Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (64 page)

But the crisis within the party was not quite over yet. Strasser’s resignation caused what Goebbels described as “great unrest” among the party rank and file.
²⁷²
There were doubts about Hitler’s leadership mixed with confusion as to where to go from here. Hitler spent the weeks before Christmas travelling to the Gaue to shore up morale among party functionaries. On 10 December in Breslau, in a sign of how dramatic the situation was, he compared the NSDAP’s struggle with that of Friedrich the Great in the Seven Years War. The Prussian king, Hitler said, had also had to deal with repeated setbacks but had triumphed in the end. Anyone hoping for a “collapse of the movement,” Hitler thundered, “was fooling himself—it stood as immovable as a cliff in the ocean.”
²⁷³
The following day in Leipzig, he declared: “I am proud of the knowledge that the entire movement stands behind me more determined than ever. The party has not been seized by crisis. It’s already put this crisis behind it.”
²⁷⁴
This was little more than whistling in the dark. Hitler’s words so obviously contradicted the true situation that he was unlikely to have convinced many of his followers. Goebbels’s diary offers a more accurate account, with its mentions of declining attendance at Nazi events and the party’s hopeless finances.
²⁷⁵
On Christmas Eve Goebbels concluded: “1932 has been one long run of bad luck. It should be smashed to pieces.”
²⁷⁶

—

In conversation with Bavarian State President Held on 10 December, the newly appointed Chancellor von Schleicher stated that he considered the National Socialist danger to have been “overcome.”
²⁷⁷
The tenor of the opinion pieces in the major liberal newspapers at the end of the year was similar. “The massive National Socialist attack on the democratic state has been repelled,” the Berlin correspondent of the
Frankfurter Zeitung
, Rudolf Kircher, declared. Julius Elbau titled his review article in the
Vossische Zeitung
“Year of Decision.” Yet Elbau also complained that the republic had not been saved because Germans had defended it. “Its attackers got rid of one another,” Elbau wote. “It was a march through the valley of the devil that makes you shudder when you look back at it.”
²⁷⁸
The
Berliner Tageblatt
already consigned the Hitler movement to the realm of history: “All over the world, people talked about…what was his first name again, Adalbert Hitler? And later? He disappeared.”
²⁷⁹

In the newspaper
Der deutsche Volkswirt
, the liberal journalist Gustav Stolper assured his readers: “The year 1932 has brought an end to Hitler’s luck.” The movement had reached its high point on 31 July, Stolper argued, and its decline had begun on 13 August. “Since then Hitlerism has been collapsing to an extent and at a rate that are comparable only with its rise,” Stolper wrote. “Hitlerism is perishing according to the same laws by which it lived.” The Social Democratic politician and former Reich Finance Minister Rudolf Hilferding agreed. In the SPD theoretical journal
Die Gesellschaft
, he wrote that 13 August had “marked a sudden shift in the drama—what is thus far the decisive turn…Herr Hitler descends the steps of the palais—it’s the demise of fascism.”
²⁸⁰

“I believe we’ve turned the corner,” Thomas Mann wrote to Hermann Hesse on 22 December. “We seem to be past the peak of the insanity.”
²⁸¹
People abroad, too, breathed a sigh of relief that the wave which had borne National Socialism seemed to be over. In the British Foreign Office, experts attributed Hitler’s declining influence to his mule-headed insistence on total political authority: “Hitler’s obstinacy in demanding complete power…has caused him to miss the bus.”
²⁸²
Harold Laski, the British political scientist and Labour politician, remarked that Hitler would likely end up as an old man in a Bavarian village, telling his friends in an evening beer garden about how he once almost toppled the German Reich.
²⁸³

Critical observers were not the only ones in late 1932 and early 1933 who were convinced that the National Socialist movement would inevitably fade into insignificance. Some Hitler supporters felt much the same way. On 31 December 1932, Luise Solmitz vented her disappointment in her diary: “This year takes with it a great hope…Adolf Hitler. The man who awakened us and led us towards national unity…is ultimately only the leader of a party that is sliding into certain desperation. I still can’t accept this bitter disappointment.”
²⁸⁴

