The Rest Is History - 297: The Nazis: Hitler's Triumph

Episode Date: January 23, 2023

Wall Street crashes. The German economy capitulates and governments start to fall. Backroom deals and political scheming come to the fore. Join Tom and Dominic as they tell the story of the shadowy deals that allowed Hitler to gain power. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Raise the flag, the ranks tightly closed, the SA marches with calm, steady step. Comrades shot by the Red Front and reactionaries march in spirit within our ranks. Clear the streets for the brown battalions, clear the streets for the storm division man millions are looking upon the hooked cross full of hope the day of freedom and of bread dawns for the last time the call to arms is sounded for the fight we all stand prepared already hitler's banners fly over all streets the time of bondage will last but a little while now.

Those are the English translation of the Horst Vessel song, which Dominic, I think I'm correct in saying, ended up kind of the anthem of Germany, didn't it? Along with Deutschland Uber Alley's Once the Nazis Had Taken Power. And it was, of course, written by a man called Horst Vessel. So hence its name. And Horst Wessel is pretty much the only time I've ever written about the rise of the Nazis, because he featured in Dominion. And as I was writing about Horst Wessel, I was kind of obviously looking at, you know, echoes of parodies of Christianity. And I hadn't fully appreciated the background to the story, which is what this episode is basically about. So it's the process by which the Great Depression hits Germany, street fights between the Nazis and communists intensify, and towards the end of it,

we move towards Hitler actually taking power. Yes. So hello, everybody. Last week, we did two episodes about the rise of the Nazis. So the origins, the intellectual and political origins of Nazism, and then the story of Hitler in the 1920s, for much of the 1920s. And this episode is the sort of the crunch point, I suppose, is the point at which the Nazis take power. So we left them with the Nazis as a small party, but expanding, particularly in the Protestant countryside in the late 1920s against the backdrop of the Weimar Republic. United under a leader in Adolf Hitler who has the gift of the gab and has become convinced that he is the man of destiny who will lead Germany to greatness. And Tom, you were very keen to talk about Horst Wessel. So Horst Wessel is a young man who joins the Nazi party in, I think, 1926. So it's round about the time that we ended the last podcast. Is that right? Yes. Yeah. I just thought it would be interesting just to zoom in because we've been, you know,

it's been a lot of kind of broad brush high politics. And I think the Horst Wessel story kind of highlights quite a lot of these broader themes. And at the end of episode two, you were talking about how the Nazis had a particular appeal for the young. And Vessel absolutely illustrates that. So you talked about Himmler, who was born in 1900, but Vessel is born in 1907. So he's joining the Nazi party age 19. He is also, he's very middle class. His father was a Lutheran pastor. And essentially, I think that Wessel discovers in the Nazis a sense of excitement and glamour and swagger and purpose that he is not finding in the church. In the previous generation,

he might have done, but not now. Like a lot of the young people that you were talking about in the previous episode, he has a feeling that he has missed out on fighting in the Great War. He was also, again, quite like, say, Goebbels or other leading Nazis. He was not physically prepossessing as a boy. He'd fallen off a horse and broken his arm. And so almost by way of compensation, he was obsessed with violence. He kind of taught himself martial arts, practiced boxing, all that kind of stuff. And he had this kind of, you know, going to school and then going on to university. He studies law in Berlin. He has this interest in street fighting.

And when Goebbels comes to Berlin, Berlin is a very red Berlin. It's a very communist city. Goebbels recognizes in Wessel someone who can provide him with a spear point, driving it into the guts of the communist areas of Berlin. And Wessel brings some of those kind of Lutheran qualities to it. So that song, the horse Vessel song, it's written like a hymn. And Vessel is writing lots of these songs, and he's kind of hiring musicians, and they're marching through communist areas playing these songs, getting into fights.

And Vessel ends up being shot. He actually kind of gets shot in the face in his own room. And he kind of lingers in agony for several weeks and then dies. And Goebbels picks on him to play the role of a martyr. And I use the word advisedly because Goebbels, who comes from a Catholic background, deliberately echoes Christian iconography. He ends at the funeral service, he explicitly compares Vessel to Christ. Just reading your notes, extraordinary. A man who calls out through his deeds, come to me, I shall redeem you. A divine element works in him, making him the man he is and causing him to act in this way. One man must set an example and offer himself up as a

sacrifice. I mean, it's explicit, isn't it? It's not even- It's absolutely explicit. And I think that, you know, and in due course, Wessel will come to serve Nazis almost as a kind of God. You have girls in the 30s who go to kind of, you know, woods or the ruins of amphitheaters or whatever, and make offerings to Wessel if they can't get pregnant. I mean, it's very, very odd. Incredible. At the Nuremberg Rally, they sing, we don't follow Christ, we follow Horst Wessel. Yeah. So I think that that shows the readiness of the Nazis to construct a mythology that will be appealing. And I think that Wessel's own life shows that a huge part of what the Nazis offer to young men who are looking for a sense of purpose is a sense of drama, of action, and the kind of thrill of

violence. And all of this is obviously happening against the backdrop of the Great Depression, which as conventionally told is what helps bring the Nazis to power and to what extent is that actually the case Dominic? Well as your story suggests I think Tom the Nazis would have always had an appeal in the kind of traumatized brutalized very unhappy neurotic landscape of 1920s Germany even if the economy had been doing much better so you know the people are somebody like Horst Wessel doesn't fight in the war looking for meaning, looking for belonging. Christianity doesn't offer that. It doesn't seem to offer that anymore. So it would have been a fringe appeal. But what transforms the Nazis' fortunes, I think,

