Four days later, on 8 June, the NSDAP began negotiations with the Centre Party and Papen over the formation of a new government in Prussia that would include the DNVP. The NSDAP demanded the posts of prime minister and minister of the interior and also the support of the Centre Party in the Reichstag for Papen’s government, for it insisted that, even after the changes in the majority situation in Prussia and the fall of Brüning, the formation of the governments in Prussia and in the Reich were still closely interlinked. However, while the Centre might have agreed to these demands in order to prop up a Chancellor from their own party, now that a renegade from their party had become Chancellor there was no reason for them to agree. They had no wish to shore up Papen’s government. The reverse was the case: the Centre wanted instead to bring about a coalition of all parties of the Right, including the NSDAP. Hitler had entirely reckoned with the Centre Party’s refusal to accept the NSDAP demands in the negotiations over Prussia. Goebbels’s diaries clearly show that the NSDAP was intentionally making demands it knew the Centre Party could not accept. Hitler shared Goebbels’s view that the Nazis could only get into government in Prussia if ‘we get total power’. All their efforts were therefore now focused on winning the elections and then acquiring the Chancellorship.7
The NSDAP leaders already had a solution in view for Prussia that Schleicher had suggested the previous autumn, namely the appointment by the Reich government of a State Commissar on the strength of Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. On the evening of 4 June Goebbels had made notes of a telephone conversation between Hitler and Schleicher: ‘The Prussian matter still undecided. Commissar or Prime Minister to come from us.’8 The failure of the negotiations over the formation of a government in Prussia made this solution, which was designed to force the Centre Party out of the power game, the preferred option, especially as the lifting of the ban on the SA on 16 June removed the last possible inducement for the NSDAP to tolerate Papen in the Reichstag. The Party’s storm troopers were now fully prepared for the election campaign.
Hitler was now determined under all circumstances to reject a role in the Prussian government unless the Party simultaneously went into government in the Reich.
Election battle and Prussian coup
In the summer of 1932 the NSDAP began the election campaign with the firm expectation of soon holding power. Gregor Strasser was to use this critical phase to expand his position within the Party as the head of its Reich organization. He persuaded Hitler to return the sections of the Reich Headquarters that had been separated off in 1929 as Reich Headquarters II under the control of Hierl to his, Strasser’s, authority. Hierl was given other responsibilities.9 In addition, Strasser used another directive from Hitler to strengthen greatly his authority to determine the Party programme. It ruled that all NSDAP motions in the Reichstag, the state parliaments, and local government that ‘concern matters of principle, including economic matters or that by the nature of their content represent an important statement by the Party or will attract particular attention in the public sphere’ should be sent to the head of the Party’s Reich Organization for expert scrutiny before they were submitted.10 There were now also two Reich Inspectors (Paul Schulz and Robert Ley), one responsible for the north and the other for the south of the Reich, who were intended to increase the influence of the Party HQ in the Gaus.11 Both men were considered confidants of Strasser.
