10
LEVERED INTO POWER

‘We’ve hired him.’

Franz von Papen, end of January 1933

‘We’re boxing Hitler in.’

Alfred Hugenberg, end of January 1933

‘No. All things considered, this government was no cause for concern.’

Sebastian Haffner (1939)

During the autumn of 1932, the state crisis of the Weimar Republic deepened. No resolution was in sight. In the first months of the winter of 1932–3, it entered its climacteric phase. During this phase, leverage over power passed increasingly into the hands of a small number of individuals – most notably Papen, Schleicher and Hindenburg. Behind them stood powerful lobbies – big business, estate-owners, and not least the army. But these élite groups did not form a solid or united ‘ruling class’. Nor did they act in unison. In fact, they were divided among themselves both in terms of their economic interests and their preferred political strategies.¹ All wanted an end to the ‘party system’ of democratic politics and the breaking of ‘Marxism’ (including the SPD) and trade unionism, together with the reversion to some form of authoritarianism. Beyond that, there was little agreement on any patent solution to the crisis. There was for a while among different sections of the élite, and particularly articulated by the Papen cabinet and its supporters, the illusion that the masses could be excluded indefinitely from any involvement in the shaping of power. In the short term, this was indeed no illusion. The German people had by this time no direct influence on the shape of the government. The attempt to emasculate the Reichstag and dispense with party rule had begun under Brüning as a way of coping with crisis. Under Papen, it became the key principle of government. But the mobilized masses could not simply be wished away. Nor were they the creation of or the tools of the élites. And on the Right, they were controlled almost wholly by Hitler.

The dilemma for all non-Nazis looking for an authoritarian solution was how to bring one about without Hitler. For Hitler, the problem was how, having mobilized the masses, to get to power if those holding power continued to refuse to give it to him. This was the impasse of autumn 1932. In the breaking of the stalemate, the actions of individuals played the vital part. Hitler could not be ignored. He had built up a mass movement of great size. It had put him in a position where he could effectively block any political options which did not give him what he wanted. But his movement, on its own, was insufficiently strong to give him power. He needed help in high places. It came precisely at the time that he might otherwise have been witnessing the beginnings of the break-up of his movement and the onset of his own political demise.

The greater the multidimensional crisis of the Weimar state became, and the tighter the straitjacket on alternative political strategies gripped, the more extensive was the scope for maverick personal ‘initiatives’ on the non-Nazi national-conservative Right. Hitler’s eventual triumph arose from such ‘initiatives’ which turned out to be grave political miscalculations. But it can scarcely be seen as a ‘works accident’. For such miscalculations were themselves the product of long-standing predispositions on the conservative Right.² Hindenburg himself and those able to influence him were so intent on finding a rightist solution that they dismissed any consideration of looking to a parliamentary way out. And the different forms of ‘taming strategy’, aimed at incorporating the National Socialists in government, which all around Hindenburg advocated at one time or another and in one form or another, reflected an underestimation of and contempt for Hitler corresponding to an ingrained over-confidence in the ability of the ‘natural’ governing classes to control the upstarts.

Hitler’s own actions were of only secondary importance in bringing him to power. They consisted exclusively, apart from sustained agitation, of holding out for the highest stakes – the Chancellorship in a presidential cabinet – and of refusing all compromise attempts to involve him otherwise in government. The policy worked in the end. But this was as a consequence of the actions of others more than of Hitler himself.

I

Hitler took the events of 13 August ‘as a personal defeat’.³ His anger and humiliation were intensified by the government’s deliberately brusque communiqué – instigated by Schleicher – on the meeting, which had briefly emphasized Hindenburg’s rebuff of Hitler’s demand for total power. Hitler’s pedantically correct, piqued rejoinder could only claim that he had not demanded ‘total’ power.⁴ At the time, his anger was chiefly directed at Papen.⁵ Sent to intercede with Hitler, by then staying at Obersalzberg, a few days later, Joachim von Ribbentrop – the vain and humourless future Reich Foreign Minister, on his upward career path not least through his marriage to the heiress of Germany’s biggest Sekt manufacturers, Henkel, and a recent recruit to the NSDAΡ – found him ‘full of resentment towards Herr von Papen and the entire cabinet in Berlin’.⁶ But if the events of January 1933 were to redeem Papen, Schleicher would emerge as the central target of Nazi aggression for his role in the months between August 1932 and January 1933.⁷ ‘The decision was right. Adolf Hitler could not have been given power,’ was the General’s reported response to Hindenburg’s decision on 13 August.⁸ Schleicher’s manoevrings behind the scenes, particularly his ‘betrayal’ in August which had led to Hitler’s humiliation, were not forgotten. He would pay for them with his life.⁹

As usual, Hitler had the capacity to channel disappointment and depression into outright aggression. And, whatever hesitation he showed before making a decision, once made, he never doubted that he had been right, that no other course of action had been possible. So it was after 13 August 1932. ‘We’ll have to see how things go,’ Hitler murmured to himself en route to Munich to address party leaders on 15 August.¹⁰ He also took the opportunity publicly to state his side of the case in a friendly interview with theRheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung – a newspaper closely associated with Ruhr big business, and with Hitler’s press chief Otto Dietrich – on 16 August. Open opposition to the hated Papen government was now proclaimed. The shadow-boxing of the summer was over. To head off any possible recurrence of a ban, and cool the temperature among the disappointed stormtroopers, the SA was sent on leave for two weeks.¹¹ ‘The question,’ he declared in an interview for the Associated Press, ‘is not whether I shall march on Berlin but rather who will have to march out of Berlin. My Storm Troops are the best disciplined body and will not attempt an illegal march. Why should I march on Berlin when I am here already?’¹²

Within days, Hitler had an opportunity to turn attention away from the débâcle of his audience with Hindenburg. On 10 August, a group of SA men had murdered an unemployed labourer and Communist sympathizer in the Silesian village of Potempa.¹³ The murder was carried out with extraordinary savagery, and in front of the victim’s mother and brother. As so often, personal and political motives intermingled. Horrifically brutal though the killing was, it is an indication of how far public order had collapsed that the event was in itself little more than a routine act of terror in the awful summer of 1932, symptomatic of the climate of violence in near civil war conditions. No one took particular notice of it at first. Given a list of three dozen acts of political violence recorded in a single day and night around the time, the Potempa incident did not stand out. However, the murder had been committed an hour and a half after the Papen government’s emergency decree to combat terrorism, prescribing the death penalty for premeditated political murder and setting up special courts to provide swift justice for cases arising under the decree, had come into effect. The trial took place at Beuthen in a tense atmosphere and amid great publicity between 19 and 22 August and ended with the pronouncement of the death penalty on five of the accused. To inflame feelings in the Nazi camp still further, two Reichsbanner men were given relatively light sentences on the very same day for killing two SA men during disturbances in Ohlau in July. These murders had not been premeditated, and had taken place before Papen’s emergency decree. But such differences naturally did not weigh among Hitler’s supporters. The Potempa murderers were portrayed as martyrs. The local SA leader, Heines, threatened an uprising if the death sentences were to be carried out. His rabble-rousing tirade incited the crowd to break the windows of Jewish-owned shops in Beuthen and attack the offices of the local SPD newspaper. In this heated atmosphere, Göring praised the condemned men and sent money to their families. Rohm was sent to visit them in jail. On 22 August, Hitler himself sent the telegram that caused a sensation. ‘My comrades!’ he wrote, ‘in view of this most monstrous verdict in blood (Bluturteil), I feel tied to you in unbounded loyalty. Your freedom is from this moment on a question of our honour. The struggle against a government under which this was possible is our duty!’¹⁴ The head of Germany’s largest political party was publicly expressing solidarity with convicted murderers. It was a scandal Hitler had to take on board.¹⁵ Not to have sympathized with the Potempa murderers would have risked alienating his SA in a particularly sensitive area, Silesia, and at a time when it was vitally important to keep the restless stormtroopers on the leash.

The next day, Hitler put out a proclamation castigating the Papen cabinet, and taking the opportunity to turn the events of 13 August on their head by claiming his own refusal to participate in a government capable of such sentences. ‘Those of you who possess a feel for the struggle for the honour and freedom of the nation will understand why I refused to enter this bourgeois government,’ he declared. ‘With this deed, our attitude towards this national cabinet is prescribed once and for all.’¹⁶

In the event, Papen, acting in his capacity as Reich Commissar in Prussia, backed down and had the death sentences for the Potempa murderers commuted into life imprisonment – a decision which Papen himself acknowledged was political rather than legal.¹⁷The murderers were freed under a Nazi amnesty as early as March 1933.¹⁸

The Potempa affair had cast glaring light, at precisely the juncture where the power-brokers were still examining ways and means of incorporating Hitler in government, on Nazi attitudes towards the law. Hitler had, in fact, welcomed Papen’s emergency decrees of 9 August, seeing them as directed at ‘the murderous banditry’ of Marxists.¹⁹ But the decrees would have looked different under a National Socialist government, announced the Völkischer Beobachter. They would have brought the immediate arrest and sentencing of all Communist and Social Democrat party functionaries, the ‘concentrated smoking out’ (konzentrierte Ausräucherung) of the ‘murder areas’ (Mordviertel), and ‘the internment of those under suspicion and intellectual inciters in concentration camps’.²⁰ After the sentencing of the Potempa murderers, Alfred Rosenberg added in the same official party organ that the Beuthen judgement showed that ‘according to bourgeois justice, one Polish Communist has the same weighting as five Germans, front soldiers’. That was why National Socialism had to look at matters ideologically. In such a philosophy, ‘one soul does not equal another, one person not another’. For National Socialism, he went on, ‘there is no “law as such”. Rather, its goal is the strong German person, its belief is the protection of this German. And all law and social life, politics and economics, have to fall into line with this aim.’²¹ Such unmistakable indications of what a Hitler government would mean for the rule of law in Germany posed no deterrent to those who still thought the only way out of the crisis was somehow to involve the Nazis in the responsibility of public office.

Hitler’s rejection of anything less than the office of Chancellor had not only created difficulties for the NSDAP. The problems for the government were now acute. Schleicher had now given up the idea of a Hitler Chancellorship as long as Hindenburg remained Reich President.²² Papen, himself resolutely opposed, took Hindenburg’s continued opposition for granted. Only two possibilities, neither attractive, appeared to remain. The first was a ‘black-brown’ – taken from the colour associated with each party – coalition of Zentrum and National Socialists. Feelers were put out from the Zentrum about such a possibility following the events of 13 August. It never stood much chance of emerging as a solution. Gregor Strasser was keen to proceed, but could do nothing without Hitler’s backing – and the tension between the two was beginning to come into the open.²³The Zentrum continued to insist that the NSDAP concede the Chancellorship, but a Hitler Chancellorship had meanwhile become a ‘question of honour’.²⁴ Brüning also refused to yield the offices, including the posts of Minister President and Minister of the Interior in Prussia, which Hitler demanded for his party.²⁵ Hitler, for his part, was unwilling now, as he was to be following the November elections when the possibility was once more raised, to head a government dependent upon Reichstag majorities for support.²⁶ In any case, the thought of a reversion to parliamentary government was anathema to Hindenburg and his advisers.²⁷

The second alternative was to persevere with a ‘cabinet of struggle’ (Kampfkabinett) without any hope of support in the Reichstag, where the Nazis and Communists together prevailed over a ‘negative majority’. This implied going ahead with plans, first advanced by Interior Minister Gayl earlier in the month, for dissolving the Reichstag and postponing new elections in order to provide time to undertake a far-reaching reduction in the powers of the Reichstag through restricted franchise and a two-chamber system with a non-elected first chamber.²⁸ The intention was to end ‘party rule’ once and for all. Necessary for such a drastic step were the support of the Reich President and the backing of the army to combat the expected opposition from the Left and possibly also from National Socialists. This solution for a dissolution of the Reichstag and postponement – in breach of the constitution – of elections beyond the sixty-day limit prescribed was put to Hindenburg by Papen at a meeting in Neudeck on 30 August. Schleicher and Gayl were also present. Hindenburg gave Papen the dissolution order without ado, and also agreed to the unconstitutional postponement of new elections on the grounds of a national state of emergency. Some leading constitutional lawyers – most prominent among them Carl Schmitt, the renowned constitutional theorist who in 1933 would place himself at the service of the Third Reich – were ready with their legal arguments to back the introduction of an authoritarian state through such a device.²⁹

Probably, if he wanted to risk such a solution, Papen should have had the new Reichstag dissolved at its very first sitting on 30 August. By the second sitting, on 12 September, the initiative had been lost.³⁰ As it was, Papen stayed away from the opening session, and the Reichstag merely heard on 30 August an attack on capitalism and advocacy of a Soviet Germany from the oldest member of the Reichstag, Clara Zetkin, given the right of speaking in the opening formalities, followed by the election on the votes of the NSDAP, BVP and Zentrum of Hermann Göring as Reichstag President.³¹ Göring lost no time in emphasizing that, as his election showed, there was a working majority in the Reichstag and no case for pronouncement by the government of a state of emergency. A joint statement by the NSDAP and Zentrum on 1 September, indicating that negotiations had begun between the two parties, had the same aim of deflecting a possible declaration of a state of emergency.³² It was from the Nazi side no more than a tactical device.³³The Nazi leadership were, however, prepared for a dissolution of the Reichstag. ‘If the opposite side breaks the constitution,’ wrote Goebbels, ‘then all compulsion to legality stops for us; then come tax strikes, sabotage, and uprising.’³⁴ At a meeting of Nazi leaders on 8 September, Hitler emphasized that new elections were inevitable – the sooner, the better. He rejected out of hand a suggestion by Gregor Strasser, of whom he was becoming increasingly suspicious, to accept a cabinet led by Schleicher. Hitler as Reich Chancellor – but of a presidential cabinet, not dependent on coalition partners – remained the sole aim.³⁵

The Reichstag met for its second – and last – sitting on 12 September. The only item on the list of the day’s agenda was a government declaration on the financial situation, announcing details of a programme aimed at economic recovery. A debate was expected to last for several days. However, the Communist Deputy Ernst Torgler proposed an alteration to the order of proceedings.³⁶ He sought first to put a proposal of his party to repeal the emergency decrees of 4 and 5 September (which had made deep incisions in the system of tariff wage-bargaining), and to couple this with a vote of no-confidence in the government. No one expected much of such a proposal. The amendment to the order of proceedings would have fallen had there been a single objection. The Nazis expected the DNVP deputies to object. Astonishingly, not one did so. In the confusion that followed, Frick obtained an adjournment of half an hour to seek Hitler’s decision on how to proceed. Papen, completely taken aback, had to send a messenger to the Reich Chancellery during the adjournment to pick up the dissolution order, signed by Hindenburg on 30 August, which he had not even bothered to bring into the chamber with him.

