Instead, the Prussian coalition leaders looked to the German constitutional court in Leipzig, which they presumed would declare the coup illegal, and to the forthcoming national elections, which they believed would punish the conservatives around Papen for their wanton destruction of a respected republican institution. Both hopes were disappointed. In the national elections of 31 July 1932, the Nazis emerged as the strongest party in Germany, with 37.4 per cent of all votes cast. It was the party’s greatest ever performance in a free election. In a mealy-mouthed verdict, the Constitutional Court rejected the charge that the Prussian authorities had been negligent in pursuing their duties, but failed to deliver the outright condemnation of the coup that the democrats so desperately needed. The moment for a last-ditch defence of the republic had passed. ‘You only have to bare your teeth at the reds and they knuckle under,’ the Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels gloated in his diary entry for 20 July. On the following day he added: ‘The Reds are finished. [They] have missed their big chance. It will never come again.’71
The putsch against Prussia ushered in the terminal phase of the Weimar Republic. Papen, Schleicher and the ‘cabinet of barons’, a team of conservative technocrats of noble lineage who were virtually unknown to the wider German public, began to tighten the screws. Vorwärts!, the moderate daily paper of the SPD, was banned twice, and official warnings were issued to the left-liberal Berliner Volkszeitung.72 There was also a small but significant adjustment to Prussian judicial practice. In the province of Hanover and the Cologne court district, the guillotine was still used for judicial executions. However, as Reich Commissioner for Prussia, Papen ordered on 5 October 1932 that the use of the guillotine – a device bearing the imprint of the French Revolution – be discontinued. In its place, state executioners were to use the older, Germanic and ‘Prussian’ hand-held axe. Here was a clear signal of Papen’s intention to ‘roll back’ the French Revolution, of which the Social Democrats were the ideological heirs, and annul its historical consequences.73 Small wonder that some among the Nazi leadership feared the Papen government would ‘do too much and leave nothing over for us’.74
Papen’s days in government were already numbered. During the chancellorship of Heinrich Brüning, the SPD had tolerated the chancellor in order to secure the system against a Nazi challenge. But after the coup against Prussia, Papen forfeited any hope of further support from the Social Democrats. Frustrated by the intrigues of Papen and his collaborators, the Nazis, too, returned to open opposition. There was now no prospect that the Chancellor would be able to muster a majority within the new parliament. On 12 September 1932, the new Reichstag passed a vote of no confidence. The motion had the support of 512 deputies. Only forty-two deputies supported Papen. There were five abstentions. It was hardly a workable parliamentary base.
There were now two possibilities. The Papen government could once again dissolve the Reichstag and announce new elections. Then, at least, they would have three months’ time – sixty days until the election and thirty more until the new Reichstag met. Ninety days of reprieve, before the process restarted itself. German democracy had been reduced to this, the machine-like repetition of the electoral reflex at the heart of the republic, a rhythmic spasm that would eventually tear the system apart. But there was an alternative, namely the dissolution of the Reichstag without elections. There was even a precedent for this course of action in Prussian history: Bismarck’s open break with the Prussian parliament during the constitutional crisis in 1862. At that time Bismarck had succeeded in overcoming a deadlock between government and parliament by breaking the constitution and ruling without the legislature. This alternative was open to Papen and Hindenburg. Reich President Hindenburg was old enough – he was born in 1847(!) – to have lived as a young adult through the crisis of the 1860s. He was also a man of Bismarck’s own class and social background whose family must have followed these events with intense interest.
Papen considered the option of a Bismarckian coup d’état, but turned it down. It was clear that a coup would bring grave risks; it might even provoke civil war – this possibility was discussed in the national cabinet. There was also uncertainty about the attitude of the Reichswehr, whose political spokesman, Kurt von Schleicher, was fast emerging as the chancellor’s rival. Papen thus opted to call yet another election for 6 November 1932. But the results of this contest, in which the Nazis shed a few percentage points but remained the strongest party, made it clear that a new Reichstag would be no more willing to tolerate Papen as chancellor than the old one had been. It was certain that the new Reichstag would use its first session to pass a vote of no confidence. Papen had to go. He was replaced on 1 December 1932 by his former friend Kurt von Schleicher. Schleicher’s first achievement as Chancellor was to get the Reichstag to agree not to meet until after Christmas. Elections during the Christmas season, and for the third time in one year, would have been too much for the German Volk to bear. The Reichstag’s Council of Elders agreed that parliament would not meet again until 31 January 1933.
