Hitler

by Volker Ullrich

  Between the initial election and the run-off, the idea briefly arose of Crown Prince Wilhelm running for president. In a letter to Hitler, Wilhelm II’s eldest son asked the Nazi leader for support, and Hitler apparently agreed to stand aside if Hindenburg did likewise. He may have speculated that if he helped the crown prince become president, the crown prince would appoint him German chancellor out of gratitude. This plan was predestined to fail. Hindenburg had no intention of standing aside shortly before he was certain to win re-election, and Wilhelm II vetoed the idea from his Dutch exile in Doorn. Crown Prince Wilhelm then officially endorsed Hitler.51

  In an interview with the Berlin correspondent of the Daily Express, Sefton Delmer, on 21 March, Hitler declared that he would run a campaign the likes of which the world had never seen.52 Hindenburg had declared an “Easter truce,” a moratorium on campaigning lasting from 20 March to 3 April, so by that time there was only a week left of activity before the run-off election. The lack of time, as Goebbels noted in his diary, required “completely new” methods of propaganda. The primary innovation was to charter an aeroplane so that Hitler could appear at a number of mass events every day.53 On 3 April, Hitler embarked in a Junkers D-1720 from Munich on his first “flying tour of Germany,” which would take him to more than twenty major campaign stops from the Saxon Nazi strongholds Dresden, Leipzig, Chemnitz and Plauen to Berlin and Potsdam, then via Pomerania to Lauenberg, Elbing and Königsberg in East Prussia. On 6 April, he flew back to southern Germany, appearing in Würzburg, Nuremberg and Regensburg. The following day supporters could see him in Frankfurt am Main, Darmstadt and Ludwigshafen. The day after that, he appeared in Düsseldorf, Essen and Münster, and on 9 April, the last day of campaigning, he spoke in Böblingen, Schwenningen and Stuttgart. “No one was able to avoid this wave of propaganda,” wrote Otto Dietrich, who had helped organise the flying tour. “It awakened sporting interests and spoke to the masses’ need for sensation as much as it addressed people’s political interests…It was a form of political propaganda that left even American methods in its shadow.”54

  Indeed, this new strategy would prove to be extraordinarily successful. Hitler was said to have spoken to 1.5 million people within a few days. Between 150,000 and 200,000 people attended Hitler’s speech in Berlin’s Lustgarten on 4 April—the event was also captured on sound film.55 There would be three other flying tours in 1932, and they helped popularise the Führer cult. The slogan “Hitler over Germany,” which party newspapers published in screaming headlines, suggested not only that Hitler was omnipresent: it also symbolised his claim to be above classes and parties and anticipated the coming “ethnic community.” The fact that the Nazis were the only party to follow the American model and use the aeroplane as a campaign tool also lent them an aura of visionary modernity. And the fact that Hitler never cancelled an event, even when the weather made flying risky, solidified the myth that he was a “national saviour” willing to sacrifice himself and unafraid of any danger. The audience at such events was usually kept waiting for hours, after which—in the words of historian Gerhard Paul—Hitler “would descend from the clouds in his plane like a messiah and announce his message of salvation.”56

  Hitler drove himself to complete exhaustion. “My God, how this man works himself into the ground,” remarked Winifred Wagner. “Anyone familiar with his antipathy for flying knows what a sacrifice that was for him!”57 Indeed, in contrast to the heroic legends spread, above all, by Otto Dietrich,58 Hitler was very afraid of flying—something his entourage was at pains to conceal. Delmer, the only foreign journalist to accompany Hitler on one of his flying tours, recalled how the others on board the Lufthansa plane captained by Hans Baur fawned over Hitler, trying to distract him. Hitler requited their efforts with irritated disregard. Delmer described him sitting and staring indifferently out of the window, his chin in his right hand and cotton balls in his ears, barely moving except to scratch his neck now and then. “It was an entirely new picture of Hitler for me, and a complete contrast to the glad-hand extrovert who had said goodbye to Magda Goebbels and the others at Tempelhof,” Delmer wrote. “Since that time I have travelled with many of the top statesmen of the world. But never again have I seen such a contrast between the public and the private figure as in Hitler.” As soon as the plane landed, Hitler’s demeanour abruptly changed. He straightened his back and once more assumed his “Führer posture”:

