The Berlin branch of the Nazi Party, which by the summer of 1931 had grown to 16,000 members, was proud of its disruption of the capital’s cultural and political life. Yet the party itself was in a state of turmoil in the first years of the new decade. The local SA was increasingly frustrated with the overall drift of the party, believing that Hitler, in his effort to come to power legally, was cozying up all too closely with establishment reactionaries. The Berlin Brownshirts tended to blame Munich for Hitler’s “conservatism”: the Bavarian town, in their eyes, was hopelessly provincial, stodgy, and backward-looking. They could not understand why Goebbels, once the champion of a more activist and radical posture, was meekly toeing the Munich line. In August 1930 they made their displeasure evident by smashing up their own party headquarters in the Hedemannstrasse. Goebbels, in fact, shared the SA’s frustration, denouncing “the scandalous pigsty in Munich,” but he did not include Hitler in his denunciation. When the Flihrer instructed him to conduct a purge of disruptive elements in Berlin, Goebbels responded: “Whatever you choose to do, I’ll back you.”
The principal target of the purge was Walter Stennes, chief of the Berlin SA. On April 1, 1931, Stennes was relieved of his post. He responded by staging a full-scale mutiny, taking over party headquarters, occupying the
In addition to internal problems, the Berlin branch of the Nazi movement had to contend with escalating attacks from the local Communists, who were not about to cede the streets of “their town” to the Brownshirts. There were rumors in summer 1931 that the KPD was about to stage a coup in the capital. No such action occurred, but a group of Communists terrorized Prenzlauer Berg, attacking pubs where Nazis were known to gather and killing two policemen. One of the Communist killers was none other than Erich Mielke, who would later become chief of the infamous East German secret police, the Stasi. These attacks generated some public sympathy for the Nazis, who claimed to be law-abiding victims of Red terror.
But not too law-abiding. On September 12, 1931, the new head of the Berlin SA, a dissolute nobleman named Wolf Heinrich von Helldorf, staged a mini-pogrom in broad daylight on the busy Kurfürstendamm. Driving up and down the boulevard in a car, he directed bands of SA thugs, dressed in normal street clothes, to attack and beat pedestrians who looked Jewish. After about two hours the police intervened and arrested Helldorf, who was obliged to spend a few days in jail. Soon he would be supervising that same jail as chief of police.
Just Kindly Nod, Please
Hindenburg, who had been reelected president in April 1932 (beating out, among other candidates, Adolf Hitler) dismissed Heinrich Brüning from the chancellorship at the end of the following month. Brüning’s demise was engineered by Kurt von Schleicher, a wily political general who operated from behind the scenes to make and break chancellors in the waning years of the Weimar Republic. Schleicher worked on behalf of a cabal of conservatives who worried that Brüning intended to impose higher taxes on the rich and to settle homeless city-folk on Prussia’s large agricultural estates; the conservatives also faulted the chancellor for failing to expand the army and for imposing a ban on public demonstrations by the SA and SS but not on the Reichsbanner, the SPD’s paramilitary group.
At Schleicher’s suggestion, Brüning was replaced by Franz von Papen, a Catholic nobleman, former Guards officer, and founder of the Herrenklub, an exclusive gentleman’s club in Berlin. The general believed that he could control Papen, whom he saw as a man with plenty of background but no backbone, and no brains. When reminded by an associate that Papen did not have a strong head, Schleicher replied, “He doesn’t have to. He’s a hat.” Along with the hat, Papen wore elegant dark suits that some said made him look like an undertaker. The comparison was appropriate, considering Papen’s political role in the coming years.
