Hitler (68 page)

 

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:

 

In a voice that sounded almost tormented... he turned to me: “My dear Papen, you will think me a scoundrel for changing my mind now. But I am now too old to accept the responsibility for a civil war. All we can do is to let Herr von Schleicher try his luck.”

Two large tears rolled down his cheeks as this tall, strong man extended his hands to me in parting. Our collaboration was at an end. The degree of spiritual harmony between us... may perhaps be seen from the inscription the Field Marshal wrote under the photograph of himself which he gave me a few hours later as a farewell gift:
Ich hatt' einen Kameraden!
⁴⁹

 

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.”