irrevocably, is the impact of the Great Depression. So Germany was always struggling in the 1920s, struggling with the burden of the First World War, as Britain is actually. But Germany has to pay reparations. But Germany has to pay reparations. It's had their hyperinflation, for which there's no real British equivalent. Germany has begun to recover by the second half of the 20s,

but it's very dependent on loans from American banks. Right. So that makes it very, very susceptible to the crash. It's a terrible position to be in. So Germany is not unusual. Austria is the same, a lot of Central Europe. It's already got quite high unemployment by 1929, by the point at which you have the Wall Street crash in October 1929, which I mean, most of our listeners, I imagine, will be vaguely familiar with the stock market crashing apocryphal stories and they are apocryphal of people leaping out of the windows of wall street buildings and so on what what happens

what definitely happens though is that american banks start to withdraw their money from central europe um and and that's quite a protracted process so that takes about a year or so to really, for the full horror of the impact to become apparent. So, I mean, Horst Wessel is shot in the beginning of 1930. And at that point, the Depression has not yet fully hit Germany. It fully hits in the spring and summer of 1931. So it's the collapse of the big Austrian bank, the Credit Anstalt, which I think at the time was the big austrian bank the credit and stelts which i think at the time is the biggest bank in central europe and then lot takes lots of other banks with it and

so again that poor price is middle class who've had their savings oh i mean the stats are frightening so about one in three workers registered workers is out of work in germany by 1932 it's probably even worse in the big industrial heartlands in the rur and silesia um i think i got this from richard evans's book about 13 million people are in germany at this point so that's what you know a quarter getting on for a quarter of the population or so um slightly less, are living in households that are blighted by unemployment, where they're either dependents of people who don't have a job or they don't have a job themselves. You get a half million people homeless, people turning in their droves to prostitution, to

begging, to crime, and so on. And it's the criminality, isn't it, for the Nazis and indeed for the communists, actually kind of heightens the sense that the streets are a battleground. So Horst Fessel, somebody like him, I mean, he's been drawn into kind of paramilitary politics, which has been there since the end of the First World War in 1918. But of course, when you have so many unemployed young men, you say to them, here's a uniform, here's a truncheon or a or a pistol come into the streets you know join us we are i mean that song that you i'm a thank god you didn't

sing it um but it's like a kind of hyper militarized boy scouts anthem exactly right yeah i think that's exactly what it is um babylon berlin the tv series that we talked about the german brilliant german tv series we talked about in the last episode, captures this very well, that young men who are looking for something, who are sick of the old men's world, somebody gives them a belt. Excitement. A shirt, excitement, belonging, friends. The stormtroopers, they will go on camps and sit around the fire

and sing songs and all of this sort of stuff. Now, the communists doing that this too so communist membership trebles between 1929 and 1932 unemployed the unemployed in particular is drawn to communism you can completely understand why the leader of the communist party sort of their answer to hitler if you like it's a man called ernst tellman who's a manual laborer from hamb. He, like Hitler, won the Iron Cross in the First World War. He's a pure classic communist revolutionary Stalinist. He's taking orders from Moscow. He absolutely believes in revolution. He believes in smashing the bourgeois parties.

The communists hate the Social Democrats and the parties of Weimar. It's understandable why, because the Social Democrats had used the army against them in 1918, 1919. And so this is key to understand, isn't it? That the Nazis are... So Horsfessel is being sent in by Goebbels to rough up the communists and to provoke them and to generate street fighting against them. So for Horsfessel and Goebbels, the communists are the main adversary. But for the communists, even though they don't like the Nazis, if they're given the opportunity, they'll go up to Horsfessel's room and shoot him in the face.

But for them, in a way, the main enemy aren't the Nazis at all. It's the Social Democrats. Yeah, it's a funny one, isn't it? It's kind of like people on the far left of the labour party disliking blairites more than they dislike tories it is that it is that in a way tom i mean it's a very sort of exaggerated lurid version of that so the yes i think the communists would say they'd say the nazis are just a kind of efflorescence. The Nazis are just clowns and criminals. The real enemy are the bourgeois capitalists of the SPD and their allies, the liberals, the Catholic Centre Party. These are

the people who are holding us down. These are the people for whom the police work and all this kind of thing. And they're the people we must smash to build a worker's state. Yeah. And this is a tension that kind of goes back to Rosa Luxemburg and everybody who, her death in 1919, the communists blame on the Social Democrats, but presumably gets turbocharged by the experience of the Depression. It does indeed.

Absolutely does. So 1929, in May 1929, there's a very famous incident shown in the series Babylon Berlin called Bloody May May where the Berlin police who are being controlled by the social democrats they attack a communist demonstration they kill 33 people and injure hundreds more I mean this for the communists is you know this inflames them against the social democrats still further now of course the interesting thing is

the communists hate the bourgeois parties as much as they hate the Nazis. The bourgeois parties are the people who vote for them. If they are given a choice, if they had to choose between the stalinism they look at the nazis they say well the nazis probably they talk very you know they're full of all this stuff and all this violence but actually if they got into government they'll probably tell you they won't nick your house they won't they won't confiscate your property and probably they would work with conservative elites and it would actually all be fine so and so the the effect of this uh a great great sentence in michael burley's book third reich new history um the electoral profile of the national socialist party has been described as an integrative people's party with an accentuated middle-class character or less pretentiously as having the profile of a man with a pot belly

