Strasser was tempted. His disaffection with Hitler had been building since the aftermath of the July 31 election. Strasser was one of the few inside the party who dared to question Hitler’s decisions, and his disapproval of “the chief’s” refusal to enter a coalition government in August was an open secret within the party hierarchy. Strasser was a deeply committed National Socialist, and he had worked tirelessly to build up the party’s imposing national organization. His differences with Hitler were tactical, not ideological, and he believed that he was negotiating with Schleicher in good faith as a true National Socialist.
His approach to politics was more pragmatic than Hitler’s, more oriented toward administrative structures, details, planning. Hitler was famously uninterested in the party’s organization except as an instrument for propaganda and campaigning. Despite the November setback and his unsuccessful negotiations with Hindenburg, Hitler was still confident that more intensive propaganda and “fanatical” campaigning would ultimately sweep the party into power. That moment, Strasser believed, had passed, and Hitler’s obstinate refusal to enter a coalition government was a disastrous mistake.
He was also painfully aware that he was being marginalized in strategy decisions, shouldered aside by his rivals Goebbels, Göring, and Röhm, all of whom scrambled over one another to win the ear of the Führer—a dynamic that would only grow worse once the party was in power. It was a symptom of his fading influence in the Führer’s inner circle that Hitler had unceremoniously renounced Strasser’s ideas for an emergency economic program at the outset of the fall campaign, and by November Strasser had lost all patience with Hitler and the circle of sycophants who surrounded him. To one fellow Nazi, he complained that “Hindenburg, a man of honor . . . honestly and decently offers him [Hitler] a place in the government, and there stands the delusional Lohengrin-Hitler with his darkly menacing boys.” The future for the party looked bleak. Göring was “a brutal egotist who cares nothing for Germany as long as he gets something [for himself]”; Goebbels was “a limping devil and basically two-faced,” while Röhm was “a pig.” These were the toadies who now surrounded the Führer, slavishly encouraging him as he led the party into inevitable decline. The situation, he lamented, was a disaster.
Matters came to a head on December 5. In a turbulent session at the Kaiserhof, Strasser pleaded with Hitler to accept Schleicher’s offer. He pointed out that before the election the National Socialists in the Reichstag might have formed a majority with the Zentrum, but now this possibility had ended. The votes were no longer there. Given Hindenburg’s resistance, the chancellorship would have to wait, but it wasn’t too late to make a deal that would put Hitler and the NSDAP into a position of power. Hitler, encouraged by Goebbels, rejected any such compromise.
Two days later, Strasser made one last personal appeal to Hitler. Meeting again at the Kaiserhof, the conversation quickly degenerated into mutual recrimination and charges of betrayal. Hitler accused Strasser of treason, of attempting to destroy the party from within and rob him of the chancellorship. Strasser held his ground. “Herr Hitler, I am no more a traitor than any other willing messenger,” Strasser responded. “My plan is to prevent a further deterioration of the party, not to bring it about.” The meeting ended with an enraged Strasser storming out, slamming the door behind him in disgust.
While this crisis within the leadership mounted, the bad electoral news just kept coming. In a series of local elections in Saxony, Bremen, and Lübeck in late November and Thuringia in early December, the NSDAP suffered catastrophic losses. “The situation in the Reich is disastrous,” Goebbels dolefully noted in early December: “In Thuringia . . . we have a loss of nearly 40 percent since July 31.” The campaign had been lethargic, the old verve absent. “This defeat is very unwelcome at the present moment,” Goebbels admitted. “In the future there must be no election in which we lose a single vote.”
Then, on December 8, a bombshell. With the party reeling from the setback in Thuringia, Strasser shocked the party and the country by publicly announcing his resignation from all his posts in the party leadership and declaring his intention to withdraw from politics. In a letter delivered to Hitler’s suite in the Kaiserhof around noon, Strasser reiterated his conviction that the Führer’s unbending stand against entering the cabinet had led the party into a cul-de-sac of futile opposition. With the flood tide of National Socialist victories now clearly ebbing, Hitler’s stubborn refusal to enter the government in both August and November had been a strategic blunder for which the party was now paying dearly. Thanks to Hitler’s intransigence, the NSDAP was no closer to power than it had been in January, and now the bottom was falling out. The great task of the age, his letter read, was “the creation of a great broad front of constructive people and their integration into the new-styled state.” In a rebuke to Hitler, he went on: “The single-minded hope that chaos will produce the party’s hour of destiny is, I believe, erroneous, dangerous, and not in the interests of Germany as a whole.” He closed by insisting that “as I refuse under all circumstances to become the focal point of oppositional endeavors or conflict of such kind, I am leaving Berlin today and subsequently leaving Germany for a considerable period.” The next morning he departed Berlin for a vacation in Italy.
