giving up its independence; now Goebbels noted that the financial situation had “improved very suddenly” and that the party as a whole was once again “sitting pretty.” Thyssen spoke of a “number of sizable contributions” that “flowed from sources in heavy industry into the treasuries of the NSDAP.” Though Hitler vehemently denied that he had made concessions to business—such talk was all “inventions and lies,” he said—he did not deny these links with industry.
To the extent to which the Cologne meeting restored the Nazis’ selfconfidence and hope of victory, it inflicted a probably decisive blow upon Schleicher and his government. Conscious of the rising danger, the Chancellor immediately informed the press and went to Hindenburg to remonstrate against Papen’s actions. But when he begged the President to henceforth receive Papen only in his—Schleicher’s—presence, he received an evasive answer, which for the first time showed him what he was up against. Hindenburg was again ready to sacrifice the propriety of his office and the very institutions of the state to his fondness for his “young friend” Papen, who had such charming manners and told anecdotes so expertly.
Now Papen was called up on the carpet. Untruthfully, he told the President that Hitler had at last softened and abandoned his demand for exclusive power to govern. Far from reproving Papen for having acted on his own, Hindenburg remarked that he had “thought right away that this account [Schleicher’s] could not be correct.” He actually ordered Papen to remain in touch with Hitler—personally and in strict confidence. Finally, he instructed his aide, State Secretary Meissner, not to mention Papen’s assignment to Schleicher. Thus the President himself was taking part in the plot against his own Chancellor.
Soon afterward, the nascent Papen-Hitler front received significant reinforcement. While Schleicher was still trying, though with failing hopes, to win over Strasser and the unions, a delegation from the Reich Agrarian League called at the presidential palace on January 11 to protest against the administration’s laggardness in aiding farming estates, and particularly its lack of protective tariffs. Behind these complaints was anxiety about the resumption of the government’s settlement program in the eastern lands—the program started by Bruning. They were also nervous about a parliamentary investigation of the
At first Schleicher seemed about to give way. But a few hours later he learned of some machinations by the Agrarian League that made him decide to stand his ground and abruptly break off the discussions. Two days later he refused to give the reactionary Hugenberg the Ministry of Economy and explicitly reaffirmed his “socialistic” platform. Now the Right was up in arms against him. The Social Democrats had from the first withheld their support for this “general in the flesh” and had even forbidden Theodor Leipart, the union leader, to negotiate with Schleicher. In their estimate of Hitler the Social Democrats had fallen back on old platitudes. In their complacency they counted on the mechanical operations of progress. (Their opposites in the conservative camp had similar notions of a “historically sanctioned” special mentality.) Hitler, the Social Democrats had decided, represented at most a brief detour, a dramatic incident before the final triumph of a libertarian system. Certainly Schleicher had compromised his credibility by his innumerable intrigues directed against the very institutions of the state. But this was hardly reason enough to distrust him more than Hitler.
At any rate, the Social Democrats failed to realize that Schleicher was the last remaining alternative to a Hitler who was waiting impatiently outside the gates to power. In the years since the collapse of the Great Coalition the Social Democratic Party had advanced scarcely a single initiative. Now it roused itself just once more—but only in order to spoil the last slim chance of survival that the republic had.
Far sooner than could have been expected, the devious Chancellor found himself facing an impasse. His approach was a promising one, but he was discovering that he was not the man for it. His employment program alienated the employers, his settlement program the agrarians, his origins the Social Democrats, his offer to Strasser the Nazis. His constitutional reform proved as unfeasible as the systems it replaced. For the time being Schleicher was able to remain in office only because his opponents had not yet put together a new cabinet. This question now became the subject of feverish activity conducted in a twilight zone.
Hitler himself, in order to improve his bargaining position and shore up the party’s claims to power, concentrated all his forces on the Landtag elections that were to take place on January 15 in the miniature state of Lippe. He conducted one of his most lavish election campaigns. Assembling the best known party speakers in the castle of Baron von Oeynhausen, he sent them out night after night, saturating the little state with the Nazi message. On the first day, Goebbels noted, “I have spoken three times, partly in tiny peasant villages.” Hitler himself addressed eighteen demonstrations within a few days. With that sure psychological insight which his critics failed to understand or regarded with disdain he saw that this election offered him an unparalleled opportunity. From the start he hammered away at the theme that this was to be the decisive test in the struggle for power, and he managed to impose this view of the election on the country at large. Thus the German public awaited this marginal event, the decision of some 100,000 voters, as if it were a kind of trial by ordeal that would decide “the political future of a nation of 68 millions.”
As a result of his massive commitment, on January 15 Hitler won his first success since the July elections. Even so, the party, with 39.5 per cent of the vote, lagged behind the share of the vote it had won in July. Moreover, the democratic parties, in particular the Social Democratic Party, in toto achieved greater gains than Hitler’s party. But compared with the results of the November election, the results in Lippe were good. Instead of reading this success in terms of the excessive effort behind it, the public was persuaded that the Hitler movement had regained its irresistible impetus. Even the heads of the government took this view. And Hitler’s own self- confidence mounted.
On January 18 Hitler met with Franz von Papen in the Berlin apartment of Joachim von Ribbentrop, a liquor salesman who had recently joined Hitler’s movement. At this meeting Hitler demanded the chancellorship for himself. Papen replied that his influence with the President was not great enough for him to put across such a demand. That refusal nearly blocked the negotiations, and only the sudden inspiration of involving Hindenburg’s son started them moving again. The meeting took place a few days later, with extraordinary precautions to insure secrecy. Hitler and his team entered von Ribbentrop’s apartment under cover of darkness, from the garden side. Meanwhile, Oskar von Hindenburg and State Secretary Meissner first appeared ostentatiously at the opera. Shortly after the intermission they slipped out of their box. Papen, for his part, was brought to the meeting in Ribbentrop’s car.
As soon as everyone was present, Hitler asked the President’s son to step into another room with him. Suddenly, Oskar von Hindenburg, who had insisted on being accompanied by Meissner, found himself forced into a man-to-man encounter with Hitler. To this day no one knows what was said during their two-hour private talk. Hitler must have attempted to swing the President’s son over to his side by a combination of blackmail and bribery. Among the threats there might well be the charge, repeatedly raised by the Nazis, that Hindenburg had participated in a
At this moment Schleicher seems for the first time to have realized what was brewing. On January 23 he called on Hindenburg and admitted that his plan for splitting the Nazi party and providing a parliamentary basis for the cabinet had failed. He then asked the President for powers to dissolve the Reichstag, declare a state of emergency, and issue a general ban on the National Socialist and Communist parties. Hindenburg, however, reminded him of their disagreement of December 2. At that time Papen had proposed a similar solution, but Schleicher had scotched it. The situation had changed, the Chancellor replied. But this reasoning had no effect on the old man; after talking the matter over with Meissner, he denied Schleicher’s request.