well yeah that's absolutely mean, it's definitely true that even though you have the antics of people like Horse Vessel being shot in the face and street fighting, that by 1929, 1930 or so, the Nazis are beginning to win more kind of respectable votes. Now, all of that said, the Nazis still would not have got into power i think had it not been for the fact that the weimar elites commit probably the most flagrant and shocking act of political suicide in modern history and what will follow is very complicated and intricate and involves all kinds of maneuvering and faction fighting but step by the people who should, as we said last time, the people who should be the guardians of Weimar democracy are actually digging its grave and indeed their own

graves in some circumstances. So should we get into that story, Tom? It's a complicated story. Are you girding your loins? Yeah, let's gird our loins for this. So the process by which the Weimar Republic commits suicide against this backdrop of depression, of street fighting, of red on brown violence and brown on red violence. So terrible situation when really anyone with a concern for democracy should be manning the defences. And instead, they basically kind of demolished the walls they do so the first blow is struck in march 1930 so up to this point the government had been run by a grand coalition under a guy called herman muller who was the um who's from the social democrats and it's a coalition of the social democrats the liberal parties and the catholic center party but that

for various complicated reasons which we don't need to go into that coalition falls apart and at that point there was no majority in the reichstag now president hindenburg the world war one general who we talked about last time who is the prussian walrus the prussian walrus as you described him i said he was he was cut from oak but you described as a walrus he's both he's an oak wooden walrus. He and his circle have never liked democracy, never liked all the parliamentary horse trading. They distrust it.

They think it's un-German. They think it's weak. They think it betrays the legacy of Bismarck and the Kaiser. And they think this is a good chance to start building, you know, the road towards the return of a proper authoritarian regime. And the people in the army like this, they think, yes, because we want to rearm. We hate the Treaty of Versailles.

We hate having to answer to politicians. The more we can sort of facilitate this, the better. So Hindenburg and the army generals around him, they agree that basically the answer is stop subordinating everything to parliamentary politics. Let's have a cabinet of experts. You pick a guy from the Reichstag, and they will rule by emergency decree. So this is the one that right from the beginning had been used. Yeah, that Ebert, the Social Democrat, had used it against the left in the early 20s. It's this sort of ticking time bomb in the Weimar constitution. I guess probably a lot of constitutions have similar emergency provisions, but the Germans have been getting used, they've got addicted to using this.

Hindenburg thinks we'll rule by decree. We won't need to worry about parliamentary majorities. So he brings in a chap from the Catholic centre party, the Zentrum, whose name is Heinrich Brüning. Brüning is from Munster. He's from a very devout Catholic family. He's a very, very clever man. He's very austere, kind of bald-haired, glasses. He'd studied, interestingly, Strasbourg, Bonn, and the London School of Economics, Tom. And his thesis, his PhD thesis was on British railways. So clearly, clearly Germany was doomed then. So yes. So he, yet another Iron Cross winner in World War I,

very patriotic, a monarchist, a believer in the Kaiser, a sort of small C conservative man, very, very serious Catholic, a tax specialist. He's got a bit of, associated with the rest of his history, Antonio Salazar. Ah, yes. About him, I think it's fair to say. In fact, there's a couple of Salazarist kind of characters in this.

So he's very reactionary, in other words. He is pretty reactionary. His party is normally the centre party, but he's pretty much on the right of that party. It's been moving to the right anyway. And he... I mean, is he as kind of, you know, back to 1450 as Salazar?

No, he's not. He's not quite that bad. No, he's not quite that bad at all. But he is austere. His instincts are quite authoritarian. So he starts, he restricts the freedom of the press quite early on. His economic policy is very deflationary. So what that means is... When you say he restricts the freedom of the press quite early on. His economic policy is very deflationary.

So what that means is- When you say he restricts the press, is he restricting just the left-wing press or all the press? Yes, yes. So all of Bruning's kind of law and order measures and things, they tend to be directed more at the left than the right. And this is that fear of communism thing. This underestimation of the Nazis and the belief,

very common among what you might call the respectable parliamentary parties, that the real threat is communism. You can understand why they think that, Tom. They want to protect their property and the class system and all of that stuff. They're also looking at what's happened in the Soviet Union. They think, Christ, that's the last thing we want to happen here. So this is understandable but fatal. Bruning's economic policy is very deflationary. He doesn't believe in tax and spend. He doesn't believe in what we'd now call Keynesianism,

so public works, all of that stuff. He says, listen, in the midst of the Depression, the thing to do is batten down the hatches, stabilize your economy, cut spending. Incidentally, this is exactly what the British are doing. So are Ramsey MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin. So this is not unheard of by any means. It's kind of what Herbert Hoover was doing in the United States.

Let's not print money. We've learned the lesson of printing money in the hyperinflation, so that's the last thing we do. The result of this is he cuts lots of people's unemployment benefits, pushes lots more people into poverty, makes himself the most unpopular chancellor since the beginning of the Weimar Republic. So this is very Herbert Hoover. Very Herbert Hoover. Exactly what's happening in the United States at the same time. Pretty much what actually happens in Britain under Ramsay MacDonald that splits the Labour Party. So you can sort of see how we were talking so much

about how much this story is unique to Germany. There are so many shared elements, but because it's happening in Germany with the street violence, with this traumatised, embittered population, it all just takes on a different character. And the framework of democracy starting to creak under the pressure.

