Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (59 page)

The Nazi leadership were not the only ones who thought definitive triumph was at hand. The party grass roots and the SA also started preparing for what looked like their certain “seizure of power.” SA units around Berlin were assembled to present a threatening backdrop and underscore the Nazis’ claim to power. “Make the fine gentlemen nervous,” Goebbels noted. “That’s the point of the exercise.”
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On 10 August, on returning to his apartment in Berlin, Harry Kessler noted that the cellar rooms of the building’s concierge, an ardent Nazi supporter, were brightly illuminated: “Music was playing on the radio, and the door was wide open so that people could simply wander in from the street. A party and a mood of victory! People are already in the ‘Third Reich!’ ”
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But the celebrations were premature. Although on 10 August the newspapers had treated Hitler’s ascension to the chancellorship as a foregone conclusion, Kessler sensed a change in mood the following day: “The opposition of the old man seems to have stiffened.”
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News to that effect had also made its way to the Nazi leadership meeting in the southern Bavarian town of Prien am Chiemsee. “The old man refuses to play along,” Goebbels wrote in his diary. “Doesn’t want Hitler…In any case, we now have to keep our nerve and stay strong.”
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So what had happened?

On the morning of 10 August, after Hindenburg had returned from Neudeck, Papen informed him that circles within the NSDAP and the Centre Party were trying to replace his government with one led by Hitler. While Centre deputies believed that they could achieve a parliamentary majority with the Nazis, Papen explained, Hitler imagined a government installed by presidential decree with him as chancellor. “The chancellor,” State Secretary Meissner noted, “left the decision up to the Reich president and declared that he would not try to block the formation of a new government.” Hindenburg stated that he wanted to stick with a government of presidential decree under Papen. As much as Hindenburg “wished to bring in the National Socialist movement and get it to cooperate,” Meissner recorded, he refused with equal conviction to appoint Hitler Reich chancellor, fearing that Hitler’s cabinet would be Nazi Party-centred and partisan. Hindenburg personally held it against Hitler that he had broken his promise to tolerate the Papen cabinet and felt there was no guarantee that Hitler, if named chancellor, would respect “the character of a presidential government.”
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In other words, Hindenburg was concerned with preserving his own sphere of influence. Finally, Hindenburg’s rejection of Hitler reflected the antipathy of a representative of the old Wilhelmine elite for an upstart. “I cannot entrust the empire of Kaiser Wilhelm and Bismarck to a private from Bohemia,” Hindenburg is alleged to have told one of his assistants.
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(During Prussia’s 1866 war against Austria, Hindenburg had passed through a Bohemian town called Braunau and mistook it for Hitler’s birthplace.)

On the afternoon of 10 August, Franz von Papen convened his cabinet and informed the ministers about his meeting with Hindenburg. The priority, he said, was “to involve the right-wing movement in the state” without entrusting Hitler with political leadership. In the wake of Hindenburg’s veto, Schleicher also distanced himself from the agreement he had reached with Hitler, speaking only of involving the NSDAP in the government and not of making Hitler chancellor. The majority of ministers agreed with this position. Summarising the results of the cabinet meeting, Papen said that coming negotiations with Hitler would determine “to what extent the National Socialists would have to be involved in the government to dislodge them from the opposition.”
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On 12 August, Hitler travelled by car to Berlin, spending the night at the Goebbelses’ in the nearby town of Caputh. Decisive talks with the government were scheduled for the following day. “Is the fruit of ten years of work now ripe?” Goebbels noted in his diary. “I hope so, but I hardly dare believe it.”
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On the morning of 13 August, Hitler met Schleicher at the Defence Ministry before heading to Papen at the Chancellery. Hundreds of people milled about the government district, expecting to witness a historic occasion.
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But Hitler was about to learn for himself, as he had already heard from others, that Hindenburg had refused to name him chancellor. Papen offered to make him vice-chancellor, but Hitler brusquely refused. As the leader of the strongest party in the Reichstag, Hitler fumed, there was no way he would “subordinate himself to another chancellor.” The conversation went on for two hours and grew quite heated, as Papen tried in vain to convince Hitler that a movement as large as the NSDAP could not remain “permanently in opposition.” In the end, Papen had to inform Hindenburg that the negotiations had failed.
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By 2 a.m., when Hitler arrived at Magda Goebbels’s apartment on Reichskanzlerplatz, it appeared that his second chance at power had come and gone.

But then, at 3 p.m. that afternoon, Hermann Pünder’s successor at the Reich Chancellery, Erwin Planck (the son of the famous physicist), called with the news that Hindenburg wanted to speak with him. At first Hitler refused: “The decision has been made—what’s the point of me going?” But Planck seems to have created the impression that Hindenburg’s mind was not completely made up. “Brief vague hope,” noted Goebbels. “Everyone kept their fingers crossed.”
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The meeting with Hindenburg took place after 4 p.m. Hitler brought along Wilhelm Frick and Ernst Röhm, while Hindenburg had Papen and Otto Meissner at his side. When the president asked whether Hitler would be willing to participate in a government under Papen, the Nazi Party chairman responded that the idea was out of the question—for the reasons he had enumerated that morning. “Given the significance of the National Socialist movement, he had no choice but to demand full leadership of the government and the party,” Meissner noted Hitler as saying. Hindenburg categorically refused Hitler’s demand, declaring that “in front of God, his conscience and his country he could not justify giving the entire power of government to a single party and especially not one so hostile towards people who thought differently.” Hindenburg urged Hitler to play his role in the political opposition in a gentlemanly fashion and suggested that he would not bear any grudges: “We two are old comrades and want to remain so. The road ahead may bring us together again. So I extend my hand as a comrade.”
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After barely half an hour, the meeting was over.

