Hitler in Hell

by Martin van Creveld

  I myself had been Staatloss (stateless) since 1925. That was when, to avoid being deported, I gave up my Austrian citizenship. Thus I could not have run for the Reichstag even if I had wanted to; but in spite of the advantages membership conferred, such as a nice salary and free railway travel, I most certainly did not. Instead, I had Göring lead our faction, a task he undertook not only with success but with considerable gusto. Nevertheless, as the leader of the second largest party, it was inevitable that I should be widely regarded as head of the opposition. That is why, when the presidential elections came up in early 1932, I saw no way I could avoid campaigning against Hindenburg even though I knew I would lose. To enable me to participate I turned to my old associate Frick. At that time he was serving as Minister of the Interior and of Education of Thuringia, the first state in which National Socialists set up a government. He made me a German citizen, and that was that.

  Once again, my collaborators and I gave everything we had. The fact that we had the backing of one of the biggest German industrialists, Fritz Thyssen, certainly helped. Another key figure was the managing director of Lufthansa, Parteigenosse (since 1929) Erhard Milch. He put one of his aircraft, a Ju-52, at my disposal. That not only enabled me to travel around much more quickly and more easily than before but gave one of my collaborators the idea behind the famous campaign poster called “Hitler over Germany.” The implication, namely that the movement and I formed a dynamic force, as opposed to the staid, if respectable, Hindenburg, was clear.

  In the first round, which was held on 13 March, Hindenburg fell just short of obtaining the absolute majority he needed. I came in second with 30 percent of the vote. A slight disappointment, I admit. But still a vast improvement over our performance in September 1930. The rest of the ballots were divided between the Communist Ernst Thälman and the Right-wing nationalist Theodor Düsterberg.

  Having come in last, Düsterberg wisely withdrew. So the next round was contested only by three of us. This time Thälman went down to ten percent whereas I went up to 37 percent. That was more than twice what I had gotten in 1930. But Hindenburg got 53 percent. It was not the great triumph he had looked for, perhaps, but is was enough to make sure that Germany would be stuck with him for another seven years. At the time he had already passed his eighty-third birthday. In Germany and elsewhere, life-expectancy was much lower than it is now; the chances that he would survive until his ninetieth, let alone be able to function as he should, seemed quite slim. That was why, no sooner had he been elected than everyone started speculating as to what would happen after his death.

  To repeat, Hindenburg had never been a great intellectual luminary. Had it been up to him, he would have retired years earlier. The more so because, as he readily admitted, he was unable to comprehend the complicated economic bills Brüning kept submitting to him for his signature. All they did was frustrate him and make him long for his estate at Neudeck in faraway East Prussia. Not that I blame him. There is nothing economists like better than to obfuscate and to confuse; in this respect, they are almost as bad as lawyers! But he had a strong sense of duty and was as unshakeable and as dignified as any man can be. He was just the kind of oak the German people, in their misery, were looking for.

  He and I met for the first time in January 1931. The occasion was a high-level conference held to decide what to do with us, the National Socialists, who seemed to be sweeping all in front of them. It was mutual dislike at first sight. I considered him an old fogey, which, by this time, he undoubtedly was. He for his part called me “The Bohemian Corporal.” Historians have often puzzled over the expression. However, to anyone who has followed his career the explanation is simple. In all probability he was confusing my birthplace, Braunau-on-the Inn, with Braunau, now Broumov, in northeastern Bohemia. As he wrote in his memoirs, that Braunau was where, as a young lieutenant during the Prussian-Austria War of 1866, he had smelled powder for the first time. That, as I can testify, is an experience one does not quickly forget.

