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Hitler, Schleicher, Hindenburg’s state secretary, Otto Meissner, and the president’s son, Oskar von Hindenburg, scripted the demise of the Brüning government.
“Yesterday the bomb went off,” Goebbels crowed. “At 12 o’clock, Brüning handed in the resignation of his entire cabinet to the old man. With that the system has collapsed.”95 By contrast, the democrat Count Kessler reacted to the news of Brüning’s dismissal with horror: “Backroom interests have got their way as in the time of [Wilhelm II],” Kessler complained on 30 May. “Today marks the beginning of the end for the parliamentary republic.”
All in all, deeply conservative representatives of the landed eastern German aristocracy dominated the body, leading the SPD newspaper Vorwärts to speak, with considerable justification, of a “cabinet of barons.”
Many people’s worst fears had come true: violence escalated to previously unseen levels as National Socialists now engaged in bloody street battles on a daily basis.
“We’ll never give up power—they’ll have to cart out our dead bodies,”
“in front of God, his conscience and his country he could not justify giving the entire power of government to a single party and especially not one so hostile towards people who thought differently.”
The impression arose that the Nazi leader was less concerned about the welfare of Germany than with securing unfettered power for himself and his followers.
Papen attributed the new wave of violence to a Nazi attempt to “unsettle the public” and to force through the idea that “Hitler had to take the leadership of the government.” To do nothing, Papen argued, would be tantamount to “the government committing suicide.”
Papen and his reactionary clique, Hitler fumed, were not interested in granting him political influence but simply getting him to “shut up.”204 Repeatedly, Hitler stressed that he was interested neither in getting a ministerial post nor in sharing power with anyone else: “The only thing that appeals to me is leadership itself, true power, and we National Socialists have a sacred right to it.”
For that reason, any Hitler-led government would have to include “counterweights and strong personalities” in order to prevent abuses of power.
Hitler-led presidential government “would inevitably become a single-party dictatorship exacerbating the tensions within the German people in a way incompatible with [Hindenburg’s] oath of office and conscience.”
Moreover, the party’s “out-of-bounds, Marxist-style agitation” risked the trust “that is essential for taking over the highest forms of authority.”
“Never has a great movement been victorious if it went down the path of compromise.”
Hitler’s strategy of trying to create political chaos in the hope that the chancellorship would then drop into his lap was “wrong, dangerous and not in the general German interest.”
“The massive National Socialist attack on the democratic state has been repelled,” the Berlin correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung, Rudolf Kircher, declared. Julius Elbau titled his review article in the Vossische Zeitung “Year of Decision.” Yet Elbau also complained that the republic had not been saved because Germans had defended it. “Its attackers got rid of one another,” Elbau wrote. “It was a march through the valley of the devil that makes you shudder when you look back at it.”
“We seem to be past the peak of the insanity.”
Hitler would likely end up as an old man in a Bavarian village, telling his friends in an evening beer garden about how he once almost toppled the German Reich.
Papen, State Secretary Meissner and Hindenburg’s son Oskar—although the Weimar Constitution had not foreseen a role played by the president’s son—were the most significant members of the supporting cast.
“If I wanted to sell myself for a plate of lentils, I would have already done
Interesting how many Biblical references Hitler makes.
Hitler would have Strasser murdered during the Night of the Long Knives on 30 June 1934.
What the pro-democracy politicians did not realise was that the biggest danger was not posed by Schleicher’s suggested violation of the constitution, but by the installing of a cabinet of “national concentration” under Hitler.
“We need to enter into a pact with Hitler and try to limit his power as much as possible.”
Hugenberg was promised the Economics Ministry as well as that of agriculture in both Prussia and the Reich. The prospect of being in charge of such a mega-ministry was so appealing that he agreed to support the deal Papen had negotiated with Hitler.
Conservatives divvying up the spoils of government not realizing it wouldn't last.
the dominance of traditional conservatives in the cabinet would neutralise the threat of Nazi abuse of power and “fence Hitler in.”
Hindenburg greeted the men and expressed his satisfaction that “the nationalist Right has finally been unified,”
“Hitler is Reich chancellor! It’s true! Farewell Marxism! Farewell Communism! Farewell parliament! Farewell Jews!—Here’s to Germany!”
