by Ian Kershaw
Schleicher later claimed he had put Hitler’s demands to the Reich President on the latter’s estate in Neudeck in East Prussia. Influential though he was with Hindenburg, Schleicher had been firmly rebuffed. The Reich President informed Schleicher in no uncertain terms, according to the Reichswehr Minister’s account, that it was ‘his “irrevocable” will’ not to appoint Hitler to the Chancellorship.348 Just after Hindenburg had returned from Neudeck to Berlin on 10 August, Papen had also raised with him the possibility of a Hitler Chancellorship, heading a ‘brown-black’ majority government of NSDAP and Zentrum.349 It was at this meeting that Hindenburg made his contemptuous remark, frequently cited, that it would be a fine thing indeed were he to make the ‘Bohemian corporal’ Reich Chancellor.350
In the dark about these developments, Hitler and Goebbels talked over the ‘problems of the seizure of power’. Goebbels was rapturous about the ‘historic task’ facing him in the ‘national education of the German people’.351 Nazi supporters scented triumph. The whole party expected power, it was reported by telephone from Berlin. The leader of the Berlin SA, Graf Helldorf, was unfolding his own big plans for the takeover of power. Stormtroopers were leaving work in expectation of what was about to happen. Party functionaries were in readiness for ‘the great hour’. ‘If things go badly, there’ll be a dreadful backlash,’ commented Goebbels.352
The Papen cabinet was divided on whether Hitler should be given power. Finance Minister Krosigk thought the best way to avoid civil war was to turn the poacher into a gamekeeper. The Minister of the Interior, Freiherr von Gayl, vehemently opposed any such idea. Supported by Foreign Minister Neurath, he proposed retention of the existing government, acknowledging that this would require a breach of the constitution. The Reichstag should be dissolved, but no date set for fresh elections, and a new, restricted franchise imposed. Justice Minister Gürtner hedged his bets. To continue the current cabinet without new elections would indeed be unconstitutional. He voiced no disapproval of the inclusion in government of the National Socialists – whose idea of the state, he pointed out, rested on their ‘instinct for retaliation’ (Vergeltungsinstinkt) against Jews and Marxists – but feared the notion was illusory unless they were to be offered leadership of the government. Other cabinet ministers favoured a continuation of the current administration. Papen and Schleicher wanted to keep their options open.353 While Gayl was publicly announcing- ironically, in a speech on ‘Constitution Day’, 11 August – his wish to replace the Weimar Constitution by an authoritarian system where government was not dependent upon the Reichstag, the armed SA were demonstratively taking up positions of apparent readiness for action around the government quarter of Berlin. ‘Makes the gentlemen very nervous,’ wrote Goebbels. ‘That’s the point of the exercise.’354
On 11 August, Hitler held a last conference with party leaders at Prien on the Chiemsee, the biggest of the Bavarian lakes, eighty or so miles east of Munich, close to the Austrian border. He was by now aware of the growing opposition in the corridors of power to his Chancellorship. There was still the possibility of threatening a coalition with the Zentrum. But Hitler was adamant that nothing less than the Chancellorship would do. After resting in his flat in Munich, he travelled next day to Berlin by car to avoid all publicity. Röhm had meetings with Schleicher and Papen that day, 12 August, but his soundings about a Hitler Chancellorship were inconclusive. Hitler arrived in darkness at Goebbels’s house in Caputh, near Potsdam, in the late evening. He was told that matters were still unresolved after Röhm’s meetings. It was now ‘either-or’, he insisted. But if it had been as simple as that, he would not have spent what was left of the evening pacing up and down, pondering how much hinged on the decision of the Reich President. It was clear to Goebbels what was at stake. Unless Hitler were to be given extensive power, meaning the Chancellorship, he would have to refuse office. In that case, ‘a mighty depression in the movement and in the electorate would be the consequence’. He added: ‘And we have only this one iron in the fire.’355
The following morning, 13 August, accompanied by Röhm, Hitler met Schleicher, followed shortly afterwards, this time together with Frick, by a meeting with Chancellor Papen. He was informed by both that Hindenburg was not prepared to appoint him Chancellor. I soon realized that I was dealing with a very different man from the one I had met two months earlier,’ von Papen recalled. ‘The modest air of deference had gone, and I was faced by a demanding politician who had just won a resounding electoral success.’ Papen suggested Hitler join the government as Vice-Chancellor. The alternative of continued opposition, he argued (convinced that support for the NSDAP had peaked), would surely mean that his party’s campaign would start to flag. Whereas, in the event of Hitler’s fruitful cooperation and ‘Once the President had got to know him better’, so Papen later wrote, he would be prepared to resign the Chancellorship in the Nazi leader’s favour. Hitler rejected point-blank the notion of the head of such a large movement playing second fiddle, and was if anything even more dismissive of the idea that he might consider staying in opposition but allowing one of his associates to take up the post of Vice-Chancellor. Papen advised him at the end of the meeting, at times heated, that the decision was the Reich President’s, but he would have to inform Hindenburg that the discussions had led to no positive outcome.356