  One of the characteristics of senility is obstinacy, even obtuseness. Whether Hindenburg was senile in the full sense of the word I leave it to the mad-doctors to decide. But he was certainly determined to have his way in not appointing me Reich Chancellor. Since the Reichstag did not function, everything came to depend on the coterie which surrounded him. Perhaps the most important person involved was his son Oskar. Acting as the President’s amanuensis, he had a greater influence on him than any of the rest. Yet Oskar von Hindenburg had none of the qualifications needed for holding high office. As a matter of fact, few people had even heard of him before his father was elected President in 1925. Once Hindenburg Sr. had died in 1934, Hindenburg Jr. did Germany and me the inestimable favor of proclaiming that his father had designated me as his successor. With that he disappeared from history; no great loss.

  Another figure who played a key role was General (ret.) Wilhelm Gröner. Gröner was a brilliant organizer, railway expert, and logistician. During the war he had been close to Ludendorff. By the time it ended he was able to mitigate some of the effects of the Dolchstoss by organizing the army’s orderly retreat into the Motherland and preventing its disintegration. Later, he did much to build the Reichswehr. Marrying for the second time in 1930, so quickly did he and his new wife produce a child that it was nicknamed “Nurmi” after the famous Finnish long-distance runner and Olympic champion. He served as Minister of Defense under Müller. When Brüning assumed office he appointed him Minister of the Interior as well.

  A much less savory character was another general, Kurt von Schleicher (“Creeper,” in German). Schleicher was a political officer par excellence. Immediately after World War I, he had been instrumental in negotiating the “pact” between Gröner and the Social Democrats that secured the Reichswehr’s support for the Republic while at the same time enabling it to function and develop. Having found his true métier, from this point on he never ceased intriguing. This was made evident, for example, by the fact that he brought down Seeckt, the man who, along with Gröner, had done more than anyone else to ensure that Germany should still have any kind of army at all. He also had a hand, a big one, in building up some other military units with the self-explanatory name, the Black Reichswehr. It was Schleicher who first suggested to Hindenburg that the answer to Germany’s constitutional crisis was a presidential government under Article 48. And he, having suggested it, did as much as anyone to bring it about.

  The fourth member of the cabal was Franz von Papen. A conservative nobleman and a member of the Center Party, Papen was a no one, really. During World War I he had served in our embassy in Washington. As he was being expelled, he committed a blunder that enabled the U.S. authorities to capture all German agents in America. During the 1920s he started dabbling in politics. As late as the first half of 1932, few people had so much as heard his name. But he was suave, not to say, slippery. And he knew how to talk to Hindenburg, which was what really mattered. Their intimacy started in 1925 when Papen, defying his own Party’s wishes, decided to vote for the latter as president. This intimacy in turn made him dear to Schleicher, who hoped that, using Papen as a figurehead, he would be able to govern Germany. In the end it was Papen, having turned his back on Schleicher, who persuaded Hindenburg to appoint me.

  For a period of some two and a half years these four men, steering Hindenburg now in one direction and then in another, played poker with Germany’s fate. Notwithstanding the fact that none of them was very well known or had any number of voters behind him. And notwithstanding the fact that none of them had anything even remotely resembling the qualities a great popular tribune, let alone a statesman of world stature, must have. So far behind the times was Papen himself that he really thought that the masses could be excluded from running the state and “depoliticized,” as his speechwriter, Edgar Jung, put it! Contrary to his wishes, though, politics was not limited to the cabal’s deeds and misdeeds. All over Germany the leading members of the various parties met, negotiated, horse-bargained, and
struck alliances, only to break them as soon as they thought they might profit from doing so. Not being a member of the Reichstag, I did my best to stay above the fray as Hindenburg also tried to do. But others in the Party, especially Göring, kept splashing in it. His extensive ties to the so-called “better circles” made him well suited for the task, one which he greatly enjoyed and, by taking bribes right and left, profited from.

