Hitler
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Given the fraught relationship between Papen’s centralizing cabinet, which could draw only on Hindenburg’s authority, and the democratically elected regional governments, it is no surprise that the thorny old issue of German federalism came to the fore again. Hitler portrayed the NSDAP as the ‘guardian of the unity of the Reich’ against ‘certain cliques belonging to the Bavarian People’s Party’, and, tilting at a very old windmill, ‘Rhenish separatists’.42 The BVP, in fact, remained in Hitler’s sights at least as much as the communists.43 His anti-Semitism, by contrast, was somewhat muzzled throughout the campaign, both at home and abroad. In July 1932, he published an interview with the American magazine Liberty, which was in most respects a carbon copy of one given to the same journalist, George Sylvester Viereck, in 1923, including frank references to the need for Lebensraum in the east, but without the diatribes against ‘the Jews’.44
When the ballots were counted at the end of July 1932, the NSDAP had secured 13.7 million votes, about 300,000 more than in the presidential election but the same percentage (37 per cent) as then. To those who looked closely at the party’s performance since April, the message was clear: Hitler had peaked. He would now have to try again to use his substantial electoral mandate to persuade Papen, and ultimately Hindenburg, to appoint him chancellor and rule by presidential decree. Given that they badly needed parliamentary backing for their emergency decrees, a deal might be possible. On 5 August, Hitler met with General Kurt von Schleicher, now minister of defence. Eight days later the two of them were joined by Papen and Hindenburg. They were unwilling to offer Hitler more than the vice-chancellorship, in return for the which the NSDAP would have become part of the governing coalition, a poisoned chalice for him. He refused ‘to join a government which we do not lead’.45 No agreement was reached. Hindenburg was adamant: he could not, ‘before God, before his conscience and the Fatherland’ hand over the entire power of government to a party like the NSDAP, which was ‘so biased in its attitude to those who thought differently’.46 He later made these sentiments public, much to the fury and embarrassment of the NSDAP. Hitler was still on the outside looking in, and later that day he withdrew to the Obersalzberg to reflect on his options.
Within the NSDAP itself, Hitler’s first priority was the management of expectations. The most critical moment for any movement, to adapt Tocqueville, is when it is on the verge of success or appears to be. That is the time when discipline frays, and pent-up emotions rise to the surface. Just before the July vote, perhaps sensing that the electoral tide would not yet carry him as far forward as he wished, Hitler stressed the need for patience. What did ‘three or four or ten years’ matter in the ‘grand sweep of German history’, Hitler asked. ‘If a great project was being accomplished,’ he continued, ‘then it is better it arrives at its goal in five or ten years’ time’ rather than ‘prematurely compromising a good cause’. To settle for the mere trappings of power, Hitler argued, would be a betrayal of the party mission. He was fighting, he averred, ‘not for ministerial posts or [parliamentary] seats’, but ‘for the political power in Germany’. ‘I do not know whether we will reach our goal today,’ he had said then, but if not, ‘then in ten or twenty years’, because ‘the youth belongs to us and therefore also the future’.47 This kind of theorizing in distant time frames was typical for Hitler.
By early August 1932, however, words were no longer enough for many party faithful, especially the SA. They wanted rewards for their years of sacrifice, and were frustrated both by the failure to win an overall majority in July and by the collapse of the subsequent negotiations with Papen.48 Some now demanded immediate revolutionary action to seize power. Hitler was well aware of their grievances because he asked Röhm to distribute a questionnaire among the SA rank and file.49 Others, such as Gregor Strasser, called for compromises to enter into a coalition government. Both tendencies were a major threat to Hitler’s strategy and authority. He was seriously embarrassed by a brutal murder in Potempa in August 1932, when the SA stamped an unemployed communist to death in front of his family.50 The SA were also increasingly brawling with the Stahlhelm and other right-wing groups, complicating Hitler’s relations with the mainstream right. The July election result had shown that the SA were a liability among voters. Hitler told the SA to disperse for a fortnight on 13 August, the same day as his failed meeting with Papen and Hindenburg.
