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This below is Chapter 2 Section 10:
10. The Eve of the National Socialist Takeover
There were many reasons why the Reich President withdrew his confidence in his chancellor on May 30, 1932, not least because Hindenburg felt resentment towards Brüning precisely because of the election that had made him the candidate of the Reds and the Catholics and thereby alienated him from the right. That is why he pushed all the more for a right turn, which Brüning resisted. One of the other main reasons was the ban on the SA, with which the government had just demonstrated its impartiality after the Red Front Fighters’ League had already been banned since May 1929. But Hindenburg and Groener were not convinced that Communists and National Socialists could be equated since they had very different relationships to the state, to national ideas and to the will to fight. Therefore, the ban was not imposed without a kind of pedagogical intention, namely to separate the “wonderful human material” that had gathered in the SA from those who were basically Bolsheviks, and thereby to win them over for cooperation in the state. The ban, however, still went too far for Hindenburg, especially because the military associations of other parties were not affected. He primarily had the Reichsbanner in mind, which according to his own self-image was non-partisan and republican. Thus, to everyone’s surprise, Franz von Papen, a little-known centrist deputy, was appointed Chancellor on June 1. He formed a government made up largely of nobles, and not merely apostrophized by Social Democrats, as the Barons' Cabinet. They immediately made two far-reaching decisions: lifting the ban on the SA and also on uniforms and dissolving the Reichstag. The new elections were set for July 31. In and of themselves, these decisions were democratic, and they thus stood in contrast to Brüning’s policy, who had emphasized when forming his second cabinet in October 1931 that he would now be even more independent of the parties. After the elections of the last few months there could be no doubt that the Reichstag elected in September 1930 no longer reflected the popular mood. However, more democracy at this point necessarily meant more radicalization, and in this respect the decision was again non-democratic. A similar paradox can be seen in the coup d'état of July 20, with which the Braun government in Prussia was deposed, so that a Reich Commissioner took its place, namely the Reich Chancellor von Papen himself. After its heavy electoral defeat on April 24th the Braun government was only the caretaker government, and that too only because the old state parliament had made a very controversial change in the rules of procedure at the last minute. In this respect, it was in an undemocratic position, and signs of resignation were unmistakable. But the dismissal was justified by the disturbances in public order, which the Braun government was allegedly no longer able to control, and these disturbances, such as the Bloody Sunday in Altona in particular, were primarily the responsibility of the Reich government, because they made such a march of the uniformed SA through hostile neighborhoods possible in the first place. The real reasons, however, were of a different nature, namely the old dislike of the right-wing parties for the Red Tsar Otto Braun and to the cultural Bolshevism which the Prussian government was allegedly promoting, but above all the concern about certain anti-fascist tendencies as they had come to light in discussions that the State Secretary Abegg had held with communists. But also at work it was probably the will to deprive the National Socialists of the control of the Prussian police if they took over the government after a possible agreement with the Center. In this authoritarian act, too, democratic and anti-democratic aspects were linked in a peculiar way, and it was not surprising that there was no resistance from the Braun government or the Social Democratic Party. The situation was quite different from when the general strike against Kapp was called in March 1920, not least because of the six million unemployed, and of course also because this time one had to expect that the communists would take advantage of it for their purposes from the outset. For this reason the Prussian police could by no means be regarded as absolutely reliable. At the end of August 1931, the Prussian Minister of the Interior, Severing, had expressly pointed out in a decree that the increasing disturbances and raids were mainly due to communist squads, which were recruited primarily from members of the dissolved Red Front Fighters’ League, but presumably also from the ranks of the “Combat League