In the multitudinous accounts of Adolf Hitler's rise to power, one interpretation dominates with regard to the political strategy of his predecessor as Reich chancellor, General Kurt von Schleicher. Beginning with the pioneering books of the journalist Konrad Heiden in the 1930s and continuing through countless versions down to the most recent scholarly works, Schleicher has, with rare exceptions, been depicted as having sought to thwart Hitler by bringing behind his own cabinet a political bloc extending from a left wing split away from the Nazi Party to trade union elements of the republican Social Democratic Party.Footnote ¹ Sometimes described as a Gewerkschaftsachse, this putative goal on the part of Schleicher has now usually come to be referred to as his Querfront strategy.Footnote ² Long regarded by most historians as axiomatic, that version of the chancellor's intentions has seldom been subjected to critical analysis. It is, however, fundamentally erroneous and serves to obscure his actually very different aims.

The most conspicuously implausible aspect of Querfront theories is the contention that at the time of his appointment as chancellor in early December 1932 Schleicher believed he could gain parliamentary backing from the ranks of the democratic left. That proposition rests on the assumption that the chancellor's overtures to Germany's largest trade-union movement, the Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (ADGB), were motivated by hope on his part of winning Reichstag votes from the Social Democratic Party. Some of the leaders of the ADGB were indeed impressed by Schleicher's pledges to combat mass unemployment by launching an extensive program of job creation. Some were even inclined to a kind of social truce with a Schleicher cabinet.Footnote ³ But contrary to Querfront theories, conciliatory attitudes on the part of the union leaders could not be translated into parliamentary support by the chancellor.

Although the ADGB was closely allied with the Social Democratic Party, the unions had no control over its policies. Some of the leaders of the SPD regarded Schleicher as a lesser evil when compared to his predecessor, Franz von Papen, but they remained resolutely oppositional. They bitterly remembered his involvement, as defense minister, in the staggering blow dealt their party months earlier by the Papen cabinet's deposition of the Prussian state government, their bastion throughout the republican period. They also knew that any political concessions the SPD made to Schleicher would predictably result in the loss of still more voters to the burgeoning Communist party. They therefore looked with disapproval upon the union leaders' flirtations with the chancellor. The most Schleicher could hope for by cultivating the ADGB was to rule out the danger of working-class protest demonstrations or a general strike, possibilities that had come to seem threateningly real as a result of the policies of the Papen cabinet. But as for the Social Democrats in the Reichstag, Schleicher told the French ambassador a few days before his appointment as chancellor that he was well aware that they would have no choice except to combat him if he formed a cabinet.Footnote ⁴

The contention that as part of a Querfront strategy Schleicher sought to split off a left wing of the Nazi party and gain its support for his cabinet is based on misinterpretations of the chancellor's unsuccessful courtship of a prominent figure in that party, Gregor Strasser.Footnote ⁵ Although Strasser had attracted favorable attention in some labor circles during 1932 by advocating governmental measures to provide work for Germany's millions of unemployed, it is highly questionable whether he belonged to what might qualify as a Nazi left wing. He did, however, object to Hitler's all-or-nothing stance and favored settling for a share of power for the party by participation in a cabinet headed by someone other than the Nazi leader. That stance made Strasser politically attractive for Schleicher, who held out to him the prospect of high governmental posts and introduced him to President von Hindenburg. This led some observers to assume at the time that the chancellor was seeking to win over Strasser in order to split the NSDAP, among them Joseph Goebbels, who feared that Strasser would betray the party by siding with Schleicher.Footnote ⁶ That assumption became a staple in early publications about Hitler's rise and would, to varying degrees, be echoed in the memoirs of prominent political figures. But since none of those memoirists can be regarded as confidantes of the secretive Schleicher, their later views are of dubious value for an assessment of his strategy.Footnote ⁷

The evidentiary basis for interpreting Schleicher's cultivation of Strasser as an effort to split the NSDAP is weak and marked by contradictions. Support for that view has been seen in the memoir published twenty years later by Franz von Papen, who wrote that at a meeting he and Schleicher had with Hindenburg on the evening of December 1, 1932, the general had proposed to bring about such a split if the president would appoint him to replace Papen as chancellor.Footnote ⁸ There is, however, no mention of such a proposal in the Aktennotiz on that same meeting written by Hindenburg's State Secretary, Otto Meissner, who was also present that evening.Footnote ⁹ Nor did Schleicher express an intent to split the NSDAP when he speculated, during a conversation with the French ambassador on the evening of November 28, about possible difficulties for the Nazis if, without Hitler's permission, Gregor Strasser accepted his offer to serve as his minister of the interior should he become chancellor.Footnote ¹⁰ Papen's memoir version is, moreover, rendered implausible for reasons set forth above by his claim that Schleicher proposed at the December 1 meeting to attain a parliamentary majority that would include not only some sixty Nazi followers of Strasser but also the Reichstag deputies of the Social Democratic Party.

