There were several institutions whose work and resources have been central to the research and writing of this book. First and foremost, the Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ), in Munich, which continues to publish landmark editions of works, ranging from Hitler’s speeches to the two-volume annotated edition of Mein Kampf, along with countless books and monographs dating back to the 1950s. The Berlin State Library provided digitized editions of dozens of newspapers from the 1930s, as well as other online resources. Similarly, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation has an extensive online collection of newspapers, including Vorwärts. I might also mention Zeitpunkt NRW, a project funded by the German federal state of Westphalia, to which dozens of archives, universities, and libraries in the region contributed. The collection has digitized twenty million pages from newspapers published between 1801 and 1945. The German Newspaper Portal, Deutsches Zeitungsportal, is a project of the German National Library that provides online access to millions more pages of German newspapers. The photo collections at the Prussian Heritage Image Archive (BPK) and the Bavarian State Library (BSB) contain a trove of primary source materials important to the writing of this book. The German Federal Archives have generously placed one hundred thousand historical photographs from their collection into the public domain.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) contributed documents as well as images. I would like to mention other U.S.-based institutions important for the research and writing of this book: New York Public Library; New-York Historical Society; Hoover Institution at Stanford University; Hesburgh Libraries at the University of Notre Dame; the sound archive at the University of California Santa Barbara; and Thornwillow Press in Newburgh, New York.
The digital lending library Archive.org was another important resource, not only for the easy access it permitted to books, but also because the digital formats made the editions searchable. This was also the case with the online transcripts of the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, and the digitized resources at the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum, in Israel. An invaluable source for audio recordings of speeches by Hitler, Hindenburg, and others, collected by the German discographer Rainer Lotz, is available in the Zeitgeschichte Collection at the University of Santa Barbara in California.
The German Historical Institute Paris, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, was a welcome resource not only for authoritative editions of speeches, diaries, memoirs, but also an extensive collection of scholarly works, as well as relatively obscure works, such as the collected Der Angriff essays of Joseph Goebbels, the memoirs of Hitler press spokesman Otto Dietrich and Brown House manager Philipp Bouhler.
All these institutions have provided many of the primary sources that I relied on for the research and writing of this book. I have turned to secondary works only for occasional orientation or details, since my main objective was to recount the last six months of Hitler’s ascent to power as it was reported and perceived at the time. To this end, I took a phased approach to structuring and layering the source material. Newspapers served their traditional role as the “first draft of history,” informing the overall structure and contour of the narrative. Official protocols, meeting notes, internal reports, correspondence, diary entries, and the like were used to deepen and detail particular moments, and also offered insights and perspectives.
Finally, postwar memoirs, interviews, and courtroom testimonies provided color, commentary, and additional details. I drew on scholarly works sparingly but gratefully when it seemed prudent to do so. Needless to say, each of these sources has strengths and weaknesses. Among them I found not only a diversity of opinions and perspectives, including contradictory information and perceptions, but also intentional obfuscations and accidental errors. I have included these, sometimes with commentary and additional information in the Notes, to help the reader experience those months in all their uncertainty, promise, and threat.
While there were dozens of news sources from which to choose, I decided to focus on a representative selection of newspapers, from the far right to the radical left, with the foreign press providing an outside perspective. The National Socialist Völkischer Beobachter and Der Angriff anchored the fascist right. The Communist newspaper Die Rote Fahne and the Social Democratic Vorwärts presented the perspectives from the left. The venerable Vossische Zeitung was always intelligent, insightful, and centrist, though with a noticeable liberal tilt. Hindenburg told Bella Fromm that the Vossische, also known as “Tante Voss” (“Auntie Voss”), was his favorite newspaper mainly because it was the only one to print his birth announcement. I also relied frequently on The New York Times, not only because it was the newspaper of record but also because it occasionally got things so remarkably wrong, repeatedly predicting Hitler’s political demise, even after January 30, 1933.
The published minutes from cabinet meetings of the Brüning, Papen, and Schleicher governments, which include extensive annotation, allow the reader to experience firsthand the behind-the-scenes deliberations to headline-making events. Similarly, Hitler’s speeches from 1932, more than a thousand pages of text meticulously transcribed and diligently annotated for the IfZ, offer insights into the major issues that occupied his attention on an almost daily basis. Diaries provide a similar service but in a more personal and intimate manner.