By the time it did so, Franz von Papen had persuaded his old friend Hindenburg to appoint Hitler Reich chancellor. After extensive negotiations behind the scenes, Papen was able to make Hindenburg an offer he couldn’t refuse. Hitler had agreed that if he were to be appointed chancellor, he would take only two National Socialists into the cabinet. The other seven ministers would be conservatives, and Papen himself would be vice-chancellor. Hemmed in thus, Hitler would be forced to take account of the conservative camarilla.75‘Within two months,’ Papen crowed, ‘we will have pushed Hitler so far into a corner that he’ll squeak.’76
And so it was that Hitler, as Alan Bullock put it many years ago, was ‘jobbed into office by a backstairs intrigue’.77 The Nazi seizure of power had not ended. On the contrary, it had just begun. But the Nazis had a few important cards in their hands. Thanks to Papen’s putsch of 20 July 1932, the elected state government of Prussia had been replaced by a Reich Commissariat for Prussia. This meant, among other things, that Hermann Goering could occupy a ministerial post without portfolio in the national cabinet and at the same time function as commissarial Prussian minister of the interior, a post that placed him in charge of Germany’s largest police force. During the spring of 1933, Goering would make ruthless and effective use of his Prussian policing powers. In this way – and not only in this way – the extravagant manoeuvres of the conservatives around the President before January 1933 helped to smooth the way towards a National Socialist monopoly of power.
Threads of the Prussian legacy were thickly woven into the skein of intrigues that brought the Nazis to power. We see them in the attitude of the army, which stood aloof from the republic after 1930, assessing the situation as it unfolded and playing its own game. We see them in the susceptibility of President Hindenburg to the arguments of the East-Elbian landed interest. Chancellors Brüning and Schleicher both lost credit with the President as soon as they began to support land reform initiatives involving the partitioning of bankrupt East-Elbian estates. The still vivid memory of conservative hegemony in the old state of Prussia breathed life into the political fantasies of the reactionaries who helped to disable the republic.78 The corporate arrogance of the Prussian nobility and its presumption of a right to lead were also in evidence, nowhere more clearly than in Franz von Papen’s boast that he and his cabinet of barons had ‘engaged’ Hitler, as if the Nazi leader were a part-time gardener or a passing minstrel. For Hindenburg, too, a sense of the vast difference in station and dignity between himself, a field marshal of the Prussian army, and Hitler, the Austrian corporal, made it difficult to see who Hitler really was, to apprehend the threat that he represented, and to understand how easily he would dissolve convention and order in politics.
But the democrats and republicans of the state government were also Prussians, albeit from a very different social world. The energetic Albert Grzesinski hailed from Tollense near Treptow in Pomerania. Born the illegitimate son of a Berlin
housemaid, he completed his training as a panel-beater in Berlin, before making a career as a trade union official and political activist. After the revolution, Grzesinski could have taken office in the national German government – he was offered the army ministry in 1920 – but he chose instead to serve the Prussian state, both as police president in Berlin (1925–6 and 1930–32) and as interior minister (1926–30). In both roles he pursued a robustly republican personnel policy. In 1927 he oversaw the drafting of laws eliminating the special police jurisdiction of the rural estate districts. In removing this last vestige of Junker feudal privilege, Grzesinski closed a fissure in the administrative fabric of the state, completed the work of the Prussian reformers of the Napoleonic era and earned the lasting hatred of the right. As a robust anti-Nazi, Grzesinski also attracted the intense loathing of the Goebbels press, which repeatedly (and erroneously) denounced him as a ‘Jew in a Jewish Republic’.79 In December 1931 he worked on a deportation order expelling Hitler from Prussia, only to find it blocked by the national government under Brüning. In a widely noticed speech in Leipzig at the beginning of 1932, Grzesinski declared it ‘lamentable’ that ‘the foreigner Hitler’ should be allowed to negotiate with the Reich government, ‘instead of being chased away with a dog whip’. Hitler did not forget or forgive these words and Grzesinski wisely fled Germany in 1933, first for France and later for New York, where he earned his living once again as a panel-beater.80 Here was a career driven by a deep commitment, not only to democracy as such, but to the specific historical calling of the Prussian state and its institutions.