Meanwhile, the Zentrum tried to persuade the National Socialists to reject the Communist proposals. But at a brief meeting with his chief henchmen, Hitler decided that the opportunity to embarrass the government could not be missed: the Nazi deputies should immediately support the Communist vote of no confidence, thus pre-empting Papen’s dissolution order which no one doubted he would now put forward.³⁷ When the Reichstag reassembled, Papen appeared with the red dispatch box which traditionally contained the orders of dissolution under his arm. Amid chaotic scenes, the Reichstag President Göring announced straight away that he would proceed with the vote on the Communist proposal. At this, Papen tried to speak. Göring ignored him, looking intentionally away from the Chancellor to the left side of the chamber. Papen’s State Secretary Planck pointed out to Göring that the Chancellor wished to exercise his right to speak. Göring retorted simply that the vote had begun. After again trying vainly to speak, Papen marched over to the Reichstag President’s platform and slapped the dissolution order down on Göring’s table. Followed by his cabinet, he then walked out of the chamber to howls of derision. Göring blithely pushed the dissolution order to one side, and read out the result of the division. The government was defeated by 512 votes to 42, with five abstentions and one invalid ballot paper. Only the DVNP and DVP had supported the government. All the major parties, including the Zentrum, had supported the Communist proposal. There had never been a parliamentary defeat like it. It was received with wild cheering and applause in the Reichstag.

Göring now read out Papen’s dissolution order, which he declared invalid since the government had already fallen through a vote of no-confidence. This was technically incorrect. Göring was subsequently compelled to concede that the Reichstag had indeed been formally dissolved by the presentation of Papen’s order. The no-confidence motion was, therefore, without legal standing. But this was of purely procedural significance. The government remained, as a consequence, in office. The reality was, however, that it had been rejected by more than four-fifths of the people’s representatives. Papen had been shown in the most humiliating way possible to be a Chancellor almost devoid of public support.³⁸ Hitler was beside himself with joy.³⁹ The cynical Nazi tactics had meanwhile given a foretaste of how they would behave in power, given the opportunity.⁴⁰

New elections – the fifth of the year – loomed. Papen still had in his possession Hindenburg’s approval to postpone the election beyond the sixty days allowed by the constitution. But after the fiasco of 12 September, the cabinet decided two days later that now was not the time to proceed with that experiment.⁴¹ New elections were set for 6 November. The Nazi leadership was aware of the difficulties. The bourgeois press was now completely hostile. The NSDAP could make little use of broadcasting.⁴² The public were weary of elections. Even leading party speakers found it difficult to sustain top form. Not least, noted Goebbels, previous campaigns had drained all available funds. The party’s coffers were empty. Funding was difficult to come by. Getting through the ‘financial calamity’ was not going to be easy, thought the Propaganda Leader, who had his organization moved from Munich to Berlin for the duration of the campaign.⁴³

Hitler himself seemed in confident mood on his way from Berlin to Munich shortly after the extraordinary events in the Reichstag.⁴⁴ Whatever the doubts in the party, he was also able to convey optimism to the propagandists assembled in Munich on 6 October, when he laid down the guidelines for the campaign: ‘I look forward to the struggle with absolute confidence,’ he said. ‘The battle can begin. In four weeks we will emerge from it as the victor.’⁴⁵

A few days earlier, on 2 October, he had attended the ‘Reich Youth Rally’ staged by the Hitler Youth in Potsdam. He had, according to Lüdecke’s account, been reluctant to go. But Schirach persuaded him not to miss such an inviting propaganda opportunity just before the election. Lüdecke was part of the accompaniment of sundry adjutants and bodyguards that formed the northward-bound cavalcade. Hitler wanted to hear about America, where Lüdecke had spent the previous few years in a variety of insignificant jobs and small-time business ventures. He was glad to discover Lüdecke’s interest in the Karl May cowboy and Indian stories which he had devoured as a boy. He said he could still read them and get a thrill out of them. The bodyguards had to be on alert as roadworks in Saxony forced the cars to slow down to overtake a procession of lorries carrying Communists waving red flags. But nothing more than insults were hurled at Hitler and his entourage. The danger passed. By the time they were approaching Potsdam, they were slowed down again – but this time by the crowds of Hitler Youth on their way to the rally.⁴⁶

An estimated 110,000 boys and girls from all over Germany, and also from Austria, Bohemia, Danzig, and Memel, had come to Potsdam – twice the number expected. Many had been on the road for days. Those who could not be accommodated had to sleep in the open, though it was already chilly in early October. Hitler was greeted with wild enthusiasm on entering the stadium, a blaze of torches, where the rally was held. ‘Tens of thousands of boys and girls stood in formation on the field,’ recalled Lüdecke. ‘When Hitler stood alone at the front of the platform, a fantastic cry went up into the night, a sound of matchless jubilation. Then he raised his arms and dead silence fell. He burst into a flaming address which lasted scarcely fifteen minutes. Again he was the old Hitler, spontaneous, fiery, full of appeal.’⁴⁷ As always when at the centre of a propaganda spectacular, he was himself gripped by the atmosphere, by the thrill of the performance. He could appear tireless, sleeping little, conveying the impression to those around him of concern for the well-being of his young supporters, then standing with outstretched arm for seven hours while the Hitler Youth paraded past him. In the evening he dined with the Kaiser’s fourth son and party member Prince August Wilhelm – Auwi as he was known – whom he addressed courteously, even deferentially, then went back to Goebbels’ house. Only when finally ‘off-stage’, slumped in his train compartment at the beginning of the journey back to Munich, could the image be put to one side as he sagged with tiredness. ‘Leave him alone,’ his adjutant Brückner told Hoffmann and Lüdecke. ‘The man’s played out.’⁴⁸

Electioneering reinvigorated him. And in the fifth long campaign of the year, he set out yet again to do what he did best: make speeches. Once more, his indispensability as the chief propaganda focus of the movement meant he had to embark upon a punishing schedule of speeches and rallies. During his fourth ‘Germany Flight’ between 11 October and 5 November he gave no fewer than fifty speeches, again sometimes three a day, on one occasion four.⁴⁹ He briefly interrupted his campaign when he heard of Eva Braun’s apparent attempted suicide by shooting late on 1 November.⁵⁰Despairing of the man she had fallen in love with but scarcely saw, and who was so taken up with his political activities that he was hardly acknowledging her existence, Eva had shot herself – allegedly aiming at the heart – with her father’s pistol. She had not, however, been too injured to telephone immediately for a doctor. She was immediately taken to hospital, where Hitler visited her bearing a large bouquet of flowers – and some doubts about whether the suicide attempt had been a genuine one.⁵¹ If he momentarily feared another scandal like the one involving Geli Raubal the previous summer, he gave no indication of it. Without delay, he was back on the campaign trail, speaking on the evening of 2 November at a big rally in the Berlin Sportpalast.⁵²

Hitler’s attack now focused squarely on Papen and ‘the Reaction’. The vast support for his own movement was contrasted with the ‘small circle of reactionaries’ keeping the Papen government, lacking all popular backing, in office.⁵³ ‘There the head of a government which depends on a small circle of reactionaries, a government on which the German people with 512 to 42 votes has given its devastating verdict; here a leader of his own strength, rooted in the people, who has worked and struggled to gain trust,’ was how Nazi propaganda depicted the contest.⁵⁴ Hitler emphasized how little ministerial titles meant to him. ‘He preferred to be the leader of his party.’ Nor did he need a ministerial salary, since he had his own income as a writer. Papen, with his property worth 5 million Marks, Hitler went on, still drew his Chancellor’s salary. He, on the other hand, had no intention of claiming one: ‘decisive for him was working for the people’.⁵⁵ Hitler declared that it was plain to see why he had not entered the ‘cabinet of the barons’ on 13 August. He was prepared, he said, to take responsibility – full responsibility – but not to take it where it was evident that he would be deprived of influence. ‘My opponents deceive themselves above all,’ he railed, ‘about my enormous determination. I’ve chosen my path and will follow it to its end.’⁵⁶

The Nazi press inevitably portrayed Hitler’s campaign as a victory march. ‘The Führer begins his new struggle for Germany,’ proclaimed the Völkischer Beobachter on 13 October. It followed with ‘The Führer’s Victory Parade through Bavaria’s Gaue’ two days later. ‘Grandiose Progress of the Hitler Days,’ ran the banner headline of the Coburger National-Zeitung on 17 October. ‘Huge participation from the entire Reich… Coburg, the Hitler town, mirrors symbolically the emergence and struggle of the German freedom movement.’ ‘Where once Marxism ruled, the people now stands by Hitler,’ professed the party’s main organ again, after its leader had spoken in Schweinfurt in Lower Franconia.⁵⁷ ‘Fourteen Years Ago War-Blind in Hospital – Now the Leader of Millions. Adolf Hitler in the Pomeranian Town of Pasewalk, the starting-point of his struggle for the German soul,’ ran another headline towards the end of the month.⁵⁸ But not even all Nazi followers read the party press. And the main bourgeois papers, with their far larger circulation, were unremittingly hostile. The triumphalist headlines in the Völkischer Beobachter in any case merely disguised worries within the movement that the party’s support was falling off, that morale among the often fickle members was low, that the SA were unwilling in many places to take part in propaganda work, and that the NSDAP was heading for a serious electoral setback.⁵⁹ Grossly inflated attendances at Hitler rallies provided in the party press – in rural areas especially thousands were brought in from outside the area to swell the numbers – hid the plain signs of disillusionment and electoral fatigue. Hitler acknowledged that the party was likely to lose votes, perhaps a large number, but characteristically, if not logically, still thought the election would be ‘a great psychological success’.⁶⁰ Even Hitler was now unable to fill the halls as he previously had done. For his speech in Nuremberg on 13 October, the Festhalle in Luitpoldhain was only half full.⁶¹ While a Hitler speech might have made a difference to the election result in some places, observers were already predicting in October that his campaign tour would do little to prevent the expected drop in Nazi support.⁶² The day before the election, Goebbels, too, was anticipating a defeat.⁶³

When the votes were counted, Nazi fears were realized. In the last election before Hitler came to power (and the last fully free election in the Weimar Republic) the NSDAP had lost 2 million voters. In a reduced turn-out – the lowest (at 80.6 per cent) since 1928 – its percentage of the poll had fallen from 37.4 in July to 33.1, its Reichstag seats reduced from 230 to 196. The SPD and Zentrum had also lost ground slightly. The winners were the Communists, who had increased their vote to 16.9 per cent (now little more than 3 per cent behind the SPD), and the DNVP, which had risen to 8.9 per cent.⁶⁴ The DΝVP’s gains had been largely in winning back former supporters who had drifted to the NSDAP. The lower turn-out was the other main factor that worked to the disadvantage of Hitler’s party, as earlier Nazi voters stayed at home.⁶⁵ Not only had the party failed, as before, to make serious inroads into the big left-wing and Catholic voting blocks; it had this time lost voters – it seems to all other parties, but predominantly to the DNVP.⁶⁶ The middle classes were beginning to desert the Nazis.

