While Hindenburg was in Neudeck, Brüning’s enemies continued to “burrow away” at the ground beneath his feet.87 Goebbels’s diaries reveal how systematically they went about their work: “The crisis is going according to script…A series of calls with Hitler. He is very satisfied” (14 May). “Everyone is celebrating Pentecost. Except Brüning who’s beginning to wobble. Time to give him a push” (18 May). “Mission Schleicher going well. Brüning completely isolated. Desperately looking for new ministers. Schleicher refused Defence. He’s going the whole hog” (19 May). “Schleicher continues to undermine. A list of ministers is being discussed…Poor Brüning. He’s on short rations” (20 May).88 On 25 May, Werner von Alvensleben, a Schleicher intimate who served as a contact with the National Socialists, reported that Brüning would be “out the door” in three days’ time. He also had a finished cabinet list with the name of the new chancellor: Franz von Papen.89
In Neudeck, Hindenburg was exposed to the influence of his extremely conservative fellow aristocrats, who encouraged the idea of firing Brüning. On 20 May, Brüning’s cabinet had drawn up a draft of an emergency decree empowering the Reich commissioner for eastern assistance, Hans Schlange-Schöningen, to buy bankrupt estates at compulsory auctions and release them for settlement by farmers. The main lobbying organisation for the large landholders, the Reichslandbund, was infuriated by what it saw as “agrarian Bolshevism” and kicked up a storm with Hindenburg. When Otto Meissner presented him with the draft emergency decree on 25 May, Hindenburg refused to sign it.90 Moreover, he communicated via his state secretary his “urgent wish” to Brüning that “the cabinet should be reformed and moved to the right.”91 This was tantamount to asking for his resignation.
When Hindenburg returned to Berlin on 28 May, the die was already cast. In a decisive conversation on the morning of 29 May, Brüning told Hindenburg that he could no longer put up with the “undermining of himself and the government from unqualified quarters, in particular the Reichswehr.” In order to continue his work, Brüning said, he needed “certain guarantees” and above all “a new demonstration of trust by the Reich president.”92 Hindenburg brusquely rejected this and told Brüning he would no longer authorise the government to draft emergency decrees. The break was complete. Around noon on 30 May, Brüning handed in his resignation request. His final meeting with Hindenburg lasted three and a half minutes.93 That was how coldly Hindenburg dismissed the man who had helped him get re-elected only seven weeks previously. Brüning’s intimate Hermann Pünder remarked that, even though Brüning did not let it show, he was “internally and justifiably outraged.”94 He also rejected Hindenburg’s request that he serve as Germany’s future foreign minister.
“Yesterday the bomb went off,” Goebbels crowed. “At 12 o’clock, Brüning handed in the resignation of his entire cabinet to the old man. With that the system has collapsed.”95 By contrast, the democrat Count Kessler reacted to the news of Brüning’s dismissal with horror: “Backroom interests have got their way as in the time of [Wilhelm II],” Kessler complained on 30 May. “Today marks the beginning of the end for the parliamentary republic.”96 And indeed the fall of Brüning represented a watershed. His departure, as historian Heinrich August Winkler pointed out, signalled the end of the “moderate phase of presidential rule.”97 At the same time, it is also true that while in office Brüning had helped undermine parliamentary democracy and bolster the power of the Reich president and the Reich military leadership by largely removing the Reichstag from the process of political decision-making. To some extent, the chancellor fell victim to a development he himself had partially initiated.
