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Led by the party’s founder, Anton Drexler, they drew up an indictment of the would-be dictator and circulated it as a pamphlet.
At the beginning of 1923 the Voelkischer Beobachter became a daily, thus giving Hitler the prerequisite of all German political parties, a daily newspaper in which to preach the party’s gospels. Running a daily political journal required additional money, and this now came from what must have seemed to some of the more proletarian roughnecks of the party like strange sources.
Later this strange but genial Harvard man, like some other early cronies of Hitler, would have to flee the country for his life.
Until nearly the end, he would be one of Hitler’s most loyal and trusted followers and one of the few who was not bitten by consuming personal ambition.
A swarm of lesser-known and, for the most part, more unsavory individuals joined the circle around the party dictator.
Such were the men whom Hitler gathered around him in the early years for his drive to become dictator of a nation which had given the world a Luther, a Kant, a Goethe and a Schiller, a Bach, a Beethoven and a Brahms.
His wants were certainly modest. Until 1929 he occupied a two-room flat in a lower-middle-class district in the Thierschstrasse near the River Isar.
The fledgling democratic Weimar Republic was in deep trouble, its very existence constantly threatened not only from the extreme Right but from the extreme Left.
In doing so they managed also to place on the shoulders of these democratic working-class leaders apparent responsibility for signing the surrender and ultimately the peace treaty, thus laying on them the blame for Germany’s defeat and for whatever suffering a lost war and a dictated peace might bring upon the German people.
But to have done so they would have had to suppress permanently, or at least curb permanently, the forces which had propped up the Hohenzollern Empire and which would not loyally accept a democratic Germany: the feudal Junker landlords and other upper castes, the magnates who ruled over the great industrial cartels, the roving condottieri of the free corps, the ranking officials of the imperial civil service and, above all, the military caste and the members of the General Staff. They would have had to break up many of the great estates, which were wasteful and uneconomic, and the industrial
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Earlier on that very day at Spa it was he who, when Field Marshal von Hindenburg faltered, had bluntly informed the Kaiser that he no longer commanded the loyalty of his troops and must go—a brave act for which the military caste never forgave him.
Ebert agreed to put down anarchy and Bolshevism and maintain the Army in all its tradition. Groener thereupon pledged the support of the Army in helping the new government establish itself and carry out its aims.
The German Army was saved, but the Republic, on the very day of its birth, was lost. The generals, with the honorable exception of Groener himself and but few others, would never serve it loyally. In the end, led by Hindenburg, they betrayed it to the Nazis.
They did not want to become the German Kerenskys. They did not want to be supplanted by the Bolshevists.
As soon as the fighting in Berlin was over, elections were held throughout Germany for the National Assembly, which was to draw up the new constitution.
The constitution which emerged from the Assembly after six months of debate—it was passed on July 31, 1919, and ratified by the President on August 31—was, on paper, the most liberal and democratic document of its kind the twentieth century had seen, mechanically well-nigh perfect, full of ingenious and admirable devices which seemed to guarantee the working of an almost flawless democracy. The idea of cabinet government was borrowed from England and France, of a strong popular President from the United States, of the referendum from Switzerland.
Or if they did, they appeared to be smugly confident that having, as the Allies urged, got rid of the Hohenzollerns, squelched the Bolshevists and set about forming a democratic, republican government, they were entitled to a just peace based not on their having lost the war but on President Wilson’s celebrated Fourteen Points.
Despite the November “revolution,” the conservatives still held the economic power. They owned the industries, the large estates and most of the country’s capital. Their wealth could be used, and was, to subsidize political parties and a political press that would strive from now on to undermine the Republic.
Under the Weimar Constitution the Army could have been subordinated to the cabinet and Parliament, as the military establishments of the other Western democracies were. But it was not.
The treason laws were ruthlessly applied to the supporters of the Republic; those on the Right who tried to overthrow it, as Adolf Hitler was soon to learn, got off either free or with the lightest of sentences.
But something even more important was destroyed: the faith of the people in the economic structure of German society. What good were the standards and practices of such a society, which encouraged savings and investment and solemnly promised a safe return from them and then defaulted?
Unfortunately for its survival, the Republic did bear a responsibility. The inflation could have been halted by merely balancing the budget—a difficult but not impossible feat. Adequate taxation might have achieved this, but the new government did not dare to tax adequately.
From then on, goaded by the big industrialists and landlords, who stood to gain though the masses of the people were financially ruined, the government deliberately let the mark tumble in order to free the State of its public debts, to escape from paying reparations and to sabotage the French in the Ruhr.
The masses of the people, however, did not realize how much the industrial tycoons, the Army and the State were benefiting from the ruin of the currency.
The abandonment of resistance to the French in the Ruhr and the resumption of the burden of reparations touched off an outburst of anger and hysteria among the German nationalists, and the Communists, who also had been growing in strength, joined them in bitter denunciation of the Republic. Stresemann was faced with serious revolt from both extreme Right and extreme Left.