Goebbels consoled himself that the results were less bad than pessimists had predicted. But he accepted they were a blow.⁶⁷ The regional and local propaganda offices of the party provided their own analysis of what had gone wrong. Lack of funding had been a major handicap in mounting a good campaign.⁶⁸ But there were less superficial reasons. An important one was Hitler’s refusal to enter the cabinet in August. This had provoked division within the party membership and among the electorate, it was reported. People had expressed reluctance to vote again for Hitler, after he had rejected the opportunity of joining the government and remained as distant from power as ever.⁶⁹ Party members in some parts were quoted as saying that they had had enough of ‘a party whose leader does not know what he wants and has no programme’.⁷⁰ Some Protestant support had also been alienated by Hitler’s negotiations with the Zentrum in August.⁷¹

Beyond these reasons, the pronounced socialist image of the NSDAP that had come across strongly during the campaign – inevitably, since the main target had been Papen’s reactionary conservatism – had plainly alienated middle-class support.⁷² The attacks of the Nazis had seemed to many little different from the class-warfare of the Communists. The similarity of ‘red’ and ‘brown’ varieties of ‘Bolshevism’ appeared proven by the NSDAP’s support for the Communist-inspired strike of Berlin transport workers during the days immediately preceding the election.⁷³ The transport strike had illustrated the party’s cleft stick in the autumn campaign. Now that the DNVP, the main bourgeois conservative party, was its open enemy, the NSDAP could no longer square the electoral circle and avoid alienating one or other side of its heterogeneous ‘catch-all’ following.⁷⁴Goebbels acknowledged that the party had been faced with no choice other than to support the Berlin workers. Otherwise, its support from the working-class population would have been seriously shaken. ‘We are in a by no means envious position,’ he wrote. ‘Many bourgeois circles are frightened off by our participation in the strike. But that’s not decisive. These circles can later be very easily won back. But if we’d have once lost the workers, they’d have been lost for ever.’⁷⁵ Hitler, with whom he was in constant telephone contact, had fully approved of Goebbels’s action in supporting the strike. The loss of ‘a few ten-thousand votes’ in ‘a more or less pointless election’ was of no consequence ‘in the active, revolutionary struggle’, the propaganda boss commented.⁷⁶

Many shocked rural voters – a mainstay of party support since 1928 – indeed stayed away from the polls as a result of the Nazi support for the strike.⁷⁷ In the middle class it was little different. Luise Solmitz, the Hamburg ex-schoolteacher so thrilled by Hitler earlier in the year, now voted – disappointed, and without enthusiasm – for the DNVP. She saw the Berlin transport strike as evidence that Hitler was arm in arm with Marxism. An acquaintance said he had twice voted for Hitler, but not again. Another thought Hitler far on the Left.⁷⁸ ‘Above all his approval of the Berlin transport strike; yes, his demand to take part in it, has cost him at the last moment thousands of voters,’ Frau Solmitz summed up, the day after the election. Hitler had lost, in her eyes, his claim to stand selflessly for the national interest. ‘For him, it’s not a matter of Germany, but of power,’ she noted. ‘Why has Hitler deserted us after showing us a future that we could welcome. Hitler awake!’⁷⁹

II

The November election had changed nothing in the political stalemate – except, perhaps, to make the situation even worse. The parties supporting the government, the DNVP and DVP, had only just over 10 per cent of the population behind them. And with the drop in the vote of both the NSDAP and the Zentrum, a coalition between the two parties, such as had been discussed in August, would in itself not suffice to produce an absolute majority in the Reichstag.⁸⁰ The only majority, now as before, was a negative one. Hitler was undeterred by the election setback. He told party leaders in Munich to continue the struggle without any relenting. ‘Papen has to go. There are to be no compromises,’ is how Goebbels recalled the gist of Hitler’s comments.⁸¹ In the light of his humiliating experience on 13 August – the memory of being out-manoeuvred rankled greatly with him – the Nazi leader insisted on replying in writing, which he did on 16 November, flatly rejecting the Chancellor’s formal entreaty to enter discussions with a view to working with the government. Papen’s request indeed marked no advance for Hitler on the position of 13 August.⁸² Equally vain were the continued hopes of the Zentrum and its sister Catholic party, the ΒVP, that Hitler might be persuaded to enter a coalition – also with the smaller parties – to provide a working majority. The ΒVP leader, Fritz Schäffer, told Papen he was even prepared to operate under Hitler as Chancellor in such a coalition.⁸³ Three days later, the same party leader was telling Reich President Hindenburg that he was well disposed towards Hitler in person; the danger lay in those around him, who would have to be controlled through strong counterweights in the government.⁸⁴ The misreading and underestimation of Hitler was not confined to mavericks on the nationalist Right. It extended, too, into the leadership of political Catholicism.

Now, as before, Hitler had no interest in power at the behest of other parties in a majority government dependent on the Reichstag. By mid-November, Papen’s attempts to find any basis of support for his government had failed. On 17 November, mourned by few, his entire cabinet resigned. It was now left to Hindenburg himself to try to negotiate a path out of the state crisis. Meanwhile, the cabinet would continue to conduct the daily business of governmental administration.⁸⁵

On 19 November, the day that Hindenburg received Hitler as part of his meetings with the heads of the political parties, the Reich President was handed a petition carrying twenty signatures from businessmen demanding the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor.⁸⁶ It did not mark proof, as was once thought, of extensive big business support for Hitler, and its machinations to get him into power. The idea was, in fact, that of Wilhelm Keppler, emerging as Hitler’s link with a group of pro-Nazi businessmen, and put into operation in conjunction with Himmler, who served as the liaison to the Brown House. Keppler and Schacht began with a list of around three dozen possible signatories. But they found it an uphill task. Eight of the ‘Keppler Circle’, headed by Schacht and the Cologne banker Kurt von Schroeder, signed the petition. The results with industrialists were disappointing. A single prominent industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, signed. But he had for long made no secret of his sympathies for the National Socialists. The acting President of the Reichslandbund (Reich Agrarian League), the Nazi-infiltrated lobby of big landowners, was another signatory. The rest were middle-ranking businessmen and landholders. It was misleadingly claimed that leading industrialists Paul Reusch, Fritz Springorum and Albert Vögler sympathized, but had withheld their names from the actual petition. Big business on the whole still placed its hopes in Papen, though the petition was an indication that the business community did not speak with a single voice. The agricultural lobby, in particular, was the one to watch.⁸⁷

In any case, the petition had no bearing on Hindenburg’s negotiations with Hitler. The Reich President remained, as the exchanges of mid-November were to show, utterly distrustful of the Nazi leader. Hitler, for his part, was privately contemptuous of Hindenburg.⁸⁸ But he had no way of attaining power without the President’s backing.

At his meeting with Hitler on 19 November, Hindenburg repeated, as in August, that he wanted to see him and his movement participating in government. The President expressed the hope that Hitler would take soundings with other parties with a view to forming a government with a parliamentary majority. This was calling Hitler’s bluff. Hindenburg knew that it would prove impossible, given the certain opposition of the DNVP.⁸⁹ The outcome would have been the exposure of Hitler’s failure, and a weakening of his position. Hitler saw through the tactic straight away.

In what Goebbels called a ‘chessmatch for power’,⁹⁰ Hitler replied that he had no intention of involving himself in negotiations with other parties before he had been entrusted by the Reich President, in whose hands the decision lay, with constructing a government. In such an eventuality, he was confident of finding a basis which would provide his government with an enabling act, approved by the Reichstag. He alone was in the position to obtain such a mandate from the Reichstag. The difficulties would be thereby solved.⁹¹

He repeated to Hindenburg in writing two days later his ‘single request’, that he be given the authority accorded to those before him.⁹² This was precisely what Hindenburg adamantly refused to concede. He remained unwilling to make Hitler the head of a presidential cabinet. He left the door open, however, to the possibility of a cabinet with a working majority, led by Hitler, and stipulated his conditions for accepting such a cabinet: establishment of an economic programme, no return to the dualism of Prussia and the Reich, no limiting of Article 48, and approval of a list of ministers in which he, the President, would nominate the foreign and defence ministers.⁹³ Hitler replied, seeking clarification of the conditions, but still pressing for appointment as Chancellor of a presidential cabinet.⁹⁴ Hindenburg’s state secretary, Otto Meissner, reiterated the distinction the President drew between a presidential cabinet, depending on Article 48, standing above parties, and requiring the leadership of a man ‘with the special trust of the Reich President’, and a parliamentary government resting on a Reichstag majority and following the aims of one or more political parties. Correspondingly, Meissner pointed out, ‘a party leader, all the more the leader of a party demanding the exclusivity of his movement, cannot be leader of a presidential cabinet’. He left open the possibility that, as in the case of Brüning, a Hitler-led parliamentary government could evolve into a presidential cabinet. But, it was made clear, only the leadership of a parliamentary majority cabinet was currently on offer to Hitler.⁹⁵ Hindenburg’s preference remained, plainly, for a presidential cabinet, if possible run by Papen, his favourite, including Hitler in a subordinate role, or at least tolerated by his party. But a presidential cabinet under Hitler’s leadership, as in August, was ruled out. Hitler immediately wrote back to Meissner. Goebbels called his letter ‘a masterpiece of political strategy’.⁹⁶ Hitler pointed to the recent judgement of the constitutional court(Staatsgerichtshof) about the powers of the Reich Commissar in Prussia which emphasized that Article 48 was intended to be used only in specific cases and for a limited period of time, not as a general method of government. Where parliamentary procedures hindered government in an emergency situation, the constitutional way, wrote Hitler, was through the deployment of an enabling act, approved by parliament, over a fixed period of time. Only his party had the prospect of obtaining such backing. He also rejected as unconstitutional – since they fell within the powers of the appointed head of government – the conditions imposed by the Reich President. Instead, he proposed his own terms for accepting the Chancellorship. He would put forward a political programme within forty-eight hours. On approval by the President, he would proffer a list of ministers. He would propose in advance Schleicher, known as the President’s ‘personal confidant’, as Defence Minister, and Neurath as Foreign Minister. Finally, and the key point, the President would grant him ‘those plenipotentiary powers which in such critical and difficult times have never been denied also to parliamentary Reich Chancellors’.⁹⁷ By this, Hitler implied the dissolution of the Reichstag and the prescribing of new elections, in the hope of winning the majority he needed to obtain an enabling act without depending on other parties.⁹⁸ Once more, Hitler was not kept waiting for an answer.

The Reich President’s unyielding views were communicated to him on 24 November, effectively repeating the sentiments Hindenburg had expressed in August: ‘that a presidential cabinet led by you would develop necessarily into a party dictatorship with all its consequences for an extraordinary accentuation of the conflicts in the German people’. For that, said the President, he could answer neither before his oath nor to his own conscience.⁹⁹ It was his second outright rejection of Hitler within little over three months. It seemed final. Hitler, for his part, remained adamant that he would do nothing to assist the current presidential cabinet.¹⁰⁰ On 30 November he rejected as pointless a further invitation to discussions with Hindenburg.¹⁰¹ The deadlock continued.

Schleicher had been gradually distancing himself from Papen. He was imperceptibly shifting his role from eminence grise behind the scenes to main part. He had helped draft Meissner’s letters to Hitler. And with Hindenburg’s approval, he had met Hitler on 23 November. Less to the President’s liking, he took soundings about whether Hitler might support a Schleicher cabinet. Hitler was unbending.¹⁰² On 1 December Schleicher sent his right-hand man, Lieutenant-Colonel Eugen Ott, to Weimar to hold talks with Hitler. On the surface, this was to make a last attempt to persuade him to participate in government. The hidden agenda was, however, exactly the opposite. Certain of Hitler’s response, Schleicher wanted to demonstrate to Hindenburg – and probably to Gregor Strasser – that the Nazi leader had to be left out of the equation. Beyond that, he had hopes of incorporating Gregor Strasser – backed by at least parts of the NSDAP – in his cabinet.¹⁰³ Hitler did not disappoint Schleicher. Ott was subjected to a three-hour monologue, denouncing the prospect of a Schleicher cabinet. Knowing word would get back to the army leadership, Hitler also expressed concern at the Reichswehr being dragged into domestic politics.¹⁰⁴ Meanwhile, Schleicher was making sure that lines were kept open to Gregor Strasser, who had played no part in the flurry of correspondence between Hitler and Hindenburg’s office, and was thought to be ready ‘to step personally into the breach’ if nothing came of the discussions with Hitler.¹⁰⁵

Schleicher threw this possibility into the ring during discussions between himself, Papen, and Hindenburg on the evening of 1 December. Strasser and one or two of his supporters would be offered places in the government. About sixty Nazi Reichstag deputies could be won over. Schleicher was confident of gaining the support of the trade unions, the SPD, and the bourgeois parties for a package of economic reforms and work creation. This, he claimed, would obviate the need for the upturning of the constitution, which Papen had again proposed. Hindenburg nevertheless sided with Papen, and asked him to form a government and resume office – something which had been his intention all along. Behind the scenes, however, Schleicher had been warning members of Papen’s cabinet that if there were to be no change of government, and the proposed breaking of the constitution in a state of emergency were to take place, there would be civil war and the army would not be able to cope. This was reinforced at a cabinet meeting the following morning, 2 December, at which Lieutenant-Colonel Ott was brought in to report on a ‘war games’ exercise which the Reichswehr had conducted, demonstrating that they could not defend the borders and withstand the breakdown of internal order which would follow from strikes and disruption. The army was almost certainly too pessimistic in its judgement. But the message made its mark on the cabinet, and on the President. Hindenburg was afraid of possible civil war. Reluctantly, he let Papen, his favourite, go and appointed Schleicher as Reich Chancellor.¹⁰⁶

III

In the wake of Schleicher’s overtures to Gregor Strasser, Hitler’s movement entered upon its greatest crisis since the refoundation of 1925. The affair surrounding the exclusion of Gregor’s brother, Otto, in 1930 and the Stennes uprising a year later had occurred with the party riding the crest of a wave. Hitler’s authority, as we have seen, was such that it could sweep away the revolts with ease. In the case of Gregor Strasser, it was different. Gregor was no fringe character. His contribution to the growth of the NSDAP had been second only to that of Hitler himself. The organization of the party, in particular, had been largely his work. His reputation inside the party – though he had made powerful enemies, not least his one-time acolyte Goebbels – was high. He was generally seen as Hitler’s right-hand man.¹⁰⁷ Some outside the party also regarded him with admiration. Oswald Spengler, for instance, author of the best-selling Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), held Hitler in contempt. ‘A dreamer (Phantast), a numbskull(Hohlkopf)… a man without idea, without strength of purpose, in a word: stupid’, was how he described him. But he liked Strasser, who had ‘a sense of reality’.¹⁰⁸ Strasser’s resignation of all his party offices on 8 December 1932 naturally, therefore, caused a sensation. Moreover, it hit a party already rocked by falling support and shaky morale. The decline in voter support had again been vividly demonstrated in the first days of December as the results of the Thuringian local elections showed a devastating drop of around 40 per cent since the high-point of the July Reichstag election.¹⁰⁹ Internal reports were commenting with alarm on the numbers leaving the party. Subscriptions to the party press were being cancelled. Unrest within the SA was scarcely containable in some areas. And the party was massively in debt after a year of non-stop electioneering.¹¹⁰ All in all, the Strasser affair struck a party undergoing a full-scale crisis of confidence. If power were not attained soon, the chances that the party might fall apart altogether could not be discounted.

