The fall of Brüning

On 30 May 1932 the German Chancellor Heinrich Brüning tendered his government’s resignation to President Paul von Hindenburg. He was brought down not by the Reichstag, which had tolerated his cabinet for two years, but by one man: the old president, who the day before had declared that he would sign no more decrees for him. Behind Hindenburg’s decision stood General Kurt von Schleicher, who for weeks had been dealing with Adolf Hitler behind the chancellor’s back, and the great landowners of the eastern provinces, outraged by a plan to break up bankrupt estates. The next day Hindenburg asked a little-known Centre Party politician, Franz von Papen, to form a government, and on 1 June Papen became chancellor. Brüning’s fall ended the first phase of presidential rule and opened a period in which the president’s circle tried to govern with Nazi support – and ended up handing them power.

A chancellor without parliament

Brüning, an economist and a politician of the Catholic Centre Party, became chancellor on 30 March 1930 on Schleicher’s initiative. From the outset he governed on the strength of the president’s confidence and of presidential decrees issued under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. After the September 1930 election, in which the NSDAP became the second-largest force in parliament, he survived thanks to the Social Democrats, who, fearing fresh elections, did not vote to revoke his decrees. He pursued a harsh austerity policy: he cut wages, salaries and benefits and raised taxes. He wanted to balance the budget and show the world that Germany could not pay reparations. That goal was already within reach: in June 1931 US President Herbert Hoover announced a moratorium on payments, and a conference was called in Lausanne for June 1932 to decide the future of reparations. The price, however, was social catastrophe. In February 1932 Germany had more than six million registered unemployed, and Brüning was called the “Hunger Chancellor”.

In the spring of 1932 Brüning fought the most important campaign of his life, persuading Germans to re-elect Hindenburg. On 10 April 1932 the president defeated Hitler in the run-off, but the victory turned against the chancellor. Hindenburg owed it to the votes of Social Democrats and Catholics, while he had lost in the milieux from which he came: among Protestant landowners, officers and veterans. He resented Brüning for putting him in that position. The president’s entourage – his son Oskar, the head of his office Otto Meissner and Schleicher – concluded that the time had come for a clearly right-wing government, independent of the SPD’s toleration.

The SA ban and Groener’s fall

The first blow was the ban on Hitler’s paramilitaries. On 13 April 1932, at the demand of the governments of Prussia, Bavaria and other states, Wilhelm Groener, Minister of the Reichswehr and of the Interior, used a presidential decree to ban the SA and the SS. Hindenburg signed it reluctantly. Schleicher, head of the Reichswehr Minister’s office, wanted an understanding with the Nazis and regarded the SA as a reservoir of men for a future army, whose expansion Germany was demanding at the disarmament conference in Geneva. He turned against his former patron and began persuading the president that Groener had lost the confidence of the army.

On 10 May 1932 Groener defended the ban in the Reichstag. He was ill and exhausted, he spoke weakly, and the NSDAP deputies shouted him down throughout his speech. That same day Schleicher told him that the generals no longer wanted him as minister. On 12 May Groener stepped down from the Reichswehr ministry, keeping the interior portfolio for the time being. The day before, Brüning had given a speech in the Reichstag assuring deputies that he was “a hundred metres from the finishing line” – just short of the abolition of reparations and equal rights for Germany in armaments. Parliament rejected motions of no confidence and adjourned. The chancellor believed he still had several months ahead of him.

Meanwhile Schleicher was playing his own game. From the end of April he had been meeting Hitler and his people. Early in May a conversation took place after which Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary on 8 May that Brüning was to fall within a few days, the Reichstag would be dissolved and a “neutral” presidential cabinet would be formed. The Nazis promised to tolerate it if they got new Reichstag elections and the lifting of the SA ban. Schleicher reckoned that in this way he would draw them into sharing responsibility for the state and tame them. Hitler reckoned that elections would bring him power.

“Agrarian Bolshevism”

The final blow came from the question of the estates in the east of the Reich. Since the second half of the 1920s the state, under the banner of Eastern Aid (Osthilfe), had spent enormous sums rescuing indebted farms in East Prussia, Pomerania and other provinces bordering Poland. Most of the money went to the great Junker estates, many of which were beyond saving. Brüning, who was cutting benefits for millions of unemployed, was preparing a decree under which estates that could not be freed from debt would be bought by the state at auction and divided into holdings for settlers, including the urban unemployed. The author of the plan was the Reich Commissioner for Eastern Aid, Hans Schlange-Schöningen, himself a Pomeranian landowner.

