precisely because of the readiness of all his subordinates to accept his unique standing in the party, and their belief that such eccentricities of behaviour had simply to be taken on board in someone they saw as a political genius. ‘He always needs people who can translate his ideologies into reality so that they can be implemented,’ Pfeffer is reported as stating.¹⁸⁸ Hitler’s way was, in fact, not to hand out streams of orders to shape important political decisions. Where possible, he avoided decisions. Rather, he laid outoften in his diffuse and opinionated fashion – his ideas at length and repeatedly. These provided the general guidelines and direction for policy-making. Others had to interpret from his comments how they thought he wanted them to act and ‘work towards’ his distant objectives. ‘If they could all work in this way,’ Hitler was reported as stating from time to time, ‘if they could all strive with firm, conscious tenacity towards a common, distant goal, then the ultimate goal must one day be achieved. That mistakes will be made is human. It is a pity. But that will be overcome if a common goal is constantly adopted as a guideline.’¹⁸⁹ This instinctive way of operating, embedded in Hitler’s social-Darwinist approach, not only unleashed ferocious competition among those in the party – later in the state – trying to reach the ‘correct’ interpretation of Hitler’s intentions. It also meant that Hitler, the unchallenged fount of ideological orthodoxy by this time, could always side with those who had come out on top in the relentless struggle going on below him, with those who had best proven that they were following the ‘right guidelines’. And since only Hitler could determine this, his power position was massively enhanced.

Inaccessibility, sporadic and impulsive interventions, unpredictability, lack of a regular working pattern, administrative disinterest, and ready resort to long-winded monologues instead of attention to detail were all hallmarks of Hitler’s style as party leader. They were compatible – at least in the short term – with a ‘leader party’ whose exclusive middle-range goal was getting power. After 1933, the same features would become hallmarks of Hitler’s style as dictator with supreme power over the German state. They would be incompatible with the bureaucratic regulation of a sophisticated state apparatus and would become a guarantee of escalating governmental disorder.

VII

At the beginning of 1931, a familiar, scarred face not seen for some time returned to the scene. Ernst Röhm, recalled by Hitler from his self-imposed exile as a military adviser to the Bolivian army, was back. He took up his appointment as new Chief of Staff of the S A on 5 January.¹⁹⁰

The case of Otto Strasser had not been the only crisis that the party leadership had had to deal with during 1930. More serious, potentially, had been the crisis within the SA. It had been simmering for some time before it exploded in the summer of 1930, during the election campaign. In reality, the crisis merely brought to a head – not for the last time – the structural conflict built into the NSDAP between the party’s organization and that of the SA. This had its origins, as we have noted, in the years before the putsch. The insistence after 1925 that the SA was the party’s ‘auxiliary troop’ (Hilfstruppe), not a paramilitary formation, had never succeeded fully in quelling the separate esprit de corps which existed among the stormtroopers. The contempt of these ‘party soldiers’ for the ‘civilians’ in the Gau offices was a constant.¹⁹¹ Regular reminders that they were subordinate to the party organization were not always easily swallowed by storm-troopers, who felt that they were the ones who went where the going was toughest, who suffered the casualties from the street warfare with Communists and Socialists.

Matters had come to a head in 1930 over the question of the placing of three SA leaders on the list of Reichstag candidates. This was, however, the occasion rather than the underlying cause. It was coupled with the financial disadvantages that the SA felt through its lack of autonomy and dependence on Gau offices and the demands for an immediate improvement. After Walter Stennes, the S A leader in the eastern regions of Germany and impatient like many of his men at the strategy of attempting to gain power by legal – and slow – means, had travelled to Munich in August to confront Hitler, but gained no audience, his subordinates in Berlin resigned their positions and refused to carry out any propaganda or protection duties for the party. A flashpoint arose when S A men assigned to protect a big Goebbels meeting in the Sportpalast on 30 August were ordered by Stennes to appear at a parade elsewhere in Berlin. Shortly afterwards, a meeting of Berlin SA leaders ended in stormtroopers forcing their way into party headquarters – overcoming the resistance of SS men (whose organization was actually still subordinate to the SA) and seriously vandalizing the building.¹⁹² Goebbels was shocked at the extent of the demolition. Hitler rushed to Berlin. Goebbels told him that a settlement was urgently needed. Otherwise the rebellion, already spreading throughout the land, would result in a catastrophe.¹⁹³ Hitler, after speaking first to some groups of the aggrieved SA men, had two meetings during the night with Stennes, without apparent success. But the next day, 1 September, he appealed to a rapidly assembled mass meeting of around 2,000 Berlin stormtroopers. Pfeffer, the supreme SA leader, had resigned three days earlier. Hitler now announced – a move received with great jubilation – that he himself was taking over the supreme leadership of the SA and SS. He outlined the achievements of the SA in the growth of the movement. He ended, his voice almost hysterical, with an appeal for loyalty. In a piece of theatre reminiscent of the party refoundation meeting in 1925, the eighty-year-old war-hero General Litzmann was brought out to offer an oath of loyalty to Hitler on behalf of all SA men. Loyalty had not been without its price. Stennes read out Hitler’s order providing for substantial financial improvements for the S A deriving from increased party dues.¹⁹⁴ The immediate crisis was over.

A memorandum from the Deputy to the Supreme Leader in South Germany, Obergruppenführer August Schneidhuber, dated 19 September 1930, did not exempt Hitler from blame for the rebellious feeling among storm-troopers. The SA had gained little recognition for an election victory which it could claim as its own, he wrote. The Berlin events had shown that Hitler had not had sufficient contact with his S A, Schneidhuber continued. Things had been brewing for some considerable time. The demand for recognition by Hitler of the achievements of the SA had been growing: ‘The Führer unfortunately did not hear the warning voices.’¹⁹⁵

The day-to-day running of the SA was temporarily taken over by Otto Wagener, a businessman recruited the previous year by Pfeffer, a former Freikorps comrade, as his chief of staff. Wagener had used his business contacts to persuade a cigarette firm to produce ‘Sturm’ cigarettes for SA men – a ‘sponsorship’ deal benefiting both the firm and the SA coffers. Stormtroopers were strongly encouraged to smoke only these cigarettes. A cut from the profit went to the SA – though after Pfeffer’s resignation, the Reich Party Treasurer made sure that control over the funds was exercised by the party itself, not by the SA.¹⁹⁶ In October 1930, Wagener passed down guidelines from Hitler indicating ‘special tasks’ for the SA in the ‘struggle for power’, and offering the expectation that after a takeover of power it would become the ‘reservoir… for a future German national army’.¹⁹⁷The claim within the SA leadership for a high degree of autonomy from the party leadership was, however, undiminished. The scope for continued conflict was still there.

This was the situation awaiting the return of Röhm, not as supreme head but as chief of staff, which was announced by Hitler to assembled SA leaders in Munich on 30 November 1930. Röhm’s high standing from the pre-putsch era, together with his lack of involvement in any of the recent intrigues, made his appointment a sensible one. However, his notorious homosexuality was soon used by those SA subordinates who resented his leadership to try to undermine the position of the new chief of staff. Hitler was forced as early as 3 February 1931 to reject attacks on ‘things that are purely in the private sphere’, and to stress that the SA was not a ‘moral establishment’ but ‘a band of rough fighters’.¹⁹⁸

Röhm’s moral standards were not the real point at issue. Hitler’s action the previous summer had defused the immediate crisis. But it was papering over the cracks. The tension remained. Neither the precise role nor degree of autonomy of the SA had been fully clarified. Given the character of the Nazi Movement and the way the SA had emerged within it, the structural problem was insoluble. And the putschist strain, always present in the SA, was resurfacing. Since his demands for Reichstag seats had been brusquely rejected, it could hardly be surprising that Stennes rebounded to an anti-parliamentary strategy. But his advocacy of taking power by force, advanced in articles in the Berlin party newspaper Der Angriff, was increasingly alarming to the Nazi leadership. Such noises flatly contradicted, and directly placed in question, the commitment to legality that Hitler had made, most publicly and on oath, following the Reichswehr trial in Leipzig the previous September, and had stressed on numerous occasions since then.¹⁹⁹ Hitler was forced in February to fire a shot across the bows to Stennes in an article in the Völkischer Beobachter, denouncing the ‘lie’ that the National Socialists were planning a violent coup, saying he understood the needs and feeling of anger of the SA and SS, but warning against ‘provocateurs’ in the movement’s own ranks who were delivering to the government the legitimation for ‘persecuting’ the party.²⁰⁰ In a speech to S A men in Munich on 7 March, Hitler stated: ‘I am accused of being too cowardly to fight illegally. I am certainly not too cowardly for that. I am only too cowardly to lead the S A to face machine-gun fire. We need the S A for more important things, namely for the construction of the Third Reich. We’ll keep to the constitution and will still come to our goal. The constitution prescribes the right to come to power. What means we use is our concern.’²⁰¹ The spectre of a ban on the party loomed very much larger with the promulgation of an emergency decree on 28 March, giving the Brüning government wide-ranging powers to combat political ‘excesses’.²⁰² ‘The party, above all the SA, seems to be facing a ban,’ wrote Goebbels in his diary.²⁰³ Hitler ordered the strictest compliance with the emergency decree by all members of the party, SA and SS.²⁰⁴ But Stennes was not prepared to yield. ‘It is the most serious crisis the party has had to go through,’ commented Goebbels.²⁰⁵

