Hitler

by Peter Longerich

  From Brüning’s point of view the deepening economic crisis did in fact improve the prospects of getting rid of reparations once and for all and beyond that of bringing down the whole system of the Versailles Treaty. Any vigorous policies aimed at tackling the crisis would have defeated this purpose, which in Brüning’s estimation was now within reach. Instead, it was important, as he thought, to stick to a strict policy of deflation, at least for a few months longer, not least to make the German economy ‘leaner and fitter’ by reducing state expenditure, cutting wages, and lowering prices. This strategy had no appeal to the impoverished masses. In place of a government that was looking ever more helpless, they turned in increasing numbers to radical parties such as the KPD and in particular to the NSDAP. The political system looked as if it would soon be totally blocked, something the chancellor sought to avoid by incorporating the NSDAP in his political strategy. This seemed particularly necessary in the light of two major events: in spring 1932 President Hindenburg’s first period of office was coming to an end and at the same time there were forthcoming elections in Prussia and most of the other states, in which NSDAP landslides were indicated. In this case the question would arise in Prussia in particular of whether and to what extent the NSDAP should participate in government or would make it possible for other parties to form a government by agreeing to tolerate them.

  Thus, at the beginning of 1932 Hitler found himself in an extremely advantageous position. During the course of the year he was to exploit these favourable circumstances to establish himself once and for all as the most important figure on the national political stage. Spoken of more and more often as the ‘coming man’, he now began in earnest to prepare to take over the responsibility of government and to counteract his image as an unrestrained demagogue. In addition to giving a series of interviews to leading foreign newspapers, in which he tried to calm fears about the rise of a radical right movement in Germany,32 during the winter of 1931/32 Hitler made particular efforts to improve his links with industry. His purpose was to dispel fears about the NSDAP’s ‘socialist’ plans and to bring in donations.

  On 26 January Hitler made a speech lasting over two hours to a full house of some 650 guests at the Düsseldorf Industry Club. As always when speaking to a business audience, he presented himself as a moderate. He avoided any mention of the ‘Jewish question’ and did not demand the conquest of ‘living space’ in the east. Instead of focusing on the political issues of the day, he gave a kind of lecture, peppered with economic concepts, on the relations between the nation, politics, and the economy, although without giving any systematic presentation of his economic policy. In his view this was unnecessary, given that he consistently stressed the primacy of a ‘nationalist’ policy. To this end, he first developed his usual line of argument regarding ‘the value of the nation’, ‘the value of the individual’, and ‘the principle of struggle and achievement’ – values, he claimed, that were irreconcilably in conflict with equality and the principle of the majority, the bases of democracy, but which were recognized in the business world. Thus Hitler was attesting to his belief in private property, one expressly derived from the principles of his ‘world view’. His audiences were also pleased to hear him declare his intention of ‘eradicating Marxism root and branch in Germany’. The decisive precondition for national resurgence was, he said, that Germany again became ‘a player in the political power game’, regardless of whether that happened by a strengthening of the export market, a renewal of the home market, or a solution to the ‘issue of space’. Whereas in other circumstances he rejected the first two options in favour of solving the ‘issue of space’ by force, here all three were put forward with apparently equal emphasis.33

  Hitler made his Düsseldorf speech at a time when industry was taking decidedly more interest in him as a person and in the NSDAP. Thus, for example, one day after the speech, on 27 January, Hitler was a guest at Fritz Thyssen’s Villa Landsberg along with Göring and Röhm, where he met Ernst Poensgen and Albert Vögler, the leading board members of United Steel.34 At the end of February the steel magnate Friedrich Flick visited the Party leader in the Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin, although the discussion appears not to have led to any concrete conclusion. This was not so in the case of Paul Reusch, the influential chairman of the board of the mining concern Gutehoffnungshütte. On 19 March 1932 Hitler came to a reciprocal agreement with him regarding the 24 April elections to the Bavarian parliament: Hitler agreed that his Party would cease to hurl scurrilous abuse at the BVP, while Reusch, who had considerable business interests in southern Germany and was banking on a coalition of BVP and NSDAP in Bavaria, promised that the newspapers he controlled, the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten and the Fränkischer Kurier, would desist from making personal attacks on Hitler and other Nazi bosses.35

