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

HINDENBURG'S STICK 461But Hitler was proved right: it was home affairs that decided.Domestic intrigue even managed to knife Bruning's foreign policy in theback. Schleicher was on terms of friendship with Andre Francois-Poncet, the French ambassador in Berlin. He told him that there was nosense in France continuing to negotiate with Bruning; for soon therewould be another government, more friendly to France. Theconsequence was that Bruning waited in vain for French PremierTardieu in Geneva; Tardieu pretended illness, and the GermanChancellor did not bring back the end of reparations, as he had hoped.This was a situation that could not last; but meanwhile the mass dramaand intrigues rolled on at home.The Prussian diet was preparing to overthrow the democratic Braungovernment; the Communists gave the signal. On May 25, they entereda motion that the diet should give the Prussian government a vote of noconfidence.If the Communists had wanted to put Hitler in power, theycould have acted no differently. Actually they did want to put Hitler inpower. They staunchly believed that they were the born heirs offascism; that they would speedily overthrow fascism if it took power,but that it must first take power. Rosa Luxemburg had regarded militarydictatorship as the necessary preliminary to the dictatorship of theproletariat, and in 1923 Stalin had written in a letter to his comrades,Zinoviev and Buk-harin: 'It is more advantageous for us that the Fascists[in Germany] should strike first: that will rally the whole working classto the Communists!' For that reason, Stalin thought, the German Communistsmust be 'restrained, not encouraged.' It was the firm convictionof all Communist leaders, including Leon Trotzky living as an exile ona Turkish island near Constantinople, that the united front of theworking class would conquer Germany. But Trotzky demanded that theCommunists create a united front through a pact with the SocialDemocrats, while the Communists under Stalin's leadership clung to theview that the Social Democrats must be smashed before fascism couldeffectively be combated, and for that reason fascism must come topower.In the Reichstag on October 13, 1931, Bruning warned the Germancapitalists of the menacing united front of the workers, and urged themnot to provoke the working class too far. The worker,