Turning first to the questions of turnout and organizational fatigue, the RPL maintained rather philosophically that the public, exhausted by months of political campaigning, had not turned away from the NSDAP alone but was disillusioned with the entire system of party politics. Growing public apathy had been clearly signaled by consistently low attendance at Nazi events through the fall, especially in the rural areas where the party had previously found an enthusiastic audience. In addition to election fatigue, the continued deterioration of the economy, the report went on, meant that the willingness of the public to make financial sacrifices for political causes had contracted sharply, and the ability of the local chapters to mount their usual propaganda operations had been severely impaired. The party treasury was running on empty, and because of the desperate financial situation, the NSDAP had nothing to spare for the regional organizations. In fact, the locals were expected to make contributions to the party treasury in Munich. This had forced them to scale back their rallies and leaflet campaigns and to concentrate instead on less costly forms of propaganda—man-to-man canvassing, the display of flags, stickers, party badges, etc. In many cases they were reduced to “chalk campaigns,” scrawling slogans on walls, and Sprechchöre—call-and-response political choruses chanted by party activists on street corners and public squares. Many impoverished local groups complained that the party’s opponents, especially the SPD and DNVP, were able to spend more and run better campaigns—a disheartening reversal of roles since the spring and summer.
Above all Goebbels wanted to know which voters had deserted the party or merely stayed at home November 6—and why? The party’s grassroots organizations provided an unequivocal answer to those questions. With startling candor, the RPL concluded that “the decline in our votes can in many ways be attributed to the fact that Hitler did not enter the government. Many quite simply have no understanding of our explanation.” The middle-class voter, in particular, had been led by his “neutral press” to believe “Hitler had to enter the Papen cabinet after August 13, and no campaign slogan could disabuse him of that notion.” The local chapters were unanimous in their conviction that middle-class voters were slipping away, and there was little to suggest that the party had been able to compensate for that loss by tapping into a reservoir of blue-collar support. Whether in the form of direct crossovers to the DNVP or DVP or in the form of no-shows, the NSDAP had suffered a massive hemorrhage of middle-class voters on November 6, and this had serious implications for Nazi strategy. The party’s unorthodox catchall strategy and its negative campaigning had proven remarkably successful after 1928 as anti-system anger boiled over and the traditional parties appeared both compromised and weak. But by the fall of 1932, after a year of relentless campaigning and intense public scrutiny, the difficulties of sustaining this anti-system, catchall strategy were becoming increasingly apparent to the NSDAP’s leadership.
“In previous campaigns,” the RPL explained with its usual cynicism, “appeals to the nationalist heart were enough to win the middle-class masses, and the socialist tendencies of the NSDAP could step into the background.” During the fall campaign that strategy had proven impossible. Since the party’s unstinting attacks on Papen and the Reaction were coupled with appeals to working-class Germans—appeals that often seemed indistinguishable from those of the Communists—the NSDAP confronted a serious dilemma. “National Socialism,” the RPL admitted, “found itself forced into an unequivocal stand against the ‘national reaction,’ rejecting compromises and placing itself—especially in the strike question—on the side of the German workers fighting for their rights.” A situation had been allowed to develop “in which we could not avoid doing things that the middle class will never understand . . . and a defection of the bourgeois masses had to follow.”
Papen and the conservatives sought to capitalize on the NSDAP’s dilemma, and in the aftermath of November 6 the Nazi leadership was convinced that they had succeeded only too well. Surveying the damage, the RPL concluded that the party’s aggressive efforts to win workers for the party had alienated important elements of the middle class. Reports from the party’s grass roots indicated that rural voters—since 1928 the mainstay of the party’s constantly expanding electorate—were shocked by the party’s apparent cooperation with the Communists in the Berlin strike, and in many cases simply refused to come to the polls as a consequence. This emerging schism between committed National Socialists and “fickle” one- or two-time supporters formed the leitmotif in the regional reports. A memorandum drafted by the Nazi county leader of Heilsberg in East Prussia offered a glimpse of the widespread bitterness toward such defectors. With a tone suffused simultaneously with aggression and anxiety, he claimed that those fair-weather bourgeois defectors “who recognized in time that they did after all belong to the gentlemen’s club or smelled a profit there for their egotistical souls, may wish to help the Reaction shield Jewish liberal capitalism from the deadly thrust our movement will deliver.”
