Hitler

our veneration for you is too great for us to allow those whom we would destroy to hide behind you. With our deep regret, therefore, you must step aside, for they want to fight us and we want to fight them.” Beside himself with delight, Goebbels noted that the Fuhrer was “once more master of the situation.”

The extent to which Hitler and the Nazis had come to dominate the political scene became clear right at the outset. For although Hindenburg, the Communist candidate Ernst Thalmann, and the Conservative Theodor Duesterberg were already running, the election campaign did not really begin until Hitler entered the race. Instantly, the Nazis began sweeping everything wildly before them. Their campaign testified both to the improved condition of the party’s treasury and to their more effective organization. In February Goebbels had transferred the national propaganda headquarters of the party to Berlin, and in his bombastic style had predicted an election campaign “such as the world has never seen before.” The top people of the party’s corps of speakers were called upon. Hitler himself traveled by car back and forth across Germany from March 1 to March 11, and if the Volkische Beobachter was to be believed, spoke to some 500,000 people. At the side of this “demagogue on the grandest scale” stood, as Hitler had prescribed, that “army of agitators who will whip up the passions of the already tormented people.” Their wit and ingenuity—they employed modern technical media for the first time—once more put to shame all their rivals. Fifty thousand copies of a phonograph record were distributed. Sound movies were made, and pressure was exerted on cinema owners to have these shown before the main film. A special illustrated magazine, devoted to the election, was launched and what Goebbels called a “war of posters and banners” unleashed, which overnight would paint whole cities or districts of cities bloody red. For days on end long columns of trucks drove through the streets. SA units stood under waving banners, chin straps drawn down, singing or shouting their “Germany, awake!” The incessant booming of slogans soon engendered within the party an autosuggestive mood of victory that Himmler tried to keep in check by restricting alcohol consumption at victory celebrations.

On the other side stood Bruning, who seemed peculiarly alone. In homage to the President, he was going through this exhausting election campaign. As for the Social Democrats, their posture all too plainly betrayed their real intentions: they were supporting Hindenburg solely in order to defeat Hitler. And their uneasiness was matched by Hindenburg’s; in the one radio address the old man made during the campaign he rather mournfully defended himself against the charge that he was the candidate of a “black-and-red [i.e., Catholic-socialist] coalition.” Nevertheless, it turned out that the election, which shifted all fronts and split all loyalties, was a match entirely between Hindenburg and Hitler. On the eve of March 13 the Berlin Angriff announced confidently: “Tomorrow Hitler will be President of the Reich.”

Given such high expectations, the actual result was a severe and shocking blow. Hindenburg, with 49.6 per cent of the votes, won an impressive victory over Hitler (30.1 per cent). Triumphantly, Otto Strasser had posters pasted in the streets showing Hitler in the role of Napoleon retreating from Moscow. The legend read: “The Grand Army is annihilated. His Majesty the Emperor is in good health.” Overwhelmingly defeated, with only 6.8 per cent of the voters supporting him, was the Conservative Duesterberg. Thus the rivalry within the nationalist camp was decided once and for all in favor of Hitler. The Communist Thalmann received 13.2 per cent of the votes.

However, Hindenburg had fallen short of the absolute majority, and the election therefore had to be repeated. Once more Hitler faced the situation in a characteristic way. While spirits fell throughout the party and some members saw no point in entering upon a second campaign, Hitler showed no emotion at all. On the very night of March 13 he issued a series of proclamations to the party, the SA, the SS, the Hitler Youth, and the NSKK (Motorized Corps of the National Socialist Party) calling for renewed and increased activity: “The first election campaign has ended; the second has begun today. I shall lead it in person,” he announced, and as Goebbels rapturously phrased it, Hitler raised up the party “in a single symphony of the aggressive spirit.” But late one night Ernst Hanfstaengl found him in his darkened apartment sunk in apathetic brooding, “the image of a disappointed, discouraged gambler who had wagered beyond his means.”