The daily entries of Joseph Goebbels’s diary not only trace his personal reaction to the events of the day but frequently record Hitler’s own thoughts and feelings. The entries are a complicated and occasionally contradictory source of information since they have appeared in various editions. Goebbels himself published select diary entries from January 1, 1932, to May 1, 1933, in a 1934 volume titled Vom Kaiserhof zur Reichskanzlei: Eine historische Darstellung in Tagebuchblättern. This version has some additional material, and occasionally deleted or misleading information, such as references to Hitler’s family life. The fourteen-volume edition published by the IfZ between 1998 and 2006, under the title Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Im Auftrag des Institut für Zeitgeschichte, edited by Elke Fröhlich, is based on the original handwritten diary entries preserved by Goebbels on microfiche glass plates. Originally found in Potsdam in 1945, they were sent to the Moscow State Archives.
An earlier four-volume version, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels Sämtliche Fragmente 1924–1941, also edited by Elke Fröhlich for the IfZ, was published by the Saur Verlag in 1987. An annotated source, Joseph Goebbels Tagebücher 1924–1945, edited by Ralf Georg Reuth (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1992), is a compilation of the 1987 Elke Fröhlich Sämtliche Fragmente edition and the Goebbels Vom Kaiserhof diary entries. Reuth indicated the latter next to the date with Kaiserhof in parenthesis. Annotations include references to Goebbels’s speeches, and historical details providing context.
The diary of Reinhold Quaatz provides a similar mirror into Alfred Hugenberg, as does the journal of Kurt von Hammerstein into Kurt von Schleicher. Questions have been raised about the provenance of an anonymous diary of a defense ministry general, edited by Helmut Klotz. “The book is obviously the work of a group of insiders,” John Chamberlain wrote in a review for The New York Times, on June 14, 1934. I have therefore used only those entries that I could corroborate with alternate sources. There has been similar speculation about the Bella Fromm diary, with evidence suggesting that she wrote it after immigrating to America. Again, I used only what I could verify. There is no question about the authenticity of Count Harry Kessler’s diary, which provides a perfect barometric reading of the political, social, and economic pressures of the times, a reflection of the inner life of the outside world.
Like diaries, memoirs offer personal perspectives on the events of the day, but filtered through hindsight, often with the intent of shaping historical memory and perception after the fact. This tendency is perhaps most evident in the two memoirs written by Franz von Papen, one published in 1953 and the other in 1968, in which he seeks to shape our understanding of his role in facilitating Hitler’s rise to power. The memoirs of Heinrich Brüning were similarly self-serving, so much so that their publication was withheld until after his death. To my mind, one of the most insightful and balanced memoirs was provided by State Secretary Otto Meissner; it offers the ultimate insider account of events in the Reich Chancellery and the president’s office. Meissner served two Reich presidents, Friedrich Ebert and Paul von Hindenburg, and one Reich chancellor, Adolf Hitler. The memoirs of Hitler associates Ernst Röhm, Hans Frank, Otto Dietrich, Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hermann Rauschning, Hans Baur, Otto Strasser, and Leni Riefenstahl, to name a few, provided nuance, insight, and detail but were read with a critical eye to potential distortions and invention. I applied the same caution to a four-hundred-page family memoir compiled and written by Hitler’s older half brother and sister-in-law. Needless to say, Hitler’s own autobiography, Mein Kampf, published in an annotated edition in 2016 by the IfZ, was an indispensable resource.
There is, of course, a vast secondary literature that has been accumulating for nearly a century. Two readings I continue to recommend from my years as a graduate student are Weimar Culture, by Peter Gay, and The Politics of Cultural Despair, by Fritz Stern, as well as, of course, the landmark works of Henry Ashby Turner, who parsed the role of industrialists in Hitler’s rise to power much more deeply than I have here. Turner would certainly have taken issue with my stance on the Schleicher strategy to split the Nazi Party, but I hope he would have appreciated the devils’ dance I describe among Hitler, Papen, Hugenberg, Schleicher, and, ultimately, Hindenburg. Scholars of the era may have wished to see a fuller treatment of certain issues, such as the tensions between state and federal authorities, especially regarding the dissolution of the state government of Prussia, in July 1932, and perhaps the ever-present potential restoration of the monarchy, but I do make certain they are at least in evidence.
I would like to mention a few secondary sources that I found particularly helpful. These include the excellent, annotated four-volume work Hitler: Das Itinerar: Aufenthaltsorte und Reisen von 1889 bis 1945, published in 2016 by Harold Sandner, which chronicles virtually every day of Hitler’s whereabouts. Mostly corroborated with other sources, Das Itinerar is an excellent resource to follow Hitler in his many travels, although not without some contradictions from other sources.
