Hitler's Charisma (12 page)

Von Papen’s cabinet resigned on 17 November 1932 and in the machinations over the next few weeks the figure of Kurt von Schleicher emerged from the shadows. Schleicher was a General with a penchant for political intrigue and had been appointed Minister of Defence six months earlier. Schleicher remembered the revolutionary turmoil immediately after the First World War and was all too well aware of the dangers of turning German soldiers against demonstrators on the street. His preferred solution to the current impasse was to try and convince elements from both the political right and left to join a Cabinet under his leadership. In the hope that such a compromise government could be created, Hindenburg had reluctantly let von Papen resign and appointed Schleicher as chancellor.

Schleicher knew that Hitler would not accept a post in his government and so on 3 December 1932 he met with Gregor Strasser. He offered Strasser both the vice-chancellorship and the key post of Minister President of Prussia. The next day, 4 December, the Nazis saw a drop of 40 per cent in their vote in local elections in Thuringia in central Germany.
Hitler had good cause to panic. But he held firm, meeting Strasser at the Kaiserhof Hotel in Berlin, first on 5 December and then 7 December, to expressly forbid him from accepting Schleicher’s offer.

Hitler now faced a potential crisis. If Strasser joined Schleicher’s Cabinet then Hitler’s prestige as leader of the Nazis would be considerably damaged. However, Strasser, after hearing Hitler’s outrage at Schleicher’s offer, decided to resign from the Nazi party and remove himself altogether from politics. He would serve neither Hitler nor Schleicher. On the morning of 8 December, the day after his meeting with Hitler, Strasser spoke to a group of senior Nazi leaders at the Reichstag. One of them, Hinrich Lohse, recorded after the war what Strasser had said.

Strasser emphasised that ever since the formation of the von Papen government in the summer, he felt Hitler had been clear only “about one thing—he wishes to be Reich Chancellor.”
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But in Strasser’s view Hitler “should, however, have become aware of the fact that he is being consistently refused the post by everybody and that in the foreseeable future there is no prospect of achieving this goal.” Strasser said he refused “to wait until the Führer is made Reich Chancellor, for by then the collapse [of the Nazi movement] will have occurred.” Hitler’s mistake, according to Strasser, had been in refusing to accept von Papen’s offer of the post of vice-chancellor. Strasser didn’t mention in this speech that he himself had just been offered the vice-chancellorship, but the implication that he had decided to act because Hitler was behaving in an irrational way is clear.

Then Strasser went on to mention another complaint, one that is especially intriguing in any investigation into Hitler’s charismatic leadership. Strasser revealed that he was upset because of a “personal aspect of the problem.” He complained that there were those “within the entourage of the Führer” who made “insults” about him. Moreover, he claimed that Göring, Goebbels, Röhm and others received invitations to meet with Hitler that he didn’t. He said he regarded this “as a slight, as a personal humiliation which I have not deserved and which I am no longer prepared to tolerate. Apart from this, I am at the end of my strength and nerves. I have resigned from the party and I am now going to the mountains to recuperate.”

