By the late 1920s, the experience of repeated crises had fragmented the agrarian political landscape, generating a profusion of special interest groups and movements of increasingly radical protest. The chief beneficiaries of this volatility were the Nazis, whose 1930 party programme promised to place the entire rural sector on a privileged footing through a regime of tariffs and price controls. Farmers who were disillusioned by the DNVP’s failure to secure benefits for the rural sector now deserted the party in search of a more radical alternative – in all, one-third of the voters who had supported the DNVP in the national elections of 1928 switched to the Nazis in the elections of 1930.54 The efforts of the Nationalist leadership to win back the renegades by hardening the party’s anti-republican course were in vain. Among those who were drawn to the National Socialist movement were numerous members of the East-Elbian nobility. A particularly striking case is that of the Wedel family, an old Pomeranian military lineage whose forebears had fought with distinction in every Prussian war since the foundation of the kingdom. No fewer than seventy-seven Wedels joined the NSDAP – the largest contingent from any German noble family.55
Nowhere was popular electoral support for the Nazis greater than in the Masurian areas of southern East Prussia, where the summer election campaign of 1932 brought forth the bizarre spectacle of National Socialist political rallies in Polish. In July 1932, 70.6 per cent of voters in the Masurian district of Lyck supported the Nazis, a higher figure than anywhere else in the Reich. The percentages for nearby Neidenburg and Johannisburg were only fractionally lower. In the March elections of 1933, Masuria once again led the Reich in its support for the Nazis, with 81 per cent in Neidenburg, 80.38 per cent in Lyck and 76.6 per cent in Ortelsburg, where Frederick William III had once paused with Queen Luise during their flight from the French.56
PRUSSIA DISSOLVED
The German national elections of September 1930 brought the first major electoral breakthrough for the National Socialists. In the previous elections of May 1928, they had been a splinter party with just 2.6 per cent of the votes (under the current constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany, they would not have qualified for entry into parliament at all) and had the Reichstag of 1928 been allowed to live out its natural lifetime, this would have remained unchanged until 1932. But in September 1930, thanks to a Reichstag dissolution conducted on the authority of the Reich President, Paul von Hindenburg, the Nazis were returned with 18.3 per cent. The number of Nazi voters rose from 810,000 to 6.4 million, the number of their deputies from twelve to 107. This was the greatest gain ever to be made by any party in German history from one Reichstag election to the next. It completely transformed the landscape of German politics.
The Prussian administration was shielded from this upheaval by the fact that there was no election in the state that year. The Prussian Landtag of 1928 remained in session and was allowed, like all its predecessors, to live out its four-year term. Within the state legislature, the Nazis remained a small splinter party. But there were many auguries of danger. Most importantly, it now became impossible for the Prussian state administration and the German national government to collaborate in addressing the threat posed by the extreme right. Under the SPD-led national government of Hermann Müller (1928–30), the German and the Prussian administrations had agreed on the need to counter the threat posed by the National Socialist movement. The means of doing so were provided by the Weimar constitution, which expressly forbade public servants to engage in political activity of any kind on behalf of a group deemed to be anti-constitutional. On 25 May 1930, the Prussian government issued an order making it illegal for Prussian civil servants to be members of the NSDAP or the Communist Party (KPD). Braun urged his colleagues in the national government to follow suit with a federal prohibition. The SPD Reich Interior Minister Carl Severing agreed and preparations were put in train to have the Nazis banned as an anti-constitutional organization. Had this measure succeeded, it would have enabled the cabinet to prevent the infiltration of government bodies (including the German army) by card-carrying National Socialists. Action could also have been taken against the Thuringian state government, where the appointment of the National Socialist Heinrich Frick to the interior ministry had opened the door to a rapid infiltration of the bureaucracy by Nazis.57
Things changed after the September elections. Heinrich Brüning, Müller’s successor as chancellor, dropped the idea of a ban, stating publicly that it would be fatal to make the mistake of regarding the NSDAP as a threat comparable to the Communist Party. He continued to play down the threat posed by the Nazis, even after the discovery in 1931 of a cache of documents belonging to an SA leader that contained plans for a violent overthrow of the Weimar regime and lists of death sentences to be carried out thereafter. Brüning’s long-term aim was to replace the Weimar constitution with something closer to the old imperial one. This goal could be achieved only if the left were disabled and pushed out of politics. Brüning planned to dislodge the SPD from their Prussian stronghold by merging the office of Prussian minister-president with that of Reich chancellor – a return to the Bismarckian model of 1871. At the same time, Brüning aimed to exclude the Social Democrats from the exercise of political power altogether through the creation of an integrated right-wing power bloc that would incorporate the Nazis in a subordinate role.
