Hitler

by Volker Ullrich

  On the morning of 2 December, Papen convened his cabinet to inform them of Hindenburg’s decision. It was a dramatic meeting. With the lone exception of Postal and Transport Minister Eltz-Rübenach, the ministers all came out against a new incarnation of the Papen government. When Meissner remarked that this would not move the Reich president to reconsider “a decision he had made after much difficult deliberation,” Schleicher played his trump card. In response to Justice Minister Gürtner’s question as to “whether the Reichswehr was ready to meet all coming eventualities,” Schleicher summoned Lieutenant Colonel Eugen Ott into the cabinet. In the preceding weeks, Schleicher had ordered him to test the Reichswehr’s readiness to deal with internal unrest and simultaneously secure Germany’s borders. The results of those tests were negative. Ott’s report left a “devastating impression” on those at the meeting, as Finance Minister von Krosigk noted in his diary.249 Papen immediately declared that the situation had changed and that he would have to renounce his mandate to form a government. Hindenburg only reluctantly accepted the resignation of his preferred chancellor. “Then in God’s name we will have to let Herr von Schleicher try his luck,” Papen recalled Hindenburg’s words.250 Even after he had stepped down as chancellor, Papen was allowed to keep his government apartment in Wilhelmstrasse. Hindenburg wanted him in close proximity as an adviser. This constellation of individuals would prove particularly significant in January 1933.

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  Hitler and his entourage welcomed Schleicher’s nomination. “Very good—it’s the old man’s final evasive manoeuvre,” Goebbels noted. “We’ll immediately start complaining and extract whatever there is to be extracted.”251 But there was also resistance within the Nazi leadership to the idea of immediate confrontation. Gregor Strasser in particular demanded a change in the course of all-or-nothing. Many historians have asserted that Schleicher offered him the post of vice-chancellor and Prussian state president at a secret meeting on 4 December, but it is far from certain whether that was indeed the case. The only primary source for the meeting is Goebbels’s From the Hotel Kaiserhof to the Reich Chancellery, but his diaries contain no mention of it or anything comparable to Goebbels’s assertion in the book that “not only did Strasser not refuse but said that he intended to run in the next election with a list of his own.” It is quite likely that Goebbels invented the meeting after the fact to make the idea of Strasser’s “grave betrayal of the Führer and the party” seem more plausible.252

  Whatever the real story may have been, no one disputes that Gregor Strasser advocated greater flexibility towards the Schleicher cabinet and did not regard the chancellor’s office as a categorical precondition for joining the government. He was strengthened in those views by the results of the Thuringian election on 4 December. Although Hitler had been heavily involved in the campaign, the NSDAP suffered heavy losses. Compared with the Reichstag election of 31 July the party lost 40 per cent of its votes.253 The headline of the article about the election in the Berliner Tageblatt read: “Nimbus Destroyed,” and the newspaper wrote: “Since the NSDAP has thus far existed solely on the psychotic belief in certain victory, the reversal of this tendency must hit them all the harder.” For the Frankfurter Zeitung, the outcome of the Thuringian election was proof that “Less and less, and not more and more, is Herr Hitler justified to appear in public claiming to be the leader of the nation…4 December has put Herr Hitler back among the ranks of all the other political leaders where he belongs.”254 It no longer seemed inconceivable that the NSDAP would suffer dramatic losses in the next Reichstag election and see its movement decline. The mood of depression that had taken hold of the party since 6 November worsened. In December 1932, Munich’s political police observed the first signs of disintegration: “Numerous resignations occur every day, dues arrive irregularly and expulsions because of arrears become more and more frequent…All sections of the party…give the impression of being run down.”255 This backdrop explains why the conflict between Hitler and Gregor Strasser would flare up as it did.

