The Coming of the Third Reich, page 32
Like many rank-and-file Communists, Thälmann followed the party line laid down by the Comintern in Moscow as it changed this way and that, often in response to Stalin’s tactical needs in his struggle to marginalize his intra-party rivals at home. Thälmann’s faith in the revolution was absolute, and in consequence so too was his faith in the only revolutionary state in the world, the Soviet Union. Others in the party leadership may have been more subtle, more ruthless and more intelligent, like the Berlin party chief Walter Ulbricht; and the Politbureau and Central Committee, together with the Comintern in Moscow, may have been the arbiters of party policy and strategy; but Thälmann’s personal standing and rhetorical gifts made him an indispensable asset to the party, which twice put him forward as its candidate in the elections for the post of Reich President, in 1925 and 1932. By the early 1930s, therefore, he was one of the best-known - and, to the middle and upper classes, one of the most feared - politicians in the land. He was more than a mere figurehead but less than a genuine leader, perhaps. But he remained the personal incorporation of German Communism in all its intransigence and ambition, driving the party towards the foundation of a ‘Soviet Germany’.27
Led by a man such as Thälmann, the Communist Party thus seemed a looming threat of unparalleled dimensions to many middle-class Germans in the early 1930s. A Communist revolution seemed far from impossible. Even a sober and intelligent, conservative moderate like Victor Klemperer could ask himself in July 1931: ‘Is the government going to fall? Is Hitler going to follow, or Communism?’28 In many ways, however, Communist power was an illusion. The party’s ideological animus against the Social Democrats doomed it to impotence. Its hostility to the Weimar Republic, based on its extremist condemnation of all its governments, even the ‘Grand Coalition’ led by Hermann Müller, as ‘fascist’, blinded it completely to the threat posed by Nazism to the Weimar political system. Its optimism about an imminent total and final collapse of capitalism had some plausibility in the dire economic circumstances of 1932. But in retrospect it was completely unfounded. Moreover, a party consisting largely of the unemployed was inevitably short of resources and weakened by the poverty and inconstancy of its members. So strapped for cash were Communist Party members that one Communist pub or bar after another had to close during the Depression, or passed into the hands of the Nazis. Between 1929 and 1933, per capita consumption of beer in Germany fell by 43 per cent, and in these circumstances the better-funded brownshirts moved in. What one historian has called a ‘quasi-guerrilla warfare’ was being conducted in the poorer quarters of Germany’s big cities, and the Communists were slowly being beaten back into their heartlands in the slums and tenement districts by the continual brutal pressure of brownshirt violence. In this conflict, bourgeois sympathies were generally on the side of the Nazis, who, after all, were not threatening to destroy capitalism or create a ‘Soviet Germany’ if they came to power.29
III
Although unemployment was above all a working-class phenomenon, economic difficulties had been wearing down the morale of other social groups as well. Well before the onset of the Depression, for instance, the drive to reduce government expenditure in the retrenchment that had to underpin the currency stabilization after 1923 led to a wave of dismissals in the state sector. Between I October 1923 and 31 March 1924, 135,000 out of 826,000 civil servants, mostly in the state railway system, the post, telegraph and Reich printing services, had been sacked, along with 30,000 out of 61,000 white-collar workers and 232,000 out of 706,000 state-employed manual labourers.30 A further wave of cuts came after 1929, with a cumulative reduction in civil service salaries of between 19 and 23 per cent between December 1930 and December 1932. Many civil servants at all levels were dismayed at the inability of their trade union representatives to stop the cuts. Their hostility to the government was obvious. Some drifted into the Nazi Party; many others were put off by the Nazis’ open threat to purge the civil service if they came to power. Nevertheless, anxiety and disillusion with the Republic became widespread in the civil service as a result of the cuts.31
Many other middle-class occupations felt their economic and social position was under threat during the Weimar Republic. White-collar workers lost their jobs, or feared that they might, as banks and finance houses got into difficulties. Tourist agents, restaurants, retailing, mail-order firms, a huge variety of employers in the service sector ran into trouble as people’s purchasing power declined. The Nazi Party, now equipped with its elaborate structure of specialist subdivisions, saw this, and began to direct its appeal to the professional and propertied middle classes. All of this was anathema to those Nazis who, like Otto Strasser, brother of the Party organizer Gregor, continued to emphasize the ‘socialist’ aspect of National Socialism and felt that Hitler was betraying their ideals. Angered by the support given by Otto Strasser and his publishing house to left-wing causes such as