It was high time to take action. Goebbels was summoned to a meeting with Hitler and other party leaders in Weimar and told on arrival that Stennes had been deposed as S A leader in eastern Germany. No sooner had Goebbels received the news than the telephone rang from Berlin to tell him that the SA had occupied the party headquarters and the offices of the Angriff. Despite putting a brave face on it to his immediate entourage, Hitler was shocked. The Berlin SA leadership published on 2 April a frontal attack on his ‘ungerman (undeutsche) and boundless party despotism and the irresponsible demagogy’.²⁰⁶ Hitler’s immediate reply was to renew his bestowal of plenipotentiary powers on Goebbels to undertake with whatever ruthlessness necessary the purge of all ‘subversive elements’ from the Berlin party. ‘Whatever you need to do in fulfilling [this task],’ wrote Hitler, ‘I will back you.’²⁰⁷

Hitler and Goebbels worked hard to ensure declarations of loyalty from all the Gaue. Stennes, increasingly revolutionary in tone, succeeded in winning support from parts of the S A in Berlin, Schleswig-Holstein, Silesia and Pomerania. But his success was short-lived. A full-scale rebellion did not occur. Ironically, the Berlin police – the butt of so many vicious attacks by Goebbels in the Angriff – now helped the party win back control over its headquarters and over the newspaper’s offices.²⁰⁸ On 4 April, Hitler published in the Völkischer Beobachter a lengthy and cleverly constructed denunciation of Stennes and an emotional appeal to the loyalty of S A men.²⁰⁹ He stressed his own unique role in creating and building up the movement ‘as its founder and as its leader’.²¹⁰He poured scorn on Stennes’s contribution, compared with the sacrifices he himself and others had made for the movement. He accused Stennes of systematically undermining the loyalty of the SA men to him through attempting to separate the ‘idea’ from the ‘person’ – the same distinction he had rejected in the case of Otto Strasser the previous May. Hitler labelled anyone trying to lead the movement ‘into an open war against the state’ as ‘either a fool or a criminal’.²¹¹ Having marched himself in 1923, he had to recognize that any further attempt would be ‘madness’. He declared his intention ‘to eradicate this conspiracy against National Socialism root and branch’ and demanded S A men choose between ‘Police Sergeant (ret.) Stennes or the founder of the National Socialist Movement and the Supreme Leader of your SA Adolf Hitler’.²¹²

Even before he wrote, the revolt was crumbling. Support for Stennes evaporated. About 500 S A men in north and eastern Germany were purged.²¹³ The rest came back into line. Göring was empowered to re-establish control in Stennes’s area.²¹⁴ Berlin was excluded from his remit. Jealously guarding his position, Goebbels had discovered that Göring had tried to exploit the situation to take over some of his own powers in Berlin. ‘I’ll never forget that of Göring,’ he wrote. ‘One could despair of mankind. It’s a heap of frozen shit.’²¹⁵ He was placated when Hitler publicly called upon all Berlin SA men to show loyalty to his ‘friend’ Goebbels.²¹⁶

The crisis was over. The SA had been put back on the leash. It would be kept there with difficulty until the ‘seizure of power’. Then, the pent-up violence would only be fully released in the first months of 1933. With great energy and no little organizational skill Röhm now took the restructuring of the S A in hand. By the end of 1931 its numbers had trebled from 88,000 in January to 260,000 in December.²¹⁷ With such a rapid increase, a more tightly-knit organization was necessary. The SA’s image was also changing in some ways. Outside the big cities, the SA were not always archetypal street fighters and ‘political hooligans’.²¹⁸ ‘Marxists’ were often scarce on the ground in rural areas. The SA’s role looked correspondingly different. Farmers’ sons and lads from other ‘upstanding’ local families, attracted by the success of the Nazi Movement and often encouraged by friends, now often joined the SA instead of (or as well as) shooting or sporting clubs. Much of their party ‘work’ was often little more than pageantry and parading. In some places, the ‘pious’ SA marched in uniform each Sunday to church.²¹⁹ It was far from disreputable to belong to such an organization.

Under Röhm’s hand, nevertheless, the SA was returning to its character as a paramilitary formation – and now a much more formidable one than it had been in the early 1920s. Röhm had behaved with exemplary loyalty to Hitler during the Stennes crisis. But his own emphasis on the ‘primacy of the soldier’, and his ambitions, suppressed as they were in 1931, for the transformation of the SA into a popular militia, bore the seeds of conflict still to come. It prefigured the course of events which would reach their denouement only in June 1934.

VIII

Not only political, but personal crisis beset Hitler in 1931. On moving in 1929 into his spacious new apartment in Prinzregentenplatz, his niece, Geli Raubal, who had been living with her mother in Haus Wachenfeld on the Obersalzberg, had come to join him. During the following two years she was frequently seen in public with Hitler. Rumours already abounded about the nature of her relations with ‘Uncle Alf’, as she called him. On the morning of 19 September 1931, aged twenty-three, she was found dead in Hitler’s flat, shot with his pistol.

Hitler’s relations with women, as we have already remarked, were in some respects abnormal. He liked the company of women, especially pretty ones, best of all young ones. He flattered them, sometimes flirted with them, called them – in his patronizing Viennese petty-bourgeois manner – ‘my little princess’, or ‘my little countess’.²²⁰ Occasionally, if the stories are to be believed, he made a clumsy attempt at some physical contact, as in the case of Helene Hanfstaengl and Henrietta Hoffmann, the daughter of his photographer, who was to marry Baldur von Schirach (from 30 October 1931 the Reich Youth Leader of the NSDAP).²²¹ His name was linked at various times with women from as diverse backgrounds as Jenny Haug, the sister of his chauffeur in the early years, and Winifred Wagner, the Bayreuth maestro’s daughter-in-law.²²² But, whatever the basis of the rumours – often malicious, exaggerated, or invented – none of his liaisons, it seems, had been more than superficial. No deep feelings were ever stirred. Women were for Hitler an object, an adornment in a ‘men’s world’. Whether in the Men’s Home in Vienna, the regiment during the war, the Munich barracks until his discharge, and his regular gatherings of party cronies in Café Neumaier or Café Heck in the 1920s, Hitler’s environment had always been overwhelmingly male. ‘Very occasionally a woman would be admitted to our intimate circle,’ recalled Heinrich Hoffmann, ‘but she never was allowed to become the centre of it, and had to remain seen but not heard… She could, occasionally, take a small part in the conversation, but never was she allowed to hold forth or to contradict Hitler.’²²³ Beginning with the semi-mythical Stefanie in Linz, Hitler’s relations with women had usually been at a distance, a matter of affectation, not emotion. The brief flirtation with Mimi Reiter had not broken the mould. Fond of Mimi though he had been, the loving devotion of the besotted sixteen-year-old remained unrequited. Nor was his long-standing relationship with Eva Braun, one of Hoffmann’s employees whom he had first met in autumn 1929, an exception. ‘To him,’ remarked Hoffmann, ‘she was just an attractive little thing, in whom, in spite of her inconsequential and feather-brained outlook – or perhaps just because of it – he found the type of relaxation and repose he sought… But never, in voice, look or gesture, did he ever behave in a way that suggested any deeper interest in her.’²²⁴

It was different with Geli. Whatever the exact nature of the relationship – and all accounts are based heavily upon guesswork and hearsay – it seems certain that Hitler, for the first and only time in his life (if we leave his mother out of consideration), became emotionally dependent on a woman. Whether his involvement with Geli was explicitly sexual cannot be known beyond doubt.²²⁵ Some have hinted darkly at the incestuous relationships in Hitler’s ancestry – presumably along the lines that he was keeping incest in the family.²²⁶ But lurid stories of alleged deviant sexual practices put about by Otto Strasser ought to be viewed as the fanciful anti-Hitler propaganda of an outright political enemy.²²⁷ Other tales, also to be treated with scepticism, circulated of a compromising letter and of pornographic drawings by Hitler that had to be bought off a blackmailer by the Party Treasurer Schwarz.²²⁸ But whether actively sexual or not, Hitler’s behaviour towards Geli has all the traits of a strong, latent at least, sexual dependence. This manifesteditself in such extreme shows of jealousy and domineering possessiveness that a crisis in the relationship was inevitable.

