Highest Alert!
Hindenburg’s Task for Hitler – Hitler Orders SA Terror Workers of Germany, Unite in the Struggle!
– Die Rote Fahne
Hitler Hesitates
– Berliner Tageblatt
The state crisis won’t end until a new system has stabilised, be it through a right-wing or left-wing victory. Until then every government will feel like a stopgap.
– Die Weltbühne
Abraham Plotkin was taking the night train from Paris to Berlin. The wooden benches in third class made it impossible to rest – he’d barely managed a wink of sleep. Travel in France was an altogether different affair. The seats there were upholstered, even in the cheapest classes, while the wood on German trains was so hard that his buttocks hurt and so smooth it was impossible to find a comfortable position. Disembarking at Potsdamer Bahnhof at 7 a.m. the next morning, Plotkin rubbed the drowsiness from his eyes. The city was cast in a leaden light. Here and there, men were cycling to work. Policemen surveyed him warily. A few beggars lay on the pavement. Plotkin was astonished that there weren’t more – nothing like back home in New York or San Francisco, although Germany, too, had been hit hard by the economic crisis. Plotkin had come to meet trade-union allies and because he wanted to see how a welfare state could function despite empty government coffers. Functioning it apparently was.
The city was still asleep, the shops shut. He dropped off his bags and went for a walk, eventually reaching the Brandenburg Gate then Unter den Linden. It was raining, but that didn’t bother him. The sky was beginning to brighten, although the streetlamps were lit and mist drifted through the wide streets. The light struck him as unreal, bathing the trees and buildings in a strange gloaming.
Plotkin decided to find the Hotel Adlon. He must have realised he was in the centre of political Berlin’s beating heart, yet he couldn’t have heard about the poker game going on just a few hundred yards away down Wilhelmstrasse.
Fatigue overwhelmed him. Plotkin dragged himself into the hotel café and took out his travel typewriter, which lent him the aura of a busy writer, but before he could order a coffee or write a line his eyelids dropped shut. One could sleep well in an Adlon armchair, and no one there was going to wake him.
Many Berliners were marvelling at the National Socialists’ latest act of heroism. To make sure he was on time for the most recent discussions about forming a new government, Hermann Göring had cut short his visit to Benito Mussolini in Italy and made a special trip on the Italian dictator’s plane from Rome to Venice, where a Ju 52 was waiting for him – the same aircraft Hitler had used to wage his legendary electoral campaign that summer. Göring, a former fighter pilot, had flown the plane himself; or that was how he told the story later, anyway.
Rome to Berlin in under six hours! A record, naturally. Göring had been awarded the Pour le Mérite, the Reich’s highest honour for bravery, for his actions on the Western Front during the First World War. A flying ace.
The headline splashed across the 12-Uhr-Blatt in Berlin:
If Hitler Fails …
Meissner for Chancellor?
Not, the newspaper added, that Meissner needed it: ‘his role as head of the office of the President affords him virtually as much influence over political affairs’. Meissner was a member of the ‘camarilla’, as the Berlin journalists liked to call it, the small circle of intimates who advised Paul von Hindenburg. Or manipulated him, if you believed the more critical voices.
To observers of the political scene, Meissner was as sinister as he was indispensable – devoted to his master, fanatically dutiful, terrifyingly well informed and well connected, with no apparent interests of his own. The factotum of power, and an expert in constitutional law, to boot.
Meissner was a man who hedged his bets. His eyes were vigilant, protected behind their spectacles. His thin, pursed upper lip was covered with a grey moustache, the corners of his mouth drawn down. His head appeared retracted into his neck, like a boxer readied for the next punch. His suits, which he liked to wear with a pocket handkerchief, always seemed to be a size too small, and the knot of his tie nestled tightly against his throat. Those who saw how much lobster he could put away at a buffet were astonished to witness such an eruption of greed in a man who otherwise kept his own interests firmly under wraps.
Otto Meissner, they said, had advised the president to make Hitler chancellor. Or perhaps that was just another rumour.
Schleicher had helped him draft the most recent letter to Hitler, lending a hand with the wording.
That was a fact.
The 12-Uhr-Blatt lay on a table chez Meissner. A servant had bought the newspaper near the Adlon because of the headline. The lady of the house, Hildegard Meissner, blanched as she read. Her voice was barely audible. ‘Anything but that,’ whispered Frau Meissner. ‘Dear God, please spare us!’
At the Kaiserhof, another note arrived from Meissner. It instructed Hitler to find coalition partners – or keep his mitts off power. Rather more politely phrased, of course.
Hitler felt attacked, and Goebbels, too, was incensed. To unwind, the two of them attended the opera at Unter den Linden. Staged that night was Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, a piece calculated to raise even the most dejected spirits. Later, well after the final curtain, Goebbels noted: ‘The orchestra played more beautifully and impressively than ever before. Wagner’s eternal music gives all of us renewed strength and endurance. At the great “Awake” chorus we all felt our hearts swell.’
Abraham Plotkin found a place to stay on the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Dorotheenstrasse, a room that cost him 2.50 marks per night. He then called the editorial department at Vorwärts (Onwards), the daily newspaper of the SPD, to ask for the telephone number of Raphael Abramovitch, whom he’d met in the USA. Abramovitch, a Russian living in exile in Berlin, was one of the Mensheviks who had lost the tussle for power with the Bolsheviks in the revolution of 1917. Since then, men like him had been threatened, persecuted, locked up and even murdered in Russia.
His voice sounded friendly down the telephone line. Did Plotkin have any news from America?
Of course, said Plotkin. For his part, he was eager to learn what was going on in Germany. They arranged to meet the next day.
Afterwards Plotkin took a stroll down Friedrichstrasse. It was unbelievable how well dressed most people were. At the same time, he’d heard that roughly a third of Germany’s more than sixty million inhabitants were currently reliant on state support. How could the government be pulling it off? Plotkin was deeply impressed. Wherever he looked that night, he could find no signs of poverty. Not in that part of town.