Hitler (69 page)

Hitler once more had mastered one of the great crises of his career and showed his talent for converting breakdown and dissolution into a new source of strength. To be sure, Strasser had made it easy for him, had forced neither a fight nor a compromise, and had conveniently made himself a scapegoat for the failures of the preceding months. But that, too, was one of the concomitants of Hitler's rise; his opponents seemingly never knew how to fight and in the face of his obstinate determination tended to shrug and give up. Brüning capitulated almost as soon as he sensed that Hindenburg was turning away from him. Now it was the turn of Strasser and his followers; later Hugenberg and others would take the same course. All of them threw in the towel and walked out when Hitler flew into one of his rages. Unlike Hitler, they lacked the passion for power. For them a crisis was tantamount to a defeat, whereas for him it was the opportunity for struggle and a springboard for fresh certainties. “Let us not fool ourselves,” he once said, acutely analyzing the character of his bourgeois opposition. “They no longer even want to put up resistance against us. Every word from them cries out their need to make a pact with us. They are none of them men who crave power and feel pleasure in the possession of power. They talk only about duty and responsibility, and would be delighted if they could tend their flowers quietly, go fishing, and for the rest spend their time in devout contemplation.”
⁵⁰
The December crisis of 1932 confirmed Hitler's view of his opponents; and deep into the war years he would remember the crisis whenever things looked darkest. Defeats and collapses were only the preludes to victory, Hitler would assure himself, for had he not more than once had to “pass through between two entirely different abysses and confront the alternatives of to be or not to be”?

The expulsion of Strasser by no means meant that the difficulties of the National Socialist Party were over. In the following weeks, Goebbels's diary continued to be full of gloom, and noted “a great deal of griping and dissension.” The top leadership of the party, particularly Hitler, Goebbels, Göring, and Ley, made trips to the various party districts every weekend, trying to restore the morale and confidence of their followers. And as he had done during the major election campaigns, Hitler spoke as much as four times a day in widely scattered cities. The financial pressure, too, continued to be calamitous. In the Berlin gau salaries of party officials had to be cut, and the Nazi members of the Prussian Landtag could not afford the usual Christmas tips to the staff of the legislature. On December 23 Goebbels noted affectedly: “The most terrible loneliness descends like mournful inconsolability upon me.” At the year's end the
Frankfurter Zeitung
somewhat prematurely celebrated the “disenchantment of the NSDAP,” while Harold Laski, one of the leading intellectuals of the English Left, considered that the day the National Socialists represented a real menace was past. Barring accidents, it appeared not improbable that Hitler would end his career as an old man in a Bavarian village, spending his evenings in the
Biergarten
telling his cronies how he once almost overthrew the German Reich.
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As if in response to that prediction, Goebbels wrote sullenly: “The year 1932 has been one interminable streak of bad luck. Now we must smash it to pieces.... All prospects and hopes have completely vanished.”

 

At that moment, to everyone's surprise, there came a sudden turnabout. For although Schleicher's reign as Chancellor had begun auspiciously, he soon found that he was pleasing nobody. He had introduced himself upon taking office as a “social-minded general.” But his concessions to labor did not manage to win over the Social Democrats, while antagonizing the employers. The small farmers were embittered by the favor shown to labor, and the large landowners opposed the projected land settlement program with that caste solidarity that had already proved Brüning's undoing. Schleicher was going at things too abruptly, and the general himself, with his well-known bent for intrigue, did not inspire trust. He may very well have been sincere about his proposals for a planned economy, or his wooing of the unions, or his efforts to reinvigorate the parliamentary system. But whatever he undertook was met with suspicion and resistance. The optimism he nevertheless expressed was based on the thought that his various opponents were in no position to join forces against him. Granted, his stratagem with Gregor Strasser had failed for the present; but the affair had done heavy damage to the demoralized and debt-ridden Nazi party. The result was that Hitler, once considered the key figure in any coalition against the administration, was now hardly a viable partner.

