The Third Reich

by Thomas Childers

  At the Kaiserhof, Hitler and his entourage mulled over the situation. Could they trust Papen? Hindenburg? “Hitler is very skeptical and mistrustful,” Goebbels noted. “With good reason. Those over there [at the Chancellery] are a big band of swindlers. . . . The Old One is unpredictable. . . . At least we are rid of Schleicher. The Old One basically threw him out.” That was “a perfect punishment” for a schemer like Schleicher. “Tomorrow the tug of war [for power] begins.”

  Despite all the mutual suspicions and misgivings, by the evening of January 29 Papen had maneuvered all the pieces into place. Hitler was satisfied, Hugenberg was tentatively onboard; all the proposed cabinet officers were in agreement. Even the reluctant Duesterberg grudgingly dropped his opposition to the cabinet, and Seldte agreed to be minister of labor. The Stahlhelm was ready to support the new government. Some potential problems remained to be resolved, especially Hugenberg’s adamant opposition to new elections, which Hitler considered essential. But everything seemed set. Even Hindenburg’s resistance to a Hitler chancellorship had apparently been overcome, at least for the moment, and a Hitler government would be sworn in at the Chancellery at eleven o’clock in the morning.

  “One doesn’t dare to believe it yet,” Goebbels wrote that night. “Is Papen honest? Who knows?” And Hindenburg was so unreliable, so changeable. Then, suddenly, a new and more ominous menace appeared. A messenger arrived at Goebbels’s apartment bearing word that Hindenburg had decided, after all, to appoint Papen chancellor. The army was vehemently opposed. Rumors had surfaced that in order to block a return of the Papen cabinet, plans were now under way at army headquarters to arrest Oskar von Hindenburg, while the Reich President would be taken away to his estate at Neudeck and held incommunicado. Army troops would occupy the city. Some believed that Schleicher was behind it; others thought Commander-in-Chief Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord. It was to be a military coup, and the outcome would be a military dictatorship, undoing all Hitler’s calculations just when it seemed that power was within his grasp.

  Göring and Hitler, who were also present in Goebbels’s apartment, swung into action. Göring immediately warned Meissner and Papen, and Hindenburg sent word to General Werner von Blomberg. The Reich President ordered the general, who was attending the Disarmament Conference in Geneva, back to Berlin immediately, warning him to proceed directly to the Reich Chancellery to be sworn in as minister of defense—a post that would make him commander-in-chief of the army. Hitler meanwhile telephoned the commander of the Berlin SA, and ordered him to put the SA on alert around the city. The Storm Troopers should be prepared for a showdown with Army troops. “We must not lose our nerve now,” Goebbels wrote. “Who knows if this is a serious threat or just childishness?” At the Kaiserhof, Hitler’s inner circle sat and waited, while he stalked silently through the suite, lost in thought. No new reports reached them. The hours ground slowly by, and as daybreak approached, nothing had happened. No troops from the Potsdam garrison, no arrests. Finally, at five in the morning, the men allowed themselves a brief sleep. The tension was still high—something could still go wrong—Hindenburg might have a change of heart, Papen might yet betray them, the army might march. The anticipation was almost unbearable. Snowflakes were filtering through the weak winter sunlight as the first crowds began to form outside the Chancellery, sensing that something momentous was going to happen. “We have only to wait a few more hours,” Goebbels anxiously noted, “then the great moment will be here.”

  Early that morning, as rumors of an impending military Putsch seized the government quarter, Oskar von Hindenburg was dispatched to the Anhalter railway station to fetch General Blomberg. The Reich President’s conviction that something was afoot was reinforced when the younger Hindenburg discovered a staff officer sent by General Hammerstein stationed on the train platform, apparently under orders to bring Blomberg directly to army headquarters in Potsdam. Instead, Blomberg was whisked straightaway to the Reich President. In a tense meeting at the Chancellery, Hindenburg briefed him on the situation, warning him to be prepared to suppress an imminent coup d’état.

