The Day They Yoked Hitler

...Yet Hindenburg did not want to appoint Hitler...

...Eventually the Conservatives, headed by Papen with his vulpine charm, chose to make common cause with Hitler...

...At ten o'clock Hitler, Goering, and Frick came out of the Kaiserhof...

...On February 3 an American university president (Thomas S. Baker of the Carnegie Institute of Technology) reported in the New York Times that he had watched the Nazi torchlight procession on the night of Hitler's appointment...

...When Hindenburg received him in late November 1932 Hitler said, among other things: "The Bolshevization of the masses proceeds rapidly...

...Six years later he was the dominator of Europe, the head of a German Reich greater than Bismarck's had ever been...

...The Berlin correspondent wrote, among other things: "Herr Hitler is reported to be in a more docile frame of mind...

...Yet his cabinet was not a Nazi one...

...Like Luther, Hitler wanted to unite the greater German nation...

...Hitler also knew another thing: that marriage was more respectable than rape, and that anti-Communism was more popular and respectable than Communism...

...but he looked up at them...

...The remaining Marxists were bitter with the pain of jealousy...

...An article followed on page 3: "Hitler Puts Aside Aim to be Dictator...

...Hitler was convinced of this...

...There was enough truth in it to bring him dose to victory...

...Then the once few National Socialists had overcome all of their opponents—the Conservatives, the Democrats, the Socialists, the Communists—because they represented and incarnated an idea that was stronger than were the ideas of their opponents...

...He was deeply moved...

...In 1933 there were millions of Communists and Social Democrats within Germany...

...Hindenburg watched it behind a window...

...It is generally felt" . . . the kind of Impersonal Passive that bedevils us during this century, whether in students' papers or in PR releases...

...The hopes and the desires of the German masses were gathering around Hitler and his party, who never spoke in economic terms, indeed, who had no-economic program at all...

...They were hesitant and weak...

...He knew what he was doing...

...Yet the number of ComWhile Mussolini was the founder of Fascism, Hitler was not the founder of National Socialism...

...There was a small crowd...

...Had someone like Hoover been President in 1940 Hitler might have won his European war...

...and Germany was the fatherland of Marxism...

...Now they knew...

...On 30 January 1933 Hitler began to paint Germany in his colors...

...The national-liberal Kol-nische Zeitung wrote: this "Cabinet of national concentration may bring the tranquillity to Germany she so urgently needs...

...In 1932 (there were four elections in that year) at least one of three, at times almost two of five...

...When Hitler's war began, that too was to be a repetition on a larger scale of what had happened -in January 1933...

...They were old-fashioned patriots, who as early as 1933 recognized what kind of man Hitler was and what his power meant, better than the Marxists and better than conservatives of the kind of a Chamberlain or a Petain...

...One Nazi had been worth two Communists or three Socialists in the streets or on the podiums of Germany then...

...He knew that his opponents as well as his newly gathered associates were hollow men...

...Because behind them was Roosevelt...

...That evening Papen told his friends: "Wir haben ihn uns engagiert...

...Among the future victims of Hitler the Czechoslovak press reported that he "has been made a prisoner of the Conservatives...

...There is also the fact" —another of those Facts—"that the Hindenburg and Hitler...

...Yet Hitler rose in Germany when both Soviet Russia and the United States had removed themselves from Europe, and when Lenin and Wilson were dying, broken men...

...Already in 1932 the only possible alternative to the Nazis may have been a military dictatorship...

...So Hitler was wrong too: but that didn't matter...

...The London Times was grey, bland, fairly noncommittal...

...Seven weeks after Hitler's appointment the elected representatives of the German people (the Communist deputies were the only ones excluded from the new Reichstag) voted, nearly five to one, to give Hitler all the dictatorial powers he wanted...

...Behind the windowpanes of the Kaiserhof Goebbels and the Nazi chieftains were feverish...

...They had outnumbered the red flags with the hammer and sickle, hanging limp...

...he asked...

...They were wrong...

...There were few people in the world who knew what Hitler's appointment meant...

...They persuaded Hindenburg to get rid of the military politician, Chancellor General Schleicher...

...Had Hindenburg appointed Hitler...

...He manipulated and steered the experienced politicians and statesmen, until they convinced themselves to give him what he wanted, in exchange for small compromises that melted away to nothing...

...Papen was wrong...

...The front page of January 30, 1933 carried the following headlines and articles: ROOSEVELT AND LINDSAY FIND A BASIS FOR BRITISH DEBTS' MEETINGS IN MARCH YOUNG ASKS NAME NOT TO BE CONSIDERED FOR A CABINET POST SARA TEASDALE, POET FOUND DEAD BRITON URGES RISE IN VALUE OF SILVER DALADIER FORMING CABINET IN FRANCE WITH SOCIALIST AID To the left, below the obituary obeisance to the late Miss Teasdale, there was an article: HITLER FAVORED IN REICH...

