Paul von Hindenburg

Hindenburg was born to a family of minor Prussian nobility in Posen. Upon completing his education as a cadet, he enlisted in the Third Regiment of Foot Guards as a second lieutenant. He then saw combat during the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars. In 1873, he was admitted to the prestigious Kriegsakademie in Berlin, where he studied for three years before being appointed to the Army's General Staff Corps. Later in 1885, he was promoted to the rank of major and became a member of the Great General Staff. After a five-year teaching stint at the Kriegsakademie, Hindenburg steadily rose through the army's ranks to become a lieutenant general by 1900. Around the time of his promotion to General of the Infantry in 1905, Count Alfred von Schlieffen recommended that he succeed him as Chief of the Great General Staff but the post ultimately went to Helmuth von Moltke in January 1906. In 1911, Hindenburg announced his retirement from the military.


After World War I started in July 1914, Hindenburg was recalled to military service and quickly achieved fame on the Eastern Front as the victor of Tannenberg. Subsequently, he oversaw a crushing series of victories against the Russians that made him a national hero and the center of a massive personality cult. By 1916, Hindenburg's popularity had risen to the point that he replaced General Erich von Falkenhayn as Chief of the Great General Staff.^[2] Thereafter, he and his deputy, General Erich Ludendorff, exploited Emperor Wilhelm II's broad delegation of power to the German Supreme Army Command to establish a de facto military dictatorship. Under their leadership, Germany secured Russia's defeat in the east and achieved advances on the Western Front deeper than any seen since the conflict's outbreak. However, by the end of 1918, all improvements in Germany's fortunes were reversed after the German Army was decisively defeated in the Second Battle of the Marne and the Allies' Hundred Days Offensive. Upon his country's armistice with the Allies in November 1918, Hindenburg stepped down as Germany's commander-in-chief and retired once again from military service in 1919.


In 1925, Hindenburg returned to public life to become the second elected president of the German Weimar Republic. Personally opposed to Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party, Hindenburg nonetheless played a major role in the political instability that resulted in their rise to power. After twice dissolving the Reichstag in 1932, Hindenburg agreed in January 1933 to appoint Hitler as chancellor in coalition with the Deutschnationale Volkspartei. In response to the Reichstag fire, which was allegedly committed by Marinus van der Lubbe, he approved the Reichstag Fire Decree in February 1933, which suspended various civil liberties. Later in March, he signed the Enabling Act of 1933, which gave the Nazi regime emergency powers. After Hindenburg died the following year, Hitler combined the presidency with his office as chancellor before proceeding to declare himself Führer und Reichskanzler des deutschen Volkes (lit. 'Leader and Reich Chancellor of the German People') and transformed Germany into a totalitarian state.

The next crisis followed Stresemann's negotiation of the Young Plan, which rescheduled reparations payments and opened the way for needed American loans. In addition, the French promised to leave the Rhineland in 1930, five years before schedule. The right formed a committee to block adoption, which started by intensively lobbying Hindenburg using such powerful voices as that of Admiral Tirpitz. Hindenburg did not budge from his refusal to support the campaign.^[161] The committee brought mainstream conservatives, such as the powerful newspaper owner Alfred Hugenberg, into alliance with the Nazis for the first time. They submitted the issue to a national plebiscite, which failed because only 15% of eligible voters cast a ballot, far short of the 50% required.^[162] In his open letter when he promulgated the required legislation to put the issue before the voters, Hindenburg pointed out that their major problem was the economic turmoil and growing unemployment stemming from the worldwide depression.


His close advisers were Oskar, Groener, Meissner, and Schleicher, known as the Kamarilla. The younger Hindenburg, "the constitutionally unforeseen son of the President", controlled access to the president.^[163] Hindenburg tried to assemble the next government by obtaining enough support from political parties while retaining essential ministers such as Groener and Stresemann, but was unable to form a working combination, the parties were too diverse and divided. A new election would only reinforce these bitter divisions. Schleicher proposed a solution: a government in which the chancellor would be responsible to the president rather than the Reichstag, based on the so-called "25/48/53 formula",^[164] named for the three articles of the Constitution that could make such a "Presidential government" possible:


