Hitler
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That Hitler’s appearances were cheered by hundreds of thousands of people could also not disguise the fact that his strategy hitherto of ignoring the political issues of the day and his tendency to be vague about his immediate and medium-term goals were becoming less and less effective the closer he got to power. His standard argument (that National Socialism had first to win power and unite the nation, before the immediate problems could be solved) could only go so far in convincing the voters. His opponents even came to the conclusion that he had no political programme at all. At the beginning of April Hitler thus felt obliged to publish a twelve-point declaration entitled ‘My Programme’, although in essence it contained only the general slogans he had been putting out for years. Thus, as before, he claimed he would ‘draw together the socialist and nationalist elements in our nation into a new German national community’ (Point 1), which must be ‘imbued with real national life and animated by a truly national will’ (Point 2). He demanded authoritarian government (Point 3), postulated that the nation must be ‘systematically toughened in order to overcome life’s adversities’ (Point 4), and asserted in Point 5 that he firmly intended always to tell the truth. He became more specific about how he would treat his opponents when he wrote that he considered the ‘defeat and extirpation of political, economic, cultural and intellectual Marxism to be absolutely necessary in the interests of the survival of the whole German nation’ (Point 6). There is no mention at all of the ‘Jewish question’ or of living space. In Point 7 he made the by now universal demand for the ‘promotion of a healthy peasantry’ and in Point 8 for a strengthening of small and medium-sized enterprises [Mittelstand]. As far as his economic ideas were concerned, in Point 9 he went so far as to say that ‘in a truly healthy nation the citizen does not exist for the sake of business and the economy, and business does not exist for the sake of capital, but rather capital should serve business and business and the economy should serve the nation.’ On social policy he commented that ‘caring for and protecting those who work is in reality caring for and protecting the nation, the people’ (Point 10). He acknowledged that in modern society women were moving into new activities, but clearly stated that ‘the ultimate goal of a truly organic and logical development’ must ‘always be the creation of families’ (Point 11). Finally, the state’s role was to ‘embody in itself and its laws all ideas of acting in good faith, law and morality that it in turn demands of its citizens’ (Point 12).76 ‘My Programme’ was not a programme at all but rather a collection of statements of general principle and empty slogans.
By contrast, the difficulties posed by the Republic Hitler was aiming to topple were very concrete for him as Party leader and for his team. The raids conducted by the Prussian police on 17 March on various SA offices had uncovered incriminating evidence. Groener, the Reich Minister of the Interior, had previously had misgivings as Minister of Defence about imposing a nationwide ban on the SA ‘for defence reasons’ [i.e. its potential as an Army reserve], and these misgivings were shared by large sections of the officer corps.77 Under pressure from state interior ministers, however, he set aside his doubts. Brüning and Groener exerted the necessary pressure on a reluctant Hindenburg until on 13 April, a few days after the second round of Presidential elections, the latter signed an emergency decree imposing the ban. The police occupied SA and SS premises and dissolved these organizations. The Nazis were tipped off about this move, however, and prepared to continue the SA and SS in a clandestine form.78 But, as is clear from his call to the SA and SS of 13 April, Hitler found it rather difficult to explain to his supporters the logic of his continued ‘lawful’ course.79
