Brüning had next to deal with the various parties and win them over to the constitutional amendment. At this point, Hitler became a key figure and was wooed and sued accordingly. This certainly helped his prestige, but it also confronted him with a perilous choice. For now he either had to make common cause with the “pillars of the system,” and thus help to consolidate Brüning’s position and deny his own radicalism, or else he had to wage an electoral campaign against the gray-haired old President, the object of so much reverence, the personification of German loyalty and the nation’s surrogate kaiser. To oppose Hindenburg might seriously hurt the movement and, moreover, offend the President personally. Given the decisive powers of the presidency, such a course might have dire consequences for Hitler’s access to power.
Gregor Strasser was for accepting Brüning’s proposal. Röhm and, above all, Goebbels were strongly against it. “What is involved here is not the President himself,” Goebbels noted in his diary. “Herr Brüning is anxious to stabilize his own position and that of his cabinet for the foreseeable future. The Führer has asked for time to consider. The situation must be clarified on all sides…. The chess game for power is beginning. Perhaps it will last throughout the year. A game that will be played with drive, prudence, and partly with cunning. The main thing is that we remain strong and make no compromises.”
Hitler remained in this quandary for some time. While Hugenberg responded with a prompt and blunt rejection, Hitler kept silent. The answer he finally gave reflected both his doubts and his caution. Each man behaved in character. Hugenberg was aping Hitler’s radicalism and breathlessly trying to surpass it but in the process only revealing his poor understanding of tactics. Hitler, on the other hand, employed his radicalism as an instrument, offsetting it with a goodly dash of shrewdness. In the present case he surrounded his rejection with so many ifs and buts that he seemed to be asking for further negotiations. He had sensed the increasing estrangement between Hindenburg and Brüning and did what he could to widen the rift. In a sudden display of pendantry he assumed the role of guardian of the Constitution, and in long-winded arguments that seemed to be scrupulously concerned about the President’s being faithful to his oath of office, he advanced all kinds of legalistic objections to the Chancellor’s plan.
Basically, this answer meant that Hitler had already decided to run against Hindenburg. But he hesitated for several weeks more before announcing the decision. For his dream had always been to come into power with the President’s blessing, not as the President’s opponent. He also realized, more keenly than did his satellites, the dangers of challenging the Hindenburg legend. Consequently, he remained impassive while Goebbels and others hammered away at him to announce his candidature. However, he went along with the proposal that German citizenship be obtained for him through the good offices of Minister of the Interior Klagges of Brunswick, who was a member of the Nazi party.25 Hitler would have to be a citizen in order to run. Here was still another instance of Hitler’s curious indecisiveness. He had a fatalistic streak and liked to let things take their course, postponing action until the last moment. For, strictly speaking, the decision had been taken long ago. Goebbel’s diary reveals, step by step, Hitler’s tortuous, almost bizarre vacillations:
January 9, 1932. Everything in confusion. Much guessing about what the Führer will do. People will be surprised!—January 19, 1932. Discussed the question of the presidency with the Führer. I report my conversations. No decision has been taken yet. I plead strongly for his own candidacy. Actually, there probably is no other course. We draw up calculations with figures.—January 21. In this situation there really is no other choice; we have to put up our own candidate. A difficult and unpleasant struggle, but we must go through with it.—January 25. The party is quivering with militancy.—January 27. The election slogan for or against Hindenburg seems to have become inevitable. Now we must come out with our candidate.—January 29. The Hindenburg Committee is meeting. Now we must show our colors.—January 31. The Führer will make his decisions on Wednesday. There can no longer be any doubts.—February 2. The arguments for the Führer’s candidacy are so thoroughly persuasive that anything else is out of the question…. At noon had a long discussion with the Führer. He sets forth his view of the presidential election. He decides to run himself. But first the opposition must occupy fixed positions. The Social Democratic Party will be the decisive factor. Then our decision will be communicated to the public. It is a struggle of enormously embarrassing alternatives, but we must go through with it. The Führer makes his moves without the slightest haste and with a clear head.