Bombshell though it was when news broke of Gregor Strasser’s resignation of his party offices, trouble had been brewing for some considerable time. Despite his image in the 1920s as a radical spokesman for the NSDAP’s populist versions of socialism and anti-capitalism, Strasser had by the early 1930s come to be seen by many in influential positions as something of a ‘moderate’ in the Nazi Movement.¹¹¹ His work in restructuring the party’s organization had made him more pragmatic about extending National Socialism’s appeal. He had not only masterminded the turn to cultivate the middle classes and peasantry, but had also coordinated the links with other right-wing organizations in the anti-Young Plan campaign.¹¹² In 1930 he had publicly broken with his brother Otto, whose brand of socialism had led to his secession from the NSDAP. By 1932, he had built up good contacts with some leading Ruhr industrialists, and benefited from their financial subventions.¹¹³ By the autumn of 1932, as Hitler – once seen by sections of business as a ‘moderate’ – was viewed as an intransigent obstacle to a conservative-dominated right-wing government, Strasser came to be seen as a more responsible and constructive politician who could bring Nazi mass support behind a conservative cabinet.¹¹⁴ Indeed, by this time Strasser, increasingly influenced by the neo-conservative ideas of Hans Zehrer’s Tat group, was advocating notions of a broad front on the Right.¹¹⁵ Now as before, though there were variations of emphasis, Strasser’s differences with Hitler were not primarily ideological. Strasser was an out-and-out racist; he did not shy away from violence; his ‘social ideas’ were hardly less vague than Hitler’s own; his economic ideas, eclectic and contradictory, were more Utopian than, but still compatible with, Hitler’s cruder and more brutal notions;¹¹⁶ his foreign policy ambitions were no less extensive than Hitler’s; and he was ruthless and single-minded in the drive for power. But tactically, there were fundamental differences. And after 13 August, as Hitler’s political inflexibility threatened increasingly to block the road to power forever, these differences came more and more to the surface. Strasser, never a complete convert to the Führer myth, continued to take the view that the party which now showed plain signs of potential disintegration was not solely Hitler’s creation.¹¹⁷ In contrast to Hitler’s ‘all-or-nothing’ stance, Strasser thought the NSDAP ought to be prepared to join coalitions, explore all possible alliances, and if necessary enter government even without the offer of the Chancellorship.¹¹⁸Immediately following the 13 August setback, Strasser was exhorted by Reventlow and some other supporters to stand out against Hitler; otherwise, they argued, the party leader’s hard-line strategy would have catastrophic consequences for the movement.¹¹⁹

Through members of the ‘Tat Circle’, Strasser had been introduced to General Schleicher in the summer of 1932. Schleicher was particularly interested in the possibility that Gregor Strasser could help bring the trade unions behind a ‘national’ – that is, authoritarian – government. This was something which the ‘Tat Circle’ had favoured. Unlike Hitler, whose dislike of trade unions had never wavered, Strasser was openly conciliatory towards the unions. Given his growing contacts with union leaders interested in a broad coalition to head off the dangers they saw on the far Right and far Left, the prospects of winning their support for a Schleicher cabinet that had Strasser in the government and offered an expansive work-creation programme could not be lightly dismissed.¹²⁰

During the autumn, the rift between Hitler and Strasser widened. Already in September, Hitler distanced himself from Strasser’s economic ideas by dissolving the Political Economy Section (Wirtschaftspolitische Abteilung), which had been run by Otto Wagener, and banning further distribution of the Economic Emergency Programme (Wirtschaftliches Sofortprogramm), both of which Strasser had inspired. Then in October, Hitler had refused to endorse a speech Strasser made to the ΝSBO which contained pro-unionist sentiments. After the November election, Strasser lost his place in Hitler’s inner circle.¹²¹ Privately, he was contemptuous of those he thought decisively influencing Hitler. Göring he thought ‘a brutal egoist’; Goebbels was ‘from the bottom up devious’; and Rohm simply ‘a swine’. Things looked black, he told Hans Frank.¹²²

Goebbels, his old enemy since the inner-party conflicts of the mid-twenties, in particular, had repeatedly castigated the ‘Strasser clique’, and had wasted no opportunity to poison Hitler against the Organization Leader. On 31 August, Goebbels had noted in his diary: ‘For the first time [Hitler] speaks openly about the doings of the Strasser clique in the party. Here, too, he has kept his eyes open; and if he has said nothing, then that’s not because he had seen nothing.’¹²³ Four days later, he added: ‘I spoke for a long time with the Führer. He distrusts Strasser very strongly.’¹²⁴ Already in early September, Hitler had rejected out of hand Strasser’s suggestion that the way forward would be to support a Schleicher cabinet. Around the same time, Strasser was the only Nazi leader advising against holding out for Hitler’s appointment to the Chancellorship.¹²⁵ Goebbels wrote, towards the end of September: ‘It would be a blessing if he [Strasser] would carry out his secret sabotage work in the open so that the Führer could act against him.’¹²⁶ Given the political sensitivities of the autumn, a public split in the party leadership was scarcely opportune. But by the first week of December, matters could rest no longer.

At a meeting held in secret in Berlin on 3 December, Schleicher offered Strasser the posts of Vice-Chancellor and Minister President in Prussia.¹²⁷ The English journalist Sefton Delmer apparently passed on news to Hanf-staengl that the two had met. Hitler gave no outward indication of his feelings when he heard of the meeting.¹²⁸ That it had produced the offer of the Vice-Chancellorship to the second man in the party, who had not turned it down, only became clear to Hitler and other leading figures in the party, it seems, when they gathered for discussions in the Kaiserhof two days later. At this meeting, Hitler and Strasser became involved in heated exchanges. According to Goebbels, Strasser pleaded in vain for toleration of the Schleicher cabinet. But those present again approved of Hitler’s flat rejection of any compromise whatsoever.¹²⁹

Strasser’s choices were now to back Hitler, to rebel against him in the hope of winning over some of the party, or to do what by 8 December he had made up his mind to do: resign his offices and withdraw from an active role in politics. After the meeting on 5 December, Strasser must have realized that the chances of leading a palace revolution against Hitler were minimal. His best support lay among the Nazi Reichstag members. But here, too, he controlled nothing amounting to a firmly organized faction. Pride, as well as his principled objections, prevented him from backing down and accepting Hitler’s all-or-bust strategy. He was left, therefore, with only the third possibility. Perhaps disappointed at the lack of open support from his party friends, he withdrew to his room in Berlin’s Hotel Exzelsior and wrote out his letter resigning his party offices.¹³⁰

On the morning of 8 December, he summoned those Regional Inspectors (Landesinspekteure) of the party – the senior Gauleiter – who happened to be in Berlin to his office in the Reichstag. Six were present besides Reich Inspector Robert Ley – Goebbels, not surprisingly, was missing – when Strasser addressed them. According to the post-war account of one of them, Hinrich Lohse, Strasser told them he had written the Führer a letter, resigning his party offices. He did not criticize Hitler’s programme, but rather his lack of any clear policy towards attaining power since the meeting with Hindenburg in August. Hitler was clear, he said, about one thing only: he wanted to become Reich Chancellor. But just wanting the post was not going to overcome the opposition he had encountered. And meanwhile the party was under great strain and exposed to potential disintegration. Strasser said he was prepared to go along with either the legal or the illegal – that is, putschist – way to power. But what he was not prepared to do was simply wait for Hitler to be made Reich Chancellor and see the party fall apart before that happened. Hitler, in his view, should have accepted the Vice-Chancellorship in August, and used that position as a bargaining counter to build up further power. On a personal note, Strasser expressed his pique at being excluded from top-level deliberations, and had no wish to play second fiddle to Göring, Goebbels, Rohm, and others. Now at the end of his tether, he was resigning his offices and leaving to recuperate.¹³¹

Strasser’s letter was delivered to Hitler in the Kaiserhof at midday on 8 December.¹³² It amounted to a feeble justification of Strasser’s position, couched in terms of wounded pride, and not touching on the fundamentals that separated him from Hitler. It had the ring of defeat in the very way it was formulated.¹³³ Hitler had been forewarned by Gauleiter Bernhard Rust, who had attended the meeting called by Strasser, to expect the letter. He had immediately summoned the same group of party Inspectors whom Strasser had addressed to the Kaiserhof for a meeting at noon.¹³⁴ The group, in dejected mood, were left standing in Hitler’s apartment while, in an agitated state, he provided a point-by-point counter to Strasser’s reasons for his resignation, as summarized by Robert Ley from the earlier meeting. Entering the Papen cabinet, he said, would have given the initiative to the party’s enemies. He would soon have been forced, through fundamental disagreement with Papen’s policies, into resignation. The effect on public opinion would have been the apparent demonstration of his incapacity for government – that which his enemies had always claimed. The electorate would have turned their backs on him. The movement would have collapsed. The illegal route was even more dangerous. It would simply have meant – the lessons of 1923 plainly recalled – standing ‘the prime of the nation’s manhood’ (das beste Mannestum der Nation) in front of the machine-guns of the police and army. As for overlooking Strasser, Hitler disingenuously claimed he entered into discussions with whosoever was necessary for a particular purpose, distributed tasks according to specific circumstances, and – according to availability – was open to all. He shifted the blame back on Gregor Strasser for avoiding him.

His address went on for the best part of two hours. Towards the end, the well-worn tactic was deployed once more: he made a personal appeal to loyalty. According to Lohse’s account, he became ‘quieter and more human, more friendly and appealing in his comments’. He had found

that comradely tone which those assembled knew and which completely convinced them. Now he was their friend, their comrade, their leader who had visibly for each one again freed the way out of the completely muddled situation which Strasser had presented, convincing them emotionally and intellectually. As he spoke, Strasser sank with his dark prophecy ever more into a shadowy distance, although those present in consideration and under the impact of what he had said had come with considerable reservations… Increasingly persuasive to his audience and inexorably drawing them under his spell, he [Hitler] triumphed and proved to his wavering, but upright and indispensable fighters in this toughest test of the movement, that he was the master and Strasser the journeyman… So he had remained the outright victor also in this last and most serious attack, directed at the substance of the movement from within its own ranks… The old bond with him was again sealed by those present with a handshake.¹³⁵

The mood that evening at Goebbels’s house, where Hitler returned, was nevertheless still sombre. There was real concern that the movement would fall apart. If that were to happen, announced Hitler, ‘I’ll finish things in three minutes.’¹³⁶ Dramatic gestures soon gave way to concerted moves to counter the possible ramifications of the ‘treachery’. Goebbels was summoned the same night at 2a.m. to a meeting in the Kaiserhof, where he found Rohm and Himmler already with Hitler. Hitler, still stunned by Strasser’s action, spent the time pacing the floor of his hotel-room. The meeting lasted until dawn. The main outcome was the decision to dismantle the organizational framework that Strasser had erected, and which had given him his power-base in the party.¹³⁷ In time-honoured fashion, as he had taken over the SA leadership following the Stennes affair, Hitler himself now formally took over the leadership of the political organization, with Robert Ley as his chief of staff.¹³⁸ A new Political Central Commission was set up, under Rudolf Heß, and the two Reich Inspectorates created by Strasser were abolished.¹³⁹ A number of known Strasser supporters were removed from their posts.¹⁴⁰ And a major campaign was begun, eliciting countless declarations of loyalty to Hitler from all parts of Germany – also from Strasser sympathizers.¹⁴¹ Strasser was rapidly turned into the movement’s arch-traitor. Hitler began the appeals to loyalty the very next day, 9 December, when he addressed the Gauleiter, Regional Inspectors, and Reichstag deputies. According to the report in the Völkischer Beobachter, every single person present felt the need to offer a personal show of loyalty by shaking hands with the Führer.¹⁴² ‘Strasser is isolated. Dead man!’ noted Goebbels triumphantly.¹⁴³ Soon afterwards, Hitler set off on a speaking tour, addressing party members and functionaries at seven meetings in nine days.¹⁴⁴ Again and again the personal appeal was successful. No secession followed Strasser’s resignation. The crisis was past.

Following the shock announcement of his resignation, Gregor Strasser had immediately left for holiday in Italy. His resignation and departure sounded the death-knell for Schleicher’s political hopes. Belated discussions in early January between a dispirited Strasser and a Chancellor whose star was evidently on the wane were a mere empty postscript to the December drama.¹⁴⁵ On 16 January, following the revival of the party’s fortunes (after a massive propaganda input) the previous day in the state elections of the dwarf-state Lippe-Detmold, Hitler delivered a three-hour verbal assault on Strasser to his assembled Gauleiter at a meeting in Weimar.¹⁴⁶ ‘His shares are no longer sought after. A short performance on the stage of significance. Now he sinks again into the void from which he came,’ was Goebbels’s – stylistically embellished – dismissal of Gregor Strasser in his diary entry.¹⁴⁷ Strasser now retired fully from all political activity and from public view. He was not excluded from the party. In fact, early in 1934 he applied for, and was granted, the NSDAP’s badge of honour, awarded to him as party member No.9, dating from the refoundation of the party on 25 February 1925.¹⁴⁸ Neither this nor a plaintive letter he wrote to Rudolf Heß on 18 June 1934 emphasizing his lengthy service and continuing loyalty to the party could save his skin.¹⁴⁹ Hitler was unforgiving to those he felt had betrayed him. His final reckoning with Gregor Strasser came on 30 June 1934, when the former second man in the party was murdered in what came to be known as ‘the Night of the Long Knives’.

