Anatomy of a democratic coup

How did the Weimar Republic, Germany's first democracy, fall to the Nazis? Takeover reprises the dramatic six months before Hitler's rise

Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power

Author: Timothy W Ryback

Publisher: Hachette India

Pages: 384

Price:  Rs 999

In December 1932, Adolf Hitler had hit rock bottom. In Reichstag elections the previous month, the party had seen a 25 per cent drop in votes despite an expensive and intensive campaign. Gregor Strasser, “chief operating officer” of the National Socialist movement, had exited the party over ideological differences and Hitler’s refusal to compromise chancellorship claims, threatening a split in the party.

Though the Nazi Party was the largest party in the Reichstag with 196 seats, business donors, such as steel magnate Thyssen, the Krupp engineering empire and piano maker Bechstein, had tightened the purse strings, repelled by the unhinged violence of the Nazi’s storm troopers, the Sturmabteilung (SA). With the party deep in the red, this paramilitary organisation was forced to sell potatoes to cover their costs; in Berlin 10,000 of them mutinied over shortage of funds.

Yet by January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler took oath as Chancellor of Germany. Less than two months later he pushed through the infamous Enabling Act, allowing him to issue laws without Parliament’s consent, setting Germany on the road to World War II and the Holocaust

How did the Weimar Republic, united Germany’s first genuine democracy, succumb to the Nazis? The standard explanations point to the humiliating terms of the Versailles Treaty imposed by the victorious Allies at the end of World War I that irreparably weakened the German economy, causing spiralling inflation and mass unemployment, inevitably enhancing the popularity of right-wing totalitarianism. But Hitler’s rise to power was by no means inevitable. Historians tell a more granular story of cynical power broking by the traditional political elite, rooted in Bismarckian privilege with tenuous loyalty to democracy.

This wheeling and dealing has been well documented by countless historians of Hitler’s Third Reich. Takeover  colours between the lines of the familiar big picture presenting in dramatic and entertaining detail the six months before Hitler assumed power.

Timothy Ryback begins the story in mid-August 1932 with Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, later the Nazis’ notorious minister of propaganda, savouring a major electoral victory in the Reichstag elections of July 31. The Nazis had won 230 seats in the 600-member Reichstag, their best performance to date. Though short of a majority, the Nazis were the biggest party and a powerful political force. Hitler calculated that President Paul Von Hindenburg, the (some say undeserved) hero of World War I, would have no choice but to offer him the Chancellorship. Thirty-seven per cent of the vote, he reckoned, represented 75 per cent of the 51 per cent majority.

The electoral victory was doubly satisfying because it put Hitler, a former Austrian corporal, in the reckoning with the Junker-dominated political clique, from which he craved recognition but despised (derisively referring to them as “Kabinet of Von Von Von Von Von”). Earlier that year, he had lost the presidential elections to Hindenburg by 5.9 million votes, a verdict he challenged and lost in court. An amusing prelude to this contest was Hitler’s attempts to acquire German citizenship. He was first hired as a village gendarme in Thuringia but after facing a storm of derision from an implacably hostile liberal press he managed a job as a mid-level bureaucrat in the state of Braunschweig. 

The power broker in the August negotiations was defence minister Kurt Von Schleicher, a Hindenburg acolyte “who knew everyone who was anyone”. Schleicher, writes Ryback, “viewed power politics as war by other means” and considered a Nazi-Conservative alliance as a means of keeping out the communists and Social Democrats. In May, he had cut a deal with Hitler to replace the centrist chancellor Heinrich Bruning with the hapless aristocrat and Schleicher puppet Franz Von Papen. In return, Schleicher convinced Hindenburg to lift Bruning’s ban on the SA, enabling the Nazis to hold  mass rallies and bludgeon opponents ahead of the July elections.

The chancellorship may have been a done deal had his stormtroopers not been implicated in the murder of a communist. Hitler’s open defence of the killers offered Hindenburg, who harboured a Junker general’s aversion to Hitler (“that Bohemian corporal”), the pretext to refuse him the chancellorship, dress him down and leak the details to the press. Thereafter, with the Communists and Nazis unexpectedly jointly voting for its dissolution, the Reichstag ended with just 50 minutes of actual parliamentary business.

For the November elections, Hitler employed the same novel (for the time) tactics of saturation rallies covering the country by air. This time, the absence of a majority by any party made Schleicher’s attempts to pull together squabbling right-wing factions impossible. He fell from grace and his acolyte Von Papen was appointed chancellor. The new man prevailed on a frail and mentally wavering Hindenburg, now 84, to agree to Hitler’s demand for chancellorship with himself as vice-chancellor. Papen’s cynical calculation was that bringing Hitler into government would “tame him”. “We’ve engaged him for ourselves,” Papen assured a doubter, surely the most fatal miscalculation in modern history.

As Professor Ryback writes, “It has been said that the Weimar Republic died twice. It was murdered and it committed suicide.” The murder was by Hitler but the suicide was undoubtedly inflicted by a cabal that weakened the institutions of Weimar democracy in the interests of wielding power. Hindenburg’s proclivity to leverage the Constitution and rule through presidial cabinets —including approving dictatorial rule for two chancellors— set the scene for Hitler to build on. As Richard Evans showed in his three-volume study of the Third Reich, Parliament convened for only three days between July 1932 and February 1933.

Dr Ryback tells a good story with the atmospherics and gossipy details, though extended flashbacks to provide context are occasionally disorienting. Takeover  reprises a familiar history that remains uncomfortably relevant in the 21st century. Among them, Hitler’s determination to destroy democracy through democratic means has echoes in Donald Trump’s plans to expand executive power in the world’s most powerful democracy should he be elected.