Hitler (59 page)

No genuine bond with this foreign world was possible; as the meeting at Harzburg had demonstrated, not even a tenable tactical relationship could be established. Nothing came of the plan for a joint opposition; nothing came of the previously much-discussed shadow cabinet or of agreement on a common candidate for the impending presidential election.

 

Much has been made of the “Harzburg Front.” Those who like to see history in terms of conspiracies and clever wirepulling find Harzburg convenient proof of their thesis that Hitler was nothing but a t< ol of finance capital. However, a closer look at the incident reveals the very opposite. Far from lending himself to the schemes of his would-be manipulators, Hitler treated these people insultingly and disappointed all their hopes. It might be more correct to say that Harzburg proved Hitler's independence of these interests.

Undeniably, there did exist a network of relationships between the leader of the Nazi party and a number of important businessmen. The party actually obtained considerable funds as well as increased prestige from these connections. But it was only inheriting the contributions that had gone earlier, and in considerably greater sums, to the parties of the Center. Neither the gains in votes of the Nazi party nor the losses of the Center parties can be ascribed to the presence or absence of wealthy patronage. As late as April, 1932, as Hitler was disturbed to learn, the shrunken Deutsche Volkspartei (German People's Party) was receiving larger sums from industry than his own party. And when Walther Funk, toward the end of 1932, went on a begging tour in the Ruhr district, all he came back with was a single contribution of some 20,000 marks. The total of such aid has often been estimated far too high. Some 6 million marks is probably a fairly realistic estimate of industry's gifts to the Nazi party up to January 30, 1933. For those who consider such a figure too low it must be pointed out that even twice that sum could not have financed a party organization of some 10,000 local groups, with a large corps of functionaries, a private army of nearly half a million men, and twelve expensively conducted election campaigns in 1932. In fact, the annual budget of the NSDAP, as Konrad Heiden discovered, amounted at this time to between 70 million and 90 million marks. Conscious that he was dealing in sums of this magnitude, Hitler would sometimes refer to himself jokingly as one of the foremost German captains of industry.
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It suits the purposes of pseudoscientific polemic to be broad and imprecise concerning the links between the Nazi party and finance capital. According to this school of thought, Hitler was the “rigorously manipulated and dearly paid political implement” of a capitalistic “Nazi clique” that needed him for “public relations.”
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But the very categories are misleading here. There were, for instance, clearly divergent interests among capitalists and among various branches of Industry Club on January 26, 1932, was intended specifically to overcome department stores, also the chemical industry and old family enterprises, such as the firms of Krupp, Hoesch, Bosch and Klöckner had great reservations about the Hitler party, at least before 1933. They were usually motivated by economic considerations. In addition, there was the rather significant number of Jewish enterprises. Otto Dietrich, who arranged some of Hitler's contracts with Rhenish-Westphalian industry, noted that the leaders of the economy refused “to believe in Hitler... in the period of our hardest struggle.” As late as early 1932 there were “strong foci of industrial resistance.” And Hitler's famous speech to the Düsseldorf Industry Club on January 26, 1932, was intended specifically to overcome this opposition.
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After that speech the party was in fact granted larger subsidies, which took care of its most pressing concerns; but the sums were by no means as large as expected. At the end of 1932 Hjalmar Schacht, former president of the Reichsbank, Albert Vogler, general manager of the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel), and Kurt von Schröder, the banker, drew up a petition to President Hindenburg asking him to appoint Hitler Chancellor. But this move was a failure; the majority of businessmen who were approached refused to give their signatures.