It was none other than Franz von Papen who confounded all Schleicher's reasoning and helped give the National Socialist Party its unexpected chance. In Papen the mutually antagonistic adversaries of Schleicher found a “common broker” after all.
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Only two weeks after the general took office as Chancellor, Papen had informed Kurt von Schroder, the Cologne banker, that he would like to meet the leader of the National Socialist Party. As it happened, this overture coincided with the rout of Gregor Strasser. This last development could be taken as a sign to actual or potential patrons in industry that the revolutionary, anticapitalistic tendencies within the party had been, if not overcome, at any rate seriously weakened. Moreover, the Reichstag elections of November had again shown significant gains for the Communists. In view of this, employers who had had reservations toward Hitler might be inclined to see things differently. The NSDAP's propaganda hammered away at this idea with the slogan: If the party breaks up tomorrow, the day after tomorrow Germany will have 10 million more Communists.

As president of the Cologne
Herrenklub,
Schroder had extensive connections throughout heavy industry in the Rhineland. He had actively supported Hitler on various occasions, had sketched plans for Nazi economic policies, and in November, 1932, had signed the petition drawn up by Hjalmar Schacht blatantly backing Hitler's claims to power. At the time, Papen had issued a sharp statement declaring this proposal impermissible. Now, on the contrary, he gladly took up the invitation, conveyed by Schroder, to a meeting with Hitler on January 4, 1933.

The conversation was held under conditions of extreme secrecy. Hitler began with a bitter monologue revolving chiefly around the humiliation of August 13 of the previous year. It was some time before Papen managed to propitiate him by placing the full blame on Schleicher for the President's refusal to appoint Hitler Chancellor. Then Papen proposed a coalition between the German Nationalists and the National Socialists, to be headed jointly by Hitler and himself. Thereupon, Hitler again launched into “a long speech”—so von Schroder testified in Nuremberg—“in which he declared that if he were appointed Chancellor he could not relinquish his demand to stand alone at the head of the government.” Nevertheless, Papen's people could enter his government as ministers if they were prepared to collaborate with policies that would change many things. Among the changes he hinted at were the removal of the Social Democrats, Communists, and Jews from leading positions in Germany and the restoration of order in public life. Papen and Hitler came to an agreement in principle. In the course of the conversation Hitler received the extremely valuable information that Schleicher had not been granted an Enabling Decree to dissolve the Reichstag and so the Nazi party need not fear new elections for the present.

With good reason that meeting has been called “the hour of birth of the Third Reich,”
⁵³
for from it a direct chain of cause and effect leads to January 30, 1933, and the realization of the coalition that was first sketched in Cologne. At the same time, the conversation threw some light upon the economic interests that supported Hitler's ambitions. Whether anything was said about the Nazi party's catastrophic financial predicament and whether measures to pay the party's debts were discussed has never been definitely clarified. But undoubtedly the conversation itself restored the party's credit, brought it, in fact, back into the game of politics. As late as January 2 a party tax adviser had stated to a Berlin tax collection office that the party could pay its taxes only by giving up its independence; now Goebbels noted that the financial situation had “improved very suddenly” and that the party as a whole was once again “sitting pretty.” Thyssen spoke of a “number of sizable contributions” that “flowed from sources in heavy industry into the treasuries of the NSDAP.” Though Hitler vehemently denied that he had made concessions to business—such talk was all “inventions and lies,” he said—he did not deny these links with industry.

To the extent to which the Cologne meeting restored the Nazis' selfconfidence and hope of victory, it inflicted a probably decisive blow upon Schleicher and his government. Conscious of the rising danger, the Chancellor immediately informed the press and went to Hindenburg to remonstrate against Papen's actions. But when he begged the President to henceforth receive Papen only in his—Schleicher's—presence, he received an evasive answer, which for the first time showed him what he was up against. Hindenburg was again ready to sacrifice the propriety of his office and the very institutions of the state to his fondness for his “young friend” Papen, who had such charming manners and told anecdotes so expertly.

