Burning the Reichstag (11 page)

It was in this uncertain moment that the brief tenure of Chancellor Franz von Papen came to a sudden end. The calculating General Kurt von Schleicher, who had the ear of President von Hindenburg, had maneuvered Papen into the chancellorship in the summer of 1932. Schleicher was confident that Papen would be a useful tool with which he could bring Nazi support behind a government that would crush Germany's socialists and Communists and put an end to the democratic coalition in Prussia. Schleicher thought that he could buy Hitler's support with a few insubstantial concessions—like ending the ban on the SA that the previous Brüning administration had just introduced—and thus keep Hitler from effective power. After the stunning Nazi victory in the elections of July 1932, however, Hitler would accept nothing less than the chancellorship
for himself, and neither Papen nor President Hindenburg was willing to give it to him.

The problem was that the 1932 elections showed that only about 10 percent of Germans supported Papen's government, and Schleicher and the men around him were shrewd enough to know that even a dictatorship needed more popular support than that. An alarming report suggested that the army could not possibly keep order in the event of a civil war between the Communists and the Nazis. Things would be even worse were these groups to join forces against the government, a prospect that did not seem far-fetched after Nazis and Communists collaborated in support of a Berlin transit strike in early November. Schleicher convinced Hindenburg that he had a viable plan to split the Nazis and draw support from the Party's Gregor Strasser wing, politically more left-leaning and tactically more accommodating than Hitler himself, as well as from the trade unions. Hindenburg accepted Schleicher's plan, dismissed Papen, and named Schleicher to the post.

Schleicher's plan failed almost immediately. Hitler succeeded in holding his party together and drove Strasser from his influential position. The unions and the Social Democrats remained unconvinced that any general could have their interests at heart. Meanwhile, Papen, brooding over his fall from power and Schleicher's betrayal, decided the path to revenge lay through assembling an alternate coalition. He would concede the chancellorship to Hitler while keeping what he hoped would be the more important vice-chancellorship for himself, and bringing other right-wing groups like the German Nationals and the Steel Helmet into a “government of national concentration.”

Negotiations for such a deal went on in January 1933, while the Nazis were able to camouflage their sharp drop in votes in the November elections with a state election victory in the tiny state of Lippe. The deal almost broke down at the last minute when Hitler insisted that the government must call new elections right away. Nationalist leader Alfred Hugenberg wanted to suspend the Reichstag so that the government could function as a dictatorship, using emergency powers from President Hindenburg, at least until it could calm the economic crisis and restore political stability by outlawing the Communists. In a sign of things to come, Hugenberg grudgingly gave way, and an election was set for Sunday, March 5th. Hitler's new government would enter office facing an immediate election campaign. “It has happened,” Goebbels
wrote exultantly in his diary. “We are sitting in the Wilhelmstrasse…. Like a fairy tale.”

Yet to most other observers, especially the Nationalist leaders, little seemed to have changed. “We have hired him,” Papen wrote confidently of Hitler. “In a few months we will have pushed him so far into the corner that he will squeak.” Decades later it is easy to laugh at his lack of foresight. But in the winter of 1933 there were reasons to believe that Papen was right. After all, Hitler and his two Nazi cabinet colleagues, Minister without Portfolio (and Prussian Interior Minister) Hermann Göring, and Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, were surrounded and outnumbered by solid establishment figures—Papen, Hugenberg, Papen's Foreign Minister Baron Constantin von Neurath, Defense Minister Werner von Blomberg, to say nothing of the venerable President von Hindenburg. Hitler could not have an audience with Hindenburg without Papen. In a crunch the army would surely stand with its revered old field marshal against Hitler. Anyway, was it not true that the responsibility of power always tamed radicals? That had certainly happened to the Social Democrats after 1918.
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“It made little impression on us,” wrote Max Fürst years later, “when Hitler came to power in January 1933.” Fürst was a young carpenter and furniture maker who had moved to Berlin from Königsberg in 1927. He had spent years as a leader of a left-wing Jewish youth group, and his closest friend (and roommate) was the radical lawyer Hans Litten. “So many, in part dreadful governments, had come and gone…. It probably couldn't get any worse than the Papen government.” The journalist Sebastian Haffner (at the time a law student) agreed: he, too, thought that Hitler's government would be little different than the preceding Papen and Schleicher administrations.
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The life spans of Weimar governments had all been short, and few expected Hitler's to prove the exception. The independent Nationalist politician Gottfried Treviranus wrote years later that everyone he knew expected Hitler to “exhaust himself on the phalanx of Hindenburg, the army, and the constitution.” Friedrich Stampfer, editor-in-chief of the Social Democratic paper
Vorwärts
(Forward), asked a foreign correspondent if he seriously believed that “this roaring gorilla can govern,” adding that Hitler's government would last no longer than three weeks. Erich Ebermayer, well connected in both literary and political circles, recorded that his mother gave Hitler's government six weeks. But his father, the
former chief Reich prosecutor, was more sober. “Even if it only lasts half a year,” said Ludwig Ebermayer, “a lot of damage can be done, especially in foreign policy.” Then, turning grimmer and more prophetic, the old man added: “But it will last longer. This is no cabinet like any other, one that will just resign someday.”
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Ludwig Ebermayer had retired in 1926 and in early 1933 he was dying of cancer. Strangely, some of the few active politicians who viewed Hitler's new government with real alarm were among those who were supposed to be Hitler's allies.

