Hitler (50 page)

Nevertheless, the agreement encountered vehement opposition inside Germany. It even disappointed many of those who had a clear view of the Reich's predicament. For there was an element of cruel mockery in having Germany undertake obligations for payments extending over nearly sixty years when she did not even have the first few annual payments at her disposal. Two hundred and twenty notables of economics, science, and politics, among them Carl Duisberg, of I. G. Farben, the theologian Adolf Harnack, the physicist Max Planck, Konrad Adenauer, then mayor of Cologne, and former Chancellor Hans Luther, issued a public statement expressing their great concern. It would appear that the many conciliatory gestures had been a mere front; eleven years after the war, the Young Plan exposed the merciless attitude of the victors toward the vanquished. What was more, the plan once again adverted to the war-guilt clause, Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty, which had earlier inflicted such wounds to the nation's self-esteem. With payments continuing until 1988, the Young Plan was fundamentally unrealistic, and the radical nationalist groups were able to make effective capital out of the phrase
le boche payera tout.
Conceived as a further step in a gradual process of softening the penalties of the war, and thus supposedly serving to stabilize the republic, the Young Plan became just the contrary, the “point of crystallization for fundamental opposition to the Weimar ‘system.' ”
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On July 9, 1929, the radical Right united to form a national committee for a plebiscite to reject the Young Plan. They staged a wild and vehement campaign (joined by the Communists on the extreme Left) that never let up until the agreement was eventually signed nine months later. The issue brought together a strange assortment of associations and interdependencies whose differences were temporarily forgotten in favor of a few hypnotic slogans. These, endlessly repeated, tried to concentrate hatred upon a few sharply etched images of the enemy. The plan was described as the “death penalty on the unborn,” the “Golgotha of the German people” whom the executioners were “nailing to the cross with scornful laughter.” Along with this the “Nationalist Opposition” demanded annulment of the war-guilt clause, the end of all reparations, immediate evacuation of the occupied territories, and the punishment of all cabinet ministers and members of the government aiding and abetting the “enslavement” of the German people.

The committee was headed by privy councillor Alfred Hugenberg, an ambitious, narrow-minded, and unscrupulous man of sixty-three who had served as settlement commissioner in the East, had been a director of the Krupp Company, and finally had built up an intricate and far-ranging press empire. In addition to an extensive list of newspapers, he controlled a news agency and UFA, the motion picture company. As the political liaison man of heavy industry, he also had sizable sums at his disposal. This money he deliberately committed to undermining the “Socialist Republic,” to smashing the unions, and to answering “class struggle from below,” as he put it, with “class struggle by the upper class.” A short, rotund figure with a mustache and close-cropped hair, he looked like a pensioned-off sergeant posing for a martial photo, not like the proud and embittered patrician he wished to be.

In the fall of 1928 Hugenberg had emerged as a dark horse and assumed leadership of the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (the German Nationalist People's Party). He promptly made himself the spokesman of radical resentment. The Right had been slowly warming toward the republic; but under Hugenberg's control all such signs of rapprochement abruptly came to an end. Both in methods and in some points of its program, the DNVP began copying the Hitler party. It never succeeded in being more than the bourgeois caricature of the Nazis. Still and all, Hugenberg broke all limits in his battle against the hated republic. The first signs of the world-wide Depression were beginning to be felt in Germany; but during the storm over the Young Plan, Hugenberg warned 3,000 American businessmen, in a circular letter, against granting credits to Germany.
²
Under this leader, the German Nationalists quickly lost something like half their membership. But this made little impression on Hugenberg; he declared coolly that he preferred a small block to a large pulp.

