Hitler

Hindenburg’s State Secretary, Otto Meissner, Hitler was asked whether he was prepared to serve in Papen’s government. His cooperation would be welcome, the President stated. Hitler declared that, for the reasons he had given to the Chancellor in full that morning, there was no question of his involvement in the existing government. Given the significance of his movement, he must demand the leadership of the government and ‘the leadership of the state to its full extent for himself and his party’. The Reich President firmly refused. He could not answer, he said, before God, his conscience and the Fatherland if he handed over the entire power of the government to a single party, and one which was so intolerant towards those with different views. He was also worried about unrest at home and the likely impact abroad. When Hitler repeated that for him every other solution was ruled out, Hindenburg advised him then to conduct his opposition in a gentlemanly fashion, and that all acts of terror would be treated with utmost severity. In a gesture of pathos more than political reality, he shook Hitler’s hand as ‘old comrades’. The meeting had lasted a mere twenty minutes. Hitlerhad controlled himself. But outside, in the corridor, he threatened to explode. Events would inexorably lead to the conclusion he had put forward and to the fall of the President, he declared. The government would be put in an extremely difficult position, the opposition would be fierce, and he would accept no responsibility for the consequences.
    Hitler was aware that he had suffered a major political defeat. It was his greatest setback since the failure of the putsch, nine years earlier. The strategy he had followed all those years, that mobilizing the masses – his natural instinct, and what he did best – would suffice to gain power, had proved a failure. He had taken his party into a cul-de-sac. The breakthrough had been made. The NSDAP’s rise to the portals of power had been meteoric. He had just won a crushing election victory. But he had been flatly rejected as Reich Chancellor by the one person whose assent, under the Weimar Constitution, was indispensable: Reich President Hindenburg. The ‘all-or-nothing’ gamble had left Hitler with nothing. With a tired, depressed, desperately disappointed, and fractious party, the prospect of continued opposition was not an enticing one. But it was all that was left. Even given new elections, the chances were that it would prove difficult to hold on to the level of support already mobilized.
    The 13th of August 1932 ought to have been a defining moment in Hitler’s bid for power. After that, it should never have come to a 30th of January 1933. Without allies in high places, able eventually to persuade the Reich President to change his mind, Hitler would never – even as head of a huge movement, and with over 13 million supporters in the country – have been able to come to power. That the Chancellorship was refused Hitler after he had won a victory, and handed to him after he had suffered a defeat (in the ensuing Reichstag election in November), was not attributable to any ‘triumph of the will’.

9
Levered into Power
    I
    Hitler took the events of 13 August ‘as a personal defeat’. His anger and humiliation was intensified by the government’s deliberately brusque communiqué – instigated by Schleicher – on the meeting, which had briefly emphasized Hindenburg’s rebuff of Hitler’s demand for total power. Hitler’s pedantically correct, piqued rejoinder could only claim that he had not demanded ‘total’ power. At the time, his anger was chiefly directed at Papen. Sent a few days later to intercede with Hitler, by then staying at Obersalzberg, Joachim von Ribbentrop – the vain and humourless future Reich Foreign Minister, on his upward career path not least through his marriage to the heiress of Germany’s biggest Sekt manufacturers, Henkel, and a recent recruit to the NSDAP – found him ‘full of resentment towards Herr von Papen and the entire cabinet in Berlin’. But if the events of January 1933 were to redeem Papen, Schleicher would emerge as the central target of Nazi aggression for his role in the months between August 1932 and January 1933. His manoeuvrings behind the scenes, particularly his ‘betrayal’ in August which had led to Hitler’s humiliation, were not forgotten. He would pay for them with his life.
    As usual, Hitler had the capacity to