Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  Two days before the first presidential election, Goebbels had noted in his diary: “Thorough discussion with SA and SS leadership of standards of behavior for the next few days. Everywhere a wild restiveness prevails. The word putsch haunts the scene.” For election day, Röhm had decreed a state of emergency readiness and his brown shirts encircled Berlin. While raiding several of the SA’s organizational centers, the Prussian police found detailed instructions for violent measures to be taken if Hitler won. Although there was no evidence of any plans for a large-scale uprising, the police did come upon the secret putsch cue familiar from other documents: “Grandmother dead.” Orders were also found instructing the storm troopers of the eastern territories to refuse to participate in the country’s defense if there were a Polish attack—a discovery that must have made its impression on Hindenburg in particular. Several state governments were urging a Reich ban on the SA and SS. The decision to impose the ban was now taken unanimously; it was an action long weighed and repeatedly postponed before finally being taken.

  But a few days before proclamation of the ban, events took a dramatic turn. Schleicher, who had at first agreed to the ban and even boasted of being its author, changed his mind overnight, and when his shift did not meet with instant approval, began intriguing furiously against the ban. Soon he had won over Hindenburg, on grounds that the ban would make the President even more unpopular with his already disappointed followers on the Right. Schleicher himself had decided that it would be better to collaborate with the SA in dissolving all other private defense organizations, such as the Stahlhelm or the loyally Republican Reichsbanner, and to collect them all into a militia or a military sports association subordinated to the army. But his change of heart also sprang from his temperamental love of intrigue. The crude method of a ban was antipathetic to him; he liked subtler procedures. His counterproposal, significantly, was to present Hitler with a number of ultimatums demanding the demilitarization of the SA. The demands would be so impossible to meet that by rejecting them Hitler would be placed in the wrong.

  With some scruples, and with anxious side glances at the “old wartime comrades” now serving in the SA and SS, Hindenburg finally signed the decree; and on April 14, in a widespread police action, Hitler’s private army was broken up, its headquarters, shelters, schools and depots occupied. This action was the most energetic blow that the government had struck against Nazism since November, 1923. The official statement at last showed a certain mettle on the part of the republic: “It is exclusively the concern of the State to maintain an organized force. As soon as such a force is organized by private parties and the State tolerates this, a danger to law and order already exists…. Undoubtedly, in a constitutional state power may be organized by the constitutional organs of the State itself. Any private organized force therefore cannot by its very nature be a legal institution…. In the interests of its own preservation, the State must order such forces dissolved.”

  Backed by the belligerence and strength of his 400,000 men, Röhm at first seemed ready for a trial of strength. But Hitler would not hear of it. Instead, without more ado, he incorporated the SA into the party organization and in this way kept its organization intact. Here was another example of a Fascist movement abandoning the field without a fight at the first show of resistance by the government. Similarly, in 1920 Gabriele d’Annunzio had evacuated the city of Fiume in response to a single cannon shot. Once more Hitler declared himself on the side of legality, and called for strict observance of the ban. He did this not out of fear but because any other measure would have nullified the “Fascist constellation,” the alliance between conservative rule and a revolutionary-popular movement.

  Hitler’s compliance may have come easily to him since by that time he had received information—from Schleicher or people close to Schleicher—about friction within the administration. On the whole he showed an air of confidence. On the eve of the day that was to begin the dismemberment of the Hitler movement, Goebbels noted a conversation with Hitler in the Hotel Kaiserhof: “We discussed personnel questions for the period of taking power just as if we were already the government. I think no movement in the opposition has ever been so sure of its success as ours!”

  The very next day a strikingly frosty letter from Hindenburg to Minister of Defense Groener gave the signal for a monumental intrigue. A passionate campaign in the rightist newspapers, joined by a choir of prominent voices of the nationalist camp, went along with it. The Crown Prince thought it “incomprehensible” that the Defense Minister of all persons should help to “shatter the marvelous human material that has been brought together in the SA and SS and is receiving valuable training there.” Schleicher advised his Minister, who still regarded him as his “adopted son,” to resign, and either circulated spiteful slanders against Groener or did nothing to stem such slanders. Word went round that Groener was ill, or that he was a pacifist, or that he had brought the army into disrepute when his second wife gave birth prematurely. Schleicher wittily told President Hindenburg that in the army the baby was called “Nurmi,” after the Finnish runner famous for his speed in the final spurt.

