Acts of political murder will be punished with a death sentence.
—PRESIDENTIAL DECREE AGAINST POLITICAL TERROR, ARTICLE 1, EFFECTIVE MIDNIGHT, AUGUST 10, 1932
The headline-making news on the morning of August 10, 1932, just hours after Konrad Pietzuch had been beaten to death, was a presidential decree imposing the death sentence for acts of political murder. The news was carried in every major newspaper in Germany and rippled across the Atlantic, onto the front page of The New York Times. “The German Cabinet, at a special session lasting more than two hours this afternoon, put into final shape the Presidential decree increasing the penalty for political acts of violence,” Fred Birchall wired from Berlin on Tuesday evening. “The decree was then telephoned to President von Hindenburg at Neudeck and provisionally approved by him.” By the summer of 1932, the eighty-four-year-old Reich president, Paul von Hindenburg, was conducting most matters of state by telegraph or telephone from Neudeck, his ancestral home in East Prussia. Couriers shuttled confidential matters of state between Berlin and Neudeck, as Werner von Alversleben had done that spring on a daily basis so that Schleicher could keep Hindenburg apprised of his efforts during his negotiations with Hitler.
While the journey could be accomplished with a brief airplane ride, Hindenburg preferred to travel by train. According to Otto Meissner, Hindenburg’s omnipresent chief of staff, the Reich president found the overnight rail journey deeply disturbing, passing as it did through the Polish Corridor, a trajectory fraught with border controls and occasional peril. More than once a train had caused injury by derailing, either through Polish negligence or sabotage, as happened in May 1925, when several carriages tumbled down a twenty-foot embankment, killing twenty-five persons, including twelve women and two children, and injuring thirty others. It was later discovered the rail spikes had been lifted and the skirting removed. The German press bewailed the fact that Germany was forced to entrust the safety of its citizens to “Polish management.” For Hindenburg, who had protected this swath of Prussia from invading Russian armies with his legendary victory at Tannenberg in August 1914, it was particularly galling to watch the territory negotiated away at Versailles, where the French had sought to exact the greatest revenge possible on Germany. Meissner noted that it required “several days” to calm the old field marshal each time he traversed the former German lands between Neudeck and Berlin. In September 1931, when Hindenburg traveled to Berlin to receive Aristide Briand, the French prime minister found the Reich president detached and distracted. Hindenburg talked mostly about the weather. “The journey [from Neudeck] was clearly tiring for the old gentleman,” Briand remarked afterward.
Hindenburg was generally a charming and animated host. “He often interrupts the conversation with short, genial questions, humor frequently breaking through,” one observer noted in those same months. Once when a friend asked what Hindenburg did when he was nervous, Hindenburg said that he whistled. “But I have never heard you whistle,” the friend observed. “Well, I have never whistled,” Hindenburg replied. At eighty-four, Hindenburg was as steady and firm as the stone monument honoring him on the Tannenberg battlefield. He made a strong impression on Daniel Binchy, the Irish ambassador to Berlin. Binchy recalled presenting his credentials at the diplomatic salon of the presential palace: “Hindenburg’s gigantic figure, held stiffly to attention with the broad shoulders squared and the mighty chest glittering with innumerable orders seemed to dwarf even the stately proportions of the reception room.” He said Hindenburg looked like a figure from “some remote age,” as if he had stepped “straight out of a Germanic saga.”
John Wheeler-Bennett served as an aide to Sir Neill Malcolm, the chief of the British Military Mission in Berlin. Wheeler-Bennett was not dazzled by Hindenburg. For him, Hindenburg was “a man of service, without ambition, and no love of pomp and ceremony,” whose life was determined by his imposing physical stature, a corpulent six-foot-six, and equally impressive aristocratic name, Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg. Hindenburg “very rarely dominated the events of his long lifetime…His misfortune was the sudden attainment of almost supernatural adoration on the part of the German people, who elevated him to the position of a god and expected from him god-like achievements,” Wheeler-Bennett observed. He called Hindenburg a “wooden titan.”