  The rivalry had been simmering for quite some time, and Goebbels had done everything in his power to discredit his former mentor and now adversary with Hitler, particularly by suggesting that Strasser was using the task of organising the party to increase his own power. “Strasser has got his hands on the party with organisational changes—very subtle,” Goebbels noted in late June 1932. “Hitler is to be gradually pushed aside. Honorary president. Hitler doesn’t want to see it. He needs to be stirred up.” Goebbels’s constant undermining of the “party Mephisto,” as he nicknamed Strasser, had its desired effect. In early September, Goebbels noted in his diary: “At noon a long conversation with Hitler. He greatly distrusts Strasser. Wants to knock his power within the party from his hands.”256 But it was no mean feat to strip Strasser of power since the Reich organisational director enjoyed great respect with the party rank and file; he was also considered by western German industrialists as one of the few National Socialists with whom one could do business. In September 1932, for example, August Heinrichsbauer, the editor of an important business journal in the city of Essen, informed Strasser that “several leading gentlemen” of industry were concerned about Hitler’s all-or-nothing principle. “Adherence to this principle in practice,” Heinrichsbauer argued, was “tantamount to self-destruction.” The NSDAP would enter into a “voluntary isolation” from which it would be difficult to escape. Moreover, the party’s “out-of-bounds, Marxist-style agitation” risked the trust “that is essential for taking over the highest forms of authority.”257 After the election defeat in November, Strasser thought the time was right to introduce a new strategy and lead the party from opposition into government. He spelled that out to Hitler in no uncertain terms. Hitler interpreted this as a challenge to his authority and reacted with commensurate venom. He was “furious with Strasser” for engaging in “sabotage,” Goebbels noted on 9 November.258

  In late November 1932, things came to an initial head when Hitler, Göring, Strasser, Frick and Goebbels debated the party’s future stance towards the Schleicher cabinet in Weimar. “Strasser was for participation; otherwise he sees no hope,” Goebbels summarised. “Hitler vehemently against him. Kept his line.”259 The conflict was ratcheted up a notch at a Reich leaders’ conference in the Hotel Kaiserhof on 5 December. Beforehand Strasser and Frick had had a meeting with Schleicher at which the chancellor threatened to dissolve the Reichstag again should the National Socialists not tolerate his cabinet. Again, Strasser spoke out for a compromise while Hitler remained adamant.260 In the afternoon of 5 December, a day before the new Reichstag convened for its first session, Hitler ordered NSDAP deputies to take a hard line, arguing that “Never has a great movement been victorious if it went down the path of compromise.” The leader of the Nazis’ parliamentary faction, Frick, then pledged his “unshakeable and inviolable loyalty” on behalf of the entire faction to the Führer.261 During Hitler’s speech, Goebbels observed, Strasser’s face “turned to stone.”262 Strasser no doubt sensed that his views had isolated him within the faction and that there was no way of getting his way against Hitler in the party.

  On the morning of 8 December, Strasser wrote to Hitler announcing his intention to resign from all his party offices and give up his Reichstag mandate. In justifying his decision, Strasser wrote that he thought Hitler’s strategy of trying to create political chaos in the hope that the chancellorship would then drop into his lap was “wrong, dangerous and not in the general German interest.” At the same time, Strasser assured Hitler that his resignation was not designed to put him at the “centre of an opposition movement within the party.” On the contrary, he wished to “return to the party rank and file without any hard feelings.” For that reason, Strasser wrote, he would be leaving both Berlin and Germany for an extended period.263

  Immediately after writing that letter, Strasser summoned the NSDAP state inspectors present in Berlin, who each supervised numerous Gaue after a reform of the party organi
sation, to his office. In a hoarse voice, Strasser informed them of his decision. Hitler, he said, had not been following a “clear line” since August 1932 other than “wanting to become chancellor at all costs.” Since there was no realistic chance of that happening, Hitler was risking the disintegration and decay of the movement. There were two ways to achieve power, Strasser argued. The legal one—in which case Hitler should have accepted the position of vice-chancellor and tried to use it as a political lever. And the illegal option—which would have entailed trying to seize power violently through the SS and SA. Strasser would have followed his Führer down either path. But he was no longer prepared to wait until some indeterminate point in the future when Hitler was named chancellor. Strasser also made no bones of the fact that his resignation was personally motivated, complaining vigorously that Göring, Goebbels and Röhm all enjoyed more of Hitler’s favour than he did. For Strasser this was a demotion which he had not deserved and was no longer willing to tolerate. As one eyewitness to the meeting described it, Strasser’s surprise announcement left the state inspectors utterly dismayed. They tried to get him to reconsider, but Strasser refused, announcing that his decision was “final and thus immutable.”264

