Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (112 page)

55. Otto Braun, Prussian minister-president. Portrait by Max Liebermann, 1932.

We might thus say that on 20 July 1932, the day of the putsch, the old Prussia destroyed the new. Or, to put it more precisely, particularist, agrarian Prussia laid an axe to the universalist, state-centred Prussia of the Weimar coalition. Traditional society, one might argue, prevailed at last over the modernizing state; the descendants of von der Marwitz triumphed over the spirit of Hegel. But this metaphorical antinomy, though it certainly captures part of the meaning of what happened in the summer of 1932, is perhaps too neat. The men of the putsch against Prussia were hardly Junkers of the classic type. Papen was a Westphalian Catholic, Wilhelm von Gayl a Rhinelander – both were, in this sense, ‘marginal Prussians’.
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Even Kurt von Schleicher, though the son of a Silesian officer, was an untypical figure, a political intriguer from outside the provincial landowning elite; his politics, a hybrid blend of authoritarian corporatism and constitutionalism, remain difficult to pigeon-hole.
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All three men pursued a politics of the nation, not of the Prussian state and certainly not of the Prussian province.

Hindenburg, the man at the centre of events in 1932, is a complex case. As an East-Elbian estate-owner and celebrated commanding officer, Hindenburg appeared to embody the Prussian tradition. But his life was formed by the forces that unified the German Reich. He was eighteen when he fought at Königgraätz during the Austrian war of 1866. He hailed from the province of Posen, an area of heightened nationalist antagonism between Germans and Poles. Having returned from retirement at the beginning of the First World War, he used his role at the apex of the German forces on the eastern front to challenge and hollow out the authority of the Prussian-German civilian executive. He blackmailed the Kaiser, to whom he professed the deepest personal loyalty, into compliance with his projects, which included the catastrophic policy of unconditional submarine warfare – a provocative and futile campaign that brought the United States into the war and doomed Germany to defeat at the hands of her enemies. One by one, he picked off the Kaiser’s closest allies – including Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg – and drove them out of politics. This was not the one-off conscientious objection of a Seydlitz or a Yorck – it was systematic insubordination born of vast ambition and an utter disregard of any interest or authority outside the military hierarchy that he himself dominated. At the same time, Hindenburg deliberately cultivated the national obsession with his own person, projecting the image of an indomitable Germanic warrior that overshadowed the increasingly marginal figure of the Emperor-king.

Although Hindenburg was among those who urged William II to abdicate and flee to Holland in November 1918, he subsequently shrouded himself in the mantle of a principled monarchism. Later again (on ascending to the office of Reich president in 1925 and on his reappointment in 1932), he put aside his monarchist convictions to swear a solemn oath to the republican constitution of the German Empire. In the last days of September 1918, Hindenburg urgently pressed the German civilian government to initiate ceasefire negotiations, yet he later disassociated himself entirely from the resulting peace, leaving the civilians to carry the responsibility and the opprobrium. On 17 June 1919, when the government of Friedrich Ebert was deliberating over whether to accept the terms of the Versailles Treaty, Hindenburg conceded in writing that further military resistance would be hopeless. Yet
only a week later, when President Ebert called the Supreme Command for a clear formal decision in support of acceptance, the field marshal contrived to be absent from the telephone room during the call, leaving his colleague Wilhelm Groener to play the ‘bête noire’ (as Hindenburg himself put it).
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Hindenburg went even further: in perhaps the most mythopoeic moment of a myth-saturated career, he claimed in November 1919 before the commission investigating the causes of the German defeat that the German armies in the field had not been vanquished by the enemy powers, but by a cowardly ‘stab in the back’ from the home front – this conceit would haunt the republic throughout its short life, tainting the new political elite with intimations of treachery and betrayal of the nation.

As Reich president after 1925, Hindenburg developed – despite all the social distance between them – an unlikely friendship with the conscientious Social Democratic Prussian Minister-President Otto Braun. In 1932, when Hindenburg stood for re-election to the presidency, Braun endorsed the old man warmly as ‘the embodiment of calm and consistency, of manly loyalty and devotion to duty for the whole people’.
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Yet in 1932, presented with the schemes of the conservative camarilla, Hindenburg abandoned his erstwhile friend without, as it seems, the slightest compunction, withdrawing from his solemn constitutional oaths of 1925 and 1932 to make common cause with the sworn enemies of the republic. And then, having publicly declared that he would never consent to appoint Hitler to any post more elevated than minister of postal services, Hindenburg levered the Austrian Nazi leader into the German chancellery in January 1933. The field marshal had a high opinion of himself and he doubtless sincerely believed that he personified a Prussian ‘tradition’ of selfless service. But he was not, in truth, a man of tradition. He was not in any deterministic sense a product of the old Prussia, but rather of the flexible power politics that fashioned the new Germany. As a military commander and later as Germany’s head of state, Hindenburg broke virtually every bond he entered into. He was not the man of dogged, faithful service, but the man of image, manipulation and betrayal.

