The Hindenburg–Hitler talks

At half past ten on the morning of 21 November 1932 Reich President Paul von Hindenburg received the NSDAP leader Adolf Hitler in his office on the Wilhelmstraße in Berlin. It was their second conversation in three days. The president handed his visitor a formal written mandate: as leader of the strongest party, Hitler was to establish whether, and on what terms, a government under his leadership could secure “a firm, workable majority” in the Reichstag. Hitler did not want such a task. He demanded what Heinrich Brüning and Franz von Papen had been given before him: the chancellorship on the strength of the president’s confidence and the right to govern by decree. After three days of exchanging letters, on 24 November, Hindenburg refused, fearing that a presidential government led by Hitler “would inevitably develop into a party dictatorship”. Two months later he gave him what he had then refused.

Chronologies usually state that on 21 November Hindenburg “began talks with Hitler” about a new government. In fact the two men had met before, among other occasions in October 1931 and on 13 August 1932, when the president refused Hitler the chancellorship, and, in the final round of talks, on 19 November as well. 21 November was the day on which Hindenburg for the first time officially entrusted Hitler with the task of forming a government – albeit on terms that Hitler could not and would not accept.

After the November election

On 6 November 1932 Germany elected a Reichstag for the second time in a year. The previous parliament, in which the NSDAP had held 230 seats and 37.3 per cent of the vote after the election of 31 July, survived only one real sitting. On 12 September the President of the Reichstag, Hermann Göring, held a vote of no confidence in Papen’s government, which the cabinet lost by 512 votes to 42, and the chancellor dissolved parliament by presidential decree.

The November election brought the Nazis their first defeat in years. The NSDAP lost about two million votes, fell from 37.3 to 33.1 per cent and, with 196 seats, remained the strongest party, but clearly weaker than in the summer. The gains went to Ernst Thälmann’s Communists (16.9 per cent and 100 seats) and to Alfred Hugenberg’s German National People’s Party, the only sizeable group that supported Papen. The Social Democrats won 20.4 per cent. The Social Democratic Vorwärts headed its commentary “Abwärts mit Hitler” (“Downhill with Hitler”), and Joseph Goebbels wrote of defeat in his diary. The party’s coffers were empty, and it was exhausted by five election campaigns in a single year.

Yet the result gave no one the means to govern. The NSDAP and the KPD, which as a matter of principle voted against every government, together held more than half the seats. Papen, who had replaced Brüning in June, had no chance whatever of winning parliamentary support: every party except the German Nationalists and the small German People’s Party was against him. When attempts at talks with the parties came to nothing, his government resigned on 17 November, although it remained in office until a successor was appointed. Hindenburg decided to talk to the party leaders himself. According to a text prepared by the head of his office, State Secretary Otto Meissner, he wished to “make an honest attempt to rally the parties from the Centre to the National Socialists behind a new government”. On 18 November he received Hugenberg, the leader of the German People’s Party Eduard Dingeldey, and the chairman of the Centre Party, Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, and the next day Hitler and Fritz Schäffer of the Bavarian People’s Party.

The first conversation, 19 November

As usual in Berlin, Hitler was staying at the Kaiserhof hotel, opposite the Reich Chancellery, in front of which his supporters gathered. At half past eleven on 19 November he called on the president. At his request, passed on by Göring, the first part of the conversation was held in private. Hindenburg afterwards summarised it in the presence of Meissner, who drew up a note. It survives in the files of the Reich Chancellery.

Hitler said that the strongest popular movement in Germany stood behind him, and from this he derived the right to lead the new government. The president replied that he had to keep to the principle of a government above parties. “A government led by Herr Hitler would be a party government,” he said, and he proposed that the Nazis take several ministries in a cabinet headed by someone without party affiliation. Hitler rejected this at once. He could join a government only if he assumed political leadership. “My movement does not want power, only leadership,” he assured the president. He warned that if his movement collapsed, Germany would have 18 million Marxists, perhaps 14–15 million of them Communists, and that a cabinet above parties, resting only on the coercive means of the state, would face a new revolution by February.

