Hitler

by Volker Ullrich

  Hindenburg greeted the men and expressed his satisfaction that “the nationalist Right has finally been unified,” whereupon Papen read out the list of ministers. After being sworn in, Hitler gave a short speech in which he asked the Reich president to have faith in him and the new government.106 At around noon, the ceremony was concluded. In his diary, Goebbels wrote: “[Hindenburg] was quite moved at the end. That’s the way it should be. Now we have to win him over completely.”107 Hitler’s followers had been waiting on tenterhooks in the Hotel Kaiserhof, and when the freshly appointed chancellor returned there, to cheers from a crowd of admirers, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. “We all had tears in our eyes,” noted Goebbels. “We shook Hitler’s hand. He deserved this. Enormous celebrations.” Goebbels had not got a cabinet post, but he had received Hitler’s promise that he would be put in charge of the Education Ministry after the next election. “Right down to work,” he noted. “The Reichstag will be dissolved. New elections in four weeks. Until then I’m free of any office.”108 Later that day, Hitler gave a speech in which he thanked his party comrades for the “loyalty and devotion” that had made his political triumph possible. “The task that lies before us is massive,” he added. “We will have to be equal to it and we will be.”109

  That evening, National Socialists celebrated Hitler’s appointment as chancellor with a torchlit parade lasting hours. “There’s a jubilant mood tonight in Berlin,” wrote Harry Kessler, who was as surprised as most people by Hitler’s elevation to chancellor. “SA and SS men, together with uniformed Stahlhelm members, are making their way through the streets, and the pavements are crowded with onlookers. In and around the Hotel Kaiserhof, it’s a veritable carnival.”110 Hitler, who greeted the marching columns of his supporters from the illuminated window of his new office, was euphoric. “The good doctor is a true wizard,” he praised Goebbels, who had hastily organised the celebrations. “Where did he get all the torches?”111 A few windows further down, Hindenburg stood stiff as a statue and received tributes from SA men. The newly appointed Nazis lost no time in exploiting the possibilities of radio. Speeches by Göring and Goebbels were broadcast on all stations in Germany except Bavaria’s Bayerischer Rundfunk. Göring compared the mood to that of August 1914, when “a nation also set out for new territory,” thereby establishing the melodramatic tone of Nazi propaganda, which would soon transform 30 January 1933 into a “day of national uprising.”112 Things only calmed down after midnight. While Hitler remained in the Chancellery and held one of his digressive monologues,113 Goebbels went to Potsdam to visit Prince August Wilhelm. There the celebrations continued for hours. “Everything completely intoxicating,” Goebbels noted. “At home at 3 a.m. Fall into bed as though dead. Exhausted.”114

  —

  January the 30th, 1933 saw something happen that hardly anyone would have thought possible at the end of December 1932. At the relatively young age of 43, Hitler had become the chancellor of the most powerful state in central Europe. Even his closest confidants like Goebbels regarded this twist of fate as “something out of a fairy tale.”115 Hess wrote to his wife on 31 January: “Am I dreaming or am I awake? I’m sitting in the chancellor’s office on Wilhelmplatz. Ministry employees silently approach on soft carpets bringing files for the Reich chancellor.” Even the day before, Hess had been afraid that everything would fall apart, especially as Hitler had confided to him that “a couple of times things were on a knife-edge” because of “intransigence” from Hugenberg, the “old shrew” in the cabinet.116

  The formation of a “Cabinet of National Concentration” also seemed like a miracle to the NSDAP’s supporters. “It’s as though we’ve been blessed and are walking on air in an unbelievable dream,” wrote Emerentia Krogmann, the wife of the northern German wholesaler Carl Vincent Krogmann. “Hitler is Reich chancellor! It’s true! Farewell Marxism! Farewell Communism! Farewell parliament! Farewell Jews!—Here’s to Germany!”117 Luise Solmitz from Hamburg, who had turned away from Hitler in disappointment at the end of 1932, was equally enthusiastic: “What a cabinet!!! We didn’t dare to dream of this last July. Hitler, Hugenberg, Seldte, Papen!!! A large portion of my German hopes are attached to each one of them. National Socialist vigour, German nationalist reason, the apolitical Stahlhelm and the unforgettable Papen…This is a memorable 30 January.”118

