The battle between Hindenburg and Hitler and the conspiracy behind it began immediately after the elections and lasted throughout the final tragic weeks of Germany’s tortured freedom. The decadent form of German democracy gradually petered out of existence, although Hitler was now supported by only 33.1 per cent of the total electorate, a fall of 4.2 per cent since the elections in July. The eminence grise behind Hindenburg was still Schleicher. On November 17 Papen resigned on his advice. According to Heiden, Goering was in Rome, sitting beside Mussolini at a banquet given in honor of the guests attending the European Congress of the Academy of Science, when news was brought to him of Papen’s defeat. Having assured Mussolini that fascism was now about to triumph in Germany, he flew back to Berlin in time to make the necessary arrangements with the President’s State Secretary, Otto Meissner, for a meeting between Hitler and Hindenburg. On November 19 Hitler met the President, and again on the twentyfirst. Nothing came of it. Hitler was determined to be Chancellor, and Hindenburg would not allow this unless he could secure majority support in the Reichstag, which was now impossible.
The next stage came when Schleicher secured the chancellorship for himself. The Nazi leaders were divided as to whether they should or should not co-operate with him. They met on December 1 at Weimar, and again on December 5 at the Kaiserhof, to discuss the matter; Gregor Strasser, never really Hitler’s man, had been in direct touch with Schleicher and was, in fact, secretly ready to lead a faction of the party deputies into Schleicher’s trap in exchange for receiving the office of Vice-Chancellor. Goering, Goebbels and Hitler were utterly opposed to any compromise. Goering was left, aided possibly by Roehm and Frick, to negotiate with Schleicher along the line determined at the final conference. According to Heiden, Goering had already been instructed to approach Schleicher on December 3 to ask for the office of Premier of Prussia and had been told there was support among the center parties only for Strasser to become State Premier.
When the new Reichstag met on December 6, Goering was reelected president. He did all he could to bring the assembly into ridicule, and he told it bluntly that its life would be a short one. When he had sat down, the Reichstag continued with its business while Goering stared at the deputies through binoculars, comparing the faces that he did not know with a file of photographs on his desk. In particular, he stared at the men he suspected of complicity with Strasser, and at Strasser himself. Two days later Strasser quarreled violently with Hitler and then wrote him a celebrated letter of recrimination, resigned from the party and left for the south. Hitler, aware his future was in the balance, threatened to shoot himself if the party deserted him, while Goering threatened to break the neck of every follower of Strasser.
On January 4, 1933, Hitler had what he gathered was to be a secret meeting with Papen at the house of the banker Schroeder, at which some form of future collaboration was discussed. Meanwhile Schleicher in courting the unions was losing the support of the industrialists, whom he then proceeded to blackmail. Strasser had returned from Rome, and it was known that he was actively conspiring with Schleicher to become his Vice-Chancellor. The party leaders were now gathered in the minute state of Lippe, where Goebbels was concentrating on a special-election campaign for the propaganda value a victory there would have in the eyes of the nation as a whole. “At midnight Goering also came,” wrote Goebbels on January 13 in his published diary of the period. “Strasser is the eternal subject of our discussion . . . The Berlin press say he is going to be appointed Vice-Chancellor.” And the next day Goebbels spent the afternoon with Goering “discussing our worries.”
Goebbels was right about the importance of the Lippe election as propaganda. After the Nazis had won a sufficiently decisive victory at the polls in this dimunitive state, the tide began to turn back in their direction. Strasser did not enter the Cabinet; the men behind Hindenburg, weary of the stalemate, decided at last to turn to Hitler. On January 22, the President’s son Oskar and the State Secretary Meissner met secretly with Hitler, Goering and Frick. They met at the house of Joachim von Ribbentrop, a member of the Nazi Party who makes his historical debut here because he happened to be known to Papen. Goering arrived here from Dresden, where he had made a speech against Hitler’s joining the present government. Hitler set out, apparently, to impress the President’s son and succeeded.
