Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

426 DER FUEHRERBut now Bruning himself let this system fall. He was making a sort ofpalace revolution against himself and his closest friends; he threw out ofhis cabinet some ministers who belonged to the Left, among themDoctor Joseph Wirth, the former Chancellor. Groener, the ReichswehrMinister, took over the Ministry of the Interior; this meant thatSchleicher had his way. From now on, with planned inactivity, theReich government looked on as Hitler strengthened his private army andsent it swarming into every town and village. The half-forgottenGeneral Ludendorff, grown bitterly hostile both to Hitler andHindenburg, wrote in an angry newspaper article that Germany 'hadbecome a country occupied by the S.A.' To dissatisfied associates likePrussian State Secretary Abegg, Schleicher declared that it was utterlyimpossible to suppress the National Socialists or dissolve the S.A. TheS.A., Abegg replied, was Hitler's private army, and where in the worldwas a private citizen allowed to maintain an army ? Then Schleichersaid: 'We simply cannot forbid the S.A., for we are no longer strongenough; if we attempt it, we shall be swept away!'In November, 1931, a set of careful and bloodthirsty plans for anuprising were found in one of the South German National Socialistheadquarters, on the Hessian estate of Boxheim. They had a suspiciouslyCommunist air about them: the S.A. would assume statepower, suspend all private enterprises, confiscate all revenues, takeaway the products of the peasants, feed the population in publickitchens; and anyone resisting, said nearly every paragraph, 'will be shot. . . will be punished by death . . . will be shot. . . .' Hitler, withoutwhose knowledge presumably nothing could be done in the party,declared indignantly that he had known nothing of these plans, but hedid not question their authenticity. Yet in private conversation he wasable to convince Schleicher that he did not favor such radicalism andthat his person constituted a sort of dam against the revolutionary floodthat was rising in the National Socialist Movement.These conversations, which took place in November and December,1931, must have made a strong impression on Schleicher; also onGroener, to whom Schleicher passed them on; even on Bruning himself.Groener began to reproach high Prussian police officials