Geli, broad-featured, with dark-brown, wavy hair, was no stunning beauty but nonetheless, all accounts agree, a vivacious, extrovert, attractive young woman. She livened up the gatherings in Café Heck. Hitler allowed her, something he permitted no one else, to become the centre of attraction. He took her everywhere with him – to the theatre, concerts, the opera, the cinema, restaurants, for drives in the countryside, picnics, even shopping for clothes.²²⁹ He sang her praises, showed her off. Geli was in Munich ostensibly to study at the university. But little studying was done. Hitler paid for singing lessons for her. But she was clearly never going to make an operatic heroine. She was bored by her lessons.²³⁰ She was more interested in having a good time. Flighty and flirtatious, she had no shortage of male admirers and was not backward in encouraging them. When Hitler found out about Geli’s liaison with Emil Maurice, his bodyguard and chauffeur, there was such a scene that Maurice feared Hitler was going to shoot him.²³¹ He was soon forced out of Hitler’s employment. Geli was sent to cool her ardour under the watchful eye of Frau Bruckmann.²³² Hitler’s jealous possessiveness took on pathological proportions. If she went out without him, Geli was chaperoned, and had to be home early.²³³ Everything she did was monitored and controlled. She was effectively a prisoner. She resented it bitterly. ‘My uncle is a monster,’ she is reported as saying. ‘No one can imagine what he demands of me.’²³⁴

By mid-September 1931 she had had enough. She planned to return to Vienna. It was later rumoured that she had a new boyfriend there, even that he was a Jewish artist whose child she was expecting.²³⁵ Geli’s mother, Angela Raubal, told American interrogators after the war that her daughter had wanted to marry a violinist from Linz, but that she and her half-brother, Adolf, had forbidden her to see the man.²³⁶ At any rate it seems certain that Geli was desperate to get away from her uncle’s clutches. Whether he had been physically maltreating her is again impossible to ascertain. It was said that her nose was broken and there were other indications of physical violence, when her body was found.²³⁷ Once more the evidence is too flimsy to be certain, and the story was one put out by Hitler’s political enemies.²³⁸ The police doctor who examined the body, and two women who laid out the corpse, found no wounds or bleeding on the face.²³⁹ But that Hitler was at the very least subjecting his niece to intense psychological pressure cannot be doubted. According to the version put out a few days later by the Socialist Münchener Post – vehemently denied in a public statement by Hitler – during a heated argument on Friday, 18 September he refused to let her go to Vienna.²⁴⁰ Later that day, Hitler and his entourage departed for Nuremberg.²⁴¹ He had already left his hotel the next morning when he was urgently recalled to be told the news that Geli had been found dead in his apartment, shot with his revolver. He immediately raced back to Munich – in such a rush that his car was stopped by the police for speeding about half-way between Nuremberg and Munich.²⁴²

Hitler’s political enemies had a field day.²⁴³ There were no holds barred on the newspaper reports. Stories of violent rows and physical mistreatment mingled with sexual innuendo and even the allegation that Hitler had either killed Geli himself or had had her murdered to prevent scandal.²⁴⁴Hitler himself was not in Munich when his niece died. And it is not easy to see the reasoning for a commissioned murder to prevent a scandal being carried out in his own flat.²⁴⁵ As it was, the scandal was enormous. The party’s own line that the killing had been an accident, which had occurred when Geli was playing with Hitler’s gun, also lacked all conviction.²⁴⁶ The truth will never be known. But suicide – possibly intended as a cri de coeur that went wrong – driven by the need to escape from the vice of her uncle’s clammy possessiveness and – perhaps violent – jealousy, seems the most likely explanation.

Hitler appears to have been near-hysterical, then fallen into an intense depression. Those close to him had never seen him in such a state. He seemed to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He spoke of giving up politics and finishing it all. There were fears that he might be suicidal. Hans Frank’s account implies that his despair at the scandal and press campaign against him outweighed any personal grief during these days. He took refuge in the house of his publisher, Adolf Müller, on the shores of the Tegernsee. Frank used legal means to block the press attacks. And once he had visited Geli’s grave in Vienna’s sprawling Central Cemetery, a few days after the funeral, Hitler was suddenly able to snap out of his depression.²⁴⁷ All at once, the crisis was over.

At his first speech a few days later, in Hamburg, he received an even more rapturous reception than usual.²⁴⁸ According to one person who was there, he looked ‘very strained (angegriffen)’ but spoke well.²⁴⁹ He was back in business. More than ever, the orgiastic frenzy he worked himself up into during his big public addresses, and the reponse he encountered in what he saw as the ‘feminine mass’, provided a substitute for the emptiness and lack of emotional bonds in his private life.

Some who saw Hitler at close quarters were convinced that Geli could have exerted a restraining influence upon him.²⁵⁰ It is a highly dubious theory. His emotional involvement with Geli, whatever its precise nature, was – everything points to this – more intense than any other human relationship he had before or after. There was something both obsessive and cloyingly sentimental about the way her rooms in the Prinzregentenplatz apartment and in Haus Wachenfeld were turned into shrines.²⁵¹ In a personal sense, Geli was indeed irreplaceable (though Hitler soon enough had Eva Braun in tow). But it was a purely selfish dependency on Hitler’s part. Geli had been allowed to have no existence of her own. Hitler’s own extreme dependency insisted that she should be totally dependent upon him. In human terms, it was a self-destructive relationship. Politically, apart from the short-lived scandal, it was of no significance. It is difficult to imagine Geli turning Hitler away from his deeper, less personal, obsession with power. Nor was his embittered thirst for vengeance and destruction altered by her death. History would have been no different had Geli Raubal survived.

IX

Little over a week after Geli’s death, the city elections in the relatively unresponsive territory of Hamburg gave the Nazis 26.2 per cent of the vote, ahead of the Communists and only fractionally behind the SPD.²⁵² With as high a vote as 37.2 per cent in rural Oldenburg the previous May, the NSDAP had become for the first time the largest party in a state parliament.²⁵³ In the last state elections of the year, in Hessen on 15 November, this feat was repeated in a remarkable poll that gave the Nazis, with 37.1 per cent, a higher proportion of the vote than the Communists and Socialists put together, and twenty-seven seats in a Landtag where they had previously been unrepresented.²⁵⁴ The electoral landslide showed no signs of abating. With the Brüning government under siege, ruling by emergency decree, its policies – calculated to demonstrate Germany’s inability to pay reparations – sending the economy plummeting to disaster in a catastrophic downward spiral of cascading production levels and soaring levels of unemployment and social misery, more and more voters were cursing the wretched Republic. By the time of the calamitous bank crash in July, when two of Germany’s major banks, the Darmstädter and the Dresdner, collapsed, those voters looking to the survival and recovery of democracy were in a dwindling minority. But what sort of authoritarian solution might follow the liquidation of the Weimar Republic was still anything but clear. Germany’s power élites were no more united on this issue than were the mass of the population.

With the levels of popular support the Nazis now enjoyed, no potential right-wing solution could afford to leave them out of the equation. In July, Hugenberg, the leader of the DNVP, and Franz Seldte, the head of the huge veterans’ organization, the Stahlhelm, had renewed their alliance with Hitler – resurrecting the former grouping to fight the Young Plan – in the ‘National Opposition’. Hugenberg assuaged the criticisms of Reich President Hindenburg, who thought the Nazis not only vulgar but dangerous socialists, by assuring him that he was ‘politically educating’ them towards the national cause to prevent them slipping into Socialism or Communism. Hitler’s line was, as ever, pragmatic. The publicity and contacts won through allying with Hugenberg were valuable. But he made sure he kept his distance. At the highly publicized rally of Nationalist Opposition forces at Bad Harzburg on 11 October, resulting in the creation of the ‘Harzburg Front’ and a manifesto (which he thought worthless) demanding new Reichstag elections and the suspension of emergency legislation, Hitler stood for the march-past of the S A then demonstratively left before the Stahlhelm could begin, having left them waiting for twenty-five minutes. He also refused to attend the joint lunch of the nationalist leaders. He could not suppress his repulsion at such meals, he wrote – deflecting the criticism of his behaviour into a further advertisement for his image as a leader who shared the privations of his followers – ‘when thousands of my supporters undertake service only at very great personal sacrifice and in part with hungry stomachs’.²⁵⁵ A week later, to underline the NSDAP’s independent strength, he took the salute at a march-past of 104,000 SA and SS men in Braunschweig, the largest Nazi paramilitary demonstration to date.²⁵⁶