Papen’s scheme to turn the tables on Schleicher was beginning to work. The President refused to allow the Chancellor, who was unable to win sufficient support in the Reichstag, to establish a military dictatorship in place of parliamentary government. On January 28 Schleicher resigned, leaving the field open to his rivals. Hitler, aware that the chancellorship was about to fall to his stubborn siege as his rivals crumbled before him, became, according to Goebbels, “very quiet.” The final negotiations were left to Papen, who was, of course, in touch with Goering. The same day, according to Papen, Hitler was told the President wanted him to form a Cabinet “within the terms of the constitution,” which meant a Cabinet commanding a majority in the Reichstag. Hitler refused; he was willing to form a presidential Cabinet—a Cabinet independent of Reichstag support—incorporating men from other parties, but he demanded first that he be made Chancellor and Reich Commissioner for Prussia and that a member of his party (he meant Goering) be Minister of the Interior both for the Reich and for the key state of Prussia. Early the following morning Hitler and Goering called again early to propose that Frick be made Reich Minister of the Interior and Goering Interior Minister for Prussia. Papen replied that he, as Vice-Chancellor, would be appointed Reich Commissioner for Prussia, and Hitler accepted this “with a bad grace.” He then left Papen to discuss the matter with the President. After all, Papen and his associates thought, they would outnumber the Nazis in the Cabinet four to one and so keep them in order.
On January 29, wrote Goebbels,
in the afternoon, whilst we are having coffee with the Leader, Goering suddenly comes in and reports . . . the Führer is to be appointed Chancellor tomorrow. . . . This is surely Goering’s happiest hour. . . . He has diplomatically and cleverly prepared the ground for the Leader in nerve-racking negotiations for months . . . This upright soldier with the heart of a child . . . confronts the Leader and brings him the greatest piece of news of his life!
But this was not quite the end of the intrigues, as Papen recalls in his memoirs.
Schleicher, in the meantime, found another card to play. He sent one of his private emissaries, von Alvensleben, to Goering, who immediately hurried over to me with the news. Schleicher had sent a message that my real intention was to deceive the Nazis, and that they would do very much better to combine with Schleicher, who only wished to retain the post of Minister of Defense. Alvensleben had indicated that means could be found to neutralize Hindenburg. Schleicher had apparently even gone so far as to suggest that if the “old gentleman” should prove difficult, he, Schleicher, would mobilize the Potsdam garrison. Goering told me that he and Hitler had returned a flat negative to the plan and had immediately told Meissner and Oskar von Hindenburg.21
To forestall such a move as this by Schleicher, the President hastily ordered General Werner von Blomberg, who was attending a conference in Geneva, to return on the next train. At the station he was met independently both by Oskar von Hindenburg and by a staff officer who had directions to take him to the Ministry of Defense. Blomberg chose to go to the President, and was told he would be Minister of Defense in Hitler’s Cabinet.
As the members of the new Cabinet were walking across the garden that joined Papen’s Chancellery to the President’s Palace, where they were to be received by Hindenburg, Hitler was still truculent about the limitations that, he claimed, were being placed upon his powers. He threatened the Cabinet with new elections, which, he said, would soon confirm the majority he at present lacked in the Reichstag. A quarrel began at once, and Hindenburg became impatient at being kept waiting. At last it was decided to ask him to decree the dissolution of the Reichstag, and the Nazis, acc
ompanied by their unhappy associates, entered the President’s room to be sworn in.
Goering has described the tension of this period.
From January 20th on I was, as political delegate, in constant touch with Herr von Papen, with Secretary of State Meissner, with the leader of the Steel Helmets [Stahlhelm], Seldte, and with the leader of the German Nationalists, Hugenberg, and was discussing with them future developments. . . . At last an agreement was reached . . . I had, as Hitler’s representative, often in the past year gone back and forth between the Kaiserhof and the Wilhelmstrasse, and I shall never forget the moment when I hurried out to my car and could be the first to tell the expectant crowds: “Hitler has become Chancellor!”22
The tactics of legality had won. “How gloriously,” wrote Goering, “had the aged Field Marshal been used as an instrument of God.”