Even though the ban on the SA was not unexpected, it nevertheless proved a hindrance to the NSDAP’s campaign for the forthcoming state parliament elections. During the two weeks remaining before election day Hitler again travelled the country by air. Between 16 and 23 April he spoke at a total of twenty-six events, from Miesbach to Flensburg, from Trier to Allenstein. He concentrated in these short addresses on biting criticisms of the ‘prevailing system’ and its representatives. ‘They have demolished Germany in the most terrible moment of its existence and shattered it into fifty parties, groups and associations!’ he declared on 22 April in Frankfurt an der Oder. ‘They have ruined the economy and plunged the peasantry into poverty; they have 6 million unemployed on their consciences and caused the inflation.’80 The trope introduced during the Presidential election of the ‘thirteen years’ during which people had experienced failed, indeed destructive, policies, again became a leitmotiv. The ‘13 million’ NSDAP voters who, he claimed, had made the NSDAP the ‘biggest political organization that Germany has ever known’ were also a usable rhetorical resource. They were no prelude to a ‘fragmentation’ of the nation, as his opponents claimed, but rather ‘the first great rallying’ on the road to national unity.81
The NSDAP achieved outstanding success in the elections to the Prussian state parliament on 24 April 1932. It increased its share of the vote sensationally from 1.8 per cent (1928) to 36.3 per cent and was now the strongest party in the largest German state. Because of the poor performance of the DNVP, however, the ‘nationalist opposition’ did not have a majority in the Prussian parliament; in order to achieve this, the NSDAP needed the support of the Centre Party. Until a new government was formed the Social Democrat prime minister Braun and his government, made up of SPD, Centre, and left liberal Deutsche Staatspartei ministers, remained in office. In Bavaria, Württemberg, and Hamburg the NSDAP achieved comparable results but had the same problem: it could not form a government. Only in Anhalt could the NSDAP create a parliamentary majority with the help of other right-wing parties. Thus the impressive results achieved by the Party did not bring about decisive political change in the states. This was the background to Goebbels’s resigned comment in his diary: ‘We must get power, or victories will kill us off.’82
An approach to the Centre Party?
The Presidential election and the state elections in Prussia and the other states had shown that the NSDAP could not come to power on its own. After the collapse of the ‘Harzburg Front’, the strategy of going it alone had now also failed. The NSDAP leadership now looked to an approach to the Centre Party as offering the most likely route to success. In the weeks that followed, the Nazis concentrated on this third variant. ‘Without the Centre we can’t do anything anywhere. Neither in Prussia, nor in the Reich’, Goebbels noted on 27 April. The same day he heard from the Berlin SA chief Wolf-Heinrich Count Helldorff that General von Schleicher was willing to ‘shift his position’: ‘Under pressure from him the Centre is expected to fall into line. Changes in the Reich too. Centre to be willing to tolerate in Prussia.’ Armed with this information from Goebbels, on the following day Hitler paid Schleicher a visit. From Helldorff Goebbels learned that ‘agreement had been reached’ at the meeting,83 but the next day Hitler said he wanted to keep the Centre ‘dangling’ for a while. Schleicher’s initiative had been prompted by Hindenburg, who for his part envisioned a hard Right solution for both the Reich and Prussia that would ideally involve the Centre Party, the DNVP, and the NSDAP.84
Schleicher, who had opposed the SA ban so as to avoid barring the way to a possible coalition with the NSDAP in Prussia, had indicated to Brüning before the Prussian parliament elections that his days as Chancellor were numbered.85 For although Hindenburg had won the Presidential election, he had done so only because Social Democrats and Catholics had voted for him, whereas in Hitler he had had a serious opponent from the ‘nationalist’ camp. Brüning had not succeeded in uniting the right-wing parties in support of an authoritarian regime, as Hindenburg had expected him to do; instead, his survival in parliament depended on the continuing support of the SPD. Thus for Hindenburg the Chancellor was expendable.