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Late in the afternoon of 30 May, as part of his consultations with the leaders of the various political parties, Hindenburg received Hitler and Göring. The NSDAP chairman declared his willingness to engage in “productive cooperation” with a Reich government under Franz von Papen, but he also reiterated the conditions he had negotiated with Schleicher: a quick dissolution of the Reichstag and the lifting of the ban on the SA.98 He received assurances on both counts. Goebbels noted with satisfaction: “Discussion with the old man went well…SA ban is gone. Uniforms allowed and Reichstag dissolved. That’s the most important thing. The man is Papen. That’s irrelevant. Elections, elections! Straight to the people! We’re all very happy.”99 The Nazi leadership considered it a given that the new government was nothing more than an interim solution. They assumed that they would achieve such an overwhelming result in the next Reichstag elections that Hindenburg would have no choice but to appoint Hitler the leader of the government. Local elections in Oldenburg on 29 May and Mecklenburg-Schwerin on 5 June, in which the NSDAP took 48.4 and 49 per cent of the vote respectively and won a majority of seats in the two Landtage,100 strengthened the conviction that they would achieve a similar triumph in the next national poll. “We have to divorce ourselves from Papen as soon as possible,” Goebbels was already writing in his diary on 6 June.101
The new chancellor Franz von Papen, an old-school gentleman from a venerable Westphalian aristocratic family, was a Centre Party backbencher in the Prussian Landtag who had never made much of a political name for himself. He had served as a battalion commander on the Western Front during the First World War, however, which recommended him in Hindenburg’s eyes. And Papen’s lack of political experience was a major advantage in the view of Schleicher, who pulled Papen’s name out of a hat in the hope the new chancellor would be all the more malleable as Schleicher increased his own political power. Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk would later recall: “He [Schleicher] wanted to pull the political strings and needed a ‘mouthpiece chancellor,’ who was able to speak but did not have a political will of his own.”102 In the new cabinet the political general, who had previously kept his manoeuvring behind the scenes, assumed the role of minister of defence and entered the public spotlight for the first time. Baron Konstantin von Neurath, previously ambassador to Britain, became foreign minister; Baron Wilhelm von Gayl was made interior minister; and the director of the East Prussian Land Society, Baron Magnus von Braun, was promoted to minister of food and agriculture. The Finance Ministry fell to Krosigk, a count who had been ministerial director there since 1929. The Postal Services and Transport Ministry went to Baron Paul von Eltz-Rübenach, previously president of the Reichsbank directorship in Karlsruhe, and the Labour Ministry was taken over by Hugo Schäffer, a former director of the Krupp concern and president of the Reich Insurance Office. Franz Gürtner, who had protected Hitler in his capacity as Bavarian minister of justice, assumed control of the Reich Justice Ministry. The only cabinet member retained from the Brüning government was Economics Minister Hermann Warmbold. All in all, deeply conservative representatives of the landed eastern German aristocracy dominated the body, leading the SPD newspaper Vorwärts to speak, with considerable justification, of a “cabinet of barons.”103 The new government had little support across the social and political spectrum. Not only the SPD and the KPD declared their opposition: the Centre Party, who blamed Papen for the betrayal of Brüning, also withheld their support.
Papen met with Hitler for the first time on 31 May. In his 1952 memoirs, Papen recalled that Hitler had struck him more as a bohemian than as a politician. The aristocrat noticed little of the “magnetic force of attraction” often ascribed to the NSDAP chairman. “He behaved politely and modestly,” Papen wrote. Brüning and Groener’s first impression of Hitler had been markedly similar. Apparently this was a role Hitler played to win over others and lure them into a false sense of security concerning his real intentions. When asked whether he would potentially participate in a later government, Hitler became evasive. “He did not want to tie himself down before the results of the election were out,” Papen recalled. “But I could tell that he considered my cabinet an interim solution and that he would continue the fight to make his party the strongest in the land and himself chancellor.”104
Hindenburg dissolved the Reichstag as promised on 4 June. The 31st