  Meanwhile, Schleicher let the leadership of the NSDAP know that he personally was not at all in favor of the ban on the SA. He still clung to the idea of disabling the Nazis by letting them participate in power and “locking them in”—to use the magic formula of the moment—by surrounding them with a cabinet of influential specialists. The example of Mussolini should have shown him that such tricks are useless against tribunes of the people who can call upon a private army.

  At the end of April Schleicher met with Hitler for a first discussion. “The conversation went well,” Goebbels noted. Soon afterward there was a second meeting, in which State Secretary Meissner, Hindenburg’s man of confidence, and Oskar von Hindenburg were included; at this time not only the dismissal of Groener but the fall of the entire Brüning cabinet was discussed. “Everything is going well….” Goebbels noted again. “Delightful feeling that nobody suspects anything, Brüning himself least of all.”

  After about a month of such intrigues, matters finally came to a head. On May 10 Groener defended in the Reichstag the SA ban against furious attacks from the Right. He was a feeble speaker at best, and his protests against the National Socialist “state within the State” and “state against the State” made little headway against the wild uproar that the Nazis unleashed. The angered, helpless, and no doubt exhausted Minister went down to defeat, and with him the cause he was advocating. Schleicher and General Kurt von Hammerstein, commander in chief of the army, coolly informed the Minister of Defense that he no longer enjoyed the confidence of the army, and must resign. Two days later, after a vain appeal to Hindenburg, Groener handed in his resignation.

  That act was, in keeping with the camarilla’s plans, only the prelude. On May 12 Hindenburg left Berlin for nearly two weeks, to spend the Whitsun holidays on his estate, Gut Neudeck. Brüning asked to see him, but the President irritably refused. During this period he was obviously under the influence of his fellow Junkers, who were now preparing the assault on Brüning’s weakening position. Whatever line of argument they followed, they no doubt brought to the task “that heavy force peculiar to large landowners and old army officers, which dispensed with honesty and concern for principle.” When Hindenburg returned to Berlin at the end of the month, he was determined to part with his Chancellor. Brüning thought he was on the verge of great successes in foreign policy, and as late as the morning of May 30, shortly before he set out to see Hindenburg, had heard that there was going to be a significant turn in the matter of disarmament. But as things turned out, he was not given the time to inform the President of this. Only a year before, Hindenburg had assured him that he would be his last Chancellor, that he would not part with him. Now Brüning found himself dismissed in an insultingly brusk interview. He had been allowed only a few minutes on the President’s calendar; Hindenburg did not want to miss the parade of the naval guard in com
memoration of the Battle of Jutland. A wartime memory and a minor military spectacle took precedence over an act that decided the fate of the republic.42

  General von Schleicher put forward as Brüning’s successor a man who at best could be considered a political dilettante. Franz von Papen came from an aristocratic Westphalian family, had served in a Junker cavalry regiment, and come to wide public notice for the first time—in a characteristic way—during the World War: in 1916 he had been expelled from the United States, where he was serving as military attaché, for sabotage activities; on the crossing to Europe he carelessly let important documents regarding his secret service work fall into the hands of the British authorities. His marriage to the daughter of a leading Saar industrialist had brought him considerable wealth and excellent connections with industry. As a Catholic nobleman he also had connections with the higher clergy, and as a former General Staff officer multiple contacts with the army. It may be that this position of Papen’s at the intersection of many interests first attracted Schleicher’s attention. The man seemed grotesquely antiquated; in all his long-legged stiffness, haughtiness, and bleating arrogance he was almost a caricature of himself—a figure from Alice in Wonderland, as a contemporary observer remarked. He was considered foolish, overhasty; nobody took him quite seriously. “If he succeeds with a thing, he is very pleased; if he fails, he does not worry about it.”

