Hitler (58 page)

Despite his boast that he would bring down the “system” in a succession of election campaigns, Hitler had exerted himself since the spring to gain the confidence and support of influential circles, realizing more keenly than ever before that he would never attain governmental power solely on the basis of his success among the masses. Article 48, which shifted effective power to the President and his immediate entourage, reduced both the power of the Reichstag and the importance of an electoral victory. Not the number of votes but the will of the President determined the holder of the chancellorship. In a sense, therefore, it was more important to commend himself to Hindenburg than to win a majority.

 

As always, Hitler advanced on several fronts at once. His oath of legality at Leipzig had already contained a hidden offer of good behavior and partnership. At the beginning of 1931 he received a hint from Schleicher: the ban on participation of Nazis in the Frontier Guard was lifted. In return, Hitler instructed the SA to refrain from street fighting. He even had an SA unit in Kassel dissolved because it had obtained weapons contrary to orders. To strengthen the point, Röhm was required to issue a memorandum implying that the storm troop detachments might be dissolved altogether; they “would be superfluous” if Hitler assumed the chancellorship. “Pretty-boy Adolf is dripping with loyalty,” General Groener wrote to a friend at this time. Hitler was no longer a problem for the Defense Ministry, he added.

When the Catholic bishops issued a sharp statement warning their flock against the Nazi party, Hitler instantly dispatched his most ingratiating associate, Hermann Göring, to Rome to negotiate. In an interview with the
Daily Express
Hitler expressed himself in favor of strong German-English co-operation to abolish reparations; he took a conciliatory, mature tone and emphasized the elements uniting England and Germany. When Wilhelm Pieck, the Communist deputy, announced that the Red Army stood ready to come to the aid of revolutionary armies of liberation within Germany, Hitler told an American newspaper that the National Socialist Party was the bulwark against advancing world Bolshevism. “He rants much less than he used to,” a contemporary account noted. “He no longer has Jews for breakfast” and was evidently doing his best “not to seem monomaniac.” His eagerness to be thought respectable extended to outward matters. He left the modest little Hotel Sanssouci, where he had previously stayed on his visits to Berlin, and chose to reside in the prestigious Kaiserhof. There was also deliberate challenge in this; the hotel lay diagonally across the square from the chancellery. Convinced that they had tamed their man, the spokesmen for the Right assured one another that Hitler was at last on the way to being a useful implement of state power.

He also wooed the financiers, who on the whole had remained rather reserved. Frau von Dircksen, who held court in the Kaiserhof and had many influential connections, came to his aid just at the right time—one more of those aging female friends to whose zeal he owed so much. Frau Bechstein also continued to promote his cause. Other contacts were made through Göring, who ran a lavish house, and through the financial journalist Walther Funk. Wilhelm Keppler, a small businessman ruined by the Depression, also brought sympathetic industrialists into the movement. He founded the “Economic Friendship Circle,” which was to become notorious through its later connection with Himmler. Otto Dietrich, who had extensive family connections with men in industry, noted: “In Munich in the summer of 1931 the Führer suddenly made the decision to work systematically on leading personalities in business and in the bourgeois Center parties, who were at the heart of the opposition to him.” He toured Germany in his supercharged Mercedes, going to confidential conferences. The better to keep them secret, some of these were held “in solitary forest clearings, in the bosom of nature.” At Streithof (“Squabble Farm”), the estate of Emil Kirdorf, the Ruhr industrialist, Hitler addressed more than thirty captains of heavy industry.
¹⁵
He ostentatiously forced Gregor Strasser and Gottfried Feder to withdraw a motion they had introduced in the Reichstag as a kind of last bow to their abandoned socialist aims, a motion calling for the expropriation of the “bank and stock exchange barons.” And when the Communist Party faction, seeing a good joke, proposed the selfsame motion on their own account, Hitler had the Nazi deputies vote against it. Henceforth, his only comments on his economic program were dark allusions. At the same time, he drew away from the somewhat pigheaded Gottfried Feder and occasionally kept Feder from speaking in public.