Schleicher suggested that in such a presidential government the trained economist and leader of the Catholic Center Party (Zentrum) Heinrich Brüning would make an excellent chancellor. Hindenburg first talked with Brüning in February 1930. He was impressed by his probity and by his outstanding combat record as a machine gun officer; and was reconciled to his being a Catholic. In January 1930, Meissner told Kuno von Westarp that soon Muller's "Grand Coalition" would be replaced by a "presidential government" that would exclude the Social Democrats, adding that the coming "Hindenburg government" would be "anti-Marxist" and "anti-parliamentarian", serving as a transition to a dictatorship.^[165] Schleicher maneuvered to exacerbate a bitter dispute within Müller's coalition, which was divided over whether the unemployment insurance rate should be raised by a half percentage point or a full percentage point.^[166] With the Grand Coalition government lacking support in the Reichstag, Müller asked Hindenburg to have his budget approved under Article 48, but Schleicher persuaded Hindenburg to refuse.^[167] Müller's government fell on 27 March 1930 and Brüning became chancellor. Brüning had hesitated because he lacked parliamentary support, but Hindenburg appealed to his sense of duty and threatened to resign himself.^[168] Only the four Social Democrats in the previous cabinet were replaced, forming what the press labeled the "Hindenburg Cabinet", which Dorpalen argues "failed to produce the hoped for turn of events".^[169] The depression grew worse, unemployment was soaring, and now the constitutional system had been drastically shaken.^[170]


Urged on by the president, the Reichstag passed a bill supporting agriculture by raising tariffs and providing subsidies. Faced with declining tax revenues and mounting costs for unemployment insurance, Brüning introduced an austerity budget with steep spending cuts and steep tax increases.^[171] The Young Plan required such a balanced budget. Nonetheless, his budget was defeated in the Reichstag in July 1930, so Hindenburg signed it into law by invoking Article 48. The Reichstag voted to repeal the budget, so Hindenburg dissolved it just two years into its mandate, and re-approved the budget with Article 48. Unemployment was still soaring. Hindenburg took no part in the campaign, in the September 1930 elections the Nazis achieved an electoral breakthrough, gaining 17 percent of the vote to become the second-strongest party in the Reichstag. The Communists also made striking gains, albeit not so great.


After the elections, Brüning continued to govern largely through Article 48; his government was kept afloat by the Social Democrats who voted against canceling his Article 48 bills in order to avoid another election that could only benefit the Nazis and the Communists. The German historian Eberhard Jäckel concluded that presidential government was within the letter of the constitution, but violated its spirit as Article 54 stated the chancellor and his cabinet were responsible to the Reichstag, and thus presidential government was an end-run around the constitution.^[172] Hindenburg for his part grew increasingly annoyed with Brüning, complaining that he was growing tired of using Article 48 all the time to pass bills. Hindenburg found the detailed notes that Brüning submitted explaining the economic necessity of each of his bills to be incomprehensible. Brüning continued with austerity; a decree in December 1930 once again cut the wages of public employees and the budget. Modest, withdrawn Brüning was completely unable to explain his measures to the voters, or even to the president, who relied on explanations from the Kamarilla. The Nazis and German Nationals marched out of the Reichstag in opposition to a procedural rule. The 1931 budget was then passed easily, and the Reichstag adjourned until October after only increasing the military budget and the subsidies for Junkers in the so-called Osthilfe (Eastern Aid) program. In June 1931 there was a banking crisis in which the funds on deposit plummeted. Complete disaster was averted by United States President Herbert Hoover obtaining a temporary moratorium on reparation payments.


In the summer of 1931, Hindenburg complained in a letter to his daughter: "What pains and angers me the most is being misunderstood by part of the political right".^[173] He met Adolf Hitler for the first time in October 1931, at a high-level conference in Berlin. Everyone present saw that they took an immediate dislike to each other. Afterwards Hindenburg in private often disparagingly referred to Hitler as "that Austrian corporal", "that Bohemian corporal" or sometimes simply as "the corporal" and also derided Hitler's Austrian dialect.^[174] For his part, Hitler often labeled Hindenburg as "that old fool" or "that old reactionary". On 26 January 1933, Hindenburg privately told a group of his friends: "Gentlemen, I hope you will not hold me capable of appointing this Austrian corporal to be Reich Chancellor".^[175] Hindenburg made it clear that he saw himself as the leader of the "national" forces and expected Hitler to follow his lead.^[173]


In foreign affairs he spoke with hostility towards Poland, often expressing a hope that the Polish state would disappear from the map of Europe "at an appropriate moment".^[176]