declarations, we must ask: What does he have in mind? The answer must be that he means what he says. Hitler certainly did.
Of course, we have little need to pay attention to every fringe movement that makes outrageous declarations. But by 1932 the Nazi Party was no fringe movement. The 1930 German election—they ran elections with incredible frequency—gave it 107 out of 577 seats in the Reichstag. In the July 1932 election, the Nazis became the single largest party in the Reichstag, with 230 seats. By then no prudent person could treat Hitler’s campaign promises lightly. Anyone listening should have understood, given the nature of what he was saying, that he meant what he said and he said what he meant. Hitler was a dictator at heart, one hundred percent.
Hitler’s party lost some seats in the November 1932 election but still remained the single largest contingent in the German parliament. The election gave the Nazis 196 seats. By January 1933, Paul von Hindenburg, the beloved and elderly German war hero and president of the Weimar Republic, acquiesced under pressure to make Hitler chancellor. Now the door was wide open to his dictatorial ambitions. In early March 1933 another election was held, almost immediately after the Reichstag fire on March 3. Hitler was quick to blame the Communists for the fire, using that as a pretext to ban them from the Reichstag. He wanted all Communist leaders executed that night—no more Mister Nice Guy—but Hindenburg refused to go along.
The March election was a mixed success for the Nazi Party. On the plus side (from its perspective), the party increased its seat share in the Reichstag from 196 to 288. On the minus side, the Nazis failed to gain a majority. That meant Hitler still had to make deals with other parties; he was not yet completely in control. He was still vulnerable to defeat if a strong enough coalition of parties in the Reichstag joined together to oppose him. The tragedy is that they didn’t.
Shortly after the March 5 election, on March 23, 1933, he negotiated his way to a two-thirds vote in the Reichstag to change the constitution to comply with the terms of the Enabling Act, a piece of legislation to make him dictator. The Enabling Act gave Hitler as chancellor essentially all of the constitutional authority also granted to the Reichstag so that he no longer needed legislative approval for policy changes he wished to put in place. The Enabling Act made Hitler Germany’s dictator and ended the need for future elections. He was well on the way to doing everything he had promised to do during the previous election campaigns.
Once the Enabling Act was approved, probably nothing short of a military uprising or foreign military intervention could have stopped Hitler on his destructive course. What about between November and March? As I said, Hitler’s intentions were no secret. Could he have been thwarted before the Reichstag fire resulted in the one hundred Communist Party members in parliament being banned, making it much easier for Hitler to put together a two-thirds vote? Hitler was stuck operating within the legal system, at least more or less, before the Enabling Act’s passage. It was far from a sure thing that he could muster a two-thirds vote. The key to his success—or failure— was the Catholic Center Party (BVP).
Allow me for a moment to frame the game as it was set up. There were four principal parties in the Reichstag at this time: the Nazis, the Catholic Center Party, the Social Democrats, and the Communists. The Social Democrats and the Communists generally opposed Hitler, and would resist his Enabling Act (the Communists, of course, irrelevant in the actual voting on account of being barred because of their supposed role in the fire). The Catholic party, however, was divided over whether to support the Enabling Act. Their leader, Ludwig Kaas, was no fan of Hitler’s. Nevertheless, Kaas, a priest, negotiated with Hitler for assurances that Catholic interests—inside and outside government—would be protected if Hitler were given their support. Kaas may also have sought assurances of a concordat with the Vatican. Hitler agreed to his terms, understanding the temporary need for compromise.
Hitler’s deal with the Catholic party was the crucial decision that gave the Nazis the two-thirds majority they needed for the Enabling Act. With the Communists barred, the Social Democrats were the only party to vote against the act, and of course Hitler won the game as a result. But it remains the case that without the Catholic Center Party, the Enabling Act would have been defeated, Hitler would not have been made dictator, and, who knows, perhaps the course of world history would have been completely altered.
Beating Hitler was no easy task. We must admit that he played even the parliamentary game the best out of all the parties. His opponents either underestimated him (with fatal consequences) or were simply incapable of outplaying him. That, however, is not to say that there weren’t winning moves open to them.
What or who could have stopped the Catholic Center Party from going along with Hitler? How could they have made someone—anyone outside the Nazi Party—Germany’s new, democratic boss? Can you see a possible strategy?
I applied my forecasting model to this question, constructing a data set in which the stakeholders are the political parties represented in the Reichstag plus Hindenburg. Their power is proportional to the number of seats they controlled, except, of course, Hindenburg, who had no seats in the Reichstag. His personal prestige and popularity, however, gave him great weight, even more than Hitler and his Nazis. Remember, Hitler could not execute the Communist leadership without Hindenburg’s (withheld) approval. I accordingly assigned Hindenburg 67 percent more clout than the Nazis. Positions on the Enabling Act are and were well known at the time. The Communists and the Social Democrats were utterly opposed, the Nazis utterly in favor; Hindenburg leaned favorably toward the Act and the Catholic Center Party did too, but ever so slightly. The rest were committed to the Act.
Right after the November 1932 election, while Hitler was angling to become chancellor, the Social Democrats and the Communists could (according to my model) have struck a deal with the Catholic Center Party, depriving Hitler of the two-thirds majority he needed. To do so, however, they would have had to move meaningfully in the direction of the Catholic Center Party’s policy desires, perhaps so much so that a member of the Catholic Center Party would have become the chancellor instead of Hitler. That is, the Social Democrats and the Communists needed to provide at least as good an assurance of Catholic interests as Hitler astutely provided months later. The model indicates that they did not believe they had this opportunity. They did not think that the Catholic Center leadership would listen to them or make a deal with them, and so, fearing rejection, they didn’t really try (or at least they didn’t try hard enough). The model says they were wrong. Too bad we can’t go back in time to test the waters and see if the deal could have been made.
We do know that Ludwig Kaas, the Center Party’s leader, had in the 1920s developed good relations with the Social Democrats’ then leader, Friedrich Ebert. It is difficult to imagine that under the circumstances Kaas would not have responded to the Social Democrats, especially if they were prepared to support him as the next chancellor (let’s remember game theory’s view of human nature and what it means for individuals seeking to obtain or maintain power and influence). The model says Kaas would have reached a deal with the Social Democrats and the Communists. Of course, for the Communist Party, atheists that they were, bitter adversaries of both the Social Democrats and the Catholic Center Party, this would have been a bitter pill to swallow. But surely it was better than the easily foreseen fate they met after the Enabling Act was passed. Many Communists were murdered, others sent to concentration camps.
Even after the Reichstag fire, the Social Democrats still had the chance to cut a deal with the Catholics, but didn’t (although whether Hitler could still have been stopped by that stage is questionable). Yes, he could have been deprived of a two-thirds majority, but just barely, once the Communists were out of the picture, and he was, as I noted earlier, playing his strategic cards effectively. In November, December, and maybe through January, however, there is a good chance that a defeated Nazi Party would have been relegated to the dustbin of history. Had Hitler attempted a coup at that stage, it probably would have failed. The German security apparatus would
