Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (60 page)

By openly declaring his solidarity with the murderers of Potempa, Hitler had let the mask slip, revealing his oft-sworn respect for the law as a means of deceiving the public. By that point, anyone in Germany could have figured out what would await the country if the Nazis ever came to political power. “In the entire country, who can comprehend that the leader of such a large political movement could so callously dare to declare his respect for these drunken murderers?” asked the
Frankfurter Zeitung
.
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Kessler saw the affair as the clear beginning of a popular disenchantment with the Nazi Party, writing that “13 August and Potempa are poison in its body.”
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But once again Hitler was bailed out by the Papen government upon which he had just declared war. In early September, the sentences of the five main perpetrators were commuted to life in prison. In March 1933, a few weeks after Hitler was named chancellor, they were pardoned.
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Nonetheless, the fact that Hitler had unmistakably revealed that a government led by him would do away with the rule of law and legalise political murder did not scare people off as much as Kessler hoped it would. Hjalmar Schacht, for example, who had been part of the cabinet negotiated between Hitler and Schleicher, hastened to assure the NSDAP leader of his “unalterable affection.” Although he knew that Hitler did not need words of consolation, Schacht wrote, perhaps a word of “most genuine sympathy” would not be unwelcome:

Your movement is borne internally of such powerful truth and necessity that victory in one form or another is a matter of course. In times of the movement’s rise, you have not let yourself be seduced by false idols. And I am completely convinced that now, at a time when you have been forced onto the defensive, that you will resist that temptation. If you stay true to yourself, your success is guaranteed.

Schacht concluded his letter by promising: “You can count on me as a faithful helper.”
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This was essentially a job application, made by a graduate of Hamburg’s prestigious Johanneum
Gymnasium
and a long-time president of the Reichsbank, for a leading position in the Third Reich whose arrival he so deeply wished for.

But how to proceed after 13 August? The situation was tied up in knots. Papen had come no closer to his goal of tying the National Socialists to the government, just as Hitler had made no progress towards achieving the decisive position of power in a cabinet that ruled by presidential decree—his desired launching pad for eradicating the Weimar “system” and erecting a dictatorship. After Hindenburg’s categorical rebuff, he seemed to have no chance of reaching this goal in the short term. So the question was whether to negotiate with the Centre Party about a coalition or, as Hitler had already threatened, to steer the NSDAP towards a stricter course of opposition to Papen’s cabinet. On 25 August, Hitler discussed the three possibilities with Goebbels in Berchtesgaden. “Either a cabinet by presidential decree. Most agreeable but least likely,” noted the latter. “Or the Centre with us. Unpleasant but relatively easy to have at present. Or the most blunt sort of opposition. Very unpleasant, but if necessary, possible.”
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While the two men conferred, Gregor Strasser arrived and reported on conversations he had had with ex-Chancellor Brüning two days earlier in the southern German town of Tübingen. According to Brüning’s memoirs, Strasser had hinted that Hitler would forgo the office of chancellor in return for a swift agreement between the Centre and Nazi Parties.
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Hitler would never have made such a commitment, as Goebbels’s diaries make clear: “Strasser very supportive of the Centre solution. Hitler and I, on the other hand, for a continuation of the idea of the cabinet by presidential decree.”
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Brüning and Hitler met once more on 29 August in the house of a manufacturer in the Berlin suburb of Grunewald, but an alliance between the two was impossible. Under no circumstances was Brüning prepared to hand over the offices of Prussian president and interior minister, with their control over the police, or to accept Hitler as chancellor of a conservative–Nazi coalition.
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Nonetheless the Nazis proceeded with informal coalition talks with the Centre Party because the spectre of a majority coalition in parliament put pressure on Hindenburg and his circles and threatened the nationalist DNVP with complete marginalisation. “There are many indications that Hitler and Brüning will reach agreement and that both we and the economy are facing a terrible regime,” Hugenberg wrote on 19 August to Albert Vögler, the chairman of the United Steelworks.
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The Papen government countered Hitler’s declaration of hostilities with a two-pronged strategy. It altered economic policy by instituting a series of measures to stimulate the domestic economy, by reducing taxes on businesses that hired new employees and by relaxing labour agreements, as employers had long demanded.
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At the same time, the cabinet intensified its pursuit of plans first suggested by Interior Minister von Gayl at a ministerial meeting on 10 August: namely to dissolve the Reichstag and delay new elections beyond the sixty-day window prescribed by Article 25 of the Weimar Constitution. “Without doubt we will come into conflict with the constitution, but that’s primarily a matter for the Reich president,” read the minutes of that meeting.
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On 30 August, Papen, Schleicher and Gayl went to Neudeck. Arguing that an “emergency of state” justified extraordinary measures, they succeeded in securing Hindenburg’s support for indefinitely postponing new elections. The Reich president also issued them a blank cheque to dissolve the Reichstag.
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The same day that Hindenburg gave the Papen cabinet permission to violate the constitution, the newly elected Reichstag convened for its inaugural session. Beforehand, Hitler underscored “the movement’s claim to power” in a speech to the NSDAP parliamentary faction, saying he had never been “more relaxed or confident.”
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Hermann Göring was elected Reichstag president with votes from the NSDAP, the Centre Party and the BVP. Although the position of first vice-president traditionally went to the second-strongest party—in this case the Social Democrats—their candidate, Paul Löbe, was defeated by a Centre Party deputy put forward by the National Socialists. The result was, in the words of the
Völkischer Beobachter
, “a Marxist-free Reichstag presidium.” The NSDAP’s strategy was obvious. The Nazis had got wind of the Papen cabinet’s emergency plan and wanted to demonstrate, as Göring declared in a speech on 30 August, that “the new Reichstag has a large nationalist majority capable of functioning, so that in no sense is there a state of governmental emergency.”
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Hitler took things one step further. Late in the evening of 31 August, he assembled his paladins in Göring’s apartment for a “secret conference.” Goebbels noted: “Bold plan drawn up. We’ll try to topple the old man. Silence and preparation of the essence. The old man doesn’t want us. He’s completely in the hands of the reactionaries. Thus, he himself must go.”
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The idea was to topple Hindenburg using Article 43 of the Weimar Constitution, which foresaw the removal of the Reich president if a two-thirds majority of the Reichstag backed a popular referendum and the German people were in favour of it. Hindenburg’s authority would have suffered just from such a resolution being drawn up. On 8 and 10 September, delegations from the NSDAP and the Centre Party met in Göring’s villa to discuss common action against Hindenburg. In Goebbels’s estimation, the Centre Party was not completely disinclined, but their representatives asked for more time to think things over.
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It was not until Brüning threatened to leave the party “if a single member of the faction conducted further negotiations in this direction” that the idea of cooperating with the Nazis was dropped.
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The former Reich chancellor himself had good reason to revenge himself on Hindenburg for his humiliating dismissal, but Brüning knew that if Hindenburg fell, his successor would in all likelihood be Hitler.

