These men are ghosts.
Adolf Hitler
The face of the Third Reich was from the beginning a double face. That principle of duality which was Hitler’s essential tactical device, which characterized the regime’s initial rise to power and meant that all structures combined terror and legality, strict order and chaos,
Machiavellian open-mindedness and dull witted instinctiveness, was also expressed, quite overtly, in physiognomic terms. The type of the
‘Unknown SS Man’, the muscular but frankly heartless and brainless hero forever tearing chains apart and smashing barriers on countless posters— for example, those by the designer Mjoelnir—was counterbalanced by the figure of the respected privy councillor of conservative stamp, who
‘placed himself confidently behind the new leadership’. The strong-arm and the respectable elements marched side by side and supplemented each other. While the half-light of the background was populated by wholly criminal characters such as troop-leader ‘Rubber Leg’ from the Berlin Central District or the Neuköllner SA unit which, with underworld self-confidence, called itself the Ludensturm, the ‘Gang of Rogues’,1 the regime presented a legalistic facade of reassuring types who guaranteed its middle-class respectability: Konstantin von Neurath, Hjalmar Schacht, Franz von Papen.
It needed them especially at the beginning. The National Socialist leadership had realized that a complicated modern administrative system was not to be overcome in open attacks in the street, but rather by the gradual capture of key points in the political, economic and bureaucratic organization; now it defined its own steps towards the conquest of the state, not as a revolutionary break, but as the final attainment of the true nationalist Germany which had remained hitherto suppressed, or at least had failed to take over government. What was presented by skilful propaganda and enthusiastically acclaimed as the emergence of the
people, the rebirth and liberation of the national honour, bore in reality all the marks of a revolutionary change.
A multitude of factors enabled this aspect to be widely and
effectively concealed at least at the beginning. Of crucial importance was the fact that the National Socialists were able to play with overwhelming success upon the weakness of character and susceptibility to
totalitarianism of the spokesmen of national conservatism, who allowed themselves to be thrust into the foreground and exploited as figureheads in the great deception. In the wider sphere of the conservative middle class the decision to support the ‘national cause’ did not spring solely from blindness and opportunism; but also from the shortsighted argument that by collaborating they could ‘avert something worse’ and block
Hitler’s path to autocratic rule. This complex of illusions and fallacies contributed essentially to the success of the National Socialist bid for power, but what weight it carried was the result not least of the
collaboration of leading representatives of conservatism, and for them these considerations possessed no significance whatever. Their personal support gave a spurious appearance of legality to the ecstatic emphasis upon the nationalist element; they were men of straw in the seizure of power, who distracted attention from the terrorism and violence, providing a murderous enterprise with an honourable veneer. Their attempt, based on an overestimate of their own importance, to enlist the regime in the service of their own aims, in themselves not very dissimilar from those of the National Socialists, lasted only until Hitler knew that he was firmly in the saddle. Then they found themselves eliminated, and for some humiliating dismissal was their first intimation of the mistake they had made in entering into this partnership.
With all his self-righteous lack of conscience Franz von Papen, of course, never achieved this insight. Nevertheless particular circumstances made him the representative of these nationalist conservative circles: his historical role itself and the characteristics and qualities which shaped him for it; his claim, in which he persisted throughout, to belong to the ‘upper stratum authorized by history’; his unhesitating identification of the interests of his class with the interests of the state; his socially reactionary attitude, which he disguised behind a pseudo-Christian vocabulary; his sprinkling of monarchist ideas; his nationalistic jargon; his tendency to think in long-outdated categories; in short, his
anachronistic profile and finally the hint of caricature which hung over his whole person. All this makes him a perfect model of that type of the ruling class which on 30 January 1933 placed itself at the disposal of National Socialism, because with an almost unparalleled blindness it imagined itself to be once more called upon by history to assume leadership.
Franz von Papen came of an old Westphalian noble family, had served in a feudal regiment, and achieved a certain publicity in 1916, during the First World War, when he was expelled from the United States for conspiratorial activities while military attaché. While crossing to
Europe he allowed important documents relating to his secret service activities to fall into the hands of British intelligence, a piece of
carelessness which seemed typical, for a similar misfortune befell him a little later on the Turkish front. A few years after the end of the war he entered politics and became a member of the centre group in the Prussian Landtag, evidently as representative of the agrarian interests of his
district. His marked rightist tendencies induced him in 1925 to canvass during the Reich presidential election not for the candidate of his own camp but for Hindenburg, and he found himself on several occasions in open conflict with his party, within which he enjoyed no particular
influence. He was more highly thought-of among the anti-parliamentary, anti-republican right, whose representatives mourned the end of the monarchy and with it their own opportunities for prestige and influence, and who were striving for the recovery of power by means of confused, naïve, reactionary and unrealistic plans.