Starting to crumble. Yeah. Brüning decides he's going to ask kindenberg in the autumn of 1930 to dissolve the reichstag and to call an election ian kershaw calls this a decision of breathtaking irresponsibility not the last that will be made in this podcast so because bruning thinks you know what bruning thinks the german people will never vote for these clowns, the Nazis. And, you know, hopefully I can get some kind of cobble together, some kind of coalition. And he also thinks, in the worst comes to the worst, Hindenburg will always protect the constitution. That's what he's sworn to do. He's a dutiful Prussian officer. He wouldn't do anything

stupid. Again, a terrible miscalculation. So we're plunged into an election campaign. You talked about a horse vessel being shot at the beginning of 1930 throughout 90 and the funeral and goebbels's speech throughout 1930 the nazis have basically whipped themselves into this frenzy marches parades because that's what that's what goebbels is famous for and he's you know horse vessels funeral exemplifies that that they're very very good at making a show putting on a show and in the context of this bleakness unemployment people with nothing to do a party that puts on a show and is promising national renewal you can you know you can see presumably any kind of detailed policy. No detailed. So it's the classic populist party program.

Something for everybody. No specifics. Cake all round. They slyly downplay. So the anti-Semitism never goes away. But the key thing in the autumn of 1930 is they say, it's the system that has failed you. The system has let you down.

The established politicians, what a waste of space they are. They have betrayed you ever since 1918. And what we offer is an end to class politics. The communists are giving you class politics. We'll end that. We're all Germans. We don't even see the classes. National unity, a racial community united and working together for greatness. They have sort of films, they have brass bands, they have parades pumping this stuff out. And clearly a lot of people, it's what they want to hear. So you have the election results.

They are a terrible blow to the Weimar system. It's not because the Social Democrats or the Catholic Centre Party lose votes. They're pretty much where they were. It's that the established mainstream, respectable, conservative parties. The bourgeois parties. The bourgeois parties. The kind of parties that you wouldn't vote for in a depression because they're the parties of the rich of the upper middle classes. They are just pretty much annihilated.

The communists go up from 54 seats to 77 seats, but the big, big winners are the Nazis. Up from a million votes last time, fringe party. They're now on six and a half million. They're up from 12 seats to 107 seats. And if you look at the kind of people who voted for them, we talked last time about how they'd started to expand among kind of Protestant farmers,

people in North Germany, in Schleswig-Holstein, in Pomerania, in Hanover, and all these kind of provincial kind of places. They're now beginning to win many more kind of respectable sort of Michael Burley's potbelly symbols. So teachers, Protestant priests, people who see them as an antidote to communism. So they're a social protest party. They also, crucially, and this is again a nice nod to your

horse vessel introduction, youngsters, young people, young first-time voters. So one in four Nazi voters in 1930 have never voted before. So anybody who thinks, oh, young people have a predisposition to be left wing. I mean, this is an absolute kind of rebuke to that. So this is a terrible, terrible result for Weimar. You've got many more, you have 77 communists who hate the Weimar Republic sitting in the Reichstag, and you have 107 national socialists. And the only bigger party than that are the social democrats themselves. It's not just that you've had all this sort of street violence. It's that actually, the language and the tone of the street violence is now in the

central arena of politics. So the Reichstag itself, instead of being all these sort of men who basically all look the same, grey men in kind of- In frock coats. In frock coats and sort of excessively tight collars. It's now, there's a lot of shouting and shaking of fists and- And uniforms. People calling each other vermin, all of that sort of stuff, exactly. And that dual strategy the Nazis have been adopting of the ballot box and the street

violence are now eligning, essentially. Exactly. So the violence has been imported into the heart of the Weimar Republic, the Weimar system. Exactly right. And the Weimar system at this point, I think you could argue, is it dead at this point? Whether Weimar itself is dead is an interesting question, but I think it is definitely seriously ailing. And as we will see after the break, what makes things worse is the politicians continue to make extremely bad

decisions and bad choices that basically condemn the patient to a swift and pretty miserable death. So join us after the break for the death of Weimar. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.

Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. We promised you before the break the death of Weimar. And Dominic, I mean, there's a terrible, tragic sense in which kind of Weimar dies of the very political complications with which it's been wrestling throughout its existence. The Nazis don't storm to power wielding guns or marching on the Capitol or anything like that. They do it by means of backroom deals, election gambits, all the kinds of things that we would recognize from a functioning democracy, but they're doing it with the aim of terminating democracy. And this is the issue with which in the 21st century, certainly the 2010s and 2020s, people have started to wrestle, isn't it? What do you do in a democracy with somebody who is competing, who is playing as a contestant, but is determined to destroy the very game in which they are playing. How do you exclude them? How do you control them? Do you try to tame them? Do you work with them?

Would you just say never? So this is the problem that is facing the, and of course, for the Weimar parliamentarians, they have no precedent. You know, there is no... Right. Yes. So for us, this is the paradigmatic political morality story, but they don't have that morality story. I mean, I suppose any morality story they would have would be the end of the Roman Republic, something like that. But I don't think people are making that comparison, actually. Well, some are. So the Roman Revolution, the famous book by Syme about the collapse of the Roman Republic is being written against exactly this backdrop. Yes, that's a very good point, Tom. So I think people are kind of vaguely aware of it, but obviously it's inadequate to compare to the moral horror for us.

