It looked like an unpromising start. “Shortly after mid-
day,” wrote Count Schwerin von Krosigk in his diary he
would be retained as finance minister “we were called into the
president’s room.”
I found the whole future Cabinet assembled there
Hitler (on whom I set eyes for the first time); Frock;
Göring; Papen [vice-chancellor]; Seldte; Hugenberg;
Blomberg; Neurath [likewise retained as foreign min-
ister]... The Old Man welcomed us with a brief
speech expressing his satisfaction that the nationalist
right wing had at last united. Papen read out the list
of ministers.Hitler had already taken one determined step to consolidate the
Nazi seizure of power. He had appointed, as was the chancellor’s
prerogative, the new minister of the interior in Prussia
Hermann Göring. In the first instance, this enabled Göring to
ban the Communist protest demonstration threatened for that
evening, but in the longer term it would provide the means to
make the Nazi party’s stranglehold on power impregnable. At
the very first Cabinet meeting, held at : .. on that January
, , while crowds swayed and chanted in the street outside,
roaring the national anthem up to the Cabinet Room windows,
Göring predicted that the existing laws and police forces might
prove inadequate; from the misgivings that he now voiced about
the “present civil service structure” of his Prussian ministry, it is
obvious that he was already planning a purge there too.
At this first Cabinet session Hitler and Göring adopted a
more moderate line than the non-Nazi ministers when the pos-
sibility of banning the Communist party altogether was consid-
ered. Hitler felt, as Schwerin von Krosigk recorded later that
day, that “a new Cabinet ought not to begin with immediate