Among those taking part at Bad Harzburg, and whose presence there made a stir, was the former President of the Reichsbank Hjalmar Schacht, now turned political adventurer. Some other figures – though not prominent ones – from the world of business were also there.²⁵⁷ Schacht – a freemason, and founding member of the pro-Republican DDP – was an unlikely fellow-traveller of Nazism. But he had moved strongly to the Right after resigning the presidency of the Reichsbank in March 1930 in protest at the ways of implementing the Young Plan, and had publicly expressed admiration for vitality of the NSDAP in December 1930.²⁵⁸ Göring, with whom he was on good terms, arranged for Schacht to come to dinner and meet Hitler on 5 January 1931. The dinner was also attended by another Nazi sympathizer from big business, Fritz Thyssen, the chairman of the supervisory board of the United Steel Works.²⁵⁹ Hitler arrived, wearing party uniform, only after the meal was over. As usual, he dominated the ‘conversation’, contributing, thought Schacht, some 95 per cent of what was said.²⁶⁰ Even so, Schacht, intelligent and with sharply critical acumen, was impressed:

His skill in exposition was most striking. Everything he said he demonstrated as incontrovertible truth; nevertheless his ideas were not unreasonable and were entirely free from any propagandist pathos. He spoke with moderation and was obviously anxious to avoid anything that might shock us in our capacity as representatives of a more traditional society… The thing that impressed me most about this man was his absolute conviction of the rightness of his outlook and his determination to translate this outlook into practical action. Even at this first meeting it was obvious to me that Hitler’s power of propaganda would have a tremendous pull with the German population if we did not succeed in overcoming the economic crisis and weaning the masses from radicalism. Hitler was obsessed by his own words, a thorough fanatic with the most powerful effect on his audience; a born agitator in spite of a hoarse, sometimes broken and not infrequently croaking voice.²⁶¹

Schacht tried at the time to persuade Brüning to include the NSDAP in a coalition, presuming the responsibilities of government would have tamed it. Thyssen, attracted by the corporatist ideas in the NSDAP’s programme, had similarly advocated working with the Nazis to the Chancellor.²⁶²Neither Schacht nor Thyssen was, however, representative of the leaders of big business.

During the 1920s, big business had, not surprisingly, shown little interest in the NSDAP, a fringe party in the doldrums without, it seemed, any prospect of power or influence. The election result of 1930 had compelled the business community to take note of Hitler’s party. A series of meetings were arranged at which Hitler explained his aims to prominent businessmen. At the end of September 1930 he put his views to the former Chancellor and current head of the Hamburg-America shipping line, Wilhelm Cuno, who was rumoured to be contemplating running for Reich President with NSDAP support when Hindenburg’s term of office expired in 1932.²⁶³ Cuno was impressed with Hitler, who advanced a ‘moderate’ economic programme upholding capitalist enterprise and even claiming that there would be no violent persecution of Jews under Nazi rule.²⁶⁴ Hitler also spoke again at the Hamburger Nationalklub, a meeting arranged by Cuno, and to a group of Ruhr industrialists at the home of Emil Kirdorf, the aged Ruhr coal magnate and long-standing Nazi sympathizer, near Mülheim.²⁶⁵ Further meetings with a number of business leaders, arranged by Walther Funk, the former editor of the financial newspaper the Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, followed early in 1931 in Hitler’s suite at the Kaiserhof Hotel, at which considerable funding was reportedly pledged in the event of an attempted left-wing coup.²⁶⁶ The reassurances given by Hitler at such meetings, as well as by Göring (who had good links to top businessmen), were, however, not able to dispel the worries of most business leaders that the NSDAP was a socialist party with radical anti-capitalist aims. Hitler was seen by many of them as a ‘moderate’.²⁶⁷ But whatever favourable impression Hitler himself was able to make, it was insufficient to remove the ‘socialist’ image of his party in the eyes of many businessmen. The NSDAΡ’s support of the Berlin metalworkers’ strike in autumn 1930, and the participation of the Nazis’ surrogate trade union, the Nationalsozialistische Betriebszellenorganisation (NSBO, National Socialist Factory Cell Organization), in four strikes the following year, alongside the continued anti-capitalist rhetoric of some party spokesmen, seemed active proof of its ‘dangerous’ tendencies.²⁶⁸

Despite growing disillusionment with the Brüning administration, most ‘captains of industry’ retained their healthy scepticism about the Hitler Movement during 1931. There were exceptions, such as Thyssen, but in general it was the owners of smaller and medium-sized concerns who found the NSDAP an increasingly attractive proposition.²⁶⁹ The story put about in the memoirs of the later press chief Otto Dietrich of Hitler ceaselessly touring Germany in his big Mercedes in the second half of 1931, cultivating big business leaders and breaking down their resistance to the NSDAP, was no more than part of the myth that Hitler had won power by conquering the hearts and minds of every section of the German people.²⁷⁰ No more solidly founded was the view of the Left at the time that the Nazi Movement was the creature of big business and sustained by its funding. Most leaders and executives of big business were shrewd enough to spread their funding round as a form of political insurance, once the Nazi breakthrough had taken place. But most of it still went to the Nazis’ political opponents on the conservative Right.²⁷¹ The leaders of big business were no friends of democracy. But nor, for the most part, did they want to see the Nazis running the country.

This remained the case throughout most of 1932, a year dominated by election campaigns in which the Weimar state disintegrated into all-embracing crisis. Hitler’s much publicized address on 27 January 1932 to a gathering of some 650 members of the Düsseldorf Industry Club in the grand ballroom of Düsseldorfs Park Hotel did nothing, despite the later claims of Nazi propaganda, to alter the sceptical stance of big business.²⁷² The response to his speech was mixed. But many were disappointed that he had nothing new to say, avoiding all detailed economic issues by taking refuge in his well-trodden political panacea for all ills.²⁷³ And there were indications that workers in the party were not altogether happy at their leader fraternizing with industrial leaders. Intensified anti-capitalist rhetoric, which Hitler was powerless to quell, worried the business community as much as ever.²⁷⁴ During the presidential campaigns of spring 1932, most business leaders stayed firmly behind Hindenburg, and did not favour Hitler. And during the Reichstag campaigns of summer and autumn, the business community overwhelmingly supported the parties that backed the cabinet of Franz von Papen – from a Westphalian aristocratic family, married to the daughter of a Saarland industrialist, well connected to industrial leaders, landowners, and Reichswehr officers – a somewhat lightweight, dilettante politician, but one who epitomized the ingrained conservatism, reactionary tendencies, and desire for a return to ‘traditional’ authoritarianism of the German upper class.²⁷⁵He was the establishment figure; Hitler the outsider and, in some respects, unknown quantity. Papen, not Hitler, was, not surprisingly then, the favourite of big business. Only in autumn 1932, when Papen was ousted by Kurt von Schleicher, the general at the heart of most political intrigues, maker and breaker of governments, did the attitude of most leading figures in business, worried by the new Chancellor’s approach to the economy and opening to the trade unions, undergo a significant change.²⁷⁶

The NSDAP’s funding continued before the ‘seizure of power’ to come overwhelmingly from the dues of its own members and the entrance fees to party meetings.²⁷⁷ Such financing as came from fellow-travellers in big business accrued more to the benefit of individual Nazi leaders than the party as a whole. Göring, needing a vast income to cater for his outsized appetite for high living and material luxury, quite especially benefited from such largesse. Thyssen in particular gave him generous subsidies, which Göring – given to greeting visitors to his splendidly adorned Berlin apartment dressed in a red toga and pointed slippers, looking like a sultan in a harem – found no difficulty in spending on a lavish lifestyle.²⁷⁸ Walther Funk, one of Hitler’s links to leading industrialists, also used his contacts to line his own pockets. Gregor Strasser, too, was a recipient.²⁷⁹Corruption at all levels was endemic.

