There have been discussions for weeks about the possibility of Gregor Strasser joining [Schleicher’s] cabinet.
—VOSSISCHE ZEITUNG, JANUARY 14, 1933
Strasser appeared to have been stunned by Hitler’s bare-knuckle attack in early December. “I ran into Strasser that morning when I arrived in Hitler’s anteroom at the Hotel Kaiserhof,” Alfred Rosenberg recalled. “I started to greet him, but he merely made a hopeless gesture with his hand and left the room. I heard that he had just resigned all his posts.” Brüning heard that Strasser had stumbled out of the hotel and wandered aimlessly across the Wilhelmplatz. Of the nearly two hundred National Socialist Reichstag delegates assembled in the hotel, not a single one rose in Strasser’s defense. Erich Koch, the gauleiter from Königsberg, offered a flicker of belated support. “However things may be in reality, one thing is certain: Gregor Strasser will never take a step which could be detrimental to the movement,” the Preussische Zeitung, a Königsberg newspaper, quoted him as saying. “Gregor Strasser is also not a man who could easily withdraw from the movement overnight, he helped build it, and a large part of what happened within the National Socialist German workers’ movement is forever associated with his name.”
Wilhelm Kube was head of the National Socialist faction in the Prussian state assembly. Deeply religious and virulently anti-Semitic, Kube rallied Christian voters to the National Socialist movement. Kube called Strasser a “man of honor” who would never break his word: “He, in particular, one of the oldest warriors of the NSDAP, knows that the idea and movement are inseparable from the Führer.” Kube said that Strasser frequently ended his speeches with the assurance, “I am a Hitlerman and remain a Hitlerman.”
Krosigk had heard that Strasser was “deeply wounded” by Hitler’s accusations of “deception and betrayal.” Hans Frank visited Strasser at the Hotel Excelsior, where Strasser stayed when he was in Berlin. Frank knew Strasser to be one of “the most confident and pragmatic men” he had ever met, but on this occasion the altercation with Hitler had left him undone. “Hitler seems to me to be completely in the hands of Himmler and his sycophants,” Strasser told Frank. “Hindenburg and honorable men offer cooperation, and here stands the ‘Wagner-Lohengrin Hitler from the Wahnfried’ with his shady guys from the Gralsberg,” he added, making a disparaging allusion to Hitler’s reverence for Wagnerian opera. Frank said that Strasser was dismayed by the increasing influence of the party radicals, especially Goebbels, Göring, and Röhm, over the movement’s clear-sighted pragmatists like Frick, Frank, and himself. “Frank, this is horrific,” Strasser said. “Göring is a brutal egotist who couldn’t care less about Germany, Goebbels is a clubfooted devil, Röhm is a pig. These are the Führer’s guards.”
In fact, Frick was working to undo the damage. Feder had recanted. He denounced “inaccurate interpretations of my relationship to the NSDAP” and professed his “loyalty and unshakeable devotion” to “my Führer.” For Christmas, Feder inscribed an advance copy of his latest book, Battle Against High Finance, to Hitler in “deepest devotion.” Frick now sought to have Hitler reconcile with Strasser.
It was impossible to know, Frick told Hitler, what portion of the National Socialist movement consisted of Strasser loyalists. A complete break with Strasser, especially at such a politically and financially perilous moment, risked fracturing the movement irreparably. Frick urged Hitler to meet with Strasser and repair the breach, to reconsider the prospect of coalition government, the possibility of a Strasser vice chancellorship within a Schleicher cabinet as a foothold to power. Hitler acquiesced, and Frick set out to locate Strasser in what Konrad Heiden has described as “a series of tragic-comic concatenations.” Frick discovered that Strasser had settled his bill and checked out of the hotel that morning, depositing his suitcases at the luggage depot at the Anhalter Bahnhof, then vanished. While Hitler waited in his suite at the Hotel Kaiserhof, and Frick vainly scoured the city, Strasser sat with a close friend, Ewald Moritz, a right-wing author who wrote under the pseudonym Gottfried Zarnow, before catching an evening train to Munich, and from there, departed for Italy with his wife and two sons for a two-week respite. “If Strasser knew how the entire party was waiting for him, how everyone was fretting and pacing their hotel room waiting for a miracle,” Heiden recalled, “perhaps he would have stayed in Berlin.”
Gauleiter Hinrich Lohse saw Strasser’s return to Munich and subsequent travel to Italy as Strasser’s final defeat. “[Hitler had] triumphed and proved to his wavering, but upright and indispensable fighters in this toughest test of the movement, that he was the master and Strasser the apprentice,” Lohse recalled. “So he remained the ultimate victor also in this last and most serious attack.” Hanfstaengl thought Schleicher had miscalculated: “He underestimated Hitler and overestimated Strasser.”
