Hitler

by Peter Longerich

  The immediate political consequences of the Reichstag election reached a conclusion on 13 August. Hitler spoke first to Schleicher and then to Papen, who both tried to persuade him to become Vice-Chancellor, but he declined the offer.45 It was renewed during his subsequent interview with the Reich President but he turned it down again. Instead, he demanded of Hindenburg the office of Chancellor. The President responded by declaring that he could not ‘be responsible before God, his conscience, and the Fatherland’ for transferring the entire power of government to a party that was ‘so intolerant towards those with a different point of view’. In addition, he admonished Hitler to conduct his opposition in a ‘chivalrous’ manner and stated in no uncertain terms that he intended to intervene ‘with the utmost severity’ against SA members who committed further acts of terrorism. The entire meeting lasted only about twenty minutes, and when he returned Hitler reported that he had been well and truly ‘lured into a trap’.46 This fear turned into certainty later that day when the official communiqué from the meeting arrived presenting Hitler’s demand to be made Chancellor as a demand that he be ‘put in charge of the Reich government and that complete power in the state be transferred’ to him. Hitler felt obliged to issue his own account of the meeting.47

  The impression that he as leader of the most important political party in Germany, and as one who was now presumably within striking distance of ‘seizing power’, had been publicly shown up by Hindenburg wounded Hitler deeply. Naturally he could not admit that he might have misjudged the situation and thus brought the humiliating defeat upon himself; the fault lay with the others, who had laid a ‘trap’ for him. In the weeks and months that followed he was to return constantly in speeches to 13 August. Of course, he spoke of his ‘decision’ not to participate in a coalition government rather than of a rejection. Thus his humiliation was turned into a courageous resolve. But the fact is that he felt that 13 August (along with 9 November 1918 and 9 November 1923) was one of the greatest defeats of his life and it dogged him to the end, though it was always bound up with the idea that he had very quickly succeeded in freeing himself from this undeserved situation and triumphing over his adversaries. His narcissism permitted him to remember the humiliation he had suffered only if he was able simultaneously to acquit himself of all responsibility for it and instead conjure up a vision of his own greatness and history of success. Nazi supporters also felt Hitler’s blunt rejection by Hindenburg as a depressing setback, which also inevitably encouraged doubts about the Party leader’s ‘lawful’ strategy. The SA in particular had believed the takeover of power was imminent and so was hard to keep in check.48 On 17 August Röhm felt obliged to use the Völkischer Beobachter to issue an appeal to the SA and SS for a ‘pause in hostilities’.49

  To put pressure on the government the Party leadership once again sought a parliamentary solution to the conflict in Prussia. Negotiations with the Centre Party were resumed, the Nazis demanding the post of Prime Minister (putting Hitler forward) as well as the Ministries of the Interior, Culture, and Finance. At this point Brüning, still a highly influential figure in the Centre Party, intervened in the negotiations, ensuring that further talks regarding a black–brown alliance took place from the end of the month onwards at Reich level.50

  An alignment of the NSDAP with the Centre in the Reich appeared even more desirable as the wave of Nazi terror and the Papen government’s counter-measures were leading to open confrontation between the government and the Nazis. The Potempa murderers were quickly apprehended and convicted on 22 August by the newly established special court in Beuthen: five death sentences were pronounced. The same day Hitler declared his solidarity with the perpetrators and the next day issued a proclamation ferociously castigating Papen’s government: ‘Herr von Papen has thus inscribed his name in the history of Germany with the blood of nationalist fighters.’51 Although the sentences were not carried out, the wave of terror had negative repercussions. For Schleicher now began to move away from the project of a Presidential cabinet led by the Nazis.52

  On 25 August Goebbels, Frick, and Strasser visited Hitler on the Obersalzberg. According to Goebbel’s jottings, Strasser reported a conversation he had just had with Brüning in Tübingen, to the effect that the Centre Party wanted a ‘long marriage’ and for the Leipzig Oberbürgermeister, Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, to become Prime Minister of Prussia. Strasser said he had strongly supported this ‘Centre Party solution’. Hitler and he, Goebbels, had on the other hand spoken up for the ‘continued pursuit of a Presidential cabinet’. After lengthy discussions there was agreement on the three possible options: ‘1. Presidential 2. Coalition 3. Opposition. To be worked on in that order.’53

