Hitler

He doubted that a general strike would take place. He was appeased when Hitler vouched for the fact that the cabinet would remain unchanged after the election. Papen favoured proposing an Enabling Act immediately and reconsidering the position once it had been rejected by the Reichstag. Other ministers, anticipating no promises of support from the Zentrum, preferred new elections to the threat of a general strike. The meeting was adjourned without firm decisions. But Hitler hadalready outflanked Hugenberg, and won support for what he wanted: the earliest possible dissolution of the Reichstag and new elections.
    The following evening, Hindenburg was persuaded to grant Hitler that which he had refused Schleicher only four days earlier: the dissolution of the Reichstag. Hitler had argued, backed by Papen and Meissner, that the people must be given the opportunity to confirm its support for the new government. Though it could attain a majority in the Reichstag as it stood, new elections would produce a larger majority, which in turn would allow a general Enabling Act to be passed, giving a platform for measures to bring about a recovery. The dissolution scarcely conformed to the spirit of the Constitution. Elections were turned into a consequence, not a cause, of the formation of a government. The Reichstag had not even been given the opportunity of demonstrating its confidence (or lack of it) in the new government. A decision which was properly parliament’s had been placed directly before the people. In its tendency, it was already a step towards acclamation by plebiscite.
    Hitler’s opening gambit stretched no further than new elections, to be followed by an Enabling Act. His conservative partners, as keen as he was to end parliamentarism and eliminate the Marxist parties, had played into his hands. On the morning of 1 February he told the cabinet of Hindenburg’s agreement to dissolve the Reichstag. The elections were set for 5 March. The Reich Chancellor himself provided the government’s slogan: ‘Attack on Marxism.’ That evening, with his cabinet standing behind him in his room in the Reich Chancellery, wearing a dark blue suit with a black and white tie, sweating profusely from nervousness, and speaking – unusually – in a dull monotone, Hitler addressed the German people for the first time on the radio. The ‘Appeal of the Reich Government to the German People’ that he read out was full of rhetoric but vacuous in content – the first propaganda shot in the election campaign rather than a stated programme of political measures. Full of pathos, Hitler appealed on behalf of the government to the people to overcome class divisions, and to sign alongside the government an act of reconciliation to permit Germany’s resurgence. ‘The parties of Marxism and those who went along with them had fourteen years to see what they could do. The result is a heap of ruins. Now, German people, give us four years and then judge and sentence us,’ he declared. He ended, as he often concluded major speeches, in pseudo-religious terms, with an appeal to the Almighty to bless the work of the governent.With that, the election campaign had begun. It was to be a different campaign from the earlier ones, with the government – already enjoying wide backing – clearly separating itself from all that had preceded it in the Weimar Republic.
    Towards the end of his proclamation, Hitler had posed for the first time as a man of peace, stating, despite love of the army as the bearer of arms and symbol of Germany’s great past, how happy the government would be ‘if through a restriction of its armaments the world should make an increase of our own weapons never again necessary’. His tone when invited by Blomberg to address military leaders gathered in the home of the head of the army General Kurt Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord on the evening of 3 February was entirely different.
    The atmosphere was cool, the attitude of many of the officers reserved, when Hitler began his lengthy speech. But what he said could not fail to find appeal. The build-up of the armed forces was the most important premiss to the central aim of regaining political power. General conscription had to be brought back. Before that, the state leadership had to see to it that all traces of pacifism, Marxism, and Bolshevism were eradicated from those eligible for military service. The armed forces – the most important institution in the state – must