Although unsuccessful in attempts to gain a seat in the Reichstag, Papen did achieve a certain political influence over the centre newspaper
Germania. Together with the industrialist Florian Klöckner he acquired a
majority of the shares in the paper and eventually became chairman of its management committee. His marriage to the daughter of a leading Saar industrialist had brought him both a considerable fortune and good
connections with industry. If we add to this the fact that he had links with the high clergy as a Catholic nobleman and contacts with the Reichswehr as a former General Staff officer, we have the picture of a man who supplemented his personal inadequacies with a network of connections and achieved some importance in the intermediate realms of politics as the point of intersection of numerous interests. Occasional lectures to rightist clubs and cliques, as well as newspaper articles, show him as a man who addressed himself with a forceful superficiality to a
conservatism which labelled itself national, above parties and Christian. In fact, this conservatism acted on behalf of massive interests, with class- political, industrial and agrarian basis, and in advocating an authoritarian regime linked nostalgia for the past with rejection of the present. Papen had practised politics more in the dilettante form of establishing and exploiting contacts and had no experience of administration or leadership when on 31 May 1932 he was appointed to succeed Brüning as head of a crisis-shaken modern industrial state. The change of government was based solely on personal whim and Papen’s appointment, the then French ambassador in Berlin, André François-Poncet, wrote, ‘was at first greeted with incredulous amazement; when the news was confirmed, everyone smiled. There is something about Papen that prevents either his friends or his enemies from taking him entirely seriously; he bears the stamp of
frivolity, he is not a personality of the first rank. He is one of those people who are considered capable of plunging into a dangerous adventure; they pick up every gauntlet, accept every wager. If he succeeds in an
undertaking he is very pleased; if he fails it doesn’t bother him.’2
Precisely these qualities no doubt contributed to the making of a Chancellor out of a political nonentity. The power groups that had brought about Brüning’s downfall and now arranged this appointment may have been less interested in Papen himself than in his political position between centre and right.3 They evidently saw in him, with his insouciant activism, a suitable front man for the elimination of the severely damaged parliamentary system in the interests of an
authoritarian class regime. Furthermore the decision of General von Schleicher, who as Hindenburg’s confidant and ‘Chancellor-maker’ very largely controlled this affair, was undoubtedly greatly influenced by the idea that the inexperienced Papen, with his concern for outward
trappings, would find his vanity satisfied by the post itself and the
representational functions connected with it, and for the rest would prove a pliable tool. This was very much to the liking of Schleicher, who
combined ambition with an aversion from publicity. When astonished friends protested that Papen had no head for administration, the General replied, ‘He doesn’t need a head, his job is to be a hat.’4
If Schleicher imagined that the real head of the new government was going to be himself, he was soon disappointed. Lacking any natural respect for the traditions and problems of his high office, Papen took up his duties, and it was no mere polemical exaggeration when his
opponents repeatedly accused him of carrying over into politics the outlook of a riding gentleman: he himself confirmed the parallel in his memoirs when he advocated riding as a school for political character- building on the grounds that it offered ‘no concern for broken bones’.5 Again and again he acted on his basic idea that a difficulty, like an obstacle confronting a rider, was overcome once one had easily and boldly jumped it. In any case, he broke free from his dependence upon Schleicher and began, with growing self-confidence, to pursue his own aims and the interests of those circles whose representative he was, so that the General was forced to the admission: ‘What do you say to that, Fränzchen has discovered himself!’6
The new Chancellor owed the opportunity of evolving a policy of his own mainly to the backing of the aged Reich President, who took a fatherly pleasure in the adroitness and frivolous charm of Papen, the man of the world. The mutual attraction sprang from their respective
characters and matched the close relationship between their prejudices, political tendencies and interests, in which, across the generation gap, a sterile conservatism bogged down in out-of-date ideas found expression. ‘Both had in common, in spite of the great age difference, the fact that they failed to recognize that times had changed,’7 and in particular, the fact that they ignored the social problem and any possible solutions, or evaded the problem with hollow phrases revealing patriarchal and aristocratic attitudes. Their anachronistic thinking still reflected the imperial period’s false alternatives of socialist or nationalist, in which every group to the left of centre was tainted with the odium of anti- patriotism; it blindly overlooked the fact that the dominant antithesis of the age had long been between democratic and totalitarian. The aim of achieving, in an imaginary halfway house between these two, something expressed by the formula of a ‘constitutional dictatorship’, a new state ‘between democracy and totalitarian dictatorship’, was nothing but the thoughtless and confused coupling together of contradictions. It made no sense but in the course of historical evolution had the effect of preparing the way structurally and psychologically for Hitler.8 When Walther Schotte, the ideologist of Papen’s reformist idea, asserted that the new state ‘must be a strong state free from sectional interests, just in itself, independent of the parties’, each of these formulas was merely a lofty synonym for a demand for domination on the part of the social classes which stood behind this project. A ‘strong state’ meant merely an anti- liberal state; ‘free from sectional interests’ meant free from any right of the trade unions or any other public institutions to participate; the demand for justice was intended to legitimize the ostensibly ‘naturally’
determined claim of these classes to have the state at their disposal; and ‘independent of the parties’ really meant independent of the left. It has been rightly pointed out that it was no coincidence that many