—February 3. The gauleiters are waiting for the announcement of the decision to run for the presidency. They wait in vain. This is a game of chess. You don’t tell in advance what moves you are going to make…. The party is terribly nervous, tense, but nevertheless everybody is still keeping silent…. In his leisure hours the Führer is occupying himself with architectural plans for a new party headquarters as well as for a spectacular rebuilding of Berlin. He has the project all worked out, and I am constantly astonished anew at his expertise in so many fields. At night many loyal old party comrades come to see me. They are depressed because they have not yet heard of any decision. They are worried that the Führer will wait too long.—February 9. Everything is still in suspense. —February 10. Outside a glassy cold winter day. Clear decisions are hovering in the clear air. They cannot be much longer in coming.—February 12. At the Kaiserhof with the Führer I once again go over our computations. It is a gamble, but we must go ahead. The decision has now been taken…. The Führer is back in Munich; the public decision postponed for a few days.—February 12. This week we must announce our stand on the presidential question.—February 15. Now we no longer have to hide our decision beneath a bushel.—February 16. I am going ahead as if the election campaign were already in progress. That makes for some difficulties, since the Führer has not yet officially announced his candidacy.—February 19. With the Führer at the Kaiserhof. I talked to him privately for a long time. The decision has been taken.—February 21. This eternal waiting is almost wearing me out.
For the following night Goebbels had scheduled a membership meeting at the Berlin Sportpalast. This was to be his first public appearance since he had been banned from public speaking on January 25. By now the election was only three weeks away, and Hitler was still wavering. In the course of the day Goebbels went to the Kaiserhof to brief Hitler on the contents of his speech. When he once more brought up the question of candidature, he unexpectedly received the permission he had so desperately waited for: to announce Hitler’s decision to run. “Thank God,” Goebbels noted. He added:
Sportpalast jammed. Genera) membership meeting of the West, East and North regions. Stormy ovations right at the start. After an hour of preamble I publicly announce the Führer’s candidacy. A storm of enthusiasm rages for almost ten minutes. Wild demonstrations for the Führer. People stand up cheering and shouting. They raise the roof. An overwhelming sight. This is truly a Movement that must win. An indescribable excitement and rapture prevails…. Late at night the Führer telephones. I report to him, and then he comes to our house. He is glad that the proclamation of his candidacy has struck home so effectively. He is and remains our Führer after all.26
The last sentence reveals the doubts that had assailed Goebbels during the preceding weeks in the face of Hitler’s weak leadership. But the sequel is just as characteristic of Hitler’s psychic pattern: the sudden surge of energy with which he, threw himself into the battle without a single glance backward, once the decision had been made. On February 26, in a ceremony at the Hotel Kaiserhof, he had himself appointed a Regierungsrat in Brunswick for the period of a week, thus acquiring German citizenship. The following day, at a meeting in the Sportpalast, he cried out to his opponents: “I know your slogan! You say: ‘We will stay at any cost.’ And I tell you: We will overthrow you in any case!… I am overjoyed to be able to fight alongside my comrades, whatever the outcome.”
He picked up a remark by Police Commissioner Albert Grzesinski of Berlin, who had spoken of driving him out of Germany with a dog whip: “Go ahead and threaten me with the dog whip. We shall see whether at the end of this struggle the whip is still in your hands.” At the same time, he tried to disclaim the unwelcome role of opponent to Hindenburg, which Brüning had forced on him. Rather, it was his duty to say to the Field Marshal—whose “name the German people must always hail as that of their leader in the great struggle”—“Dear old man, our veneration for you is too great for us to allow those whom we would destroy to hide behind you. With our deep regret, therefore, you must step aside, for they want to fight us and we want to fight them.” Beside himself with delight, Goebbels noted that the Führer was “once more master of the situation.”
