Hitler
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There was a perceptible shift in Hitler’s strategy after the November vote. He now effectively gave up hope of a purely electoral path to power. An internal NSDAP analysis of the election results suggested that the party had maximized its vote, that ‘it must not come to another election’, and that there was ‘nothing more… to be done with words, placards and leaflets. Now we must act!’77 There were many who saw this as an argument for revolutionary measures, but not Hitler, who dismissed such talk as suicidal, He concentrated instead on a narrower front, that is, persuading or browbeating Hindenburg to let him govern by emergency decree.78 ‘I was with Hitler late into the night,’ Goebbels noted, and he spoke of ‘a rejection of the parliamentary solution’ and ‘demanded a presidential solution for us as well’.79 He was no longer objecting to the use of emergency powers as such, but argued that they should be based on the ‘sustainable part of the people’, in other words the NSDAP. This demand was rejected by Hindenburg and his chief secretary Meissner on the grounds that it would lead to a dictatorship by Hitler. ‘The old man’ had not budged since the summer. Hitler was stymied again.
Despite his pressing domestic preoccupations in the second half of 1932, Hitler never ceased to think about the crucial international context to events in Germany. He sought to break up the circling coalition by developing an alternative global vision for Germany and Anglo-America. In an interview with the New York American conducted by Karl von Wiegand he called on ‘the big powers of the Western World to combine under a “world economic dictatorship” to stave off the growing power of Russia, China, India and the east’. Hitler wanted the western powers–of which he named America, England, Germany, France, and Italy–to agree to deny their competitors the ‘machinery’ and ‘technical experts’ they needed to develop their economies. ‘Once these countries with their low wages and low standard of living become industrialized,’ he warned, ‘then the Western industrial nations will be economically destroyed.’ Hitler ruled out visiting America himself for now–‘takes too long’80–at least until there was a regular passenger airline connection.
On 2 December, Hindenburg appointed Schleicher chancellor.81 He planned to rely on the army, if necessary, to keep order internally, to stimulate employment through work-creation schemes, and to secure the prestige victory of German equality in armaments on the international stage. He also hoped to broaden the slender parliamentary base of his administration by winning over the Nazis through the wavering Gregor Strasser. Hitler was alarmed on several counts. Firstly, the threat of a conservative coup which would shut him out of power indefinitely was now greater than ever. Secondly, he feared that an active foreign policy would provoke a pre-emptive strike by France and Poland. Two days after Schleicher came to power, Hitler wrote to the Reichswehr commander in exposed East Prussia, Walther von Reichenau, that he thought that Germany was already ‘in the middle of a new encirclement policy, if not at its completion’, in which France and Poland had the Reich in a vice grip. In this context, ‘the theoretical acceleration of the German rearmament’ was the ‘worst’ possible thing one could do. The most dangerous period after winning the right to rearm would be the immediately ‘following period, because theoretical equality had to be followed by practical, technical and organizational rearmament’. ‘If there were ever grounds for a preventive war,’ he continued, ‘then in this case’, ‘an attack by France on Germany’ was to be expected. Besides, a military-backed putsch, perhaps involving some element of a Hohenzollern restoration, might itself precipitate an intervention by outside powers.82
The most immediate threat posed by Schleicher, however, was to the unity of the NSDAP. Strasser was on the verge of open revolt unless Hitler settled for the general’s terms. A day after Schleicher’s appointment, the two met in Berlin. There is no evidence that Schleicher planned to divide the party, which would have been pointless, as the breakaway faction could only provide him with limited parliamentary cover. Instead he wanted to use Strasser as a lever to shift the NSDAP as a whole.83 Sharp words were exchanged at a meeting in the Berlin Kaiserhof on 6 December.84 Hitler was now under the greatest pressure he had been under since the party struggles of the mid to late 1920s. Money was short. There was a large turnover of membership in the party and SA, but a growing net outflow. Hitler also seemed to be losing his charismatic touch. Attendances at speeches were down and on one occasion during the Thuringian election campaign in early December 1932, when he spoke more briefly than usual, people began to leave early,85 something previously unheard of. That campaign went badly for the NSDAP. To add to his woes, a disaffected functionary from the Franconian Party, Hans Sauer, published a devastating critique of Gauleiter Julius Streicher in December 1932.86 Then on 8 December, there was a bombshell: Strasser resigned, together with Gottfried Feder. Morale plummeted. ‘Trouble and money worries,’ Goebbels noted the following day, ‘it is always the same.’87 The NSDAP seemed as far from power as they had been at the start of the year.