  Here he stood bareheaded, erect and unsmiling, his shoulders squared back, his mouth set in martial resolution, his hands raised to the salute. Then as the roars of the welcoming crowd swelled to a crescendo he went over to phase two of his pose. His eyes widened to show their whites and a “light” came into them. A light intended to denote kindly understanding of people’s needs, fearless confidence, the light in the eyes of a Messiah predestined to lead Germany to its place in the sun.59

  Local dignitaries usually showed up to meet Hitler’s plane. Young girls would give him bouquets of flowers, while SA bands would provide appropriate music. Frequently, Communist protestors would slow Hitler’s motorcade during the trip from the landing strip to wherever he was appearing. In the Baltic Sea port of Elbing, for example, Delmer witnessed Hitler’s bodyguards, under the command of Sepp Dietrich, jumping from their cars to beat demonstrating workers with plastic truncheons and brass knuckles.60 The police did nothing to stop them. It was an indication that the National Socialists already felt like the masters of Germany, entitled to take the law into their own hands.

  In his speeches, Hitler repeated his never-ending complaints about thirteen years of alleged financial mismanagement in Germany, combined with promises to clean up the “party gang” as soon as he came to power. It was taxing for his entourage to have to listen to the nearly identical tirades, varied only slightly to reflect where he was speaking. In Potsdam, for example, he compared the development of the NSDAP to the rise of the small state of Brandenburg which became the global power Prussia. “When we began, we were small, disdained and ridiculed, and we slowly worked our way up to become a National Socialist movement,” Hitler said. “Today we have more than 11 million people behind us. The largest organisation Germany has ever seen marches under our banner.”61

  In early April, Hitler was put in an uncomfortable position when the left-liberal newspaper Welt am Montag published a bill from the Hotel Kaiserhof under the headline “This Is How Hitler Lives.” According to the bill, Hitler and his entourage had spent 4,008 reichsmarks within ten days in March 1932. The figure was in fact exaggerated. The bills from the hotel for the years 1931 and 1932 have been preserved, and they show that Hitler and the three or four people who usually accompanied him typically spent between 606 and 829 marks for a four-day stay. For the five days between 28 April and 2 May 1932, Hitler paid 837 marks for five people and seven rooms.62 Nonetheless, the sums were considerable and stood in marked contrast to Hitler’s image as a man of the people with simple tastes who had retained his modest lifestyle. In a declaration on 7 April, the NSDAP chairman hastily declared the published bill a fake, and in his speeches, he continued to contrast himself with the “bigwigs” from the other parties as an unworldly politician who did not have any wealth of his own: “I don’t need any—I live like a bird in the wild.”63

  The results of the election announced on the evening of 10 April were less disappointing for the National Socialists than those of 13 March. Hindenburg was re-elected as expected with a 53 per cent majority, but Hitler had gained around 2 million additional ballots and increased his share of the vote to 36.8 per cent—he seems to have won over the majority of Duesterberg’s support after the latter withdrew his candidacy. Thälmann only got 10.2 per cent, after many KPD supporters boycotted the election.64 The results of the vote did nothing to calm the nerves of defenders of the Weimar Republic, however. “Yesterday Hindenburg was re-elected in Germany, but despite that success, what horrific growth of the Hitler party,” wrote Thea Sternheim from Paris. “The battle is not over yet, not by
a long shot.”65 The NSDAP leadership regained some of their former confidence. “An overwhelming victory for us…” Goebbels commented. “Hitler is entirely happy. Now we have a springboard for the Prussian elections.”66

