Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (65 page)

Hitler and Papen immediately withdrew for two hours into Schröder’s office, with their host accompanying them as a silent witness. Schröder recalled Hitler opening the conversation by attacking Papen for his government’s handling of the Potempa case. Papen replied that they should put their past differences behind them and try to arrive at a common basis for a new government that would consist of conservatives and National Socialists. It seems that Papen suggested something along the lines of a “duumvirate,” in which he and Hitler would share power. To make this idea more appealing, he dangled the positions of defence and interior ministers before Hitler’s nose, whereupon Hitler commenced one of his feared monologues in which he justified his insistence upon the chancellorship. However, he would accept Papen adherents in his cabinet, as long as they supported the changes he wanted to institute after taking office. The first measures Hitler specified were “the removal of all Social Democrats, Communists and Jews from leading positions” and the “re-establishment of order in public life.” There was still a considerable gap between the two men’s positions, but they did promise to continue their discussions.
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On 6 January, Keppler wrote to Schröder that “the meeting had a very positive effect in the desired direction.” Hjalmar Schacht, too, thanked the banker for the “courageous initiative in paving the way for an understanding between men whom we both greatly admire and whose cooperation could perhaps bring about a positive solution most quickly.” Hopefully, Schacht wrote, “the conversation in your house will be of historical importance.”
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Schacht’s hope would come true. The meeting in Cologne was the starting point of a process that concluded on 30 January 1933. Hitler, who had been at his wits’ end in the final days of December, saw himself catapulted back into the contest for power. The most important thing to emerge from the Cologne meeting was that Papen and Hitler agreed to put aside their enmity and work together to topple Schleicher. Although the contours of a new government had not been discussed in detail, and the all-important question of the chancellorship remained unanswered, the first step had been taken. Hitler could be sure that Papen would bring his influence with Hindenburg to bear to advance the solution they were going to negotiate. On 9 January, Hitler spoke with Goebbels, who then noted in his diary: “Papen dead set against Schleicher. Wants to topple and eradicate him entirely. Has the old man’s ear. Even stays with him. Arrangement with us prepared. Either the chancellorship or the ministries of power: defence and interior. Worth listening to.”
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The attempt to keep the conspiratorial meeting secret failed. When Papen got out of his car in front of Schröder’s house, he was photographed by a waiting reporter. One day later, the pro-Schleicher
Tägliche Rundschau
newspaper ran a story with the headline: “Hitler and Papen against Schleicher.”
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The Catholic newspaper
Germania
compared the revelation with “prodding an anthill” and wrote that it had given rise to a flurry of wild speculation.
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In a joint declaration on 5 January, Papen and Hitler tried to dispel the idea that their discussions had been directed against the new Reich chancellor. The meeting had merely been about exploring “the possibility of a broad national front of unity,” the two men declared, and their talks had “not touched at all” on the current cabinet.
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This disingenuous declaration did not succeed in putting the issue to rest. For days, the newspapers were filled with “a huge amount of guessing” as to what the purpose of Hitler and Papen’s meeting had been.
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Initially Schleicher did not appear all that worried. At tea with the French ambassador, André François-Poncet, on 6 January, the chancellor spoke disparagingly about his predecessor. When next they met, Schleicher said, he would tell Papen: “My dear little Franz, you’ve committed another blunder.”
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On 9 January, Papen personally went to Schleicher and tried to convince him that the Cologne meeting had been about finding a place for Hitler in Schleicher’s government—an assertion that Papen would repeat in his memoirs. It is hard to imagine that the former army general believed such an obvious lie, but in a joint communiqué the two men did assert that their discussion “completely belied” the reports of a falling-out between them.
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That same day, Papen also reported to Hindenburg about his meeting with Hitler. If we believe Otto Meissner’s memoirs, Papen said that Hitler “had given up his previous demands for the entire power of government and was now prepared in theory to participate in a coalition government with other right-wing parties.” In response, Hindenburg charged Papen with continuing to negotiate with Hitler “on a personal and strictly confidential basis.”
