Crazy things are going on. With guns and things like that.
—JOSEPH GOEBBELS, DIARY ENTRY, AUGUST 12, 1932
For all the precautions taken to keep the August 5 meeting between Hitler and Schleicher out of the public eye, details of their deliberations quickly found their way into the press, albeit in wildly corrupted and fanciful form. “Schleicher advocates that Adolf Hitler become Reich president,” Die Schwarze Front reported the next morning. That right-wing—though decidedly anti–National Socialist—newspaper, published by Gregor Strasser’s brother Otto, who had broken with the National Socialist movement, announced that Hitler was to replace Hindenburg as the ultimate constitutional power in the country. Schleicher would be appointed Reich chancellor, with Hitler agreeing to retain the Schleicher cabinet for a minimum of two years—enough time, the newspaper said, to eradicate the Communist threat and increase military spending as top priorities. By Monday, the Frankfurter Zeitung was offering a more plausible though equally unnerving prospect: that Hitler was to be appointed chancellor.
By the morning of Tuesday, August 9, the Vossische Zeitung had reported on the “secret” that all of Berlin was talking about. The next day, Vorwärts splashed the news in a banner headline, “Hitler wants to rule!” The editors were frantic at the thought. “The appointment of Hitler is out of the question because he lacks even the most basic qualifications,” they wrote. “You cannot entrust a government to the leader of a party that in recent days has been responsible for perpetrating countless horrific acts of violence without discrediting the authority of the German state before the eyes of the entire world, not to mention the majority of its own people.” There was also the fact that Hitler had served prison time for treason against the very state he was now seeking to rule.
Unlike Hitler’s anti-Semitism, a toxic brew of pseudoscientific readings and malignant mentoring, Hitler’s hatred of the Weimar Republic was the result of personal observation of political processes. He hated the haggling and compromise of coalition politics inherent in multiparty political systems. “Is it really a nation when there are thirty political parties?” he wondered. “Do you think it’s thanks to them that Germany even continues to exist today?” Hitler was particularly troubled by the absence of personal accountability and individual responsibility, as well as the immunities accorded elected representatives to legislative bodies. “Parliament can take any kind of decision, regardless of how devastating the circumstances, and no one carries any responsibility for that, no one can be held to account,” he wrote in Mein Kampf.
At his 1924 trial for treason, Hitler used the courtroom to grandstand against weak-kneed democracies and lectured the court on the relationship between violent force and rule of law. He quoted Frederick the Great: “Law is worthless unless it is defended with the tip of a sword.” He cited Otto von Bismarck, the “blood and iron” chancellor, who had forged the German Reich against the will of the Reichstag, which had opposed him in a vote of 160 to 11. “How was Bismarck described by everyone in the opposition press?” Hitler asked. “As a violator of the constitution, as a traitor!” Had Bismarck failed, Hitler said, he would have been tried for treason. Instead, he was a hero. Ditto Mussolini. “How do you legalize a coup d’état?” Hitler continued. You eliminate the political opposition, he answered. You restructure government. You rewrite laws. “The legalization of the ‘March on Rome’ was not completed until after Mussolini had undertaken an enormous cleansing process,” Hitler said. “That’s how you legalize high treason.” According to Hitler, his only crime was failure.
He had expressed this same anti-democratic conviction before the Reich Supreme Court in Leipzig in September 1930, when he was called to testify in defense of three young Reichswehr officers charged with treason. The men had allegedly committed the crime as part of a National Socialist plot to overthrow the government. Rather than answer questions related directly to the case at hand, Hitler took the opportunity to rage against the republic. He insisted that he was not a putschist. He was not a tyrant. He was simply fighting for the honor of the German people. Invoking Article 1 of the Reich constitution, Hitler reminded the judges that the power of the state emanated from the will of the people. “The constitution only prescribes the field of battle, but not the ultimate goal,” he said. “When we are finally in possession of the constitutionally guaranteed rights and powers, we will pour the state into the form that we think is best.”
It seemed an astonishingly brazen admission, but no less astonishing was the judge’s follow-on question: “So, only by constitutional means?” Hitler’s reply was crisp and pointed: “Jawohl!” Hitler repeated his intentions almost verbatim in an interview the following December. “The National Socialist movement will achieve power in Germany by methods permitted by the present Constitution—in a purely legal way,” he told The New York Times. “It will then give the German people the form of organization and government that suits our purposes.”
