From Weimar to Hitler

Studies in the Dissolution of the Weimar Republic and the Establishment of the Third Reich, 1932-1934

Hermann Beck, Larry Eugene Jones, Hermann Beck, Larry Eugene Jones

• Editorial: Berghahn Books
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781785339189
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: German History

Though often depicted as a rapid political transformation, the Nazi seizure of power was in fact a process that extended from the appointment of the Papen cabinet in the early summer of 1932 through the Röhm blood purge two years later. Across fourteen rigorous and carefully researched chapters, From Weimar to Hitler offers a compelling collective investigation of this critical period in modern German history. Each case study presents new empirical research on the crisis of Weimar democracy, the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship, and Hitler's consolidation of power. Together, they provide multiple perspectives on the extent to which the triumph of Nazism was historically predetermined or the product of human miscalculation and intent.

1

TAMING THE NAZI BEAST

Kurt von Schleicher and the End of the Weimar Republic

Larry Eugene Jones

The systemic breakdown of the late Weimar Republic created a situation in which the actions of specific individuals were suddenly invested with much greater causal agency than they would otherwise have ever possessed. This was especially true in the case of Kurt von Schleicher, the political mastermind of the German Reichswehr and the most important player behind the scenes between 1930 and 1933. Schleicher’s personality and political machinations have long intrigued historians, and he remains a controversial figure in the last years of the Weimar Republic, with assessments of his career and accomplishments ranging from the hagiographic and exculpatory to the devastatingly critical by scholars of great stature such as Henry Ashby Turner Jr., who was planning to write a full-length biography of Schleicher before his untimely death in December 2008.¹ This chapter takes a fresh look at Schleicher’s aspirations and policies from the fall of the Brüning cabinet in the late spring of 1932 through Hitler’s appointment as chancellor on 30 January 1933. It focuses in detail on the two months of December 1932 and January 1933 when Schleicher served as chancellor in what was a desperate attempt to prevent the apparatus of the German state from being handed over to Adolf Hitler and his supporters in the leadership of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP). The chapter not only draws upon the archival materials that were available to historians when the first detailed studies of his political career appeared in the early and mid-1960s but also makes use of new materials that have surfaced only in the last decade or so. From this will emerge a more balanced assessment of Schleicher’s failure in the last months of the Weimar Republic to keep the Nazis from the reins of power than either his apologists or his detractors have been willing or able to provide.²

Schleicher’s Taming Strategy

When Schleicher was appointed chief of the newly created Office of Ministerial Affairs (Ministeramt) in the Reich ministry of defense in January 1929, his overriding objective was to provide Germany with the most modern and effective military in Europe despite the limitations of size and armaments that had been placed upon it by the Versailles Peace Treaty. In this respect, however, Schleicher realized that the government could not dispense with the mantle of popular legitimacy if it were to mobilize the resources necessary for the modernization of the German army, and he was fully prepared to work within the framework of Germany’s new republican government to accomplish his objectives. While this is not to suggest that Schleicher was somehow a Vernunftrepublikaner in the fashion of Gustav Stresemann or Friedrich Meinecke, it is nevertheless important to stress that his conservatism had little in common with the arch-conservatism of Prussia’s prewar military elite and was actually more profoundly influenced by the writings of young conservative intellectuals like Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Edgar Julius Jung, and Heinrich von Gleichen than by those conservatives whose view of the world was rooted in the old imperial order.³ More importantly, Schleicher was quick to recognize that the Social Democrats of the Weimar era were different from the Social Democrats of the old imperial order and that the acceptance of governmental responsibility in Prussia and elsewhere had had a moderating effect upon their policies and actions. But Schleicher’s hopes that the Social Democrats might underwrite his efforts to rearm and build up the German army were dashed by Philipp Scheidemann’s revelations in December 1926 about the Reichswehr’s secret arrangement with the Red Army.⁴ Schleicher remained nonetheless impressed about the moderating effect that governmental responsibility had had upon the Social Democrats and used this as a model for how he would go about dealing with the National Socialists four years later.⁵

Schleicher had been following Hitler’s career ever since the early 1920s and once described him in a conversation with the left-wing publicist Artur Zickler at the end of 1922 as a “schizophrenic windbag full of undigested ideas, a born asocial with inferiority complexes and delusions of grandeur, obsessed with a fixed sense of mission, egocentrically devious, revengeful, and disloyal.”⁶ But with the NSDAP’s dramatic breakthrough in the 1930 Reichstag elections and its continued success into the first months of 1931, Schleicher felt that he and his associates could no longer afford to dismiss Hitler as a political incompetent who did not have to be taken seriously and began to formulate the general outlines of a strategy for “taming” the Nazi beast. The underlying premise of Schleicher’s Zähmungskonzept was twofold, first that the radicalism of the Nazi movement could be mitigated by saddling it with political responsibility and second that the NSDAP’s entry into the government would deprive it of the obvious advantages it enjoyed as an opposition party.⁷ At the same time, bringing the Nazis into the government would provide Germany’s conservative elites with the mantle of popular legitimacy they needed to carry out a fundamental revision of Germany’s constitutional system, a revision that had already begun under the aegis of Reich president Paul von Hindenburg with the appointment of Heinrich Brüning, the parliamentary leader of the German Center Party, as chancellor in March 1930. The Brüning cabinet, extending as it did from the left-liberal German Democratic Party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei) to the moderate conservatives on the left wing of the German National People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei or DNVP) and entrusted with special emergency powers that Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution had invested in the office of the Reich president, was indeed Schleicher’s brainchild and bore the clear imprint of his political calculus.⁸