Once again, Hitler held his ground. He immediately assembled his senior officials and Reichstag deputies in Berlin to ensure their loyalty. Strasser was condemned as a traitor who had stabbed the party in the back. His bureaucratic empire was broken up: Robert Ley received the leadership of the party organization, Goebbels was assigned ‘the education of the people’, and agrarian matters were hived off as well. In this way, Hitler implicated other party stakeholders in the purging of the Strasser faction.88 ‘Strasser is isolated,’ Goebbels noted with satisfaction, adding that he was ‘a dead man’.89 Hitler remained adamant that he would only accept the chancellorship.90 For the rest, Hitler tried to avoid being sucked into confrontation. In Franconia, he neither opposed nor supported Streicher, who managed to cling to power there. It was typical Hitler: decisive, radical action in some quarters, tergiversation in others. Once again, the crisis had been contained. Like his brother, Gregor Strasser had ultimately succeeded only in blowing himself up, and not Hitler along with the entire party. Within the NSDAP, the last barrier to Hitler’s absolute power had now fallen.
The party crisis prompted Hitler to reflect on the structure of the movement and issue new guidelines. Hitler was well aware of the dangers of over-governing.91 Some sort of bureaucracy was needed. The danger, he warned, was that the Germans would indulge in their propensity to over-administrate. ‘The German is too inclined to succumb to the error,’ he noted, ‘to see in [the party] organization a field for pedantic and mechanical work.’ Instead, he demanded that ‘one should not organize mechanically what one can, but only that which one must organize’. The main point was that one should avoid ‘building a top-down schematic organization’, but rather ‘build up gradually’ a ‘leadership apparatus’ from ‘below’. This would enable the party to weed out unqualified ‘careerists’ and promote the tested and talented. Here Hitler articulated a governing style which was to characterize the Reich as a whole after the assumption of power.
Hitler did not use the opportunity to establish total control, only his absolute authority. To be sure, the opening sentence of his first of two memoranda on the reform of the movement stated unambiguously that the ‘basis of the political organization is loyalty’. From this he deduced the need for ‘obedience’. Yet Hitler also knew that the movement depended on the goodwill and creativity, rather than just the blind conformity, of its members. ‘Constant supervision,’ he argued, ‘gradually destroys the authority of every agency’ by insulting the ‘honour’ of officers and sapping their ‘initiative’. For this reason, Hitler called for leaders to be given ‘greater room for manoeuvre’. The Gauleiter, in particular, were expected ‘to make independent judgements’ in ‘hundreds and thousands of questions’.92 At the end of the document there was a brief concession to participatory structures, when Hitler referred to a future ‘little senate of the party’ whose task it would be ‘to discuss important party issues’ in committees or ‘plenary’ session. Nothing more was heard of this idea, however.
Despite the
failure of his overtures to Strasser, Schleicher continued to pursue an understanding with Hitler. Hindenburg, however, still refused point-blank to countenance Hitler as chancellor, who in turn would not accept a lesser office. Hitler moved to end the dispute in Franconia. Holding his nose, he backed Streicher over the SA, whose leader backed down but revolted again at the end of the month. Moreover, although Strasser had been ousted, and founded no breakaway organization, he still retained a strong and sullen following in the larger cities. Money was so short that Göring sent an emissary to the chargé d’affaires in the American Embassy to explore whether the party might raise a loan in the United States.93 Frustration mounted further.
