Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (84 page)

Hitler was no expert on questions of economic policy, but he had enough of an understanding of the subject to know that populist rhetoric alone would be insufficient. Incentives were needed to stimulate a self-perpetuating economic recovery. However, among the measures designed to jump-start the economy and create new jobs, the role played by the construction of the autobahn was less important than later myths about the Nazi “economic miracle” would have it. In his opening speech at the International Motor Show on 11 February 1933, Hitler had announced “the commencement and completion of a large-scale roadworks plan.” He proclaimed: “Just as horse-drawn traffic created paths and the railway system built the tracks it needed, motor-vehicle transport has to get the motorway it requires.”
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The idea was not fundamentally new. In the mid-1920s, an “Association for the Preparation of the Motorway Hanseatic Cities–Frankfurt–Basle” (Hafraba) had drawn up plans for an autobahn. Hitler had probably also read a pamphlet written by the Munich engineer Fritz Todt in late 1932 entitled “Road Construction and Management,” in which the author had stressed the “strategic” importance of motorway construction and calculated that Germany needed 5,000 to 6,000 kilometres of high-speed roads.
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In late March and early April, Hafraba’s commercial director gave two talks about the planned project in the Reich Chancellery. The motoring fan Hitler seized upon the idea “with great enthusiasm” but insisted on aiming for a national motorway network instead of a single stretch of road: “It would be a great achievement if we succeeded in realising the network under our regime.”
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At a conference with leading industrialists on 29 May, Hitler reiterated his intention to support the construction of the autobahn with all the means at his disposal. Tackling “the problem in its entirety” was the main task, Hitler proclaimed, adding: “Traffic in the years to come will take place on the largest of streets.”
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On 27 June, the Law for the Establishment of the Undertaking “Reich Autobahn” came into force. Three days later, Todt was appointed inspector general of German roadways. On 23 September, Hitler personally dug the first turf for the stretch of motorway between Frankfurt and Darmstadt—a gesture with the propaganda aim of suggesting the Führer was leading the way in what was called the “labour battle.”
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But the short-term effect on unemployment of building the autobahn was only marginal. In 1933, no more than 1,000 men were employed building the first stretch of motorway, and a year after Todt’s appointment only 38,000 had been given work.
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On the one hand, the number of newly registered cars almost doubled in 1933, compared with the previous year, and the number of people employed in the car industry had also grown substantially; on the other, compared with the United States, the level of car ownership in Germany was low. The main reason, as Hitler complained in a meeting to discuss the financing of the autobahn in September 1933, was that the German car industry had not adapted its production to reflect people’s actual income. “They keep building cars that are too heavy and are a long way from realising the goal of a car ranging in price from 1,000 to 1,200 reichsmarks,” Hitler said.
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Thus it was that in 1934 the idea was born of producing an affordable small car, the
Volkswagen
—the people’s car—that would be affordable to the working classes.
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The strongest long-term stimuli driving economic recovery and the decrease in unemployment came from the rearmament of Germany, which Hitler began pursuing immediately after being named Reich chancellor. As early as February 1933, Hitler was stressing to Germany’s military and his cabinet that rearmament would be made an absolute priority. “Sums in the billions” would have to be found, Hitler declared, because “the future of Germany depends solely and alone on the reconstruction of the Wehrmacht.”
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Hitler did not think then that Reichsbank President Hans Luther was flexible enough to support accelerated rearmament with expansive monetary and credit policies, so in March 1933 he appointed Hjalmar Schacht to the post. This was also an expression of gratitude for the valuable services Schacht had rendered to the National Socialists before 1933.
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The package of expenditures drawn up for the military totalled an astronomical 35 billion reichsmarks. The sum dwarfed that allocated for civilian job-creation measures and was to be placed at the government’s disposal in annual instalments of 4.4 billion reichsmarks over the course of eight years.
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To finance such expenses, Schacht came up with a deviously clever system for procuring money. In the summer of 1933, for the purpose of financing arms contracts, four large industrial and armaments companies—Gutehoffnungshütte, Krupp, Rheinstahl and Siemens—formed a dummy firm called Metallurgische Forschungsgesellschaft (Mefo—Metallurgic Research Society), which issued bills of exchange, guaranteed by the state and discounted by the Reichsbank, to the arms producers. The first Mefo bills were drawn in the autumn of 1933, but in line with the pace of rearmament the first major payments only began in April 1934.
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That initiated a spiralling process of financing a rearmament industry on credit, which in the long term would have led to serious economic defaults.

“Never stand still—always move forwards!” That was Goebbels’s concise formulation in November 1933 of the action-first principle that had guided the Nazis since they took power on 30 January.
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The principle reflected Hitler’s social Darwinist mantra that constant struggle would be the vital elixir of his movement. Like all charismatic leaders, Hitler faced the problem that his power, which he owed to an extreme and extraordinary situation, might wear thin over time and be subjected to a process of “normalisation.”
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Thus while the tempo of his power consolidation and development varied, things were never allowed to come to a standstill. Hitler may have made more progress and achieved easier triumphs than he had dared imagine in his wildest dreams, but he was still quite some way from being the “Führer” whose dictatorship was unquestioned. While their positions were growing weaker, he still had to take into consideration the power of the military and the Reich president. And above all, within the Nazi movement itself, the SA was becoming a problem.