On 21 March 1933, the Garrison Church at Potsdam provided the setting for a ceremony marking the inauguration of the ‘new Germany’ under Adolf Hitler. The occasion was the opening of the new Reichstag following the national elections of 5 March 1933. It was a festivity that would usually have been conducted in the Reichstag building itself. But on 27 February the Dutch leftist Marinus van der Lubbe had torched the building, reducing the main chamber to a blackened ruin. Built by Frederick William I in 1735, the Garrison Church was an eloquent memorial to Prussia’s military history. Mounted on the church tower was a weather vane bearing the initials FWR and the iron silhouette of a Prussian eagle aspiring towards a gilded sun. Trumpets, flags and cannon, rather than angels or biblical figures, decorated the stone of the chancel. The tombs of the ‘soldier king’ Frederick William I and his illustrious son Frederick the Great lay side by side in the crypt.
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Josef Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, saw immediately the symbolic potential of this historic setting and he took personal control of the preparations, planning the event in painstaking detail as a propaganda spectacle. After all, as he noted in a diary entry of 16 March 1933, this was the moment when the ‘new state’ inaugurated by Hitler’s appointment to the chancellorship would ‘present itself symbolically for the first time’.
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The ‘Day of Potsdam’, as it has come to be known, was a concentrated act of political communication. It offered the image of a synthesis, even a mystical union, between the old Prussia and the new Germany.
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Veterans of the Wars of Unification were ferried to the town to take part in the festivities. The flags of the most venerable Prussian regiments – including the renowned IX Infantry, whose recruits were traditionally sworn in under the vaults of the Garrison Church – were placed on prominent display. The streets of the city were decked with German imperial, Prussian and swastika flags. The red, black and gold tricolour of the Weimar Republic was nowhere to be seen. Even the date was significant. Goebbels had chosen 21 March not only because it was officially the first day of spring, but also because it was the anniversary of the opening of the first German Reichstag after the proclamation of the German Reich in January 1871. At the centre of the proceedings
was Reich President Hindenburg. Decked out in full uniform, glittering with medals of every shape and size, and clutching his field marshal’s baton in his right hand, Hindenburg processed at a stately pace through the streets of the old town past ranks of Reichswehr men and brown-shirted paramilitaries with their arms raised in salute. As he took up his prominent seat before the altar, he turned to acknowledge with a solemn flourish of his marshal’s baton the empty throne of the former king and Emperor William II, now in Dutch exile. This exercise in humbug was devised in part for the benefit of the two Hohenzollern princes in attendance, one in the traditional uniform of the Death’s Head Hussars, the other in the brown outfit of an SA man.

56. The Day of Potsdam, 21 March 1933. Hitler and Hindenburg shake hands in front of the Garrison Church in Potsdam.

In his speech to the assembled guests, Hindenburg expressed the hope that ‘the ancient spirit of this place of renown’ would enthuse a new generation of Germans. Prussia had earned greatness through ‘never-failing
courage and love of fatherland’; might the same apply to the new Germany. In his reply from the reader’s lectern, Hitler – wearing a dark tailored lounge suit rather than his party uniform – expressed his profound veneration for Hindenburg and gave thanks for the ‘Providence’ that had placed this indomitable warlord at the head of the movement for Germany’s renewal. He closed with words that summed up the propagandistic function of the ceremony: ‘As we stand in this space that is holy to every German, may Providence bestow upon us that courage and that steadfastness that we feel as we struggle for the freedom and greatness of our people at the foot of the tombs of the greatest of kings.’
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Having shaken hands before the congregation, the two men laid wreaths on the tombs of the Prussian kings, while a battery of Reichswehr guns outside the church fired a salute and the choir within belted out the ‘Leuten Chorale’. There followed a military review through the streets of the city. Goebbels recalled the moment in an effusive diary entry:

The Reich President stands on a raised platform, the Field Marshal’s baton in his hand, and greets Army, SA, SS and Stahlhelm as they march past him. He stands and waves. Over the whole scene shines the eternal sun, and God’s hand stands invisibly bestowing his blessing over the grey city of Prussian greatness and duty.
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The celebration of ‘Prussiandom’ was a consistent strand of National Socialist ideology and propaganda. The right-wing ideologue and inventor of the idea of the ‘Third Reich’, Arthur Moeller van der Bruck, had prophesied in 1923 that the new Germany would be a synthesis of the ‘manly’ spirit of Prussia with the ‘feminine’ soul of the German nation.
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In
Mein Kampf
, published two years later, Adolf Hitler found warm words for the old Prussian state. It was the ‘germ cell of the German Empire’, which owed its very existence to the ‘resplendent heroism’ and ‘death-defying courage of its soldiers’; its history demonstrated ‘with marvellous sharpness that not material qualities but ideal virtues alone make possible the formation of a state’.
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‘Our ears still ring,’ wrote the Nazi Baltic-German ideologue Alfred Rosenberg in 1930, ‘with the trumpets of Fehrbellin and the voice of the Great Elector, whose deed spelt the beginning of Germany’s resurrection, salvation and rebirth.’ Whatever one might criticize in Prussia, he added, ‘the decisive salvation of Germanic substance will remain forever
its
deed of renown; without
it there would be no German culture, and no trace of a German people.’
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No one trumpeted the Prussian theme more consistently than Joseph Goebbels, who first became aware of its propaganda potential during a visit to Sans Souci in September 1926. Prussia thereafter remained one of the stock themes of the Goebbels publicity machine. ‘National Socialism,’ he claimed in an election speech of April 1932, ‘can justly lay claim to Prussiandom. All over Germany, wherever we National Socialists stand, we are the Prussians. The idea we carry is Prussian. The symbols for which we fight are filled with the spirit of Prussia, and the objectives we hope to achieve are a renewed form of the ideals for which Frederick William I, the Great Frederick and Bismarck once strove.’
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