Hitler

by Volker Ullrich

  Ever more frequently he used the word “annihilating,” first directed against the SPD, then against the “reactionaries” and finally against France as our arch-enemy and Russia as the hotbed of Bolshevism. When he was part of the government, he said, he would insist that Germany put down all of these enemies with the help of England, Italy and America.

  When Brüning asked Hitler how he intended to keep Germany solvent, given that the mere news of the NSDAP’s electoral triumph had led to a flight of foreign capital from the country, Hitler simply kept on talking. “One thought flashed through my mind: Mussolini,” Brüning recalled. Although Brüning and Hitler parted amicably, it was clear that involving the NSDAP in the government was out of the question, although Brüning refused to categorically rule out a right-wing coalition in the future.54

  “Late at night the boss and Frick return from Brüning,” Goebbels confided to his diary. “We’re staying in opposition. Thank God…Hitler seems to have made quite an impression with Br[üning]. He was very happy.”55 But in truth, Hitler had come away wounded from the meeting. The chancellor had made it clear that he did not take Hitler seriously as a politician, thus prodding Hitler’s weak spot, his inferiority complex.56 For the next year, Hitler avoided any further encounter with Brüning, and he set his party on a course of vehement opposition to the government cabinet.

  Compensating for the affront was the attention Hitler now received as the rising star of German politics. Electoral triumph had catapulted the Führer into the centre of public interest. “You have no idea how the situation of the movement and H[itler] has literally changed overnight, since the night of the election,” Hess told his parents. “We’ve suddenly become ‘acceptable’ in polite society. People who would previously have given H a wide berth now suddenly have to talk with him. The domestic and foreign press is beating down our doors.”57

  Several days after the election, Hitler offered Ernst Hanfstaengl the post of NSDAP foreign press officer. Because of Hanfstaengl’s connections to the Anglo-Saxon world in particular, Hitler told him, he could “provide the party with a valuable service.”58 Hanfstaengl accepted the offer and began building up contacts to representatives of the foreign press. In the latter half of September and the first half of October, Hitler gave a series of interviews to the Daily Mail, The Times and papers belonging to William Randolph Hearst’s U.S. news empire. In them, he sought to dissipate the fears that his party’s electoral success had raised among Germany’s former enemies. Hitler presented himself as a patriotic politician who knew the value of rational argument and whose only goal was to find a peaceful way of relieving Germany of the burdens placed upon it by the Treaty of Versailles and the Young Plan. The alternative to the necessity of revising these agreements, Hitler argued, was the Bolshevisation of Germany, which could not be in the interest of the Western powers. Much like Rothermere, Hitler claimed that his movement represented a “Young Germany” that wanted only to coexist peacefully with other nations. This younger generation, Hitler added, could not be held responsible for the First World War and therefore rejected any further “payment of tributes.” Daily Mail correspondent Rothay Reynolds subsequently wrote of the NSDAP chairman’s great modesty and seriousness, explaining to readers that Hitler’s charisma came not from his eloquence or his ability to hold an audience, as was often proposed, but rather from the depth of his convictions.59

  But not everyone was taken in by Hitler’s act. In Germany, too, there were warning voices. To many people’s surprise, on 17 October, Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann issued an impassioned “Appeal to Reason” in Berlin’s Beethoven-Saal auditorium. The call was combined with a complex analysis of the intellectual and social preconditions for National Socialism. The Hitler movement would never have reached such a level of “mass emotional conviction,” Mann asserted, if it had not been preceded by “the sense of the beginning of a new epoch and…a new spiritual situation for humanity.” People had turned away from the fundamental principles of a civil society—“liberty, equality, education, optimism and belief in progress”—and faith in reason to embrace “the forces of the unconscious, of unthinking dynamism and of pernicious creativity,” which rejected everything intellectual. Fed by those tendencies and carried by a “gigantic wave of eccentric barbarism and primitive, populist fairground barking,” National Socialism pursued “a politics of the grotesque…replete with Salvation Army allures, reflexive mass paroxysms, amusement-park chiming, cries of hallelujah and mantra-like repetition of monotonous slogans until everyone foamed at the mouth.” Mann did not just excoriate the NSDAP. He also drew political conclusions. Only the Social Democrats, he said, seemed to be capable of stopping the forward march of the National Socialists. For that reason, he believed, the “political home” of respectable, middle-class German citizens had to be the SPD. Mann’s speech was repeatedly interrupted by hostile interjections, orchestrated by Arnolt Bronnen, a former exponent of literary expressionism and friend of Bertolt Brecht who had converted to Nazism. “Our people spit on the head of Thomas Mann, who shamelessly insulted us in his lecture ‘Appeal to Reason,’ ” noted Goebbels.60