It would be surprising if none of such donations had reached Hitler. Indeed, Göring is alleged to have said that he passed on to Hitler some of the funding he received from Ruhr industrialists.²⁸⁰ Hitler had from the earliest years of his ‘career’, as we have seen, been supported by generous donations from benefactors.²⁸¹ But by the early 1930s he was less dependent on financial support from private patrons, even if his celebrity status now unquestionably brought him many unsolicited donations. His sources of income have remained largely in the dark. They were kept highly secret, and totally detached from party finances. Schwarz, the party treasurer, had no insight into Hitler’s own funds. But his taxable income alone – and much was doubtless left undeclared – trebled in 1930 to 48,472 Marks as sales of Mein Kampf soared following his election triumph. That alone was more than Funk had earned from a year’s salary as editor of a Berlin daily. Though for image purposes he repeatedly emphasized that he drew no salary from the party, nor any fee for the speeches he delivered on its behalf, he received hidden fees in the form of lavish ‘expenses’ calculated on the size of the takings at his meetings. In addition, he was paid handsomely for the articles he contributed to the Völkischer Beobachter and, between 1928 and 1931, to the Illustrierter Beobachter. And with the foreign press now clamouring for interviews, another door to a lucrative source of income opened. Partly subsidized, if indirectly, by the party, partly drawing substantial royalties from his stated occupation as a ‘writer’, and partly benefiting from unsolicited donations from admirers, Hitler’s sources of income were more than adequate to cover the costs of an affluent lifestyle. His proclaimed modest demands in matters of food and clothes – a constant element of his image as a humble man of the people – fell within a context of chauffeur-driven Mercedes, luxury hotels, grand residences, and a personal livery of bodyguards and attendants.²⁸²

X

During 1932, the terminal nature of Weimar’s ailing democracy became unmistakable. A prelude to the drama to follow had its setting in the presidential election in the spring.

Reich President Hindenburg’s seven-year term of office was due to expire on 5 May 1932. In the prevailing conditions of economic depression and political turmoil, the prospect of a bitterly contested election for the presidency was hardly enticing. But the chances of the parties agreeing on a single candidate were zero. Moves, initially prompted by Papen, had already therefore been afoot since the previous autumn to have the eighty-four-year old war-hero Paul von Hindenburg und Beneckendorff confirmed by the Reichstag for a further period in office, without the need for a divisive election. But a constitutional change would be required to achieve this, necessitating a two-thirds majority in the Reichstag. This could only be obtained if the National Socialists and DNVP were prepared to support it.²⁸³ Hitler was summoned early in January 1932 to a meeting in Berlin with the Reich Defence and acting Interior Minister Wilhelm Groener and Hindenburg’s State Secretary Otto Meissner, where the proposition was put to him. Hitler did not commit himself immediately. But the Nazi leadership recognized that such a move could only strengthen Brüning’s position. The Chancellor’s tactics had put them on the spot. ‘The chessmatch for power begins,’ noted Goebbels.²⁸⁴

A week later, Hitler notified the Chancellor of his party’s rejection of the proposal – on ‘constitutional, foreign-political, domestic, and moral grounds’.²⁸⁵ A rancorous public exchange with Brüning followed.²⁸⁶ How genuine Hitler’s constitutional scruples were became clear in his offer to support Hindenburg’s candidacy if the Reich President dismissed Brüning and announced new Reichstag and Prussian elections, following which the newly elected Reichstag – which Hitler was confident of controlling – would extend his period of office.²⁸⁷

Hindenburg’s refusal, expected though it was, left Hitler in a quandary. In the event of presidential elections, he could scarcely refrain from standing. Not to stand would be incomprehensible, and a massive disappointment to his millions of supporters. They might start to turn away from a leader who shied away from the challenge. On the other hand, a personal contest between the corporal and the field-marshal, between the upstart political adventurer and the revered hero of Tannenberg, widely regarded as the symbol of national values above the fray of party politics, could hardly be expected to result in a victory for Hitler. Faced with his dilemma, Hitler dithered for more than a month before deciding to run for president. Goebbels was almost in despair at the indecision, as party morale wavered and Hitler preoccupied himself with grandiose schemes for rebuilding Berlin.²⁸⁸ At last, on 22 February, Goebbels was given permission to announce Hitler’s candidacy during his speech at a big rally in the Sportpalast that evening. ‘Thank God’ was the propaganda chief’s reaction. The cheering following the announcement lasted for ten minutes. Goebbels’ barely concealed criticism of Hitler’s leadership in the past weeks was immediately dispelled. ‘He is and remains our Leader,’ he reminded himself. And a few days later, he added that the Führer was ‘again on top of the situation’.²⁸⁹

A technicality had to be cleared up: Hitler was still not a German citizen. Previous ideas of attaining citizenship for him, in Bavaria in 1929 and Thuringia the following year, had foundered. He remained ‘stateless’. Rapid steps were now taken to appoint Hitler to the post of Regierungsrat(government councillor) in the Office of State Culture and Measurement (Landeskultur- und Vermessungsamt) in Braunschweig and as a state representative in Berlin. Through his nomination as a civil servant, Hitler acquired German citizenship. On 26 February 1932, he swore his oath as a civil servant to the German state he was determined to destroy.²⁹⁰

Just how far the political centre of gravity had shifted to the Right was shown by the perverse alignments in the presidential election campaign. Hindenburg was dependent for support on the Socialists and Catholics, who had formed his main opposition seven years earlier, and made strange and unwelcome bedfellows for the staunchly Protestant and arch-conservative doyen of the military caste. The bourgeois Right, headed by Hugenberg, refused Hindenburg their support. Showing how fragile the professed unity of the Harzburg Front had been, they also denied it to Hitler. But their largely unknown nominee, the deputy leader of the Stahlhelm, Theodor Duesterberg, was hardly a serious candidate.²⁹¹ On the Left, the Communists nominated their leader, Ernst Thälmann, sure of support only from his own camp. It was plain from the outset, therefore, that the main contenders were Hindenburg and Hitler. Equally plain was the Nazi message: a vote for Hitler was a vote for change; under Hindenburg, things would stay as they were. ‘Old man… you must step aside,’ proclaimed Hitler at a rally attended by an estimated 25,000 in the Berlin Sportpalast on 27 February.²⁹²

The Nazi propaganda machine went into top gear. The country was engulfed during the first of five major campaigns that year with a veritable flood of Nazi meetings, parades, and rallies, accompanied by the usual pageantry and razzmatazz. Hitler himself, his indecision resolved, poured all his energies as usual into his speaking tourneys, travelling the length and breadth of Germany, and addressing huge crowds in twelve cities during the eleven-day campaign. In Breslau he arrived four hours late, in Stuttgart two hours behind schedule. The crowds still waited. The Völkischer Beobachter claimed – though certainly with some exaggeration – that he spoke in all to around half a million people.²⁹³

Expectations were built up. ‘Everywhere there’s a victory mood,’ wrote Goebbels on election day, 13 March. But he added, cautiously: ‘I’m somewhat sceptical.’ He shared the bitter disappointment and depression of Hitler’s supporters when the results were announced.²⁹⁴ The 30 per cent won by Hitler was more or less in line with expectations, though lower than the NSDAΡ’s showing in the Oldenburg and Hessen state elections the previous year. But Thälmann, with only 13 per cent, had done less well than anticipated, Duesterberg had gained under 7 per cent, and the SPD’s supporters, whatever their distaste for the President, had evidently stuck by Hindenburg, whose vote had, therefore, held up well. With over 49 per cent of almost 38 million votes cast, the Reich President ended up a mere 170,000 votes short of the absolute majority.²⁹⁵ There had to be a second round.

This time Nazi propaganda had a new gimmick. Hitler took to the skies in a hired plane, American-style, in his first ‘Germany Flight’ (Deutschlandflug), embellished with the slogan of ‘the Führer over Germany’. Flying from city to city in a truncated campaign squeezed into less than a week to accommodate an Easter truce in politicking, Hitler was able to hold twenty major speeches in different venues before huge audiences, totalling close to a million persons.²⁹⁶ It was a remarkable electioneering performance, the like of which had never before been seen in Germany. This time there was no disappointment in the Nazi camp. Hindenburg, with 53 per cent, was re-elected. But while Thälmann had slumped to only 10 per cent, Hitler had increased his support to 37 per cent. He had done much more than merely save face. Well over 13 million, 2 million more than in the first round, had voted for him.²⁹⁷ The Führer cult, the manufactured commodity of Nazi propaganda and once the property of a tiny collection of fanatics, was now on the way to being sold to a third of the German population.