Against Fascism.” Thus the capitulation of the Prussian government on July 20 was neither groundless nor incomprehensible, but in fact it was an important step on the way that came to its temporary end with the election of July 31 and now also created a situation in the Reich which there had never been a precedent in a modern large state. The National Socialists achieved an unprecedented triumph, which was by no means unexpected after the presidential elections and the results in Prussia: they received almost 14 million votes and 230 seats. But it was not without reason that the communists could claim to have won a major electoral victory: 5.3 million votes and 89 Reichstag seats were on their list, and they were now stronger than the Social Democrats not only in Berlin, but in larger parts of the Ruhr area and central Germany. But were they really on the way to becoming the party of the German working class, as they had aspired to since the beginning of the republic? In the constituency of Chemnitz-Zwickau, one of the oldest strongholds of the labor movement, the National Socialists received around 550,000 votes, the Social Democrats 260,000 and the Communists 230,000, while all other parties together could hardly win more than 80,000. In any case, no government could have a majority in this Reichstag if the National Socialists were in opposition, since together with the Communists they held a negative majority of 52% of the seats. The only way out seemed to be a coalition between the National Socialists and the Center, and Hitler’s chancellorship was seriously considered on many sides, apparently also by the Reichswehr Minister von Schleicher, who came more and more to the fore. But the party negotiations did not make much headway, and the decision was made by Hindenburg, who did not want a party government and was even more opposed to a party dictatorship. Papen, for his part, was striving to involve the National Socialists, but did not want to grant them leadership. The result was the famous parley of August 13, in which the Reich President gave the leader of by far the strongest party a brief and ungracious refusal, on the grounds that he could not, in his conscience, take responsibility for appointing as Reich Chancellor a man who demanded all power for himself and his party. This refusal was probably at the same time an interpretation that was justified on the merits, but not in the wording of the demand, and which, it seems, left a long-lasting trauma in Hitler. The authoritarian Papen government now had to set about resisting the divided will of the people, which it had helped to break through in the first place. Thus, it issued the August 9 Ordinance Against Political Terror, which provided for the death penalty for politically motivated homicides. This immediately put itself in a difficult position when the special court in Beuthen imposed five death sentences on National Socialists who had brutally killed a communist, and when Hitler promised “his comrades” in a telegram unconditional solidarity against the “monstrous blood sentence.” The fact that the perpetrators were pardoned had to have the effect of acquiescence, although it was justified in the matter at hand, since the convicts had not yet been aware of the ordinance. The history of the hitherto short-lived Reichstag of the Republic was just as symptomatic as it was curious. On August 30, it was opened by the senior president, Clara Zetkin, who gave a communist-anti-fascist combat speech and concluded with the expression of the hope that the senior president would soon be able to open Soviet Germany’s first council congress. Then the dissolution took place in a very strange way: under irregular circumstances, the National Socialist President of the Reichstag, Goering, brought a motion of no confidence from the Communists to the vote, which was accepted by 512 votes to 42 (German nationalists). This was the greatest triumph of the teamwork, despite mutual deadly enmity, between Communists and National Socialists, but it did not last, since the legality of the Reich President’s order of dissolution had to be recognized. Papen now emphasized the principle of authoritarian government all the more, but he could not avoid calling new elections, and November 6 was set as the date for this. With these elections began the immediate eve of Hitler’s assumption of power.
It is appropriate to pause here once more to ask the following question: what were the alternatives in this extraordinary situation, which had had some parallel only in Italy during 1922, although there existed only a relatively small Communist Party and also Mussolini’s party, although very strong in the streets, only had a very limited number of deputies in Parliament?