  Mann’s speech largely fell on deaf ears. The majority of middle-class Germans treated the National Socialists along the lines described by the historian Friedrich Meinecke in December 1930: “People laugh at their economic demands, and the upper ten thousand dutifully berate their rowdyism on the street, as the conventions of polite society demand; yet these very circles continue, quietly yet unabatedly, to murmur about how useful National Socialism might become.”61 Sebastian Haffner, who came from the educated upper-middle class and was finely attuned to changes in attitude, spoke in 1939 about people’s “fascination with the monster,” that “strange haze and intoxication of should-be opponents who cannot come to terms with the phenomenon” and instead “turn themselves over, increasingly defencelessly, to the magic of the horrible and the thrill of evil.”62 The erosion of the political centre, reflected in the dramatic decline in support for the DDP/DSP and the DVP, was primarily the result of the radicalisation of voters from the middle classes, whose fears of dropping down the social ladder and anti-parliamentarian longings pushed them in droves into the hands of the National Socialists. The comprehensive criticism of the Weimar Republic by intellectual spokesmen of the anti-democratic “conservative revolution”—Oswald Spengler, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Ernst Jünger, Edgar Julius Jung and Carl Schmitt—had paved the way for a movement that wanted to do away with German democracy as soon as possible.63

  Not all liberal and left-wing intellectuals were as prescient as Thomas Mann. Even an otherwise acute observer of his times like Theodor Wolff, the editor-in-chief of the Berliner Tageblatt, fooled himself about the character of the Nazi movement and its leader. On 14 September 1930, before the first election results were released, Wolff wrote an editorial warning people not to “overestimate the fairground party.” Even if the NSDAP sent a few more deputies to parliament, they remained a “society of incompetents.” Wolff added: “Most probably this will be the National Socialists’ day in the sun, and their fall from grace will follow soon. The crown worn by the kings of the rabble-rousers will slip, and Herr Hitler will fade into the sunset.”64 Carl von Ossietzky, editor-in-chief of the influential cultural magazine Die Weltbühne, was even further off the mark. Shortly before the election, he had reassured his readers: “The National Socialist movement has a noisy present, but no future at all. The rather bizarre notion that Adolf Hitler had been called to save the nation is pure mysticism.” And mysticism, Ossietzky predicted, could intoxicate people, but never satisfy them in the long run.65 When the outcome of the election had proved him wrong, Ossietzky called for the Brüning government to be dismissed. “Brüning has made fascism something big,” Ossietzky wrote. “It’s better to have an openly right-wing government than a prolongation of Brüning’s. This pointy-nosed man with a face like parchment, this caricature of piety with his Iron Cross First Class dangling
from his rosary, must simply disappear.”66 Ossietzky was equally insulting towards Hitler, calling him a “half-insane rascal,” a “pathetic dunderhead,” a “nowhere fool” and a “big mouth.”67 But attempts to depict the NSDAP leader as ridiculous could not combat the phenomenon of Adolf Hitler. Nor did they undermine the tendency of his supporters to see him as the national saviour.

