Hitler

From Provincial to National Politics

Hitler launched his first massive offensive against the consolidated system of the republic in the summer of 1929, and at once his advance carried him a long way. He had long been in search of a slogan that could mobilize the masses. Suddenly, Gustav Stresemann’s foreign policy offered a breach into which he could hurl the full weight of his propaganda. The debate over reparations had broken out afresh, and Hitler mustered all his energy to move the NSDAP from its role of isolated sectarian party and propel it into the limelight of national politics. By good luck his campaign coincided in time with the world-wide Depression, and derived its psychological impact from economic conditions. This gave him the opportunity to test his forces, his organization, and his tactics in a kind of prelude. The struggle that raged around the reparations question brought on the crisis that was to grip the republic to the very end, a crisis initiated by Hitler and cleverly fomented until the republic broke down.

Strictly speaking, the point of departure came with the death of Gustav Stresemann at the beginning of October, 1929. The German Foreign Minister had worn himself out trying to put over his subtle foreign policy. Branded as a “compliance policy,”[9] it actually aimed at gradual abrogation of the Versailles Treaty. Until shortly before his death Stresemann, though with considerable doubts, had backed the reparations arrangements drafted by a committee of experts under the chairmanship of Owen D. Young, the American banker. The Young Plan represented a distinct improvement on the existing conditions. Moreover, thanks to Stresemann’s obstinacy and diplomatic adroitness, it had been coupled with the promise of the Allied occupying forces evacuating the Rhineland before the date stipulated by treaty.

Nevertheless, the agreement encountered vehement opposition inside Germany. It even disappointed many of those who had a clear view of the Reich’s predicament. For there was an element of cruel mockery in having Germany undertake obligations for payments extending over nearly sixty years when she did not even have the first few annual payments at her disposal. Two hundred and twenty notables of economics, science, and politics, among them Carl Duisberg, of I. G. Farben, the theologian Adolf Harnack, the physicist Max Planck, Konrad Adenauer, then mayor of Cologne, and former Chancellor Hans Luther, issued a public statement expressing their great concern. It would appear that the many conciliatory gestures had been a mere front; eleven years after the war, the Young Plan exposed the merciless attitude of the victors toward the vanquished. What was more, the plan once again adverted to the war-guilt clause, Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty, which had earlier inflicted such wounds to the nation’s self-esteem. With payments continuing until 1988, the Young Plan was fundamentally unrealistic, and the radical nationalist groups were able to make effective capital out of the phrase le boche payera tout. Conceived as a further step in a gradual process of softening the penalties of the war, and thus supposedly serving to stabilize the republic, the Young Plan became just the contrary, the “point of crystallization for fundamental opposition to the Weimar ‘system.’”¹

On July 9, 1929, the radical Right united to form a national committee for a plebiscite to reject the Young Plan. They staged a wild and vehement campaign (joined by the Communists on the extreme Left) that never let up until the agreement was eventually signed nine months later. The issue brought together a strange assortment of associations and interdependencies whose differences were temporarily forgotten in favor of a few hypnotic slogans. These, endlessly repeated, tried to concentrate hatred upon a few sharply etched images of the enemy. The plan was described as the “death penalty on the unborn,” the “Golgotha of the German people” whom the executioners were “nailing to the cross with scornful laughter.” Along with this the “Nationalist Opposition” demanded annulment of the war-guilt clause, the end of all reparations, immediate evacuation of the occupied territories, and the punishment of all cabinet ministers and members of the government aiding and abetting the “enslavement” of the German people.

The committee was headed by privy councillor Alfred Hugenberg, an ambitious, narrow-minded, and unscrupulous man of sixty-three who had served as settlement commissioner in the East, had been a director of the Krupp Company, and finally had built up an intricate and far-ranging press empire. In addition to an extensive list of newspapers, he controlled a news agency and UFA, the motion picture company. As the political liaison man of heavy industry, he also had sizable sums at his disposal. This money he deliberately committed to undermining the “Socialist Republic,” to smashing the unions, and to answering “class struggle from below,” as he put it, with “class struggle by the upper class.” A short, rotund figure with a mustache and close-cropped hair, he looked like a pensioned-off sergeant posing for a martial photo, not like the proud and embittered patrician he wished to be.

In the fall of 1928 Hugenberg had emerged as a dark horse and assumed leadership of the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (the German Nationalist People’s Party). He promptly made himself the spokesman of radical resentment. The Right had been slowly warming toward the republic; but under Hugenberg’s control all such signs of rapprochement abruptly came to an end. Both in methods and in some points of its program, the DNVP began copying the Hitler party. It never succeeded in being more than the bourgeois caricature of the Nazis. Still and all, Hugenberg broke all limits in his battle against the hated republic. The first signs of the world-wide Depression were beginning to be felt in Germany; but during the storm over the Young Plan, Hugenberg warned 3,000 American businessmen, in a circular letter, against granting credits to Germany.² Under this leader, the German Nationalists quickly lost something like half their membership. But this made little impression on Hugenberg; he declared coolly that he preferred a small block to a large pulp.

The campaign against the Young Plan gave Hugenberg the chance to assert leadership over the scattered forces of the Right, mainly the Stahlhelm (Steel Helmets), the Pan-Germans, the Landbund (Agrarian League), and the Nazis. His larger purpose was to reconquer for the old upper class some of its lost initiative. The misfired revolution of 1918 had not deprived that class of influence, positions of status, money, and property, but it no longer had any credit with the people. With all the arrogance of one of the “top-drawer people” toward a figure associated with the rabble, Hugenberg thought he could make use of Hitler. Here was someone with a proven gift for agitation, he calculated, the very man to lead the masses back to conservatism. For Hugenberg was intelligent enough to see that the usual spokesmen for the conservative cause were largely isolated by their social vanity. When the time came, he thought, he would know how to put Hitler in his place.

Hitler’s own thoughts were far less devious. When Reichstag deputy Hinrich Lohse heard of the alliance, he commented anxiously: “Let’s hope the Führer knows how to pull a fast one on Hugenberg.” But Hitler was not thinking of deceptions. From the start he came on with an air of unmistakable superiority. He scarcely bothered to hide his contemptuous opinion of Hugenberg, the bourgeois reactionary, and all the “gray, moth-eaten eagles,” as Goebbels called them. He said no to the concessions Hugenberg demanded—all the more flatly since the “Left” within the Nazi party was keeping a suspicious watch over the proceedings. What it amounted to was that Hitler alone named the conditions under which he would permit these new backers to help him move forward. At first he proposed marching separately but finally let himself be coaxed into the alliance. However, he demanded complete independence in propaganda and a sizable share of the proffered funds. Then, as if bent on confounding or humiliating his new allies, he appointed the most prominent anticapitalist in the ranks of the Nazi party, Gregor Strasser, to be his representative on the joint financing committee.

The alliance was his first success in a remarkable series of maneuvers that brought Hitler a long way ahead and finally to his goal. His insight into the true nature of situations, his knack for penetrating the various strata of interests, for spotting weaknesses and setting up temporary coalitions, in short, his tactical instinct, certainly contributed as much to his rise as his oratorical powers, the backing of the army, industry, and the judiciary, and the terrorism of his brown shirts. To insist on the magical, the conspiratorial, or the brutal elements in Hitler’s rise to power certainly betrays an inadequate understanding of the course of events. But beyond that, it perpetuates the erroneous notion of the leader of the Nazi party as a mere propagandist or tool. All the facts belie that picture. Hitler was consummately skillful in the field of politics.

With an actor’s agility, at first playing hesitant, conducting his negotiations in a sometimes provocative, sometimes sulky manner, while at the same time conveying an impression of sincerity, ambition, and drive, Hitler finally lured his partners into such a position that they were furthering and financing his rise even as they were paying for it politically. A factor in this particular success, however, was the leftist element in his own ranks, which kept him from making any significant concessions. While the negotiations were going on, Strasser’s militant newspapers carried banner headlines featuring a saying of Hitler’s: The greatest danger to the German people is not Marxism but the bourgeois parties.

In evaluating this episode we must not overlook the power-hungry blindness of the German nationalist conservatives. By parasitically seizing on the force and vitality of the Nazi movement, by uniting with the secretly despised but also admired upstart Hitler, they were trying to forestall German nationalist conservatism’s departure from the stage of history, when that departure had been long since decided. Still, Hitler’s success remains remarkable. For four and a half years he had waited, preparing himself and, in keeping with the unforgotten doctrine of Karl Lueger, working toward alliance with the “powerful institutions,” the holders of political and social influence. When the offer was finally made to him, he had coolly and firmly named his terms. For years Adolf Hitler had stood at the head of an inconspicuous extremist party, ignored or an object of mockery. Only in the light of that fact can we grasp what is meant to him to team up with Hugenberg. It freed him from the noisome odor of being a crackpot revolutionary and putschist. He could appear in public within a circle of respectable, influential patrons and make their good reputation his own. Once before he had had that chance and thrown it away; now he indicated that he meant to behave much more circumspectly.

After concluding the alliance, the Nazi party for the first time had funds enough to crank up its excellent propaganda apparatus. It at once began showing the public a style of propaganda of unprecedented radicality and impact. Nothing of the kind had ever existed in Germany, Hitler declared in a letter of that period. “We have thoroughly worked over our people as no other party has done.” None of the other partners in the nationalist alliance could approach the Nazi party in stridency, sharpness, and psychological cunning. From the start the Nazis made it plain that the Young Plan was only the pretext for the campaign. They broadened their attack to include the whole “system,” which they claimed was collapsing from incompetence, treason, and corruption. “The time will come,” Hitler cried out in a speech at Hersbruck, near Nuremberg, toward the end of November, “when those responsible for Germany’s collapse will laugh out of the other side of their faces. Fear will grip them. Let them know that their judgment is on the way.” Fascinated by the demogogic wildness of the Nazis, Hugenberg and the rest of the conservatives in the coalition stared at the tremendous wave they had set in motion. They encouraged it, repeatedly lent impetus to it, and in their smug faith in their natural leadership thought they were riding it when they had long since been swamped by it.

In these circumstances it did not very much matter to Hitler that the campaign was less than a smashing success. The referendum was held; the draft proposal for a “law against the enslavement of the German people” barely received the 10 per cent of the votes required if it were to be submitted to the Reichstag. But in the Reichstag the proposal was accepted by only eighty-two representatives, with 318 votes against it. The third stage in the process, the holding of a plebiscite on December 22, 1929, likewise ended in defeat. The proponents of the draft law won barely 14 per cent of the votes, about a quarter of the number needed—some 5 per cent less than the votes the Nazi party and the Nationalist party had won in the Reichstag elections the previous year.

Nevertheless, this campaign meant for Hitler the final breakthrough into national politics. Thanks to the support provided by the many and variegated publications of the Hugenberg empire, he had made a name for himself nationally and had proved himself the most energetic and purposeful force on the divided and directionless Right. He himself spoke of the “extremely great reversal” in public opinion and marveled at “the way arrogant, snobbish or stupid rejection of the party, which was the rule only a few years ago, has been transformed into expectant hope.” On August 3 and 4, 1929, after the opening of the campaign, he convoked a party rally in Nuremberg, probably to show his conservative partners something of the mettle of his movement. By now he knew a great deal about staging such demonstrations. More than thirty special trains brought some 200,000 followers (if the figures are correct) from all over Germany. For several days their uniforms, banners, and bands dominated the scene in the medieval walled city. The majority of the twenty-four new standards, which were consecrated in a highly emotional ceremony, came from Bavaria, Austria, and Schleswig-Holstein. At the grand final muster, some 60,000 SA men, by this time all in uniform and provided with active-service field equipment, paraded past Hitler for three and a half hours. In the euphoria of the day some units threatened to take immediate violent action. A similar mood underlay a motion by the party’s radical wing proposing that any participation in government by the NSDAP should be “forbidden now and for ever.” With the terse and characteristic remark that any step was justified that might “lead the movement into the possession of political power,” Hitler rejected the motion. Nevertheless, his adherence to legality was now threatened anew by the self-assurance of the rapidly growing party army. By the end of the year the SA was the equal of the Reichswehr in manpower.

The alliance with Hugenberg also provided Hitler with many connections among industrialists who by and large had over the years supported Stresemann’s foreign policy but who now vigorously opposed the Young Plan. Hitherto, Hitler had received material support only from small factory owners—aside from such notable exceptions as the industrialist Fritz Thyssen. His antisocialist, proproperty attitude on the question of the expropriation of the sovereigns had made him no new friends. Now, suddenly, he could draw on more opulent sources. While still banned from public speaking, he had used his time in systematically traveling through the industrial regions of Germany, primarily the Ruhr, talking at closed meetings often to several hundred largely skeptical businessmen and endeavoring to remove their fears of his form of nationalistic socialism by presenting himself as a staunch defender of private property. True to his belief that success was an index of aristocracy, he hailed the large-scale entrepreneur as the type of a superior race, “destined for leadership.” On the whole he tried to convey that what he was “demanding was nothing employers need object to.”

Hitler’s connections with the Munich salons, in which he continued to be something of a lion, also proved their value once again. Elsa Bruckmann had by now made it her “life task to bring Hitler into contact with the leading men in heavy industry,” as she herself put it. In 1927 she arranged for him to meet old Emil Kirdorf, who became extremely important to Hitler—not only as an influential industrialist but also as administrator of a political fund known as the “Ruhr Treasury.” Hitler was deeply impressed by this rough old man who had spent his life plotting against those above him and despising those below him. And Kirdorf in turn was fascinated by Hitler; he soon became one of his most valuable supporters, possibly the most valuable. Kirdorf participated as a guest of honor in the party rally in Nuremberg, and subsequently wrote to Hitler that those days had been an overwhelming experience he would never forget.

All this new assistance and new money would be translated into significant successes in the regional elections of 1929. In Saxony and Mecklenburg-Schwerin the Nazis had won nearly 5 per cent of the vote the previous spring. But their progress in the Prussian community elections was more impressive. In Coburg they elected the mayor, and in Thuringia they succeeded in voting into office the first Nazi provincial government minister, Wilhelm Frick. Frick soon made a stir by introducing Nazi prayers into the schools and came into conflict with the national government—although on the whole he tried to demonstrate that his party was quite capable of cooperating in coalitions.

In keeping with his greed for public display, Hitler set about creating a glorious backdrop for his newly won success. The setting, in turn, was to prepare the ground for future successes. Since 1925, the Munich party headquarters had been located in an unostentatious, utilitarian building on Schellingstrasse. Now, with funds supplied largely by Fritz Thyssen, Hitler bought the Barlow Palace on Briennerstrasse in Munich and renovated it to serve as the “Brown House.” Together with the architect Paul Ludwig Troost, he spent much of his time planning the interior decoration. It was as if he were returning to his youthful dreams of a fine, aristocratic mansion. He sketched furniture, doors, and designs for marquetry. A grand open stairwell led up to his office, which was furnished with a few outsized pieces, a portrait of Frederick the Great, a bust of Mussolini, and a painting of an attack by the List Regiment in Flanders. Adjoining was the so-called Senate Hall. Here, around a gigantic horseshoe-shaped table, stood sixty armchairs in red morocco, their backs displaying the party eagle. Bronze tablets to either side of the entrance listed the names of the victims of the abortive putsch of November 9, 1923. In the room itself there were busts of Bismarck and Dietrich Eckart. This hall, however, never served its ostensible purpose. It existed solely to satisfy Hitler’s theatrical needs, for he had always firmly rejected any thought of placing a senate or any other group of advisers at his side. The canteen in the cellar of the Brown House had a “Fuhrer’s seat” reserved for him under a portrait of Dietrich Eckart. Here he would sit for hours in his circle of adjutants and reverent chauffeurs, indulging in the idle chatter beloved by Vienna coffeehouse habitues.

His personal affairs also reflected the improved financial state of the party. In the course of 1929, the interest and amortization payments for his considerably swollen debts abruptly disappear from the documents concerning his personal finances. At the same time he moved into an opulent nine-room apartment at 16 Prinzregentenstrasse in one of the solidly middle-class residential districts of Munich. Frau Reichert, his former landlady from Thierschstrasse, and Frau Anny Winter did the housekeeping for him, while Frau Raubal, his half-sister, continued to run Haus Wachenfeld on the slope of Obersalzberg. His niece Geli, who had picked up her uncle’s love for the theater and was now taking singing and acting lessons, soon moved into the apartment. The gossip about this relationship bothered him somewhat, but he also rather enjoyed the aura of bohemian freedom and the suggestion of a grand and fateful passion in this liaison between uncle and niece.

The campaign against the Young Plan had barely come to its end when Hitler once more committed an act of political audacity. He dramatically broke with Hugenberg’s conservative associates, on the grounds that their half-heartedness and bourgeois weakness had been responsible for the failure of the plebiscite. The ease with which he made such ruptures, undeterred by any sense of common purpose and common struggles, once more served him well. For this sudden swerve silenced the critics within the party who had been grumbling at his alliance with “the capitalist pig Hugenberg.” Moreover, the move enabled him to disavow his own share in the defeat, so that he could once again emerge as the only vigorous force on the antirepublican Right.

Such bold gestures made all the more of an impression because they seemed entirely out of keeping with the numerical strength of the still small party. But Hitler had recognized that it was all important to keep alive that interest in the movement which he had at last succeeded in arousing. Stripping the party for more aggressive tasks, as it were, he undertook a reorganization of headquarters. Gregor Strasser was placed in charge of Organization Section I (Political Organization). Former Colonel Konstantin Hierl became head of Organization Section II (National Socialist State; the shadow government). Goebbels became propaganda chief. In a letter of February 2, 1930, Hitler predicted “with almost clairvoyant certainty” that “the victory of our movement will take place… at the most in two and a half to three years.”

After the break with Hugenberg he continued without interruption, and with virtually undiminished violence, the campaign against the republic. Only now it was the Nazi party’s own campaign. The previous year, instructions from party headquarters, signed by the then director of propaganda Heinrich Himmler, had called for a series of “propaganda operations” that represented a new departure in the art of politicking. An onslaught would be made on a single district, down to its remotest villages. In the course of a week all the party’s top speakers would be hurled in to address several hundred meetings. They would be enlisted “to the extreme limit” of their capacities. During this period every city and town would be bombarded with posters, banners, and leaflets—with Hitler himself frequently deciding the designs and slogans. “Recruiting nights” would be staged, when the SA was to show—in the words of the directive—“what it can do out of its own resources, including: athletic events, living tableaus, plays, singing of songs, lectures by SA men, showing of the movie of the Party Rally.” In the period preceding the elections for the Landtag (legislature) of Saxony in June, 1930, the party held no fewer than 1,300 such affairs.

Along with these regional actions the party continued its efforts to gain a foothold within specific social groups, and in particular to win over some of the white-color workers and the rural population. In a series of vigorous thrusts the party conquered leading positions in co-operatives, craft unions, and professional organizations. In some rural areas conditions of acute distress prevailed: a peasant protest movement in Schleswig-Holstein, for example, marched under black banners. The party responded with the elusive slogan of “land reform” and by blaming matters on the Jews—tapping the springs of latent peasant anti-Semitism, which, as the party training directive put it, “must be incited to the point of furious rage.” A young Auslandsdeutscher (German from abroad) named Walter Darre, whom Rudolf Hess had introduced to Hitler, was meanwhile working out an agrarian program that was published early in March, 1930. It combined a generous offer of subsidies with fulsome tributes to the “noblest class in the nation.” At the same time, the party took advantage, in its propaganda among white-collar workers, of that general sense of crisis which had been engendered by the outcome of the war, urbanization, and the pressure of changes in the social structure. For the time being the factory workers remained aloof from the party. But the influx of office and agricultural workers that started in 1929 seemed to justify the party’s claim to being the “party of all toilers.” Throughout the country there sprang into being a host of small cells and bases that prepared the way for the great breakthrough.

Hitler kept whipping the party on; but these successes were not entirely the result of his drive or of his talent for addressing himself to the confused and emotional thinking of the traditionally splintered Right. Rather, the incipient world-wide Depression came to his aid. Signs of crisis became apparent in Germany by the beginning of 1929, when the number of unemployed for the first time passed the 3 million mark. In the course of the spring the number of business failures began to increase alarmingly. By the first five days of November, in Berlin alone, fifty-five bankruptcies were recorded and from 500 to 700 persons daily were taking the debtor’s oath that they were unable to satisfy their creditors. These figures partly reflected the economic and psychological consequences of October 24, 1929, the famous Black Friday on which prices on the New York Stock Exchange collapsed.

In Germany, especially, the devastating effects were felt almost immediately. The foreign loans, mostly short-term, that had underwritten the country’s economic revival and countenanced a certain recklessness on the part of some municipalities, were withdrawn by the anxious creditors. The abrupt recession in world trade simultaneously destroyed all prospects of making up for the losses, at least temporarily, by increased exports. As world market prices dropped, agriculture was drawn into the crisis; soon farms could be kept going only by subsidies which in turn increased the burden on the general public. One disaster fed the next in a classic chain reaction. In Germany, too, stock prices tumbled, unemployment grew by leaps and bounds, factories closed their doors, and new pawnshops opened theirs. Long columns in the newspapers announced forced auction sales. The political effects soon followed. Ever since the election of 1928 the country had been governed by a broad coalition painfully held together and straining to fly apart. This government was headed by the Social Democratic Chancellor Hermann Muller. When diminished tax receipts forced rigorous belt tightening, a stubborn fight ensued between the capitalistic and the left-wing groups within the government, each trying to make the other assume the burdens of the Depression.

Actually, by this time it was obvious that nobody was going to be spared. The most prominent characteristic of the Depression in Germany was its totality. Although the ancillary economic and social consequences in, say, England—and especially in the United States—were no less far-reaching, they did not lead in those countries to an overwhelming psychological crisis that destroyed all political, moral, and intellectual standards and was felt to be something far greater than its specific causes: a shattering of faith in the existing order of the world. The turn of events in Germany simply cannot be adequately considered in terms of the objective economic conditions. For it was more than an economic slump; it was a psychological shock. Weary of everlasting troubles, their psychic resistance worn thin by war, defeat, and inflation, sick of democratic rhetoric with its constant appeals to reason and sobriety, people let their emotions run rampant.

First reactions, to be sure, were nonpolitical: resignation in the face of the fatefulness and inscrutable character of the disaster. People thought primarily about their own survival, about the daily trek to the employment offices, standing in front of grocery stores or on breadlines. And along with all the trivial daily vexations, there was the terrible idleness of men who had nothing to do but to hang around, apathetically or desperately, in dreary taverns, on street corners or in darkened apartments, feeling life was going to waste. In September, 1930, the number of jobless once again crossed the 3 million mark; a year later it had reached almost 4.5 million, and in September, 1932, more than 5 million—which was an improvement over the beginning of the year, for in January more than 6 million unemployed had been registered, not including temporary workers. Approximately every second family was directly affected, and from 15 million to 20 million persons found themselves dependent on the dole. This “relief” was in a sense sufficient to sustain life since, according to the figures of the American journalist H. R. Knickerbocker, it would take ten years to starve to death on it.

A sense of total discouragement and meaninglessness pervaded everything. Among the most striking concomitants of the Great Depression was an unprecedented wave of suicides. At first the victims were chiefly failed bankers and businessmen, but as the Depression deepened, members of the middle class and the petty bourgeoisie more and more frequently took their own lives. With their keen sense of status, many office workers, owners of small shops, and persons with small private incomes had long regarded poverty as a badge of social degradation. They suffered less from the deprivations than the disgrace. Quite often whole families chose death together. Dropping birth rates and rising death rates led to decreasing populations in at least twenty of Germany’s major cities. The combination of public misery and the unfeelingness displayed by a hard-pressed and sickly capitalism led to the sense that everything was doomed to go down to destruction very soon. And, as always, such eschatological moods were accompanied by wild hopes that sprang up like weeds, along with irrational longings for a complete alteration of the world. Charlatans, astrologers, clairvoyants, numerologists, and mediums flourished. These times of distress taught men, if not to pray, pseudoreligious feelings, and turned their eyes willy-nilly to those seemingly elect personalities who saw beyond mere human tasks and promised more than normality, order, and politics as usual—who offered, in fact, to restore to life its lost meaning.

With remarkable instinct, Hitler grasped these cravings and knew how to make himself the object of them. This was his hour in every sense. For the past years he had been given to spells of apathy, had seemed inclined to withdraw into private life. But this was over now. For a long while the factors that could rouse his energies had simply been missing. The Dawes Plan, the vexations imposed by the occupying forces, or Stresemann’s foreign policy had hardly lent themselves to his purposes. He must have been aware that the disproportion between these facts and the excitement he tried to whip up over them could all too easily lead to absurd effects. Now, however, he saw emerging that state catastrophe which made the perfect background for his demagogic flights. To be sure the staples of his propaganda remained what they had always been: Versailles and Stresemann’s foreign policy, parliamentarism and the French occupation, capitalism, Marxism, and above all the Jewish world conspiracy. But now each of these items could easily be linked with the prevailing malaise, with the misery everyone was conscious of.

Hitler surpassed all his rivals in knowing how to give the color of a political decision to the personal wishes and despairs of the masses, and to insinuate his own aims into those who held the most divergent views and expectations. When spokesmen of other parties encountered the populace, their own lack of faith became apparent despite their efforts to win the people. They, too, had no answers and could count only on the solidarity of the powerless in the face of disaster. Hitler, on the other hand, took an optimistic and aggressive tone. He showed confidence in the future and cultivated his animosities. “Never in my life,” he declared, “have I been so well disposed and inwardly contented as in these days.”³

Hitler was also able to ring many changes on his cries of alarm. He appealed to bewildered people terrified by the prospect of being declassed, people who felt threatened equally by the Right and the Left, by capitalism and by Communism, and who blamed the existing system for having failed them. The program Hitler outlined rejected everything: it was anticapitalistic and antiproletarian, revolutionary and restorational; it conjured up its dire visions of the future along with nostalgic pictures of the good old days. It was of a piece with and helped sustain the paradox of a revolutionary attitude that denounced the present state of things and aimed at reinstating the way things used to be. Hitler deliberately cut across all the traditional fronts. But while he took up a radical position far outside the “system,” he kept asserting that he was in no way responsible for the prevailing misery, and that those very conditions proved how right he was in condemning the existing state of affairs.

As if to confirm his charges, the parliamentary institutions of the republic failed their first serious test. The coalition government fell apart in the spring of 1930, even before the Depression reached its peak. The end of the coalition was a signal for multitudes to abandon the republic. What precipitated the breakup of the coalition was a long-simmering but essentially trivial disagreement among the parties on how the costs of unemployment insurance were to be distributed. But in fact Chancellor Hermann Muller’s government was shattered by the general tendency to flee to the extremes, a tendency that manifested itself in all the political camps. The process revealed how thin the underlying support of the republic was, how little loyalty it could command. In the preceding few years the Weimar Republic had made some considerable achievements; but there had been a grayness about its competence, so that even during its best years it had, fundamentally, only bored people. It had remained for Hitler to tap those wellsprings which the republican politicians in their hard-working, commonplace efficiency had neither recognized nor utilized. Among these were: the craving for utopia and for suprapersonal goals; an idealism that welcomed the appeal to generosity and the spirit of sacrifice; the quest for leaders in whom the opaqueness of modern power processes would be made visible; and the demand for some interpretation of the present misery that would give heroic stature to those who were suffering it.

The slogans that formulated the “spiritual” alternatives did far more than the vague economic pledges to lead the disoriented masses toward the Nazi party. Hitler himself put aside his reservations about a mass party. For the first time the flexibility of the widely ramified party organization proved its worth. The NSDAP could effortlessly absorb the most heterogeneous elements, for it was not restricted to a single class and not hampered by a rigid program. It could offer room to persons of every background, every age, every motivation. Its membership appeared peculiarly structureless; certainly no strict class analysis applied to it. We would be wrong to see it solely as a movement of the reactionary bourgeois and peasant masses, whose impetus came chiefly from the material interests of its following. To take this view would be to miss the decisive factor in its rise.

Small tradesmen, peasants, industrialists and consumers had all become indispensable to the party. The manifold contradictions among these groups stood in the way of the formation of a class movement. Sooner or later every party had come up against this barrier. It seemed insuperable. Certainly in a period of intense economic and social distress it could not be overcome simply by making empty promises to all and sundry. There were too many politicians trying the same dodge; it soon ceased to fool anyone. Those who concerned themselves with material questions could win the masses only by promising higher wages and lower prices, more dividends and fewer taxes, better pensions, higher tariffs, higher prices to the farmers and lower prices to the consumers. But Hitler’s great trick was to leap over the economic contradictions and offer instead high-sounding principles. When he spoke of material interests it was chiefly to make an effective contrast between himself and his opponents. “I do not promise happiness and prosperity, like the others,” he would occasionally proclaim. “I can only say this one thing: we want to be National Socialists; we want to realize that we cannot rightfully be nationalistic and shout, ‘Deutschland, Deutschland iiber alles’ when millions of us have to go on the dole and have nothing to wear.” For his key weapon was his understanding that the behavior of human beings is not motivated exclusively by economic forces or interests. He counted instead on their need to have a suprapersonal reason for living and trusted in the power of an “alternative culture” to dissolve class limits. This alternative was a package of slogans—an invocation of national honor, national greatness, oaths of loyalty and readiness for sacrifice. He called for dedication without prospect of advantage: “And you will see—we’ll be marching!”

Nevertheless, the party still won influence and members chiefly among those middle-level groups who had clung to the rudiments of their political ideas and who had all along tended to flee from dubious existential situations into the shelter of a stern and uncomplicated system of order. Their wishes, resentments, and interests were not too well represented by the existing spread of parties. The unloved republic had alienated them from politics, but now hunger and anxiety sent them in search of “their” party in a series of aimless vacillations. In their encounter with Hitler they succumbed, to be sure, to his great demagogic powers. But almost equally they were drawn by a similarity of destinies: he, too, unmistakably bourgeois, sharing that overwhelming fear of being declassed, a failure in civilian life until he discovered politics, which had liberated him and lifted him socially. Wouldn’t the same magic affect them? Hitler’s fate seemed to be the apotheosis of their own.

It was this “sinking middle class” who joined the NSDAP in vast numbers and dominated the sociological picture of the party during those years. Yet it would be wrong to assume a direct link between economic distress and the appeal of the party. Its greatest increment of members came not in the big cities and industrial regions where the slump had struck hardest, but in the small towns and rural areas. For there, against the background of an on the whole still intact order of things, economic crisis was felt as far more elemental and catastrophic than in the big cities, which had always known such ups and downs.⁴

As the Depression went on, however, the Nazi party began winning its first successes among the workers. Gregor Strasser even tried to set up an organization of party cells in every shop to combat what was called “shop Marxism” (Goebbels coined the slogan, “A Nazi cell on top in every shop”). What remained of the Nazi Left was desperately trying to keep its social-revolutionary workers’ party from degenerating into a collecton of anti-Semites and petty bourgeois. “Winning a single worker is incomparably more valuable than declarations of adherence by a dozen Excellencies or ‘superior’ personages in general.” By and large, Strasser’s efforts failed. But what the Nazi party for a long time could not achieve within the class-conscious proletariat, it did achieve more and more among the growing masses of the unemployed. The SA proved to be an ideal catchment basin. In Hamburg, of 4,500 members of the SA, 2,600 were unemployed—nearly 60 per cent. Party stalwarts would be posted outside relief offices, where the jobless had to report twice a week, to hand out the propaganda sheet, The Jobless, which was skillfully slanted toward the problems of this group. They would deliberately start long discussions with the men who were standing around, and thus put across the Nazi message.

Counteraction by the Communists, who saw the Nazis challenging them in their very own domain, led to brawls and street battles. Step by step the numbers involved in these struggles increased, until gradually there developed that “silent civil war” which until January, 1933, left behind it a thin but steadily bleeding trail. Then it came to an abrupt end when the one side seized power.

The battles with the Communists had begun as early as March, 1929, in the area of Dithmarschen (Schlesing-Holstein). During a fierce brawl, two members of the SA (a farmer named Hermann Schmidt and a cabinetmaker named Otto Streibel) had been killed and thirty persons injured, some of them gravely. Hereafter the strife shifted to the big cities whose working-class districts and networks of alleys served as a grim terrain for a form of guerrilla warfare. Corner cafes and basement bistros served as bases for the belligerents; these were the so-called storm pubs; one contemporary described his as a “fortified position in the battle zone.” As early as May 1, 1929, hostilities broke out on Berlin’s East End between the storm troopers and the Communists’ military organization, the Red Front Fighters League. For days whole rows of streets were in the grip of virtual war; the strife resulted in nineteen dead and forty wounded, most of them severely. It took massive intervention by the police, ultimately supported by armored cars, to stop the fighting.