After his August 5, 1932, meeting with Schleicher, Hitler had every reason to assume he would be chancellor by week’s end, as reflected in the increasingly fevered newspaper headlines that week. “In the course of the day the press has been filling with reports that Hitler will be chancellor,” Kessler wrote in his diary that Thursday evening. When he returned to his apartment sometime after ten o’clock, Kessler noticed that the basement room of his servant, a fervent National Socialist, was open to the street. The lights were on. Music blared. “Jubilation and victory in the air,” Kessler wrote. “The people are already living in the Third Reich!”
As the left-wing press panicked and the right-wing press cheered, Hitler prepared for his meeting with Hindenburg. By midweek, most of his lieutenants had departed. Röhm was preparing his private army for the long-awaited “March on Berlin.” Goebbels noted in his diary that calling the SA to Berlin “makes the gentlemen very nervous. That is the purpose of the maneuver.” Meanwhile, Strasser was conducting further reconnaissance in Berlin.
Goebbels and his wife remained on the Obersalzberg, planning to travel with Hitler to Munich, then Berlin by car. But on the evening of August 10, Hitler received an unexpected call from Munich, possibly from his friend and personal photographer Heinrich Hoffmann or from his Munich housekeeper, Anni Winter. Eva Braun, a young woman Hitler had been seeing discreetly, was in the hospital in Munich. The twenty-year-old blonde had shot herself in the neck in a failed suicide attempt.[*]
Goebbels’s diary entries tend to be a reliable barometer for measuring emotions and concerns within Hitler’s inner circle. Following a disagreement with Strasser in January 1930, Goebbels reported, “Hitler is as furious as a hand grenade.” Goebbels writes of “jubilation beyond all measure” after a local electoral victory in Saxony in June 1930. A performance of Wagner’s Meistersinger in the spring of 1931 left Hitler calm and reflective, musing on “style, culture, and civilization.” “He is so clear-headed, a truly brilliant thinker,” Goebbels wrote in April 1931. On August 11, there is no mention by Goebbels of Eva’s suicide attempt. Goebbels writes, “Departure from Obersalzberg. Hitler comes along. Scorching heat.”
With Hitler in the passenger seat and his chauffeur at the wheel, they proceeded down the series of switchbacks to Berchtesgaden, and from there up the valley to Bad Reichenhall, arriving at Prien-am-Chiemsee, a lakeside town midway to Munich, where Strasser was waiting with news. It wasn’t good. Papen and Schleicher had tested the idea of a Hitler chancellorship on Hindenburg. Strasser reported, “The old man is resisting.” In fact, Hindenburg had been more direct in his response: conditio sine qua non. Under no conditions was he going to appoint Hitler as chancellor.
It was difficult to determine from a lakeside terrace in rural Bavaria what the former Prussian field marshal was thinking. Perhaps the conditio sine qua non was in response to being presented with a fait accompli. Perhaps the leaks to the press of a potential Hitler chancellorship had irritated him. Vorwärts ran an admonishing banner headline: “Warning! Those Who Play with Fascism Play with Germany’s Ruin.” Or perhaps the Hero of Tannenberg bristled at the suggestion that he could be intimidated by an army of storm troopers descending on Berlin. How could one know? The man was impenetrable and, in Goebbels’s words, “unberechenbar,” or unpredictable. Papen reacted differently.
Harry Kessler read that Papen, “terrified by the idea” of an imminent march on Berlin, had declared his willingness to step down and leave the chancellor position to Hitler. Another rumor tangled the chancellorship and a storm trooper coup yet further: “Goebbels and Strasser were said to have wanted to launch the ‘March on Berlin’ but Hitler realized the right moment had passed and, both furious and disappointed, had returned to Munich without even waiting for his appointment with Hindenburg,” Kessler wrote.
Sitting on the lakeside terrace, Hitler now huddled with his closest lieutenants. Goebbels panicked, as he so often did, leaving Strasser to master the moment. Why not turn Hitler’s problem into Papen’s problem, Strasser proposed. With 37 percent of the electorate and 230 seats in the Reichstag, Hitler had the capacity to paralyze the legislative process. If Papen and Schleicher could not deliver the chancellorship to Hitler, the National Socialists would simply go into obstructionist mode. Papen would be forced to rule by executive decree. The Communists would mobilize, the Papen government would collapse, and Hindenburg would be left with the starkest of choices: Hitler or chaos. The Strasser strategy seemed clear, simple, and sensible. Goebbels calmed down. “In any event, we need to keep our nerves and stay strong,” said Goebbels, reprising the collective lakeside sentiment. “We are all of one mind. Strasser is already readying himself for the interior minister position.”