  Our own immediate task was to bug the Social Democrats as much as we could. They were, after all, the largest party. They were also the one that, having overthrown the Kaiser in 1918 and held a majority for so long, were mainly responsible for Germany’s plight. The Communists apart, we were prepared to cooperate with anyone to carry out this task. That included the Center and, above all, the conservative Right. In October 1931 we even joined the latter in forming the so-called Harzburg Front. Some subsequent German historians, seeking to discredit that Right as well as their own fathers, who had been very much a part of it, have exaggerated its role out of all proportion. Not only did it share much of our ideology, those historians claimed, but it made a decisive contribution to our victory.

  But that is nonsense. It is true that, like ourselves, Herr Alfred Hugenberg and his cronies were nationalists. They demanded an end to reparations, the reestablishment of a powerful army, and the restoration of Germany’s 1914 borders. In every other respect, though, they were very different from us. We were revolutionary; they were reactionary. We came from, and turned to, the people; they were a bunch of millionaires and snobs who looked down on everyone else and could only appeal to other millionaires and snobs like themselves. We were anti-Semitic—rabidly so, our enemies claimed. They, while not liking Jews very much, did not give the racial problem nearly as much attention as it deserved. All this limited their electoral appeal. In the words of a man whose name I do not wish to mention, they were useful idiots. One of them, the abovementioned Fritz Thyssen, having fallen out with us and left Germany, even admitted as much! They brought us some votes in the Reichstag and quite a lot of money to use to pay the SA and to conduct our propaganda. But that was all.

  Nor was politics limited to the smoke-filled rooms where these and other men—there were, as yet, no women among them—met. More, much more, was going on in the streets. Better than anyone else, we understood how important the streets were and that they had to be conquered. “He who rules the streets rules the country” could have been our motto. Our principal instrument in achieving this goal was the SA. The first small unit, which was charged with making sure that hecklers could not disrupt our meetings, was established in February 1920 with Emil Maurice as its commander. In 1921 I replaced him with Hans-Ulrich Klintzsch, a former army officer who knew more about military organization than Maurice did, and then by Ernst Röhm. The term Sturmabteilung dates from the same period.

  We put our fledgling troops into brown mustard-like uniforms. Not because I liked brown, as some idiot of a psychologist, eager to put me down and to make a name for himself, claimed. In fact, brown was one color conspicuously missing from all three of my homes, the two private ones and the flat in the Reichskanzlei. But because, early on, there happened to be on sale a large contingent of uniforms, originally destined for our African colonies, of that color. Armed with chair legs, beer mugs, truncheons, and occasionally knives as well, oftentimes the men engaged in more or less massive Saalschlachten (hall battles) against our opponents. I personally taught them to concentrate their forces and to attack one table after another. That, after all, is what Clausewitz also recommended. A fight is a fight, regardless of its size! Using those tactics, they normally emerged on top, enabling me and the Party’s other speakers to perform without too many interruptions. Besides, nothing impresses both opponents and bystanders as much as a show of force does. That was the purpose of the uniforms, the parades, the bands, and so on, Our Putsch having failed, the Bavarian Government banned the SA. But it continued to exist under different names.

  After we reestablished the Party in 1925, the SA resumed operations. It tackled our opponents, the Communists in particular, not only at meetings but in the streets, too. Now commanded by Franz Pfeffer von Salomon, another former officer, the number of its members grew slowly but surely, from a few dozen at first to tens of thousands at the end of the 1920s, and much more than that after our victory in the 1930 elections. Shortly after those elections Pfeffer fell out with me, however, compelling me to dismiss him. Thereupon, I placed a telephone call to Röhm, who had gone to Bolivia to train the local army. He came.

  History, and the historians who write it, often perform strange somersaults. Before 1933, a great many of those who wrote about the SA described it as a bunch of uncouth rowdies. From 1933 to 1945 we saw to it that they would change their tune. Goebbels in particular, by glorifying our dead comrade Horst Wessel, contributed heavily to this. By the late 1930s there probably was not one city, town, or village in the whole of Germany that did not boast its very own Strasse der SA, SA Street. Then came 1945, and things changed again. In Babelsberg, which thanks to its villas and the fact that it was the center of movie production became Goebbels’ favorite stomping ground, the Strasse der SA was renamed after Karl Marx. Imagine that!