Indeed, Hindenburg had been called out of retirement, in 1914, to serve country and kaiser in the Great War, only to retire again, in 1918, and only to be called into service yet again, in 1925, this time as Reich president. Hindenburg had intended to retire in spring 1932, after completing his first seven-year presidential term, but Chancellor Brüning convinced him to extend his service for an additional two years to allow the German economy and political situation to stabilize. Had conservatives and centrists banded together, they could have delivered the two-thirds Reichstag majority required by the constitution to prolong Hindenburg’s presidential term. Hitler wanted none of it. The National Socialist movement thrived on political chaos and economic despair. Hitler hoped that Hindenburg, faced with another seven years in office, which would take him to age ninety-one, would decline to run for reelection, leaving a field of candidates that guaranteed Hitler an election triumph. When the proposal to extend Hindenburg’s term was blocked in the Reichstag, Hindenburg was forced to run for a second term. In April 1932, he crushed Hitler at the polls by more than six million votes. His reelection to another seven-year term was tantamount to a death sentence. If the “wooden titan” was to die in office, he wanted to die at home and be laid to rest beside his late wife—“my companion and dearest friend”—in the Neudeck family plot.
Hindenburg had been coming to Neudeck since the 1850s, when his grandparents were resident on the sprawling property set in the wooded moorlands of East Prussia. Hindenburg’s youngest brother, Bernhard, who died at age seventy-three, just two weeks before Hindenburg announced his reelection campaign, had written fondly of the ancient house, “with its old-fashioned roof, the poplar trees right and left, and the thick bushes with wild red and yellow roses,” beyond which lay the forest paths where the three Hindenburg boys and their sister, Ida, used to play. Evenings were spent in the sitting room—two long sofas back to back and an adjacent round dining table with a brass chandelier—listening to family lore. As a young cadet at the military academy in Berlin, Hindenburg had traveled to Neudeck for holidays in “slow, unheated trains” and even slower post coaches over rutted country roads.
Hindenburg recalled his grandfather’s stories of Napoleon Bonaparte, who was resident in a nearby palace, in the winter of 1806, when soldiers of the Grande Armée beat back advancing Russian troops at a bridge on the Hindenburg estate. A French officer was shot by a stray bullet through one of Neudeck’s attic windows. The aging family gardener recounted his service in the army of Frederick the Great. “In this way, it may be said, this last ray of the glorious Frederician past fell upon my young self,” Hindenburg recalled in memoirs.
Otto ran the family estate until his death in March 1908, after which it was managed by his widow, Lina von Benneckendorff. The property gradually fell into disrepair and financial distress. Elard von Oldenburg, a “conservative country squire to the bone,” according to The New York Times, lived on the nearby estate of Januschau. On one visit he found Hindenburg in a despondent state. When asked what was wrong, Hindenburg lamented that this “last Hindenburg property” could no longer be maintained. “Since the field marshal was not in a position to buy Neudeck himself, I decided to find a way to acquire the property and give it to the Hindenburg family,” Oldenburg recalled. He proposed a public fundraising campaign, the Hindenburgpfennig, or Penny for Hindenburg, to purchase the property, but Hindenburg would not hear of it. Any money raised in his name, he insisted, was to be given “entirely to the benefit of disabled veterans or the families of war dead.” Oldenburg discreetly solicited financing for Neudeck from wealthy friends and industrialists, negotiating with the tax authorities “so that we were able to offer Neudeck as a gift to the field marshal without additional cost.” The deed to the property was presented to Hindenburg on his eightieth birthday, in October 1927.
Neudeck was restored, and an additional story was added, along with a handsome mansard roof. The interior rooms were hung with family portraits and antlers from ancient hunts, along with a full-sized painting of Hindenburg as Reich president. Beside his desk, Hindenburg kept an aging piece of paper inscribed with the words Ora et labora—“Pray and work”—given to him by his father. On the front porch, where flowerpots would normally have stood, Hindenburg positioned two field guns from the Battle of Tannenberg, still with their frontline splinter shields.
The house was managed by Hindenburg’s daughter-in-law, Margarete, who served as an ersatz first lady, while Hindenburg’s only son, Oskar, acted as his father’s aide-de-camp. “The young Hindenburgs are both most unattractive. They are ungracious and haughty,” observed Bella Fromm. Fromm wrote that Margarete had all the charm of a “Prussian petty officer in petticoats.” Oskar exuded a “morose gloom.” Diarist Harry Kessler considered Oskar “incompetent militarily and in every other way” and plagued by immense feelings of insecurity. Schleicher credited Oskar’s career to his blood association with Haus Hindenburg. Hitler called Oskar “ein seltenes Abbild der Doofheit,” or a paragon of stupidity.
But Oskar was his father’s son. Hindenburg included him in briefings, sent him to greet dignitaries at the train station, and occasionally dispatched him on errands. “Oskar Hindenburg wants a detailed report on the effective strength and equipment of the Reichswehr, for ‘papa,’ ” a Reichswehr general reported derisively in his diary that July. During his father’s first presidential election bid in 1925, Oskar followed the returns on the radio all night and rushed into his father’s bedroom at seven a.m. with news of victory. Hindenburg berated his son for the disturbance. The news, he said, would have been “just as true an hour later.” Then he went back to sleep.