At this point Brüning intended to intervene in Prussia if the coalition talks with the NSDAP in the largest German state should break down. In the first week of May the Chancellor ordered the state secreta
ries in the Reich Interior and Justice Ministries to prepare an emergency decree placing the Prussian police and the judicial system under the control of the Reich.86 These plans were, however, thwarted by Schleicher, who was now openly seeking to bring Brüning down. During the night of 2/3 May he visited Brüning (at the time Hitler and the Goebbelses were on a motoring tour for several days between Berlin and Berchtesgaden) and suggested he should make way for the right-wing government that had been discussed with the leaders of the NSDAP. When Brüning replied that he intended to remain in office as Chancellor and Foreign Minister until his policy of bringing about a revision of the Versailles Treaty was sure of success, Schleicher made it clear that he would no longer support him.87
Hitler, now in Berchtesgaden with Goebbels and his wife, observed events unfolding. The news from Berlin, as Goebbels records it in his diary, was ‘that the generals are still digging . . . Brüning and Groener will have to go.’ On 5 May Hermann Warmbold, the Economics Minister in Brüning’s cabinet, resigned after he was unable to win support for his plans to stimulate economic growth in opposition to Brüning’s policy of retrenchment. ‘Schleicher has let the bomb go off’, noted Goebbels on the minister’s resignation, hinting that this move was part of Schleicher’s intrigue to dismantle the government. Optimistically he added: ‘Brüning and Groener are wobbling.’88 Hitler set off for Berlin where on 7 May, accompanied by Röhm and Helldorff, who acted as his intermediaries with Schleicher, he met state secretary Meissner, Hindenburg’s son and adjutant, Oskar, and Schleicher himself. ‘Brüning is going to fall this week’, gloated Goebbels afterwards. ‘The old man will withdraw his support. Schleicher is pressing for it. . . . Then there’ll be a Presidential cabinet. Reichstag dissolved. The laws hemming us in will go. We’ll have freedom to agitate and we’ll produce our tour de force.’89 Later that day the Party leaders assembled in Berlin agreed by telephone with Schleicher to accelerate Brüning’s fall, thereby allowing him no opportunity of putting the issue to a vote of confidence in the Reichstag.90 Goebbels’s diary entries reveal the role played by the NSDAP in Schleicher’s plotting. The Party was to tolerate the new government in parliament and in return received a promise that the ban on the SA would be lifted and fresh elections held. These concessions would inevitably lead to a new outbreak of SA terrorism and, given the NSDAP’s recent electoral successes in the various states, would inevitably make it the strongest parliamentary party in the Reichstag.
Originally the decisive talks between Hitler and Hindenburg were planned for 11 May. Brüning, however, told the President’s office that they would be seen as the first step in a government reshuffle, thereby reducing his effectiveness as Foreign Minister just when he was about to go into the crucial negotiations aimed at finally removing Germany’s war reparations. He thus managed to have this date (and the talks Hindenburg was planning to have with the other party leaders) put back. The end of the month was now scheduled as the time when the parties, from the Centre to the National Socialists, would look for ways of working together in order to form a government in Prussia. Under those circumstances Brüning declared himself ready to accept a reshuffle of the Reich government as well.91
After this the President went to his Neudeck estate for more than two weeks. One day later Groener resigned as Defence Minister, ostensibly as the direct consequence of a poor performance in the Reichstag on 10 May but in reality as a result of the overwhelming pressure exerted on him in particular by Schleicher and the generals, whose superior he was. Hindenburg too was clearly distancing himself from his Defence Minister.92 Groener had defended the ban on the SA during these weeks against all protests and his departure meant that an important obstacle to closer cooperation between the right-wing conservatives and the Nazis had been removed.
As Brüning’s fall was imminent, Hitler at first saw no more reason to continue with the project of an alliance with the Centre. Speaking to the NSDAP parliamentary party in the Prussian parliament on 19 May he clearly distanced himself from such coalition plans, saying that they had not ‘struggled for thirteen years in order to continue the politics of today’s Germany in some coalition or other’.93 During this time Goebbels learnt more details about Schleicher’s plot to topple Brüning from Werner von Alvensleben, a close friend of Schleicher.94 Alvensleben already had a list of ministers that Schleicher had agreed with Hitler: ‘Chancellor von Papen, Foreign Minister Neurath.’95