The same can be said for the man who served at the helm of the Prussian state until 1932, Minister-President Otto Braun. The son of a low-ranking Königsberg railway employee, Braun joined the Social Democratic Party in 1888, when it was still illegal in Bismarck’s Prussia. He won notice and respect for his work among landless rural East-Elbian labourers and the sharpness of his editorial pen. He had held a seat in the old Prussian Landtag, one of a small band of Social Democrat deputies who managed to squeeze through the barriers of the three-class franchise. As a champion of the rural proletariat, Braun was the antitype of the old-Prussian agrarian elite whose political hegemony he helped to overthrow in 1918–19. Yet he was as emphatically and unmistakably Prussian as they. His endless appetite for work, his fastidious attention to detail, his dislike of posturing, and his profound sense of the nobility of state service were all attributes from the conventional catalogue of Prussian virtues. Even his authoritarian style of management, which earned him the nickname ‘the red tsar of Prussia’, could be construed as an ancestral Prussian trait. ‘A Social Democrat like Otto Braun,’ the conservative journalist Wilhelm Stapel observed in 1932, ‘is, for all the anti-Prussianism of his party, more a Prussian than a German. His demeanour in office is that of the Junker who leaves an ungrateful king to his own devices and “grows his own cabbage”.’81 Braun even became a passionate hunter, a pastime he shared with Reich President Paul von Hindenburg. The two men hunted in adjacent areas during the season and developed a comfortable personal intimacy that allowed them to exchange views on the key political issues of the day.82 Here again was evidence of the curious affinity between the Social Democratic Party elite and the Prussian state that had once been its nemesis. It is striking that SPD leaders of this era found it far easier to handle the responsibilities and risks of state power in Prussia than they did in the German Reich.
55. Otto Braun, Prussian minister-president. Portrait by Max Liebermann, 1932.
We might thus say that on 20 July 1932, the day of the putsch, the old Prussia destroyed the new. Or, to put it more precisely, particularist, agrarian Prussia laid an axe to the universalist, state-centred Prussia of the Weimar coalition. Traditional society, one might argue, prevailed at last over the modernizing state; the descendants of von der Marwitz triumphed over the spirit of Hegel. But this metaphorical antinomy, though it certainly captures part of the meaning of what happened in the summer of 1932, is perhaps too neat. The men of the putsch against Prussia were hardly Junkers of the classic type. Papen was a Westphalian Catholic, Wilhelm von Gayl a Rhinelander – both were, in this sense, ‘marginal Prussians’.83 Even Kurt von Schleicher, though the son of a Silesian officer, was an untypical figure, a political intriguer from outside the provincial landowning elite; his politics, a hybrid blend of authoritarian corporatism and constitutionalism, remain difficult to pigeon-hole.84All three men pursued a politics of the nation, not of the Prussian state and certainly not of the Prussian province.
Hindenburg, the man at the centre of events in 1932, is a complex case. As an East-Elbian estate-owner and celebrated commanding officer, Hindenburg appeared to embody the Prussian tradition. But his life was formed by the forces that unified the German Reich. He was eighteen when he fought at Königgraätz during the Austrian war of 1866. He hailed from the province of Posen, an area of heightened nationalist antagonism between Germans and Poles. Having returned from retirement at the beginning of the First World War, he used his role at the apex of the German forces on the eastern front to challenge and hollow out the authority of the Prussian-German civilian executive. He blackmailed the Kaiser, to whom he professed the deepest personal loyalty, into compliance with his projects, which included the catastrophic policy of unconditional submarine warfare – a provocative and futile campaign that brought the United States into the war and doomed Germany to defeat at the hands of her enemies. One by one, he picked off the Kaiser’s closest allies – including Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg – and drove them out of politics. This was not the one-off conscientious objection of a Seydlitz or a Yorck – it was systematic insubordination born of vast ambition and an utter disregard of any interest or authority outside the military hierarchy that he himself dominated. At the same time, Hindenburg deliberately cultivated the national obsession with his own person, projecting the image of an indomitable Germanic warrior that overshadowed the increasingly marginal figure of the Emperor-king.
