Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

When the economic crisis began in 1929, Germany had a democratic government of the Center and Social Democratic parties. The crisis resulted in a decrease in tax receipts and a parallel increase in demands for government welfare services. This brought to a head the latent dispute over orthodox and unorthodox financing of a depression. Big business and big finance were determined to place the burden of the depression on the working classes by forcing the government to adopt a policy of deflation—that is, by wage reductions and curtailment of government expenditures. The Social Democrats wavered in their attitude, but in general were opposed to this policy. Schacht, as president of the Reichsbank, was able to force the Socialist Rudolf Hilferding out of the position of minister of finance by refusing bank credit to the government until this was done. In March 1930, the Center broke the coalition on the issue of reduction of unemployment benefits, the Socialists were thrown out of the government, and Heinrich Brüning, leader of the Center Party, came in as chancellor. Because he did not have a majority in the Reichstag, he had to put the deflationary policy into effect by the use of presidential decree under Article 48. This marked the end of the Weimar Republic, for it had never been intended that this “emergency clause” should be used in the ordinary process of government, although it had been used by Ebert in 1923 to abolish the eight-hour day. When the Reichstag condemned Brüning’s method by a vote of 236 to 221 on July 18, 1930, the chancellor dissolved it and called for new elections. The results of these were contrary to his hopes, since he lost seats both to the Right and to the Left. On his Right were 148 seats (107 Nazis and 41 Nationalists); on his Left were 220 seats (77 Communists and 143 Socialists). The Socialists permitted Brüning to remain in office by refusing to vote on a motion of no confidence. Left in office, Brüning continued the deflationary policy by decrees which Hindenburg signed. Thus, in effect, Hindenburg was the ruler of Germany, since he could dismiss or name any chancellor, or could permit one to govern by his own power of decree.

Brüning’s policy of deflation was a disaster. The suffering of the people was terrible, with almost eight million unemployed out of twenty-five million employable. To compensate for this unpopular domestic policy, Brüning adopted a more aggressive foreign policy, on such questions as reparations, union with Austria, or the World Disarmament Conference.

In the crisis of 1929-1933, the bourgeois parties tended to dissolve to the profit of the extreme Left and the extreme Right. In this the Nazi Party profited more than the Communists for several reasons: (1) it had the financial support of the industrialists and landlords; (2) it was not internationalist, but nationalist, as any German party had to be; (3) it had never compromised itself by accepting the republic even temporarily, an advantage when most Germans tended to blame the republic for their troubles; (4) it was prepared to use violence, while the parties of the Left, even the Communists, were legalistic and relatively peaceful, because the police and judges were of the Right. The reasons why the Nazis, rather than the Nationalists, profited by the turn from moderation could be explained by the fact that (1) the Nationalists had compromised themselves and vacillated on every issue from 1924 to 1929, and (2) the Nazis had an advantage in that they were not clearly a party of the Right but were ambiguous; in fact, a large group of Germans considered the Nazis a revolutionary Left party differing from the Communists only in being patriotic.

In this polarization of the political spectrum it was the middle classes which became unanchored, driven by desperation and panic. The Social Democrats were sufficiently fortified by trade unionism, and the Center Party members were sufficiently fortified by religion to resist the drift to extremism. Unfortunately, both these relatively stable groups lacked intelligent leadership and were too wedded to old ideas and narrow interests to find any appeal broad enough for a wide range of German voters.

The whole of 1932 was filled with a series of intrigues and distrustful, shifting alliances among the various groups which sought to get into a position to use the presidential power of decree. On October 11, 1931, a great reactionary alliance was made of the Nazis, the Nationalists, the Stahlhelm (a militaristic veterans’ organization), and the Junker Landbund. This so-called “Harzburg Front” pretended to be a unified opposition to Communism, but really represented part of the intrigue of these various groups to come to power. Of the real rulers of Germany, only the Westphalian industrialists and the army were absent. The industrialists were taken into camp by Hitler during a three-hour speech which he made at the Industrial Club of Düsseldorf at the invitation of Fritz Thyssen (January 27, 1932). The army could not be brought into line, since it was controlled by the presidential coterie, especially Schleicher and Hindenburg himself. Schleicher had political ambitions of his own, and the army traditionally would not commit itself in any open or formal fashion.

In the middle of this crisis came the presidential election of March-April 1932. It offered a fantastic sight of a nominally democratic republic forced to choose its president from among four antidemocratic, antire-publican figures of which one (Hitler) had become a German citizen only a month previously by a legal trick. Since Hindenburg appeared as the least impossible of the four, he was reelected on the second ballot:

First Ballot

Second Ballot

Hindenburg

18,661,736

19,359,533

Hitler, Nazi

11,338.571

13,418,051

Thälmann, Communist

4,982,079

3,706,655

Düsterberg, Stahlhelm

2,557,876

Hindenburg continued to support Brüning until the end of May 1932, when he dismissed him and put in Von Papen. This was done at the instigation of Von Schleicher who was hoping to build up some kind of broad-front coalition of nationalists and workers as a facade for the Reichswehr. In this plan Schleicher was able to get Hindenburg to abandon Brüning by persuading him that the chancellor was planning to break up some of the bankrupt large estates east of the Elbe and might even investigate the Osthilfe scandals. Schleicher put in Papen as chancellor in the belief that Papen had so little support in the country that he would be completely dependent on Schleicher’s ability to control Hindenburg. Instead, the president became so fond of Papen that the new chancellor was able to use Hindenburg’s power directly, and even began to undermine the influence of Schleicher in the president’s entourage.

Papen’s “Cabinet of the barons” was openly a government of the Quartet and had almost no support in the Reichstag and little support in the country. Papen and Schleicher realized that it could not last long. Each began to form a plot to consolidate himself and stop the polarization of political opinion in Germany. Papen’s plot was to cut off the financial contributions from industry to Hitler and break down the Nazi Party’s independence by a series of expensive elections. The chancellor felt sure that Hitler would be willing to come into a Cabinet of which Papen was head in order to recover the financial contributions from industry and prevent the disruption of his party. Schleicher, on the other hand, hoped to unite the Left wing of the Nazi Party under Otto Strasser with the Christian and Socialist labor unions to support the Reichwehr in a program of nationalism and unorthodox finance. Both plots depended on retaining the favor of Hindenburg in order to retain control of the army and of the presidential power to issue decrees. In this, Papen was more successful than Schleicher, schemes.