representatives of this brand of conservatism ‘saw the Middle Ages as their ideal, not only because at this period men were rooted in a firmly established order and had faith, but also because political rights were at that time possessed only by the few’.9
From the socially reactionary emergency decrees of mid-June 1932, which gained the administration the mocking title ‘the cabinet of barons’, through the coup d’état against Prussia, to the openly proclaimed intention to bring society back to its class foundations and wipe out the ‘so-called achievements of the Revolution’,10 every measure of Papen’s administration betrayed a fixation with out-of-date ideas. Its aims and programme gained the support of only a minute fraction of the public, whose personal interests they represented; otherwise the regime remained highly unpopular. If Papen was appointed Chancellor in the hope of
replacing the SPD’s toleration of the government’s line by toleration on the part of the NSDAP, this hope quickly proved ill-founded. Even the hazardous credit which the government extended to the Hitler party, ruthlessly fighting its way to power by the method of civil war but nevertheless a good nationalist and anti-liberal party, did not bring it the hoped-for period of toleration. Amid loud expressions of public
disapproval and supported only upon the narrow foundations of the President’s trust, it slipped into isolation. No other cabinet in German parliamentary history ever suffered, like this one, a defeat by 42 to 512 votes. Astonishingly enough, in spite of growing failures, the Chancellor lost all his former doubts11 as to his fitness for government office. Only tremendous pressure by Schleicher compelled him to resign at the end of 1932, just as he was about to carry out a large-scale coup. In a touching scene, which conveyed to the departing Chancellor the certainty of his undiminished influence at the presidential court, Hindenburg handed him his photograph with the inscription ‘I had a comrade’.12
Papen used his influence for an altogether disastrous intrigue. In spite of all assertions to the contrary, it was he who took the initiative in establishing an alliance with Hitler, who was already beginning to despair of attaining power. Any hesitations he may have had about entering into this suicidal partnership were doubtless swept aside by his natural
recklessness, his arrogant assumption of his own right to lead, and an itch for revenge upon his rival Schleicher, now Chancellor in the new cabinet. At all events, the offended Papen cleared away the last personal obstacles to a partnership between the nationalist right and the NSDAP, thereby restoring the Harzburg alliance, but this time with real chances of
achieving power.13 The fragility of this alliance had already been clearly demonstrated several times, but no experience could cure Papen,
Hugenberg or the German nationalist circles around them of their
illusions. The curious mixture of personal vindictiveness, blindness and arrogance which had brought about this alliance shows how far the leading elements in German conservatism had come in the long process of degeneration, and it is undoubtedly more than a coincidence that its thinking led it to Hitler.
Agreement went far beyond tactics, not merely negatively in a common antagonism to democracy, liberalism and all freedom, but also positively in the vision of an authoritarian, nationalist class order with militarily orientated structures and the idea of a national community welded into a single disciplined entity. The nationalist and the National Socialist visions only gradually parted company. ‘Papen spoke on the radio,’ Goebbels noted in his diary in August 1932. ‘A speech that sprang
from beginning to end from our ideas.’14 Long since shorn of all humanist and religious values, but also devoid of the critical consciousness of tradition, the position of the conservatives no longer had any vitality or any ideas relevant to the future. It contained nothing but the rigid
demand, linked with the memory of past privileges, to entrench and wait for the hour to strike. Such conservatism could boast no intellectual or practical result that was not lost in the catastrophe it brought about. It stood immobile on all fronts; defensively it staked everything on the negation of the Revolution of 1789 with its political and social
consequences, while offensively it had nothing to show but the concept of the nationalist authoritarian state; and whatever it presented as
conservative ideology, the overwhelmingly predominant ideas were nothing but variations on these two uninspired motifs.
This was the point at which the national conservative and the National Socialist ideologies met. It was not so much the voters’ lack of discrimination, as Papen later reproachfully claimed, as the largely identical points of departure which led the greater part of the population to vote for Hitler instead of for the ‘conservative programme’.15 Strictly speaking, all attempts to differentiate the conservative ideology and programme from the National Socialist failed, and the verbiage expended in the effort reveals precisely what it seeks to conceal. ‘If I were not a German Nationalist, I should like to be a Nazi,’ Oldenburg-Januschau declared at a public meeting.16 A remark of this kind tells us more than the most extensive analysis could about the degeneration of the
conservative spirit in Germany. Fundamentally, he and his kind admired the consistency and ruthlessness of the National Socialists, and only the more helpless and stilted manner in which the German Nationalist movement expressed its aims distinguished it from the other camp. Whereas Hitler was able to set masses in motion, the turgid conservative proclamations, together with the recurrent assumption of arrogant
superiority, prevented their having any effect whatever. In January 1933 as in Harzburg, a crucial attraction of the alliance with Hitler was the hope that the ‘officers without an army’ in the ranks of the NSDAP might at last come to lead those masses that had refused their allegiance to the conservative cause as such.17 The hate-filled demagogy, naked barbarism and evil impulses that filtered up to the top were indulgently ascribed by these gentlemen to what they called the basically good-natured young and to the movement’s excessive revolutionary impetus, which they
confidently expected to tame. With such a wide range of agreement on practical points, they believed the points of disagreement were mainly