On the evening of January 3, as Hitler boarded the train to Lipperland, Strasser was on his way back to Berlin. The Vossische Zeitung had reported, “The first round of the party’s wrestling match for power is over, and if there’s no mistake, the winner is Goebbels, Strasser’s chief opponent.” The article added that “Strasser has now lost his important post in the party; it remains to be seen what his countermove will be.” Bella Fromm was delighted. “For a whole month, Gregor Strasser and Hitler have been at each other’s throats,” she wrote. “It is good to know that they are weakening the party by their constant frictions.”
Strasser, of course, already knew what his next move would be, since Schleicher had offered to make him vice chancellor. One of the first people Strasser saw in Berlin was former chancellor Brüning. Strasser told Brüning that Schleicher had approached him about the vice chancellorship, the same position they had discussed in December and, before that, in August, before Hitler blew their chance with his meeting with Hindenburg. But now Schleicher was raising the prospect of a vice chancellorship yet again, only this time Schleicher was chancellor and not just minister of defense. Brüning told Strasser to be careful. Schleicher “is clever but not loyal,” he said. “Therefore you have to nail this down in the presence of the Reich president. Otherwise I see a catastrophe coming not only for Germany but for you.”
On the second Friday in January, Schleicher sat with the latest secret dispatch: a detailed briefing on the discussion between Hitler and Papen at the Schröder villa the previous week. “The aim of the discussion on the H. side was to persuade the Reich president, through Papen’s mediation, to withdraw his confidence in the chancellor before the new elections and to replace him with some type of alternative scenario,” the memo read. It questioned Papen’s potential motivations for the meeting with Hitler. “If Papen is Schleicher’s friend and an honest player, then his objective must be to humiliate H., and to make him do whatever the chancellor wants.” That was obviously not the case. Papen had not informed Schleicher of the meeting. “If Papen is not a friend of the chancellor, then it can be assumed that the objective was the same on both sides”—i.e., the dissolution of the Schleicher government. The mole said that no credence should be given to press reports that Hitler might consider the positions of minister of defense, minister of the interior, or the head of the state government of Prussia. As long as the Reich president holds firm, the memo concluded, Schleicher’s position would be fine. “If the Reich president doesn’t yield, then the situation for the chancellor’s government is not at all bad.”
In fact, assuming Schleicher could bring Strasser into his government, and assuming Strasser could bring a significant number of voters with him, Schleicher could cobble together a functioning government with Reichstag support—also assuming, of course, that Hindenburg would approve Strasser as a member of the cabinet. Unlike Hitler, whose belligerent nationalism, hard-line conservatism, and vicious anti-Semitism allowed him to be easily pigeonholed within right-wing politics, Strasser was more complex. He railed against the Treaty of Versailles, the Weimar constitution, and alleged Jewish conspiracies with all the vigor of a right-wing extremist. He was a fierce nationalist, as he had demonstrated on national radio when he’d sworn allegiance to “Germany, only Germany, and nothing but Germany.”
But he was equally passionate in his denunciation of the “slave market of capitalism” and the “political domination of money” with all the vigor of a Social Democrat. “The German people are protesting against an economic system that thinks only about money, profit, and dividends, and which forgets about labor and performance,” Strasser told the Reichstag in a speech in May 1932. It was the sort of rhetoric that unnerved the conservative center. Hindenburg had met Hitler variously in the company of Göring, Frick, and even Röhm, never Strasser. But Schleicher felt that offering Strasser a post was worth the risk. Hindenburg agreed to meet Strasser, albeit under strict, confidential circumstances, with no recorded protocol. But there was, inevitably, a leak. When news of the meeting broke, the presidential office firmly denied the assertion. It was, however, eventually forced to concede that the two men had met.
“The Reich president had the wish to meet the renowned Herr Gregor Strasser, and had invited him for this purpose a few days ago,” the official statement read on January 11, 1933. “The Reich president declined to comment on what Mr. Strasser presented to him, and therefore did not attach any importance to making this known in order that personal conclusions would not be drawn from [the meeting].” There are no minutes or references in the official protocol, but the discussion must have gone well, as Otto Meissner, Hindenburg’s aide, reported afterward. “Even the Reich president, in his conversation with Strasser, found nothing revolutionary to criticize in regard to his political and social views, and agreed to Schleicher’s proposal to appoint Strasser vice chancellor,” Meissner wrote. With presidential approval, Schleicher could now bring Strasser into his cabinet and, with him, the prospect of a cross-aisle centrist majority in the Reichstag.
Five days later, on Monday, January 16, Schleicher convened his cabinet. The prospective Strasser appointment topped the agenda. Schleicher underscored the fact that Hindenburg had repeatedly expressed his desire to establish a government with a “broad base” in the Reichstag. Schleicher believed that securing a majority would require a wide coalition, extending from Strasser’s National Socialists to Hugenberg’s German Nationalists and possibly including the Center Party. One cabinet member wondered whether Strasser was really willing to join the Schleicher cabinet and, equally important, whether he could bring enough delegates to secure a ruling majority. Schleicher confirmed Strasser’s willingness to accept a cabinet position. There was no certainty concerning the number of delegates he could bring. One “optimistic” estimate placed the number of potential Strasser defectors at forty. These were thought to be National Socialist Reichstag delegates who feared losing their seats in tightly contested voting districts if the party held to its radical “all or nothing” strategy. There was another caveat: in the event that he joined the cabinet, Strasser did not want to leave the National Socialist Party but would reform it “in a positive direction.”
