rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

136 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICHBut the aged President was not interested. He, whose duty it had beenas Commander of the Imperial Army to tell the Kaiser on that dark fall dayof November 1918 at Spa that he must go, that the monarchy was at an end,would not consider any Hohenzollern’s resuming the throne except the Emperorhimself, who still lived in exile at Doom, in Holland. When Bruening explainedto him that the Social Democrats and the trade unions, which with the greatestreluctance had given some encouragement to his plan if only because it mightafford the last desperate chance of stopping Hitler, would not stand for thereturn of either Wilhelm II or his eldest son and that moreover if the monarchywere restored it must be a constitutional and democratic one on the lines ofthe British model, the grizzly old Field Marshal was so outraged he summarilydismissed his Chancellor from his presence. A week later he recalled him toinform him that he would not stand for re-election.In the meantime first Bruening and then Hindenburg had had their firstmeeting with Adolf Hitler. Both talks went badly for the Nazi leader. He hadnot yet recovered from the blow of Geli Raubal’s suicide; his mind wanderedand he was unsure of himself. To Bruening’s request for Nazi support for thecontinuance in office of Hindenburg Hitler answered with a long tirade againstthe Republic which left little doubt that he would not go along with the Chancellor’splans. With Hindenburg, Hitler was ill at ease. He tried to impressthe old gentleman with a long harangue but it fell flat. The President, at thisfirst meeting, was not impressed by the ”Bohemian corporal,” as he called him,and told Schleicher that such a man might become Minister of Posts but neverChancellor – words which the Field Marshal would later have to eat.Hitler, in a huff, hastened off to Bad Harzburg, where on the next day,October 11, he joined a massive demonstration of the ”National Opposition”against the governments of Germany and Prussia. This was an assembly notso much of the radical Right, represented by the National Socialists, as of theolder, conservative forces of reaction: Hugenberg’s German National Party, theright-wing veterans’ private army, the Stahlhelm, the so-called Bismarck Youth,the Junkers’ Agrarian League, and an odd assortment of old generals. But theNazi leader did not have his heart in the meeting. He despised the frock-coated,top-hatted, be-medaled relics of the old regime, with whom, he saw, it mightbe dangerous to associate a ”revolutionary” movement like his own too closely.He raced through his speech in a perfunctory manner and left the field beforethe parade of the Stahlhelm, which, to his annoyance, had shown up in largernumbers than the S.A. The Harzburg Front which was formed that day andwhich represented an effort of the old-line conservatives to bring the Nazis into aunited front to begin a final assault on the Republic (it demanded the immediateresignation of Bruening) was thus stillborn. Hitler had no intention of playingsecond fiddle to these gentlemen whose minds, he thought, were buried in thepast to which he knew there was no return. He might use them for the momentif they helped to undermine the Weimar regime and made available to him, asthey did, new financial sources. But he would not, in turn, be used by them.Within a few days the Harzburg Front was facing collapse; the various elementsof it were once more at each other’s throats.Except on one issue. Both Hugenberg and Hitler refused to agree to Bruening’sproposal that Hindenburg’s term of office be prolonged. At the beginningof 1932 the Chancellor renewed his effort to get them to change their minds.With great difficulty he had prevailed on the President to agree to serving fur-