The Third Reich

by Thomas Childers

  For all his vaunted political skills, Schleicher found himself increasingly isolated. Without allies in industry, agriculture, or labor he was more than ever dependent on the favor of the Reich President, and to his dismay his relations with Hindenburg had deteriorated perceptibly. Whereas Papen had shown virtually feudal deference to Hindenburg and his son Oskar, Schleicher’s conduct, his imperious manner and overconfident presumption of Hindenburg’s support, grated on the Old Gentleman. The Osthilfe scandal didn’t help.

  Above all, Hindenburg resented Schleicher pushing him to dismiss Papen in December. Despite Papen’s utter lack of popular support, Hindenburg preferred him to the Machiavellian general. During Papen’s roughly six months as chancellor, Hindenburg had come to look on him as a close family friend and advisor and wanted to keep him close by. So reluctant to part with him was Hindenburg that he allowed Papen to remain in his apartment in the Ministry of the Interior after his dismissal. That allowed Papen to pass unnoticed through the extensive back gardens that linked the Ministry of Interior, the Foreign Office, and the Chancellery, where Hindenburg resided while the Presidential Palace was undergoing renovations. While Schleicher had infrequent meetings with Hindenburg, Papen had direct and frequent access. The aristocratic and unloved Papen had disappeared from public view in December, but he had not abandoned his political ambitions: he was determined to use his influence with Hindenburg to undermine Schleicher and to return to power.

  In early January, Kurt von Schröder, a Rhineland banker with connections to both the Hitler and Papen camps, arranged a clandestine meeting between the two bitter rivals at his home outside Cologne. Long a Nazi sympathizer, Schröder was apparently acting on his own, not as a representative of big business as it seemed to many at the time—and later. The meeting took place on January 4 in Schröder’s lavish townhouse and was intended to be held in complete secrecy. Papen arrived alone by taxi at around noon to find Hitler, Himmler, party secretary Rudolf Hess, and a Nazi economic advisor waiting for him.

  When Schröder took the two principals into the next room for a private discussion, the meeting began on an unpromising note. So much bad blood had flowed between them. Hitler began by reciting from his extensive catalogue of grievances against Papen, especially his actions in the previous summer when, he was convinced, Papen had blocked his appointment as chancellor. Papen insisted that it was Schleicher who had poisoned Hindenburg’s mind about that possibility. Whether Hitler accepted this highly creative inversion of events is unknown, but he was impressed by Papen’s obvious antipathy toward Schleicher and his determination to bring him down. Playing on Hitler’s rabid anti-Marxism, Papen expressed his conviction that a rightist coalition government could be formed that would smash the left once and for all. Was Hitler interested in joining forces in this undertaking? Although neither trusted the other, each had something to gain from a bargain. Papen had no popular base; Hitler did. Hitler, on the other hand, had no access to Hindenburg, the gatekeeper to the corridors of power; Papen did. “He has the old man’s ear,” Goebbels wrote hopefully of Papen. It was the basis for a marriage of convenience.

  The two men could not, however, agree on the shape of a new government or who should lead it. Papen argued that owing to Hindenburg’s continuing aversion to the Nazi leader, Hitler should, at least for the time being, accept Nazi control over two powerful ministries in the new government—Interior and Defense. Hitler was still unwilling to accept anything less than the chancellorship, but he seemed less dogmatic, more flexible and open to other possibilities than he previously had been. Mulling over the possible combinations, they even discussed ruling jointly as a “duumvirate,” but that had little appeal to either. The meeting ended without any agreement on the thorny question of the chancellorship, but it was a beginning. They agreed to further discussions, but no firm arrangements were made. The Nazis left the meeting encouraged, having learned something of vital importance: “Papen wants to oust Schleicher,” Goebbels offered in summation. “Bravo! We can use him.”

  Despite elaborate measures to hold the meeting in complete secrecy, there had been a leak. As soon as Papen had stepped from his taxi upon arriving, a photographer, stationed at Schröder’s door, had snapped his picture. The next day the meeting was national news. Speculation dominated the front pages, usually under such headlines as the Tägliche Rundschau’s “Hitler and Papen Against Schleicher.” The two men promptly issued a joint statement denying any conspiracy against the Schleicher government, with Papen insisting that the meeting was intended merely to explore the possibilities of a broad right-wing coalition that would support the Schleicher cabinet.