So, yeah, I mean, I think that is always a really important thing to bear in mind when looking at this story, is that we have the example of the Nazi takeover, but people living through the Nazi takeover obviously didn't. Yeah, so almost none of the characters that we're going to meet in the second half take the Nazis seriously. They just don't see. They maybe haven't read Mein Kampf. They see them as violent clowns who they can use. So Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, the sort of austere Catholic British Railways enthusiast who we talked about in the first half he has now has no real chance of a majority in fact there is no majority for anything at all

in the reichstag from september 1930 onwards so increasingly in the next few years you see endlessly being suspended or adjourned or when it does meet just a lot of shouting and and um sort of disputation and so how is the country being governed so it's being governed by decree bruning is governing it by decree using hindenburg so basically the And so how is the country being governed? So it's being governed by decree. Brüning is governing it by decree using Hindenburg. So basically the way that works is the Reich Chancellor, which is Brüning, goes to President Hindenburg and says, under Article 48, I would like you to do this. And Hindenburg basically says yes. And who is kind of holding the strings of who? Well, this is always a little bit unclear. Everybody is trying to pull the strings of

everybody else. And here there's a really interesting character enters the story. So there's a rising figure who's a kind of intermediary between politics and the army. And this is a chap called General Kurt von Schleicher. He's a Prussian, you'll be surprised to hear, born in 1882. He's clever. He's a great intriguer. Everybody knows that Schleicher loves intrigue. He's always sort of whispering in back rooms. He's a very political general. He's worked his way up the ladder. I read in the Bodleian Library, Tom, it says,

Schleicher was well known for his sense of humor, his lively conversational skills, his sharp wit, and his habit of abandoning his upper-class aristocratic accent to speak his German with a salty, working-class Berlin accent full of risque phrases that many found either charming or vulgar. So I read that on Wikipedia, so it's almost certainly not true. But it's a nice pen portrait, isn't it? It's a nice pen portrait.

Trotsky, of all people, said Schleicher was a question mark with the epaulettes of a general. That's a very good quote. He's a Prussian general who's just scheming the whole time. Too clever by half. But everybody knows it. This is the trouble. Yeah.

What he seems to want is a military dictatorship of some kind, an authoritarian vehicle. And he is playing off Hindenburg, the politicians. He's talking to the Nazis quite early on. Presumably the example of Bismarck is hanging over this. I suppose he might see himself as a bit of a Bismarck. I mean, what the army wants is they want a government that will basically,

they won't be bothered by politicians anymore. They'll be able to rearm and make Germany great again. Yeah, yeah, get out the tanks. And that probably will involve wars. But I don't think people in the army think, let's wage a massive world war and take on all the old allies again for round two. They think, let's fight the Poles and get Danzig.

Have a crack at the Czechs. Exactly. And we'll feel good about ourselves. I think that's what they're after. Now, President Hindenburg is 84. His presidential term is up in 1932. He toys with standing down, but such is the sort of chaos and confusion at the time that it's fairly easy for his advisor to persuade him to stand again. So now we have this crazy situation where Hindenburg,

the epitome of the Prussian reactionary, is standing again for the presidency. And his two big rivals in the second round, so the first round is sort of ambiguous, so this goes to a second round. His two big rivals are Tellmann, the leader of the communists, and Hitler, the leader of the Nazis. So what that means, it's a bit like a supercharged version of those kind of Macron-Le Pen or Chirac-Le Pen elections, where loads of people who normally would hate the

mainstream person have to hold their nose and vote for them because they can't stand the extremist alternatives. Because Hindenburg, who hates Weimar, is now the candidate for Weimar. Exactly right. Yeah, exactly. The Social Democrats, they describe him as the embodiment of calm and constancy, of manly loyalty and devotion to duty, a man on whose work one can build, a man of pure desire and serene judgment. I mean, that's a bonkers thing to say because Hindenburg thinks the Social Democrats

are absolute, you know. And they know it. Yeah, he holds them in very low regard. So it goes to a second ballot. And for the first time, Hitler, the Nazis import American style campaign techniques. So this is where he gets on planes, doesn't he? He gets on a plane. For the first time, yeah.

And this is the interesting thing, isn't it, about the Nazis, about fascism generally, how it's simultaneously backward looking and incredibly futuristic. So same with Mussolini. Love his planes and cars and things. Men of thing. People are very, very excited by this. They're very good at democracy. That's the weird thing. That's the irony of it.

They're deploying all kinds of tricks and techniques that are still being deployed to this day. Yeah, I guess that's true. I mean, as we said last time, if you watch Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will, you watch Nazi rallies, do political party conferences in Britain or American presidential conventions in the United States, do they learn those techniques? Of course they do. They absolutely do.

So Hitler gets 37% in that presidential election, 13 million votes. Hindenburg gets 53%. That's actually pretty weak by Hindenburg, given he is the titanic war hero, and he's got almost all the conventional parties behind him. And actually, in some parts of the Protestant countryside, Schleswig-Holstein, Pomerania, Hitler actually wins. Hitler beats Hindenburg. Such is the sense of anger about the depression and desperation for something new. So it's pretty clear that the wind is in the Nazis' sails.

And actually Brüning, who's still hanging around, who's been, I think it's fair, I don't actually, Richard Evans, for example, is very harsh on Brüning. He just regards Brüning as an absolute waste of space. I think that's a tiny bit harsh, but it's fair to say Brüning has made a series of very bad decisions. He basically gets booted out at the end of May 1932. So now Hindenburg needs a new chancellor. He's not going to pick Hitler. Hitler's an extremist, a rabble-rouser, a demagogue, a mere corporal.

He's not going to pick Hitler. He picks a man, the ultimate sort of establishment man, and this is a chap called Franz von Papen. Well, you've got a brilliant description in your notes. Looks like a greyhound or a man from the Daily Telegraph. Yeah, there's people listening from the Daily Telegraph. I don't know, do they like a greyhound or a man from the daily telegraph yeah there's people listening from the daily telegraph i don't know do they look like greyhounds maybe they do well you're thinking of charles moore someone like that yeah i actually you know kind of the tall thin angular do you know the columnist tim stanley yes i knew tim stanley when he was a very

young man uh i think franz von papen looks an older, more Germanic version of Tim Stanley. Tim Stanley has quite vibrant hair. Yeah, bouffant, I would say. Bouffant hair. Does Franz von Papen? No, but there's something in the features. I can't really describe it. Listen, I mean, this is of no use to most people who don't know who these people are.

