Page 34 - Was Hitler a Riddle?

The British Diplomats 21

Conditions were so fluid and precarious that very many people were un-
able to make reasoned decisions about their country’s future. the “golden
years of the republic,” which began in 1924 and were marked by economic
recovery and relative political stability, ended with the devastating depres-
sion of 1929. early in 1933, close to 7.5 million people, about one-third of
the workforce, were unemployed. in addition, the country was now “full
of private armies” and political violence was a regular occurrence, mostly
involving street fights between Nazis and Communists. during the last two
weeks of June 1932, seventeen people lost their lives in politically motivated
clashes, and in July the number rose to eighty-six. Hundreds of citizens
were wounded. the government did little to stem the violence, and to
many Germans it seemed that the country was undergoing a breakdown of
authority and that it faced a slide into anarchy. 16
there were other signs of the republic’s fragility. in the elections to the
reichstag on July 31, 1932, the National socialists became the largest party
in the legislature, having captured 230 out of 608 seats and 37.2 percent of
the vote. the Nationalists were supported by 6.1 percent, which meant that
43.3 percent now favored right-wing parties hostile to the republic. the
moderate and liberal parties were almost wiped out, and the social demo-
crats, the one major party still committed to democracy, received only 21.6
percent of the vote. the Communists, who rejected “bourgeois democ-
racy,” gained 14.3 percent of the vote, which indicated that only about 43
percent of the electorate supported the constitutional order established in
1919. in a new election in November 1932 the Nazis declined to 33.1 percent,
but the Nationalists’ support rose to 8.3 percent, which gave the right wing
a total of 41.4 percent, still not a majority.
their strength, however, was sufficient to persuade the aged President
Paul von Hindenburg—then eighty-five-years old and no longer fully in
control of his faculties—to succumb to the endless intrigues of his advisers
in favor of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. Hindenburg was not enam-
ored of Hitler, whom he considered to be an uncultivated upstart, a “Bo-
hemian corporal” who could not resist delivering long monologues. But
the reigning assumption in the Presidential Palace was that in a coalition
government consisting of nine conservatives and three National socialists,
the former would be able to rein in the latter. Better to tame the Nazis by
bringing them into the political system than to let them cause national havoc
as an opposition movement without any responsibility for their actions. 17
Christie and some other British diplomats knew that the Weimar po-
litical system was no longer functioning, that intriguers in the Presidential