The extent to which Hitler and the Nazis had come to dominate the political scene became clear right at the outset. For although Hindenburg, the Communist candidate Ernst Thälmann, and the Conservative Theodor Duesterberg were already running, the election campaign did not really begin until Hitler entered the race. Instantly, the Nazis began sweeping everything wildly before them. Their campaign testified both to the improved condition of the party’s treasury and to their more effective organization. In February Goebbels had transferred the national propaganda headquarters of the party to Berlin, and in his bombastic style had predicted an election campaign “such as the world has never seen before.” The top people of the party’s corps of speakers were called upon. Hitler himself traveled by car back and forth across Germany from March 1 to March 11, and if the Völkische Beobachter was to be believed, spoke to some 500,000 people. At the side of this “demagogue on the grandest scale” stood, as Hitler had prescribed, that “army of agitators who will whip up the passions of the already tormented people.” Their wit and ingenuity—they employed modern technical media for the first time—once more put to shame all their rivals. Fifty thousand copies of a phonograph record were distributed. Sound movies were made, and pressure was exerted on cinema owners to have these shown before the main film. A special illustrated magazine, devoted to the election, was launched and what Goebbels called a “war of posters and banners” unleashed, which overnight would paint whole cities or districts of cities bloody red. For days on end long columns of trucks drove through the streets. SA units stood under waving banners, chin straps drawn down, singing or shouting their “Germany, awake!” The incessant booming of slogans soon engendered within the party an autosuggestive mood of victory that Himmler tried to keep in check by restricting alcohol consumption at victory celebrations.
On the other side stood Brüning, who seemed peculiarly alone. In homage to the President, he was going through this exhausting election campaign. As for the Social Democrats, their posture all too plainly betrayed their real intentions: they were supporting Hindenburg solely in order to defeat Hitler. And their uneasiness was matched by Hindenburg’s; in the one radio address the old man made during the campaign he rather mournfully defended himself against the charge that he was the candidate of a “black-and-red [i.e., Catholic-socialist] coalition.” Nevertheless, it turned out that the election, which shifted all fronts and split all loyalties, was a match entirely between Hindenburg and Hitler. On the eve of March 13 the Berlin Angriff announced confidently: “Tomorrow Hitler will be President of the Reich.”
Given such high expectations, the actual result was a severe and shocking blow. Hindenburg, with 49.6 per cent of the votes, won an impressive victory over Hitler (30.1 per cent). Triumphantly, Otto Strasser had posters pasted in the streets showing Hitler in the role of Napoleon retreating from Moscow. The legend read: “The Grand Army is annihilated. His Majesty the Emperor is in good health.” Overwhelmingly defeated, with only 6.8 per cent of the voters supporting him, was the Conservative Duesterberg. Thus the rivalry within the nationalist camp was decided once and for all in favor of Hitler. The Communist Thälmann received 13.2 per cent of the votes.
However, Hindenburg had fallen short of the absolute majority, and the election therefore had to be repeated. Once more Hitler faced the situation in a characteristic way. While spirits fell throughout the party and some members saw no point in entering upon a second campaign, Hitler showed no emotion at all. On the very night of March 13 he issued a series of proclamations to the party, the SA, the SS, the Hitler Youth, and the NSKK (Motorized Corps of the National Socialist Party) calling for renewed and increased activity: “The first election campaign has ended; the second has begun today. I shall lead it in person,” he announced, and as Goebbels rapturously phrased it, Hitler raised up the party “in a single symphony of the aggressive spirit.” But late one night Ernst Hanfstaengl found him in his darkened apartment sunk in apathetic brooding, “the image of a disappointed, discouraged gambler who had wagered beyond his means.”
