Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (62 page)

Hitler was invited by telephone to a personal audience with Hindenburg at 11:30 a.m. on 19 November. The day before that, he flew with Wilhelm Frick and Gregor Strasser to Berlin. Goebbels advised him to treat Hindenburg like a father: “Cajole him in the most primitive fashion and try to gain his trust.” The Nazi leaders sat together until late at night. “We ate, laughed, chatted and made some music,” Goebbels noted in his diary. “Hitler was very relaxed…God willing, may everything turn out well.”
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As they had on 13 August, Nazi supporters congregated on Wilhelmstrasse, cheering Hitler on as he arrived for his appointment with Hindenburg. It was the third time he had met with the Reich president, but the first in which he had insisted on a private discussion. Only during the second half of their meeting, which lasted more than an hour, was State Secretary Meissner allowed to join the two men. Once again, Hindenburg appealed to Hitler as the “leader of a large movement,” whose nationalist sentiment he respected, not to rule out the invitation to be part of a nationalist government. “The times are too serious for everyone to follow his own personal interests and go his own way,” Hindenburg argued according to Meissner’s minutes. “We have to put our differences behind us and come together in an emergency community.” Hitler stuck to his guns, telling Hindenburg he would only join a governing cabinet if he received “political leadership,” that is the office of chancellor. He did, however, signal willingness to compromise on the further composition of such a cabinet. By no means, he assured Hindenburg, did he want to fill the remaining ministerial posts exclusively with National Socialists. When Hindenburg asked him if he was willing to initiate discussions with other parties about the policies of a potential coalition, Hitler responded that the Reich president first needed to call upon him to form a government. At this point, Hitler suggested an idea to which he presumed Hindenburg would be receptive: “I think I could find a basis upon which I and the new government would receive an enabling law from the Reichstag.” The possibility of ruling by virtual decree via an enabling law was a legal option in times of crisis—albeit one that required a two-thirds parliamentary majority. Stresemann had already used such a law during the crisis of October 1923. An enabling law had the advantage of allowing the government to act independently of the institutions of the Reichstag for a time without constantly having to approach the Reich president for emergency decrees. Hindenburg said that he would think over Hitler’s suggestion and then speak to him again.
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The most important result to come out of 19 November was that after his one-to-one meeting, Hindenburg seemed no longer categorically opposed to Hitler’s chancellorship. Nonetheless, Hitler’s entourage was uncertain as to whether this was really a “serious attempt to come together” or another attempt by the other side to “screw us,” as Goebbels coarsely put it.
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That issue was resolved on 21 November, when Hindenburg received Hitler a second time and charged him with forming a government—but only under the condition that he create “a stable working majority with a set, unified agenda in the Reichstag.” That would only be possible if Hitler secured the support of the Centre Party as well as the DNVP, and for Hitler, Hugenberg’s party was clearly a lost cause. Otto Meissner had informed Hitler about Hindenburg’s intentions in advance, allowing him to respond with a carefully prepared letter he now presented to the Reich president. In it, Hitler demanded that he be given “the authority that all previous bearers of Your Excellency’s presidential power have possessed”—i.e. the comprehensive powers of a chancellor of a presidential cabinet enjoyed by Brüning and Papen. Hindenburg was by no means prepared to accede to this demand. With that, negotiations had broken down to all intents and purposes, even if Hindenburg assured Hitler: “You will always find my door open.”
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Hitler’s meetings with Hindenburg led to a correspondence between Hitler and Meissner that once more laid out the fundamental difference between a presidential cabinet and a parliamentary government based on a majority in the Reichstag.
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On 23 November, Hitler officially renounced Hindenburg’s mandate to negotiate with other parties to form a parliamentary majority as “impossible to fulfil for internal reasons.” One day later, in a letter from Meissner, Hindenburg officially refused Hitler’s request to be charged with the leadership of a presidential cabinet. Hindenburg’s justification essentially repeated the arguments of 13 August. The Reich president felt unable to take responsibility for entrusting his “comprehensive presidential powers to the leader of a party that had always stressed its desire to rule exclusively and that was negatively inclined towards the measures which [Hindenburg] himself personally favoured and judged politically and economically necessary.” Under such circumstances, the letter read, there was reason to fear that a Hitler-led presidential government “would inevitably become a single-party dictatorship exacerbating the tensions within the German people in a way incompatible with [Hindenburg’s] oath of office and conscience.”