...It is generally felt that the government is Colonel von Papen's show...

...He also knew that this was the kind of argument that would impress Hindenburg and the Conservatives and the industrialists...

...Six years later Adolf Hitler was the master of a Great German Reich, and the most powerful and feared statesman in the world...

...In 1933 people said that Hitler might mislead the befuddled Germans but that such an uninstructed and inexperienced man would be no match for the statesmen of Europe...

...Thereupon the president of the university, a good old Conservative Lutheran Staatsbeamter and Hoch-gelehrter...

...On that thirtieth of January in 1939 he would enter the monumental marble halls of a new Reich Chancellery, designed and built by Albert Speer, perhaps the most impressive government building of the twentieth century...

...Schleicher had the support neither of Hinden-burg nor of his fellow generals...

...In the Kaiserhof Hotel, his headquarters then, Adolf Hitler rose unusually early...

...He said as much about Roosevelt and the Jews in a speech on January 30,1939, when he occupied the new Chancellery, on the sixth anniversary of his Chancellorship...

...One look at the faces: he had...

...Had the United States been led by an isolationist the British might not have declared war on him in 1939 or fought him as they did in 1940...

...Hitler (and Goebbels) had a governing idea...

...Hitler once said...

...But who would listen to (let alone trust) Polish nationalists...

...Hitler was not...

...It was a hyperborean day in Berlin, befitting that great Prussian capital city, unusually cold...

...At the end of that year, thirteen years after the Treaty of Versailles had declared the demilitarization of the Germans, both the President and the Chancellor of Germany were generals...

...Unlike Bismarck, he had achieved this without wars...

...He also reported (this was a subhead): "100,000 Republicans at Rally in Berlin Voice Their Readiness to 'Mount the Barricades'"—something that never happened, a non-event...

...Against Hitler their convictions and resolutions amounted to nothing...

...Wedding, 1933...

...Next to him stood Count Helldorf, the SA leader of Great-Berlin, and another SA leader, Karl Ernst...

...so did Hitler...

...There was the political genius of Hitler...

...In 1919, when he began to speak in public, those who had known him before laughed at his aspirations...

...Mussolini received him, for the first and last time in his life, an event of which Pound was so proud that he kept the letter of invitation framed on his wall...

...He turned to the group around him...

...People thought, and many still think, that he was nothing more than a rabblerouser, or a nationalist idealist without political experience...

...Why had the British begun to oppose him...

...Unlike Bismarck's, that pact was to be an instrument not of peace but of war...

...By February 4 all references to Germany disappeared from the front page...

...In one sense his rabid assessment of Roosevelt was correct...

...One German soldier was worth at least two Russian soldiers or three French soldiers...

...The Times editorial that day: "Hitler is regarded as the prisoner of Von Papen . . . and the Generals...

...Those whom they had believed to be theirs had heard the voice of Hitler, they had chosen to be married to Hitler...

...For the first time there was an editorial about Hitler, as soothing and obtuse as editorials so often are, with a good dosing of "facts" of the future (that is, out of the editorial writer's wearisome imagination): "Germany's foreign policy will remain unchanged...

...Eventually he failed because Germany was one thing, and the rest of the world another...

...Then Meissner came in...

...That evening, at seven, there began a march of triumph, a torchlight parade of Nazi troops and groups, nearly a mile long...

...Der alte Herr, the Old Gentleman, was waiting...

...but in the university of Breslau Nazi students had broken into Cohen's classroom and threatened to throw'him out of the window...

...because his Nazis appealed to certain atavistic German sentiments and ideas...

...It consisted of nine Conservatives and two Nazis, Goering and Frick, beside Hitler...

...Within Germany, too, the handful of brave men who attempted the Tyrannicide of 1944, to kill Hitler, who, in their minds, had brought Germany not only close to defeat but who had covered the German name with infamy, were men who, for the most part, were moved by convictions that were reactionary and not merely conservative, religious and not merely political: they were not modern nationalists but old-fashioned patriots...

...and so we will stay till the last breath of every one of us...

...How did this former Austrian waif, a bohemian painter, a self-made demagogue, the plotter of a failed coup d'etat, who had not even become a citizen of Germany until seven months before, about whom the old Hindenburg had made scathing comments only two months before, become the Chancellor of the Reich...

...Ten years later people said that he might be a successful speaker but he had no political talent...

...Adolf Hitler came to power on Franklin Roosevelt's birthday...

...Unfortunately General Schleicher was a political dilettante...

...That day, too, was the thirtieth of a month, and a Monday...