Asked whether he intended to discuss a programme of cooperation with other parties, Hitler replied that he did not wish to enter into party negotiations: the decision lay with the president. Only if he were given the mandate to form a government would he talk to the parties. He added a remark that, in the light of what happened in March 1933, sounds ominous: he believed he would find a basis on which his government would obtain an enabling act from the Reichstag. “No one but I will get such an authorisation from the Reichstag.” Hindenburg appealed to his “patriotic and soldierly sense of duty” and to their “old comradeship from the battlefield”, but ended the conversation without a decision. It had lasted an hour and five minutes. Papen, reading Meissner’s note, marked the announcement that talks with the parties would come “only after receiving the mandate” and wrote in the margin: “impossible”.

The mandate of 21 November

Over the next two days the president’s advisers concluded that, since Hitler claimed he could win a majority, he should be put to the test. The talks with Kaas and Schäffer gave the appearance of such a possibility: the leaders of the Centre Party and the Bavarian People’s Party gave assurances that they would not block a government that included Hitler, provided he was given conservative counterweights. On 21 November Hindenburg read out to Hitler a text prepared by Meissner. By a presidential cabinet he meant a government led “not by a party leader but by a man above parties” who enjoyed the president’s special confidence. Since Hitler had declared that his movement would support only a government under his own leadership, such a government had to have a majority in the Reichstag. He expected an answer by Thursday evening, that is, by 24 November.

Hitler had brought a letter in which he anticipated this proposal. He wrote that he had been fighting the parliamentary system for thirteen years, that Papen’s government had ended up in “hopeless isolation”, and that a new cabinet could succeed only if it combined “authority from above” with “strength from below”. He asked to be given “at least as much authority and standing” as his predecessors had received, though they had brought to the government neither a mass movement nor 196 deputies. He promised to equip a presidential cabinet under his leadership with the “constitutional prerequisites” for lasting work – which in practice meant precisely an enabling act.

When Hitler asked about the conditions, Hindenburg listed them and handed them over in writing as well. The government was to adopt an economic programme, not to restore the division of power between the Reich and Prussia – where a Reich commissioner had ruled since Papen’s coup of July – and not to restrict the president’s right to issue decrees under Article 48 of the constitution. The president reserved for himself final approval of the list of ministers and regarded the appointment of the foreign and Reichswehr ministers as his personal decision. At the end he said: “How these talks will end, God knows. We do not. But one thing I wish to stress: however they end, my door will always be open to you.” The conversation lasted about twenty minutes. The president’s office issued a communiqué about the mandate, and the newspapers wrote of “Hitler’s attempt”.

The exchange of letters and the refusal

That same afternoon Hitler wrote back to Meissner that he saw an “insoluble contradiction” between the mandate and the conditions. He asked what the president actually wanted: a presidential cabinet that merely secured the toleration of parliament, or a parliamentary government with reservations that only an authoritarian government could honour. He pointed out that Brüning had been a Centre Party politician and yet had headed a presidential cabinet. On 22 November Meissner explained on the president’s behalf that a presidential cabinet rested on Article 48 and a parliamentary one on a majority, and that the leader of a party – “and a party claiming exclusivity for its movement” – could not head a presidential government. The mandate therefore concerned only a majority government.

On 23 November Hitler returned the mandate. He considered it impossible to fulfil under the conditions set, and at the same time proposed that he be appointed chancellor and given the powers needed to win a majority for a time-limited enabling act. That same day, with the president’s knowledge, the Reichswehr Minister, General Kurt von Schleicher, spoke with him. Hitler rejected any form of participation in a government that he would not lead.

On 24 November Meissner conveyed Hindenburg’s reply, whose content had been agreed beforehand with Schleicher. The president thanked Hitler for his readiness to lead a “presidential cabinet” but felt that he could not justify to the German people handing over his powers to the leader of a party that constantly stressed its exclusivity and was hostile both to him personally and to his policies. He would have to fear that a presidential cabinet led by Hitler “would inevitably develop into a party dictatorship, with all its consequences for an extraordinary sharpening of the antagonisms within the German nation”, which he could not reconcile with his oath and his conscience. He considered further talks pointless but repeated that his door remained open.