Berlin was now moving more and more into the center of the Nazi strategy for seizing power. The city was traditionally leftist, with the Marxist parties there far outstripping all rivals in strength. For that very reason it was the bastion which had to be taken. And Gauleiter Goebbels had just the temperament to pit his tiny following against the “Reds” right in the heart of their power, where they imagined themselves unassailable. “Adolf Hitler devours Karl Marx!” was one of the slogans with which Goebbels launched his offensive. From the bourgeois suburbs where the Nazi party had led a clubbish existence taken up chiefly with internal squabbles, Goebbels sent the members straight toward the bleak proletarian districts in the northern and eastern parts of the city. For the first time someone was disputing the Left’s control of the streets and the shops. Goebbels himself, sallow, looking in need of sleep, wearing a leather jacket, was also often on the scene, and became a well-known figure in the period’s gallery of types. The nervousness of the Left—which for too long had fobbed off its shadow play of world revolution on increasingly skeptical masses—was reflected in the slogan issued by the Communist Party district leadership in Berlin in answer to Goebbels’ competition: “Drive the Fascists out of the shops! Strike them wherever you meet them!”

Following Hitler’s example, Goebbels also developed his tactics by studying his opponent’s methods. The slogan squads, the parading bands, the political activity on the job, the system of street cells, the mass demonstrations, the door-to-door canvassing—all this represented techniques of building the party long practiced by the socialists, combined with the “grand Munich style” Hitler had created. Goebbels added a few intellectual and metropolitan trappings to the party’s provincial look, thereby making it attractive to more sophisticated strata of the population. He was witty, hard-boiled, and cynical in a way that usually impresses the public. Labeled by his adversaries “chief bandit of Berlin,” he adopted this insult as an honorary title.

What distinguished the Nazis from conservatives of the old school was their absence of false pride about the manner of achieving power. They were more than willing to learn from their opponents, and this gave their reactionary notions a cast of modernity. They were far more attentive to the radical leftist press than to the bourgeois papers, and in their own publications they often printed “significant sections” from Communist instructions, applying them to their own following. They tried to throw their opponents off balance by rude behavior—again borrowing from Communist practice—while at the same time pluming themselves on their innocence and idealism. “Heroes with the hearts of big children” and “Christlike socialists” were among the descriptions Goebbels gave to the Nazis in the process of creating a martyr out of the SA leader Horst Wessel. In actuality Wessel had been shot by a Communist rival for the affections of a slut; the killing was at least in part a matter of jealousy.

One of Goebbels’ most effective tactics was to exhibit the heavily bandaged victims of street battles on stretchers beside his speaker’s platform. The incident in Dithmarschen had confirmed the propagandist value of the dead and wounded, and the leaders of the party had seen that a few bloody victims were a good investment. According to police reports, the party membership rolls increased by 30 per cent after that affair. The report stated that since the battle “simple old peasant women are wearing the swastika on their blue work smocks. In talking with such old mothers you sensed at once that they knew nothing at all about the aims and intentions of the National Socialist Party. But they are convinced that all honest people in Germany today are being exploited, that the government is incompetent and… only the National Socialists can save the country from this alleged misery.”

The NSDAP made its most remarkable inroads among the youth. More than any other political party it was able to exploit the state of mind of the younger generation. In the nature of things the generation from eighteen to thirty had been especially hard hit by the Depression. Their ambition and their desire to prove themselves had been thwarted by the prevailing mass unemployment. At once radical and looking for some way to escape reality, the young generation formed a gigantic aggressive potential. They despised their environment, the homes of their parents, their educators and traditional authorities, engaged only in restoring the old bourgeois order. The young people had long ago moved beyond that order. A contemporary poem voiced this mood: “No longer content with faith in the past and yet too sound for mere negation.” Germany, it was also said, had lost not only the war but the revolution as well, and she must make up for both.

The republic was held in contempt not only because of its powerlessness but also for pretending that its indecisiveness was a virtue, a democratic willingness to compromise. The young people also rejected the republic’s unimaginative welfare-state materialism, its “epicurean ideals”—in which they found no trace of that tragic sense of life they had made their own.

They were equally unattracted to the traditional type of party that in no way satisfied their craving for “organic” forms of community—a craving awakened by the youth movement before the war and strengthened by the war experience itself. They were repelled by “the rule of old men” and bristled at the very thought of the usual party leaders, narrow-minded and self-righteous and all alike.

A good many of the young joined the Communists, although the narrow class-struggle bias of the party was for some a psychological stumbling block. Others tried to buttress their vulnerability by joining one of the many splinter groups among the wilder nationalistic conservatives. But the majority, especially among the students, went over to the National Socialists. The NSDAP was their natural alternative. In the ideological gamut offered by Nazi propaganda, they heard chiefly the revolutionary notes. They were seeking discipline and heroism and were susceptible to the romantic lure of a movement that operated close to the edge of legality and permitted the wholly committed to step over the edge. The NSDAP seemed less a party than an association of fighters who made demands on the whole man and answered a brittle and crumbling world with the battle cry of a new order.

With the influx of younger members, the Nazi party—especially before the masses began flocking to it—became for a while a new kind of youth movement. In the Hamburg district, for example, some two thirds of the party members were under thirty in 1925; in Halle the figure went as high as 86 per cent; and in the other party districts the percentages were much the same. In 1931, 70 per cent of the Berlin SA men were under thirty; in the party as a whole nearly 40 per cent of the total membership belonged to this age group. The Social Democratic Party had barely half as many young people. Only 10 per cent of the Social Democratic Reichstag deputies were under forty; among the Nazis the figure was 60 per cent. Hitler’s enlistment of the young proved to be a canny policy. He also saw the wisdom of entrusting them with high positions. Goebbels became a gauleiter at twenty-eight, Karl Kaufmann at twenty-five. Baldur von Schirach was twenty-six when he was appointed Reich youth leader, and Himmler was only two years older when he was promoted to chief of the SS, with the impressive new title of Reichsführer-SS. The dedication and faith of these youthful leaders, their “purely physical energy and militancy,” as one of them later recalled, “gave the party a momentum the bourgeois parties could not begin to match.”

All these elements had had a place in the party since 1929, even before the sudden large-scale influx of members. But the sociological range of the party remained vague. In fact, it was deliberately obscured by pretentious slogans, behind which Hitler tried to disguise the fact that he had made few conquests among the politically conscious working class and that the National Socialist Party on the whole remained restricted to its original strata of the population. Moreover, the government began again to show displeasure. On June 5, 1930, Bavaria issued a ban on the private wearing of uniforms. A week later Prussia forbade the brown shirt, so that the storm troopers henceforth had to appear in white shirts. Only two weeks later the state of Prussia prohibited membership in the National Socialist or the Communist Party for all civil servants. The new toughness of the Weimar Republic was expressed in the increasing number of court cases against members of both parties. Up to 1933 some 40,000 trials were held, as a consequence of which a total of 14,000 years’ imprisonment and nearly 1.5 million marks in fines were imposed.⁵

Such measures, however, did not dispel the impression of weakness that clung to the “system.” After the inglorious end of the Great Coalition there was pressure within the government itself for some sort of change in the machinery of rule. Up to this point President von Hindenburg had conducted his office with fidelity to the letter of the Constitution, although he had no particular respect for its spirit. But some members of his entourage began to say that the incompetent parliamentary regime should be replaced by authoritarian presidential rule. It is difficult to judge to what extent the President accepted such counsels; but in any case he for the first time intervened vigorously and decisively in the formation of the new government. His choice of Heinrich Brüning for Chancellor indicated that from now on he would exert influence on the daily business of government. The personality of the new Chancellor combined integrity, austerity, and sense of duty. He seemed ready for those mute self-sacrifices that Hindenburg demanded of his associates. Soon after taking office, with unseemly haste, without exhausting the possibilities for compromise, Brüning risked a vote of confidence and dissolved the Reichstag. The moment was particularly ill chosen; unemployment was increasing sharply, and terror of the Depression was mounting. In vain Interior Minister Wirth implored the antagonists to compromise and not to expand the parliamentary crisis into a crisis of the system, as if democracy were tired of itself. No one yielded, and new elections were set for September, 1930.

Nazi propaganda immediately flared to new heights. Once again the mobil agitation squads made loud and turbulent irruptions into towns and rural areas, organizing an endless succession of open-air concerts, sports festivals, “rallyes,” solemn bugling of taps church meetings. Their stock-in-trade was diatribes against their competitors. “Throw the scum out! Tear the masks off their mugs! Take them by the scruff of the neck and kick them in their fat bellies on September 14, and sweep them out of the temple with trumpets and drums!” Goebbels wrote; in this election campaign he was undergoing his first test since his appointment as Reich propaganda chief. The philosopher Ernst Bloch has spoken contemptuously of the Nazis’ “stupid enthusiasm.” But in fact that was their greatest strength. The Communists, by contrast, in spite of their grandiloquent faith in ultimate victory, seemed colorless and without élan, as though they had, not history, but only the daily grind on their side. The 2,000 to 3,000 graduates of the Nazi party speakers’ school were now thrown into the fray for marathon sessions. And though their expositions of party doctrine often sounded crude and memorized, and probably won few new adherents, the mere appearance of these hordes of preachers spread the impression of a vast party engaged in tireless and overwhelming activity. Simultaneously, the better-known and experienced party speakers addressed the populace at large-scale meetings. “Meetings attended by between a thousand and five hundred persons are of daily occurrence in the larger cities,” a memorandum of the Prussian Interior Ministry noted. “Often, in fact, one or several parallel meetings have to be held because the previously selected halls cannot hold the number of persons wishing to attend.”

Heading it all as leader, star performer, and organizer was Hitler himself. He had led off the campaign with a mass meeting in Weimar and continued his tour indefatigably, by car, by train, or by plane. Wherever he turned up, he set the masses into motion, although he had no plan, no theory of the Depression and how to fight it. But he could name those responsible : the Allies, the corrupt politicians of the system, the Marxists, and the Jews. And he had his formula for ending the distress of the people: determination, self-assurance, and recaptured power. His emotional appeals remained in the realm of generalities. Topical concerns be damned, he would declare. The German people had been ruined by wrestling with such petty matters. “Topical concerns blind our eyes to greatness.” The crisis of the parliamentary system arose from the very fact that the parties were focusing their attention on the “everyday junk,” for which people were not “willing to make sacrifices.”

Hitler’s effectiveness was due as much to the decisiveness of his manner and the impressive ritual with which he was surrounded as to his oratorical powers. His ideas could easily be translated into slogans; once planted, these sank into the deeper layers of men’s mind, took root and grew. During those weeks of the election campaign he acquired, in addition to a vast amount of organizational experience, the refined psychological technique for the larger and stormier campaigns he was to launch two years later.

The paucity of the actual Nazi program, as against the energy and noise level of its agitation, caused many people to underestimate the NSDAP. In the view of intelligent contemporaries, the party was asserting itself as a noisy, bothersome and slightly crazy phenomenon in noisy and slightly crazy times. Thus, the political satirist Kurt Tucholsky made this quip about Hitler: “The man doesn’t exist; he is only the noise he makes.” Meanwhile, on a more serious plane, little attention was paid to a memorandum from the Reich Interior Ministry disclosing the anti-Constitutional character of the party, so thinly disguised by formal professions of legality.

Instead, those most concerned with defense of the republic trusted to the pent-up explosive forces within the party. It was growing too fast, they thought; surely its inner contradictions would cause it to blow up. And surely it would be destroyed by the intellectual mediocrity, the crudeness and the warring ambitions of its corps of leaders.

Such prognoses seemed confirmed by the upheavals within the National Socialist Party in the summer of 1930. Only in hindsight could these be recognized as purges which tightened party discipline and strengthened its thrust. First of all, Hitler forced the long-delayed confrontation with the party Left, whose position had patently become more contradictory. As long as the NSDAP had been a marginal party, making a considerable uproar but not having to put its ideas into practice in legislatures or administrations, it had been easy to conceal its internal ideological disagreements. But after the recent victories in regional elections, the party was being compelled to take a definite stand. Otto Strasser and his followers obstinately held to their old principles. They advocated aggressive “catastrophe tactics,” preached crude anticapitalism, came out for extensive nationalization of industry and an alliance with the Soviet Union, and flouted the party line by supporting local strike movements. This last activity, of course, was bound to strain the party’s new and highly profitable entente with industry. In addition their habit of rashly discussing programs caused trouble, for Hitler liked to skirt such questions and keep his options open.

As early as January, 1930, the Führer had asked Otto Strasser to turn over the publishing house to him. Cunningly mixing flattery with threats and attempts at bribery, Hitler promised the refractory comrade the post of press chief at Munich headquarters and offered to pay some 80,000 marks for the publishing organization. He appealed to Strasser as an old soldier and a National Socialist of many years standing. But Strasser, who regarded himself as the repository of true National Socialism, had rejected all such bids. The final showdown came on the night of May 21, 1930, in what was then Hitler’s Berlin headquarters, the Hotel Sanssouci on Linkstrasse. Max Amann was present, as well as Rudolf Hess and Otto Strasser’s brother Gregor, when the two sides fell into a heated debate that was to go on for seven hours and to expose the full extent of their differences.

In that grandiloquent manner of the self-educated which was later to drive his entourage to distraction, Hitler began by sounding off on the subject of art (there are no revolutionary breaks in art; there is only “eternal art,” and whatever deserves the name is art of the Greco-Nordic type; anything else is fraud). He then expatiated on the role of personality, the problems of race, the global economy, Italian Fascism, and finally turned to socialism, which was the “Pilate’s question”—that is, the question of the nature of truth. That question, to be sure, had been present from the start. Now Hitler took Strasser to task for placing “the idea” above the Führer and wanting “to give every party comrade the right to decide the nature of the idea, even to decide whether or not the Führer is true to the so-called idea.” That, he cried angrily, was the worst kind of democracy, for which there was no place in their movement. “With us the Führer and the idea are one and the same, and every party comrade has to do what the Führer commands, for he embodies the idea and he alone knows its ultimate goal.” He was not going to allow the whole party organization, which was built up on the discipline of the members, “to be destroyed by a few megalomaniac scriveners.”

Hitler’s incapacity to see human relationships in anything but hierarchic terms had seldom shown itself so clearly as in the course of this dispute. Compulsively, he answered every objection, every consideration, by referring back to the question of power: Who was to give the orders and who was the subordinate? Everything was mercilessly reduced to the contrast between master and servants; all that existed was the raw, unshaped mass and the great personality for which that mass was an instrument, material for manipulation. To satisfy the legitimate needs of this mass for protection and welfare was, to his mind, socialism. When Strasser came out with the charge that Hitler was trying to throttle the party’s revolutionary socialism in the interests of his new connections with bourgeois reaction, Hitler replied heatedly. “I am a socialist of an entirely different type from, for instance, the high and mighty Count Reventlow [an aristocratic party member], I started out as a plain workman. To this day I can’t bear to have my chauffeur eat less well than myself. But what you mean by socialism is simply crude Marxism. You see, the great mass of the workers don’t want anything but bread and circuses. They have no understanding for any kind of ideals and. we will never be able to count on winning over the workers to any considerable degree. We want an elite of the new master class who will not be motivated by any morality of pity, but who will realize clearly that they are entitled to rule because of their superior race and who will ruthlessly maintain and secure this rule over the broad masses…. Your whole system is a desk product that has nothing to do with real life.”

He turned to his publisher: “Herr Amann, would you stand for it if your stenographers suddenly wanted to interfere with your work? The employer who bears the responsibility for production also provides the workers with their livelihood. Our biggest employers in particular are not so much concerned about amassing money, about luxurious living, and so on. What is most important to them is the responsibility and the power. Because of their capability they have worked their way to the top, and because of their selectness, which again only proves their superior race, they have a right to lead.”

After more excited discussion Strasser posed what to him was the key question: If the Nazis took power, would the means of production remain unchanged? Hitler replied: “But of course. Do you think I am so mad as to destroy the economy? The state would intervene only if the employers were not acting in the interests of the nation. But for that there would be no need for expropriation or the workers having any voice in the decisions.” Actually, he said, only one system existed: “Responsibility toward superiors, authority toward inferiors.” So it had been for thousands of years, and no other way was possible.

Obviously, there was no humanitarian impulse or desire for a new form of society in Hitler’s version of socialism. He himself declared that his socialism had “nothing at all to do with a mechanical construction of economic life”; rather, it was the complementary concept to the word “nationalism.” Socialism meant the responsibility of the whole for the individual, whereas “nationalism” was the devotion of the individual to the whole; thus the two elements could be combined in National Socialism. This prestidigitation allowed all interest groups to have their way and reduced the ideas to mere counters: capitalism found its true and ultimate fulfillment in Hitler’s socialism, whereas socialism was only attainable under the capitalistic economic system. This ideology took a leftist label chiefly for tactical reasons. It demanded, within the party and within the state, a powerful system of rule that would exercise unchallenged leadership over the “great mass of the anonymous.” And whatever premises the party may have started with, by 1930 Hitler’s party was “socialist” only to take advantage of the emotional value of the word, and a “workers’ party” in order to lure the most energetic social force. As with Hitler’s protestations of belief in tradition, in conservative values, or in Christianity, the socialist slogans were merely movable ideological props to serve as camouflage and confuse the enemy. They could be changed or rearranged, depending on the situation. The leaders, at any rate, were totally cynical about the principles of the program—as one enthusiastic young convert learned from a talk with Goebbels. When the young man remarked that Feder’s call for smashing the enslaving system of interest payment did contain an element of socialism, Goebbels replied that what ought to be smashed was anyone who listened to such twaddle.

Nevertheless, Otto Strasser’s reasoned attack on the inconsistencies of his position hit Hitler hard. Sulkily, he returned to Munich, and as was his way kept silent for weeks about the whole matter, so that Strasser was left in uncertainty. In fact, Hitler did not strike back until Strasser published a pamphlet entitled “Cushioned Ministerial Seats or Revolution,” in which he renewed the controversy and accused the party leader of betraying the socialist heart of their common cause. At this point, Hitler sent a letter to his Berlin gauleiter ordering Strasser and his followers to be expelled from the party.

For months as responsible leader of the National Socialist Party I have been watching attempts to introduce strife, confusion and insubordination into the ranks of the movement. Under the mask of desiring to fight for socialism a policy has been advocated which corresponds totally to the policy of our Jewish-liberal-Marxist opponents. These cliques call for the very things our enemies desire…. I now consider it necessary to ruthlessly throw these destructive elements out of the party, every single one of them. We have shaped and determined the essential content of our movement; we who founded this movement and fought for it, suffered for it in the prisons, and we who led it back from collapse and up to its present height. Anyone who does not like the essential content of the movement which was established by us, and primarily by me, should not enter the movement or must leave it again. As long as I am leading the National Socialist Party, it will not become a debating club for rootless scribblers or unruly parlor Bolsheviks. It will remain what it is today: a disciplined organization which was not created for the doctrinaire games of political boy scouts, but for the fight for a future Germany in which the concepts of class will have been smashed.⁶

On June 30 Goebbels called a membership meeting of the gau, to assemble at the Hasenheide in Berlin. “Those who do not fit in will be kicked out!” he thundered. Otto Strasser and his followers, who had come to argue their point of view, were forcibly ejected from the hall by the SA. The Strasser group thenceforth talked of “purebred Stalinism” and deliberate “persecution of socialists” on the part of the leadership; however, the Strassers and their followers were put more and more on the defensive. On July 1 Gregor Strasser resigned his editorship of the Kampfverlag newspapers and disassociated himself from his brother’s views. Von Reventlow and other prominent members of the party’s left wing also abandoned the rebels. Some of them probably did so for economic reasons, since they owed a post, a living, a deputy seat to Hitler. But most of them acted out of that “almost perverse personal loyalty” that Hitler evoked and which persisted despite countless acts of disloyalty on his part. With great assurance Goebbels declared that the party would “sweat out this attempt at sabotage.”

Thereupon, on July 4, Otto Strasser’s newspapers announced: “The socialists are leaving the NSDAP.” But hardly anyone followed Otto Strasser. It turned out that the party had virtually no socialist members and in general very few who cared about the theoretical aspects of their politics. Otto Strasser founded a new party which first called itself the Revolutionary National Socialists and later the Black Front but never escaped the odor of mere dogmatism. Hitler’s followers were forbidden to read’ the publications of the Kampfverlag; but the subjects belabored by these publications soon ceased to attract attention anyhow. Who cared about petty revelations of party secrets when the party was obviously answering the summons of history and valiantly struggling against world-wide disaster. The masses were fixing their hopes of salvation on Hitler, not on his program.

The departure of Otto Strasser ended once and for all the sole conflict over principles within the Nazi party. It also meant a considerable loss in status for Gregor Strasser, who thereafter had no seat of power and no newspaper platform. He continued to be organization leader of the party, resided in Munich, and held many threads in his hand, but he became more and more remote from the members and the public. Only six months earlier the political journal Weltbühne had predicted that “one of these days not so far in the future he will overshadow his lord and master Hitler” and himself seize the power in the party. That was now out of the question. His more decisive defeat was to follow two years later, when he roused himself for one last opposition gesture and then, weary and broken, turned his back on the party.

Among the afterpains of the Strasser crisis must be counted the mutiny of the Berlin SA under former Police Captain Walter Stennes. The discontent among the storm troopers had less to do with the wrangle over socialism than with the recurrent rumors about bossism and favoritism, as well as the poor pay for strenuous service during the election campaign. While the storm troopers had to be out on duty night after night until thoroughly exhausted, the Political Organization was making itself comfortable in a luxurious palace. That was the most common charge. Reminded that there was to be a monument in marble and bronze to the SA in the Brown House, the storm troopers responded that such a monument looked more like a mausoleum. “As far as the PO was concerned,” one SA Oberführer wrote, “the SA is here just to die.” Things were getting more and more out of hand, and Goebbels called for help from Hitler and the SS. Only a few days after his appeal, the dissident Berlin SA men stormed the district party office on Hedemannstrasse, and there was a bloody clash with Himmler’s biack-shirted elite guards. It speaks well for Hitler’s authority that he had only to appear for the rebellion to die down. Significantly, however, he made a point of avoiding a frank discussion with Stennes and instead tried to win over the rank-and-file storm trooper. Accompanied by armed SS men, he went from one beer hall to the next, seeking out the regular tables and guardrooms of the SA. He pleaded with the units, even occasionally broke into tears, spoke of impending victories and the rich rewards that would be due to them, the soldiers of the revolution. For the time being he promised them legal services and better treatment: the funds for these benefits would come from a special levy of twenty pfennig on every party member. As for the SS, he repaid it for its services in this juncture by awarding it the watchword: “Your honor is loyalty!”

The collapse of the rebellion meant the departure of Captain Pfeffer von Salomon. With growing fatalism, the commander of the SA had watched the power of the Political Organization swell while that of the SA had dwindled perceptibly. One reason for this shift was Hitler’s own changing psychological requirements. With his sense of mission daily reinforced by mass cheering, he developed a craving for homage that could far more easily be paid by the petty bourgeois functionary type of the Political Organization than by the soldierly leaders of the SA. Consequently, the PO received the lion’s share of the party’s limited funds and was distinctly favored in the drawing up of deputy lists and other acts of patronage. But there was also the personal incompatibility between Hitler, with his semiartistic and South German temperament, and the austere, “Prussian”-minded Pfeffer von Salomon.

At the end of August Hitler relieved Pfeffer of his duties and then, as he was to do later on after his conflicts with the army in 1938 and 1941, himself assumed the post of supreme SA leader. Ernst Röhm, who had meanwhile become a military instructor in Bolivia, was called back to take over the day-to-day work of SA leader. By becoming Oberster SA-Führer (OSAF) Hitler finally made himself master of the movement; all the special privileges Pfeffer had obtained or claimed now devolved upon Hitler himself. Only a few days after assuming the post, Hitler issued an order requiring every SA leader to take an “unconditional oath of loyalty” to him personally and subsequently to have every single member of the SA do the same. This reinforced the oath taken by every member on entering the SA: “To carry out all orders fearlessly and conscientiously, since I know that my leaders will require of me nothing illegal.”

It was significant that no resistance was offered to the total subordination implicit in such formulas. Institutionally as well as psychologically the movement had at last prepared its members to fit into the totalitarian framework. In June, as a matter of fact, Hitler had revealed his totalitarian vision to a number of chosen party journalists. Speaking to them in the Senators’ Hall of the new Brown House, he had sketched a picture of the hierarchy and organization of the Catholic Church. The party, he declared, must build its leadership pyramid after the model of the church, “on a broad pedestal of… political parish priests who stand in the midst of the people.” The pyramid itself must “rise above the tiers of the Kreisleiter and Gauleiter to the body of Senators and finally to the Leader-Pope.”

He did not shy away from the comparison between gauleiters and bishops, and between future senators and cardinals, one of those present reported; and similarly he boldly transferred the concepts of authority, obedience, and faith from the spiritual to the secular realms in a series of bewildering parallels. He concluded by saying, without a trace of irony, that he did not “wish to contest the Holy Father in Rome his claim to mental—or is the word spiritual—infallibility on questions of faith, I don’t know much about that. But I think I know a great deal more about politics. Therefore I hope that the Holy Father henceforth will not contest my claim. And herewith I now lay claim, for myself and my successors in the leadership of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, to political infallibility. I hope the world will bow to that as quickly as it has bowed to the Holy Father’s claim.”⁷

Perhaps even more illuminating than these remarks was the reaction to them. There was no sign of astonishment or demur among the party journalists. Here is proof of the effectiveness of Hitler’s policy of subjugating the entire internal life of the Nazi party to himself personally. Many circumstances had aided him. The movement had always viewed itself as a militant community founded upon charismatic leadership and the discipline of faith. This was the source of the dynamic confidence so lacking in the traditional parties with their interests and programs. In addition Hitler had been able to count on the background and experience of the “Old Fighters.” Almost all of them had taken part in the World War. They had grown to manhood in a climate of strict orders and obedience. Many of them, moreover, came from homes whose pedagogical patterns were based on the rigid mores of the cadet schools. Altogether, Hitler profited greatly from the peculiarities of an authoritarian educational system. It is surely more than a matter of chance that of his seventy-three gauleiters, no fewer than twenty were drawn from the teaching profession.

Once the two intraparty crises of the summer of 1930 had been mastered with relative ease, there no longer existed any office or authority within the Nazi party that did not emanate directly from Hitler. However slight a danger Otto Strasser, Stennes, or Pfeffer may have been—their names stood for at least a theoretical alternative which set certain limits to any claim to absolute power. Now the South German SA commander August Schneidhuber issued a memorandum giving full credit for the growing might of the movement not to any of its functionaries but entirely to Hitler. With busy propagandists singing his praises in more and more transcendental terms, “der Führer” was on his way to becoming a legendary figure, immune from all criticism, standing far above any intraparty voting procedures. One observer commented that the party press at this time contained nothing but deifications of Hitler and attacks on the Jews.

Still, the complaint arose that Hitler was putting himself at too great a remove from his followers. The loyal Schneidhuber described the sense of desertion that filled “almost every SA man.” He wrote: “The SA is struggling with the Führer for his soul and does not yet have it. But it must have it.” He spoke of the “clamor for the Führer,” which remained unanswered.

It was at this period, and not by chance, that the greeting “Heil Hitler” became generally established. (It had cropped up occasionally before and had been deliberately introduced into Berlin practice by Goebbels.) At the same time, posters announcing meetings no longer mentioned “Adolf Hitler” as the speaker. Instead, nameless and already with the aloofness of a general concept, he appeared simply as the Führer. If party members thronged around him in hotel lobbies or offices, he reacted with irritation, would take.notice of them only reluctantly; he was bothered by so much familiarity. Nor was he happy at having hard-working party members introduced to him; he shunned social occasions with unknown persons.

To be sure, he could also show an engaging side. If he dropped his pose of unapproachability, he might chat charmingly in a group of ladies, might present himself to a group of workers as one of them, with the bluff manner of the common man, or might appear in a fatherly role, gazing benevolently over the heads of blond children. “In solemn handshakes and wide-open eyes he is unmatched,” a contemporary noted. But his intimates could not help observing how much deliberate play-acting was involved. He was constantly calculating effects, practicing the touching as well as the grand gesture. He had grasped precisely what makes a celebrity, what laws he must follow, and to what extent he must conform to a specific craving of the age. His delicate health had made him give up smoking some time ago; in the meantime, he had also been compelled to give up alcohol. Both these facts he used to cultivate a reputation for asceticism. With his clear awareness of role-playing, he was certainly the most modern phenomenon in the German politics of the period. At any rate, he knew the secrets of public effectiveness far better than any of his rivals, from Hugenberg to Brüning. These politicians had never even considered their public image, showing again their rootedness in past conditions and their lack of instinct for the mood of the present.

From this point on, there was no one who could be said to exert a significant, demonstrable influence upon Hitler. The days of Dietrich Eckart, even those of Alfred Rosenberg, lay far behind. “I never make a mistake. Every one of my words is historic,” he had screamed at Otto Strasser in the course of their quarrel. His intellectual curiosity continued to dwindle the more he fitted himself into the stylized role of “LeaderPope.” Surrounded entirely by sycophants and simple-minded members of his retinue, he gradually slid intellectually also into a state of isolation. His onetime model Karl Lueger, the mayor of Vienna, had impressed him with his pessimistic opinion of mankind. Now he himself scarcely troubled to conceal his own contempt for his followers as well as his opponents. In keeping with his fundamentally conservative instinct, he insisted that man was evil by nature, “stuff running rampant on this earth,” as he put it in a letter. And: “The masses are blind and stupid and do not know what they do.”

His consumption of people was as great as his contempt for them. He was forever demoting, rebuking, or elevating, juggling people and positions—this habit, in fact, was one of the secrets of his success. But experience had also taught him that followers wanted to be treated ruthlessly. Thus, in connection with the forthcoming election, he made impossible demands of his campaign workers. The nucleus of the party’s functionaries and auxiliaries came from the traditionally unpolitical classes of the population. They were brisk, brash, and ready to throw themselves heart and soul into the contest. Their tempestuousness was in marked contrast to the dull, routine way in which the established parties went through the motions of an election campaign. During the two days before the election, in Berlin alone the Nazis held twenty-four major demonstrations. Once more their posters were pasted on every wall and fence, immersing the city in shrieking red. The party newspapers were put out in huge editions and sold to members for a pfennig apiece to be distributed door-to-door or outside factories. Hitler himself regarded these activities of his followers as a kind of process of selection: “Now a magnet is simply being passed over a heap of dung; and afterwards we will see how much iron there was in the dung heap that has clung to the magnet.”

The elections were set for September 14, 1930. Hitler hoped for fifty or, in exuberant moods, even sixty to eighty Nazi seats. He was counting on the voters of the crumbling bourgeois center, on the young people who were voting for the first time, and on inveterate nonvoters who by all political logic ought to fall to his party, assuming that they could be persuaded to vote at all.

The Landslide

September 14, 1930, became one of the turning points in the history of the Weimar Republic. It signified the end of the reign of democratic parties, and announced the initial death throes of the republic. By the time the election results became available, toward three o’clock in the morning, everything had changed. With a single step the Nazi party had advanced into the anteroom of power, and its leader, object of ridicule and idolatry, the “drummer” Adolf Hitler, had become one of the key figures on the political scene. The fate of the republic was sealed, the Nazi press exulted. Now mopping-up operations could begin.

No less than 18 per cent of the voters had responded to the appeals of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. In the two years since the last elections the party had succeeded in increasing the number of votes it received from 810,000 to 6.4 million. Instead of 12 seats in the Reichstag, it now had 107; after the Social Democratic Party it was the second strongest in the Reich. No comparable breakthrough can be found in the history of German political parties. Of the bourgeois parties, only the Catholic Center Party had been able to maintain its position. All others had suffered severe losses. The four center parties henceforth held only seventy-two seats. Hugenberg’s rightist Deutschnationale Volkspartei (German National People’s Party) had been cut almost exactly by half; from 14.3 per cent of the vote it had fallen to 7 per cent. Its alliance with the more radical Nazis had proved to be suicidal. With only forty-one seats in the Reichstag it was now blatantly inferior to the Nazi party, and Hitler’s claim to leadership of the Right seemed to be impressively confirmed. The Social Democrats had also suffered considerable losses. The Communists were the only other party to have emerged from the elections with gains, although theirs were considerably more modest than the Nazis’. Their share in the vote had risen from 10.6 to 13.1 per cent. The Communists hailed the results in their usual fashion: “The only victor in the September elections is the Communist Party.”

On the whole, most observers recognized the historic importance of what had happened. With varying accents they attributed it to the deep crisis of the party system or saw it as the expression of a spreading lack of faith in the liberal and capitalist systems, coupled with a desire for a fundamental change in all conditions of life. “Most of those who have given their vote to the extremist parties are not at all radical; they have only lost faith in the old way.” No less than a third of the people had rejected the existing system in principle without knowing or asking what would follow it. There was talk of the “bitterness vote.”

At this point it is pertinent to recall once more the circumstances that had marked the birth of the republic ten years before; it came into being as a state no one had really wanted. Now those origins rebounded against it. It had never won more than the nation’s tolerance, and many seem to have considered it merely a transitional phase with “nothing inspiring” about it, which had brought forth “no bold crime,” “no memorable slogan” and “no great man,” to quote the rhetoric of Oswald Spengler. On both Left and Right visibly growing numbers waited for the state to recall its fundamental meaning and assert its old power. All the repressed doubts of the democratic party system, all the slumbering contempt for “un-German” parliamentarism, came to the fore once more and could not be argued away. Hitler’s thesis, repeated thousands of times, that this republic was a sop to Germany’s enemies and the worst shackle of the Treaty of Versailles, was widely and eagerly embraced.