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With that the Reich president consciously and in full knowledge of the consequences became a participant in a conspiracy aimed at creating a new government of “national concentration” behind the current Reich chancellor’s back. It was the same sort of government that Hitler’s intransigence had blocked in the autumn of 1932.
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Schleicher was no longer assured of the Reich president’s support. As early as 10 January, Goebbels learned that the chancellor could by no means count on an executive order dissolving parliament if the Reichstag staged a vote of no confidence when it reconvened in late January. Schleicher, Goebbels noted, was on “a downward slope.”
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And indeed, the chancellor’s position in early January was precarious. In a government statement he had made via radio on 15 December 1932, Schleicher had presented himself as a “socially responsible general,” promising not just to take measures to boost employment, but also to revoke the ordinance of the Papen cabinet from 5 September that allowed employers to pay lower wages than those contained within the official labour agreements. These announcements alienated business leaders, and Schleicher further awakened mistrust with the “sacrilegious” assertion that he supported “neither capitalism nor socialism” and that he was not impressed by concepts like “private or planned economy.”
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On the other hand, Schleicher never succeeded in garnering the support of trade unions. While his policy of state-financed job creation met with approval in union circles, the Social Democrats, who were closely allied with the unions, stuck to their position of “absolute opposition” to the chancellor, whom they rightfully accused of being in part responsible for the coup d’état in Prussia in July 1932.
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Any hopes Schleicher had placed in cooperating with Gregor Strasser proved unrealistic. On 6 January, the Reich chancellor introduced the former NSDAP organisational director to Hindenburg, who agreed in principle to appointing Strasser vice-chancellor and labour minister. But Schleicher did not force the issue. Once news had got around about Papen and Hitler’s Cologne meeting, there was very little chance that a significant part of the NSDAP would support Schleicher’s government.
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To make matters worse for Schleicher, his cabinet was coming under attack from the Reichslandbund, the lobbying organisation of Germany’s wealthy aristocratic landowners. It accused the government of not doing enough to protect big farmers against cheap food imports and of foreclosing on bankrupt agricultural enterprises. On 11 January, Hindenburg received a delegation from the Reichslandbund, consisting of four committee members, which included the National Socialist Werner Willikens. The organisation’s president, Count Eberhard von Kalckreuth, painted the situation in the blackest terms. If immediate measures were not taken to “improve economic conditions in agriculture,” disaster was imminent. Hindenburg immediately ordered Schleicher and his ministers for agriculture and economics to listen to the complaints and to take action.
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Shortly after this meeting, however, a declaration that the Reichslandbund had given to the press before seeing Hindenburg was published. It accused the government of hastening the “impoverishment of German agriculture” in a fashion “unimaginable even under a purely Marxist regime.” Schleicher responded to this attack by refusing to negotiate in future with representatives of the Reichslandbund.
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In many respects the anti-Schleicher conspiracy resembled the campaign against Brüning’s purported “agrarian Bolshevism” that had led to his dismissal in late May 1932. Hindenburg, who as the owner of a large estate in Neudeck was thoroughly receptive to the concerns of the East Elbian agrarians, was once again easily influenced. Schleicher’s position, already weakened by Papen and the failure of the plans for a “cross-party front,” was further undermined. “Schleicher has a conflict with the Landbund—the farmers are going wild,” Goebbels noted. In a revised version of his diary from 1934, he was even more explicit: “That serves us quite well at the moment.”
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But perhaps even more damaging to Schleicher was the deterioration since late 1932 of his relationship with Oskar von Hindenburg, who served as a military adjutant and close adviser to his father. We do not know what precisely caused the rift between the two men, but the consequences were serious. Schleicher lost his most important advocate in the house of Hindenburg.
