No Public Support: Chancellor Throws in the Towel Papen Government to Step Down?
– Völkischer Beobachter
Proletarian Offensive Blows Papen Cabinet Apart Papen Government Resigns – Schleicher Press Demands Hitler for Chancellor – Working People in Extreme Danger
– Die Rote Fahne
Negotiations to form a new government started late that morning, as Hindenburg started casting about for a solution. He was hoping to forge what he termed ‘a national aggregation of forces spanning the Centre to the Nazis’. The first person he met, around half past eleven, was Alfred Hugenberg, leader of the conservative DNVP, the German National People’s Party. Hugenberg, well known for being particularly blinkered when it came to defending his interests, functioned largely as a mouthpiece for Germany’s landowners and captains of industry. He expressed serious reservations about Hitler.
Although frequently mocked – he was a perennial favourite of caricaturists – Hugenberg was a powerful man. One of Europe’s biggest media tycoons, with an empire of newspapers, magazines and film production companies, Hugenberg was well aware of his ability to wield print media and film to influence public opinion and, thus, politics. At this juncture, a right-wing government without the DNVP seemed impossible to countenance.
At six o’clock, Ludwig Kaas, head of the Centre Party, arrived for his presidential visit. He suggested a ‘loyalty pact’ between three or four ‘brave party leaders’. Hitler did not seem to faze him. Eduard Dingeldey of the German People’s Party was next up; as far as he was concerned, appointing the next chancellor was a matter for the president. His party, he announced, would support Hindenburg’s candidate. Moreover, he added: ‘Personally I would have not the least objection to entrusting the role to Papen once more.’
For Hindenburg, the process of democratic wrangling had always been a tortuous affair. Prior to his first presidential elections in 1925, he had sought the blessing of the former Kaiser, Wilhelm II, who was at that point exiled in the Netherlands. Politics had not made a republican out of Hindenburg, but he did possess a sense of duty and a deep affection for the Fatherland – he knew his responsibilities as president. And his rights, of course. He was under no obligation to hold talks with just anyone.
He did not, for instance, invite the Social Democratic Party to the table. The SPD, nearly seventy years old, had given birth to the Weimar Republic, but the party was now at daggers drawn with virtually everyone, and especially with the Communists. They had supported Hindenburg during his re-election campaign in April 1932 as part of a calculated ploy to stymie his rival, Hitler, but the old man had never shown them any gratitude. On the contrary. ‘Who elected me? The Socialists elected me, the Catholics elected me,’ Hindenburg once complained to his press secretary. ‘My people didn’t elect me.’ His people – monarchists, conservatives, opponents of the Republic – had largely transferred their backing to Hitler. For the president, votes from supporters of the Social Democrats were an embarrassment.
He may, too, have still been in a huff because the SPD had flatly rejected an invitation from the chancellor to enter into talks on the fate of the government only a few days earlier. ‘We’re not going to Papen,’ Kurt Schumacher had declared at a meeting of the SPD’s executive committee.
Bella Fromm, a woman with a coquettish mouth and dark eyebrows, was the forty-one-year-old society reporter for the Vossische Zeitung. The newspaper was required reading for anyone in Berlin involved in politics, as well as anyone who played or hoped to play a prominent role on the social scene, including ministers, members of Parliament and their assistants, civil servants, military men, lobbyists, diplomats and their respective spouses.
Fromm had become a journalist more out of necessity than passion. Born into the Jewish upper classes, her parents ran a successful international business trading wines from Main and the Moselle. They sent their daughter to study at a conservatory in Berlin. Shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, Bella married and gave birth to a daughter, Gonny, but the relationship quickly soured. Getting a divorce required her to prove her husband’s infidelity – which she succeeded in doing. Subsequently married and divorced a second time, she enjoyed only a brief glimpse of freedom before inflation spiralled out of control and she lost the majority of her inherited wealth (although the money still stretched to a villa in Berlin, a sports car and two horses). Fromm needed a source of income, and as she moved in the capital’s more elevated circles she began to write about their lives. From 1928 onwards she was a columnist for the Vossische Zeitung, while also writing for the Berliner Zeitung and several other papers owned by the Ullstein publishing company.