Interestingly enough, a good deal of foreign opinion, particularly as expressed in the British and American journals, took a similar tone, interpreting the electoral results as a reaction to the impossible harshness of the peace-treaty provisions and the hypocritical conduct of the victorious powers. On the whole, only France was incensed, although she, too, cherished a secret hope that the extreme rightist tendencies might give her a reason for a more rigorous policy toward her neighbor across the Rhine. Out of the chorus of reactions there arose, for the first time, one of those voices that was to be heard for ten years to come, condoning all of Hitler’s excesses and provocation’s own purposes. Thus, Lord Rothermere in the Daily Mail of September 24, 1930, pointed out that Hitler’s victory should not be regarded as a danger; it should be recognized that the man offered all sorts of advantages; that he was building a bulwark against Bolshevism; that he was eliminating the grave danger that the Soviet campaign against European civilization might reach into Germany.⁸

The Nazi party’s victory was to a large extent due to its mobilization of the youth and of the nonpolitical elements who ordinarily did not go to the polls. Compared with 1928 the votes cast had increased by more than 4.5 million, to 80.2 per cent of the electorate. The Communists, too, had picked up votes—though considerably fewer—from among the same group; remarkably enough, they had waged their campaign with outspokenly nationalistic slogans. The Nazis were so little ready for their sweep that they had not even put up the required 107 candidates and did not have people immediately available. Hitler himself had not run for office since he still did not hold German citizenship.

The results of this election have often been described as a landslide; its consequences were in fact even more fateful. In the consternation of election night wild rumors arose of Nazi plans for a putsch; the result was massive withdrawal of foreign funds from Germany, which worsened the already catastrophic credit crisis. All at once, everyone was interested in this new party. The adventurers, the fearful, and the opportunists made a quick adjustment to the new situation. This was especially true of the horde of eternally alert journalists who now hastily attempted to ride “the wave of the future,” and by their extensive reporting made up for the traditional weakness of the Nazi press. In many quarters it became chic to join the Nazi party. In the spring one of the Kaiser’s sons, Prince August Wilhelm (“Auwi”), had become a member, remarking that where a Hitler led anyone could find a place. Now came Hjalmar Schacht, then president of the German Federal Bank (Reichsbank), one of the co-authors of the Young Plan which the Nazis had so viciously attacked. Many others followed. “Nobody likes being a failed politician,” Hitler sneered as he watched the flurry. During the two and a half months to the end of the year the membership of the NSDAP rose by almost 100,000, to 389,000. Special interest groups also tried to adjust to the shift in power and to the obvious trend. “Almost automatically the NSDAP now acquired those cross-connections and positions necessary for the further extension and consolidation of the ‘movement.’ ”

“Once the great masses swing over to us shouting hurrah, we are lost,” Hitler had declared two years earlier, at the 1928 meeting of the leaders in Munich. And Goebbels now spoke contemptuously of the “September-lings.” Often, he remarked, he thought back “with nostalgia to the good old days when we were only a small sect throughout the Reich, and National Socialism in the capital had hardly a baker’s dozen followers.”

What worried them was that the unprincipled masses would swamp the party and corrupt its revolutionary will, only to desert it again at the first setbacks, like the unforgotten “inflation recruits” of 1923. “We must not allow ourselves to be weighted down with the corpses of a ruined bourgeoisie,” a memorandum stated five days after the election. But contrary to such fears, the party had little trouble bringing the new members—as Gregor Strasser wrote—“into the great pot of the National Socialist idea” and melting them down. While the adversaries of the movement were still looking for soothing explanations, the party continued its tempestuous advance. Faithful to his maxim that the best time to attack is right after the victory, Hitler staged a wave of party actions after September 14 and garnered new successes for the party. In the Bremen mayoralty election of November 30 the party’s percentage of the vote was almost double what it had been in the recent Reichstag election. It won more than 25 per cent of the seats in the city council; all the other parties suffered losses. The results were similar in Danzig, Baden, and Mecklenburg. In the intoxication of such triumphs Hitler at times seemed to believe that the regime could now be “voted to death,” without any external aid.

On October 13 the session of the Reichstag began amidst tumultuous scenes. In protest against the persisting Prussian ban on uniforms, the Nazi party deputies had marched through the Reichstag building and entered the chamber in brown shirts, howling and making unmistakable gestures of protest. In a passionate speech Gregor Strasser declared war on “the system of shamelessness, corruption and crime.” His party would not cringe from even the ultimate step of civil war, he announced; the Reichstag was not going to frustrate the party’s goals. The people were the decisive factor and the people were on his party’s side: Outside, meanwhile, brawls with the Communists were being staged, as well as the first pogrom—organized by Goebbels—against Jewish businesses and passers-by. Questioned on this matter, Hitler replied that the excesses were the work of rowdies, looters, and Communist provocateurs. The Völkische Beobachter proclaimed that in the Third Reich the windows of Jewish stores would be better protected than they were now under the reign of the Marxist police. Simultaneously, more than 100,000 metal workers went on strike, supported by both the Communists and the Nazis. Civil order was visibly disintegrating.

Hitler himself appeared not to waver for a moment in his tactical conduct. What he had learned back in 1923 and not forgotten was that even the shakiest system remained impervious to attacks by street mobs. There were plenty of romantic hotheads in the party who could not imagine a revolution without powder smoke and who immediately after the triumph of September 14 began to rant about marching on Berlin and waging the final struggle. Hitler, however, would not be budged from his policy of legality, although he made no secret of his reasons for it: “We are not in principle a parliamentary party,” he declared in Munich, “for that would be a contradiction of our whole outlook; we are a parliamentary party by compulsion, and that compulsion is the Constitution…. The victory we have just won is nothing but the winning of a new weapon for our struggle.” Göring stated the matter even more cynically: “We are fighting against this State and the present system because we wish to destroy it utterly, but in a legal manner. Before we had the Law for the Protection of the Republie, we said we hated this State; under this law, we say we love it—and still everyone knows what we mean.”⁹

Hitler’s caution was partly guided by the one eye he kept cocked in the direction of the army. It was on the Reichwehr’s account, he later admitted, that he had renounced the idea of a coup d’état. For the more patently public order was disintegrating, the more decisive the power and influence of the Reichswehr became. The 1923 putsch, and the subsequent ban on contact between the army and the newly founded SA, had considerably clouded mutual relationships. As early as March, 1929, however, Hitler had made tentative overtures to the representatives of the state’s armed might. In a pointed speech he had questioned the concept of the “unpolitical soldier,” formulated by General von Seeckt. He drew a picture of a leftist victory, after which the army officers would find themselves serving as “executioners and political commissars.” Then he contrasted this dreadful prospect with the radiant aims of his own movement, concerned as it was for the greatness and the military honor of the nation. The speech was a piece of skillful psychology and impressed in particular the younger members of the officer corps.

A few days after the September election three officers of the army garrison at Ulm were placed on trial at the federal high court in Leipzig. They were charged with violating a decree of the Reich Defense Ministry by establishing connections with the NSDAP and proselytizing for the Nazis inside the Reichswehr. At the request of his lawyer, Hans Frank, Hitler was invited to testify. The sensational trial gave him an opportunity for publicly wooing the army and a platform for presenting his political aims effectively. On the third day of the trial, September 25, 1930, Hitler stepped forward to testify with the self-assurance of a recently victorious party leader, confident more than ever of ultimate victory.

Under cross-examination he explained that his convictions were a response to three challenges: the peril of foreign racial influences, or internationalism; the devaluation of personality and the rise of the democratic idea; and the poisoning of the German people with the spirit of pacifism. In 1918, he said, he had entered public life in order to oppose to these disturbing tendencies a party of fanatical Germanism, of absolute authority for the leader, and of uncompromising struggle. But he was by no means an antagonist of the armed power of the state. Whoever sowed sedition in the army was an enemy of the people; the SA was not intended to attack the state or to compete with the army.

He was then questioned about his position on legality and boldly assured the court that the National Socialist Party had no need of violence: “Another two or three elections and the National Socialist movement will have the majority in the Reichstag, and then we will make the national revolution.” Asked what he meant by that, Hitler replied:

The concept of National Revolution has generally been considered in terms of purely domestic politics, but to National Socialists it means simply a German patriotic uprising. Germany was tied hand and foot by the peace treaties. All German legislation today is nothing but an attempt to impose the terms of the peace treaties on the German people. The National Socialists regard these treaties not as binding law, but as something forced upon us. We do not acknowledge our war guilt, nor will we burden future generations who are entirely guiltless with these fictitious debts. We will proceed against these treaties both on the diplomatic front and by circumventing every one of their provisions. If we fight against them with every means at our disposal, we will be on the way of the Revolution.

This reply, which turned the concept of revolution against the outside world, concealed his plans for domestic policy. When the presiding judge asked whether the revolution directed against the outside world would also make use of illegal methods, Hitler was remarkably frank: “All methods, including those that from the world’s viewpoint are illegal.” Asked about his many threats against so-called traitors at home, Hitler responded:

The applause from the gallery indicated the mood in the courtroom. The counterarguments of the Ministry of the Interior, which came forth with ample proofs of the Nazi party’s anti-Constitutional activities, were disregarded. With perfect calm the court heard Hitler’s subsequent statement that he felt bound by the Constitution only during the struggle for power; as soon as he possessed constitutional powers he would eliminate or at any rate replace the Constitution. In fact, according to the tenets of the time, this was not so brazen as it seems. The Constitution could be legally abrogated. One of the people’s rights was to give up its sovereignty. This was a door through which Hitler could advance unhindered, paralyze all resistance, seize the government and subject the state to his will.

But there was more behind Hitler’s pledges of loyalty to the Constitution, more than his frank admission that he was forgoing violence only until he could cloak it with legality. Throughout this period Hitler injected into his professions of legalism a note of disturbing ambiguity. Though he proclaimed that he stood “hard as granite on the ground of legality,” he was encouraging his followers to make reckless speeches in which violence appeared chiefly in images and frightening metaphors: “We come as enemies! Like the wolf breaking into the sheepfold, that is how we are coming.” Strictly speaking, only the party heads talked the language of legality. Further down, in the backyards of the Berlin Wedding District, a working-class area, in the nocturnal streets of Altona or Essen, murder, manslaughter, and contempt for the law prevailed. Evidence of such conduct was dismissed with a shrug as “excesses of local units.” Goebbels gave the game away. Speaking to Lieutenant Scheringer, one of the three young officers at the Leipzig trial (who were ultimately convicted), Goebbels said jokingly: “I regard this oath [of Hitler’s] as a brilliant move in the chess game. Now what can they possibly do to us? They were only waiting for the chance to strike. Now we’re strictly on the up and up.”

The very uncertainty about Hitler’s intentions, his continual veering between oaths of loyalty to the Constitution and threats against it, served his cause in many ways—which was precisely what he intended. The general public was reassured, but there was always that edge of uneasiness which produces deserters and renegades. As for those who guarded the doors to power, above all Hindenburg and the army, Hitler was on the one hand making an offer of alliance, on the other hand warning them that they had better meet him halfway. Finally, the ambiguity was directed to those among his followers who were still expecting a march on Berlin. To them he seemed to be winking the message that the Führer would know how to trick every imaginable adversary. From all these angles, then, Hitler’s testimony under oath at Leipzig was enormously effective.

Viewed as a whole, however, Hitler’s tactics of leaving doors open on all sides reveal something more than clever calculation. They also reveal his character; for such tactics conformed to the deeply rooted indecisiveness of his nature. There are paradoxes here, for such tactics were also extremely risky; they required a keen sense of balance and therefore also satisfied his craving for risks. If he failed, there remained only a premature and all but hopeless attempt at a putsch, or withdrawal from politics.

The SA was a living example of the idea underlying Hitler’s tactics and illustrated the risks and difficulties inherent in them. For by Hitler’s complicated principle, the party’s brown-shirted army was to combine a formal respect for the law with the romanticism of insurgency. The men were supposed to abjure weapons but keep up the spirit of armed conflict. Pfeffer had been unable to slant things along these paradoxical lines. Early in 1931 Ernst Röhm took office as chief of staff of the SA, and immediately shifted the stress back toward the military model. The territory of the Reich was divided into five supergroups (Obergruppen) and eighteen groups (Gruppen). Standards (Standarten)—which corresponded to regiments—were assigned the numbers of former regiments of the imperial army, and a system of special units, such as the air storm troops, the naval, engineering and medical storm troops, further stressed the military structure.

Pfeffer had issued a vast number of isolated orders that added up to a highly complicated system. Röhm now had these summed up in an SA service manual. As if under some mechanical compulsion, all his measures continually reverted to the old idea of an army for civil war. This time, unlike 1925, Hitler gave him the green light. One reason for this was Hitler’s greater confidence in his own authority; but more important, Röhm’s idea suited his deliberate policy of ambiguity. If we examine the reforms put through after the replacement of Pfeffer, we see all the traits of Hitlerian sham reforms. Instead of a decision made on basic principles, a few of the leading personalities were changed. Oaths of loyalty were taken, and a competing institution was created. For in view of his continuing difficulties with the SA, Hitler began cautiously to expand the SS, which, as a kind of elite and “inner party police,” had played a shadowy role and by 1929 numbered only 280 men, and to give it increasing independence of Röhm. Moreover, the whole thing was to end in a manner characteristically Hitler’s: the inevitable conflicts arising from contradictory tendencies would be resolved by a bloody and disproportionately violent coup.

Under Röhm the SA began its development into a mass army. Thanks to the new chief of staff’s outstanding organizational gifts, by the end of 1932 his army had swollen to more than half a million men. Attracted by the SA homes and the SA kitchens, vast numbers of the out-of-work poured into the brown-shirt formations. The bitterness of the unemployed combined with the hatreds of the adventurous activists into a high charge of aggressiveness.

One of Röhm’s first acts was to oust Pfeifer’s Frontbann officers and replace them with his own homosexual friends. Behind them, a sizable and notorious company moved in; word went around that Röhm was building a “private army within the private army.” Soon there were noisy protests. Hitler replied to these in a message that was to become famous. He rejected the reports on the morally culpable behavior of the supreme SA leadership “fundamentally and with all sharpness.” The SA, he declared, was “an association of men for a political purpose… not an ethical institution for the education of gentlewomen.” What counted was whether or not the individual did his duty. “The men’s private lives can be the object of examination only if they run contrary to essential principles of National Socialist ideology.”

This message constituted a charter for the lawless elements within the SA. In spite of all the pledges of legality, Hitler’s army was soon creating a wave of paralysis and terror which in turn increased the demand for a dictatorship. According to reports of the police, the arms stores of the SA contained all the classic weapons of criminals: blackjacks, brass knuckles and rubber truncheons. In tight situations, they had their “molls” carry the hand guns. Their jargon also had an underworld ring. In Munich a pistol was called a “lighter” and the rubber truncheon an “eraser.” The Berlin SA, in the manner of gangs, adopted nicknames that gave the lie to their allegedly revolutionary spirit. One SA “storm” in Wedding called itself the Robber Storm, while many troopers assumed various desperado names—Potshot Muller or Pistol Packer. The typical mixture of assertive proletarianism, love of violence, and threadbare ideology can be seen in the Berlin SA song, which ran:

But that was the frightening reverse of the coin, flashes of which appeared only now and then. The other side was marked by the austere regularity of marching columns, by uniforms and sharp cries of command—those military noises so familiar to the nation as symbols of order. Germany, Hitler later commented, thirsted for order during those years of chaos and wanted it restored at any price. More and more often, behind flags and brass bands, the brown columns turned into strangely stilled streets. They paraded with an air of self-assurance, their discipline contrasting in what seemed a significant manner with the dismal gray processions of the Communists. For the latter straggled along in uncertain order behind the provocative nasal sound of a woodwind ensemble, raising clenched fists and intoning the slogan “Hunger!”—a pathetic sight whose effect was to make the poor conscious of their misery but never give them anything to hope for.

Yet these SA rowdies brought a considerable degree of self-sacrifice to their role as guerrilla fighters. This can be seen in a letter to Gregor Strasser from a thirty-four-year-old SA standard leader:

Against this kind of dedication the republic could do little. Moreover, once the Hitler movement had made its breakthrough and become a mass party, the republic no longer had the strength to steer a determined course against the Nazis without risking conditions bordering on civil war. The defenders of the republic clung to the hope that they could stem the assault of irrationalism by the power of argument. They trusted in the educational effect of democratic institutions, in what they believed to be the irreversible trend toward more humane social conditions. Some of the old nineteenth-century faith in progress lingered on in these views. But even then, at the beginning of the thirties, it should have been clear that this theory was erroneous because it assumed rationality and the capacity to discriminate, where in fact there was nothing but a tangled web of anxiety, panic, and aggression. That the Nazi propagandists were by and large ignorant fellows, that their answers to the problems of the Depression were inadequate, that they fell back so tediously on their anti-Semitic slogans, discredited them for only a select group. The experts might dismiss them as a pack of dumbbells, but the Nazis continued their rise. By contrast, when Chancellor Brüning went on a tour of East Prussia and Silesia, where unemployment and misery were rife, he was everywhere greeted coolly, if not with hostility. When he spoke to crowds, banners were strung up bearing the words: “Hunger dictator,” and he was often booed.

In the Reichstag, meanwhile, the Nazis played with growing mastery their double game as destroyers and judges of the “system.” Thanks to the strength of their fraction they were now in a position to paralyze the workings of the legislature and to confirm their reputation as “noisemakers” by putting on displays of undisciplined catcalling. They opposed every serious attempt at stabilization on the grounds that any improvement in conditions would only serve the ends of “compliance politics”—that is, the policy of meeting the terms imposed by the Allies. In that light, they maintained, every sacrifice the government asked of the people was an act of high treason.

In addition to argument, they utilized the devices of sheer obstruction: clamor, debates on points of order, or marching out of the hall in a body as soon as a “Marxist” took the floor. It is a measure of the unruliness of the Nazi faction that, according to a report of the Agenda Committee, some 400 motions of censure had been filed against the 107 Nazi deputies. In February, 1931, a law was passed setting limits on parliamentary immunity. Thereupon, the Nazis, followed by the German Nationalists and for a time by the Communists also, withdrew completely from the Reichstag. They threw their energy more than ever into street demonstrations and public meetings, where they rightly conjectured they had far better prospects for winning followers and projecting a clear and definite image. Goebbels sneered at the deputies who remained in the Reichstag as “backside parties” and pointed out that while they were talking to a powerless legislature he had, in four days, spoken to more than 50,000 persons. For a time the Nazis toyed with the demagogic notion of setting up in Weimar, with the aid of Minister of the Interior Frick of Thuringia, a counter-Reichstag of the nationalist opposition. But they dropped this idea when the federal government threatened sanctions against the state.

There was a certain logic to the Nazi exodus from the Reichstag. After all, the Nazis themselves had done everything they could to paralyze the work of the legislature and to reduce its prestige. It was now no longer the site of political decision making. Even before the elections of September, 1930, Chancellor Brüning had sometimes acted without the assent of the dissension-torn Reichstag, invoking the President’s emergency powers under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. But now that the paths to normal legislative operations by the formation of a majority were blocked, he governed almost exclusively by drawing on the President’s exceptional powers. In practice, he was running a semidictatorial administration. Anyone, however, who considers Brüning’s action as “the death knell for the Weimar Republic” (as the Marxist historian Arthur Rosenberg did) ought to consider that the shift in power from the legislature to the executive was possible only because it accorded with the tendency of nearly all the parties to dodge political responsibility. To this day, some historians blame the turn to authoritarianism upon the “nonpolitical masses.” But, rather than the masses, it was the political parties, from right to left, who at moments of crisis rushed to shift the responsibility to the “Ersatz Kaiser,” the President, anxious to be disassociated from the unpopular decisions that crises called for. In leaving the Reichstag, the Nazis were only demonstrating that they were superior in consistency compared with the other political parties; and although they, too, were running from responsibility, running forward not backward. Part of the “secret” of their rise was this lead in consistency.

The vexation with democracy—to understate the case—was intensified by the government’s obvious failures in both domestic and foreign affairs. Brüning’s austerity policy, which he pursued to the point of masochism, had not succeeded in eliminating either the fiscal problems or the decline of demand, and in no way diminished the vast army of unemployed. Nor did the government win any ground on questions of reparations and disarmament. Above all, France—alarmed by the results of the September elections—refused all concessions and cultivated her hysterias.

The Depression had brought on general economic warfare among governments. Tentative efforts toward trade agreements and a lowering of customs barriers stagnated at the beginning of 1931. Germany and Austria thereupon, on their own initiative, concluded a tariffs treaty that did not infringe on the economic autonomy of both partners and explicitly called upon other countries to join. But France viewed this agreement as undermining a crucial feature of the Treaty of Versailles and concluded that “peace on the old Continent was once again imperiled.”¹² French banks in both Germany and Austria promptly called their short-term loans, throwing both countries “into a massive bankruptcy,” which compelled them, in the autumn of 1931, abjectly to abandon the plan. Austria had to make considerable economic concessions. In Germany Hitler and the radical Right gloated over the government’s loss of prestige and its further enforced efforts at accommodation. When, on June 20, President Hoover proposed a moratorium on reparations payments for one year, “a mood like that at the outbreak of war” prevailed in the Chamber of Deputies in Paris.¹³ Subsequently, France, which admittedly would be most affected by this plan, spun out the negotiations until a series of vast collapses in Germany intensified the crisis to a degree far worse than anyone had thought possible. In Berlin, too, a contemporary observer was reminded of the days before the outbreak of the war. But it was more the deserted look of the streets, the silence brooding over the city, and the extreme tension in the atmosphere, that produced this feeling.¹⁴ At the end of 1931 Hitler announced that during the previous year the party had had fifty men killed and about 4,000 wounded.

It was apparent to all that the democratic party system was on its last legs, in theory as well as reality. There were all sorts of proposals for a revised Constitution. They combined contempt for the inadequacies of parliamentary democracy with anxiety over the totalitarian drive of extremists from both Right and Left. Conservative journalists offered foggy plans for a “new state” or a “constitutional dictatorship,” that would head off Hitler’s more radical alternative by a more moderate option.

Similar intentions inspired the ideas for an authoritarian constitution reestablishing the prerevolutionary state, which in view of the increasing weariness with democratic methods were discussed among the Reich President’s entourage. Among the principal advocates of such plans that tended to a gradual restoration of the monarchy were Chancellor Brüning himself; Minister of Defense Groener; Groener’s liaison man with the other departments of government, the chief of the newly created Ministerial Bureau, General Kurt von Schleicher, who, thanks to his intimacy with Hindenburg, had become a key figure, albeit a background one, of the political scene.

Schleicher had already made his presence felt in the appointment of Brüning as Chancellor; he had adroitly proceeded in extending his influence to the point that no Chancellor or cabinet minister could be appointed or dismissed without his consent. His preference for background activity and finespun nets of intrigue had earned him the reputation of being a “field-gray eminence.” He was cynical, as highly sensitive persons tend to be, impulsive, unprejudiced, and wary. He used the army intelligence service to spy even on friends and neighbors. His peculiar combination of frivolity, sense of responsibility, and bent for intrigue made him a distinctly difficult person to deal with.

Schleicher’s reasoning started from the thesis that a broad popular movement like Hitler’s could not be quelled by governmental instruments of power. The shock of the revolution, when the officers’ corps suddenly found itself pitted against the strange gray hordes of the masses, had convinced the more open-minded members of the Reichswehr leadership that the army must never again be turned against the people. Although Schleicher hardly took the Nazi party leader seriously, describing him as a “visionary and idol of stupidity,” he acknowledged and respected the factors that had obtained for Hitler so tremendous a following. Schleicher by no means overlooked the disturbing aspects of the movement, that blend of lawlessness, resentment, and fanaticism that one of Schleicher’s fellow officers had called the “Russian character” of the Nazi party. But this made him all the more intent on putting through his plan. As long as Hindenburg was still alive and the army seemed organically sound, Schleicher thought he could “domesticate” Hitler by taking him into the inner circle of political responsibility. The mass army of his following, meanwhile, as long as the curbs of the Versailles Treaty remained in effect, would be used to strengthen Germany’s “defense posture.” Cautiously, therefore, Schleicher began seeking contact with Hitler by way of Ernst Röhm and Gregor Strasser.

Other conservative leaders were likewise eager to have a hand in polishing the rough diamond who happened to be master of the stadia and meeting halls; among them was Alfred Hugenberg. In the summer of 1931 President Hindenburg complained to Hugenberg about Hitler’s “ruffians” and said he did not regard the NSDAP “as a reliable nationalist party.” Hugenberg replied that that was all the more reason to strike up an alliance; he believed he had already contributed to the political education of the Nazis, he said. In spite of all previous unpleasant experiences, he added, he, too, was seeking to re-establish the broken connection with Hitler.

These efforts at rapprochement from several sides corresponded to the advances that the vexed Führer of the Nazi party was making at the same time. He was vexed because his success of September still profited him nothing. The outcome of the elections had indeed made him one of the chief actors on the political stage; but as long as his isolation continued he was condemned to play a mute part. “Hitler has lost many months,” Carl von Ossietzky wrote. “He has wasted his time in inactivity, and no eternity will ever restore that lost time to him. No power in the world will ever give him back the 15th of September with the defeated parties trembling and officialdom bewildered. At that time the hour for the German Duce had come; who would have asked whether he was acting legally or illegally? But this German Duce is a cowardly, effeminate slugabed, a petty bourgeois rebel who’s fast grown fat, who takes it easy and does not realize when fate lays him in a pickling solution along with his laurels. This drummer pounds his tomtom only in rear echelon…. Brutus sleeps.”

Given a following held together less by political convictions than by volatile emotions, Hitler was actually dependent, far more than the other party leaders, on a train of new, spectacular successes. True, the party continued its victorious march in 1931: at the beginning of May it won 26.9 per cent of the vote in the elections for the Landtag, the provincial legislature, in Schaumburg-Lippe; two weeks later it reached 37.2 per cent in Oldenburg, thus for the first time becoming the strongest party in a Landtag. But these successes were only repeating on the provincial scale what the party had already achieved on the plane of national politics in September. When the Nazis marched through squares or narrow streets roaring in unison, “Hitler at the gates!” it sounded more as though they were trying to get him to the gates, despite their boast that he was already there. Nor could the Nazi party accomplish anything in the legislatures, since it continued to pursue its policy of paralysis. Thus there remained only the stale boasts over the ever-increasing membership figures, the more and more record-breaking meetings, or—these always announced with sanctimonious hypocrisy—more and more martyrs. Dissatisfaction with this state of affairs manifested itself once again in the spring of 1931, when the Berlin SA under Walter Stennes revolted. But before the SA leader could organize this open defection from the party and draw the vacillating Goebbels over to his side, an order arrived from Hitler deposing Stennes. The other conspirators quickly returned to the fold amid renewed assurances on Hitler’s part and new vows of loyalty on their own.

Despite his boast that he would bring down the “system” in a succession of election campaigns, Hitler had exerted himself since the spring to gain the confidence and support of influential circles, realizing more keenly than ever before that he would never attain governmental power solely on the basis of his success among the masses. Article 48, which shifted effective power to the President and his immediate entourage, reduced both the power of the Reichstag and the importance of an electoral victory. Not the number of votes but the will of the President determined the holder of the chancellorship. In a sense, therefore, it was more important to commend himself to Hindenburg than to win a majority.

As always, Hitler advanced on several fronts at once. His oath of legality at Leipzig had already contained a hidden offer of good behavior and partnership. At the beginning of 1931 he received a hint from Schleicher: the ban on participation of Nazis in the Frontier Guard was lifted. In return, Hitler instructed the SA to refrain from street fighting. He even had an SA unit in Kassel dissolved because it had obtained weapons contrary to orders. To strengthen the point, Röhm was required to issue a memorandum implying that the storm troop detachments might be dissolved altogether; they “would be superfluous” if Hitler assumed the chancellorship. “Pretty-boy Adolf is dripping with loyalty,” General Groener wrote to a friend at this time. Hitler was no longer a problem for the Defense Ministry, he added.

When the Catholic bishops issued a sharp statement warning their flock against the Nazi party, Hitler instantly dispatched his most ingratiating associate, Hermann Göring, to Rome to negotiate. In an interview with the Daily Express Hitler expressed himself in favor of strong German-English co-operation to abolish reparations; he took a conciliatory, mature tone and emphasized the elements uniting England and Germany. When Wilhelm Pieck, the Communist deputy, announced that the Red Army stood ready to come to the aid of revolutionary armies of liberation within Germany, Hitler told an American newspaper that the National Socialist Party was the bulwark against advancing world Bolshevism. “He rants much less than he used to,” a contemporary account noted. “He no longer has Jews for breakfast” and was evidently doing his best “not to seem monomaniac.” His eagerness to be thought respectable extended to outward matters. He left the modest little Hotel Sanssouci, where he had previously stayed on his visits to Berlin, and chose to reside in the prestigious Kaiserhof. There was also deliberate challenge in this; the hotel lay diagonally across the square from the chancellery. Convinced that they had tamed their man, the spokesmen for the Right assured one another that Hitler was at last on the way to being a useful implement of state power.

He also wooed the financiers, who on the whole had remained rather reserved. Frau von Dircksen, who held court in the Kaiserhof and had many influential connections, came to his aid just at the right time—one more of those aging female friends to whose zeal he owed so much. Frau Bechstein also continued to promote his cause. Other contacts were made through Göring, who ran a lavish house, and through the financial journalist Walther Funk. Wilhelm Keppler, a small businessman ruined by the Depression, also brought sympathetic industrialists into the movement. He founded the “Economic Friendship Circle,” which was to become notorious through its later connection with Himmler. Otto Dietrich, who had extensive family connections with men in industry, noted: “In Munich in the summer of 1931 the Führer suddenly made the decision to work systematically on leading personalities in business and in the bourgeois Center parties, who were at the heart of the opposition to him.” He toured Germany in his supercharged Mercedes, going to confidential conferences. The better to keep them secret, some of these were held “in solitary forest clearings, in the bosom of nature.” At Streithof (“Squabble Farm”), the estate of Emil Kirdorf, the Ruhr industrialist, Hitler addressed more than thirty captains of heavy industry.¹⁵ He ostentatiously forced Gregor Strasser and Gottfried Feder to withdraw a motion they had introduced in the Reichstag as a kind of last bow to their abandoned socialist aims, a motion calling for the expropriation of the “bank and stock exchange barons.” And when the Communist Party faction, seeing a good joke, proposed the selfsame motion on their own account, Hitler had the Nazi deputies vote against it. Henceforth, his only comments on his economic program were dark allusions. At the same time, he drew away from the somewhat pigheaded Gottfried Feder and occasionally kept Feder from speaking in public.

During the early part of July, 1931, Hitler finally met with Hugenberg in Berlin. Soon thereafter he had a talk with Franz Seldte and Theodor Duesterberg, leaders of the paramilitary veteran association Stahlhelm (“steel helmet”), who once again wanted to join forces with him. Then he met with General von Schleicher and General von Hammerstein-Equord, chief of the army command. He conferred with Brüning, Groener, and once again with Schleicher. The purpose of all these conversations was to sound out Hitler’s intentions, but they were also rapprochements designed to draw Hitler into the system against which he had been battling on principle. The idea was to capture him by tactical alliances and, as General Groener put it, “bind him doubly and triply to the stake of legality.” But none of these important persons had any idea of Hitler’s toughness and intransigence. They also seemed to discount Hitler’s capacity for dissimulation. Consequently, the gains were all on his side—the leader of the Nazi party emerged from his isolation and was raised several ranks in status. The conversations encouraged his followers, confused his antagonists, and impressed the voters. How desperately Hitler had been waiting for this turn of events is evident from his reaction when he was summoned to Berlin for the meeting with Chancellor Brüning. Hess, Rosenberg, and Rosenberg’s deputy, Wilhelm Weiss, were with him in Munich when the telegram arrived. He skimmed it hastily, then held it out to the others. “Now I have them in my pocket!” he exclaimed. “They have recognized me as an equal partner in negotiations.” The image he was trying to project is reflected in Groener’s summary: “Hitler’s intentions and aims are good, but [he is an] enthusiast, fervent, many-sided. Likable impression, modest, orderly person and in manner the type of the ambitious, self-educated man.” Hereafter, in confidential communications among his distinguished counterparts he would be referred to—with a shade of mockery—as “Adolf.” He had made his successful entree.