Alfred Rosenberg, meanwhile, was using the Volkische Beobachter to give the fainthearted followers a good shaking: “Now the fight goes on with a fierceness, a ruthlessness, such as Germany has never before experienced…. The basis of our struggle is hatred for everything that is opposed to us. Now no quarter will be given.” A few days later nearly fifty prestigious personages—nobles, generals, Hamburg patricians, and university professors—issued a statement declaring themselves for Hitler. Election day was set for April 10. But with the idea of keeping down the agitation by radicals of the Right and Left, with its eruptions of hatred and threats of civil war, the government declared a mandatory truce until April 3—on the pretext of preserving peace during Easter. This meant that the actual election campaign was limited to about a week. But as always when he found himself with his back to the wall, Hitler turned this obstacle into one of his most effective gestures. To make maximum use of the short time at his disposal, he chartered a plane for himself and his intimates, Schreck, Schaub, Bruckner, Hanfstaengl, Otto Dietrich, and the photographer Heinrich Hoffmann. On April 3 he started off on the first day of his subsequently famous flights over Germany, which day after day took him to four or five demonstrations organized with military precision. In all he visited twenty-one cities. And quite apart from the party propaganda that tried to weave a legendary wreath around this undertaking, there is no doubt that the flights created an impression of brilliant inspiration, bold modernity, fighting spirit, and a rather sinister omnipresence. “Hitler over Germany” was the effective slogan for these flights; its double meaning stirred millionfold expectations and millionfold anxieties. Moved by his own daring and the waves of cheering that greeted him, Hitler declared that he thought he was an instrument of God, chosen to liberate Germany.

As predicted, Hindenburg had no difficulty winning the requisite absolute majority, with nearly 20 million votes, 53 per cent of the total. Nevertheless, Hitler chalked up a larger increase in votes than the President; the 13.5 million voters who cast their ballots for him represented a percentage of 36.7. Duesterberg had not run in the second campaign; the Communist Thalmann received little more than 10 per cent of the total.

On the very day of the election, in a mood that mingled exhaustion, feverish excitement, and the intoxication of success, Hitler issued instructions for the elections to the state legislatures in Prussia, Anhalt, Wurttemberg, Bavaria, and Hamburg, which once more involved the entire country, four-fifths of the population. Goebbels recorded Hitler’s orders: “We will not rest for a moment and are already making decisions.” Once more Hitler set out on an airplane flight over Germany, speaking in twenty-five cities in eight days. His entourage boasted of a “world record” in personal encounters. But that was precisely what did not happen. Rather, Hitler’s individuality seemed to disappear behind the ceaseless activity, as if nothing but a dynamic principle were at work: “Our whole life is now a frantic chase after success and after power.”

For long stretches of his life, therefore, the personality of this man, elusive in any case, evaporates, slips from the biographer’s grasp. Hitler’s entourage tried in vain to give color, individuality, and a human aura to the phenomenon. Even the masters of propaganda, who could command almost any effect, found themselves at a loss here. The diaries and accounts of Goebbels or Otto Dietrich are prime examples of that failure. The anecdotes his publicists endlessly circulated about Hitler the lover of children, the navigator with an infallible sense of direction in the lost airplane, the “dead shot” with a pistol, the hero with remarkable presence of mind in the midst of the “Red rabble”—all these tales sounded strained and added to the impression they were trying to dispel: remoteness from real life. Only the props he had gradually acquired gave him a certain individual outline: the raincoat, the felt hat or leather cap, the snapping whip, the intensely black mustache, and the way his hair was brushed down over his forehead. But because these items always remained the same, they, too, depersonalized him.

Goebbels has vividly described the restiveness that gripped the leading members of the party at this time:

This endless traveling begins again. Work must be taken care of standing, walking, driving and flying. You hold your most important conversations on stairs, in hallways, at the door, or on the drive to the railroad station. You scarcely have time to think. By train, car and plane you’re carried back and forth across Germany. You turn up in a city a half hour before your speech is scheduled, sometimes with even less time to spare; you climb to the speaker’s platform and speak…. By the time you’re done you’re in a state as if you’d just been pulled out of a hot bath fully dressed. Then you get into the car and drive another two hours….²⁷

Only a few times during this year and a half of nonstop electioneering did circumstances jolt Hitler out of his impersonality and for brief moments offer a glimpse of his real character.

On September 18, 1931, just as the frantic chase across Germany was beginning and while he was setting