Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (61 page)

In contrast to many of his underlings, Hitler projected optimism. The Papen government would soon collapse “like a house of cards,” he told the
Daily Mail
on 24 September.
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In a speech at the Reich propaganda conference in the Brown House on 6 October, Hitler tried to mobilise party members for the coming election: “We National Socialists will give the nation an unprecedented display of our strength of will…I head into this struggle with absolute confidence. Let the battle commence. In four weeks, we’ll emerge victorious from it.”
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The main Nazi campaign slogan was “Against Papen and the reactionaries.”
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The diplomat Ulrich von Hassell, who visited Hitler in his Munich apartment on 23 September after being named Germany’s ambassador to Italy, found the NSDAP leader still extremely bitter towards Papen and Hindenburg. “Hitler said he would place no limits upon his agitation against this government, which had fought against and ‘betrayed’ him,” wrote Hassell. “He made no bones about his feelings towards the barons.”
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The Nazi propaganda instructions issued by Goebbels ran in the same vein. Papen, Goebbels instructed, should be depicted as an “equally ambitious and incompetent representative of the reactionary old boys’ club.”
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Hitler knew what was at stake. If he did not succeed in bettering or at least maintaining his level of support from the 31 July election, it would threaten the aura of inevitable triumph surrounding National Socialism, and the momentum that had carried the movement from success to success could be reversed. He therefore submitted to an even more gruelling election campaign. The fourth “flying tour of Germany,” which he began in his Junkers 52 on 11 October, lasted three and a half weeks and took him to every corner of the country, including such provincial places as East Frisia or the Bergisches Land, which he had previously skipped. Hitler started all his speeches by justifying his decision not to join the Papen cabinet on 13 August. It was a sign of how disappointed he was at his failure to seize the office of chancellor. He had not wanted to be a “minister by Papen’s grace,” he told the crowds, adding that he was not cut out for such a “decorative role.” Using different imagery, he said that he did not want to get on board a train he would have to get off a few months later. Papen and his reactionary clique, Hitler fumed, were not interested in granting him political influence but simply getting him to “shut up.”
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Repeatedly, Hitler stressed that he was interested neither in getting a ministerial post nor in sharing power with anyone else: “The only thing that appeals to me is leadership itself, true power, and we National Socialists have a sacred right to it.”
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His opponents should be under no illusions about his “enormous determination.” Hitler had chosen his path, he assured his audiences, and would pursue it to the end: “A man like me may perish. A man like me may be beaten to death. But a man like me cannot yield!” One word that did not exist in the National Socialist vocabulary, Hitler crowed, was “capitulation.”
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But the fact that Hitler felt forced to make such assurances suggests that his confidence in victory was partially play-acted, that he himself may have feared a possible setback. Indeed, while the Nazi press once again boasted about how successful Hitler’s propaganda tour was, attendance was in reality declining. Nuremberg’s Luitpoldhalle auditorium was only half full for Hitler’s appearance on 13 October.
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A substantial number of voters who had flocked to the putative saviour in July turned their backs on him after 13 August. “They say he’s come up short,” Konrad Heiden wrote, describing the mood among parts of the German populace. “He’s just another misguided fanatic, who overreaches and achieves nothing. A falling comet in the November fog.”
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As if to bolster the impression that he himself had closed the doors to power with his inflexible fanaticism, Hitler gave free rein to his anti-Semitic hatred in his election campaign. Strangely, none of Hitler’s biographers have remarked on this shift, although it is perfectly evident. In all of his speeches, Hitler falsely claimed that Papen’s economic programme was the brainchild of the Jewish banker Jakob Goldschmidt, the former director of the Danatbank, and was “welcomed above all by Jews.” No speech was complete without a tirade against the “Jewish press of Berlin” or an invocation of the spectre of “Jewish-internationalist Bolshevism,” which Hitler characterised as a “plague that has beset almost the entire European continent and threatens to attack us.” On 30 October in Essen, Hitler thundered: “Either the German people will escape from the hands of the Jews or it will degenerate into nothing. I want to be its advocate and lead it into a unified German empire.”
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Once again Hitler had made it perfectly plain that there would be no room for Jews in the new ethnically defined state.

But bourgeois voters were less disconcerted by Hitler’s naked anti-Semitism than by his polemics against Papen’s “reactionary clique” and the anti-capitalist, class-warfare tone of the party’s propaganda, which seemed to clash with the slogan of “ethnic community.” On 25 September, Goebbels had insisted that “right now the most radical socialism has to be advanced.”
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The Berlin Gauleiter put these words into practice when he saw to it that the NSDAP supported a strike by the city’s public transport workers a few days before the election. Together with the Communist-dominated Revolutionary Union Opposition (RGO), the Nazi Factory Cell Organisation (NSBO) formed picket lines and brought traffic in Berlin to a standstill. “All yesterday: strike,” Goebbels noted on 5 November. “Our people in the lead. Grave acts of terror. Already 4 dead. Revolutionary mood in Berlin. Press on!”
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Goebbels maintained constant contact with Hitler during the strike, and Goebbels noted with satisfaction that Hitler supported his position, even though cooperating with the Communists was likely to cost the Nazis votes. “Hitler has gone Marxist for the moment—the Berlin transport strike,” the Hamburg schoolteacher Luise Solmitz wrote in her diary on the day of the election.
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In July she had voted for the NSDAP, but she switched to the DNVP on 6 November. Solmitz was obviously not alone among conservative-nationalist voters: Hugenberg’s party increased its share of the vote from 5.9 to 8.9 per cent.