The latter’s continuing efforts to centralize, bureaucratize, and create a hierarchy for the NSDAP (on 17 August he was to introduce a further level of control into the Party structure by appointing ‘state [Land] inspectors’)12 was inevitably going to clash sooner or later with Hitler’s claim to be an absolute ‘Führer’. For his position as ‘Führer’ of the Party rested in essence on a very personal, indeed personalistic, style of leadership that put him in a position to intervene at any time at any level of the Party structure, whereas a Party apparatus with something like a general staff and established areas of responsibility of the kind Strasser was about to create would inevitably conflict with this in the longer term. At a conference of Gauleiters held in Munich at the end of June 1932 Goebbels gained the impression that by means of ‘organizational changes’ Strasser had ‘got his hands on the Party’, was aiming to become ‘General Secretary’, and wished to make Hitler ‘Honorary President’.13
Strasser’s increased importance became evident above all through the decisive impact he had on the content of the Party’s electoral campaign. On 10 May he had made a speech in the Reichstag advocating a consistently ‘anti-capitalist’ line and demanding increased state benefits for the millions of people who because of the crisis had lost all their money or were facing imminent poverty.14 In view of the strict austerity pursued by Papen’s government this line seemed an appropriate starting point from which to launch a popular political alternative to the policies of the ‘barons’. When on 14 June Strasser as official representative of the Party gave a talk on the radio he therefore advocated above all state intervention to support the crisis-ridden economy and reduce unemployment. Strasser also had 600,000 copies of his pamphlet ‘The NSDAP’s Emergency Economic Programme’distributed via the Party organization.15 In it he put forward the same ideas. All this undercut Hitler’s policy of creating good relations with business. The working group formed around Hitler’s economic adviser Keppler had begun its work, and on 20 June a dozen men from the business world, including Hjalmar Schacht, the Cologne banker Kurt von Schröder, and the chairman of United Steel, Albert Vögler, had a meeting with the Party leader in the Hotel Kaiserhof at which Hitler tried hard to present his party’s economic line as ‘not doctrinaire’.16 Yet in the light of the NSDAP’s ‘anti-capitalist’ election propaganda such efforts were more or less fruitless. The majority of business leaders saw their interests well represented in Papen’s cabinet.
In the election campaign the Reich propaganda machine particularly stressed the Party’s distance from the current government and the equal importance it attached to its fight against the KPD, and against the ‘system’ and its parties, principally the SPD and the Centre Party.17 The Party organization was instructed to use every means possible to reach people: mass rallies, loudspeaker vans, films, gramophone records, flags and banners, leaflets, the election newspaper Der Flammenwerfer [The Flamethrower], pamphlets, posters,18 not forgetting ‘individual propaganda’, which meant talking in person to individuals.19
The main attraction of the campaign was, however, once more Hitler’s tour by air of the whole of Germany, the third he had undertaken and celebrated in the Party’s press as the ‘Freedom Flight’.20 Between 15 and 30 July he made appearances in fifty places, from Tilsit in East Prussia via Silesia, from where he embarked on a circular tour that took him through Central, North, and West Germany down to the South-West until he arrived for the final rally on 30 July in Munich.21 On this journey Hitler presented the election as the ‘turning point in the fate of a nation’22 and continually conjured up the vision of a strong Reich united by the NSDAP. Admittedly, he could no longer avoid descending to the level of the political issues of the day. For on 19 July the Centre Party newspaper, Germania, published details of the negotiations that Papen had conducted with the NSDAP in June about a governing coalition in Prussia and the toleration of his government in the Reichstag. Hints about deals between Papen and the Nazis that had already appeared in the left-wing press were thereby confirmed, with the result that the Social Democrats geared up to describe Papen’s government as holding the ladder for the Nazis.23 As Hitler’s main line of campaigning had been to claim that the ‘cabinet of the barons’ with its callous policy of austerity was hostile to the nation and socially destructive, he found himself with some explaining to do. He defended himself by saying that through the ‘dissemination of falsehoods’ an attempt was being made to pin the blame on the Nazis ‘for what has been happening for the last six weeks under Papen’s government’.24
An enduring theme in his campaign speeches was t
he by now familiar litany of the ‘13 years’ of the Weimar Republic, with which he contrasted the ‘13 million’ NSDAP voters as the advance guard of the nation unified. He became more specific whenever he engaged with statements by politicians in opposing parties, criticized the Papen government’s foreign policy, and repeatedly pilloried the ‘fragmentation’ of the political landscape into more than thirty parties which he, as he announced candidly, was minded ‘to sweep out of Germany’.25 He consistently kept quiet, however, about his longer-term aims if he should come to power. He wasted no words at all on the main theme of his party’s campaign, namely Strasser’s work-creation programme. It was evident that there were yawning gaps in the Party leader’s propaganda that Strasser was increasingly filling with his announcements about pragmatic policies to combat the crisis. One thing was clear, however: Hitler’s unsparing criticism of Papen’s government ruled out any resumption of a policy of toleration of this cabinet.
