Hitler Visits Hindenburg Today
– Vossische Zeitung
After Papen Resigns: No Half Measures!
History Demands Action
– Völkischer Beobachter
Central Committee Calls for United Front: Join Forces to Battle Fascist Dictatorship!
– Die Rote Fahne
The negotiations to form a government continued at a frenetic pace, despite Hindenburg’s advanced age. Visiting the president on 19 November was a guest he only reluctantly received: Adolf Hitler had asked Otto Meissner, head of the office of the President and Hindenburg’s most senior member of staff, for an interview with Hindenburg alone. They agreed on strict confidentiality.
At half past eleven, the leader of the Nazi party arrived as agreed. The president made it clear to Hitler that he wanted to adhere to the principle of a non-partisan government. A government led by Herr Hitler, however, would be a single-party administration. Still, he added, Hitler could achieve his goals another way, by agreeing to a government led by a non-partisan. In return, Hindenburg would allocate Hitler’s party some ministerial posts.
Hitler, having arrived with sky-high expectations, struggled to conceal his indignation. He would only join a cabinet, he insisted, if he was given the reins of power. Moreover, he followed this up with a threat: ‘A non-partisan cabinet may be able to govern for a while by authoritarian means, supported by the instruments of state power, but it wouldn’t last long-term. By February there would be a new revolution, and Germany would cease to be a significant force in world politics.’
The president demurred.
Yet he continued to observe the proprieties. The man sitting before him was a candidate for chancellor, after all – at least in theory.
The conversation lasted not fifteen minutes, as agreed, but sixty-five. It was only their fourth private meeting. Meissner noted that sort of thing. Meissner noted everything. Afterwards Hindenburg recounted to him every twist and turn of the discussion.
Hitler had suggested that Hindenburg sign an ‘enabling act’, a legal step – taken years earlier, for example, under the liberal Chancellor Gustav Stresemann – that would give a chancellor governing without a majority sweeping plenary powers and allow the president to withdraw from the day-to-day minutiae of politics. It would also require the dissolution of Parliament. True, Stresemann’s situation in 1923 had been somewhat different, what with hyperinflation and the Occupation of the Ruhr by the French, but, in both cases, there was serious internal unrest caused by both the left and the right.
An enabling act. Yes, perhaps that might work.
Around half past twelve Hitler left the Chancellery and climbed into his car. Outside the entrance on Wilhelmstrasse, a crowd had gathered. They had broken through the chain of police officers and surged towards the gate, but gradually they cleared a path, and the car edged its way through. Outside the Hotel Kaiserhof, the mob was in a festive mood. ‘Heil Hitler!’ they bellowed, most of them men in brown shirts.
Hitler didn’t address them; he had nothing to report. Instead, he was whisked into the hotel, leaving murmurs of hope and impatience in his wake. Only briefly did the Führer make an appearance at his window.
At five o’clock that afternoon, Fritz Schäffer of the Bavarian People’s Party arrived at Wilhelmstrasse 77 for a meeting with the president. Hitler, Schäffer felt, gave less cause for alarm than those around him. The man only needed a strong counterweight.
Thank you, said Hindenburg, and continued to brood.
Each party was concerned solely with furthering its own advantage, and there were also the personal grudges or compacts among the relevant actors to be considered, which were difficult to judge. How could Hindenburg make a decision that would bring Germany together instead of splitting it further apart? Uniting the people – that was the most important thing of all.
At two o’clock, in the Kammersäle in Teltower Strasse the nineteenth district conference for the Berlin-Brandenburg–Lausitz–Grenzmark branch of the German Communist Party, the KPD began. More than a million KPD voters lived in this area, which was the most important party district in Germany. Roughly eight hundred delegates were in attendance, and they were confident. The chaos at Wilhelmstrasse could only drive more voters into their arms.
At the top of the agenda was ‘the political situation and our next task’. Comrade Walter Ulbricht, a member of the Central Committee of the KPD, addressed the assembly. During the transport workers’ strike in early November he had joined forces with Joseph Goebbels in leading the charge; now Ulbricht warned against sharing power with the NSDAP.
Of primary concern to the Communists, however, was an altogether different enemy: the Social Democrats. The comrades who had erred from the righteous socialist path – in the eyes of the KPD, at least, and in their propaganda. Yet not all of those sympathetic to the party understood why their leaders were campaigning more resolutely against the Social Democrats than against the Nazis. In reality, the senior figures in the KPD were not free to decide how they should treat the Social Democrats. Strategic decisions were made by Moscow, and Moscow’s strategy required that the Nazis assume control of the German government. At first, anyway. Hadn’t Marx and Engels predicted that the counterreaction would smooth the Communists’ way into power? As soon as the NSDAP ruled Germany, thousands of workers would transfer their allegiance to the KPD.