It was an extraordinary statement to make at a time of national emergency, more reminiscent of an emotional outburst caused by a lover’s rebuff than a series of reasoned arguments about political strategy. And
Gregor Strasser was no weakling. He’d won an Iron Cross for bravery in the First World War, taken part in the Beer Hall Putsch and then forced his way into the highest echelons of the Nazi party. He’d previously admitted that politics was “a rough business … especially in a strongly activist-orientated movement like ours.”
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Yet here was Strasser walking away from not just the Nazi party, but also from the chance of obtaining one of the most important public positions in the German state, partly because he felt Hitler was not inviting him to functions and taking enough notice of him. And this from someone who, out of all of the senior Nazis (with the possible exception of Ernst Röhm) had seemed the most resistant to the personal charisma of Adolf Hitler. Strasser, for instance, was the only senior Nazi privately to call Hitler the “Chief” or “PG” (
Parteigenosse
, or party comrade) rather than “Führer.”
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As one historian who has made a special study of Gregor Strasser writes, “The irony is that, while Strasser had consistently and overtly repudiated the quasi-mystical Führer cult, it would appear that for all his bluff assertiveness the innately sensitive Strasser really was captivated by Hitler’s charismatic personality. He thus became the most unsuspecting victim of the Führer myth.”
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As soon as Hitler heard that Strasser had spoken to this collection of senior Nazis he immediately called his own meeting for noon at the Kaiserhof hotel. Here he addressed all of those who had listened to Strasser just a few hours before. In a calm and rational response to Strasser’s objections, he pointed out that if he had accepted the offer of the vice-chancellorship then he would have had “serious differences”
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with von Papen “within the first week.” He then would have had to resign and his position would have been seriously weakened. He also said that the option of another putsch was simply impossible, revealing that Colonel von Reichenau, a German Army officer sympathetic to the Nazis, had told him how the army would have little choice but to open fire on the stormtroopers if the Nazis attempted an armed insurrection. Reichenau had “urged” Hitler “to keep within the law” since “one day power will inevitably fall into your lap.” As for Strasser’s claim that he wasn’t invited to meet with Hitler as often as he wanted, Hitler said that he was always available to “anyone who wishes to speak with me.”

Hitler exuded confidence that all would come right, saying that he
still intended to wait until he was offered the chancellorship. He promised, “that day will come—it is probably nearer than we think.” Success depended on “our unity and on our unshakeable faith in victory; it depends on our leadership.” Hitler ended his remarks—as he often did in moments of potential crisis—with a personal appeal for loyalty.

Hitler had managed to avert a crisis within senior Nazi ranks. And, significantly, he had achieved this by making a speech that contained no logical explanation of how he was going to achieve the desired goal of the chancellorship. It was enough to have “unshakeable faith.” It was enough to make an emotional commitment.

However, what Hitler also knew was that without Strasser as part of his government, General Schleicher’s position as chancellor was no more tenable than von Papen’s had been. Schleicher had managed to oust von Papen by saying to Hindenburg that he could deliver a broader-based regime—and he couldn’t. Moreover, he had now earned the enmity of von Papen. (In German, Schleicher means “sneak,” which many at the time thought was an apt name for the general.)

Von Papen now opened negotiations with Hitler about the formation of a new government, and met Hitler at the house of Kurt von Schröder in Cologne on 4 January 1933 for preliminary discussions. True to form, Hitler insisted that the price to be paid for his active participation in any new administration remained the chancellorship—but he would be flexible on the composition of the Cabinet and would be prepared to include within it a majority of non-Nazis.

Hitler, understanding the crucial element of timing in all political decisions, now ordered the Nazis to commit a vast—seemingly disproportionate—effort in state elections to be held in the tiny district of Lippe-Detmold on 15 January. The tactic worked. When the results were announced the Nazi share of the vote had increased by 20 per cent—from 33,000 to 39,000. The message to the German political elite was clear—the Nazi party was not going away. Von Papen now decided that he could accept Hitler as chancellor, as long as he—von Papen—was vice-chancellor. The problem they faced now was to convince Hindenburg that this was the right solution to Germany’s political crisis.

Hindenburg remained unimpressed by Hitler. But, nonetheless, now he too began to consider the possibility of a Hitler chancellorship. There were a number of reasons why he was prepared to change his mind—all
pragmatic, and none of which related to any new-found belief in Hitler’s “charisma.” First, there was the presence of von Papen. Hindenburg had grown personally fond of von Papen when they had been working closely together in the summer and autumn of 1932. So much so that he had presented von Papen, on his departure as chancellor, with a portrait of himself on which he had inscribed
“Ich hatt einen Kameraden”
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(“I had a comrade”)—the words from a poignant soldiers’ song. Now, here was von Papen, a man he trusted, saying that the best way forward was for Hitler to be chancellor, and that he could successfully be constrained by other members of the German elite.