Had Gregor Strasser succeeded in splitting the party, bringing one part of it behind the Schleicher government, and joining the cabinet himself, the chances are that a Hitler takeover of power would never have occurred. History would have taken a different course. But in fact Strasser never even seriously attempted to create a party rebellion.¹⁵⁰ He turned his protest into a personal one by the nature of his resignation. As a consequence, it was all the easier to isolate him as Hitler and Goebbels orchestrated their recovery. And since his resignation, and the way it was carried out, fully undermined Schleicher’s plans and left the Chancellor increasingly exposed, it paradoxically cleared the path, which had appeared – also to Strasser – blocked, to a Hitler Chancellorship.¹⁵¹

Ultimately, the Strasser affair – the most serious of the inner-party crises since 1925 – revealed once again most graphically just how strong Hitler’s hold over the party had become, how much the NSDAP had become a ‘leader party’. The implications of this for the character of the party on the eve of its becoming the state party of the Third Reich were illustrated in Hitler’s guidelines for the organization of the party after Strasser’s departure. Hitler’s memorandum of 15 December 1932 ‘on the inner reasons for the instructions to produce a heightened fighting power (Scblagkraft) of the Movement’ demonstrates plainly the key differences between his conception of the party and that of Strasser.¹⁵²

‘The basis of the political organization is loyalty. In it is revealed as the most noble expression of emotion (Gefüblsausdruck) the recognition of the necessity of obedience as the premiss for the construction of every human community. Loyalty in obedience can never be replaced by formal technical measures and institutions, of whatever sort. The aim of the political organization is the enabling of the widest possible dissemination of the knowledge seen as necessary for the maintenance of the life of the nation as well as the will that serves it. The final aim is thereby the mobilization (Erfassung) of the nation for this idea. The victory of the National Socialist idea is the goal of our struggle, the organization of our party a means to attaining this goal.’ Such ethereal language emphasizes how remote Hitler’s conception of the party was from any notion of a bureaucratic organization. Ideal, though in practice impossible, he went on, would be to do without organization altogether. As it was, organization should be kept to a minimum since ‘a world-view (Weltanschauung) needs for its dissemination not civil servants but fanatical apostles’. In preparing for the time when it would be able to permeate the state with this world-view, it was important to remember that the state too offered no end in itself, but was merely ‘an institution that had to serve the maintenance and continuation of the life of a people’. The ‘supreme and most sublime mission’ of the party was, therefore, to provide for the expansion of the ‘idea’. To do this, it had continually to return to its ‘greatest and first task: propaganda’. Leaders were not to be imposed from above, because of their administrative competence, but to emerge from below, through their talents and achievements on behalf of the movement’s struggle. There would be inevitable difficulties in working together between individual leaders of different temperament and ability. But this must be taken on board. The key issue was ‘that the essentials of unconditional party discipline should not be affected by this’. The party was engaged in ‘the hardest ideological struggle’. Hence, Hitler underlined once more, ‘all its institutions have somehow to serve the propaganda of ideas’.¹⁵³

For Hitler, the organization of the party, his memorandum makes clear, had no meaning in itself. It was there solely to serve the ends of propaganda, as a means to obtaining power.¹⁵⁴ Propaganda and mobilization remained for Hitler the purpose of the party. Where Strasser had worked, conventionally enough, towards a bureaucratic structuring of the party, mirroring in essence the administrative framework of the state, Hitler intentionally destroyed any inherent bureaucratic rationality in favour of an instrument devoted solely to propaganda, to upholding the ‘idea’ of National Socialism as embodied in the Leader. The intrinsic contradiction between ‘leadership of people’ (Menschenführung) and ‘administration’ (Verwaltung), which would be laid bare during the Third Reich, was, his memorandum plainly shows, inherent to Hitler’s conception of the party and approach to power. The untrammelled personalized form of power that he represented could not dispense with bureaucratic organization, but was nevertheless inimical to it. As long as the party existed only to attain power, the contradiction could be sustained. In government, it was a recipe for chaos.

IV

The mass of the German people had no part in, or knowledge of, the intrigues of high politics in the second half of 1932. They were by now largely powerless to affect the political dramas which would determine their future. As autumn turned to winter, they were entering upon the fourth year of deepening misery in the apparently unending Depression.

Statistics provide only an abstract glimmer of the human suffering. Industrial production had fallen by 42 per cent since 1929. The stocks and shares index had dropped by more than two-thirds. In the hard-hit agrarian sector, which had felt crisis long before the general Depression had caught hold, compulsory farm-sales had more than doubled. Falling demand, prices, and income had brought mounting indebtedness.¹⁵⁵ Above all, the dark shadow of mass unemployment on an unprecedented scale hung over the country. The Employment Offices recorded 5,772,984 persons without work at the end of 1932; in January 1933 the figure was 6,013,612. Taking into account short-time workers and hidden unemployment, it was reckoned that the real total already in October 1932 had reached 8,754,000.¹⁵⁶ This meant that close on half of the work-force was either fully or partially unemployed.¹⁵⁷ Towns offered free meals at soup kitchens, cheap or free warm baths for the unemployed, and warming-houses where they could shelter in winter.¹⁵⁸

The politically radicalized among the unemployed had fed mainly the ranks of the KPD – par excellence the party of the young, unemployed males – the overwhelming proportion of whose 320–360,000 members by late 1932 had no work.¹⁵⁹ Not a few also found their way to the Nazi stormtroopers.¹⁶⁰ Both the Communists and the Nazis offered an organizational framework of support, forms of political activism, and the vision of a better society to the young unemployed.¹⁶¹ But alongside the unemployed who became radicalized, a great number were simply resigned and apathetic, imagining that all governments had failed and none was capable of mastering the problems which had brought about their fate. A few days before Hitler’s appointment to the Chancellorship, in conditions of freezing cold, the people of the small town of Ettlingen in Baden could not engender the slightest interest in an SA parade. There had been no shortage of demonstrations, they said. ‘If only we had as much bread and work.’¹⁶²

Nor could a younger generation whose ‘working lives’ had been entirely without work find much enthusiasm for a self-professed working-class party, the SPD, which had – however necessary it had objectively been – kept Brüning in office and voted Hindenburg back into power. Not a few would shrug their shoulders several years later and say that at least Hitler had brought them work, which the working-class parties before 1933 had failed to do. It was abbreviated logic. But it was how many felt.

Mass unemployment split and atomized the working class not just at the party-political and ideological level, but at its social roots.¹⁶³ For those still fortunate enough to have work, self-confidence was eaten away by fear of losing their jobs, by the loss of the power of the unions, exposure to employer aggressiveness, and – so far as they were sympathizers of the Social Democrats – by the SPD’s perceived failure to look after working-class interests. The disorientation and disillusionment of so many former SPD supporters after 1933, however little they were won over by the Nazi regime, stemmed from what they saw as its unmitigated failure in the crisis of the state of which it was the main pillar.

In the countryside, too, there was a widespread feeling of hopelessness.¹⁶⁴ Apathy sprang from the sense that there was no sign of improvement, whoever was in government. The mood of deep resignation had spread in areas of bedrock Nazi support in autumn 1932 after Hitler had turned down the chance of entering government and the NSDAP’s promises were no nearer to realization.¹⁶⁵ From one district of Franconia, where the NSDAP had built up a high level of support, it was reported in the first days of January 1933 that ‘the mood of the rural population is calm but extraordinarily depressed on account of the continued fall in prices of all agricultural products. A certain despondency has taken over. One gains the impression that many of those who had previously put their hopes in Hitler have become sceptical and have lost hope in any improvement.’ The sentiments, the report claimed, were general ones, not confined to that district.¹⁶⁶

The disconsolate mood intermingled with enormous bitterness and political radicalization. From Lower Bavaria in January 1933 it was reported that ‘all attacks on the government find a lively echo among the peasants; the more caustic the language, the more pleasant it sounds in their ears’.¹⁶⁷The anger was further fired up by news that ‘Eastern Aid’ (Osthilfe), intended for restoring agricultural prosperity on impoverished properties in eastern Germany, was lining the pockets of big landowners and being used for luxury expenditure.¹⁶⁸ Bitterness towards all Weimar governments and parties, each of which was seen to have failed the people, was a hallmark of popular feeling in the countryside as it was in the towns. ‘No one wants to know anything of a parliamentary government, since all large parties had failed’ was the reported mood in one Bavarian region in December 1932. – a feeling certainly not confined to that part of the country. The Nazi Party was not excluded from such criticism. ‘The party leaders are blamed for being led in their decisions less by considerations of people and Fatherland than by those of the party and themselves. It is especially held against the NSDAΡ that it has recently shunned responsibility and does not follow its wide-ranging promises with action.’ No expectations were placed in Hitler in this region. ‘Apart from National Socialists,’ the report went on, at this point reflecting the weighting of a heavily Catholic region, ‘more or less all the remaining sections of society are negatively disposed towards a Hitler dictatorship.’ It concluded: ‘Under the impact of economic distress and the disunity of the other parties, the KPD is flourishing.’¹⁶⁹ At the same time, the despair was such that any political leader outside the ranks of the dreaded Marxists who could bring about economic improvement was guaranteed – at least in the short term – to attract support. This was to Hitler’s advantage once he became Chancellor. The feeling that Hitler should at least be given the chance to see what he could do coexisted with initial scepticism.¹⁷⁰

For other social groups, too, the expectations placed in Hitler’s movement and the motivations that underpinned their subsequent support or antipathy were strongly influenced by experiences in the Depression years. The way society and government had fallen apart in those years brought to the boil the welling resentment at the democratic system and sense of national humiliation that had been simmering throughout the Weimar era. The depth of anger towards those held responsible was one side of the response. The desire for social harmony and unity – to be imposed by the elimination of those seen to threaten it – was the other, and intrinsically related, side.¹⁷¹

The report from one locality in Franconia in December 1932 brought out how sectionalized grievances combined to create generalized disaffection. Businessmen were complaining about poor turnover, ran the report, farmers about low produce prices, teachers and civil servants about their salaries, workers about unemployment, the unemployed about levels of support, and war-cripples and war-widows about drops in their pensions. All in all, there was ‘general discontent, the best preparation (Wegbereiter) for Communism’.¹⁷²

Middle-class disaffection was, naturally enough, fragmented along the lines of sectional interest. The outlook remained bleak. But despite some drop in confidence in Hitler in autumn 1932 from groups which had been a backbone of his support, no political alternatives were on offer on the Right which appeared capable of creating the conditions of national renewal and imposed social harmony needed for economic recovery. For businessmen, craftsmen and small-scale producers, the Nazis held out the prospect of salvation from the economic threat posed by department stores, consumer associations, mail-order firms and mass-production. Authoritarian rule was far from an unattractive proposition. Part of its illusion was an implied return to the ‘good old days’ before the First World War and protection of the ‘little man’ from the incursions of the modern, interventionist state.¹⁷³ Civil servants, smarting under Brüning’s salary cuts, had their own illusions of a state which would restore their own traditional status – and financial position. Teachers and lawyers also looked to renewed authority once the shackles of democratic ‘interference’ had been removed, and to enhanced status. Doctors, too, like lawyers a social group traditionally sympathetic to the nationalist Right, had their resentment at diminished career prospects, falling earnings, and a ‘leftist’ imposed funding system greatly amplified during the Depression years.¹⁷⁴ Many looked to a new, authoritarian regime for rescue.

For young people, the Depression years had both in material and in psychological terms been appallingly damaging. Hopes and ideals had been blighted almost before they could take shape. By the end of 1932, four consecutive cohorts of pupils had left school to miserable prospects. Those lucky enough to find work had done so in deteriorating conditions, and were usually dismissed at the end of their apprenticeships. The youth welfare system was close to collapse. Growing suicide and youth criminality rates told their own tale. Those from more well-to-do backgrounds faced greatly diminished chances of launching a career in the professions to match their ambitions. Above average support for the Nazis among university students was one indication of middle-class youth’s alienation from the Weimar Republic. In fact, the attractiveness of extremist parties of Right and Left – the NSDAP and the KPD – to young people is an indication of their different forms of alienation from Weimar democracy and their readiness to resort to political radicalism. In many respects, it was a generational revolt against a system and a society that had failed them. Militant parties capable of playing to Utopian expectations could fill the void produced by the alienation. Young Germans in late 1932 were still split largely along party-political lines which themselves reflected in the main class and religious divisions. The socialist, Catholic, and – taken together – the collectivity of bourgeois youth organizations still dwarfed the Hitler Youth. But the overlap of ideals and ideology with the bourgeois youth organizations, especially, offered a rich potential for expansion to the Nazi youth leader, Baldur von Schirach, should his party start to recover from its setbacks of autumn 1932, and should his Leader manage to get to power soon.¹⁷⁵

The disaffection in German society did not, it seems, divide on gender lines. The Depression heightened the discrimination against women in the jobs market that had existed throughout the Weimar Republic. Traditional prejudice that a woman’s role should be confined to ‘children, kitchen, and church’ was strongly reinforced. The witchhunt against ‘double-earners’ – where both husband and wife worked and the woman was regarded as unnecessarily occupying a ‘man’s job’ – was an indication of growing intolerance.¹⁷⁶Nazi propaganda had no difficulty in playing on such intolerance, both before and after 1933. But anti-feminism was by no means confined to Hitler’s Movement. Despite its ‘macho’ image, the NSDAP’s views on the role of women were essentially shared by all conservative and denominational parties. Women’s political behaviour in the Depression was little influenced by anti-feminism or, conversely, by pro-feminist issues. Women voted, it appears, much like men did, and presumably for the same reasons. They voted in disproportionately large numbers for the conservative and Christian parties, which were anti-feminist. They voted in smaller numbers than men for the radical parties of both Left and Right. The party with the most pronounced emancipatory stance regarding women, the KPD, was the least successful of all in attracting women’s votes, and was as male-dominated a party as was the NSDAP. Despite all the talk of Hitler’s mesmerizing attraction for women, the elderly, statesmanlike Hindenburg, not the dynamic Nazi leader, had been their choice in the presidential elections earlier in 1932. But by the November Reichstag election, the gap between female and male voting support for the NSDAP had narrowed almost to vanishing-point. Women were just about as likely as men to find the prospect of a Hitler dictatorship an attractive one. The mentalities which Nazism could build upon and exploit crossed the gender divide.