 

During the early part of July, 1931, Hitler finally met with Hugenberg in Berlin. Soon thereafter he had a talk with Franz Seldte and Theodor Duesterberg, leaders of the paramilitary veteran association Stahlhelm (“steel helmet”), who once again wanted to join forces with him. Then he met with General von Schleicher and General von Hammerstein-Equord, chief of the army command. He conferred with Brüning, Groener, and once again with Schleicher. The purpose of all these conversations was to sound out Hitler's intentions, but they were also rapprochements designed to draw Hitler into the system against which he had been battling on principle. The idea was to capture him by tactical alliances and, as General Groener put it, “bind him doubly and triply to the stake of legality.” But none of these important persons had any idea of Hitler's toughness and intransigence. They also seemed to discount Hitler's capacity for dissimulation. Consequently, the gains were all on his side—the leader of the Nazi party emerged from his isolation and was raised several ranks in status. The conversations encouraged his followers, confused his antagonists, and impressed the voters. How desperately Hitler had been waiting for this turn of events is evident from his reaction when he was summoned to Berlin for the meeting with Chancellor Brüning. Hess, Rosenberg, and Rosenberg's deputy, Wilhelm Weiss, were with him in Munich when the telegram arrived. He skimmed it hastily, then held it out to the others. “Now I have them in my pocket!” he exclaimed. “They have recognized me as an equal partner in negotiations.” The image he was trying to project is reflected in Groener's summary: “Hitler's intentions and aims are good, but [he is an] enthusiast, fervent, many-sided. Likable impression, modest, orderly person and in manner the type of the ambitious, self-educated man.” Hereafter, in confidential communications among his distinguished counterparts he would be referred to—with a shade of mockery—as “Adolf.” He had made his successful entree.

Only the conversation with Hindenburg—which Schleicher arranged for October 10—ended in a failure. The President's entourage had the strongest reservations; in fact, Oskar, Hindenburg's son, had acidly commented on Hitler's request for an interview: “I suppose he wants a free drink.” Hitler came with Göring. He seemed nervous during the meeting; when the President suggested that he support the administration, in view of the predicament of the whole country, Hitler launched into divagations on the aims of his party. On being reprimanded for the increasing acts of violence on the part of his followers, Hitler responded with verbose assurances that obviously did not satisfy the President. From Hindenburg's entourage the remark was subsequently leaked that the President was at most prepared to appoint this “Bohemian corporal” Postmaster General, certainly not Chancellor.
¹⁶

After the interview Hitler went to Bad Harzburg, where next day the Nationalist opposition was celebrating its union by a great demonstration. Once more Hugenberg had gathered together everybody on the Right who had power, money, or prestige: the leaders of the Nazis and of the German Nationalists, the rightist members of the Reichstag and of the Prussian Landtag, the representatives of the German People's Party (Deutsche Volkspartei), the Economic Party, the Stahlhelm, and the Reichslandbund. In addition, he had assembled many prominent patrons, members of former ruling houses headed by two Hohenzollern princes. Also present were Heinrich Class, leader of the Pan-Germans, and his presiding committee, such retired generals as von Lüttwitz and von Seeckt, and many notables of finance and industry, including Hjalmar Schacht, Fritz Thyssen, Ernst Poensgen of the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel), Louis Ravene of the Iron Wholesalers' Association, the shipbuilding magnate Blohm of Hamburg, the bankers von Stauss, Regendanz, and Sogemeyer. All the enemies of the republic, with the exception of the Communists, were deployed here: a variegated army of the discontented, united less by a single aim than by a single animosity.

Hitler was in the worst of humors. He had consented to participate only with great reluctance, and the failure of his interview with Hindenburg had increased his sullenness. As in the case of the alliance against the Young Plan, he once more had to expect criticism from his own ranks; and personally he could not help feeling uncomfortable about this liaison with all the bourgeois forces. Shortly before the beginning of the meeting, therefore, he had a closed session of his own following. Frick spoke, justifying the pact with this “bourgeois mishmash” on purely tactical grounds. Mussolini, too, Frick said, had had to win power by the roundabout route of a nationalist coalition.

As soon as Frick had ended his speech, Hitler, with that dramatic surprise technique of his, entered the room with his personal retinue and in a solemn ceremony had everyone there take a pledge to follow his line. Meanwhile, the “Nationalist United Front” was waiting in the Kursaal for Hitler to appear.

For Hugenberg, who had already made all sorts of concessions to the Nazi party leader during the preparatory phases, this delay was not the last humiliation of the meeting. Hitler deliberately trampled on the feelings of his influential partners. He did not bother to appear at the session of the joint editorial committee, declaring its work to be a sheer waste of time. And at the final parade, which was supposed to be the inspiring climax of the meeting, Hitler ostentatiously left the stands as soon as the SA formations had marched past and the Stahlhelm was approaching. Nor would he attend the dinner; he could not feast, he declared, as long as thousands of his followers did their “duty on empty stomachs.” Only “concern over the adverse publicity, which none of the participants desired,” Hugenberg complained in disappointment, had prevented a “breach right out in the open.”