strikes, Hitler summoned the leading men in the Party to a meeting in April 1930 and ranted against Strasser’s views. As a way of trying to neutralize Otto Strasser’s influence, he now appointed Goebbels Reich Propaganda Leader of the Party. But, to Goebbels’s annoyance, Hitler repeatedly postponed decisive action, hoping that Otto Strasser’s propaganda apparatus would still be of some use in the regional elections that took place in June 1930. Only after this, and Strasser’s publication of an unflattering account of his row with Hitler earlier in the year, did he decide to purge the party of Otto Strasser and his supporters, who pre-empted this move by resigning on 4 July 1930. The split was a serious one. Observers held their breath to see if the Party would survive this exodus of its left wing. But things had changed markedly from the days when Goebbels and his friends had revived the Party in the Ruhr with socialist slogans. The dissidents’ departure revealed that Strasser and his ideas had little support within the Party; even his brother Gregor disowned him. Otto Strasser vanished from serious politics, to spend the rest of his life in Germany, and, later, in exile, dreaming up small, sectarian organizations to propagate his views to tiny audiences of the like-minded.32
Having shed the last vestiges of ‘socialism’, Hitler now moved to build more bridges to the conservative right. In the autumn of 1931 he joined with the Nationalists in the so-called ‘Harzburg Front’, producing a joint declaration with Hugenberg at Bad Harzburg on 11 October stating their readiness to join together in ruling Prussia and the Reich. Though the Nazis emphasized their continued independence - Hitler, for example, refusing to review a march-past of the Steel Helmets - this marked a significant extension of the collaboration that had first taken place in the campaign against the Young Plan in 1929. At the same time, Hitler took serious steps to persuade industrialists that his Party posed no threat to them. His address to some 650 businessmen at the Industry Club in Düsseldorf in January 1932 appealed to his audience by denouncing Marxism as the source of Germany’s ills - he did not refer to the Jews in the speech even once - and by emphasizing his belief in the importance of private property, hard work and proper rewards for the able and the enterprising. However, the solution to the economic woes of the moment, he said, was mainly political. Idealism, patriotism and national unity would create the basis for economic revival. These would be provided by the National Socialist movement, whose members sacrificed their time and money, and risked their lives day and night, in the struggle against the Communist threat.33
Delivered in a two-and-a-half-hour oration, these remarks were extremely general, and offered nothing concrete in the way of economic policies at all. They revealed Hitler’s Social Darwinist view of the economy, in which struggle was the way to success. This cannot have impressed his knowledgeable audience very much. The senior industrialists were disappointed. The Nazis later declared that Hitler had won over big business at last. But there was little concrete evidence to show this was the case. Neither Hitler nor anyone else followed up the occasion with a fund-raising campaign amongst the captains of industry. Indeed, parts of the Nazi press continued to attack trusts and monopolies after the event, while other Nazis attempted to win votes in another quarter by championing workers’ rights. When the Communist Party’s newspapers portrayed the meeting in conspiratorial terms, as a demonstration of the fact that Nazism was the creature of big business, the Nazis went out of their way to deny this, printing sections of the speech as proof of Hitler’s independence from capital.
The result of all this was that business proved not much more willing to finance the Nazi Party than it had been before. True, one or two individuals like Fritz Thyssen were enthusiastic, and provided funds to subsidize the extravagant tastes of leading Nazis such as Hermann Goring and Gregor Strasser. And, in broad terms, the speech was reassuring. When the time came, it made it that much easier for big business to come round to the support of the Nazi Party. But in January 1932 this still lay some way in the future. For the time being, the Nazi Party continued, as before, to finance its activities mainly through the voluntary contributions of its members, through entry fees to its meetings, through the income from its press and publications and through donations from small firms and businesses rather than large ones. The antisemitism which Hitler had so conspicuously forgotten to mention when talking to representatives of large industrial firms was far more likely to have an appeal in quarters such as these.34 Nevertheless, Nazism now had a respectable face as well as a rough one, and was winning friends among the conservative and nationalist elites. As Germany plunged deeper into the Depression, growing numbers of middle-class citizens began to see in the youthful dynamism of the Nazi Party a possible way out of the situation. All would depend on whether the Weimar Republic’s fragile democratic structures held up under the strain, and whether the Reich government could produce the right policies to stop them from collapsing altogether.
