Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (48 page)

In July 1931, Hitler again enlisted the support of Alfred Hugenberg and Stahlhelm leader Franz Seldte. In a joint telegram to Brüning in the name of “the entire national opposition,” the three men insisted that Germany could no longer bear “the burdens imposed upon it” and therefore should consider any new reparations obligations towards France as non-binding.
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Hitler also decided to support a public referendum put forth by the Stahlhelm to get rid of the ruling coalition in Prussia and replace it with a government “that reflects the popular will unequivocally expressed in the election of 14 September 1930.” On 9 August 1931, the eve of the referendum, Hitler issued a plea to his supporters: “As long as the Social Democrats and the Centre Party are not overcome, Germany will not be able to rise anew. And the position from which the Social Democrats today rule Germany is Prussia.”
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But the referendum was a failure: only 37.1 per cent of voters supported the premature dissolution of the Prussian Landtag. For Goebbels, this was a “grim defeat” into which the Stahlhelm had pulled the NSDAP. “We must get away from the bourgeois mush,” he demanded of Hitler. “We must be more imperious and rigorous. We must be National Socialists. That’s the source of salvation.”
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What Berlin National Socialists considered a “more rigorous” approach was made abundantly clear on the evening of 12 September 1931, the start of the Jewish New Year. Some 500 SA men ran wild on the major shopping boulevard Kurfürstendamm, chanting “Germany awaken—Judah must die,” harassing passers-by and brutally assaulting people they thought were Jewish. During the unrest, the newly appointed head of the Berlin SA, Count Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorf, drove up and down the boulevard in an open-top car with his assistant Karl Ernst issuing instructions. The Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith later spoke of “pogrom-like rioting,” while the Social Democratic newspaper
Vorwärts
described what had happened as a “shameful excess” and “an insult to culture.” In subsequent trials, thirty-three of the rioters who had been arrested were given jail sentences of up to a year and nine months. Helldorf and Ernst, however, each got off lightly with six months in jail and a 100-mark fine. They appealed, and in February 1932, they were cleared of charges of disturbing the peace. The sentences of most of the others who had been convicted were also significantly reduced. “What is certain,” wrote the
Berliner Tageblatt
, “is that with this verdict one of the most serious acts of terror has gone unatoned for, in particular by those who bore the most responsibility for it.”
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Once again, the goddess of German justice had shown that she was blind in her right eye. The SA took the affair as encouragement in their strategy of occupying public spaces and subjecting everyone present to their visible domination.

On 15 September in Munich, Hitler again cautioned his SA Gruppenführer to be “extraordinarily cautious” and “not to get drawn out,” adding that “the legal path is the only secure one at the moment.” But he also suggested that he sympathised with actions like the one taken on Kurfürstendamm. In large cities, Hitler said, the SA faced the necessity “of undertaking something to satisfy the revolutionary mood of the people.” The party would have to publicly distance itself from the SA leaders who had been involved, but Hitler assured his henchmen: “You can be certain that the party will not forget their services and will restore them to their posts as soon as the time is ripe.”
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It was the clearest signal yet that Hitler’s insistence on legality was a purely tactical manoeuvre. Once he had gained political power, he planned to overthrow the democratic state.

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Yet although Hitler’s adherence to legal means was transparently hollow, the leaders of the German military and the Reich government redoubled their efforts in the autumn of 1931 to co-opt the NSDAP into the governing coalition. On 9 September, Hess reported that various parties had tried to convince Brüning “to involve Hitler at least partly in the government.” Hess said that as a condition, Hitler had insisted on fresh elections, “which would result in another huge triumph for the movement.”
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The Reich president himself was at the forefront of the move to involve the NSDAP in the government, in the form of a “concentration of national forces” that would span the entire German right wing from Brüning to Hitler. The head of the ministerial office in the Reichswehr Ministry, General Kurt von Schleicher, told Brüning’s secretary Erwin Planck on 20 September that Hindenburg had insisted on a “reconstitution of the cabinet to enable cooperation with the far right.”
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Schleicher had been in contact with the NSDAP via Ernst Röhm since the spring, and on 3 October, he met Hitler. At that meeting, the latter reiterated his willingness to join the Brüning cabinet, but only after fresh elections. “First we will be willing to forgo Prussia, once we’ve achieved a significant position of power in the Reich,” was how Goebbels summarised Hitler after the meeting. “In Prussia, a state commissioner will suffice to force Marxism to its knees.”
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Schleicher, who had a follow-up meeting with Hitler a few days later, came away with a positive impression: “An interesting man with an extraordinary speaking talent. In his plans he tends to get above himself, however. One has to tug him back down to reality by his coat-tails.”
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The general-turned-politician Schleicher believed he would be capable of influencing Hitler’s political ambitions, thereby “taming” him. For Schleicher, that mistake would ultimately prove fatal.