Hitler arrived in Munich in time for lunch. Goebbels and his wife, Magda, proceeded north to their country house in Caputh near Potsdam, with Hitler remaining behind and visiting the hospitalized Braun. He had been seeing the blue-eyed photo-shop assistant discreetly on and off for the past two years. Braun had first come to his attention in October 1930, when he stopped by Hoffmann’s photo studio. She recalled this “man with a funny moustache, a light-colored English-style overcoat and a big felt hat in his hand.” Braun, who had shortened her dress earlier that day, noticed Hitler looking at her legs. Hitler began inviting the young woman to the theater, to dinner. She kept the relationship from her parents for as long as she could, knowing they would not approve. Hitler also kept the increasingly intimate relationship discreet. Hoffmann knew, as did Anni Winter, but almost no one else in his inner circle.
Hitler’s mentor, Dietrich Eckart, allegedly told Hitler that he needed to stay single so all the women of Germany could imagine him as their own. Germany was his bride. Hitler’s personal pilot, Hans Baur, suggested a more practical reason. “I saw Hitler surrounded by a group of attractive girls,” Baur recalled. “None of the girls had eyes for anyone but him.” But Hitler kept a noticeably practiced distance. When Baur mentioned this, Hitler replied, “As a matter of fact you are right. And I have to keep it that way. I’m in the spotlight of publicity and anything of that sort could be very damaging.” Were Baur to have an affair, Hitler continued, no one would notice or care. “But if I did, there’d be hell to pay,” he said. “And women can never keep their mouths shut.”
The press was unrelenting in exposing and exploiting irregularities in Hitler’s private life. Hitler’s father had been born out of wedlock, was originally named Schicklgruber, and had married a cousin who was barely half his age. His sister in Vienna was said to be mentally impaired. His brother in Hamburg was a convicted felon and bigamist. There were rumors of Jewish blood in the Hitler family lineage. Indeed, the National Socialist leader could not provide the incontrovertible evidence of a pure Aryan lineage that he was demanding from his own followers.
On September 18, 1931, Hitler was in his car with Hoffmann on his way to a weekend rally in Erlangen when Julius Schreck, their driver, was flagged down thirty minutes outside Nuremberg by a speeding car dispatched from the Grand Hotel in Nuremberg, where Hitler had spent Thursday night. Anni Winter had called the hotel saying that she urgently needed to speak with Hitler. When Hitler called, she told him that something terrible had happened to his twenty-three-year-old niece, Geli Raubal, who kept a room in Hitler’s Prinzregentenplatz apartment. Schreck raced back to Munich “with the accelerator jammed to the floor.” “In the driving mirror I could see the reflection of Hitler’s face,” Hoffmann said. “He sat with compressed lips, staring with unseeing eyes through the windscreen.”
By the time they arrived at the apartment, Strasser was already there, interrogating Winter, managing the police, speaking to the reporters who swarmed the entrance. Hitler’s youth leader, Baldur von Schirach, who was Hoffmann’s son-in-law, had called Adolf Dresler, head of the party’s press section in the Brown House, and instructed him to issue a statement explaining that Hitler was “in deep grief” over his niece’s suicide. “Dr. Dresler had just fulfilled the instructions when Schirach called back on the telephone,” Hitler’s close associate and foreign press adviser Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl remembered. “In fact, the press release should make no mention of suicide as the cause of death, rather it should simply refer to an unfortunate accident.” By then it was too late.
On September 21, the Münchner Merkur reported on an alleged altercation between Hitler and his niece that had preceded the suicide. “Neighbors heard screaming and shouting in the apartment,” the newspaper reported. The Münchner Post, a decidedly anti-Hitler newspaper, ran the headline “A Puzzling Affair—Suicide of Hitler’s Niece” and supplied graphic details, suggesting physical abuse. A letter was allegedly found, written by Geli, saying she was moving to Vienna. By Monday afternoon, the puzzling affair had become lurid. “A mysterious darkness envelops the niece’s suicide in the house of Hitler,” Vorwärts reported in its evening edition. “Officially she has lived for the past two years as subletter with a married couple who live on the same floor as Hitler and keep house for him.” But she was often seen in her uncle’s company “when going to the movies or other places of entertainment.”
The report was followed by that of a case of incest between a niece and her uncle, a prominent Social Democrat in the Mecklenburg region who had hanged himself after unrelenting coverage in the National Socialist press. Vorwärts framed the story as a cautionary tale. “In the luxuriously decorated Munich apartment of her uncle, a young woman commits suicide,” Vorwärts concluded. “The uncle’s name is Adolf Hitler. But how are the Nazis planning to respond after establishing their concepts of morality in the Mecklenburg [incest] case?”
