Hitler
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By contrast, Hitler did not engage much with the Soviet Union, and he did not regard it as a world power in the military sense. To be sure, he emphasized the dangers of Bolshevism with his Anglo-American interlocutors, and towards German business audiences. His speeches and public letters posited a stark choice between ‘National Socialism’ and ‘Bolshevism’. Germany was portrayed as a bulwark against ‘Asia’. ‘Bolshevism’ would ‘either secure its world victory in the Reich’ or it would be ‘broken’ there.134 The danger, he told an audience of German entrepreneurs, was that communism ‘had occupied a state’ and was using this base gradually ‘to take over the entire world’.135 There was something tactical and synthetic about these statements, however, and in private Hitler stated that he did not fear war with Russia so much as the threat of communist revolution in Germany, a theme which he had been elaborating for more than ten years.136 Besides, Hitler had not changed his view that Bolshevism was allied with and subordinated to the forces of international capitalism. He claimed that while the Marxist parties condemned the capitalist economy in the strongest terms, they worked hand in hand with ‘the forces of international high finance, and supra-state world capital’.137
9
Making the Fewest Mistakes
In early 1932, it was clear that things were moving Hitler’s way. The question was whether they were moving quickly enough. The onset of stomach cramps, sweating and other afflictions briefly convinced him that he was suffering from cancer.1 Hitler was, in fact, not seriously ill, but he was clearly worn out. Faced with an increasing sense of his own mortality–something which was to become a constant theme in his rhetoric and thinking–the forty-two-year-old Hitler began to think seriously about the question of his successor. It was in this context that he reflected once again on the idea of a party senate, which had languished since the room envisaged for it in the new headquarters, the Braunes Haus in Munich, had been refurbished at great expense. This would help to incubate and select the new leader. ‘Without such a party senate,’ Hitler remarked, ‘should I depart this life prematurely, there would be a struggle for the leadership succession.’2 His timeline had narrowed again. To the increased prospect of power after the 1930s elections was added the imperative to seize it before time ran out on Hitler himself.
On 6–7 January 1932, Hitler was called to a meeting with the Reichswehrminister Wilhelm Groener, Hindenburg’s close associate Kurt von Schleicher and Brüning.3 They hoped to gain Nazi support in the Reichstag, but were offering little in return. Discussions continued for a few days.4 Hitler held out for power, and soon broke off negotiations. He bitterly resented their treatment of him as someone who would merely rally a horde of voters behind their betters. Hitler fulminated that he was not merely a ‘drummer’ for ‘reaction’.5 He henceforth adopted a remarkably stiff tone with Hindenburg, rejecting attempts to bring ‘foreign’ powers into play as critics of Nazi violence, and accusing him of using article 48 to suppress democracy, making the president himself guilty of tolerating serious ‘constitutional violations’.6 Worse still, Hitler began to worry that the conservative right might stage a coup which would destroy all hopes of a Nazi takeover on the back of their growing popularity.7
Hitler sought to break the deadlock, and to head off an authoritarian regime, with a two-pronged strategy. First, he stepped up his campaign to win over the key conservative constituencies. In early January 1932, the former diplomat Prince Victor von Wied arranged for him to meet Konstantin von Neurath, ambassador to London and a stalwart of the conservative right. We do not know what passed between them on that occasion except that Hitler asked Neurath whether he would be willing to serve as foreign minister in any future cabinet headed by him.8 In late January, Hitler seized the opportunity to speak to the renowned ‘Industrial Club’ in Düsseldorf, the capital of German heavy industry.9 His speech was widely reported and often taken as an endorsement by his hosts. In fact, the audience was less weighty than one might imagine–most of the key figures in armaments, steel and coal production did not attend themselves–but the rapturous welcome he received did indicate the extent to which Hitler was gaining traction. At the very least, big business, which continued to support other parties more extensively, was beginning to take out ‘insurance policies’ with the NSDAP as well.10 There were no direct references to the Jews, though plenty of coded ones.11 The standard anti-capitalist language was muted, a little, over the next few months. There was no let-up, however, in Hitler’s assault on international capitalism. ‘National Socialism,’ he reiterated in mid February 1932, privileged the life of the people over ‘the interests of international finance capital, which had led to the destruction of all natural bases of the German people and the German economy’.12
