Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (58 page)

With that the focus shifted to the second option of subjecting Prussia to Reich administration. In a Reich ministers’ conference on 11 July, Interior Minister von Gayl declared that “the psychological moment had come for a Reich intervention.” The Prussian government was concentrating exclusively on combating the Nazi movement while “insufficiently” addressing “the Communist threat.” In the protocol, Papen said that the meeting had agreed upon “deploying a Reich commissioner in Prussia.”
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On 14 July, Papen, Gayl and State Secretary Meissner went to Neudeck to get Hindenburg’s unconditional authorisation to carry out this planned coup. The date of the “Ordinance on the Restoration of Security and Order in the Territory of Prussia” was left open. The conspirators were waiting for a suitable excuse to have it go into force.
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That excuse was the “Bloody Sunday” in Altona, back then an exclave part of Prussia, of 17 July. The next day, Heinrich Hirtsiefer, Carl Severing and Prussian Finance Minister Otto Klepper were ordered to report to the Reich Chancellery on the morning of 20 July. Without further ado, Papen told them that Hindenburg had appointed him Reich commissioner of Prussia and had relieved the ministers of their duties. Papen added that he would personally take over the duties of Prussian state president and that he had appointed Essen Lord Mayor Franz Bracht as acting Prussian interior minister. Hirtsiefer’s and Severing’s objections that this procedure was “unheard-of” and “without precedent in history” left Papen entirely unimpressed.
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Immediately after the meeting, he declared a military state of emergency in Berlin and throughout Brandenburg province. Lieutenant General Gerd von Rundstedt, who would be promoted all the way up to general field marshal in Hitler’s Wehrmacht, was put in command. In a letter to Papen, the outgoing Prussian government officials complained and announced that they would challenge the decision in Germany’s highest court.
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That made it clear that resistance to the coup d’état would be restricted to legal means—which was tantamount to capitulation. “In Berlin everything calm,” noted Goebbels with glee. “SPD and unions completely tame. They won’t do a thing. Reichswehr entering. The swine have lost power.”
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Would the Prussian authorities have been capable of resisting? This question has been hotly debated. It is clear that if Prussian leaders had mobilised their police forces, the Papen government would have responded with the Reichswehr, and there is no doubt which side would have won that battle. Moreover, the Prussian police, especially the higher-ranking officers, were by no means as loyal to the Weimar Republic as many liked to pretend after 1945.
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Reich Banner activists were most eager to fight, and they were greatly disappointed by the passivity of the SPD leadership. “I saw Reich Banner people weeping around that time,” the Lower Silesian SPD secretary, Otto Buchwitz, later recalled. “Older functionaries threw their membership books on the ground at our feet.”
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But realistically, the Reich Banner would have been no match for the right-wing paramilitary organisations.

The most effective means of protest would probably have been a general strike. That was a possibility feared not only by the “cabinet of barons” but also within Hitler’s circles. “Is a general strike coming?” asked Goebbels. “I don’t think so, but wait and see. Feverish tension.”
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Goebbels no doubt recalled the fact that a general strike had meant the end of the Kapp–Lüttwitz putsch. But the situation in the summer of 1932 was very different from that in the spring of 1920. Back then, Germany had enjoyed full employment. In 1932, there were 6 million jobless, and all indications were that a call for strike action would have found little support. Moreover, the Prussian “coup” was not as blatantly unconstitutional as the Kapp putsch. In 1920 right-wing conspirators tried to topple a legitimate government; in 1932, action was taken by the Reich government and Reich president against a state government that had lost its parliamentary majority.

Thus it is hard to fault Social Democrats and trade unions for not wanting to risk civil war. They can, however, be blamed for sitting back and letting things take their course. Abandoning the bastion of Prussia without resistance demoralised the supporters of democracy and encouraged their enemies. Immediately after the “coup,” the new masters began to “cleanse” the Prussian civil service of democrats, and the National Socialists would continue this process immediately after taking power. The historian Karl-Dietrich Bracher rightly pointed out that the “Prussia coup” was a prelude to the Nazi assumption of power on 30 January 1933.
