Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (57 page)

On 28 April, Schleicher secretly met with Hitler to discuss the conditions under which the NSDAP chairman would join or at least tolerate a governing coalition. According to Goebbels, the conversation—in which Kurt von Hammerstein also took part—went well, and agreement was reached. In May Goebbels reported that the two generals “were continuing to stir things up…Brüning and Groener must go!” At a second secret meeting on 7 May, Hitler, Schleicher, Hindenburg’s state secretary, Otto Meissner, and the president’s son, Oskar von Hindenburg, scripted the demise of the Brüning government. Goebbels summarised: “Brüning is to fall this week. The old man will revoke his trust. Schleicher is throwing himself behind that…Then there will be a presidential cabinet. The Reichstag is dissolved. The emergency laws revoked. We will be free to act and can deliver our
coup de grâce
.”
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Hitler had refused to join the government but he had agreed to tolerate a more right-wing, interim presidential cabinet if fresh elections were scheduled and the ban on the SA and SS lifted. Hitler could be more than satisfied with this arrangement. He had not tied himself down and still held all the trump cards. “The boss is relaxed and good-humoured,” Goebbels noted. “We’re conferring over the next election campaign. It’s going to be a huge hit.”
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But the conspiracy did not go to plan. Brüning was able to stave off his demise by warning Hindenburg of the negative foreign-policy effects his dismissal would have, and by threatening to make the former field marshal’s ingratitude known to the Reichstag.
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The German parliament convened once again on 9 May. In his role as speaker for the NSDAP faction, Göring directly attacked Groener and demanded that the ban on the SA and SS be lifted. Groener delivered his rebuttal the following day, but weakened by illness and constantly distracted by jeers from Nazi deputies, he did not make a very good impression. “Unfortunately, Groener was catastrophically bad in defending his position in front of parliament,” wrote the German State Party deputy and post-war German President Theodor Heuss. “We knew he couldn’t speak off the cuff, which is why he mostly read out statements. But he was completely agitated, and his head was covered in bandages because of boils. He looked awful, tried to speak extemporaneously and was unable to finish his sentences because he was constantly interrupted.”
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After this disastrous performance, Groener had to go, and Schleicher and Hammerstein lobbied for his dismissal. “So far so good,” Goebbels joked. “If the cloak falls so does the duke.”
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On 12 May, Groener announced that he would step down as Reich defence minister. However, he wanted to stay on as interior minister. Hindenburg had departed that day for his family’s estate in East Prussian Neudeck, so the decision was postponed. To all intents and purposes, though, Groener’s career was over on 12 May, and with him the Brüning cabinet had lost its most important pillar.
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While Hindenburg was in Neudeck, Brüning’s enemies continued to “burrow away” at the ground beneath his feet.
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Goebbels’s diaries reveal how systematically they went about their work: “The crisis is going according to script…A series of calls with Hitler. He is very satisfied” (14 May). “Everyone is celebrating Pentecost. Except Brüning who’s beginning to wobble. Time to give him a push” (18 May). “Mission Schleicher going well. Brüning completely isolated. Desperately looking for new ministers. Schleicher refused Defence. He’s going the whole hog” (19 May). “Schleicher continues to undermine. A list of ministers is being discussed…Poor Brüning. He’s on short rations” (20 May).
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On 25 May, Werner von Alvensleben, a Schleicher intimate who served as a contact with the National Socialists, reported that Brüning would be “out the door” in three days’ time. He also had a finished cabinet list with the name of the new chancellor: Franz von Papen.
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In Neudeck, Hindenburg was exposed to the influence of his extremely conservative fellow aristocrats, who encouraged the idea of firing Brüning. On 20 May, Brüning’s cabinet had drawn up a draft of an emergency decree empowering the Reich commissioner for eastern assistance, Hans Schlange-Schöningen, to buy bankrupt estates at compulsory auctions and release them for settlement by farmers. The main lobbying organisation for the large landholders, the Reichslandbund, was infuriated by what it saw as “agrarian Bolshevism” and kicked up a storm with Hindenburg. When Otto Meissner presented him with the draft emergency decree on 25 May, Hindenburg refused to sign it.
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Moreover, he communicated via his state secretary his “urgent wish” to Brüning that “the cabinet should be reformed and moved to the right.”
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This was tantamount to asking for his resignation.