For the National Socialists, the 6 November election was a catastrophe. The party lost 2 million voters, and their overall share of the vote declined by 4.2 per cent to 33.1 per cent. They only picked up 196 parliamentary seats, a decrease of 34. Along with the DNVP, the big winners of the election were the KPD, who increased their share of the vote from 14.5 to 16.9 per cent and took 100 seats in the Reichstag. The SPD and the two Catholic parties suffered small declines in support: the SPD dropped from 21.6 to 20.4 per cent, the Centre from 12.5 to 11.9 per cent and the BVP from 3.2 to 3.1 per cent. The DVP did slightly better, rising from 1.2 to 1.9 per cent, and the German State Party held steady at 1 per cent. Overall turnout declined by almost 4 per cent compared with July, falling to 80.6 per cent—which probably hurt the NSDAP more than any other party.
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The major liberal papers in Berlin depicted the election as a sensation. “The National Socialist idea has lost its power to win people over,” wrote the
Vossische Zeitung
. “The aura is gone…the magic has failed. The faith is flagging…Hitler’s failure as a politician and a statesman has become apparent.”
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Goebbels, who had hoped a few days before the vote that the result would not be “all that bad,” also had to admit: “We suffered a heavy defeat…We now face some difficult struggles.”
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For Hitler personally, 6 November represented a third painful defeat within the year 1932. His charismatic aura, which was based on his magnetic effect on the masses and their belief in him as a political messiah, was coming under fire. Hitler of course did his best to put a positive spin on the results in his post-election speech. The “massive attack on the Nazi Party” had been repelled, he claimed, and the Papen government had suffered a “debilitating defeat” since the DNVP, which supported the status quo, had been unable to break the 10-per-cent mark. The message for National Socialists, Hitler said, was “to continue the fight against this regime until it has been ultimately eradicated.”
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But he was unable to lift the NSDAP out of the deep depression that had set in throughout the party.
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For the first time, there were considerable doubts about Hitler’s political judgement. Did not the Nazi strategy of all-or-nothing condemn the party to eternal opposition, many Hitler followers asked? Would the next election bring an even worse defeat? Hitler seems to have been utterly unmoved by such concerns. After a long meeting with Hitler on 9 November, Goebbels noted: “No reconciliation. Hold steady! Papen must go. There can be no compromises. The reactionaries will be left scratching their heads. We don’t do things by halves.”
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Papen had every reason to be happy with the election result, which meant that the NSDAP and the Centre Party no longer had a parliamentary majority and Hitler could no longer threaten him with a “black and brown” coalition. Papen thus believed he would be greeted more receptively on 13 November when he issued a written invitation for Hitler to join his cabinet along the lines of what he had proposed in August. The 6 November election, Papen wrote, had created “a new situation” and a “new possibility to concentrate all [of Germany’s] nationalist forces.” The bitterness of the election, Papen suggested, should be forgotten in order to jointly serve “the welfare of the country.”
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The Nazi Party leadership suspected that this was yet another attempt to lure Hitler into a trap. “No repeat of 13 August—that would be a catastrophe,” Goebbels noted in his diary, leaving no doubt as to what the main obstacle was. “Hitler must be Reich chancellor!
Conditio sine qua non.
”
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Hitler took three days before refusing Papen’s request to discuss the possibility of National Socialist participation in the government. He was at most prepared to engage in a written exchange of ideas. “Under no circumstances,” Hitler wrote in his reply to Papen, “will I tolerate a repeat of the proceedings of 13 August.”
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In a cabinet meeting on 17 November Papen admitted that his efforts to ally Germany’s nationalist parties had failed. Papen dissolved the cabinet “in order to clear the way…for the Reich president to open negotiations with the leaders of the political parties.”
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Hindenburg accepted Papen’s resignation but asked him to continue to temporarily administer the government’s business.

Harry Kessler celebrated the news of Papen’s resignation: “Finally! This perpetually smiling, foolhardy dilettante has done more damage in six months than any of his predecessors in a comparable period.”
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The socialist newspaper
Vorwärts
reported the news under the headline: “Cabinet of lords deposed!”
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People in Social Democratic circles remembered all too well that Papen had been the one who had destroyed the last bulwark of the Weimar Republic with his 20 July coup d’état against Prussia. Yet it was entirely unclear who would succeed Papen as chancellor or whether a way out of the political crisis could be found. The only thing that was clear, Kessler noted on 19 November, was the absolute impenetrability and uncertainty of the situation: “Everything more or less depends on chance and the good or bad moods of four or five individuals.”
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—

On 18 November, Hindenburg commenced negotiations with party leaders. His goal remained to form a “cabinet of national concentration,” ranging from the Centre Party to the National Socialists. The first man he received was Alfred Hugenberg, who came out in favour of continuing rule by presidential decree and against making Hitler chancellor. He had been “unable to discover much respect for agreements in Hitler,” Hugenberg said.
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DVP Chairman Eduard Dingeldey also warned against Hitler, calling him “an unpredictable person easily subject to outside influences.” No one, Dingeldey argued, could rule out Hitler “trying to seize power even against the will of the Reich president.”
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The chairman of the Centre Party, Ludwig Kaas, was more moderate in his views, as was the leader of the BVP, Fritz Schäffer. Both argued that the National Socialists should be part of the new government. But both declined to offer suggestions about who should be Reich chancellor, saying that was a matter for Hindenburg alone. Schäffer even contended that the danger resided “less in Hitler himself than in the people surrounding him,” since they were obsessed with the idea of a “single-party dictatorship.” For that reason, any Hitler-led government would have to include “counterweights and strong personalities” in order to prevent abuses of power.
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