  Hitler’s conservative coalition partners also believed they had achieved their goals. When an acquaintance warned Papen about Hitler’s thirst for power, he replied: “You’re wrong. We engaged him for our ends.”119 And in response to accusations of betrayal from the Pomeranian estate owner Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, the vice-chancellor shot back: “What do you want? I have Hindenburg’s confidence. In two months, we’ll have pushed Hitler so far into a corner he’ll squeak.”120 It was impossible to underestimate more fatally Hitler’s will to power and determination to dispose of his conservative cabinet members as soon as possible. Hugenberg was famously quoted as telling the Leipzig mayor, Carl Goerdeler, the day after Hitler’s appointment that he had committed “the greatest act of foolishness” in his life by concluding an alliance with the “biggest demagogue in world history,” but it is unlikely that Hugenberg said any such thing.121 The super-minister felt that he was the most powerful figure in Hitler’s cabinet and believed, along with the other conservatives, that they could keep the new chancellor in check and direct him for their own purposes. Another bit of fiction is the oft-repeated story of Erich Ludendorff writing to Hindenburg at the end of January and accusing the Reich president of “delivering [Germany] up to one of the biggest demagogues of all time.” Ludendorff is supposed to have stated: “I solemnly prophesy that the man will cast our empire into the abyss and bring unimaginable misery to our nation. Coming generations will curse you in your grave for this decision.”122 These would have been prophetic words indeed, had Ludendorff actually written them. The reality, however, was that while Ludendorff was initially sceptical of the Hitler government, the two men would re-establish contact after Hindenburg died in August 1934. In April 1937, Hitler and Ludendorff met in Munich and were officially “reconciled.” The “hero of Tannenberg” was a useful spokesman for the Führer’s drive to rearm the Wehrmacht. When Ludendorff died that December, the Nazis staged a pompous state funeral for the former general.123

  Not only Hitler’s conservative helpers, but many of his democratic opponents initially assumed that Papen and Hindenburg would hold the true power in the cabinet. On 31 January, Harry Kessler recorded a conversation he had had with the banker and politician Hugo Simon: “He sees Hitler as a prisoner of Hugenberg and Papen. ‘The poor fellow,’ who’s not very clever, has been delivered up, hands and feet bound, to those cagey conspirators.” Kessler apparently shared this estimation. A few days later, he predicted that the government would not last long since only the intrigues of the “windbag” Papen were holding it together: “Hitler must have already realised that he has fallen into a trap. His hands and feet are tied in government, and he has no room to manoeuvre either forward or back.”124 The Vossische Zeitung initially consoled itself with the idea that Hitler had not succeeded with his policy of “all or nothing”: “He moves into Wilhelmstrasse not as a dictator who knows no other law than his own will. This is not a Hitler cabinet. It is a Hitler–Papen–Hugenberg government that is full of contradictions, even if it clearly agrees that a complete break has to be made with what came before it.” However, the newspaper called this government “a dangerous experiment that can only be followed with profound concern and deepest distrust.”125

  Jewish circles were also worried, although several prominent figures warned against panic. In an editorial on 2 February, Ludwig Holländer, the director of the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith, wrote: “Despite the times, German Jews will not lose the composure granted them by the knowledge of their inalienable connection to everything truly German.”126 Fairly typical of the reaction of conservative and patriotic German Jews to Hitler�
�s appointment as chancellor was the 30 January diary entry of the Breslau teacher and historian Willy Cohn: “I fear that this means civil war! The right wing will be initially victorious, but in the end there’ll be communism! And then a left-wing revolution will come, and it won’t be nearly this mild. If Hitler abides by the constitution, however, he’ll be doomed with his own people too. In any case, times are gloomy, especially for us Jews!” The following day Cohn noted that the National Socialists had behaved like victors on the streets, but he stuck by his prognosis: “They too will be unable to deal with the economic crisis, and then there’ll be a massive turn to the left.”127 Cohn’s fear of communism still outweighed his worries about National Socialism—an attitude that was to change very soon.