The earliest, and in 1918/19 seemingly overwhelming, of the fundamental alternatives was that of capitalism or socialism, of bourgeois or socialist democracy. However, it was soon greatly weakened by the Russian events and the positive use of the concept of dictatorship by the communists. As early as 1918 and 1919, Karl Kautsky, Otto Bauer, Friedrich Stampfer and basically all Social Democrats formulated the postulate “democracy, not dictatorship.” They did mean to abandon the first alternative, but they firmly defended the opinion against the Bolsheviks that progress towards socialism was only possible along the path of formal or bourgeois democracy. Already during the first years after the war, terms such as totalism or the claim to exclusivity were in use as opposing terms to dictatorship, and with thus one found oneself on the main line of European state thinking since Montesquieu; for many years they were chiefly directed against to Bolshevism, which for that very reason was often called asiatic from many sides and very often. However, around 1920 the term “right-wing Bolsheviks” also appeared, and in 1929 the President of the Reichstag, Paul Löbe, vividly expressed the emerging “concept of totalitarianism” by addressing the communists and the National Socialists with the following sentences: “If the state-will of the gentlemen had been carried out from the right, then you (the communists) would have been given the prospect of being put against the wall. If your state-will had been carried out, then you would have put the gentlemen from the right against the wall. We first have given you and the others civil rights. Perhaps we will get around to granting Mr. Trotsky free asylum in Germany.” But even Alfred Hugenberg did not speak differently on the matter to Adolf Hitler in March 1932, when he emphatically rejected a unification of all positions of power in Hitler’s hands, on the grounds that something of the sort had “never before occurred under any emperor or king in Germanic lands.” In a different and yet similar way, the Prussian government, in its appeal of August 1931, spoke out against the referendum of the Stahlhelm and the National Socialists, which was also supposed to be in the Red Referendum: “National Socialists and Communists want chaos, want the overthrow of the status quo. Buth each thinks of putting his rule in the place of the overthrown and to be able to trample the others—who were just welcome confederates in the referendum.” What is unusual about this view, which justifies its precedence, is that it also takes a positive view of one’s own opponents, who are to be prevented the mutual annihilation struggle, because their existence is also considered worth preserving and necessary to the system. But the prerequisite for the realization was that one clearly wanted what was already in place, i.e. the non-revolutionary further development of the given conditions of the liberal system, and it was precisely here that the difficulty for social democracy lied. Again and again the older alternative proved powerful, and leading representatives of the party often spoke out against the capitalist system with such vehemence that they seemed almost indistinguishable from the communists. Thus, an appeal by the party executive of the Social Democratic Party on the banking crisis in July 1931 stated that the lie of “Marxist mismanagement” was only made up to “divert attention from the real culprits: the capitalist system and its representatives.” The ambivalence became particularly clear in a speech by Deputy Sollmann during a Reichstag debate in February 1931. On the one hand, he noted that that the living conditions of the masses in the two dictatorially ruled countries, Russia and Italy, were far below the living conditions in the countries of all democracies the whole globe. However, that did not prevent him from making the claim shortly thereafter: “It was not Marxism that failed, but capitalism.”
So if the traditional alternative of socialism or capitalism could weaken the first of the real post-war alternatives, namely democracy against totalitarian dictatorship, this in turn could be included in the second alternative, which was called authority or chaos. It was Papen’s motto, and even Brüning’s, and both could claim that democracy can no longer be a useful counter-reality to dictatorship if the democratic method leads to the destruction of democracy because it is rejected by a strong minority or even by a majority of the voters. Then obviously only an independent force can help, namely the popularly elected Reich President and the government supported by his confidence, which preserves the best elements of democracy, e.g. the rule of law, but suspends its bad and dangerous components, e.g. the unbridled party agitation and the civil war slogans at least for a certain time. Only a strong state would then be able to retain the unleashed society and protect it from self-destruction. However, this view, which gave rise to a whole doctrine of the New State, also revealed serious contradictions. If it really made an unlimited equation of the forces geared towards dictatorship, its chances of assertion in an age of press freedom were slim. For this reason, Franz von Papen emphatically opposed the equation of communists and National Socialists in his radio address on July 20: “Because influential political circles cannot decide to give up the political and moral equation of communists and National Socialists, that unnatural formation of fronts has come into being which places the anti-state forces of communism in a united front against the rising movement of the NSDAP.” But it wasn't even three months before the Reich Chancellor said in a speech that Hitler had laid claim to the chancellorship on August 13 “out of the principle of ‘totality,’ of ‘exclusiveness,’” to which his party paid homage. This claim to totality, however, was rejected by the Reich President and by himself on the grounds of principle, because there was an unbridgeable difference between a conservative policy based on faith and a National Socialist faith based on policy. But could a merely conservative and Christian state leadership be strong enough to prevail against two totalitarian movements with their mutually negating claims of exclusivity? It would certainly have been able to do that if there had been a constitutional provision obliging all constitutional parties to combine as soon as the totalitarian parties’ share of the votes exceed a certain limit. Such a provision did not exist, however, and it must have been very doubtful whether an emphatically Christian government could get the Social Democrats and the Democrats behind it. The only remaining option to avoid the third alternative was large-scale prohibition measures through the full deployment of the Reichswehr and the police, and that ultimately means a willingness to engage in civil war.