  An air of anticipation gripped the city. Expectant crowds filled the Wilhelmstrasse, flocking into the square that separated the Kaiserhof from the Chancellery. Around ten, Hitler and Hugenberg slipped through a back garden into Papen’s residence for a last discussion before proceeding to their audience with Hindenburg. When in the course of the conversation, Hugenberg learned for the first time that the issue of new elections had not been settled, he flew into a rage. He had entered into this arrangement with the understanding that there would be no new elections. Hitler, for his part, was taken aback that Papen had not actually secured Hugenberg’s agreement beforehand. Under these circumstances, Hugenberg threatened to back out of the deal, and Hitler’s efforts to reassure him that there would be no changes in the cabinet no matter what the outcome of the elections fell on deaf ears. Finally, Papen, at wits’ end, interjected: “If the new government is not formed by eleven o’clock, the army is going to march. Schleicher may establish a military dictatorship.” It was approaching eleven before the men, still arguing, marched through the snow-dusted back gardens and into presidential secretary Meissner’s office in the Reich Chancellery, where the presumptive ministers of the new cabinet had gathered.

  With Hindenburg waiting impatiently in the next room, the row over new elections flared again. Once more Hitler tried to reassure Hugenberg, promising that no matter what might come he would hold his position as economics and agriculture minister—he would be economics czar, a term that greatly appealed to Hugenberg’s vanity. Papen seconded those promises, but Hugenberg could not be mollified. At that point Meissner reminded them that it was already five past eleven, and they were keeping the Reich President waiting. When this warning failed to move the implacable Hugenberg, Papen asked plaintively, “Do you want to risk the national unity which has finally been achieved after so many difficult negotiations? You cannot possibly doubt the solemn word of a German man.” The argument was still sputtering on when Meissner reappeared from Hindenburg’s office, watch in hand, and announced: “The President requests you not to keep him waiting any longer. It is now eleven-fifteen. The Old Gentleman may retire at any moment.”

  Meissner’s anxious words seemed to jolt Hugenberg into motion, and, with agreement hanging by a gossamer thread, the triumvirate marched at last into Hindenburg’s presence. So irritated with the situation was Hindenburg that he could not bring himself to offer the cabinet the ceremonial welcoming speech. Unfazed, Hitler, too, broke with protocol and surprised the company by plunging into a short speech of his own. He solemnly promised the Reich President that he would uphold the Weimar constitution, find a majority in the Reichstag so that emergency decrees would no longer be necessary, resolve Germany’s economic crisis, and restore unity to a divided and downtrodden German people. When he finished, a startled and still peeved Hindenburg offered no comment, except to utter a perfunctory “And now, gentlemen, forward with God!”

  Across the square at the Kaiserhof, Hitler’s entourage waited anxiously. “The inward excitement almost takes our breath away,” Goebbels wrote. “In the street below the crowd stands silently between the Kaiserhof and the Chancellery. What is happening there? We are torn between doubt, hope, joy and despair. We have been deceived too often to be able wholeheartedly to believe in the great miracle.” Röhm stood at the window, watching the door of the Chancellery from which the Führer would emerge. “We will be able to judge by his face if the interview has gone well,” Goebbels worried. “Torturous hours of waiting! At last a car draws up in front of the entrance. The crowd cheers. They seem to feel that a great change is taking place or has already begun. The Führer is coming.”

  A few minutes later, Hitler entered the suite that had served as his headquarters. At first he did not speak. Overwhelmed, he looked at his disciples in silence. “He says nothing, and we all remain silent also,” Goebbels wrote, overflowing with unctuous piety. “Hi
s eyes are full of tears. It has come! . . . Germany is at a turning point in its history.” Adolf Hitler, the indifferent student, the failed artist, the tramp, the obscure soldier of the Great War, the vulgar beer hall agitator, was, improbably, chancellor of Germany. “It was,” Goebbels wrote, “like a dream, a fairy tale.”

