They had indeed, but a more important battle was being fought in the elegant rooms where Hitler and the men he hoped to use, and who hoped to use him in turn, held their secret discussions about who should run the country. In January 1933 Hitler met twice with Papen at the Dahlem villa of Joachim von Ribbentrop, a foppish champagne salesman with good connections among Berlin’s nouveau riche. The meetings proved unproductive because both men remained insistent on holding the top place in a government that the other would join in a subordinate position.
Meanwhile, the Nazi Party continued on its financial downslide, which threatened its ability to wage further electoral contests. The situation was so precarious that Göring tried to touch the American Embassy for a loan. On top of the financial difficulties, the SA and the SS were at each other’s throats, each claiming to be the top enforcement arm of the party. Tired of waiting for their Führer to grab power, some of Hitler’s minions were turning in their brown shirts. Hoping to rally his discouraged troops, on January 20 Hitler delivered a fiery speech at Berlin’s Sportpalast, site of the infamous Six-Day Bicycle Races. Like a doughty rider who keeps peddling despite exhaustion, Hitler vowed to continue fighting until he triumphed. He warned Nazism’s enemies that they could “strike blows against us but never defeat us.”
This might have remained empty rhetoric had not Chancellor Schleicher proved woefully inept at the political intrigue he so loved. He continued to believe that he could bully Hitler into accepting a subordinate political position by mobilizing dissident Nazis against him. In the meantime his own position was becoming precarious because of his deteriorating relationship with Hindenburg. The old man held Schleicher responsible for parliamentary attacks on the East Prussian landowners, who had been accused of using a state fund designed to help them avert bankruptcy to purchase fancy cars and junkets to the French Riviera. At the same time, Schleicher underestimated Papen’s vindictiveness, failed to see the extent to which he would go to revenge himself and to regain some measure of power.
Unbeknownst to Schleicher, Papen had now concluded that it would be acceptable to concede the chancellorship to Hitler, provided that he, Papen, retained actual power through his close connection to Hindenburg. With the intention of exploring this possibility, Papen arranged a secret meeting between Hitler, himself, Oskar von Hindenburg (the president’s son), and Otto Meissner, Hindenburg’s chief of staff. The scene, once again, was Ribbentrop’s villa in Dahlem. After an extensive preliminary discussion, Papen let it be known that he would settle for the vice-chancellorship in a cabinet headed by Hitler but dominated by conservatives. Hitler accepted the proposal. Crucially, so did Oskar von Hindenburg and Meissner, who, along with Papen, agreed to try to sell this deal to the president. When presented with this proposal on January 23, the old man countered that Hitler was qualified at most to be postmaster general. But he gradually relented when his son and Meissner joined Papen in promising that Hitler could be used to browbeat the Communists and then discarded when he was no longer useful.
Schleicher soon discovered just how isolated and impotent he had become. Having lost the confidence of parliament, the chancellor asked Hindenburg for authority to dissolve the Reichstag on January 28. The president refused, leaving Schleicher with no option but to resign. That same evening, Berlin’s journalistic establishment held its annual Press Ball. Carl Zuckmayer recalled that the atmosphere was tense but determinedly lighthearted, the guests indulging “in a macabre blend of somberness and hectic gaiety.” In the Ullstein box the firm’s managing director kept refilling the champagne glasses, saying each time, “Drink up, go ahead, who knows when you’ll again be drinking champagne in an Ullstein box.” The celebrated fighter pilot, Ernst Udet, proposed to Zuckmayer that they “take their pants down and dangle our backsides over the box.” But neither was feeling jocular enough to “moon” the ball. Schleicher, who showed up after midnight, did the next best thing: he offered a toast to nothing. Later, commenting on his brief and ill-fated moment in the political spotlight, he said: “I stayed in power only seventy days and on each and every one of them I was betrayed seventy times. Don’t ever speak to me of ‘German loyalty’!”
Most observers assumed that Schleicher’s fall would mean Papen’s return to power as chancellor. Harry Kessler, for one, was horrified at this prospect. He wrote in his diary on January 28: “Schleicher has fallen and Papen is to form a new government. He now plays unequivocally the part of presidential minion, for he lacks all other support and has almost the whole nation against him. I feel physically sick at the thought of this mutton-head and gambler ruling us again and apparently acting as Foreign Minister as well.”
But what actually transpired was far worse. On January 29 Papen and Hitler worked out the details of their power-sharing arrangement. Hitler’s cabinet would include, in addition to Papen as vice-chancellor, Hugenberg as minister of economics, and Franz Seldte, chief of the conservative Stahlhelm veterans’ organization, as minister of labor. Only two cabinet posts would go to Nazis: Wilhelm Frick would take the Interior Ministry and Hermann Göring would become minister without portfolio. The Interior Ministry, however, was a crucial post, for it embraced the police. Moreover, Papen consented to Hitler’s demand that Göring take over the Prussian Interior Ministry, with similar police functions for that state. These were fateful breaches in the “conservative wall” around Hitler. But Papen remained oblivious to the danger. When a Prussian Junker questioned his wisdom in working with Hitler, he replied: “What do you want? I have the confidence of Hindenburg. In two months we’ll have pushed Hitler so far into a corner that he’ll squeal.”
Hitler was appointed chancellor by Hindenburg at 11:30 in the morning on January 30. Upon moving into the Chancellery, he reportedly said, “No one gets me out of here alive.” That evening the Nazis celebrated their victory with a torchlight procession through the streets of Berlin, the first of many such extravaganzas. Having assembled in the Tiergarten, the marchers paraded east through the Brandenburg Gate, crossed the Pariser Platz, then turned down the Wilhelmstrasse. Watching the procession, Theodor Düsterberg of the Stalhelm noticed thousands of townspeople joining the celebration. “The Berliners, usually so level-headed, witty and skeptical were in a state of collective delirium,” he reported. According to Hedda Adlon, who watched the procession from her husband’s famous hotel, crowds in the Pariser Platz “broke into prolonged applause” when one of the SA bands, upon passing the French embassy, struck up the war-song “Siegreich wollen wir Frankreich schlagen.” But not all Berliners were jubilant. As the procession passed his house near the Brandenburg Gate, Max Liebermann was heard to mutter: “Pity one can’t eat as much as one wants to vomit.”