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Hindenburg had long been pondering how to remove the SPD from power and subordinate Germany’s political parties to an authoritarian rule by the presidency.7 That was the brief handed to Heinrich Brüning, the chairman of the Centre Party, who was appointed Germany’s new chancellor. He governed without a parliamentary majority in the interest of Hindenburg and his camarilla, relying on the president’s support and on Article 48 of the Reich constitution, which accorded the president extensive powers in states of emergency.
Didn't fully realize this, nor Brüning being held in Hindenburgs grasp
the government’s turn away from parliamentarianism and the undermining of democracy played into Hitler’s hands.
Hitler was not interested in participating in government per se: he was aiming to take over the executive branch from the inside.
Veteran, highly skilled civil servants suspected of sympathising with the SPD were fired and replaced with Nazi stooges. Prayers were made mandatory in schools in order, as Frick told the Landtag, to “prevent the people being swindled by Marxism and the Jews.”
The core of the two men’s disagreement, however, was their varying interpretation of what was meant by the term “socialism” in the party programme. Strasser accused Hitler of “choking off revolutionary socialism in the interest of keeping the party legal and…cooperating with the mainstream right-wing parties (Hugenberg, Stahlhelm, etc.).” An agitated Hitler responded: “I am a socialist…But what you mean by socialism is nothing but crass Marxism. The masses of workers only want panem et circenses. They have no comprehension of any sort of ideals.” Hitler also reaffirmed his axiomatic belief
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Brüning announced that he was dissolving the Reichstag.
In fact the result exceeded even the most wildly optimistic expectations. The NSDAP went from 2.6 to 18.3 per cent of the vote, earning 107 seats in parliament compared to their previous 12. There had never been such a landslide improvement for a party in a German election.
“107 National Socialists,” he wrote in his diary the morning after the election. “What a humiliation! How near we are to a civil war!”
In Britain, too, the election results were seen to make normal relations with Germany much more difficult.
The spectacular results of September opened up the prospect that Hitler could come to power legally.
Hitler answered with a monologue that went on for an hour. “He began so shyly and hesitantly that Treviranus and I felt sorry for him and began to encourage him with brief interjections,” Brüning later recalled. “After a quarter of an hour we realised that this was the wrong approach. His voice was getting louder and louder.” Hitler slipped into his public-speaking mode.
“We’ve suddenly become ‘acceptable’ in polite society. People who would previously have given H a wide berth now suddenly have to talk with him. The domestic and foreign press is beating down our doors.”
People had turned away from the fundamental principles of a civil society—“liberty, equality, education, optimism and belief in progress”—and faith in reason to embrace “the forces of the unconscious, of unthinking dynamism and of pernicious creativity,” which rejected everything intellectual. Fed by those tendencies and carried by a “gigantic wave of eccentric barbarism and primitive, populist fairground barking,” National Socialism pursued “a politics of the grotesque…replete with Salvation Army allures, reflexive mass paroxysms, amusement-park chiming, cries of hallelujah and mantra-like
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“fascination with the monster,” that “strange haze and intoxication of should-be opponents who cannot come to terms with the phenomenon” and instead “turn themselves over, increasingly defencelessly, to the magic of the horrible and the thrill of evil.”
But attempts to depict the NSDAP leader as ridiculous could not combat the phenomenon of Adolf Hitler. Nor did they undermine the tendency of his supporters to see him as the national saviour.
It was common in left-wing circles to think that, if the Nazis ever got a share of power, they would soon be undone by their own incompetence.
“You’re not here to make political speeches,” the judge told him again. “Calm down and keep your statements objective.”
he would “under no circumstances use illegal means” to achieve his ends.
NSDAP’s seeming support for law and order
“the NSDAP was an organisation hostile to the state that strives to undermine the constitutionally enshrined republican form of state.” Statements seemingly to the contrary by Hitler only served “to cloak [the movement] in legality so as to avoid problems with the authorities.”
Note the distancing of the movement from violence to avoid accusations of illegitimacy.
In interviews with the foreign press, Hitler distanced himself from the unrest, calling it the work of “rowdies, shoplifters, plunderers and Communist provocateurs” and claiming that his movement had nothing to do with it.
Denial of any connection with violence.
in the Reichstag presidium and on all parliamentary committees, their attitude from the very beginning of the legislative period was one of obstructionism. The party’s only aim was to bring the Reichstag to a standstill by subverting negotiations, filing frivolous motions and submitting nonsensical queries.
By early 1931, the growing radicalism of political conflicts created conditions that were akin to a civil war.83 In most cases, it was the SA who started the violence.
