2	Seizing the State The Irresistible Rise of Hitler’s Nazis

After the chaotic early years of the Weimar Republic, Germany had, in the mid-1920s, settled into a state of precarious prosperity, in which the fragile freedoms established at such high cost after the post-war period of near civil war, of revolution and counter-revolution, of strikes, demonstrations, political assassinations, plots, putsches and murderous conspiracy, were briefly enjoyed by a majority of Germans. Appearances, however, were deceptive. Although Weimar governments were dominated by parties of the centre and moderate left, the forces of extremism were quiescent, rather than subdued; many – perhaps most – conservative Germans regarded the republic, the bastard child of defeat and revolution, as a necessary evil at best, to be grudgingly tolerated until a more suitable form of government appeared.

On the right, conservatives and nationalists fondly harked back to the days of the Kaiser, to order, military pride and keeping the working classes firmly in their place at the bottom of the social heap. On the left, the fathers of the republic, the majority Social Democratic Party (SPD), remained in government, in coalition with other parties such as the Catholic Centre Party and the Liberal Democrats. The SPD were, however, always menaced by the German Communist Party (KPD) on their far left. The KPD had never forgiven their SPD rivals for their complicity in the Freikorps’ murder of their founders, Liebknecht and Luxemburg. Now fierce rivals for Germany’s working-class vote, the two socialist parties, with their different versions of Marxism – the gradualist and the Leninist – expended more energy in attacking each other than they did their ‘bourgeois’ rivals. The Communists, true to the party line dictated from Stalin’s Moscow, suicidally regarded their true enemy to be the ‘social fascism’ of the SPD rather than Nazism, which they saw as a passing phenomenon: this was to prove a fatal error. Although Communist Red Front fighters battled the Nazi Brownshirts on the streets, they had much in common with their proletarian political opposite numbers, including a taste for violence and thuggery, a fondness for uniforms and an aggressive hostility to bourgeois respectability in all its forms.

But the greatest threat to the frail republic lay on the right. Although the Nazi Party was still weak outside its Bavarian birthplace – the First World War hero General Erich von Ludendorff had won less than 2 per cent of the vote when he stood on the Nazi ticket against his old comrade-in-arms, Paul von Hindenburg, in the 1925 presidential elections – the Nazis had built the skeleton of a national organisation. They received a further boost in 1929 when Hitler appointed a propagandist of genius, the mesmeric ‘poison dwarf’ Josef Goebbels, to head the party organisation in Berlin and wrest the capital away from its allegiance to the ‘Reds’.

The Wall Street crash of October 1929 was the storm signal that gave the Nazis their chance. The global depression that followed the crash was particularly severe in Germany, which had barely recovered from the debilitating inflation of the mid-1920s. To the embitterment of the middle class, who had lost both their savings and psychological security in the chaos that had followed the war, was added the fury of a resentful working class as unemployment climbed steadily towards six million. Benefits were slashed to the bone by the bankrupt state, presided over by the Catholic politician Heinrich Brüning, appointed chancellor by Hindenburg in March 1930. Brüning’s own parliamentary backing in the Reichstag was so shaky that he had to rule by decree, which hardly did much to increase his already negligible popularity.

In these conditions Hitler’s intoxicating message – a heady brew mixing hatred with hope, bawled out hoarsely and repetitiously by the Nazi leader from a thousand public platforms – found a ready, even eager response from a demoralised public desperate for order, stability and vengeance on the world of enemies that had laid Germany low. Hitler demonised such enemies: the Marxists who had plunged their knife into Germany’s prostrate body as she waged her life-or-death struggle in 1918; the traitorous politicians – the ‘November criminals’ – who had ridden to power on the back of Communist revolution and then made a treacherous peace with the Allies; above all, the Jews, whose ‘money power’ lay at the root of all the Fatherland’s myriad of woes. But there was also hope in Hitler’s impassioned, vengeful rhetoric: identify Germany’s enemies, rub them out, and all might yet be well. Once the Marxist republic and the venal men of Weimar had been pulled down and all power given to the Führer and his cohorts, work would return, the criminals would be put in their place, and a shining future would open for all racially purged and pure sons and daughters of the true Volk.

Hitler’s message of German national resurgence held a strong appeal, even for aristocratic families such as the Stauffenbergs, who might have been expected to look askance at the vulgar street brawling and violent criminality that were the thuggish hallmarks of the Nazi Brownshirts or Sturmabteiling (SA). The writings of Stefan George had certainly called for the coming of a Führer-figure to save the country from dissolution, and if the almost absurd, common, gesticulating figure of Hitler was some way from the ideal knight as envisaged by the George-Kreis, at least he might represent a move in the right direction.

That was certainly the view of Stauffenberg’s cousin, Casar von Hofacker, later a courageous and central figure in the anti-Hitler resistance who would suffer torture and death at the hands of the regime, but who in 1922/3 helped to found the first SA group at Göttingen University. Ten years later, in March 1933, in the last elections before the National Socialists clamped their shackles around Germany, Hofacker was campaigning for the Nazis, publicly demanding that the people must empower the government ‘to do away with elections once and for all, and to replace the Reichstag by a dictatorship’.

Stauffenberg’s cousin, Lieutenant-Colonel Casar von Hofacker in the Second World War.

