Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

HINDENBURG'S STICK 479rnanded to be made Chancellor and also Premier of Prussia. He boastedthat he would be able to wrestle a majority from the Reichstag, 'likeMussolini in 1922.' This was exactly what Schleicher wanted, and heseems to have answered: If Hitler could gain a majority, nobody couldand would prevent him from governing. Hitler, who, when excited,never was a good listener, believed that Schleicher had promised to'make' him Chancellor; well satisfied, he returned to Munich, andGoebbel's diary, not for the first time, shows a suspicion that his Fuhreragain might have been duped.The party was in a fever of anticipation. Rohm ordered a state ofalarm for the S.A., stationed strong troops in the headquarters so thathundreds of thousands could be mobilized within an hour. 'The wholeparty,' Goebbels reports, 'has prepared itself to take power. The S.A.men are leaving their places of work in order to make themselves ready.'And the other great and small functionaries of the party 'are preparingfor the great hour' — the great hour of mass murder. 'If things go well,'sighed Goebbels in his diary, 'everything is in order. But if things gobadly' — that is, if Hitler does not become Chancellor and there is noblood-bath — 'there will be a terrible setback.'The smell of revolution was in the air. Almost hourly, news reachedBerlin of new murders committed by National Socialists, particularly inthe eastern parts of the Reich; and the opposing side, the 'Iron Front' andthe Communists, also shed blood. The Reich government declaredmartial law; providing summary justice and the death penalty even forlesser acts of violence. That was at noon of August 9. In the night of thesame day, in the village of Potempa in Upper Silesia, five NationalSocialists armed with revolvers entered the house of a Communistminer by the name of Konrad Pietrzuch; the whole family — Pietrzuch,his mother, and his brother — were in bed; the five pulled Pietrzuch outof bed, threw him to the floor, and, before the eyes of his mother andbrother, beat him and trampled him for half an hour; the heel of a bootfractured his larynx, and he died.Hitler was back in his house a few hundred yards above Berchtesgaden;he was in good spirits and thought himself near his goal. Then —on August 9 — Strasser and Frick came for a visit and dis-