  Here, I want to put it on the record that the SA were not just a band of rowdies. To be sure, they were a rough bunch, addicted to drinking and brawling. They liked beating up people, including Communists, socialists, Jews, and similar swine. Who would begrudge them that pleasure? And how, given their low social origins and the nature of their opponents, could they be anything but what they were? The day-to-day lives of many of them were desperately hard, so much so that, at times, we had to organize soup kitchens for them. No wonder they looked forward to the moment when they could put on their brown shirts and take action. Almost any action.

  Some of them were homosexuals. But it was not we National Socialists who enacted the notorious so-called “Pink Paragraph,” which made it a crime for people of the same sex to have it. That had been done as far back as 1871. I personally did not care much about the matter. Whom they did it with, and how, was their own affair. What I did do was to use it retroactively to persuade the German people that my 1934 purge of the SA leadership had indeed been necessary and justified. In 1935, to prevent more of the same, we passed a law broadening the legal definition of punishable homosexual offenses. The rest I left to Himmler in his capacity as chief of the German police. He was far more puritanical and far keener on uprooting homosexuals than I was; even so, they only ever formed a very small minority of those incarcerated in our concentration camps.

  More important, right from the beginning the SA were not always as disciplined as they should have been. That was particularly true in Berlin, a city which, then as now, had strong socialist and even communist leanings. In 1930 the local commander, Walter Stennes, called for an SA strike against their own party. A year later, his men even had the gall to storm our offices! This was the kind of thing that ultimately forced me to settle accounts with them. It was painful, but it had to be done.

  However, there was another side to the SA, which subsequent historians have done their best to deny. Starting at a time when our Party’s prospects looked anything but bright, they joined us and did their duty week after week, month after month, sometimes year after year. All this, for very little pay indeed. Those of them who were employed gave us their leisure hours. Many also brought along their wives, girlfriends, and sisters. They distributed rolls, ran soup kitchens, looked after the men’s uniforms, dressed their wounded, and mourned their dead. Dead they had eighty-six in 1931 alone, and wounded plenty more. After all, their opponents often gave as good as they got. Under their rough exterior, many of them were idealists. Their contribution to our eventual victory was much greater than that of some others I can think of.

  We were, in fact, going from strength to strength. In May 1932, two months after he was reelected, Hindenburg made Papen Chancellor. Not having the support of anyone else, it’s no wonder
he steered a zig-zag course. In an effort to appease us, one of the first things he did was to rescind the ban Brüning had imposed on the SA. Not that it made much of a difference, given that the ban had never been effective. His next move was to dissolve the Reichstag and to order new elections to be held. Once again we mobilized all our forces. Once again we campaigned as hard as we knew how to. I personally held so many speeches in so many cities that I lost count. My audiences, which ten years earlier could be counted in the low thousands, now grew to tens of thousands. Entire trainloads of people came to see and hear me speak. And the results more than justified our efforts. The number or our seats in the Reichstag almost doubled, reaching 230, which made us the largest party by far. In fact we now had more seats than did the Socialists and the Communists combined. Power appeared to be well within our reach.

  First, however, it had to be paid for with blood. In the summer of 1932 461 street battles took place in Berlin alone, leaving eighty-two people dead. But it was to no avail. Hindenburg and his advisers refused to see the light. Instead, they blamed the growing number of casualties on us. They were strengthened in their determination to do whatever they could to prevent me from becoming Chancellor. On 13 August, Hindenburg personally told me so. To rub salt into our wounds, he let it be known that he had advised me to steer my politics and those of the Party into kinder, gentler channels! So obstinate was their opposition that some of my followers started giving up. Others, to the contrary, redoubled their efforts to push me into mounting a coup.