But anyway, it's good to find light amid the darkness. Papen is an aristocrat. He's from the Catholic Centre Party. Again, very Catholic. Bizarrely, he'd been expelled from the United States for spying during the First World War. He married the daughter of a rich industrialist. So he's rich. He's very well connected.

He's posh. He knows everybody. He has contacts in every- So he's very, He's very well connected. He's posh. He knows everybody. He has contacts in every... So he's very, very different to Hitler then. Completely different. Utterly different. Yeah. He knows lots of people in the army.

He knows lots of people in politics, in big business. Interestingly, we talked about Brüning and our old chum Antonio Salazar from the Portuguese episodes. Frans von Papen has a lot of this going on as well. There's a sort of Catholic political authoritarianism very common in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Von Papen and the people around him actually talk about a new state, which is the same, you know, they call it the Estado Novo in Portugal.

They dream of this kind of Catholic order returning to Germany. Of course, it's never going to happen because there's so many Protestants in Germany. But anyway, Hindenburg makes him chancellor, and he fills his cabinet with other people like him. So people call it the Cabinet of Barons. Some people call it the Cabinet of Experts, which is very sort of anti-Gove. But I think the Cabinet of Barons is a better- That's much funnier.

I mean, I suppose darkly funny. Well, you'd think of a baron as kind of ruthlessly efficient, wouldn't you? But these barons are all... Yes. Like the Red Baron. Yeah. Van Pappen is in.

I think it's fair to say he, like General Schleicher, he's an intriguer, and I don't believe he has the slightest idea how to get Germany out of the mess that it is in. An effete Machiavelli, Burley describes him as. That is brilliant. I mean, that is exactly what he's a dilettante. He's a man from the Daily Telegraph. There's a brilliant example in Richard Evans' book.

He says one of Papin's great initiatives is to abolish the guillotine, which has been used since the French Revolution, because he regards it as too newfangled, and to replace it with the traditional Prussian handheld axe for executions. That's very Daily Telegraph, isn't it? Very Daily Telegraph. But it's absolutely not Germany's priority in 1932. No.

Pappen and Schleicher, so they team up for the time being. The intriguing general and the intriguing effete. What was he in an effete? Machiavelli. Yet again, they persuade President Hindenburg to dissolve the Reichstag and call new elections. I mean, why people keep on doing this? This is great error.

I mean, even though it's more left-leaning. Famously, the definition of insanity is to keep repeating the same mistake over and over again, expecting it to come out differently. It's strange when you read the accounts, especially by kind of, you know, sort of left-leaning historians like Richard Evans, who keep saying, they keep basically saying,

why do they not just prorogue the parliament forever and impose some kind of authoritarian rule? Why do they keep making these terrible mistakes? Anyway, they do this. Presumably, the alternatives,

as we now see, is a kind of authoritarian military dictatorship or the Nazis. And because we know which is the kind of authoritarian military dictatorship or the nazis and because we know which is the worst of those yeah you're right we're tempted to see it as the worst of all fates but they you know to repeat they don't know that you're right of course but they're also i mean they do want a military dictatorship but they're kind of frightened that they won't get to do it themselves that somebody else will take it over they're also frightened of alarming the public

and provoking civil war so they want to get they want to put themselves in a position where there won't be anybody in the street complaining, where everybody would be delighted, where they've got maybe backing the Reichstag for it. They call new elections. They're conscious of Hitler and his strength. And they think to themselves, listen, we don't want to really alienate him. So they lift, there's been a ban on the stormtroopers marching openly. They say, we'll lift this ban because this will appease him, buy him off and maybe make him an ally. What could possibly go wrong? What could possibly go wrong?

Well, almost immediately in July 1932, there's enormous fighting in a place called Altona in Prussia, which is near Hamburg, between the stormtroopers and the communist Red Front. And 18 people are killed and hundreds of people are injured because the police lose control and they start shooting wildly. And Papen then makes another of these terrible, terrible mistakes. Instead of doing what he should have done, which is to ban all the paramilitaries completely, he thinks, great, I can use this as an opportunity

to seize control of the state government of Prussia. So Prussia is the England of Germany. It dominates Germany. It's by far the biggest state. If you control Prussia, you don't quite control the lot, but you're a lot of the way there. And Prussia is run by the Social Democrats. And basically, von Papen and Hindenburg dissolve by emergency decree

the Social Democratic, they take over the Social Democratic government of Prussia, they kick out the Social Democrats from their great stronghold, and von Papen will use this as his own personal fiefdom. And this is a disaster for democracy because here you have the central government unconstitutionally effectively getting rid of the biggest party and the Social Democrats do nothing to resist it.

Why do they not resist it? Because they're worried about civil war as well? They are, exactly. The Social Democrats are paralysed. But they've been paralysed the whole way through, haven't they? I mean, they've been kind of sitting there waiting for the revolution to come

and nothing ever happens. It's that, but also they've known from the very beginning of Weimar that lots of people in the army don't like them, that there are lots of reactionaries who think they're illegitimate. I mean, they've known this from even before the First World War. And at this key moment, they do nothing. They don't have a general strike. They're being robbed of their heartland.

You know, I'm trying to imagine an analogous situation. It's as though there was an elected English government that the Westminster Parliament suddenly kicked out and said, we'll run it ourselves, in a context of street violence. And that government did nothing about it. Didn't say, oi, this is illegal. Take to the streets, have a general strike or something.