The third alternative was: Soviet star or swastika. It had been formulated as early as 1923, and it was widespread and popular during Brüning’s reign. To be sure, it was always understood by the communists as a mere transformation of the form of the unbreakable opposition between socialism and capitalism. Thus the deputy Koenen said in the Reichstag in July 1930: “The struggle between communism and fascism will take place under the sign of the political mass strike, the unification of all reactionary forces from the Social Democratic Party bureaucrats to the Nazis under the leadership of finance capital. This road to financial dictatorship will fail because of the iron will of the Communist Party, which, at the head of the working class, will open the struggle for a Soviet Germany with political mass strikes.” A year later Hermann Remmele said: “Today it is certain: the dying, sinking capitalist world no longer has any means of saving or maintaining itself. No means of power can help it. We are the victors of tomorrow, and the question stands no longer: who, whom? That question has already been decided.” And against this reiteration of Lenin’s death promising civil war alternative, “Kto kogo” [translator: russian for who (rules) whom] the lines of the Horst Wessel song, which were sung again and again, opposed themselves with similar certainty and determination: “Hitler flags are already fluttering over all streets, slavery will only last a short time” and just as much Hitler’s repeated assurances that he would destroy Marxism and that the Soviet star must sink into the dust before the swastika. Despite contradictory statements, the victory of the swastika was not understood as a mere transformation of the form of capitalism, but was obviously intended to lead to a national path of socialism against the “Red Front and reaction.” Abroad, too, the situation was often seen quite similarly, for example by the American journalist H. R. Knickerbocker, who wrote in his book “Deutschland so oder so?” (i.e. under a swastika or hammer and sickle) in addition to vivid descriptions of the plight of the poor and the opulence of large sections of the business bourgeoisie, gave Hitler far better chances than the communists as the representative of the “German resistance,” but ended with the gloomy statement that America could be grateful to the Atlantic Ocean, but there was no ocean between Western Europe and the Soviet Union.
The simplest hope for a return of Germany to normality was dashed on November 6. In 1924, too, two Reichstag elections had taken place in one year, and both the number of votes for the Communists and the number of votes for the Volkish and the National Socialists had fallen considerably in the second election, as had been the government’s expectations and intentions. This time, however, only a few optimists were able to perceive a noticeable improvement in the economic situation, and in truth it was not the second but the fifth major election of the year. The result was very different from that in 1924. The National Socialists lost two million votes and went from 230 to 196 seats. Some of their opponents already believed that they could confidently await the time when the party would vanish into thin air again, just as it seemed to have emerged from thin air in 1930. But the NSDAP had lost comparatively fewer votes than it had in 1924, and it had retained its position as by far the largest party. Most of the votes it had lost had stayed on the right and benefited Hugenberg’s German Nationalists. However, the hope of ever being able to win an absolute majority on its own had to be definitively abandoned, and to that extent the result could be described as a strengthening of the non-radical forces within the hardly weakened Right, which, however, as a whole could have formed a parliamentary majority only together with the Center. Far more novel and disturbing must have been the election result that had emerged within the Left. The communists had continued their rise and now had 100 seats. They had made their gains at the expense of the Social Democratic Party, which had lost 12 seats. Within the Left, then, the radical forces had been strengthened, and the most remarkable thing about the whole election was the fact that the Communists in Berlin, having gained about 140,000 votes, had far outstripped the Social Democratic Party and were now almost as strong in the Reich capital Social Democrats and National Socialists combined. Moreover, they were now stronger than the Social Democratic Party in a number of other constituencies, particularly in the Ruhr and central Germany. They had thus come a great step closer to their goal of turning the Social Democratic Party into a small party of labor aristocrats and constituting themselves as the party of the German proletariat. As the example of Berlin showed, the entire Social Democratic Party could now be viewed as a potential electoral reservoir for the Communists.