of July was set as the date for new elections. On 16 June, the ban on the SA was lifted. Hitler’s two conditions for tolerating the Papen cabinet were thereby fulfilled. Bavarian State President Held had protested in vain at a meeting between Papen and representatives of the German states on 11 June that Hindenburg’s 13 million voters would not understand these measures. Held called them the equivalent of a “carte blanche for murder, manslaughter and the worst sort of terrorising of everyone who thought differently [than the Nazis].”105 Many people’s worst fears had come true: violence escalated to previously unseen levels as National Socialists now engaged in bloody street battles on a daily basis. “We are getting closer and closer to civil war,” Harry Kessler observed. “Day for day, Sunday for Sunday, this is a continuous St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.”106 One of the worst clashes occurred on 17 July in Altona just outside Hamburg. After conferring with Carl Severing, the SPD police president had granted permission for 7,000 SA men to march provocatively through the left-wing districts of the city. Seventeen people died, and many were seriously wounded in the ensuing violence. “The shock at this new bloody Sunday is widespread and deep,” wrote Kessler.107
The escalation in violence the Papen government had helped bring about served as an excuse to realise one of its most important aims, namely to chip away at the republican “Prussian bulwark.” Despite the electoral debacle of 24 April, the fragile coalition between the SPD, the Centre and the German State parties had remained in office. Nonetheless, by June 1932, the once-so-powerful SPD state president, Otto Braun, had resigned and passed on his duties to his former deputy, Welfare Minister Heinrich Hirtsiefer of the Centre Party. Rumours were already swirling that a Reich commissioner could be appointed for Prussia. In the short term, Papen favoured a different solution. On 6 June, he called upon the president of the Prussian Landtag, the National Socialist Hanns Kerrl, to begin “without delay” trying to form a new coalition between the NSDAP, the Centre Party and the DNVP.108 Negotiations quickly stalled. “No shared responsibility in Prussia either. Either total power or opposition,” Goebbels noted in his diary to summarise Hitler’s logic.109 The Centre Party was willing to accept a conservative nationalist, but not a National Socialist, as state president. In early July, attempts to form a majority government in Prussia were deemed a failure, and the Landtag went into indefinite recess.
With that the focus shifted to the second option of subjecting Prussia to Reich administration. In a Reich ministers’ conference on 11 July, Interior Minister von Gayl declared that “the psychological moment had come for a Reich intervention.” The Prussian government was concentrating exclusively on combating the Nazi movement while “insufficiently” addressing “the Communist threat.” In the protocol, Papen said that the meeting had agreed upon “deploying a Reich commissioner in Prussia.”110 On 14 July, Papen, Gayl and State Secretary Meissner went to Neudeck to get Hindenburg’s unconditional authorisation to carry out this planned coup. The date of the “Ordinance on the Restoration of Security and Order in the Territory of Prussia” was left open. The conspirators were waiting for a suitable excuse to have it go into force.111
That excuse was the “Bloody Sunday” in Altona, back then an exclave part of Prussia, of 17 July. The next day, Heinrich Hirtsiefer, Carl Severing and Prussian Finance Minister Otto Klepper were ordered to report to the Reich Chancellery on the morning of 20 July. Without further ado, Papen told them that Hindenburg had appointed him Reich commissioner of Prussia and had relieved the ministers of their duties. Papen added that he would personally take over the duties of Prussian state president and that he had appointed Essen Lord Mayor Franz Bracht as acting Prussian interior minister. Hirtsiefer’s and Severing’s objections that this procedure was “unheard-of” and “without precedent in history” left Papen entirely unimpressed.112 Immediately after the meeting, he declared a military state of emergency in Berlin and throughout Brandenburg province. Lieutenant General Gerd von Rundstedt, who would be promoted all the way up to general field marshal in Hitler’s Wehrmacht, was put in command. In a letter to Papen, the outgoing Prussian government officials complained and announced that they would challenge the decision in Germany’s highest court.113 That made it clear that resistance to the coup d’état would be restricted to legal means—which was tantamount to capitulation. “In Berlin everything calm,” noted Goebbels with glee. “SPD and unions completely tame. They won’t do a thing. Reichswehr entering. The swine have lost power.”114
Would the Prussian authorities have been capable of resisting? This question has been hotly debated. It is clear that if Prussian leaders had mobilised their police forces, the Papen government would have responded with the Reichswehr, and there is no doubt which side would have won that battle. Moreover, the Prussian police, especially the higher-ranking officers, were by no means as loyal to the Weimar Republic as many liked to pretend after 1945.115 Reich Banner activists were most eager to fight, and they were greatly disappointed by the passivity of the SPD leadership. “I saw Reich Banner people weeping around that time,” the Lower Silesian SPD secretary, Otto Buchwitz, later recalled. “Older functionaries threw their membership books on the ground at our feet.”116 But realistically, the Reich Banner would have been no match for the right-wing paramilitary organisations.