The idea of taming the Nazis by bringing them into the government was not particularly new and had already been aired by no less a figure than Count Kuno von Westarp, the former chairman of the right-wing German National People’s Party and a strong supporter of the Brüning cabinet.⁹ The idea had also gained traction within the ranks of Germany’s industrial elite, where it was seen as a way of keeping the more radical elements on the NSDAP’s left wing in check.¹⁰ But it was not until after the Austro-German banking crisis in the summer of 1931, when pressure from the Reich president and his immediate entourage for a reorganization of the Brüning cabinet began to build,¹¹ that Schleicher took up active pursuit of this strategy. This coincided with an attempt by the Nazi party leader Adolf Hitler to ingratiate himself with Germany’s political leadership, no doubt with an eye to the upcoming presidential elections that were scheduled for the spring of 1932. It was against the background of these developments that Schleicher first met with Hitler on 26 September 1931 and then arranged a meeting between the Nazi party leader and the Reich president on 10 October, the day before the anti-republican German Right was scheduled to hold a major rally against the Brüning cabinet in the small central German resort town of Bad Harzburg.¹² These and subsequent contacts between the Reichswehr, the Reich president’s office, and the Nazi party leadership in the fall of 1931 and early 1932 persuaded Schleicher and other government leaders that Hitler was indeed sincere about his stated goal of pursuing the conquest of power by legal means and legal means only. From the perspective of Schleicher and his associates—and to a certain extent from that of Brüning as well—the principal obstacle to an understanding with the radical right was not Hitler but DNVP party chairman Alfred Hugenberg and the more militant elements within the NSDAP.¹³

All of this augured well for the success of Schleicher’s taming strategy, at least in the initial stages of its implementation. But what had originally seemed a promising overture to the Nazi party leader quickly fell apart in the events leading up to the 1932 presidential elections. Brüning, Schleicher, and the presidential entourage had hoped that Hindenburg could be spared the rigors of a national reelection campaign by a special vote in the Reichstag that would extend the Reich president’s term of office. In the initial stages of the negotiations, Hitler and Hugenberg indicated that they might be amenable to such a solution but that their support was conditional upon Brüning’s dismissal as chancellor and the formation of a new national government that included the forces of the national opposition.¹⁴ When Hindenburg replied that under no conditions would he accept the terms that the leaders of the radical right had attached to their support of a parliamentary initiative to extend the Reich president’s term of office, Hitler and Hugenberg declared in separate statements on 11 January 1932 that the proposed maneuver violated provisions of the Weimar Constitution and that they could not support it.¹⁵ On 22 February—a week after Hindenburg had declared himself a candidate for reelection to the Reich presidency—Hitler announced his own candidacy in a move that sabotaged the unity of the Harzburg Front and permanently damaged Hitler’s relations with the non-Nazi elements of the national opposition.¹⁶ To Schleicher, who had been following the Nazi party leader’s rise to prominence since the early 1920s, Hitler’s behavior before and during the ensuing presidential campaign definitively dashed whatever hopes he might have had of an understanding with the Nazis. When asked how he would vote in the upcoming election, Schleicher replied,

Hindenburg is the only candidate who is in a position to defeat Hitler. Since I am convinced that Hitler is as suited for the presidency as the hedgehog for a face towel and because I fear that his presidency would lead to civil war and ultimately to Bolshevism, the decision about [the candidate] for whom I will vote is in this case not difficult. …¹⁷

This did not mean, however, that Schleicher had abandoned his strategy of trying to tame the Nazis by saddling them with the burden of governmental responsibility. To the contrary, the strong gains that the NSDAP recorded in the state parliamentary elections that took place in much of Germany on 24 April 1932 only underscored—at least from Schleicher’s perspective—the imperative of bringing the Nazis into the government at the earliest possible opportunity. To accomplish this, Schleicher would have to force the resignation of the two men who stood in the way of a rapprochement with the Nazis, Chancellor Heinrich Brüning and Wilhelm Groener, Brüning’s defense minister and Schleicher’s long-time mentor. By the end of May 1932 both had been driven from office.¹⁸ The painful irony in all of this was that the resignations of Brüning and Groener left Schleicher greatly weakened at precisely the moment he sought to broker an arrangement with the NSDAP. Groener had always served as an effective filter through which Schleicher’s ideas reached the Reich president, while Brüning had functioned for the most part as a trusted and loyal instrument of Schleicher’s strategic initiatives. Without them Schleicher would become increasingly exposed to the intrigues of his enemies in the presidential entourage, namely Hindenburg’s son Oskar and Otto Meissner, chief of staff in the Office of the Reich Presidency.

In the meantime, Schleicher had begun to set the stage for a change of political course by meeting secretly with Hitler on two occasions in the late spring of 1932. Here Schleicher struck a deal—or, at least, so he thought—with the Nazi party leader whereby the NSDAP would tolerate either a reorganized Brüning cabinet or an entirely new government in return for a suspension of the ban against the SA and new national elections, thereby effectively sealing the fate of the Brüning cabinet.¹⁹ Schleicher then proceeded to install a relative unknown in Franz von Papen as Brüning’s successor. Schleicher’s choice of Papen continues to baffle historians as to why someone of Schleicher’s political sophistication would pick a political neophyte and outsider like Papen for the chancellorship. What Schleicher had chosen in Papen was not only someone whose strategic assessment of the domestic political situation conformed to his own but whose lack of a genuine political constituency made him more pliable to manipulation from the Bendlerstraße. The choice of Papen was further predicated upon the twofold assumption that he would receive the support of the Center Party and that the National Socialists would honor their pledge to Schleicher. This strategy, however, began to unravel when first the Center responded to the formation of the new government with a blistering rebuff that caught both Papen and S...