Only the conversation with Hindenburg—which Schleicher arranged for October 10—ended in a failure. The President’s entourage had the strongest reservations; in fact, Oskar, Hindenburg’s son, had acidly commented on Hitler’s request for an interview: “I suppose he wants a free drink.” Hitler came with Göring. He seemed nervous during the meeting; when the President suggested that he support the administration, in view of the predicament of the whole country, Hitler launched into divagations on the aims of his party. On being reprimanded for the increasing acts of violence on the part of his followers, Hitler responded with verbose assurances that obviously did not satisfy the President. From Hindenburg’s entourage the remark was subsequently leaked that the President was at most prepared to appoint this “Bohemian corporal” Postmaster General, certainly not Chancellor.¹⁶

After the interview Hitler went to Bad Harzburg, where next day the Nationalist opposition was celebrating its union by a great demonstration. Once more Hugenberg had gathered together everybody on the Right who had power, money, or prestige: the leaders of the Nazis and of the German Nationalists, the rightist members of the Reichstag and of the Prussian Landtag, the representatives of the German People’s Party (Deutsche Volkspartei), the Economic Party, the Stahlhelm, and the Reichslandbund. In addition, he had assembled many prominent patrons, members of former ruling houses headed by two Hohenzollern princes. Also present were Heinrich Class, leader of the Pan-Germans, and his presiding committee, such retired generals as von Lüttwitz and von Seeckt, and many notables of finance and industry, including Hjalmar Schacht, Fritz Thyssen, Ernst Poensgen of the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel), Louis Ravene of the Iron Wholesalers’ Association, the shipbuilding magnate Blohm of Hamburg, the bankers von Stauss, Regendanz, and Sogemeyer. All the enemies of the republic, with the exception of the Communists, were deployed here: a variegated army of the discontented, united less by a single aim than by a single animosity.

Hitler was in the worst of humors. He had consented to participate only with great reluctance, and the failure of his interview with Hindenburg had increased his sullenness. As in the case of the alliance against the Young Plan, he once more had to expect criticism from his own ranks; and personally he could not help feeling uncomfortable about this liaison with all the bourgeois forces. Shortly before the beginning of the meeting, therefore, he had a closed session of his own following. Frick spoke, justifying the pact with this “bourgeois mishmash” on purely tactical grounds. Mussolini, too, Frick said, had had to win power by the roundabout route of a nationalist coalition.

As soon as Frick had ended his speech, Hitler, with that dramatic surprise technique of his, entered the room with his personal retinue and in a solemn ceremony had everyone there take a pledge to follow his line. Meanwhile, the “Nationalist United Front” was waiting in the Kursaal for Hitler to appear.

For Hugenberg, who had already made all sorts of concessions to the Nazi party leader during the preparatory phases, this delay was not the last humiliation of the meeting. Hitler deliberately trampled on the feelings of his influential partners. He did not bother to appear at the session of the joint editorial committee, declaring its work to be a sheer waste of time. And at the final parade, which was supposed to be the inspiring climax of the meeting, Hitler ostentatiously left the stands as soon as the SA formations had marched past and the Stahlhelm was approaching. Nor would he attend the dinner; he could not feast, he declared, as long as thousands of his followers did their “duty on empty stomachs.” Only “concern over the adverse publicity, which none of the participants desired,” Hugenberg complained in disappointment, had prevented a “breach right out in the open.”

To Hitler, the disharmony at Harzburg was by no means a tactical feint. Nor was it part of his prima-donna pose. Rather, the meeting confronted him again with the crucial question of power. Hugenberg’s talk about unity did not disguise the claim to leadership, which as arranger of the festivities he was actually making. With his own peculiar consistency, Hitler realized that any community of action could mean only subordination. At best it would imply that henceforth Germany would have to be looking up to two “saviors”—an absurdity from Hitler’s point of view. In order to dispel any such mistaken impression, only a week after the Harzburg meeting, Hitler organized a huge demonstration on the Franzensfeld in Brunswick. More than 100,000 SA men were brought there in special trains. During the hours that the parade lasted, planes with gigantic swastikas streaming behind them circled over the field. And during the dedication of standards Hitler declared that this would be the last such ceremony before the seizure of power. The movement, he said, stood “within a yard of its goal.”

At the same time there can be no doubt that Hitler’s rudeness at Harzburg expressed some of his hostility toward the bourgeois world, which he was never able to completely quell. The very sight of top hats, tailcoats, and starched shirt fronts irritated him, as did the titles, the decorations, and the conceit they suggested. Here were people who thought morality itself sustained their claims to dominance, who liked to speak of their “historically appointed role.” But Hitler sensed the weakness and rot behind the display of composure, the outmodedness of these swarms of mummies with middle-class manners.

Yet this was the very bourgeois world that the young coffeehouse dandy, the lazy disciple of the arts, had longed to join. Though it had rejected him, he had nevertheless uncritically taken over its social, ideological, and aesthetic evaluations and held on to them for a long time. But in the meantime that world had declared its bankruptcy, and Hitler—unlike the representatives of the bourgeois world—never forgot that fact. In Hugenberg he was meeting a replica of the cunning, arrogant, and feeble Bavarian Prime Minister, Herr von Kahr, who had for him become the prototype of bourgeois notables. He now regarded them as a group who claimed to rule, yet had the souls of lackeys. “Cowardly,” “stupid,” “idiotic,” and “rotten,” were the adjectives he now attached to the mention of any member of this group. “No class of the population is stupider in political matters than this so-called bourgeoisie,” he would often remark. Once he said that he had for a long time deliberately tried, by strident propaganda and improper manners, to keep bourgeois people from joining the party.

In May, 1931, Richard Breiting, editor in chief of the Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten, asked Hitler for an interview. Hitler began the conversation by remarking, “You are a representative of the bourgeoisie which we are fighting.” He stressed that he had no intention of rescuing the dying bourgeoisie; on the contrary, he would eliminate it and would, at any rate, find it much easier to handle than Marxism. Hitler openly flaunted his present aloofness from bourgeois culture: “If a proletarian brutally tells me what he thinks, I can cherish the hope that some day this brutality can be turned toward the enemy. When a bourgeois indulges in daydreams of culture, civilization and aesthetic joys for the world, I say to him: ‘You are lost to the German nation! You belong in Berlin’s West End! Go there, dance your nigger dances till you’re worn out, and croak!’ ”

He occasionally referred to himself as a “proletarian,” but with an emphasis that made it appear as though he were talking not so much of his social status but of a social renunciation. “I can never be understood in terms of the bourgeoisie,” he declared. Even in his hope of winning over the working class—to which he referred occasionally as a class of “true nobility”—he seemed to be agitated not so much by any fondness for the workers than by his abiding hatred of the bourgeoisie, which had rejected him. There was an incestuous element in his hatred of the bourgeoisie, with the resentment of a would-be bourgeois who had been first rejected, then deceived, constantly erupting. The type of low-class bully he preferred for his immediate personal entourage, the crude “chauffeur types” like Schaub, Schreck, Graf, and Maurice, reflected in an extreme fashion this prejudice, which could be overcome only temporarily by a few individuals: by Ernst Hanfstaengl, for example, or by Albert Speer, or by Carl Jacob Burckhardt, League of Nations commissioner for Danzig, to whom Hitler said “sadly” in 1939: “You come from a world that is foreign to me.”¹⁷

No genuine bond with this foreign world was possible; as the meeting at Harzburg had demonstrated, not even a tenable tactical relationship could be established. Nothing came of the plan for a joint opposition; nothing came of the previously much-discussed shadow cabinet or of agreement on a common candidate for the impending presidential election.

Much has been made of the “Harzburg Front.” Those who like to see history in terms of conspiracies and clever wirepulling find Harzburg convenient proof of their thesis that Hitler was nothing but a t

Undeniably, there did exist a network of relationships between the leader of the Nazi party and a number of important businessmen. The party actually obtained considerable funds as well as increased prestige from these connections. But it was only inheriting the contributions that had gone earlier, and in considerably greater sums, to the parties of the Center. Neither the gains in votes of the Nazi party nor the losses of the Center parties can be ascribed to the presence or absence of wealthy patronage. As late as April, 1932, as Hitler was disturbed to learn, the shrunken Deutsche Volkspartei (German People’s Party) was receiving larger sums from industry than his own party. And when Walther Funk, toward the end of 1932, went on a begging tour in the Ruhr district, all he came back with was a single contribution of some 20,000 marks. The total of such aid has often been estimated far too high. Some 6 million marks is probably a fairly realistic estimate of industry’s gifts to the Nazi party up to January 30, 1933. For those who consider such a figure too low it must be pointed out that even twice that sum could not have financed a party organization of some 10,000 local groups, with a large corps of functionaries, a private army of nearly half a million men, and twelve expensively conducted election campaigns in 1932. In fact, the annual budget of the NSDAP, as Konrad Heiden discovered, amounted at this time to between 70 million and 90 million marks. Conscious that he was dealing in sums of this magnitude, Hitler would sometimes refer to himself jokingly as one of the foremost German captains of industry.¹⁸

It suits the purposes of pseudoscientific polemic to be broad and imprecise concerning the links between the Nazi party and finance capital. According to this school of thought, Hitler was the “rigorously manipulated and dearly paid political implement” of a capitalistic “Nazi clique” that needed him for “public relations.”¹⁹

But the very categories are misleading here. There were, for instance, clearly divergent interests among capitalists and among various branches of Industry Club on January 26, 1932, was intended specifically to overcome department stores, also the chemical industry and old family enterprises, such as the firms of Krupp, Hoesch, Bosch and Klöckner had great reservations about the Hitler party, at least before 1933. They were usually motivated by economic considerations. In addition, there was the rather significant number of Jewish enterprises. Otto Dietrich, who arranged some of Hitler’s contracts with Rhenish-Westphalian industry, noted that the leaders of the economy refused “to believe in Hitler… in the period of our hardest struggle.” As late as early 1932 there were “strong foci of industrial resistance.” And Hitler’s famous speech to the Düsseldorf Industry Club on January 26, 1932, was intended specifically to overcome this opposition.²⁰ After that speech the party was in fact granted larger subsidies, which took care of its most pressing concerns; but the sums were by no means as large as expected. At the end of 1932 Hjalmar Schacht, former president of the Reichsbank, Albert Vogler, general manager of the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel), and Kurt von Schröder, the banker, drew up a petition to President Hindenburg asking him to appoint Hitler Chancellor. But this move was a failure; the majority of businessmen who were approached refused to give their signatures.

The theory of a close, pragmatic alliance between Hitler and the major capitalists also fails to explain the time lag between the explosive growth of the party and the injection of, funds from industry. By the time Hitler delivered his Düsseldorf speech the Nazi party had more than 800,000 members and could command between 6.5 million and 13 million votes. The party’s strength depended on these legions of little people, and Hitler had to keep in mind their “enormous anticapitalist nostalgia.” All in all, he was more attuned to them than to the proud, pigheaded businessmen. To the industrialists he sacrificed little more than that troublemaker Otto Strasser, for whom he too had no love. When his followers joined in the Berlin metalworkers strike, Hitler explained the situation tersely by telling the employers that striking Nazis were still better than striking Marxists. But the thesis that Hitler’s party was in the pay of capitalism is most unsatisfactory in its failure to answer the key question: why this novel mass movement sprung from nothing could so effortlessly outstrip the splendidly organized German Left with its depth of tradition behind it. To call Hitler a tool of capitalism, as Marxist theory does, is merely to fall back on belief in demons. Marxist orthodoxy is prone to such simplifications. Such demonology is, as it were, “the anti-Semitism of the Left.”²¹

But it is one thing to speak of an outright plot between industry and Nazism, quite another to speak of the atmosphere of “partiality” or sympathy that surrounded Nazism. Many elements within industry were frankly in favor of Hitler’s becoming Chancellor, even though they were not themselves disposed to do anything about it. And many who were not prepared to offer him material support nevertheless regarded his program with some approval. They expected no concrete economic or political gains from it and never entirely lost their distrust for the socialistic, antibourgeois sentiments within the NSDAP. But they had never really accepted bourgeois democracy with its consequent rights of the masses. The republic had never been their state. To many of them Hitler’s promise of law and order meant a larger scope for enterprise, tax privileges, and restraints upon the unions. Implicit within the slogan, “salvation from this system,” coined by Hjalmar Schacht were vague plans for restoring the old order of things. Petrified remnants of the authoritarian state paradoxically survived more obstinately in the dynamic business world than in almost any other stratum of the German social structure. If we are to blame “capital” for the rise of the Nazi party, it was not so much on the basis of common aims, let alone of some dark plot, but on the basis of the antidemocratic spirit, the rancor against the “system,” emanating from big business. It is true that the spokesmen for business were deceived about Hitler. They saw only his mania for order, his rigid cult of authority, his reactionary features. They failed to sense the peculiar vibrations he threw off, the pulse of futurity.

Hitler’s above-mentioned address to the Düsseldorf Industry Club was one of the most masterly samples of his oratorical skill. Appearing in a dark pin-striped suit, behaving skillfully and correctly, he expounded the ideological foundations of his policies to an initially reserved group of big businessmen. Every word of the two-and-one-half-hour presentation was carefully adapted to his audience. Not only did he understand how attached these people were to law, order, and authority, but he was able to turn that attachment toward himself.

Early in the speech, Hitler outlined his argument for the primacy of domestic politics. He explicitly disagreed with the view—elevated to a kind of dogma by Chancellor Brüning—that Germany’s fate was largely dependent upon her foreign relations. Foreign policy, Hitler maintained, was, on the contrary, “determined by the inner condition” of a people. Any other view would be resignation, surrender of self-determination, or a dodge on the part of bad governments. In Germany the caliber of the nation had been undermined by the leveling influences of democracy:

When the capable minds of a nation, which are always in the minority, are regarded as only of the same value as all the rest, then genius, capacity, the value of personality are slowly rendered subject to the majority, and this process is then falsely named the rule of the people. For this is not rule of the people, but in reality the rule of stupidity, of mediocrity, of half-heartedness, of cowardice, of weakness, and of inadequacy. It is more the rule of the people to let a people be governed and led in all the walks of life by its most capable individuals, those who are born for the task, rather than… by a majority who in the very nature of things must always find these realms entirely alien to them.

The democratic principle of equality, he continued, was not an inconsequential idea with merely theroretic bearing. Rather, in the short or long run it would extend into all the aspects of life and could slowly poison a nation. Private property, he told the industrialists, was fundamentally incompatible with the principle of democracy. For the logical and moral rationale for private property was the belief that people are different in nature and achievement. At this point, Hitler came to the heart of his argument:

Once this is admitted, it is madness to say: in the economic sphere there are undoubtedly differences in value, but that is not true in the political sphere. It is absurd to build up economic life on the conception of achievement, of the value of personality, and therefore in practice on the authority of personality, but in the political sphere to deny the authority of personality and to thrust into its place the law of the greater number—democracy. In that case there must slowly arise a gulf between the economic and the political point of view, and to bridge that gulf an attempt will be made to assimilate the former to the latter…. In the economic sphere communism is analogous to democracy in the political sphere. We find ourselves today in a period in which these two fundamental principles clash in all areas where they meet….

In the State there is an organization—the army—which cannot in any way be democratized without surrendering its very existence…. The army can exist only if it maintains the absolutely undemocratic principle of unconditional authority proceeding downwards and absolute responsibility proceeding upwards. But the result is that in a State in which the whole political life—beginning with the municipality and ending with the Reichstag—is built upon the conception of democracy, the army is bound to gradually become an alien body.

He cited many other examples to demonstrate this structural contradiction, and then described the menacing spread of the democratic, and hence the communistic, idea in Germany. He dwelt at length on the terrors of Bolshevism:

Can’t you see that Bolshevism today is not merely a mob storming about in some of our streets in Germany but is a conception of the world which is on the point of subjecting to itself the entire Asiatic Continent, and… will gradually shatter the whole world and bring it down in ruins. Bolshevism, if it proceeds unchecked, will transform the world as completely as in times past did Christianity…. Thirty or fifty years count for nothing where fundamental ideologies are at issue. Three hundred years after Christ Christianity was only slowly beginning to establish itself throughout all of southern Europe.

Because of Germany’s intellectual confusion and psychological disintegration, he continued, Communism had already made greater inroads there than in other countries. Millions of persons had been persuaded that Communism was the “logical theoretical complement of their actual, practical economic situation.” It was therefore wrong to seek the causes of the present misery in external factors and to attempt to fight them with external methods. Economic measures or “another twenty emergency decrees” would not be able to halt the disintegration of the nation. The reasons for Germany’s decline were political in nature and therefore required political decisions, nothing less than “a fundamental solution”:

That solution rests upon the realization that economic systems in collapse have always as their forerunner the collapse of the State and not vice versa—that there can be no flourishing economic life which has not before it and behind it the flourishing powerful State as its protection—that there was no Carthaginian economic life without the fleet of Carthage….

But the power and well-being of states, he added, are a consequence of their internal organization, of the “firmness of common views on certain fundamental questions.” Germany is in a state of great internal dissension; approximately half of the people are Bolshevistic, in the broad sense of the word, the other half nationalistic. One half affirm private property; the other half regard it as a kind of theft. One half consider treason a crime, the other half a duty. In order to halt this decomposition and to overcome Germany’s impotence, he had created a movement and an ideology:

For here you see before you an organization… inspired to the highest degree by nationalist sentiment, built on the concept of the absolute authority of the leadership in all spheres, at every stage—the sole party in whose adherents not only the conception of internationalism but also the idea of democracy has been completely overcome, which in its entire organization acknowledges the principles of Command and Obedience, and which has thus introduced into the political life of Germany a body numbering millions which is built up on the principle of achievement. Here is an organization which is filled with an indomitable aggressive spirit, an organization which when a political opponent says, “We regard your behavior as a provocation,” for the first time does not submissively retire from the scene but brutally enforces its own will and hurls against the opponent the retort, We fight today! We fight tomorrow! And if you do not regard our meeting today as a provocation we shall hold another one next week…. And when you say, “You must not come into the street,” we go into the street nevertheless. And when you say, “We shall kill you,” however many sacrifices you force upon us, this young Germany will always continue its marches…. And when people cast in our teeth our intolerance, we proudly acknowledge it—yes, we have formed the inexorable decision to destroy Marxism in Germany down to its very last root. And this decision we formed not from any love of brawling; I could easily imagine a pleasanter life than being harried all over Germany….

Today we stand at the turning point of Germany’s destiny. If th^ present course continues, Germany must one day land in Bolshevist chaos, but if this development is broken, then our people must be enrolled in a school of iron discipline…. Either we will succeed in once more forging out of this conglomerate of parties, leagues, associations, ideologies, upper-class conceit and lower-class madness an iron-hard national body, or Germany will finally perish because of the lack of this inner consolidation….

People say to me so often: “You are only the drummer of nationalist Germany.” And what if I were only the drummer? It would be a far more statesmanlike achievement to drum a new faith into this German people than gradually to squander the only faith they have [cheers from the audience]…. I know quite well, gentlemen, that when National Socialists march through the streets and suddenly a tumult and commotion breaks out in the evening, then the bourgeois draws back the window curtain, looks out, and says: “Once more my night’s rest disturbed; no more sleep for me.”… But remember there is sacrifice involved when those many hundred thousands of SA and SS men of the National Socialist movement every day have to climb into their trucks, protect meetings, stage marches, exert themselves night after night and then come back in the gray dawn either to workshop and factory or as unemployed to take the pittance of the dole…. If the whole German nation today had the same faith in its vocation as these hundred thousands, if the whole nation possessed this idealism, Germany would stand in the eyes of the world otherwise than she stands now! [Loud applause.]²²

Yet for all the applause, at the end of the meeting only about a third of the audience joined in Fritz Thyssen’s cry of “Heil, Herr Hitler!” The financial benefits from this appearance were also disappointing. But what it did accomplish was to bring Hitler out of isolation. It was the government, now, which was more and more becoming isolated. From all sides growing armies of opponents besieged the battered positions of the Weimar Republic. In the state of Prussia, still ruled by a coalition under Social Democratic leadership, an attempt was made to dissolve the Landtag by referendum. All the nationalist parties united for a common action and were actually joined by the Communists. And although their united forces represented only 37 per cent of the votes, the impression lingered of a broad front of opponents ready and eager to overthrow the existing government.




The bitter clashes between the paramilitary formations, especially between Communists and Nazis, and between these squadrons and the police, were further symptoms of the shattered authority of the state. General chaos in the streets and a train of bloody outrages on weekends became almost the rule. On the Jewish New Year the Berlin SA under Count Helldorf (who was subsequently to become police chief of Berlin) organized a series of wild riots. At the universities there were sometimes physical assaults on professors whom the Nazis did not like. The court trials of party members became the occasions for unprecedented scenes. There was no actual civil war, but Hitler’s remark that some day heads would roll still rang in the nation’s ears, and a general impression arose that more was happening in the streets than occasional bloody brawls between rival parties struggling for the favor of the voters and seats in the legislature. Some time before, Hitler had declared:

The goal the bourgeois parties have in mind is not annihilation [of the opponent] but merely an electoral victory…. We recognize quite clearly that if Marxism wins, we will be annihilated. Nor would we expect anything else. But if we win, Marxism will be annihilated, and totally. We too know no tolerance. We shall not rest until the last newspaper is crushed, the last organization destroyed, the last educational institution eliminated and the last Marxist converted or exterminated. There is no middle course.²³

The fighting in the streets amounted to the preliminary skirmishes of a civil war that had been interrupted rather than fought to a decision in 1919 and which would shortly, in the spring of 1933, be carried to its logical conclusion in the torture cellars and concentration camps of the SA.

In this highly charged atmosphere, the authorities were frightened of driving Hitler to extremes. At the end of November, 1931, ten days after the elections to the Landtag of Hesse in which the National Socialist Party won 38.5 per cent of the seats, thus becoming by far the strongest party in this provincial legislature, a Nazi renegade gave the police chief of Frankfurt the Nazi plan of action in case the Communists attempted an uprising. These “Boxheim Papers”—as they were known from the estate at which the Nazi leaders had held their secret meetings—outlined the manner in which the SA and kindred organizations would assume power. The Papers spoke of “ruthless measures” to achieve “sharpest discipline of the populace.” Any act of resistance or even of disobedience would incur the death penalty, in certain cases “on the spot without trial.” Private property and all interest payments were to be suspended, the population fed communally, and everyone would be required to work. Jews, however, would not be allowed to work or receive food.

The disclosure of the plan created a stir. Hitler, however, disclaimed any part in the affair, though he also took no disciplinary measures against the authors of the project. Again, he seemed not too displeased to have the public given a good scare. Although the plan deviated from his own conception in its details, and especially in its semisocialist elements, its basic assumption was the same as his: that the ideal starting point for the seizure of power would be an attempt at a Communist rising. This would evoke a cry for help on the part of the threatened government and bring him forward with his SA, so that he could take over in the name of justice and with an appearance of righteousness. That was the cry he had vainly tried to force Herr von Kahr to utter on the night of November 8–9, 1923. He had never wanted to be cast merely as one politician among many others. His idea was always to come on the scene as savior from the deadly embrace of Communism, surrounded by his rescuing hosts, and thus take power. This role coincided with both his dramatic and his eschatological temperament, his sense of being always engaged in a global struggle with the powers of darkness. Wagnerian motifs, the image of the White Knight, of Lohengrin, of the Grail and an endangered fair-haired woman vaguely and half-consciously entered into this picture. Later, when circumstances did not produce this constellation, when no Communist putsch seemed in the offing, he tried to create it.

Nothing happened to the authors of the Boxheim Papers. That in itself was indicative of the deterioration of concepts of legality throughout the governmental apparatus. The bureaucracy and the judiciary obviously delayed prosecuting a case of treason. The political authorities, too, dismissed the affair with a resigned shrug, instead of seizing the chance for a strong last-minute effort to save the republic. Hitler could have been arrested and brought to trial on the basis of the clear and damning evidence. Instead, the administration remained conciliatory. Alarmed by his threats, it tried even harder to placate him. Nor was it forgotten that he had been received by Schleicher and Hindenburg and accepted as an equal by influential politicians, businessmen, and notables. In short, he had moved once more “into the vicinity of the President.” By now, moreover, one might well ask whether the movement could be curbed by police or judicial measures, or whether any such measures might not produce a most undesirable swing in the Nazis’ favor. In any case, in December, 1931, Prussian Minister of the Interior Severing shelved a plan to have Hitler arrested and deported. And around the same time General von Schleicher, urged to take energetic measures against the Nazis, replied: “We are no longer strong enough. Should we try to, we would simply be swept away!”

Suddenly people were no longer so sure that the Hitler party was merely a collection of petty bourgeois vermin and demagogic windbags. A feeling of paralysis spread, rather similar to the apathy felt before a force of nature. “It is the Jugendbewegung [youth movement], it can’t be stopped,” the British military attaché wrote,²⁴ describing the prevalent attitude in the German officers corps. The story of the rise of the National Socialist Party, which we have been tracing, is equally the story of the corrosion and decline of the republic. For the republic lacked the strength to resist; it also lacked any compelling vision of the future, such as Hitler was able to conjure up in his rhetorical flights. There were few who still believed the republic would long survive.

“Poor system!” Goebbels noted ironically in his diary.

At the Gates of Power

It was not only Hitler’s demagogic gifts, not only his tactical skill and radical verve that sped his fortunes; the force of irrationality itself seemed cunningly at work for him. Thus there were five major elections, held largely by chance in the course of 1932, in which Hitler could employ his special brand of agitation.

The term of the President of the Reich was to expire in the spring. In order to avoid the risks and radicalizing effects of an election campaign, Brüning had earlier proposed that Hindenburg be made President for life by an amendment to the Constitution. Brüning’s whole policy was aimed at gaining time. The winter had seen an almost inconceivable worsening of the Depression. In February, 1932, the number of unemployed rose to over 6 million. But with the rigidity of the technical expert who feels that his principles stand far above the base adaptability of the politician, Brüning kept firmly to his course. He was counting on eventual cancellation of reparations, on some success in the disarmament conference, on Germany’s being granted equal rights. In the shorter perspective, he was hoping that the spring would bring proof of the efficacy of his austerity policy, rigorous to the point of starvation.

But the common people shared neither his rigor nor his hopes. They were suffering from hunger, cold, and the humiliating side effects of misery. They hated the endless stream of emergency decrees with their stereotyped appeals to the spirit of sacrifice. The government was administering misery instead of relieving it, a bitter joke had it. Certainly Brüning’s policy of belt tightening was questionable from the economic point of view; but it proved to be far more questionable politically. For the Chancellor, with his matter-of-fact approach to the problem, did not know how to frame his plea for sacrifice in terms people could respond to. All that he seemed to promise was a program of further austerity stretching on into the dim future.

Brüning’s effort to gain time was totally dependent on the support from the President. But to his surprise Hindenburg himself had no desire to stay in office. Hindenburg was by now eighty-four; he had long since grown tired, and he foresaw troublesome discussions in connection with the plan and new attacks upon him from his already disappointed friends on the Right. All that he would consent to was a two-year extension of his term—and even this only after much persuasion. Significantly, what swayed him was a reference to Kaiser Wilhelm I, who at the age of ninety-one had declared that he had no time to be tired. But, in the course of it all, the old President lost confidence in Brüning, whom he recognized as the motive force behind all the urging. In putting across his stratagem, the Chancellor had actually lost what he had hoped to gain.

Brüning had next to deal with the various parties and win them over to the constitutional amendment. At this point, Hitler became a key figure and was wooed and sued accordingly. This certainly helped his prestige, but it also confronted him with a perilous choice. For now he either had to make common cause with the “pillars of the system,” and thus help to consolidate Brüning’s position and deny his own radicalism, or else he had to wage an electoral campaign against the gray-haired old President, the object of so much reverence, the personification of German loyalty and the nation’s surrogate kaiser. To oppose Hindenburg might seriously hurt the movement and, moreover, offend the President personally. Given the decisive powers of the presidency, such a course might have dire consequences for Hitler’s access to power.

Gregor Strasser was for accepting Brüning’s proposal. Röhm and, above all, Goebbels were strongly against it. “What is involved here is not the President himself,” Goebbels noted in his diary. “Herr Brüning is anxious to stabilize his own position and that of his cabinet for the foreseeable future. The Führer has asked for time to consider. The situation must be clarified on all sides…. The chess game for power is beginning. Perhaps it will last throughout the year. A game that will be played with drive, prudence, and partly with cunning. The main thing is that we remain strong and make no compromises.”

Hitler remained in this quandary for some time. While Hugenberg responded with a prompt and blunt rejection, Hitler kept silent. The answer he finally gave reflected both his doubts and his caution. Each man behaved in character. Hugenberg was aping Hitler’s radicalism and breathlessly trying to surpass it but in the process only revealing his poor understanding of tactics. Hitler, on the other hand, employed his radicalism as an instrument, offsetting it with a goodly dash of shrewdness. In the present case he surrounded his rejection with so many ifs and buts that he seemed to be asking for further negotiations. He had sensed the increasing estrangement between Hindenburg and Brüning and did what he could to widen the rift. In a sudden display of pendantry he assumed the role of guardian of the Constitution, and in long-winded arguments that seemed to be scrupulously concerned about the President’s being faithful to his oath of office, he advanced all kinds of legalistic objections to the Chancellor’s plan.

Basically, this answer meant that Hitler had already decided to run against Hindenburg. But he hesitated for several weeks more before announcing the decision. For his dream had always been to come into power with the President’s blessing, not as the President’s opponent. He also realized, more keenly than did his satellites, the dangers of challenging the Hindenburg legend. Consequently, he remained impassive while Goebbels and others hammered away at him to announce his candidature. However, he went along with the proposal that German citizenship be obtained for him through the good offices of Minister of the Interior Klagges of Brunswick, who was a member of the Nazi party.²⁵ Hitler would have to be a citizen in order to run. Here was still another instance of Hitler’s curious indecisiveness. He had a fatalistic streak and liked to let things take their course, postponing action until the last moment. For, strictly speaking, the decision had been taken long ago. Goebbel’s diary reveals, step by step, Hitler’s tortuous, almost bizarre vacillations:

January 9, 1932. Everything in confusion. Much guessing about what the Führer will do. People will be surprised!—January 19, 1932. Discussed the question of the presidency with the Führer. I report my conversations. No decision has been taken yet. I plead strongly for his own candidacy. Actually, there probably is no other course. We draw up calculations with figures.—January 21. In this situation there really is no other choice; we have to put up our own candidate. A difficult and unpleasant struggle, but we must go through with it.—January 25. The party is quivering with militancy.—January 27. The election slogan for or against Hindenburg seems to have become inevitable. Now we must come out with our candidate.—January 29. The Hindenburg Committee is meeting. Now we must show our colors.—January 31. The Führer will make his decisions on Wednesday. There can no longer be any doubts.—February 2. The arguments for the Führer’s candidacy are so thoroughly persuasive that anything else is out of the question…. At noon had a long discussion with the Führer. He sets forth his view of the presidential election. He decides to run himself. But first the opposition must occupy fixed positions. The Social Democratic Party will be the decisive factor. Then our decision will be communicated to the public. It is a struggle of enormously embarrassing alternatives, but we must go through with it. The Führer makes his moves without the slightest haste and with a clear head.—February 3. The gauleiters are waiting for the announcement of the decision to run for the presidency. They wait in vain. This is a game of chess. You don’t tell in advance what moves you are going to make…. The party is terribly nervous, tense, but nevertheless everybody is still keeping silent…. In his leisure hours the Führer is occupying himself with architectural plans for a new party headquarters as well as for a spectacular rebuilding of Berlin. He has the project all worked out, and I am constantly astonished anew at his expertise in so many fields. At night many loyal old party comrades come to see me. They are depressed because they have not yet heard of any decision. They are worried that the Führer will wait too long.—February 9. Everything is still in suspense. —February 10. Outside a glassy cold winter day. Clear decisions are hovering in the clear air. They cannot be much longer in coming.—February 12. At the Kaiserhof with the Führer I once again go over our computations. It is a gamble, but we must go ahead. The decision has now been taken…. The Führer is back in Munich; the public decision postponed for a few days.—February 12. This week we must announce our stand on the presidential question.—February 15. Now we no longer have to hide our decision beneath a bushel.—February 16. I am going ahead as if the election campaign were already in progress. That makes for some difficulties, since the Führer has not yet officially announced his candidacy.—February 19. With the Führer at the Kaiserhof. I talked to him privately for a long time. The decision has been taken.—February 21. This eternal waiting is almost wearing me out.

For the following night Goebbels had scheduled a membership meeting at the Berlin Sportpalast. This was to be his first public appearance since he had been banned from public speaking on January 25. By now the election was only three weeks away, and Hitler was still wavering. In the course of the day Goebbels went to the Kaiserhof to brief Hitler on the contents of his speech. When he once more brought up the question of candidature, he unexpectedly received the permission he had so desperately waited for: to announce Hitler’s decision to run. “Thank God,” Goebbels noted. He added:

The last sentence reveals the doubts that had assailed Goebbels during the preceding weeks in the face of Hitler’s weak leadership. But the sequel is just as characteristic of Hitler’s psychic pattern: the sudden surge of energy with which he, threw himself into the battle without a single glance backward, once the decision had been made. On February 26, in a ceremony at the Hotel Kaiserhof, he had himself appointed a Regierungsrat in Brunswick for the period of a week, thus acquiring German citizenship. The following day, at a meeting in the Sportpalast, he cried out to his opponents: “I know your slogan! You say: ‘We will stay at any cost.’ And I tell you: We will overthrow you in any case!… I am overjoyed to be able to fight alongside my comrades, whatever the outcome.” He picked up a remark by Police Commissioner Albert Grzesinski of Berlin, who had spoken of driving him out of Germany with a dog whip: “Go ahead and threaten me with the dog whip. We shall see whether at the end of this struggle the whip is still in your hands.” At the same time, he tried to disclaim the unwelcome role of opponent to Hindenburg, which Brüning had forced on him. Rather, it was his duty to say to the Field Marshal—whose “name the German people must always hail as that of their leader in the great struggle”—“Dear old man, our veneration for you is too great for us to allow those whom we would destroy to hide behind you. With our deep regret, therefore, you must step aside, for they want to fight us and we want to fight them.” Beside himself with delight, Goebbels noted that the Führer was “once more master of the situation.”