While negotiating with the Centre Party, Hitler stepped up his attacks on the Papen cabinet. In his speech in the Sportpalast on 1 September, he excoriated it as “a political regime that rules by the bayonet.” Hitler scoffed at the notion that serial dissolutions of the Reichstag represented a threat to the National Socialists: “For all we care, do it a hundred times. We’ll emerge as the victors. I’m not going to lose my nerve. My will is unshakeable, and I can outwait my adversaries.”
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Three days later, at the NSDAP Gau conference in Nuremberg, Hitler attacked the “reactionary clique” of aristocrats in the cabinet: “Do they truly think I can be bought off with a few ministerial seats? I don’t want anything to do with them…They can’t imagine how totally meaningless that all is to me. If God wanted things to be the way they are, we’d have all been born with monocles.”
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A further three days later, in a speech at Zirkus Krone on 7 September, Hitler even depicted himself as a defender of the German constitution: “We have a right to say that we will form the government. The fine gentlemen refuse to grant us this right. I’ll pick up the glove tossed on the ground…They say that the constitution is obsolete. I say, only now does it make sense.”
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—

On 12 September, the Reichstag met for its first working session. On the agenda was a governmental declaration by Papen, which was to be followed by several days of general debate. But the session took an unexpected turn. Before business had even been opened, Communist deputy Ernst Torgler seized the floor, demanding an immediate vote on the motions brought by his party, which included rejecting emergency governmental measures and a declaration of no confidence in the Papen government. The KPD initiative could have been blocked had a single deputy objected, but that did not happen. In the general confusion that ensued Wilhelm Frick moved for a half-hour adjournment. While Papen used the break to have messengers fetch Hindenburg’s order to dissolve the Reichstag issued on 30 August, Hitler instructed the NSDAP faction to support the Communist motion. Hitler’s intent was to demonstrate, for all to see, how little parliamentary support the Papen government had.

After the session was reopened, Göring in his capacity as Reichstag president began to explain the various voting procedures, studiously ignoring the Reich chancellor, who repeatedly requested the floor from the government bench while brandishing a red folder containing Hindenburg’s decree. “In that situation,” Papen recalled in his memoirs, “I had no choice but to lay the dissolution order on Göring’s desk, to roars and yells from the deputies, and to leave the building with my government.”
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Shortly thereafter, Göring announced the results of the vote. Five hundred and twenty-two Reichstag members had voted to withdraw confidence in the Papen government, while only forty-two DNVP and DVP deputies had rejected the motion. “It was the most humiliating defeat imaginable,” Goebbels noted.
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The psychological effects of the vote were massive. The rug was pulled from under Papen’s feet, and his protestations that the dissolution decree had been presented before the vote, thereby rendering it moot, did nothing to undo the damage. The fact was, as Kessler concluded, that “more than nine-tenths of the Reichstag and the German people are against this chancellor of ‘national concentration.’ ”
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In the wake of the overwhelming defeat, the Papen cabinet decided on 14 and 17 September to back off from the emergency plan agreed with Hindenburg and schedule new parliamentary elections on 6 November, the last possible day within the sixty-day deadline.
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In a conversation with Brüning’s former deputy Hermann Pünder in October 1932, Kurt von Schleicher admitted that the Papen cabinet had failed in its main task of “tying the NSDAP to the government” but asserted that the Nazis had been “completely demystified.” In the coming weeks, Schleicher predicted, support for both the National Socialists and the Centre Party would erode so that a parliamentary majority would no longer be possible. At that point, he believed, the Reichstag would be willing to tolerate the government in order to avoid yet another vote.
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“Election prospects extremely pessimistic,” Goebbels noted in late September. “We’ll have to work until we burst. Then perhaps we’ll succeed again.”
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After four difficult elections, fatigue was beginning to show both among the populace in general and the Nazis’ supporters. The SA in particular had little desire to focus all its energy on an election again after the disappointment of 13 August. For the first time, the numbers of Nazi Party members declined: from 455,000 in August to 435,000 in October 1932. From around the country came reports of a “downcast” mood and a “tendency to complain.”
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Moreover, the constant election campaigns had depleted the party coffers, and it was difficult to find additional resources. “Procuring money is difficult,” Goebbels complained. “The fat cats are with Papen.”
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The Papen government, whose new economic programme was very much to the liking of entrepreneurs, could indeed count on the support of big business. Their donations went nearly exclusively to parties that favoured Papen and his cabinet, that is the DNVP and the DVP.
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