IV
Conquest of the State
AT HALF PAST TWO in the afternoon, Goering received the press in his palace. He was overcome by the emotions of victory, and he beamed at the foreign journalists who gathered anxiously about him. They were conscious of the changing atmosphere in the streets outside, which were filled with triumphant Nazis. Goering felt a need to ease the tension, and he turned the reception into a social occasion. It grew dark quickly in the winter afternoon; the “Horst Wessel Song,” sung by the men who knew their Leader was master at last of the Reich Chancellery, began to sound menacing in the ears of the majority of Germans who had nothing to celebrate.
It was night when Hitler, with Goering by his side, held his first Cabinet meeting. The duennas of democracy, Vice-Chancellor von Papen, Baron Konstantin von Neurath, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, Minister of Finance, and Hindenburg’s special man General von Blomberg, Minister of Defense and head of the Reichswehr, believed in the blindness of their innocence that they were there to maintain due modesty of behavior now that the untried Nazis held the reins of power. Facing them and their lesser colleagues were Hitler, Goering and Frick, three Nazis to nine old-time politicians. Outside they could hear the crowds singing “Deutschland über Alles.” The Nazis were invading the streets of every city in Germany.
But Hitler had not obtained from Hindenburg a presidential Cabinet, and his government could, therefore, fall at any time the Reichstag voted it out of office. The alternative facing the Nazis was either to offer concessions to the Catholic Center Party, in order to gain its support, or to persuade the Cabinet, the majority of whose members belonged to other parties, to agree to fresh elections in which, they must realize, the Nazis could bring every kind of pressure to bear on the public to ensure a decisive majority for themselves in the Reichstag. Hitler and Goering, their eyes on the wary men sitting opposite, were trying to make the present situation seem so impossible that their colleagues could do nothing else but agree to the dissolution of the Reichstag.
Meanwhile, a few hours had to be spared for rejoicing before these indelicate negotiations were renewed. Drums were beating, echoing in the distance from the Brandenburg Gate. In the Tiergarten the S.A. and the S.S. were assembling to gather torches filled with fuel for the night’s festivity. The people stood waiting along the Wilhelmstrasse and in the Wilhelmplatz for the procession to come. Then, with bands playing, the brown ranks began to march in a flare path of torches while Hindenburg, the helpless President, stood at his window watching the homage paid to Hitler, who stood rigid with outstretched arm on the balcony of the Chancellery nearby. “For the first time the German people in demonstration is being broadcast,” wrote Goebbels in his diary, and Goering roared his enthusiasm through the microphone installed in the Chancellery:
“January 30, 1933, will be recorded in German history as the day when the nation was restored to glory once more, as the day when a new nation arose and swept aside all the anguish, pain and shame of the last fourteen years . . . There stands the renowned Field Marshal of the World War, and by his side the young Führer of Germany, who is about to lead the people and the Reich to a new and better era. May the German people herald this day as joyfully as it is heralded by the hundreds of thousands in front of these windows who are inspired by a new faith . . . that the future will bring us what we fought for in vain for a long time—bread and work for our fellow men, and freedom and glory for the nation.”1
On this night of celebrations Goering’s mind was already occupied with the opportunities ahead. In Hitler’s Cabinet he was Minister without Portfolio, Minister of the Interior for Prussia and Reich Commissioner of Aviation. The first office made him Hitler’s plenipotentiary, ambassador, paladin (to use what was to become his favorite term); the second office, though technically under Papen’s supervision, gave him unique power over the police in what was by far the most important state in Germany; and the third recognized that he would soon have an immediate, special duty to develop an Air Force in the Reich. He also remained president of the Reichstag, which was dissolved the following morning, when Hitler finally reported to his Cabinet that there was no chance of agreement between the Nazis and the Center Party. The new elections were announced for one month ahead, on March 5; meanwhile the new Cabinet was to stay in office. “It was understood by all of us that as soon as we had once come into power we must keep that power under all circumstances,” said Goering in his evidence at Nuremberg. “We did not want to leave this any longer to chance, elections and parliamentary majorities. . . . In order to consolidate this power now, it was necessary to reorganize the political relationships of power.”