At around this time, Hitler suffered another personal blow. Since the suicide of Geli Raubal, he had brooded over his loss. When Ferdinand Liebermann made a bust of her, he was so moved that his eyes filled with tears.51 Later in the year, Hitler made a brief visit to Geli’s grave in Vienna.This did not stop Hitler from ‘pining’ for a new woman.52 Two of those he showed most interest in, Helene Hanfstaengl and Magda Goebbels, were married. It may be that he cultivated the connection precisely because they were spoken for. Hitler enthused openly to Goebbels about his wife, ‘whom he admires very much and considers to be a most beautiful, kind and intelligent woman’.53 He may also have had a dalliance with the daughter of the Gauleiter of Kurhessen, Karl Weinrich.54 The only permanent relationship he established, however, was with Eva Braun. Hitler was deeply shocked when she tried to commit suicide in the autumn of 1932.55 He rushed to the hospital with flowers. She recovered quickly and, unlike with Geli Raubal, there was no public scandal. In public, Hitler continued to describe himself as a ‘bachelor’.56
It was clear that Hitler’s main enemy lay on the right. In order to destabilize Papen, and head off the prospect of a conservative coup, Hitler now turned up the rhetoric against the conservative ‘cabinet of the barons’. He also lambasted the ‘bourgeois’–a term of abuse in his lexicon–parties, organizations and newspapers. Three days after his catastrophic meeting with Hindenburg, Hitler attacked the ‘bourgeois reactionaries’ who were pursuing narrowly ‘class and corporate’ interests.57 Hitler reiterated the revolutionary and anti-capitalist credentials of Nazism and denied being a mere ‘drummer’ for the conservative establishment. When Papen announced new emergency decrees in Münster at the end of August, which were welcomed by business for offering tax relief but little direct work creation, he was battered by the Nazi press. Hitler needed to demonstrate the illegitimacy and unsustainability of the Papen government by showing its complete lack of popular and parliamentary support. ‘One can perhaps govern without the Reichstag,’ he remarked pointedly in late August 1932, ‘but one cannot govern without the people’; no government, in fact, could survive, he said, without a ‘living connection to the people’.58 Hitler had also come to the view that he would have to unbolt Hindenburg himself from the presidency. To do this, Hitler approached some of the other Weimar parties, who were equally concerned about Papen’s intentions. Right at the end of August, just after Hindenburg had finally refused Nazi demands, he met with Göring, Röhm and Goebbels in secret conclave.59
Contact was established with the Catholic Centre Party, who were hostile to the Nazis ideologically but conceded Hitler’s electoral mandate and feared Papen’s ‘dictatorship of the master class’.60 A black-brown coalition in the Reichstag, however improbable for other reasons, was mathematically possible. Negotiations were begun on 30 August 1932. Hitler’s aim was to undermine Papen further and to prevent the Centre Party from backing or tolerating a coup designed to keep the Nazis out of power. The Centre Party agreed in principle to support Hitler as chancellor, subject to Hindenburg’s approval. On economic policy, they both rejected Papen’s decrees. Hitler was determined to force new elections, and at a meeting of Nazi leaders on 8 September he prevailed over Gregor Strasser, who wanted to join or at least tolerate a Schleicher cabinet.61 ‘Hitler is now going for broke,’ Goebbels noted. ‘Hindenburg must be deposed by the Reichstag. An audacious plan.’62 Hitler now seized the opportunity to bring Papen down. When the communists proposed a vote of no confidence in the government two days later, he instructed his deputies to support it. The Centre Party and the Social Democrats joined in. The government s
uffered a disastrous defeat by 512 votes to 42. Fatally damaged, Papen had no choice but to set a date for fresh elections in early November. Hitler would get another chance at an overall majority.
