Not at the meeting were the leaders of the Catholic Center Party, which was as it sounded-Catholic and centrist-though it leaned more to the right than the left. 3 Other men were present in the room, including current cabinet ministers who had agreed to join the new government that Hitler would lead, but these three were in charge. The satirist Karl Kraus remarked, “Hitler brings nothing to my mind.” Hitler “doesn’t exist,” said another funny man “he is only the noise he makes.” True, Hitler was very loud, but people listened to him. His enemies considered him a “hamster” even his friends remarked on the sixty-seven-year-old’s lack of “political sex appeal.” 2 And forty-three-year-old Adolf Hitler, a veteran of World War I and the postwar political struggles but otherwise without experience in government, was powerful because he was the indisputable leader of the nation’s largest party, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, a violent, populist movement with an energized following that had swept with terrific force onto the political scene. A contemporary described the fifty-four-year-old Westphalian Catholic as an antiquated caricature: “a figure from Alice in Wonderland” perfectly cast with “long-legged stiffness, haughtiness, and bleating arrogance.” 1 Press tycoon Alfred Hugenberg was powerful because he led the right-wing German National People’s Party, which had lost most of its voters over the years but remained crucial to any plan for a nationalist unity government. Chief negotiator Franz Joseph Hermann Michael Maria von Papen, the nation’s unpopular chancellor from June to December 1932, had standing among conservative, antirepublican elites and clout because of his friendship with President Hindenburg. The men were powerful for different reasons. The men in the room were determined: they would destroy the republic and establish a dictatorship powerful enough to bend back the influence of political parties and break the socialists. They met in the Chancellery Building in Berlin, where Hindenburg and Meissner had temporary offices while the Presidential Palace underwent repairs. The most powerful men in German politics had gathered in the first-floor office of Otto Meissner, chief of staff to the president of the republic, Paul von Hindenburg, who occupied the second-floor suite. T HE POCKET WATCH told the time: It was shortly before eleven o’clock in the morning on Monday, January 30, 1933. INTRODUCTION Quarter Past Eleven, One Hundred Days, a Thousand Years
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