Schleicher becomes chancellor

On 3 December 1932 Reich President Paul von Hindenburg appointed as chancellor General Kurt von Schleicher, until then Reichswehr Minister. For the first time since Leo von Caprivi, chancellor from 1890 to 1894, Germany was to be led by a general. For years Schleicher had been the most important politician in uniform: it was he who devised presidential government, who in 1930 put Heinrich Brüning forward to Hindenburg, and who in 1932 brought Brüning down and replaced him with Franz von Papen. Now he had brought down Papen too, and had to step out from behind the scenes himself. He wanted to split the NSDAP, detach its moderate wing from Adolf Hitler and base his government on a “cross-front” stretching from the trade unions to part of the Nazis. He achieved none of these things. His cabinet, the last government of the Weimar Republic before Hitler, lasted less than two months.

The fall of Papen

After the election of 6 November 1932 no government could count on a majority in the Reichstag. The NSDAP had lost two million votes, but together with the Communists it still held more than half the seats. Papen resigned on 17 November, and the Hindenburg–Hitler talks ended on 24 November with the president’s refusal. Hitler demanded the chancellorship with the full powers of a presidential government; Hindenburg was unwilling to give them to him.

Papen had his own answer to this. Together with the Interior Minister, Wilhelm von Gayl, he had prepared a plan known as the state emergency: dissolve the Reichstag, postpone elections indefinitely, govern by decree with the help of the army and police, and eventually amend the constitution in an authoritarian direction. This meant breaking the constitution, which required elections to be held within 60 days of the dissolution of parliament. Schleicher considered the plan dangerous. He believed it was possible to obtain the Reichstag’s toleration if the government won over part of the NSDAP. The final dispute was played out on the evening of 1 December in the president’s study. Papen presented his plan and Schleicher his. Hindenburg came down on Papen’s side and instructed him to form a new government.

But Schleicher held the army. On the morning of 2 December, at a cabinet meeting, his closest associate, Lieutenant Colonel Eugen Ott, presented the results of a war game held at the Reichswehr Ministry in November, after the joint Communist and Nazi strike on Berlin’s public transport. It showed that in a civil war the Reichswehr and the police could not cope simultaneously with the SA and the Communists, with a general strike and with the defence of the borders should Poland exploit the situation. The conclusion was that the Reichswehr Minister must prevent the declaration of a military state of emergency. Many historians believe the war game was prepared precisely in order to bring Papen down. The ministers, already unenthusiastic about the risky plan, turned against the chancellor.

Papen went to the president and proposed dismissing the Reichswehr Minister instead of himself. Hindenburg refused. According to Papen’s memoirs, he told him with tears in his eyes that he was too old to take on responsibility for a civil war at the end of his life, “so in God’s name we must let Herr von Schleicher try his luck”. At noon the next day, 3 December, Papen’s government met for the last time, and a quarter of an hour later Schleicher’s first cabinet meeting took place. Papen left with a sense of grievance against a man whom he had until recently regarded as a friend. That feeling was to weigh heavily on the events of the following weeks.

A general as chancellor

Schleicher’s cabinet was essentially Papen’s cabinet without Papen. It retained the Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath, the Finance Minister Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, the Justice Minister Franz Gürtner, the Minister of Posts and Transport Paul von Eltz-Rübenach and several others. Gayl was replaced at the Interior Ministry by Franz Bracht, and Friedrich Syrup, president of the labour exchange authority, became Labour Minister. Schleicher kept the Reichswehr Ministry for himself. An important new office was that of Reich Commissioner for Job Creation. It went to Günther Gereke, an activist in rural local government and author of a plan for credit-financed public works.

Public opinion greeted the change with relief, since Papen, head of the “cabinet of barons”, had been unpopular almost everywhere. At the first cabinet meeting Schleicher noted with satisfaction that many people saw his appointment as a relaxation of tension. The general wanted to shed the image of a reactionary government. On 15 December, in a radio address that took the place of a government statement in the Reichstag, he presented himself as the “social general”: he announced that his programme essentially had a single point – creating jobs – and that he was a supporter of neither capitalism nor socialism. The government reversed some of the cuts in wages and benefits introduced by Papen and prepared credits for public works, which Hitler would boast of after 1933.

In foreign policy Schleicher scored a success attributed almost entirely to his government. On 11 December 1932 in Geneva, representatives of Britain, France, Italy, the United States and Germany recognised in a declaration the principle of Germany’s equality of rights in armaments “in a system which would provide security for all nations”. Germany, which had left the disarmament conference in the autumn, returned to it. In practice the powers had conceded that the military provisions of the Treaty of Versailles would not remain in force for ever. According to accounts of his meeting with German journalists in mid-January 1933, Schleicher even announced the reintroduction of conscription by the spring of 1934 at the latest.

The cross-front

Most important of all, however, was his political plan. Schleicher had no party of his own in the Reichstag. He wanted to win parliament’s toleration by building support where no one had looked for it: in the trade unions, both Christian and Social Democratic, in the veterans’ organisations and in the moderate wing of the NSDAP. This concept was called the cross-front (Querfront), because it was meant to cut across the divisions between left and right. Some historians believe the general took it seriously; others that it was above all a bogey meant to force Hitler into supporting the government.