Hitler and his entourage, gathered in Goebbels’s house on the Reichskanzlerplatz, had by now, not surprisingly, become pessimistic. They could do nothing but wait. When State Secretary Planck rang from the Reich Chancellery around three o’clock, he was asked whether there was any point in Hitler seeing the Reich President, since the decision had evidently been taken. He was told that Hindenburg wanted first to speak to him. Perhaps there was still a chance.357 Hundreds were gathered in Wilhelmstraße as Hitler arrived at the Presidential Palace for his audience, set for 4.15p.m. Hindenburg was correct, but cool. According to the notes made by Hindenburg’s State Secretary, Otto Meissner, Hitler was asked whether he was prepared to serve in Papen’s government. His cooperation would be welcome, the President stated. Hitler declared that, for the reasons he had given to the Chancellor in full that morning, there was no question of his involvement in the existing government. Given the significance of his movement, he must demand the leadership of the government and ‘the leadership of the state to its full extent (die Staatsführung in vollem Umfange) for himself and his party’. The Reich President firmly refused. He could not answer, he said, before God, his conscience and the Fatherland if he handed over the entire power of the government to a single party, and one which was so intolerant towards those with different views. He was also worried about unrest at home and the likely impact abroad. When Hitler repeated that for him every other solution was ruled out, Hindenburg advised him then to conduct his opposition in a gentlemanly (ritterlich) fashion, and that all acts of terror would be treated with utmost severity. In a gesture of pathos more than political reality, he shook Hitler’s hand as ‘old comrades’. The meeting had lasted a mere twenty minutes. Hitler had controlled himself. But outside, in the corridor, he threatened to explode. Events would inexorably lead to the conclusion he had put forward and to the fall of the President, he declared. The government would be put in an extremely difficult position, the opposition would be fierce, and he would accept no responsibility for the consequences.358 According to the Nazis’ own version, the brief, heated exchange outside the President’s room ended with an airy gesture by Reich Chancellor Papen dismissing the importance of the Reichstag and remarking to the Nazi delegation: ‘If you had been prepared to enter the government, you would in any case have been within three weeks where you wanted to be today.’359
‘The notion of the Führer as Vice-Chancellor of a bourgeois cabinet is too grotesque to be taken seriously,’ recorded Goebbels after Hitler had returned within half an hour empty-handed.360 But his embellished account in the published version of his diaries hid the deep dismay within the movement.361
Hitler was a
ware that he had suffered a major political defeat. It was his greatest setback since the failure of the putsch, nine years earlier.362 The strategy he had followed all those years, that mobilizing the masses – his natural instinct, and what he did best – would suffice to gain power, had proved a failure. He had taken his party into a cul-de-sac. The breakthrough had been made. The NSDAP’s rise to the portals of power had been meteoric. He had just won a crushing election victory. But he had been flatly rejected as Reich Chancellor by the one person whose assent, under the Weimar Constitution, was indispensable: Reich President Hindenburg. The ‘all-or-nothing’ gamble had left Hitler with nothing. With a tired, depressed, desperately disappointed, and fractious party, the prospect of continued opposition was not an enticing one. But it was all that was left. Even given new elections, the chances were that it would prove difficult to hold on to the level of support already mobilized.
The thirteenth of August 1932 ought to have been a defining moment in Hitler’s bid for power. After that, it should never have come to a 30th of January 1933. Without allies in high places, able eventually to persuade the Reich President to change his mind, Hitler would never – even as head of a huge movement, and with over 13 million supporters in the country’ have been able to come to power. That power was refused Hitler after he had won a victory, and handed to him after he had suffered a defeat (in the ensuing Reichstag election in November), was not attributable to any ‘triumph of the will’.
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 the Rheinisch-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 dé
bâcle 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.