The other way of breaking the logjam was for Hitler to capture the presidency himself, or at least to use his candidature to drive a wedge between Hindenburg and Brüning.13 In late January 1932, he discussed the issue with Goebbels. ‘He is still undecided,’ Goebbels noted, adding that ‘I argue for his candidature’ because ‘he alone will drive Hindenburg off the field’.14 There was one immediate problem to be sorted out. The president had to be a German citizen and Hitler was stateless, with no chance of naturalization by one of the bigger Länder. His only hope was to secure appointment to public office in one of the smaller ones, which would give him local citizenship and, on the strength of it, that of the Reich as a whole. Luckily for Hitler, the Nazis had gained power in Brunswick, and the little cameo that followed was an illustration of the fragmented nature of the German polity that Hitler so deplored. Attempts to appoint him as an extraordinary professor for ‘the organic study of society and politics’ at the Technical University there miscarried, but he was made a state councillor instead.15 Hitler was now finally a German citizen, nearly twenty years since he had taken up arms for the Reich.
Nazi strategy in the presidential campaign was carefully thought out. First, Hitler declared, one should wait for the SPD to support Hindenburg, which would paint him into a left-wing corner. Only then would Hitler himself declare. That was ‘Machiavellian’, Goebbels commented, ‘but right’.16 The hope was that Hitler would beat Hindenburg into first place, and then prevail in the run-off. He skilfully tried to frame his venerable rival–who enjoyed iconic status as supreme commander during the war–as old and out of touch, and also tainted by his politicization by the Weimar Republic. ‘We regret,’ he announced in mid February 1932, ‘that Field Marshal von Hindenburg allowed himself to be prevailed upon to use up his name in this struggle.’ The choice of words was significant: the old man was not merely being used, but ‘used up’.17 Hitler had to tread carefully, however, as any sign of overt disrespect might boomerang.18 For this reason he gave strict instructions that there should no ‘personal’ attacks on Hindenburg.19
The Nazis were confident of success. A few days before the first round of voting, Hitler predicted to foreign journalists that he would secure 12 million votes. He actually secured 11.3 million, Hindenburg more than 18 million. It was a significant improvement on the 1930 Reichstag election, but nowhere near enough to capture the presidency. Hitler, as Goebbels noted, was ‘totally surprised by the result’.20 There was no question, however, of backing down now. Hitler threw himself into the second round of the campaign. He doubled down on his message of ‘change’ and his attacks on reaction. ‘National Socialism,’ he announced in late March 1932, aimed to ‘proclaim a new political ideal’ on ‘the ruins of the bourgeois and proletarian ideology’. A future ‘Nazi regime’, he added, just in case his meaning had been unclear, ‘will not represent a return to the past’. Hitler underlined the vigour and modernity of his message by attempting–unsuccessfully, because the authorities forbade it–to address the German people through radio broadcasts21 and embarking on a whirlwind tour of the Reich by aeroplane. At Hanfstaengl’s suggestion, he included a journalist on each flight, often a Briton or an American, a measure borrowed from FDR’s campaign strategy.22
/> Hitler also tried to split the conservative coalition behind Hindenburg. In late March 1932, he met with representatives of the Christlich-Soziale Volksdienst (CSVD), one of the more moderate smaller right-wing parties sustaining Brüning in the Reichstag. He hoped to dissuade them from supporting an authoritarian solution to the continuing crisis and to back him in the second round of the presidential elections. The meeting was not a success. The CSVD announced its intention to endorse Hindenburg. ‘One cannot discuss with Hitler,’ his interlocutors remarked, because ‘“the other” is always in the wrong if he represents a different opinion to Hitler’. One of them predicted that ‘if Hitler comes to power, then that can only end in a catastrophe’. ‘God protect our Fatherland,’ he continued, ‘that this man will not control our fate.’23