  Also at this time the former president of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht, secured Hitler’s agreement for the establishment of a ‘bureau’ to ensure ongoing contacts between business and National Socialism. This project had the support of industrialists such as Reusch, Vögler, Thyssen, Fritz Springorum, and Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach.36 Through his plan for a ‘bureau’, Schacht came into contact with a working group made up of owners of small to medium-sized businesses that the chemicals manufacturer, Wilhelm Keppler (since 1932 Hitler’s personal adviser on economic matters), had established with other entrepreneurs he knew personally.37 Hitler seems to have made a more positive impression in this milieu of small and medium-sized businesses than among big industrialists. The Nazis’ participation in the Thüringian government in 1930/31 had come about to a great extent through the involvement of locally-based small and medium-sized firms. As with Keppler, a number of small and medium-sized businessmen were trying to position themselves for when the NSDAP, as expected, came to power. Among them were Albert Pietzsch, the owner of a chemicals factory in Munich and from 1936 onwards head of the Reich Chamber of Commerce, Paul Pleiger, the owner of a small machine factory in Witten, Hans Kehrl, a textiles manufacturer (both he and Pleiger were to assume leading roles in the war economy in the Third Reich), and Fritz Kiehn, a maker of cigarette papers from Trossingen in Württemberg, who after 1933 became President of the Württemberg Chamber of Commerce and built up a small business empire.38

  In spite of Schacht’s efforts, by the end of 1932 heavy industry had in fact given only a relatively modest amount of direct financial support to the NSDAP. There is evidence of payments by individual businessmen and associations, but they represented only a fraction of the total donations to political parties made by industry during this period. They were in the main a form of insurance for the future rather than a sign that industry wanted to see the Nazis come to power, for company boards preferred the parties traditionally well-disposed to industry, the DVP and DNVP. All the same, Hitler used the closer contacts that were gradually developing to position himself consistently in opposition to the ‘anti-capitalist’ wing of the NSDAP, cutting the latter down to size in order to gain favour with influential figures in the business world as a partner in any future right-wing coalition. This is the real significance of these contacts. But to begin with Hitler tested a further strategy for turning the growing support for the NSDAP into concrete power.

  Going it alone

  At the beginning of December 1931 Brüning had responded to the discovery of the Boxheim documents by taking a more critical line with regard to the NSDAP. On the occasion of the signing of the Fourth Emergency Decree he delivered an address on the radio casting serious doubt on Hitler’s declarations that the NSDAP was pursuing the path of ‘legality’. The fact that the new decree also contained a general ban on uniforms and insignia (although this did not come into force immediately) was intended as a warning to the NSDAP.39 Brüning wished to try to secure NSDAP support for an extension of the Reich President’s term of office, for which, as it would require a change to the constitution, a two-thirds majority was needed. A reminder of the Chancellor’s powers could, from h
is point of view, be very useful.

  During an audience with the Reich President on 11 December Göring agreed that the Party would ‘welcome re-election or an extension for the Reich President’.40 On 5 January Hindenburg gave Brüning the task of beginning talks that would lead to his term of office being extended.41 After this there were four days of talks with Hitler; on 7 and 9 January Brüning and Hitler talked directly and the rest of the time through intermediaries (Groener, Schleicher, and the President’s state secretary, Otto Meissner).42 As an opening gambit on 7 January Brüning (according to his own recollection) declared that for Hitler the opportunity had arrived to ‘be the first’ to promote ‘the re-election of the Reich President’ (by parliament) and thus to ‘assume political leadership’.43 That was a clear offer: If the NSDAP were to support Hindenburg, Hitler’s path to the office of Chancellor would be unimpeded.44

  Meanwhile, however, Hitler had been pursuing another approach. On 11 January the indications were becoming more numerous that Hitler and Hugenberg (with whom Brüning was engaged in parallel negotiations) would not agree to parliament extending the President’s term of office. In a letter to the Chancellor Hitler now voiced ‘constitutional concerns’ about these proposals and published it in the Völkischer Beobachter. The plan was for Brüning to be left as the man who had attempted to pressurize the head of state into a breach of the constitution.45 Hitler’s attempt to drive a wedge between Hindenburg and Brüning failed, however, for the President was not yet prepared to abandon Brüning. The leaders of the NSDAP felt they had suffered an embarrassing defeat,46 although his abortive attempt to extend the President’s term of office also led to a significant loss of prestige on the part of the Chancellor, who contemplated resignation.47