  There were state elections on 24 April not only in Prussia, but in Bavaria, Württemberg and Anhalt as well, and voters in Hamburg were choosing a new mayor. The day after the 10 April result, Goebbels was already gearing up for the next round of polls: “14 days of election propaganda. We want to produce our masterpiece.”67 On 16 April, Hitler set off on his second flying tour, this time including the provinces, where he sparked enormous interest. “The masses stood for seven hours waiting for the Führer,” reported the Völkischer Beobachter about an event in Donauwörth in southern Bavaria.68 But Hitler concentrated his efforts on Prussia, the biggest and most important of the German states. The poll, he emphasised, would determine the destiny of Prussia, and he promised to topple the governing SPD-led coalition under Otto Braun and continue the legacy of “Friedrich the Great’s Prussia, which had been a unique model of cleanliness, order and discipline for centuries.” Prussia, Hitler thundered, had been a “standard-bearer of German freedom” in the 1813 campaign against Napoleon, and it would likewise become “a standard-bearer of the new, great social unification of the German nation.”69

  The Nazis celebrated major electoral gains in the elections of 24 April. In Prussia, they improved their share of the vote from 1.8 per cent in 1928 to 36.3 per cent, taking 162 seats and becoming the largest party in the Landtag. The coalition between the SPD, the Centre and the State Party lost their majority, but formed the acting government because the NSDAP lacked the absolute majority needed to force the election of a new state president. In Bavaria, the BVP got 32.6 per cent and just edged out the NSDAP, whose share of the vote rose from 6.1 to 32.5 per cent. In Württemberg, the Nazis received 26.4 per cent of the vote and became the strongest party, and in the Social Democratic stronghold Hamburg, the NSDAP took 31.2 per cent, surpassing the SPD’s 30.2 per cent. The best result came in Anhalt, where the party received 40.9 per cent of ballots cast.70 Yet despite these impressive results, the Nazis failed to convert their strength into positions in government in Prussia, Bavaria, Württemberg or Hamburg. Anhalt was the only place in which they succeeded in replacing the Social Democratic state president. Amidst all the euphoria over the NSDAP’s “phenomenal victory,” Goebbels’s diary betrays a certain helplessness: “What now? Something has to happen. We have to gain power. Otherwise we will triumph ourselves to death.”71

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  As was often the case, unexpected external events rather than any ingenious inspiration from Hitler came to the NSDAP’s assistance. Hindenburg and Brüning fell out because the Reich president was angry that he had been re-elected with Social Democratic and Catholic Centrist votes rather than those of right-wing nationalists for whom he felt the greatest affinity. “What an ass I was to stand a second time,” Hindenburg is reported to have remarked.72 On 11 April, when Brüning congratulated Hindenburg in the name of his cabinet, the former field marshal was visibly irritated and signalled that the German chancellor’s days were numbered.73

  The issue of a potential ban on the SA and SS worsened the mood between Hindenburg and Brüning. On 17 March, Prussian Interior Minister Carl Severing ordered the NSDAP’s and the SA’s offices in Prussia searched. The material confiscated showed that the SA had been put on high alert on the day of the 13 March election. Hitler protested against the search order but also called upon the SA and SS not to let themselves be “provoked into breaking the law.”74 At a conference in Berlin on 5 April, the interior ministers of the German states, and in particular those of Prussia and Bavaria, lobbied Reich interim Interior Minister Groener to do something about the Nazi paramilitary organisations. After much humming and hawing, Groener decided to act. In a memo to Brüning on 10 April, he suggested that Hindenburg’s re-election was an auspicious moment to rein in the “Brownshirt columns.” It took a considerable amount of persuading, but Brüning finally convinced Hindenburg that a ban was necessary, and on 13 April, the president issued an emergency decree for the “Assurance of State Authority,” which dissolved all the paramilitary organisations of the NSDAP.75

  Count Harry Kessler was surprised “that the issue could be resolved so quickly with the stroke of a pen” and that the SA and SS allowed themselves to be disarmed “as timidly as lambs.” Kessler decided that this reflected “Hitler’s weak feminine character,” which made the Nazi chairman, like Wilhelm II before him, “a big mouth with nothing to back it up when the situation turned serious.”76 Kessler could hardly have been more wrong in his assessment of both the political situation and Hitler. The National Socialists were informed about the imminent ban and had sufficient time to take counter-measures. Overnight the Brownshirts may have disappeared from Germany’s streets, but the organisational cohesion of the SA and the SS remained intact, and their members continued to be active under the general umbrella of the party. The emergency decree thus actually did little to dissolve the organisations.77 In an address on 13 April, Hitler made it clear that he saw the ban as a temporary impediment and that the cards would be reshuffled after the Landtag elections on 24 April. He therefore instructed his followers not to give “those who momentarily hold power any excuses to cancel the elections.” Hitler promised: “If you do your duty, our propaganda will redirect this attack by General Groener a thousand-fold back upon himself and his allies.”78