So they can't have a general strike because unemployment is so high that you know people aren't going to down tools to go out on the streets so as as richard evans says parpins coup dealt a mortal blow to the weimar republic it destroyed the federal principle and opened the way to the wholesale centralization of the state which the nazis are all about. Of course. Because if you have a Führer. So if the Nazis ever do take power, they can follow that precedent. So the election.

This election in July 1932 that von Papen has called takes place in a context of where we began with horse vessel and the street violence. This is now worse than ever before. So Hitler is again flying around, addressing different venues. The propaganda is more aggressive than ever. I mean, Richard Evans is brilliant on this, actually. He says every poster, no matter what party it's for,

basically looks the same. It's a giant half-naked male worker smashing his adversaries. He says all over Germany, electors were confronted with violent images of giant workers smashing their opponents to pieces, kicking them aside, yanking them out of parliament, or looming over frock-coated and top-hatted politicians who were almost universally portrayed as insignificant and quarrelsome pygmies.

And of course, if everybody's doing that, it plays into the hands of the people who do it best. Of course, yeah. And that's the Nazis. So they run, yet again, they say... And the Nazis are saying, what is their policy? What is their policy to their political opponents? Are they saying, we'll put them in concentration camps,

we'll ban them? Are they... They're never so explicit. They're never so explicit. They talk in abstractions. They say, we'll end the parliamentary pygmies and their bickering, national unity, national rebirth, down with the Jewish financiers,

down with the communists, down with the November criminals. Right, but when they say down with the communists, what are they saying they're going to do to the communists? They're not specific. They're never specific. So even if you read Mein Kampf, Tom, I mean, Hitler is all generalities. It's all kind of the language, the medical language that we've talked about a lot in this series,

or the sort of slightly religious language that you are obviously familiar with from your stuff with Horse Vessel. You know, that sort of talk of rebirth and national salvation. It's all that sort of stuff. And that election, 31st of July, it is an absolute disaster for the mainstream and a victory for the extremes. So the Nazis double their vote, 6 to 13 million. They're now by far the biggest single party in the Reichstag, 230 seats.

The communists also increased their vote. They're on 89 seats. There is a sense, however, this is as good as it will ever get for the Nazis. This was their greater popularity. They've hit the the glass ceiling they've probably hit a ceiling so even goebbels in his diary says you know we've got 37 of the vote it's probable we've got as many people who will ever vote for us in a kind of free election so this is the point at which we should become a party of power we should enter government the issue is is that they don't want to enter government

as anybody else's partner. Well, because Hitler can't, can he? No, you're right. If he's proclaiming himself the Fuhrer, this man of destiny, this kind of Wagnerian hero, he can't sit down with all the frock-coated pygmies and behave like any other politician. Exactly right.

I think you're absolutely right, Tom. I think if he's got this sacred destiny to lead Germany into a national revolution, how can you do that if you're sitting with the very people? So he starts to have secret talks with General Schleicher about doing a deal and becoming chancellor. But for various reasons, this is in August 1932, for various reasons, those talks run aground. One reason is that there's yet more extreme street violence.

Papen has just announced the death penalty for all political crimes, basically to use it against the communists. Presumably with an axe, yes. Prussian axe. So that's something to cheer the traditionalists up. Yeah. The letter writers of the day will be delighted with that. Papen wants this.

He tends to use this against the communists. However, the first crime that happens within hours of the law being passed is a load of Nazi brown shirts killing a communist in an Upper Silesian village, and five of them are sentenced to death. Hitler goes absolutely mad and says, how can I work with anybody who sentences our people to death? They're not criminals.

They're fighting for the fatherland. Against this background, Hindenburg still has slightly cold feet about dealing with it. I mean, Hindenburg is, what did I say? Last time he was 84. Now he's, I mean, he's 85 going on 127 yeah he's still a bit iffy about this he has a key meeting on the 13th of august 1932 with hitler the presidential palace he says i want you to serve under franz von papen hitler says no no i want to be chancellor i have to be chancellor i'm leading the biggest party

and hindenburg says no and and he says something which he should say. He says, I will not hand over the Reich to one party that is so intolerant and that encourages violence. I will not do it. And the meeting lasts just 20 minutes and Hitler goes out. Furious that Hindenburg has said no it's that meeting is largely forgotten today in his biography Ian Kershaw says that should have been that yet again that was hit this chance it was gone is that when Hitler plunges into his big depression I think well yeah I guess he does plunge into a big depression then yes because he feels he's had his chance and it slipped through and it's and yeah and he's blown it well it's not that he's blown it. It's that the one man that he couldn't circumvent, the war hero, the one man who really is, you know, the guardian of the constitution,

if he can't persuade Hindenburg to give him a chance, he has no hope, unless he sort of kills Hindenburg or something, or Hindenburg waits till he's dead. But if he waits till he's dead, Germany will have recovered from the depression by then or be in the recovery, and then Arsene's momentum will have passed. So that should be that for Hitler, but of course it isn't. So what happens next is pure intrigue.

Papen has a plan that he will, let's just dissolve the Reichstag forever. Let's just get rid and use Hindenburg's presidential emergency powers to rule by decree. And that will pave the way for an authoritarian regime that we've always dreamed of, that we've wanted since 1918. There's an incredible moment. It's pure parliamentary drama. Von Papen goes to the Reichstag on the 12th of September, 1932, to dissolve it, to basically set this in train. But before he can do that, the communists place a vote of no confidence in the government. And to Von Papen's horror and fury, the Nazis, the biggest party who are basically running it, so Goering is the sort of president of the session goering says we'll vote on the no confidence thing first they vote on it

and they the no confidence wins by 512 votes to 42 so pop and his government completely what's a ringing defeat isn't it a very ringing defeat they're completely humiliated how can you now dissolve it and rule by decree when you've been so completely rebuked and shown that you have no democratic legitimacy at all? And so Papen and co, they kind of lose their bottle. And yet again, they say, well, we'll have another election. Oh, I'll bang my head against his door again. Everybody is sick of elections by now. Actually, the Nazis now are beginning to drop. This is the incredible thing, Tom.