Bella Fromm’s column ‘Berlin Diplomats’ in the Vossische Zeitung proved popular with readers. Most of what she reported was friendly gossip about foreign emissaries, staff at the Foreign Ministry and politicians in Berlin; she let slip none of her poison-tongued political analysis in the papers. That was reserved for her diary.
Fromm considered the idea that the Nazis could be neutered by integrating them into government extremely dangerous. Four days earlier, at the Kaiserhof Hotel, she had bumped into the former President of the National Bank, Hjalmar Schacht, who was on his way to see Hitler. ‘I’d like to know what he wants there,’ she noted. ‘Surely nothing that bodes well for decent people.’ Her readers in the Vossische Zeitung, however, were not privy to musings such as these.
Fromm was never one to shy away from undercover work if it helped her get a scoop. One year earlier, at a reception given by the president for the diplomatic corps (to which the press were not invited), she had slipped into men’s clothing and mingled with the curious onlookers outside the presidential palace to see who arrived when and with whom – and, above all, who left when and with whom. For the most part, however, she had no need to resort to stratagems. The gentlemen at the Foreign Office and the Chancellery were particularly susceptible to her charm.
She also kept herself well informed about frequent visitors to the Kaiserhof, including Hitler. Among her close circle of friends, Fromm referred to the Führer as ‘Kaiser Adolf’, and, whenever Kaiser Adolf held court at the luxury hotel, she could often be found in the lobby, observing the spectacle.
On one occasion, she bided her time there for several hours. At first nothing happened. Hitler was fond of making people wait. Amped-up Nazis, expecting an audience, settled at the bar and tried to drown their impatience in beer. Correspondents from foreign newspapers poked their heads through the door, loitered for an hour or so, then gave up.
Finally, at seven o’clock, the doors opened and senior party leaders in brown shirts poured into the lobby. The whole rigmarole reminded Fromm of a country fair, the men wearing badges and insignia in sky blue, garish red, golden yellow and a rainbow of other colours.
As the Brownshirts ‘strutted around like peacocks’, Fromm thought it was lucky they didn’t realise how absurd they appeared. ‘Their large brown trousers,’ she scoffed, ‘were of such widely exaggerated cut that they seemed to bear wings on either side.’
Their feet clattering, the party members shuffled into rows. A murmur filled the room, and then the man himself made his appearance. She noted the grave, belligerent expression on his face, watched arms shoot aloft, heard the men roaring ‘Heil’. A single word crossed Bella Fromm’s mind: ‘Manitu’.
Hitler strode across the room without bothering to glance left or right – then vanished through a side door.
Once the apparition had passed, a few observers began to laugh. All of them foreigners. They could afford to, thought Fromm.
That day, Friday 18 November, Hitler was expected back in Berlin. The Kaiserhof was already trembling with anticipation.
Whenever Hitler – only a German citizen since February 1932 – was in Berlin, he stayed at the Kaiserhof as a matter of principle. In recent months he had visited the city often, entering into secret negotiations with representatives of the government, holding audiences with Hindenburg, and conferring with his entourage. High-ranking guests, journalists and political opponents were received in his suite. The hotel, with its heavy chandeliers and stuccoed walls, had become the Nazis’ de facto campaign headquarters. A highly symbolic site, it was an ideal base for them. The main attraction of the building was its dining room, an airy, vaulted space where sumptuous meals were served. Even when it opened fifty years earlier, the hotel had offered an array of modern conveniences, including pneumatic lifts and private radiators in each of the 230 rooms. And the location was unbeatable. You could see straight across onto Wilhelmstrasse 77.
Hitler had only to step out of the Kaiserhof and stand beneath its porticoed entrance, and there it was, almost within his grasp: the Chancellery of the Reich.
