Peter Fritzsche - Hitlers First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich

T HE POCKET WATCH told the time: It was shortly before eleven oclock in the morning on Monday, January 30, 1933. The most powerful men in German politics had gathered in the first-floor office of Otto Meissner, chief of staff to the president of the republic, Paul von Hindenburg, who occupied the second-floor suite. They met in the Chancellery Building in Berlin, where Hindenburg and Meissner had temporary offices while the Presidential Palace underwent repairs. The men in the room were determined: they would destroy the republic and establish a dictatorship powerful enough to bend back the influence of political parties and break the socialists.

The men were powerful for different reasons. Chief negotiator Franz Joseph Hermann Michael Maria von Papen, the nations Other men were present in the room, including current cabinet ministers who had agreed to join the new government that Hitler would lead, but these three were in charge.

Not at the meeting were the leaders of the Catholic Center Party, which was as it soundedCatholic and centristthough it leaned more to the right than the left. Also missing were representatives of the Social Democratic Party, Germanys oldest (and, until 1932, largest) party and the most reliable pillar of German democracy, and the Communists, who, like the National Socialists, had gained votes by furiously attacking the system in the embittered years of the Great Depression. Together, the absent politicians represented more Germans than the conspiratorial men in the room, but they shared little if any common ground. There was no such thing as majority opinion in the country: not enough Germans supported Hitler, not enough supported the republic, and not enough supported the old-fashioned conservatives. Almost no one supported the old kaiser in exile. After all the electioneering of the previous year, the political system had checkmated itself.

Since July 1932, the two radical partiesthe National Socialists, or Nazis (German acronyms usually incorporate syllables rather than letters), and the Communists, or the Communehad composed a slim negative majority in the Reichstag. Given this, the other parties might have been expected to form a coalition to protect the constitution and preserve law and order. But German politics didnt work that way. To understand how they did work, one must first understand the political divide that made even moderate Social Democrats unacceptable partners to the right-of-center groups. The inability of Right and Left to communicatedivided as they were on the issue of the November Revolution of 1918, which established the democratic Weimar Republic, and the stab-in-the-back legend, which blamed the revolutionaries for Germanys defeat in World War Idisabled every level of government. The Right derided the new national flag, which replaced the imperial colors of black, red, and white, as a despicable mix of black, red, and mustard. It dismissed volunteers in the republican civil guard, the Reichsbanner, as Reich bananas or Reich bandits. The German Rights hatred and dread of the Left drove the plot against the republic and pushed these plotters into the arms of the Nazis.

Yet those gathered in the Chancellery Building had reached no agreement on the best political plan. It was now past eleven oclock, when Hitler and Papen were scheduled to present the new cabinet to President Hindenburg. Hitler, hoping to attain a Nazi-dominated supermajority in the Reichstag in order to revise or suspend the constitution, pressed Hugenberg to endorse the proposal for one last round of elections. As the leader of a relatively small party without modern campaign machinery, Hugenberg refused, at the last minute jeopardizing the plan. Hindenburg was expecting them upstairs.

The assembled men felt a real sense of urgency. In the past week, three big demonstrations had crowded downtown streets in the capital: Nazi storm troopers (Sturmabteilung, or SA) on January 22 (shouting, Germany, Wake Up!), Communists on January 25 (Red Front!), and Social Democrats on January 29 (Freedom!). The negotiations to put Hitler in the number one spot, as chancellor, had been difficult. And most of the men in the room had heard rumors that the army command was unhappy, although no one was sure whether the Reichswehr opposed the return of Papen to that postwhich journalists thought the likely but highly unfortunate solution to the present crisisor intended to block the last-chance gamble on the peoples demagogue, Hitler, whose brown-shirted storm troopers vastly outnumbered the governments regular soldiers. Maybe the army wouldnt move at all. In consultations, Hitler quickly promised not to use future election results to rearrange the composition of the new cabinet, in which Hugenberg and his allies occupied powerful positions. From the perspective of Hugenberg, who suspected that any plan calling for the dissolution of the Reichstag and new elections would strengthen the National Socialists and ultimately result in legislation overriding the constitution and giving the Nazi leader emergency powers, Hitlers pledge was beside the point.

The issue of elections was important. The decision would determine the division of power in the room that morning and the hardness of the envisioned dictatorship. Without new elections, the leaders of the nationalist unity government would rule by emergency decree, which required the consent of the president. The new autocrats would bypass the Reichstag, ignore its negative majorities, and push aside the democratic opposition. Such a solution would be frankly authoritarian, but it would leave power divided between the chancellor and the president and preserve the political influence of the various right-wing partners represented in the cabinet. Government structures would remain in place. This was the illegal path to a partial authoritarian state supported by Hugenberg and his German Nationalists as well as Germanys military, business, and civil service elites. As establishment figures, Hugenberg and Papen would serve as guarantors. With new elections, on the other hand, Hitler would pursue a legal though much more adventurous path. By cementing a coalition with Hugenberg, Hitler planned to lead the national unity government to an electoral victory, making the new Nazi majority powerful enough to revise the constitution and put emergency powers in his own hands. The legal path would lead to a total authoritarian solution that would allow the Nazis to dismantle the power of the presidency and consolidate the partys power, all without any constraint on arbitrary rule or revolutionary ambition. Hugenberg was the lone holdout against Hitlers proposal.