Despite the dubious aspects of Papen's version of the meeting of December 1, it stands confirmed with regard to Schleicher's estimate of Strasser's Nazi followers at sixty, for on the evening of January 13, 1933, in the course of a dinner with a group of journalists, Schleicher himself used that same number in response to a question about Strasser.Footnote ¹¹ On the latter occasion, he made no mention of a possible split in the NSDAP, however. Had he done so, the assembled journalists would have recognized it as implausible, for even if sixty Nazi deputies were to join Strasser in breaking with Hitler to support the Schleicher cabinet, the opposition of the remaining 136 Nazi deputies would, in combination with the 121 Social Democrats and 100 Communists, have sufficed to provide a sizeable majority for adoption of a no-confidence measure in a Reichstag of 584 deputies.

Other contemporaneously recorded statements by Schleicher reveal that he regarded it as impossible to split the NSDAP and placed his hopes instead on winning its political support. In early November 1932 he told the Papen cabinet that only Hitler could decide whether the NSDAP would support a government and that no other Nazi would break with him on that question.Footnote ¹² Later that month, after meeting with Hitler, he reported to Papen's cabinet that the Nazi leader had not only refused to enter a cabinet headed by Schleicher or to allow any member of his party to do so but had also announced his opposition to such a cabinet.Footnote ¹³ In early December Schleicher nevertheless held out to his own cabinet the prospect of a cooperative Reichstag majority consisting of the Catholic Center Party, the small middle parties, and the NSDAP, a formula that was arithmetically feasible only if it included the putative sixty followers of Strasser.Footnote ¹⁴ In mid-December the chancellor explained to a gathering of army officers that his goal was “cooperation by the Nazis under Strasser with the Messiah's blessing” of Hitler.Footnote ¹⁵ A month later, he told the members of his cabinet that he was still hopeful of adding Strasser to their ranks even though the latter lacked many followers and did not want to break with the NSDAP. The backing of a parliamentary majority, the chancellor added on that occasion, would be possible only with Hitler's support.Footnote ¹⁶ As these and other statements by Schleicher leave little doubt, in pursuing Strasser he was seeking to gain the support not of a left wing of the Nazi party but of its entire Reichstag delegation, either in the form of passive toleration by abstention from no-confidence votes or active participation within his cabinet. Moreover, he was well aware that this would be possible only with Hitler's consent.

Still other statements by Schleicher reveal that he viewed the NSDAP in a positive light and had no intention of weakening it. Apparently impervious to the Nazis' fanaticism and ruthlessness, he looked with favor on their ardent patriotism and viewed their 400,000-man paramilitary auxiliary, the SA, as an asset for his plans to rearm Germany as soon as possible. In a letter of March 1932 to his predecessor as defense minister, he described the Nazis as “troublesome types” but a useful counterweight to the SPD. “If they were not there,” he added, “one would have to invent them.”Footnote ¹⁷ One of his aides in the defense ministry later recalled that the general regarded the Nazi movement as “an essentially healthy reaction of the Volkskörper” and “the only party that could attract voters away from the radical left and had already done so.” That same associate also recalled that Schleicher, who personally met with Hitler on several occasions during 1932, had described him as “an interesting man with unusual rhetorical gifts” who “gets easily carried away with his own plans.”Footnote ¹⁸

In a statement dated one year to the day after his replacement by Hitler that was originally intended for publication in the press, Schleicher asserted that he had “consistently and persistently sought to include the Nazis in the government” since the autumn of 1930.Footnote ¹⁹ In view of the political circumstances under which that statement was written in January 1934, it might seem self-servingly suspect. But although Schleicher may have antedated his active interventions on behalf of the NSDAP, his actions from the spring of 1932 on bear out his claim. As he correctly pointed out in that same statement, he had been instrumental in bringing about the deal whereby the ban on the Nazi stormtroopers was lifted and, in return for Hitler's empty promise to withhold his opposition to the new Papen cabinet, his demand for a national election in July was granted. Again correctly, Schleicher pointed out in his statement of 1934 that after the resulting electoral gains by the NSDAP he had favored Hitler's appointment as chancellor until Hindenburg ruled that out. In mid-December 1932, after his own appointment as chancellor, he told a gathering of army officers that destruction of the NSDAP was not in the interest of the state.Footnote ²⁰ A week later he informed the British ambassador that “he would regret the collapse of the Hitler movement” since it would entail “positive dangers,” including an exodus of disappointed Nazis to the Communist ranks. What was necessary, he explained, was “to harness the movement in service to the state.”Footnote ²¹