  No one, except, oddly enough, Schleicher, seemed to buy this disingenuous explanation. Schleicher simply couldn’t believe that his feckless protégé, his Fränzchen, had acted behind his back. To French ambassador François-Poncet he scoffed at the idea that Papen had intended any intrigue. “He is frivolous,” Schleicher commented dismissively. “He imagined that he was going to pull off a master stroke and serve up Hitler to us on a platter. As if Hitler had not shown many times that he was not to be trusted! . . . I won’t scold him. I’ll just say to him: ‘My Fränzchen, you’ve committed another blunder.’ ” He did, however, press the Reich President to order Papen to refrain from such unauthorized initiatives in the future.

  For Hitler, the meeting with Papen was of tremendous significance. It put him back in the headlines when he seemed increasingly like yesterday’s news; it revealed the vulnerability of Schleicher’s position; and at a time when the NSDAP’s fortunes were at a low ebb and the path to the Chancellery blocked, new possibilities appeared. Instead of languishing in a political no-man’s-land, the door to Hindenburg—and power—seemed at last to open ever so slightly. But now more than ever, the Nazis desperately needed to demonstrate their political relevance, that their losses in November and December had been merely temporary setbacks, that the party had recovered its balance and was once again on the upswing.

  An opportunity beckoned. On January 15 an election would be held in the Lilliputian state of Lippe. Demographically this small political backwater in the northwest was ideally suited for the Nazis—rural, Protestant, a region of small towns, small shopkeepers, small farmers, and a relatively small Social Democratic and Communist presence. With an electorate of only about ninety thousand in a small, compact area, it offered the financially strapped NSDAP an opportunity to concentrate its limited resources for a major propaganda effort. No new Deutschlandflug was necessary, no far-flung speaking engagements. But it was a risk. If the Nazis suffered another defeat, it would confirm their downward spiral, sending the party into a potentially fatal tailspin. Hitler understood the stakes, and he launched the party into the campaign with a vengeance born of desperation. “The electoral contest in Lippe is beginning,” Goebbels recorded in his notes on January 3. “With much effort we have succeeded in scraping together the necessary money for it. We will concentrate all our energy on this small state in order to obtain the prestige of a success. The party must . . . show that it can still be victorious.”

  For the first two weeks of January, all the party’s financial and human resources were marshaled and hurled into the campaign. Hitler kept up his usual frenetic pace, speaking seventeen times in ten days. All the party’s top speakers made appearances, addressing modest crowds in chilly tents on cold windswept nights. The audiences, Goebbels recorded, were “only peasants and little people, but that [was] fine and most seem convinced.” For two weeks a blizzard of leaflets, pamphlets, and posters blanketed the countryside; SA men, bused in from the surrounding states, went door-to-door, distributing flyers, inviting residents to party rallies. They marched in parades, and toured the countryside in caravans of trucks carrying loudspeakers that blared out Nazi slogans. No village, no hamlet was bypassed. It was the most concentrated, most intense campaign the Nazis had ever conducted.

  The message of the campaign had a by now familiar ring. Hitler offered the usu
al recapitulations of National Socialist philosophy, its determination to overcome Germany’s social, religious, and regional prejudices, to awaken the dormant powers of the people and turn a divided Germany into a genuine Volksgemeinschaft that would restore Germany’s place in the world—the same shibboleths that had formed the content of Nazi appeals for well over a year.

  But if the party’s message was familiar, the targets and the tone shifted. There were fewer harangues against the system parties or even Schleicher. Both were savaged but in a surprisingly perfunctory fashion, as if they were no longer of any relevance. Nazi speeches carried a sharper, more insistent ideological tone and focused on another, more ominous menace: Bolshevism. Jewish Bolshevism. The official slogan of the campaign was “Down with Marxism,” and the linkage of Bolshevism and Jews, a staple of Nazi ideology, came front and center. “The danger of Bolshevism is gigantic,” Hitler warned in his annual New Year’s Declaration to the party faithful, “a threat to all of Europe. . . . The slogan, ‘Proletarians of the world unite,’ has become the rallying cry of sub-humanity [Untermenschentum],” and behind this threat, he claimed darkly, lurked the “international Jew . . . the intellectual inspiration in almost every country of the world in a struggle of the less gifted lower races against higher humanity. . . . Jewish intellectual leadership of world revolution” had already conquered Russia, and its tentacles stretched now into all the countries of Europe.

