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Hundreds of citizens were wounded. 16 There were other signs of the republic’s fragility. 2 percent of the vote. 3 percent now favored right-wing parties hostile to the republic. 6 percent of the vote. 3 percent of the vote, which indicated that only about 43 percent of the electorate supported the constitutional order established in 1919. 4 percent, still not a majority. Their strength, however, was sufficient to persuade the aged President Paul von Hindenburg—then eighty-five-years old and no longer fully in control of his faculties—to succumb to the endless intrigues of his advisers in favor of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor.

The interview lasted only one hour, but time enough for the ambassador to size up the man’s character. ” Baron Neurath, the German foreign minister from 1933 to 1938, attended the meeting but kept quiet or said very little, his customary behavior in Hitler’s presence. The Führer made several dubious claims, and Rumbold duly noted them without comment, which he no doubt considered unnecessary since they were so far-fetched. Hitler insisted that the recent revolution in Germany that had brought him to power was unique because it had been accomplished with a “minimum of violence and bloodshed.

His portrait of Hitler the man, sprinkled with humorous asides, still stands up as thoroughly convincing. Given Hitler’s growing power and the cult of Hitlerism, which was evolving rapidly in Germany, such a portrait of his psychology was potentially very useful to the officials in London who shaped Britain’s foreign policy. In his first meeting with the chancellor, on October 24, 1933, Phipps was taken aback by Hitler’s unexpected and passionate outburst on his willingness to die for his people rather than “sign away their honour” by failing to press for an end to foreign intervention in German affairs.