  At the end of August the actual negotiations began in Berlin between the Centre and the NSDAP with both parties making them public in a joint declaration.54 On 29 August Hitler also arrived in Berlin for talks with Brüning and then with Papen and Schleicher. As far as Brüning was concerned, Goebbels was told that he was ‘prepared to do anything’, whereas Papen and Schleicher held out the usual ‘vague promises’. There was, he reports, a danger that the Reichstag, which had only just been elected, would be immediately dissolved.55 Yet the incipient cooperation between the Centre and the Nazis produced its first concrete results. At the constitutive meeting of the Reichstag on 30 August Göring was elected its President with the support of the Centre votes, while the Centre Party deputy Thomas Esser was elected as one of three Vice-Presidents. The new President recalled parliament for 12 September.

  The same day Papen, accompanied by Schleicher and his Interior Minister, Wilhelm Freiherr von Gayl, discussed matters with Hindenburg at his Neudeck estate. As Papen hoped, Hindenburg provided him with authority to dissolve the Reichstag in order, just as the Nazis feared, to torpedo the coalition negotiations between the NSDAP and the Centre Party. In addition, Hindenburg accepted Papen’s proposal that fresh elections might be delayed beyond the constitutionally established interval of sixty days, as a state of emergency had clearly developed that could not be tackled simply by repeated visits to the polling booth.56

  The NSDAP leadership was already at work on a countermove. On 31 August Hitler discussed with a small group consisting of Goebbels, Göring, and Röhm a plan to remove the Reich President from power. They had discovered Article 43 of the constitution, which allowed for the possibility of a referendum to remove the Reich President if it was supported by a two-thirds majority in the Reichstag.57 Further negotiations with the Centre Party, at which Hitler asked for support for this plan, were held on 8 and 10 September in Göring’s residence as Reichstag President. The Centre Party representatives, however, asked for time to consider.58 Brüning, however, threatened to leave the party, causing the Centre to reject this option.59 As far as the question of who should become Chancellor was concerned, the Centre conceded that anyone might be a contender who was acceptable to the Reich President.60 The NSDAP and the Centre nevertheless agreed on the outline of a bill concerning the appointment of a deputy for the Reich President, according to which the President of the Reich Supreme Court rather than the Reich Chancellor should deputize for the Reich President if the latter should be unable to fulfil the demands of his office. This manoeuvre was designed to prevent Papen from acquiring a key political position in the event of Hindenburg, now eighty-five, becoming seriously ill. A law to that effect altering the constitution was, in fact, passed by the Reichstag in December 1932.61

  At the Reichstag session of 12 September the KPD surprised everyone by proposing a motion of no confidence in Papen; the NSDAP and the Centre quickly agreed to support it. The result was 512 votes to 42 in favour.62 Admittedly, the vote took place only because the President of the House, Hermann Göring, quite simply ignored the red folder containing the order to dissolve parliament that Papen had placed on his desk during the session.63 Constitutionally, however, this made no difference to the fact that the Reichstag was dissolved. Fresh elections were set for 6 November.

  N
ovember elections

  On 13 September Hitler gave the NSDAP Reichstag deputies the slogan for the coming election: ‘Vote no to Papen and Reaction’. The election campaign was built around that.64

  By contrast with the June/July campaign of 1932, Nazi propaganda focused not on the ‘parties of the system’ but rather on Papen and his ‘reactionary’ backers, in other words the DNVP in particular.65 One target attacked fiercely by the NSDAP was the emergency decree Papen issued on 4 September in an attempt to get unemployment under control through measures favourable to business, such as tax breaks and lowering the basic wage for new employees. Much as this course of action was welcomed by industry, it was vigorously opposed by the NSDAP. Yet unlike in the July election campaign, which had been strongly influenced by Strasser’s anti-capitalist demands, such social and economic policy arguments did not constitute the main thrust of the campaign.66

