by Ian Kershaw
176. Karin Hausen, ‘Unemployment Also Hits Women: the New and the Old Woman on the Dark Side of the Golden Twenties in Germany’, in Stachura, Unemployment, 78–120, here esp. 112; Helgard Kramer, ‘Frankfurt’s Working Women: Scapegoats or Winners of the Great Depression?’, in Evans and Geary, The German Unemployed, I08–41, here esp. 134; Renate Bridenthal, ‘Beyond Kinder, Küche, Kirche: Weimar Women at Work’, Central European History, 6 (1973), 148–66; Tim Mason,’Women in Germany, 1925–1940: Family, Welfare, and Work’, History Workshop Journal, 1 (1976), 74–113; Richard J. Evans, ‘German Women and the Triumph of Hitler’, Journal of Modern History, 48 (1976, demand supplement), 1–53; Helen L. Boak, ‘Women in Weimar Germany: the “Frauenfrage” and the Female Vote’, in Richard Bessel and E. J. Feuchtwanger (eds.), Social Change and Political Development in the Weimar Republic, London, 1981, 155–73, here 165–8.
177. See Allen, 146.
178. See Allen, 147.
179. Statistics on the demographic and social structure of German Jewry are provided in Werner Mosse (ed.), Entscheidungsjahr. Zur Judenfrage in der Endphase der Weimarer Republik, Tübingen, 1965, 87–131 (94 for the proportion of Jews in the total population). See also Helmut Genschel, Die Verdrängung der Juden aus der Wirtschaft im Dritten Reich, Göttingen, 1966, 20–28.
180. Deuerlein, Aufstieg, 411. See also Tyrell, Führer, 352, where the membership numbers on 30 January 1933 were given as 1, 435, 530. Since the membership numbers were given out in continuous series and numbers of those leaving the party not renewed, the figures for members actually in the party were substantially lower.
181. Fischer, Stormtroopers, 6.
182. Fischer, Stormtroopers, ch.6 downplays the role of ideology at all in recruiting for the SA.
183. Cit. Niewyk, 82 and n.2.
184. Arnold Paucker, Der jüdische Abwehrkampf gegen Antisemitismus und Nationalsozialismus in den letzten Jahren der Weimarer Republik, Hamburg, 1968; Niewyk, 86ff.
185. Niewyk, 82–6.
186. See Peter Gay, ‘In Deutschland zu Hause… Die Juden der Weimarer Zeit’, in Arnold Paucker (ed.), Die Juden im Nationalsozialistischen Deutschland 1933–1943, Tübingen, 1986, 31–43.
187. Lion Feuchtwanger, Die Geschwister Oppermann, Fischer edn, Frankfurt, 1983, 116. The novel brings out brilliantly the anxieties, but also the complacency, in Jewish bourgeois society in the months immediately before Hitler’s takeover of power. See, e.g., 15–16, 69, 119–32.
188. Richard J. Evans, ‘Die Todesstrafe in der Weimarer Republik’, in Bajohr et al., Zivilisation und Barbarei, 156–61; and Richard J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600–1987, Oxford, 1996, ch. 13, esp. 604–10.
189. Noakes, ‘Nazism and Eugenics’, 84–5.
190. The varied contemporary impressions of Hitler are excellently surveyed in Schreiber, Part I.
191. Turner, German Big Business, 314–15 and 460 n.2; Papen, 225–6. And see, for the Papen-Hitler meeting at Schröder’s house, Turner, Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power, 42–52.
192. Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, ed. Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim Zentralkomitee der SED, East Berlin, 1966, iv.604–7.
193. Turner, German Big Business, 315–17.
194. Turner, German Big Business, 311–12.
195. Turner, German Big Business, 321–2.
196. Winkler, Weimar, 570–72; Turner, German Big Business, 324.
197. Papen, 227–8.
198. See Winkler, Weimar, 568.
199. Domarus, 175; Papen, 227; Winkler, Weimar, 569; see Goebbels, Kaiserhof, 235 (5 January 1933), TBJG, I.2, 328 (6 January 1933, unpubl.).
200. Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, iv. 604–7; reprinted in Deuerlein, Aufstieg, 411–14, here 412.
201. Deuerlein, Aufstieg, 412.
202. TBJG, I.2, 332 (10 January 1933, unpubl.).
203. Papen, 228; Deuerlein, Aufstieg, 412–13; Winkler, Weimar, 568.
204. Meissner, Staatssekretär, 261–2; Turner, Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power, 50–51·
205. Ribbentrop, 22 and n.1.
206. Falter et al., Wahlen, 96.
207. Stories advanced at the time, and often repeated in later accounts, of subventions from big business to finance the Lippe campaign have been shown to be wide of the mark. The campaign had to pay for itself. Higher entrance fees than normal were charged for meetings addressed by Hitler and other celebrities. Funds raised were immediately poured back into the campaign. Financial embarrassment in settling the claims of creditors and in raising money to rent halls for speakers was on more than one occasion only narrowly avoided. See Turner, German Big Business, 318 and 463 n.25.
208. Winkler, Weimar, 573. A full analysis of the campaign is provided by Jutta Ciolek-Kümper, Wahlkampf in Lippe, Munich, 1976; for Nazi propaganda in Lippe, see also Paul, Aufstand der Bilder, I09–10.
209. Beginning on 4 and ending on 14 January 1933: Domarus, 175–80; Ciolek-Kümper, 318–64. Nazi gains at the election were over-average in places where Hitler spoke (Ciolek-Kümper, 264).
210. Falter et al., Wahlen, 96; Deuerlein, Aufstieg, 415; Winkler, Weimar, 574. Despite the saturation propaganda, the Lippe election is a clear indicator of the limits of Nazi penetration in a pluralist system. Recent empirical findings have confirmed the view that propaganda success relied upon prior ideological leanings in those susceptible to it. (See Dieter Ohr, Nationalsozialistische Propaganda und Weimarer Wahlen. Empirische Analysen zur Wirkung von ΝSDAP – Versammlungen, Opladen, 1997.)
211. See Goebbels’s diary entry (unpubl.), for 16 January 1933: ‘Party again on the forward march. So, it has paid off (TBJG, I.2, 339).
212. Schleicher had, by the time of his cabinet meeting on 16 January, still not completely given up hope of winning over Strasser, whose supporters had likewise not finally given up. Their efforts, and news of Strasser meeting President Hindenburg, sowed great distrust in the minds of Hitler and his entourage (Turner, Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power, 60–61).
213. Papen, 234; Winkler, Weimar, 571–2, 578–80, 606–7; Turner, German Big Business, 324.
214. Winkler, Weimar, 574–5.
215. Ribbentrop, 22–3. After consultations with Hitler, he had tried to arrange the meeting on one of the previous two days, but the respective movements of Hitler and Papen had made this impossible. Papen stated in his memoirs that he did not meet Hitler between 4 and 22 January (Papen, 236). Frau Ribbentrop’s dictated notes show that there were two meetings in the interim, on 10 and 18 January (Ribbentrop, 22–3).
216. Ribbentrop, 23; Papen, 235.
217. TBJG, I.2, 346 (22 January 1932, unpubl.). Goebbels does not appear to have been informed about the meeting until two days later, on 24 January (TBJG, I.2, 349 (25 January 1933, unpubl.)).
218. Domarus, 181–2; TBJG, I.2, 348 (23 January 1932, unpubl.). Goebbels attributed Hitler’s poor form to the arrogance of Frau Wessel, Horst’s mother, on the anniversary of her son’s murder (TBJG, I.2, 347–8).
219. Papen, 235.
220. Hans Otto Meissner and Harry Wilde, Die Machtergreifung, Stuttgart, 1958, 148ff., esp. 162–3; Domarus, 183 (who states, mistakenly, that the demands were the same; moreover, the Göring ministry was left undetermined). See also Winkler, Weimar, 580.