On the morning of 10 October, Brüning met Hitler. The chancellor would later recall that the leader of the NSDAP possessed “a far greater aura of self-confidence.” Again, Hitler did not reject the idea of joining the government, but he did refuse to endorse Hindenburg, who was standing for re-election in early 1932. “On the face of it, it was an extremely cordial conversation,” Brüning wrote in his memoirs.
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At the chancellor’s request, Hindenburg met with Hitler and Göring for two hours that very evening. The Reich president was none too pleased that during his appearances in East Prussia young National Socialists had greeted him with cries of “Germany awaken!” But Hitler was able to defuse the situation by slipping into the role of the First World War private full of reverence for the former field marshal.
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Hindenburg made it clear to the two Nazi leaders that he would vigorously oppose any attempt to gain power without his consent. Their meeting ended without yielding any concrete results. Hitler talked a good game, Hindenburg was quoted as saying, but was best suited for the office of postmaster “so that he can lick me from behind—on my stamps.”
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But other sources suggest that Hitler made a more positive impression on Hindenburg than has often been assumed. “Hitler was very appealing,” the Reich president told one of his old comrades, General Karl von Einem. In a letter to his daughter of 14 October, Hindenburg wrote that the “national opposition” had failed to use its first chance. But he did not rule out a second one: “If the right wing had not issued repeated refusals, everything would have been all right.”
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Hitler, too, was satisfied. “The result: we’re fit for good society,” Goebbels noted. “The old man has met us face to face. The boss called him worthy of respect.”
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In the autumn of 1931, Hindenburg approved the reconstitution of the governing cabinet. Brüning agreed to dismiss several ministers, including Interior Minister Joseph Wirth from the left wing of the Centre Party, whom Hindenburg considered insufficiently conservative. Wirth was replaced on an interim basis by Reichswehr Minister Wilhelm Groener, who thereby became the second most powerful man in the cabinet. Chancellor Brüning took over the Foreign Ministry himself. The new cabinet was less tightly connected to political parties than the old one since the DVP was no longer represented. That fact was a sign that the business circles were distancing themselves from Brüning.
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On 16 October, the new Brüning cabinet barely survived a vote of no confidence—thanks only to votes from the SPD faction. A short time before, in a long open letter to the chancellor, Hitler tried to justify why the NSDAP continued to strictly oppose the government. Hitler thought the idea of reviving Germany economically before entering into negotiations with the Western powers to revise the Treaty of Versailles was putting the cart before the horse. Without an end to reparations, he argued, there could be no economic recovery. Brüning’s deflationary economic policies, Hitler scoffed, were like declaring the operation a success after the patient had died. The criticism was not without justification. Hitler failed to mention, however, that the National Socialists were the main beneficiaries of these policies, which had only worsened Germany’s economic crisis.
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On the evening of 10 October, directly after their meeting with Hindenburg, Hitler and Göring, with Goebbels in tow, drove to the central German town of Bad Harzburg, where the “national opposition” was set to stage a joint event the following day. The man behind it was Alfred Hugenberg, and Bad Harzburg had been selected because it was located within Braunschweig, which the National Socialists had governed with the DNVP since October 1930. The entire anti-republican German right wing had gathered there. Along with the leaders of the NSDAP, the DNVP, the Stahlhelm, the Reichslandbund and the Pan-Germanic League, there was Hohenzollern Prince Eitel Friedrich, former chief of the army command and now DVP deputy General von Seeckt, and Hjalmar Schacht, who went public with his political change of heart with a scathing speech about Brüning’s economic policies.
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Large-scale industry was barely represented. Aside from Thyssen and United Steelworks director Ernst Brandi, the representatives of big business were mostly second-rate figures like Ernst Middendorf, the director general of the petroleum company Deutsche Erdöl AG, or the Hamburg shipyard owner Rudolf Blohm. “It was a shame that industry failed to turn up in Harzburg,” Schacht complained in a letter a few days later.
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Hitler had only reluctantly agreed to participate in the event, appearing hours late to a preparatory meeting on 10 October. “Hitler is enraged that people are trying to push us against a wall,” Goebbels noted. “I had to talk to him for another hour. More distance to the right.”
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The NSDAP chairman had not come to Bad Harzburg to show solidarity but to underline his predominance within the German far right and show his potential allies that he was not merely a “drummer boy” they could exploit for their own purposes. The only thing Hitler did on the morning of 11 October was to inspect a parade of SA and SS units; he left as soon as Stahlhelm formations appeared. He also skipped the communal lunch, disingenuously claiming that he could not dine at a table while his SA men’s stomachs were growling.
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After a lengthy and heated quarrel with Hugenberg, he appeared late to the afternoon rally at the local entertainment hall, and his speech and the manifesto he read out left no doubt as to who would have the say in the future. The National Socialists, Hitler proclaimed, “were prepared to take any and all responsibility for forming national governments at both the Reich and Land levels,” and in this spirit they were ready to “extend their hands in loyal cooperation to the other associations of the nationalist opposition.”
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The “Harzburg Front,” as the alliance came to be known, was a fragile construct, characterised by mistrust between the putative partners. Everyone suspected everyone else of pursuing a hidden personal agenda. “Hitler and Hugenberg are in a clinch like two boxers trying to prevent the opponent from drawing back and landing a dangerous blow—that was clear well before the Harzburg conference,” wrote the
Vossische Zeitung
newspaper.
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The only things the principals truly agreed on were their rejection of the Weimar “system” and their desire to bring down the Brüning government. There was no joint programme for how to overcome Germany’s economic and political crises. Hugenberg, who frequently had himself praised in his newspapers as the leader (Führer) of the right-wing and conservative camp, was forced to acknowledge that Hitler would by no means be content with the role of junior partner. Yet conversely, no matter how brusquely he behaved in Bad Harzburg, Hitler did not want to cause a major rift on the right. He still needed the support of mainstream figures of respectability to pose a credible threat to the Brüning government.
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Nonetheless, he made no secret of his claim to a leading role for himself and his movement. One week after the Harzburg conference, he summoned 100,000 members of the SA, the SS and the Hitler Youth to Braunschweig, urging them to “hold their nerve in the final minute.”
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For Goebbels, this demonstration was “our answer to Harzburg and Brüning.”
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