NO ONE COULD HAVE CONFUSED
Dr. Ernst Oberfohren with a liberal democrat. Oberfohren was the leader of the German National People's Party's Reichstag caucus. A 1931 speech gives a good idea of his political outlook. His party was not in the Reichstag, he said, to “palaver.” They were there to declare war on the “system,” and on “the bearers of this system.” By the “system,” of course, he meant the democracy of Weimar Germany.
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Nonetheless Oberfohren became an early critic and an early target of the National Socialists, starting with a public war of words with the Nazi leader in Schleswig-Holstein, Hinrich Lohse (later infamous as the Reich commissar, or governor, of German-occupied territories in the Baltic and Belarus regions of the Soviet Union, where he was responsible for widespread atrocities). Lohse attacked Oberfohren as “racially undefined,” a freemason, a “political conman.” For Oberfohren the Nazis were a southern, Catholic party, unsuitable for a leading role in Lutheran northern Germany, fatally reckless and irresponsible.
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When in 1932 the Nazis had come to power in the small northern state of Oldenburg and opened a reign of terror on their political opponents, including the Nationalists, Oberfohren urged the Reich interior minister to use emergency powers to remove Oldenburg Prime Minister Carl Röver from office, just as Papen's government had overturned the Braun-Severing administration in Prussia. Under the headline “Against Every Party-Dictatorship” a German National newspaper quoted Oberfohren as saying “We German Nationals do not one-sidedly reject the idea of a party-state run by Social Democrats, rather [we reject] the idea of a party state altogether.” In return, Nazis often disrupted or broke up meetings at which Oberfohren spoke—which at any rate reinforced his point.
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When Hitler became chancellor it did not take Oberfohren long to see that the Nazis would rule Germany with the violence and lawlessness they had deployed in Oldenburg, and he began to slip into despair at the lack of resistance. Ernst Torgler later remembered a conversation he had with Oberfohren in the Reichstag on February 6, 1933, the day after the state funeral for the SA leader Hans Maikowski. Maikowski, as we have seen, was shot by one of his own men, possibly on Goebbels's orders, the night Hitler came to power. The Nazis decided to give him the Horst Wessel treatment. That day Torgler noticed Oberfohren's “dreadfully angry expression,” but greeted him cheerfully: “Hey, Herr Colleague Oberfohren, I can see the joy in your face at the new governing coalition!” Oberfohren replied gravely: “Oh, you have no idea; what just went on here is an absolute outrage,” referring to Maikowski's funeral. Torgler added that he could not repeat publicly the expression that Oberfohren had actually used.