Meanwhile, Hitler sought to keep the party, and especially the SA, on a leash. Morale was low. ‘SA in depression,’ Goebbels noted.63 He and others yearned for an open struggle against ‘the system’. For now, however, Hitler was telling them to wait it out. In the place of revolutionary action, he preached attentism. Throughout the autumn and the rest of the year, he invoked the rhetoric not only of endurance but of inevitability. ‘I will not sell out the party for some sort of title,’ he averred, ‘I will fight on! One year, two years, [or even] three years.’ His great ‘rival’, Hitler pointed out, was eighty-five, whereas he was forty-three, and healthy. Convinced that ‘destiny’ was on his side, Hitler was confident that ‘it will eventually be our turn’, adding, ‘I will not give in.’ Hitler was now engaged in a war of attrition, in which he banked on an electoral breakthrough, a change of heart by Hindenburg and his entourage, or simply outlasting his opponents. This was a very different Hitler from the panicked adventurer of 1923. In late 1932, he showed himself to have nerves of steel. ‘Today we need only one thing,’ he told the NSDAP Gautag, ‘and that is nerves. We must keep our nerve and not yield.’64
In the meantime, Hitler began to prepare the movement for power. Goebbels was promised control of propaganda and education. ‘We discussed problems of the seizure of power,’ Goebbels reported of one long nocturnal session. ‘We talked through the whole question of the education of the people,’ he wrote. ‘I will get schools, universities, film, radio, theatre, [and] propaganda.’ This was an enormous brief. ‘The national education of the German people,’ Goebbels wrote, ‘will be placed in my hands.’65 In early September 1932, Hitler established the ‘Military Political Office’ (Wehrpolitisches Amt) of the NSDAP. Noting that Germany would need to regain its ‘external’ military security and re-establish its ‘internal’ capacity for defence, Hitler claimed that the German people expected ‘a corresponding participation in the building up of territorial defence’ by the party. To this end, Franz Ritter von Epp, a Bavarian war veteran and Nazi Party Reichstag member, was charged with laying down ‘the principles… which should be decisive for the integration of the armed forces into the state’.66 When the time came, Hitler and the movement would be able to hit the ground running.
In the autumn of 1932, Hitler threw himself into the new Reichstag election campaign.67 He fought on multiple fronts, against his enemies: the ‘Berlin Jewry, gentlemen’s club, [and] bourgeois parties’.68 The source of Germany’s economic woes, he continued to argue, was political, the external subjection of the Reich due to its internal weakness. ‘Germany is sick,’ Hitler claimed, ‘Germany’s economy is collapsing’, but ‘only because her political power is collapsing.’ Defeat, he argued, had led to reparations and debt-slavery which caused the misery confronting Germany on a daily basis. Indeed, Hitler took credit for having predicted all this even during the economically prosperous years of the Weimar Republic. ‘This is the economic disintegration of the German nation which I predicted,’ he said, ‘but only because I did not allow myself to be distracted by so-called booms from the fact that when politics collapses, the economy must collapse with it.’69
Since politics was the problem, politics was also the solution. ‘First you must banish German divisions,’ he claimed, ‘and then you can banish German deprivation.’ For this reason Hitler called a few days before the vote for a ‘People’s Community’ which would ‘slowly’ reconcile Germans ‘across all professions, classes [and] all confessional divides’. Central to the whole project, finally, was tackling the Jewish question. Compared to the first nine months of the year, there was a perceptible increase in Hitler’s anti-Semitic rhetoric, reflecting the widening gulf with the old elites. Some of this was directed against ‘Jewish-international Bolshevism’, but most of it was targeted at the capitalist clique supposedly supporting Papen. Thus Hitler repeatedly denounced the government’s economic programme as written ‘in its essential parts by the Jew Jakob Goldschmidt [the former director of the Darmstadt Bank]’. ‘Either the German people escapes the clutches of the Jews,’ he warned, ‘or it will decay.’70
In a remarkable ‘open letter’ to Chancellor Papen, Hitler rejected short-term domestic ‘reforms’. The ‘supreme duty of a true statesman,’ he argued, was ‘the improvement of the blood of the people’s body politic’. The problem, Hitler said, was that Germany’s ‘blood values’ had been ‘spoiled within short periods of time’, but could only be ‘improved over longer periods’. This was why the lack of living space was so fatal. Hitler now reprised the link between space and race, between Lebensraum and standard of living which had informed his thinking since the mid 1920s. He spoke again of the desperate need to address the tension between the living space currently ‘allotted’ to the German people and what it needed on the strength of its ‘numbers’, ‘blood-based capabilities’ and the ‘resulting cultural requirements and [expectation] of a general living standard’.71 The two possible internal solutions, namely exports (‘the sending-out of German work capacity as goods’) or emigration (‘the deportation of the German workforce as emigrants’) either did not work, in the case of exports, or was unacceptable, in the latter case. Once again, Hitler was offering the German people a way out of their domestic travails through external territorial expansion, in effect through a war of aggression.