As the month drew to a close, Hitler steadied Goebbels. ‘We must remain stubborn,’ the latter wrote in his diary after their meeting, and ‘study Roman, Prussian and British history to see how something like this is done’.94 Hitler had gone into 1932 with great hopes, but he now spent a miserable Christmas and New Year. Wherever he looked there was ill-feeling, disappointment and reproach. Unlike many, Hitler had no family to fall back on. He missed Geli in ways that Eva Braun could not compensate for. ‘The Christmas celebration,’ Hitler wrote to Winifred Wagner, ‘has been only a feast of mourning for me for two years’, and ‘I cannot bring myself to be as I was before.’ ‘Unfortunately,’ he continued, ‘there are always new mountains to be overcome.’95
Hitler and the NSDAP appeared to have hit a wall. Hitler’s New Year Proclamation struck a defiant but also forlorn note. ‘The suggestion of the clever ones’, he remarked sarcastically, that we might ‘gradually prevail’ from ‘inside’ the system and ‘through the back door’ was rejected.96 To most observers this sounded like whistling in the wind. On 1 January 1933, the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung spoke for many when it announced confidently that ‘The mighty Nazi assault on the democratic state has been repulsed.’97
Suddenly, Hitler’s luck turned, partly because he made his good fortune by standing fast, and partly because his opponents woefully miscalculated. He threw himself into the election campaign in the tiny state of Lippe in order to regain lost momentum. Hitler was still running on empty: Otto Dietrich had to advance his own money to book a hall for electioneering purposes.98 Lippe was classic Nazi territory: rural and Protestant, and as the British ambassador observed, Nazi efforts there had ‘the magnetic attraction of a jazz band’.99 The excellent result–a huge increase on the previous election, which had taken place in 1929 before the great gains of the following years–in no way reflected any broader surge in support for the NSDAP, but gave the impression of renewed dynamism. In mid January 1933, Hitler assembled his senior leaders and officials in Weimar, crushing all residual support for Strasser.
Meanwhile, the reactionary front around Hindenburg had begun to crack. On 4 January, Papen began a fresh round of negotiations with Hitler at the house of the Cologne banker von Schröder.100 He hoped to use the Nazis to unbolt Schleicher from the chancellorship. Six days later, they met at the residence of Joachim von Ribbentrop, a wine salesman and Nazi sympathizer who had offered himself as an intermediary.101 A few days after the Lippe result, Hindenburg was engulfed by the ‘Osthilfe’ scandal, in which several of his aristocratic associates were exposed as having embezzled funds intended to help struggling agrarians in East Elbia. The DNVP leader, Alfred Hugenberg, met with Hitler on 17 January; his confidant Reinhold Quaatz remarked that ‘he seemed to have come to terms with Hitler without the understanding being perfect’.102 Likewise, there was movement on Hindenburg’s side. He still rejected ‘Hitler as the chancellor of a presidential cabinet, because he demanded [control of] the Reichswehr, wanted [to introduce a] dictatorship and was a fantasist’, but on 21 January, Meissner thought that the president ‘would perhaps be won over to a chancellorship of Hitler if he secured a majority to pass an enabling law’.
In a fulminating speech at the Berlin Sportpalast on 22 January 1933, Hitler’s new confidence was palpable. Victory, he predicted, would go not to the infallible, but to those ‘who make the fewest mistakes’.103 Two days later, he met yet again with Papen, Frick and Göring at Ribbentrop’s house and it was agreed that Hitler would be recommended to Hindenburg at the head of a right-wing cabinet. Three days after that, Hitler conferred with Hugenberg, who eventually came aboard. So did Franz Seldte, the head of the Stahlhelm. He, Papen and the rest of the plotters believed that they could control Hitler, continuing to govern in the old fashion while hiding behind the electoral mandate of the NSDAP. At a meeting with Hitler Hugenberg resisted giving Nazis control of the Interior Ministry, but Papen overruled him.104 Göring assured Meissner that Hitler would respect not only the constitutional rights of the president, but also his supreme command of the armed forces.105 Schleicher tried to head off the danger by dissolving the Reichstag and calling fresh elections, or at least threatening to do so, but there was no appetite for that in Hindenburg’s circle. His position hopeless, Schleicher resigned on 28 January 1933. That same day, Hindenburg, Meissner and Papen reluctantly agreed to a Nazi-led government, with the strongest possible balancing conservative participation within and outside the cabinet.