Beyond stories of abuse and incest, rumors proliferated. Geli was desperate to move to Vienna to study singing. She was in love with Hitler’s driver. She was pregnant by a Jewish music instructor. Anni Winter later claimed that Geli found a letter from Eva Braun in Hitler’s coat pocket, tore it to pieces, then shot herself. Winter recalled piecing the scraps together: “Dear Herr Hitler, thank you for the wonderful invitation to the theater. It was a memorable evening.” Braun looked forward to seeing Hitler in the future.
Hitler sought refuge in the country house of his printer, Adolf Müller, on the Tegernsee, where he paced his room, day and night, refusing to eat or sleep; he told Frank he was abandoning politics. He could not bear to read the press, to appear in public ever again. Schreck hid Hitler’s pistol to prevent another suicide. Hoffmann eventually convinced Hitler to eat. Göring provided a comforting lie: Geli had mishandled the pistol and accidentally shot herself. Hanfstaengl recalled Hitler’s eyes filling with tears as he embraced Göring. “Yes, yes, that is exactly what happened, my dear Göring,” Hitler said. “Now I know who my true friend is!”
Now, less than a year later, Eva Braun, four years younger than Geli, had shot herself, and just before he expected to be named chancellor. That afternoon, Hoffmann accompanied Hitler to the hospital to see Braun. Hitler asked the surgeon, “Do you think that Fräulein Braun shot herself simply to become an interesting patient and to draw my attention to herself?” The doctor told Hitler it had been a serious suicide attempt, that the young woman felt desperately neglected. Hitler turned to Hoffmann. “You see, the girl did it out of love for me. But I have given her no cause that could justify such a deed.” He murmured, “Obviously, I must now look after the girl.” Hoffmann objected. He said that Hitler had not obligated himself in any way. “And who, do you think, would believe that?” Hitler replied. Within a day, Hitler was on his way to Berlin.
Meanwhile, the opposition press was processing a more public Hitler scandal. That same day, Vorwärts ran a front-page headline, “Bestial Murder in Upper Silesia,” over an article on a savage killing in the village of Potempa “perpetrated by soldiers of the prospective chancellor candidate Hitler.” In reaffirming his commitment to a legal path to power, Hitler had sought to balance the expectations of the violent extremists in his movement with his sworn oath before the country’s highest court. A cartoon that week showed Hitler, in an SA uniform with a swastika armband, leading a storm trooper on a leash while the storm trooper gleefully tosses bombs over his shoulder. The caption read, “I have the SA in hand, but what the SA have in their hands is none of my business.” For all its intended irony, the caricature raised a serious question: How much control did Hitler have over his most fanatic followers—or, for that matter, over Ernst Röhm?
The former Reichswehr captain possessed a fierce and occasionally unhinged independence. In 1925, he broke with Hitler and bolted for Bolivia, not returning until 1931, when Hitler handed him the SA leadership. “I had an honest friendship with Hitler,” Röhm once said. “Precisely because he was so beset with flatterers who worshipped him unconditionally and never dared contradict him, I felt duty-bound to speak freely, as his true friend.” Röhm addressed Hitler as “Adolf” or “Adi,” and always with the second-person familiar du.
Röhm shared Hitler’s tenacity. He was the last holdout during the 1923 putsch. His men had barricaded themselves in the Bavarian War Ministry, where “machine guns poked out from every window.” The rear of the building, facing the English Garden, was protected by barbed wire. Röhm remained defiant as the Reichswehr prepared to lay siege. “The artillery brought up a field gun to Schönfeld Strasse and aimed it at us,” Röhm wrote. “Machine guns were installed in a building across from us in the Ludwig Strasse, and the mortar company set up on the side of the road.” Even after learning that the putsch had collapsed amid a hail of gunfire on the Odeon Square, with Hitler wounded and whisked away in a waiting vehicle, Röhm refused to surrender. Only when orders came from General Erich Ludendorff, who had joined Hitler in the march through the city, did Röhm relent.
Associated Press reporter Louis Lochner remembers meeting Röhm in January or February 1930 when Röhm came to the AP office in Berlin to arrange an interview with Hitler. Lochner found him to be “a rather stout, squatty, heavy-set man” who wore a hat pulled over his eyes. “When he took off his hat I saw a badly cut-up face,” Lochner recalled, “that had been horribly mangled in the first world war and had been further scarred by attempts at facial surgery.”