Despite the disappointment in Hitler and decline in support for the NSDAP in the autumn of 1932, such mentalities, which would benefit the Nazi regime once Hitler had taken power, were kept alive and given sustenance by the bruising years of the Depression. Though two-thirds of the people had not voted for Hitler, many were less than root-and-branch opposed to all that Nazism stood for, and could fairly easily be brought in the coming months to find some things in the Third Reich that they might approve of. The loathing and deep fear of Communism that ran through some four-fifths of society was one important common denominator. Faced with a stark choice between National Socialism and Communism-which was how Hitler was increasingly able to portray it after his takeover of power – most middle-class and well-to-do Germans, and even a considerable leaven of the working class, preferred the Nazis. The Communists were revolutionaries, they would take away private property, impose a class dictatorship, and rule in the interests of Moscow. The National Socialists were vulgar and distasteful, but they stood for German interests, they would uphold German values, and they would not take away private property. Crudely put, this reflected a widespread train of thought, not least in the middle classes.

Fear, bitterness, and radicalization were part of a climate of political violence. These tensions of the Depression years had made political violence an everyday occurrence, even in the sleepiest of places.¹⁷⁷ People became used to it. If it was targeted at the ‘Reds’ they often approved of it – even ‘respectable’ sections of society which decried the breakdown of ‘order’ in public life. Paradoxically, the party responsible for much of the mayhem, the NSDAP, could benefit by portraying itself – enhanced by the image of serried ranks of marching stormtroopers – as the only party capable of ending the violence by imposing order in the national interest. The acceptance of a level of outright violence in public life, which had been there at the birth and in the early years of the Weimar Republic and again become pronounced in the Depression years, helped to pave the way for the readiness to accept Nazi terror in the aftermath of the ‘seizure of power’.¹⁷⁸

Along with this went a vindictiveness that the deprivations and tensions of the Depression years had promoted. Someone had to be blamed for the misery. Scapegoats were needed. Enemies were targeted. Political enemies were lined up for scores to be settled. Personal and political enmities often went hand in hand. If the anonymity of the big city could offer some protection, that was not the case in small towns and in villages. Here there was no hiding-place. Once the power of the state could be used to support violence, not contain it, there would be no shortage of those volunteering to participate in the bloodletting. For countless others, the social and political conflicts of the Depression years stored up personal grudges that would be paid back after 1933 through denunciation for real or fictional political ‘offences’.

As regards scapegoats, the Jews were an easy target. Nazi diabolization of Jews enabled them to be portrayed as both the representatives of rapacious big capital and of pernicious and brutal Bolshevism. Most Germans did not go along with such crude images. Nor were they likely to become involved in, or approve of, physical violence directed at individual Jews and their property. But dislike of Jews extended far beyond Nazi sympathizers. No political party, pressure-group, or trade union, and neither main Christian denomination, made the defence of the Jewish minority an issue. And, when times were hard, it was simple enough to stir envy and resentment against a tiny minority of the population – 0.76 per cent in 1933 belonged to the Jewish faith – by stressing how they dominated out of all proportion to their numbers sections of business, the arts, and the professions.¹⁷⁹ It was no coincidence, for instance, that one of the most viciously antisemitic Nazi sub-organizations was the Fighting League of the Commercial Middle Class (Kampfbund des gewerblichen Mittelstandes), where small traders campaigned against department stores that they claimed to be largely in Jewish hands. Most people during the Depression years, as we have already commented, did not vote for the NSDAP, or even join the party, primarily because of its antisemitism. But the widespread latent antisemitism in Weimar Germany – the feeling that Jews were somehow different, ‘unGerman’, and a harmful influence – did not provide any deterrent to people offering their enthusiastic support to Hitler’s movement in full cognizance of its hatred of Jews. And since that hatred was central to the ethos of a Movement which was massively expanding its membership in the early 1930s – by the end of 1932 its membership numbers had reached 1,414,975¹⁸⁰– more and more people were becoming exposed, once in the Movement, to the full brutality and viciousness of Nazi antisemitism. The same applied to the SA, by this time numbering around 400,000 stormtroopers.¹⁸¹ Even many of the young thugs who had been attracted to it in increasing numbers were not outrightly antisemitic before they joined.¹⁸² But once members, they were part of an organization whose ‘Fighting Song’ contained the lines: ‘When Jews’ blood spurts from the knife, good times are once more here.’¹⁸³

The half-a-million-strong Jewish community – the vast majority patriotic, liberal-minded Germans, anxious to be assimilated into, not separated from, their fellow countrymen – was divided in its reactions to the upsurge of antisemitism. The main Jewish organization, the Centralverein-the ‘Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith’ – took the danger very seriously, and put up a sturdy defence of Nazi inroads into civil rights.¹⁸⁴ Others were more complacent – a feeling they often combined with a sense of helplessness. They thought the danger would blow over. Few had direct experience of racist attacks – something Jews themselves associated with Russia, Poland or Rumania, not with Germany. It was possible to accept some discrimination, avoid threatening situations, and generally keep out of trouble.¹⁸⁵ It was still possible to feel ‘at home’ in Germany.¹⁸⁶ It was still possible on the very last day of 1932, as Lion Feuchtwanger’s fictional characters in Geschwister Oppermann did, to joke about whether ‘the Führer’ would end up as a market salesman or an insurance agent.¹⁸⁷

Three years of crippling Depression had left Germany a more intolerant society. A sign that the humane principles on which the Republic had been based were being whittled away during the Depression, as German society lurched towards the Right, was the reintroduction of the death penalty in the early 1930s. A few years earlier it had seemed close to abolition. The Nazis were to make it the pivot of their proclaimed restoration of ‘order’.¹⁸⁸ Another indicator of a changing climate in which liberal values were being rapidly eroded was the radicalization of medical views on eugenics and ‘racial hygiene’. The costs of keeping mental patients in asylums at a time of drastic cuts in public expenditure brought increased pressure for legislation to introduce the voluntary sterilization of those with hereditary defects. Growing support for such measures among doctors, psychiatrists, lawyers, and civil servants led to draft proposals, supported by the German Doctors’ Association, for a Reich Sterilization Law. Württemberg and Prussian Chambers of Doctors underlined their backing for such legislation in November and December 1932.¹⁸⁹ Hitler’s party, with a third of the voters behind it, went further and advocated compulsory sterilization of the hereditarily sick. In 1933, the Nazis wasted little time after coming to power in introducing notorious legislation to this effect. But the ground had been prepared by the ‘experts’ before Hitler took office.

At the end of 1932, images of Hitler continued to reflect, as they always had done, the main ideological divides and sub-cultures of German society.¹⁹⁰ For the Socialist and Communist Left – with only minor differences between them in this regard – Hitler was portrayed as the hireling of big capitalism, the front-man for imperialists, the political strike-force of the enemies, of the working class. Such views were to persist after 1933 in the left-wing underground resistance organizations, the underestimation of Hitler they contained hindering clear perceptions of the ideological dynamism of Nazism. For Catholics – the other sub-culture which Nazism found greatest difficulty in penetrating, before and after 1933 – Hitler was above all seen as the head of a ‘godless’, anti-Christian movement. In Protestant church-going circles, impressions of Hitler varied. Some looked to the dangers of a neo-heathen movement which had roused the base instincts of the masses. Others saw the potential, at a time when church attendance was dwindling and moral and religious values were allegedly being undermined, of Hitler’s ‘national renewal’ bringing in its wake ethical and religious revival. On the nationalist-conservative Right, the relatively sympathetic treatment of Hitler at the time of the Young Plan Campaign had given way to hostility. Hitler was portrayed for the most part as intransigent and irresponsible, a wild and vulgar demagogue, not a statesman, an obstacle to political recovery, the head of an extremist movement with menacing socialistic tendencies. Against these negative images had to be set the adulation of the third of the population that, despite the setbacks of summer and autumn, still saw in Hitler the only hope for Germany’s future. More than 13.5 million had voted for Hitler in the July election. They were all potential or real devotees of the Führer cult. Despite the losses in November, it still amounted to a huge reservoir of support, its focal point personalized in the extraordinary Leader of the NSDAP. And if Hitler could once get to power, and achieve some success, then there was the distinct chance that the strands of an ideological consensus rooted in strident anti-Marxism, hostility to party politics and pluralist democracy, and yearning for a restoration of national pride under authoritarian leadership, might come together to widen the basis of his support. The key would be whether he could shed the divisive image of a party leader, and appear to stand above party, for the nation. In January 1933, two-thirds of the German population were still dismissive of such a notion.

V

The events of January 1933 amounted to an extraordinary political drama. It was a drama that unfolded largely out of sight of the German people.

A fortnight after Schleicher had taken over from him as Reich Chancellor, Franz von Papen had been guest of honour at a dinner at the Berlin Herrenklub. Among the 300 or so guests listening to his speech on 16 December, justifying his own record in government, criticizing the Schleicher cabinet, and indicating that he thought the NSDAP should be included in government, was the Cologne banker Baron Kurt von Schröder. A few weeks earlier, Schroder had been a signatory to the petition to Hindenburg to make Hitler Chancellor. For months before that he had been a Nazi sympathizer, and was a member of the ‘Keppler Circle’ – the group of economic advisers that Wilhelm Keppler, a one-time small businessman, had set up on Hitler’s behalf. Already in November – though nothing came of it at the time – Keppler had told Schröer that Papen might be prepared to intercede with Hindenburg in favour of a Hitler Chancellorship. Now, after Papen’s Herrenklub speech, interested by what the former Chancellor had had to say, Schröder met him for a few minutes late in the evening to discuss the political situation. The two had known each other for some time. And since Schröder also knew Hitler, he was the ideal intermediary at a time that relations between the Nazi leader and the former Chancellor were still icy. Out of the discussion came the suggestion, probably from Schröder though it is impossible to be sure, of a meeting between Hitler and Papen. Just before the end of December, Schroder rang Papen to ask whether he were free for a meeting during the next few days. The meeting was fixed to take place at Schroder’s house in Cologne on 4 January 1933. Since Papen was travelling to Berlin from his home in the Saar that day, intending to stop off at his mother’s house in Düsseldorf, and since Hitler would be in the vicinity en route to begin the election campaign in Lippe-Detmold that evening, the venue was chosen because of its mutual convenience, though Keppler had, in fact, already suggested Schröder’s house to Hitler as a meeting-place following the banker’s discussion with Papen on 16 December.¹⁹¹

In his own post-war account of the meeting, Schroder indicated that he had already taken soundings among figures from the business community about collaboration in government between Papen and Hitler, and found them favourably disposed. Fear of Bolshevism, the hope that National Socialism in power would provide a stable political climate for economic recovery, and removal of constraints on business autonomy were what they wanted. They hoped that ‘a strong leader’ would come to power and form a government that would remain for a long time in office.¹⁹²Schröder’s soundings had, in fact, extended no further than the Keppler Circle – the limited number of businessmen whose sympathies for Hitler had not been in doubt. He had not consulted leading industrialists, either individually or through the main industrialists’ organization, the Reichsverband der deutschen Industrie (Reich Association of German Industry). The view, long taken for granted, that Schröder was acting as an agent of big business is without substance. Schroder did not know the leading figures in the business world, and they, for their part, had no idea of his attempts to bring Papen and Hitler together.¹⁹³ Big business was, in fact, divided in its opinion of the Schleicher government. Its early fears of the ‘Red General’, regarded by business leaders as a crypto-socialist, had not materialized. Relations with National Socialism were in the meantime poor.¹⁹⁴ For major figures in industry, Papen was still their man. His return to the Chancellor’s seat, with Hitler in a subordinate role to bring the NSDAP behind the government, remained their favoured scenario.¹⁹⁵ As January progressed, it would prove to be the big landowners, through their lobbying organization the Reichslandbund (Reich Agrarian League), rather than the ‘captains of industry’, who emerged as the mortal enemies of the Schleicher cabinet and the leading proponents of an elevation of Hitler to the Chancellorship.¹⁹⁶

Papen later disingenuously claimed that his aim was to try to persuade Hitler to join the Schleicher government.¹⁹⁷ His actual aim was to take first soundings about the prospects of collaborating with Hitler in a new cabinet. Papen, whatever his later altruistic claims, was smarting from his ousting by Schleicher. Hitler knew that if anyone could unlock the door to Hindenburg’s approval, it was Papen.¹⁹⁸

Papen arrived around midday at Schroder’s house. The meeting was meant to be secret, but word of it had leaked out. As he stepped out of his taxi, Papen was photographed. The following day, the Tägliche Rundschau, the Tat Circle’s newspaper, reported that the meeting revolved around considerations of bringing about a Hitler government through using Papen’s good offices with the Reich President. Papen and Hitler were both forced to deny that anything was discussed beyond ‘the possibility of a great national political unity front’.¹⁹⁹ Papen found Hitler – who had entered through the back door – together with Hess, Himmler and Keppler, waiting for him. Hitler, Papen and Schröder adjourned to another room, while the others waited. Schröder took no part in the discussions.²⁰⁰ Hitler began aggressively, with an attack on Papen’s treatment of him on 13 August and a denunciation of the sentences on the Potempa murderers. When he calmed down, talk revolved around the format for a new government. Hitler reportedly spoke of involvement of Papen’s supporters in a cabinet under his leadership, as long as they were prepared to accept the removal of Social Democrats, Communists and Jews from ‘leading positions’, and the ‘restoration of order in public life’.²⁰¹ But for the first time, in the course of the discussions, Hitler seems to have hinted that he might accept less than the Chancellorship – at least for a while. A few days later he told Goebbels that Papen was keen to bring Schleicher down, and had the ear of the President: ‘Arrangement with us prepared. Either the Chancellorship or power ministries. Defence and Interior. That’s still to be heard about.’²⁰² Probably, Papen had reminded him – if he needed reminding – that Hindenburg’s objections to him becoming Chancellor would still be difficult to overcome. Most likely, the question of who was to lead the new government was left open at the meeting. Papen spoke loosely of some sort of duumvirate, and left open the possibility of ministerial posts, even if Hitler himself did not feel ready to take office, for some of his colleagues. After about two hours, discussions ended for lunch with an agreement to deal with further issues at a subsequent meeting, in Berlin or elsewhere. Papen evidently felt progress had been made. A few days later, reporting on the meeting to industrialists, he gave the impression that Hitler was prepared to play the role of a ‘junior partner’ in a cabinet dominated by conservatives.²⁰³ In discussion with Chancellor Schleicher on 9 January, Papen intimated that the Nazi leader would be satisfied with the Defence and Interior Ministries. The implication was that the talks with Hitler had been about incorporating him in a Schleicher cabinet, not toppling it. And in a private audience with the Reich President the same day, Papen informed Hindenburg that Hitler had lessened his demands and would be prepared to take part in a coalition government with parties of the Right. The unspoken assumption was that Papen would lead such a government. The Reich President told Papen to keep in touch with the Nazi leader.²⁰⁴