But even more exciting for the public than the election results was an extra-parliamentary event that took place between November 3 and November 7, namely the strike in the Berlin transport company. It was a wildcat strike called against the will of the union leadership, jointly by the communist Red Trade Union Opposition (RGO) and the National Socialist Factory Cell Organization (NSBO). The leading committee included eight members of the RGO and four of the NSBO, in addition to three free trade unionists. The strike was so popular that the balloting nearly achieved the required three-quarters majority. It was directed against a planned reduction in wages that the local authorities wanted to implement in order to equalize wages in the various municipal companies; it was therefore a strike to preserve inequality. Despite this, or because of this, radicalization was considerable, and by most accounts the National Socialists were even more violent than the communists. In the lists compiled by the police about those who threw stones at streetcars and about those who took part in erecting barricades, etc. there are almost as many members of the NSDAP as of the Communist Party of Germany. Only with great effort the Berlin transport company was able to maintain partial operation; on the election day itself, the Berlin transport network was almost completely at a standstill. The RGO called for a political mass strike to “make the ruling system ripe for overthrowing,” evoking those that strikes “swept away Cuno and Kapp.” However, it soon became apparent that the other employees of the municipal companies did not join the strike, which was in a way directed against them, and neither did workers in large private companies. But when on November 8 the stream of those willing to return to work could no longer be stopped, the 400 National Socialists present at a meeting in the Hohenzollern halls voted to continue the strike, while the RGO advocated a termination. According to reports from police officers about later meetings of the RGO officials, there was a lot of self-criticism, but mostly “from the left,” and complaints were also made “that the management has been sending instructors all the time lately…who could not even speak German properly.” In response, the leader of the meeting then declared “that the cooperation of the Russian comrades could not be dispensed with, because they saw the most suitable elements for bringing the right revolutionary momentum into the spirit of the working masses.”
In any case, it served no propaganda purpose that the Berlin police chief reported to the Minister of the Interior on January 14, 1933 about a questionnaire campaign by the Communist Party of Germany in the factories, describing it as one of the many preparatory efforts by the Communist Party of Germany to successfully carry out the decisive battles expected of it in the foreseeable future. The report then continued: “However, since the radicalization of the working class is now taking on ever greater proportions, the Communist Party of Germany is certainly reckoning with the possibility of being able to take power in Germany in the near future. It is again making preparations in order to be able to successfully withstand a civil war.”
So the confident, even triumphant words that the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany had found after the election were by no means unfounded. Self-confidence and hope had to result from the fact that not only had the “breaking into the working masses of Social Democracy” continued mightily, but that “significant masses of National Socialist workers and other working class supporters of the Hitler movement” had also been conquered. Admittedly, there was one major weakness that was not hidden, which was expressed more bluntly by an RGO official at an internal meeting than was possible in public: he was not sure whether his colleagues no longer had any revolutionary feeling at all or whether they were so dominated by fear for their jobs that they wanted nothing to do with a general strike. This lack of revolutionary enthusiasm among the German workers was to be countered by Russian comrades, but the real breakthrough was obviously not expected from a general strike to prevent a Hugenberg or Hitler government, but from the enormous potential of National Socialist working class votes who, after a few weeks or at most months of such a government, would be disappointed and embittered, and join the Communist Party of Germany in hundreds of thousands, just as thousands of National Socialist Berlin Transport Company workers had gone on strike together with the RGO. Only then would the armed uprising be as successful in Germany as it had been in Russia in 1917.
Communists, National Socialists, the role model or the nightmare of the Soviet Union, but also the direct instructions and influence of the Comintern: this field of force and tension was not the only one in Germany in the last months of 1932, but it was the most important one alongside the police and the Reichswehr and was certainly more important than the only defensively thinking middle parties from the Social Democratic Party to the Center to the German Nationalists, two of which were oriented to the right, while the third and largest had to look anxiously to the left in order not to lose even more supporters to the communists.
