Schleicher had scarcely left when Papen, in conjunction with Oskar von Hindenburg and Meissner, began urging the President to appoint Hitler Chancellor. Still vacillating, Hindenburg made a last effort to evade responsibility for this decision. Contrary to custom, he did not personally request Hitler to form a new government, but appointed Papen his homo regius with the assignment “to clarify the political situation by negotiations with the parties and to determine the available possibilities.”
That afternoon Papen was able to win Hugenberg by promising his party two seats in the cabinet. He then got in touch with Hitler. In the elaborate preliminary talks they had already agreed that Hitler’s people should have the Ministry of the Interior and a Ministry for Civil Air Transport, to be newly created especially for Göring. Now Hitler insisted on the posts of Reich Commissioner for Prussia and Prussian Minister of the Interior. These would assure him control of the Prussian police. In addition, he demanded new elections.
Once more everything teetered. On hearing of Hitler’s further demands, Hindenburg had a fresh siege of foreboding. He calmed down only after he had received Hitler’s assurance—in highly equivocal words—“that these would be the last elections.” Finally the President let things take their course. With the exception of the post of Reich Commissioner for Prussia—which was reserved for Papen himself—all of Hitler’s demands were met. The decision had been taken.
On the afternoon of January 29 a rumor arose that Schleicher, together with General Hammerstein, had put the Potsdam garrison on alert and was planning to seize the President, proclaim a state of emergency, and with the aid of the army take power. Days later, Oskar von Hindenburg’s wife was still exercised over the matter: the plan had called for the President’s being removed to Neudeck “in a sealed cattle car.” Hitler, who was in Goebbels’s apartment on Reichskanzlerplatz when he heard the rumor, reacted with an audacious gesture: he instantly placed the Berlin SA on alert and, in a flamboyant anticipation of the power he expected to receive, ordered six nonexistent police battalions to prepare to occupy the Wilhelmstrasse.
The author of this rumor has never been traced, but the person who profited by it is obvious. None other than Papen used the phantom of a threatening military dictatorship to push forward his plans. General von Blomberg had been summoned from Geneva, and on the morning of January 30 Papen was sworn in as Minister of Defense, before any other members of the cabinet. Evidently this was to prevent any last-minute desperate intervention by Schleicher, who on his own had been making contact with Hitler. Hugenberg, who had obstinately rejected Hitler’s demand for new elections, felt blackmailed by the new threat of a military take-over. To avert any possibility that the mysterious reports of an imminent putsch might be clarified, Papen summoned Hugenberg at seven o’clock in the morning on January 30 to beg him—“in greatest excitement”—to change his mind. “Unless a new government has been formed by eleven o’clock this morning,” he exclaimed, “the army will march!” But Hugenberg would not be stampeded. More keenly than Papen, he saw through Hitler’s scheme. The Nazis wanted to improve on the election results of November 6. With the power and unlimited funds of the state at their disposal, they could unquestonably do so. No new elections, Hugenberg said.
Once again his stubbornness seemed to be imperiling the whole agreement. At fifteen minutes before ten o’clock Papen led the members of the projected government through the snow-covered ministerial gardens to the presidential palace and into Meissner’s office. There he formally greeted Hitler as the new Chancellor. Even as he expressed his thanks, Hitler declared that “now the German people must confirm the completed formation of the cabinet.” Hugenberg resolutely spoke up against this. A vehement argument broke out. Hitler finally went up to his antagonist and gave him his “solemn word of honor” that the new elections would change nothing in regard to the persons composing the cabinet. He would, he said, “never part with any of those present here.” Anxiously, Papen followed this up: “Herr Geheimrat, would you want to undermine the agreement reached with such difficulty? Surely you cannot doubt the solemn word of honor of a German!”
The cheerful notion of boxing Hitler in and taming him thus came to grief at the first test. In purely arithmetic terms, it is true, the conservatives had managed to retain the advantage. There were three National Socialist as against eight conservative ministers, and virtually all the key positions in the government were in the hands of a group of men united on certain basic social and ideological principles. The trouble was that such men as Papen, Neurath, Seldte or Schwerin-Krosigk were not the right persons to box anyone in. For that they would have needed a sense of values and the energy to defend it. Instead they considered themselves summoned merely to preserve traditional privileges. Hitler’s readiness to accept such a numerically unfavorable arrangement testifies to his self-assurance and his deadly contempt for his conservative adversaries.
Now his would-be tamers had drawn Hugenberg into a window niche and were pleading with him to co-operate. Hugenberg held out. In the adjoining room, meanwhile, the President sent for State Secretary Meissner and wanted to know the meaning of the delay. “Watch in hand,” Meissner returned to the disputants: “Gentlemen, the President set the swearing-in for eleven o’clock. It is eleven-fifteen. You cannot make the President wait any longer.” And what could not be accomplished by the arm twisting of Hugenberg’s conservative friends, by Hitler’s cajolery and by Papen’s pleas, was done easily—for the last time, at the hour of the republic’s last agony—by the allusion to the legendary figure of the Field Marshal-President. Hugenberg was in the habit of referring to himself, with candid pride, as “a stubborn mule”; as recently as August, 1932, he had told Hindenburg that he had found Hitler “somewhat remiss at keeping agreements.” Now, however, knowing full well what was at stake, he yielded to the exigencies of Hindenburg’s appointments calendar. A few minutes later the cabinet had been sworn in.
Papen seems actually to have thought that he had put across a political master stroke. He had avenged himself upon Schleicher while at the same time using Schleicher’s concept of taming the wicked Nazis. He had satisfied his own ambition, which had swollen to absurd proportions during his brief, unexpected chancellorship, by entering the government once more. And he had made Hitler take a position of responsibility without turning control of the government over to him completely. For the leader of the NSDAP was not even the Chancellor of a presidential cabinet; he would have to maintain a parliamentary majority. Moreover, he did not enjoy Hindenburg’s confidence; it was Franz von Papen who continued to have a special relationship with the old President. In the negotiations Papen had insisted—this was one of the results he was proudest of—that he must participate in all conversations between Hitler and the President. Finally, Papen was also Vice-Chancellor and Prime Minister of Prussia. In the cabinet the Nazis held only the Ministry of the Interior, which did not control the federal police, and a Ministry without Portfolio which was intended to satisfy Göring’s vanity but not to have any powers. To be sure, Göring was also Prussian Minister of the Interior, and in Prussia this ministry did control the police. But Papen was confident that he would block any independent action on Göring’s part. Finally, within the cabinet foreign policy, finance, economics, labor, and agriculture were in the hands of experienced conservatives, and command of the army still remained the prerogative of the President. Papen saw it as a brilliantly conceived, splendid combination, which, moreover, placed that troublesome Herr Hitler at the service of employers and big landowners and of Papen’s own plans for an authoritarian new state. His own unfortunate fling at the chancellorship seemed to have taught Papen that a modern industrial nation shaken by crisis could not be openly governed by the dismissed representatives of an outmoded epoch. By harnessing the slightly unsavory manipulator of the masses to his own wagon, Papen seemed to be solving the ancient problem of conservatism: that it did not enjoy the support of the people. In this sense, using the vocabulary of a political impresario, Papen complacently replied to all warnings: “No danger at all. We’ve hired him for our act.”