The reactionary politician Franz von Papen and the wily General Schleicher (both later destined to suffer – Schleicher fatally – during the Night of the Long Knives purge) succeeded each other as chancellor, and jostled for the ear of the rapidly fading President Hindenburg. After this complex game of political musical chairs, the ageing president was bamboozled into doing what he had sworn he would never do: call for the man he called a ‘Bohemian Corporal’ – Hitler – to become chancellor. Although Hitler’s first cabinet was a coalition in which the Nazis held only a minority of posts, and conservatives like Papen were convinced that they could master and manipulate the insignificant little Austrian, it was Hitler who turned the tables on them. In giving him the keys to the Reichs Chancellery, Papen and the others had boarded a train they could not stop. On 30 January 1933 Hitler was appointed chancellor.

It is more difficult – because hard evidence is lacking – to gauge Claus von Stauffenberg’s attitude towards Hitler and the Nazis in their early days in power than it is to perceive the views of other members of his circle. Apart from Hofacker, those who initially threw their support behind the new government but who later became passionate Hitler-haters and prominent in the resistance included Hans Oster, Henning von Tresckow, Mertz von Quirnheim and Helmut Stieff. There is one unsubstantiated – and unlikely – report that, on the night of 30 January, as joyful Nazis lit beacons all across Germany, Stauffenberg, in full uniform, placed himself at the head of a spontaneous celebratory column of enthusiastic Nazi supporters in Bamberg. His own explanation was that he had been swept up willy-nilly by the mob, and had simply walked along with them. As he told fellow officers who reproached him in the Mess later that evening, the soldiers of the Prussian national revolution against Napoleon, including his own ancestor Gneisenau, would certainly have had a more sympathetic attitude towards this new and latter-day revolution than Hitler’s critics did.

It does not detract from Stauffenberg’s later heroic role in the resistance to concede that, like most of his brother officers in the army, he adopted a wait-and-see attitude towards the new regime that was broadly sympathetic towards the avowed Nazi aims of national renewal, economic reconstruction and strengthening the armed forces. The army – from its chief Blomberg downwards – was unanimous that rearmament and a reclaiming of Germany’s standing through throwing off the chains imposed by the Versailles Treaty were essential if the nation was to regain the world’s regard and its own self-respect. It took several years before the officer corps learned the hard way that what they first dismissed as Nazism’s ‘excesses’ were in fact the very essence of a criminal regime.

Besides, Stauffenberg had other things to think about. On 1 May 1933 he was promoted to full Lieutenant. Four months later, on 26 September 1933 he married a fellow aristocrat, Baroness Nina von Lerchenfeld. The social backgrounds of the couple were almost identical. Like his mother, Stauffenberg’s bride came from a mixed Baltic and Bavarian background and was a Lutheran Protestant. Her father, like Alfred von Stauffenberg, had also been a royal chamberlain – in his case to the Bavarian court in Munich. Nevertheless, despite Nina’s Protestantism, the wedding took place in Bamberg’s St Jakob’s Catholic Church, and the couple’s children would be brought up in their father’s Catholic faith.

Nina Freiin von Lerchenfeld and Claus von Stauffenberg, 1931.

Claus von Stauffenberg and his bride Nina outside St Jakob’s Church in Bamberg after their wedding on 26 September 1933.

 

The match seems to have been more of a career move than a grand passion. Stauffenberg quoted a comment made by the homosexual Prussian king Frederick the Great to his future mother-in-law when he said that for an officer a wife was ‘a necessary evil’. Aged twenty-six himself, Claus told his seventeen-year-old fiancée that he had chosen her because she would make a good mother for his children. They had met in Bamberg at her father’s house in 1930 and swiftly became engaged, albeit secretly because of Nina’s youth. Stauffenberg married in full uniform – including steel helmet – and they honeymooned in Mussolini’s Italy.

While the young couple had been sunning themselves and seeing the ancient sites of Italy, momentous events were occurring in their Fatherland. The March 1933 elections, which had hardly been free or fair as there had been heavy Nazi pressure and intimidation thanks to the party’s control of the police and organs of propaganda, including the radio, had still failed to return an absolute majority for Hitler, his party gaining 43 per cent of the vote. Even before the elections, though, the Nazis had been moving with increasingly bold steps to take over the German state.

In February 1933 the Reichstag, the German parliament in central Berlin, had been destroyed in a suspicious fire. A young Dutch Communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, had been arrested inside the building with combustible material in his possession, but the fire had spread with astonishing rapidity; there were many who suspected the Nazis themselves had torched the place. At any rate, alleging that there was a Communist conspiracy to take control in a coup, the Nazis banned the party and arrested many of its functionaries.

The SA street fighters stepped up their thuggery: arresting, beating up, torturing and imprisoning opponents in scores of private jails. The first of many concentration camps for those who dared to speak out against Hitler was opened at Oranienburg, fifty miles from Berlin. Thanks to Goebbels’s increasingly tight control of the press and radio, Hitler’s image and his ranting, raving voice were seen and heard in every corner of the country. As soon as the election results were in, on 23 March 1933 the remnants of the Reichstag, meeting in Berlin’s Kroll Opera House, were pressured, persuaded, bribed and bullied into passing an Enabling Act giving Hitler’s government the power to pass any law it saw fit – without reference to parliament or indeed to the German Constitution itself, which could be bypassed by Special Courts, against whose decisions there was to be no right of appeal. Only the SPD voted against the law, its last action before being banned itself. Its Parliamentary leader Otto Wels courageously told Hitler, ‘Wir sind wehrlos, aber nicht ehrlos’ (‘We are defenceless, but not without honour’). At a stroke, the Weimar Republic had committed suicide, and German democracy had sleepwalked into a dictatorship.