There is no doubt that this situation was clearly known to the politicians who had to make the decision about the future of Germany after this truly catastrophic. Adolf Hitler may have been guided by tactical objectives when he claimed during the negotiations with the Reich President in November 1932 that the Bolshevization of the broad masses was progressing rapidly and that if his movement perished there would be “18 million Marxists in Germany and among them there are perhaps 14 to 15 million Communists,” but the statement by Prelate Kaas, the leader of the Center, was quite credible, telling Hindenburg on November 18: “We are facing a bad winter; on the one hand there are 12 Millions of Germans in the right-wing opposition, on the other hand 13.5 million in the left-wing opposition. That is why the goal of national concentration, including the National Socialists, is a necessity.” Again it was Hindenburg, no doubt encouraged by those closest to him, who refused to entrust the leader of what was still by far the strongest party with the formation of a presidential cabinet, this time on the more general grounds that the NSDAP as such had always reemphasized its exclusivity, so that the establishment of a party dictatorship was to be feared. But at the end of his answer he also expressed the hope that in time it would still be possible to persuade Hitler and his movement “to cooperate with all other forces of the nation willing to build up,” i.e. he referred him to the path of coalition-building and the willingness to compromise. But Hindenburg, in perhaps the most terrible aporia ever faced by an 85-year-old statesman, also decided against the first alternative solution to avoiding Hitler, which Papen suggested to him: to take up the fight against “the militant forces of the Communists and the National Socialists” at the same time and not to shy away from the danger that this would result in a civil war. According to Papen’s report, the Reich President replied with tears in his eyes that he had grown too old to take responsibility for a civil war at the end of his life and that therefore he had to let Herr von Schleicher try his luck in God’s name.
Kurt von Schleicher also had a concept, the second of three possible ones. He wanted to rely on the trade unions and at the same time bring together with them the parts of the National Socialists that were willing to cooperate. That was the so-called “cross-front conception,” which resulted from the impossibility of taking the apparently most obvious path and bringing together the democratic parties from the German National People’s Party to the Social Democratic Party in a closed defensive front against totalitarianism from the right and from the left. If the Social Democratic Party was immobile, then the General German Trade Union Federation was to take action, and since Hitler apparently could not be dissuaded from his demand of all or nothing, hope had to be placed in the second man of the party, the Reich organization leader Gregor Strasser. Until then, Strasser had always been considered one of the radicals in the party, and the payments made by some industrialists to the NSDAP were largely for the very purpose of supporting Hitler as the moderate against Strasser’s socialist tendencies, but Schleicher was considered a social general, and Strasser thought it appropriate to accommodate his plans. Schleicher was also listened to by the trade unions, and for a moment it looked as if the path had been taken that would enable Germany to emerge from the political and then also from the economic crisis. However, Strasser was too much of a convinced National Socialist to want to rebel against Hitler and split the party; the representatives of the General German Trade Union Federation, however, were too close to Social Democracy not to obtain the vote of the party leadership. The vote was negative and Schleicher lost his big game after just a few weeks. At best, he could still fall back on Papen’s plan, namely to have Hindenburg authorize him to dissolve the Reichstag and face a possible civil war.