In the face of this criticism, Goebbels doggedly insisted that the party had, in fact, made significant inroads into the working class, but his claims resounded with the hollow ring of forced optimism. Confronted by the mounting difficulties of maintaining a firm grip on the party’s socially diverse electorate and the unmistakable erosion of the party’s middle-class base, the RPL strongly implied that the moment for hard sociopolitical choices was at hand. Although the report did not advocate discarding the NSDAP’s revolutionary catchall strategy, it did endorse a propaganda more sharply focused on the working class. The outcome of the election had revealed that “the worker, once converted and embraced by National Socialist organization, is a thousand times more dependable than the middle class with its nationalist traditions.” The RPL acknowledged that “the largely unionized blue-collar labor force still approaches the NSDAP with a certain mistrust,” but strongly urged that efforts to win working-class voters continue. “In future propaganda, tactical concessions to the middle classes at the expense of the working class must cease.”
This plea for a shift in the social emphasis of Nazi propaganda was doubly significant. It clearly indicated a conviction that the NSDAP had reached the outer limits of its appeal to middle-class Germans and that even maintaining the party’s broad-based support within the Mittelstand at anything like the levels of the spring and summer was at best problematic. On the other hand, an intensified effort to win greater working-class support could only exacerbate the NSDAP’s problems within its volatile middle-class base, while hurtling the party into a more direct and doubtfully successful competition with the Social Democrats and Communists. After all, the two leftist parties together had won more votes than the Nazis in November. Equally distressing, the Nazis had not been particularly successful in mobilizing support among the unemployed, the vast majority of whom were workers and who on the whole seemed far more inclined to gravitate to the radical left than to the National Socialists.
As the implications of the election began to sink in, the spirits of the party plummeted. “Everywhere,” Goebbels wrote, “we find trouble, conflicts, and dissension.” Especially disturbing were reports of SA refusals to cooperate with local Nazi political leaders in the conduct of the campaign. The RPL reported that “approximately 60 percent of the party districts were dissatisfied with the SA’s propaganda efforts during the fall campaign.” Several districts even attributed a major share of the responsibility for the loss of voters in their region to the Storm Troopers.
While some districts registered disappointment with this mood of uncooperative resentment, other regional officials complained that vulgar, violent, and generally unruly behavior by the Brown Shirts had cost the party dearly at the polls. Understandably, such complaints were loudest in the east, where SA violence had been rampant since August and where relations between local Nazi political leaders and SA units had deteriorated dangerously. Party officials in Lower Silesia claimed that “a great segment of the electorate was deeply offended by t
he rowdy behavior of the SA, who have become a genuine pestilence in the land following the elections of 31 July.” In Central Silesia, Nazi political functionaries stated that “if we had more SA men who knew how to behave like decent people on the street,” the party’s propaganda operations could be conducted effectively. “It must be made clear to the SS and SA that they are parts of a political movement and as such must cooperate instead of striking out on their own often misguided ways.”
This image of an unruly horde of violent freebooters ran through the regional reports, almost all of which demanded tighter control over and greater political training for the SA. The Storm Troopers had gotten out of hand and something had to be done. “The SA man should not only be a soldier in the military sense but a political soldier as well,” the propaganda leader of Upper Silesia complained. He should “view himself as the representative of the National Socialist Weltanschauung and always conduct himself . . . in a manner consistent with this ideology.” The Storm Trooper, however, “creates the impression of mercenaries who have joined the NSDAP out of love of adventure . . . rather than out of ideological conviction.”
