ABSTRACT
Historians agree that Heinrich Brüning’s appointment as Reich chancellor ended parliamentary democracy in Germany, but there is considerably less consensus on the relationship between the advent of the “presidential regimes” in 1930 and the coming to power of the Nazis in 1933. Did Brüning and his two successors, Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher, pave the way for totalitarianism, or were they the last, ineffective, barrier stemming the Nazi tide, as they claimed? Certainly, the change from the “New Conservatism” of the presidential governments to the totalitarianism of the Nazi regime was fluid rather than abrupt. A number of New Conservatives thought of the Nazis as their natural allies and, as we will see, some among them were instrumental in helping Hitler come to power. Both groups rejected parliamentary democracy as a political system. They were also united in their opposition to Stresemann’s policy
with the Communists that Germany could only choose between Nazism and communism. Both, therefore, sought to evoke an apocalyptic atmosphere, but in contrast to the communist appeal to proletarian revolution, Hitler’s movement promised to overcome class divisions and create a genuine “national community” (Volksgemeinschaft) (see the fuller discussion below, pp. 179-81) that would enjoy economic prosperity and national greatness. To achieve this goal, the Nazis demanded the destruction of democracy, the elimination from power of those forces that in their view had brought ruin to Germany-Jews, Marxists, democrats, and republicans-and their replacement by Adolf Hitler and his f ollowers.