Quite literally while the votes were being counted, Goebbels was laying the preparations for the next battle: the series of state elections on 24 April in Prussia, Bavaria, Württemberg and Anhalt, and the city elections in Hamburg.²⁹⁸ All in all, this amounted to about four-fifths of the country.²⁹⁹Without a break, the frenetic campaigning continued. In his second ‘Germany Flight’ between 16 and 24 April, Hitler – this time taking his campaign not just to the cities but deep into the provinces – gave twenty-five big speeches.³⁰⁰ In small towns in provincial backwaters, the impact was enormous. Nothing had been seen like it before. At Miesbach, in Upper Bavaria, the local press described Hitler’s speech as ‘an unprecedented sensation’. Thousands had waited for hours in pouring rain for it.³⁰¹ Elsewhere it was ‘Führer weather’. ‘The April sun shone as in summer, turning everything into a picture of happiest expectation,’ wrote Luise Solmitz, a Hamburg schoolteacher, about the atmosphere in which Hitler addressed over 120,000 people crowded on to the speedway track at Lokstedt in the Hamburg district on 23 April. The streams of people arriving by foot and unloading from trains seemed endless. Most had a lengthy wait to see their hero. Frau Solmitz herself was there two and a half hours before Hitler was due to speak. But the massive crowd was well-behaved, controlled only by stewards with the police keeping in the background. Most of those attending were already attracted to the Nazi cause. ‘No one said “Hitler”, always just “the Führer”,’ recorded Frau Solmitz. ‘“The Führer says”, “the Führer” wants, and what he said and wanted, that seemed good and proper.’ Her description continued:

The hours passed, the sun shone, the expectation mounted… It got to 3 o’clock. ‘The Führer’s coming!’ A thrill goes through the masses. Around the platform hands could be seen raised in the Hitler greeting… There stood Hitler in a simple black coat, looking expectantly over the crowd. A forest of swastika banners rustled upwards. The jubilation of the moment gave vent to a rousing cry of ‘Heil’. Then Hitler spoke. Main idea: out of the parties a people (Volk) will emerge, the German people. He castigated the ‘system’… For the rest, he refrained from personal attacks and also unspecific and specific promises. His voice was hoarse from speaking so much in previous days. When the speech was over, there were roars of jubilation and applause. Hitler saluted, gave his thanks, the ‘Germany Anthem’ sounded over the track. Hitler was helped into his coat. Then he went. How many look to him in touching faith as the helper, saviour, the redeemer from overgreat distress. To him, who rescues the Prussian prince, the scholar, the clergyman, the peasant, the worker, the unemployed out of the party into the people.³⁰²

The results were closely in line with the votes won by Hitler in the run-off presidential election. Leader and party were largely indistinguishable in the eyes of the voters. In the giant state of Prussia, embracing two-thirds of Reich territory, the NSDAP’s vote of 36.3 per cent made it easily the largest party, now far ahead of the SPD which had been the dominant party since 1919. Since the previous election, in 1928, the Nazis had held six seats in the Prussian Landtag. Now they had 162 seats. In Bavaria, with 32.5 per cent, they came to within 0.1 per cent of the ruling BVP. In Württemberg, they rose from 1.8 per cent in 1928, to 26.4 per cent. In Hamburg, they attained 31.2 per cent. And in Anhalt, with 40.9 per cent, they could nominate the first Nazi Minister President of a German state.³⁰³

‘It’s a fantastic victory that we’ve attained,’ noted Goebbels, with justification. But he added: ‘We must come to power in the foreseeable future. Otherwise we’ll win ourselves to death in elections.’³⁰⁴ Mobilizing the masses was in itself going to be insufficient, Goebbels was recognizing. Despite the immense gains over the previous three years, there were signs that the limits of mobilization were being reached. The way ahead was still anything but clear. But another door was about to open.

XI

The state election campaign had been fought in the wake of a ban on the SA and SS. Chancellor Brüning and Interior and Defence Minister Groener, under pressure from the state authorities, had persuaded Hindenburg three days after the President’s re-election to dissolve ‘all military-like(militärähnliche) organizations’ of the NSDAP.³⁰⁵ The dissolution was directly occasioned by the Prussian police’s discovery, following a tip-off to Reich Minister of the Interior Groener, in raids on Nazi Party offices, shortly after the first round of the presidential election, of material indicating the SA’s readiness for a takeover of power by force following an electoral victory by Hitler.³⁰⁶ Despite Hitler’s repeated declarations that he would come to power by legal means, the concern of the authorities about the putschist intentions within the party, particularly within the SA, had persisted. The sensational discovery the previous autumn of the ‘Boxheimer Documents’ – named after the place in Hessen, the Boxheimer Hof, where they were found – outlining Nazi plans for taking power by force, had strongly underlined the justification for such concern. Actually, the ‘Boxheimer Documents’ had amounted to a half-baked concoction of measures to be taken in the event of a Nazi takeover of state power following the smashing of a Communist attempted putsch, devised on his own initiative by the ambitious head of the party’s legal section in Gau Hessen, Werner Best.³⁰⁷ At the time, an embarrassed Hitler, whose claim to have known nothing of the incriminating material was in fact correct, had satisfied Groener with a renewed declaration of his legal intentions.³⁰⁸ But there had been distinct signs during the presidential election campaigns that the S A – now close to 400,000 strong – was straining at the leash.³⁰⁹ Talk of a putsch attempt by the Left in the event of a Hitler victory was in the air.³¹⁰ The SA had been placed on nationwide alarm. But instead of action, the stormtroopers had sat depressed in their quarters after Hitler’s defeat.³¹¹ Goebbels noted the impatience of the SA again on 2 April, commenting that a premature strike with force could destroy Nazi hopes at one fell swoop.³¹² News of the impending ban leaked to the Nazi leadership two days before it was imposed.³¹³ Some preparations could therefore be made to retain the SA as distinct units within the party organization by simply reclassing the stormtroopers now as ordinary party members.³¹⁴ And since the Left also had its paramilitary organizations which did not fall under the Groener dissolution order, the authorities had delivered the Nazis a further effective propaganda weapon, which Hitler was quick to exploit.³¹⁵

More importantly, the SA ban opened up the machinations that were to undermine the position not only of Groener, but of Brüning too, and to move the Reich government sharply to the Right. The key figure was to be General von Schleicher, head of the Ministerial Office, the army’s political bureau, in the Reichswehr Ministry, and seen up to now as Groener’s protege. Schleicher’s aim was an authoritarian regime, resting on the Reichswehr, with support from the National Socialists. The idea was to ‘tame’ Hitler, and incorporate the ‘valuable elements’ from his Movement into what would have been essentially a military dictatorship with populist backing.³¹⁶ Schleicher opposed the ban on the SA, therefore, which he wanted as a feeder organization for an expanded Reichswehr, once the reparations issue was out of the way. In secret talks with Schleicher on 28 April, Hitler had learnt that the Reichswehr leadership no longer supported Brüning.³¹⁷ He followed this on 7 May with what Goebbels described as ‘a decisive discussion with General Schleicher’, attended by some of Hindenburg’s immediate entourage. ‘Brüning is to go in the next days,’ he added. ‘The Reich President will withdraw his confidence. The plan is to install a presidential cabinet. The Reichstag will be dissolved; all coercive laws will be dropped. We will be given freedom of action, and will then deliver a masterpiece of propaganda.’³¹⁸ Removal of the SA ban and new elections were, then, Hitler’s price for supporting a new right-wing cabinet.³¹⁹ With the emphasis on elections, it is clear that Hitler thought, as always, essentially of little more than coming to power by winning over the masses.

Brüning was able to survive longer than the conspirators had imagined. But his days were plainly numbered. In the meantime, the orchestrated campaign by the Nazis to pressurize Groener into resignation proved successful. After rowdy scenes in the Reichstag during his speech on 10 May, and after being told by Schleicher that he had lost the confidence of the Reichswehr, Groener announced his resignation on 12 May.³²⁰ It was seen as the beginning of the end for Brüning. Hitler was ‘extraordinarily content’.³²¹ The next day, Goebbels noted: ‘We get message from General Schleicher: the crisis continues according to plan.’³²²

The last straw for Brüning was Hindenburg’s displeasure, influenced by lobbying from fellow estate-owners in eastern Germany, at a planned emergency decree to break up bankrupt estates to create smallholder settlements. This was, however, only a contributory factor to Brüning’s downfall. His deflationary policies that had precipitated the steepest economic collapse outside war witnessed in a modern industrial society had served their purpose. The end of reparations was now in sight, and would effectively be brought about at the Lausanne Conference only a few weeks later. With that, the move to the Right that Hindenburg favoured and Schleicher had worked for could now be actively implemented. On 29 May, Hindenburg brusquely sought Brüning’s resignation. The following day, in the briefest of audiences, it was submitted.³²³

‘The system is collapsing,’ wrote Goebbels. Hitler saw the Reich President that afternoon. The meeting went well, he told his propaganda chief in the evening: ‘The SA ban will be dropped. Uniforms are to be allowed again. The Reichstag will be dissolved. That’s the most important of all. v. Papen is foreseen as Chancellor. But that is not so interesting. Voting, voting! Out to the people. We’re all very happy.’³²⁴

XII

The new Chancellor, Franz von Papen, an urbane and well-connected member of the Catholic nobility, a former diplomat and arch-conservative formerly on the right of the Zentrum, had been sounded out by Schleicher some days before Brüning’s fall. Schleicher had not only cleared the ground with Hindenburg for Papen’s appointment, but had also drawn up a list of cabinet ministers and discussed the matter with some of them even before Papen agreed to serve.³²⁵ With his ‘cabinet of barons’ independent of parties, Papen made no pretence at parliamentary government. With no prospect of finding a majority in the Reichstag, he was dependent solely upon presidential emergency decrees – and the toleration of the NSDAP. Just over a week after coming into office, he met Hitler for the first time. ‘I found him curiously unimpressive,’ wrote Papen after the war.