...Churchill knew that...

...They went into the Chancellery, up to the spacious anteroom of the President's Secretary Meissner, arguing still...

...in the end Hitler (and Papen) accused him of preparing a military coup d' etat, falsely so...

...All of this is an interesting and even instructive story, retold by many historians...

...and the record of his cruelties will darken his name until civilization perishes from this earth...

...They walked past it, passing the President's apartments, to a building close by on the Wilhelmsstrasse, containing the apartment of Franz von Papen...

...It "seemed somewhat tame," he wrote...

...Hitler is hardly a Napoleon...

...There were, as yet, no anti-Semitic regulations in Germany (indeed, the German Foreign Ministry issued a circular, instructing German diplomatic posts abroad to assure people that nothing of that kind was to be expected...

...He knew that this was not true...

...To deal with a Chamberlain would be no more trouble than to deal with a Papen had been...

...Inside every British or Polish or French or Russian or American workingman there was a nationalist, too: but not a German one...

...So did de Gaulle...

...Best assurance of all is the fact that President Hindenburg will retain supreme command, prepared to unmake Hitler as quickly as he has made him...

...Europe Will Soon Know the German Danger and The Sooner The Better...

...The accepted opinion, according to which Hitler knew nothing about the United States, is untrue...

...The first was to be hanged elev«n years later, the second was to be shot less than two years later, on Hitler's orders...

...Throughout his life Hitler was underestimated...

...Hitler had won the Germans because inside every German Communist and inside every German Socialist there was a German nationalist...

...During the entire week after Hitler's appointment among the forty or fifty Letters to the Editor printed in the New York Times not one spoke about Germany or Hitler...

...Their discussions had to stop...

...they underestimate it even now...

...But he gave relatively little thought to the United States until the winter of 1938-39 when he began to realize that his greatest opponent might be Roosevelt...

...Pound, too, was wrong: the man who would go unhesitant to the root, the real radical, was not Mussolini, it was Hitler...

...People underestimated this then...

...He wrote that Mussolini was "The Boss," a man able to go "unhesitant to the root...

...Like Bismarck, he made a pact with Russia...

...Why should I nationalize the industries...

...munist votes hardly rose during the entire period from 1930 to 1933...

...Rector Magnificus, chose to suspend the professor, not the students, in the name of law and order, no doubt...

...Unlike Luther, his failure was not partial but complete...

...The hotel stood across from a Prussian baroque building which had been built in 1738, two years before Frederick the Great became King...

...Unlike ten years before, when his putsch was shot to pieces in a Munich street, he would become the ruler of Germany legally, constitutionally, not against but with the support of the most respectable elements in Germany...

...And so he arrived at the thirtieth of January...

...Pound was deeply moved and impressed...

...Regarding that thirtieth of January there was yet another coincidence...

...The others did not...

...That evening there were six million Germans without jobs...

...After half an hour Hitler's friends, crowded against the windows of the Kaiserhof, saw a small group: Hitler, Goering, Frick, Papen, and others coming back, talking...

...While preparing this article I looked up the contemporary New York Times...

...The Socialist Vor-w'drts: the cabinet was made up of "agrarian and capitalist reactionaries...

...Surely this was not what Professor Ernst Cohen felt that day...

...In order to be entrusted with power he had to get the Respectables on his side...

...There was a surge of excitement...

...He held them in the hollow of his hand...

...In 1930 one of five or six...

...This is what our leaders believe...

...I shall nationalize the people...

...Because of the kind of sloppy and dishonest intellectual habits so typical of this century "Fascist" and "Fascism," at first promoted by fellow-travelers, thereafter became the common term denominating all kinds of non-leftist dictatorships, at the cost of historical accuracy and truth...

...His hatred of Roosevelt eventually soared even beyond his hatred for Churchill (not to speak of Stalin of whom he would speak with respect and even with admiration throughout the war...

...and behind Roosevelt he saw the Jews...

...There was the failure of the parliamentary, the liberal, the republican democracy of the Weimar Germany before Hitler...

...In 1878 Bismarck chose it for the Chancellery of the Reich...

...Among his future allies the Italian press chortled with satisfaction: here was a German who followed the model that Mussolini had given the world...

...but no further...

...this is the thesis of all kinds of contemporary historians and cold war theorists: the Great Confrontation began in 1917, with Lenin and Wilson...

...Now Adolf Hitler was the Chancellor of Germany...

...Wedding, Red Wedding, was the name of a working-class Berlin district, the grimy citadel of Central European Communism and Socialism...

...It was the Nazis, not the Conservatives, who would rule Germany for the twelve years to come...

...In 1933 Hitler rode the wave of the future...

...cry does not carry conviction...

