won a comfortable majority in the Reichstag. The
Nazis in July won 230 seats and 37 per cent of the
vote, becoming the largest single party; in the
election of November 1932 they held on to 33 per
cent of the electorate, saw their seats drop to 196,
but remained the largest party; the Nationalists
secured almost 9 per cent, and the Communists
17 per cent (100 seats) – nor did the three anti-
democratic parties have any scruples about acting
together. The Socialists slipped from 133 seats to
- Papen had gambled on making the Nazis
more amenable by inflicting an electoral defeat on
them. The Nazis did indeed suffer a setback in
November 1932. Papen was pleased, but Hitler
had lost only a battle, not a war. On 17 November
Papen resigned. Hitler thought his moment had
come. Summoned to Hindenburg, he was told by
the field marshal that he would be considered as
chancellor only if he could show that a parliamen-
tary majority backed him and that, unlike Papen,
he could govern without special presidential
decrees. Such conditions, Hindenburg and Hitler
perfectly well knew, could not be met. They
amounted to a rejection of Hitler.
Hindenburg wanted his favourite, Papen, back.
Papen planned to prorogue the Reichstag and
change the constitution. However, General Kurt
von Schleicher, who represented the right of
the army high command and who had played
an influential political role behind the scenes,
persuaded Hindenburg that Papen’s plans would
lead to civil war and that the army had lost confi-
dence in Papen’s ability to control the situation.
With obvious reluctance Hindenburg appointed
Schleicher on 2 December 1932 to head the last
pre-Hitler government. Schleicher’s own solution
was to try to split the Nazi Party and to win the
support of Gregor Strasser and his more left-wing
section of the party. Strasser, who was very influ-
ential as the head of the party’s political organisa-
tion, had become disillusioned with Hitler’s
tactics of demanding total power and his adamant
refusal to share power with coalition partners.
Despite evidence of falling Nazi support in the
November 1932 election, Hitler won. Strasser
made the task easier for him by resigning from the
party in early December 1932 after bitterly quar-
relling with Hitler, who accused him of treachery.
Hindenburg’s opposition and internal disputes
made many Nazis feel that their chance of gaining
power was ebbing away. But Hitler was proved
right only a few weeks later. Schleicher announced
his government’s programme for relieving unem-
ployment and distress; wages and benefits were
raised, but even so the divided Reichstag was
united on one issue alone – to refuse Schleicher
their backing. Papen, meanwhile, ensured that the
only outcome of Schleicher’s failure would be a
new coalition ostensibly led by Hitler but which
Papen expected to control.
Hindenburg was cajoled into concluding that
the parliamentary crisis could be ended only by
offering the chancellorship to Hitler, the leader of
the largest party, even though Hitler had not set
foot in the Reichstag as a parliamentary leader. The
ins and outs of the final intrigues that overcame
Hindenburg’s obvious reluctance are still debated
by historians. Papen and the conservative and
nationalist right totally misjudged and under-
estimated Hitler. They believed they could tame
him, that he would have to rely on their skills of
government. Instead, Hitler ended the parliamen-
tary crisis in short order by doing what he said he
would do, that is by crushing the spirit of the
Weimar constitution and setting up a totalitarian
state. But Papen’s intrigues were merely the final
blow to the already undermined structure of
Weimar’s democracy; it cannot be overlooked that
Hitler, whose party had openly proclaimed that it
stood for the destruction of Weimar, had won one-
third of the votes in November 1932; this meant a
higher proportion of electors supported the Nazi
Party than had supported any other single party at
previous post-1920 Reichstag elections. Given the
multiplicity of parties and the system of propor-
tional representation, a greater electoral victory
than the Nazis achieved is difficult to conceive. It
was not backstairs diplomacy alone then that
brought Hitler to power, but the votes of millions
of people which made his party the largest in the
Reichstag by far. In November 1932 the Nazis had
polled 11,737,000 votes against 7,248,000 of the
second-largest party, the Social Democrats.
There is a strong contrast between the long wait
for power and the speed with which Hitler
1
THE FAILURE OF DEMOCRACY AND RISE OF HITLER, 1920–34 189
