grounds that the ban would make the President even more unpopular with his already disappointed followers on the Right. Schleicher himself had decided that it would be better to collaborate with the SA in dissolving all other private defense organizations, such as the Stahlhelm or the loyally Republican Reichsbanner, and to collect them all into a militia or a military sports association subordinated to the army. But his change of heart also sprang from his temperamental love of intrigue. The crude method of a ban was antipathetic to him; he liked subtler procedures. His counterproposal, significantly, was to present Hitler with a number of ultimatums demanding the demilitarization of the SA. The demands would be so impossible to meet that by rejecting them Hitler would be placed in the wrong.
With some scruples, and with anxious side glances at the “old wartime comrades” now serving in the SA and SS, Hindenburg finally signed the decree; and on April 14, in a widespread police action, Hitler’s private army was broken up, its headquarters, shelters, schools and depots occupied. This action was the most energetic blow that the government had struck against Nazism since November, 1923. The official statement at last showed a certain mettle on the part of the republic: “It is exclusively the concern of the State to maintain an organized force. As soon as such a force is organized by private parties and the State tolerates this, a danger to law and order already exists…. Undoubtedly, in a constitutional state power may be organized by the constitutional organs of the State itself. Any private organized force therefore cannot by its very nature be a legal institution…. In the interests of its own preservation, the State must order such forces dissolved.”
Backed by the belligerence and strength of his 400,000 men, Rohm at first seemed ready for a trial of strength. But Hitler would not hear of it. Instead, without more ado, he incorporated the SA into the party organization and in this way kept its organization intact. Here was another example of a Fascist movement abandoning the field without a fight at the first show of resistance by the government. Similarly, in 1920 Gabriele d’Annunzio had evacuated the city of Fiume in response to a single cannon shot. Once more Hitler declared himself on the side of legality, and called for strict observance of the ban. He did this not out of fear but because any other measure would have nullified the “Fascist constellation,” the alliance between conservative rule and a revolutionary-popular movement.
Hitler’s compliance may have come easily to him since by that time he had received information—from Schleicher or people close to Schleicher—about friction within the administration. On the whole he showed an air of confidence. On the eve of the day that was to begin the dismemberment of the Hitler movement, Goebbels noted a conversation with Hitler in the Hotel Kaiserhof: “We discussed personnel questions for the period of taking power just as if we were already the government. I think no movement in the opposition has ever been so sure of its success as ours!”
The very next day a strikingly frosty letter from Hindenburg to Minister of Defense Groener gave the signal for a monumental intrigue. A passionate campaign in the rightist newspapers, joined by a choir of prominent voices of the nationalist camp, went along with it. The Crown Prince thought it “incomprehensible” that the Defense Minister of all persons should help to “shatter the marvelous human material that has been brought together in the SA and SS and is receiving valuable training there.” Schleicher advised his Minister, who still regarded him as his “adopted son,” to resign, and either circulated spiteful slanders against Groener or did nothing to stem such slanders. Word went round that Groener was ill, or that he was a pacifist, or that he had brought the army into disrepute when his second wife gave birth prematurely. Schleicher wittily told President Hindenburg that in the army the baby was called “Nurmi,” after the Finnish runner famous for his speed in the final spurt.
Meanwhile, Schleicher let the leadership of the NSDAP know that he personally was not at all in favor of the ban on the SA. He still clung to the idea of disabling the Nazis by letting them participate in power and “locking them in”—to use the magic formula of the moment—by surrounding them with a cabinet of influential specialists. The example of Mussolini should have shown him that such tricks are useless against tribunes of the people who can call upon a private army.
At the end of April Schleicher met with Hitler for a first discussion. “The conversation went well,” Goebbels noted. Soon afterward there was a second meeting, in which State Secretary Meissner, Hindenburg’s man of confidence, and Oskar von Hindenburg were included; at this time not only the dismissal of Groener but the fall of the entire Bruning cabinet was discussed. “Everything is going well….” Goebbels noted again. “Delightful feeling that nobody suspects anything, Bruning himself least of all.”
