43: "A Leap Into the Dark": Hitler Becomes Chancellor

We should not be so focused on the threats we clearly see in front of us that we are completely blind to the threats behind us. 

By Ian Kershaw

By the afternoon of 29 January [1933], Papen was able to tell Göring and Ribbentrop that all was clear. "Everything perfect," Göring reported back to the Kaiserhof. Hitler was expected by the Reich President at eleven o'clock the next morning to be sworn in as Chancellor.

Just before the new cabinet entered the Reich President's chambers, it was finally agreed that they would seek the dissolution order that Hitler so badly wanted. At least, shortly after noon, the members of the Hitler cabinet trooped into the Reich President's rooms. Hindenburg gave a brief welcome address, expressing satisfaction that the nationalist Right had finally come together. Papen then made the formal introductions. Hindenburg nodded his approval as Hitler solemnly swore to carry out his obligations without party interests and for the good of the whole nation. He again approvingly acknowledged the sentiments expressed by the new Reich Chancellor who, unexpectedly, made a short speech emphasizing his efforts to uphold the Constitution, respect the rights of the President, and, after the next election, to return to normal parliamentary rule. Hitler and his ministers awaiting a reply from the Reich President. It came, but in only a single sentence: "And now, gentlemen, forwards with God."

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"Hitler is Reich Chancellor. Just like a fairy-tale," noted Goebbels. Indeed, the extraordinary had happened. What few beyond the ranks of Nazi fanatics had thought possible less than a year earlier had become reality. Against all odds, Hitler's aggressive obstinacy -- born out of lack of alternatives -- had paid off. What he had been unable to achieve himself, his "friends" in high places had achieved for him. The "nobody of Vienna", "unknown soldier", beerhall demagogue, head of what was for years no more than a party on the lunatic fringe of politics, a man with no credentials for running a sophisticated state-machine, practically his sole qualification that ability to muster the support of the nationalist masses whose base instincts he showed an unusual talent for rousing, had now been placed in charge of government of one of the leading states in Europe. His intentions had scarcely been kept secret over the years.

Whatever the avowals of following a legal path to power, heads would roll, he had said. Marxism would be eradicated, he had said. Jews would be "removed', he had said. Germany would rebuild the strength of its armed forces, destroy the shackles of Versailles, conquer "by the sword" the land it needed for its "living space", he had said. A few took him at his word, and thought he was dangerous. But far, far more, from Right to Left of the political spectrum -- conservatives, liberals, socialists, communists -- underrated by his intentions and unscrupulous power instincts at the same time as they scorned his abilities.

The Left's underestimation was at least not responsible for getting him into power. Socialists, communists, trade unions were all little more than by-standers, their scope for influencing events emasculated since 1930. It was the blindness of the conservative Right to the dangers which had been so evident, arising from their determination to eliminate democracy and destroy socialism and the consequent governmental stalemate they had allowed to develop, that delivered the power of a nation-state containing all the pent-up aggression of a wounded giant into the hands of the dangerous leader of a political gangster-mob.

There was no inevitability about Hitler's accession to power. Had Hindenburg been prepared to grant Schleicher the dissolution that he had so readily allowed Papen, and to prorogue the Reichstag for a period beyond the constitutional sixty days, a Hitler Chancellorship might have been avoided. With the corner turning of the economic Depression, and with the Nazi movement facing potential break-up if power were not soon attained, the future -- even if under an authoritarian government -- would have been very different. Hitler's rise from humble beginnings to "seize" power by triumph of the will" was the stuff of Nazi legend. In fact, political miscalculation by those with regular access to the corridors of power rather than any actions on the part of the Nazi leader played a larger role in placing him in the Chancellor's seat.

His path ought to have been blocked long before the final drama of January 1933. The most glaring opportunity was missed through the failure to impose a hefty jail sentence after the putsch fiasco of 1923 -- and to compound this disastrous omission by releasing him on parole within a matter of months and allowing him a fresh start. But those miscalculations, as well as those during the Depression years that opened up the possibility, then the reality, of a Hitler Chancellorship, were not random acts. They were miscalculations of a political class determined to inflict what injury it could on (or at least make only the faintest attempts to defend) the new, detested, or at best merely tolerated democratic Republic. The anxiety to destroy democracy rather than the keenness to bring the Nazis to power was what triggered the complex developments that led to Hitler's Chancellorship.

