Read Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris for Free Online Page A

with the present, but resting on the true values – as they saw it – of the Teutonic past. Hitler encapsulated their hopes of a ruthless showdown with their enemies and exploiters, and embodied their dreams of a reborn Germany. ‘Any true German,’ declared another new member around this time, ‘in his soul longed for a German saviour, and sought to raise his eyes in trust and confidence to a truly great leader.’ 4
    Economic crises frequently unseat governments. It is much rarer for them to destroy
systems
of government. Even the extreme severity of the Depression of the early 1930s was compatible in some countries with the survival of democracy – where democracy was already firmly anchored, and not undermined by a lost war. The terrible privations that accompanied mass unemployment and economic collapse in the US A and Britain brought turbulence but no serious challenge to the democratic state. Democracy could emerge intact, perhaps strengthened. Even France, where democracy had a much more flimsy base, survived with some scares. But in Germany, the ‘system’ itself, the very nature of the state, was at stake from the beginning of the crisis. Hitler and his party were the beneficiaries of this systemic crisis of the Weimar state. They were not its primary cause. Even in its ‘golden’ years, Weimar democracy had never won the hearts and minds of large numbers of Germans. And even in those years, powerful sectors of society – business, the army, big landowners, leading civil servants in charge of government administration, academics, many intellectuals and opinion-leaders – had tolerated rather than actively supported the Republic. Not a few among the power élites were awaiting the opportunity to discard the democracy they detested so much. Now, as the crisis started to unfold, such groups began to show their true colours at the same time as the massesbegan to desert the Republic in droves. In Britain and America, the élites backed the existing, and long-established, democratic system, deeply embedded constitutionally, because it continued to serve their interests. In Germany, where the roots of democracy were far more shallow, they looked to change a system which, they felt, less and less upheld their interests, and to move to authoritarian rule. (For most of them this did not mean, at the time, Nazi rule.) In Britain and America the masses were, despite misery and discontent, faced with little alternative to the existing, well-established political parties. Nor, with few exceptions, did they look for any. In Germany, ‘political space’ was opened up for the Nazi breakthrough by the prior fragmentation of support for the parties of the centre and Right. 5 In Germany, therefore, the economic crisis ushered in from the beginning a fundamental crisis of the state. The battleground was, from the outset, the state itself. That was what Hitler wanted.

10
LEVERED INTO POWER

‘We’ve hired him.’
    Franz von Papen, end of January 1933
‘We’re boxing Hitler in.’
    Alfred Hugenberg, end of January 1933
‘No. All things considered, this government was no cause for concern.’
    Sebastian Haffner (1939)

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THE MAKING OF THE DICTATOR

‘It can’t be denied: he has grown. Out of the demagogue and party leader, the fanatic and agitator, the true statesman… seems to be developing.’
    Diary entry of the writer Erich Ebermayer,
for 21 March 1933
‘What the old parliament and parties did not accomplish in sixty years, your statesmanlike foresight has achieved in six months.’
    Letter to Hitler from
Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, 24 July 1933
‘In nine months, the genius of your leadership and the ideals which you have newly placed before us have succeeded in creating, from a people inwardly torn apart and without hope, a united Reich.’
    Franz von Papen, 14 November 1933,
speaking on behalf of the members of the Reich Government

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SECURING TOTAL POWER

‘I gave the order to shoot those most guilty