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As if the situation were not bad enough, the DNVP also distanced itself from the government. On 13 January, Alfred Hugenberg offered to join the Schleicher cabinet as minister of economics and agriculture, but only on the condition that the chancellor implemented a strictly authoritarian regime that ruled independently of parliament. Schleicher, however, had made clear in his radio address of 15 December that he “could hardly sit on the point of a bayonet” and “could not rule for very long without broad popular approval behind him” and therefore refused Hugenberg’s offer.
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Consequently, a week later, on 21 January, the DNVP Reichstag faction attacked the Schleicher government in tones no less harsh than the Landbund. Schleicher’s government “tended towards internationalist socialism,” the faction declared in a statement. “It runs the risk of Bolshevism in the countryside and is liquidating the authoritarian idea that the Reich president created when he appointed the Papen cabinet.”
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All of this was grist for the mill of Schleicher’s enemies. During the night of 10–11 January, after attending a performance of Verdi’s
La Traviata
, Hitler met again with Papen in a villa belonging to the sparkling-wine merchant Joachim von Ribbentrop in the wealthy Berlin district of Dahlem. Ribbentrop, a former military officer who had gone into business after the First World War and got rich by marrying the daughter of winemaker Otto Henkell, had met Hitler in August 1932 and joined the NSDAP soon thereafter. Thanks to the excellent social contacts Ribbentrop enjoyed as a member of the exclusive Gentlemen’s Club, he was an ideal mediator between conservative circles and the National Socialists.
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We do not know precisely what Hitler and Papen discussed at their second meeting, but apparently they did not make much progress since Hitler declined at short notice an invitation to continue the exchange of opinions over lunch in Dahlem on 12 January. “Everything still up in the air,” noted Goebbels.
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Hitler’s attention at this time was focused on the Landtag election in Lippe-Detmold, which he hoped would prove that the NSDAP had recovered from the crisis of the end of the previous year and was back on the path to victory. “Lippe is the first opportunity to go from the defensive back on the offensive,” Goebbels announced in his capacity as propaganda director.
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The small region of 174,000 inhabitants, including 117,000 eligible voters, was flooded by an unprecedented wave of propaganda in the first two weeks of January. The NSDAP sent all their well-known speakers there, including Goebbels, Göring, Frick and Prince August Wilhelm. Hitler himself spoke at sixteen events in ten days. In an article entitled “Hitler Hits the Villages,” the
Lippische Landes-Zeitung
concluded: “The NSDAP must be in serious trouble if the great ‘Führer’ himself is travelling to tiny villages.”
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Because the venues in Lippe were too small, Nazi campaign directors rented three tents, the largest of which could accommodate 4,000 people. In order to fill them, audience members were brought in great numbers from elsewhere: six specially chartered trains arrived on 4 January alone for Hitler’s appearance at the opening of the campaign.
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Hitler’s speeches offered little that was new. Once again, he justified his decision not to join the government in August and November 1932: “If I wanted to sell myself for a plate of lentils, I would have already done so.” Whoever conquered the hearts of people, Hitler boasted, would inevitably be given the power of government one day. He had inherited a “thick peasant’s skull” from his ancestors, he told audiences, and could wait until “Providence deems the time is at hand.” Attentive listeners might have pricked up their ears at Hitler’s repeated assertion that he did not want to enter the halls of power “through the back door but rather through the main gate.” This—entry into the Chancellery—was precisely what Hitler was busily preparing in his meetings with Papen. Hitler’s only reference of local interest was when he utilised the myth of the Germanic warrior Arminius to promote the Nazi ethnic-popular community. On 5 January, he invoked “the first communal, powerful and successful appearance of the German nation under Arminius against Roman tyranny,” adding: “Internal fragmentation and squandering of strength has caused great injury to the German people down the years. The National Socialist ethnic-popular community will put an end to this situation.”
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One week later, Hitler and Goebbels visited the monument to Arminius near Detmold, which commemorated the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest at which the Roman general Varus’s legions had been annihilated in A.D. 9. “Was covered in fog and made such a grand impression,” Goebbels noted. “Defiant towards France. That’s always been the thrust of German politics.”
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