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On 25 October 1932, Germany’s highest court delivered its verdict. It could hardly have been more contradictory. On the one hand, the judges upheld the Reich president’s right to appoint Reich commissioners. On the other, they declared the complete exclusion of the Prussian government unconstitutional. This verdict did nothing to alter the new power relations. The former Prussian government was rehabilitated, in a formal sense, but it led little more than a shadow existence alongside the Reich commissioner.
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Hitler began campaigning in early July 1932. He had already set the basic tenor at a conference of Gauleiter in Munich on 8 June, where he declared that 31 July had to be turned into “a general reckoning by the German people with the policies of the past fourteen years and those responsible for them.”
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The main slogans promoted by the Reich propaganda directorship were “Germany awaken! Give Adolf Hitler power!” and “Down with the system, its parties and its exponents!”
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In mid-July Hitler made a shellac recording distributed at a price of 5 marks by the Eher Verlag.
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After that, he went on his third flying tour, which included appearances in fifty cities all over Germany. The scenes were familiar. Tens of thousands of people waited to hear him, often for hours, wherever he went. On 19 July in Stralsund, people remained patient until long after midnight.
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The following evening in Bremen, Hitler’s fully illuminated aeroplane flew a couple of loops over the local football stadium before landing—this was intended to symbolise that the Führer was an enlightened deus ex machina, who was above the squabbles of political fighting.
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By the time the election marathon was over, a local newspaper in the town of Gladbek would describe Hitler as making “a tired, worn-out impression.”
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Ernst Hanfstaengl, who accompanied Hitler on his travels, would write in his memoirs of a “murderous chase from mass event to mass event, from city to city.” The Nazi chairman, Hanfstaengl recalled, was utterly exhausted: “Truth be told, we were nothing more than the corner men of a boxer and had our hands full trying to get Hitler fit again between rounds of speeches.”
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Hitler seldom said anything new. He began his speeches by sketching the general economic and political decay, which he blamed on the Weimar “system.” This was followed by a promise to get rid of “the nepotism of parties.” One of his goals, he told a crowd in Eberswalde on 27 July, was “to sweep the thirty different political parties out of Germany.”
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At that point, Hitler invoked the “miracle” of the National Socialist movement, which had grown from a handful of people to a massive organisation that would stay true to its principles instead of agreeing to “putrid compromises.” The Nazis, Hitler proclaimed, were interested in “the future of the German people,” not in parliamentary seats or ministerial positions. The NSDAP was not a party representing narrow interests or classes of people: it was a “party of the German people” whose greatest service was to have “filled millions of people with renewed hope.”
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Hitler was careful not to be too critical of the new presidential cabinet. In Tilsit Hitler told his audience on 15 July: “When my enemies say, ‘You’re providing cover for the Papen government,’ I have to say, ‘Be happy Papen is governing and not I.’ ”
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Hitler entirely left out any shrill anti-Semitism, obviously in an attempt to win some votes from the socially liberal middle classes. In his speech in Kiel on 20 July, for example, when Hitler spoke of a “sub-humanity” which the Nazis wanted to “do away with,” he deliberately left it open exactly who was meant.
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Nonetheless he never lost sight of the central tenets of his world view. He was merely concealing them, for tactical reasons, in public. In the introduction he wrote at the time for the official guidelines for the Nazi Party’s Political Organisation, Hitler grandiloquently proclaimed that the Nazi movement had not only recognised but “consciously honoured” for the first time ever “blood and race, personality and its value, struggle as a phenomenon of the ongoing selection of the fittest, soil and living space as determining, compelling and driving forces.”
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At the end of July 1932, Hitler was celebrating another electoral result. “A great victory has been achieved,” he crowed. “The National Socialist German Workers’ Party is now clearly the strongest party in the German Reichstag.”
