One of Papen’s first acts as chancellor was to revoke Brüning’s ban on public demonstrations by the SA and SS. The Nazis immediately launched a new campaign of violence, which killed ninety-nine people in four weeks. Much of the action centered on Berlin, where the SA attacked both Communists and the police, hoping thereby to discredit the local Socialist-controlled security forces as protectors of public order.
The tactic paid off. Blaming the SPD-dominated Prussian government for the disorders, Papen deposed the Prussian regime on July 20, 1932, and named a Reich Commissioner to run that state. Twelve years earlier the workers of Berlin had defeated a coup from the right by calling a general strike, but this time there was no significant resistance from the workers or the SPD, which decided not to mobilize the Reichsbanner. When Papen’s new officials came to expel Berlin’s police president, Albert Grzesinski, and Vice President of Police Bernhard Weiss, the men made no trouble. As a friend of Bella Fromm’s noted: “A bullet or two might have changed the picture, but they could not well rebel against the orders of their superior.” Nonetheless, their capitulation meant that Berlin was now under the direct control of a national regime committed to an authoritarian course. To strengthen that course, the new Prussian Commissioner declared martial law in Berlin, placing day-to-day administration in the hands of the Reichswehr’s regional chief, General Gerd von Rundstedt.
In July 1932 Papen dissolved the Reichstag and called new elections, which Hitler demanded as a price for tolerating the chancellor’s conservative “cabinet of barons.” If the September 1930 elections were distressing to all those who had hoped to hold Hitler at bay, the results of the poll on July 31, 1932, were a cause for apoplexy. Nationwide, the Nazis won 37.4 percent of the vote and 230 (out of 608) seats in the Reichstag, which made them by far the largest party in the country, almost twice the size of the SPD. In Berlin the Nazis garnered 28.6 percent, significantly less than their national average but almost twice what they had polled in 1930, and almost equal to what they managed in Munich, the movement’s birthplace and headquarters. Worrisome too, at least to the beleaguered backers of the democratic ideal, was the continuing rise of the Communists in Berlin, who tied the Socialists’ tally of 27.3 percent.
As the leader of the nation’s largest party, Hitler now demanded to be named chancellor. He presented his demand to the backroom kingmaker, Schleicher, who told him that if the Nazis were to attain a majority in the Reichstag nobody could stand in his way. Confident that he could form a coalition with the other rightist parties, Hitler assumed that Schleicher had, in effect, promised him the chancellorship. But Schleicher was biding his time, waiting to see if Hitler could indeed craft a majority coalition when the new Reichstag convened in September. In the meantime, he proposed that the Nazi leader make do with the vice-chancellorship under Papen. Exasperated, Hitler paid a second call on Schleicher, demanding full power immediately and threatening to turn the SA loose on Berlin if he was rebuffed. This outburst won him an audience with Hindenburg, but instead of handing him power the president rebuked him for going back on his promise to support Papen and for abandoning all “chivalry” in his political campaigns. This last charge suggested that the old man did not fully understand what Hitler was all about.
George Grosz had a very good understanding of Hitler’s intentions, and he knew that Berlin constituted no Red dam against the brown flood. As he later recalled: “I saw the cracks on the floor, and noticed that this or that wall was starting to wobble. I observed my cigar man was overnight wearing a swastika in the same buttonhole where there always used to be a red enamel hammer-and-sickle.” Grosz was also depressed by the fact that the art market in Germany had virtually collapsed, making it impossible for him to sell his paintings. In spring 1931 he had received an offer to teach at the Art Students’ League in New York, and in May 1932 he boarded an ocean liner for that city, convinced that it was time to put Berlin behind him. He returned to Berlin in late 1932 only to make arrangements for a permanent relocation to America. He sailed back to New York just five days before Hitler was named chancellor, thus averting probable arrest by the new German rulers.