A second meeting between Hitler and Papen soon followed. It took place this time in the study of Ribbentrop’s house in Dahlem, a plush residential suburb of Berlin, on the night of 10–11 January. Nothing came of it, since Papen told Hitler that Hindenburg still opposed his appointment to the Chancellorship. Hitler angrily broke off further talks until after the Lippe election.²⁰⁵

Elections in the mini-state of Lippe-Detmold, with its 173,000 inhabitants,²⁰⁶ would at other times scarcely have been a first priority for Hitler and his party. But now they were a chance to prove the NSDAP was again on the forward march after its losses the previous November and after the Strasser crisis. Despite the poor state of the party’s finances, no effort was spared towards obtaining a good result in Lippe.²⁰⁷ For close on a fortnight before the election, on 15 January, Lippe was saturated with Nazi propaganda. All the Nazi big guns were fired. Göring, Goebbels, Frick, and Prince Auwi spoke.²⁰⁸ Hitler himself gave seventeen speeches in eleven days.²⁰⁹ It paid off. The NSDAP won almost 6,000 more votes compared with the November result, and increased its share of the poll from 34.7 to 39.5 per cent. The Nazis presumably won back most of the voters they had lost to the DNVP, whose support now dropped by over 3,000. The Communists also lost over 3,000 votes, while the SPD gained over 4,000. In reality, the Nazi success was less impressive than portrayed. Their support in the region still lagged by some 3,000 votes behind the result the party had obtained in the July Reichstag election.²¹⁰ This was naturally overlooked. The optical impression was what counted. The bandwagon seemed to be rolling again.²¹¹

Hitler’s position was strengthened, however, less by the Lippe result than by Schleicher’s increasing isolation. Not only had his lingering hopes of Gregor Strasser and gaining support from the Nazi ranks practically evaporated by mid-January,²¹² but the Reichslandbund had by then declared open warfare on his government because of its unwillingness to impose high import levies on agricultural produce. Schleicher was powerless to do anything about such opposition, which had backing not only within the DNVP but also within the NSDAP. Accommodation with the big agrarians would axiomatically have meant opposition both from both sides of industry, bosses and unions, together with consumers. Hugenberg’s offers to bring the DNVP behind Schleicher if he were to be given the combined ministries of Economics and Food were therefore bound to fall on deaf ears. Correspondingly, by 21 January, the DNVP had also declared its outright opposition to the Chancellor. Shrill accusations, along with those of the agrarians, of the government’s ‘Bolshevism’ in the countryside because of its schemes to divide up bankrupt eastern estates to make smallholdings for the unemployed were a reminder of the lobbying which had helped bring down Brüning. Schleicher’s position was also weakened by the Osthilfe (Eastern Aid) scandal which broke in mid-January. The agrarian lobby was incensed that the government had not hushed up the affair. Since some of Hindenburg’s close friends and fellow landowners were implicated, the ire directed at Schleichercould be transmitted directly through the Reich President. And when, in the wake of the scandal, it was revealed that the President’s own property at Neudeck, presented to him by German business five years earlier, had been registered in his son’s name to avoid death-duties, Schleicher was held responsible by Hindenburg for allowing his name to be dragged through the mud.²¹³

At a cabinet meeting on 16 January, the day after the Lippe result had been announced, Schleicher had again raised the issue which had occupied Papen in the autumn: whether to seek a dissolution of the Reichstag and postponement of new elections; in other words, to risk a breach of the constitution. In contrast to Papen’s last cabinet meeting, no minister opposed such a move. Schleicher remained optimistic that, over a period of time, he could broaden the support for his government, and thought, following the line that Papen had fed him, that Hitler had now given up pretensions to the Chancellorship and had the more modest aim of the Defence Ministry, which Hindenburg would certainly refuse him.²¹⁴ Schleicher’s strategy for a breach of the constitution was in effect no different from that, which he himself had rejected, put forward by Papen. It required the support of the Reich President. At the beginning of December, Schleicher had persuaded Hindenburg that a breach of the constitution and declaration of a state of emergency would risk a civil war, and that the Reichswehr would not be able to withstand the civil unrest. He now faced the difficult task of persuading the President that what he had prophesied would happen in December would not happen in January – even though conditions were little different. His prospects were not good.

Serving as the go-between, Ribbentrop had arranged another meeting between Hitler and Papen on 18 January.²¹⁵ Accompanied by Rohm and Himmler, Hitler – encouraged by the Lippe success and by Schleicher’s mounting difficulties – now hardened his position from the earlier meetings in the month and expressly demanded the Chancellorship. When Papen demurred, claiming his influence with Hindenburg was not sufficient to bring this about, Hitler, in his usual way, told the former Chancellor he saw no point in further talks. Ribbentrop then suggested that it might be worth talking to Hindenburg’s son, Oskar. The following day, Ribbentrop took his suggestion further with Papen. The result was a meeting, arranged for late on the Sunday evening, 22 January, at Ribbentrop’s house, at which Oskar von Hindenburg and the Reich President’s State Secretary Otto Meissner agreed to be present. Frick accompanied Hitler. Göring joined them later.²¹⁶ Hitler had not felt well the previous day. Goebbels put it down to his sleeping and eating too little.²¹⁷ Perhaps he was still unwell, or perhaps his meeting later that evening with Oskar von Hindenburg was on his mind, when he delivered a below-par speech to party functionaries in the Sportpalast in Berlin on 22 January.²¹⁸ But when he arrived at Ribbentrop’s at ten o’clock, he was determined to make an impression on Hindenburg junior. The main part of the meeting consisted of a two-hour discussion between Hitler and the President’s son. Hitler also spoke with Papen, who told him that the President had not changed his mind about making him Chancellor, but recognized that the situation had changed and that it was necessary to incorporate the National Socialists in this or a new government. Hitler was unyielding. He made it plain that Nazi cooperation could only come under his Chancellorship. The official communiqué following the ill-fated meeting on 13 August still rankled with him. He was adamant that he had not sought total power then, and had no objection to extensive representation of bourgeois politicians in his cabinet, as long as they were not serving as representatives of political parties.²¹⁹ Apart from the Chancellorship for himself, he insisted only upon the Reich Ministry of the Interior for Frick and a further cabinet post for Göring. These claims were more modest – and were recognized as being such – than those he had put forward to Schleicher the previous August.²²⁰ Papen demanded the post of Vice-Chancellor for himself.²²¹ On that basis, he now agreed to press for Hitler to become Chancellor – a notable breakthrough – but promised to withdraw if there was any sign that he did not have Hitler’s confidence.²²² Oskar von Hindenburg commented to Meissner on the way back from Dahlem that he had been impressed by what Hitler had had to say.²²³ Hitler was less complimentary about the President’s son. ‘Young Oskar’, he told Goebbels, cut ‘a rare image of stupidity’.²²⁴

The following day, Chancellor Schleicher, by now aware of the threat to his position, informed the Reich President that a vote of no-confidence in the government could be expected at the delayed recall of the Reichstag on 31 January. He requested an order of dissolution and postponement of new elections. Hindenburg agreed to consider a dissolution, but rejected the breach of Article 25 of the Weimar Constitution.²²⁵ What he had been prepared to grant Papen five months earlier, he now refused Schleicher. But since Schleicher himself had argued against the wisdom of such a drastic step as recently as the beginning of December, he could scarcely criticize the President for continuing to follow the advice he had given at that time, rather than the reverse advice he was now offering.

At the same time, Hindenburg had left himself with little room for manoeuvre. He had once more rejected the idea of a Hitler Chancellorship.²²⁶ That left only the return to a Papen cabinet – Hindenburg’s favoured outcome, but scarcely likely to resolve the crisis, and regarded with scepticism even by Papen himself. As rumours hared round Berlin, the prospect of a reversion to Papen’s ‘cabinet of struggle’, with a major role for Hugenberg, and a declaration of a state of emergency was, remarkable though it now seems, seen as more worrying than a cabinet led by Hitler.²²⁷ Fears of such an eventuality were sharply intensified after Schleicher, on 28 January, having been refused the dissolution order by the Reich President, submitted his own resignation and that of his entire cabinet.²²⁸ Within hours, Hindenburg asked Papen to try to work towards a solution within the framework of the Constitution and with the backing of the Reichstag.²²⁹ According to Papen’s own account, he was asked by the President to take soundings about the possibilities of a Hitler cabinet.²³⁰ Papen told Ribbentrop that Hitler must be contacted without delay. A turning-point had been reached. After his talk with Hindenburg, he now thought a Hitler Chancellorship a possibility.²³¹

By this time, Papen had come round to full acceptance of a government led by Hitler. The only question in his mind was to ensure that Hitler was firmly contained by ‘reliable’ and ‘responsible’ conservatives. On 27 January, the day before Schleicher’s resignation, Hitler had been practically incapable of rational deliberation. He told his advisers he had no more to say to Hindenburg. And he broke off discussions with Hugenberg in great anger when the DNVP leader rejected his demands to install a National Socialist as Prussian Minister of the Interior in a new cabinet and – a point of great importance to Hitler – for new Reichstag elections.²³² Hitler was beside himself with anger and frustration. He had to be calmed down by Göring and Ribbentrop, and dissuaded from leaving Berlin immediately for Munich. ‘I have never seen Hitler in such a state,’ commented Ribbentrop. ‘I proposed to him and Göring that I should see Papen alone that evening’ – Hitler had declined to meet him – ‘and explain the whole situation to him. In the evening I saw Papen and convinced him eventually that the only thing that made sense was Hitler’s Chancellorship, and that he must do what he can to bring this about. Papen declared that the matter of Hugenberg was of secondary importance, and that he was now absolutely in favour of Hitler becoming Chancellor; this was the decisive change in Papen’s attitude… This recognition by Papen is, I believe, the turning-point.’²³³

Following the resignation of the Schleicher cabinet on 28 January, Papen had meetings with Hugenberg and Hitler.²³⁴ Hugenberg agreed that a Hitler cabinet was the only way forward, but stressed the importance of limiting his power. He demanded for himself the Reich and Prussian Ministries of Economics as the price of the DΝVP’s support. Hitler, unsurprisingly, refused – as he had done since August – to entertain the notion of a government dependent on a parliamentary majority, and held out for the headship of a presidential cabinet with the same rights that had been granted to Papen and Schleicher. He reiterated his readiness to include those from previous cabinets whom the President favoured, as long as he could be Chancellor and Commissioner for Prussia, and could place members of his own party in the Ministries of the Interior in the Reich and Prussia.²³⁵ The demands for extensive powers in Prussia caused problems. Ribbentrop and Göring tried to persuade Hitler to settle for less. Eventually, ‘with a bad grace’, as Papen put it, he accepted that the powers of Reich Commissar for Prussia would remain with Papen, in his capacity as Vice-Chancellor.²³⁶

Meanwhile, Papen had taken soundings by telephone from several former cabinet members, conservatives held in esteem by Hindenburg. All replied that they would be prepared to work in a Hitler cabinet, with Papen as Vice-Chancellor, but not in a Papen-Hugenberg ‘cabinet of struggle’. This impressed Hindenburg, when Papen reported to him late on the night of 28 January. He was also gratified by the ‘moderation’ of Hitler’s demands. For the first time, the Reich President was now amenable to a Hitler cabinet.²³⁷The deadlock was broken.