Hitler replied the same day that he had demanded no party dictatorship. The NSDAP turned the whole correspondence into a propaganda weapon. In the afternoon Göring called a press conference at the Kaiserhof, handed out the letters to journalists and declared that Hitler had been given no chance at all – that obstacles had been thrown in his path – and that behind the president stood forces that had deliberately prevented him from governing. At the same time Hindenburg asked Kaas to try to build a majority. The monsignor admitted that it would take “faith that moves mountains”, and after two days of talks, in which Hitler again refused to negotiate, he had to concede that the attempt had failed.

The industrialists’ petition

For decades the talks of November 1932 were viewed through the lens of a document made public in 1956 by East German historians. This was the so-called industrialists’ petition (Industrielleneingabe), a letter to Hindenburg dated 19 November in which a group of businessmen, bankers and landowners asked the president to entrust the leadership of a presidential cabinet to “the leader of the largest national group” – that is, to Hitler. The idea originated at the end of October in the so-called Keppler Circle, a group of businessmen sympathetic to the NSDAP, and the text was written by the former President of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht. The link to the party was Heinrich Himmler.

The petition, however, was signed by only about twenty people, mostly bankers from Hamburg and Cologne, merchants and representatives of agricultural organisations, among them the Cologne banker Kurt von Schröder and the president of the Reich Agrarian League, Count Eberhard von Kalckreuth. The only truly major industrialist was the head of the United Steelworks, Fritz Thyssen, whose signature was in any case added later. The organisers had hoped for names such as Robert Bosch, Carl Friedrich von Siemens and Wilhelm Cuno, but they declined. Most of big industry at the time supported Papen and his authoritarian but not Nazi programme. Meissner put the letter before the president only on 22 November, after both conversations with Hitler, and the document did not change Hindenburg’s decision. Since the research of the American historian Henry Ashby Turner in the 1980s, most historians have regarded the petition as a failed initiative by a narrow group rather than proof that “big capital” forced the handover of power to the Nazis. It nevertheless remains evidence of the sympathy Hitler aroused among part of Germany’s economic elite.

What came next

The failure of the November talks confronted Hindenburg with a choice he had wanted to avoid. Papen proposed dissolving the Reichstag, postponing elections and continuing to govern with the help of the army, even at the cost of breaking the constitution. Schleicher was against this and counted on a split in the NSDAP. On 30 November Hitler declined to come from Weimar for another conversation with the president, this time about possibly tolerating a Schleicher government. He explained that he had already said everything. A few days later Schleicher himself became chancellor.

Hitler emerged from the November talks apparently the loser. The party was weakened, a conflict was growing within its leadership with Gregor Strasser, who wanted to enter government on less ambitious terms, and on 4 December the NSDAP suffered heavy losses in the local elections in Thuringia. Many observers, abroad as well, concluded that the Nazi tide had passed its peak. Hitler, however, stuck to his principle: all or nothing. He did not join anyone else’s government, did not negotiate with the parties, and waited until the president’s circle concluded of its own accord that Germany could not be governed without him.

Significance

The conversations of 19 and 21 November 1932 and the letter of 24 November are among the best-documented evidence that Hindenburg knew full well the dangers of handing power to Hitler. He predicted in writing that a presidential government under Hitler’s leadership would turn into a party dictatorship and sharpen the conflicts within the nation to the point of threatening civil war. Hitler, for his part, made no secret of what he wanted: the chancellorship, the power to rule by decree and an enabling act which, as he put it, no one but he would obtain.

Two months later, on 30 January 1933, Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor of precisely such a presidential cabinet, without a majority in the Reichstag, persuaded by Papen that conservative ministers would be able to “hem him in”. On 23 March 1933 the Reichstag, from which the Communist deputies were now absent, passed the Enabling Act, and by the summer Germany had become a one-party state. The prediction of November was fulfilled to the letter. The dictatorship the president had wanted to stop began rearmament, broke with the Treaty of Versailles and within seven years led to the attack on Poland on 1 September 1939.