Hitler had held his temper in front of Hindenburg, but as soon as he was out in the hall of the Reich Chancellery, he vented his rage, accusing Papen and Meissner of deceiving him. The two had allowed Planck to suggest that Hindenburg’s mind was open, Hitler fumed, when in fact the decision had already been made.
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“How do you intend to rule?” he asked Papen. “Does the government believe it can work with this Reichstag?” Papen nonchalantly dismissed these objections. “The Reichstag?” he replied. “I’m surprised that you of all people think the Reichstag is important.”
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On the evening of 13 August, the government issued an official communiqué that chronicled the conversation in a way that publicly embarrassed Hitler. The Nazi leader had demanded the “entire power of state,” which Hindenburg had been forced to reject “because his conscience and sense of national duty forbade him from transferring complete authority to the National Socialist movement, which would use it one-sidedly.”
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A few days later Planck told Pünder that the communiqué had been modelled on the Ems Dispatch, which Bismarck had used in 1870 to cast aspersions on France and provoke the Franco-Prussian War.
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In a statement hastily prepared by Frick and Röhm, Hitler replied that he had demanded the “leadership” of the government, that is the position of chancellor, and not the entire power of state,
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but that was not sufficient to limit the damage. The nationalist circles sympathetic to the Nazis came to believe, with considerable justification, that Hitler was incapable of compromise and was banging his head against a wall. The impression arose that the Nazi leader was less concerned about the welfare of Germany than with securing unfettered power for himself and his followers.

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August the 13th was a major setback for Hitler. The politician whose instincts were regarded as fail-safe had gone after the big jackpot and come up short. Or to borrow a different metaphor from Alan Bullock: Hitler had “knocked on the door of the Chancellery, only to have the door publicly slammed in his face.”
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This sort of rejection painfully reminded the NSDAP chairman of his failed November 1923 putsch, and he repeatedly invoked it over the next weeks. At a Gau conference in Nuremberg he compared the current situation with that of a decade before, declaring: “The party battles and comes close to victory, but at the last moment the same old conspiracy against it always appears. A tiny bunch of reactionaries with no future join together with Jews and try to prevent the party’s imminent triumph at the last minute.” Unlike in 1923, however, the Nazi Party was not going to be lured into a putsch but would “hold its nerve and not give in.”
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But appeals like this could not compensate for the deep disappointment of Hitler’s followers at their renewed failure to take control. Especially within the SA, whose members believed they had entered the antechambers of power, discontent was rife. Ernst Röhm declared that it had never been so difficult to maintain calm among his brown-shirted battalions.
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Hitler immediately had himself driven back to Munich on the evening of 13 August. “Well, we’ll just have to see how things progress now,” his companions heard him remark during the journey.
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For a few days, he retreated to the Obersalzberg. Karl Weigand, a correspondent for the
New York American
who interviewed Hitler on 18 August in Haus Wachenfeld, found him still fuming at being dismissed by Hindenburg.
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But in a conversation that same day with Louis P. Lochner from the
Manchester Guardian
, Hitler denied revived rumours that he was planning a “march on Berlin.” His storm troopers were sufficiently disciplined, Hitler said, and would not take a single step from the path of legality.
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Belying that claim in early August, the SA had engaged in a whole series of politically motivated acts of violence in East Prussia, Upper Silesia and Schleswig-Holstein. They primarily targeted members of the KPD and the Reich Banner and claimed a number of lives. Attacks were also directed at trade union buildings, left-wing newspapers and Jewish locations like the main synagogue in the city of Kiel.
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These acts of terror, wrote Count Harry Kessler, gave a small taste of what the Nazis would do “in larger fashion and throughout the Reich if they achieved victory.”
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Within the Reich cabinet, which had consulted on 9 August about proposed “measures for restoration of public safety,” Papen attributed the new wave of violence to a Nazi attempt to “unsettle the public” and to force through the idea that “Hitler had to take the leadership of the government.” To do nothing, Papen argued, would be tantamount to “the government committing suicide.” That very day, the cabinet drafted an emergency decree making politically motivated manslaughter a capital crime. Special courts were set up in Berlin and the East Prussian district of Elbing to prosecute the perpetrators more quickly.
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A few hours later, in the night of 9–10 August, one of the most grisly murders of the pre-1933 years took place in the Upper Silesian village of Potempa. Nine uniformed SA men forced their way into the apartment of the miner and KPD supporter Konrad Pietrzuch, dragged him out of bed and kicked him to death in front of his mother and his brother.
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Since this crime was carried out after the emergency decree had come into force, the perpetrators were subject to the new stricter punishment. Less than two weeks later, on 22 August, the special court in the town of Beuthen rendered its verdict: five of the perpetrators were sentenced to death, one was given two years in prison and three were acquitted. The verdict elicited outraged protest from the National Socialists. Hitler sent those convicted a telegram which read: “In light of this monstrously bloodthirsty verdict, I feel connected to you in boundless loyalty. From this moment on, your freedom is a matter of honour for us, and the fight against a government, under which this judgment was possible, is our duty.”
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On 24 August, in an article headlined “The Jews Are to Blame,” Goebbels openly expressed sentiments that Hitler had suppressed, for tactical reasons, in his campaign speeches the previous month: “Never forget it, comrades! Repeat it out loud a hundred times a day until the words follow you into your deepest dreams: The Jews are to blame! And they will not evade the criminal tribunal that they deserve.”
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