  Yet it was obviously this cavalier quality of Papen that recommended him to Schleicher. For Schleicher was plainly thinking more and more of doing away with the weakened parliamentary system and replacing it by some kind of “moderate” dictatorship. Papen might be just the man to carry out such plans for him. Schleicher must also have imagined that the inexperienced Papen, a man concerned largely with externals, would find his vanity satisfied with the office and its ceremonial functions, and for the rest would be a docile tool. Schleicher, as ambitious as he was wary of publicity, needed exactly that kind of man. When Schleicher’s friends, incredulous at his choice, protested that Papen was a man without a head, Schleicher replied: “I don’t need a head, I need a hat.”

  If, however, Schleicher had considered that Papen, thanks to his extensive connections, would be able to put together a coalition, or at any rate to win parliamentary approval of a cabinet including all parties to the right of the Social Democrats, he soon found that he was mistaken. The new Chancellor had no political base at all. The Center, embittered by the betrayal of Brüning, sharply opposed him. And Hugenberg, who saw himself once more passed over, also proved indignant. From the public, too, Papen encountered hostile rejection. Although he cashed in on Brüning’s successful negotiations and came back from the Lausanne Conference with the reparations question settled, he gained no popularity. The fact was that his cabinet could in no way be regarded as a legitimate solution to Germany’s problems, neither in terms of democracy nor expertise. It consisted entirely of men of distinguished families who had not been able to resist the President’s appeal to their patriotism and who now “surrounded Hindenburg like officers their general.” Seven of them were noblemen, two company directors; the roster also included Hitler’s protector from his Munich days, Franz Gurtner, and a general. Not a single representative of the middle class or the working class was included in the cabinet. The shadows seemed to be returning. But the mass indignation, the scorn and protest on the part of the populace, had no effect—proof of how thoroughly the members of the former ruling class had lost contact with reality. The “cabinet of barons,” as it was soon called, drew its support solely from Hindenburg’s authority and the army’s power.

  The extraordinary unpopularity of the government prompted Hitler to take an attitude of cautious restraint. In his negotiations with Schleicher he had agreed to tolerate the government if new elections were called, the ban against the SA lifted, and the NSDAP allowed full freedom to carry on agitation. A few hours after Brüning’s dismissal, he had answered positively when the President asked him whether he agreed to the appointment of Papen. The new Chancellor promptly, on June 4, began his series of fateful concessions by dissolving the Reichstag and indicating that he would shortly lift the ban on the SA. Nevertheless, the Nazis began disentangling themselves. “We must part company as quickly as possible with the bourgeois transitional cabinet,” Goebbels noted. “All these are questions of delicately feeling one’s way.” A few days later he noted: “We had better betake ourselves as swiftly as possible out of the compromising vicinity of these bourgeois adolescents. Otherwise we are lost. In the Angriff I am launching a fresh attack on the Papen cabinet.” When the SA ban was not dropped in the first few days, as anticipated, Goebbels one evening entered “a large café on Potsdamer Platz with forty or fifty SA leaders in full uniform in spite of the ban, for the sake of provocation. All of us longing to have the police arrest us…. Around midnight we stroll very slowly on Potsdamer Platz and Potsdamer Strasse. But nobody lifts a finger. The patrolmen look stumped and then shamefacedly turn their eyes away.”

  Two days later, on June 16, the ban was lifted; but the period of hesitancy had meanwhile given the impression of a “virtual genuflection by the administration before the coming new power.” At the last moment Papen made a transparent effort to trade off his conciliatory gesture for a promise that the Nazis would later help form a government. Tactically, he made his offer too late; but it also revealed a grotesque incomprehension of the urgency of Hitler’s hunger for power. Coolly, Hitler put him off; there would be time enough to consider his requests after the Reichstag elections.

