The failure of Weimar democracy and Hitler's appointment
By the end of 1932 the Nazi vote was falling and the party was almost bankrupt. Yet on 30 January 1933 Adolf Hitler walked into the Reich Chancellery as the new Chancellor of Germany. The puzzle of this lesson is how a party that had just lost 34 Reichstag seats in November came to power twelve weeks later. The answer is not that Hitler was ‘voted in’ — the Nazis never won an outright majority in a free election. He was appointed by an 85-year-old President after a sequence of backstairs deals between elite conservatives who believed they could control him.
The April 1932 Presidential Election
The crisis of 1932 began with the presidential election. Paul von Hindenburg, then 84, stood for re-election against Hitler. Hindenburg won the second round in April 1932 with 53% to Hitler's 36%, but the result shook the conservative establishment. Hitler had won 13 million votes and proved that the Nazi movement was a permanent feature of German politics.
Hindenburg disliked Hitler personally — he called him ‘the Bohemian corporal’ — but the President was now surrounded by a small group of right-wing advisers including his son Oskar and General Kurt von Schleicher. They concluded that the only way to govern without the SPD was to harness the Nazi vote inside a controlled cabinet.
Germany had four chancellors in twelve months: Bruning (until May 1932), Papen (June 1932), Schleicher (December 1932), Hitler (January 1933). Each was appointed by Hindenburg using Article 48; none commanded a Reichstag majority. By January 1933 parliamentary government had effectively ceased to function.
Papen's Cabinet of Barons, June 1932
In May 1932 Schleicher persuaded Hindenburg to dismiss Bruning and appoint Franz von Papen, an obscure Centre Party aristocrat with no Reichstag seat. Papen's cabinet was nicknamed the ‘Cabinet of Barons’ because most of its members were aristocrats. It had almost no support in the Reichstag — in a vote of confidence in September 1932, Papen lost 512 to 42.
Papen's most aggressive move was the ‘Preussenschlag’ of 20 July 1932 — he used Article 48 to dismiss the elected SPD-led Prussian state government and install himself as Reich Commissioner. This destroyed the largest democratic stronghold in Germany and removed an SPD-controlled police force that had been resisting Nazi street violence. Many historians see this as the decisive moment when Weimar democracy stopped defending itself.
In the July 1932 election the Nazis polled 37.4% and won 230 Reichstag seats — their high water mark. Hitler demanded the chancellorship. Hindenburg refused, telling Hitler to his face on 13 August 1932 that he would not appoint him to a presidential cabinet. Papen called fresh elections for November. The Nazi vote fell to 33.1% and 196 seats — a loss of 34 deputies and around two million votes. Communist support rose. Goebbels's diary recorded that party morale was collapsing and finances were near bankruptcy. If parliamentary politics had simply continued, the Nazi tide might have ebbed. It did not get the chance.
Schleicher's Failed Chancellorship, December 1932
In December 1932 Schleicher persuaded Hindenburg that he, rather than Papen, should now be Chancellor. Schleicher tried to build a ‘cross-front’ coalition by splitting Gregor Strasser's left wing of the Nazi Party away from Hitler and combining it with trade-union support. The strategy failed within four weeks. Strasser was politically broken; Schleicher had no Reichstag majority either; and the trade unions had no reason to trust an aristocratic general.
Meanwhile Papen, furious at being pushed out, was working in private to bring Hitler back into government — with himself as Vice-Chancellor pulling the strings. On 4 January 1933 Papen met Hitler in secret at the Cologne home of the banker Kurt von Schroeder. Industrial donors were lined up to pay off Nazi debts. Within three weeks Schleicher was finished.
The Appointment, 30 January 1933
On 28 January Schleicher resigned. On 29 January Papen presented Hindenburg with his proposed cabinet: Hitler as Chancellor, Papen as Vice-Chancellor and Reich Commissioner for Prussia, Alfred Hugenberg (DNVP) as Economics Minister, and only two other Nazis (Frick and Goring) in the cabinet of eleven. Papen reassured Hindenburg that they had ‘hired’ Hitler and could box him in: ‘Within two months we will have pushed Hitler so far into a corner that he'll squeak.’
Hindenburg, now 85, reluctantly agreed. At noon on 30 January 1933 Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. That evening, lit torchlight columns of SA paraded through the Brandenburg Gate. Goebbels wrote in his diary: ‘It is almost like a dream. The Wilhelmstrasse is ours.’ The Nazi share of the cabinet was small — three of eleven — but Hitler had what mattered: control of the Chancellery, command of Reich-level policy, and a President willing to issue Article 48 decrees on his recommendation.
Three layers of cause are usually identified. Structural causes include the Treaty of Versailles, the Article 48 emergency provision, the use of proportional representation that produced fragmented Reichstags, and the survival of anti-democratic elites in the army, judiciary and civil service. Long-term causes include the Depression, the rise of the Nazi and Communist parties, and the discrediting of moderate parties by 1932. Contingent causes are the personal decisions of a small group: Hindenburg's willingness to govern by decree, Papen's vendetta against Schleicher, and the Cologne meeting of 4 January 1933. Hitler's appointment was not inevitable — it was the product of all three layers and an avoidable miscalculation by elite conservatives.
Hitler was appointed, not elected. The Nazis lost 34 seats in November 1932. Hitler became Chancellor on 30 January 1933 because Papen persuaded Hindenburg that a Hitler-led cabinet of three Nazis and eight conservatives could be controlled. Papen's prediction — that they would push Hitler ‘into a corner’ within two months — was the most catastrophic miscalculation in twentieth-century European politics.