As always, Hitler advanced on several fronts at once. His oath of legality at Leipzig had already contained a hidden offer of good behavior and partnership. At the beginning of 1931 he received a hint from Schleicher: the ban on participation of Nazis in the Frontier Guard was lifted. In return, Hitler instructed the SA to refrain from street fighting. He even had an SA unit in Kassel dissolved because it had obtained weapons contrary to orders. To strengthen the point, Röhm was required to issue a memorandum implying that the storm troop detachments might be dissolved altogether; they “would be superfluous” if Hitler assumed the chancellorship. “Pretty-boy Adolf is dripping with loyalty,” General Groener wrote to a friend at this time. Hitler was no longer a problem for the Defense Ministry, he added.
When the Catholic bishops issued a sharp statement warning their flock against the Nazi party, Hitler instantly dispatched his most ingratiating associate, Hermann Göring, to Rome to negotiate. In an interview with the Daily Express Hitler expressed himself in favor of strong German-English co-operation to abolish reparations; he took a conciliatory, mature tone and emphasized the elements uniting England and Germany. When Wilhelm Pieck, the Communist deputy, announced that the Red Army stood ready to come to the aid of revolutionary armies of liberation within Germany, Hitler told an American newspaper that the National Socialist Party was the bulwark against advancing world Bolshevism. “He rants much less than he used to,” a contemporary account noted. “He no longer has Jews for breakfast” and was evidently doing his best “not to seem monomaniac.” His eagerness to be thought respectable extended to outward matters. He left the modest little Hotel Sanssouci, where he had previously stayed on his visits to Berlin, and chose to reside in the prestigious Kaiserhof. There was also deliberate challenge in this; the hotel lay diagonally across the square from the chancellery. Convinced that they had tamed their man, the spokesmen for the Right assured one another that Hitler was at last on the way to being a useful implement of state power.
He also wooed the financiers, who on the whole had remained rather reserved. Frau von Dircksen, who held court in the Kaiserhof and had many influential connections, came to his aid just at the right time—one more of those aging female friends to whose zeal he owed so much. Frau Bechstein also continued to promote his cause. Other contacts were made through Göring, who ran a lavish house, and through the financial journalist Walther Funk. Wilhelm Keppler, a small businessman ruined by the Depression, also brought sympathetic industrialists into the movement. He founded the “Economic Friendship Circle,” which was to become notorious through its later connection with Himmler. Otto Dietrich, who had extensive family connections with men in industry, noted: “In Munich in the summer of 1931 the Führer suddenly made the decision to work systematically on leading personalities in business and in the bourgeois Center parties, who were at the heart of the opposition to him.” He toured Germany in his supercharged Mercedes, going to confidential conferences. The better to keep them secret, some of these were held “in solitary forest clearings, in the bosom of nature.” At Streithof (“Squabble Farm”), the estate of Emil Kirdorf, the Ruhr industrialist, Hitler addressed more than thirty captains of heavy industry.15 He ostentatiously forced Gregor Strasser and Gottfried Feder to withdraw a motion they had introduced in the Reichstag as a kind of last bow to their abandoned socialist aims, a motion calling for the expropriation of the “bank and stock exchange barons.” And when the Communist Party faction, seeing a good joke, proposed the selfsame motion on their own account, Hitler had the Nazi deputies vote against it. Henceforth, his only comments on his economic program were dark allusions. At the same time, he drew away from the somewhat pigheaded Gottfried Feder and occasionally kept Feder from speaking in public.
During the early part of July, 1931, Hitler finally met with Hugenberg in Berlin. Soon thereafter he had a talk with Franz Seldte and Theodor Duesterberg, leaders of the paramilitary veteran association Stahlhelm (“steel helmet”), who once again wanted to join forces with him. Then he met with General von Schleicher and General von Hammerstein-Equord, chief of the army command. He conferred with Brüning, Groener, and once again with Schleicher. The purpose of all these conversations was to sound out Hitler’s intentions, but they were also rapprochements designed to draw Hitler into the system against which he had been battling on principle. The idea was to capture him by tactical alliances and, as General Groener put it, “bind him doubly and triply to the stake of legality.” But none of these important persons had any idea of Hitler’s toughness and intransigence. They also seemed to discount Hitler’s capacity for dissimulation. Consequently, the gains were all on his side—the leader of the Nazi party emerged from his isolation and was raised several ranks in status. The conversations encouraged his followers, confused his antagonists, and impressed the voters. How desperately Hitler had been waiting for this turn of events is evident from his reaction when he was summoned to Berlin for the meeting with Chancellor Brüning. Hess, Rosenberg, and Rosenberg’s deputy, Wilhelm Weiss, were with him in Munich when the telegram arrived. He skimmed it hastily, then held it out to the others. “Now I have them in my pocket!” he exclaimed. “They have recognized me as an equal partner in negotiations.” The image he was trying to project is reflected in Groener’s summary: “Hitler’s intentions and aims are good, but [he is an] enthusiast, fervent, many-sided. Likable impression, modest, orderly person and in manner the type of the ambitious, self-educated man.” Hereafter, in confidential communications among his distinguished counterparts he would be referred to—with a shade of mockery—as “Adolf.” He had made his successful entree.
Only the conversation with Hindenburg—which Schleicher arranged for October 10—ended in a failure. The President’s entourage had the strongest reservations; in fact, Oskar, Hindenburg’s son, had acidly commented on Hitler’s request for an interview: “I suppose he wants a free drink.” Hitler came with Göring. He seemed nervous during the meeting; when the President suggested that he support the administration, in view of the predicament of the whole country, Hitler launched into divagations on the aims of his party. On being reprimanded for the increasing acts of violence on the part of his followers, Hitler responded with verbose assurances that obviously did not satisfy the President. From Hindenburg’s entourage the remark was subsequently leaked that the President was at most prepared to appoint this “Bohemian corporal” Postmaster General, certainly not Chancellor.16
After the interview Hitler went to Bad Harzburg, where next day the Nationalist opposition was celebrating its union by a great demonstration. Once more Hugenberg had gathered together everybody on the Right who had power, money, or prestige: the leaders of the Nazis and of the German Nationalists, the rightist members of the Reichstag and of the Prussian Landtag, the representatives of the German People’s Party (Deutsche Volkspartei), the Economic Party, the Stahlhelm, and the Reichslandbund. In addition, he had assembled many prominent patrons, members of former ruling houses headed by two Hohenzollern princes. Also present were Heinrich Class, leader of the Pan-Germans, and his presiding committee, such retired generals as von Lüttwitz and von Seeckt, and many notables of finance and industry, including Hjalmar Schacht, Fritz Thyssen, Ernst Poensgen of the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel), Louis Ravene of the Iron Wholesalers’ Association, the shipbuilding magnate Blohm of Hamburg, the bankers von Stauss, Regendanz, and Sogemeyer. All the enemies of the republic, with the exception of the Communists, were deployed here: a variegated army of the discontented, united less by a single aim than by a single animosity.