The Nazis took power after they were dropping. Their vote drops from 13.7 million votes to 12.7 million. They lose 44 seats. They are still the biggest party, but now they are smaller than the Social Democrats and the Communists combined. The Communists are going up all the time, by the way, they're now up to 100. But the Communists and the Social Democrats won't work with each other.

They'll never work together. They hate each other. More than they hate the Nazis. Well, is it more than they hate the Nazis? As much as. I think it's certainly fair to say. So what happens now? Total stasis.

Nobody knows. And just pure factionalism. So Papen and Schleicher, so the effete Machiavelli and the intriguing general, they've kind of fallen out with each other. They both want to be running Germany. They're more interested basically in their own personal fortunes than they are in thinking about what the Nazis truly represent. Schleicher says to Papen, you've got to go, mate.

The army's not going to back you anymore. So Papen, you've got to go, mate. The army's not going to back you anymore. So Papen resigns. There's then two weeks of sort of general intrigue. Finally, Schleicher, the general, takes on the chancellorship himself. It's not really what he wanted. I think he wanted a puppet to do it for him. Hindenburg, by now, is very distrustful of General Schleicher. He thinks General Schleicher has been plotting against Papen all this time.

Schleicher opens talks with the Nazis. He appeals to Hitler's, I suppose you could say almost Hitler's, rival within the Nazi party, Gregor Strasser, who's tempted. This is such a dangerous thing to be. Very dangerous thing to be, as Gregor Strasser will discover. Strasser is tempted, but the Nazis say, no, you can't do this without hitler so he ends up resigning all his posts and leaving the nazi party inside the hindenburg circle they're all talks the whole time what on earth are we going to do who's going to

run the country and there are lots of conservatives around hindenburg who say you can't trust general schleicher you know von papen was quite good get him back you know more of the stuff with the axe bring i mean he's conservative we can trust him they never think they never think why don't we bring the kaiser back no i think the kaiser is completely uh so he's off in holland isn't he he's off in holland becoming very anti-semitic well there's a kaiser who previously in his previous appearances and the rest is history has been very much a comic figure. I think it's fair to say that against this backdrop, it's hard to see him in quite the same entertaining light as previously.

So the Hindenburg Circle decide, okay, let's talk to the Nazis after all. And they do it through the press baron, Alfred Hugenberg, nationalist press baron, who I talked about in the previous podcast. Von Papen is this great intriguer. He is the key figure. They have talks with Hitler. They say, maybe we'll put you in as chancellor after all. But most of your cabinet have to be conservative. It's not Nazis. Meanwhile, they hear talks that Schleicher, General Schleicher, may be planning

some sort of coup. So they're very exercised by this. They say, we must hurry, we must hurry. We must get, you know, we must sort this out so that Schleicher doesn't get in instead. I mean, it's pure court politics. The ideological divisions between Hindenburg, Pap and Schleicher are minimal. It's all Game of Thrones. Yeah, it's very Game of Thrones. And Ian Kershaw says in his biography,

you know, even at this point, if they had basically stopped intriguing against each other, if Hindenburg had just said, listen, this is a shambles, let's dissolve the Reichstag, go on, Schleicher, have a go, run the country, rearm, do what you like, be a bit authoritarian, the Nazi regime could have been averted. But again, they don't know.

No. But that is a worse alternative. No, they don't. Because Schleicher thinks, you know what? The Nazis maybe aren't so bad. I'll probably end up running the army. The Italy army will run things anyway. So, you know, who cares?

And von Papen, he is convinced that he's been chancellor already. He thinks, you know, Hitler, this two-bit Austrian, it's fine. I'll be his vice chancellor and I'll run things and the cabinet will be full of my friends. So it is that on the 22nd of January, 1933, there is a crucial secret meeting between Hitler and Papen

and Hindenburg's son, Oskar. It's at that meeting they do the deal and they agree that Hitler will be the chancellor and Papen will be his deputy. And Dominic, do you know what else happens on the 22nd of January, 1933? Is it some test match? No. Hitler goes to the grave of Horst Wessel because Hitler had not gone to Horst Wessel's funeral, but he goes to his grave and he addresses a memorial service in the evening.

And they play the funeral march from Gotterdammerung, from Wagner. And the stage is all set with laurel trees, with candelabras, and with a huge larger than life size portrait of Bessel. So even as he is doing his kind of behind the scenes shenanigans and all that kind of stuff, he is also out on the public stage promoting this this nazi martyr well doesn't that capture something about the nazi rise to power that it's the combination of the backstairs back room absolutely intriguing yeah and then these sort of lurid pseudo-religious theatrical spectacles so yeah so with that so from that moment the deal is done and on the 30th of january uh hitler goes into hindenburg's apartment at the reich's chancellery

wilhelm strass if you remember from the first episode yeah renovated and they do the deal and hindenburg says and now gentlemen forwards with god and um somebody says to von Papen about that time, how can you work with these vulgar, stupid, utterly inexperienced, extremely violent sort of common men? Thugs. Thugs. And Papen says, you are wrong. We've hired him. And how wrong he was. Okay. So thank you dominic we will look at the reichstag fire and how hitler outsmarts pappen and hindenburg and everybody and establishes his regime

until he ends up dead outside his bunker in 1945. Bye-bye. Bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment

and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.