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

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THE LAST DAYS OF THE REPUBLIC 1931-33 163moment, as the final curtain fell, a minor farce took place among the motleygroup of conspirators gathered to bury the republican regime. Papen laterdescribed it.At about half-past ten the members of the proposed Cabinet met inmy house and walked across the garden to the Presidential palace,where we waited in Meissner’s office. Hitler immediately renewedhis complaints about not being appointed Commissioner for Prussia.He felt that this severely restricted his power. I told him . . . thePrussian appointment could be left until later. To this, Hitler repliedthat if his powers were to be thus limited, he must insist on newReichstag elections.This produced a completely new situation and the debate becameheated. Hugenberg, in particular, objected to the idea, and Hitlertried to pacify him by stating that he would make no changes inthe Cabinet, whatever the result might be . . . By this time it waslong past eleven o’clock, the time that had been appointed for ourinterview with the President, and Meissner asked me to end ourdiscussion, as Hindenburg was not prepared to wait any longer.We had had such a sudden clash of opinions that I was afraid ournew coalition would break up before it was born . . . At last wewere shown in to the President and I made the necessary formalintroductions. Hindenburg made a short speech about the necessityof full co-operation in the interests of the nation, and we were thensworn in. The Hitler cabinet had been formed. 167In this way, by way of the back door, by means of a shabby political dealwith the old-school reactionaries he privately detested, the former tramp fromVienna, the derelict of the First World War, the violent revolutionary, becameChancellor of the great nation.To be sure, the National Socialists were in a decided minority in the government;they had only three of the eleven posts in the cabinet and except for thechancellorship these were not key positions. Frick was Minister of the Interiorbut he did not control the police as this minister did in most European countries– the police in Germany were in the hands of the individual states. Thethird Nazi cabinet member was Goering, but no specific office could be foundfor him; he was named Minister without Portfolio, with the understanding thathe would become Minister of Aviation as soon as Germany had an air force.Little noticed was the naming of Goering to be also Minister of the Interior ofPrussia, an office that controlled the Prussian police; for the moment publicattention was focused on the Reich cabinet. Goebbels’ name, to the surprise ofmany, did not appear in it; momentarily he was left out in the cold.The important ministries went to the conservatives, who were sure theyhad lassoed the Nazis for their own ends: Neurath continued as Minister ofForeign Affairs; Blomberg was Minister of Defense; Hugenberg took over thecombined Ministries of Economy and Agriculture; Seldte, the Stahlhelm leader,was made Minister of Labor; the other ministries were left in the hands of nonparty”experts” whom Papen had appointed eight months before. Papen himselfwas Vice-Chancellor of the Reich and Premier of Prussia, and Hindenburg hadpromised him that he would not receive the Chancellor except in the company
164 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICHof the Vice-Chancellor. This unique position, he was sure, would enable himto put a brake on the radical Nazi leader. But even more: This governmentwas Papen’s conception, his creation, and he was confident that with the helpof the staunch old President, who was his friend, admirer and protector, andwith the knowing support of his conservative colleagues, who outnumbered theobstreperous Nazis eight to three, he would dominate it.But this frivolous, conniving politician did not know Hitler – no one reallyknew Hitler – nor did he comprehend the strength of the forces which hadspewed him up. Nor did Papen, or anyone else except Hitler, quite realize theinexplicable weakness, that now bordered on paralysis, of existing institutions– the Army, the churches, the trade unions, the political parties – or of thevast non-Nazi middle class and the highly organized proletariat all of which, asPapen mournfully observed much later, would ”give up without a fight.”No class or group or party in Germany could escape its share of responsibilityfor the abandonment of the democratic Republic and the advent of AdolfHitler. The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failureto unite against it. At the crest of their popular strength, in July 1932, theNational Socialists had attained but 37 per cent of the vote. But the 63 per centof the German people who expressed their opposition to Hitler were much toodivided and shortsighted to combine against a common danger which they musthave known would overwhelm them unless they united, however temporarily, tostamp it out. The Communists, at the behest of Moscow, were committed tothe last to the silly idea of first destroying the Social Democrats, the Socialisttrade unions and what middle-class democratic forces there were, on the dubioustheory that although this would lead to a Nazi regime it would be onlytemporary and would bring inevitably the collapse of capitalism, after which theCommunists would take over and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.Fascism, in the Bolshevik Marxist view, represented the last stage of a dyingcapitalism; after that, the Communist deluge!Fourteen years of sharing political power in the Republic, of making all thecompromises that were necessary to maintain coalition governments, had sappedthe strength and the zeal of the Social Democrats until their party had becomelittle more than an opportunist pressure organization, determined to bargainfor concessions for the trade unions on which their strength largely rested. Itmight be true, as some Socialists said, that fortune had not smiled on them:the Communists, unscrupulous and undemocratic, had split the working class;the depression had further hurt the Social Democrats, weakening the tradeunions and losing the party the support of millions of unemployed, who in theirdesperation turned either to the Communists or the Nazis. But the tragedyof the Social Democrats could not be explained fully by bad luck. They hadhad their chance to take over Germany in November 1918 and to found a statebased on what they had always preached: social democracy. But they lackedthe decisiveness to do so. Now at the dawn of the third decade they werea tired, defeatist party, dominated by old, well-meaning but mostly mediocremen. Loyal to the Republic they were to the last, but in the end too confused,too timid to take the great risks which alone could have preserved it, as theyhad shown by their failure to act when Papen turned out a squad of soldiers todestroy constitutional government in Prussia.Between the Left and the Right, Germany lacked a politically powerful middleclass, which in other countries – in France, in England, in the United States
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William L. ShirerTHE RISE AND FALL
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It was Hitler’s boast that the Th
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15 THE NAZI-SOVIET PACT 45916 THE L
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viiiTHE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD
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xTHE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REI
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Chapter 1BIRTH OF THE THIRDREICHOn
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BIRTH OF THE THIRD REICH 5dotage, h
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BIRTH OF THE THIRD REICH 13Mein Kam
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BIRTH OF THE THIRD REICH 15Hitler t
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BIRTH OF THE THIRD REICH 17and part
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BIRTH OF THE THIRD REICH 19Vienna w
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BIRTH OF THE THIRD REICH 21There we
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BIRTH OF THE THIRD REICH 23Though r
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BIRTH OF THE THIRD REICH 25My inner
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Chapter 2BIRTH OF THE NAZIPARTYOn t
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BIRTH OF THE NAZI PARTY 29approachi
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BIRTH OF THE NAZI PARTY 31regime, m
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BIRTH OF THE NAZI PARTY 37who remai
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Book Two:⋆ ⋆ ⋆TRIUMPH ANDCONS
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Book Six:⋆ ⋆ ⋆THE FALL OF THE
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