By August 9, not even Neudeck’s comforts and isolation could protect Hindenburg from the troubles of the beleaguered republic. That morning, he received a frantic telegram from political leaders in the state of Silesia, whose political landscape was as fraught as neighboring Upper Silesia. “Last night, there were eleven revolver and hand grenade attacks on supporters of the republic in central Silesia alone,” they reported. “The population of Silesia, which supports the republic, pleads for your protection.” A copy was also sent to Interior Minister Gayl, with the request for an “energetic defense against the terror to which all citizens supporting the republic are being exposed.”
Hindenburg was no stranger to bloodshed. He had devoted his life to killing, first as a frontline soldier and later as a field marshal. As a teenager, Hindenburg had watched his fellow cadets blown to pieces in an artillery barrage during Prussia’s war with Austria in 1866 and was himself briefly knocked unconscious when a cluster shot pierced his helmet and grazed his head. (Hindenburg kept the “shattered helmet,” which he proudly showed visitors decades later.) He recovered and pressed the assault, capturing a cannon and returning fire on fleeing riders, whose “white cloaks made excellent targets.” In 1870, Hindenburg, as troop commander, was ordered to lead his men to battle against the French. He later observed that it was an instance when “advanced weapons” first met “obsolete tactics.” His battalion suffered heavy losses.
After his great victory at Tannenberg in August 1914, Hindenburg was elevated to field marshal and was ultimately responsible for three million German war deaths, along with millions more French, British, and American, including the twelve hundred passengers and crew members killed when the Lusitania was sunk by the Hindenburg-approved strategy of unrestricted submarine warfare. He was accused of war crimes but never tried. Hindenburg had blood on his hands, but he was a soldier, not a killer. During the war, he sought to intervene with his Turkish allies to prevent the mass killing of the Armenians but was rebuffed. Hindenburg came to realize that the passions unleashed by politics and religion were vastly more dangerous than war. He wore the cloak of the war with solemnity. He avoided politics.
“As an active soldier I had always kept more of a distance from the domestic politics of the day,” Hindenburg later explained. “Even after my transition into retirement, I was engaged only in the context of a quiet observer.” He intended to pass his waning years, as he wrote in his memoirs, in “the shade of the tree” planted in the “ethical and political soil” tilled by the Hohenzollern monarchy. At heart, he was a monarchist.
Hindenburg initially declined suggestions to run for office following the death of Reich president Friedrich Ebert, in 1925, but coaxing by friends and a petition with three million signatures, collected in two weeks, convinced him to run as a nonaligned candidate. On May 12, 1925, Hindenburg entered the Reichstag to be sworn in as Reich president. In his acceptance speech he said, “Whereas the Reichstag is the place where opposing views and political convictions clash in partisan conflict, the Reich president’s duty should be dedicated to the non-partisan task of uniting and coordinating the nation’s constructive and progressive elements for the common welfare of our people, without regard for party consideration.” He went on to swear his oath before “the Almighty, All-Knowing God” to devote all his energies to the welfare of the German people, to increase their prosperity, to protect them from injury, to preserve the constitution and laws of the republic, and to perform his duties “conscientiously and to deal justly with all.”
The preamble to the Reich constitution, which Hindenburg had vowed to protect as Reich president, promised to unite Germans “in all their racial elements,” to promote “liberty and justice,” to preserve “peace at home and abroad.” The aspirational sentiments imbedded in this foundational federal document—its 181 articles were meticulously crafted by the finest legal minds of the day—appeared to be failing on every count, thanks at least in part to the fearmongering and fomenting of a single man.
Hindenburg had first met Hitler in October 1931. The man had ranted, in his distinctly Austrian accent, for nearly an hour, not letting the Reich president say a word. Hindenburg had sought to appeal to Hitler’s love of the fatherland and of the German people, to his sense of honor as a decorated war veteran, all to no visible effect, which left Hindenburg convinced that he wanted nothing further to do with “that Bohemian corporal,” as he told Otto Meissner afterward. Less than six months later, Hindenburg found himself confronting Hitler again, this time in a presidential election.
In announcing his candidacy in February 1932, Hindenburg spoke to the public for the first time on the radio: “When I was asked the first time, seven years ago, to run for Germany’s highest office, I deliberately avoided speaking at partisan meetings, and have therefore spoken only once to the entire nation.”