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Having already exchanged opinions with Meissner, Hitler expected his request to be refused and reacted calmly. “The old man doesn’t trust him, and the feeling is mutual,” Goebbels noted. “The farce is over. Papen will be back no doubt…The barons have won again. But for how long?”
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Hindenburg did not change his mind even when a small group of industrialists, bankers and agricultural producers submitted a petition on 19 November calling upon the president to give the “leader of the largest nationalist group”—i.e. Hitler—“responsible directorship” of a presidential cabinet.
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The initiator of this action was Wilhelm Keppler, a middle-class entrepreneur, whom Hitler had made an economic adviser in the spring of 1932. At the behest of Hjalmar Schacht, a department named after Keppler was set up to “harmonise the National Socialist economic policies…with the flourishing of the private sector.”
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But the petition had not attracted nearly the amount of support from the business sector as its initiators expected. It contained only nineteen signatures, a little fewer than half of whom came from the so-called “Keppler Circle”: Schacht, bankers Kurt von Schröder (the owner of the Stein bank in Cologne) and Friedrich Reinhart (a Commerzbank board member), the industrialist August Rosterg and Ilseder Steelworks supervisory board member Ewald Hecker. Hamburg merchant circles were prominently represented with four signatories: Emil Helfferich, Franz Witthoeft, Carl Vincent Krogmann (later mayor of Hamburg under the Nazis) and Kurt Woermann. Five signatories were large-scale agriculturalists—they were led by the president of the Reichslandbund, Count Eberhard von Kalckreuth. The Ruhrlade—an organisation representing the interests of the Ruhr Valley’s twelve leading industrialists—provided only one signatory, Fritz Thyssen, a long-time Hitler admirer.
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Schacht had already informed Hitler on 12 November that most representatives of heavy industry—in keeping with the ponderousness of that designation—were not going to take part in the petition.
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The director of the United Steelworks, Albert Vögler, told Schröder on 21 November that he, Gutehoffnungshütte Supervisory Board Chairman Paul Reusch and Hoesch General Director Fritz Springorum agreed with the petition’s “solution to the current crisis” but had declined to sign it because they “always avoided taking any sort of political position.”
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This suggests a change of mood in Hitler’s favour that was probably influenced by the electoral gains of the KPD in the November election and the renewed fears among business leaders that Germany could be “Bolshevised.” Still, the majority of industrialists stuck by Papen as their preferred choice for chancellor. That being the case, the petition was hardly going to sway Hindenburg. The greatest impression was probably made by the fact that it had been signed by Kalckreuth, since the lobbyists for the large landowners east of the Elbe had usually regarded Hindenburg as their advocate. In January 1933, their influence would prove particularly fateful.

After the attempt to form a “cabinet of national concentration” including the Nazis had failed, Hindenburg had no option other than to appoint either Papen or another one of his intimates chancellor. And aside from Papen, the only other option was Schleicher, the
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of the presidential government. On 23 November, the general and Reich defence minister had already sounded out Hitler as to whether he would support a cabinet headed by him. Hitler answered in the negative and stressed that he would not allow any of his people to join such a cabinet. Given the circumstances, Schleicher said at a ministerial conference on 25 November, there “was nothing to be gained by a change of chancellor.”
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In fact, however, Schleicher had already decided to jettison Papen since, contrary to expectations, his protégé had proved to be anything but a passive puppet and had long since emancipated himself politically. Papen’s greatest capital was the trust he had built up with Hindenburg during the five months of his chancellorship, which Papen now sought to cash in against Schleicher. On 26 November, Hindenburg refused to honour Papen’s request not to be charged with forming a new government. “It broke his heart,” Hindenburg wrote, that Papen too now wanted to abandon him.
