Meanwhile, Schleicher let the leadership of the NSDAP know that he personally was not at all in favor of the ban on the SA. He still clung to the idea of disabling the Nazis by letting them participate in power and “locking them in”—to use the magic formula of the moment—by surrounding them with a cabinet of influential specialists. The example of Mussolini should have shown him that such tricks are useless against tribunes of the people who can call upon a private army.
At the end of April Schleicher met with Hitler for a first discussion. “The conversation went well,” Goebbels noted. Soon afterward there was a second meeting, in which State Secretary Meissner, Hindenburg’s man of confidence, and Oskar von Hindenburg were included; at this time not only the dismissal of Groener but the fall of the entire Brüning cabinet was discussed. “Everything is going well….” Goebbels noted again. “Delightful feeling that nobody suspects anything, Brüning himself least of all.”
After about a month of such intrigues, matters finally came to a head. On May 10 Groener defended in the Reichstag the SA ban against furious attacks from the Right. He was a feeble speaker at best, and his protests against the National Socialist “state within the State” and “state against the State” made little headway against the wild uproar that the Nazis unleashed. The angered, helpless, and no doubt exhausted Minister went down to defeat, and with him the cause he was advocating. Schleicher and General Kurt von Hammerstein, commander in chief of the army, coolly informed the Minister of Defense that he no longer enjoyed the confidence of the army, and must resign. Two days later, after a vain appeal to Hindenburg, Groener handed in his resignation.
That act was, in keeping with the camarilla’s plans, only the prelude. On May 12 Hindenburg left Berlin for nearly two weeks, to spend the Whitsun holidays on his estate, Gut Neudeck. Brüning asked to see him, but the President irritably refused. During this period he was obviously under the influence of his fellow Junkers, who were now preparing the assault on Brüning’s weakening position. Whatever line of argument they followed, they no doubt brought to the task “that heavy force peculiar to large landowners and old army officers, which dispensed with honesty and concern for principle.” When Hindenburg returned to Berlin at the end of the month, he was determined to part with his Chancellor. Brüning thought he was on the verge of great successes in foreign policy, and as late as the morning of May 30, shortly before he set out to see Hindenburg, had heard that there was going to be a significant turn in the matter of disarmament. But as things turned out, he was not given the time to inform the President of this. Only a year before, Hindenburg had assured him that he would be his last Chancellor, that he would not part with him. Now Brüning found himself dismissed in an insultingly brusk interview. He had been allowed only a few minutes on the President’s calendar; Hindenburg did not want to miss the parade of the naval guard in commemoration of the Battle of Jutland. A wartime memory and a minor military spectacle took precedence over an act that decided the fate of the republic.42
General von Schleicher put forward as Brüning’s successor a man who at best could be considered a political dilettante. Franz von Papen came from an aristocratic Westphalian family, had served in a Junker cavalry regiment, and come to wide public notice for the first time—in a characteristic way—during the World War: in 1916 he had been expelled from the United States, where he was serving as military attaché, for sabotage activities; on the crossing to Europe he carelessly let important documents regarding his secret service work fall into the hands of the British authorities. His marriage to the daughter of a leading Saar industrialist had brought him considerable wealth and excellent connections with industry. As a Catholic nobleman he also had connections with the higher clergy, and as a former General Staff officer multiple contacts with the army. It may be that this position of Papen’s at the intersection of many interests first attracted Schleicher’s attention. The man seemed grotesquely antiquated; in all his long-legged stiffness, haughtiness, and bleating arrogance he was almost a caricature of himself—a figure from Alice in Wonderland, as a contemporary observer remarked. He was considered foolish, overhasty; nobody took him quite seriously. “If he succeeds with a thing, he is very pleased; if he fails, he does not worry about it.”
Yet it was obviously this cavalier quality of Papen that recommended him to Schleicher. For Schleicher was plainly thinking more and more of doing away with the weakened parliamentary system and replacing it by some kind of “moderate” dictatorship. Papen might be just the man to carry out such plans for him. Schleicher must also have imagined that the inexperienced Papen, a man concerned largely with externals, would find his vanity satisfied with the office and its ceremonial functions, and for the rest would be a docile tool. Schleicher, as ambitious as he was wary of publicity, needed exactly that kind of man. When Schleicher’s friends, incredulous at his choice, protested that Papen was a man without a head, Schleicher replied: “I don’t need a head, I need a hat.”
If, however, Schleicher had considered that Papen, thanks to his extensive connections, would be able to put together a coalition, or at any rate to win parliamentary approval of a cabinet including all parties to the right of the Social Democrats, he soon found that he was mistaken. The new Chancellor had no political base at all. The Center, embittered by the betrayal of Brüning, sharply opposed him. And Hugenberg, who saw himself once more passed over, also proved indignant. From the public, too, Papen encountered hostile rejection. Although he cashed in on Brüning’s successful negotiations and came back from the Lausanne Conference with the reparations question settled, he gained no popularity. The fact was that his cabinet could in no way be regarded as a legitimate solution to Germany’s problems, neither in terms of democracy nor expertise. It consisted entirely of men of distinguished families who had not been able to resist the President’s appeal to their patriotism and who now “surrounded Hindenburg like officers their general.” Seven of them were noblemen, two company directors; the roster also included Hitler’s protector from his Munich days, Franz Gurtner, and a general. Not a single representative of the middle class or the working class was included in the cabinet. The shadows seemed to be returning. But the mass indignation, the scorn and protest on the part of the populace, had no effect—proof of how thoroughly the members of the former ruling class had lost contact with reality. The “cabinet of barons,” as it was soon called, drew its support solely from Hindenburg’s authority and the army’s power.
The extraordinary unpopularity of the government prompted Hitler to take an attitude of cautious restraint. In his negotiations with Schleicher he had agreed to tolerate the government if new elections were called, the ban against the SA lifted, and the NSDAP allowed full freedom to carry on agitation. A few hours after Brüning’s dismissal, he had answered positively when the President asked him whether he agreed to the appointment of Papen. The new Chancellor promptly, on June 4, began his series of fateful concessions by dissolving the Reichstag and indicating that he would shortly lift the ban on the SA. Nevertheless, the Nazis began disentangling themselves. “We must part company as quickly as possible with the bourgeois transitional cabinet,” Goebbels noted. “All these are questions of delicately feeling one’s way.” A few days later he noted: “We had better betake ourselves as swiftly as possible out of the compromising vicinity of these bourgeois adolescents. Otherwise we are lost. In the Angriff I am launching a fresh attack on the Papen cabinet.” When the SA ban was not dropped in the first few days, as anticipated, Goebbels one evening entered “a large café on Potsdamer Platz with forty or fifty SA leaders in full uniform in spite of the ban, for the sake of provocation. All of us longing to have the police arrest us…. Around midnight we stroll very slowly on Potsdamer Platz and Potsdamer Strasse. But nobody lifts a finger. The patrolmen look stumped and then shamefacedly turn their eyes away.”