I could detect no inner quality which might explain his extraordinary hold on the masses. He was wearing a dark blue suit and seemed the complete petit-bourgeois. He had an unhealthy complexion, and with his little moustache and curious hair style had an indefinable bohemian quality. His demeanour was modest and polite, and although I had heard much about the magnetic quality of his eyes, I do not remember being impressed by them… As he talked about his party’s aims I was struck by the fanatical insistence with which he presented his arguments. I realized that the fate of my Government would depend to a large extent on the willingness of this man and his followers to back me up, and that this would be the most difficult problem with which I should have to deal. He made it clear that he would not be content for long with a subordinate role and intended in due course to demand plenary powers for himself. ‘I regard your Cabinet only as a temporary solution, and will continue my efforts to make my party the strongest in the country. The Chancellorship will then devolve on me,’ he said.³²⁶

Five days earlier, as prearranged, the Reich President had dissolved the Reichstag, setting new elections for the latest possible date, 31 July 1932. Hitler now had his chance to try to win power by the ballot-box. State elections in Oldenburg at the end of May and in Mecklenburg-Schwerin on 5 June brought the NSDAP respectively 48.4 and 49.0 per cent of the vote.³²⁷ On 19 June in Hessen the Nazis increased their proportion of the vote there to 44 per cent.³²⁸ An absolute majority in the Reichstag election did not seem out of the question.

The second part of Schleicher’s deal with Hitler, the lifting of the ban on the SA and SS, eventually took place, after some delay, on 16 June.³²⁹ It was already by then being openly flouted.³³⁰ It ushered in a summer of political violence throughout Germany such as had never been seen before. The latent civil war that had existed throughout the Weimar Republic was threatening to become an actual civil war. Armed clashes and street-fighting between the SA and the Communists were daily occurrences. Nazi violence, it might be thought, ought to have put off the ‘respectable’ bourgeois following it was increasingly attracting.³³¹ But since such Nazi supporters saw the threat as lying on the Left, the anti-Communist thuggery purporting to serve the interests of the nation alienated remarkably few voters.

The level of violence was frightening. In the second half of June, after the lifting of the S A ban, there were seventeen politically motivated murders. During July, there were a further eighty-six killings, mainly Nazis and Communists. The numbers of those seriously injured rose into the hundreds. Four were killed and thirty-four injured in a single clash on 10 July in Ohlau in Silesia. In the worst incident, the Altona ‘Blood Sunday’ of 17 July, seventeen people were killed and sixty-four injured as shooting broke out during an SA parade seen as a direct provocation by the town’s Communists.³³²

The Papen government immediately took up plans it had temporarily postponed to depose the Prussian government, still headed by the Social Democrat Otto Braun with another Socialist, Carl Severing, as Interior Minister, and placed the largest state in Germany in the hands of a Reich Commissar. On 20 July, representatives of the Prussian government were told that they were deposed, and that Papen was now acting as Reich Commissar for Prussia. The biggest and most important state, and the vital bulwark of Social Democracy, capitulated without resistance. Militant opposition would almost certainly have been futile. A general strike, of the kind that had broken the back of the Kapp Putsch in 1920, was unthinkable with 6 million unemployed. There were fears, too, that an attempt at a general strike would provoke a military dictatorship. But the passivity of the main defender of the Republic in the face of such a blatant breach of the constitution was desperately demoralizing for the SPD’s supporters. And it showed Hitler he had little to fear from that quarter. Papen’s destruction of the Prussian bastion without a blow being struck in anger was undertaken by conservatives, not Nazis. But it set the model for the takeover of power in the states more than six months before Hitler became Chancellor.³³³

Meanwhile, Hitler’s party had entered upon its fourth election campaign within four months. Goebbels had claimed in mid-April that shortage of money was hindering propaganda.³³⁴ There was little sign of either money or energy being spared, however, as the propaganda machine was cranked up once more. Nazi toleration of the Papen government counted for little once the campaign was under way. But the main aim was to destroy the remnants of voting for the bourgeois splinter parties and attempt to make inroads into the Zentrum’s support.³³⁵ There was a good deal of parading and pageantry.³³⁶ A novel touch was the use of film propaganda and production of 50,000 gramophone records of an ‘Appeal to the Nation’ by Hitler.³³⁷ There was awareness that boredom with the constant electioneering was setting in.³³⁸ Hitler began a speaking marathon in fifty-three towns and cities during his third ‘Germany Flight’.³³⁹ The monotony for his entourage was scarcely bearable. He arrived, gave his speech, had his bags packed, and left for the next venue. His attendants, commented Hanfstaengl, were like boxing seconds who had to keep their man fit between rounds – in Hitler’s case, speaking bouts.³⁴⁰ His theme was unchanged: the parties of the November Revolution had presided over the untold ruin of every aspect of German life; his own party was the only one that could rescue the German people from its misery.³⁴¹

When the results were declared on 31 July, the Nazis could record another victory – of sorts. They had increased their share of the vote to 37.4 per cent. This made them, with 230 seats, easily the largest party in the Reichstag.³⁴² The Socialists had lost votes, compared with 1930; the KPD and Zentrum had made slight gains; the collapse of the bourgeois parties of the centre and right had advanced still further.

The victory for the Nazis was, however, only a pyrrhic one. Compared with the Reichstag election results of 1930, let alone 1928, their advance was indeed astonishing. But from a more short-term perspective the outcome of the July election could even be regarded as disappointing. They had scarcely improved on the support they had won in the second presidential election and in the April state elections. Goebbels gave a sober assessment of the position: ‘We have won a tiny bit… Result: now we must come to power and exterminate (ausrotten) Marxism. One way or another! Something must happen. The time for opposition is over. Now deeds! Hitler is of the same opinion. Now events have to sort themselves out and then decisions have to be taken. We won’t get to an absolute majority this way.’³⁴³

On 2 August, Hitler was still uncertain what to do. He talked over the possibilities of action with Goebbels while recuperating from the election campaign by the Tegernsee. A coalition with the Zentrum was one option briefly considered but discarded. No conclusions were reached. It was decided to wait and see how things developed. Music, films, relaxation, and a visit to Tristan und Isolde in Munich filled the space.³⁴⁴ Within two days, while at Berchtesgaden, Hitler had decided how to play his hand. He arranged a meeting with Schleicher in Berlin to put his demands: the Chancellorship for himself, Interior Ministry for Frick, Air Ministry for Göring, Labour Ministry for Strasser, and a Ministry for the People’s Education (Volkserziehung) for Goebbels. He was confident that ‘the barons would give way’. But he left a question mark over the response of ‘the old man’, Hindenburg.³⁴⁵

The secret negotiations with Reichswehr Minister Schleicher, at Fürstenberg, fifty miles north of Berlin, lasted for several hours on 6 August. When Hitler reported back to other Nazi leaders gathered at Berchtesgaden, he was confident. ‘Within a week the matter will burst open,’ thought Goebbels. ‘Chief will become Reich Chancellor and Prussian Minister President, Strasser Reich and Prussian Interior, Goebbels Prussian and Reich Education, Darre Agriculture in both, Frick state secretary in the Reich Chancellery, Göring Air Ministry. Justice [Ministry] stays with us. Warmbold Economy. Crosigk [i.e. Schwerin von Krosigk] Finance. Schacht Reichsbank. A cabinet of men. If the Reichstag rejects the enabling act, it will be sent packing (nach Hause geschickt). Hindenburg wants to die with a national cabinet. We will never give up power again. They’ll have to carry us out as corpses… I still can’t believe it. At the gates of power.’³⁴⁶

The deal with Schleicher appeared to offer Hitler all he wanted. It was not total power. But there was little left wanting so far as internal power and control over domestic politics was concerned. From Schleicher’s point of view, the concession of a Hitler Chancellorship was a significant one. But the Reichswehr Minister presumably reckoned that as long as the army remained under his own control, Hitler could be kept in check, and would provide the popular basis for an authoritarian regime in which he himself would continue to be the eminence grise.³⁴⁷ The prospect of a civil war, into which the Reichswehr might be drawn, would recede sharply. And the teeth of the Nazis would be drawn by the inevitable compromises they would have to make in the face of the realities of political responsibility. Such was the thinking behind all variants of a ‘taming strategy’ which would unfold over the following months.