Hitler and Goering still kept the masks of legality held firmly in front of their faces at Cabinet meetings, according to both Schwerin von Krosigk and Papen. “The concept ‘illegal’ should perhaps be clarified,” Goering was to explain later to his judges. “If I aim at a revolution, then it is an illegal action for the state then in existence. If I am successful, then it becomes a fact and thereby legal.” Goering’s procedure was therefore to use his new position as Minister of the Interior for Prussia as the principal channel through which to consolidate the Nazi hold on both the elected and the permanent officials, not only in Prussia itself but in all the provincial states.
According to Gritzbach, his official biographer, Goering all but lived in the Prussian government office for the next two months; he took his meals in the building and worked all through the night. On the first day he assembled the staff of the Prussian civil service and addressed them “as the representatives of the new patriotic spirit that has arisen.” He reminded them that his own father had once been a senior civil servant. Then he put aside the charm with which he had deliberately opened the meeting and told them their first duty was to eradicate any taint of Communism which might exist among them. Those who felt they could not work with him were invited to resign at once.2
While Goebbels set out during February to achieve what he called “a masterpiece of propaganda” to ensure sweeping victories at the polls on March 5, Goering was careful not to consult Papen, his senior as Reich Commissioner for Prussia, who was engaged in the election campaign; instead he began quickly and ruthlessly to take over control of the Prussian civil service and police. The Prussian Parliament was dissolved against its will on February 4. Men whom Goering could not trust had been or were being blacklisted; they were then dismissed, suspended, ordered or induced to resign, and their places given to Nazis. “Goering is cleaning out the Augean stables . . . Names of great importance yesterday fade away to nothing today,” scribbled Goebbels with delight on February 15. “To begin with,” wrote Goering in his Germany Reborn, the following year, “it seemed to me of the first importance to get the weapon of the police firmly into my own hands. Here it was that I made the first sweeping changes. Out of thirty-two police chiefs I removed twenty-two. Hundreds of inspectors and thousands of police sergeants followed in the course of the next month. New men were brought in, and in every case these men came from the great reservoir of the storm troopers and guards.” Batons and rubber truncheons, which were
in Goering’s view undignified, were replaced by revolvers.
The importance of this administrative revolution, carried out during the single month of February while everyone was occupied with the election campaign, cannot be overestimated. It put the law directly into Hitler’s hands. In a series of manifestoes and decrees of ruthless audacity, Goering openly revealed what he was doing and enabled the Nazis to conduct their campaign against the other parties as if protecting the nation against criminal subversion. The Prussian Ministry of the Interior in fact controlled the greater part of Germany; the powers of the Reich Ministry of the Interior were purely nominal. Goering’s manifestoes on behalf of the police force that he was so rapidly strengthening and reshaping in his own image read like a declaration of war on all forms of opposition. These were the tactics of legality—once, that is, the law was in your hands. Hitler, as Chancellor, gave Goering full powers. And Papen, the Vice-Chancellor and Reich Commissioner for Prussia, when he reflected later on this period of disintegration, seemed able to say only, “My own fundamental error was to underrate the dynamic power which had awakened the national and social instincts of the masses.”3 He had no party behind him, only the ear of the ancient President. “I see,” he wrote, “that there were many times when I should have invoked the President’s authority.” The other ministers, including Blomberg, turned aside and left these tiresome affairs to Hitler’s energetic administration. Papen claims he was often in dispute with Goering over his highhanded methods and once even suggested that he ought to resign. Goering turned on him violently and cried, “You will only get me out of this room flat on my back!” Sir Horace Rumbold, the British ambassador, reported to London on March 1 about Goering’s activities: “In a recent private conversation with Baron Neurath, the latter described Goering to me as a ‘dreadful man,’ whom Herr von Papen was quite unable to control. Goering is regarded as the real Fascist in the Hitler Party . . .”4
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