Hindenburg was concerned over the fracturing of the polity, and especially the dangers to the German Reich posed by the prospective candidates. He did not mention them by name, but he was clearly worried about both Ernst Thälmann, the Communist leader on the extreme left, and Adolf Hitler on the extreme right. Hindenburg said he was not going to present a political platform. He was not going to hold rallies. He would not seek to justify himself to the public. He preferred to let his life and his life’s work “speak to his single driving motivation, to fulfill his sense of duty to the Fatherland.” He asked no more of every voter than what he had done: to set aside personal interests and agendas and do what was best for the country. He raised his voice only twice during the address, once in towering indignation over a right-wing smear campaign against his character, and again in the final words when he appealed to the nation’s people to set contention and differences aside for the sake of the country. The radio address lasted four minutes and ten seconds but delivered him a second term of “this sadly distraught republic,” to borrow Birchall’s phrase.
Less than six months later, Hitler was back at the polls. Having failed in his bid for the Reich presidency, he was now determined to win a majority in the Reichstag and, with it, a claim to the Reich chancellorship. If he couldn’t be head of state, he would become head of government. His 37 percent of the vote did not achieve that. Then came the August 4 call from Schleicher.
But just as Schleicher was placing his call to Hitler on the Obersalzberg to test the waters for his potential interest in the chancellorship, Hindenburg received his own telephone call at Neudeck from Papen, who briefed him on his continuing efforts to forge the nationalist parties into a conservative Reichstag majority. Papen told Hindenburg that it was his sense that Hitler had reached his political high-water mark in the July 31 elections, and that for all the jubilation of his supporters, Hitler was disappointed that he had failed to secure an outright majority. Papen knew that the radical elements in the National Socialist movement were escalating post-election violence in an attempt to force the president to place Hitler in power. “The recent acts of terror are part of this plan,” Papen told Hindenburg. Papen said there was talk of a “March on Berlin,” like Mussolini’s demonstration in Rome a decade earlier, which brought Papen to the issue of additional measures to restore public security.
Papen said that in the cabinet meeting he had just convened, the reestablishment of public security had been high on the agenda. Interior Minister Gayl suggested introducing special courts for dealing with political violence and stressed the need to sharpen the existing gun-control legislation. “For those who injure or kill political opponents with a weapon,” Gayl said, “a death sentence has to be introduced.” A heated discussion ensued. One cabinet member felt that the “boulevard press” had created an artificial sense of crisis, suggesting that reports of public violence were exaggerated. Might it not be better to promote responsible reporting in the press instead of death sentences for street brawlers? He was concerned that state authorities, already politically polarized, would flout any federal dictates on gun control. A second cabinet member cautioned against introducing the death sentence for practical reasons. Given the current epidemic of political murder, the courts would be turned into killing machines.
The discussion turned to an earlier potential solution, that of a general disarmament in which gun owners would willingly deposit their weapons at neutral points. In Breslau, local authorities had introduced a municipal “disarmament action” that permitted anyone in possession of an unregistered weapon, in violation of the 1928 law, to hand it over to local authorities with impunity. It was pointed out that it was wholly unreasonable to think one could disarm the entire country when the nation was awash with weapons, when one could buy a revolver on any street corner for five or six reichsmarks (about $32 today). That very week, a police raid on an SA arsenal hidden in a storage facility for farm equipment had seized a motorcycle loaded with ammunition, twenty-three potato-masher hand grenades, a heavy machine gun—mounted on skids—with sixteen belts of ammunition, an army knife, a revolver, and a rubber truncheon weighted with lead. Konstantin von Neurath, the foreign minister and one of the oldest and most sober-minded cabinet members, warned, “The current situation is so tense that only the more peaceable elements would follow such an order, thus leaving the troublemakers as the only ones in the possession of weapons.”
A death-sentence decree appeared to be the best—possibly the only remaining—solution for quelling the epidemic of murder sweeping the country. On August 9, a draft of the “Presidential Decree Against Political Terror” was telegraphed to Neudeck for approval. Paragraph 1 imposed a mandatory death sentence on “anyone who commits murder as the aggressor based on political motivations.” A companion decree established special courts for dealing with political murder in an expeditious manner. Both decrees went into effect as of midnight, August 10, 1932.