After about a month of such intrigues, matters finally came to a head. On May 10 Groener defended in the Reichstag the SA ban against furious attacks from the Right. He was a feeble speaker at best, and his protests against the National Socialist “state within the State” and “state against the State” made little headway against the wild uproar that the Nazis unleashed. The angered, helpless, and no doubt exhausted Minister went down to defeat, and with him the cause he was advocating. Schleicher and General Kurt von Hammerstein, commander in chief of the army, coolly informed the Minister of Defense that he no longer enjoyed the confidence of the army, and must resign. Two days later, after a vain appeal to Hindenburg, Groener handed in his resignation.
That act was, in keeping with the camarilla’s plans, only the prelude. On May 12 Hindenburg left Berlin for nearly two weeks, to spend the Whitsun holidays on his estate, Gut Neudeck. Bruning asked to see him, but the President irritably refused. During this period he was obviously under the influence of his fellow Junkers, who were now preparing the assault on Bruning’s weakening position. Whatever line of argument they followed, they no doubt brought to the task “that heavy force peculiar to large landowners and old army officers, which dispensed with honesty and concern for principle.” When Hindenburg returned to Berlin at the end of the month, he was determined to part with his Chancellor. Bruning thought he was on the verge of great successes in foreign policy, and as late as the morning of May 30, shortly before he set out to see Hindenburg, had heard that there was going to be a significant turn in the matter of disarmament. But as things turned out, he was not given the time to inform the President of this. Only a year before, Hindenburg had assured him that he would be his last Chancellor, that he would not part with him. Now Bruning found himself dismissed in an insultingly brusk interview. He had been allowed only a few minutes on the President’s calendar; Hindenburg did not want to miss the parade of the naval guard in commemoration of the Battle of Jutland. A wartime memory and a minor military spectacle took precedence over an act that decided the fate of the republic.42
General von Schleicher put forward as Bruning’s successor a man who at best could be considered a political dilettante. Franz von Papen came from an aristocratic Westphalian family, had served in a Junker cavalry regiment, and come to wide public notice for the first time—in a characteristic way—during the World War: in 1916 he had been expelled from the United States, where he was serving as military attache, for sabotage activities; on the crossing to Europe he carelessly let important documents regarding his secret service work fall into the hands of the British authorities. His marriage to the daughter of a leading Saar industrialist had brought him considerable wealth and excellent connections with industry. As a Catholic nobleman he also had connections with the higher clergy, and as a former General Staff officer multiple contacts with the army. It may be that this position of Papen’s at the intersection of many interests first attracted Schleicher’s attention. The man seemed grotesquely antiquated; in all his long-legged stiffness, haughtiness, and bleating arrogance he was almost a caricature of himself—a figure from
Yet it was obviously this cavalier quality of Papen that recommended him to Schleicher. For Schleicher was plainly thinking more and more of doing away with the weakened parliamentary system and replacing it by some kind of “moderate” dictatorship. Papen might be just the man to carry out such plans for him. Schleicher must also have imagined that the inexperienced Papen, a man concerned largely with externals, would find his vanity satisfied with the office and its ceremonial functions, and for the rest would be a docile tool. Schleicher, as ambitious as he was wary of publicity, needed exactly that kind of man. When Schleicher’s friends, incredulous at his choice, protested that Papen was a man without a head, Schleicher replied: “I don’t need a head, I need a hat.”
If, however, Schleicher had considered that Papen, thanks to his extensive connections, would be able to put together a coalition, or at any rate to win parliamentary approval of a cabinet including all parties to the right of the Social Democrats, he soon found that he was mistaken. The new Chancellor had no political base at all. The Center, embittered by the betrayal of Bruning, sharply opposed him. And Hugenberg, who saw himself once more passed over, also proved indignant. From the public, too, Papen encountered hostile rejection. Although he cashed in on Bruning’s successful negotiations and came back from the Lausanne Conference with the reparations
