Goering by Roger Manvell

elections were held on September 14. The result was an outstanding victory for the Nazis and a most significant step forward in their campaign for power. They polled nearly six and a half million votes, which entitled them to 107 Reichstag seats. Overnight they leaped from the lower depths of German political intrigue to the vantage point of the second largest party in the Reichstag. Now they could negotiate from strength, exploiting at every opportunity the weakness and vacillation of the democratic government in Germany.
    The whole Western world was moving into a period of financial strain which was to sap its strength and weaken its moral resistance to corruption. These were the black years. The Wall Street collapse had come in the autumn of 1929. Stresemann, the only statesman of vision, resource and staying power that the successive democratic governments had produced, was dead. Field Marshal von Hindenburg, aged and obstinate, was President. Brüning, of the Catholic Center Party, honest and well-meaning, had tried to rule as Chancellor without the Reichstag, by obtaining emergency powers, and he had failed. The result had been the election which swept the Nazis onto the doorstep of power.
    Hitler was now more than ever convinced that the right way to achieve his ambition was the legal and constitutional way. Goering completely accepted this policy. After a Law for the Protection of the Republic had been passed in March 1930, as an attempt to suppress the growing public disorder, Goering said, “We are fighting against this State and the present system because we want to destroy it utterly—but in a legal manner” to satisfy “the long-eared plain-clothes men. Before we had the Law for the Protection of the Republic we said we hated this State; under this law we say we love it—and still everyone knows what we mean!” 8 When three saboteurs had been charged by the Minister of Defense with spreading Nazi doctrines in the Army, Hitler himself had appeared before the Supreme Court in Leipzig as a witness for the defense; there he had made his celebrated statement that the time would come when the German national revolution would take place by constitutional means and that then, still by constitutional means, “we will form the State in the manner which we consider to be the right one.” ‘This was on September 25, eleven days after the results of the election.
    So the Nazis continued to play a shrewd double game to entice both the workers and the industrialists into their political net. On October 14 Goering was a co-signatory with Goebbels, Gregor Strasser and other Nazi deputies of a motion due to go before the chamber which recommended the confiscation of “the entire property of the banking and Bourse magnates . . . for the benefit of the German people without compensation,” and that “all large banks, including the so-called Reichsbank,” should “become the property of the State without delay.” 9 Hitler was furious and the motion was withdrawn. Only two months later, in December, Stauss, a member of the board of the Deutsche Bank, was inviting Hjalmar Schacht, who had resigned from his position as president of the Reichsbank the previous March, to dinner in order to meet Deputy Hermann Goering. The latter impressed Schacht as “a pleasant, urbane companion” without “anything that might have been described as an irreconcilable or intolerable political radicalism .” 10
    Goering was quick to invite Schacht to a dinner party where he might meet Hitler himself. This was on January 5, 1931; Fritz Thyssen and Goebbels were also present. Schacht remarked on the comfort and good taste of Goering’s “pleasant middle-class home.” There was, he found, no ostentation. He thought Frau Goering most winning and kindly; she gave him “an essentially simple meal” and then retired to lie on a sofa and listen to the conversation.