When Hindenburg returned to Berlin on 28 May, the die was already cast. In a decisive conversation on the morning of 29 May, Brüning told Hindenburg that he could no longer put up with the “undermining of himself and the government from unqualified quarters, in particular the Reichswehr.” In order to continue his work, Brüning said, he needed “certain guarantees” and above all “a new demonstration of trust by the Reich president.”
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Hindenburg brusquely rejected this and told Brüning he would no longer authorise the government to draft emergency decrees. The break was complete. Around noon on 30 May, Brüning handed in his resignation request. His final meeting with Hindenburg lasted three and a half minutes.
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That was how coldly Hindenburg dismissed the man who had helped him get re-elected only seven weeks previously. Brüning’s intimate Hermann Pünder remarked that, even though Brüning did not let it show, he was “internally and justifiably outraged.”
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He also rejected Hindenburg’s request that he serve as Germany’s future foreign minister.

“Yesterday the bomb went off,” Goebbels crowed. “At 12 o’clock, Brüning handed in the resignation of his entire cabinet to the old man. With that the system has collapsed.”
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By contrast, the democrat Count Kessler reacted to the news of Brüning’s dismissal with horror: “Backroom interests have got their way as in the time of [Wilhelm II],” Kessler complained on 30 May. “Today marks the beginning of the end for the parliamentary republic.”
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And indeed the fall of Brüning represented a watershed. His departure, as historian Heinrich August Winkler pointed out, signalled the end of the “moderate phase of presidential rule.”
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At the same time, it is also true that while in office Brüning had helped undermine parliamentary democracy and bolster the power of the Reich president and the Reich military leadership by largely removing the Reichstag from the process of political decision-making. To some extent, the chancellor fell victim to a development he himself had partially initiated.

—

Late in the afternoon of 30 May, as part of his consultations with the leaders of the various political parties, Hindenburg received Hitler and Göring. The NSDAP chairman declared his willingness to engage in “productive cooperation” with a Reich government under Franz von Papen, but he also reiterated the conditions he had negotiated with Schleicher: a quick dissolution of the Reichstag and the lifting of the ban on the SA.
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He received assurances on both counts. Goebbels noted with satisfaction: “Discussion with the old man went well…SA ban is gone. Uniforms allowed and Reichstag dissolved. That’s the most important thing. The man is Papen. That’s irrelevant. Elections, elections! Straight to the people! We’re all very happy.”
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The Nazi leadership considered it a given that the new government was nothing more than an interim solution. They assumed that they would achieve such an overwhelming result in the next Reichstag elections that Hindenburg would have no choice but to appoint Hitler the leader of the government. Local elections in Oldenburg on 29 May and Mecklenburg-Schwerin on 5 June, in which the NSDAP took 48.4 and 49 per cent of the vote respectively and won a majority of seats in the two Landtage,
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strengthened the conviction that they would achieve a similar triumph in the next national poll. “We have to divorce ourselves from Papen as soon as possible,” Goebbels was already writing in his diary on 6 June.
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The new chancellor Franz von Papen, an old-school gentleman from a venerable Westphalian aristocratic family, was a Centre Party backbencher in the Prussian Landtag who had never made much of a political name for himself. He had served as a battalion commander on the Western Front during the First World War, however, which recommended him in Hindenburg’s eyes. And Papen’s lack of political experience was a major advantage in the view of Schleicher, who pulled Papen’s name out of a hat in the hope the new chancellor would be all the more malleable as Schleicher increased his own political power. Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk would later recall: “He [Schleicher] wanted to pull the political strings and needed a ‘mouthpiece chancellor,’ who was able to speak but did not have a political will of his own.”
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In the new cabinet the political general, who had previously kept his manoeuvring behind the scenes, assumed the role of minister of defence and entered the public spotlight for the first time. Baron Konstantin von Neurath, previously ambassador to Britain, became foreign minister; Baron Wilhelm von Gayl was made interior minister; and the director of the East Prussian Land Society, Baron Magnus von Braun, was promoted to minister of food and agriculture. The Finance Ministry fell to Krosigk, a count who had been ministerial director there since 1929. The Postal Services and Transport Ministry went to Baron Paul von Eltz-Rübenach, previously president of the Reichsbank directorship in Karlsruhe, and the Labour Ministry was taken over by Hugo Schäffer, a former director of the Krupp concern and president of the Reich Insurance Office. Franz Gürtner, who had protected Hitler in his capacity as Bavarian minister of justice, assumed control of the Reich Justice Ministry. The only cabinet member retained from the Brüning government was Economics Minister Hermann Warmbold. All in all, deeply conservative representatives of the landed eastern German aristocracy dominated the body, leading the SPD newspaper
Vorwärts
to speak, with considerable justification, of a “cabinet of barons.”
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The new government had little support across the social and political spectrum. Not only the SPD and the KPD declared their opposition: the Centre Party, who blamed Papen for the betrayal of Brüning, also withheld their support.