The national press exploded with jubilant speculation. “The Jewish papers can hardly hide their satisfaction at Strasser’s step,” Goebbels grumbled. “The Führer and the party are given up by all. ‘Hitler’s star has faded,’ is the refrain of Jewish elation. One is almost ashamed to meet acquaintances in the street, and would like to hide one’s diminished head. . . . Everywhere the rats flee from the sinking ship,” he wrote in a tangle of mixed metaphors. “Among them are the grave robbers . . . who come to take part in the execution of the will. Wild rumors are afloat. Strasser’s defection is the talk of the day. He has a good Jewish press and deserves it, too.”
Coming on the heels of the party’s disastrous electoral performance, Strasser’s resignation confronted Hitler with a very real possibility that the party would disintegrate, splintering into competing factions. And for the first time, his nerve seemed to desert him. He hurriedly gathered party leaders and pleaded for their support; he convened a meeting of the Nazi Reichstag delegation to explain the situation and reassure them that he was in control. To Goebbels, he was not so confident. “If the party falls apart,” he told his startled propaganda chief, “I’ll finish myself off with a pistol within three minutes.”
“It is high time we attained power,” Goebbels noted forlornly, “although for the moment there is not the slightest chance of it.” He found it difficult to be upbeat. “Deep depression reigns in the organization,” Goebbels wrote in early December. “We are all very downhearted, above all because the danger now exists that the entire party will fall apart and all our work will have been done for nothing.”
Compounding these problems, the party’s financial situation was little short of catastrophic. Membership dues, subscriptions to party publications, and paid attendance at Nazi events had dropped precipitously, and contributions from backers in the business community, always exaggerated both then and subsequently, had virtually evaporated. Even the firm that printed the Völkischer Beobachter threatened several times in November and December to stop printing unless the party paid up. So deeply in debt was the party that wages to party employees were cut, and National Socialist Reichstag deputies were even ordered to forgo the customary Christmas tips to porters. SA men, who only weeks before had been planning to take the government by storm, could now be seen on Berlin street corners collecting money from passersby. They stood, Konrad Heiden observed with satisfaction, “in their thin shirts, shivering with the cold . . . rattling their tin collection cups and crying lamentably: ‘Give something to the wicked Nazis!’ ”
Only six months after reaching the very threshold of power, the NSDAP was poised on the cusp of decline and disintegration. In evaluating the party’s options, the RPL concluded that the
cluster of strategic dilemmas facing the NSDAP could not be resolved in the context of a free and competitive parliamentary system. After an ascent of unparalleled swiftness, the Nazis had reached the limits of their popular support and now faced almost certain decline. The policy of legality, of mass mobilization for electoral campaigning, had failed. Only a National Socialist seizure of power could ensure the survival of the party as a mass phenomenon. Quoting from a local propaganda leader whose views it obviously endorsed, the RPL concluded its postmortem of the November election with the stunning conclusion that “On the basis of numerous contacts with our supporters, we are of the opinion that little can be salvaged by way of propaganda. . . . New paths must be taken. Nothing more is to be accomplished with words, placards, and leaflets. Now we must act!”
But above all else, the RPL asserted with uncommon frankness, “it must not come to another election. The results could not be imagined.” It was a sobering admission for the party’s proud propaganda operatives but one that accurately gauged the NSDAP’s grim electoral prospects. There was still hope, the RPL concluded, “if Adolf Hitler succeeds in bringing about a political transformation in Germany and appears before the German people as a man of action.” In December 1932 that prospect seemed remote indeed.
As “the year of elections” drew to a close, the great expectations of the spring and summer had dissolved. Hitler remained as far from the Reich Chancellery as ever, and none of the fundamental strategic dilemmas that had plagued the party in the fall had been resolved. The party’s narrow window of opportunity seemed to have been wedged firmly shut. Local elections in November and December had confirmed the verdict of the Reichstag campaign. It was becoming increasingly obvious that the disappointing results of the November election had not been a fluke but marked the onset of an undeniable trend. The volatile Nazi constituency was fragmenting; the party’s treasury was empty; and the Storm Troopers were fed up with the endless campaigns and impatient for action. Strasser’s resignation and the fear that he might lead a revolt within the ranks merely deepened the shadows that hung over the party and cast a lengthening pall over its future.
Reflecting back over the triumphs and travails of the past year, Goebbels could muster little optimism for the future. “The year 1932 was an endless run of bad luck,” he mused in late December. “Outside the peace of Christmas reigns in the streets. I am at home alone, pondering over my life. The past was sad, and the future looks dark and gloomy; all prospects and hopes have completely failed.”
7
* * *
THE IMPOSSIBLE HAPPENS
By the close of 1932, Hitler’s road to power seemed blocked. Nazi popular appeal was waning, its catchall strategy had run aground; its organization was demoralized, its militants disillusioned. The Storm Troopers were once again at the point of revolt, and the party was deeply in debt. Hitler, virtually everyone agreed, had missed his chance. Now he was wandering in the wilderness, his run at power stalled. “The mighty National Socialist assault on the democratic state,” the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung declared in its New Year’s Day edition, “has been repulsed.” The threat of National Socialism seemed to have passed.