The extent to which Hitler and the Nazis had come to dominate the political scene became clear right at the outset. For although Hindenburg, the Communist candidate Ernst Thälmann, and the Conservative Theodor Duesterberg were already running, the election campaign did not really begin until Hitler entered the race. Instantly, the Nazis began sweeping everything wildly before them. Their campaign testified both to the improved condition of the party’s treasury and to their more effective organization. In February Goebbels had transferred the national propaganda headquarters of the party to Berlin, and in his bombastic style had predicted an election campaign “such as the world has never seen before.” The top people of the party’s corps of speakers were called upon. Hitler himself traveled by car back and forth across Germany from March 1 to March 11, and if the Völkische Beobachter was to be believed, spoke to some 500,000 people. At the side of this “demagogue on the grandest scale” stood, as Hitler had prescribed, that “army of agitators who will whip up the passions of the already tormented people.” Their wit and ingenuity—they employed modern technical media for the first time—once more put to shame all their rivals. Fifty thousand copies of a phonograph record were distributed. Sound movies were made, and pressure was exerted on cinema owners to have these shown before the main film. A special illustrated magazine, devoted to the election, was launched and what Goebbels called a “war of posters and banners” unleashed, which overnight would paint whole cities or districts of cities bloody red. For days on end long columns of trucks drove through the streets. SA units stood under waving banners, chin straps drawn down, singing or shouting their “Germany, awake!” The incessant booming of slogans soon engendered within the party an autosuggestive mood of victory that Himmler tried to keep in check by restricting alcohol consumption at victory celebrations.

On the other side stood Brüning, who seemed peculiarly alone. In homage to the President, he was going through this exhausting election campaign. As for the Social Democrats, their posture all too plainly betrayed their real intentions: they were supporting Hindenburg solely in order to defeat Hitler. And their uneasiness was matched by Hindenburg’s; in the one radio address the old man made during the campaign he rather mournfully defended himself against the charge that he was the candidate of a “black-and-red [i.e., Catholic-socialist] coalition.” Nevertheless, it turned out that the election, which shifted all fronts and split all loyalties, was a match entirely between Hindenburg and Hitler. On the eve of March 13 the Berlin Angriff announced confidently: “Tomorrow Hitler will be President of the Reich.”

Given such high expectations, the actual result was a severe and shocking blow. Hindenburg, with 49.6 per cent of the votes, won an impressive victory over Hitler (30.1 per cent). Triumphantly, Otto Strasser had posters pasted in the streets showing Hitler in the role of Napoleon retreating from Moscow. The legend read: “The Grand Army is annihilated. His Majesty the Emperor is in good health.” Overwhelmingly defeated, with only 6.8 per cent of the voters supporting him, was the Conservative Duesterberg. Thus the rivalry within the nationalist camp was decided once and for all in favor of Hitler. The Communist Thälmann received 13.2 per cent of the votes.

However, Hindenburg had fallen short of the absolute majority, and the election therefore had to be repeated. Once more Hitler faced the situation in a characteristic way. While spirits fell throughout the party and some members saw no point in entering upon a second campaign, Hitler showed no emotion at all. On the very night of March 13 he issued a series of proclamations to the party, the SA, the SS, the Hitler Youth, and the NSKK (Motorized Corps of the National Socialist Party) calling for renewed and increased activity: “The first election campaign has ended; the second has begun today. I shall lead it in person,” he announced, and as Goebbels rapturously phrased it, Hitler raised up the party “in a single symphony of the aggressive spirit.” But late one night Ernst Hanfstaengl found him in his darkened apartment sunk in apathetic brooding, “the image of a disappointed, discouraged gambler who had wagered beyond his means.”

Alfred Rosenberg, meanwhile, was using the Völkische Beobachter to give the fainthearted followers a good shaking: “Now the fight goes on with a fierceness, a ruthlessness, such as Germany has never before experienced…. The basis of our struggle is hatred for everything that is opposed to us. Now no quarter will be given.” A few days later nearly fifty prestigious personages—nobles, generals, Hamburg patricians, and university professors—issued a statement declaring themselves for Hitler. Election day was set for April 10. But with the idea of keeping down the agitation by radicals of the Right and Left, with its eruptions of hatred and threats of civil war, the government declared a mandatory truce until April 3—on the pretext of preserving peace during Easter. This meant that the actual election campaign was limited to about a week. But as always when he found himself with his back to the wall, Hitler turned this obstacle into one of his most effective gestures. To make maximum use of the short time at his disposal, he chartered a plane for himself and his intimates, Schreck, Schaub, Brückner, Hanfstaengl, Otto Dietrich, and the photographer Heinrich Hoffmann. On April 3 he started off on the first day of his subsequently famous flights over Germany, which day after day took him to four or five demonstrations organized with military precision. In all he visited twenty-one cities. And quite apart from the party propaganda that tried to weave a legendary wreath around this undertaking, there is no doubt that the flights created an impression of brilliant inspiration, bold modernity, fighting spirit, and a rather sinister omnipresence. “Hitler over Germany” was the effective slogan for these flights; its double meaning stirred millionfold expectations and millionfold anxieties. Moved by his own daring and the waves of cheering that greeted him, Hitler declared that he thought he was an instrument of God, chosen to liberate Germany.

As predicted, Hindenburg had no difficulty winning the requisite absolute majority, with nearly 20 million votes, 53 per cent of the total. Nevertheless, Hitler chalked up a larger increase in votes than the President; the 13.5 million voters who cast their ballots for him represented a percentage of 36.7. Duesterberg had not run in the second campaign; the Communist Thälmann received little more than 10 per cent of the total.

On the very day of the election, in a mood that mingled exhaustion, feverish excitement, and the intoxication of success, Hitler issued instructions for the elections to the state legislatures in Prussia, Anhalt, Württemberg, Bavaria, and Hamburg, which once more involved the entire country, four-fifths of the population. Goebbels recorded Hitler’s orders: “We will not rest for a moment and are already making decisions.” Once more Hitler set out on an airplane flight over Germany, speaking in twenty-five cities in eight days. His entourage boasted of a “world record” in personal encounters. But that was precisely what did not happen. Rather, Hitler’s individuality seemed to disappear behind the ceaseless activity, as if nothing but a dynamic principle were at work: “Our whole life is now a frantic chase after success and after power.”

For long stretches of his life, therefore, the personality of this man, elusive in any case, evaporates, slips from the biographer’s grasp. Hitler’s entourage tried in vain to give color, individuality, and a human aura to the phenomenon. Even the masters of propaganda, who could command almost any effect, found themselves at a loss here. The diaries and accounts of Goebbels or Otto Dietrich are prime examples of that failure. The anecdotes his publicists endlessly circulated about Hitler the lover of children, the navigator with an infallible sense of direction in the lost airplane, the “dead shot” with a pistol, the hero with remarkable presence of mind in the midst of the “Red rabble”—all these tales sounded strained and added to the impression they were trying to dispel: remoteness from real life. Only the props he had gradually acquired gave him a certain individual outline: the raincoat, the felt hat or leather cap, the snapping whip, the intensely black mustache, and the way his hair was brushed down over his forehead. But because these items always remained the same, they, too, depersonalized him.

Goebbels has vividly described the restiveness that gripped the leading members of the party at this time:

Only a few times during this year and a half of nonstop electioneering did circumstances jolt Hitler out of his impersonality and for brief moments offer a glimpse of his real character.

On September 18, 1931, just as the frantic chase across Germany was beginning and while he was setting out on an election campaign visit to Hamburg, word reached him that his niece Geli Raubal had committed suicide in the apartment they shared on Prinzregentenstrasse in Munich. According to the accounts, Hitler, stunned and horrified, abruptly turned about; and unless all the indications are deceptive, no other event in his personal life affected him as strongly as did this one. For weeks he seemed close to a nervous breakdown and repeatedly swore to give up politics. In his fits of gloom he spoke of suicide; this was, once again, the mood of total capitulation into which he recurrently fell when misfortune struck. This melancholia testified to the highly charged quality of his life, demanding constant effort of will in order to be the person he wanted to seem to be. The energy that emanated from him was not the exuberance of a vigorous man but the forced product of neurosis. In keeping with his belief that the great man must have no feelings, he hid away for several days in a house on the Tegernsee, in southern Bavaria. According to his intimates, tears would come to his eyes whenever he spoke of his niece in later years; it was an unwritten rule that no one but he might mention her name. Her memory was surrounded with a kind of cult. Her room at the Berghof was kept just as she had left it; a bust of her was set up in the room at Prinzregentenstrasse in Munich, where her body had been found. There, year after year, on the anniversary of her death, Hitler would lock himself in for a meditation that might last for hours.²⁸

There was a strangely exaggerated, idolizing quality about all of Hitler’s reactions to his niece’s death—in strong contrast to his usual coldness and inability to relate to others. We have reason to think that he was not putting on a performance, that in fact the incident was one of the key events in his personal life. It seems to have fixed forever his relationship to the opposite sex, which was curious enough in any case.

If our evidence is to be believed, for some time after his mother’s death, women had played only the most peripheral part in his life. The men’s home, chance acquaintanceships in Munich beer halls, the dugout, the barracks, the male circles of politics and the party—these had been his world. The realm that complemented them tended to be the brothel, which, however, he found despicable, or light, casual relationships—but these were not easy for him to form, with his stiff unyielding nature. The shy inhibited attitude he had toward women was early expressed in his youthful crush on Stefanie. His fellow soldiers in the field considered him a “woman hater.” Though later on he was always involved in close social relationships, always surrounded by a host of people, his biography is eerily empty of other human beings. His fear of all undignified attitudes included, according to a remark by a member of his entourage, constant anxiety about “having his name linked with a woman.”

His complexes seemed to loosen up only after Geli Raubal appeared with her sentimental and at first, evidently, half-childish fondness for “Uncle Alf.” It may be that he could be more relaxed with someone of his own blood. In fact, his feelings for Geli may have sprung from this very incestuous factor. There is a precedent in his own immediate family. His father had taken a niece into his house when she was sixteen and made her his mistress. Among the many women who crossed Hitler’s path—from Jenny Haug, the sister of his first chauffeur, to Helena Hanfstaengl, the first wife of Ernst Hanfstaengl, Leni Riefenstahl, and all those he addressed or referred to in the Austrian intimate style as “Mein Prinzesschen,” “Meine kleine Gräfin,” “Tschapperl,” or “Flietscherl,” and up to Eva Braun—none meant as much to him as Geli Raubal. She was, oddly inappropriate though the phrase sounds, his great love, a tabooed love of Tristan moods and tragic sentimentality.

One must wonder at Hitler’s obtuseness in regard to Geli, for he could be acute enough psychologically where others were concerned. Did he not see that the situation was becoming impossible for this impulsive and unbalanced girl? It has never been established that she was Hitler’s mistress. Some informants claim to know she was, and explain the suicide as a desperate escape from what had become the unendurably oppressive relationship with her uncle. Another story is that certain abnormal acts demanded of her by a perverted Hitler drove the girl to suicide. Still a third version denies that there was any sexual relation between the two, but lays stress on Geli Raubal’s promiscuity with the men of Hitler’s uniformed staff.²⁹

It is fairly certain that she enjoyed her uncle’s fame and naively participated in his celebrity. But the relationship, which for years had been sustained by joint enthusiasms, by love for the opera and the pleasures of coffeehouses and country outings, had gradually developed oppressive aspects. Hitler’s shadow fell heavily upon his niece. He was given to furious jealousy, and to making inordinate demands upon her. Though she had only a moderate gift and scarcely any ambition, he insisted on sending her to famous singing teachers so that she could be trained as a Wagnerian heroine. And his tyranny cut her off from any opportunity to lead a life of her own. Members of his entourage reported that immediately before his departure for Hamburg there had been a loud, violent scene between them, triggered by the girl’s wish to go to Vienna for a while. It seems probable that all these complex and seemingly hopeless circumstances finally sent her over the brink. Less plausible is the story popular among his political enemies that the girl shot herself because she was expecting a child by Hitler. Still others held that Hitler himself ordered her murdered, or purported to know that the SS had passed a Feme (vigilante) sentence on Geli because she had distracted her uncle from his historic mission. Hitler himself occasionally grumbled that all this “terrible filth” was killing him. He also declared darkly that he would never forgive his enemies for the nasty gossip of those weeks.³⁰

As soon as he had recovered his composure, he continued on to Hamburg after all. There, amid the cheers of thousands, he delivered one of his passionate speeches that whipped the audience into a kind of collective orgy, all waiting tensely for the moment of release, the orgasm that manifested itself in a wild outcry. The parallel is too patent to be passed over; it lets us see Hitler’s oratorical triumphs as surrogate actions of a churning sexuality unable to find its object. No doubt there was a deeper meaning to Hitler’s frequent comparison of the masses to “woman.” And we need only look at the corresponding pages in Mein Kampf, at the wholly erotic fervor that the idea and the image of the masses aroused in him, to see what he sought and found as he stood on the platform high above the masses filling the arena—his masses. Solitary, unable to make contact, he more and more craved such collective unions. In a revealing turn of phrase (if we may believe the source) he once called the masses his “only bride.” His oratorical discharges were largely instinctual, and his audience, unnerved by prolonged distress and reduced to a few elemental needs, reacted on the same instinctual wave length. The sound recordings of the period clearly convey the peculiarly obscene, copulatory character of mass meetings: the silence at the beginning, as of a whole multitude holding its breath; the short, shrill yappings; the minor climaxes and first sounds of liberation on the part of the crowd; finally the frenzy, more climaxes, and then the ecstasies released by the finally unblocked oratorical orgasms. The writer René Schickele once spoke of Hitler’s speeches as being “like sex murders.” And many other contemporary observers have tried to describe the sensually charged liquescence of these demonstrations in the language of diabolism.

Nevertheless, anyone who thought the entire secret of Hitler’s success as an orator lay in this use of speech as a sexual surrogate would be making a serious mistake. Rather, once again it was the curious coupling of delirium and rationality that characterized his oratory. Gesticulating in the glare of spotlights, pale, his voice hoarse as he hurled his charges, tirades, and outbursts of hatred, he remained always the alert master of his emotions. For all his seeming abandon, he never lost control. We are dealing here with the same ambiguity that governed his entire behavior and was one of the basic facts of his character. His oratorical technique was as tangibly marked by it as his tactic of legality and later the methodology of his conquest of power or his maneuvers in foreign policy. The very regime he set up assumed this character and has actually been defined as a “dual state.”³¹

In fact, the triumphs of this phase were distinguished from those of earlier years by the greater planning that went into his performances, as well as the elaborated stagecraft. Essentially, Hitler’s effectiveness still depended upon his always going to the utmost extreme; but he was now more radical not only in his emotions but also in his calculations. As long ago as August, 1920, he had, in a speech, described his task as “to arouse and whip up and incite… the instinctive” on the basis of sober understanding. He had, it would seem, a fairly good grasp of these basic principles right from the start. But only now, under the impact of the worldwide Depression, did he consciously shape his style of agitation to achieve the psychological “capitulation” that he had called the goal of all propaganda. When he planned his campaigns, every detail was, as Goebbels wrote, “organized down to the least item.” Nothing was left to chance: the route, the massing of party units, the size of the meetings, the carefully determined proportions of the audiences, the mounting suspense produced by processions with waving banners, march rhythms, and rapturous shouts of Heil, while the speaker’s appearance was again and again artificially delayed. Then, suddenly, he would step out in a blaze of lighting effects in front of an audience deliberately starved and prepared for frenzy. Ever since Hitler had once, in the early days of the party, arranged a morning meeting and in spite of the full hall had felt “profoundly unhappy at being unable to create any bond, not even the slightest contact” between himself and his audience, he had held his meetings only in the evening hours. Even during his campaign by plane throughout Germany, he kept to this rule as far as possible, although concentrating the already concentrated meetings within a few hours made for many difficulties. Thus it could happen that on a flight to Stralsund he was delayed and did not arrive at the demonstration until half past two in the morning. But 40,000 persons had waited it out nearly seven hours, and by the time he began his speech dawn was breaking.

He assigned a high significance to space as well as time. The “mysterious magic” of the darkened Bayreuth Festspielhaus during a performance of Parsifal and the “artificially created, yet mysterious twilight in Catholic churches” were, he believed, almost perfect examples of places treated for their maximum psychological effect. This was, in his words, what all propaganda aimed at: to achieve “an encroachment upon man’s freedom of will.”³²

In that solemn annunciatory tone he reserved for his fundamental insights he declared: “For, in truth, every such meeting represents a wrestling bout between two opposing forces.” In accord with his views on the nature of fighting, he approved of any and all means by which the agitator might overwhelm his adversary. His methods were meant for the “elimination of thinking,” “paralysis by suggestion,” creating a “receptive state of fanatical devotion.” Along with the place, the time, the march music, and the play of lights, the mass meeting was itself a form of psychotechnical warfare. Hitler offered the following explanation:

He boasted that an “exact calculation of all human weaknesses” underlay his ideas and demagogic maxims, and this assured them a virtually “mathematical” certainty of success. In the course of his second airplane campaign he discovered the emotional effect the illuminated plane had in the night sky as it circled above tens of thousands of people staring in fascination. He thereupon used this trick again and again. Any invocation of the martyrs of the movement was also, he found, highly effective, though not as much as it might be. After the first defeat in the presidential election he criticized the party press for “dullness, monotony, lack of independence, lukewarm absence of passion.” Above all, he wanted to know what the press had done with the deaths of so many SA men. Mismanagement of this matter drove him into a fury. As one person present at the meeting recalled his words, he declared that the party comrades had “been buried with pipes and drums and the party sheet had written a pompous and self-pitying sermon about it. Why hadn’t the newspapers displayed the corpses in their own windows, so the people could see the dead men with shattered skulls, their shirts bloody and ripped by knives? Why had these newspapers not preached funeral sermons calling on the people to riot, to rise up against the murderers and their manipulators, instead of bleating out ridiculous political half-truths? The sailors of the battleship Potemkin made a revolution out of rotten food, but we could not make a national struggle of liberation out of the deaths of our comrades.”³⁴

But his thoughts returned again and again to the subject of the mass meetings which “burned into the small, wretched individual the proud conviction that, paltry worm that he was, he was nevertheless a part of a great dragon, beneath whose burning breath the hated bourgeois world would some day go up in fire and flame.”³⁵ The procedure of these meetings followed an unchanging tactical and liturgical order, which he was forever improving, to dramatize his own appearance. While the flags, the marches, and the shouts of expectation sent the audience into a state of restlessness and receptivity, he himself sat nervously, drinking mineral water almost continually, in a hotel room or a party business office. Every few minutes he would check on the mood in the hall. Quite often he issued final instructions or suggested some message to be relayed to the audience. Only when the excitement of the masses threatened to sag would he set out for the meeting.

He had learned that long processions increased the suspense and therefore made a principle of entering the meeting halls only from the rear. He had chosen the “Badenweiler March” for his own entrance music, reserved for him alone. The distant sound of it would hush the murmuring and send the people springing from their seats with raised arms, shouting wildly—overwhelmed in the double sense of being manipulated and ecstatic: now HE was here. Many films of the period have preserved his appearance as he strode down the path of light made by the spotlights between lines of shouting, sobbing people—a “via triumphalis… of living human bodies,” as Goebbels extravagantly wrote. Often women pressed to the front, while he himself remained unapproachable, tight-lipped, in no way lending himself to their hungers. He ruled out introductory speeches or greetings that could only distract the audience from his person. For a few moments he would linger before the platform, mechanically shaking hands, mute, absent-minded, eyes flickering restively, but ready like a medium to be imbued and carried aloft by the strength that was already there, latent, in the shouting of the masses.

The first words were dropped mutedly, gropingly, into the breathless silence; they were often preceded by a pause that seemed to become utterly unbearable, while the speaker collected himself. The beginning was monotonous, trivial, usually lingering on the legend of his rise: “When in 1918 as a nameless soldier at the front I…” This formal beginning prolonged the suspense once more, into the very speech itself. But it also allowed him to sense the mood and to adjust to it. A catcall might abruptly inspire him to take a fighting tone until the first eagerly awaited applause surged up. For that was what gave him contact, what intoxicated him, and “after about fifteen minutes,” a contemporary observer commented, “there takes place what can only be described in the primitive old figure of speech: The spirit enters into him.” With wild, explosive movements, driving his metallicly transformed voice mercilessly to its highest pitch, he would hurl out the words. Quite often, in the furor of his conjuring, he would cover his grimacing face with his clenched fists and close his eyes, surrendering to the spasms of his transposed sexuality.

Although his speeches were carefully prepared and strictly followed the notes he always had in front of him, they nevertheless all sprang from his close communication and immediate exchange with the masses. It seemed to one of his temporary followers that he actually inhaled the feelings of his audience. This remarkable sensitivity of his, which endowed him with an unmistakably feminine aura, made possible those orgiastic unions with his public; it “knew him” in the Biblical sense of the word. To be sure, he was a shrewd psychologist and a superb stage manager. Yet he could not have bewitched the masses if he had not shared their secret emotions and incorporated all their psychoses into his own psyche. When he spoke, the masses met, hailed, and idolized themselves. An exchange of pathologies took place, the union of individual and collective crises in heady festivals of released repression.

It has often been asserted that Hitler told every meeting only what it wanted to hear, that he merely brought its true intentions to the fore and flaunted them for all to see. That, too, is true. Nevertheless, he was not an opportunistic flatterer of the crowd; rather, he was the spokesman for the massed feelings of being victimized, of fear, of hatred. He at once integrated those feelings and transformed them into political dynamics. The American journalist H. R. Knickerbocker noted after a mass meeting in Munich:

At such moments Hitler made “the collective neurosis the echo of his own obsession.” He had to have applause to bring out his full oratorical powers. Even a reluctant mood in the hall irritated him, and the SA—which he had had surrounding him at all public appearances right from the beginning—served not so much to keep order as to silence all opposition, all feelings of resistance, and to whip up enthusiasm by sheer menace. There were a number of occasions when Hitler, faced with an unfriendly audience, would abruptly lose the thread, break off his speech, and turning on his heel sulkily leave the room.

His whole being needed the mass acclaim. For this sort of cheering had once aroused him; now it maintained his states of tension and propelled him onward. He himself said that in the midst of the tumult he became “another person.” The historian Karl Alexander von Müller had long ago observed that Hitler communicated to his listeners an excitement that in turn provided fresh impetus to his voice. Certainly Hitler was a superior tactician, a capable organizer, a canny psychologist, and, despite all his deficiencies, one of the most remarkable phenomena of the period. But his invincible genius came to him only in the course of mass meetings, when he exalted platitudes into the resounding words of a prophet and seemed truly to transform himself into the leader; for in his everyday state he seemed only to be posing as der Führer with considerable effort. His basic condition was lethargy punctuated by “Austrian” spells of weariness. Left to himself, he seemed ready to fall back on dull movies, endless performances of the Meistersinger, the Carlton Tearoom’s luscious chocolate confections called Mohrenköpfe, or going on and on about architecture. He needed hubbub around him to be fired for action. He drew his dynamism from the crowd. Its worship also gave him the stamina to carry out those terribly strenuous campaigns and flights over Germany; it was the drug his strained, driven existence constantly needed. When in October, 1931, he met Brüning for his first private talk with the Chancellor, he launched into a one-hour speech, in the course of which he worked himself up to a frenzy—lashed on by the singing of his SA unit, which he had ordered to march up and down past the windows. Obviously he had done this partly to intimidate Brüning, partly to recharge himself.³⁷

It was this deep pathological link with the masses that made Hitler more than an effective demagogue and gave him his undeniable advantage over Goebbels, whose speeches were more pointed and clever. Hitler lifted the crowds out of their apathy and despair to, as he himself called it, “forward-driving hysteria.” Goebbels called these demonstrations “the divine services of our political work,” and a Hamburg schoolmistress wrote in April, 1932, after an election meeting attended by 120,000 persons, that she had witnessed scenes of “moving faith” which showed Hitler “as the helper, rescuer, redeemer from overwhelming need.” Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the philosopher’s sister, drew similar conclusions after Hitler paid a visit to her in Weimar. He “struck her as a religious rather than political leader.”³⁸

In this phase of his career Hitler operated more on the metaphysical than on the ideological plane. His success with the masses was above all a phenomenon of the psychology of religion. He spoke less to people’s political convictions than to their spiritual state. Of course Hitler could link up with an extensive system of traditional thought and conduct: with the German bent for authoritarianism and unrealistic intellectual constructs; with profound needs to follow a leader, and with a peculiar disorientation in politics. But, beyond this, agreement for the most part ended. His anti-Jewish slogans derived their force not so much from any especially violent German anti-Semitism as from the old demagogic trick of presenting people with a visible enemy. Nor was it the unique bellicose character of the Germans that Hitler mobilized; rather, he appealed to their long-ignored feelings of self-respect and national pride. The masses were not seduced by his images of land in the Ukraine; rather, they followed Hitler for the sake of their lost dignity, because they wanted once more to be participants in history. While Mein Kampf was issued in numerous editions, it was read by hardly anyone; this testifies to the general lack of interest all along in Hitler’s specific programs.

Hence, the rise of the National Socialist Party and its coming to power was not—as has often been argued in hindsight—a great conspiracy of the Germans against the world aimed at carrying out imperialistic and anti-Semitic ends. Hitler’s speeches during the years he was attracting mass audiences in the greatest numbers contain very little in the way of specific statements of intentions, and even scant his ideological obsessions, anti-Semitism and Lebensraum. Their salient characteristic, in fact, is their vague, general subject matter and the frequent resort to philosophical metaphors acceptable to all. As for spelling out aims, they are a far cry from the candor of Mein Kampf. A few months before the outbreak of the Second World War, in the midst of one of the crises he had unleashed, Hitler himself admitted that for years he had put on a show of harmlessness. Circumstances, he declared, had forced him to masquerade as peaceable.

With the bravura of a great orator, however, he was freeing himself more and more from specific content and concrete ideas. His continuous triumphs were proof that Nazism was a charismatic rather than an ideological movement, not looking to a progam but looking up to a leader. His personality gave outline and consistency to the loose jumble of ideas in the foreground. What people followed was merely the tone, a hypnotic voice; and although Hitler could draw upon unfulfilled nostalgias and dreams of hegemony, most of those who wildly cheered him were longing to forget, beneath his speaker’s platform, their exhaustion and their panic. They were certainly not thinking of Minsk or Kiev, or of Auschwitz, either. They wanted, above all, things to change. Their political faith scarcely went beyond blind negation of the status quo.

Hitler recognized what could be done with these negativistic complexes more keenly than did any of his rivals on the Left or the Right. His agitational technique really consisted in defamation and vision, in indicting the present and promising a potent future. All he did was ring the changes on his praise of a strong state, his glorification of the nation, his call for racial and national rebirth and for a free hand on the domestic and the foreign fronts. He appealed to the German longing for unity, decried the nation’s “self-laceration,” called class struggle the “religion of the inferior,” hailed the movement as the “bridge building of the nation,” and conjured up the fear that the Germans might once more become the world’s “cultural manure.”

But his major theme, which he found as harrowing as did the masses, was the “ruin of the Reich.” He cited the vast numbers who were reduced to wretchedness, the danger of Marxism, the “unnatural incest of party government,” the “tragedy of the small savers,” hunger, unemployment, suicides. His descriptions were deliberately generalized, first, because that assured him the maximum following, and secondly because he had recognized that within parties the precise statements of policy led to dissension and the impetus of a movement increased with the vagueness of its goals. Whoever succeeded in combining the most thorough negation of the present with the most indefinite promises for the future would capture the masses and ultimately win power. Thus, in one of his typical dualities of image and counterimage, of damnation and utopia, he demanded: “Is it by any chance German when our people is torn apart into thirty parties, when not one can get along with the others? But I tell all these sorry politicians: ‘Germany will become one single party, the party of a heroic great nation!’ ”

By turning all his propaganda against the status quo, he achieved the simplicity that he himself saw as one of the requirements for success. “All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to.” To illustrate his approach, here is a passage from a speech of March, 1932, in which he upbraids the government for having had thirteen years to prove its worth yet having produced nothing but a “series of disasters”:

With such accusatory formulas, varied and repeated a thousand times over, with vague invocations of fatherland, honor, greatness, power, and revenge, he mobilized the masses. He saw to it that their stormy emotions furthered the chaos he so scathingly described. He placed his hope in everything that could destroy existing conditions, or could at least create disturbance, because any movement would have to be movement away from the existing system and would ultimately accrue to his profit. For nobody else was formulating in so credible, decisive, and mass-effective a manner the agonizing craving for change. People in Germany were so desperate, Harold Nicolson noted in his diary during his visit to Berlin at the beginning of 1932, that they would “accept, anything that looks like an alternative.”⁴⁰

The vagueness of his terms also enabled him to brush aside social conflicts and veil social contradictions in a cloud of verbosity. After one midnight speech by Hitler in the Berlin Friedrichshain district, Goebbels noted: “That is where the very little people are. They are deeply moved after the Führer’s speech.” But the very big people were no less moved, and those in between as well. A Professor Burmeister proposed Hitler as the “candidate of the German artists” and spoke of the “humanly gripping heartwarming tones of his oratory.” After Hitler had given a two-hour talk to leaders of the Agrarian League and the Brandenburg nobility, one of the landowners stood up and “in the name of everyone present” called for omitting the customary discussion: “We would not want our sense of solemn dedication to be disturbed by anything distracting.” Hitler continually exacted such an unquestioning response from his audiences on the ground that with skeptics one “of course could not conquer the world; with them one cannot storm either a kingdom of heaven or a State.” Out of the curious hodgepodge of his slogans, bits of eclectic philosophy, and cleverly played-on emotions, everyone could take what he had put in. The frightened bourgeoisie could find the promise of order and recovered social status; the revolutionary-minded youth the outline for a new, romantic society; the demoralized workers security and bread; the members of the 100,000-man army the prospect for careers and fine uniforms; the intellectuals a bold and vital creed in line with the fashionable attitude of contempt for reason and idolization of “life.” Underneath all this ambiguity was not so much deception as the gift of striking the fundamental note of an unpolitical attitude. Like Napoleon, Hitler could say of himself that everyone had run into his net and that when he came to power there was not a single group which in some way did not place its hopes in him.

On the whole, 1932 was undoubtedly the year of Hitler’s greatest oratorical triumphs. To be sure, some members of his entourage would recall that he had spoken more richly and persuasively in earlier years, and in the perfectly ritualized mass meetings of his years as Chancellor he reached larger, almost unbelievably large crowds. But never again did the longing for redemption, consciousness of his charismatic powers, utter concentration upon a goal, and faith in his own chosenness, against the highly emotional background of misery, all enter into such an “alchemical” combination. For Hitler himself that period of his life was one of his key experiences, and the examples he drew from it served again and again to influence his decisions. In the myth of the “time of struggle,” this period was glorified as “heroic epic,” a “hell fought through,” a “titanic battle of character.”

Just as the ritual of opening a mass meeting was carefully orchestrated, so was the conclusion. Amid the din and the cheering the band burst out with “Deutschland, Deutschland iiber Alles,” or else one of the party anthems. The music created an impression of closed ranks and high pledges. But it was also intended to hold the audience until Hitler, still dazed and soaked in sweat, had left the room and entered the waiting car. Sometimes he stood for a few moments beside the chauffeur, saluting, mechanically smiling, while the crowd surged up or SA and SS units formed into broad columns for a torchlight parade. He, however, went back to his hotel room, totally drained; and this bears out the erotic quality of these mass meetings. One follower, who came upon Hitler at such a moment, staring silently into space with a glazed look, started toward him but was blocked by his adjutant Bruckner, who said: “Leave him be; the man is done in!” And the morning after one speech a gauleiter found him in the remotest room of a hotel suite occupied by him and his retinue. Hitler, “alone, back bent, looking tired and morose, sat at a round table slowly sipping his vegetable soup.”

