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Although Strasser’s banishment required Schleicher to search for other ways to neutralize the Nazis, he remained confident that he could find such a way. At an intimate dinner party at the chancellor’s house on December 28, the society columnist Bella Fromm brought up Karl von Weigand’s gloomy prediction of an eventual Nazi victory. Schleicher replied: “You journalists are all alike. You make a living out of professional pessimism. . . . I think I can hold [the Nazis] off.”

One is tempted at this point to reinject the story of Wang Lun—to suggest that if Schleicher had only bowed as he expressed his confidence, the true state of affairs would have been revealed. In late December 1932, however, Hitler’s triumph was by no means a foregone conclusion. A full month, with much maneuvering and plenty of possibilities for alternative endings, remained before Hitler could indeed grasp power. During that period many Germans, not just Schleicher, remained hopeful that the Nazis could be kept from their prize. This was especially true in Berlin, where the various anti-Nazi forces were strongest. In hindsight we might smile over—but we should not dismiss as hopelessly head-in-the-sand (or head-already-cut-off)—the blissful confidence of a Berliner Tageblatt reporter who imagined that some day in the future he would be able to say to his grandchildren: “Everywhere, throughout the whole world, people were talking about—what was his first name?—Adalbert Hitler. Later? Vanished!”

Nazi torchlight parade, January 30, 1933

6

HITLER’S BERLIN

Berlin is the Reich, and the Reich is Berlin.

—Program for Berlin’s 700th

Anniversary, 1937

ALTHOUGH THE NAZIS invariably identified Weimar Berlin with cultural corruption and political disorientation, once they had established the city as their capital they claimed to have turned it into a bastion of order, decency, and correct thinking. Only the National Socialist “revolution,” they insisted, had managed to return Berlin to its true self as a “happy and clean city.” Yet the Nazis themselves were often unhappy in the great metropolis on the Spree. Most of the top leaders hailed from other parts of Germany, and, despite their best efforts to remake the city in their own image, they continued to find it alien and unsettling—a place from which, as one Nazi writer put it, “countless Germans are spiritually in flight.” Hitler hoped to remedy this problem by tearing out the heart of Old Berlin and building a brand new capital in its place, to be called “Germa-nia.” Fortunately he was not able to complete much of this project before the onset of World War II forced him to focus on other ambitions. But if the Nazis did not manage to add more than a few new buildings (and, during the war, flak bunkers) to Berlin’s urban landscape, they took a great deal away from the city’s spirit. As soon as they came to power they began driving into exile or “inner emigration” many of Berlin’s most illustrious artists and intellectuals. They also began a campaign to rid the city of its Jews. Their cultural purges and anti-Semitic crusade decimated the capital’s economic and intellectual life. No other major city in modern times has suffered such a social and cultural bloodletting.

On the Eve of Power

Munich remained the headquarters of the Nazi Party throughout the Third Reich, but Berlin, not the Bavarian capital, provided the main stage for the complicated maneuvering that finally brought Hitler to power on January 30, 1933. The Nazi leader traveled several times to the Spree metropolis for key meetings with conservative power brokers in the days before he assumed the chancellorship. Ordinary Berliners had little knowledge of what was going on behind the scenes, but they knew that in the streets Nazi and Communist thugs were attacking each other with redoubled fury. On New Year’s Eve, 1933, despite a holiday truce, bloody fights broke out across the city. A seamstress walking home in a working-class district was shot dead by an SA man who shouted “Heil Hitler” as he rode away on his bicycle. Three weeks later some 15,000 storm troopers, shouting “We shit on the Jew republic!” held a rally outside KPD headquarters on Bülowplatz. Because the Nazis were protected by a large police guard, the Communists could not drive them away. Goebbels wrote gleefully in his diary: “The Commies raging in the side streets . . . Armored vehicles, machine guns. Police preventing anyone from shooting at us from windows... SA men marching in front of Karl Liebknecht House. A fantastic thing! . . . We have won a battle.”