The fifth division of the High Court at Leipzig sentenced three Communists to lengthy spells in prison, accusing them of ‘high treason in coincidence with crimes against the Explosives Act and offences against the Firearms and Military Equipment Act’. A thirty-one-year-old carpenter was handed six years in prison and ten years deprived of his civil rights, including the right to vote; two construction workers, twenty-five and twenty-eight, were jailed for three years each. The police had found the men in possession of sixty-five kilograms of explosives, as well as rifles, pistols and ammunition, and the judges assumed the convicted men were planning to launch an attack.
In Hofgeismar, not far from the city of Kassel, four National Socialists were standing trial. They had built an armoured vehicle, complete with bullet-proof cladding and shooting slits, which the police seized in the early hours of 1 August. The accused claimed in court that the vehicle was intended to protect the NSDAP from Communist violence. The public prosecutor proposed fines of between 50 and 200 marks for the men, who were members of the SA.
For Harry Graf Kessler, once a diplomat and now an art collector and intellectual, this was a red-letter day. Papen had finally resigned. That reckless, perpetually grinning dilettante had wreaked more havoc in six months than any chancellor before him. Worst of all, perhaps, he’d made Hindenburg – that hero of the First World War – look like a fool. A few months earlier Kessler had written that Papen looked ‘like an ill-tempered billy-goat in a silk-lined black Sunday suit trying to stand to attention. A character out of Alice in Wonderland.’
Kessler, a member of the Reichsbanner – the paramilitary wing of the Social Democrats – had voted for the SPD in the November elections, as had 20 per cent of the German electorate. After all, the SPD was one of the only parties still trying to defend the Republic.
Fromm wasn’t mourning the departed chancellor either. Papen had mainly represented the interests of the major landowners in eastern Germany, who, in November 1932, were eagerly scrabbling for power. She believed ‘they underestimated the radical movement’, meaning the Nazis.
Two months earlier she’d spent a Sunday with Schleicher and Papen at the racetrack. The chancellor had approached her as she stood with Schleicher and a female friend. Papen kissed her hand – he could be gallant, on occasion. ‘Frau Bella, would it not be a marvellous idea to take a group photograph for your newspaper?’ he asked. His object, of course, was to make people believe he was still on the best of terms with the Defence Minister, thought Fromm. It was all for show. She knew the two men had fallen out long before.
At Karstadt’s Lebensmittel, the comestibles department at the vast department store near Hermannplatz Station, a pound of top-quality butter cost 1.44 marks, a pound of pork belly 64 pfennigs and a litre of wine from Edenkoben 60 pfennigs, assuming you could buy ten.
The average worker earned 164 marks per month.
‘This is how they live every day,’ announced a leaflet Communists were handing out on the streets of Berlin. ‘Hitler’s bill at the Kaiserhof: 1 breakfast, 23 marks – times twelve, 276 marks! And 28,890 marks for the room! All while you’re going hungry!’
Propaganda or truth? At the end of 1931, we know the Nazis paid a sum total of 650.86 marks for three nights and seven rooms, including food and service. Although it’s also true that the Kaiserhof was among the most expensive hotels in the city.
That said, Hitler frequently abstained from the chef’s famous dishes at the Kaiserhof: after all, you never knew what kind of mischief people might be planning. He also had a better alternative. Magda Goebbels’ cooking was exquisite, and she prepared vegetarian meals just the way the Führer liked them. The Goebbels lived only a few minutes’ drive away, in Charlottenburg, not far from Berlin’s largest sports stadium. Their spacious, high-ceilinged apartment was originally Magda’s, paid for by her ex-husband, the millionaire Günther Quandt. A grand piano stood in the salon.
The address had a nice ring to it: Reichskanzlerplatz 2.