As a decorated veteran of the Great War, Röhm wore his scar and Iron Cross, first class, with belligerent pride. For him, as for Kurt von Schleicher, politics was war by other means, which was why he preferred General Ludendorff to Field Marshal Hindenburg, the twin heroes of Tannenberg. “Hindenburg was a figurehead,” Röhm said, “but the leadership of the Army and the heavy work of organization was borne mainly on Ludendorff’s shoulders.” While Hindenburg withdrew after the war to write his memoirs, Ludendorff joined Hitler in the putsch, standing erect amid the hail of bullets as others fell or fled. Unlike Hitler, who emerged from prison committed to following “the legal path” to power, Röhm remained committed to the violent overthrow of the constitutional republic. “It was the old story: as soon as a power bloc formed outside parliament and became significant, its own bosses made war on it and destroyed it.” Strasser had indeed advocated the dissolution of the SA. “Parliamentarians cannot tolerate any other gods around them,” Röhm said.
Röhm was outraged by the government’s abandonment of the paramilitary victories in Upper Silesia, in 1921, and their subsequent efforts in the Ruhr, in 1923, when the German political leadership acquiesced to Allied demands. Röhm liked to quote Field Marshal Gebhard von Blücher after Waterloo. “I most respectfully request that the diplomats,” the victorious Prussian commander said, “be instructed not to lose what the soldier has won for us with his blood.” When Röhm entered the Reichstag as a delegate, he reminded his fellow National Socialists that they had not been elected “to wear a top hat and tails, but a trench helmet.”
Brüning had moved against the SA in the spring of 1932, closing their offices and confiscating their arsenals, only to have the ban lifted in advance of the July 31 elections, in exchange for a promise from Hitler of orderly behavior. The storm troopers had shown restraint, but they marched into Communist and Social Democrat strongholds as provocations, subjecting themselves to jeers and stones and sniper attacks, on the expectation that the election would see Hitler elevated to chancellor. But ten days after the 37 percent triumph, Hitler was still not in power. The storm troopers grew impatient and increasingly violent as they awaited Hitler’s ascendence to the chancellorship. “Every adjournment, every postponement of the seizure of power, results in increasing unrest among these National Socialists who have been most primed to take action,” wrote Die Weltbühne. “It is this very pressure that keeps forcing Hitler again and again into negotiating.” Vorwärts distilled Hitler’s dilemma to a simple existential question: “To revolt or negotiate, that is the question.” By week’s end, with rumors confirmed that Hitler would be meeting with Hindenburg, tens of thousands of storm troopers “marched” on Berlin in anticipation of the appointment of their Führer as chancellor. They were instructed to pack razors, along with their weapons, so they could be clean-shaven after what promised to be a long night.
Goebbels spent August 12 at his country house in Caputh awaiting Hitler’s arrival from Munich. In the evening hours he fretted and stewed about the heat, about Magda’s health, about the machinations of Himmler and Röhm, whom he suspected would begin vying for power once Hitler was appointed chancellor—“They all smell the prey”—and about the growing restlessness among the storm troopers. “It is hardest for them,” Goebbels wrote. “Who knows whether the units can be held together. Nothing is harder than telling triumphant troops that their victory has slipped out of their hands.” Goebbels feared that Röhm would lose control of his men. He feared that “crazy things” might happen, especially with the men armed to the teeth with “weapons and such things.”
Mostly, though, Goebbels worried that evening about the upcoming meeting with Hindenburg. Schleicher and Papen were willing, Goebbels knew. Now, only the Reich president had to be managed. Hitler would be received. Then the die would be cast. It was a make-or-break moment for the National Socialist movement. “The Führer stands before serious decisions. Without complete power he will not be able to master the situation,” Goebbels calculated. “If he is not given full power, then he will have to decline [the chancellor position]. If he declines, the result will be an immense depression in our movement and in the electorate.” Or worse.
Hitler arrived at Goebbels’s country house around ten o’clock that evening, in a state of nervous distraction and still uncertain whether Hindenburg would actually receive him the next day. Goebbels remembers him pacing the house until late in the night.
* There is some dispute over the actual date of Eva Braun’s suicide attempt. Heinrich Hoffmann mentioned early November 1932 in his memoirs, a date used by eminent Hitler biographers such as Ian Kershaw and Volker Ullrich. Heike Görtemaker, a leading Braun biographer, places the suicide attempt in mid-August, a date supported by Harald Sandner in Hitler: Das Itinerar, a day-by-day accounting of Hitler’s life by location.