The most effective means of protest would probably have been a general strike. That was a possibility feared not only by the “cabinet of barons” but also within Hitler’s circles. “Is a general strike coming?” asked Goebbels. “I don’t think so, but wait and see. Feverish tension.”117 Goebbels no doubt recalled the fact that a general strike had meant the end of the Kapp–Lüttwitz putsch. But the situation in the summer of 1932 was very different from that in the spring of 1920. Back then, Germany had enjoyed full employment. In 1932, there were 6 million jobless, and all indications were that a call for strike action would have found little support. Moreover, the Prussian “coup” was not as blatantly unconstitutional as the Kapp putsch. In 1920 right-wing conspirators tried to topple a legitimate government; in 1932, action was taken by the Reich government and Reich president against a state government that had lost its parliamentary majority.
Thus it is hard to fault Social Democrats and trade unions for not wanting to risk civil war. They can, however, be blamed for sitting back and letting things take their course. Abandoning the bastion of Prussia without resistance demoralised the supporters of democracy and encouraged their enemies. Immediately after the “coup,” the new masters began to “cleanse” the Prussian civil service of democrats, and the National Socialists would continue this process immediately after taking power. The historian Karl-Dietrich Bracher rightly pointed out that the “Prussia coup” was a prelude to the Nazi assumption of power on 30 January 1933.118 On 25 October 1932, Germany’s highest court delivered its verdict. It could hardly have been more contradictory. On the one hand, the judges upheld the Reich president’s right to appoint Reich commissioners. On the other, they declared the complete exclusion of the Prussian government unconstitutional. This verdict did nothing to alter the new power relations. The former Prussian government was rehabilitated, in a formal sense, but it led little more than a shadow existence alongside the Reich commissioner.119
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Hitler began campaigning in early July 1932. He had already set the basic tenor at a conference of Gauleiter in Munich on 8 June, where he declared that 31 July had to be turned into “a general reckoning by the German people with the policies of the past fourteen years and those responsible for them.”120 The main slogans promoted by the Reich propaganda directorship were “Germany awaken! Give Adolf Hitler power!” and “Down with the system, its parties and its exponents!”121 In mid-July Hitler made a shellac recording distributed at a price of 5 marks by the Eher Verlag.122 After that, he went on his third flying tour, which included appearances in fifty cities all over Germany. The scenes were familiar. Tens of thousands of people waited to hear him, often for hours, wherever he went. On 1
9 July in Stralsund, people remained patient until long after midnight.123 The following evening in Bremen, Hitler’s fully illuminated aeroplane flew a couple of loops over the local football stadium before landing—this was intended to symbolise that the Führer was an enlightened deus ex machina, who was above the squabbles of political fighting.124 By the time the election marathon was over, a local newspaper in the town of Gladbek would describe Hitler as making “a tired, worn-out impression.”125 Ernst Hanfstaengl, who accompanied Hitler on his travels, would write in his memoirs of a “murderous chase from mass event to mass event, from city to city.” The Nazi chairman, Hanfstaengl recalled, was utterly exhausted: “Truth be told, we were nothing more than the corner men of a boxer and had our hands full trying to get Hitler fit again between rounds of speeches.”126
Hitler seldom said anything new. He began his speeches by sketching the general economic and political decay, which he blamed on the Weimar “system.” This was followed by a promise to get rid of “the nepotism of parties.” One of his goals, he told a crowd in Eberswalde on 27 July, was “to sweep the thirty different political parties out of Germany.”127 At that point, Hitler invoked the “miracle” of the National Socialist movement, which had grown from a handful of people to a massive organisation that would stay true to its principles instead of agreeing to “putrid compromises.” The Nazis, Hitler proclaimed, were interested in “the future of the German people,” not in parliamentary seats or ministerial positions. The NSDAP was not a party representing narrow interests or classes of people: it was a “party of the German people” whose greatest service was to have “filled millions of people with renewed hope.”128 Hitler was careful not to be too critical of the new presidential cabinet. In Tilsit Hitler told his audience on 15 July: “When my enemies say, ‘You’re providing cover for the Papen government,’ I have to say, ‘Be happy Papen is governing and not I.’ ”129
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