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

Papen’s plot developed more rapidly than Schleicher’s and appeared more hopeful because of his greater ability to control the president. Having persuaded his close friends, the industrialists, to stop their contributions to the Nazis, Papen called a new election for November 1932. In the balloting the Nazis were reduced from 230 to 196 seats, while the Communists were increased from 89 to 100. The tide had turned. This had three results: (1) Hitler decided to join a coalition government, which he had previously refused; (2) the Quartet decided to overthrow the republic in order to stop the swing to the Communists; and (3) the Quartet, especially the industrialists, decided that Hitler had learned a lesson and could safely be put into office as the figurehead of a Right government because he was growing weaker. The whole deal was arranged by Papen, himself a colonel and an industrialist as well as a Westphalian aristocrat, and was sealed in an agreement made at the home of the Cologne banker Baron Kurt von Schroder, on January 4, 1933.

This agreement came into effect because of Papen’s ability to manage Hindenburg. On January 28, 1933, the president forced the resignation of Schleicher by refusing to grant him decree powers. Two days later Hitler came to office as chancellor in a Cabinet which contained only two other Nazis. These were Minister of Air Göring and Frick in the vital Ministry of the Interior. Of the other eight posts, two, the ministries of economics and agriculture, went to Hugenburg; the Ministry of Labor went to Franz Seldte of the Stahlhelm, the Foreign Ministry and the Reichswehr Ministry went to nonparty experts, and most of the remaining posts went to friends of Papen. It would not seem possible for Hitler, thus surrounded, ever to obtain control of Germany, yet within a year and a half he was dictator of the country.

The Nazi Regime

COMING TO POWER, 1933-1934

When Adolf Hitler became chancellor of the German Reich on January 30, 1933, he was not yet forty-four years old. From his birth in Austria in 1889 to the outbreak of war in 1914, his life had been a succession of failures, the seven years 1907-1914 being passed as a social derelict in Vienna and Munich. There he had become a fanatical Pan-German anti-Semite, attributing his own failures to the “intrigues of international Jewry.”

The outbreak of war in August 1914 gave Hitler the first real motivation of his life. He became a superpatriot, joined the Sixteenth Volunteer Bavarian Infantry, and served at the front for four years. In his way he was an excellent soldier. Attached to the regimental staff as messenger for the First Company, he was completely happy, always volunteering for the most dangerous tasks. Although his relations with his superiors were excellent and he was decorated with the Iron Cross, second class, in 1914 and with the Iron Cross, first class, in 1918, he was never promoted beyond Private, First Class, because he was incapable of having any real relationships with his fellow soldiers or of taking command of any group of them. He remained on active service at the front for four years. During that period his regiment of 3,500 suffered 3,260 killed in action, and Hitler himself was wounded twice. These were the only two occasions on which he left the front. In October 1918 he was blinded by mustard gas and sent to a hospital at Pasewalk, near Berlin. When he emerged a month later he found the war finished, Germany beaten, and the monarchy overthrown. He refused to become reconciled to this situation. Unable to accept either defeat or the republic, remembering the war as the second great love of his life (the first being his mother), he stayed with the army and eventually became a political spy for the Reichswehr, stationed near Munich. In the course of spying on the numerous political groups in Munich, Hitler became fascinated by the rantings of Gottfried Feder against the “interest slavery of the Jews.” At some meetings Hitler himself became a participant, attacking the “Jewish plot to dominate the world” or ranting about the need for Pan-German unity. As a result he was asked to join the German Workers’ Party, and did so, becoming one of about sixty regular members and the seventh member of its executive committee.

The German Workers’ Party had been founded by a Munich locksmith, Anton Drexler, on January 5, 1919, as a nationalist, Pan-German, workers’ group. In a few months Captain Ernst Rohm of Franz von Epp’s corps of the Black Reichswehr joined the movement and became the conduit by which secret Reichswehr funds, coming through Epp, were conveyed to the party. He also began to organize a strong-arm militia within the group (the Storm Troops, or SA). When Hitler joined in September 1919, he was put in charge of party publicity. Since this was the chief expense, and since Hitler also became the party’s leading orator, public opinion soon came to regard the whole movement as Hitler’s, and Rohm paid the Reichswehr’s funds to Hitler directly.

During 1920 the party grew from 54 to 3,000 members; it changed its name to National Socialist German Workers’ Party, purchased the Völkischer Beobachter with 60,000 marks of General von Epp’s money, and drew up its “Twenty-five-Point Program.”

The party program of 1920 was printed in the party literature for twenty-five years, but its provisions became more remote from attainment as years passed. Even in 1920, many of its clauses were put in to win support from the lower classes rather than because they were sincerely desired by the party leaders. These included (1) Pan-Germanism; (2) German international equality, including the abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles; (3) living space for Germans, including colonial areas; (4) German citizenship to be based on blood only, with no naturalization, no immigration for non-Germans, and all Jews or “other aliens” eliminated; (5) all unearned incomes to be abolished, the state to control all monopolies, to impose an excess-profits tax on corporations, to “communalize” the large department stores, to encourage small business in the allotment of government contracts, to take agricultural land for public purposes without compensation, and to provide old-age pensions; (6) to punish all war profiteers and usurers with death; and (7) to see that the press, education, culture, and religion conform to “the morals and religious sense of the German race.”

As the party grew, adding members and spreading out to link up with similar movements in other parts of Germany, Hitler strengthened his control of the group. He could do this because he had control of the party newspaper and of the chief source of money and was its chief public figure. In July 1921, he had the party constitution changed to give the president absolute power. He was elected president; Drexler was made honorary president; while Max Amann, Hitler’s sergeant in the war, was made business manager. As a consequence of this event, the SA was reorganized under Rohm, the word “Socialism” in the party name was interpreted to mean nationalism (or a society without class conflicts), and equality in party and state was replaced by the “leadership principle” and the doctrine of the elite. In the next two years the party passed through a series of crises of which the chief was the attempted Putsch of November 9, 1923. During this period all kinds of violence and illegality, even murder, were condoned by the Bavarian and Munich authorities. As a result of the failures of this period, especially the abortive Putsch, Hitler became convinced that he must come to power by legal methods rather than by force; he broke with Ludendorff and ceased to be supported by the Reichswehr; he began to receive his chief financial support from the industrialists; he made a tacit alliance with the Bavarian People’s Party by which Prime Minister Heinrich Held of Bavaria raised the ban on the Nazi Party in return for Hitler’s repudiation of Ludendorff’s anti-Christian teachings; and Hitler formed a new armed militia (the SS) to protect himself against Rohm’s control of the old armed militia (the SA).