Now Papen was called up on the carpet. Untruthfully, he told the President that Hitler had at last softened and abandoned his demand for exclusive power to govern. Far from reproving Papen for having acted on his own, Hindenburg remarked that he had “thought right away that this account [Schleicher's] could not be correct.” He actually ordered Papen to remain in touch with Hitler—personally and in strict confidence. Finally, he instructed his aide, State Secretary Meissner, not to mention Papen's assignment to Schleicher. Thus the President himself was taking part in the plot against his own Chancellor.

Soon afterward, the nascent Papen-Hitler front received significant reinforcement. While Schleicher was still trying, though with failing hopes, to win over Strasser and the unions, a delegation from the Reich Agrarian League called at the presidential palace on January 11 to protest against the administration's laggardness in aiding farming estates, and particularly its lack of protective tariffs. Behind these complaints was anxiety about the resumption of the government's settlement program in the eastern lands—the program started by Brüning. They were also nervous about a parliamentary investigation of the
Osthilfe
—the scandalous subsidies to debt-ridden landowners in the lands east of the Elbe. Many of Hindenburg's peers had enriched themselves on these
Osthilfe
funds, thereby taking their revenge on the hated republic. Members of the cabinet were called in at once for consultation, and in their presence Hindenburg vigorously took the part of the delegation. Schleicher was unwilling to make binding promises on a moment's notice. The owner of Estate Neudeck, thereupon, according to an eyewitness, pounded his fist on the table and delivered an ultimatum: “I request you, Chancellor von Schleicher—and as an old soldier you know such a request is merely the polite form of a command—to hold a cabinet meeting this very night, at which legislation to meet these problems is to be drawn up and presented to me for signature tomorrow morning.”

At first Schleicher seemed about to give way. But a few hours later he learned of some machinations by the Agrarian League that made him decide to stand his ground and abruptly break off the discussions. Two days later he refused to give the reactionary Hugenberg the Ministry of Economy and explicitly reaffirmed his “socialistic” platform. Now the Right was up in arms against him. The Social Democrats had from the first withheld their support for this “general in the flesh” and had even forbidden Theodor Leipart, the union leader, to negotiate with Schleicher. In their estimate of Hitler the Social Democrats had fallen back on old platitudes. In their complacency they counted on the mechanical operations of progress. (Their opposites in the conservative camp had similar notions of a “historically sanctioned” special mentality.) Hitler, the Social Democrats had decided, represented at most a brief detour, a dramatic incident before the final triumph of a libertarian system. Certainly Schleicher had compromised his credibility by his innumerable intrigues directed against the very institutions of the state. But this was hardly reason enough to distrust him more than Hitler.

At any rate, the Social Democrats failed to realize that Schleicher was the last remaining alternative to a Hitler who was waiting impatiently outside the gates to power. In the years since the collapse of the Great Coalition the Social Democratic Party had advanced scarcely a single initiative. Now it roused itself just once more—but only in order to spoil the last slim chance of survival that the republic had.

 

Far sooner than could have been expected, the devious Chancellor found himself facing an impasse. His approach was a promising one, but he was discovering that he was not the man for it. His employment program alienated the employers, his settlement program the agrarians, his origins the Social Democrats, his offer to Strasser the Nazis. His constitutional reform proved as unfeasible as the systems it replaced. For the time being Schleicher was able to remain in office only because his opponents had not yet put together a new cabinet. This question now became the subject of feverish activity conducted in a twilight zone.

Hitler himself, in order to improve his bargaining position and shore up the party's claims to power, concentrated all his forces on the Landtag elections that were to take place on January 15 in the miniature state of Lippe. He conducted one of his most lavish election campaigns. Assembling the best known party speakers in the castle of Baron von Oeynhausen, he sent them out night after night, saturating the little state with the Nazi message. On the first day, Goebbels noted, “I have spoken three times, partly in tiny peasant villages.” Hitler himself addressed eighteen demonstrations within a few days. With that sure psychological insight which his critics failed to understand or regarded with disdain he saw that this election offered him an unparalleled opportunity. From the start he hammered away at the theme that this was to be the decisive test in the struggle for power, and he managed to impose this view of the election on the country at large. Thus the German public awaited this marginal event, the decision of some 100,000 voters, as if it were a kind of trial by ordeal that would decide “the political future of a nation of 68 millions.”