  Representatives of Germany’s political Left also had the wrong ideas about the new government. “The Harzburg Front has been resurrected in the Hitler–Papen–Hugenberg cabinet,” the SPD leadership and the Social Democratic parliamentary faction asserted in a statement to party members on 30 January, warning against “undisciplined behaviour.” The battle was to be pursued on “the basis of the constitution” in order not to give the new right-wing government any pretence for doing away with that document.128 The KPD did call for a general strike to protest “the fascist dictatorship of Hitler, Hugenberg and Papen,” but Communist appeals to form a common front fell on deaf ears among Social Democrats, who remembered all too well being defamed by the Communists as “social fascists.”129 Union leaders also did not put much stock in extraparliamentary protests. “Organisation and not demonstration is the watchword of the hour,” General German Trade Union Association chairman, Theodor Leipart, stated on 31 January.130 For many representatives of the Social Democratic labour movement, Hitler was a hostage of the old reactionary elites, the large agricultural estate owners in the east and the major industrialists in the west. Policy, in their view, would be set not by the new chancellor, but by Vice-Chancellor von Papen and the “economic dictator” Hugenberg, who would soon succeed in demystifying the messiah from Braunau. People on the left failed to recognise both Hitler’s determination to seize total power or the dimensions of the danger he presented. Most Social Democratic and trade union leaders had grown up in the Wilhelmine Empire, and some had directly experienced Bismarck’s campaign against the SPD. They may have suspected that the new government would pass anti-socialist legislation, but they could not imagine that National Socialism would seriously try to destroy the entire organised labour movement.

  In his book Defying Hitler, written in British exile in 1939, Sebastian Haffner recalled the “icy fright” that had been his first reaction to the news that Hitler had been named chancellor: “For a moment I almost physically sensed the odour of blood and filth surrounding this man Hitler. It was a bit like being approached by a threatening and disgusting predator—it felt like a dirty paw with sharp claws in my face.” But on the evening of 30 January 1933, Haffner—then a young intern at Berlin’s Superior Court of Justice—calmly discussed the prospects of the new government with his father, a liberal Prussian educational reformer. The two men agreed that the Hitler-led cabinet would do some damage but would not stay in office for very long. “A conservative-reactionary government on the whole, with Hitler as its mouthpiece,” Haffner later recalled their conclusion. “That was the main difference to the last two governments that had followed after Brüning…No, all things considered, this government was no great cause for alarm.”131 In line with this statement, many Germans reacted to Hitler’s appointment as chancellor with indifference. There had been three changes of government in 1932, and people had almost come to expect such shifts. In the weekly cinema newsreels, the swearing-in of the new cabinet came last—after the major sporting events.132 Only a handful of particularly keen observers recognised that 30 January had been an irreversible turning point. Thea Sternheim, who learned of Hitler’s appointment while in Paris, wrote in her diary: “Hitler as chancellor. On top of everything else, now this intellectual humiliation. The last straw. I’m going home. To vomit.”133 Klaus Mann noted: “News that Hitler has become Reich chancellor. Horror. Never thought it possible. (The land of unlimited possibilities…)”134

  For most foreign diplomats, on the other hand, 30 January did not mark a major caesura. Sefton Delmer heard from his contacts in the British embassy that Hitler was a “chancellor in handcuffs,” held hostage by Papen and Hugenberg.135 The British ambassador, Horace Rumbold, advocated taking a wait-and-see approach to the new government. He too saw Hitler as the weaker partner in the coalition and considered the vice-chancellor the true architect of the political alliance: “It may be said that the Hitler movement has been saved for the time being, largely owing to the instrumentality of Herr von Papen.” Rumbold predicted that conflicts would soon erupt since Papen and Hugenberg’s goal of restoring the monarchy could not be squared with Hitler’s plans. The ambassador regarded it as a positive sign that Neurath had remained foreign minister, which he took as an indication that German foreign policy was not going to change.136

