Joachim Fest: Plotting Hitler's Death

Hitler’s right-wing coalition partners owed their sense of security to two factors: their “strongmen” in the cabinet-Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen and Alfred Hugenberg, leader of the German na­tionalists-and the army, which they envisioned would soon clamp down on the rowdyism and lawlessness that they saw as the only blemish on the Nazi revolution. The supreme commander of the armed forces was, after all, none other than that conservative stalwart President Paul von Hindenburg. The right-wing parties were cer­tainly not misguided in claiming him and the clout of his office as their own; they failed, however, to consider the frailty of the old man. He may still have cut a fine figure, but he was by this point little more than a majestic-looking marionette, easily manipulated by self-serving interests lurking in the background.

Hitler fully intended to take advantage of the weakness and tractability of the president, and success was not long in coming. Papen was inordinately proud of a concession he had obtained that stipulated he be present whenever Hitler met with Hindenburg. The president, however, soon informed Papen that this arrangement betrayed a dis­trust that his “dear young friend,” as he sometimes called Hitler, could not long be expected to endure. Hitler managed to get his way time after time in the selection of the cabinet by playing his conserva­tive coalition partners off against each other. On the afternoon of January 29, for instance, the day before he became chancellor, he let it be known in preliminary discussions that he would be prepared to accept as minister of defense the outgoing chancellor, his old and hated foe General Schleicher. But at literally the last minute, he abruptly changed course, managing with the help of Hindenburg and Papen to slip General Werner von Blomberg into the post. Impulsive in and easily influenced, Blomberg was given to flights of fancy, earning among his army comrades the nickname “the rubber lion.” Hitler went back on other agreements as well: he insisted, despite a previous understanding, that a Nazi be appointed Prussian minister of the interior; most importantly, he managed, once again with Papen’s help, to push Hugenberg into agreeing in principle to new elections on March 5, 1933, though Hugenberg remained extremely reluctant and was still resisting in the president’s antechamber until just before the swearing-in ceremony. All these steps were further moves toward disarming and quashing the conservative forces.

Even before the new government had taken power, the conservatives’ plan to “tame” Hitler had begun to look shaky. Papen was warned of this repeatedly but maintained that the doomsayers were in error: “You’re wrong,” the vice-chancellor stormed, “we have his solid commitment.” Papen even went so far as to boast that he would soon have Hitler backed so tightly into a corner that he would “squeak.” 17Instead, Papen was blindsided by the new chancellor, who toured the country making triumphant appearances, a performance that the vice-chancellor could hardly hope to match. Although Papen must have realized by this time that Hitler was not about to be tamed, he still failed to perceive that he had gotten himself into the untenable politi­cal position of opposing both the democratic, constitutional state and Hitler’s mounting autocracy. The haughty simplemindedness of the conservative members of the cabinet was on full display in their ea­gerness to see the constitution set aside, even though it was the foun­dation of their own power and security. They looked forward just as eagerly to the passage of the Enabling Act on March 23, which freed Hitler from the last remaining constraints of constitutional law and cleared the way for him to seize virtually unlimited power. By late June 1933 the German National People’s Party was forced to dissolve despite its insistence on its rights as a coalition partner in the “cabinet of national revival.” Its powerful leader, Alfred Hugenberg, was made to resign from the government by Hitler, in contravention of all the Führer’s earlier assurances.

The venerable Social Democratic Party met an equally pathetic end. “A signal will come,” the party’s leader, Otto Wels, had assured restless members who were eager to rise up against Hitler. As time passed, though, it became increasingly apparent that no one had any idea where the signal would come from and what it would mean. 18The SPD leadership had no ready response either to Hitler’s acces­sion to power or once he was in office, to his tactics. It was especially in the tactical arena that it utterly failed to match him. Some of the befuddled SPD leaders, still enmired in theories of class struggle, continued to see Hugenberg as the real foe and Hitler as a mere front man or “agent of the reaction.” The SPD leadership was inundated with demands that it organize resistance activities, but instead it sought to calm the waters by pointing to the guarantees in the constitution, though the constitution was clearly being disassembled. From January 30 on, the SPD issued repeated statements that it would not be the first to overstep the bounds of legality. This seemed to be a threat to fight fire with fire, but such hints were far too mild to make much of an impression on Hitler; indeed, they did not even move him to scorn. The chief effect of the statements was to demoralize the party rank and file, which could not help noticing the leadership’s lack of backbone and its readiness to capitulate. In February and March 1933 the first wave of resignations from party organizations began, presumably registering members’ fear, disappointment, or acceptance of the inevitable. In May many of the SPD’s local associations voluntarily disbanded, anticipating in their confusion and sense of isolation the ultimate dissolution and prohibition of the SPD itself on June 22.

The once mighty trade unions came to similar if not even more pitiful ends. As early as the end of February 1933, union leaders had already abandoned the SPD’s principled opposition to the regime in an attempt to preserve their “influence over the structuring of social life,” not to mention their union halls, hostels, and charitable institutions. 19In March they began signaling their allegiance to the new authorities and even issued declarations of loyalty despite the harass­ment and arrest of union leaders all across Germany. True to form, Hitler correctly perceived these attempts to appease him as signs of weakness. The reliability of his instincts was confirmed shortly there­after by the union leadership itself. When Hitler acceded to the old union demand, which had never been granted by the Weimar Repub­lic, to make May 1 a national workers’ holiday, union leaders sum­moned their members to participate in the official ceremonies, and the world was treated to the spectacle of unionized blue- and white-collar workers marching in parades beneath swastika flags and listening bitterly but with forced applause to the speeches of their triumphant foes. This humiliating experience did more than anything else to break the will to resist among millions of organized workers. Just one day later, on May 2, union halls were occupied, their prop­erty was confiscated, and union members were swallowed into the newly established Nazi workers’ organization, the German Labor Front.

The Communist Party, too, disappeared with barely a whimper, in an atmosphere of quiet terror, flight, and quick reversals of old alle­giance. Right up to the brink of Hitler’s “new age,” it had stood its ground as a powerful foe not only of the Nazis but of the entire established order. For years the Nazis had fed on fears that the Com­munist movement sowed among the middle classes and had wel­comed them as they fled its predictions of catastrophe. The image Hitler liked to project of himself as a savior was based largely on the great showdown that he sought with the Communists, and he saw the struggle to which he now dedicated all the powers of the state as only the prelude to a worldwide battle for supremacy.