  Thereupon the conditions of virtual civil war, with wild clashes in the streets, were abruptly revived, and now reached their real climax. In the five weeks up to July 20 there were nearly 500 such clashes in Prussia alone, with a toll of 99 dead and 1,125 wounded. Throughout the Reich seventeen persons were killed on July 10; in many places the army had to intervene in the furious street battles. Ernst Thälmann, the Communist leader, rightly defined the lifting of the ban on the SA as an open invitation to murder, although he did not say whether his own fighting units took an active or a passive part. On July 17 one of the bloodiest conflicts of the summer took place in Hamburg-Altona. A deliberately provocative parade of some 7,000 Nazis through the streets of the Red working-class quarter was answered by the Communists with heavy sniping from roofs and windows, which the Nazis answered in kind. There was a bitter battle over hastily erected barricades. At the end there were seventeen dead and many severely wounded. Of the eighty-six persons who died in political clashes in July, 1932, thirty were on the side of the Communists, thirty-eight on the side of the Nazis.43 “There is brawling and shooting,” Goebbels remarked. “The regime’s last show.”

  Refusing to realize that his concessions were only emboldening the Nazis, Papen went a step further. His idea was to strengthen the prestige of his virtually isolated administration, and simultaneously conciliate Hitler and the Nazis, by some grand gesture of authoritarianism. Accordingly, on the morning of July 20 Papen summoned three members of the Prussian government to the chancellery and abruptly informed them that he had just deposed Prussian Prime Minister Braun and Interior Minister Severing by emergency decree. He himself, he said, would assume the duties of the Prime Minister as Reich Commissioner.

  Severing declared that he would yield only to force. Papen—“a cavalier even in a coup d’état”—inquired what exactly he meant by that. The Minister retorted that he would move out of his office only under pressure. Meanwhile, using a prepared second emergency decree, Papen imposed a military state of emergency on Berlin and Brandenburg, thus seizing the police powers for himself. In the evening three police officers came to the Ministry of the Interior and requested Severing to leave. He was now yielding to force, Severing replied, and stepped out of his office and into his adjacent apartment. By the following afternoon, similarly without resistance, the leadership of the redoubtable Prussian police had been “overwhelmed.” Berlin Police Commissioner Grzesinski, Deputy Commissioner Weis
s, and Police Commander Heimannsberg were led across the yard of police headquarters for a brief internment. It is said that some of the policemen called after their chiefs the slogan of the Social Democratic Reichsbanner: “Freiheit!” Konrad Heiden has pointedly remarked that this was the last gasp of the crumbling, unwanted and now surrendered freedom of the Weimar Republic.

  Widespread resistance had, to be sure, been considered. According to a contemporary observer, Grzesinski and Heimannsberg, in conjunction with Undersecretary Klausener are supposed to have urged Severing to “carry on the fight by every means.” In particular they allegedly demanded “immediate action by the Berlin police, proclamation of a general strike, immediate arrest of the Reich government and the President, and declaration of the President’s incapacity to perform his duties.” But Severing is said to have rejected this proposal. Opposition did not go beyond ineffectual publication of protests and an appeal to the Supreme Court. The Prussian government had at its disposal more than 90,000 well-equipped police troops, the paramilitary Reichsbanner, the adherence of the republican parties, the unions, and all the important key posts. Fear of civil war, respect for the Constitution, doubts of the force of a general strike when so many men were unemployed, and many similar considerations ultimately undermined all ideas of resistance. Papen was able to seize power in the “strongest bulwark of the Republic,” with nothing to stop him beyond the looks of anguished resignation in his opponents’ eyes.

  It is hard to deny a good deal of validity to the arguments of the Prussian politicians. In view of all the circumstances, their decision may well have been a reasonable one. But in the face of history their reasonableness counts for little. No thought was given to a demonstration of defiance, and in no phase of the events did Severing and his unnerved, morally broken fellows consider the possibility that going down to defeat in honor might have made people forget the halfway measures and missed opportunités of the past thirteen years, and have sparked a renewal of confidence in democracy. The real and immense importance of July 20, 1932, lies in its psychological consequences. It discouraged one side and taught the others how little fight the defenders of the republic would be likely to put up.