  Strasser had his letter delivered to the Hotel Kaiserhof that very morning, and it created a massive stir among Hitler and his entourage. Hitler feared that it could be the harbinger of an inner-party rebellion and immediately took counter-measures. At noon, he held an audience with the state inspectors in his hotel suite, mustering all his powers of persuasion and melodrama to secure their loyalty. Hitler began his address on a very sombre note: “If one individual turns disloyal and abandons me in the most difficult hour of the party, I can overcome that. If you all intend to abandon me, my life’s work and my struggle for it no longer makes any sense, and the movement will collapse. Without this movement and the life’s mission that goes with it, I have nothing…”—at this point, Hitler glanced over at the bust of his niece Geli Raubal—“…tying me to this earth. In that case, I will bear the consequences and would only ask that you decorate my body and my coffin with the banner I once created for the movement and as a symbol of a new Germany.”

  After this prelude, Hitler demanded that the state inspectors “openly and honestly” reveal the reasons Strasser had named for his resignation. Robert Ley did so, whereupon Hitler commenced a long monologue in which he tried to refute Strasser’s arguments one by one. Becoming vice-chancellor, Hitler countered, would have quickly led to fundamental differences with Papen, who would have dismissed any initiative with a cold smile and the statement that he was the chancellor and the head of the cabinet and that Hitler could resign if he did not like his course. With that Papen and his backers would have succeeded in publicly demonstrating that Hitler was incapable of governing. “I refuse to go down this road and still wait until I’m offered the chancellorship,” Hitler said. “The day will come, and probably sooner than we think.” Even less promising was the illegal path to power, since Hindenburg and Papen would not hesitate to issue orders for the army to shoot. “Gentlemen,” Hitler said, “I am not so irresponsible as to hound Germany’s youth and the war generation, the best of Germany’s manhood, in front of police and Reichswehr machine guns. Gregor Strasser will never see the day when that happens!”

  Hitler also rejected all criticism of how he had treated his long-term comrade. He had been aware for quite some time that Strasser had become “reserved, sombre and reticent” towards him. “Is that my fault?” Hitler asked. “Can I help it if Göring and Goebbels show up for uninvited visits more often than Strasser?…Are these sufficient reasons for one of my most intimate and oldest colleagues to turn his back on the movement?” At this point, Hitler used his thespian ability and modulated his tone, becoming, as Hinrich Lohse, the state inspector of the northern Gaue, recalled, “ever more calm, human, friendly and solicitous.” In the end, none of those in attendance at the two-hour meeting were able to resist Hitler’s seductive logic. “He triumphed,” Lohse remembered. “In the gravest test the movement had faced he proved to his uncertain yet indispensible foot soldiers, who then collected themselves, that he was the master and Strasser was the vassal.”265

  Nonetheless the mood that evening in the Goebbelses’ apartment was subdued, with Hitler looking “very pale.” At 3 a.m., Goebbels, Röhm and Himmler were summoned to an emergency meeting in the Hotel Kaiserhof. There they inspected the latest edition of the Tägliche Rundschau newspaper, which broke the news of Strasser’s resignation and speculated that only if he took over the party leadership would the NSDAP be able to break free of its “hopeless confusion.” Hitler saw his fears of a conspiracy confirmed. “If the party falls apart, I’ll put an end to everything in three minutes,” Goebbels quoted Hitler as saying.266 As he had after the failed putsch of 1923, Hitler toyed with the idea of suicide; it would not be the last time before 30 April 1945, when he did in fact end his own life in the bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery. Despite the mood of despair, however, Hitler was astonishingly quick to take organisational measures. Strasser’s office was to be restructured and the institution of the state inspectors abolished. Hitler himself took over the leadership of political organisation, naming Robert Ley, previously the NSDAP’s Reich Inspector II, as his deputy. The Nazi departments for agriculture and education were made autonomous and handed over to Walther Darré and Goebbels respectively.267