The continuing controversy surrounding the SA chief of staff, Ernst Röhm, did not help matters, especially given Hindenburg’s known aversion to homosexuality.24 In early March 1932, at the height of the first round of the presidential election campaign, a Social Democrat weekly paper published extracts from letters proving his homosexuality beyond all doubt. The row rumbled on for more than a month, damaging the party and Hitler personally, but despite his own personal distaste, he refused to throw Röhm to the wolves. ‘Hitler does not want to drop Röhm,’ Goebbels noted in his diary, ‘but he is strongly opposed to the queers.’25 In early April, Hitler felt obliged to make a public statement backing Röhm and condemning the ‘dirtiest and most revolting agitation’ against him.26
Throughout the two rounds of the presidential election campaign, Hitler did not vary his core message. Foreign policy remained at the centre of his concerns: it featured prominently in his public and private utterances.27 Hitler continued to blame Germany’s internal woes on her international inferiority as epitomized by the Versailles Treaty and the reparations regime. ‘The German people,’ he lamented, had ‘suffered since November 1918 from a hardly bearable spiritual, political and material deprivation’; the defeat had ‘stamped them as second-class citizens of the world’. He slammed the Young Plan, his old bugbear, for being responsible for the ‘complete destruction of the German economy’. Above all, Germany suffered from the ‘limitation of [her] living space’. The ‘political deprivation’, in short, had been ‘converted into economic deprivation’. Wherever he went to canvass support for his presidential bid, to Hamburg, Stettin or Leipzig, Hitler hammered home the same familiar theme.28
During the campaign, Hitler’s attitude to women was challenged. It was not a subject on which he had said or written much hitherto. Now, he was forced to rebut claims that he ‘wanted to deprive German woman of her rights and drive her from her job’. Hitler responded that ‘there is no battle for the man which is not also a battle for the woman’. He envisaged a largely reproductive role for women, to produce and raise as many healthy children for Germany as possible. Hitler defined the woman as ‘the smallest, but most valuable unit in the structure of the entire state’ by virtue of motherhood.29 Privately, Hitler was even prepared to set aside conventional morality so long as it led to an increase in the number of ‘racially valuable’ births. For example, when Magda Goebbels fearfully reported her discovery that her parents had not been married when she was born, Hitler laughed off this embarrassing fact, which could have been exploited by hostile press elements.30
On 3 April 1932, Hitler took to the air for the first of several ‘flights over Germany’, which ended on 9 April. The following day, Germany went to the polls again. Hitler won 13.4 million votes, or 36.8 per cent of the total. It is doubtful that many of these ballots were cast primarily in the hope of gaining living space in the east, or sorting out the ‘Jewish Problem’, yet unless they were either deaf or illiterate voters cannot have been entirely ignorant of his diagnosis either. One way or the other, whether it constituted a mandate for aggression and genocide or not, the result was very respectable, but nowhere near enough to dislodge Hindenburg from the presidency, where he remained. Hitler did not know it, but the Nazi vote had effectively peaked. He was aware, though, that he had a problem on his hands. ‘You had a head of state who was not against you’, Hitler reflected in an interview with an Italian paper, in fact ‘the king in the end summoned Mussolini, whereas I still have President Hindenburg against me,’ a man ‘who still enjoys undisputed personal respect’.31
There was no time for a prolonged inquest, however, as the NSDAP was almost immediately plunged into a fresh round of campaigning. In late April 1932, there were Landtag elections scheduled in Prussia, Bavaria, Württemberg, Anhalt and Hamburg, areas which totalled about 80 per cent of the population of the Reich. He took to the skies once again between 16 and 22 April for another week-long ‘flight over Germany’. Hitler was hampered by various constraints, especially the banning of the SA. 32 The results of these contests, which took place on 24 April, showed no change from the second round of the presidential contest earlier that month. The punishing cycle of elections continued, with polls in Oldenburg and Mecklenburg-Schwerin, when the NSDAP gained absolute majorities. This was the first major breakthrough of the party at regional level,33 after its false start in Thuringia.