  After Strasser’s early summer programme of immediate economic measures drew heavy criticism from industry, Hitler had agreed to the request from Schacht, now one of his most important go-betweens with business circles, that it should be binned. In addition, on 17 September Hitler made changes to the Party’s economics department (Wagener’s former sphere of activity) by making Feder responsible in future for ‘economic matters involving the state’ and Walter Funk, an economic journalist sympathetic to business, who had joined the Party in 1931, for dealing with the sensitive issues involved with the ‘private sector’. This was designed to ensure that the leaders of the Party’s organization would in future refrain from any fundamental criticism of ‘capitalism’.67

  As far as possible, concrete issues were to be kept out of the NSDAP’s campaign, which was personalized to a high degree. The Party leader himself was contrasted with ‘reaction’ and presented as ‘our last hope’, as a poster slogan put it.68 The election campaign was in other words dominated by Führer propaganda.

  On 6 October Hitler launched the election campaign at a Party propaganda conference in Munich by issuing a warning directed at the ‘Reich President’s palace’ that either his party would be given ‘power or it would not be given power, in which case they will be defeated by the power of this movement’.69 He was, in other words, determined to reverse the deep humiliation and loss of prestige that he had suffered on 13 August by launching a second attempt to convince the President of his claim to the Chancellorship. After this Hitler completed his fourth ‘flight around Germany’ and was able to make almost fifty speeches between 11 October and 5 November throughout the Reich. He gave prominence in each to a detailed justification of his ‘decision’ of 13 August not to enter government under another Chancellor. He had refused, he said, to be made responsible for failed policies. The long sections devoted to explaining this decision reveal how exercised he was by the public humiliation of 13 August and how he dealt with it. For the decisive factor had not, as he was now claiming, been his refusal to go into government, but rather Hindenburg’s refusal to offer him the Chancellorship, which had been Hitler’s aim as the clear victor in the 31 July election. He then went on to make detailed criticisms of Papen’s economic policies, which only treated the symptoms while ignoring the political causes of the economic crisis, such as Germany’s lack of political power and the German nation’s fragmentation following defeat and revolution.70

  The central document in Hitler’s election campaign was, however, an ‘open letter’ in which he responded to a programmatic speech that Papen made on 12 October 1932 to the Bavarian Industrial Association in Munich. Hitler published his reply on 21 October in the Völkischer Beobachter and in the form of a pamphlet.71 Around sixty manuscript pages long, the text refuted Papen’s speech and contained an unsparing criticism of his economic, domestic, and foreign policies in which Hitler plainly expressed his belief that Papen was completely unable to understand the fundamentals of the political situation. Two and a half weeks before the elections he could not have distanced himself more clearly from the serving Chancellor.

  The document contains a number of ‘programmatic’ statements by Hitler that indicate how he thought the current crisis could be solved, though without descending to the nitty gritty of day-to-day politics. Thus he argued that the ‘ultimate causes’ of the present economic crisis in Germany could not be grasped ‘through a purely economic analysis’. Rather, the origin of the crisis lay in the ‘imbalance between, on the one hand, the numerical size of the German nation, its significance in terms of the abilities inherent in its blood, its consequent need for cultural expression and a certain general standard of living and, on the other hand, the area currently allocated to the Reich as living space for the German nation’. This line of argument is only too familiar from his public statements from 1925 onwards. Yet he was not willing to be explicit in the document about the only solution he saw to the problem, namely that of correcting the ‘imbalance’ between population size and living space by means of a war.