The uproar unleashed by Hitler would, however, never have led to power by itself. The elections to the Prussian Landtag had given the NSDAP 36.3 per cent of the vote and eliminated the preponderance hitherto enjoyed by the coalition of Social Democrats and Center parties. But the hoped-for absolute majority had not been attained, nor was it reached three months later in the Reichstag elections of July 31, 1932. Nevertheless, the party had more than doubled its previous number of seats, to 230, and was by far the strongest party in the Reichstag. There were many indications that Hitler had expanded as far as he could go. True, he had decimated or entirely absorbed the bourgeois parties of the Center and the Right. But he had not been able to make significant inroads on the Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party. All that tremendous propaganda effort, the incessant mass meetings, parades, poster and leaflet distributions, the party speakers pushing their strength to the limit, and even Hitler’s third “flight over Germany,” in the course of which he spoke in fifty cities within fifteen days—all of it had brought the party an increase of only 1 per cent compared with the vote for the Prussian Landtag. Goebbels remarked on the results: “Now something must happen. We must come to power in the near future. Otherwise we’ll drop dead from winning elections.”⁴¹

Alarmingly, the first signs of this sinister prospect began to appear. With the switch to governing purely by emergency decree, and especially since his re-election, Hindenburg had given his office an increasingly personal touch and had more and more obstinately equated his wishes with the welfare of the state. In this opinionated behavior he was supported by a small group of irresponsible advisers. One of these was his son Oskar, whose role in the government, to quote a popular sarcasm, “was not provided for in the Constitution.” Others were State Secretary Meissner, General Schleicher, the young conservative deputy Dr. Gereke, Hindenburg’s neighboring estate owner, von Oldenburg-Januschau (who had long enjoyed the reputation of being a “reactionary brute” and who, for example, outraged public opinion by asserting that it should always be possible to dissolve Parliament by sending a lieutenant and ten enlisted men to do the job). In addition there were some other Prussian magnates, and later the group was joined by Franz von Papen.

The following months were filled with the background maneuvers of these men. Their various motives and interests are hard to determine. Hitler had appeared on the political scene as a tremendous and troublesome force, and their general intention was to integrate him, to bind him, and also to use him as a threat against the Left. This was the last attempt, springing from the deluded arrogance of a traditional leadership, by old Germany to regain a forfeited role in history.

The first victim of this group was, ironically, Brüning himself. The Chancellor, trusting that he would be backed by the President, had incurred the enmity of some of those “mighty institutions” that his opponent Hitler was trying so persistently and successfully to cultivate. He had too often refused to consider the demands of industry. Now he antagonized Hindenburg’s peers in the landowning class. They expected subsidies from the state, but Brüning wanted to make such financial aid conditional on an examination of the profitability of the estate in question. Hopelessly indebted properties were to be used for resettling some of the unemployed upon the land.

The landowners were appalled. Their fierce attacks on the proposal culminated in the charge that the Chancellor had Bolshevistic tendencies. Given the President’s age and weak judgment, one cannot say how much he was swayed by such pressure. But there is no doubt that it at least contributed to his decision to drop Brüning. Moreover, Hindenburg bore a grudge against the Chancellor for leading him to fight on the wrong front for reelection. Nor did his entourage let him forget that painful affair. Brüning’s hour struck when he lost thé confidence of Schleicher, who alleged that he spoke in the name of the army.

The beginning of Brüning’s overthrow was marked by what looked like an act of governmental vigor, but actually exposed the hidden contradictions within the leadership of the Reich, thereby hastening the death of the republic. The government banned the SA and the SS. Since the discovery of the Boxheim Papers, fresh evidence had accumulated of the real intentions of the Nazis. The party’s army was becoming more impatient and brash than ever. And Hitler kept up his pretense of legality by off and on publicly worrying how long he would be able to keep his brown storm troops in check. Testily, Ludendorff referred to Germany as territory “occupied by the SA.”

Two days before the first presidential election, Goebbels had noted in his diary: “Thorough discussion with SA and SS leadership of standards of behavior for the next few days. Everywhere a wild restiveness prevails. The word putsch haunts the scene.” For election day, Röhm had decreed a state of emergency readiness and his brown shirts encircled Berlin. While raiding several of the SA’s organizational centers, the Prussian police found detailed instructions for violent measures to be taken if Hitler won. Although there was no evidence of any plans for a large-scale uprising, the police did come upon the secret putsch cue familiar from other documents: “Grandmother dead.” Orders were also found instructing the storm troopers of the eastern territories to refuse to participate in the country’s defense if there were a Polish attack—a discovery that must have made its impression on Hindenburg in particular. Several state governments were urging a Reich ban on the SA and SS. The decision to impose the ban was now taken unanimously; it was an action long weighed and repeatedly postponed before finally being taken.

But a few days before proclamation of the ban, events took a dramatic turn. Schleicher, who had at first agreed to the ban and even boasted of being its author, changed his mind overnight, and when his shift did not meet with instant approval, began intriguing furiously against the ban. Soon he had won over Hindenburg, on grounds that the ban would make the President even more unpopular with his already disappointed followers on the Right. Schleicher himself had decided that it would be better to collaborate with the SA in dissolving all other private defense organizations, such as the Stahlhelm or the loyally Republican Reichsbanner, and to collect them all into a militia or a military sports association subordinated to the army. But his change of heart also sprang from his temperamental love of intrigue. The crude method of a ban was antipathetic to him; he liked subtler procedures. His counterproposal, significantly, was to present Hitler with a number of ultimatums demanding the demilitarization of the SA. The demands would be so impossible to meet that by rejecting them Hitler would be placed in the wrong.

With some scruples, and with anxious side glances at the “old wartime comrades” now serving in the SA and SS, Hindenburg finally signed the decree; and on April 14, in a widespread police action, Hitler’s private army was broken up, its headquarters, shelters, schools and depots occupied. This action was the most energetic blow that the government had struck against Nazism since November, 1923. The official statement at last showed a certain mettle on the part of the republic: “It is exclusively the concern of the State to maintain an organized force. As soon as such a force is organized by private parties and the State tolerates this, a danger to law and order already exists…. Undoubtedly, in a constitutional state power may be organized by the constitutional organs of the State itself. Any private organized force therefore cannot by its very nature be a legal institution…. In the interests of its own preservation, the State must order such forces dissolved.”

Backed by the belligerence and strength of his 400,000 men, Röhm at first seemed ready for a trial of strength. But Hitler would not hear of it. Instead, without more ado, he incorporated the SA into the party organization and in this way kept its organization intact. Here was another example of a Fascist movement abandoning the field without a fight at the first show of resistance by the government. Similarly, in 1920 Gabriele d’Annunzio had evacuated the city of Fiume in response to a single cannon shot. Once more Hitler declared himself on the side of legality, and called for strict observance of the ban. He did this not out of fear but because any other measure would have nullified the “Fascist constellation,” the alliance between conservative rule and a revolutionary-popular movement.

Hitler’s compliance may have come easily to him since by that time he had received information—from Schleicher or people close to Schleicher—about friction within the administration. On the whole he showed an air of confidence. On the eve of the day that was to begin the dismemberment of the Hitler movement, Goebbels noted a conversation with Hitler in the Hotel Kaiserhof: “We discussed personnel questions for the period of taking power just as if we were already the government. I think no movement in the opposition has ever been so sure of its success as ours!”

The very next day a strikingly frosty letter from Hindenburg to Minister of Defense Groener gave the signal for a monumental intrigue. A passionate campaign in the rightist newspapers, joined by a choir of prominent voices of the nationalist camp, went along with it. The Crown Prince thought it “incomprehensible” that the Defense Minister of all persons should help to “shatter the marvelous human material that has been brought together in the SA and SS and is receiving valuable training there.” Schleicher advised his Minister, who still regarded him as his “adopted son,” to resign, and either circulated spiteful slanders against Groener or did nothing to stem such slanders. Word went round that Groener was ill, or that he was a pacifist, or that he had brought the army into disrepute when his second wife gave birth prematurely. Schleicher wittily told President Hindenburg that in the army the baby was called “Nurmi,” after the Finnish runner famous for his speed in the final spurt.

Meanwhile, Schleicher let the leadership of the NSDAP know that he personally was not at all in favor of the ban on the SA. He still clung to the idea of disabling the Nazis by letting them participate in power and “locking them in”—to use the magic formula of the moment—by surrounding them with a cabinet of influential specialists. The example of Mussolini should have shown him that such tricks are useless against tribunes of the people who can call upon a private army.

At the end of April Schleicher met with Hitler for a first discussion. “The conversation went well,” Goebbels noted. Soon afterward there was a second meeting, in which State Secretary Meissner, Hindenburg’s man of confidence, and Oskar von Hindenburg were included; at this time not only the dismissal of Groener but the fall of the entire Brüning cabinet was discussed. “Everything is going well….” Goebbels noted again. “Delightful feeling that nobody suspects anything, Brüning himself least of all.”

After about a month of such intrigues, matters finally came to a head. On May 10 Groener defended in the Reichstag the SA ban against furious attacks from the Right. He was a feeble speaker at best, and his protests against the National Socialist “state within the State” and “state against the State” made little headway against the wild uproar that the Nazis unleashed. The angered, helpless, and no doubt exhausted Minister went down to defeat, and with him the cause he was advocating. Schleicher and General Kurt von Hammerstein, commander in chief of the army, coolly informed the Minister of Defense that he no longer enjoyed the confidence of the army, and must resign. Two days later, after a vain appeal to Hindenburg, Groener handed in his resignation.

That act was, in keeping with the camarilla’s plans, only the prelude. On May 12 Hindenburg left Berlin for nearly two weeks, to spend the Whitsun holidays on his estate, Gut Neudeck. Brüning asked to see him, but the President irritably refused. During this period he was obviously under the influence of his fellow Junkers, who were now preparing the assault on Brüning’s weakening position. Whatever line of argument they followed, they no doubt brought to the task “that heavy force peculiar to large landowners and old army officers, which dispensed with honesty and concern for principle.” When Hindenburg returned to Berlin at the end of the month, he was determined to part with his Chancellor. Brüning thought he was on the verge of great successes in foreign policy, and as late as the morning of May 30, shortly before he set out to see Hindenburg, had heard that there was going to be a significant turn in the matter of disarmament. But as things turned out, he was not given the time to inform the President of this. Only a year before, Hindenburg had assured him that he would be his last Chancellor, that he would not part with him. Now Brüning found himself dismissed in an insultingly brusk interview. He had been allowed only a few minutes on the President’s calendar; Hindenburg did not want to miss the parade of the naval guard in commemoration of the Battle of Jutland. A wartime memory and a minor military spectacle took precedence over an act that decided the fate of the republic.⁴²

General von Schleicher put forward as Brüning’s successor a man who at best could be considered a political dilettante. Franz von Papen came from an aristocratic Westphalian family, had served in a Junker cavalry regiment, and come to wide public notice for the first time—in a characteristic way—during the World War: in 1916 he had been expelled from the United States, where he was serving as military attaché, for sabotage activities; on the crossing to Europe he carelessly let important documents regarding his secret service work fall into the hands of the British authorities. His marriage to the daughter of a leading Saar industrialist had brought him considerable wealth and excellent connections with industry. As a Catholic nobleman he also had connections with the higher clergy, and as a former General Staff officer multiple contacts with the army. It may be that this position of Papen’s at the intersection of many interests first attracted Schleicher’s attention. The man seemed grotesquely antiquated; in all his long-legged stiffness, haughtiness, and bleating arrogance he was almost a caricature of himself—a figure from Alice in Wonderland, as a contemporary observer remarked. He was considered foolish, overhasty; nobody took him quite seriously. “If he succeeds with a thing, he is very pleased; if he fails, he does not worry about it.”

Yet it was obviously this cavalier quality of Papen that recommended him to Schleicher. For Schleicher was plainly thinking more and more of doing away with the weakened parliamentary system and replacing it by some kind of “moderate” dictatorship. Papen might be just the man to carry out such plans for him. Schleicher must also have imagined that the inexperienced Papen, a man concerned largely with externals, would find his vanity satisfied with the office and its ceremonial functions, and for the rest would be a docile tool. Schleicher, as ambitious as he was wary of publicity, needed exactly that kind of man. When Schleicher’s friends, incredulous at his choice, protested that Papen was a man without a head, Schleicher replied: “I don’t need a head, I need a hat.”

If, however, Schleicher had considered that Papen, thanks to his extensive connections, would be able to put together a coalition, or at any rate to win parliamentary approval of a cabinet including all parties to the right of the Social Democrats, he soon found that he was mistaken. The new Chancellor had no political base at all. The Center, embittered by the betrayal of Brüning, sharply opposed him. And Hugenberg, who saw himself once more passed over, also proved indignant. From the public, too, Papen encountered hostile rejection. Although he cashed in on Brüning’s successful negotiations and came back from the Lausanne Conference with the reparations question settled, he gained no popularity. The fact was that his cabinet could in no way be regarded as a legitimate solution to Germany’s problems, neither in terms of democracy nor expertise. It consisted entirely of men of distinguished families who had not been able to resist the President’s appeal to their patriotism and who now “surrounded Hindenburg like officers their general.” Seven of them were noblemen, two company directors; the roster also included Hitler’s protector from his Munich days, Franz Gurtner, and a general. Not a single representative of the middle class or the working class was included in the cabinet. The shadows seemed to be returning. But the mass indignation, the scorn and protest on the part of the populace, had no effect—proof of how thoroughly the members of the former ruling class had lost contact with reality. The “cabinet of barons,” as it was soon called, drew its support solely from Hindenburg’s authority and the army’s power.

The extraordinary unpopularity of the government prompted Hitler to take an attitude of cautious restraint. In his negotiations with Schleicher he had agreed to tolerate the government if new elections were called, the ban against the SA lifted, and the NSDAP allowed full freedom to carry on agitation. A few hours after Brüning’s dismissal, he had answered positively when the President asked him whether he agreed to the appointment of Papen. The new Chancellor promptly, on June 4, began his series of fateful concessions by dissolving the Reichstag and indicating that he would shortly lift the ban on the SA. Nevertheless, the Nazis began disentangling themselves. “We must part company as quickly as possible with the bourgeois transitional cabinet,” Goebbels noted. “All these are questions of delicately feeling one’s way.” A few days later he noted: “We had better betake ourselves as swiftly as possible out of the compromising vicinity of these bourgeois adolescents. Otherwise we are lost. In the Angriff I am launching a fresh attack on the Papen cabinet.” When the SA ban was not dropped in the first few days, as anticipated, Goebbels one evening entered “a large café on Potsdamer Platz with forty or fifty SA leaders in full uniform in spite of the ban, for the sake of provocation. All of us longing to have the police arrest us…. Around midnight we stroll very slowly on Potsdamer Platz and Potsdamer Strasse. But nobody lifts a finger. The patrolmen look stumped and then shamefacedly turn their eyes away.”

Two days later, on June 16, the ban was lifted; but the period of hesitancy had meanwhile given the impression of a “virtual genuflection by the administration before the coming new power.” At the last moment Papen made a transparent effort to trade off his conciliatory gesture for a promise that the Nazis would later help form a government. Tactically, he made his offer too late; but it also revealed a grotesque incomprehension of the urgency of Hitler’s hunger for power. Coolly, Hitler put him off; there would be time enough to consider his requests after the Reichstag elections.

Thereupon the conditions of virtual civil war, with wild clashes in the streets, were abruptly revived, and now reached their real climax. In the five weeks up to July 20 there were nearly 500 such clashes in Prussia alone, with a toll of 99 dead and 1,125 wounded. Throughout the Reich seventeen persons were killed on July 10; in many places the army had to intervene in the furious street battles. Ernst Thälmann, the Communist leader, rightly defined the lifting of the ban on the SA as an open invitation to murder, although he did not say whether his own fighting units took an active or a passive part. On July 17 one of the bloodiest conflicts of the summer took place in Hamburg-Altona. A deliberately provocative parade of some 7,000 Nazis through the streets of the Red working-class quarter was answered by the Communists with heavy sniping from roofs and windows, which the Nazis answered in kind. There was a bitter battle over hastily erected barricades. At the end there were seventeen dead and many severely wounded. Of the eighty-six persons who died in political clashes in July, 1932, thirty were on the side of the Communists, thirty-eight on the side of the Nazis.⁴³ “There is brawling and shooting,” Goebbels remarked. “The regime’s last show.”

Refusing to realize that his concessions were only emboldening the Nazis, Papen went a step further. His idea was to strengthen the prestige of his virtually isolated administration, and simultaneously conciliate Hitler and the Nazis, by some grand gesture of authoritarianism. Accordingly, on the morning of July 20 Papen summoned three members of the Prussian government to the chancellery and abruptly informed them that he had just deposed Prussian Prime Minister Braun and Interior Minister Severing by emergency decree. He himself, he said, would assume the duties of the Prime Minister as Reich Commissioner.

Severing declared that he would yield only to force. Papen—“a cavalier even in a coup d’état”—inquired what exactly he meant by that. The Minister retorted that he would move out of his office only under pressure. Meanwhile, using a prepared second emergency decree, Papen imposed a military state of emergency on Berlin and Brandenburg, thus seizing the police powers for himself. In the evening three police officers came to the Ministry of the Interior and requested Severing to leave. He was now yielding to force, Severing replied, and stepped out of his office and into his adjacent apartment. By the following afternoon, similarly without resistance, the leadership of the redoubtable Prussian police had been “overwhelmed.” Berlin Police Commissioner Grzesinski, Deputy Commissioner Weiss, and Police Commander Heimannsberg were led across the yard of police headquarters for a brief internment. It is said that some of the policemen called after their chiefs the slogan of the Social Democratic Reichsbanner: “Freiheit!” Konrad Heiden has pointedly remarked that this was the last gasp of the crumbling, unwanted and now surrendered freedom of the Weimar Republic.

Widespread resistance had, to be sure, been considered. According to a contemporary observer, Grzesinski and Heimannsberg, in conjunction with Undersecretary Klausener are supposed to have urged Severing to “carry on the fight by every means.” In particular they allegedly demanded “immediate action by the Berlin police, proclamation of a general strike, immediate arrest of the Reich government and the President, and declaration of the President’s incapacity to perform his duties.” But Severing is said to have rejected this proposal. Opposition did not go beyond ineffectual publication of protests and an appeal to the Supreme Court. The Prussian government had at its disposal more than 90,000 well-equipped police troops, the paramilitary Reichsbanner, the adherence of the republican parties, the unions, and all the important key posts. Fear of civil war, respect for the Constitution, doubts of the force of a general strike when so many men were unemployed, and many similar considerations ultimately undermined all ideas of resistance. Papen was able to seize power in the “strongest bulwark of the Republic,” with nothing to stop him beyond the looks of anguished resignation in his opponents’ eyes.

It is hard to deny a good deal of validity to the arguments of the Prussian politicians. In view of all the circumstances, their decision may well have been a reasonable one. But in the face of history their reasonableness counts for little. No thought was given to a demonstration of defiance, and in no phase of the events did Severing and his unnerved, morally broken fellows consider the possibility that going down to defeat in honor might have made people forget the halfway measures and missed opportunités of the past thirteen years, and have sparked a renewal of confidence in democracy. The real and immense importance of July 20, 1932, lies in its psychological consequences. It discouraged one side and taught the others how little fight the defenders of the republic would be likely to put up.

As a result, Papen’s coup only increased the impatience of the Nazis. In the struggle for power three sharply divided camps now faced one another: the nationalist-authoritarian group around Papen, who in parliamentary terms represented barely 10 per cent of the voters but who had the backing of Hindenburg and the army; the exhausted democratic groups, who however could still count on considerable support by the public; and the totalitarian opposition consisting of both Nazis and Communists. Together these last held a negative majority of 53 per cent. But just as the Nazis and Communists could not work together, all the groups blocked and paralyzed one another. The summer and autumn of 1932 were marked by continuous efforts to overcome the current political rigidity by some new tactical maneuver.

On August 5 Hitler met Schleicher in Fürstenberg, Mecklenburg, near Berlin, and for the first time demanded full power: the office of Chancellor for himself, the Ministries of the Interior, Justice, Agriculture, and Air Transport, and a Propaganda Ministry to be newly created. He also insisted, on the basis of the coup of July 20, on the posts of Prussian Prime Minister and Prussian Minister of the Interior. Furthermore, he wanted a law empowering him to rule by decree with unlimited powers. For, as Goebbels remarked, “if we have the power we’ll never give it up again unless we’re carried out of our offices as corpses.”

Hitler left Schleicher convinced that he stood on the verge of power. As they parted, he genially proposed that a plaque be put on the house in Fürstenberg to commemorate their meeting. The storm troopers were already leaving their places of work and preparing for the day of victory with its celebrations, its excesses, and the promise of becoming big shots. To quiet them, as well as lend emphasis to his demands, Hitler had the SA units around Berlin parade within the city, and encircle it in an ever tighter ring. Throughout the Reich, but especially in Silesia and East Prussia, the number of bloody clashes increased. Thereupon, a decree of August 9 threatened the death penalty for anyone who “in the passion of the political struggle undertakes, in rage and hatred, a fatal assault upon his opponent.” The very next night five uniformed SA men in Potempa, a village in Upper Silesia, forced their way into the apartment of a Communist worker, pulled him out of bed, and literally trampled him to death before his mother’s eyes.

These events obviously contributed to the sudden shift that once again barred the gates of power from the Nazis. But to what degree has not yet been clarified. Schleicher may have abandoned his idea of taming the Nazis by making Hitler Chancellor in a rightist coalition government, thus fettering him with responsibility and undermining his popularity. At any rate this plan now encountered vigorous resistance from the President, who had developed a paternal fondness for the agile and frivolous Papen. Hindenburg certainly did not care to exchange Papen for the Bohemian fanatic and ersatz messiah Hitler, who, moreover, would want to take over the Kaiser role that the President had grown attached to. On August 13 an extended round of negotiations with the National Socialist leadership was held. In conjunction with Papen, Hindenburg rejected all Hitler’s claims to assume full powers and instead offered him the post of Vice-Chancellor in the existing cabinet. Furious, in the all-or-nothing mood of those days, Hitler turned down the offer, and stuck to his refusal, even when Papen broadened the terms. He would give his word of honor, he proposed, that after an interlude of “trusting and fruitful collaboration” he would resign the chancellorship in favor of Hitler.

We can be sure that Hitler had already visualized how he would offer to a dumfounded and doomed world the spectacle of his summons to rule. On the way to Berlin he had stopped in a restaurant at Chiemsee and, “while eating a large piece of sponge cake,” had described to his lieutenants how he was going to massacre the Marxists. Instead he suddenly found himself, made a fool of. And as always in response to setbacks, a dramatic gesture of despair followed hard upon the disappointment. When he was summoned to see Hindenburg that afternoon, he at first wanted to refuse to come. Only an explicit assurance from the presidential palace that nothing had yet been decided gave him hope once more. But Hindenburg merely inquired whether he was prepared to support the present administration. Hitler said no. An appeal to patriotism, such as the old man commonly sprinkled into his personal interviews, left Hitler unaffected. The meeting ended with a few admonishments and an “icy leave-taking.” In the hallway Hitler excitedly prophesied the overthrow of the President.

Hitler’s bitterness increased when he found himself outmaneuvered by the official communiqué. Hindenburg, it stated, had rejected Hitler’s demands “very firmly on the grounds that he could not reconcile with his conscience and his duties to the Fatherland transferring all administrative power exclusively to the National Socialist movement which intends to apply this power onesidedly.” There was also an expression of official regret that Hitler did not see fit to support, in keeping with his earlier promises, a nationalist government that enjoyed the President’s confidence. In the oblique style of officialese, this was nothing less than charging Hitler with breaking his word; and for Hitler the reproach conjured up figures of the past, Seisser and the hated Herr von Kahr. Only a few months later, however, such spasms of resentment were forgotten.

For the moment, however, the National Socialists threw their whole weight into embittered opposition. When on August 22 the five who had trampled the Communist to death at Potempa were condemned to death on the basis of the new law against political terrorism, the Nazis demonstrated wildly inside the courtroom. The SA leader in Silesia, Edmund Heines, stood up in court in full uniform and shouted threats of vengeance. And Hitler sent a telegram to the five assuring them that “in the face of this monstrous, bloodthirsty sentence” he remained linked to them in “boundless loyalty.” He promised that they would soon be released. Now he was throwing off the mask of respectable conduct that he had so carefully maintained for the past two years. Once more, as in wilder early days, he was expressing solidarity with murderers. Such recklessness revealed how badly disappointed he had been—although to some extent he was driven by the need to placate his followers. Once more the SA felt itself thwarted. It was by far the largest paramilitary organization in the country, was raring to fight, and despised the tail-coated von Papen. Toughs of this sort could not comprehend why Hitler would go on accepting humiliations when he could turn loose his loyal warriors and let them take over the streets for that bloody carnival they thought they were entitled to.

At any rate, Hitler was now deploying the SA in a more and more threatening manner. And on September 2, after ten days of disorders, Papen actually backed down and sacrificed the slender remnant of his prestige: he recommended to the President commuting the five men’s sentences to life imprisonment—from which they were released a few months later, hailed as glorious fighters. Yet in a speech that Hitler delivered on September 4 the rage and indignation of a man who felt he had been duped rang out:

Hitler’s fury over the snub from Hindenburg and Papen was so strong that he seemed for the first time tempted to abandon his course of legality and seize power by a bloody insurrection. The affront had not only meant a political setback; it had been a personal insult, a fresh reminder that he could not be part of respectable circles. More and more often the grim formula was uttered in demonstrations: “The hour of reckoning is coming!” He began negotiations with the Center with the aim of overthrowing the Papen government; and once during the discussions the wild proposal arose to form an alliance with the disappointed Left and force the deposing of Hindenburg by decree of the Reichstag; this would then be followed by a referendum. Then again, in the vengeful mood of those weeks, he painted for himself and his entourage the circumstances and the chances for a revolutionary seizure of the key government posts. Once again he dwelt on the bloodbath he would prepare for his Marxist opponents. In any case, the legal course he had been following for years corresponded only to the circumspect, instinctively dependent side of his nature; on the other side were his aggressiveness, his powerful imagination, and the conviction that historical greatness could not be achieved without bloodshed.

This dichotomy was on his mind when Hermann Rauschning, the Nazi President of the Danzig Senate, called upon him at Obersalzberg around this time. Rauschning was astonished at the petty bourgeois life style of the mighty tribune of the people, the cretonne curtains on the windows, the so-called peasant furniture, the chirping songbirds in the draped cage, and the society of stout elderly ladies. Hitler inveighed violently against Papen and called the nationalistic bourgeoisie “the real enemy of Germany.” He justified his protest against the Potempa sentences in grandiloquent abstract terms: “We must be cruel. We must recover the capacity to commit cruelties with a clear conscience. Only in this way can we expel our nation’s softheartedness and sentimental philistinism, this Gemütlichkeit and easygoing evening-beer mood. We have no more time for fine feelings. We must compel our nation to greatness if it is to fulfill its historic task.”

And while he was expatiating on the historical challenge he had seen and accepted, and was comparing himself to Bismarck, he abruptly asked whether there was a formal extradition treaty between the Free City of Danzig and the German Reich. When Rauschning indicated that he did not understand the question, Hitler explained that a situation might arise in which he would need a place of refuge.

Then again his mood swung to confidence. Papen’s frivolity, foolishness, and weakness, together with the President’s softness toward all nationalist elements, not to speak of the old general’s age (it made him laugh, Hitler publicly stated)—all these things gave him cause for hope. A few days after he had called the Potempa murderers “comrades” Hitler received a message from Hjalmar Schacht. It assured him of the writer’s “unalterable sympathy,” and expressed faith that sooner or later power would come to him, one way or another. Schacht advised him for the present not to allow himself to be identified with any specific economic program, and concluded: “Wherever my work may lead me in the near future—even if some day you should see me inside the fortress—you can count on me as your reliable helper.”

When an Associated Press correspondent asked Hitler at this time whether he might not after all march on Berlin, as Mussolini had marched on Rome, he answered ambiguously: “Why should I march on Berlin? I’m already there, you know.”⁴⁵

At the Goal

Obeying the rules of classical drama, the events of the autumn of 1932 took a turn which seemed to promise that the crisis might be overcome. The elements to which Nazism chiefly owed its rise began to be undermined. For one ironic moment the play seemed to reverse itself on every plane and to expose Hitler’s expectations of power as wildly exaggerated—before the scene suddenly collapsed.

Ever since August 13 Papen had obviously made up his mind to make no more concessions to Hitler. Why he took this hard line is something of a mystery, since his own explanations do not ring true. It may be that he belatedly caught on to the trickery of the Nazis, saw through their posture, which Goebbels later accurately described as “sham moderation,” and changed his attitude accordingly. He realized also that the National Socialist Party depended heavily on a constant series of successes. Its internal situation was so precarious that it could not long stand up to determined sternness. To be sure, the government had had to give in to Nazi pressure and commute the Potempa sentences. But in the end Hitler had been outmaneuvered; he had become nervous and betrayed himself by his telegram to the murderers. Shortly afterward he once more made a serious mistake.

Papen had convoked the Reichstag for its first working session on September 12. In his drive to take vengeance on Papen, Hitler lost sight of all other considerations. Göring had in the meantime been elected President of the Reichstag, and with his help Hitler dealt the Chancellor the severest defeat in German parliamentary history, a vote of no confidence carried by a vote of 512 to 42. Papen had already obtained an order of dissolution before the session; he carried it in the traditional red portfolio for everyone to see; but Göring deliberately ignored it until the no-confidence vote had been taken. Papen was thus given his comeuppance; but the result was that the newly elected legislature was dissolved after a session lasting approximately one hour. The new elections were set for November 6.

Unless all indications are wrong, Hitler originally wanted to avoid this turn of events, for it obviously ran counter to his interests. “Everyone is dumbfounded,” Goebbels noted. “Nobody thought it possible that we would have the courage to bring about this decision. We alone are rejoicing.” But this euphoric mood was soon over, giving way to a degree of depression the Nazi leaders had not known for years. Hitler himself was only too keenly aware that the impulse voters to whom the party owed its recent increments could not be depended on. He distinctly sensed that the debacle of August 13, the falling back into the opposition, the Potempa affair and the conflict with Hindenburg were spoiling the image of himself as the destined savior and unequaled leader. Once the trend to success was reversed, the party’s attraction was dispelled and it could plunge straight to the bottom.

Hitler had additional worries. After the expensive campaigns of the past year the movement’s funds were exhausted. Moreover, it seemed for the present to have reached the limits of its strength. “Our opponents,” Goebbels wrote in diary notes that grew increasingly gloomy, “are counting on our losing our nerve in this struggle and being worn out.” A month later he noted friction among the party’s followers, disputes over money and seats in the Reichstag, and observed that “the organization has of course become very nervous as a result of the many election campaigns. It is overworked like a company that has lain too long in the trenches.” He tried to look at the bright side: “Our chances are improving from day to day. Although the prospects are still fairly rotten, they at any rate cannot be compared with our hopeless prospects of a few weeks ago.”

Hitler alone seemed once again confident and free of moods, as always after he had made a decision. During the first half of October he set out on his fourth airplane campaign, and with his compulsion to magnify everything constantly, increased the number of his speeches and the miles flown. To Kurt Luedecke, who had accompanied him in the dramatic Mercedes motorcade, surrounded by heavily armed “men from Mars,” to the Reich Youth Day functions in Potsdam, he sketched ideas that were a curious mixture of hopes and reality—in which he appeared as Chancellor. Two days later, after an impressive propaganda show with 70,000 members of the Hitler Youth parading by for hours, Luedecke bade good-bye to Hitler at the railroad station. He found him sitting in the corner of his compartment exhausted, capable only of weary and feeble gestures.

Only the exaltation of struggle, the promise of power, the theater of public appearances, homages and collective deliriums kept him going. Three days later he appeared at a Munich meeting of Nazi leaders “in great form,” as Goebbels noted, and gave “a fabulous outline of the development and status of our struggle in the very long view. He is indeed the Great Man, above us all. He pulls the party to its feet again out of every despairing mood.” The difficulties the party was facing were in fact growing ever more hopeless. The shortage of money tended to paralyze all activity. With their attacks on Papen and his “Cabinet of Reaction,” the Nazis inevitably forfeited the sympathy of the wealthy members of the Nationalist opposition, whose contributions now flowed more sparsely than ever before. “Raising money is extraordinarily difficult. The gentlemen of ‘property and culture’ all stand with the government.”

The election campaign, too, was conducted chiefly against the “clique of the nobles,” the “bourgeois young bravos,” and the “corrupt Junker regime.” The party propaganda office issued a host of slogans to be spread by word of mouth and whose intent was to whip up “an outright mood of panic against Papen and his Cabinet.” Once again Gregor Strasser and his shrunken following had a period of great although deceptive hopes. “Against reaction!” was the official election slogan given out by Hitler. Nazi speakers passionately denounced the business-oriented economic policies of the administration. Nazi rowdies now took to breaking up nationalist meetings and organizing attacks on Stahlhelm leaders. To be sure, the NSDAP’s socialism remained without a program, as it had always been; it was formulated only in the figurative language of a prescientific mentality. Thus Nazi socialism was “the principle of achievement of the Prussian officer, of the incorruptible German civil servant, the walls, the town hall, the cathedral, the hospital of a Free City of the German Reich—all that.” It was also the “changeover from working class to labor” (“von der Arbeiterschaft zum Arbeitertum”). The very ambiguities of such language made it popular. “An honest living for honest work”—that had a more persuasive ring than any economic theory learned in the evening schools run by workmen’s circles. “If the distribution apparatus of today’s world economic system does not know how to properly distribute nature’s lavish productivity, this system is false and must be changed.” That corresponded to a basic popular feeling, and people did not think to ask what this change would consist of. Significantly, it was not the Communists but Gregor Strasser who was able to sum up the broad general dissatisfaction of the period in a phrase that instantly became part of the language. In one of his speeches he spoke of a mood that was passing through the public and was in itself a sign of a great turning point in history—this mood he described as “anticapitalist nostalgia.”