  The formation of the Hitler–Papen–Hugenberg cabinet had been kept secret until the very last minute, the French ambassador, André François-Poncet, reported to Paris on the evening of 30 January. He was most concerned about the possible consequences for Germany’s foreign policy. The new government with Hitler at the top represented “une experience hasardeuse” for all of Europe and not just Germany, since Hitler would try to bring about revisions of the Treaty of Versailles. Nonetheless, François-Poncet recommended that his government stay calm and wait to see how things developed. When he met Hitler for the first time on 8 February at a reception hosted by Hindenburg for the diplomatic corps, the ambassador was relieved. The new chancellor struck him as “dull and mediocre,” a kind of miniature Mussolini without any initiative or ideas of his own. François-Poncet thought he understood why the Reich president’s advisers had argued that it would be easy to use and control Hitler.137

  The Swiss senior envoy in Berlin, Paul Dinichert, received the news of the new government’s formation at lunch with some “elevated German personalities.” In his report to Berne on 2 February, Dinichert wrote: “None of them seemed to have had any intimation. Heads were shaken. ‘How long can this last?’ ‘It could have been worse.’ The conversation went round in circles.” The Swiss diplomat recognised that Hitler’s appointment was the result of a “political game of chess and puzzle-solving,” in which “the watchful and ever-active Herr von Papen, backed up by Hindenburg’s unique trust in him,” had pulled the strings. But like so many other observers, Dinichert failed to recognise the true import of the new constellation of power when he wrote: “Hitler, who for years insisted on ruling by himself, has been yoked, hemmed in or constrained (take your pick) with two of his disciples between Papen and Hindenburg.”138

  —

  January the 30th, 1933 was thus not seen at the time as the major date in world history it rightfully appears now. In fact, the date marked the start of a fateful process that saw the new man in the chancellor’s office quickly seize complete power and that ultimately ended in the fathomless crimes of the wars of annihilation against Poland and the Soviet Union and the mass murder of European Jews. Historians have perennially tried to answer the question of whether Hitler’s rise to power could have been halted. Doubtlessly, there were powerful tendencies, deeply anchored in German history, which promoted the success of National Socialism. They included an anti-Western nationalism that rejected the “ideas of 1789,” that felt particularly provoked by Germany’s unexpected defeat in the First World War and the perceived humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles, and that took refuge in stab-in-the-back legends and lies about Germany’s lack of responsibility for the war, so as to prevent any sort of self-critical examination of who was responsible for the disaster of 1918. Other factors included the anti-Semitism that already permeated all strata of German society except the Social Democratic working classes in the Wilhelmine Empire, and whi
ch had been radicalised by the First World War and in particular by the revolutionary months of 1918 and 1919; the influence of pre-democratic elites, above all the military, Eastern Elbian aristocratic landowners, large-scale industrialists and civil servants within the government and the justice system, whose power had basically remained untouched in the democratic Weimar Republic; the structural shortcomings of the Weimar Constitution, making the Reich president into something of an ersatz kaiser and allowing him to rule by emergency decree, which in the hands of a dedicated monarchist like Hindenburg was practically an invitation to abuse political power during the economic crisis of 1929 and 1930; and finally the unwillingness of Germany’s political parties to compromise, which was partially to blame for the chronic functional difficulties of parliamentary democracy and which culminated in the collapse of the grand coalition in March 1930, ringing in the phase of rule by presidential decree.139

  However, despite all of these weaknesses, which were primarily the result of the failure to break decisively enough with the legacy of Wilhelmine authoritarianism when the Weimar Republic was founded in 1918 and 1919, it was by no means inevitable that political power would be handed over to Adolf Hitler. There were repeated opportunities to end Hitler’s run of triumphs. The most obvious one was after the failed putsch of November 1923. Had the Munich rabble-rouser been forced to serve his full five-year term of imprisonment in Landsberg, it is extremely unlikely that he would have been able to restart his political career.140 Hindenburg’s unnecessary dismissal of Brüning in late May 1932 was also, in the words of the historian Heinrich August Winkler, a “decisive turning point in the German crisis of state” after 1930. Had Brüning remained in office, Papen would not have been able to destroy the “democratic bulwark” of Prussia, and Reichstag elections would not have been held until September 1934—by which point Germany’s economy would have probably recovered somewhat and extremist parties would have lost some of their appeal.141 Instead the Reichstag election of 31 July made the NSDAP Germany’s strongest party and supported Hitler’s claims to power.