The campaign against the Young Plan gave Hugenberg the chance to assert leadership over the scattered forces of the Right, mainly the Stahlhelm (Steel Helmets), the Pan-Germans, the Landbund (Agrarian League), and the Nazis. His larger purpose was to reconquer for the old upper class some of its lost initiative. The misfired revolution of 1918 had not deprived that class of influence, positions of status, money, and property, but it no longer had any credit with the people. With all the arrogance of one of the “top-drawer people” toward a figure associated with the rabble, Hugenberg thought he could make use of Hitler. Here was someone with a proven gift for agitation, he calculated, the very man to lead the masses back to conservatism. For Hugenberg was intelligent enough to see that the usual spokesmen for the conservative cause were largely isolated by their social vanity. When the time came, he thought, he would know how to put Hitler in his place.

Hitler's own thoughts were far less devious. When Reichstag deputy Hinrich Lohse heard of the alliance, he commented anxiously: “Let's hope the Führer knows how to pull a fast one on Hugenberg.” But Hitler was not thinking of deceptions. From the start he came on with an air of unmistakable superiority. He scarcely bothered to hide his contemptuous opinion of Hugenberg, the bourgeois reactionary, and all the “gray, moth-eaten eagles,” as Goebbels called them. He said no to the concessions Hugenberg demanded—all the more flatly since the “Left” within the Nazi party was keeping a suspicious watch over the proceedings. What it amounted to was that Hitler alone named the conditions under which he would permit these new backers to help him move forward. At first he proposed marching separately but finally let himself be coaxed into the alliance. However, he demanded complete independence in propaganda and a sizable share of the proffered funds. Then, as if bent on confounding or humiliating his new allies, he appointed the most prominent anticapitalist in the ranks of the Nazi party, Gregor Strasser, to be his representative on the joint financing committee.

The alliance was his first success in a remarkable series of maneuvers that brought Hitler a long way ahead and finally to his goal. His insight into the true nature of situations, his knack for penetrating the various strata of interests, for spotting weaknesses and setting up temporary coalitions, in short, his tactical instinct, certainly contributed as much to his rise as his oratorical powers, the backing of the army, industry, and the judiciary, and the terrorism of his brown shirts. To insist on the magical, the conspiratorial, or the brutal elements in Hitler's rise to power certainly betrays an inadequate understanding of the course of events. But beyond that, it perpetuates the erroneous notion of the leader of the Nazi party as a mere propagandist or tool. All the facts belie that picture. Hitler was consummately skillful in the field of politics.

With an actor's agility, at first playing hesitant, conducting his negotiations in a sometimes provocative, sometimes sulky manner, while at the same time conveying an impression of sincerity, ambition, and drive, Hitler finally lured his partners into such a position that they were furthering and financing his rise even as they were paying for it politically. A factor in this particular success, however, was the leftist element in his own ranks, which kept him from making any significant concessions. While the negotiations were going on, Strasser's militant newspapers carried banner headlines featuring a saying of Hitler's: The greatest danger to the German people is not Marxism but the bourgeois parties.

In evaluating this episode we must not overlook the power-hungry blindness of the German nationalist conservatives. By parasitically seizing on the force and vitality of the Nazi movement, by uniting with the secretly despised but also admired upstart Hitler, they were trying to forestall German nationalist conservatism's departure from the stage of history, when that departure had been long since decided. Still, Hitler's success remains remarkable. For four and a half years he had waited, preparing himself and, in keeping with the unforgotten doctrine of Karl Lueger, working toward alliance with the “powerful institutions,” the holders of political and social influence. When the offer was finally made to him, he had coolly and firmly named his terms. For years Adolf Hitler had stood at the head of an inconspicuous extremist party, ignored or an object of mockery. Only in the light of that fact can we grasp what is meant to him to team up with Hugenberg. It freed him from the noisome odor of being a crackpot revolutionary and putschist. He could appear in public within a circle of respectable, influential patrons and make their good reputation his own. Once before he had had that chance and thrown it away; now he indicated that he meant to behave much more circumspectly.