Of course, there were other voices that warned against drawing conclusions too hastily. In a letter to the industrialist Robert Bosch on 29 December, the journalist, political scientist and liberal politician Theodor Heuss expressed the hope that “all the fuss around Hitler will not survive this current crisis.” At the same time, he added: “But it would be dangerous to underestimate the movement as a power factor since thousands of people are fighting for their economic survival within the [party] apparatus.”
²⁸⁵
In the New Year’s edition of
Die
Weltbühne
, Carl von Ossietzsky also expressed his satisfaction that Hitler’s party, which had knocked on the doors of power at the start of the year, was now “rocked by a serious crisis.” But Ossietzsky, too, warned against overheated expectations: “The economic situation is still perfect for breeding further desperadoes.”
²⁸⁶
With almost 5.8 million Germans still out of work in late 1932, unemployment was still very high, and in January that figure once again exceeded 6 million.
²⁸⁷
The reasons for the rise, however, were seasonal, and the figures were better than those of the previous years. The worst of the crisis was over and cautious optimism started to spread. “Land in sight!” read the headline of the business section of the
Frankfurter Zeitung
on 1 January 1933.
²⁸⁸

12

Month of Destiny: January 1933

“The amazing thing about my life,” Heinrich Brüning quoted Hitler as saying in early February 1933, just after being appointed German chancellor, “is that I’m always rescued just when I myself have given up.”
¹
And indeed, the NSDAP’s prospects at the beginning of 1933 looked anything but rosy. Hitler’s party was in deep crisis, with many members feeling deflated and resigned. Dissatisfaction with the party leadership was threatening to make the SA explode. In short, the National Socialist movement seemed further away from power than it had been at the start of 1932. In a letter to his friend Winifred Wagner in early 1933, Hitler complained about “all the difficult and onerous work” he had had to take on in the preceding weeks. New worries were constantly being added to old ones, Hitler carped. “I now know,” he wrote, “why Wagner and his destiny in particular meant more to me as a young man than many other great Germans. It is no doubt the same misery of an eternal struggle against hatred, envy and incomprehension.”
²

Despite the confidence he projected externally, Hitler’s dissatisfaction with his situation was clearly evident in the New Year’s message he dictated on the Obersalzberg on 30 December—his droning voice could be heard echoing throughout Haus Wachenfeld.
³
That evening, Hitler read out his message to his paladins. Goebbels raved: “No reconciliation. A battle to the last drop of blood…Hitler is grand. Radicalism at its most extreme.”
⁴
Gone were all tactical considerations that Hitler had maintained in order to preserve an aura of middle-of-the-road respectability at his appearances in front of business circles and during his 1932 campaign. The fanatic, anti-Semitic beer-cellar rabble-rouser re-emerged, articulating his obsession in language that was both exceedingly aggressive and pseudo-religiously convoluted: “In almost all states of the world, the international Jew as an intellectual inspirer conducts the battle of the deficiently gifted inferior race against culture—and therefore against the talent of a higher breed that creates and secures human life, whose capacity to resist has been exhausted by liberalism.” In Russia, Hitler added, the “Jewish intellectual leadership of the world revolution” had already done its destructive work, and the plan was “to infect the rest of the world via a network of connections and bases.” Only one country, Hitler claimed, was standing up to this threat—Mussolini’s Italy, which had found in Fascism “a dominant ideal capable of reshaping its entire life anew”: “There we see the only state and the only people who have overcome the bourgeois, class-defined state and thereby achieved the preconditions for overcoming and rooting out Marxism.”

Hitler reiterated his refusal to compromise in any form, stating that at this moment he was “utterly decided not to sell the first-born child of our movement for the pittance of being allowed to participate, without power, in a government.” He would fight “down to his last breath” against bartering “the proudest and greatest uprising of the German people for a couple of ministerial seats.”
⁵
There seemed to be no doubt that Hitler was sticking to his all-or-nothing strategy, and the party seemed headed for political marginalisation.