The Junkers and their organisations, led by the powerful Reich Agrarian League, regarded the plan as an assault on property. The German National People’s Party group in the Reichstag called it “out-and-out Bolshevism”, and in the president’s circle there was talk of “agrarian Bolshevism”. Hindenburg was one of them, and not only in spirit. In 1927, for his 80th birthday, industrialists and landowners had presented him with his family estate of Neudeck in East Prussia (today Ogrodzieniec), bought back with their contributions and registered in the name of his son Oskar to avoid inheritance tax. In mid-May 1932 the president went there to rest. His neighbours, led by Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau, a friend of the president and one of the organisers of the gift, convinced him that the chancellor was leading the country to socialism.

29 and 30 May

By the time Hindenburg returned to Berlin, the decision had been made. On 29 May 1932 he received Brüning and, according to the chancellor’s account, read out a statement from a sheet of paper: because the government was unpopular, it would receive no further consent from him for new decrees or for changes of personnel. That meant the end of a cabinet that could not govern without presidential decrees. Brüning replied that he would convene the government and resign. According to his memoirs, the president urged him to do so quickly.

On the morning of 30 May 1932 the government decided to resign, and in a brief, humiliating audience the chancellor handed Hindenburg the cabinet’s resignation. A chancellor who had still not lost a single vote in parliament had in effect been dismissed by the president himself. Brüning made no attempt to defend himself publicly or to appeal to the Reichstag, where he could still count on the toleration of the Social Democrats. For many republicans who had only just voted for Hindenburg, it came as a shock.

Papen

On 31 May Hindenburg entrusted Franz von Papen with forming a government. He was Schleicher’s choice; the two had known each other from the General Staff before the war. Papen, a Westphalian aristocrat, former cavalry officer and member of the Prussian Landtag from the right wing of the Centre Party, had no government experience at all, but he had everything the president valued: a title, a uniform in his past, a Catholicism that was supposed to attract the Centre, and monarchist views. Schleicher reportedly told acquaintances that Papen was to be merely a “hat” on his own head. The day before, Papen had promised the chairman of the Centre Party, Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, that he would not accept the office. When he did, Kaas called him an Ephialtes, the traitor of Thermopylae, and on 3 June Papen left the party to avoid being expelled.

On 1 June 1932 Papen became chancellor. His government included seven aristocrats, so the Social Democratic press dubbed it the “cabinet of barons”. Schleicher himself, stepping out of the shadows for the first time, became Reichswehr Minister; Baron Konstantin von Neurath became Foreign Minister and Baron Wilhelm von Gayl Interior Minister. The Centre Party refused its support and the Social Democrats announced their opposition. The new government could count only on the German Nationalists and the small German People’s Party – roughly one eighth of the deputies.

The deal with the Nazis was carried out to the letter. On 4 June Hindenburg dissolved the Reichstag and elections were set for 31 July. On 16 June the government lifted the ban on the SA and SS. The summer of 1932 brought the bloodiest campaign in the republic’s history, with dozens killed in clashes between Nazis and Communists. On 20 July Papen, citing the unrest, removed the Social Democratic government of Prussia and took power there himself as Reich Commissioner. In Lausanne, at the conference held from 16 June to 9 July, the creditors agreed to replace reparations with a lump sum of three billion marks, which was never paid. Brüning had indeed been close to the finishing line, but it was his successor who reaped the rewards.

Significance

Brüning’s dismissal was a point of no return for the Weimar Republic. Brüning was not a democrat in the full sense: he had accustomed Germans to government without parliament and himself contemplated an authoritarian reform of the state. Yet his government was the last that rested on even the tacit consent of a Reichstag majority and acted within the bounds of the constitution. After him came cabinets with practically no support in parliament, existing solely at the will of an 84-year-old president and a few advisers. Their only real social base could be Hitler’s movement.

Schleicher wanted to tame the Nazis, but he did exactly what they wanted. The lifting of the SA ban and new elections gave the NSDAP 37.3 per cent of the vote on 31 July 1932 and the position of the largest party in Germany. Papen and Schleicher fell out, and both, one after the other, lost out to Hitler. In January 1933 the same Papen persuaded Hindenburg that Hitler, surrounded by conservative ministers, could be controlled. On 30 January 1933 Hitler became chancellor. Two years later Brüning fled Germany ahead of the Night of the Long Knives, in which Schleicher, among others, was killed. The intrigue of May 1932, pursued in the name of a strong state and the rebuilding of the army, opened the way for the man who seven years later led that army against Poland.