On 8 July Hitler went to Berlin for another meeting with Schleicher. The next day Goebbels heard from Schleicher’s close friend Werner von Alvensleben that Schleicher and Hitler were in the process of preparing to move jointly against Papen, who, as Goebbels noted, would have to ‘fall’ along with his cabinet.26 Thus Schleicher had made another U turn, breaking with Papen, whom he had previously ‘invented’ as Reich Chancellor, after only a few weeks, following the latter’s almost complete political isolation. In this situation Papen’s government now resorted to Schleicher’s scheme of using a commissar to solve the Prussian problem.27 Amongst other things such a move freed Papen from the now impossible task of getting the Centre Party to make a deal with the NSDAP in Prussia in order to persuade the NSDAP to tolerate his government in the Reich. By taking over Prussia, the largest German state, and its apparatus of power – control of the police, judicial system, and local administration – Papen believed he finally possessed the resources to compel the NSDAP to be more cooperative in supporting his policies in the Reich.
The ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Altona gave him the excuse he was looking for to appoint a commissar. On 17 July this violent clash between police, Nazis, and communists in Altona claimed the lives of eighteen people.28 It was the high water mark for a wave of acts of violence that had swept across the entire country following the lifting of the ban on the SA.29 Regardless of the fact that he had revoked the ban himself, Papen now argued that the Prussian government was no longer capable of guaranteeing security in its own state and on 20 July introduced an emergency decree signed by Hindenburg30 on the strength of which he appointed himself Reich Commissar for Prussia and Franz Bracht, the Oberbürgermeister of Essen, as Prussian Minister of the Interior. The existing Social Democrat ministers were dismissed.31
The NSDAP leaders had been informed at the latest by 9 July about the concrete preparations for the so-called Prussian coup. On 21 July Goebbels noted that ‘everything is going according to plan’; a ‘list of requests’ had been put together for Bracht, as well as a ‘list of the people in Prussia who have to go’.32 This indication of an understanding between the NSDAP leadership and the government regarding the Prussian issue makes it clear that from Papen’s point of view the Prussian coup was a preliminary offering to the NSDAP that he hoped would bring him greater support for his government – a miscalculation, as soon became evident.
Triumph and humiliation
In the Reichstag elections of 31 July the Nazis gained 230 seats with 37.4 per cent of the votes. They thus became the strongest party in the Reichstag. At the same time the DNVP and the smaller right-wing splinter parties were so decimated that it was impossible to create a right-wing majority. The DNVP emerged with 6.2 per cent (it had gained 7 per cent in 1930) and all the others combined reached only 2 per cent rather than the previous 13.8 per cent of the votes. The liberal parties’ losses were dramatic. The DVP secured only 1.2 per cent, the German State Party (DStP) only 1 per cent of the votes, whereas in 1930 they had managed 4.7 per cent and 3.8 per cent respectively. The Catholic parties, the Centre Party and the BVP, increased their combined result from 14.8 per cent to 16.2 per cent. In the left-wing camp there was a shift; whereas the Social Democrats dropped from 24.5 per cent to 21.6 per cent, the communists increased their share of the vote from 13.1 per cent to 14.5 per cent.