Democracy was surrendered without a fight. This was most notably the case in the collapse of the grand coalition in 1930. It was again the case -- however vain the opposition might have proved -- in the lack of resistance to the Papen coup against Prussia in July 1932. Both events revealed the flimsiness of democracy's base. This was not least because powerful groups had never reconciled themselves to democracy, and were by this time actively seeking to bring it down. During the Depression, democracy was less surrendered than deliberately undermined by elite groups serving their own ends. These were not pre-industrial leftovers, but -- however reactionary their political aims -- modern lobbies working to further their vested interests in an authoritarian system. In the final drama, the agrarians and the army were more influential than big business in engineering Hitler's takeover. But big business, also, politically myopic and self-serving, had significantly contributed to the undermining of democracy which was the necessary prelude to Hitler's success.

The masses, too, had played their part in democracy's downfall. Never had circumstances been less propitious for the establishment of successful democracy that they were in Germany after the First World War. Already by 1920, the parties most supportive of democracy held only a minority of the vote. Democracy narrowly survived its early travails, though great swathes of the electorate opposed it root and branch. Who is to say that, had not the great Depression blow it completely off course, democracy might not have settled down and consolidated itself? But democracy was in a far from healthy state when the Depression struck Germany. And in the course of the Depression, the masses deserted democracy in their droves. By 1932, the only supporters of democracy were the weakened Social Democrats (and even many of these were by this time lukewarm), some sections of the Zentrum (which had itself moved sharply to the Right), and a handful of liberals. The Republic was dead. Still open was what sort of authoritarian system would replace it.

The ruling groups did not have the mass support to maximize their ascendancy and destroy once and for all the power of organized labor. Hitler was brought in to do the job for them. That he might do more than this, that he might outlast all the predictions and expand his own power immensely and at their own expense, either did not occur to them, or was regarded as an exceedingly unlikely outcome. The underestimation of Hitler and his movement by the power-brokers remains a leitmotiv of the intrigues that placed him in the Chancellor's office.

The mentalities which conditioned the behavior both of the elites and of the masses, and which made Hitler's rise possible, were products of strands of German political culture that were plainly recognizable in the twenty years or so before the First World War. Even so, Hitler was no inexorable product of a German "special path", no logical culmination of long-term trends in specifically German culture and ideology.

Nor was he a mere "accident" in the course of German history. Without the unique conditions in which he came to prominence, Hitler would have been nothing. It is hard to imagine him bestriding the stage of history at any other time. His style, his brand of rhetoric, would, deprived of such conditions, have been without appeal. The impact on the German people of war, revolution, and national humiliation, and the acute fear of Bolshevism in wide sections of the population gave Hitler his platform. He exploited the conditions brilliantly. More than any other politician of his era, he was the spokesman for the unusually intense fears, resentments, and prejudices of ordinary people not attracted by the parties of the Left or anchored in the parties of political Catholicism. And more than any other politician of his era, he offered such people the prospect of a new and better society -- though one seeming to rest on "true" German values with which they could identify. 

The vision of the future went hand in hand with the denunciation of the past in Hitler's appeal. The total collapse of confidence in a state system resting on discredited party politics and bureaucratic administration had led over a third of the population to place its trust and its hopes in the politics of national redemption. The personality cult carefully nurtured around Hitler turned him into the embodiment of such hopes.

Whatever the future held, for those who could not share the delirium of the SA hordes marching through the Brandenburg Gate in celebration on the evening of 30 January 1933, it was at best uncertain. "A leap into the dark" was how one Catholic newspaper described Hitler's appointment to the Chancellorship.

Many Jews and political opponents of the Nazis now feared for their well-being -- even for their lives. Some made hurried plans to leave the country. There were those, not just on the defeated Left, who foresaw disaster. But others rapidly shook off their initial foreboding, convincing themselves that Hitler and the Nazis had few prospects of ruling for long.

Sebastian Haffner, then a young Berlin lawyer, later -- after leaving a country whose government he could no longer tolerate -- a distinguished journalist and writer, summarized his views at the time: "No. All things considered, this government was no cause for concern. It was only a matter of what would come after it, and perhaps the fear that it was lead to civil war." Most of the serious press, he added, took the same line next day.

Few, indeed, predicted that things would turn out so differently.

Source:

Kershaw, I. (2008). Hitler: A Biography. London: W. W. Norton and Company.