THE CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY
I
The Depression’s first political victim was the Grand Coalition cabinet led by the Social Democrat Hermann Müller, one of the Republic’s most stable and durable governments, in office since the elections of 1928. The Grand Coalition was a rare attempt to compromise between the ideological and social interests of the Social Democrats and the ‘bourgeois’ parties left of the Nationalists. It was held together mainly by its common effort to secure the Young Plan, an effort made in the teeth of bitter opposition from the Nationalists and the extreme right. Once the plan was agreed towards the end of 1929, there was little left to bind the parties to one another. Following the onset of the Depression in October 1929, the coalition’s constituent parties failed to agree on how to tackle the rapidly worsening unemployment problem. Deprived of the moderating influence of its former leader Gustav Stresemann, who died in October 1929, the People’s Party broke with the coalition over the Social Democrats’ refusal to cut unemployment benefits, and the government was forced to tender its resignation on 27 March 1930.35
Although few realized it at the time, this marked the beginning of the end of Weimar democracy. From this point on, no government ruled with the support of a parliamentary majority in the Reichstag. Indeed, those who had President Hindenburg’s ear saw the fall of the Grand Coalition as a chance to establish an authoritarian regime through the use of the Presidential power of rule by decree. Particularly influential in this respect was the German army, represented by the Minister of Defence, General Wilhelm Groener. His appointment in January 1928 to replace the Democrat politician Otto Gessler had signalled the liberation of the army from any kind of political control, and was cemented by the right of the army chief to report directly to the President instead of going through the cabinet. Despite the limitations placed by the Treaty of Versailles on its numbers and equipment, the army remained by a long way the most powerful, most disciplined and most heavily armed force in Germany. While civilian institutions of one kind and another, from the political parties to the legislature itself, crumbled, the army remained united. For most of the 1920s, since the debacle of the Kapp putsch, it had stayed quiet, focusing its attention on building up illegal equipment and manpower, but in the crisis of the early 1930s it saw its opportunity. Rearmament and the rebuilding of Germany as a great power could, in the view of men like Groener’s political adviser, Colonel, later General Kurt von Schleicher, now be grasped by freeing the state from the shackles of parliamentary coalitions. And the more Germany descended into political chaos and extremist violence, the more pivotal the position of the army became. Already in the autumn of 1930 Groener was telling officers: ‘Not a brick can be moved any more in the political process in Germany without the word of the army being thrown decisively onto the scales.’36
The army threw its weight into the political process initially in order to protect itself from budgetary cutbacks, which it successfully did. While all around it state institutions were having their budgets slashed, the army’s stayed intact. But it still remained generally aloof from the Nazi Party. Older officers, schooled in the stern traditions of Prussian monarchism, were generally resistant to the populist appeal of radical nationalist politics. Even here, however, there were some who openly favoured the Nazis, like Colonel Ludwig Beck.37 And younger officers were much more susceptible to Nazi propaganda. Already in 1929 a number of junior officers were engaging in discussions with the Nazis and debating the prospects for a ‘national revolution’. The army leadership under Groener and Schleicher combated these tendencies vigorously, engaging in counter-propaganda and having the three ringleaders in the discussions arrested and put on trial in 1930 for preparing an act of high treason. The trial outraged other young officers, even those who were not inclined to collaborate with the Nazis. The army leadership, wrote one of them, had caved in to the ‘Novemberists’ and tried men whose only motivation was ‘unselfish love of the fatherland’. Ninety per cent of the officers, he added, thought the same way.38
The trial was the occasion for a widely publicized speech delivered by Hitler from the witness box, where he was summoned by Hans Frank, the Nazi lawyer who was acting for one of the defendants. The Nazi Party, he declared, had no intention of committing high treason or subverting the army from within. Its intention was to come to power by legal means, and he had expelled those, like Otto Strasser, who had urged it to carry out a revolution. The Party would win a majority in an election and form a legitimately constituted government. At that point, he said, to cheers from the public benches, the real traitors, the ‘November criminals’ of 1918, would be put on trial, and ‘heads will roll’. But until then, the Party would stay within the law. The court made Hitler swear to the veracity of his testimony on oath. ‘Now we are strictly legal’, Goebbels is reported to have said. Putzi Hanfstaengl, recently put in charge of Hitler’s foreign press relations, made sure that the speech was reported around the world. He sold three articles by Hitler outlining the Nazi Party’s aims and methods, in suitably bowdlerized form, to William Randolph Hearst, the American press baron, for 1,000 Reichsmarks each. The money enabled Hitler to use the Kaiserhof Hotel in the centre of Berlin as his headquarters whenever he stayed in the capital from then on. In Germany itself, Hitler’s reassurances dispelled the fears of many middle-class Germans about the Nazi Party’s intentions.39