Then there was the issue of Schleicher’s support for potential land reform in eastern Germany, where a number of German aristocrats (including Hindenburg himself) held vast tracts of land. A Hitler/von Papen government would make this contentious issue disappear. In addition, Hindenburg hadn’t forgotten the results of an army war game that had been presented to him early in December 1932, which had demonstrated that the armed forces of the state couldn’t suppress an uprising by the Nazis and the Communists and protect the borders of Germany at the same time.
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Finally, there was the sudden presence on the scene of General Werner von Blomberg. Von Papen suggested to Hindenburg that Blomberg become Minister for the Armed Forces in the proposed Hitler cabinet. This post was, not surprisingly, vital to Hindenburg, and had previously been held as a power base by Schleicher. Blomberg seemed to be everything Schleicher was not—upright, honest and not the least bit “sneaky.” But Blomberg had also recently been converted to the merits of Nazism. Naturally enthusiastic, he had formed the view during his most recent posting in East Prussia that the Nazis were attempting a national revival. He had also fallen under the influence of a leading army chaplain called Ludwig Müller who was himself a Nazi. So Blomberg was a character that von Papen, Hindenburg and Hitler could all support. Although, as events were to turn out, it was Hitler who benefited by far the most from Blomberg’s presence in the forthcoming government.

But still, up until almost the last moment, Hindenburg wavered. Instinctively, he must have felt that Hitler was the wrong man to lead Germany. But Hindenburg was by now an old man of eighty-five, and with people he trusted—including his own son Oskar—saying that Hitler
should be appointed chancellor, his resistance collapsed. The only immediate alternative would have been to allow Schleicher to form an authoritarian dictatorship, and that was worse, in Hindenburg’s mind, than seeing Hitler as chancellor.

“He [Hindenburg] felt his age,” says Josef Felder, who was elected as a Socialist member of the Reichstag in 1932. “And he realised that he was becoming physically weaker, very much weaker. He could barely carry his marshal’s baton any more. One of the officers who marched with him once said that Hindenburg, the older he got, and the more difficult the situation became, the more afraid he became [that] he could no longer get Germany to go back to being an empire, that he would die before the old constitution was reinstalled in place of the German parliament—parliament being turned back into the monarchy. He wanted to see a new monarchy before he died.”
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Hindenburg held out until the afternoon of Sunday, 29 January. It was only then that he finally told von Papen that he was prepared to accept Hitler as chancellor. At eleven o’clock the next morning Hitler achieved the goal he had been striving for—he was Chancellor of Germany.

To Hitler’s supporters his success in gaining the chancellorship was a further demonstration of his legitimacy as a charismatic leader. At key points in the future, whenever doubts arose and they felt that Hitler was pursuing an apparently damaging policy, they could hark back to this moment and remember that in the end Hitler had been right and they had been wrong.

However, Hitler’s appointment as chancellor wasn’t necessarily seen by everyone as a watershed in the history of Germany. “At first we didn’t take him seriously,” says Herbert Richter, a veteran of the First World War and someone who had so far been immune to Hitler’s charisma, “because in the first Hitler government, the Nazis weren’t even in the majority.” Richter felt that since Hitler was surrounded by “quite reasonable people” then “he couldn’t do much harm.”
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As for the Socialist politician, Josef Felder, he remembers that “we believed we could still control him [i.e., Hitler] through parliament—total lunacy!”
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And even after he had witnessed the abyss into which Hitler had led Germany, von Papen still refused to accept full responsibility for his catastrophic misjudgement in pushing for a Hitler chancellorship. Hitler, he wrote, became chancellor “by the normal interplay of democratic processes” and that “it still seemed
reasonable to suppose that the responsible head of a government would adopt a different attitude” than that of “an irresponsible party chief.”
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But for those who believed in the charismatic leadership of Adolf Hitler, this moment was of obvious and immense significance. Hitler had said openly in his election speeches that he despised democracy and wanted to sweep it away. Therefore for Nazi supporters this was not just a change in government, but the beginning of a change in political systems. “I have never myself been a democrat,” says Reinhard Spitzy, at the time a committed Nazi. “I believe a country should be ruled like a big company. That means a certain council of specialists and so on, but I didn’t believe in the role of parliament. When we had such a terrible crisis, like an economic crisis, and hunger and unemployment, and in such a moment, we were longing for a new general director, like what happens in a big company. You find a man, and he has to bring the whole thing in order.”
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