A few days before the election, as the campaign was approaching its end—it had been conducted at obvious excess pressure and with failing strength—the party had an opportunity to demonstrate the seriousness of its leftist slogans. At the beginning of November a strike broke out in Berlin among the transportation workers. It had been instigated by the Communists over the vote of the unions, and contrary to all expectations the Nazis actually supported the strikers. Together, the SA and the Red Front paralyzed public transportation for five days. They tore up streetcar tracks, formed picket lines, beat up scabs, and forcibly stopped the sketchily organized auxiliary transport. This unity of action has always been cited as evidence for the fatal community of leftist and rightist radicalism. But in fact the Nazis at this moment had scarcely any other choice, even though it meant alienating many of their bourgeois voters and finding that their financial contributions dried up almost completely. “The entire press is denouncing us,” Goebbels noted. “It calls our action Bolshevism; and yet we really could not do anything else. If we had withdrawn our support for this strike, which involves the most basic rights of the streetcar workers, our firm position among the working people would have been shaken. This way, with the election coming, we can once again show the public that our antireactionary course comes from the heart and is genuine. A great opportunity.” And a few days later, on November 5: “Last onslaught. Desperate drive of the party against defeat. At the last minute we manage to scare up another 10,000 marks which we blow on propaganda Saturday afternoon. We have done whatever could be done. Now fate must decide.”

Fate decided, for the first time since 1930, emphatically against the National Socialists’ claims to power. They lost 2 million votes and thirty-four Reichstag seats. The Social Democratic Party also lost a few seats, while the German Nationalists emerged from the election with eleven additional seats and the Communists with an increase of fourteen. On the whole it seemed as if the steady decline of the bourgeois Center parties, which had been going on for years, had at last come to a halt. It was significant that the NSDAP’s losses were evenly distributed throughout the country, and hence could not be considered regional setbacks. They’reflected a weariness with Nazi propaganda. Even in predominantly agricultural regions, such as Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony, or Pomerania, which in the preceding elections had contributed the strongest and most reliable support for the NSDAP and thus gave the party quite another cast from the urban petty bourgeois party it had been originally, the Nazis suffered considerable losses.⁴⁶ And although party leaders promised they would “sweat and fight until this disgrace is wiped out,” the wave continued to ebb in the local elections of the following week. The party’s march to victory seemed broken at last, and even though it could still be called a large party, it was no longer a myth. The question was precisely whether it could continue to exist as an ordinary party, or whether its survival depended on its being a myth.

Papen, in particular, was gratified by the outcome of the elections. Conscious of a great personal success, he turned to Hitler with the proposal that they put aside old quarrels and have another try at a union of all nationalistic forces. The Chancellor’s self-assured tone made Hitler only too aware of his own weakness; the Führer’s response was to stay away from Berlin and remain inaccessible for days on end. On the eve of the elections he had issued a call to the party disdaining all thought of a reconciliation with the government and calling for “adamant continuation of the struggle until this partly overt, partly camouflaged opponent is brought to his knees” and a stop put to the reactionary policies that were driving the country into the arms of Bolshevism. Papen had to dispatch a second official letter to him before, after a deliberate delay of several days, he sent a rejection which he cloaked once again in a series of unfulfillable demands. The Chancellor received similar cold answers from the other nationalist parties.

The government, then, had only two alternatives, neither of which was very popular: either to dissolve the Reichstag once more and thus obtain a political breathing spell, as risky as it was expensive, or else to take the open step against the Constitution that had long been contemplated. This would involve using presidential and military powers to ban the Nazi party, the Communist Party, and possibly other parties. Then the rights of the legislature would be drastically pruned, a new electoral law promulgated, and Hindenburg established as a kind of superauthority in the midst of representatives of the old ruling class whom he would appoint to the seats of power. The argument in Papen’s circles went that the parliamentary-democratic “rule of the minorities” had obviously failed. The new state they were planning would ensure the “rule of the best” and thus undercut such wild ideas about dictatorship as the Nazis were advocating. Papen hinted at some of these matters in a speech delivered on October 12. Many of the details remained nebulous and indeed were never worked out. But the concept as a whole had progressed far beyond the stage of mere theory. In his reactionary bluntness Hindenburg’s neighbor and confidant, old Oldenburg-Januschau, averred that he and his friends would shortly “brand the German people with a constitution that would make their senses reel.”⁴⁷

While Papen was still drawing up blueprints for the sort of state “which will not be pushed around as the plaything of political and social forces, but will stand unshakably above them,” he suddenly met with unexpected resistance on the part of Schleicher. The general had originally chosen Papen to serve as a willing and handy instrument for taming the Hitler party within the framework of a broad nationalist coalition. Instead, Papen had become involved in a futile personal dispute with Hitler. As he consolidated his position with Hindenburg, he had also shown less of that docility that would have made him useful to the publicity-shy general. “Well, what do you think of that?” Schleicher would occasionally remark sarcastically to a visitor. “Little Franz has discovered himself.” Unlike Papen, Schleicher took a serious view of the problems of a Depression-shaken industrial state. There was more to the question than the proposition that the government must be strong. He therefore had little patience with the Chancellor’s plans. Schleicher had no intention of letting the army be used to help put over this scheme. For it would mean virtual civil war, with the troops pitted against Nazis and Communists, who together were almost 18 million strong at the polls and had millions of militant followers at their disposal. But there was another factor in Schleicher’s change of front, and probably this was the decisive one. He had meanwhile discovered, or thought he had discovered, how at last to carry out his plan of taming and gradually wearing down the National Socialist Party. All that was needed was a different constellation.

With some mental reservations, therefore, Schleicher advised Papen to resign and let Hindenburg in person negotiate with the party leaders for a “Cabinet of National Concentration.” On November 17 Papen followed this recommendation, secretly hoping that the talks would fail and he would once more be summoned to the chancellorship. Two days later Hitler, cheered by a hastily assembled crowd, drove the few yards from the Hotel Kaiserhof to the presidential palace. But two talks with Hindenburg proved fruitless. Hitler obstinately demanded a presidential cabinet with special powers, whereas Hindenburg, directed by Papen in the background, would not hear of this. If the country were still to be governed by special decree, he saw no reason to dismiss Papen. Hitler, the President said, could become Chancellor only if he could put together a parliamentary majority, something the Nazi party leader was clearly in no position to do. Hindenburg’s state secretary, Meissner, summed up the matter in a letter dated November 24:

This was another and painful rebuff. “Once again the revolution is facing closed doors,” Goebbels angrily noted. Nevertheless, this time Hitler succeeded in hiding the defeat by adroit propaganda. In a detailed letter he analyzed with considerable acumen the inherent contradictions of Hindenburg’s offer, sketching for the first time the solution finally arrived at on January 30. What attracted particular attention at the presidential palace was his suggestion of a new approach to the process of forming a government. All that was needed was legislation which would free Hindenburg from involvement in the daily business of politics and thus relieve him of onorous responsibilities. This was a proposal whose importance to the further course of events can scarcely be overestimated. Certainly it did a great deal to persuade the President to assent to the claims of the man to whom, a short while back, he had at most been willing to concede the postal ministry.

Although Papen had counted on the negotiations coming to naught and himself returning to the Chancellor’s office, things turned out differently. For in the meantime Schleicher had got in touch with the Nazi party through Gregor Strasser and was exploring the possibilities of having the Nazis enter a cabinet under his own leadership. This was basically a maneuver and one typical of Schleicher: he reasoned that a generous offer of a share in the administration would produce an explosive conflict among the members of the Hitler party. The blasting powder lay ready to hand. Gregor Strasser had, in the face of recent setbacks, argued repeatedly that the party should adopt more conciliatory tactics. Göring and especially Goebbels had denounced all “halfway solutions” and insisted on demanding undivided power.

On the evening of December 1, Schleicher was summoned to the presidential palace along with Papen. Where did he stand? Hindenburg asked Papen. Papen outlined his plan for a constitutional reform involving a virtual coup d’état. Since the matter had been discussed openly for months, the request for the President’s consent was only a formality, but Schleicher broke in before Papen was finished. He called Papen’s plan both superfluous and dangerous, pointed out the danger of a civil war, and presented his own suggestion: prying the Strasser wing loose from the NSDAP and uniting all constructive forces from the Stahlhelm and the unions to the Social Democrats in a multipartisan cabinet under his own leadership.

But Hindenburg, scarcely troubling to examine the plan, waved this away. Schleicher persisted, pointing out that his plan would spare the President the unpleasantness of violating his oath of office. But by now the doddering old man could not bear to part with his favorite Chancellor, regardless of constitutional questions.

Schleicher, however, refused to accept defeat. When Papen, later in the evening, asked whether the Reichswehr would be ready to back his actions, Schleicher flatly refused to give any such assurances. To Papen that night, and at a cabinet meeting next day, he spoke of a study made by his ministry, based on a three-day war game. It concluded that the army was incapable of handling a joint uprising by the Nazis and the Communists. Such an emergency could no longer be ruled out, since the two parties had already joined forces during the Berlin transportation strike. In the event of a simultaneous general strike along with Polish attacks on the eastern border, the Reichswehr would be totally helpless. In addition, Schleicher expressed his doubts about employing the nonpartisan instrument of the army to put across a “restoration” such as Papen had in mind—the wild idea of a Chancellor supported by a vanishing minority.

Schleicher’s arguments made a strong impression on the cabinet. An indignant Papen went crying to the President that he had been betrayed, and even demanded that Schleicher be replaced by a new and more cooperative army minister. But at this point Hindenburg himself beat a retreat. Papen has described the emotional scene that followed:

Papen had been as quick to win the President’s heart as he had been “to throw away the last chances for a sensible solution to the political crisis.” But while he felt worsted, there was some comfort in the thought that his enemy could no longer operate discreetly in the wings but would have to expose himself to the public, while Papen could now assume the well-nigh omnipotent role Schleicher had enjoyed as confidant of the President. Papen might be leaving, but it was not yet a real good-bye. No less significant than his “spiritual harmony” with Hindenburg was the fact that even out of office Papen continued to occupy his official apartment—with the self-assurance of a person who regarded the state as his own property. Only a garden path separated this apartment from Hindenburg’s dwelling. It was like a joint household—which also included State Secretary Meissner and Oskar von Hindenburg. All four together looked spitefully on while the general played his cards, obstructed him when they could, and ultimately had the satisfaction of seeing Schleicher fail—at a high price.

Basically, the moment was favorable for Schleicher’s plans. For the crisis Hitler was facing had just reached its height, and the pressures upon him were greater than any he had previously known. The rank and file were seething with impatience and disappointed hopes. Moreover, the party seemed about to be crushed by its burden of debt. Creditors were growing restless—the printers of the party newspapers, the makers of uniforms, the suppliers of equipment, the landlords of business offices, and the innumerable holders of promissory notes. With flippant logic Hitler later admitted that at the time he had borrowed to the hilt because victory would make repayment easy and defeat would make it superfluous. On all the street corners storm troopers hung about, extending collection boxes to passers-by “like discharged soldiers whom the warlord has given, instead of a pension, a permit for begging.” “For the wicked Nazis!” they could cry ironically. Konrad Heiden has reported that many desperate SA subleaders were running to opposition parties and newspapers to betray alleged secrets for hard cash. There were other signs of decay. The motley crowd of opportunists that had gathered around the rising movement was gradually beginning to disperse. In the Landtag elections in Thuringia, formerly one of Hitler’s bastions, the NSDAP received its most stunning setback. Goebbels’s diary entry for December 6 notes: “The situation in the Reich is catastrophic. Since July 31 we have suffered almost 40 per cent losses in Thuringia.” Goebbels later admitted publicly that at that time he had sometimes wondered whether the movement would not perish after all. In the offices controlled by Gregor Strasser statements of resignation from the party piled up.

With the skepticism about the party’s future Hitler’s whole concept came into question. He had repeatedly rejected offers of partial power but had not managed to win total power. The investiture of Schleicher represented one more miscarriage of his policy. To be sure, his stand had its own impressive consistency. But we might ask, as one commentator did at the time, whether Hitler’s unyieldingness had not by now become stupidity. At any rate, a sizable band of his followers, headed by Strasser, Frick, and Feder, felt that the opportunity to come to “power” had been allowed to slip by. True, the Depression to which the party owed so much was far from over; the total number of the unemployed, including the “invisible” jobless, had been set at 8.75 million in October, 1932, and the country was heading into a new winter of misery with all its predictable demoralizing and radicalizing effects. But the experts claimed to see signs of a turning point. And in foreign policy also the long-delayed process of equalization was once more on its way. Hitler’s all-or-nothing slogan, as the Strasser group recognized, was fundamentally revolutionary in nature and therefore stood in contradiction to the tactics of legality. They were now afraid that Schleicher might once more dissolve the Reichstag and call an election. The party was neither financially nor psychologically able to cope with another campaign.

It can no longer be determined how large a following Strasser commanded and how ready it was to obey him against the Führer. One version has it that Hitler gave way and was on the point of permitting Strasser to enter the cabinet, since such a solution would preserve his own charismatic claim to all or nothing and would at the same time bring the party to power. According to this version, Göring and Goebbels pressed Hitler to return to his unyielding course. According to other informants, he kept to that course throughout. It is likewise uncertain whether Schleicher, in negotiations on the formation of his “cabinet of anticapitalist nostalgia,” offered Strasser the posts of Vice-Chancellor and Minister of Labor in return for a promise from Strasser to split the party. Nor is there real proof that Strasser had any thought of outmaneuvering Hitler. He may simply have acted with the self-assurance of the second man in the party, feeling entitled to take up negotiations on his own—perhaps just like Göring, who, according to still another version, proposed himself to Schleicher as Minister of Air Transport. Out of the welter of secret agreements, implied pledges, and presumptuous claims, scarcely a single reliable document has survived. What is thoroughly documented is the confusion of intrigues, the cabals, accusations, and embittered rivalries. This was the other face of the party based entirely on the Führer idea and the principle of loyalty. In the absence of any firm ideology or objective principles, every issue was decided on purely personal grounds. The leadership remained to the last a retinue of mutually feuding satellites around Hitler, with each against each at some time or other.

On December 5, after the costly election in Thuringia, the party leadership held a meeting in the Hotel Kaiserhof. There was a violent dispute, in the course of which Strasser, evidently already abandoned by Frick and vanquished by Hitler’s oratory, found himself forced into isolation. Two days later he confronted Hitler once more in the same place. This time he was accused of underhandedness and treachery. Possibly the temper of the meeting had already convinced Strasser of the hopelessness of his efforts. At any rate, in the midst of general furor, he picked up his things and silently left the room, bidding no one good-bye. In his hotel room he wrote Hitler a long letter reviewing their relations over many years. He deplored the influence of Goebbels and Göring upon the party, criticized Hitler’s lack of principle, and finally prophesied that he was heading toward “acts of violence and a German rubble heap.” He concluded by tendering his resignation from all the posts he held in the party.

The letter threw the party into a panic—all the more so since it contained no indications of what Strasser planned to do next. Strasser’s following, such men as Erich Koch, Kube, Kaufmann, Count Reventlow, Feder, Frick, and Stöhr, were obviously waiting for some sign from him. Hitler, too, seemed to have become nervous and prepared to smooth over the quarrel in a public discussion. The uneasiness increased when nobody could locate Strasser. “The Führer spends the evening at our house,” Goebbels noted. “Nobody is in a lively mood. We are all greatly depressed, mostly because of the danger of the whole party’s falling apart and all our work having been in vain. We are facing the decisive test.” Later, back in his hotel room, Hitler abruptly broke his silence to say: “If the party ever falls apart, it won’t take me more than three minutes to shoot myself.”

But the much-sought and much-feared Strasser, who for one historic moment seemed to hold the fate of the movement in his hands, spent the afternoon drinking beer with a friend and getting the whole thing off his chest in a torrent of words. He then took the train to Munich, where he picked up his family and continued on to Italy for a vacation. The followers he left behind were bewildered. They could not believe that he would totally abandon the field in this way. But Gregor Strasser had remained loyal too long to strike out on his own. The very next day, as soon as Strasser’s departure became known, Hitler set about smashing his apparatus. Instantaneously, with feverish sureness, he drew up a flock of decrees and appeals. Following the pattern he had used in the SA crisis, he himself took over Strasser’s post as national organization leader and appointed Robert Ley, who had already proved his blind loyalty years earlier in Hanover, as his chief of staff. He installed Rudolf Hess, who had been his private secretary, as chief of a political central secretariat, which was clearly meant to serve as a counterweight to the power hunger of other leaders. In addition, subdivisions that had formerly handled agriculture and education were converted into independent departments and assigned to Darre and Goebbels.

Hitler then called the functionaries and deputies of the NSDAP to a meeting in Hermann Göring’s office at the palace of the President of the Reichstag. Political histrionics were in order. Hitler declared that he had always been loyal to Strasser, but that Strasser had repeatedly broken faith and had brought the party, now so close to victory, to the brink of ruin. The story goes that Hitler dropped his head to the table, sobbing and playing out his despair. Goebbels at any rate thought the address had “so intense a personal note that one’s heart is altogether healed…. Old party comrades who have fought and worked for years unswervingly for the Movement have tears in their eyes from rage, grief and shame. The evening is an enormous success for the unity of the Movement.” Hitler insisted on the old Strasser adherents making an act of public submission. “All shake hands with him and promise… to continue the struggle and not to deviate from the great cause, whatever may happen, even at the cost of their lives. Strasser is now completely isolated. A dead man.”

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.⁵¹ 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.⁵²

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.”

As a result of his massive commitment, on January 15 Hitler won his first success since the July elections. Even so, the party, with 39.5 per cent of the vote, lagged behind the share of the vote it had won in July. Moreover, the democratic parties, in particular the Social Democratic Party, in toto achieved greater gains than Hitler’s party. But compared with the results of the November election, the results in Lippe were good. Instead of reading this success in terms of the excessive effort behind it, the public was persuaded that the Hitler movement had regained its irresistible impetus. Even the heads of the government took this view. And Hitler’s own self-confidence mounted.

On January 18 Hitler met with Franz von Papen in the Berlin apartment of Joachim von Ribbentrop, a liquor salesman who had recently joined Hitler’s movement. At this meeting Hitler demanded the chancellorship for himself. Papen replied that his influence with the President was not great enough for him to put across such a demand. That refusal nearly blocked the negotiations, and only the sudden inspiration of involving Hindenburg’s son started them moving again. The meeting took place a few days later, with extraordinary precautions to insure secrecy. Hitler and his team entered von Ribbentrop’s apartment under cover of darkness, from the garden side. Meanwhile, Oskar von Hindenburg and State Secretary Meissner first appeared ostentatiously at the opera. Shortly after the intermission they slipped out of their box. Papen, for his part, was brought to the meeting in Ribbentrop’s car.

As soon as everyone was present, Hitler asked the President’s son to step into another room with him. Suddenly, Oskar von Hindenburg, who had insisted on being accompanied by Meissner, found himself forced into a man-to-man encounter with Hitler. To this day no one knows what was said during their two-hour private talk. Hitler must have attempted to swing the President’s son over to his side by a combination of blackmail and bribery. Among the threats there might well be the charge, repeatedly raised by the Nazis, that Hindenburg had participated in a coup d’état against Prussia. Hitler may also have hinted that the Nazis would publicize the tax evasion by the Hindenburgs when Estate Neudeck was transferred to them.⁵⁴ In addition, Hitler’s magnetic personality must have made an impression upon the President’s opportunistic son. In any case, Oskar, who had come to the conference prejudiced against Hitler, remarked to Meissner on his way home that there was no alternative, that Hitler would have to become Chancellor—especially now that Papen had agreed to accept the Vice-Chancellorship.

At this moment Schleicher seems for the first time to have realized what was brewing. On January 23 he called on Hindenburg and admitted that his plan for splitting the Nazi party and providing a parliamentary basis for the cabinet had failed. He then asked the President for powers to dissolve the Reichstag, declare a state of emergency, and issue a general ban on the National Socialist and Communist parties. Hindenburg, however, reminded him of their disagreement of December 2. At that time Papen had proposed a similar solution, but Schleicher had scotched it. The situation had changed, the Chancellor replied. But this reasoning had no effect on the old man; after talking the matter over with Meissner, he denied Schleicher’s request.

As might be expected, the camarilla saw to it that the public was immediately informed of Schleicher’s wish to dissolve the Reichstag and rule by decree. There was a general outcry. The Nazis made a great fuss over “Primo de Schleicheros’ ” would-be coup d’état. The Communists, too, were understandably indignant. And the Chancellor lost the remnant of the prestige he had enjoyed among the democratic Center parties. This unanimous reaction made its impression on Hindenburg and may have made him look with greater favor on plans for a Hitler cabinet. On January 27, moreover, Göring called on Meissner at the presidential palace and asked him to inform the “revered Field Marshal” that Hitler, unlike Schleicher, had no intention of burdening the President’s conscience by violating the law but would practice strict and loyal adherence to the Constitution.

Meanwhile, the tireless Papen was pushing matters forward. His thought was to make the planned cabinet more acceptable to Hindenburg by securing participation of the German Nationalists and of the Stahlhelm leaders, who were close to the President’s heart. While Duesterberg vigorously disagreed that there was anything like the so-called compelling necessity for a Hitler cabinet, Seldte and Hugenberg fell in with Papen’s plans. Having learned nothing from the experiences of recent years, Hugenberg declared with self-assurance “that nothing much would be able to happen”; Hindenburg would be remaining President and commander in chief of the armed forces, Papen would be Vice-Chancellor, he himself would be taking charge of the entire economy, and Seldte of the Ministry of Labor. “We’ll be boxing Hitler in.”

Hindenburg himself, tired, confused, and capable of grasping the situation only for brief spells, was at this time evidently still thinking of a Papen cabinet with Hitler as Vice-Chancellor. On the morning of January 26 General von Hammerstein, army commander in chief, called on him to express his concern about the way things were going. Hindenburg was “quick to suppress any attempt to influence him politically, but then said, apparently to reassure me, that he ‘had no intention at all of making the Austrian lance corporal Defense Minister or Chancellor.’ ” But next day Papen called on the President and reported that a Papen cabinet was impossible at the moment. Now Hindenburg stood alone in his resolve not to have Hitler form a government.

The factors that made him change his mind in the course of the following day are almost too complicated to list. Among them were the schemings of the camarilla, the blackmail of the NSDAP, the pressure of his friends from among the large landowner and nationalist groups. The effect of all this counsel was that the name of Schleicher ceased to represent an alternative either to Hindenburg or anyone else. Another significant factor was Papen’s promise to the President that the new government would be made up exclusively of members of the Right. For the thing Hindenburg was most set against was what was summed up in his exhausted mind as “rule of the union functionaries.” The prospect of a rightist government had been one of the decisive elements in his dismissal of Brüning; now the same promise was being dangled before him if he would get rid of Schleicher.

The party leaders, whom Hindenburg once more consulted, also turned against General Schleicher. But they were not in favor of another try with Papen. Rather, they indicated, the time had come at last to summon Hitler to power, with all appropriate guarantees; let him be exposed to that chastening by responsibility, which they had all undergone. The republic had truly reached the end of its rope.

On the morning of January 28 Schleicher made one last attempt to regain control. He let the public know, through the press, that he would ask Hindenburg for powers to dissolve the Reichstag or offer his resignation. Toward noon he went to the presidential palace. At this time he himself clearly knew nothing about the imminence of Hitler’s chancellorship—a measure of his loss of grip. On the contrary, he seems to have counted to the last on Hindenburg’s support. He had assumed office with the President pledged to give him the power of dissolution of the Reichstag at any time. But the President tersely turned down his request. Stung to the quick, Schleicher is reported to have said angrily: “I concede your right, Mr. President, to be dissatisfied with the way I have conducted my office, although you assured me of the contrary four weeks ago in writing. I concede your right to depose me. But I do not concede you the right to make alliances with someone else behind the back of the Chancellor you yourself summoned to office. That is a breach of faith.” Hindenburg thought for a moment, then answered. He stood with one foot in the grave, he said, and did not know whether or not he might regret his decision in heaven. Schleicher is supposed to have shot back: “After this breach of confidence, Your Excellency, I would not be too sure that you will go to heaven.”⁵⁵

Schleicher had scarcely left when Papen, in conjunction with Oskar von Hindenburg and Meissner, began urging the President to appoint Hitler Chancellor. Still vacillating, Hindenburg made a last effort to evade responsibility for this decision. Contrary to custom, he did not personally request Hitler to form a new government, but appointed Papen his homo regius with the assignment “to clarify the political situation by negotiations with the parties and to determine the available possibilities.”

That afternoon Papen was able to win Hugenberg by promising his party two seats in the cabinet. He then got in touch with Hitler. In the elaborate preliminary talks they had already agreed that Hitler’s people should have the Ministry of the Interior and a Ministry for Civil Air Transport, to be newly created especially for Göring. Now Hitler insisted on the posts of Reich Commissioner for Prussia and Prussian Minister of the Interior. These would assure him control of the Prussian police. In addition, he demanded new elections.

Once more everything teetered. On hearing of Hitler’s further demands, Hindenburg had a fresh siege of foreboding. He calmed down only after he had received Hitler’s assurance—in highly equivocal words—“that these would be the last elections.” Finally the President let things take their course. With the exception of the post of Reich Commissioner for Prussia—which was reserved for Papen himself—all of Hitler’s demands were met. The decision had been taken.

On the afternoon of January 29 a rumor arose that Schleicher, together with General Hammerstein, had put the Potsdam garrison on alert and was planning to seize the President, proclaim a state of emergency, and with the aid of the army take power. Days later, Oskar von Hindenburg’s wife was still exercised over the matter: the plan had called for the President’s being removed to Neudeck “in a sealed cattle car.” Hitler, who was in Goebbels’s apartment on Reichskanzlerplatz when he heard the rumor, reacted with an audacious gesture: he instantly placed the Berlin SA on alert and, in a flamboyant anticipation of the power he expected to receive, ordered six nonexistent police battalions to prepare to occupy the Wilhelmstrasse.

The author of this rumor has never been traced, but the person who profited by it is obvious. None other than Papen used the phantom of a threatening military dictatorship to push forward his plans. General von Blomberg had been summoned from Geneva, and on the morning of January 30 Papen was sworn in as Minister of Defense, before any other members of the cabinet. Evidently this was to prevent any last-minute desperate intervention by Schleicher, who on his own had been making contact with Hitler. Hugenberg, who had obstinately rejected Hitler’s demand for new elections, felt blackmailed by the new threat of a military take-over. To avert any possibility that the mysterious reports of an imminent putsch might be clarified, Papen summoned Hugenberg at seven o’clock in the morning on January 30 to beg him—“in greatest excitement”—to change his mind. “Unless a new government has been formed by eleven o’clock this morning,” he exclaimed, “the army will march!” But Hugenberg would not be stampeded. More keenly than Papen, he saw through Hitler’s scheme. The Nazis wanted to improve on the election results of November 6. With the power and unlimited funds of the state at their disposal, they could unquestonably do so. No new elections, Hugenberg said.

Once again his stubbornness seemed to be imperiling the whole agreement. At fifteen minutes before ten o’clock Papen led the members of the projected government through the snow-covered ministerial gardens to the presidential palace and into Meissner’s office. There he formally greeted Hitler as the new Chancellor. Even as he expressed his thanks, Hitler declared that “now the German people must confirm the completed formation of the cabinet.” Hugenberg resolutely spoke up against this. A vehement argument broke out. Hitler finally went up to his antagonist and gave him his “solemn word of honor” that the new elections would change nothing in regard to the persons composing the cabinet. He would, he said, “never part with any of those present here.” Anxiously, Papen followed this up: “Herr Geheimrat, would you want to undermine the agreement reached with such difficulty? Surely you cannot doubt the solemn word of honor of a German!”

The cheerful notion of boxing Hitler in and taming him thus came to grief at the first test. In purely arithmetic terms, it is true, the conservatives had managed to retain the advantage. There were three National Socialist as against eight conservative ministers, and virtually all the key positions in the government were in the hands of a group of men united on certain basic social and ideological principles. The trouble was that such men as Papen, Neurath, Seldte or Schwerin-Krosigk were not the right persons to box anyone in. For that they would have needed a sense of values and the energy to defend it. Instead they considered themselves summoned merely to preserve traditional privileges. Hitler’s readiness to accept such a numerically unfavorable arrangement testifies to his self-assurance and his deadly contempt for his conservative adversaries.

Now his would-be tamers had drawn Hugenberg into a window niche and were pleading with him to co-operate. Hugenberg held out. In the adjoining room, meanwhile, the President sent for State Secretary Meissner and wanted to know the meaning of the delay. “Watch in hand,” Meissner returned to the disputants: “Gentlemen, the President set the swearing-in for eleven o’clock. It is eleven-fifteen. You cannot make the President wait any longer.” And what could not be accomplished by the arm twisting of Hugenberg’s conservative friends, by Hitler’s cajolery and by Papen’s pleas, was done easily—for the last time, at the hour of the republic’s last agony—by the allusion to the legendary figure of the Field Marshal-President. Hugenberg was in the habit of referring to himself, with candid pride, as “a stubborn mule”; as recently as August, 1932, he had told Hindenburg that he had found Hitler “somewhat remiss at keeping agreements.” Now, however, knowing full well what was at stake, he yielded to the exigencies of Hindenburg’s appointments calendar. A few minutes later the cabinet had been sworn in.

Papen seems actually to have thought that he had put across a political master stroke. He had avenged himself upon Schleicher while at the same time using Schleicher’s concept of taming the wicked Nazis. He had satisfied his own ambition, which had swollen to absurd proportions during his brief, unexpected chancellorship, by entering the government once more. And he had made Hitler take a position of responsibility without turning control of the government over to him completely. For the leader of the NSDAP was not even the Chancellor of a presidential cabinet; he would have to maintain a parliamentary majority. Moreover, he did not enjoy Hindenburg’s confidence; it was Franz von Papen who continued to have a special relationship with the old President. In the negotiations Papen had insisted—this was one of the results he was proudest of—that he must participate in all conversations between Hitler and the President. Finally, Papen was also Vice-Chancellor and Prime Minister of Prussia. In the cabinet the Nazis held only the Ministry of the Interior, which did not control the federal police, and a Ministry without Portfolio which was intended to satisfy Göring’s vanity but not to have any powers. To be sure, Göring was also Prussian Minister of the Interior, and in Prussia this ministry did control the police. But Papen was confident that he would block any independent action on Göring’s part. Finally, within the cabinet foreign policy, finance, economics, labor, and agriculture were in the hands of experienced conservatives, and command of the army still remained the prerogative of the President. Papen saw it as a brilliantly conceived, splendid combination, which, moreover, placed that troublesome Herr Hitler at the service of employers and big landowners and of Papen’s own plans for an authoritarian new state. His own unfortunate fling at the chancellorship seemed to have taught Papen that a modern industrial nation shaken by crisis could not be openly governed by the dismissed representatives of an outmoded epoch. By harnessing the slightly unsavory manipulator of the masses to his own wagon, Papen seemed to be solving the ancient problem of conservatism: that it did not enjoy the support of the people. In this sense, using the vocabulary of a political impresario, Papen complacently replied to all warnings: “No danger at all. We’ve hired him for our act.”

Hitler himself undoubtedly saw through this strategy from the start. His demand for new elections was intended as a direct counterstroke. By winning an unprecedented electoral triumph he wanted to break out of the box Papen had nailed together and with the sanction of the vote behind him throw off the role of puppet Chancellor. He certainly did not mean to let cheap words of honor stand in his way. Thus the “Cabinet of National Concentration” was already a system of crisscrossing mental reservations even before Hindenburg sent it out into the world with the words: “And now, gentlemen, forward with God!”

The Wilhelmstrasse had meanwhile filled with a silent crowd, assembled there by Goebbels. “Torn between doubt, hope, happiness and discouragement,” Hitler’s entourage waited in the Hotel Kaiserhof, across the square. Through binoculars Ernst Röhm nervously watched the entrance to the chancellery. Göring emerged first and called out the news to the people waiting. Immediately afterward, Hitler’s car came out of the driveway. Standing, Hitler received the plaudits of the crowd. When he joined his followers in the Kaiserhof a few minutes later, he had tears in his eyes, according to one of those present. Sometime before he had publicly vowed that once he possessed power he would never let it be taken from him. On the very afternoon of this January 30 he took a first step to guarantee this matter. Calling an immediate cabinet meeting, he had the cabinet formally decide—against the now impotent objections of Hugenberg—on the dissolution of the Reichstag and new elections. It was Papen himself who cleverly overcame Hindenburg’s last scruples by describing Hugenberg’s obstructionism as “a matter of party tactics,” which the President abhorred.

