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In October 1934, as Chiang closed in, Mao broke out on a long twisting trek during which he lost, by disease, war and defections, 80,000 of his 100,000 followers. Mao himself abandoned his own brother as well as a wife and several babies, but in January 1935 at Zunyi he won power over the Party Secretariat. The trek was later mythologized as the Long March, with many of its heroic battles invented by Mao’s propagandists. He was no military genius, his leadership quixotic and costly – Chiang was bewildered by this ‘wandering in circles’. Finally, when Mao and just 4,000 troops set up headquarters at Shaanxi, on the Yellow Earth Plateau close to the Yellow River, he was joined by his former superior Zhou Enlai, sophisticated, French-speaking and feline, as lieutenant and backed by the comrade who would one day rule China, Deng Xiaoping, a diminutive, peppery Sichuan landlord’s son aged thirty-one.^* Setting himself up at Yan’an in comfortable cave houses filled with his books, Mao built up military power, determined to destroy Chiang. He would remain at this base for ten years as Japan advanced into China, disdaining the League of Nations.

In March 1932, Hindenburg beat Hitler in the presidential elections. Hindenburg, who now faced soaring Nazi violence, was determined to be the leader of the right. ‘I won’t abandon my efforts for a healthy move to the right,’ he promised, appointing a new chancellor, Schleicher’s wartime friend Franz von Papen, a rich Catholic nobleman, prize-winning equestrian and decorated wartime officer who during the First World War had tried to orchestrate a Mexican attack on the USA. Schleicher, now defence minister, controlled this ‘cabinet of monocles’, but Hindenburg offered the vice-chancellorship to Hitler, leader of the largest Reichstag party, who overreached by demanding the chancellorship. ‘I can’t entrust the empire of Kaiser Wilhelm and Bismarck to a corporal from Bohemia,’ growled the president, but he received Hitler regally: ‘I want to extend my hand to you as a fellow soldier.’ The corporal and the field marshal had different styles but much in common: both were German nationalists, both loathed the republic and Versailles, both planned to dismantle Poland.^* Both believed they personified the German nation (though Hindenburg revered the monarchy and preferred a Hohenzollern restoration), both believed in the ‘stab in the back’ by socialists and Jews, both revered a militaristic Volksgemeinschaft – national community – and despised democracy, as did the Japanese generals who now accelerated conflict in the east.

Schleicher and Papen were already negotiating with the Nazis, hoping to exploit their thugs on the streets and their votes in the Reichstag. Schleicher regarded them as a vulgar but essential manifestation of the nation, yet the Nazis had passed their peak: in November 1932 they lost votes. By Christmas Hitler was in despair.

As Papen struggled to maintain order, Hindenburg fired him and appointed Schleicher. Papen, still close to Hindenburg, craved the chancellorship. On 4 January 1933, he met Hitler at the Cologne house of the Nazi banker Baron Kurt von Schröder, typical of the magnates now backing Hitler. The Nazi was back in the game. Papen still insisted on the chancellorship, but finally, on 23 January, meeting at the house of a Nazi champagne salesman, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Papen agreed to propose Hitler as chancellor.

When Schleicher resigned, the president, despite his promises never to appoint ‘the corporal’, asked Papen to form a cabinet that included Hitler. Even though Papen learned that Hitler would dismiss the Reichstag and assume absolute powers, he persuaded Hindenburg to appoint Hitler to the chancellorship with himself as deputy, both men supporting the principles of Hitler’s openly stated programme – ‘removal [from society] of Social Democrats, Communists and Jews’ and ‘re-establishment of order’ – while convinced they themselves could stop any excesses. Papen recruited Alfred Hugenberg, former Krupp executive, leader of the National People’s Party and media baron, who agreed to become economics minister. ‘We’ve bought Hitler,’ claimed Papen. Hugenberg agreed that Hitler was their ‘tool’ and they would ‘limit his power as much as possible’.

At the last minute, Hitler, securing the police and military portfolios, shook hands with Hindenburg. It was, thought Goebbels, who arranged a torchlit parade, ‘like something out of a fairy tale’, while Hitler believed it was ‘nothing less than the renewal of a millennial condition’. Moving into the chancellery, Hitler confided to a henchman, ‘Now we can really get started. I am never leaving here.’