* * *
Nazi propaganda officials at all levels had ample reason for wanting to shift the responsibility for the party’s November slide to the SA, but it was painfully obvious to all that the NSDAP was confronting a very serious internal crisis at the close of 1932. It is indicative of the magnitude of that conflict that at a meeting of the Nazi leadership in Munich on November 8, SA leaders reportedly responded to charges of undermining the campaign effort by lashing out at Hitler’s policy of legality, claiming that it, not the SA, was losing support for the NSDAP. “The people are no longer satisfied with Hitler’s decisions,” they were quoted as saying. “It doesn’t work to keep on merely talking about continuing the parliamentary and propaganda struggle. That will lead the party to ruin, as the last elections have shown. . . . The people urgently demand a revolutionary act.” What was clear to Nazi propaganda operatives at all levels was that the party had failed to convert the legions of protest voters who had, for a variety of reasons, been attracted to the NSDAP since 1930. Some might be convinced to cast a protest vote once, twice, three times, or maybe even more, but the longer the party campaigned without being able to deliver on its promise to change the discredited system, the less likely it would be to maintain the credibility of its protest appeal. This problem was particularly dangerous to the NSDAP, since, as Goebbels understood, these millions of protest voters were not committed ideologically to National Socialism, and in November it appeared that it was to a large extent these volatile, uncommitted voters who had either defected or simply stayed home.
The propaganda leader of Hanover–South Braunschweig, in reporting on the provincial election, echoed the RPL’s criticism of Hitler’s strategy. Hundreds of thousands of former Nazi supporters, the RPL believed, “had registered their disapproval” by simply refusing to vote at all. Much of this election fatigue could undoubtedly be attributed to simple exhaustion after a year of nonstop campaigning. By November, funding, enthusiasm, and endurance were running low in all the Weimar parties, but for the NSDAP, as a party of protest that counted on voter anger, the growing public apathy was particularly ominous. The longer the NSDAP was forced to campaign without being able to deliver on its promises, the less convincing its image of irrepressible dynamism and power was bound to become and the less appealing its fanatical and yet fruitless anti-system stance would appear. As the year wore on, with four national elections and regional campaigns in almost every German state, Nazi propaganda strategists became increasingly aware of this problem. Goebbels had noted in his diary as early as April, when the NSDAP’s political star was still on the rise, that “we have to come to power in the near future or we will win ourselves to death in these elections.” The party’s window of opportunity was small, and its ability to sustain its protest-oriented appeal over time was tenuous at best.
By the close of 1932 party leaders realized that the NSDAP had reached the limits of its middle-class appeal, and any serious attempt to broaden the party’s base by more aggressive efforts to recruit working-class voters ran the very substantial risk of alienating the NSDAP’s essential middle-class base. The impact of the party’s radical quasi-socialist rhetoric and, more directly, its support for the Berlin transportation strike seemed to have demonstrated precisely that. On the other hand, if the party were now forced to fall back on a more traditional class-based strategy, the NSDAP would be admitting the end of its electoral expansion and would forfeit its cherished claim to be a genuine Volkspartei.
The RPL acknowledged this when it concluded that although the party had suffered serious losses in November, “the results proved that the hard core of the party remained unshaken and [had] by no means wavered.” Even though stated very confidently, this conclusion had to be extremely sobering to Nazi strategists. If the party were unable to sustain its mass protest appeal and were once again reduced to its lower-middle-class base, it would be forced inexorably back to the periphery of German political life.
While the NSDAP was attempting to cope with these dilemmas, the Papen cabinet, with no parliamentary majority in sight, resigned on November 17, and in a reprise of the August negotiations, a new round of discussions among Papen, Schleicher, Hindenburg, and Hitler took place. Far from being chastened by the November defeat, Hitler continued to insist on the chancellorship and full power in a presidential government, while Papen and Schleicher renewed their efforts to coax the Nazis into a coalition of right-wing forces. Hitler met twice with the Reich President, and although the latter man appealed to Hitler’s patriotism to “meet me half way,” Hitler could not be moved.