Schleicher’s candidate for Chancellor, Franz von Papen, was a Centre Party deputy in the Prussian parliament and chair of the editorial board of the party newspaper, Germania. Although he was not well known to the general public he certainly enjoyed some influence in the party. His arch-conservative cast of mind, his aristocratic background, and appropriate career to match it (Papen had been a diplomat and officer in Imperial Germany), were likely, Schleicher assumed, to make him acceptable to Hindenburg. The fact that Papen was a Centre Party deputy in the Prussian parliament again opened up prospects of a comprehensive arrangement with the Nazis: Dissolution of the Reichstag and fresh elections, and at the same time the formation of a coalition government with the Centre in Prussia.96 Hindenburg responded as Schleicher wished; during these days he informed his ‘still Chancellor’ Brüning through his state secretary Meissner that he intended to create a government that would strengthen the right of the political spectrum. He was considering, he said, a situation where the National Socialists would tolerate the new Reich cabinet in exchange for being given a share in government in Prussia.97
In Prussia, however, obstacles remained. Although after discussions with the Centre98 the NSDAP had managed to secure agreement that at the opening session of the Prussian parliament on 25 May the NSDAP deputy Hanns Kerrl would be elected as President of the House, the coalition negotiations between the two parties were not progressing.99 Hitler set off for the state of Oldenburg on an election tour, as state parliament elections were taking place there on 29 May.100 At the end of May he let Goebbels, whom he met on the journey, know that ‘things are looking bad for Brüning. On Sunday he’ll learn his fate from Hindenburg.’101 Hitler was showing once again that he was extremely well informed. Brüning’s position vis-à-vis Hindenburg had finally become untenable when representatives of the Reichslandbund and the DNVP made an emphatic appeal to the Reich President to prevent Brüning’s government from forcing the auctioning off of bankrupt estates in eastern Germany that could no longer be bailed out and turning them over to be settled by peasants. The slogan ‘Agrarian Bolshevism’ was flying around.102 On Sunday 29 May the Reich President summoned Brüning and informed him ‘very coldly’, as the latter recorded, that he was not minded to issue any more emergency decrees for his government; Brüning responded as expected, by offering his and his cabinet’s resignation, which the President immediately accepted.103
The same day the NSDAP won an absolute majority in the Oldenburg election.104 On 30 May Hitler had already reached agreement with Hindenburg in Berlin that he would support or tolerate the new cabinet, if the following conditions were met: dissolution of the Reichstag and fresh elections, a lifting of the ban on the SA, and access for the Party to the radio network. Hindenburg accepted these conditions.105 The following day Papen confirmed to Hitler that he also agreed106 and Hindenburg charged Papen with forming a government.
11
On the Threshold of Power
Papen’s government, the so-called cabinet of the barons, was made up predominantly of arch-conservative ministers from the nobility. Significantly, in the public mind they were associated with (and not without a certain polemical undertone) the exclusive Berlin Herrenklub [Gentlemen’s Club], to which Papen himself and at least two other cabinet ministers did actually belong.1
The new government was to a great extent isolated in parliament and could only count on support from the small German Nationalist Party (DNVP). The Centre Party refused to cooperate with its own Chancellor because of his blatant intrigues against Brüning. In respo
nse, on 31 May, one day before he was appointed Chancellor, Papen left the party. Thus the foundation for the government as originally envisaged by Schleicher was removed. From the NSDAP’s point of view, the fact that Papen had broken with the Centre Party reduced their interest in supporting the Chancellor, because the anticipated comprehensive arrangement in the Reich and in Prussia, for which the Centre Party was required, would now be much harder to achieve. Up until the last moment Schleicher had acted on the assumption that the Centre would finally come to terms with Papen and support him in parliament.2 Now hopes were focused on the Nazis and Hindenburg and Papen upheld the concessions already made, namely the lifting of the ban on the SA and fresh elections.3
During the week after Brüning’s fall, Hitler had speaking commitments in the election campaign in Mecklenburg-Schwerin, where elections to the state parliament were held on 5 June. The NSDAP hoped that the anticipated gains would strengthen its hand in the negotiations taking place in Berlin. Hitler made no secret of this in his campaign speeches. ‘The battle in the states’, he stated on 3 June at an election meeting, ‘is nothing less than a preliminary skirmish before the major confrontation coming in the Reich, and that will not be a matter of simply taking over purely formal power but of the reorganization of the German nation.’4 The same day Hitler again had a meeting with Schleicher, who told him that the other side was sticking to what it had agreed.5 The next day the President, in accordance with the cabinet’s wishes, signed the decree dissolving parliament and set 31 July 1932 as the latest possible date for fresh elections.6