221. TBJG, I.2, 349 (25 January 1933, unpubl.).
222. Ribbentrop, 23.
223. Winkler, Weimar, 580. Otto Meissner, Staatssekretär, 263, makes no mention of this conversation in his brief account of the meeting at Ribbentrop’s house. The version of his son, Hans Otto Meissner, and Harry Wilde, noting Oskar von Hindenburg’s seemingly grudging admission that Hitler’s many concessions and solemn promises made it difficult to refuse him the Chancellorship, derived, however, from Otto Meissner’s recollection (Meissner-Wilde, 163, 291 n.37).
224. TBJG, 1.2, 349 (25 January 1933, unpubl.).
225. Papen, 236; Winkler, Weimar, 581. For reasons not entirely clear, Schleicher had not considered putting
to Hindenburg the suggestion of his Defence Ministry staff, on the advice of legal theorists, that a loophole in the Weimar Constitution might allow the cabinet, even after defeat in a vote of confidence, to remain in office indefinitely as a caretaker government unless the other parties could agree on an alternative Chancellor and government (Turner, Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power, I18–21, 124–5).
226. Ribbentrop, 23.
227. Winkler, Weimar, 581–3, 587–9.
228. Akten der Reichskanzlei. Das Kabinett von Schleicher, ed. Anton Golecki, Boppard am Rhein, 1986, 306–11, Nr.71–2; Papen, 237–8; Winkler, Weimar, 584–6.
229. Schulthess’ Europäischer Geschichtskalender 1933, Bd. 74, Munich, 1934, 28–30; AdR, Kabinett von Schleicher, 316–19, Nr.77. And see Winkler, Weimar, 586.
230. Papen, 239. And see AdR, Kabinett von Schleicher, 318.
231. Ribbentrop, 25.
232. Winkler, Weimar, 584.
233. Ribbentrop, 24–5.
234. Papen, 239; Winkler, Weimar, 589. In a third meeting, Fritz Schäffer, the head of the ΒVP, probably speaking on behalf of the Zentrum as well as his own party, was prepared to support a parliamentary government under Hitler. But, as earlier, this proposal had no chance of meeting the approval of the Nazi leader.
235. Papen, 239.
236. Ribbentrop, 25; Papen, 241: Hitler was told on 29 January that the President would not appoint him Reich Commissar for Prussia.
237. AdR, Kabinett von Schleicher, 318; Papen, 240; Winkler, Weimar, 589.
238. Papen, 240; Winkler, Weimar, 590.
239. Papen, 241; Deuerlein, Aufstieg, 417; Winkler, Weimar, 590–91.
240. TBJG, I.2, 355 (30 January 1933, unpubl.); 357 (31 January 1933, unpubl.).
241. Papen, 241.
242. Hubatsch, 347 (18 November 1932).
243. Theodor Duesterberg, Der Stahlhelm und Hitler, Wolfenbüttel/Hanover, 1949, 38–9. Support from the Stahlhelm, the conservative veterans’ organization, was still not guaranteed. While Seldte had been won over, Duesterberg remained irked by earlier Nazi insults about his ‘non-Aryan’ background. His backing for the cabinet was only assured on the morning of 30 January, when Hitler expressed his regrets for the attacks on Duesterberg by his party and, with tears in his eyes, gave the Stahlhelm deputy leader his word that he had not instigated them (Duesterberg, 40; Winkler, Weimar, 592). It did not take Hugenberg long to realize the error of his ways. The very day after Hitler’s appointment to the Chancellorship, he was reported as saying: ‘Yesterday, I did the most stupid thing of my life. I joined forces with the greatest demagogue in world history’ (cit. in Gerhard Ritter, Carl Goerdeler und die deutsche Widerstandsbewegung, Stuttgart, 1956, 64. And see Larry Eugene Jones, ‘“The Greatest Stupidity of My Life”. Alfred Hugenberg and the Formation of the Hitler Cabinet, January 1933’, Journal of Contemporary History, 27 (1992), 63–87).
