Germany's last chancellor before Hitler tried to tame him, and failed
Kurt von Schleicher spent the Weimar years as the army's backroom political fixer, toppled rivals, and finally became chancellor himself in December 1932. Within two months his schemes to split or contain the Nazis had collapsed, he recommended Hitler as his successor, and in 1934 Hitler's SS killed him and his wife.
Born in 1882 into a military family in Brandenburg an der Havel, Schleicher joined the Prussian Army in 1900, where his friends included Oskar von Hindenburg, son of the future president. At the war academy he met Franz von Papen, and on the General Staff he became the protégé of Wilhelm Groener. During the First World War he spent nearly all his time at headquarters; a paper criticising war profiteering won him an unexpected liberal reputation and the approval of the Social Democrat leader Friedrich Ebert.
When the monarchy fell in 1918, Groener took de facto command of the army and Schleicher became the link between soldiers and the new civilian government. He helped negotiate the Ebert-Groener pact, which traded military support for the republic against leftist uprisings for the army's political independence, a state within the state, and he helped found the Freikorps in January 1919. In the early 1920s he arranged secret cooperation with the Soviet Union, trading German help for Soviet arms industry in exchange for ways around the Versailles disarmament rules, and he was part of the team behind the covert Black Reichswehr.
He engineered the fall of his own patron, General Hans von Seeckt, in 1926, and became in effect the army's political chief and a close adviser to President Hindenburg. In 1932 he served as defence minister under Papen, then undermined him and took over as chancellor on 3 December. He tried to lure the Nazi Gregor Strasser into defecting and to pressure Hitler with a threatened cross-party alliance, but Hitler would not give up his claim to the top job.
Out of options and in poor health, Schleicher resigned on 28 January 1933 and advised appointing Hitler. He later hoped to exploit the rift between Hitler and the SA leader Ernst Röhm, but on 30 June 1934, during the Night of the Long Knives, he and his wife Elisabeth were murdered on Hitler's orders.
Source: Kurt von Schleicher
