Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (44 page)

Nazi electoral success also occasioned worries abroad. The British ambassador to France, Ronald Hugh Campbell, wrote from Paris that the Nazi triumph was seen as an “unpleasant surprise” and a turning point that could have significant consequences for international relations.
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French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand felt “personally hurt” and informed his German counterpart Julius Curtius that Paris would be forced to act with “the greatest possible reserve” in its future dealings with Germany.
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In Britain, too, the election results were seen to make normal relations with Germany much more difficult. In his initial analysis on 18 September, the British ambassador in Berlin, Horace Rumbold, attributed Nazi success to the widespread mood of protest against economic misery, which Hitler and his movement in their youthful élan had been able to harness and turn into votes. The Foreign Office feared that Hitler’s radical agitation against the Treaty of Versailles would harden French attitudes towards Germany as well as lead Brüning to adopt a more uncompromising foreign policy. A Foreign Office memo read: “There will be…a stiffening of the German foreign policy for Brüning will surely try to exploit the Nazi bogey.”
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The British press also emphasised that the election had been dominated by protest. The
Manchester Guardian
wrote that the NSDAP had been able to mobilise a million disgruntled non-voters, while
The Times
had an alternative explanation for Nazi success: “They have succeeded, momentarily at any rate, in winning a large section of Young Germany.” Controversially, in the
Daily Mail
on 24 September, the newspaper magnate Viscount Rothermere praised the Nazi triumph as an important milestone in the rebirth of the German nation that would usher in a new epoch in British–German relations; the article was reprinted the following day in the
Völkischer Beobachter
. For Rothermere, the NSDAP represented a new generation of Germans who would extend a hand of reconciliation towards Britain. A strong Germany was in Britain’s interest as a bulwark against Bolshevism, he argued. “Western civilisation” could only profit if a government inspired by “healthy principles” came to power in Berlin, as it had done eight years ago with Mussolini in Italy.
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Such remarks were a harbinger of efforts made by some in the British Establishment to curry favour with Hitler’s Germany after 1933.

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The spectacular results of September opened up the prospect that Hitler could come to power legally. “The constitution only stipulates the means, not the end,” the Führer declared on election night. “And no power in the world can force us from the path of legality.”
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Yet Hitler was unable to reap any immediate benefits of his election triumph. The shock at the NSDAP’s unexpected success led the moderate parties to close ranks. In early October 1930, the SPD faction in the Reichstag decided to tolerate the Brüning government. The Social Democrats would no longer support any vote of no confidence or block the unpopular austerity measures Brüning had instituted via emergency fiat. It was a difficult decision since it opened the SPD up to attacks by their left-wing competitors, the KPD. But there was no alternative if the Social Democrats wanted to maintain their last bastion of power, the government of Prussia under State President Otto Braun, who led a coalition with the Centre Party and the DSP. The policy of tolerance made the SPD a “silent partner” in the Brüning government. But this had not been Hindenburg’s original plan of tactic presidential governance and was the source of potential friction between the president and the chancellor.
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On 5 October 1930, in the course of coalition negotiations with the Reichstag parties, Heinrich Brüning met Hitler for the first time, accompanied by Wilhelm Frick and Gregor Strasser, in the apartment of the minister for the occupied territories, Gottfried Treviranus. The chancellor informed Hitler that the rigorous domestic austerity programme was an attempt to get the Allies to reduce and eventually cancel Germany’s reparations payments, and he appealed to the “former front-line soldier” to support the project with constructive opposition, thereby holding out the “prospect of working together in the future.” Hitler answered with a monologue that went on for an hour. “He began so shyly and hesitantly that Treviranus and I felt sorry for him and began to encourage him with brief interjections,” Brüning later recalled. “After a quarter of an hour we realised that this was the wrong approach. His voice was getting louder and louder.” Hitler slipped into his public-speaking mode. As Brüning remembered:

Ever more frequently he used the word “annihilating,” first directed against the SPD, then against the “reactionaries” and finally against France as our arch-enemy and Russia as the hotbed of Bolshevism. When he was part of the government, he said, he would insist that Germany put down all of these enemies with the help of England, Italy and America.

When Brüning asked Hitler how he intended to keep Germany solvent, given that the mere news of the NSDAP’s electoral triumph had led to a flight of foreign capital from the country, Hitler simply kept on talking. “One thought flashed through my mind: Mussolini,” Brüning recalled. Although Brüning and Hitler parted amicably, it was clear that involving the NSDAP in the government was out of the question, although Brüning refused to categorically rule out a right-wing coalition in the future.
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“Late at night the boss and Frick return from Brüning,” Goebbels confided to his diary. “We’re staying in opposition. Thank God…Hitler seems to have made quite an impression with Br[üning]. He was very happy.”
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But in truth, Hitler had come away wounded from the meeting. The chancellor had made it clear that he did not take Hitler seriously as a politician, thus prodding Hitler’s weak spot, his inferiority complex.
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For the next year, Hitler avoided any further encounter with Brüning, and he set his party on a course of vehement opposition to the government cabinet.