The next morning, the press greeted the new “anti-terrorism” decree with boldfaced headlines, skepticism, even derision. “Do people really believe that the grenade throwers and sharpshooters from the Hitler army would let themselves be deterred from their thuggish activities by the threat of a death penalty when they are celebrated as heroes and martyrs in their party organs at the same time?” a writer for Vorwärts asked in its morning edition. The National Socialists applauded the murder decree. The Völkischer Beobachter saw it as a “beginning to the annihilation of the red murder banditry.” Hitler himself weighed in with a personal commentary. “One would expect that these new decrees are not just words on paper,” he wrote, “but will be used with all severity against the Marxist commandos and snipers.” In the past, the president had exercised emergency powers, accorded him by Article 48 of the constitution, in order to suppress National Socialist violence, especially attacks on synagogues and Jews. Hitler now welcomed a decree aimed at his political opponents, though, he noted, a “National Socialist emergency decree,” while equally draconian, would provide for the “immediate arrest and conviction of all Communist and Social Democratic party functionaries.”
Hitler’s endorsement was based, in good part, on the fact that the majority of the alleged political murders were perpetrated by Red Front fighters, with a noticeable decline in SA-related killings, as Hitler sought to position his movement for political power. Following a pre-election rally in Königsberg, on July 17, Hitler dispatched a telegram to Gayl, with copies to Hindenburg and Papen. “The SA conducted themselves in exemplary fashion during a propaganda march through the city,” Hitler wrote. “As the columns marched past me, I was witness to such outrageous provocations by the Königsberg police that only the unbounded discipline of my followers prevented a catastrophe.” The telegram was prompted by an altercation between the local police chief and Gauleiter Erich Koch, who threatened to unleash his storm troopers on police officers seeking to control the crowds. If not for the “discipline” and “restraint” of the National Socialists, Hitler said, the incident would have escalated into a “bloody catastrophe.” The incident, like the telegram, belied ongoing SA attempts to incite and provoke public violence, along with almost daily incidents of stabbings, shootings, and bombings. A storm trooper in Reichenbach was blown apart when a grenade he was preparing to throw exploded in his hand. Another survived an exchange of gunfire with a Communist in Ortelsburg. Beatings and other abuses were beyond counting.
Two years earlier, Hitler had talked publicly about how difficult it was to restrain, let alone disarm, men with weapons. He spoke of “eine innere Liebe zur Waffe,” or a man’s “inner love for a weapon.” “Even if I could order that the SA could no longer own a weapon, don’t you think they would secretly disobey me?” Hitler asked, noting that this was especially true when Social Democrats and Communists were armed to the teeth. “It would be completely impossible, aside from being insane,” Hitler added. As self-serving and cynical as Hitler’s public confession of his limited control over his storm troopers may have been, his observation about a man’s inborn love of weapons did ring with nonpartisan truth.
When Hitler welcomed Hindenburg’s draconian measures against political violence, he assumed the decree would be used to target Communists and Social Democrats. Hitler knew that the application of laws and decrees was ultimately left to prosecutors and judges, who were generally conservative and often exercised judicial leniency in cases involving National Socialists. In a 1922 statistical study, Four Years of Political Violence, Emil Gumbel criticized the judicial system for the disturbingly frequent number of acquittals in cases involving right-wing defendants. “Subtly [the judge’s] soul sways along with the murderer, covered by a mask of proper procedure,” Gumbel wrote. “The murderer goes free.”
Hitler himself could have faced extradition, extended imprisonment, or even execution for high treason following his attempted 1923 putsch. Instead, he was given a scandalously light prison sentence. The presiding judge allowed Hitler to use the courtroom for extended tirades and spoke of the defendant’s “noble” and “unselfish” motivations. The prosecutor, in his closing statement, praised Hitler for his “honest efforts to inspire belief in the German cause.”[*]
Hitler understood that any law or decree, no matter how draconian, was only as effective as the individuals entrusted with its implementation. Hindenburg had issued a series of presidential decrees seeking to quell public violence, to protect Jewish places of worship, to bridle the rising National Socialist movement, all to little effect. The 1932 presidential decree prohibiting storm troopers from wearing uniforms in public, displaying swastika banners, and conducting mass rallies had been whispered away in a backroom deal with the promise of National Socialist tolerance of a Papen chancellorship and agreement to participate in a coalition government. There was no reason to assume that the latest presidential decree could not be subverted, manipulated, or eventually rescinded, and even if implemented, would target, as Hitler wrote in the Völkischer Beobachter, Communist or Social Democratic perpetrators rather than National Socialists.
* Hitler served less than eight months of a five-year sentence in a minimum-security facility with a private suite of rooms.