244. Papen, 242.
245. Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, Es geschah in Deutschland, Tübingen/Stuttgart, 1951, 147. To the arch-conservative opponent of the Nazis, Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, who would later pay for his principled opposition with his life, Papen asserted that within two months he would have Hitler pushed into a corner. Kleist-Schmenzin was duly scathing at such a presumption (Bodo Scheurig, Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin. Ein Konservativer gegen Hitler, Frankfurt am Main, 1994, 121).
246. TBJG, I.2, 355 (30 January 1933, unpubl.).
247. Ribbentrop, 26; Winkler, Weimar, 590–91.
248. TBJG, I.2, 355–6 (30 January 1933, unpubl.). Hitler still vividly recalled Alvensleben’s news in his story of the takeover of power, told on 21 May 1942 in his ‘Special Train’ en route to Berlin (Picker, 364).
249. Papen, 242–3; Duesterberg, 39; Winkler, Weimar, 591–2.
250. Papen, 243–4; Duesterberg, 40–41; Meissner, Staatssekretär, 269–70; Winkler, Weimar, 592.
251. AdR, Kabinett von Schleicher, 322–3; Meissner, Staatssekretär, 270. Remarkably, it was the first time that the Finance Minister, Schwerin von Krosigk, had seen Hitler. Half an hour before arriving in the Reich Chancellery, he had thought Papen, not Hitler, was to be sworn in as Chancellor (AdR, Kabinett von Schleicher, 321–3. Krosigk, Es geschah in Deutschland, I93; Turner, Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power, I56–7).
252. Meissner, Staatssekretär, 270; Papen 244; Hans Otto Meissner, 30. Januar 1933. Hitlers Machtergreifung, Munich 1979, 275–6 (Hindenburg’s reply – see 388 n.31 – apparently based upon a verbal account by Otto Meissner); Winkler, Weimar, 593·
253. TBJG I.2, 357 (31 January 1933, unpubl.).
254. For an example of intellectual underestimation of National Socialism, see Thomas Mann’s comments on 12 January 1933 in a letter to the Prussian Education Minister, Adolf Grimme: ‘The social and democratic Germany, I am firmly convinced, can trust in the fact that the present constellation is a passing one and that, despite everything, the future is on its side. The raging of nationalist passions is nothing more than a late and final flickering of an already burnt-out fire, a dying flare mistaken for a new glow of life’ (Deuerlein, Aufstieg, 414).
255. See, for the landed élites, Wolfgang Zollitsch, ‘Adel und adlige Machteliten in der Endphase der Weimarer Republik. Standespolitik und agrarische Interessen’, in Winkler, Staatskrise, 239–56; Horst Gies, ‘NSDAP und landwirtschaftliche Organisationen in der Endphase der Weimarer Republik’, VfZ, I5 (1967), 341–76; Dieter Gessner, Agrarverbände in der Weimarer Republik, Düsseldorf, 1976; Gustavo Corni and Horst Gies, Brot, Butter, Kanonen: Die Ernährungswirtschaftin Deutschland unter der Diktatur Hitlers, Berlin, 1997, Part I. For the military élite, the argument has been most cogently advanced by Michael Geyer in his study, Aufrüstung oder Sicherheit. Die Reichswehr in der Krise der Machtpolitik 1924–1936, Wiesbaden, 1980, his more general survey, Deutsche Rüstungspolitik 1860–1980, Frankfurt am Main, 1984, 188–39, and his essays, ‘Etudes in Political History: Reichswehr, NSDAP, and the Seizure of Power’, in Peter D. Stachura (ed.), The Nazi Machtergreifung, London, 1983, 101–23, and ‘Professionals and Junkers: German Rearmament and Politics in the Weimar Republic’, in Bessel and Feucht-wanger, 77–133.
256. See Turner, German Big Business, 318–28, for the stance of big business in late January 1933; also, Reinhard Neebe, Großindustrie, Staat und NSDAP 1930–1933, Göttingen, 1981.