  Other parties might be content to fight for a few ministerial posts in a new cabinet, a few more seats in the Reichstag, but the National Socialist movement was embarked on a world-historical struggle, an ideological crusade for the soul of Germany. The NSDAP, as Hitler rasped in a speech in Detmold before about three thousand shivering spectators, “doesn’t see forming a government as its goal. Its ultimate mission is winning people. Race, Volk and land are the eternal sources from which the life of a people is constructed.” In Berlin, Goebbels, who shuttled back and forth from the capital to Lippe, underscored the sharper ideological tone of the campaign. Speaking to a crowd of 100,000 in Berlin’s Lustgarten, Goebbels delivered “a sharp denunciation of the Jews. The masses,” he wrote afterward, “were delirious.”

  But something was amiss. Maybe it was the weather. Bone-chilling cold and freezing rain, frosts and frigid winds buffeted the campaign. Many events were held in large, poorly heated tents, and Hitler, with his usual late arrivals, often appeared hours behind schedule. He seemed tired. So did the message—and the audience. His predictable recitation of the party’s history and his own spectacular rise from obscurity, the betrayal of 1918, and the predatory Allies were refrains his audiences could recite from memory. His appearances always drew a full house, the numbers always grossly inflated in the Nazi press, but while Goebbels hailed them as stunning successes, the public response, as more neutral reports indicated, was often lukewarm. One local newspaper reported that while Hitler’s “remarks sometimes displayed his inner agitation,” his speech in Detmold was “not interrupted by applause until the last part,” when he turned to the political issues of the day. A Hitler speech in Lipperode just three days before the balloting elicited a similar response. Hitler’s lengthy “introduction into the world of National Socialist political thinking . . . brought him no applause. Not until the second part of his speech, when he took up current political questions, did his speech stir interest.”

  Adding to Hitler’s sense of crisis, the party continued to be plagued by internal dissension. Throughout December and January the specter of Gregor Strasser haunted the party. Rumors ran riot—Strasser had entered into talks with Schleicher, with Hindenburg, even with Papen, raising the possibility that he would split the party and enter the government, taking other Nazi leaders with him. Some believed that he was planning to found his own party. So concerned was Hitler that since mid-December he traveled the country speaking to party leaders, from the highest to the lowest, to reaffirm their loyalty. Strasser remained a member of the party, and Hitler was reluctant to expel him, but in mid-December he dismissed Strasser loyalists from their positions in the party leadership, dismantled his network of inspectors (the Amtswälter), reshuffled its personnel, and assigned their tasks to men whose fealty was beyond suspicion.

  At the same time he issued a memorandum to party leaders that, while not explicitly denouncing Strasser, highlighted the differences in their views and underscored Hitler’s “unalterable” vision of the party’s organization and its mission. “The basis of political organization,” it began, “is loyalty.” Loyalty and obedience could “never be replaced by formal technical measures and structures, no matter what their type.” The victory of the National Socialist idea was “the goal of our struggle,” and the party’s organization was merely “a means to achieve this end.” In an expression of Hitler’s careless approach to organization that would characterize his regime after 1933, he stated that “It is a mistake to assume that the organization would be better, the more extensive and structured its apparatus. The opposite is correct. . . . A Weltanschauung doesn’t need bureaucrats . . . but fanatical apostles.”

  Despite these moves to erase Strasser’s influence in the party, the rumors persisted. Goebbels’s diary obsessively recorded each new Strasser sighting, each new bit of Strasser gossip. There was much to report. “The Berlin papers have a new theme,” he wrote on January 3. “Strasser will enter the Schleicher cabinet. . . . They are nattering that he has already had a number of talks with the General . . . and we already have proof of it. This is the most unscrupulous act of treachery that has ever been committed against the party.” Some days later he feared that Strasser was “about to betray us to Schleicher. . . . But he will pay for this.” On the eve of the election in Lippe he learned that Strasser had met with Hindenburg. “That’s just how I imagine a traitor,” Goebbels groused. “I have always seen through him. Hitler is very distressed. Everything hangs in the balance. . . . Everything now hangs on Lippe.”