To Hitler, the disharmony at Harzburg was by no means a tactical feint. Nor was it part of his prima-donna pose. Rather, the meeting confronted him again with the crucial question of power. Hugenberg's talk about unity did not disguise the claim to leadership, which as arranger of the festivities he was actually making. With his own peculiar consistency, Hitler realized that any community of action could mean only subordination. At best it would imply that henceforth Germany would have to be looking up to two “saviors”—an absurdity from Hitler's point of view. In order to dispel any such mistaken impression, only a week after the Harzburg meeting, Hitler organized a huge demonstration on the Franzensfeld in Brunswick. More than 100,000 SA men were brought there in special trains. During the hours that the parade lasted, planes with gigantic swastikas streaming behind them circled over the field. And during the dedication of standards Hitler declared that this would be the last such ceremony before the seizure of power. The movement, he said, stood “within a yard of its goal.”

At the same time there can be no doubt that Hitler's rudeness at Harzburg expressed some of his hostility toward the bourgeois world, which he was never able to completely quell. The very sight of top hats, tailcoats, and starched shirt fronts irritated him, as did the titles, the decorations, and the conceit they suggested. Here were people who thought morality itself sustained their claims to dominance, who liked to speak of their “historically appointed role.” But Hitler sensed the weakness and rot behind the display of composure, the outmodedness of these swarms of mummies with middle-class manners.

Yet this was the very bourgeois world that the young coffeehouse dandy, the lazy disciple of the arts, had longed to join. Though it had rejected him, he had nevertheless uncritically taken over its social, ideological, and aesthetic evaluations and held on to them for a long time. But in the meantime that world had declared its bankruptcy, and Hitler—unlike the representatives of the bourgeois world—never forgot that fact. In Hugenberg he was meeting a replica of the cunning, arrogant, and feeble Bavarian Prime Minister, Herr von Kahr, who had for him become the prototype of bourgeois notables. He now regarded them as a group who claimed to rule, yet had the souls of lackeys. “Cowardly,” “stupid,” “idiotic,” and “rotten,” were the adjectives he now attached to the mention of any member of this group. “No class of the population is stupider in political matters than this so-called bourgeoisie,” he would often remark. Once he said that he had for a long time deliberately tried, by strident propaganda and improper manners, to keep bourgeois people from joining the party.

In May, 1931, Richard Breiting, editor in chief of the
Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten,
asked Hitler for an interview. Hitler began the conversation by remarking, “You are a representative of the bourgeoisie which we are fighting.” He stressed that he had no intention of rescuing the dying bourgeoisie; on the contrary, he would eliminate it and would, at any rate, find it much easier to handle than Marxism. Hitler openly flaunted his present aloofness from bourgeois culture: “If a proletarian brutally tells me what he thinks, I can cherish the hope that some day this brutality can be turned toward the enemy. When a bourgeois indulges in daydreams of culture, civilization and aesthetic joys for the world, I say to him: ‘You are lost to the German nation! You belong in Berlin's West End! Go there, dance your nigger dances till you're worn out, and croak!' ”

He occasionally referred to himself as a “proletarian,” but with an emphasis that made it appear as though he were talking not so much of his social status but of a social renunciation. “I can never be understood in terms of the bourgeoisie,” he declared. Even in his hope of winning over the working class—to which he referred occasionally as a class of “true nobility”—he seemed to be agitated not so much by any fondness for the workers than by his abiding hatred of the bourgeoisie, which had rejected him. There was an incestuous element in his hatred of the bourgeoisie, with the resentment of a would-be bourgeois who had been first rejected, then deceived, constantly erupting. The type of low-class bully he preferred for his immediate personal entourage, the crude “chauffeur types” like Schaub, Schreck, Graf, and Maurice, reflected in an extreme fashion this prejudice, which could be overcome only temporarily by a few individuals: by Ernst Hanfstaengl, for example, or by Albert Speer, or by Carl Jacob Burckhardt, League of Nations commissioner for Danzig, to whom Hitler said “sadly” in 1939: “You come from a world that is foreign to me.”
¹⁷