Fortunately for the Republic he now chose to stand behind it, not because he believed in republican, democratic principles but because he saw that for the moment the support of the existing regime was necessary for the preservation of the Army, itself threatened by revolt in Bavaria and in the north, and for saving Germany from a disastrous civil war.
The basis for a successful political revolution on which he had always insisted—the support of existing institutions such as the Army, the police, the political group in power—was now crumbling.
Neither side had any heart for killing.
Apparently Ludendorff’s name had no magic sound for him; this was the police, not the Army.
wounded Goering was given first aid by the Jewish proprietor of a nearby bank into which he had been carried and then smuggled across the frontier into Austria by his wife and taken to a hospital in Innsbruck. Hess also fled to Austria.
consequences of committing high treason, if you were a man of the extreme Right, were not unduly heavy, despite the law, and a good many antirepublicans took notice of it.
1935 Hitler, the Chancellor, had the bodies of the sixteen Nazis who had fallen in the brief encounter dug up and placed in vaults in the Feldherrnhalle, which became a national shrine.
The system of proportional representation and voting by list may have prevented the wasting of votes, but it also resulted in the multiplication of small splinter parties which eventually made a stable majority in the Reichstag impossible and led to frequent changes in government.
But Hitler was too shrewd at this point, when the party fortunes were at their lowest ebb, to rake over old coals.
In his first year of office Mein Kampf sold a million copies, and Hitler’s income from the royalties, which had been increased from 10 to 15 per cent after January 1, 1933, was over one million marks (some $300,000), making him the most prosperous author in Germany and for the first time a millionaire.* Except for the Bible, no other book sold as well during the Nazi regime, when few family households felt secure without a copy on the table. It was almost obligatory—and certainly politic—to present a copy to a bride and groom at their wedding, and nearly every school child received one on
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Not every German who bought a copy of Mein Kampf necessarily read it. I have heard many a Nazi stalwart complain that it was hard going and not a few admit—in private—that they were never able to get through to the end of its 782 turgid pages. But it might be argued that had more non-Nazi Germans read it before 1933 and had the foreign statesmen of the world perused it carefully while there still was time, both Germany and the world might have been saved from catastrophe.
True, Hitler recognized, “but nature has not reserved this soil for the future possession of any particular nation or race; on the contrary, this soil exists for the people which possesses the force to take it.”
If land was desired in Europe, it could be obtained by and large only at the expense of Russia, and this meant that the new Reich must again set itself on the march along the road of the Teutonic Knights of old, to obtain by the German sword sod for the German plow and daily bread for the nation.”
So the great steppes to the East, Hitler implies, could be taken over easily on Russia’s collapse without much cost in blood to the Germans. Can anyone contend that the blueprint here is not clear and precise?
Why was the world so surprised, then, when Chancellor Hitler, a bare few years later, set out to achieve these very ends?
There is almost nothing about economics in the book.
What interested Hitler was political power; economics could somehow take care of itself.
Beyond that vague, crude philosophy and a passing reference in Mein Kampf to “economic chambers,” “chambers of estates” and a “central economic parliament” which “would keep the national economy functioning,” Hitler refrains from any expression of opinion on the economic foundation of the Third Reich.
And so with this mention of the preservation of the species and of the race in Mein Kampf we come to the second principal consideration: Hitler’s Weltanschauung, his view of life, which some historians, especially in England, have seen as a crude form of Darwinism but which in reality, as we shall see, has its roots deep in German history and thought.
Like Darwin but also like a whole array of German philosophers, historians, kings, generals and statesmen, Hitler saw all life as an eternal struggle and the world as a jungle where the fittest survived and the strongest ruled—a “world where one creature feeds on the other and where the death of the weaker implies the life of the stronger.”
Chaff were the Jews and the Slavs, and in time, when he became dictator and conqueror, Hitler would forbid the marriage of a German with any member of these races, though a fourth-grade schoolmarm could have told him that there was a great deal of Slavic blood in the Germans, especially in those who dwelt in the eastern provinces.
It was an easy step for a man as ignorant of history and anthropology as Hitler to make of the Germans the modern Aryans—and thus the master race.
Exactly what kind of state that was—or was intended to be—I never clearly understood despite many rereadings of Mein Kampf and listening to dozens of addresses on the subject by the Fuehrer himself, though more than once I heard the dictator declare that it was the central point of his whole thinking.
In Mein Kampf Hitler has a difficult time trying to define the folkish state, announcing, for example, on page 379 that he will clarify “the ‘folkish’ concept” only to shy away from any clarification and wander off on other subjects for several pages.
That one day he would build it and rule it he had no doubts whatsoever, for he was possessed of that burning sense of mission peculiar to so many geniuses who have sprouted, seemingly, from nowhere and from nothing throughout the ages.