Although Hindenburg was among those who urged William II to abdicate and flee to Holland in November 1918, he subsequently shrouded himself in the mantle of a principled monarchism. Later again (on ascending to the office of Reich president in 1925 and on his reappointment in 1932), he put aside his monarchist convictions to swear a solemn oath to the republican constitution of the German Empire. In the last days of September 1918, Hindenburg urgently pressed the German civilian government to initiate ceasefire negotiations, yet he later disassociated himself entirely from the resulting peace, leaving the civilians to carry the responsibility and the opprobrium. On 17 June 1919, when the government of Friedrich Ebert was deliberating over whether to accept the terms of the Versailles Treaty, Hindenburg conceded in writing that further military resistance would be hopeless. Yet only a week later, when President Ebert called the Supreme Command for a clear formal decision in support of acceptance, the field marshal contrived to be absent from the telephone room during the call, leaving his colleague Wilhelm Groener to play the ‘bête noire’ (as Hindenburg himself put it).85 Hindenburg went even further: in perhaps the most mythopoeic moment of a myth-saturated career, he claimed in November 1919 before the commission investigating the causes of the German defeat that the German armies in the field had not been vanquished by the enemy powers, but by a cowardly ‘stab in the back’ from the home front – this conceit would haunt the republic throughout its short life, tainting the new political elite with intimations of treachery and betrayal of the nation.
As Reich president after 1925, Hindenburg developed – despite all the social distance between them – an unlikely friendship with the conscientious Social Democratic Prussian Minister-President Otto Braun. In 1932, when Hindenburg stood for re-election to the presidency, Braun endorsed the old man warmly as ‘the embodiment of calm and consistency, of manly loyalty and devotion to duty for the whole people’.86 Yet in 1932, presented with the schemes of the conservative camarilla, Hindenburg abandoned his
erstwhile friend without, as it seems, the slightest compunction, withdrawing from his solemn constitutional oaths of 1925 and 1932 to make common cause with the sworn enemies of the republic. And then, having publicly declared that he would never consent to appoint Hitler to any post more elevated than minister of postal services, Hindenburg levered the Austrian Nazi leader into the German chancellery in January 1933. The field marshal had a high opinion of himself and he doubtless sincerely believed that he personified a Prussian ‘tradition’ of selfless service. But he was not, in truth, a man of tradition. He was not in any deterministic sense a product of the old Prussia, but rather of the flexible power politics that fashioned the new Germany. As a military commander and later as Germany’s head of state, Hindenburg broke virtually every bond he entered into. He was not the man of dogged, faithful service, but the man of image, manipulation and betrayal.
PRUSSIA AND THE THIRD REICH
On 21 March 1933, the Garrison Church at Potsdam provided the setting for a ceremony marking the inauguration of the ‘new Germany’ under Adolf Hitler. The occasion was the opening of the new Reichstag following the national elections of 5 March 1933. It was a festivity that would usually have been conducted in the Reichstag building itself. But on 27 February the Dutch leftist Marinus van der Lubbe had torched the building, reducing the main chamber to a blackened ruin. Built by Frederick William I in 1735, the Garrison Church was an eloquent memorial to Prussia’s military history. Mounted on the church tower was a weather vane bearing the initials FWR and the iron silhouette of a Prussian eagle aspiring towards a gilded sun. Trumpets, flags and cannon, rather than angels or biblical figures, decorated the stone of the chancel. The tombs of the ‘soldier king’ Frederick William I and his illustrious son Frederick the Great lay side by side in the crypt.87 Josef Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, saw immediately the symbolic potential of this historic setting and he took personal control of the preparations, planning the event in painstaking detail as a propaganda spectacle. After all, as he noted in a diary entry of 16 March 1933, this was the moment when the ‘new state’ inaugurated by Hitler’s appointment to the chancellorship would ‘present itself symbolically for the first time’.88
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