Hitler then called the functionaries and deputies of the NSDAP to a meeting in Hermann Göring’s office at the palace of the President of the Reichstag. Political histrionics were in order. Hitler declared that he had always been loyal to Strasser, but that Strasser had repeatedly broken faith and had brought the party, now so close to victory, to the brink of ruin. The story goes that Hitler dropped his head to the table, sobbing and playing out his despair. Goebbels at any rate thought the address had “so intense a personal note that one’s heart is altogether healed…. Old party comrades who have fought and worked for years unswervingly for the Movement have tears in their eyes from rage, grief and shame. The evening is an enormous success for the unity of the Movement.” Hitler insisted on the old Strasser adherents making an act of public submission. “All shake hands with him and promise… to continue the struggle and not to deviate from the great cause, whatever may happen, even at the cost of their lives. Strasser is now completely isolated. A dead man.”
Hitler once more had mastered one of the great crises of his career and showed his talent for converting breakdown and dissolution into a new source of strength. To be sure, Strasser had made it easy for him, had forced neither a fight nor a compromise, and had conveniently made himself a scapegoat for the failures of the preceding months. But that, too, was one of the concomitants of Hitler’s rise; his opponents seemingly never knew how to fight and in the face of his obstinate determination tended to shrug and give up. Brüning capitulated almost as soon as he sensed that Hindenburg was turning away from him. Now it was the turn of Strasser and his followers; later Hugenberg and others would take the same course. All of them threw in the towel and walked out when Hitler flew into one of his rages. Unlike Hitler, they lacked the passion for power. For them a crisis was tantamount to a defeat, whereas for him it was the opportunity for struggle and a springboard for fresh certainties. “Let us not fool ourselves,” he once said, acutely analyzing the character of his bourgeois opposition. “They no longer even want to put up resistance against us. Every word from them cries out their need to make a pact with us. They are none of them men who crave power and feel pleasure in the possession of power. They talk only about duty and responsibility, and would be delighted if they could tend their flowers quietly, go fishing, and for the rest spend their time in devout contemplation.”50 The December crisis of 1932 confirmed Hitler’s view of his opponents; and deep into the war years he would remember the crisis whenever things looked darkest. Defeats and collapses were only the preludes to victory, Hitler would assure himself, for had he not more than once had to “pass through between two entirely different abysses and confront the alternatives of to be or not to be”?
The expulsion of Strasser by no means meant that the difficulties of the National Socialist Party were over. In the following weeks, Goebbels’s diary continued to be full of gloom, and noted “a great deal of griping and dissension.” The top leadership of the party, particularly Hitler, Goebbels, Göring, and Ley, made trips to the various party districts every weekend, trying to restore the morale and confidence of their followers. And as he had done during the major election campaigns, Hitler spoke as much as four times a day in widely scattered cities. The financial pressure, too, continued to be calamitous. In the Berlin gau salaries of party officials had to be cut, and the Nazi members of the Prussian Landtag could not afford the usual Christmas tips to the staff of the legislature. On December 23 Goebbels noted affectedly: “The most terrible loneliness descends like mournful inconsolability upon me.” At the year’s end the Frankfurter Zeitung somewhat prematurely celebrated the “disenchantment of the NSDAP,” while Harold Laski, one of the leading intellectuals of the English Left, considered that the day the National Socialists represented a real menace was past. Barring accidents, it appeared not improbable that Hitler would end his career as an old man in a Bavarian village, spending his evenings in the Biergarten telling his cronies how he once almost overthrew the German Reich.51 As if in response to that prediction, Goebbels wrote sullenly: “The year 1932 has been one interminable streak of bad luck. Now we must smash it to pieces…. All prospects and hopes have completely vanished.”
At that moment, to everyone’s surprise, there came a sudden turnabout. For although Schleicher’s reign as Chancellor had begun auspiciously, he soon found that he was pleasing nobody. He had introduced himself upon taking office as a “social-minded general.” But his concessions to labor did not manage to win over the Social Democrats, while antagonizing the employers. The small farmers were embittered by the favor shown to labor, and the large landowners opposed the projected land settlement program with that caste solidarity that had already proved Brüning’s undoing. Schleicher was going at things too abruptly, and the general himself, with his well-known bent for intrigue, did not inspire trust. He may very well have been sincere about his proposals for a planned economy, or his wooing of the unions, or his efforts to reinvigorate the parliamentary system. But whatever he undertook was met with suspicion and resistance. The optimism he nevertheless expressed was based on the thought that his various opponents were in no position to join forces against him. Granted, his stratagem with Gregor Strasser had failed for the present; but the affair had done heavy damage to the demoralized and debt-ridden Nazi party. The result was that Hitler, once considered the key figure in any coalition against the administration, was now hardly a viable partner.
It was none other than Franz von Papen who confounded all Schleicher’s reasoning and helped give the National Socialist Party its unexpected chance. In Papen the mutually antagonistic adversaries of Schleicher found a “common broker” after all.52
Only two weeks after the general took office as Chancellor, Papen had informed Kurt von Schroder, the Cologne banker, that he would like to meet the leader of the National Socialist Party. As it happened, this overture coincided with the rout of Gregor Strasser. This last development could be taken as a sign to actual or potential patrons in industry that the revolutionary, anticapitalistic tendencies within the party had been, if not overcome, at any rate seriously weakened. Moreover, the Reichstag elections of November had again shown significant gains for the Communists. In view of this, employers who had had reservations toward Hitler might be inclined to see things differently. The NSDAP’s propaganda hammered away at this idea with the slogan: If the party breaks up tomorrow, the day after tomorrow Germany will have 10 million more Communists.
As president of the Cologne Herrenklub, Schroder had extensive connections throughout heavy industry in the Rhineland. He had actively supported Hitler on various occasions, had sketched plans for Nazi economic policies, and in November, 1932, had signed the petition drawn up by Hjalmar Schacht blatantly backing Hitler’s claims to power. At the time, Papen had issued a sharp statement declaring this proposal impermissible. Now, on the contrary, he gladly took up the invitation, conveyed by Schroder, to a meeting with Hitler on January 4, 1933.