  Strasser wasn’t the only source of trouble. Overtaxed by the exertions of 1932, the party’s organization seemed to be fracturing under the strain. The tensions between the NSDAP’s political leadership and the SA that had plagued the party in 1932 had not subsided following the November election. Bursts of SA violence and acts of criminality (petty larceny, armed robberies, extortion) continued to embarrass the party, and SA resentment against the political leadership continued to smolder. During December an acrimonious dispute between the top SA commander in the Nazi stronghold of Franconia, Wilhelm Stegmann, and the powerful Gauleiter of the area, Julius Streicher, burst into the open. Stegmann accused the Gauleiter of failing to honor a commitment to reimburse the SA for expenses incurred in the November election, and Streicher, in turn, accused Stegmann of embezzling party funds.

  Streicher appealed for support to the top leadership of the SA; Stegmann called on local SA leaders in Franconia to back him. After removing several Streicher loyalists from their posts, Stegmann’s men stormed into SA offices in Nuremberg. Fighting broke out, and the police had to be called in to restore order. The opposition press gloried in all the embarrassing details. “Hitler SA smashes SA Heads,” Vorwärts gleefully reported. Röhm initiated an investigation, and relieved Stegmann of his command pending the outcome of the probe. Stegmann did not protest; he did not complain; he simply ignored the order. It was symptomatic of the tenuous control exerted by the party over the SA that Stegmann, relying on grassroots support from the Franconian SA, defied the Munich leadership and continued on in his position. Hitler appeared to have arranged reconciliation between the warring factions, but on the eve of the voting in Lippe, the conflict in Franconia flared again.

  So serious was the situation that Röhm, who was enjoying a romantic getaway on Capri, was immediately ordered back to Germany to deal with his recalcitrant Storm Troopers. On election eve Hitler summoned Stegmann to a meeting, where, under considerable duress, Stegmann signed a public statement pledging his loyalty and obedience to the Führer. It was cruc
ial, Hitler insisted, for the party to project an image of unity as voters went to the polls. As events would soon demonstrate, the trouble was far from over.

  By the time the polls closed in Lippe on January 15, Hitler, Goebbels, and the high echelons of the party had returned to Berlin to await the results. The party simply could not endure another setback. By late evening it was clear that the NSDAP could lay claim to a victory. “The party is on the march again,” Goebbels sighed with relief. “It has paid off after all.” With 39.6 percent of the vote, the party had surpassed its November figure of 34 percent, and the Nazi press heralded the outcome in Lippe a great triumph, a turning point. But while Goebbels was selling Lippe as a historic victory—in the Nazi lexicon all triumphs were “decisive” and “historic”—few were buying it. True, the Nazis had picked up some five thousand votes over the previous November, mostly at the expense of the Conservatives, whose vote tumbled, but their numbers still fell some 3,500 short of the party’s July figures. Other parties, with far less funding and far less effort, had achieved bigger gains—to the Nazi 17 percent surge, the tiny Democratic Party had gained 60 percent, the liberal DVP 20 percent. These were small parties, but the Social Democrats also registered a gain of 15 percent. Together the Social Democrats and Communists had outpolled the Nazis. Little wonder that so few were impressed with the NSDAP’s “historic triumph.” Typical was a withering editorial assessment in the liberal Berliner Tageblatt: “Hitler has brought home from his heroic struggle in Lippe only a fly impaled on the tip of his sword.”

  His confidence revived by the Lippe “victory,” Hitler convened a meeting of all the Gauleiter in Weimar. He would now settle the Strasser problem once and for all; the time had come for “tough intransigence . . . no compromises.” For three hours he harangued the assembled leaders. His remarks were blunt, going into all the sordid details of Strasser’s alleged betrayal. The Gauleiter, according to Goebbels, were shaken. Then one after another they joined in the escalating denunciation. Strasser’s “best friends are deserting him,” Goebbels rejoiced. Martin Mutschmann, Gauleiter of Saxony, “characterized him as a Jew. Judas would be better.” At the end of the day, Hitler had “achieved a complete victory. The Strasser case is done. Finis. Poor Gregor,” Goebbels gloated, “his best friends have slaughtered him.”