The court was not impressed by Hitler, whom it reprimanded for abusing his position as a witness, and sentenced the young officers to eighteen months’ imprisonment, cashiering two of them from the army.40 The conservatism of the judiciary was almost bound to put the court on the side of the army. Still, the sentences did nothing to stop young army officers from continuing their flirtation with Nazism. Schleicher’s attempts to counter such ideas, curb the radicalism of the younger officers and restore political discipline in the army, were less than effective, not least because he admitted openly to the officer corps that he sympathized with the ‘national part’ of the Nazis’ programme, and particularly with ‘the wave of indignation brought forth by the National Socialist movement against Bolshevism, treason, filth etc. Here’, he said, ‘the National Socialist campaign undoubtedly has extremely stirring effects.’41 Sympathy with the Nazis meant co-operating with them, but such was the arrogance and self-importance of the army leaders that they still thought they could bend the Nazis to their will and enlist them as military and political auxiliaries, much as they had done with other paramilitary groups in the early 1920s. Time was to show how misguided this policy really was.
The newly prominent political position of the army found expression in the appointment by Hindenburg, acting above all on the advice of senior officers, including Schleicher, of Müller’s successor as Chancellor. From the outset there was no attempt to appoint a government that would rest on the democratic support of the parties represented in the Reichstag. Instead, a ‘cabinet of experts’ would be put in place, with the intention of bypassing the Reichstag through the use of Hindenburg’s power to rule by emergency decree. Of course, the scope of rule by decree was limited, and many measures, above all the budget, still had to be approved by the Reichstag. Steps were taken to ensure that this did not appear as the inauguration of an authoritarian regime. The new cabinet included such well-known Reichstag politicians as Josef Wirth, a former Reich Chancellor, for the Centre Party, Hermann Dietrich, for the Democrats (renamed the State Party in July 1930), Martin Schiele, for the Nationalists, Julius Curtius, for the People’s Party, and Viktor Bredt, for the small Economy Party. But it did not include the Social Democrats, to whom Hindenburg and his advisers were unwilling to entrust the power of ruling by decree. Without the Social Democrats it had no parliamentary majority. But this did not seem to matter any more.
The new government was led by a man whose appointment as Reich Chancellor proved in retrospect to be a fatal choice. Superficially, the President’s nomination of Heinrich Brüning, born in 1885, as Reich Chancellor was defensible in democratic terms. As floor leader of the Centre Party’s deputies in the Reichstag, he represented the political force that more than any other had been the mainstay of parliamentary democracy in the Weimar Republic. But already by the time of his appointment the Centre, under the influence of its new leader Prelate Ludwig Kaas, was moving towards a more authoritarian position, more narrowly concerned with defending the interests of the Catholic Church. Moreover, Brüning himself was at best a fair-weather friend of Weimar democracy. A former army officer, he had been shocked by the November Revolution, and remained a staunch monarchist all his life. In his memoirs, indeed, he portrayed the restoration of the monarchy as his main purpose after becoming Chancellor. Yet in doing so he was probably lending retrospective coherence to a political career that was dominated, like that of so many politicians, by short-term imperatives.42 Despite his inner conviction that a return to the Bismarckian system would be best for all, he had no detailed plan to restore the monarchy, let alone bring back the Kaiser. Nevertheless, his instincts were authoritarian at heart.43 He planned to reform the constitution by reducing the power of the Reichstag and combining the offices of Reich Chancellor and Prussian Minister-President in his own person, thus removing the Social Democrats from their dominance of Germany’s largest state. Brüning did not have sufficient backing from Hindenburg to put this idea into effect, but it remained on the table, ready for anyone to use who did. Brüning also began to restrict democratic rights and civil liberties.44 In March 1931, for instance, he introduced sharp curbs on the freedom of the press, especially when it published criticisms of his own policies. By mid-July the liberal Berlin Daily News-Sheet (Berliner Tageblatt) was estimating that up to a hundred newspaper editions were being banned every month across the country. By 1932 the Communist newspaper The Red Flag was being banned on more than one day in three. Press freedom was seriously compromised long before the Nazis came to power.45