It was quite natural that in this situation may different combinations of ideas were made and that all sorts of interested parties made themselves felt in order to have a say, since this is precisely the rule before any normal formation of a government. But all interested parties could only speak out in favor of Papen’s alternative, which Schleicher or other military or politicians would adopt, or in favor toward a parliamentary tendency and compromise “Hitler’s solution,” as Meissner had suggested in Hindenburg’s name. And all those who took the floor or exercised influence were under the impression of events and possibilities that were present to them even if they did not expressly speak of them or if one or the other event had even remained unknown to them. Thus, on January 27, Inprekorr published a speech made by a leading member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern in Moscow, which said: “At least 200,000 workers belong to the National Socialist Party and its storm troopers. It is said that among the Nazi voters are more than two million workers, many of whom are unemployed. They have been infatuated with the anti-capitalist demagogy of the Nazis…It is unthinkable that they will follow the National Socialists permanently. Signs of disintegration are already evident everywhere.” In fact, the next day the Rote Fahne in great splendor reported that no fewer than 1,500 Berlin SA men were about to leave. This corresponded to repeated reports that people from the Reichsbanner had joined to the Communist Party of Germany or had at least declared their willingness to take up the fight together as part of the Anti-Fascist Action. Even more impressive, however, was the news which the communist press was able to publish about what was happening on the streets. On January 22, the SA organized a large march on Bülowplatz, facing the Karl Liebknecht House, the party headquarters of the Communist Party of Germany. But the 20,000 SA men had been accompanied and protected by an extraordinarily large police force; in parts they had had to move along stretches of hostile crowds through a guard of honor, and elsewhere streets and squares were deserted. Nowhere did they encounter even the slightest sign of sympathy, not even—if the Rote Fahne report is to be believed—in the west of the city, where “petty-bourgeois groups” expressed mute disapproval. The mood of the marchers was “frozen” and at Bülowplatz they had to impotently notice that “the Soviet flag was waving defiantly” on the roof of the enemy party headquarters. The situation was completely different three days later at the counter-rally of the Communist Party of Germany, and the Rote Fahne proudly headlined its report: “This is the Commune.” For four hours, the fighters of Red Berlin flooded Bülowplatz to march past the Central Committee and the leader of the party, Ernst Thälmann, well over a hundred thousand in number, cheered by the population, without police protection, among them “the self-defense columns of the masses who already smothered the first wave of terror by the Nazis with an iron hand and who will also strangle the new wave of terror with the force of their mass.”
Those who consider the communists to be the somewhat more radical part of the labor movement; who believe that Hitler had unequivocally identified himself as the future author of the final solution; who think that the Soviet Union, in the interest of undisturbed industrialization, wanted to prevent a communist revolution in Germany, may be pleased to know that the NSDAP has been in decline since November and that at the next election it would again have lost a few million. Contemporaries did not see things that way, and as a rule, they could not see them that way. They perceived two parties that made radical demands and were undoubtedly anti-constitutional. But one wanted to eliminate the capitalist system and the other wanted to eliminate the Versailles system. One was hostile to the Weimar state and the other to statehood in general. The one demanded the cessation of all tributes, the other wanted to eliminate all external and internal debts, i.e. to remove Germany from the context of the world economy. One demanded that the citizenship status of a small minority, which had only been fully naturalized in the second half of the 19th century, be revoked; the other postulated the social annihilation of the entire bourgeoisie, including the officers and the large farmers, and identified unreservedly with a neighboring state that had largely also physically exterminated these classes or at least disenfranchised and persecuted them in a way that was inconceivable to anyone in Germany. Contemporaries must have seen in the Communists the far more extreme of the two radical parties, and it must have filled them with the gravest concern that the larger and less extreme party appeared to be on the verge of a disintegration, the consequences of which were incalculable, while the smaller and more extreme seemed able to attract large sections of both Social Democratic Party and NSDAP voters. Admittedly, those who thought that former NSDAP voters would return to the German National People’s Party and the liberal parties might consider their fears to be far exaggerated, and anyone who thought the goals of the Communist Party of Germany to be just and timely might indict the prospective victims with moral indignation. But the vast majority of people who had something to lose, or who were concerned above all about the functioning of a highly complex industrialized country with many different links to the world economy, necessarily saw things differently.