If Schleicher was not seeking to split the NSDAP in order to align a political Querfront behind his cabinet, what did he actually want? Reliable evidence indicates that he sought to tame the Nazis by co-opting them. One of his closest military aides later wrote that his goal had been to “integrate the movement into the Reich government with the double goal of making use of its power of national attraction (nationale Anziehungskraft) and gradually silencing its demagogy through shared responsibility for the work of governing (Staatsarbeit).”Footnote ²² Even after Strasser's resignation from his party posts in December 1932 in the face of Hitler's rejection of Nazi participation in the Schleicher cabinet, the chancellor continued to place his hopes on making the NSDAP a subordinate partner that would accord either active or passive support to his cabinet. An article planted in the press in mid-December, apparently by Schleicher's closest aide, amounted to an invitation for such an arrangement. Denying that the chancellor sought to destroy the NSDAP, the article stated that a renewal of the Reich could be achieved only if “the greatest national freedom party” entered into alliance with “those forces which have always formed the core of the Prussian-German state”—an obvious reference to the military—and accepted the latter's leadership.Footnote ²³ In mid-January 1933 Schleicher told a journalist that his paramount aim was to bring the Nazis to abandon their “messianic beliefs” and accept integration into “a new extra-parliamentary front in support of an authoritarian regime.”Footnote ²⁴

In pursuit of his goal of harnessing the Nazis, Schleicher resorted in January 1933 to the tactic of seeking to bluff Hitler into accepting his terms by holding out the threat of a Reichstag dissolution and another national election that would add to the growing string of Nazi losses.Footnote ²⁵ Unwilling to assume the role of a supplicant by inviting Hitler to meet with him, the chancellor repeatedly let his readiness to receive him be known. But although Schleicher had by mid-January convinced himself that Hitler did not really want power, the Nazi leader's nerves proved the stronger, and he frustrated the chancellor by maintaining his distance. Buttressed by Nazi electoral gains in the dwarf state of Lippe in mid-January, Hitler broke definitively with Strasser and put an end to Schleicher's hopes of using the latter to win the backing of the NSDAP. Faced with a certain vote of no confidence when the Reichstag reconvened and unwilling to risk an election in which no major party would stand behind his cabinet, Schleicher finally abandoned hope of co-opting the Nazis. Blundering into the trap being laid for him by his embittered erstwhile protégé Franz von Papen, he asked President von Hindenburg to dissolve the Reichstag and violate the constitution by not scheduling a new election within the constitutionally mandated sixty days. Forced to resign the chancellorship when the president rejected his request, he clung to the vain hope of retaining control of the army as defense minister and recommended that the president appoint Hitler as his successor if the Nazi leader could muster a Reichstag majority.

This assessment of Schleicher's role in the developments that brought Hitler to power differs sharply from those found in the many versions based on the non-existent Querfront project. That myth has accorded him the status of a failed but well-intentioned chancellor who strove in vain to keep power beyond Hitler's grasp—as virtually an anticipatory Widerstandskämpfer. Stripped of that myth, he emerges as a political incompetent who sought in vain to tame the NSDAP by offering it a subordinate role in an authoritarian regime he himself intended to head, an arrangement that would unavoidably have entailed extensive policy concessions to Nazi ideology.Footnote ²⁶ In his vain pursuit of that goal, Schleicher maneuvered himself into a political Sackgasse that resulted in his fall and cleared the way for the success of Papen's intrigues on behalf of Hitler's appointment as his successor. Taken together with his earlier part in the transfer of power from the parliament to the presidency and his complicity in the destruction of the Prussian anchor of Weimar democracy, Schleicher's pursuit as chancellor of a partnership with the Nazis entitles him to a place high on the list of Totengräber of the republic.

By casting Schleicher in a benign, if ineffectual, anti-Hitler role, Querfront theories distort the historical record in numerous ways. Most damagingly for an understanding of the demise of the Weimar Republic, they divert attention from the sources of Schleicher's political prominence. His rise to the top of the German government was made possible only by the failure, after the revolution of 1918, to replace the old Prussian-German army with a republican defense force and the election, seven years later, of former Field Marshall von Hindenburg as president. The resulting resurgence of military influence at the top levels of politics—exercised in large measure behind the scenes by Schleicher himself—played a major role in undermining Germany's first attempt at democracy and reached its disastrous denouement during his ill-fated chancellorship.

As for the Querfront myth itself, its persistence, despite abundant contrary evidence, bears testimony to the authoritativeness bestowed by one of the most potent determinants of how the past is perceived, even by professional historians: sustained repetition.