  It was common in left-wing circles to think that, if the Nazis ever got a share of power, they would soon be undone by their own incompetence. A remarkable exception was the dramatist Ernst Toller, who had served five years in prison for participation in the Munich Soviet Republic. “Reich Chancellor Hitler is waiting just outside the gates of Berlin,” Toller wrote in Die Weltbühne on 7 October 1930, warning against the dangerous illusion that the Nazis would bankrupt themselves if allowed to rule for a brief period. One should not underestimate Hitler’s “will to power and determination to keep it,” Toller cautioned. The dramatist was in no doubt that as chancellor Hitler would eradicate all democratic progress with a stroke of his pen: “Overnight, all republican civil servants, judges and police officers will be fired in favour of a reliable, fascist cadre…Hundreds of thousands of Hitlerites are waiting for jobs!” Toller also predicted that a Hitler regime would brutally terrorise socialists, communists, pacifists and the few surviving democrats, and that once he felt strong enough, the Nazi leader would even go after the trade unions. “For once there is truth to the phrase: it’s one minute to midnight,” Toller wrote.68

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  A few days after the election, Hitler was given the opportunity to spell out in public how he planned to come to power and what he would do after he did. On 23 September, a Reich court in Leipzig began hearing a case concerning three young Reichswehr officers from the southern German city of Ulm who had violated an order from the Defence Ministry by establishing contact with and promoting the NSDAP. On the third day of the trial, the National Socialist lawyer for the defence called Hitler as a witness. Many people had collected outside the court building, and a number of foreign reporters had also come to see the man who had suddenly become the great hope of millions of people. “The atmosphere positively crackled with excitement,” Hanfstaengl observed, when Hitler appeared before the court and the judge began to question him.69 The judge warned him not to give an “hour-long propaganda speech”—a reference to the 1924 trial at which the Munich judge had allowed Hitler to use the courtroom as a pulpit. After calmly beginning his testimony, however, Hitler began to get excited, earning himself a reprimand. “You’re not here to make political speeches,” the judge told him again. “Calm down and keep your statements objective.”

  When asked about the NSDAP’s attitude towards state monopoly on legitimate force, Hitler answered that the Reichswehr was “the most important instrument in the restoration of the German state and the German people.” Any attempt to corrode it, he added, was insanity. If his party came to power, he told the judge, he would ensure the military, which the Treaty of Versailles had restricted to 100,000 men, would once again become a “great German people’s army.” Hitler also reiterated his promise from countless campaign speeches that he would “under no circumstances use illegal means” to achieve his ends. Whenever, as in the case of Otto Strasser, one of his subordinates had violated his instructions, he had “immediately intervened.” The NSDAP did not need to resort to violence, Hitler boasted, because after the next election, it would be Germany’s strongest party. “In this constitutional way,” Hitler said, “we will try to achieve decisive majorities in all legislative bodies so that, if we’re successful, we can remould the state in a form that corresponds to our ideas…If our movement is victorious in its entirely legal battle, there will be a German national court, there will be retribution for November 1918, and heads will roll.”70

  Hitler could hardly have stated any more clearly that he was only prepared to renounce violence until he came to power. His adherence to the Weimar constitution was a tactical ploy to gain the NSDAP political room for manoeuvre and legal protection, which it used to undermine stability and ultimately to bring down German democracy. Goebbels belied the NSDAP’s seeming support for law and order when he remarked to one of the officers on trial in Leipzig, Richard Scheringer, that Hitler’s testimony had been a “clever move.” “What do the authorities think they can do to us now?” Goebbels asked. “They were waiting to make their move. But now we’re strictly legal. Legal no matter what.”71

  In the summer of 1930, at the request of the Prussian interior minister, Carl Severing of the SPD, the political division of the Berlin police put together a memorandum on the character of the Hitler movement. It considered a wealth of material, concluding that “the NSDAP was an organisation hostile to the state that strives to undermine the constitutionally enshrined republican form of state.” Statements seemingly to the contrary by Hitler only served “to cloak [the movement] in legality so as to avoid problems with the authorities.”72 Nonetheless, in a cabinet meeting on 19 December 1930, the Reich ministers unanimously agreed that there was nothing they could do about the NSDAP. Heinrich Brüning himself warned against using “the same mistaken methods that were applied before the war against the Social Democrats.”73 The Prussian memorandum disappeared in a filing cabinet in the Reich Chancellery.