  There was nothing inevitable about that day, about Hitler’s rise to power. He was not voted into office, not swept into power on a tidal wave of public support. At the height of their electoral popularity in July the Nazis had received only 38 percent of the vote, and although they could not know it at the time, it was the largest vote they would ever claim in a free election. Then in November, in the last truly unfettered elections of the Weimar era, the Nazi vote fell to 33 percent and continued to plummet in state and local elections that followed. As they had done through virtually all the elections from 1928 to 1933, more Germans had voted for the tragically divided parties of the left than for the Nazis. These figures do not mean that those who voted for other parties were voting against the NSDAP or that they rejected all that National Socialism stood for. But it does mean that when given a free choice, even in the depths of the Great Depression, two thirds of the German population preferred someone else.

  It, therefore, constitutes a monstrous historical irony that Adolf Hitler was inserted into power at a moment when the party’s popularity was rapidly receding, its street organization was in revolt, and its treasury empty. What Hitler and the NSDAP’s sophisticated propaganda apparatus had failed to achieve at the apex of the party’s popular appeal in 1932, a group of highly placed conservative figures managed by engineering a backroom deal to create a Hitler cabinet. They believed, as Papen put it, that the National Socialist demagogue could be “tamed,” that they had “sandbagged Hitler.” But, as they would soon discover, they had made a fatal miscalculation, disastrously underestimating Hitler’s limitless ambition, his capacity for treachery, and his ruthless political acumen. They would not be the last to make such an error. Just a day after Hitler’s appointment, Hugenberg was already experiencing buyer’s regret. “Yesterday,” he is reported to have said, “I committed the greatest stupidity of my life. I joined forces with the greatest demagogue in world history.”

  * * *

  Dusk was settling over the city, the street lamps just springing to life, when the first elements of the vast parade came into view. The streets of the government quarter were thronged with people, the sidewalks packed, young boys perched in the branches of trees, bands playing, impromptu choruses chanting Nazi songs. To a thunderous rumbling of drums, column after column of SA men, Hitler Youth, SS, and Stahlhelm holding torches aloft emerged from the darkness of the Tiergarten and surged onto Unter den Linden. French ambassador François-Poncet watched in awe as the massed columns, “flanked by bands that played martial airs to the muffled beat of their big drums . . . passed under the triumphal arch of the Brandenburg Gate. The torches they brandished formed a river of fire, a river with hastening, unquenchable waves . . . sweeping . . . over the very heart of the city. From these brown-shirted, jack booted men, as they marched by in perfect discipline and alignment, their well-pitched voices bawling warlike songs, there rose an enthusiasm and dynamism that were extraordinary. The onlookers, drawn up on either side of the marching columns, burst into a vast clamor.” For three interminable hours the procession passed beneath the windows of the Reich Chancellery Annex where Hitler, nodding and extending his arm in his abbreviated version of the Nazi salute, beamed down upon them. Just beyond, the ancient Hindenburg stood at his window, “a towering, dignified heroic figure,” Goebbels now gushed, “invested with a touch of old time marvel. Now and then, he beats time to the military marches with his cane,” perhaps wondering at what he had done. For Goebbels it was “the rising of a nation. Germany has awakened.”

  Far from the tumultuous scene in the Wilhelmstrasse, Erich Ludendorff penned a note to Hindenburg. Ludendorff had been Hindenburg’s partner in commanding Germany’s military effort in the Great War, and in 1923 had been Hitler’s co-conspirator in the failed Putsch attempt. He was widely considered something of a crank. But he knew a few things about Hitler and on that fateful January day, he sent an ominous warning to the aged Reich President: “I solemnly prophesy,” he wrote, “that this accursed man will cast our Reich into the abyss and bring our nation to inconceivable misery. Future generations will damn you in your grave for what you have done.”

  8

  * * *

  SEIZING POWER

  Around the country Nazis celebrated through the night. Bonfires burned in the countryside, columns of SA men tramped through village streets; swastika banners fluttered on public buildings. Germany, the National Socialist press proclaimed, had reached a “historic turning point,” and January 30, 1933, was “an event like nothing that has come before in Germany’s post-war evolution. With a strong National Socialist advance guard our leaders have moved into the government to clear the road to freedom for the German people.” The discredited Weimar Republic had been dispatched; the new Germany had ridden to the rescue of a country long mired in confusion and despair. This, at any rate, was the National Socialist version of January 30—a glorious new chapter in the official Nazi narrative of events. Reality, as usual, was more prosaic, and more complicated. While the Nazis hyperventilated over the new cabinet, most Germans greeted the announcement of the Hitler government with something of a wait-and-see shrug. There were a few outbreaks of violence, but bloody confrontations were far fewer than had been anticipated. As The New York Times reported, “everything is going on much as usual in the country.” So many cabinets had come and gone; so little had changed.