Cohn’s fear of communism still outweighed his worries about National Socialism—an attitude that was to change very soon.
The two men agreed that the Hitler-led cabinet would do some damage but would not stay in office for very long.
“Hitler as chancellor. On top of everything else, now this intellectual humiliation. The last straw. I’m going home. To vomit.”
Historians have perennially tried to answer the question of whether Hitler’s rise to power could have been halted. Doubtlessly, there were powerful tendencies, deeply anchored in German history, which promoted the success of National Socialism. They included an anti-Western nationalism that rejected the “ideas of 1789,” that felt particularly provoked by Germany’s unexpected defeat in the First World War and the perceived humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles, and that took refuge in stab-in-the-back legends and lies about Germany’s lack of responsibility for the war, so as to prevent any
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There were repeated opportunities to end Hitler’s run of triumphs.
“The history of Hitler is the history of people underestimating him,”
Hitler can be accused of a lot of things, but one cannot say that he was not frank about his intentions.
On the one hand, Dietrich asserted, Hitler possessed extraordinary capabilities and gifts. On the other, and particularly in conjunction with his fanatical anti-Semitism, he could be intellectually primitive and boorish.
“My moustache will be all the rage one day—you can bet on that,”
Whether people perceived Hitler’s gaze as cold or benevolent, impenetrable or friendly and inquisitive depended both on the given situation and their political views.
“Education is irrelevant…just look at those lovely hands.”
Numerous contemporaries who rejected Hitler and his party struggled to resist the lure of Hitler’s overwhelming rhetoric—indeed, some succumbed to it.
Hitler was even able to fake affection for people whom he despised in reality.
“He had a form for expressing everything—agitation, moral outrage, sympathy, emotion, fidelity, condolence and respect,” wrote Ernst von Weizsäcker, state secretary at the German Foreign Ministry from 1938 to 1942, in his post-war memoirs.
Legendary and much feared by military leaders was Hitler’s head for numbers—whether they were the calibre, construction and range of firearms or the size, speed and armour of a warship.62 He knew the navy calendar, which he kept by his bedside, by heart.63 Indeed, from all indications he had a nearly photographic memory.64 He would not only recognise people, but recall when and where they had met, leading Christa Schroeder to wonder how so many facts could fit inside one human brain.65 The speed with which Hitler read was also an indication of his astonishing memory. “He could scan not just
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Of course, Hitler’s knowledge was just as unsystematic and incomplete as it was varied. He simply ignored whatever did not mesh with his world view. “He had no concept of knowledge for knowledge’s sake,” Karl Alexander von Müller wrote. “Everything he knew was thoroughly connected with some purpose, and at the heart of every purpose were Hitler himself and his political power.”72 The school drop-out never overcame his need to display his self-taught and carefully memorised selective knowledge.
As a result he was very prickly when confronted with people who obviously knew more about a topic than he did.
Attempts to get him to travel abroad and see the world from a different perspective also fell on deaf ears.
Hitler’s fondness for lederhosen also clashed with the Führer cult his acolytes began to celebrate from 1922. Hess was appalled when Hitler turned up at the Obersalzberg with exposed knees and rolled-up sleeves.84 In late 1926 and early 1927, he posed in lederhosen and a brown shirt for a series of portraits by his official photographer Heinrich Hoffmann.
“I believe my life is the greatest novel in world history,”
“Hitler was an indefatigable talker,” Otto Dietrich remarked. “Talking was an element of his very being.”97 Such verbal diarrhoea was a burden on those around him.
Hitler was afraid of “moments of uncontrolled affection and spontaneous intimacy,” claimed Otto Strasser. “For him the idea of letting himself go was a sheer horror.”
Hitler instinctively knew who had submitted completely to him and who retained reservations, reacting to the latter with knee-jerk animosity.
Divide and conquer was Hitler’s strategy, and he would perfect and personify it during his years as Germany’s dictator.133 Speer characterised Hitler style of leadership as “a carefully balanced system of mutual enmity.” No matter how significant his area of responsibility, none of Hitler’s subordinates could imagine he possessed any stable authority of his own.