In pursuit of this objective, the Brüning administration directly obstructed the efforts of the Prussian government to neutralize the Nazi movement. In December 1931, Albert Grzesinski, police president of Berlin, a former interior minister of Prussia, and one of the most energetic defenders of democracy against extremism, persuaded Otto Braun to have Adolf Hitler arrested. But Brüning refused to allow the arrest to go ahead. The Prussians were informed that if they attempted to deport Hitler, Reich President Hindenburg would countermand the order using an emergency decree that had already been drawn up for the purpose. On 2 March 1932, Prussian Minister-President Otto Braun sent Heinrich Brüning a 200-page dossier analysing in detail the activities of the NSDAP and demonstrating that the party was a seditious organization dedicated to undermining the constitution and overthrowing the republic. Accompanying the dossier was a letter informing the chancellor that a Prussia-wide prohibition of the SA was imminent. Only now, under pressure, did Brüning respond by urging Hindenburg to support nationwide action against the Nazis. The result was the emergency decree of 13 April 1932 banning all National Socialist paramilitary organizations throughout the Reich.
This was a victory of sorts. In a limited way, the Prussian state was fulfilling its promise as the bulwark of democracy in the Weimar Republic. But the position of the republican coalition remained extremely fragile. It seemed reasonable to assume that the millions who had voted Nazi in the national elections of September 1930 might well do so again at the next Prussian election of 1932. The size of the problem was made clear in February 1931, when a loose alliance of right-wing parties – including the DNVP and the Nazis – secured the introduction of a plebiscite proposing the dissolution of the Prussian Landtag. When the plebiscite went to the polls in August 1931, it received the support of no fewer than 9.8 million Prussians, with a marked concentration in the agrarian eastern provinces – not enough to secure dissolution, but worrying none the less.58 In many areas new recruits were still streaming to the Nazi Storm Troopers, despite the government ban on their activities – in Upper and Lower Silesia, the numbers of (now clandestine) SA members jumped from 17,500 in December 1931 to 34,500 in July 1932.59 Street violence remained a problem, as Nazis, Communists, police and men of the Reichsbanner, a republican militia, slugged it out on the streets with blackjacks, brass knuckles and firearms.60
By the spring of 1932, as preparations got under way for the next state elections, it was clear that the result would leave the Prussian government without a democratic majority. The Prussian elections of 24 April 1932 confirmed the worst fears of the beleaguered republicans. In an election marked by an exceptionally high rat
e of participation (81 per cent), the Nazis weighed in with 36.3 per cent of the popular vote. The main victim of this success was the DNVP (whose share shrank to 6.9 per cent) and the liberal DDP and DVP, which collapsed into splinter parties controlling 1.5 per cent each. The Communists registered their best result to date, with 12.8 per cent. A curious interregnum thus ensued: under the revised procedural regulations of the Prussian Landtag, the right-wing anti-republican opposition could not accede to power because it was incapable of mustering a majority – a coalition with the Communists was out of the question. So the SPD-led government coalition under Otto Braun remained nominally in office, though it was unable to command a majority and was thus dependent on its emergency powers. On 14 July 1932, the annual state budget had to be passed by emergency decree. Democratic Prussia had lost its mandate.
At the national level, too, there were ominous political developments with far-reaching consequences for the state of Prussia. By the spring of 1932, the conservatives in President Hindenburg’s entourage – and the president himself – had lost faith in Brüning. He had made no progress against the Social Democrats in Prussia. He had also done nothing to integrate the right into a conservative bloc capable of driving the left out of politics. In the presidential elections of 10 April 1932, to Hindenburg’s profound consternation, the right-wing parties all put forward their own candidates, leaving the Centre Party and the Social Democrats to vote the 84-year-old incumbent back into office. Hindenburg, once a celebrated figurehead of the nationalist right, had become the candidate of socialists and Catholics.61 Nothing could better have demonstrated the failure of Brüning’s plans to prepare the way for a conservative restoration. Hindenburg was thus in an ill humour when his attention was drawn to legislation under preparation by the Brüning government to partition a number of financially unviable East-Elbian estates and parcel them out as smallholdings for the unemployed. For Hindenburg, himself a landowner with numerous close connections in the Junker milieu, this amounted to agrarian Bolshevism.62 Brüning had no majority in the Reichstag and he had forfeited the support of the President. On 30 May 1932, he drew the consequences and resigned.
Brüning’s departure removed the last semblance of a functioning Weimar democracy. What replaced him was a junta of ultra-conservatives determined to dismantle the republican system without delay. Hindenburg appointed the new chancellor, Franz von Papen, on 1 June 1932. Papen was a Westphalian nobleman and landowner, an old friend of the president, and a man of truly reactionary instincts. The most influential figure in the cabinet was the Reichswehr minister Kurt von Schleicher, a seasoned intriguer who had persuaded the President to appoint Papen. Another key player was Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm von Gayl. Gayl, Papen and Schleicher disagreed on a number of tactical issues, but they were all enthusiastic exponents of a conservative ‘new state’ that would do away with political parties and cut back the powers of elected assemblies at every level. They also agreed that the time had come to roll back the republican system.
The first step was to appease the Nazis and win them over to collaboration on terms acceptable to the conservatives. Hitler had long been calling for a further Reichstag dissolution and on 4 June, only three days after his appointment, Chancellor von Papen secured a decree of dissolution from the President. Ten days later, he suspended the nation-wide ban on the SS and SA in return for a promise from Hitler that the Nazi Reichstag fraction would not oppose his continuation in office or vote down his emergency decrees.63 The ‘integration of the right’ had begun.
