Kurt von Schleicher

Kurt von Schleicher was the political general of the Weimar Republic, the man who made and unmade chancellors from the Reichswehr ministry for four years, who was himself the last chancellor before Hitler, for fifty-seven days, and who was shot with his wife in his own house on 30 June 1934 in the purge that killed Rohm. He had served in Hindenburg's old regiment, the Third Foot Guards, with Hindenburg's son as a friend, and spent the war and the republic on the staff, where he ran the army's political office and its relations with the government and the president. He engineered the fall of the Muller government in 1930 and the appointment of Bruning, whom he then dropped in May 1932 for Papen, whom he had found and thought he could manage. As Papen's defence minister he supplied the troops that deposed the Prussian government in July. By the autumn he had decided Papen was leading the country to civil war, and he told Hindenburg that the army could not hold the country against the Nazis and the Communists together, which brought Papen down on 2 December. His own plan as chancellor was to split the Nazi party by bringing in Gregor Strasser, its organisation chief, and to build a front with the trade unions and the Reichswehr around a programme of jobs; Strasser was disowned by Hitler and resigned, the unions did not come, and the industrialists and the landowners, alarmed by his talk of land settlement in the east, turned to Papen. Papen made his bargain with Hitler behind Schleicher's back in January 1933, Hindenburg refused Schleicher the emergency powers he asked for, and he resigned on 28 January, two days before Hitler was appointed. He lived quietly at Neubabelsberg outside Berlin, talked too much, and was on Goring's list. The SS men who came on 30 June shot him in his study and his wife when she ran in, and the regime announced that he had been plotting with Rohm and a foreign power. Hindenburg did not protest.

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