Göring becomes President of the Reichstag

On 30 August 1932, at the first sitting of the Reichstag elected on 31 July, the deputies chose as President of the chamber Hermann Göring – Adolf Hitler’s deputy in Berlin, a former flying ace and a participant in the Beer Hall Putsch. He received 367 votes, not only from the NSDAP but also from the Catholic Centre Party, the Bavarian People’s Party and part of the right. The office, held with a short break since 1920 by the Social Democrat Paul Löbe, was formally the third in the state, after the president and the chancellor. The sitting was opened by the oldest member, the 75-year-old Communist Clara Zetkin, who had come from Moscow to call for a common front against fascism. A few hours later parliament was being run by a Nazi. Two weeks later Göring used his position to humiliate the government of Franz von Papen, and in the months that followed to help Hitler on his way to power.

The election of 31 July

The Reichstag had been dissolved on 4 June 1932, a few days after the fall of Heinrich Brüning. The new chancellor, Papen, and the Reichswehr Minister, General Kurt von Schleicher, had promised Hitler elections and the lifting of the ban on the SA in return for tolerating the government. The ban was lifted on 16 June, and the campaign was the bloodiest in the republic’s history. According to contemporary tallies, nearly a hundred people were killed in political clashes in a single month. On 17 July in Altona near Hamburg an SA march through working-class districts ended in a shoot-out in which more than a dozen people died, most of them from police bullets. Papen used this “Bloody Sunday” as a pretext: on 20 July he removed the Social Democratic government of Prussia by decree and himself took power as commissioner in the largest state of the Reich.

On 31 July 1932, 84 per cent of the electorate went to the polls. The NSDAP won 13.75 million votes, 37.3 per cent, and 230 of the 608 seats – more than twice as many as in 1930. The Social Democrats won 21.6 per cent and 133 seats, the Communists 14.3 per cent and 89 seats, the Centre Party 12.4 per cent and 75 seats, and its Bavarian sister party 22 seats. Alfred Hugenberg’s German Nationalists, the government’s only allies, had 37 deputies, and the liberal parties all but vanished. For the first time the parties openly hostile to the republic, the Nazis and the Communists, together held a majority in the Reichstag. They could bring down any government, but together they could form none.

Hitler demands all power

Hitler had no intention of tolerating Papen any longer. As leader of the largest party, he demanded the chancellorship and the key ministries for himself. On 13 August Papen and Schleicher offered him the post of vice-chancellor. He refused. The same day Hindenburg received him. The conversation lasted about twenty minutes. The president declared that he could not answer before God, his conscience and the fatherland for handing all power to a single party – and one, moreover, so intolerant of people with different views. The president’s office immediately issued a communiqué stating that Hitler had demanded “all power”. For the NSDAP leader it was a public humiliation. His party went into fierce opposition.

A few days earlier, on the night of 9–10 August, five SA men in the village of Potempa in Upper Silesia (today Potępa) beat a Communist worker, Konrad Pietzuch, to death in front of his mother. Under a new decree against political terror, a special court in Beuthen (Bytom) sentenced them to death on 22 August. Hitler sent the condemned men a telegram calling them his comrades and assuring them of his “boundless loyalty”. At the beginning of September Papen pardoned them, commuting the sentence to life imprisonment. In the spring of 1933 they were set free.

The Centre Party and the Nazis

In August 1932 talks began that would have been unthinkable only a few months earlier: the Catholic Centre Party, the party of the ousted Brüning, negotiated with the NSDAP. The Centre wanted to punish Papen, who had betrayed it, and believed that the Nazis could be “tamed” by sharing responsibility for a government based on parliament. The Nazis wanted to show the president that they had a majority, and at the same time to guard against the government without the Reichstag that Papen was planning. The first fruit of this rapprochement was the election of the chamber’s presiding officers. By parliamentary custom the president of the Reichstag was nominated by the strongest group, which for most of the 1920s had been the SPD. Now the Nazis were the strongest, and their candidate was Göring.

Göring was then 39. In the First World War he had been a fighter ace, decorated with the Pour le Mérite, and the last commander of the famous “Flying Circus”, the fighter wing of the fallen Manfred von Richthofen. In 1923 he commanded the SA; he was badly wounded in the Beer Hall Putsch and fled abroad, returning to Germany after an amnesty in 1927. He had sat in the Reichstag since 1928. Within the party he was the link to big industry, the aristocracy and the army, and his standing as a war hero opened doors that remained closed to other Nazis.