The key figure was Gregor Strasser, head of the NSDAP’s party organisation and regarded as the most serious politician in Hitler’s circle. Strasser favoured entering government even without the chancellorship for Hitler, and feared that the “all or nothing” strategy would destroy a party that had just lost two million voters and on 4 December suffered further losses in the local elections in Thuringia. At the beginning of December – on 3 December, according to most accounts – Schleicher offered him the posts of vice-chancellor and Prime Minister of Prussia. Witnesses from the period later estimated that in the event of a split between 60 and 100 of the NSDAP’s 196 deputies might have followed Strasser.

Hitler learned of the talks and reacted immediately. On 5 December, at a meeting of the leadership at the Kaiserhof hotel, he rejected participation in Schleicher’s government, and on 7 December there was a fierce confrontation between him and Strasser. Hitler was backed by Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels, Strasser’s rivals. On 8 December Strasser unexpectedly resigned all his party posts in a letter to Hitler, but he did not leave the NSDAP or place himself at the head of any faction. He went on holiday to Italy. Hitler meanwhile toured the party districts, collected declarations of loyalty from deputies and Gauleiters, and took over the leadership of the party organisation personally, relying on Rudolf Hess and Robert Ley. The split on which Schleicher’s plan depended did not happen.

Things went little better with the unions. The chairman of the Social Democratic trade union federation, Theodor Leipart, was willing to talk to the general, but the SPD leadership regarded Schleicher as the man who in July had helped bring down the Social Democratic government of Prussia, and forbade any cooperation. The Christian unions were friendlier, but they could not on their own provide the government with support.

Government without parliament

The new Reichstag met on 6 December and sat for only a few days. It re-elected Göring as its president, passed an amnesty for political offences and, with the majority required for a constitutional amendment, changed the provisions on deputising for the president: in the event of Hindenburg’s death or incapacity, he was to be replaced not by the chancellor but by the President of the Reich Court. This was an expression of distrust of the general’s ambitions. On 9 December parliament adjourned indefinitely, which gave Schleicher time. The general reckoned that within a few months the first effects of public works and the disintegration of the NSDAP would improve his position.

Time, however, was working against him. Every group he wanted to win over distrusted him, while those on whom Hindenburg had relied so far were turning away from him. Industrialists feared a “red general” who talked to the unions. The great landowners of the eastern provinces, with whom the president felt a bond, protested against his tariff policy and against announcements that bankrupt estates would be divided among settlers. On 11 January 1933 the leaders of the Reich Agrarian League, in Hindenburg’s presence, accused the government of betraying the interests of agriculture. At the same time a scandal erupted in the Reichstag over abuses in the Eastern Aid (Osthilfe) programme and over the Neudeck estate, given to the president in 1927 and registered in his son’s name. Hindenburg felt himself implicated.

Most dangerous of all, however, was Papen’s revenge. On 4 January 1933 Papen met Hitler at the house of the banker Kurt von Schröder in Cologne. The meeting began several weeks of negotiations on a joint government, conducted behind the chancellor’s back. Papen still had free access to the president and from 9 January kept him informed of his talks. On 15 January the NSDAP, throwing all its forces into the campaign in the tiny state of Lippe, won 39.5 per cent of the vote there, and its propaganda presented the result as the end of the party’s crisis. A few days later Schleicher admitted that the Strasser option had collapsed.

The general was left with only what he had taken away from Papen a month earlier: dissolving parliament and postponing elections – in other words, breaking the constitution. On 23 January he asked Hindenburg for this, as word came from the parties of a vote of no confidence at the next sitting of the Reichstag. The president refused. On 28 January Schleicher renewed his request, received the same answer and resigned. Two days later Hitler became chancellor, with Papen as vice-chancellor.

Significance

Schleicher’s government was the last attempt to keep Hitler from power using the instruments the general himself had created: the president’s confidence, decrees under Article 48 and the army. Historians still argue over whether his plan had any chance at all. Some see in him the last hope of Weimar; others an intriguer who undermined the republic and underestimated Hitler. Whatever the verdict, his defeat showed how far Germany’s fate now depended solely on the decisions of one 85-year-old man and a few of his advisers. Once the general had lost Hindenburg’s confidence, he had nothing to fall back on.

Hitler took over several things ready-made from Schleicher’s government. The public works programme, which after 1933 became part of the legend of the Third Reich’s economic miracle, had been prepared by Gereke. The declaration of 11 December 1932 gave Germany international recognition of the principle of equal rights in armaments, which Hitler invoked when in October 1933 he took Germany out of the disarmament conference and the League of Nations, and when in March 1935 he reintroduced conscription. Schleicher himself withdrew from politics, but he soon began to criticise the new government and to build contacts with the disaffected. On 30 June 1934, during the Night of the Long Knives, he was shot dead together with his wife at their home in Neubabelsberg. Gregor Strasser was killed the same day.