Prussia was next on the list. Kurt von Schleicher, the most influential figure in the camarilla around Reich President Paul von Hindenburg, had long been in favour of using presidential emergency powers to do away with the Prussian government by transferring its responsibilities to the national executive.64 In a cabinet meeting of 11 July 1932, the new interior minister, Wilhelm Freiherr von Gayl, called for what he described as a ‘final solution’ of the Prussian problem:
The young, ever larger and more inclusive circles of the Adolf Hitler movement must, in order to render the forces of the nation useful to the reconstruction of the people, free itself from the chains that were laid upon it by Brüning and Severing and must be supported in the victorious struggle against international Communism. [… ] In order to free the way for [this] task and in order to strike a blow against the Socialist-Catholic coalition in Prussia, the dualism between the Reich and Prussia must be eliminated once and for all through the removal of the Prussian government.65
Since Gayl had already agreed these points in separate meetings with Papen and Schleicher, his proposals went uncontested. Five days later, on 16 July, Papen informed his cabinet colleagues that he had a ‘blank cheque’ from the Reich President to proceed against Prussia.66
While the plans of the presidential clique matured, the Nazis were making the fullest use of the opportunities created by Papen’s suspension of the ban against the SS and the SA. From 12 June, Nazi Storm Troops swarmed back on to the streets in search of a final reckoning with the Communists. There was a wave of street violence. The mayhem reached a high point in Altona, a busy harbour and manufacturing town adjoining Hamburg, but situated within the Prussian province of Holstein. Here, on the ‘Bloody Sunday’ of 17 July 1932, the Nazis mounted a provocative procession through the working-class (and largely Communist) quarter of the town. In the mêlée that followed, eighteen were killed – most by police gunfire – and over 100 wounded. Papen and his colleagues saw their moment. Arguing that the Prussian government had failed in its duty to impose law and order within its territory – a fantastically cynical charge, given that it was Papen himself who had suspended the ban on the paramilitary organizations – the chancellor secured from Hindenburg an emergency decree on 20 July 1932 deposing the government of Minister-President Otto Braun and replacing the Prussian ministers with ‘commissary’ agents of the national executive.67 Albert Grzesinski, his deputy president of police in Berlin, Bernhard Weiss, and Marcus Heimannsberg, the Centre Party man who had risen through the ranks to a senior post in the service, were all imprisoned and then released when they undertook to withdraw peacefully from their official duties. A state of emergency was declared in Berlin.
The SPD leadership responded with profound passivity and resignation to this utterly illegal manoeuvre. It had been known for some weeks that an action of this kind was being prepared, but no attempt was made to plan or organize resistance. In December 1931, the Social Democrats had formed a defence organization called the Iron Front, consisting of a militia called the Reichsbanner, various union organizations and a network of workers’ sporting clubs, but it was not mobilized or even placed on alert. Even after the events of 17 July in Altona, when the SPD in Berlin learned that a coup was imminent, nothing was done. On the contrary, at a meeting held on the day after ‘Bloody Sunday’, the party leadership agreed not to issue a call for a general strike and not to authorize armed resistance. This was encouraging, to say the least, for Papen and his co-conspirators, who could now be fairly sure that the coup would pass without serious opposition.
The reasons for this regrettable lethargy are easy enough to discern. The Prussian Social Democrats and their coalition allies were already demoralized by their failure to assemble a majority in the Landtag after the state elections of April 1932. As principled democrats, they felt politically undermined by the verdict of the electorate. For a legally minded man such as Otto Braun, the move from officialdom into insurgency did not come naturally: ‘I have been a democrat for forty years,’ he told his secretary, ‘and I am not about to become a guerrilla chief.’68 Braun and many of his associates thought the centralization of the Reich and the partitioning of Prussia were inevitable in the long run – did this perhaps disincline them to take a stand over the issue of state rights, however appalled they might be by the political machinations behind the coup?69 The balance of forces was in any case stacked against the Prussian government. The call for a general strike – t
he weapon that had brought down Kapp and Lüttwitz in 1920 – would have been futile, given the high level of unemployment in 1932.
There had always been friction between the Prussian ministries and the army ministry in Berlin, and it was clear that the Reichswehr leadership did not oppose the foreclosure of Prussia. Resisting the coup might thus mean a fight between the Prussian police and the German army, and it was uncertain how police units would react. The Nazis had been quite successful in some areas in infiltrating police social networks – it was forbidden under the decree of 25 June 1930 for policemen to be active National Socialists, but the Nazis got around this by placing activists within the Association of Former Police Officers, a body of conservative outlook that was receptive to the Nazi critique of the republic and maintained multifarious links with the men still in active service.70 Had they been raised, the 200,000 paramilitaries of the republican Reichsbanner would have faced Nazi and conservative militia forces numbering over 700,000. Finally, there was the fact that the Social Democratic Minister-President Otto Braun was ill, not to mention physically and emotionally exhausted.
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