  Thus a further election for Reich President was now unavoidable. Hitler hesitated to put himself forward as a candidate. In an interview at the beginning of December for the British mass circulation newspaper Sunday Graphic he had dismissed rumours to that effect as nonsense.48 Although the situation had changed fundamentally, he could not be moved to change his mind, not even by Goebbels, who made several attempts,49 and not even after a ‘Hindenburg Committee’ was formed in Berlin at the end of January to re-elect the serving President. Hitler wanted to let Hindenburg go first in announcing his candidacy and wait for signs of support to come from the republican parties, in particular the Social Democrats.50 On 15 February, as expected, Hindenburg announced he would stand for re-election. The fact that in the meantime the Centre Party and the SPD had publicly come out in support of him gave Hitler an excuse to announce that he rejected Hindenburg’s candidacy.51 It was not until a week after this, on 22 February, that Hitler, when on a visit to Berlin ‘at last’, as Goebbels noted, gave him permission to announce that he too would run. Goebbels did just that the very same evening at an event at the Sportpalast. On the same day the Stahlhelm and the DNVP put up their own candidate, namely Theodor Duesterberg, the second national chairman of the Stahlhelm, thereby demonstrating that the ‘Harzburg Front’ was incapable of taking concerted political action.52

  A few days later the coalition government in Brunswick, which included members of the NSDAP, removed a not insignificant obstacle to Hitler’s candidacy. On 25 February it appointed Hitler as a Brunswick government official, thereby making him a German citizen. Before then the Party leader had not even been eligible to assume public office.53

  The election campaign, which began on 27 February, was conducted by the NSDAP propaganda HQ above all through ‘posters and speeches’.54 The prominent message of the campaign was that the election was a ‘decisive struggle’ between the Weimar ‘system’ and National Socialism. As the ‘Leader of a young Germany’ Hitler was to impress the public as a contrast to Hindenburg, the old man who was finding no way out of the crisis. This was the first time that the NSDAP had geared its entire propaganda to the ‘Führer’.55 Between 27 February and 11 March Hitler made speeches in thirteen different places,56 turning the fact that Hindenburg’s candidacy was supported by the Social Democrats, of all people, into the crux of his argument. He therefore spoke at length about November 1918 and attempted to convince his audience that the intervening ‘thirteen years’ (he kept on repeating this catchphrase) had brought nothing but suffering and had led to a series of bad decisions and failures that had inevitably produced the present political and economic crisis, with its temporary measures and emergency decrees. In line with the campaign strategy he frequently referred to his adversary as an ‘old man’ who, though he was revered for his service to the fatherland, was now no more than a puppet of the Social Democrats and Republicans: ‘Venerable old man, you must stand aside so that we can destroy those who are standing behind you.’57 He was ‘immensely proud’, Hitler boasted, ‘to have forced the SPD to kneel now before the Field-Marshal in less than thirteen years.’58 Unlike Hindenburg, he, Hitler, was the dynamic leader of a movement that embodied a new, young Germany and would heal the rifts in society by creating a national community.59 Carried away by his self-image as saviour of the nation, he turned repeatedly to the notion of what might have happened if he had been born ten or fifteen years earlier and ‘had already had my political education by 1915’. If that had been the case, he continued in his grandiose attack on his two targets, he might have succeeded as early as 1918 in forcing the Social Democrats to accept the authority of Field-Marshal Hindenburg: ‘Germany would not have lost the war and there would have been no revolution. We would not have had this endless sequence of madness, anxieties, and misery.’60