...As early as 1932 Stalin proscribed the term "National Socialist" and "Nazi" from the Communist vocabulary—ever since that time the proper Soviet reference has been "Fascists" or "Hitlerites"—for a good reason: people might have recognized that national socialist was exactly what Stalin and the Soviet Union had become...

...He was reined in," Hitler was on Papen's team now...

...Much of Hitler's old electoral thunder has either been stolen from him or has died down into a negligible rumble...

...Underneath its garden, under another pile of rubble, Hitler killed himself...

...Few of them have concentrated on the larger meaning of these events...

...Wasn't it thus that this erstwhile poor and defeated Germany became the principal power of Europe, indifferent to the potential opposition of the French and the British Empires, no matter how large these were on the map, no matter how large their natural resources...

...I doubt it...

...but the latter term was more precise...

...Hitler News Fails to Stir Wall Street...

...Communism...

...In 1940 Churchill and de Gaulle proved true to themselves...

...In the office of the Reich President Hindenburg sat behind Bismarck's desk...

...Mussolini had read, or pretended to have read, Pound's draft of the XXX Cantos...

...The Soviet press commented not at all...

...Next day this correspondent cabled from Berlin: "The composition of the Cabinet leaves Herr Hitler no scope for gratification of any dictatorial ambition...

...And there was the historical condition, full of meaning for us even now, when for nearly forty years we have been living under the shadow of what seems to be The Great Confrontation of the Twentieth Century, that of Capitalism vs...

...At noon they came out into the cold grey Berlin air...

...There was one exception: the Polish nationalist newspapers...

...He tried to split the Nazi party in vain...

...The Nazis had become the largest party in Germany...

...PAPEN IS SEEN IN CONTROL, said the New York Times headline on February 1. "Close scrutiny of the cabinet line-up . . . would seem to show that Herr Hitler has merely been taken in tow...

...Papen and Goering were smiling...

...John Lukacs THE DAY THEY YOKED HITLER "Herr Hitler is reported to be in a more docile frame of mind," a Berlin correspondent wrote on January 30,1933In 1933, fifty years ago, the thirtieth of January fell on a Monday: the beginning of a week, and of much else besides...

...And in the end there were not two or three but five or ten enemy soldiers converging on every German one...

...They saw the struggle for Europe as if that were but a repetition, on a larger scale, of the struggle which they had fought and won in Germany in 1933...

...That day, 30 January 1933— one of those curious coincidences that logicians loathe—was a starry day in the life of Ezra Pound...

...Now we are together...

...but, in more than one way, Mussolini and Stalin were national socialists...

...The Depression affected Germany worse than any other country in the world, including the United States...

...In February 1933 red swastika flags sprouted like large vulgar flowers from the windows of those dark tenements...

...There are still historians and political "scientists" who blame the coming of Hitler on the economic conditions of the Depression...

...After 1920 there arose a new force in Europe, Fascism (a very inadequate term* but which, for the sake of intellectual shorthand, must do) whose prime incarnation was to be Hitler's Germany, and which eventually proved so powerful that it took a world war and the combined forces of Communism and Democracy, the armies of the British, the American, and the Russian empires, to defeat it: neither the Anglo-Americans nor the Russians could do it alone...

...It was eleven-fifteen...

...In any event it was Hitler and not Mussolini or Lenin or Stalin or Mao who was the greatest revolutionary in the history of the twentieth century —just as four hundred years before, at the opening of the Modern Age, Luther had been a greater revolutionary than Zwingli or Calvin...

...Another six years and three months later that Chancellery was a mound of rubble...

...He painted himself into a corner in the end...

...He saw the world according to his colors...

...Two years later there were but a few thousand...

...Yet the events leading to his appointment to the Chancellorship show that his political ability at least matched his oratorical one...

...So the new Germany would overcome the capitalist democracies in the West and the primitive mass of Soviet Russia in the east...

...Marxism, or of Democracy vs...

...He warned Jews "inside and outside Europe" that if they were "to succeed" in bringing about a second world war, the result would be "the annihilation of the Jewish race throughout Europe"— words that went largely unheeded...

...The Catholic Ger-mania: the new cabinet "has established clearness and unequivocal responsibility...

...They were not going to the Chancellery...

...John Lukacs is professor of history at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia...

...Did they talk about Hitler...

...Like 1914,1933 showed up—or, more precisely, it should have showed up—the antiquated intellectual categories of Marxism, and the most widespread idiocy of the twentieth century, the belief in Economic Man...

...In 1928 only one of every thirty-six German voters had chosen Hitler's party...

...Reich Shows True Face...

...Hitler was not a Fascist (he once told one of his confidants that Fascism was only "a half-job...

...The division of Europe, of Germany, of Berlin was the result of his war...

...Negligible rumble" was good...