Before the new contest could take place, the Nazis and the Communists seized upon another opportunity to raise joint havoc in Berlin. When the government decreed a slight reduction in wages for Berlin’s transport workers, Goebbels directed the Nazi employees of the BVG to go out on strike. Goebbels said this would show that the Nazis were serious about offering “a conscious rejection of bourgeois methods.” The KPD, not to be outdone by the Nazis, instructed their people in the transport union also to walk off the job. The leader of their strike team was Walter Ulbricht, later to become dictator of East Germany and architect of the Berlin Wall. On November 2, as the strike began, Nazis and Communists paraded together in front of Berlin’s rail yards, beating up scabs and wrecking any busses or streetcars that were still running.
Goebbels realized that this collaboration with the Reds might cost the Nazis some support among bourgeois voters in the upcoming elections, but he remained confident that striking a “revolutionary” posture was the best way to win Berlin in the long run. “After all,” he said, “we want to conquer Berlin, and for that it doesn’t matter whether one loses a lousy twenty thousand votes or so in a more or less pointless election. Those votes would have no significance anyway in an active revolutionary struggle.”
On the day of the election the Berlin transport strike was still in progress, so voters had to walk to the polls. Goebbels’s debunking of the contest notwithstanding, he spent the day in “incredible tension.” It turned out that his anxiety was justified. Nationwide, the Nazis lost more than 2 million votes (about 4 percent of their previous total) and 34 Reichstag seats. However, they still remained the largest party in the country. In Berlin the losses were less dramatic: a 2.4 percent drop, from 28.6 to 26.2. The Communists’ showing was strong nationwide—a gain of 11 seats, making them the third largest party—and even stronger in the capital, where their 31.3 percent of the total put them, for the first time, above the SPD as the largest party in Berlin.
The Nazis’ setback in the November elections caused the movement’s various opponents to breathe a collective sigh of relief: it seemed that the “brown plague” was receding. The constant campaigning, moreover, had put a huge dent in the party coffers, and contributions were dropping off. Gloating over the Nazis’ financial problems, the liberal
Chancellor Papen could take little comfort in the Nazis’ decline because he was fading fast himself. He had done nothing to curb the depression or to restore order. In desperation he cooked up a scheme to eliminate popular sovereignty entirely and to set up a “corporate” state run exclusively by the wealthy elite. Schleicher, still the power behind the throne, would have none of this scheme. He convinced Hindenburg that Papen’s plan, if executed, would lead to civil war, with the Nazis and Communists collaborating to overturn the existing order. Reluctantly, Hindenburg asked Schleicher himself to form a new government, and, just as reluctantly (for he truly preferred to stay in the shadows) Schleicher accepted the call. His appointment as chancellor on December 3, 1932, seemed a positive development to many Germans, who reasoned that a military man might be able to put matters right. Even Berlin’s liberal press, which had generally been hostile to Schleicher, applauded this step.
Yet there were also voices of pessimism. Karl von Weigand, the Hearst correspondent in Berlin, remained convinced that Hitler would find a way to come to power, by hook or by crook. Weigand knew that Papen, livid over his ouster by Schleicher, was mobilizing his Herrenklub clique against the new chancellor. He worried, correctly as it turned out, that Papen might even try to strike some power-sharing deal with Hitler in order to get back at Schleicher and to regain power himself.
Chancellor Schleicher had his own scheme for dealing with the Nazis. He planned to split the party by offering Gregor Strasser, the popular head of the party’s Political Office, the post of vice-chancellor. Knowing that Hitler would not countenance this, Schleicher counted on Strasser to bolt from the party and to bring his many friends with him. The chancellor was proud of this scheme, not the least because it was redolent of the intrigue he so loved.
But the plan was too clever by half. When he got word of the impending deal, Hitler mobilized all his resources to crush Strasser and to drive him from the party. He then replaced Strasser’s Political Office with a new central party office under his loyal aide, Rudolf Hess.
