All Against All by Paul Jankowski

Author:Paul Jankowski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

10

The Reich under Foreign Eyes

Carnival in Berlin: On the evening of January 30, bystanders gaped from the sides of the Wilhelmplatz as Nazi storm troopers and the nationalist veterans of the Stahlhelm marched by. Many carried torches. In the entrance foyer of the Kaiserhof Hotel, the Nazi headquarters, uniformed SS formed an honor guard, and others patrolled the corridors. On the steps outside, party dignitaries gave Fascist salutes to endless columns of brown-uniformed SA. But the men on the steps were second-rate, even faceless, for Hitler was already in the Chancellery.1

He had entered there much as his immediate predecessors had—appointed by an aged president under no obligation to do so, after weeks of favoritism, speculation, and backstairs intrigue. The election of November 6 left Chancellor Papen further than ever from cobbling together a semblance of a parliamentary majority—he could boast only 4.5 out of 35 million votes. Early in the mornings after the election, an attaché at the French embassy would cross paths with him in the Tiergarten. Papen still rode there, in gray waistcoat, beige breeches, and white gloves, looking very English, and when, one of those evenings, he dined at the Rumanian embassy, he seemed as insouciant and worldly as ever. But his days were numbered. He had lost not only the voters but the army as well, in the person of the minister of war. General Schleicher viewed the chancellor he had helped install as disloyal and now useless, unable to cajole and deliver the Nazis into some kind of authoritarian coalition that he might direct in obscurity from the wings. Reluctantly Hindenburg accepted the resignation of his favorite, and at the beginning of December appointed Schleicher in his stead.

“I am a fanatical servant of the state,” the general had told the French ambassador, as though to impress on him his Prussian bona fides.2 But to the Germans he presented himself improbably as a peacemaker, the architect of détente with the Left, a “social general,” neither a Socialist nor a capitalist, indifferent now to concepts of either a market or a planned economy. In a radio speech on December 15, he proposed work programs and relief for the unemployed, the parceling out of bankrupt estates in East Prussia to the landless, and a halt to wage reductions. Such heresies—“Agrarian bolshevism,” among other epithets, greeted his words—alarmed conservatives without winning over any social democrats, and his political base, narrower even than Papen’s in spite of the army behind him, continued to erode.3 Around him the plotting began at once, orchestrated by a Papen who not only connived to oust from office the false friend who had just ousted him, but also still had the ear of Hindenburg and still occupied an official residence near the president’s, in the Wilhelmstrasse; and his discreet rounds quickly came to include his own most savage critic, Adolf Hitler.

The election of November 6 had pierced the Nazis’ nimbus of inexorable success, and since then, regional elections in Saxony and Thuringia had done nothing to restore it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.