Word: hindenburg
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...couple of wellborn smart-alecks, General Kurt von Schleicher and ex-Lieut. Colonel Franz von Papen, both conservatives, both of good regiments, who delivered Weimar over to the Nazis. They were also both favorites of the republic's beloved 85-year-old President Paul von Hindenburg (who at least had the excuse of senility), and cronies of his incompetent, corruptible son Oskar. Confidently they set out to grab power and outflummox that ex-Corporal Adolf Hitler...
First the two got Hindenburg to fire the incumbent Chancellor and replace him with Von Papen. The delighted Hindenburg beamed: "Now I can have a Cabinet of my friends." Then, in a double-cross, Schleicher had Von Papen ousted and became Chancellor himself, planning to rule Germany by splitting the Nazi Party and taking over a third of Hitler's Reichstag deputies. The plan had some merit; large numbers of Nazis, including at one time Berlin Party Chief Joseph Goebbels, thought Hitler had sold out to the capitalists...
...Papen contrived Schleicher's fall and convinced Hindenburg that the way to neutralize Nazi power was to give Hitler the chancellorship and then surround him with conservative ministers. Within a year Schleicher had been killed and Germany belonged to the Führer...
Died. Heinrich Bruning, 84, Chancellor during the last years of the Weimar Republic; in Norwich, Vt. Appointed by Hindenburg in 1930, BrUning tried everything from stern economic measures to rule by decree in an effort to hold the country together Nothing worked, and his near-dictatorial powers earned him many enemies among industrialists and landowners, who turned Hindenburg against him. Bruning resigned in 1932, then fled Germany during the 1934 "blood purge" and later taught at Harvard...