According to the analysis carried out by the psephologist Jürgen Falter and his team, referred to in Chapter 9, ‘Conquering the Masses’, this time 12 per cent of the NSDAP voters were previous non-voters, 6 per cent had previously voted DNVP, 8 per cent had voted for the two liberal parties, the DStP and the DVP, 10 per cent had previously voted SPD, and no fewer than 18 per cent came from all the others, which lost almost half of their voters to the NSDAP; the numerous splinter parties had turned out to be half-way houses in the migration of conservative and liberal voters to the far right.33 As in the case of the first great electoral victory of 1930, NSDAP voters were disproportionately male and Protestant, were relatively often members of the traditional Mittelstand (craftsmen, shopkeepers, and farmers), and tended to live in the countryside rather than the city. Over all, the NSDAP had once again succeeded in reaching large numbers of voters from all social classes and sections of the population.34
On election night Hitler was in Munich. Goebbels, while visiting him there, noticed he appeared uncertain as to what to do next: ‘Hitler is pondering. Big decisions coming. Legal path? With the Centre? Nauseating!’35 Papen soon made another attempt to come to terms with the NSDAP,36 but instead Hitler approached Schleicher and, at the beginning of August, discussed with him in Berlin the best way to secure the chancellorship.37 Hitler had first tried to gain power through a nationalist front of right-wing conservatives. Then he had tried going it alone, but without success, falling back temporarily on a compromise deal with the Centre Party. Then, when Papen had taken over from Brüning and this solution was no longer viable, he had been drawn into an apparent toleration of Papen’s government. Now, after resounding success at the polls, he was toying with the idea of a further permutation, namely to become chancellor himself; however, lacking a parliamentary majority he could do this only through the powers of the President, and for this he needed Schleicher’s support. ‘In a week’s time it’ll all start happening’, Goebbels noted confidently about the discussion. ‘The boss will be Reich Chancellor and Prime Minister of Prussia. Strasser Reich and Prussian Minister of the Interior. Goebbels Prussian Minister of Culture and Reich Education Minister. Darré Agriculture in both Reich and Prussia, Frick State Secretary in the Reich Chancellery. Göring Air. Justice will be ours.’ According to Goebbels’s notes an ‘enabling law’ was planned; should the Reichstag reject this, ‘it will be sent home. Hindenburg wants to die with a nationalist cabinet. We’ll never give up power again. They’ll have to carry us out as corpses.’38
In fact, Hitler seems to have made more modest demands with regard to personnel. At any rate Schleicher announced in cabinet that the Party leader had merely asked for the chancellorship for himself and the Interior Ministry for Strasser, with Göring possibly also having to have a role. Thus most of the ministers in the old government would have remained in post, thereby making the new government more palatable to the German Nationalists and possibly other right-wing deputies.39
Before Hitler could take over the Chancellery, however, he had to get over a further crucial hurdle. When on 11 August the NSDAP leadership met in Prien on the Chiemsee it was clear to everyone that Hindenburg was continuing to reject Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor. The consensus round the table was to go on negotiating with the Centre Party in order to put Papen and Schleicher under pressure to act.40 The fact that the Nazis were drawing attention to themselves at this time through acts of terror and threatening gestures had evidently reinforced Hindenburg’s rejection of the Party. On 1 August, immediately after the election, the SA and SS had ramped up their terrorism to a level not yet seen. In East Prussia and Upper Silesia in particular a series of bomb attacks and assassination attempts ha
d occurred, causing many injuries and even some deaths.41 Papen’s government intervened quickly and decisively. On 9 August it passed a set of measures to tackle political terrorism, in particular through heavier penalties (including the threat of the death penalty for repeat offenders) and through the creation of special courts. Where necessary, the Reich President instituted these measures by using emergency decrees.42 A few hours later the wave of terror reached its climax: during the night of 9/10 August in Potempa in Silesia a small band of Nazis murdered a communist in the most brutal fashion.43 In addition, the SA was carrying out extensive ‘manoeuvres’ in the Berlin area in order to put the government under increased pressure.44
Figure 2. Hitler’s setback on 13 August 1932 prompted John Heartfield to represent him satirically as Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had boldly promised the Germans, ‘I shall lead you to a glorious era!’ Instead of the inscription ‘Pour le mérite’, the order of merit pinned to his chest below the crossed swords bears the words ‘Pour le profit’.
Source: © The Heartfield Community of Heirs / DACS 2018. Image kindly provided by Akron Art Museum
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