But the situation of the Weimar government had hardly improved since Schleicher had become chancellor in December. The Reichstag, the centerpiece of Weimar’s democratic system, had been rendered irrelevant, stymied by almost three years of political polarization and rule by emergency decree. Of the Weimar parties, only the SPD and the Zentrum remained staunch defenders of the democratic constitution and its institutions. Although bitter enemies, together the Nazis and Communists held a majority in the Reichstag and were determined to destroy it. The liberal parties, long in decline, had receded almost to the vanishing point. The moderate center of German politics had dissolved; the margins had become the mainstream. With the political system mired in hopeless paralysis, real power devolved onto a small group of insiders from Germany’s agrarian, industrial, and military elites. They, not the dispirited parties or the disillusioned public, would decide Germany’s destiny.
That fate would be sealed during four intense weeks in January 1933, enacted in a drama played out almost entirely behind the scenes. Occasionally the curtain would lift for a brief moment, offering tantalizing glimpses of the high-stakes drama that was unfolding offstage, but little more. Many—politicians, pundits, diplomats, and journalists—speculated about the possible twists of plot, but few anticipated the fantastic resolution. By the end of the month, the last act of Weimar’s tragedy had been played, and when the house lights went up, Germans were startled to discover that the impossible had happened.
Between 1928 and January 1933, German politics had been driven by large-scale economic and political developments—the Great Depression, mass unemployment, political polarization, institutional paralysis, and a rising tide of violence and chaos. Those wrenching macro-level forces had provided the context and catalyst for the rise of the Nazis and had delivered Hitler to the very threshold of power, but they could not push him across. January 1933 would change all that. It was a month of intrigue, of plots and subplots, more suited to the conspiratorial intricacies of a Renaissance court than the age of mass politics. Ironically it was not Hitler, the presumed protagonist of the piece, who drove the action forward—Hitler played a supporting and surprisingly secondary role—but former chancellor Franz von Papen and a handful of other powerful players whose connivances propelled events. Their motives and ambitions differed, but they shared one overriding and ultimately fatal illusion: all believed that Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP could be “tamed” and used for their political purposes.
Through much of December and into January Schleicher made overtures to the socialist labor unions, to the SPD, the Christian trade unions, the DNVP, and to the National Socialists. He hoped to fashion a broad base of support stretching from the right wing of the SPD and labor unions to the Conservatives and the Nazis. He was convinced that he would succeed where Papen had failed and would lure the more reasonable elements of the NSDAP into some sort of cooperation. Just the threat of that, he thought, might be enough to prompt Hitler into support for a right-wing government.
In an effort to win support from labor, Schleicher repealed Papen’s immensely unpopular emergency decree that had allowed employers to reduce wages below levels set by collective bargaining agreements, and he voided Papen’s decree that mandated a means test for unemployment compensation. Whereas Papen had attempted to stimulate the economy by giving tax breaks and other incentives to business, Schleicher favored a stimulus package to jump-start the economy and proposed a major public works bill that he hoped would make an immediate dent in Germany’s still-astronomical unemployment. Although the unions looked favorably upon these moves, it was not enough to overcome their deep reservations about the “red general,” as Schleicher was sometimes called. In the end, none of these moves met with success. The labor unions distrusted the former general, and the Social Democrats wanted no part of him or his government. The irascible Hugenberg kept his distance, and Hitler, even with his diminished stature, remained intractable. These pro-labor initiatives did, however, succeed in unsettling many in the business community, who interpreted them as populist pandering and yet another example of the profligate government spending that had crippled the German economy. Papen, with his unvarnished pro-business stance, remained the option of choice for the country’s industrial and financial elites.
In a move more damaging than his troubles with business, Schleicher also incurred the wrath of the powerful agrarian lobby. The Reich Agricultural League (Reichslandbund), dominated by large eastern landowners, turned with a fury on Schleicher for his refusal to raise tariffs on agricultural imports, a step, the chancellor correctly believed, that would be vigorously opposed by labor and by consumers. Exacerbating his problems, Schleicher also exhumed Brüning’s ill-fated plan to resettle the unemployed on bankrupt agrarian estates in the east, reviving near-hysterical charges of “agrarian
Bolshevism.” Hindenburg, who was proud of his Junker heritage and his status as an estate owner, came under heavy pressure from his friends and turned that pressure on Schleicher. Overstepping the bounds of his constitutional authority, he intervened directly in the dispute and insisted that Schleicher resolve these difficulties immediately.
While Schleicher struggled with these problems, his troubles were greatly exacerbated by a scandal that erupted in mid-January over alleged improprieties in the Eastern Aid (Osthilfe) program. A Reichstag oversight committee claimed that some East Elbian landowners had misused the funds to take luxury vacation trips to the south of France, to purchase expensive automobiles, and indulge in other extravagances. Some of the implicated landowners were friends of the Reich President, and in the course of the hearings it came to light that Hindenburg’s ancestral estate, bought for him in 1928 by industrialist friends, had been registered in his son’s name to avoid inheritance taxes. The Agricultural League was furious that the Schleicher government had let the inquiry go forward, and Hindenburg was incensed that Schleicher had allowed his name to be connected with the scandal.
The Third Reich Page 26
