Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris

the army, of which as Head of State Hindenburg was supreme commander. The Reichswehr leadership was intensely and increasingly alarmed by the military pretensions of the SA. Failure on Hitler’s part to solve the problem of the SA could conceivably lead to army leaders favouring an alternative as Head of State on Hindenburg’s death – perhaps resulting in a restoration of the monarchy, and a
de facto
military dictatorship. Such a development would have met with favour among sections, not just of the military old guard, but of some national-conservative groups, which had favoured an authoritarian, anti-democratic form of state but had become appalled by the Hitler regime. The office of the Vice-Chancellor, Papen, gradually emerged as the focal point of hopes of blunting the edge of the Nazi revolution. Since Papen continued to enjoy the favour of the Reich President, such ‘reactionaries’, though small in number, could not be discounted in power-political terms. And since at the same time there were growing worries among business leaders about serious and mounting economic problems, the threat to the consolidation of Hitler’s power – and with that of the regime itself – was a real one.
    Hitler did not act before he was compelled to do so. The pressure from the Reichswehr leadership and the machinations of Göring, Himmler and Heydrich played decisive roles in bringing matters to a head in summer 1934. Then, within a matter of five weeks, the destruction of the SA leadership in the Night of the Long Knives (accompanied by the murder of leading figures in the ‘reaction’) and the rapid takeover by Hitler of the headship of state on Hindenburg’s death (under a law agreed by the cabinet while he was still alive) amounted to a decisive phase in the securing of total power.

13
WORKING TOWARDS THE FÜHRER

‘It is the duty of every single person to attempt, in the spirit of the Führer, to work towards him.’
    Werner Willikens, 21 February 1934
‘The Führer had for outward appearances to ban individual actions against the Jews in consideration of foreign policy, but in reality was wholly in agreement that each individual should continue on his own initiative the fight against Jewry in the most rigorous and radical form.’
    Reported opinion in Hessen, March 1936
‘I go with the certainty of a sleepwalker along the path laid out for me by Providence.’
    Hitler, 14 March 1936



1. Adolf Hitler (
top row, centre
) in his Leonding school photo, 1899

2. Klara Hitler, the mother of Adolf

    3. Alois Hitler, Adolf’s father

    4. Karl Lueger, Bürgermeister of Vienna, admired by Hitler for his antisemitic agitation

    5. August Kubizek, Hitler’s boyhood friend in Linz and Vienna

6. The crowd in Odeonsplatz, Munich, greeting the proclamation of war, 2 August 1914. Hitler circled.

7. Hitler
(right)
with fellow dispatch messengers Ernst Schmidt and Anton Bachmann and his dog ‘Foxl’ at Fournes, April 1915

    8. German soldiers in a trench on the Western Front during a lull in the fighting

9. Armed members of the KPD from the Neuhausen district of Munich during a ‘Red Army’ parade in the city, 22 April 1919

    10. Counterrevolutionary Freikorps troops entering Munich, beginning of May 1919

11. Anton Drexler, founder in 1919 of the DAP (German Workers’ Party)

    12. Ernst Röhm, the ‘machine-gun king’, whose access to weapons and contacts in the Bavarian army were important to Hitler in the early 1920s

13. Hitler’s DAP membership card, contradicting his claim to be the seventh member of the party

    14. Hitler speaking on the Marsfeld in Munich at the first Party Rally of the , 28 January 1923

15. ‘Hitler speaks!’ NSDAP mass meeting, Cirkus Krone, Munich, 1923

16. Paramilitary organizations during the church service at the ‘German Day’ in Nuremberg, 2 September 1923

    17. Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler, and Friedrich Weber (centre, behind Hitler, Christian Weber) during the march-past of the SA and other paramilitary groups to mark the laying of the war memorial foundation stone, Munich, 4 November 1923

18. The putsch: armed SA men (
centre,
holding the old Reich flag, Heinrich Himmler, right, with fur collar, Ernst Röhm) manning a barricade outside the War Ministry in Ludwigstraße, Munich, 9 November 1923

    19. The putsch: armed putschists from the area around Munich, 9 November 1923

20. Defendants at the trial of the putschists:
left to right,
Heinz Pernet, Friedrich Weber, Wilhelm