Alfred Rosenberg, meanwhile, was using the Völkische Beobachter to give the fainthearted followers a good shaking: “Now the fight goes on with a fierceness, a ruthlessness, such as Germany has never before experienced…. The basis of our struggle is hatred for everything that is opposed to us. Now no quarter will be given.” A few days later nearly fifty prestigious personages—nobles, generals, Hamburg patricians, and university professors—issued a statement declaring themselves for Hitler. Election day was set for April 10. But with the idea of keeping down the agitation by radicals of the Right and Left, with its eruptions of hatred and threats of civil war, the government declared a mandatory truce until April 3—on the pretext of preserving peace during Easter. This meant that the actual election campaign was limited to about a week. But as always when he found himself with his back to the wall, Hitler turned this obstacle into one of his most effective gestures. To make maximum use of the short time at his disposal, he chartered a plane for himself and his intimates, Schreck, Schaub, Brückner, Hanfstaengl, Otto Dietrich, and the photographer Heinrich Hoffmann. On April 3 he started off on the first day of his subsequently famous flights over Germany, which day after day took him to four or five demonstrations organized with military precision. In all he visited twenty-one cities. And quite apart from the party propaganda that tried to weave a legendary wreath around this undertaking, there is no doubt that the flights created an impression of brilliant inspiration, bold modernity, fighting spirit, and a rather sinister omnipresence. “Hitler over Germany” was the effective slogan for these flights; its double meaning stirred millionfold expectations and millionfold anxieties. Moved by his own daring and the waves of cheering that greeted him, Hitler declared that he thought he was an instrument of God, chosen to liberate Germany.
As predicted, Hindenburg had no difficulty winning the requisite absolute majority, with nearly 20 million votes, 53 per cent of the total. Nevertheless, Hitler chalked up a larger increase in votes than the President; the 13.5 million voters who cast their ballots for him represented a percentage of 36.7. Duesterberg had not run in the second campaign; the Communist Thälmann received little more than 10 per cent of the total.
On the very day of the election, in a mood that mingled exhaustion, feverish excitement, and the intoxication of success, Hitler issued instructions for the elections to the state legislatures in Prussia, Anhalt, Württemberg, Bavaria, and Hamburg, which once more involved the entire country, four-fifths of the population. Goebbels recorded Hitler’s orders: “We will not rest for a moment and are already making decisions.” Once more Hitler set out on an airplane flight over Germany, speaking in twenty-five cities in eight days. His entourage boasted of a “world record” in personal encounters. But that was precisely what did not happen. Rather, Hitler’s individuality seemed to disappear behind the ceaseless activity, as if nothing but a dynamic principle were at work: “Our whole life is now a frantic chase after success and after power.”
For long stretches of his life, therefore, the personality of this man, elusive in any case, evaporates, slips from the biographer’s grasp. Hitler’s entourage tried in vain to give color, individuality, and a hu
man aura to the phenomenon. Even the masters of propaganda, who could command almost any effect, found themselves at a loss here. The diaries and accounts of Goebbels or Otto Dietrich are prime examples of that failure. The anecdotes his publicists endlessly circulated about Hitler the lover of children, the navigator with an infallible sense of direction in the lost airplane, the “dead shot” with a pistol, the hero with remarkable presence of mind in the midst of the “Red rabble”—all these tales sounded strained and added to the impression they were trying to dispel: remoteness from real life. Only the props he had gradually acquired gave him a certain individual outline: the raincoat, the felt hat or leather cap, the snapping whip, the intensely black mustache, and the way his hair was brushed down over his forehead. But because these items always remained the same, they, too, depersonalized him.
Goebbels has vividly described the restiveness that gripped the leading members of the party at this time:
This endless traveling begins again. Work must be taken care of standing, walking, driving and flying. You hold your most important conversations on stairs, in hallways, at the door, or on the drive to the railroad station. You scarcely have time to think. By train, car and plane you’re carried back and forth across Germany. You turn up in a city a half hour before your speech is scheduled, sometimes with even less time to spare; you climb to the speaker’s platform and speak…. By the time you’re done you’re in a state as if you’d just been pulled out of a hot bath fully dressed. Then you get into the car and drive another two hours….27
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