Torgler asked Oberfohren if the new government planned to ban the Communist Party. “Look,” Oberfohren replied, “Herr Colleague Torgler, we would be fools” to go along with such a ban. Without the Communists the Nazis would not need the Nationalists to reach a majority in the Reichstag. Then “we would be finished,” said Oberfohren. But it was clear that leader Hugenberg did not agree. Oberfohren said that he had warned Hugenberg the Nazis would “devour” the German Nationals, but Hugenberg wouldn't listen. Oberfohren added that he “put nothing at all past the Nazis. I got to know them in Schleswig-Holstein.” By another account Oberfohren made the last point even more explicitly: “The Nazis are preparing an important act of provocation,” he told Torgler. Again, he had warned Hugenberg, and again Hugenberg would not believe him.
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Oberfohren was not the only establishment conservative who did not trust the Nazis and viewed any coalition with them with alarm. His parliamentary colleague Reinhold Quaatz recorded that President Hindenburg (officially non-partisan but close to the German Nationals) complained that Hitler never kept his word, adding “That is really the evil. They are nihilists.” In a private conversation in February, Foreign Minister von Neurath, Hindenburg's own choice for that post, complained to the British Ambassador Sir Horace Rumbold that Göring was a “dreadful man” whom Papen could not control. In the dislike that Oberfohren and many of his colleagues felt for the Nazis we can see the roots of what would become the conservative-military resistance to Hitler, culminating in the
Valkyrie plot of July 1944. Many of those resistance figures were prominent German Nationals, notably the former mayor of Leipzig, Carl Goerdeler, and Goerdeler's young protégé Hans Bernd Gisevius.
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Even if the German Nationals and the Nazis shared some goals and elements of ideology—extreme nationalism, militarism, and anti-Semitism—they were worlds apart in social composition and style. The Nationalists were devoutly, indeed militantly Protestant, while the leaders of the Nazi Party, as Diels noted, tended to be lapsed Catholics, in whom the apostate's hatred of the church mixed oddly with lingering Catholic influence. The Nationalists were the party of Germany's traditional elites—the aristocracy, the army high command, the senior civil service, and some sections of industry—whereas the Nazis generally came from much lower down in the social hierarchy. Devoted to the idea of an authoritarian political system, the German Nationals had no use whatsoever for the Nazis' contempt for the rule of law, or for the anti-elitism and anticapitalism that often marked Nazi rhetoric.

After the effort to form an alliance at Bad Harzburg in 1931—the Harzburg Front discussed earlier—relations between the two parties had deteriorated steadily. In late 1932 the Nationalists had formed the only basis of support for the Papen administration, and so in the fall election campaign the Nazis aimed their vitriol primarily at the Nationalists. Both parties attacked each other without restraint.

At the outset of the campaign, Goebbels instructed Nazi activists that “the struggle against the Papen Cabinet and the reactionary circles behind it must now begin all along the line.” Papen's “regime” was nothing but a “small feudal clique,” and the Nazis must fight it without mercy. Papen and Hindenburg had dissolved the Reichstag and called the November election, said a Nazi press release, only because the Nazi-dominated Reichstag elected on July 31st had contained “too few Jews and too many anti-Semites.” Goebbels's
Angriff
referred contemptuously to the Nationals' leader Hugenberg as “Hugenzwerg”—meaning “Hugen-dwarf.” In an election speech earlier that year, the Oldenburg Nazi Carl Röver denounced the German Nationals as “scoundrels” and “traitors to the people.” Violence between the two camps, especially attacks on the other's meetings, was common. In January 1933 SA men murdered a German National official in Pomerania.
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The German Nationals pushed back. A Nationalist pamphlet entitled “How the Nazis Govern” exposed the abuses of Nazi rule in the states of
Oldenburg, Braunschweig, and Anhalt. It characterized the Nazis as the party of lies, egoism, and villainy. A similar pamphlet was called “How the Nazis Fight.” Its cover showed a clean-cut, uniformed SA man. But crouching behind him was a thug with an insidious, rather sub-mental smile, clutching an anarchist's classic grapefruit-shaped bomb.
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Of all the prominent Nazis, the one who felt the German Nationals' dislike and distrust most clearly—and who most defiantly returned it—was Goebbels. Even at Bad Harzburg, Goebbels, who thought the Nationals too bourgeois and too “reactionary,” had recorded his particular dislike of Oberfohren, who “pisses and puffs himself up. Oh, what better people are we savages! I have to puke.” When the Nazis themselves finally got power, the goal would be to “kick out the reactionaries as fast as possible. We alone will be the lords of Germany …”
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