  The military leadership, which had played a decisive role in the transition to rule by presidential decree in March 1930 and which was a key element in the new political constellation, began to revise its stance towards the NSDAP. Impressed by Hitler’s vow in Leipzig to keep things legal, Reich Defence Minister Wilhelm Groener and his closest political adviser, General Kurt von Schleicher, argued that Hitler’s party should no longer be considered a revolutionary movement bent on overthrowing the state but a serious political force that would have to be involved in Germany’s future. The military hoped to co-opt the Nazis’ enthusiasm for the armed forces for their own ends and recruit party members for the national defence. Military leaders also thought that involving the NSDAP would exert a moderating, domesticating influence on the movement.74 For his part Hitler had not forgotten the lesson he had learned from the Beer Hall Putsch: that the path to power depended upon the support or at least the neutrality of the military. The way he presented himself in Leipzig was calculated to bring about a rapprochement with military leaders. In mid-January 1931, he met with the chief of the general staff, General Kurt von Hammerstein. The purpose of the meeting is clear from a short entry in Goebbels’s diary: “We have to get the army on our side.”75

  But when the new Reichstag first met on 13 October 1930, it was immediately apparent how hollow Hitler’s promise of legality was. Despite a prohibition on uniforms at parliamentary sessions in Prussia, the 107 NSDAP deputies appeared in their brown shirts and swastika armbands. Nazis also staged a provocative demonstration in Berlin’s city centre. Horrified, Count Kessler wrote: “All afternoon and evening, there were large masses of Nazis who demonstrated and smashed the windows of the [Jewish-owned] department stores Wertheim, Grünfeld, etc., in Leipziger Strasse. In the evening on Potsdamer Platz, crowds chanted ‘Germany awake,’ ‘Death to Judah’ and ‘Heil, heil.’ ” They had to be dispersed by police on horseback and in trucks.76 The fact that this “attack on shop windows” was directed almost exclusively against Jewish businesses suggests that it was a coordinated act, not a spontaneous outburst of public sentiment.77 In interviews with the foreign press, Hitler distanced himself from the unrest, calling it the work of “rowdies, shoplifters, plunderers and Communist provocateurs” and claiming that his movement had nothing to do with it.78 Hitler’s denials were transparent lies. In his response to a speech in the Reichstag by Gregor Strasser, the Bavarian SPD deputy Wilhelm Hoegner said the events of 13 October had belied the Nazis’ promises to stay within the bounds of legality: “We do not believe that yesterday’s wolves have transformed themselves overnight into pious lambs watched over by peaceful shepherds.”79

  Although as the second most
powerful faction the NSDAP was represented in the Reichstag presidium and on all parliamentary committees, their attitude from the very beginning of the legislative period was one of obstructionism. The party’s only aim was to bring the Reichstag to a standstill by subverting negotiations, filing frivolous motions and submitting nonsensical queries.80 At the same time Goebbels pressed ahead with extra-parliamentary actions. In early December, he organised the disruption of the world premiere of the film All Quiet on the Western Front, based on Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 anti-war novel, in the Mozartsaal cinema on Berlin’s Nollendorfplatz. “After 10 minutes, the cinema already resembled a madhouse,” Goebbels noted in his diary. “The police were powerless, and the embittered crowd turned on the Jews…‘Jews out!’ they cried. ‘Hitler is at the gates.’ The police sympathised with us…The screening was cancelled, as was a second one. We’ve won.” On 12 December, after further protests against the film, authorities banned it from being shown. It was the first act of capitulation in the face of Nazi terror. “The National Socialist street is dictating behaviour to the government,” Goebbels crowed.81

  The Reichstag changed its procedural rules in an attempt to break the National Socialists’ policy of obstruction, so on 10 February 1931 the NSDAP faction, along with forty-one delegates from the DNVP and four from the rural protest party, the Landvolk, began boycotting parliamentary sessions. NSDAP faction leader and Reichstag vice-president Franz Stöhr declared that his party would only rejoin the “Young [Plan] Parliament” if it saw a possibility “to flout a particularly pernicious measure by the majority Reichstag, which is hostile to the people.”82 On 26 March, the Reichstag went into recess; it would not reconvene until October.