  Strasser’s resignation was the top news story of 10 December. All the major newspapers led with it. Wild rumours flew around. But it soon became clear that the departure of this once-so-powerful man would not lead to a schism within the NSDAP. Strasser had accepted he would have to take a lesser role a long time before. He had no desire to engage in a power struggle with Hitler. The day of his resignation, he boarded a train to Munich from where he travelled on to Tyrol. He would not return from this holiday until shortly before Christmas. For two weeks, not even his close friends knew where he was.268 The only Nazi leader to sympathise with him was Gottfried Feder, who had played an important role in Hitler’s rise in the early 1920s but who no longer enjoyed much political influence.269 On the afternoon of 9 December, Hitler once again spoke to the inspectors and Gauleiter before addressing Nazi Reichstag deputies. Goebbels noted: “Annihilating towards Strasser and even more towards Feder. The people howled in anger and pain. Huge triumph for Hitler. In the end a spontaneous declaration of loyalty. Everyone shook Hitler’s hand. Strasser is isolated. A dead man.”270 Two days later, after the party leadership had met in the Brown House in Munich, Goebbels remarked: “Everyone rallying around Hitler. Joy that the Strasser affair was liquidated so quickly.”271

  But the crisis within the party was not quite over yet. Strasser’s resignation caused what Goebbels described as “great unrest” among the party rank and file.272 There were doubts about Hitler’s leadership mixed with confusion as to where to go from here. Hitler spent the weeks before Christmas travelling to the Gaue to shore up morale among party functionaries. On 10 December in Breslau, in a sign of how dramatic the situation was, he compared the NSDAP’s struggle with that of Friedrich the Great in the Seven Years War. The Prussian king, Hitler said, had also had to deal with repeated setbacks but had triumphed in the end. Anyone hoping for a “collapse of the movement,” Hitler thundered, “was fooling himself—it stood as immovable as a cliff in the ocean.”273 The following day in Leipzig, he declared: “I am proud of the knowledge that the entire movement stands behind me more determined than ever. The party has not been seized by crisis. It’s already put this crisis behind it.”274 This was little more than whistling in the dark. Hitler’s words so obviously contradicted the true situation that he was unlikely to have convinced many of his followers. Goebbels’s diary offers a more accurate account, with its mentions of declining attendance at Nazi events and the party’s hopeless finances.275 On Christmas Eve Goebbels concluded: “1932 has been one long run of bad luck. It should be smashed to pieces.”276

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  In conversation with Bavarian State President Held on 10 December, the newly appointed Chancellor von Schleicher stated that he considered the National Socialist danger to have been “overcome.”277 The tenor of the opinion pieces in the major liberal newspapers at the end of the year was similar. “The massive National Socialist attack on the democratic state has been repelled,” the Berlin correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung, Rudolf Kircher, declared. Julius Elbau titled his review article in the Vossische Zeitung “Year of Decision.” Yet Elbau also complained that the republic had not been saved because Germans had defended it. “Its attackers got rid of one another,” Elbau wote. “It was a march through the valley of the devil that makes you shudder when you look back at it.”278 The Berliner Tageblatt already consigned the Hitler movement to the realm of history: “All over the world, people talked about…what was his first name again, Adalbert Hitler? And later? He disappeared.”279

  In the newspaper Der deutsche Volkswirt, the liberal journalist Gustav Stolper assured his readers: “The year 1932 has brought an end to Hitler’s luck.” The movement had reached its high point on 31 July, Stolper argued, and its decline had begun on 13 August. “Since then Hitlerism has been collapsing to an extent and at a rate that are comparable only with its rise,” Stolper wrote. “Hitlerism is perishing according to the same laws by which it lived.” The Social Democratic politician and former Reich Finance Minister Rudolf Hilferding agreed. In the SPD theoretical journal Die Gesellschaft, he wrote that 13 August had “marked a sudden shift in the drama—what is thus far the decisive turn…Herr Hitler descends the steps of the palais—it’s the demise of fascism.”280