Papen met with Hitler for the first time on 31 May. In his 1952 memoirs, Papen recalled that Hitler had struck him more as a bohemian than as a politician. The aristocrat noticed little of the “magnetic force of attraction” often ascribed to the NSDAP chairman. “He behaved politely and modestly,” Papen wrote. Brüning and Groener’s first impression of Hitler had been markedly similar. Apparently this was a role Hitler played to win over others and lure them into a false sense of security concerning his real intentions. When asked whether he would potentially participate in a later government, Hitler became evasive. “He did not want to tie himself down before the results of the election were out,” Papen recalled. “But I could tell that he considered my cabinet an interim solution and that he would continue the fight to make his party the strongest in the land and himself chancellor.”
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Hindenburg dissolved the Reichstag as promised on 4 June. The 31st of July was set as the date for new elections. On 16 June, the ban on the SA was lifted. Hitler’s two conditions for tolerating the Papen cabinet were thereby fulfilled. Bavarian State President Held had protested in vain at a meeting between Papen and representatives of the German states on 11 June that Hindenburg’s 13 million voters would not understand these measures. Held called them the equivalent of a “carte blanche for murder, manslaughter and the worst sort of terrorising of everyone who thought differently [than the Nazis].”
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Many people’s worst fears had come true: violence escalated to previously unseen levels as National Socialists now engaged in bloody street battles on a daily basis. “We are getting closer and closer to civil war,” Harry Kessler observed. “Day for day, Sunday for Sunday, this is a continuous St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.”
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One of the worst clashes occurred on 17 July in Altona just outside Hamburg. After conferring with Carl Severing, the SPD police president had granted permission for 7,000 SA men to march provocatively through the left-wing districts of the city. Seventeen people died, and many were seriously wounded in the ensuing violence. “The shock at this new bloody Sunday is widespread and deep,” wrote Kessler.
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The escalation in violence the Papen government had helped bring about served as an excuse to realise one of its most important aims, namely to chip away at the republican “Prussian bulwark.” Despite the electoral debacle of 24 April, the fragile coalition between the SPD, the Centre and the German State parties had remained in office. Nonetheless, by June 1932, the once-so-powerful SPD state president, Otto Braun, had resigned and passed on his duties to his former deputy, Welfare Minister Heinrich Hirtsiefer of the Centre Party. Rumours were already swirling that a Reich commissioner could be appointed for Prussia. In the short term, Papen favoured a different solution. On 6 June, he called upon the president of the Prussian Landtag, the National Socialist Hanns Kerrl, to begin “without delay” trying to form a new coalition between the NSDAP, the Centre Party and the DNVP.
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Negotiations quickly stalled. “No shared responsibility in Prussia either. Either total power or opposition,” Goebbels noted in his diary to summarise Hitler’s logic.
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The Centre Party was willing to accept a conservative nationalist, but not a National Socialist, as state president. In early July, attempts to form a majority government in Prussia were deemed a failure, and the Landtag went into indefinite recess.