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On the surface, the Nazis’ victory was indeed impressive. They took 37.3 per cent of the vote, a growth of 19 per cent, and formed the largest parliamentary faction with 230 seats. The Communists also recorded slight gains, from 13.1 to 14.5 per cent, while the Social Democrats’ share declined from 24.5 to 21.6 per cent. The Centre Party and the BVP registered modest rises from 11.8 to 12.5 and 3 to 3.2 per cent respectively. The DNVP saw their share of the vote decline from 7 to 5.9 per cent, while the DVP and the German State Party suffered dramatic losses, going from 4.7 to 1.2 and 3.8 to 1 per cent respectively. “The centre is fully destroyed,” noted the DNVP deputy Reinhold Quaatz drily.
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On close inspection, however, the results were less impressive for the NSDAP. Compared with the presidential run-off election on 10 April, the party’s share of the vote had increased by only 0.6 per cent, suggesting that the party could have reached its limits. Count Kessler concluded with satisfaction: “Not only have the Nazis failed to reach their goal. For the first time there are clear signs of standstill and an ebbing of their flood.”
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Goebbels saw the situation in similar terms. “We won’t get an absolute majority like this,” he noted in his diary. “We need another way.” On the question of what this “other way” might be, Goebbels wrote: “We have to come to power now and eliminate Marxism. By hook or by crook. Something has to give. Our time in opposition is at an end. Deeds are what we need now.”
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Hitler was uncertain as to what his next steps should be and retreated to Adolf Müller’s house on Tegernsee Lake, as he had after Geli Raubal’s death. There he met Goebbels on 2 August, who noted in telegraph style immediately thereafter: “Hitler ponders. Difficult decisions ahead. Legal? With Centre? Nauseating!”
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Indeed, for a short time, Hitler seems to have considered forming a coalition with the Centre Party, with whom the Nazis would have had a parliamentary majority. But he quickly dropped the idea since it would have entailed sharing power—and that with a party he had repeatedly defamed in past elections as one of the pillars, together with the SPD, of the “system” he so loathed. As he always did when faced with tough choices, Hitler procrastinated. On 3 August, to distract himself, he attended a performance of
Tristan and Isolde
with Goebbels in Munich. Afterwards they enjoyed some “music and light conversation” at the Hanfstaengls.
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Still, no sooner had Hitler returned to Berchtesgaden than he made up his mind. Hitler would go and see Kurt von Schleicher to demand the chancellorship for himself and four further ministries for his party. Frick would be interior, Göring aviation, Strasser labour and Goebbels popular education minister. “That means complete power or nothing,” Goebbels noted. “That’s the way. The worst thing is to back down. [Hitler] believes the barons will give in. But what about the old man?”
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That was the great uncertain factor in Hitler’s calculations. Would Hindenburg be willing to name him chancellor?

On 5 August, Hitler met Schleicher at a secret location in the town of Fürstenberg near Berlin, and he apparently convinced the defence minister, during the course of an “hours-long walk,” that there was no way around him becoming chancellor.
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In any case, upon returning to the Obersalzberg, Hitler immediately called together his paladins and told them that everything had gone well. “In one week the deal will be done,” Goebbels recorded. “The boss will become chancellor and Prussian state president. Strasser Reich and Prussian interior minister. Goebbels Prussian culture and Reich education minister. Darré in charge of both agriculture ministries. Frick permanent secretary in the Reich Chancellery. Göring aviation. Justice remains ours. Warmbold economics. Crosigk [
sic
] finance. Schacht Reichsbank. A cabinet of men.” We do not know whether Hitler had in fact negotiated all these positions with Schleicher, or whether Goebbels was being over-optimistic. What is certain is that Schleicher wanted to keep the Defence Ministry, which is probably why he thought that he could control a Chancellor Hitler. By contrast Goebbels and Hitler agreed that, should they get those positions, the National Socialists would have achieved their aims. “We’ll never give up power—they’ll have to cart out our dead bodies,” Goebbels wrote. “This is a total solution. It will cost some blood, but it cleanses and purifies. A job well done. We’ll work like berserkers. We talk the whole evening, and I draw up plans deep into the night. I can’t believe it. We’re at the gates of power.”
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