Joseph Goebbels was thirty-five years old, a small, slight man with a weedy torso, a large head, brown eyes and black hair. Club-footed, he walked with a limp, courtesy of a childhood attack of bone-marrow inflammation. His adversaries referred to him mockingly as a ‘shrunken Teuton’, a term that became increasingly common in Nazi Germany for men of short stature. At the podium, however, he radiated power; he was a demagogue whose oratorical skill had won over thousands of new supporters for the Nazis in Berlin. When he took over the Berlin branch of the NSDAP in November 1926 it was a bickering mess; by 1932 he was the undisputed master of its well-organised ranks.
More than a few Berliners were afraid of him, of his radicalism, his unscrupulousness, his cunning. Goebbels was pathologically ambitious, a megalomaniac and workaholic desperate for recognition. And he sought the favour of one man above all others: Adolf Hitler. He was willing to use any means to aid Hitler’s rise to power, convinced that one day, when his Führer became Führer to all Germans, his own brilliance would truly come to shine. Hitler? ‘A wonderful man!’ noted Goebbels in November 1932. ‘For him I would willingly be quartered.’ He hoped that when Hitler and Hindenburg stood face to face once more, shook hands and looked each other in the eye, they would trust each other. Although Hindenburg, it was rumoured, referred derisively to Hitler as the ‘Bohemian lance corporal’.
At one o’clock an aeroplane coming from Munich landed at Tempelhof Airfield. On board were Adolf Hitler, Wilhelm Frick, head of the NSDAP parliamentary group in the Reichstag, Gregor Strasser, organisational director, and Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl, senior foreign press secretary. They had come to arrange their rise to power. Hitler was driven from the airport to Goebbels’ house, where Goebbels updated his guest on the events of the past few days.
The question was, what was Kurt von Schleicher thinking? Always whispering in Hindenburg’s ear. In conversation with English-speaking informants, Hanfstaengl only ever referred to the Defence Minister as ‘Mr Creeper’, a literal translation of his surname that made him sound like some whimsical creation out of a Dickens novel. Hanfstaengl was a cultured man, the son of a prominent art dealer and a keen if unsubtle pianist. His renditions of Wagner’s magnificent arias, hammered out on the keyboard, moved Hitler profoundly.
How did Hitler, Austrian by birth, acquire German citizenship so quickly? Without it, he would have been ineligible to stand for president. More than a few people in Germany were wondering the same thing, including Oskar Thielemann, an SPD politician.
The official explanation? That the Free State of Brunswick had given Hitler an advisory role in local government and granted him German citizenship for his ‘valuable services’. Valuable services? What kind? Thielemann put the question to the Nazi-led Interior Ministry of the Free State: ‘What contracts has Councillor Hitler secured for the economy of Brunswick, and what work, if any, has he carried out for the State of Brunswick thus far?’
The answer arrived on 17 November: ‘The Interior Minister of Brunswick has communicated that Councillor Hitler provided valuable services to him in his role as special adviser on economic issues, in particular regarding the preservation of the mining industry in Unterharz.’
Hitler, an expert on mining? The news must have come as a surprise to more people than just Thielemann.
Abraham Plotkin was a riddle unto himself. In his writing he tried to explore what was driving him, tried to probe what he was seeking in Europe. His family had fled from the ‘dark shadows of terror’ in Tsarist Russia for America when he was a child. ‘Now I am going back. What for? I hardly know. Perhaps I am going so as to escape the humdrum of everyday city life in my own country. […] Perhaps later when and if I become aware of it I’ll feel as silly as I look. One never can really tell how foolish one is.’
Around midnight Hitler returned to Reichskanzlerplatz, where the Goebbels were expecting him. First their guest told them a little of what had happened that day. He seemed entirely at ease. The government would declare another ‘truce’ the next morning: there were to be no demonstrations and no open-air rallies until 2 January. Gregor Strasser, meanwhile, was getting on the Führers’ nerves. Recently Hitler had sounded contemptuous whenever his name was mentioned. But enough of all that – it was time for music. Why else was there a grand piano in the salon?
Goebbels himself was a keen accordion-player. Music, he observed, was the only indulgence Hitler permitted himself after a dogfight.