one instant,” he bragged afterward, “the whole maneuver would
have flopped. As it was, Papen was finished.”
He was developing two personalities, and reveling in both
of them the beer hall adventurer of and the lion of soci-
ety of . He became a famous host and a much-sought-after
guest for dinners and hunting parties. Wealthy landowner
Martin Sommerfeldt, who invited him to hunt that autumn on
his estate in the province of Brandenburg, noticed that the di-
chotomy in this former aviator persisted, “torn between the
blustering and rowdy revolutionary and the visionary grand
seigneur between the SA’s brown shirt in the forenoon and
the snug-fitting dinner jacket at night.”
Fresh elections had been called for November , . A real
electoral cliff-hanger was beginning. In this new poll Hitler lost
two million voters, and the number of Nazi deputies in the
Reichstag was trimmed accordingly from to . Hitler sent
Göring urgently to see Mussolini, possibly to raise cash for the
exhausted Nazi party coffers; the Bavarian frontier police re-
ported on the thirteenth that Göring “mentioned casually at the
currency checkpoint that they were not carrying very much
cash, as they had been invited as guests to Rome” and the
“they” included former Reichsbank governor Dr. Hjalmar
Schacht, who had assured Hitler in a secret letter on August
that the Nazis could count on him. The news of Papen’s resig-
nation as chancellor four days later reached Göring when he was
actually dining with Mussolini; he rushed back to Berlin as the
Führer’s personal delegate to revive the horse-trading with
Hindenburg. Hindenburg sent for both the Nazi leaders on the
nineteenth, and again over the next few days. (“Herr Hitler,” he
boomed, “I want to hear what your ideas are!”) The politicking
continued until the end of November, with Göring backing
Hitler all the way in his unflinching demand for the supreme