He'd lost 2 million votes. The Nazis were bankrupt. Yet there's a reason Hitler went from doomed to dictator in just six days, as a riveting new book reveals...

On January 24 1933, a cartoon appeared in a German newspaper showing Adolf Hitler standing in the graveyard of his failed political movement. He was depicted as a Hamlet figure, holding and gazing at his own skull among a forest of swastika-shaped gravestones.

If only!

The non-Nazi wishful thinkers of Germany had managed to convince themselves that the danger had passed. In spite of Hitler having travelled 40,000 miles by air during the recent election campaign, showing off all his oratorical tricks in crowded halls across the country, his National Socialist party hadn’t got near to achieving the necessary 51 per cent of the national vote for a parliamentary majority. 

At the Reichstag elections on November 6, two-thirds of Germany’s voters had rejected him. He’d lost two million votes since the previous elections in July. And his party was bankrupt: 90 million Reichsmarks in debt.

Even Goebbels, Hitler’s devoted acolyte, admitted in his vicious, terse diary that ‘the year 1932 has been one long streak of bad luck. One has to smash it to pieces.’

Hitler is cheered by adoring crowds after being made chancellor in 1933

German president Paul von Hindenburg with Chancellor Adolf Hitler after his election victory

Yet, just six days after that ridiculing cartoon, Reich President Field Marshal von Hindenburg would appoint the little ‘Bohemian corporal’ (as he called him) as his new chancellor. Hindenburg could hardly stand the man. So how on earth did it happen?

Reading Timothy Ryback’s excellent and forensic account of the complicated events in German politics in the six-month run-up to that fateful moment, I found myself willing the end result not to happen. I clung to the misguided opinions of so many commentators at the time: ‘Hitler is out of the running.’ ‘His reputation is on the wane.’ Even on January 28 1933, Ryder writes, the German papers were still predicting a variety of imminent coalitions, none of which included Hitler.

But none of those commentators reckoned with the fundamental fact that we now know to be true: nothing could keep Hitler down. Like a tantrummy toddler, he screamed and ranted till he got his own way. As resilient as steel, he was positively invigorated by setbacks, and in fact played his cards precisely right to get what he wanted: total, dictatorial power.

As he’d written in Mein Kampf, recalling his unhappy Austrian childhood, even the severest canings by his father had been unable to shake his resolve. Ryder’s book is a terrifying testament to the triumph of stubbornness.

‘Nein,’ said Hindenberg, politely but firmly, to Hitler, when this book opens in August 1932. Hitler had arrived for a meeting with the president, fully expecting to be appointed chancellor. Having gained 37 per cent of the nation’s vote, he insisted that this entitled him to be leader of the country.

But Hindenburg told him he could never entrust government to a party whose members were so intolerant, undisciplined and violent. Only five days previously, Hitler’s stormtroopers had broken into the house of Communist trade unionist Konrad Pietzuch and murdered him in front of his mother. ‘But, Herr Reich President,’ Hitler pleaded, ‘have an understanding that my people sometimes get a little excited.’

Conceding that the National Socialists were now a party with strong national support, Hindenburg asked Hitler whether he might agree to participate in the government. To which Hitler, with equal force, replied, ‘Nein.’ He had no intention of playing second fiddle to anyone.

Quite a few times during the next five months, politicians would try to bribe or coerce him to go into coalition government with them. ‘I would rather besiege a fortress than be a prisoner in one,’ was Hitler’s disdainful retort. 

He insisted that single-party rule was the only possible solution for Germany’s myriad problems. ‘Dictatorship,’ he explained to an American journalist, ‘is the only viable future for Germany.’

It was true that the German parliamentary system had pretty well broken down in the chaos of too many short-lived, weak coalitions.

More and more, Hindenburg was resorting to using his ‘Article 48’ powers to issue dictator-style emergency decrees without parliamentary approval.

At the end of that August meeting in 1932, it was agreed that Hitler would go into opposition. The current chancellor, Von Papen, would remain in post. And Hitler vowed to make life difficult for them both. He would gridlock the Reichstag (parliament) and sow political and social chaos.

This is exactly what he did, hence those new November elections, in which the Nazis did badly.

But nor did any of the other parties do well. Von Papen resigned, as he knew he couldn’t bridge the party divides and find a way to govern. No one could, it seemed.

Hindenburg appointed Kurt von Schleicher as the new (and, it would turn out, final) chancellor of the Weimar Republic, hoping he would be able to work with the Nazis to create a viable government. Others fervently hoped the nationalist business mogul Alfred Hugenberg could go into coalition with the other, slightly more palatable, Nazi Gregor Strasser. I admit that by this time my head was spinning with all the possible political permutations.

By mid-January 1933, constitutional paralysis had set in. Schleicher was frustrated by trying to run the government without a mandate to rule by dictatorial decree. Hindenburg was getting irritated by him, and Schleicher, finding himself isolated and out in the cold, resigned.

Von Papen, who loathed Schleicher, saw his chance. He’d been keeping in with Hindenburg, and he suggested forming a new government with Hitler in charge.

‘You mean to tell me,’ said Hindenburg, ‘that I have the unpleasant task of appointing this fellow Hitler as the next chancellor?’ Papen nodded.

Hitler pictured rehearsing a speech in front of the mirror in 1933

The fuhrer's first cabinet meeting in Berlin, on January 30, 1933, including Hermann Goering , Vice-Chancellor Franz Von Papen and Minister of Economy Alfred Hugenberg 

Up to the last minute, even as they’d taken a Mercedes from their hotel to the Reichstag on January 30, we see Hitler and the power-hungry Hugenberg locked in battle on the staircase, both red with rage, arguing about who was to be who in the cabinet. 

The president was annoyed to be kept waiting as the two men fought it out. Hugenberg only softened and backed down when Hitler promised that after new elections he would listen to all voices and ‘try to build a broad majority’. Up they went, into the president’s office, and the deal was signed. Hitler was the new chancellor. The next day, Hugenberg said to a friend, ‘I just made the biggest mistake of my life.’

You certainly did, Hugenburg, and so did Hindenburg. Worn down, they had ushered in what Hitler vowed would be his ‘thousand-year Reich’.

Within three weeks of the new elections of March 1933, far from ‘building a broad majority’, the Reichstag passed an enabling law establishing Hitler’s government as a dictatorship.

The rest is history.

Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power by Timothy W. Ryback is out now (Headline, £25)