The sitting of 30 August

The constituent sitting of the sixth Reichstag was opened by Clara Zetkin, the oldest member. A veteran of the labour movement, a friend of Rosa Luxemburg and one of the leaders of the KPD, she had lived in the Soviet Union for years. Gravely ill, after a recent bout of malaria, she had come to Berlin specifically to deliver this speech and reached the rostrum only with difficulty. She called for a united front of all workers against fascism, which she described as the greatest danger to Germany, but she also attacked the Social Democrats as those who had paved the way for presidential rule. She ended by saying she hoped to live to see the day when, as the oldest member, she would open the first congress of councils of a “Soviet Germany”. The Nazis, who occupied almost two-fifths of the chamber, heard her out in silence. Zetkin died near Moscow in June 1933, by which time Hitler was already ruling Germany.

Zetkin then, as her duties required, conducted the election of the president. The candidates were Göring, the outgoing president Löbe of the SPD, and the leader of the Communist group, Ernst Torgler. Göring won 367 votes – out of 583 valid votes, according to German studies – an absolute majority in the very first ballot. He was supported by the deputies of the NSDAP, the Centre Party, the Bavarian People’s Party and most of the right. The vice-presidents elected were Thomas Esser of the Centre, Walther Graef of the DNVP and Hans Rauch of the Bavarian People’s Party. The Social Democrats, the second-largest force in the chamber, had no one on the presiding board.

Göring took over the chair from a Communist. In a short speech, according to press reports, he promised to uphold the honour and dignity of the nation and to conduct proceedings fairly. The most important part of his address was aimed at the president: by electing its presiding officers, he said, the Reichstag had proved that it had a working majority, and there was no reason whatever to dissolve it or to govern by bypassing parliament. He then adjourned the sitting indefinitely.

That same day, far from Berlin, a decision was taken that would show what this declaration was worth. At his Neudeck estate in East Prussia Hindenburg received Papen, Schleicher and the Interior Minister, Wilhelm von Gayl. He agreed to issue an order dissolving the Reichstag, with the date to be filled in by the chancellor, and did not rule out postponing the elections for longer than the constitution allowed. The government could therefore dissolve the new parliament at the first opportunity.

12 September

The Reichstag reconvened on 12 September 1932 to hear the government’s statement. Papen brought with him a red folder containing the dissolution order. Before he could speak, the leader of the KPD group, Torgler, moved to change the order of business and hold an immediate vote of no confidence in the government. A single deputy’s objection would have been enough to defeat the motion, but nobody objected: the Nazis and the Centre had decided to support it. Göring called a half-hour recess and, immediately afterwards, proceeded to the vote. Papen stood up and demanded the floor, to which a member of the government was always entitled, but the president turned his back on him and pretended not to see him. The chancellor laid the folder with the order on Göring’s desk and left the chamber with his ministers.

The motion of no confidence passed by 512 votes to 42 with 5 abstentions – by 513 to 42 according to some tallies. Almost the only deputies to vote for the government were the German Nationalists and the German People’s Party. Only then did Göring “notice” the order and declare it invalid, on the grounds that it had been countersigned by ministers in whom parliament had just expressed no confidence. Legally he was wrong: the Reichstag had already been dissolved and the vote was formally void. Politically, however, it was crushing for Papen. Nine out of ten deputies had voted against his government. New elections were set for 6 November 1932. The NSDAP lost about two million votes in them but, with 33.1 per cent, remained the largest party, and on 6 December Göring was re-elected President of the Reichstag.

President for thirteen years

Göring held the office until the end of the Third Reich, although after 1933 the Reichstag ceased to be a parliament. When the Reichstag building burned in February 1933, Göring, as Prussian Interior Minister, directed the wave of arrests of Communists. Torgler gave himself up to the police to clear his name and ended up in prison. On 23 March 1933 Göring presided over the sitting in Berlin’s Kroll Opera House at which deputies, surrounded by the SA and SS, passed the Enabling Act. From the summer of 1933 only Nazis and candidates approved by them entered the chamber, and its sittings served solely to hear Hitler’s speeches. On 15 September 1935 in Nuremberg Göring read out the laws that stripped German Jews of their civil rights, and on 1 September 1939 he presided over the sitting at which Hitler announced that since dawn Germany had been “returning fire” on Poland.

Significance

Göring’s election was the first time a Nazi had taken one of the highest offices of the Reich. It happened entirely legally, with the votes of parties of the democratic centre, which hoped to draw the NSDAP into responsibility and to protect parliament from rule by decree. The opposite happened. Göring used the office to discredit the government, break the standing orders and persuade Hindenburg that Germany could not be governed without Hitler. Papen’s clash with the Reichstag hastened the fall of successive presidential cabinets, and in the autumn and winter of 1932 Göring was one of the main intermediaries in the talks that on 30 January 1933 gave Hitler the chancellorship.

The sitting of 30 August 1932 was also a symbol of Germany’s paralysis. It was opened by a Communist dreaming of a Soviet Germany and closed by a Nazi who promised the end of the “system”. The parties that wanted to defend the republic were in a minority in the Reichstag. A few months later the same president of the chamber presided over a parliament that stripped itself of its own powers, and seven years later over the sitting at which war against Poland was announced.