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When the Nazis had consolidated their power in the summer of 1933, the Brownshirts saw themselves robbed of their most important
raison d’être
: terrorising and neutralising the Nazis’ political opponents. Consequently, in early August, Göring rescinded the decree from the preceding February which made the SA an auxiliary police force. Politically there was no point any more to the Brownshirts’ violent activism, and the Nazi leadership viewed it as counter-productive. Many SA men were disappointed. They had hoped that when the party achieved power, their personal situation would change for the better overnight, and these people now felt that the “party bigwigs” and their “reactionary” supporters had cheated them of the spoils of victory.
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Within the SA itself tensions were rising between the “old fighters” and new members who had joined the paramilitary group in hordes since the May 1933 moratorium on new NSDAP members. On 30 January 1933, the SA had fewer than 500,000 members. By the summer of 1934, that number—which now also included incorporated nationalist militias, above all the Stahlhelm—had risen to 4.5 million. This enormous influx of newcomers could hardly be integrated, and increased the potential for dissatisfaction.
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Calls for a “second revolution” were growing.

In June 1933, SA Chief of Staff Ernst Röhm made reference to this negative mood in an article he published in the monthly journal
Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte
. The “national uprising,” wrote Röhm, had thus far “only travelled part of the way up the path of German revolution.” The SA, he asserted, “would not tolerate the German revolution falling asleep or being betrayed by non-fighters halfway towards its goal.” At the end of his article, Röhm issued a direct threat to all “wimpy bourgeois souls”; he wrote, “Whether they like it or not, we will continue our fight. If they finally understand what is at stake, then with them! If they refuse to understand, then without them! And if need be, against them!”
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With that the perennial structural problem in the relationship between the NSDAP and the SA had re-emerged. Röhm made it unmistakably clear that the SA did not want to be reduced to a mere recipient of commands from the party leadership. On the contrary, he laid claim to a position of power for himself and his organisation within the Third Reich. The mass influx of new SA members played into his hands since it added weight to his demands vis-à-vis the much smaller Reichswehr. Röhm envisioned transforming the SA into a kind of militia army, thereby challenging the regular army’s monopoly on the right to weaponry and threatening to subordinate the Reichswehr to the SA. This was a prospect that alarmed both the military leadership and Hitler, who had concluded an alliance with Germany’s generals in February 1933.

The problems presented by the SA were inseparably connected to the question of who would succeed Hindenburg. In early October 1933, the Reich president turned 86. It was obvious that he could die at any time. When the time came, Goebbels had insisted at a meeting on the Obersalzberg in late March, Hitler himself should succeed him. But Hitler was undecided. “He is not really up for it,” Goebbels noted.
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By July, having conferred with Reich Chancellery State Secretary Hans Heinrich Lammers, Goebbels had decided: “Hitler cannot tolerate a Reich president hanging over him, even as a figurehead. Both offices must be united in a single person.” After a “long discussion about fundamental principles” on 24 August, Hitler and Goebbels agreed that the positions of Reich chancellor and Reich president should be merged.
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Two days later, Hitler travelled to East Prussia to visit Hindenburg in Neudeck and take part in a celebration at the Tannenberg memorial on 27 August. He considered it “a blessing and gift of providence,” Hitler proclaimed, to be able to express thanks to the field marshal “in the name of the German people…on the soil of the most glorious battlefield in the great war.” Hitler also used the occasion to give Hindenburg title to the Prussian domains of Langenau and the Preussenwald forest and declare the Neudeck estate exempt from taxes.
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Hitler could only succeed Hindenburg with the support of the Reichswehr since the Reich president was the army’s commander-in-chief. That alone was reason enough to keep Röhm in his place. But as always when faced with difficult decisions, Hitler played for time. Initially he tried to make Röhm more obedient with a combination of verbal attacks and solicitous gestures. On the one hand, in his speech to his Gauleiter on 6 July, he left no doubt that he would “drown, if necessary, in blood” any attempt at a “second revolution.” On 28 September, he repeated this threat in front of the same audience. “He knew all too well that there were many dissatisfied creatures whose ambition could not be sated,” one report of that speech read. “As a matter of course he could show no consideration for such ambitions. He would not sit back and watch the activities of such subjects for very much longer. At some point he would suddenly intervene.”
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On the other hand, in December, Hitler invited Röhm to join his cabinet as a minister without portfolio, the same distinction that Hess enjoyed. And on New Year’s Eve, he sent a letter to his “dear chief of staff,” gushing with thanks for the “eternal services” he had performed for “the National Socialist movement and the German people.”
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Nonetheless in early 1934 it became increasingly clear that Hitler could not postpone a decision for much longer. The mood of dissatisfaction had spread beyond SA circles. The national euphoria of the first few months of the regime had yielded to a certain sobriety. Even Goebbels had to acknowledge: “Negative mood in broad circles because of grandiosity, price hikes, state intervention in agriculture, etc.”
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Workers were angry that food prices were rising while their wages stagnated. Farmers did not like the Hereditary Farm Law, which restricted their freedom in running their property. Middle-class retailers still felt subjected to unfair competition from large department stores. And economic recovery was not continuing as fast as many people had hoped. Disappointment at unfulfilled material desires was combined with increasing bitterness at corruption and nepotism. The latter was directed at party functionaries who had seized the moment to claim lucrative posts. Hitler himself was largely exempt from criticism, however. The reports of the SPD in exile in Prague, which were based on information from sources within Germany, recorded as typical the sentiments of a Munich resident: “Our Adolf is all right, but those around him are all complete scoundrels.”
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