Compensating for the affront was the attention Hitler now received as the rising star of German politics. Electoral triumph had catapulted the Führer into the centre of public interest. “You have no idea how the situation of the movement and H[itler] has literally changed overnight, since the night of the election,” Hess told his parents. “We’ve suddenly become ‘acceptable’ in polite society. People who would previously have given H a wide berth now suddenly have to talk with him. The domestic and foreign press is beating down our doors.”
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Several days after the election, Hitler offered Ernst Hanfstaengl the post of NSDAP foreign press officer. Because of Hanfstaengl’s connections to the Anglo-Saxon world in particular, Hitler told him, he could “provide the party with a valuable service.”
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Hanfstaengl accepted the offer and began building up contacts to representatives of the foreign press. In the latter half of September and the first half of October, Hitler gave a series of interviews to the
Daily Mail
,
The Times
and papers belonging to William Randolph Hearst’s U.S. news empire. In them, he sought to dissipate the fears that his party’s electoral success had raised among Germany’s former enemies. Hitler presented himself as a patriotic politician who knew the value of rational argument and whose only goal was to find a peaceful way of relieving Germany of the burdens placed upon it by the Treaty of Versailles and the Young Plan. The alternative to the necessity of revising these agreements, Hitler argued, was the Bolshevisation of Germany, which could not be in the interest of the Western powers. Much like Rothermere, Hitler claimed that his movement represented a “Young Germany” that wanted only to coexist peacefully with other nations. This younger generation, Hitler added, could not be held responsible for the First World War and therefore rejected any further “payment of tributes.”
Daily Mail
correspondent Rothay Reynolds subsequently wrote of the NSDAP chairman’s great modesty and seriousness, explaining to readers that Hitler’s charisma came not from his eloquence or his ability to hold an audience, as was often proposed, but rather from the depth of his convictions.
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But not everyone was taken in by Hitler’s act. In Germany, too, there were warning voices. To many people’s surprise, on 17 October, Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann issued an impassioned “Appeal to Reason” in Berlin’s Beethoven-Saal auditorium. The call was combined with a complex analysis of the intellectual and social preconditions for National Socialism. The Hitler movement would never have reached such a level of “mass emotional conviction,” Mann asserted, if it had not been preceded by “the sense of the beginning of a new epoch and…a new spiritual situation for humanity.” People had turned away from the fundamental principles of a civil society—“liberty, equality, education, optimism and belief in progress”—and faith in reason to embrace “the forces of the unconscious, of unthinking dynamism and of pernicious creativity,” which rejected everything intellectual. Fed by those tendencies and carried by a “gigantic wave of eccentric barbarism and primitive, populist fairground barking,” National Socialism pursued “a politics of the grotesque…replete with Salvation Army allures, reflexive mass paroxysms, amusement-park chiming, cries of hallelujah and mantra-like repetition of monotonous slogans until everyone foamed at the mouth.” Mann did not just excoriate the NSDAP. He also drew political conclusions. Only the Social Democrats, he said, seemed to be capable of stopping the forward march of the National Socialists. For that reason, he believed, the “political home” of respectable, middle-class German citizens had to be the SPD. Mann’s speech was repeatedly interrupted by hostile interjections, orchestrated by Arnolt Bronnen, a former exponent of literary expressionism and friend of Bertolt Brecht who had converted to Nazism. “Our people spit on the head of Thomas Mann, who shamelessly insulted us in his lecture ‘Appeal to Reason,’ ” noted Goebbels.
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Mann’s speech largely fell on deaf ears. The majority of middle-class Germans treated the National Socialists along the lines described by the historian Friedrich Meinecke in December 1930: “People laugh at their economic demands, and the upper ten thousand dutifully berate their rowdyism on the street, as the conventions of polite society demand; yet these very circles continue, quietly yet unabatedly, to murmur about how useful National Socialism might become.”
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Sebastian Haffner, who came from the educated upper-middle class and was finely attuned to changes in attitude, spoke in 1939 about people’s “fascination with the monster,” that “strange haze and intoxication of should-be opponents who cannot come to terms with the phenomenon” and instead “turn themselves over, increasingly defencelessly, to the magic of the horrible and the thrill of evil.”
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The erosion of the political centre, reflected in the dramatic decline in support for the DDP/DSP and the DVP, was primarily the result of the radicalisation of voters from the middle classes, whose fears of dropping down the social ladder and anti-parliamentarian longings pushed them in droves into the hands of the National Socialists. The comprehensive criticism of the Weimar Republic by intellectual spokesmen of the anti-democratic “conservative revolution”—Oswald Spengler, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Ernst Jünger, Edgar Julius Jung and Carl Schmitt—had paved the way for a movement that wanted to do away with German democracy as soon as possible.
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Not all liberal and left-wing intellectuals were as prescient as Thomas Mann. Even an otherwise acute observer of his times like Theodor Wolff, the editor-in-chief of the
Berliner Tageblatt
, fooled himself about the character of the Nazi movement and its leader. On 14 September 1930, before the first election results were released, Wolff wrote an editorial warning people not to “overestimate the fairground party.” Even if the NSDAP sent a few more deputies to parliament, they remained a “society of incompetents.” Wolff added: “Most probably this will be the National Socialists’ day in the sun, and their fall from grace will follow soon. The crown worn by the kings of the rabble-rousers will slip, and Herr Hitler will fade into the sunset.”
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Carl von Ossietzky, editor-in-chief of the influential cultural magazine
Die Weltbühne
, was even further off the mark. Shortly before the election, he had reassured his readers: “The National Socialist movement has a noisy present, but no future at all. The rather bizarre notion that Adolf Hitler had been called to save the nation is pure mysticism.” And mysticism, Ossietzky predicted, could intoxicate people, but never satisfy them in the long run.
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When the outcome of the election had proved him wrong, Ossietzky called for the Brüning government to be dismissed. “Brüning has made fascism something big,” Ossietzky wrote. “It’s better to have an openly right-wing government than a prolongation of Brüning’s. This pointy-nosed man with a face like parchment, this caricature of piety with his Iron Cross First Class dangling from his rosary, must simply disappear.”
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Ossietzky was equally insulting towards Hitler, calling him a “half-insane rascal,” a “pathetic dunderhead,” a “nowhere fool” and a “big mouth.”
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But attempts to depict the NSDAP leader as ridiculous could not combat the phenomenon of Adolf Hitler. Nor did they undermine the tendency of his supporters to see him as the national saviour.