The democratic parties were still more worried about an authoritarian dictatorship under Papen or Schleicher than they were about Hitler’s imminent appointment as chancellor. The head of the Bavarian People’s Party, Fritz Schäffer, seems to have offered Hitler his backing, and that of his fellow Catholic Centre Party, for a cabinet led by him. If so, he apparently declined on the grounds that he did not want to be dependent on them.106 On Sunday, 29 January Hitler and Göring met Papen in the Wilhelmstrasse. The outlines of a deal were now clear. Hitler would become chancellor, Papen vice-chancellor and commissar for Prussia, while Göring would get the Prussian Ministry of the Interior. Hitler also demanded a new election so that he could secure a majority for an enabling act. Separately, Hitler reassured Schleicher via an intermediary that he had no objection to having him as defence minister. A day later, Hitler and Papen met at the latter’s apartment in Berlin. He persuaded Duesterberg to let Seldte join the cabinet, thus securing Stahlhelm support. He gave his word of honour that there would be no changes to the cabinet even after fresh elections; there was also an expectation that he would try to bring the Centre Party into the government, or at least secure their acquiescence. Hitler feared to the last that Papen would back out, or that the president would maintain his veto.
On 30 January 1933, Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor.107 Göring’s securing of the post of Prussian interior minister crucially gave him control over the all-important Prussian police. Werner von Blomberg, the adviser to the Geneva disarmament conference, became Reichswehr minister; Schleicher was sidelined. Over Hugenberg’s objections, Hitler achieved his demand for another and final election to gain Reichstag backing for an enabling law. His enemies had blinked first, having convinced themselves that, as Hugenberg put it, ‘we are containing Hitler’.108 Papen, the ultimate author of this strategy, was particularly bullish. ‘You are mistaken,’ he told one critic, ‘we have hired him for our act.’109 ‘What is your problem,’ he asked another critic. ‘I have the confidence of Hindenburg’ so that within two months ‘we will have pressed Hitler so hard into the corner that he squeaks’.110 Thanks to their weakness and miscalculation, the conservatives let Hitler in through the back door when his waning electoral appeal was bolting the front entrance ever more firmly against him. There were no more mistakes to make. Some regretted their actions almost immediately. ‘I’ve just committed the greatest stupidity of my life,’ Hugenberg supposedly remarked the day after Hitler’s appointment, ‘I have allied myself with the greatest demagogue in world history.’111
It was an astonishing and fateful achievement. Against all the odds, Hitler had hung on until all others, including some in his own party, had given up or given way. He called Schleicher’s bluff over Strasser, the threatened dissolution of the Reichstag and new elections. Hitler rejected all compromise, but he did not, in the
end, overdo it. Hitler was not infallible, but he indeed made the fewest mistakes. He settled for just enough, securing not so much power itself as the power to achieve power.
PART FOUR
Mobilization
The first four years of the Third Reich were characterized by Hitler’s frenetic mobilization of German society. This involved the progressive removal of restraints on his authority and the ‘coordination’ of all sectors of German society and politics. It led to a ‘battle of production’, that is, the economic and agricultural mobilization of the country in support of rearmament and autarchy. It also involved a ‘battle of consumption’, in which the regime sought to match the cultural and economic appeal of western modernity. In parallel with all this, Hitler embarked on a long-term project of racial regeneration, designed–as he saw it–to eliminate the negative and accentuate the positive in the German Volk. Its ultimate aim was to ‘lift’ the Germans onto a higher racial plane where they could co-exist–and if necessary compete–with Anglo-America. Throughout this period, there was a fundamental tension in Hitler’s timeline. On the one hand, he believed that the racial regeneration of Germany would take decades if not centuries, and could only be completed long after his own death. On the other hand, Hitler expected that the Reich would need to be ready for conflict within eight to ten years. By the end of this period, this tension between the racial and the diplomatic clocks was becoming ever more apparent.