That was the plan.
A letter arrived at Hindenburg’s office in Wilhelmstrasse. By no means all of Germany’s most prominent industrialists had signed it, but a considerable number had. ‘Your Excellency, most honoured President of the Reich! Like Your Excellency, we are imbued with a passionate love of the German people and the Fatherland, and we the undersigned are hopeful regarding the fundamental transformation in the leadership of state business that Your Excellency has initiated.’ One of the signatories was Kurt Freiherr von Schröder, a Cologne-based banker who was influential in the Rheinland. He had big plans for Hitler.
Similar letters arrived from leading businessmen such as Fritz Thyssen, Erwin Merck and the former banker Hjalmar Schacht. They, too, wrote that ‘the National Socialist German Workers’ Party fundamentally’ approved of Hindenburg’s policies. ‘Entrusting the leadership and responsibilities of a presidential cabinet endowed with the best practical and personal talents to the leader of the largest nationalist group will eliminate the detritus and drawbacks that inevitably cling to every mass movement, and will sweep along with it millions of people who are currently standing back, making them a positive force.’
Hindenburg was very impressed, as he confessed to his inner circle, particularly because one of the signatories was Eberhard Graf von Kalckreuth, president of the National Rural League and one of the most influential landowners in Prussia.
Details remained sketchy regarding the ‘detritus and drawbacks’.
Reinhold Georg Quaatz, a nationalist, conservative-leaning Member of Parliament, was nervous. If Hitler and Schleicher reached a deal, they could conceivably marshal a majority in the Reichstag. If so, they would be in the president’s good books. Quaatz, a member of the DNVP, observed: ‘If that happens, we’ll end up squashed against the wall.’
Everybody was talking about Schleicher, Schleicher, Schleicher. He didn’t think much of the former military man. Did he have the toughness required to see through a grand plan? Moreover, Quaatz had heard that Schleicher was ill.
‘What do you reckon?’ he’d asked Otto Meissner. ‘Does Schleicher want to be chancellor?’ Meissner and Quaatz knew each other well, and spoke candidly.
‘Schleicher’s intentions are always obscure,’ replied Meissner. Personally, he added, he objected ‘sharply’ to the idea of the man becoming chancellor. But it wouldn’t come to that – Hindenburg wanted to save the General for a military government.
Hitler’s visit to the president was already common knowledge. Harry Graf Kessler – who enjoyed a fierce exchange of opinions – had invited Georg Bernhard to dinner. Bernhard was senior publisher at Ullstein, a defender of free speech and opponent of the National Socialists. A man after Harry Graf Kessler’s own heart. Bernhard invited several other guests: the author Heinrich Mann, whose novel Untertan (The Subject) had delivered a devastating critique of Prussian militarism; Wolfgang Huck, newspaper magnate and one of Berlin’s biggest taxpayers; Hans Schäffer, who had been responsible for the national budget at the Finance Ministry until the spring of that year and was currently head of the Ullstein publishing house; and Bernhard Weiss, erstwhile Deputy Chief of Police in Berlin, whom Papen had hounded out of office. Also present was Rudolf Hilferding, a Marxist theorist who had twice served as Finance Minister for the SPD, as well as various other politicians, journalists and diplomatic staff. It was an illustrious gathering, one generally abreast of the latest news – and usually with an accurate sense of everything else.
Even here, however, Kessler didn’t really find out what Hindenburg was thinking. Nothing but rumours. Huck said the meeting between Hindenburg and Hitler had been quite civilised – very different from their previous encounters. Bernhard announced that Papen’s resignation was merely a ruse! He’d be back. Several other gentlemen believed a general strike was unavoidable if the National Socialists took power.
But who was going to be chancellor? ‘Nobody knew anything,’ wrote Kessler in his diary at the evening’s end. ‘Everything is more or less down to chance and the whims, good or bad, of four or five people.’
Hindenburg, Meissner, Schleicher, Hitler – and Papen? Or was Kessler thinking of someone else? Either way, it had nothing to do with transparent democratic decision-making.
At midnight Joseph Goebbels appeared before the leaders of the SA in Berlin. The Sturmabteilung had invited him to a cordial social gathering, although it turned out to be anything but. After months of waiting, the party soldiers were itching to finally get their hands on power. Goebbels knew many of them hoped for senior posts to reward their loyalty. They were the ones who’d risked their necks, who’d taken brutal, hospitalising beatings for their Führer and the party or served their adversaries the same treatment. The events of August, when Hitler had seemed on the verge of becoming chancellor, had been a bitter disappointment for them, too.
It was now or never: Hitler must finally become chancellor. And it wasn’t just the SA finding the tension unbearable. ‘The whole city was in a state of tremulous agitation,’ as Goebbels wrote.