Such acts of provocation, which often precipitated brawls, were like invasions of hostile territory. As a rule, public action taken by the German communists and socialists were aimed at defending themselves against the SA’s increasingly aggressive behaviour in working-class areas, which the police frequently refused to prevent and thus tacitly supported.
The SA particularly appealed to young unemployed men from middle-class backgrounds who worried about falling to the bottom of the social ladder. The organisation offered them not only a social safety net, for instance free food in SA soup kitchens or a place to stay in SA men’s homes, but also a forum for releasing their aggression. The SA “storm pubs,” with their atmosphere of incipient violence, were like outposts for a coming German civil war and greatly shaped the fearsome public image of Hitler’s brown-shirted battalions.
for the Nazis’ political adversaries, it became an object of scorn since the building’s splendour sharply contrasted with the lip service the party paid to socialism.
Schacht claimed, he had encouraged Brüning to invite the National Socialists to join the governing coalition as a way of “directing the movement into orderly channels.”
The hopes of moderates, soon to be dashed.
Nonetheless, with their often unbridled polemics against the Weimar system, trade unions and the social welfare state, large-scale business entrepreneurs contributed indirectly to the success of the radical
The power of his words lies in his temperament, not in his intellect. He shakes things up. That’s what the German people need. You can only beat speed with more speed. He described the destruction of Marxism as his life’s goal.”
“the thread running through Brüning’s policies was not how to overcome but how to politically exploit the Depression.”
“What is certain,” wrote the Berliner Tageblatt, “is that with this verdict one of the most serious acts of terror has gone unatoned for, in particular by those who bore the most responsibility for it.”142 Once again, the goddess of German justice had shown that she was blind in her right eye.
The party would have to publicly distance itself from the SA leaders who had been involved, but Hitler assured his henchmen: “You can be certain that the party will not forget their services and will restore them to their posts as soon as the time is ripe.”
“reconstitution of the cabinet to enable cooperation with the far right.”
“An interesting man with an extraordinary speaking talent. In his plans he tends to get above himself, however. One has to tug him back down to reality by his coat-tails.”147 The general-turned-politician Schleicher believed he would be capable of influencing Hitler’s political ambitions, thereby “taming” him. For Schleicher, that mistake would ultimately prove fatal.
Hitler talked a good game, Hindenburg was quoted as saying, but was best suited for the office of postmaster “so that he can lick me from behind—on my stamps.”
The “Boxheim documents,” as they became known, included a series of proclamations and ordinances to be issued in the event that the National Socialists seized power in the wake of an alleged Communist uprising.
an ambitious young lawyer who apparently wanted to show his party comrades how semi-legal tricks could be used to disguise a seizure of power as an act of self-defence.
The conciliatory attitude of legal authorities towards the National Socialists stood in stark contrast to the rigour with which they went after the political Left.
On the other hand, Hitler said, he could not forbid fellow party members from playing through the scenario of a Communist uprising. Once again, Hitler over-dramatised the threat posed by the Communists to divert attention away from the danger represented by the National Socialists.
if Hitler came to power he would be unable to hold on to it for very long. “He is certainly not the type from which statesmen evolve,” Sackett sniffed.
Mann’s account is an excellent example of how a purely aesthetic reaction to Hitler—in this case, revulsion at his physical appearance—could lead observers to underestimate the man and his political tenacity.
On the one hand, Heuss found, it inhabited a world of strong emotions and passions. These were evident in the Führer cult, the pseudo-religious faith followers invested in one man and his world view, and the mass psychosis triggered by his public appearances.
the tactical need not to appear monomaniacal.”
“domesticate his same-sex passion”
She gave him two sofa cushions embroidered with swastikas;
In the elections of early November, the NSDAP suffered significant losses for the first time. Its aura of invincibility was tarnished, and the party’s trust in its leadership shaken.
only a strong state could set the parameters for a flourishing economy, and that whoever believed in the concept of private property had to reject the idea of democracy. “It is nonsense to build upon the concept of achievement, the value of personality and thus personal authority in an economic sense,”
Hitler in place of Hindenburg means the triumph of the reactionary part of the bourgeoisie over the progressive middle classes and the working class, the destruction of all civil liberties, of the press and of political, union and cultural organisations, increased exploitation and wage slavery.
“If there is one thing we admire about National Socialism it’s the fact that it has succeeded, for the first time in German politics, in the complete mobilisation of human stupidity.”
On 13 March, after thirteen years, we must become judges over that which has been destroyed by one side and over those internal values of our people which the other side has built up again!”