Other scrupulously researched works include the biography Hindenburg: Herrschaft zwischen Hohenzollern und Hitler, by Wolfram Pyta, and Gregor Strasser und die NSDAP, by Udo Kissenkötter, as well as a most helpful biography, Alfred Hugenberg: The Radical Nationalist Campaign Against the Weimar Republic, by John Leopold. Werner von Blomberg: Hitlers erster Feldmarschall, by Kirstin Anne Schäfer, should also be mentioned. There are, of course, many excellent Hitler biographies, some recent, like that by Volker Ullrich, and those from the recent past, including the landmark volumes by Ian Kershaw and Joachim Fest, but also some early works, like those by John Toland and Konrad Heiden. I would also like to mention several books for the details they provided, in particular, James Pool and Suzanne Pool’s Who Financed Hitler: The Secret Funding of Hitler’s Rise to Power, 1919–1933 and Daniel Siemens’s Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts, as well as Die Totengräber: Der letzte Winter der Weimarer Republik, by Rüdiger Barth and Hauke Friederichs. Die Machtergreifung: 30. Januar 1933, by Hans Otto Meissner deserves special mention, as does Hitler—30 janvier 1933—La Véritable Histoire, by François Delpla.
A major challenge was balancing the occasionally contradictory information found in primary sources with details in the secondary literature, as in the case with the dating of Eva Braun’s suicide attempt and subsequent hospitalization. The medical records have vanished. In his memoirs, Heinrich Hoffmann placed the suicide attempt and Hitler’s visit on November 1, which has led most accounts to use this date. Heike B. Görtemaker, who has written an authoritative account of Eva Braun, Eva Braun: Leben mit Hitler (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2010), situates Braun’s suicide attempt in August, a dating that I have used, and that is consistent with Hitler’s itinerary. Given that Hitler held a series of rallies on November 1, 2, and 3 in Karlsruhe, Berlin, and Hannover, respectively, it would have made it impossible for him to have visited Eva Braun in the hospital at that time.
There were similarly conflicting accounts of Hitler’s exact location following his August meeting with Hindenburg. Goebbels notes, in his original diary entry, that Hitler planned to return to the Goebbels country house in Caputh, while his published diary entry has Hitler returning to the Obersalzberg. Otto Dietrich claimed that Hitler departed Berlin for Munich, where he worked “in the midnight hour at the Brown House,” an account supported by Ernst Hanfstaengl in his memoirs. The most recent scholarship has hardly clarified matters. Das Itinerar reports Hitler staying overnight at the Hotel Kaiserhof. Volker Ullrich writes that Hitler departed directly for the Obersalzberg. I have tried to navigate these contradictions by selecting the version that seems best supported by evidence, generally citing contradictory accounts in the notes.
The photographic documentation posed its own set of complexities. There was the occasional manipulation of an image, as with the photograph of Hitler and Hugenberg together during the Harzburger Front meeting. Hitler has obviously been “photoshopped” into the scene, as evidenced by his awkward stance, and by his absence in the original photograph. (Despite the manipulation, the image conveys the two men’s abiding and mutual disdain.) In some cases, the exact date or even year is difficult to determine. A photograph of Hitler casting his ballot at a polling station has been variously attributed to the presidential election in spring 1932 or one of the subsequent Reichstag elections, in November 1932 or March 1933. The curators in the NARA photographic collection, where the original is held, have marked the image tentatively “March 1933 (?).”
NARA places a photograph of Hitler addressing “107 Reichstag delegates” at September 1930, while the German Federal Archives dates it at December 8, 1932. The Polish National Archives indicates it at August 13, 1932, as does Das Itinerar. In each case, I have sought to weigh the existing evidence and prevailing academic opinion to select the most logical date. For example, in this latter case, I chose August 13 over August 10, because we know from multiple sources, including press accounts and Goebbels’s diary entries, that on August 10, Hitler was on the Obersalzberg. In cases of continuing doubt, as with the photograph of Hitler voting, I have captioned the image, without specific attribution to date, simply as an example of him exercising his democratic right to vote.
Finally, a note on the translations. I have generally sought to transpose rather than directly translate the German text into English, not only for the sake of the narrative flow but also to make certain words or passages more comprehensible to the reader. For example, when Goebbels expresses frustration at Hindenburg’s resistance to appointing Hitler chancellor, he writes, “Hitler muss heran,” which might be translated literally as “Hitler has to come.” I have translated this as “It has to be Hitler.” At times, I have left the original German, as with Hugenberg’s initial response to joining a Hitler cabinet: “Nein! Nein! Nein!” In some cases, there were nuanced differences in the languages that I have sought to convey. I have translated Reichstagfraktion as Reichstag “faction,” rather than “fraction,” since in English the term “fraction” can refer to a splinter grouping within a parliamentary faction, thus, one could speak of a potential Strasser fraction within the National Socialist Reichstag faction.