Background
Kurt von Schleicher was born on 7 April 1882 in Brandenburg.
Kurt von Schleicher was born on 7 April 1882 in Brandenburg.
He entered military service at the age of eighteen as a subaltern in the Third Foot Guards, President von Hindenburg's old regiment, and during World War I served as a General Staff officer and Adjutant to General Wilhelm Groener at Supreme Headquarters. After the war von Schleicher helped organize the illegal Freikorps and the ‘Black Reichswehr’ under General von Seeckt and was a key figure in the negotiations with Moscow about training German tank and air officers in Soviet Russia.
In 1929 Colonel von Schleicher was made head of the newly created Ministeramt (Ministry Bureau) in the Reichswehr Ministry, when his old friend General Groener became Minister of Defence. Von Schleicher was now in charge of the political and press affairs of the army and navy and began to emerge as a talented, unscrupulous intriguer with a nimble mind and a flair for politics. For the next three years von Schleicher was one of the decisive influences behind the scenes who determined the fate of the Weimar Republic.
He was largely responsible for the appointment of Brüning as Chancellor on 28 March 1930 and then for his dismissal. Similarly he prevailed on President von Hindenburg to appoint Franz von Papen as Brüning’s successor only to bring him down in a web of intrigue.
On 2 December 1932 General von Schleicher became the last Chancellor of the Weimar Republic, lasting for fifty-seven days in office and ruling by presidential decree as had his immediate predecessors before him. He tried unsuccessfully to flirt with the trade unions and create an alliance between the army and the working classes against the propertied classes and the Nazis. The latter he sought to divide by offering Gregor Strasser the Vice-Chancellorship and Premiership of Prussia and by making a deal with Ernst Rohm to bring the SA under the military authority of the Reichswehr. Von Schleicher’s ‘socialist’ policies in military garb and his proposal to break up the bankrupt larger estates in East Prussia infuriated the big landowners and industrialists who feared and distrusted him. The new Chancellor’s indifference to traditional class alignments alienated big business. Unable to find a majority in the Reichstag, von Schleicher failed to persuade President von Hindenburg to let him institute a military dictatorship and he was abruptly dismissed on 28 January 1933 after a complicated intrigue in which his old rival, von Papen, played a leading part. Von Schleicher retired from public life though he continued secret contacts with Strasser and Rohm and had not given up all hope of a political comeback.
On 30 June 1934 he and his wife were brutally murdered by Nazi assassins in their home in the suburbs of Berlin during the Night of the Long Knives.