Günther Gereke had helped lead Hindenburg’s reelection campaign. He wondered how wise it was to appoint Strasser just now. He feared that Hitler would press for new elections to prevent Strasser from gaining traction within the party. Perhaps it would be more prudent to wait with the Strasser appointment. Perhaps Schleicher could convince the Reichstag to tolerate his government as it stood. Schleicher stuck by his candidate. Of all the National Socialists, he said, Strasser was the only one he could imagine serving in their government. He suggested that if Strasser were paired with Hugenberg, it could anchor the government within conservative circles. The Center Party might not want to cooperate with Strasser and Hugenberg, but Schleicher was certain that they could anchor a solid conservative coalition.
Gereke disagreed, arguing that a majority in the Reichstag would not be achieved even if the cabinet was reorganized according to Schleicher’s suggestion. Schleicher conceded that a parliamentary majority could be achieved only with Hitler, but added that if the government was given time to show results, especially on the economic and unemployment fronts, it would effect “a gradual change in the mood of the population that would work in the cabinet’s favor.” Schleicher was buying time.
With Hitler pressing hard for new Reichstag elections, Schleicher knew he needed to make a case for postponement for as long as possible, ideally until the autumn. The ministers were skeptical that the situation in the autumn would be much different than it was currently. At one point, Meissner intervened to express concern that the Reich president could view the postponement beyond sixty days as a violation of the constitution. Schleicher told Meissner not to worry about Hindenburg; he had the old man well in hand. The cabinet meeting concluded with general agreement that one should wait to engage further with Strasser until after the results of the previous day’s Lippe election.
When Schleicher informed his cabinet that Strasser would insist on retaining his party membership, he was speaking not only on the basis of his discussions with Strasser but also with regard to talking points presented by his Brown House mole, who had parsed possible future scenarios following the Hitler-Strasser rupture, with pointedly cautionary observations. Schleicher knew from the intelligence gathered that both Hitler and Strasser recognized their mutual dependency. That was why Hitler did not expel Strasser from the party, and why Strasser resigned from his positions but not from the party. As tempers cooled, Hitler and Strasser would find their way back to each other in a more tempered, less strident National Socialist movement. “I consider it a mistake that [Schleicher] still regards the movement as a single force in his calculation. If the chancellor is to lead a government, he can only do this if Hitler and Strasser reach some kind of agreement, in which Strasser leads the restored collective movement. That healing process has not happened yet,” the mole wrote in a confidential letter to Prince Wilhelm.
To court Strasser and split the party or to let the party potentially heal and temper? That was the question, at least from the intelligence gained at the Brown House.
Beyond the political awkwardness of the Schröder villa fiasco, and the subsequent feeding frenzy in the press, not to mention anticipation over the ultimate outcome and potential impact of the Lippe election, Hitler had a more protracted concern: Who had leaked the Schröder meeting? Papen thought it was Schleicher. “Apparently he had my phone monitored to keep track of my movements,” Papen maintained. Strasser’s dentist, Dr. Hellmuth Elbrechter, who circulated in conservative circles and was a suspect, had helped facilitate the initial meeting between Schleicher and Hitler in the spring of 1932. He was now rumored to have learned of the Schröder meeting through either a patient or the editor of a right-wing newspaper, Die Tat, for which he occasionally wrote. Elbrechter had indeed called the chancellor with a brief warning: “Fränzchen hat Sie verraten”—your little friend Franz has betrayed you.
By then, Schleicher had already been alerted through a circuitous royal route. Hitler’s financial adviser, Keppler, had mentioned the upcoming Schröder villa meeting to a Munich banker friend, who, in turn, mentioned it to Crown Prince Wilhelm. The prince subsequently delivered that intelligence to Schleicher on New Year’s Day. Schleicher recruited a former member of his entourage, a retired military captain, to stake out the Schröder villa with a camera. The press did the rest.
Confronted by incontrovertible evidence—photographs of Hitler and Papen on the steps of the Schröder villa—Hitler did what he always did in the face of uncomfortable fact: he denied it publicly and vociferously. On January 5, in the joint statement with Papen, he denounced the “false assumptions.” He claimed “that the discussions dealt exclusively with the question of the possibility of a large national political front” and insisted that there had not been any talk about an incumbent Reich cabinet within the framework of this general debate. As we’ve seen, Papen gave Schleicher a similar assurance.
Within a week, Papen and Hitler were meeting in secret yet again, this time at the villa of Joachim and Annelies von Ribbentrop, in the fashionable Berlin neighborhood of Dahlem.