257. An attempt to use the ‘Bonapartist’ model of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to explain how Hitler gained power is advanced by Eberhard Jäckel, ‘Wie kam Hitler an die Macht?’, in Karl Dietrich Erdmann and Hagen Schulze (eds.), Weimar. Selbstpreisgabe einer Demokratie, Düsseldorf, 1980, 305–21.
258. See, for instance, the recognition of this by Friedrich Meinecke, Die deutsche Katastrophe, 3rd edn, Wiesbaden, 1947, esp. 11–12, 39–40.
259. See Mosse, Crisis, esp. Part One, for a thorough exploration of the strands of this consciousness.
260. See, esp., the influential work of David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History, Oxford, 1984, and the debate on the ‘Sonderweg’ question: Deutscher Sonderweg – Mythos oder Realität, Kolloquien des Instituts für Zeitgeschichte, Munich/Vienna, 1982. The complexity of the differing continuities in German history which made National Socialism and a Hitler dictatorship possible – but by no means inevitable – is emphasized in a sophisticated analysis by Thomas Nipperdey, ‘1933 und Kontinuität der deutschen Geschichte’, Historische Zeitschrift, 227 (1978), 86–111.
261. See Lothar Kettenacker, ‘Sozialpsychologische Aspekte der Führer-Herrschaft’, in Gerhard Hirschfeld and Lothar Kettenacker (eds.), Der ‘Führerstaat’: Mythos und Realität. Studien zur Struktur und Politik des Dritten Reiches, Stuttgart, 1981, 98–132.
262. Regensburger Anzeiger, 31 January 1933.
263. Sebastian Haffner, Geschichte eines Deutschen. Die Erinnerungen 1914–1933, Stuttgart-Munich, 2000, 104–6 (quotation, 106).
CHAPTER 11: THE MAKING OF THE DICTATOR
1. Jochmann, Nationalsozialismus und Revolution, 421.<
br />
2. Julius Leber, Ein Mann geht seinen Weg, Berlin, 1952, 90.
3. Josef and Ruth Becker (eds.), Hitlers Machtergreifung. Dokumente vom Machtantritt Hitlers 30. Januar 1933 bis zur Besiegelung des Einparteienstaates 14. Juli 1933,2nd edn, Munich, 1992, 45, cit. Schwäbische Volkszeitung, 7 February 1933.
4. Becker, Hitlers Machtergreifung, 32.
5. Becker, Hitlers Machtergreifung, 34–5.
6. John Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933–45, London, 1968, 9.
7. H. Rößler, ‘Erinnerungen an den Kirchenkampf in Coburg’, Jahrbuch der Coburger Lande s Stiftung (1975), 155–6.
8. Theophil Wurm, Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben, Stuttgart, 1953, 84.
9. Cit. in Klaus Scholder, Die Kirchen und das Dritte Reich, Frankfurt am Main/Berlin/Vienna, 1977, i.279–80.
10. DBFP, 2nd Ser., iv.401.
11. StA München, GS Ebersberg, 11 February 1933; see also BHStA, MA 106672, RPvNB/OP, 3 February 1933.
12. Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, 31 January 1933. The journalist was Erwein Freiherr von Aretin, a monarchist who was to be taken into ‘protective custody’ a few weeks later.
13. Hanfstaengl, 15 Jahre, 288; TBJG, I.2, 357 (31 January 1933, unpubl.).
14. See Hoffmann, 69, for Hitler’s praise and surprise at Goebbels’s ability to stage it at such short notice.
15. TBJG, I.2, 358 (31 January 1933). The British Ambassador reported: ‘During the demonstration Herr Göring, the President of the Reichstag, took possession of the microphone and after delivering a speech of the usual turgid kind handed the instrument to his followers. Berlin radio listeners were consequently deprived of their evening’s entertainment and treated to an absurdly sentimental account of the torchlight procession and the final triumph of the National Socialist movement’ (DBFP, 2nd Ser., iv.402).
16. TBJG, I.2, 358, 31 January 1933; DBFP, 2nd Ser., iv.402.