The Unfathomable Ascent: How Hitler Came To Power by Peter Ross Range

Author:Peter Ross Range [Range, Peter Ross]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2020-05-12T00:00:00+00:00

36

HINDENBURG, HUGENBERG, AND HARZBURG

He can lick me from behind.

—President Paul von Hindenburg, 1931

Adolf Hitler and President Paul von Hindenburg had never met. By the autumn of 1931, the Great War’s field marshal and the western front’s trench courier had become the antipodes of German politics—each with great certainty about his mission, each with a constituency and a unique kind of power. Hitler commanded a popular following that had shifted politics on its axis. Hindenburg controlled the ultimate lever, the power to appoint the chancellor. Between those two poles lay the entirety of the political establishment: the government, the parliament, all the other parties. Hitler was trying to leapfrog them all. Hindenburg was standing at the other end, his door closed.

With Germany plunging deeper into economic depression and with joblessness soaring, the Nazis were garnering an average of 29 percent of the vote in state and local elections. The party’s electioneering was a “work of genius,” reported the New York Times.1 Yet Hitler was still not in the chancellor’s chair or even in the cabinet. Nor had he laid eyes on the man who stood in his way: President Hindenburg.

On Saturday, October 10, Chancellor Brüning called Hitler in for a conference. Brüning had now shifted his position: he was trying to lure the Nazi leader into a coalition as a junior partner—if Hitler would agree to a dubious scheme to keep President Hindenburg in office for another seven-year term. With the president’s current term slated to end in the spring of 1932, Brüning wanted at all costs to avoid a bitter presidential election just when he was trying to right the German economy in the eyes of international investors. The chancellor proposed a constitutional amendment to allow Hindenburg to be installed as president for life without the divisive thrashings of a popular balloting. Though of highly questionable legality, this initiative, Brüning felt, could be passed with a two-thirds majority of the Reichstag. For that, he needed Hitler’s Nazis.

Hitler refused Brüning’s proposal as extralegal. Without telling Brüning, the Nazi leader also had an ulterior motive: he was already mulling the prospect of running for the presidency himself—as a side door to political power. Yet Brüning did not give up. He asked Hitler, Why don’t you sit down for a conversation with President Hindenburg? Having traveled so far, having butted his head against the wall of exclusion, Hitler would not refuse. Brüning made the arrangements for that same afternoon.

The chance to meet with the most revered living hero in Germany was a political triumph for Hitler. Dismissed not so long ago as a carnival huckster, he was now ushered into the presidential palace, on Wilhelmstrasse—the sanctum sanctorum of German political life—for an audience with the hero of the First World War, Germany’s highest constitutional officeholder. The six-foot-five-inch aristocrat and the five-foot-nine-inch stateless commoner finally shook hands.

The meeting was not a success. Though the conversation in Hindenburg’s chambers started well enough, with Hitler showing appropriate humility, the Nazi’s demagogic instincts soon took over. Straining

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