  Hitler knew that Hindenburg had signed the decree against his better judgement and that there was great opposition to the ban within the Reichswehr leadership. On 15 April, Hindenburg had ordered Groener to review whether Social Democratic militias like the Reich Banner Black-Red-Gold should be banned as well. The tone of Hindenburg’s order was anything but cordial, and included with it was incriminating material against the Reich Banner, which Hindenburg had been given by Army Commander-in-Chief General Kurt von Hammerstein.79 What ultimately sealed the fate of Groener—and with him that of the entire Brüning cabinet—was the fact that he lost the support of his political patron, the head of the Ministerial Bureau in the Defence Ministry, General Kurt von Schleicher. Schleicher opposed the ban because he viewed the SA street fighters as a potentially useful tool for rebuilding Germany’s military might, and he began to actively undermine Groener. Schleicher also continued to advocate tying the NSDAP to a governing coalition as a means of “taming” the party. In this he was of one mind with Hindenburg, who had long pushed for the cabinet to be expanded to the political right and who blamed Brüning for relying on the SPD to tolerate his government.80

  On 28 April, Schleicher secretly met with Hitler to discuss the conditions under which the NSDAP chairman would join or at least tolerate a governing coalition. According to Goebbels, the conversation—in which Kurt von Hammerstein also took part—went well, and agreement was reached. In May Goebbels reported that the two generals “were continuing to stir things up…Brüning and Groener must go!” At a second secret meeting on 7 May, Hitler, Schleicher, Hindenburg’s state secretary, Otto Meissner, and the president’s son, Oskar von Hindenburg, scripted the demise of the Brüning government. Goebbels summarised: “Brüning is to fall this week. The old man will revoke his trust. Schleicher is throwing himself behind that…Then there will be a presidential cabinet. The Reichstag is dissolved. The emergency laws revoked. We will be free to act and can deliver our coup de grâce.”81 Hitler had refused to join the government but he had agreed to tolerate a more right-wing, interim presidential cabinet if fresh elections were scheduled and the ban on the SA and SS lifted. Hitler could be more than satisfied with this arrangement. He had not tied himself down and still held all the trump cards. “The boss is relaxed and good-humoured,” Goebbels noted. “We’re conferring over the next election campaign. It’s going to be a huge hit.”82

  But the conspiracy did not go to plan. Brüning was able to stave off his demise by warning Hindenburg of the negative fo
reign-policy effects his dismissal would have, and by threatening to make the former field marshal’s ingratitude known to the Reichstag.83 The German parliament convened once again on 9 May. In his role as speaker for the NSDAP faction, Göring directly attacked Groener and demanded that the ban on the SA and SS be lifted. Groener delivered his rebuttal the following day, but weakened by illness and constantly distracted by jeers from Nazi deputies, he did not make a very good impression. “Unfortunately, Groener was catastrophically bad in defending his position in front of parliament,” wrote the German State Party deputy and post-war German President Theodor Heuss. “We knew he couldn’t speak off the cuff, which is why he mostly read out statements. But he was completely agitated, and his head was covered in bandages because of boils. He looked awful, tried to speak extemporaneously and was unable to finish his sentences because he was constantly interrupted.”84 After this disastrous performance, Groener had to go, and Schleicher and Hammerstein lobbied for his dismissal. “So far so good,” Goebbels joked. “If the cloak falls so does the duke.”85 On 12 May, Groener announced that he would step down as Reich defence minister. However, he wanted to stay on as interior minister. Hindenburg had departed that day for his family’s estate in East Prussian Neudeck, so the decision was postponed. To all intents and purposes, though, Groener’s career was over on 12 May, and with him the Brüning cabinet had lost its most important pillar.86