  Meanwhile in Berlin in the run-up to the elections a conflict was brewing that put the NSDAP in a difficult position. The Berlin city transport services were on strike and the NSDAP, which in the meantime had established its own employees’ association in the form of the National Socialist Factory Cell Organization, joined with the KPD in supporting the strike action. On 3 November public transport in the Reich capital was largely at a standstill. As the two sides in the dispute were unable to reach agreement, the state arbitrator declared the outcome of arbitration to be binding and the unions called on their members to return to work. The KPD and the NSDAP, however, united to oppose this decision. The strike action escalated until there were violent clashes and several people died in shootings.72 Hitler publicly defended the strike, referring to the workers’ low pay,73 but on 7 November the dispute had to be abandoned. This was yet another embarrassing defeat for the NSDAP. The strike had been unsuccessful and by cooperating with the communists the Party had damaged itself in the eyes of many potential voters.

  This was an important reason why the NSDAP dropped more than four percentage points in the Reichstag elections of 6 November, securing only 33.1 per cent of the votes. The general perception was that the Party had already peaked. The chief gains were made by the KPD, which increased its vote by 2.6 per cent to 16.9 per cent over all, but the DNVP also gained 2.4 per cent. After the ‘Harzburg Front’ had collapsed in the elections for Reich President, Hitler had failed to bring about either an alliance with Papen or with the Centre Party, and finally Hindenburg had refused to countenance the idea of Hitler as Chancellor ruling through Presidential decree; it was, therefore, hard to see how Hitler could possibly realize his leadership ambitions in German politics. Given the political impasse he and his party now found themselves in, the strategy of concentrating Party propaganda predominantly on him as an individual had backfired and damaged the NSDAP and its ‘Führer’, as the November election result had clearly demonstrated.

  In spite of this defeat Hitler remained defiant and confident of victory. In the Völkischer Beobachter he proclaimed: ‘Single-minded continuation of the struggle until these partly open and partly secret opponents of a real resurrection of our nation are brought low! No compromises of any kind and no suggestion of any kind of deal with these elements.’74

  When, after the elections, Papen began talks with the party leaders, he therefore got nowhere with Hitler, who responded to the conciliatory tone of his written invitation with a detailed letter setting out a series of manifestly unrealistic conditions for such talks. Hitler made it blatantly obvious that he was not prepared to be drawn into Papen’s political strategy but was sticking to his demand to become Chancellor with a cabinet governing through Presidential decree.75 Papen’s efforts thus came to nothing and the cabinet offered the President its resignation on 17 November. Hindenburg accepted it, while asking the government to remain in office for the time being.76

  Hitler hurried to Berlin to meet Hindenburg on 19 November,77 again demanding the office of Chancellor and also the P
resident’s support on the basis of Article 48. Once appointed Chancellor, he said, he would conduct talks with the parties on forming a government and obtain from parliament an ‘enabling act’ to make the government independent of emergency decrees from the President. After the NSDAP’s losses, Hitler could not have been seriously expecting Hindenburg suddenly to support his demand to be Chancellor, given that Hindenburg had dismissed the idea on 13 August. The fact that Hitler nevertheless made the demand may well have been due to his calculation that in spite of his party’s losses he still had the upper hand. For it was clear that Papen’s government was unsustainable without some kind of support from the NSDAP and that Hindenburg would be forced sooner or later to find another solution. With the next government crisis on the horizon, Hitler persisted in demanding the office of Chancellor. Had he relinquished this demand he would have been renouncing his own claim to political leadership at home and then the humiliation of 13 August would have been complete. Hindenburg, however, merely offered him and the NSDAP a number of ministerial posts in what was fundamentally a ‘non-party’ government. If, however, Hitler wished to be Chancellor, the President said, he would first have to demonstrate, on the basis of exploratory talks with the parties, that he had a parliamentary majority.78 At a further meeting on 21 November both Hindenburg and Hitler stuck to their positions, Hitler having delivered beforehand to the President a written version of his own stance.79 For his part, Hindenburg set a series of conditions that would have to be met if Hitler were to form any majority government. He was to be left in no doubt that, if appointed Chancellor, Hindenburg would give him relatively little freedom of action.80 During the course of these negotiations Hitler referred repeatedly to the fact that by going into government he was gambling with the future of his ‘movement’, thereby revealing his altogether justified fear that if he as ‘Führer’ made a tactical error the current dissatisfaction in the Party could cause it to collapse.81