That evening the Nazis celebrated with a tremendous torchlight parade. All restrictions within the government quarter were lifted; spectators crowded the sidewalks, excited and noisy. “Tonight Berlin is in a really festive mood.”⁵⁶ And among the spectators, keeping order and intervening in self-important delight, was the huge corps of police deputies. From seven in the evening until after midnight, 25,000 uniformed Hitler followers, together with Stahlhelm units, marched through the Brandenburg Gate and past the chancellery. In one of the illuminated windows the nervous, prancing figure of Hitler could be seen. From time to time the upper part of his body, with raised arm, abruptly leaned forward over the railing. Beside him were Göring, Goebbels, and Hess. A few windows farther along the façade Hindenburg looked out reflectively at the marching formations, abstractedly pounding his cane in time to the music of the bands. Despite the protests of those in charge, Goebbels had insisted that the Reich radio stations broadcast an account of the demonstration. Only the Munich station stuck to its refusal, as Hitler irritably noted. It was past midnight before the last columns had marched through the government quarter. And as Goebbels dismissed the waiting crowd with a shout of Heil for Hindenburg and Hitler, “this night of the great miracle ended… in an insensate tumult of enthusiasm.”

The so-called Seizure of Power by the Nazis was soon being hailed as “miracle” and a “fairytale.” The regime’s propaganda specialists deliberately chose phrases from the realm of magic to give the event the aura of a supernatural consecration. They could count on striking an echoing chord, because the event itself undeniably had something peculiarly displaced, something scarcely credible about it. On the political plane Hitler had made the unexpected step from a crisis that had nearly destroyed the party into the President’s office; and on the individual plane he had taken the leap from dreary beginnings, from lethargy and a tramp’s existence, to power. In truth: “Elements of fairy tales are recognizable in it, though badly botched.”⁵⁷

The notion of a miracle, invented by Goebbels, has lived on to the present day. It colors all those analyses that postulate a demonic theory of Hitler, that try to view his success as the result of background intrigues by nameless powers, or make much of Papen and his machinations. The central thought, in all these theories, is that the seizure of power was a historical accident.

Undoubtedly Hitler’s way could have been blocked up to the very last moment. These opportunities were lost by chance, frivolity, and bad luck. Nevertheless, history was not diverted from its rightful course. A host of powerful trends, partly historical, partly political in nature, pointed toward what happened on January 30. The real miracle would have been a decision to resist Nazism. From the time Brüning was dismissed, all that stood between the republic and Hitler were the whims of a senescent President, Schleicher’s faculty for conniving, and the blinded simple-mindedness of Franz von Papen. Thus the background machinations, the schemings of various interest groups, and the high-level intrigues are relatively unimportant. All these influenced the circumstances in which the republic went aground but did not bring about the shipwreck itself.

This is by no means to assert that Hitler would have prevailed over more resolute opponents. Seldom in modern political history has a change of such enormous impact been more strongly determined by personal factors, by the caprices, prejudices, and emotions of a tiny minority. And seldom have the institutions of a state been so invisible at the moment of decision. Hitler in power is scarcely conceivable without the camarilla around the President. And however short a step separated him from power after the summer of 1932, that step was still beyond his own strength. His adversaries were the ones to make it possible: they had shorn the parties and the Reichstag of political power; they set up the series of election campaigns; they created the precedent of undermining the Constitution. Whenever one of them decided to resist the Nazis, another inevitably stood up to frustrate him. On the whole, the forces of the other side were up to the last greater than Hitler’s own. But since they turned against one another, they balanced one another out. It was not hard to see that Nazism was the enemy of all: the bourgeois, the Communists and Marxists, the Jews, the republicans. But these groups wert all so blind and weak that very few came to the natural conclusion: they must unite against their common foe.

In the apologias of participants, the argument still arises that Hitler’s summoning to the chancellorship had become inescapable once the NSDAP rose to the rank of strongest party in Germany. But this argument overlooks a vital fact: throughout all the years of the republic up to a few months before January 30, 1933, the Social Democratic Party held the same preponderance, yet did not take part in most of the cabinets. Also ignored is the fact that Hitler had always been the declared foe of the very Constitution in whose spirit such views are propounded. The Communists might have won far more votes than the Nazis, yet would have encountered massive resistance. The truth was that Hitler’s conservative backers thought he could be trusted to carry out their intentions—in a more vulgar manner than they liked, granted, but effectively. They realized too late that he was just as radically (though differently) opposed to them and the world they wanted to preserve as was the Communist leader Thälmann. The nameless Bavarian plain-clothes man who attended a demonstration of the NSDAP in the summer of 1921 and reported to his office that Hitler was “nothing but… the leader of a second Red Army” had grasped the essence of the man more keenly than the conservative notables of 1933.⁵⁸

Given all these favoring forces and circumstances, we may be tempted to ask what Hitler’s particular feat was during those weeks. The fact is that his real abilities scarcely show up very convincingly during the period just before January 30, 1933. His principal feat was a passive one: he was able to wait in spite of his impatience, was able to control his refractory following, keep his composure during a fiasco, and even at the last moment, in the President’s anteroom, play his cards with the icy poise of a great gambler who accepts all risks. A retrospective look at the years since the plebiscite on the Young Plan makes it plain to what extent he had outgrown the riot-and-propaganda phase of his career and had become a politician. At the same time, the experience of those weeks once again confirmed his gambler’s instinct. What was most amazing about his life, he declared during this period, was that he was always being saved when he himself had already given up.⁵⁹

That night, after the cheering was over, after the music and the thunder of marching feet had faded, Hitler stayed up until early morning in the small room adjacent to the Chancellor’s reception room. Deeply moved, he lost himself in one of his endless rambling monologues. He recalled the morning’s swearing-in ceremony, happily went over his triumphs, commented on the consternation of his “Red” adversaries, and reverted to one of his favorite topics: the art of propaganda. He had not looked forward to any election campaign as much as he did to this one, he declared. Some people thought there would be war, he then remarked. His chancellorship, he continued, was inaugurating the final struggle of the white man, the Aryan, for mastery of the earth. The non-Aryans, the colored races, the Mongols, were already striving to seize the mastery for themselves under Bolshevism, but this day marked the beginning of “the greatest Germanic racial revolution in world history.” His eschatological visions intersected with architectural projects: the first thing he would do, he said, would be to rebuild the chancellery; it was a “mere cigar box.”⁶⁰ It was close to dawn before he left the building through a small door in the rear wall and went across to his hotel.

The day had been an overwhelming one, full of satisfactions and vindications. But this was not yet his goal; it was only a stage along the way to it. Though we have no actual text of his protracted monologue of that night, it is clear that his mind was now dwelling on the revolution he had repeatedly proclaimed as imminent. Like every real revolutionary, he believed that with his coming a new day in history had begun.

Significantly, he framed this idea in negative terms. “We are the last who will be making history in Germany,” he declared at this time.

Interpolation II German Catastrophe or German Consistency?

The dramatic ceremonial with which Hitler took over the chancellorship, the accompaniment of torchlight parades and mass demonstrations, bore no relationship to the constitutional importance of the event. For, strictly speaking, January 30, 1933, brought nothing more than a change of administrations. Nevertheless, the public sensed that the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor could not be compared with the cabinet reshufflings of former years. Despite all the vaunted intentions of the German Nationalist coalition partners “to keep the frustrated Austrian painter on the leash,” the Nazis from the start made ready to seize full power and to apply it in revolutionary ways. All the efforts of Papen and his fellows to play a part in the oratory, the celebrating, or the directing of affairs only gave the impression of breathless running to keep up. Numerical superiority in the cabinet, influence with the President, or in the economy, the army, and the bureaucracy could not conceal the fact that this was their rival’s hour.

After January 30 a mass desertion to the Nazi camp began. Once again the axiom was proved that in revolutionary times principles are cheap, and perfidy, calculation, and fear reign supreme. This was true, but not the whole truth. For the massive political turncoatism bespoke not only lack of character and servility. Quite often it represented the spontaneous desire to give up old prejudices, ideologies, and social restrictions and to join with others in making a fresh start. “We were not all opportunists,” wrote the poet Gottfried Benn in retrospect, speaking as one of that vast host of people who were carried along by the force of the spreading revolutionary mood.¹ Powerful traditional parties and associations cracked under the propagandist^ onslaught; and even before they were forcibly dissolved and banned they left a leaderless following to its own devices. The past—republic, divisiveness, impotence—was over and done with. A rapidly shrinking minority did not succumb to the frenzy. But such holdouts were driven into isolation; they saw themselves excluded from those celebrations of the new sense of community, from those who could reveal in mass oaths in cathedrals of light, in addresses by the Führer, in mountaintop bonfires and choral singing by hundreds of thousands of voices. Even the first signs of the reign of terror could not mute the rejoicing. The public mind interpreted the terror as an expression of a ruthlessly operating energy for which it had looked all too long in vain.

These concomitants of enthusiasm are what have given Hitler’s seizure of power its distressing note. For they undermine all the arguments for its having been a historical accident, the product of intrigues or dark conspiracies. Any attempt to explain the events of those years has always had to face the question of how Nazism could so rapidly and effortlessly have conquered the majority, not just attained power, in an ancient and experienced civilized nation. And how could it have thrown that majority into a peculiarly hysterical state compounded of enthusiasm, credulity, and devotion? How could the political, social, and moral checks and balances, which a country belonging to the “nobility of nations”² after all possesses, have so glaringly failed? Before Hitler came to power, an observer described what he considered the inevitable course of events: “Dictatorship, abolition of the parliament, crushing of all intellectual liberties, inflation, terror, civil war; for the opposition could not simply be made to disappear. A general strike would be called. The unions would provide a core for the bitterest kind of resistance; they would be joined by the Reichsbanner and by all those concerned about the future. And if Hitler won over even the Army and met the opposition with cannon—he would find millions of resolute antagonists.”³ But there were no millions of resolute antagonists and consequently no need for a bloody coup. On the other hand, Hitler did not come like a thief in the night. With his histrionic verbosity he revealed, more perhaps than any other politician, what he had been aiming for through all the byways and tactical maneuvers: dictatorship, anti-Semitism, conquest of living space.

Understandably enough, the euphoria of those weeks gave many observers the impression that Germany had rediscovered her true self. Although the Constitution and the rules of the political game as played in the republic remained valid for the time being, they nevertheless seemed curiously obsolete, cast off like an alien shell. And for decades this image—of a nation that seemed to have found itself in exuberantly turning away from the European tradition of rationality and humane progress—determined the interpretation of events.

The first attempts at tracing the success of Nazism to a special mentality rooted in German history thus began early in the thirties. The German was pictured as perplexing, full of antitheses, making a principle of his aloofness from civilization and civil conduct. He seemed to take a truculent pride in being the representative of a culturally advanced nation that could so offensively scandalize the world. Reckless pedigrees were constructed extending through Bismarck and Frederick the Great all the way back to Luther or into the Middle Ages, sometimes even as far back as the Teutonic leader Arminius who at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest A.D. 9 defended German living space from Roman penetration. Such “ancestry” was supposed to prove a tradition of latent Hitlerism long before Hitler. This theory was best expressed in a number of books by the French specialist in Germanic studies, Edmond Vermeil. For a time, subsequently, it dominated British and American efforts at interpretation; William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which has to a large degree formed the world’s picture of Germany, made use of it. Vermeil wrote:

The usurpation of the Roman Empire, the Hanseatic League, the Reformation, German mysticism, the rise of Prussia, romanticism—all these were more or less disguised manifestations of this missionary urge. And the sense of mission began to take a more overt turn with Bismarck’s blood-and-iron policies and the German Empire’s determination to achieve the status of a global power. Seen from this angle, nothing in German history was “innocent.” Even in its most idyllic moments, the specters of obedience, militarism, and expansionism were palpably present. The German yearning for the infinite could be seen as an endeavor to exert in the realm of the mind a dominion that Germany still had not the power to achieve in reality. Ultimately everything terminated in Hitler; he was by no means a “German catastrophe,” as the title of a well-known book⁵ asserted, but a product of German consistency.

Without doubt there were unmistakably German features in National Socialism; but they are of a different and more complex kind than those set forth by Vermeil or Shirer. No genealogy of evil, no single explanation, can do justice to the nature of the phenomenon. Nor should we see its seeds only in the obviously dark and ominous elements in the German past. Many naïve attitudes, or at any rate attitudes that for generations caused no trouble, and even some virtues and commendable values, made the success of Nazism possible. One of the lessons the era has to teach us is that a totalitarian power system need not be built up. upon a nation’s deviant or even criminal tendencies. A nation cannot decide, like a Richard III, to become a villain. Historical, psychological, and even social conditions comparable to those in Germany existed in many countries, and frequently only a fine line separated other nations from Fascist rule. The Germans were not the only people to arrive late at the sense of nationhood, or to be behindhand at developing democratic institutions. As for the unbridgeable gulfs between liberal and socialist forces, between the bourgeoisie and the working class, these, too, were not peculiarly German. We may also question whether revanchist yearnings, bellicose ideologies, or dreams of great power status were more pronounced in Germany than in some of her European neighbors. And even anti-Semitism, decisively though it governed Hitler’s thinking, was surely not a specifically German phenomenon. In fact, it was rather weaker among the Germans than in most other peoples. Racial emotions did not, at any rate, win the masses over to National Socialism or kindle their enthusiasm. Hitler himself was cognizant of this, as his efforts to play down his anti-Semitism during the final phase of his struggle for power plainly showed.⁶

During the same era many Fascist or Fascist-oriented movements came to power—in Italy, Turkey, Poland, Austria, and Spain, for example. What was peculiarly German about National Socialism emerges most clearly by comparison with the systems in these other countries: it was the most radical, the most absolute manifestation of Fascism.

This fundamental rigor, which came out on the intellectual as well as the administrative plane, was Hitler’s personal contribution to the nature of National Socialism. In his way of sharply opposing an idea to reality, of elevating what ought to be above what is, he was truly German. The failed local politician, subletting a room on Thierschstrasse, sketched triumphal arches and domed halls that were to assure his posthumous fame. Ignoring mockery, the Chancellor did not reckon in generations, but in millennia; he wanted to undo not merely the Treaty of Versailles and Germany’s impotence but nothing less than the consequences of the great migrations. Whereas Mussolini’s ambition aimed at restoring a lost historical grandeur, whereas Maurras called for a return to the ancien regime and the “gloire de la Deesse France,” whereas all the other Fascisms could do no better than invoke a past golden age, Hitler set himself a goal more grandiose than anything the world had ever seen: an empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals and from Narvik to Suez. His pure master race seeking its rightful place would fight for and win this empire. Would other countries oppose him? He would crush them. Were peoples located contrary to his plans? He would resettle them. Did the races fail to correspond to his image? He would select, breed, eliminate until the reality fitted his conception. He was always thinking the unthinkable; in his statements an element of bitter refusal to submit to reality invariably emerged. His personality was not without manic characteristics. “I confront everything with a tremendous, ice-cold lack of bias,” he declared. He seemed authentically himself only when he spoke and acted with the utmost radicality. To that extent, National Socialism cannot be conceived apart from Hitler.

Among the things that set Nazism apart from the Fascist movements of other countries is the fact that Hitler always found obedient instruments to carry out his eccentric radicalism. No stirrings of pity mitigated the concentrated and punctilious harshness of the regime. Its barbarous features have often been ascribed to the deliberate application of cruelty by murderers and sadists, and such criminal elements continue to loom large in the popular mind. To this day types of this sort appear in literary works, whip in hand, as the personifications of Nazism. But the regime had quite another picture of itself. No question about its making use of such people, especially in the initial phase; but it quickly realized that lasting rule cannot be founded upon the unleashing of criminal instincts. The radicality that constituted the true nature of National Socialism does not really spring from the license it offered to instinctual gratification. The problem was not one of criminal impulses but of a perverted moral energy.

Those to whom Nazism chiefly appealed were people with a strong but directionless craving for morality. In the SS, National Socialism trained this type and organized it into an elite corps. The “inner values” that were perpetually being preached within this secular monastic order—the theme of many an evening meeting complete with romantic torchlight—included, according to the prescript of Heinrich Himmler, the following virtues: loyalty, honesty, obedience, hardness, decency, poverty, and bravery. But all these virtues were detached from any comprehensive frame of reference and directed entirely toward the purposes of the regime. Under the command of such imperatives a type of person was trained who demanded “cold, in fact, stony attitudes” of himself, as one of them wrote, and had “ceased to have human feelings.”⁷ Out of his harshness toward himself he derived the justification for harshness toward others. The ability to walk over dead bodies was literally demanded of him; and before that could be developed, his own self had to be deadened. It is this impassive, mechanical quality that strikes the observer as far more extreme than sheer brutality. For the killer who acts out of an overpowering social, intellectual, or human resentment exerts a claim, however small, upon our sympathy.

The moral imperative was supplemented and crowned by the idea of a special mission: the sense of taking part in an apocalyptic confrontation, of obeying a “higher law,” of being the agent of an ideal. Images and slogans alike were made to seem like metaphysical commandments, and a special consecration was conferred upon relentlessness. That is how Hitler meant it when he denounced those who cast doubt on his mission as “enemies of the people.” This fanaticism, this fixation upon his own deeper insight and his own loftier missionary aims, reflected the traditional German false relationship to politics, and beyond that the nation’s peculiarly distorted relationship to reality in general. The real world in which ideas take form and are experienced by people, in which thoughts can be translated into despairs, anxieties, hatreds, and terrors, simply did not exist. All that existed was the program, and the process of putting it across, as Hitler occasionally remarked, involved either positive or negative activity. The lack of humanitarian imagination (which comes to the fore whenever Nazi criminals are brought to trial, from the Nuremberg Trials on) was nothing but the expression of this loss of a sense of reality. That was the characteristically German element in National Socialism, and there is reason to believe that various connecting lines run far back into German history.

According to a paradoxical epigram, the most significant event in modern German history was “the revolution that did not take place.”⁸ Often this incapacity for revolution has been seen as the expression of a particularly submissive character. For a long time the type of good-natured, dreamy, unwarlike German served as a kind of laughingstock for more self-assured neighbors. But in reality the profound suspicion of revolution was only the reaction of a nation whose historical experiences were largely dominated by the sense of being menaced. Due to her central position geographically Germany early developed defensive and encirclement complexes. These seemed to be all too justified by the horrible, never to be forgotten experiences of the Thirty Years’ War, when the country was transformed into an underpopulated wasteland. The most momentous legacy of that war was the traumatic feeling of helplessness and a deep-seated dread of all chaotic conditions. This feeling was perpetuated and used to good advantage by Germany’s rulers for generations. Keeping the peace was regarded as a citizen’s foremost duty; but peace and order in turn became the citizen’s foremost demand upon his government. The role of the authorities was to keep out fear and misery; the Protestant view of governmental authority accorded well with this.

The tendency of the Enlightenment throughout Europe was to challenge existing authorities. But the spokesmen of the Enlightenment in Germany refrained from criticizing the government of princes; some even lauded it—so ingrained were the terrors of the past. The German mind accords unusual respect to the categories of order, discipline, and self-restraint. Idolization of the state as court of last resort and bulwark against evil, and even faith in a leader, have their origin in such historical experiences. Hitler was able to play on such attitudes and use them to further his plans for dominion. Thus he created the cult of obedience to the Führer or staged those militarylike demonstrations whose precise geometry offered protection against the chaos so feared by all and sundry.

The epigram about the German revolution that did not take place contains only half the truth. For the nation whose past is devoid of beheaded kings or victorious popular risings has contributed more than any other to the revolutionary mobilization of the world. It supplied the most provocative insights, the most trenchant revolutionary slogans, for the so-called Age of Revolutions. It heaved up rocky masses of ideas, out of which future ages built their houses. In intellectual radicalism Germany has had no match; and this, too, is part of a heritage that has conferred greatness and a characteristic bravura upon the better minds in Germany. But this again had little to do with the ability to assume pragmatic attitudes in which thought and life became reconciled and reason turned rational. The German mind had small concern with that; it was asocial in the literal sense of the word and thus basically oriented neither to the right nor the left but, rather, chiefly to the celebrated antithesis to life: uncompromising, always taking the “I can do no other” position, revealing a nearly apocalyptic “tendency toward the intellectual abyss.”

The process of alienation from reality was intensified by the many dis-illusionments the bourgeois mind experienced in the course of its efforts to achieve political emancipation during the nineteenth century. The traces of this process can be seen on almost every plane: in the unreal character of political thought; in the mythologizing of history by Winckelmann and Wagner; and in the German adulation of culture. The superior man was supposed to live in the phantom realm of art and the sublime. The realm of politics was situated off to one side, and finer spirits would not venture there.

The social type in whom these tendencies became concentrated has enjoyed the highest prestige to this day. We recognize him, for his professorial face conforms to those old portraits of withdrawn, thoughtful men, whose features are imprinted with high-minded austerity and adherence to principle, though there could be some strange strains within their depths. They thought in sweeping terms, toppled or erected systems; they gazed toward remote horizons. At the same time, they were surrounded by an atmosphere of intimacy and cozy domesticity and led what would seem happy private lives. Books and dreams, as Paul de Lagarde has remarked, were their element. Their imaginations made up for their distance from reality. They had a good opinion of themselves, feeling themselves ennobled by their intellectual occupation, and were on the whole content with civilization and their own contribution to it.

Contempt for reality corresponded to an increasingly overt belittling of politics. Politics was reality in the bluntest, most obtrusive sense: the “rule of the inferior,” as the title of a celebrated book of the twenties put it.⁹ Aside from a thin minority that was forever being forced into isolation, the public in Germany did not know what to make of politics. The German world was oriented toward private concepts, aims, virtues. No social goals could match the rewards of the private world: family happiness, the emotions aroused by nature, the quiet passions of the study. Joys such as these made a whole world of intelligible satisfactions, and no one was going to abandon them, exchanging the mystery of the forest for the “din of the market place” and the freedom of dreams for constitutional rights.

This feeling also was driven to an extreme. “A political person is repulsive,” Richard Wagner wrote to Franz Liszt. One of his admirers has remarked: “If Wagner was in any way an expression of his nation, if there was anything in which he was German, humanistically German and bourgeois German in the highest and purest sense of those words, he was so in his hatred for politics.”¹⁰ The antipolitical bias tended to be dressed up as defense of morality against power, of humanity against socialistic trends, of the intellect against public life. From these pairs of opposites, constantly elaborated by new profundities and polemical ponderings, the favorite themes of bourgeois self-examination developed. The supremely brilliant expression of the general attitude, in the form of a complex confession and profession of faith, was Thomas Mann’s Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (“Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man”), published in 1918. It was intended as a brief on the part of culture-proud Germany against the “enlightened,” Western “terrorism of politics.”

This attitude was also evident in the way the Germans responded when war and the postwar era confronted them squarely with politics. They reacted to the “dirty” revolution with passionate disdain and made a scramble for the traditional escape route that led into aesthetic or mythological realms. In their inability to make any sense of political facts, they spawned all the conspiracy theories that thickened the air during the Weimar years: the myth of the stab in the back, for example, or the theory of the dual menace by a Red (Communist) and a golden (capitalist) International. Anti-Semitism and the widespread anxiety complexes about Freemasons and Jesuits also sprang from the same source. In short, the Germans’ abhorrence of politics drove them into an imaginary world full of the romantic concepts of treason, loneliness, and deceived greatness.

What political thought there was was also marked by nonpolitical images. Ideologies were constructed out of “the war experience” and out of such notions as “young nations,” “total mobilization” or “barbaric Caesarism.” The vast flood of nationalistic and utopian schemes and catchword philosophies of the so-called Conservative Revolution aimed at dressing up the world in the costume of irrationalism. These ideologies pitted their radical slogans against the toilsome compromises of political reality. They passed judgment on everyday life in the name of grandiose myths. It is true that they exerted little direct influence. But by presenting confusing romantic alternatives they contributed to the process of intellectually starving out the republic. This was all the easier because reality had become so hateful that “disgust with politics” could be aroused far more effectively than ever before. While the advocates of Weimar often seemed like apologists for a corrupt system, the attackers of the Right seemed imaginative, overflowing with projects, as they constructed out of mythology, sentimentality, and concentrated bitterness an anti-image to the republic. Among their most contemptuous slurs aimed at the “system” was that it had nothing to offer to the nation but “domestic bliss,” consumption, and petty bourgeois epicureanism. Adventure, tragedy, doom—such words fascinated the age. Among Germany’s intellectuals, Carl von Ossietzky found many “altruistic lovers of every catastrophe, gourmets of world-political misfortunes.” Meanwhile, a French observer at the beginning of the thirties wondered whether Germany’s “present crisis is not too passionately and violently felt.”¹¹ In fact, it was this tendency toward melodrama that gave the crisis its hopeless, desperate cast. This in turn made the craving to escape from reality a mass phenomenon and the idea of a heroic leap into the unknown the most familiar of all thoughts.

The phenomenon of Hitler must be seen against this ideological milieu. Sometimes he actually seems the artificial product of these attitudes and complexes: he illustrates so neatly the combination of mythological and rational thinking, the extreme radicality of the socially alienated intellectual. His speeches contain the stock in trade of antipolitical bias as he pours out his hatred for parties, for the compromises of the “system,” for the republic’s lack of “grandeur.” To him politics was a concept closely related to fate, incapable of producing anything of its own accord, needing to be liberated by the strong man, by art, or by a higher power called “Providence.” In one of the key speeches he made during the course of the seizure of power—the speech of March 21, that famous “day” of Potsdam—he dealt with the very question of the relationship between political impotence, surrogate reveries and redemption by art as follows:

Once he had given up his dream of being an artist, he came to regard himself as the savior the nation awaited. He considered politics principally as a means to achieve greatness, allowing him to compensate for his inadequate artistic talent by entering upon another grandiloquent role. For all his bathos about art, “the humanities” left him indifferent. The documents that reveal him at his most spontaneous, his early speeches and the table talk at the Fuhrer’s headquarters, are convincing evidence of this. Probably few tributes gratified him so much as the remark of Houston Stewart Chamberlain in a letter of October, 1923, hailing him as “the opposite of a politician.” Chamberlain had added: “The ideal of politics would be to have none; but this non-politics would have to be frankly acknowledged and imposed upon the world.” In this sense Hitler actually had no politics; what he had, rather, was a large, portentous idea of destiny and the world. And with manic persistence he made it the goal of his life to attain that ideal.

Walter Benjamin called Fascism the “aestheticizing of politics.” The German conception of politics had always been infected with aesthetics, and Nazism gave a central place to this quality. One of the reasons for the Weimar Republic’s failure was that its representatives did not understand the German psychology and thought of politics solely as politics. It remained for Hitler to endow public affairs with the necessary eclat. This he did by his endless obfuscations, his theatrical scenarios, the storms of ecstasy and idolization. Those vaults created by massed searchlight beams were the fitting symbol for it all: walls of magic and light erected against the dark menace of the outside world. And if the Germans did not share Hitler’s hunger for space, his anti-Semitism, his vulgar and brutal qualities, they applauded him and followed him because he had once more restored passion to politics, and overlaid it with a note of dire significance.

In keeping with the theory of the unpolitical “aesthetic state,” Hitler regarded his artistic and political ideas as a unity and was fond of repeating that his regime had at last reconciled art and politics. He considered himself a ruler in the mold of Pericles and was wont to draw parallels; Albert Speer recalls that he regarded the Autobahnen as his Parthenon.¹³ He declared quite seriously that neither Heinrich Himmler nor Rudolf Hess could succeed him because they were “totally unartistic,” whereas Speer rose so high and was for a while actually the intended successor to the Führer chiefly because he ranked in Hitler’s mind as an “artistic person,” an “artist,” a “genius.” Characteristically, at the beginning of the war, Hitler exempted the artists from military service, but not the scientists and technicians. Even when being shown new weapons, he seldom overlooked the aesthetic form. He was capable, for example, of praising the “elegance” of the barrel on an artillery piece. There was absolutely nothing that mattered outside of art, he would say; even as a general, only an artistic person could be successful. After the victory over France he preferred to enter Paris not as a conqueror but as a sort of museum visitor. His early yearnings for retirement, which later on he expressed with increasing urgency, also sprang from this basic attitude. “I became a politician against my will,” he remarked repeatedly. “For me politics is only a means to an end. There are people who think that I would find it hard someday to be no longer active as I am now. Not at all! It will be the best day of my life when I drop out of political life and leave all the worries, the troubles and the vexation behind me…. Wars come and go. What remains are the values of culture alone.” Hans Frank regarded such sentiments as expressing the tendency of the age: “To be able to banish everything that is connected with governments, war, politics, etc., and to subordinate these to the high ideal of cultural activity.” In this context it is significant that the top Nazi leadership consisted of a disproportionately large number of inchoate, frustrated, or failed semiartists. Aside from Hitler, Dietrich Eckart is a case in point. Goebbels had tried his hand as a novelist. Rosenberg had started out as an architect, von Schirach and Hans Frank as poets. Funk dabbled in music. Speer, too, in his determinedly individualistic and nonpolitical stance, may be counted among them. The same is true for that type of intellectual whose aestheticizing pronunciamentos, at once vague and unqualified, accompanied and furthered the rise of National Socialism.

Hitler’s private style also exemplified the lack of grip upon reality characteristic of socially alienated intellectuals. Many of his contemporaries noted his tendency to take off, in conversation, into “higher regions,” from which he had constantly to be “pulled down to the solid ground of facts,” as one of them wrote. Significantly, Hitler gave himself to his fantasies particularly when he was at home at Obersalzberg, or in the Eagle’s Nest, which he had built on the Kehlstein above the Berghof, at an altitude of more than 6,000 feet. Here, in thinner air, against the backdrop of the mountains, he thought over his projects; here, he repeatedly said, he had come to all major decisions. But the fantasies of a vast empire extending to the Urals, the wild geopolitical schemes for partitioning the world, the visions of mass slaughter of whole peoples and races, the superman dreams and phantasmagorias of blood purity and Holy Grail, and finally the elaborate diagrams of runways, military installations, and fortified villages conceived on a continental scale—all this in substance can hardly be called “German.” What was German about it was only the intellectual consistency with which he constructed these mental systems. What was German also was the merciless rigor, the shrinking from no logical conclusion. Certainly Hitler’s harshness stemmed from a monstrous character structure, while his radicality always had something of the brutality of the gutter. But over and beyond that, this radicality may be attributed to the apolitical attitude, the hostility toward reality, which belongs to the intellectual tradition of the country.

On the other hand, what distinguished him from all his ilk was his capacity for political action. He was the exception, the intellectual with a practical understanding of power. More radical postulates than his can easily be found in the texts of his forerunners. Both Germans and other Europeans came out with even stronger anathemas against the present, showed an even stronger aestheticizing contempt for reality. The Futurist Filippo Marinetti, for example, proclaimed redemption from “infamous reality,” and in a 1920 manifesto demanded “all power to the artists.” But these and similar pronouncements were merely the bombast of intellectuals who were all too conscious of their impotence. What made Hitler the exception once again was his readiness to take his intellectual fictions literally.

It is certainly true that he did not take the Germans by surprise, as the tyrant Pisistratus did the Athenians while they were at table. Like the rest of the world, the Germans could have been warned, since Hitler always set forth his intentions. He had scarcely any intellectual reserve. But the traditional divorce of conceptual from social reality had long ago persuaded Germany that words were cheap, and none seemed less expensive than his. That is the only way to explain the great misjudgment of him, which was also a misjudgment of the times. Rudolf Breitscheid, chairman of the Social Democratic Party faction in the Reichstag, clapped his hands with pleasure when he heard the news of Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor. Now at last the man would ruin himself, he said. Breitscheid ultimately died in the Buchenwald concentration camp. Other parliamentarians added up the votes to prove that Hitler would never be able to achieve the two-thirds majority necessary to alter the Constitution. Julius Leber, another leading Social Democrat, remarked sardonically that he was waiting like everybody else in the hope of at last “finding out the intellectual foundations of this movement.”¹⁴

No one seemed to grasp who Hitler really was. The expected sanctions from abroad were never imposed. Instead, foreign governments, with that same combination of blindness, weakness, and hopes of “taming” the wild man that afflicted Germany prepared for the agreements and pacts of the coming years. There were only a few isolated expressions of forebodings, even these mingled with an odd fascination. A German observer in Paris noted among Frenchmen “a feeling as if a volcano has opened up in their immediate vicinity, the eruption of which may devastate their fields and cities any day. Consequently they are watching its slightest stirrings with astonishment and dread. A natural phenomenon which they confront almost helplessly. Today Germany is again the great international star that appears in every newspaper, in every cinema, fascinating the masses with a mixture of fear, incomprehension, and reluctant admiration, to which a goodly dash of delighted malice has been added. Germany is the great, tragic, uncanny, dangerous adventurer.”¹⁵

Scarcely one of the ideas under whose aegis the country began this adventure belonged to it alone. But the inhuman earnestness with which it embarked on its flight from reality was authentically German. The tendencies and biases described above, reinforced by the exacerbated tension between a revolutionary idea formulated a century ago and the immobility of social conditions, gave this emergence extraordinary force, the fury of a belated reaction. The German thunder had reached its goal at last.

But the rejection of reality in the name of radically idealized concepts cannot be suppressed, linked as it is to the spontaneity of the imagination and the risk-taking of thinking. That this involves hazards in the political sphere is undeniable. In the final analysis, however, the German mind owes a good deal of its glory to this tendency, and, despite what many think, not all its issues necessarily lead to Auschwitz.