The theory of a close, pragmatic alliance between Hitler and the major capitalists also fails to explain the time lag between the explosive growth of the party and the injection of, funds from industry. By the time Hitler delivered his Düsseldorf speech the Nazi party had more than 800,000 members and could command between 6.5 million and 13 million votes. The party's strength depended on these legions of little people, and Hitler had to keep in mind their “enormous anticapitalist nostalgia.” All in all, he was more attuned to them than to the proud, pigheaded businessmen. To the industrialists he sacrificed little more than that troublemaker Otto Strasser, for whom he too had no love. When his followers joined in the Berlin metalworkers strike, Hitler explained the situation tersely by telling the employers that striking Nazis were still better than striking Marxists. But the thesis that Hitler's party was in the pay of capitalism is most unsatisfactory in its failure to answer the key question: why this novel mass movement sprung from nothing could so effortlessly outstrip the splendidly organized German Left with its depth of tradition behind it. To call Hitler a tool of capitalism, as Marxist theory does, is merely to fall back on belief in demons. Marxist orthodoxy is prone to such simplifications. Such demonology is, as it were, “the anti-Semitism of the Left.”
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But it is one thing to speak of an outright plot between industry and Nazism, quite another to speak of the atmosphere of “partiality” or sympathy that surrounded Nazism. Many elements within industry were frankly in favor of Hitler's becoming Chancellor, even though they were not themselves disposed to do anything about it. And many who were not prepared to offer him material support nevertheless regarded his program with some approval. They expected no concrete economic or political gains from it and never entirely lost their distrust for the socialistic, antibourgeois sentiments within the NSDAP. But they had never really accepted bourgeois democracy with its consequent rights of the masses. The republic had never been their state. To many of them Hitler's promise of law and order meant a larger scope for enterprise, tax privileges, and restraints upon the unions. Implicit within the slogan, “salvation from this system,” coined by Hjalmar Schacht were vague plans for restoring the old order of things. Petrified remnants of the authoritarian state paradoxically survived more obstinately in the dynamic business world than in almost any other stratum of the German social structure. If we are to blame “capital” for the rise of the Nazi party, it was not so much on the basis of common aims, let alone of some dark plot, but on the basis of the antidemocratic spirit, the rancor against the “system,” emanating from big business. It is true that the spokesmen for business were deceived about Hitler. They saw only his mania for order, his rigid cult of authority, his reactionary features. They failed to sense the peculiar vibrations he threw off, the pulse of futurity.

Hitler's above-mentioned address to the Düsseldorf Industry Club was one of the most masterly samples of his oratorical skill. Appearing in a dark pin-striped suit, behaving skillfully and correctly, he expounded the ideological foundations of his policies to an initially reserved group of big businessmen. Every word of the two-and-one-half-hour presentation was carefully adapted to his audience. Not only did he understand how attached these people were to law, order, and authority, but he was able to turn that attachment toward himself.

Early in the speech, Hitler outlined his argument for the primacy of domestic politics. He explicitly disagreed with the view—elevated to a kind of dogma by Chancellor Brüning—that Germany's fate was largely dependent upon her foreign relations. Foreign policy, Hitler maintained, was, on the contrary, “determined by the inner condition” of a people. Any other view would be resignation, surrender of self-determination, or a dodge on the part of bad governments. In Germany the caliber of the nation had been undermined by the leveling influences of democracy:

 

When the capable minds of a nation, which are always in the minority, are regarded as only of the same value as all the rest, then genius, capacity, the value of personality are slowly rendered subject to the majority, and this process is then falsely named the rule of the people. For this is not rule of the people, but in reality the rule of stupidity, of mediocrity, of half-heartedness, of cowardice, of weakness, and of inadequacy. It is more the rule of the people to let a people be governed and led in all the walks of life by its most capable individuals, those who are bom for the task, rather than... by a majority who in the very nature of things must always find these realms entirely alien to them.