Hindenburg and Papen discussed the composition of the cabinet. The President was glad that the trusted Neurath would remain at the Foreign Ministry. He wanted someone equally sound at the Defence Ministry, following Schleicher’s departure. His own suggestion was General von Blomberg, the army commander in East Prussia and currently technical adviser of the German delegation to the Disarmament Conference in Geneva. Hindenburg thought him extremely reliable and ‘completely apolitical’. The following morning he was ordered back to Berlin.²³⁸

Papen continued his power-brokerage on the morning of 29 January in discussions with Hitler and Göring. The composition of the cabinet was agreed. All posts but two (other than the Chancellorship) were to be occupied by conservatives, not Nazis. Neurath (Foreign Minister), Schwerin von Krosigk (Finance), and Eltz-Rübenach (Post and Transport Ministry) had been members of the Schleicher cabinet. The occupancy of the Justice Ministry was left open for the time being. Frick was nominated by Hitler as Reich Minister of the Interior. Compensation for the concession made over the position of Reich Commissar of Prussia was the acceptance by Papen that Göring would serve nominally as his deputy in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior.²³⁹ This key appointment effectively gave the Nazis control over the police in the giant state of Prussia, embracing two-thirds of the territory of the Reich. There was no place as yet for Goebbels in a propaganda ministry, part of Nazi expectations the previous summer. But Hitler assured Goebbels that his ministry was waiting for him. It was simply a matter of necessary tactics for a temporary solution. Apart from all else, Hitler needed Goebbels for the election campaign he was insisting must follow his appointment as Chancellor.²⁴⁰

Papen had talks the same day with Hugenberg and with the Stahlhelm leaders, Seldte and Duesterberg. Hugenberg still objected to the Nazi demands for new elections, from which his own party had nothing to gain. But, tempted by the offer of the powerful Economics Ministry, which he had long coveted, he tentatively offered his cooperation.²⁴¹ The previous November, Hugenberg had told Hindenburg he thought Hitler untrustworthy. ‘His entire way of dealing with political matters makes it extraordinarily difficult to give him the political leadership,’ was Hugenberg’s judgement at the time. He would have very great reservations about such a step, he added.²⁴² Now, his own power ambitions removed such reservations. When, in late January, the deputy Stahlhelm leader Theodor Duesterberg warned him of the consequences of entrusting the Chancellorship to someone as dishonest as Hitler, Hugenberg waved the objections aside. Nothing could happen. Hindenburg would remain Reich President and supreme commander of the armed forces; Papen would be Vice-Chancellor; he himself would have control of the entire economic sphere, including agriculture; Seldte (the Stahlhelm leader) would be in charge of the Labour Ministry. ‘We’re boxing Hitler in,’ concluded Hugenberg. Duesterberg replied darkly that Hugenberg would find himself one night fleeing through ministerial gardens in his underpants to avoid arrest.²⁴³

Some of Papen’s conservative friends also expressed their deep concern at the prospect of a Hitler cabinet. Papen told them there was no alternative within the framework of the Constitution.²⁴⁴ To one who warned him that he was placing himself in Hitler’s hands, Papen replied: ‘You are mistaken. We’ve hired him.’²⁴⁵

A last problem still had to be resolved. Hitler insisted at his meeting with Papen on new elections to be followed by an enabling act. For Hitler, this was crucial. An enabling act was vital to be able to rule without dependency on either the Reichstag or on presidential backing for emergency decrees. But the current composition of the Reichstag offered no hope of passing an enabling act. Papen reported back, via Ribbentrop, that Hindenburg was not in favour of new elections. Hitler told Ribbentrop to inform the President that there would be no further elections after these. By the afternoon of 29 January, Papen was able to tell Göring and Ribbentrop that all was clear. ‘Everything perfect,’ Göring reported back to the Kaiserhof.²⁴⁶ Hitler was expected by the Reich President at eleven o’clock the next morning to be sworn in as Chancellor.²⁴⁷

In the evening there was another scare. Werner von Alvensleben, one of Schleicher’s go-betweens, turned up at Goebbels’s house with rumours that Hindenburg was, after all, going to install a Papen minority cabinet. That was something the Reichswehr would not accept. Oskar von Hindenburg would be arrested the next day. The President himself, no longer seen as fit for office, had been taken off to his estate at Neudeck. Hitler and Göring, in the adjacent room, were immediately informed. Göring wasted no time in letting Meissner and Papen know what was afoot. Goebbels was sceptical. But the Nazi leadership took the rumours seriously enough to put the SA on alert in Berlin.²⁴⁸ The President’s entourage also acted. The next morning, Oskar von Hindenburg was sent to the Anhalter Bahnhof to intercept Blomberg, on his arrival from Geneva, before he could be whisked away to army headquarters by the adjutant of General von Hammerstein, the army chief of staff, also waiting on the station platform. Blomberg was taken directly to the President, informed of the alleged putsch plans, and sworn in as new Defence Minister – itself a technical breach of the Constitution, since ministers could only be sworn in on the recommendation of the head of government. Blomberg was told by Hindenburg that it was his duty to reverse Schleicher’s course, and keep the Reichswehr out of politics.²⁴⁹

Quarter of an hour before the time of its appointment with the Reich President, at eleven o’clock on Monday, 30 January 1933, there was still dissension in the ranks of the members of the new cabinet who were wending their way through the ministerial gardens to the Reich Chancellery – Hindenburg’s residence while the Reich President’s Palace was under repair. Hitler was still unhappy at the restriction on his powers through the blockage on his appointment as Reich Commissar for Prussia. He insisted again on new elections. Hugenberg was opposed. Hitler and Hugenberg were still locked in heated argument even as they waited in Meissner’s room to meet the President. There was a chance that the cabinet might collapse before it had even been sworn in. Hitler promised that the composition of the cabinet would remain unaltered by the results of the election. Hugenberg remained unimpressed. The time for the appointment arrived. But the arguing continued. Meissner warned that the President could not be kept waiting much longer. Papen interceded to ask Hugenberg to respect the word of a German man. A last concession wrung out of Hitler by Papen was worthless: that he would consult the Zentrum and Β VP without delay about broadening the support for the government. Just before the new cabinet entered the Reich President’s chambers, it was finally agreed that they would seek the dissolution order that Hitler so badly wanted.²⁵⁰

At last, by now shortly after noon, the members of the Hitler cabinet trooped into the Reich President’s rooms. Hindenburg, piqued at being kept waiting, gave a brief welcoming address, expressing satisfaction that the nationalist Right had finally come together.²⁵¹ Papen then made the formal introductions. Hindenburg nodded his approval as Hitler solemnly swore to carry out his obligations without party interests and for the good of the whole nation. He again approvingly acknowledged the sentiments expressed by the new Reich Chancellor who, unexpectedly, made a short speech emphasizing his efforts to uphold the Constitution, respect the rights of the President, and, after the next election, to return to normal parliamentary rule. Hitler and his ministers awaited a reply from the Reich President. It came, but in only a single sentence: ‘And now, gentlemen, forwards with God.’²⁵²

VI

‘Hitler is Reich Chancellor. Just like a fairy-tale,’ noted Goebbels.²⁵³ Indeed, the extraordinary had happened. What few beyond the ranks of Nazi fanatics had thought possible less than a year earlier had become reality. Against all odds, Hitler’s aggressive obstinacy – born out of lack of alternatives – had paid off. What he had been unable to achieve himself, his ‘friends’ in high places had achieved for him. The ‘nobody of Vienna’, ‘unknown soldier’, beerhall demagogue, head of what was for years no more than a party on the lunatic fringe of politics, a man with no credentials for running a sophisticated state-machine, practically his sole qualification the ability to muster the support of the nationalist masses whose base instincts he showed an unusual talent for rousing, had now been placed in charge of government of one of the leading states in Europe. His intentions had scarcely been kept secret over the years. Whatever the avowals of following a legal path to power, heads would roll, he had said. Marxism would be eradicated, he had said. Jews would be ‘removed’, he had said. Germany would rebuild the strength of its armed forces, destroy the shackles of Versailles, conquer ‘by the sword’ the land it needed for its ‘living-space’, he had said. A few took him at his word, and thought he was dangerous. But far, far more, from Right to Left of the political spectrum – conservatives, liberals, socialists, communists – underrated his intentions and unscrupulous power instincts at the same time as they scorned his abilities.²⁵⁴ The Left’s underestimation was at least not responsible for getting him into power. Socialists, communists, trade unions were all little more than by-standers, their scope for influencing events emasculated since 1930. It was the blindness of the conservative Right to the dangers which had been so evident, arising from their determination to eliminate democracy and destroy socialism and the consequent governmental stalemate they had allowed to develop, that delivered the power of a nation-state containing all the pent-up aggression of a wounded giant into the hands of the dangerous leader of a political gangster-mob.

There was no inevitability about Hitler’s accession to power. Had Hindenburg been prepared to grant to Schleicher the dissolution that he had so readily allowed Papen, and to prorogue the Reichstag for a period beyond the constitutional sixty days, a Hitler Chancellorship might have been avoided. With the corner turning of the economic Depression, and with the Nazi Movement facing potential break-up if power were not soon attained, the future – even if under an authoritarian government – would have been very different. Even as the cabinet argued outside Hindenburg’s door at eleven o’clock on 30 January, keeping the President waiting, there was a possibility that a Hitler Chancellorship might not materialize. Hitler’s rise from humble beginnings to ‘seize’ power by ‘triumph of the will’ was the stuff of Nazi legend. In fact, political miscalculation by those with regular access to the corridors of power rather than any actions on the part of the Nazi leader played a larger role in placing him in the Chancellor’s seat.

His path ought to have been blocked long before the final drama of January 1933. The most glaring opportunity was missed through the failure to impose a hefty jail sentence after the putsch fiasco of 1923 – and to compound this disastrous omission by releasing him on parole within a matter of months and allowing him a fresh start. But those miscalculations, as well as those during the Depression years that opened up the possibility, then the reality, of a Hitler Chancellorship, were not random acts. They were the miscalculations of a political class determined to inflict what injury it could on (or at least make only the faintest attempts to defend) the new, detested, or at best merely tolerated democratic Republic. The anxiety to destroy democracy rather than the keenness to bring the Nazis to power was what triggered the complex developments that led to Hitler’s Chancellorship.

Democracy was surrendered without a fight. This was most notably the case in the collapse of the grand coalition in 1930. It was again the case – however vain the opposition might have proved – in the lack of resistance to the Papen coup against Prussia in July 1932.. Both events revealed the flimsiness of democracy’s base. This was not least because powerful groups had never reconciled themselves to democracy, and were by this time actively seeking to bring it down. During the Depression, democracy was less surrendered than deliberately undermined by élite groups serving their own ends. These were no pre-industrial leftovers, but – however reactionary their political aims – modern lobbies working to further their vested interests in an authoritarian system.²⁵⁵ In the final drama, the agrarians and the army were more influential than big business in engineering Hitler’s takeover.²⁵⁶ But big business, also, politically myopic and self-serving, had significantly contributed to the undermining of democracy which was the necessary prelude to Hitler’s success.

The masses, too, had played their part in democracy’s downfall. Never had circumstances been less propitious for the establishment of successful democracy than they were in Germany after the First World War. Already by 1920, the parties most supportive of democracy held only a minority of the vote. Democracy narrowly survived its early travails, though great swathes of the electorate opposed it root and branch. Who is to say that, had not the great Depression blown it completely off course, democracy might not have settled down and consolidated itself? But democracy was in a far from healthy state when the Depression struck Germany. And in the course of the Depression, the masses deserted democracy in their droves. By 1932, the only supporters of democracy were the weakened Social Democrats (and even many of these were by this time lukewarm), some sections of the Zentrum (which had itself moved sharply to the Right), and a handful of liberals. The Republic was dead. Still open was what sort of authoritarian system would replace it.

Hitler did not represent a classic ‘Bonapartist’ solution. There was no ‘class equilibrium’ in 1932.²⁵⁷ The working class was cowed and broken by Depression, its organizations enfeebled and powerless. But the ruling groups did not have the mass support to maximize their ascendancy and destroy once and for all the power of organized labour. Hitler was brought in to do the job for them. That he might do more than this, that he might outlast all predictions and expand his own power immensely and at their own expense, either did not occur to them, or was regarded as an exceedingly unlikely outcome. The underestimation of Hitler and his movement by the power-brokers remains a leitmotiv of the intrigues that placed him in the Chancellor’s office.

The mentalities which conditioned the behaviour both of the élites and of the masses, and which made Hitler’s rise possible, were products of strands of German political culture that were plainly recognizable in the twenty years of so before the First World War.²⁵⁸ Analogous trends can be seen elsewhere, most notably in Italy. But the parallels do not amount to close similarity, let alone identity. Most of the elements of political culture that fed into Nazism were peculiarly German. And the consciousness – especially among intellectuals – of Germany’s distinctiveness, even cultural superiority, as a nation was something which Hitler’s chauvinistic and bowdlerized version of this could build upon.²⁵⁹ Even so, Hitler was no inexorable product of a German ‘special path’, no logical culmination of long-term trends in specifically German culture and ideology.²⁶⁰

Nor was he a mere ‘accident’ in the course of German history. Without the unique conditions in which he came to prominence, Hitler would have been nothing. It is hard to imagine him bestriding the stage of history at any other time. His style, his brand of rhetoric, would, deprived of such conditions, have been without appeal. The impact on the German people of war, revolution, and national humiliation, and the acute fear of Bolshevism in wide sections of the population, gave Hitler his platform. He exploited the conditions brilliantly. More than any other politician of his era, he was the spokesman for the unusually intense fears, resentments, and prejudices of ordinary people not attracted by the parties of the Left or anchored in the parties of political Catholicism. And more than any other politician of his era, he offered such people the prospect of a new and better society – though one seeming to rest on ‘true’ German values with which they could identify. The vision of the future went hand in hand with the denunciation of the past in Hitler’s appeal. The total collapse of confidence in a state system resting on discredited party politics and bureaucratic administration had led over a third of the population to place its trust and its hopes in the politics of national redemption. The personality cult carefully nurtured around Hitler turned him into the embodiment of such hopes.²⁶¹

Whatever the future held, for those who could not share the delirium of the SA hordes marching through the Brandenburg Gate in celebration on the evening of 30 January 1933, it was at best uncertain. ‘A leap into the dark’ was how one Catholic newspaper described Hitler’s appointment to the Chancellorship.²⁶²

Many Jews and political opponents of the Nazis now feared for their well-being – even for their lives. Some made hurried plans to leave the country. There were those, not just on the defeated left, who foresaw disaster. But others rapidly shook off their initial foreboding, convincing themselves that Hitler and the Nazis had few prospects of ruling for long. Sebastian Haffner, then a young Berlin lawyer, later – after leaving a country whose government he could no longer tolerate – a distinguished journalist and writer, summarized his views at the time: ‘No. All things considered, this government was no cause for concern. It was only a matter of what would come after it, and perhaps the fear that it would lead to civil war.’²⁶³ Most of the serious press, he added, took the same line next day.

Few, indeed, predicted that things would turn out so differently.