  On election day, 13 March, however, the NSDAP gained only 11.3 million votes (30.2 per cent), whereas more than 18.6 million Germans (49.6 per cent) voted for the current office-holder, Hindenburg, who thus just missed achieving the absolute majority required. As the Stahlhelm and DNVP now withdrew their candidate, Duesterberg, who had managed to win two and a half million votes (6.8 per cent), and also declared in favour of Hindenburg, the latter’s victory in the obligatory second round of voting was more or less assured. In a telephone conversation with Goebbels on the evening of 13 March Hitler appeared surprised and disappointed about the result but also determined to continue the battle into the second round.61 This obvious determination also characterized the calls to action he addressed on 13 March to Party comrades.62 His decision to continue to the next round was not prompted by any calculation that he could still defeat Hindenburg, but rather by the hope of mobilizing voters for the imminent parliamentary elections in Prussia and other states.63 At a Party leaders’ conference on 19 March in Munich Goebbels was evidently obliged to put up with a fair amount of criticism of his propaganda campaign in the previous few weeks.64 Yet Hitler appealed to the Party leaders to continue the fight in spite of everything. The NSDAP, he said, could bear anything except ‘immobility or giving up the struggle’. They had ‘to fight to their last breath’.65

  After an Easter truce established by emergency degree, the second round of the election campaign began on 3 April and lasted only a week. In view of the short time available, and in order to increase the impact of the Party leader’s public appearances, Hitler used an aircraft for his speaking tour and so was able to reach a mass audience in at least three or four cities each day, although he had only between fifteen and thirty minutes per stop and so was forced to restrict himself to short addresses consisting in essence of a denunciation of the ‘system’ and the vision of a nation united under his leadership. In these speeches he hardly even mentioned the imminent election for the presidency for he was already focused on the electoral battles to come after it. These short speeches exuding confidence in victory were to become typical of his oratorical style in 1932.

  Nazi propaganda trumpeted the ‘flight around Germany’ as a kind of victory parade. The huge crowds that Hitler was mobilizing day after day in cities throughout the Reich were an expression, it was claimed, of his extraordinary popularity, while the use of a plane was designed to reinforce Hitler’s ‘modern’ image, in pa
rticular in his contest with the ‘elderly’ Hindenburg.66 The fact that first of all he had had to overcome his fear of flying, as Hans Baur, his pilot at the time (later his chief pilot), reports, was another story. Hitler had all too vivid memories of his first flight from Munich to Berlin in a superannuated military aircraft in 1920. Since then he had tried to avoid aeroplanes.67

  Once again the NSDAP’s election campaign was disrupted by the SA. On the evening before the first round of voting rumours of a Nazi putsch had started to circulate in the wake of large-scale SA ‘manoeuvres’ in the Berlin area.68 A few days later, on 17 March, the police carried out searches of Nazi premises throughout Prussia, and there were hints of an impending ban on Nazi organizations.69 Hitler’s protests about the ‘merry-go-round of arrests and confiscations cooked up in the old familiar ways’ had no effect.70 In addition, Röhm’s homosexuality put increasing strain on the Party. On 6 March 1932, in the middle of the election campaign, the Welt am Montag had published a private letter of Röhm’s, openly admitting his homosexuality.71 Hitler immediately instructed Goebbels by telephone that he was to declare any more accusations of that kind against Röhm to be ‘a pack of lies’.72 When the accusations continued Hitler gave an assurance of his confidence in Röhm, defending him against ‘the most filthy and vile harassment’.73

  Hindenburg was able to win the second round on 10 April with a decisive 53 per cent of the votes. The NSDAP had increased its share of the vote by more than two million and achieved 36.7 per cent of the total vote, while Thälmann, the KPD candidate, gained a little over 10 per cent. Although on the evening of election day Hitler celebrated the result as a ‘victory’ and made efforts to direct the energies of his supporters to the regional parliamentary elections scheduled for 24 April,74 in the final analysis the campaign as such, with its emphasis on Hitler as the hope of the nation, had been a massive failure. The slogan ‘Hitler’ was far from convincing to the majority of German voters. Although Goebbels’s strategy of reducing the campaign’s focus to Hitler himself was, as stated above, controversial in the Party, he, as the architect of the campaign, tried after 1933 to declare that strategy retrospectively to have been the winning formula that led to the Party gaining power, presenting the 1932 election as part of a success story that was beyond challenge and culminated in the enthusiasm for the ‘Führer’ shown in the so-called Third Reich. But looked at objectively, the attempt to sweep the NSDAP to power on a wave of enthusiasm for Hitler had been a failure.75