Schleicher later claimed he had put Hitler’s demands to the Reich President on the latter’s estate in Neudeck in East Prussia. Influential though he was with Hindenburg, Schleicher had been firmly rebuffed. The Reich President informed Schleicher in no uncertain terms, according to the Reichswehr Minister’s account, that it was ‘his “irrevocable” will’ not to appoint Hitler to the Chancellorship.³⁴⁸ Just after Hindenburg had returned from Neudeck to Berlin on 10 August, Papen had also raised with him the possibility of a Hitler Chancellorship, heading a ‘brown-black’ majority government of NSDAP and Zentrum.³⁴⁹ It was at this meeting that Hindenburg made his contemptuous remark, frequently cited, that it would be a fine thing indeed were he to make the ‘Bohemian corporal’ Reich Chancellor.³⁵⁰

In the dark about these developments, Hitler and Goebbels talked over the ‘problems of the seizure of power’. Goebbels was rapturous about the ‘historic task’ facing him in the ‘national education of the German people’.³⁵¹ Nazi supporters scented triumph. The whole party expected power, it was reported by telephone from Berlin. The leader of the Berlin SA, Graf Helldorf, was unfolding his own big plans for the takeover of power. Stormtroopers were leaving work in expectation of what was about to happen. Party functionaries were in readiness for ‘the great hour’. ‘If things go badly, there’ll be a dreadful backlash,’ commented Goebbels.³⁵²

The Papen cabinet was divided on whether Hitler should be given power. Finance Minister Krosigk thought the best way to avoid civil war was to turn the poacher into a gamekeeper. The Minister of the Interior, Freiherr von Gayl, vehemently opposed any such idea. Supported by Foreign Minister Neurath, he proposed retention of the existing government, acknowledging that this would require a breach of the constitution. The Reichstag should be dissolved, but no date set for fresh elections, and a new, restricted franchise imposed. Justice Minister Gürtner hedged his bets. To continue the current cabinet without new elections would indeed be unconstitutional. He voiced no disapproval of the inclusion in government of the National Socialists – whose idea of the state, he pointed out, rested on their ‘instinct for retaliation’ (Vergeltungsinstinkt) against Jews and Marxists – but feared the notion was illusory unless they were to be offered leadership of the government. Other cabinet ministers favoured a continuation of the current administration. Papen and Schleicher wanted to keep their options open.³⁵³ While Gayl was publicly announcing- ironically, in a speech on ‘Constitution Day’, 11 August – his wish to replace the Weimar Constitution by an authoritarian system where government was not dependent upon the Reichstag, the armed SA were demonstratively taking up positions of apparent readiness for action around the government quarter of Berlin. ‘Makes the gentlemen very nervous,’ wrote Goebbels. ‘That’s the point of the exercise.’³⁵⁴

On 11 August, Hitler held a last conference with party leaders at Prien on the Chiemsee, the biggest of the Bavarian lakes, eighty or so miles east of Munich, close to the Austrian border. He was by now aware of the growing opposition in the corridors of power to his Chancellorship. There was still the possibility of threatening a coalition with the Zentrum. But Hitler was adamant that nothing less than the Chancellorship would do. After resting in his flat in Munich, he travelled next day to Berlin by car to avoid all publicity. Röhm had meetings with Schleicher and Papen that day, 12 August, but his soundings about a Hitler Chancellorship were inconclusive. Hitler arrived in darkness at Goebbels’s house in Caputh, near Potsdam, in the late evening. He was told that matters were still unresolved after Röhm’s meetings. It was now ‘either-or’, he insisted. But if it had been as simple as that, he would not have spent what was left of the evening pacing up and down, pondering how much hinged on the decision of the Reich President. It was clear to Goebbels what was at stake. Unless Hitler were to be given extensive power, meaning the Chancellorship, he would have to refuse office. In that case, ‘a mighty depression in the movement and in the electorate would be the consequence’. He added: ‘And we have only this one iron in the fire.’³⁵⁵

The following morning, 13 August, accompanied by Röhm, Hitler met Schleicher, followed shortly afterwards, this time together with Frick, by a meeting with Chancellor Papen. He was informed by both that Hindenburg was not prepared to appoint him Chancellor. I soon realized that I was dealing with a very different man from the one I had met two months earlier,’ von Papen recalled. ‘The modest air of deference had gone, and I was faced by a demanding politician who had just won a resounding electoral success.’ Papen suggested Hitler join the government as Vice-Chancellor. The alternative of continued opposition, he argued (convinced that support for the NSDAP had peaked), would surely mean that his party’s campaign would start to flag. Whereas, in the event of Hitler’s fruitful cooperation and ‘Once the President had got to know him better’, so Papen later wrote, he would be prepared to resign the Chancellorship in the Nazi leader’s favour. Hitler rejected point-blank the notion of the head of such a large movement playing second fiddle, and was if anything even more dismissive of the idea that he might consider staying in opposition but allowing one of his associates to take up the post of Vice-Chancellor. Papen advised him at the end of the meeting, at times heated, that the decision was the Reich President’s, but he would have to inform Hindenburg that the discussions had led to no positive outcome.³⁵⁶

Hitler and his entourage, gathered in Goebbels’s house on the Reichskanzlerplatz, had by now, not surprisingly, become pessimistic. They could do nothing but wait. When State Secretary Planck rang from the Reich Chancellery around three o’clock, he was asked whether there was any point in Hitler seeing the Reich President, since the decision had evidently been taken. He was told that Hindenburg wanted first to speak to him. Perhaps there was still a chance.³⁵⁷ Hundreds were gathered in Wilhelmstraße as Hitler arrived at the Presidential Palace for his audience, set for 4.15p.m. Hindenburg was correct, but cool. According to the notes made by Hindenburg’s State Secretary, Otto Meissner, Hitler was asked whether he was prepared to serve in Papen’s government. His cooperation would be welcome, the President stated. Hitler declared that, for the reasons he had given to the Chancellor in full that morning, there was no question of his involvement in the existing government. Given the significance of his movement, he must demand the leadership of the government and ‘the leadership of the state to its full extent (die Staatsführung in vollem Umfange)for himself and his party’. The Reich President firmly refused. He could not answer, he said, before God, his conscience and the Fatherland if he handed over the entire power of the government to a single party, and one which was so intolerant towards those with different views. He was also worried about unrest at home and the likely impact abroad. When Hitler repeated that for him everyother solution was ruled out, Hindenburg advised him then to conduct his opposition in a gentlemanly (ritterlich) fashion, and that all acts of terror would be treated with utmost severity. In a gesture of pathos more than political reality, he shook Hitler’s hand as ‘old comrades’. The meeting had lasted a mere twenty minutes. Hitler had controlled himself. But outside, in the corridor, he threatened to explode. Events would inexorably lead to the conclusion he had put forward and to the fall of the President, he declared. The government would be put in an extremely difficult position, the opposition would be fierce, and he would accept no responsibility for the consequences.³⁵⁸ According to the Nazis’ own version, the brief, heated exchange outside the President’s room ended with an airy gesture by Reich Chancellor Papen dismissing the importance of the Reichstag and remarking to the Nazi delegation: ‘If you had been prepared to enter the government, you would in any case have been within three weeks where you wanted to be today.’³⁵⁹

‘The notion of the Führer as Vice-Chancellor of a bourgeois cabinet is too grotesque to be taken seriously,’ recorded Goebbels after Hitler had returned within half an hour empty-handed.³⁶⁰ But his embellished account in the published version of his diaries hid the deep dismay within the movement.³⁶¹

Hitler was aware that he had suffered a major political defeat. It was his greatest setback since the failure of the putsch, nine years earlier.³⁶² The strategy he had followed all those years, that mobilizing the masses – his natural instinct, and what he did best – would suffice to gain power, had proved a failure. He had taken his party into a cul-de-sac. The breakthrough had been made. The NSDAP’s rise to the portals of power had been meteoric. He had just won a crushing election victory. But he had been flatly rejected as Reich Chancellor by the one person whose assent, under the Weimar Constitution, was indispensable: Reich President Hindenburg. The ‘all-or-nothing’ gamble had left Hitler with nothing. With a tired, depressed, desperately disappointed, and fractious party, the prospect of continued opposition was not an enticing one. But it was all that was left. Even given new elections, the chances were that it would prove difficult to hold on to the level of support already mobilized.

The thirteenth of August 1932 ought to have been a defining moment in Hitler’s bid for power. After that, it should never have come to a 30th of January 1933. Without allies in high places, able eventually to persuade the Reich President to change his mind, Hitler would never – even as head of a huge movement, and with over 13 million supporters in the country’ have been able to come to power. That power was refused Hitler after he had won a victory, and handed to him after he had suffered a defeat (in the ensuing Reichstag election in November), was not attributable to any ‘triumph of the will’.