 

The democratic principle of equality, he continued, was not an inconsequential idea with merely theroretic bearing. Rather, in the short or long run it would extend into all the aspects of life and could slowly poison a nation. Private property, he told the industrialists, was fundamentally incompatible with the principle of democracy. For the logical and moral rationale for private property was the belief that people are different in nature and achievement. At this point, Hitler came to the heart of his argument:

 

Once this is admitted, it is madness to say: in the economic sphere there are undoubtedly differences in value, but that is not true in the political sphere. It is absurd to build up economic life on the conception of achievement, of the value of personality, and therefore in practice on the authority of personality, but in the political sphere to deny the authority of personality and to thrust into its place the law of the greater number—democracy. In that case there must slowly arise a gulf between the economic and the political point of view, and to bridge that gulf an attempt will be made to assimilate the former to the latter.... In the economic sphere communism is analogous to democracy in the political sphere. We find ourselves today in a period in which these two fundamental principles clash in all areas where they meet....

In the State there is an organization—the army—which cannot in any way be democratized without surrendering its very existence.... The army can exist only if it maintains the absolutely undemocratic principle of unconditional authority proceeding downwards and absolute responsibility proceeding upwards. But the result is that in a State in which the whole political life—beginning with the municipality and ending with the Reichstag—is built upon the conception of democracy, the army is bound to gradually become an alien body.

 

He cited many other examples to demonstrate this structural contradiction, and then described the menacing spread of the democratic, and hence the communistic, idea in Germany. He dwelt at length on the terrors of Bolshevism:

 

Can't you see that Bolshevism today is not merely a mob storming about in some of our streets in Germany but is a conception of the world which is on the point of subjecting to itself the entire Asiatic Continent, and... will gradually shatter the whole world and bring it down in ruins. Bolshevism, if it proceeds unchecked, will transform the world as completely as in times past did Christianity.... Thirty or fifty years count for nothing where fundamental ideologies are at issue. Three hundred years after Christ Christianity was only slowly beginning to establish itself throughout all of southern Europe.

 

Because of Germany's intellectual confusion and psychological disintegration, he continued, Communism had already made greater inroads there than in other countries. Millions of persons had been persuaded that Communism was the “logical theoretical complement of their actual, practical economic situation.” It was therefore wrong to seek the causes of the present misery in external factors and to attempt to fight them with external methods. Economic measures or “another twenty emergency decrees” would not be able to halt the disintegration of the nation. The reasons for Germany's decline were political in nature and therefore required political decisions, nothing less than “a fundamental solution”:

 

That solution rests upon the realization that economic systems in collapse have always as their forerunner the collapse of the State and not vice versa—that there can be no flourishing economic life which has not before it and behind it the flourishing powerful State as its protection—that there was no Carthaginian economic life without the fleet of Carthage....

 

But the power and well-being of states, he added, are a consequence of their internal organization, of the “firmness of common views on certain fundamental questions.” Germany is in a state of great internal dissension; approximately half of the people are Bolshevistic, in the broad sense of the word, the other half nationalistic. One half affirm private property; the other half regard it as a kind of theft. One half consider treason a crime, the other half a duty. In order to halt this decomposition and to overcome Germany's impotence, he had created a movement and an ideology:

 

For here you see before you an organization... inspired to the highest degree by nationalist sentiment, built on the concept of the absolute authority of the leadership in all spheres, at every stage—the sole party in whose adherents not only the conception of internationalism but also the idea of democracy has been completely overcome, which in its entire organization acknowledges the principles of Command and Obedience, and which has thus introduced into the political life of Germany a body numbering millions which is built up on the principle of achievement. Here is an organization which is filled with an indomitable aggressive spirit, an organization which when a political opponent says, “We regard your behavior as a provocation,” for the first time does not submissively retire from the scene but brutally enforces its own will and hurls against the opponent the retort, We fight today! We fight tomorrow! And if you do not regard our meeting today as a provocation we shall hold another one next week.... And when you say, “You must not come into the street,” we go into the street nevertheless. And when you say, “We shall kill you,” however many sacrifices you force upon us, this young Germany will always continue its marches.... And when people cast in our teeth our intolerance, we proudly acknowledge it—yes, we have formed the inexorable decision to destroy Marxism in Germany down to its very last root. And this decision we formed not from any love of brawling; I could easily imagine a pleasanter life than being harried all over Germany....