After concluding the alliance, the Nazi party for the first time had funds enough to crank up its excellent propaganda apparatus. It at once began showing the public a style of propaganda of unprecedented radicality and impact. Nothing of the kind had ever existed in Germany, Hitler declared in a letter of that period. “We have thoroughly worked over our people as no other party has done.” None of the other partners in the nationalist alliance could approach the Nazi party in stridency, sharpness, and psychological cunning. From the start the Nazis made it plain that the Young Plan was only the pretext for the campaign. They broadened their attack to include the whole “system,” which they claimed was collapsing from incompetence, treason, and corruption. “The time will come,” Hitler cried out in a speech at Hersbruck, near Nuremberg, toward the end of November, “when those responsible for Germany's collapse will laugh out of the other side of their faces. Fear will grip them. Let them know that their judgment is on the way.” Fascinated by the demogogic wildness of the Nazis, Hugenberg and the rest of the conservatives in the coalition stared at the tremendous wave they had set in motion. They encouraged it, repeatedly lent impetus to it, and in their smug faith in their natural leadership thought they were riding it when they had long since been swamped by it.

In these circumstances it did not very much matter to Hitler that the campaign was less than a smashing success. The referendum was held; the draft proposal for a “law against the enslavement of the German people” barely received the 10 per cent of the votes required if it were to be submitted to the Reichstag. But in the Reichstag the proposal was accepted by only eighty-two representatives, with 318 votes against it. The third stage in the process, the holding of a plebiscite on December 22, 1929, likewise ended in defeat. The proponents of the draft law won barely 14 per cent of the votes, about a quarter of the number needed—some 5 per cent less than the votes the Nazi party and the Nationalist party had won in the Reichstag elections the previous year.

Nevertheless, this campaign meant for Hitler the final breakthrough into national politics. Thanks to the support provided by the many and variegated publications of the Hugenberg empire, he had made a name for himself nationally and had proved himself the most energetic and purposeful force on the divided and directionless Right. He himself spoke of the “extremely great reversal” in public opinion and marveled at “the way arrogant, snobbish or stupid rejection of the party, which was the rule only a few years ago, has been transformed into expectant hope.” On August 3 and 4, 1929, after the opening of the campaign, he convoked a party rally in Nuremberg, probably to show his conservative partners something of the mettle of his movement. By now he knew a great deal about staging such demonstrations. More than thirty special trains brought some 200,000 followers (if the figures are correct) from all over Germany. For several days their uniforms, banners, and bands dominated the scene in the medieval walled city. The majority of the twenty-four new standards, which were consecrated in a highly emotional ceremony, came from Bavaria, Austria, and Schleswig-Holstein. At the grand final muster, some 60,000 SA men, by this time all in uniform and provided with active-service field equipment, paraded past Hitler for three and a half hours. In the euphoria of the day some units threatened to take immediate violent action. A similar mood underlay a motion by the party's radical wing proposing that any participation in government by the NSDAP should be “forbidden now and for ever.” With the terse and characteristic remark that any step was justified that might “lead the movement into the possession of political power,” Hitler rejected the motion. Nevertheless, his adherence to legality was now threatened anew by the self-assurance of the rapidly growing party army. By the end of the year the SA was the equal of the Reichswehr in manpower.

The alliance with Hugenberg also provided Hitler with many connections among industrialists who by and large had over the years supported Stresemann's foreign policy but who now vigorously opposed the Young Plan. Hitherto, Hitler had received material support only from small factory owners—aside from such notable exceptions as the industrialist Fritz Thyssen. His antisocialist, proproperty attitude on the question of the expropriation of the sovereigns had made him no new friends. Now, suddenly, he could draw on more opulent sources. While still banned from public speaking, he had used his time in systematically traveling through the industrial regions of Germany, primarily the Ruhr, talking at closed meetings often to several hundred largely skeptical businessmen and endeavoring to remove their fears of his form of nationalistic socialism by presenting himself as a staunch defender of private property. True to his belief that success was an index of aristocracy, he hailed the large-scale entrepreneur as the type of a superior race, “destined for leadership.” On the whole he tried to convey that what he was “demanding was nothing employers need object to.”