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Schleicher assumed responsibility for negotiating with the leaders of the political parties to get them to tolerate a Papen cabinet. But the sly general in fact used the meetings to test out the possibilities of becoming chancellor himself.
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The NSDAP leadership waited to see how “the Papen–Schleicher wrestling match” would turn out,
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and Hitler studiously remained absent from Berlin, decamping to Weimar where he had a number of speaking engagements before the upcoming Thuringian local elections. Sefton Delmer visited him in his home away from home, the Hotel Elephant on Weimar’s central market square, on 27 November, and Hitler appeared confident that the great day was at hand for the National Socialist movement, and that it would triumph in four months at the latest. After the interview Delmer asked him whether he aimed to restore the Hohenzollern monarchy once he assumed power. Hitler answered that he had no intention of being “a racehorse for an imperial jockey who wants to jump on my back precisely at the moment when I cross the finishing line.”
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On 30 November, Hitler refused an invitation from Meissner to come to Berlin for another meeting with the Reich president. His tone was cordial, but his message was clear: as long as neither side had changed its position, there was no point in further talks. Hitler could not allow public hopes to be raised, he wrote, “which would inevitably lead to disappointment when they went unfulfilled.”
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The trauma of 13 August was still fresh.

By the time Hindenburg invited Papen and Schleicher to a meeting in the late afternoon of 1 December, it was clear that a decision on the chancellor question would have to be made. Schleicher reported on the lack of progress he had made with his negotiations but advocated “waiting to see how the Nazi camp would develop.” He also revealed for the first time how, in his mind, a cabinet led by him might be able to find a way out of the crisis. Schleicher’s idea was to get some National Socialists, under the leadership of Gregor Strasser, to join the cabinet, thereby dividing the NSDAP and establishing a “vertical front” from the trade unions through the bourgeois parties to dissident Nazis that would be willing to support measures necessary to stimulate the economy and lower unemployment. Hindenburg found that the prospects of success for this endeavour were too uncertain. He refused to accept further delay and asked Papen to continue heading the government. Papen agreed under the condition that “he would be given all the authority of the presidency in the conflict with the Reichstag that was sure to come.” Hindenburg agreed, saying that it was a matter of “preserving Germany from the damage that would result from a violation of the duties of the Reichstag.”
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In other words, Hindenburg had decided upon a “battle cabinet” that would institute the emergency plans drawn up in August and September and dissolve the Reichstag, postpone new elections indefinitely and force through changes to the constitution that would divorce the government from the parliament. Schleicher made no secret of the fact that he could not support this decision because openly violating the constitution would lead to a de facto civil war. “You have a difficult road ahead, little monk,” he threatened Papen when the meeting broke up.
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On the morning of 2 December, Papen convened his cabinet to inform them of Hindenburg’s decision. It was a dramatic meeting. With the lone exception of Postal and Transport Minister Eltz-Rübenach, the ministers all came out against a new incarnation of the Papen government. When Meissner remarked that this would not move the Reich president to reconsider “a decision he had made after much difficult deliberation,” Schleicher played his trump card. In response to Justice Minister Gürtner’s question as to “whether the Reichswehr was ready to meet all coming eventualities,” Schleicher summoned Lieutenant Colonel Eugen Ott into the cabinet. In the preceding weeks, Schleicher had ordered him to test the Reichswehr’s readiness to deal with internal unrest and simultaneously secure Germany’s borders. The results of those tests were negative. Ott’s report left a “devastating impression” on those at the meeting, as Finance Minister von Krosigk noted in his diary.
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Papen immediately declared that the situation had changed and that he would have to renounce his mandate to form a government. Hindenburg only reluctantly accepted the resignation of his preferred chancellor. “Then in God’s name we will have to let Herr von Schleicher try his luck,” Papen recalled Hindenburg’s words.
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Even after he had stepped down as chancellor, Papen was allowed to keep his government apartment in Wilhelmstrasse. Hindenburg wanted him in close proximity as an adviser. This constellation of individuals would prove particularly significant in January 1933.