Before Hitler became Fuhrer

Success in history has an air of inevitability about it. This emboldens some clever historians to play “what if” games. What would have been the trajectory of Hitler’s career if a semi-demented individual had not set the Reichstag on fire on February 27, 1933? Historians are, however, moored to what happened since that cannot be changed and they do their best to analyse how and why certain events took the shape they did. This is where the theme of Ryback’s book is particularly interesting. There is no denying that Hitler, who was driven by the ambition to be the dictator of Germany, came to power through an electoral process and at the helm of a mass movement. Ryback focuses on the few months after Hitler’s setback in 1932 and his final emergence as a dictator in 1933-34.

A cult in the making

The “setback” needs to be explained especially as it is not narrated and analysed by Ryback. The post-World War I Weimar Republic was reeling under the impact of the 1929 Wall Street crash. Industrial output and wages fell precipitously; inflation spiralled; and unemployment soared. These were the realities that fuelled the mass base of the Nazi party under Hitler. Elections became frequent in the first three years of the 1930s. In each of these elections, the Nazis improved their position in the Reichstag and the various regions of Germany.

In the elections held in July 1932, the Nazis had increased their vote share to 37 per cent and with 230 seats, the Nazis were clearly the largest party in the Reichstag. Preceding the elections, street-level violence, following the lifting of the ban on the SA, between the Nazis and the Communists had brought Germany to the brink of a civil war. But this violence did not deter large sections of the people from voting for the Nazis. The election results posed before Hitler the question of what to do. He wanted to be the Chancellor. He had mass support but the stumbling block was the Weimar president Hindenburg who point-blank refused to appoint Hitler as Chancellor. This was a setback for Hitler who had 13 million supporters but no Chancellorship. His ambition to have total power now seemed, even to him, a distant dream.

Hitler chose the path of complete opposition to the government, through violence and other means. But in the November 1932 elections — the fifth of the year — his tactics didn’t bring him the expected results. The Nazi share of the votes and the number of seats declined. But Hitler remained undeterred and unyielding on his basic demand that he be made Chancellor. Hindenburg remained equally unbending in his rejection of Hitler. The stalemate continued. Within the Nazi party, however, Hitler was emerging as the undisputed leader and a Fuhrer cult was in the making.

Just like a fairy tale?

It is precisely this stalemate and Hitler’s growing rise to supremacy in the Nazi party that provide Ryback with the entry points for his narrative. As the crisis in the government aggravated, some Right-wing non-Nazi leaders, principally Franz von Papen, arrived at the solution that to break the impasse, Hitler had to be brought into the government even if it meant making him the Chancellor. In their scheme, they thought they would be able to tame Hitler. Two of the masterminds of this plan were Papen and Alfred Hugenberg. The former said at the end of January 1933, “We’ve hired him [Hitler]’’; the latter said around the same time, “We’re boxing Hitler in.’’ (To be fair to Hugenberg it should be noted, as Ryback does, that the day after the swearing-in, he told a friend, “I just made the biggest mistake of my life.’’) Hitler was sworn in as the Reich Chancellor a little after noon on 30 January 1933. “Hitler is Reich Chancellor. Just like a fairy-tale,’’ was Goebbels’ telling observation.

Ryback’s narrative ends with Hitler’s accession to the Chancellorship. As a postscript, he narrates what happened on the Night of the Long Knives — the elimination of Hitler’s opponents, Rohm, Schleicher, Strasser and others, all murdered by the SA. It was a bloodbath.

It is only in the last paragraph, almost as a coda, that Ryback tells us about the final takeover. Less than three weeks after the elections held in March 1933, the Reichstag passed an Enabling Act allowing Hitler to pass and enforce laws to establish his government as a legal/elected dictatorship. When in August 1934, Hindenburg died, Hitler made himself the president thus merging the offices of the chancellor and president. He was thus the head of the State, the government and the party. In short, he had made himself the dictator of Germany. But his path to the dictatorship was paved by popular support which had brought him electoral success.

Ryback tells the story of this takeover through a racy narrative, moving, whistle-stop, from event to event, anecdote to anecdote. Those who do not know the story will find this a good and informative read but those who know the story will be disappointed. Ryback is short on analysis. He believes a narration of events says it all.

Alas, in the case of Hitler’s meteoric rise to power, this is not true. There has to be some analysis of the factors that made an unknown rabble-rouser into a mass leader and of how a mass movement became a dictatorship. Ryback makes hardly any analysis of the political, social and economic impact of the 1929 crash. He underplays that there were powerful political forces in Germany, the Nationalist illiberal Right, who were keen to undermine the Weimar Constitution and subvert democracy in Germany. These political forces had the support of powerful business and industrial lobbies. Men like Papen represented these forces and believed that they could tame Hitler and have in him a powerful ally against the growing tide of communism.

The rise of Hitler and the history of the Nazis is a crowded field. Ryback’s book will have to jostle with some great books to be noticed in that space.

(The author is Chancellor and Professor of History at Ashoka University. Views are personal.)