Throughout the campaign, Hitler confronted the establishment, rejecting the notion that he was a mere ‘drummer’ for the old elites. He cast himself as the defender of the Weimar constitution against the reactionary and putschist tendencies of Papen and his cronies. ‘According to the imperial constitution,’ he insisted, ‘I am legally entitled to be entrusted with the government.’ He noted pointedly that while the NSDAP had been persecuted for more than a decade on account of its alleged illegality, it was now Papen who had abandoned the constitution. In an allusion to the Bourbons, he lampooned Papen and his men as ‘restoration politicians, who have learned and forgotten nothing’; he spoke of the ‘Hugenberg-Papen Reaction’. Playing to the populist gallery, Hitler professed himself ‘against the Junker domination and chimney barons’ and ‘for the Lower Saxon farmer and worker’. Hitler also attacked the ‘bourgeois parties’, which he lumped in together with ‘Berlin Jewry’. He made fun not only of ‘bourgeois politicians’ and ‘bourgeois flags’, but the whole ‘bourgeois mentality’. In case anybody had not got the message, Hitler concluded that the German people ‘must logically be led out of bourgeois concepts as much as out of the Marxist world of ideas’.72 As if to underline his determination to break the bourgeois mould, the NSDAP and KPD engaged in a symbolically important joint transport strike on 2 November 1932, just days before the vote.
Finally, Hitler rounded on his internal critics. In mid October 1932, he announced that he refused to be a ‘beautification minister’ for another presidential cabinet, which would be intended ‘not to allow him work but to shut him up’. Three days later, Hitler announced that he had no intention of taking on the post of interior minister, as that would have given political cover to the government’s plan to suppress ‘the masses’. He said that he had ‘not got on the train’ on 13 August at the failed meeting with Hindenburg ‘because I had no intention of getting out again a few months later’. ‘I will not on principle get into any train,’ he continued, ‘which is heading in a completely different direction from my own, or which I know will be derailed.’ ‘When we take power,’ Hitler vowed, ‘then we will keep it.’ ‘Whoever marches into the capital,’ he laid down, ‘must stay there.’73 Hitler could not have been clearer: once in power, he had no intention of ever giving it up.
So Hitler tore around the country once again, cajoling, motivating and upbraiding in a punishing schedule of speeches. Between 11 October and 5 November he undertook his fourth ‘flight over Germany’. There was,
however, no triumphant progression towards an inevitable takeover of power. ‘On [our] journeys through the Reich,’ his press secretary Otto Dietrich recalled not long after, ‘we sensed despite all sympathy and affection the inner reservations of dismissive or agitated national comrades’, and ‘we saw next to greeting hands, clenched fists and faces contorted with hatred’.74 By mid October 1932, in fact, there were unmistakable signs of popular fatigue and disillusionment with the Nazis. When Hitler spoke at the great Congress Hall at Nuremberg, he failed to fill it: the 10,000 listeners who turned up were substantially fewer than on previous visits earlier in the year.75
When the results came in on 6/7 November 1932, they were a huge disappointment but not a complete surprise. The NSDAP had lost some 2 million votes and 34 seats; the communists had made substantial gains. On 8 November, the same day that FDR swept to victory in the US presidential election, Hitler called a meeting of Nazi leaders in Munich to discuss next steps. Strasser repeated his demand that the NSDAP join a presidential cabinet. Hitler remained firm. He was convinced that the other side would crack first. Relations between him and Strasser, already very strained, deteriorated further. A day later, Hitler rejected Papen’s renewed offer of the vice-chancellorship. The negotiations dragged on. Towards the end of the month Hindenburg met Hitler again, and indicated that he would accept him as chancellor if he secured a parliamentary majority, which was no concession at all, as he was unlikely to secure one, and did not need Hindenburg if he did. At every turn Strasser urged compromise, and on a number of occasions it seemed as if Hitler might do so. Right at the end of the month, however, he announced to a meeting of the Nazi leadership in Weimar, over Strasser’s strenuous objections, that he would hold out for the chancellorship itself.76