Four weeks later, Hitler was German chancellor. This turnabout, which astonished a great many people at the time, was no “triumph of the will” or “seizure of power,” as Nazi propaganda would soon claim. It was the result of sinister intrigues behind the scenes in which a handful of figures, most notably former Chancellor von Papen, pulled the strings. “Herr Hitler was a defeated man when he was given victory,” the journalist and sociologist Leopold Schwarzschild remarked in an article entitled “Chancellor Hitler” in early February 1933. “He had already lost the contest for governmental authority, when he was offered the opportunity to win it
ex post facto
.”
⁶

The decisive factor in the political intrigue was access to Hindenburg, or, as Konrad Heiden more casually wrote, “who had the old man’s ear.”
⁷
Ultimately the destiny of Germany depended on the Reich president. In his definitive Hindenburg biography, Wolfram Pyta convincingly showed that the ageing German president was not merely a marionette in the hands of his camarilla, as earlier historians had depicted him. On the contrary, Hindenburg remained in control of his decisions at all times.
⁸
He played the leading part in the drama that preceded Hitler’s appointment to the chancellorship. Papen, State Secretary Meissner and Hindenburg’s son Oskar—although the Weimar Constitution had not foreseen a role played by the president’s son—were the most significant members of the supporting cast.

—

The beginning of the drama took place on 4 January, when Papen met with Hitler—an event which the historian Karl-Dietrich Bracher has rightly described as the “hour when the Third Reich was born.”
⁹
It was arranged by the banker Kurt von Schröder, a member of the “Keppler Circle” and a signatory of the petition to Hindenburg of 19 November 1932. On 16 December, after a speech by Papen to the Berlin Gentlemen’s Club, he had started conversing with the former Reich chancellor. The idea was broached—historians disagree whether by Papen or Schröder—of organising a tête-à-tête with Hitler, and Schröder immediately informed Keppler of Papen’s willingness to meet the NSDAP chairman. “In the current situation the wish to arrange a discussion between P[apen] and H[itler] seems to me to be very crucial,” Keppler wrote on 19 December, adding that Papen “could surely judge best of all…what the old man’s mood was like these days and how resistance from that quarter could be best overcome.”
¹⁰
That very day, Keppler wrote to Hitler offering to mediate. As a location for the meeting he suggested Schröder’s house just outside Cologne, and he assured Hitler that he could vouch for the banker’s “absolute reliability.”
¹¹
On 26 December, Keppler informed Schröder that Hitler would be arriving in Cologne on the morning of 4 January. He hoped that the “skill” of the host would succeed in “removing the final barriers during the conversation.” From his estate at Wallerfangen an der Saar in south-western Germany, Papen agreed to the date and place.
¹²

The planned meeting opened up interesting prospects for both Papen and Hitler. Papen had not got over being politically outmanoeuvred by his former patron Schleicher and was eager to get revenge, seeing a deal with Hitler as a way of forcing Schleicher from office and once more playing a major role himself. For his part, Hitler recognised that a possible understanding with Papen offered the chance of getting out of the dead end into which he had led his party and reversing his own fortunes. He knew that Papen retained privileged access to Hindenburg and hoped that the aristocrat could help break down the president’s resistance to the idea of Hitler becoming chancellor.
¹³
Both sides insisted that the meeting be kept secret. Hitler, who was scheduled to open the campaign for the Landtag elections in Lippe-Detmold in western Germany on 4 January, did not travel directly to the first event there, but took the night train from Munich to Bonn. At the train station, his chauffeur Schreck was already waiting with a Mercedes limousine and drove Hitler and his travelling companions to the Hotel Dreesen in Bad Godesberg for breakfast. A short time later, a second automobile with curtained windows picked up Hitler, Himmler and Hess for the trip to Schröder’s Cologne villa. Keppler, who had come from Berlin, showed up a short time later, while Papen arrived at 11:30 a.m.
¹⁴