However, it was not impossible for them to make a counter-calculation. For example, Adolf Hitler’s New Year’s appeal of January 1, 1932, was aimed entirely at fighting communism and was otherwise quite optimistic; A year later, however, tones were again noticeable which were by no means merely anti-Jewish in the sense described above, but which again brought to the fore a historical-theoretical, even anthropological radicalism which was equal in intensity to that of the communists and yet was to be completely different in content: “The religiously and ideologically rootless liberal mankind is at the end of its age…The international Jew as an intellectual inspirer is leading in almost all countries of the world this fight of poorly qualified, primitive sub-races against the…culture-creating…ability of a higher humanity whose powers of resistance slackened in liberalism…In a state that has 6 million communists, 7.5 million social democrats and 6 million other more or less pacifist-infected elements, one should better stop talking about equality and not more from “armament” talk…In the face of this tremendous need, only a defense that is just as powerful can be of use.” If Hitler’s calculation was correct, he would have to rob about four-tenths of the people of their inner conviction, even if he left all their external possessions untouched, and he would have to bring Germany into abysmal opposition not only to the Soviet Union but also to England and the Western world in general, with which, after all, he wanted to ally himself. And wouldn’t there be a similar result if he put the 500,000 Jews back under alien law, since they were so much closer to their relatives and friends than the many millions of Russian citizens and kulaks? And what would happen if the anti-pacifist radicalism expressed in the appeal was not just a threatening gesture, but expressed the will for a great war?
Thus, in retrospect, Papen’s solution must appear to be the better one, which accepted a civil war against both extremes, but did not inevitably bring about it. However, it must also be remembered that the civil war, if it came to pass, could very easily result in the division of Germany. France would not have stopped at its borders if the communists had threatened to seize power in Berlin, and after the end of the first five-year plan the Soviet army was in a position, indeed, to “trample Poland like a straw” and to advance at least as far as the Elbe. Germany was still the continent’s most powerful industrial power, and if Europe was to succeed in asserting itself as an equal world power, then Germany had to be the nucleus of the new “United States,” but as soon as anything unusual happened within its borders, given its current military weakness, it would it the object of serious precautionary measures by its neighbors. And its neighbors were as bourgeois as itself: the threat of a Communist seizure of power would cause them to intervene farther than a Nazi seizure of power. But if the danger of division actually existed, the vast majority of Germans would certainly have preferred war to civil war.
Thus, there is no clear answer to the question posed at the beginning. The tales of the guilt of the schemers are not entirely unfounded: Schleicher made his friend “Fränzchen” chancellor, although he considered him “a hat, not a head,” and he himself thought far too optimistically and militarily to be a statesman of distinction. Next to Brüning, the aged Hindenburg cut the best figure among all those involved in the last Weimar years. But even if all the contributors had been brilliant statesmen and almost as wise as their descendants can be, they would have seriously considered the solution to which Hindenburg agreed when Schleicher on January 28 asked him to share the same responsibility Papen had on December 2 for a possible civil war. He no longer stood in Hitler’s way when Hitler appeared to have fulfilled the postulate of November 24 and, despite far-reaching safeguards, was willing to cooperate with other forces willing to build up the country. Admittedly, Hindenburg had not considered one thing: Mussolini, too, had worked with similar forces in the early days of his reign. If Zinoviev was right about a side remark he had already made in 1922, i.e. if Europe had really entered an epoch of fascism, then Hitler would have to cover the road to autocracy even faster and more radically than Mussolini had done, and then he would have to confront in a special way the state that had ushered in the epoch of proletarian world revolution.
In Europe, two large ideological states now faced each other, whose actions were ultimately determined by conceptions that interpreted the past and future course of world history and interpreted the meaning of human life. Almost all of the accusations they leveled at one another were pointed and propagandistic in nature, but they were based on real facts that inflamed the passions of countless people on both sides. Both had ideological allies throughout the continent and beyond: the Soviet Union had the communist parties, Germany, with much greater ambivalence, the mostly still small fascist movements, and potentially the fascist regime in Italy. Both were, of course, part of a whole network of relationships and circumstances, and for many years it could still appear as if the relationship between Germany and the Soviet Union or between the fascist movements and the communist regimes was a subordinate issue in world history. In the end, however, it proved to be the decisive contrast that determined the fate of the world to a far greater extent than, say, the war between Japan and China, the conquest of Ethiopia by Italy, or Roosevelt’s efforts to bring the United States back into world politics.