Hindenburg’s tone in these meetings had softened—even addressing Hitler as a fellow soldier, a comrade-in-arms of the Great War—but his unwillingness to appoint Hitler chancellor had not. Hindenburg informed Hitler that he could not justify “handing presidential power over to the leader of a party that has never renounced its claim to absolute power” and that he feared that “a presidential cabinet headed by you would necessarily develop into a party dictatorship with all the consequences this implies.” After one of his frustrating encounters with Hitler in the Presidential Palace, a scornful Hindenburg turned to his advisor Otto Meissner and asked if it was true that the Nazi leader had been a housepainter in Munich before the war. It wasn’t, but without waiting for an answer, he remarked, “One can’t put a house painter in Bismarck’s chair.”
As Hindenburg groped for a solution to this impasse, Papen approached him with a bold plan. It called for the Reich President to dissolve the Reichstag and declare a state of emergency. Although according to Article 25 of the Weimar constitution, elections were to take place no later than sixty days after a dissolution of the Reichstag, Papen now insisted that Hindenburg postpone elections indefinitely—a clear breach of the constitution. Papen would then rule by emergency decree, effecting the transition from stalemated Republic to authoritarian regime.
Although sympathetic to Papen’s goals, Hindenburg had deep reservations about such a course of action. He was not comfortable with such a blatant violation of the constitution, especially since the responsibility for such a move would rest squarely on him. Some members of Papen’s cabinet shared his reluctance, fearing that the chancellor’s plan would provoke a civil war, with both the Communists and Nazis rising against the government. Among those opposed to Papen’s strategy was his patron and minister of defense, Kurt von Schleicher. Although he had engineered Papen’s remarkable elevation to the chancellorship in June, he had grown increasingly irritated at Papen’s tendency to act independently, ignoring Schleicher’s advice. He, too, was convinced that a continuation of the massively unpopular Papen government would lead to serious unrest. It was time to make a change. At a meeting of the cabinet on December 2, Schleicher spoke out against Papen’s plan and produced an army study showing that the military, with its hundred thousand troops, would
be no match for the paramilitary forces of both radical parties. Civil war would be the inevitable result, and the outcome would be very much in doubt.
Schleicher’s study, with its military imprimatur, made a strong impression on Hindenburg. Although he was quite fond of Papen, who treated him and his son Oskar with feudal obeisance and had become a close family friend, he had to act. With great reluctance, he asked for Papen’s resignation, and on December 3 turned to Schleicher to form a new government. The Reichstag, which had still not convened, was not consulted. Now a career military man with even less parliamentary backing than Papen was chancellor of the German Republic.
A virtual unknown to the public, Schleicher now stepped boldly from the shadows into the spotlight. He announced his intention of forming a government that would stand above parties, which was fortunate since he commanded, if possible, even less popular support than his predecessor. His government’s economic policy, he asserted, would transcend both capitalism and socialism, though just what this meant no one, perhaps not even the general, really understood. Schleicher was not burdened by Papen’s reactionary reputation (he favored, for example, a jobs creation program that Papen had opposed), and he had unorthodox ideas about forging a broad coalition that would bring together elements of the labor unions, the agrarian associations, and disaffected National Socialists. Such a government, he believed, would enjoy the support of the army and industrial interests. Schleicher liked to be called “the social general,” but most would have agreed with Leon Trotsky’s famous description that he was “a question mark in the epaulettes of a general.”
Feeling that a sobered Hitler might be more tractable in defeat, Schleicher renewed efforts to win his support, holding out the prospect of important cabinet positions in his government, but Hitler was in no mood for compromise. His strategy since the heady days of summer had been “all or nothing,” and even now he was not prepared to deviate from that hard-line stance. Schleicher opened secret negotiations with Strasser, though those talks soon became public news, and offered him the post of vice chancellor. He hinted that other National Socialists might also assume important cabinet posts. He hoped that Strasser, who commanded a strong following with the NSDAP, could bring a large contingent of Nazi Reichstag deputies into the fold. Schleicher also labored under the illusion that the more reasonable Nazis under Strasser might join with the Zentrum, the DNVP, DVP, and, most improbably, the Social Democrats to form a viable basis for the new government. Failing that, he held out the hope that an offer of important positions in the cabinet would finally tempt Hitler into joining forces with the new Reich government.
The Third Reich Page 25