Kurt von Schleicher

German Army Gen. Kurt von Schleicher was born in 1882 in Brandenburg, Germany (then Prussia), the son of an officer in the Prussian army. He himself enlisted in the Prussian army, soon graduating from officer training school with the rank of lieutenant. In 1909 he attended the Prussian Military Academy, where he made the acquaintance of future political leader Franz von Papen. Schleicher subsequently was assigned to the Railway Department of the Prussian General Staff. When World War I broke out Schleicher, now a captain, was attached to the General Staff at Supreme Army Command. During the year-long battle of Verdun--in which more than one million men died--Schleicher suspected that the reason many of the German artillery shells, for example, didn't explode on contact was because of shoddy workmanship due to defense contractors' greed for profits, and he wrote a blistering paper attacking war profiteering. That earned him a reputation as a liberal--not the best thing to be known as in an organization as fanatically conservative as the Prussian officer corps--and he spent the rest of the war on the General Staff. After the war he became assistant to Gen. Wilhelm Groener, who was placed in charge of the German army. In November of 1918 Germany was torn by political turmoil, much of it coming from a militant, armed leftist group known as the Spartacist League. Schleicher was used by the army as the negotiator between the civilian government and army, which wanted to enter Berlin and crush the Spartacist revolution once and for all. Schleicher managed to persuade the government to accede to the army's wishes, which caused his stock to rise in the halls of power within Germany. It was Schleicher's efforts that led to the government allowing the army to remain basically autonomous, without civilian oversight or control, in exchange for the army's promise to protect the government against any further revolutionary attacks. One problem the army had was that, due to the Treaty of Versailles' restrictions on the size of the newly re-formed German army, many of the troops left in the army couldn't be counted on to remain completely loyal. Schleicher solved that problem by helping to form "freikorps", or paramilitary-type militia units, which consisted mainly of disaffected German veterans, in addition to street toughs, ex-convicts and convicted criminals. These units, while not officially part of the German army, were used to crush political opposition--the Spartacist League, for example, was effectively destroyed by the freikorps--in either street battles or straight-out assassinations, often in close cooperation with army officials. Adolf Hitler's feared "Storm Troopers", and later his even more feared SS, originally consisted mostly of former or current freikorps members. The German army did not consider the Weimar Republic, the elected government at the time, to be legitimate, and did everything it could to sabotage and undermine it. Schleicher's main function was to ensure that the army stayed independent of the government and got what it wanted without giving anything up, a task at which he succeeded admirably. Schleicher rose quickly through the ladders of power in the German army and government, gaining a reputation for ambition and ruthlessness combined with a knack for ingratiating himself with the powers-that-be and a mastery of the intricacies and intrigues of the cutthroat--and lethal--politics of the time. He became a proponent of the philosophy of "total war" against Germany's real and perceived enemies and found ways around the disarmament clauses of the Treaty of Versailles, meant to ensure that Germany would never re-arm itself to the point where it would pose another threat to peace in Europe. He used the freikorps to crush street protests against the government and even to assassinate political opponents. He became a close confidant and adviser to German President Paul von Hindenburg through his friendship with Hindenburg's son, a fellow army officer. In that capacity he exercised immense power and used that power to undermine the democratic process in Germany--he believed that only a military dictatorship, with him as head, could "make Germany great again"--and decided to use the ever-increasing power of Adolf Hitler's Nazi movement to accomplish that. He believed that he could use the Nazis to crush all domestic opposition and put them in power, then destroy them himself. However, Nazi officials knew Schleicher better than he thought they did--Herman Goering once quipped that "any Chancellor who has Herr von Schleicher on his side must expect sooner or later to be sunk by the Schleicher torpedo"--and they had no illusions as to what he had in store for them. Schleicher's rise to power eventually resulted in his being appointed Chancellor. However, his term turned out to be a disaster. His relations with the Cabinet were frosty at best, and his once solid friendship with President Hindenburg's son evaporated over some sort of personal affront--it's never been made clear exactly what happened--but it also resulted in the loss of his access to President von Hindenburg himself. Schleicher's skills at political intrigue didn't translate into skills at governing, and he alienated practically every level of the German government and society itself. Matters finally came to a head when the army leadership demanded that Hindenburg fire Schleicher as Chancellor and install Hitler, which Hindenburg did on January 30, 1933. Schleicher tried to ingratiate himself with the new Hitler government, but with little success. Hearing of the growing rift between Hitler and SA (Storm Trooper) leader Ernst Röhm, Schleicher decided to throw in with Rohm against Hitler. That proved to be his undoing. Hitler, fearing that Rohm was organizing a coup against him by the SA, moved against Rohm on June 30, 1934, thereafter known as "The Night of the Long Knives". Rohm and the top SA leadership and their associates were arrested and imprisoned--many, including Rohm, were murdered in their cells by SS executioners--and many more were simply shot as soon as they were found. Unfortunately for Schleicher, he was one of them. SS assassins burst into his house that night and shot and killed Schleicher and his wife.