  Most informed opinion, both in Germany and abroad, assumed that Hitler had been outfoxed by Papen. The wily ex-chancellor had lured the Nazi leader into heading a coalition government in which he would be outnumbered by Conservatives and overshadowed by his own vice chancellor. All agreed that Hitler had little room for maneuver. “The composition of the cabinet leaves Herr Hitler no scope for gratification of any dictatorial ambition,” The New York Times confidently proclaimed. “Nationalists to Dominate in Government Led by National Socialist” was a typical headline. Hitler had “merely been taken in tow . . .” It was generally felt that “the government is Colonel von Papen’s show . . .” He was expected “to be a buffer to National Socialist influence in the Cabinet. . . . There is also a very definite impression in political circles that the Vice Chancellor has received a certain vetoing authority that he can oppose to any radical action Herr Hitler may attempt to undertake.”

  Others claimed to be gratified that Hitler had at last been enticed into a position of responsibility and that his days of savaging the government from the safety of the sidelines were over. And, of course, behind this view was the plausible assumption that he would be no more capable of dealing with Germany’s colossal economic problems than his predecessors. While conceding that the appointment of Hitler was “a severe blow to Social Democracy,” France’s Le Temps suggested that “it is possible that the new Chancellor will be quickly exhausted by this exposure and his reputation as a worker of miracles will vanish.” The editors of Le Temps were also convinced that “it will be impossible for the new Chancellor to make good the madly demagogic program that succeeded in attracting the support of the German people.”

  The German papers were more ambivalent. The liberal Frankfurter Zeitung sounded the alarm, calling on the public to rally “to the defense of the rights of the working population, fundamentals of democracy, freedom of thought and justice and social economic rationality.” The leftist press anticipated a crackdown, but tended to see Hitler as a mere figurehead. Hewing to the Comintern line from Moscow, the Communists held that Hitler was nothing more than a tool of monopoly capitalism, and that the real power in the new government was that representative of big business and big agriculture Alfred Hugenberg. More common was the view of the left-liberal Berliner Tageblatt that the Nazis for all t
heir fanatical zeal posed little cause for concern. “There is the Socialist Hitler under the business supervision of the foxy capitalist Hugenberg and an ex-corporal amidst a Count and four Barons.” But at least this cabinet was better than Papen’s because of “the disenchantment that will now come to Hitler’s followers.”

  For his part, Hitler was content to encourage this public perception. In cabinet meetings he was cooperative, even deferential, eager to indulge his conservative partners. Publicly, the Nazi propaganda machine was careful not to describe the events of January 30 as a National Socialist revolution but a “national uprising” of all anti-Marxist, nationalist forces, a term intended to reassure. Such illusions did not last long.

  Hitler had promised Hindenburg that he would conduct negotiations with the Zentrum, whose votes in the Reichstag would give the government a parliamentary majority, and, apparently true to his word, he began talks with the Zentrum leadership on the morning of his first full working day in the Chancellery. Hindenburg had grown weary of issuing repeated emergency decrees to keep minority cabinets afloat—a burden that had weighed heavily on him since 1930, but especially in 1932. Hitler went dutifully through the motions, but he had no intention of coaxing the Catholic party into “the Government of National Concentration,” as it was now being called. After only a brief meeting with Prelate Ludwig Kaas, the Zentrum leader, Hitler reported to Hindenburg and the cabinet that unfortunately no progress in the talks was possible. The Zentrum was not prepared to join the government. No one was more surprised to learn this than Kaas, who was, in fact, open to entering the coalition and believed that his conversation with Hitler was only the beginning of negotiations. Hitler was misrepresenting his position, he protested to Hindenburg, but it was too late. The Reich President had already signed a decree dissolving the Reichstag and calling for new elections to be held on March 5. It was exactly what Hitler wanted.