At the end of May, Brüning resigned the chancellorship. Reichstag elections were scheduled for July. Hindenburg appointed the conservative Catholic aristocrat Franz von Papen chancellor. Hitler still hoped to take the electoral route to power. The day after Brüning resigned, he told a meeting in Wismar that he hoped the party would grow ‘until the last German has been won over’, a sentiment he repeated on numerous occasions throughout the rest of the year.34 Hitler was not deterred by a setback at the Landtag elections in Hesse in late June, where the NSDAP fell short of an absolute majority. His third ‘flight over Germany’ was his longest, lasting two weeks in the second half of July. During the campaign, Hitler spoke in more than fifty towns and cities. In terms of intensity, technological innovation and sheer razzmatazz, the Nazi campaigns of 1932 were like nothing Germany had ever witnessed before. Otto Dietrich, who accompanied Hitler on most trips as press secretary, later calculated that by the end of the year he had covered 50,000 kilometres by air, and 25,000 by road. ‘It was political propaganda,’ he wrote, ‘which even put American efforts [Roosevelt was at this time conducting his own victorious election campaign] in the shade.’35
Hitler’s campaign themes were the usual ones: the need to drill Germans into national unity by reconciling socialism and nationalism, and banishing ‘class madness and class prejudice’.36 Capitalism and the Jews were given the customary battering and the nationalist right was slammed not only as ‘pro-Jewish’ but also as the instrument of ‘money-grubbing capitalism’.37 As usual, he had little to say about the Soviet Union itself, but he did inveigh against the ‘murderous scum of the communist criminal fraternity’ and the ‘lying slogans of the Marxists’. Though the communists were the main target of SA street violence, they were not Hitler’s primary concern. Instead, Hitler once more stressed the need to secure Lebensraum, which he defined once again as the ‘determining and driving force’, which trumped considerations of ‘export and import and the world economy’. Lebensraum, in short, was his economic programme. To those who demanded concrete answers to the specific political and economic problems of the day, Hitler responded as always with the healing power of ideology. ‘Imagined futures,’ he explained, were ‘the most powerful realities which exist in the lives of peoples.’38
One of those swept up by Hitler’s message and rhetoric was the twenty-nine-year-old film director Leni Riefenstahl. Earlier in the year, she had attended one of Hitler’s speeches in the Berlin Sportpalast. ‘It seemed to me,’ she later recalled, ‘as if the ground opened in front of me like a hemisphere which suddenly split in the middle [and] out of which an incredible jet of water was flung,’ so mighty, she claimed, ‘that it touched the heavens and caused the earth to quake’. ‘There is no doubt,’ Riefenstahl added, ‘I was infected.’ After reading Mein Kampf carefully, she wrote to Hitler i
n mid May 1932 and secured a meeting with him towards the end of the month. Hitler, who was deeply conscious of the need for the party to master the medium of film, immediately recognized Riefenstahl’s talent. ‘If we ever get to power,’ he allegedly told her, ‘then you must make my films.’39
Hitler sought to distance himself from Papen’s ‘cabinet of the barons’ or ‘gentlemen’s club’, and portrayed himself as the defender of average Germans against a distant and, in Hindenburg’s case, aged elite. He was open, however, to collaboration with conservatives on his own terms. When approached by two emissaries from the giant chemical combine IG Farben in June 1932, Hitler gave them an enthusiastic welcome, despite earlier Nazi attacks on the firm as a nest of ‘money-grubbing Jews’ and an instrument of alleged Jewish international capitalism.40 Their plan to produce synthetic fuel fitted his conception of autarchy perfectly, and he also told them of the projected system of motorways for Germany. Hitler also signalled some flexibility on restoring the Hohenzollerns. Despite his longstanding hostility to the various princely houses, and the former imperial family, he feared a direct confrontation. ‘Hitler is for a purified monarchy,’ Goebbels noted on the very first day of June 1932, and seems genuinely if briefly to have toyed with making Prince August Wilhelm (‘Auwi’) regent, and ultimately his son Alexander emperor. ‘Hitler,’ Goebbels believed, ‘exaggerates the [pro-]Hohenzollern instincts among the people.’41