The Ruling Elite Page 2
Feder, an economist, studied the relationship of finance and politics particularly during World War I. He developed a growing antagonism to what he called “Jewish finance capitalism” and wealthy bankers. He wrote a “manifesto on breaking the shackles of interest.” He was an early member of the German Workers’ Party and was its economic theoretician. He believed that the state should generate and regulate the money supply, using a national bank. At that time, privately owned banks printed and controlled money and charged usurious rates for the use of their currency. Feder’s views were similar to the stipulations contained in the US Constitution.
The Beer Hall Putsch
On June 11, 1922, the Jewish-owned Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse, which employed Theodor Herzl, published an article by Friedrich Meinecke about the roots of the claims of treason behind the armistice. From 1922 to 1923, as the inflated Reichmark was bottoming out due to monetary manipulation, Hitler and his followers encouraged nationalism, a feeling to which a discouraged yet hopeful populace could readily relate. His group, which battled the communists, often in bloody street fighting, had its own militia, the Sturmabteilung (SA), superseded on April 4, 1925, by the Schutzstaffel (SS) under Heinrich Himmler. Hitler’s group countered the strength of the communists throughout Bavaria. Meanwhile, the Bavarian government did little to prevent the communists’ seizure of power.15
Hitler easily assumed political leadership of several patriotic associations in Bavaria, composed of many former soldiers and known collectively as the Kampfbund. He and other Kampfbund leaders believed that they had to seize power in Berlin or their followers would turn to the communists for solutions to economic problems. The Bavarian government opposed Berlin’s resolution to abandon its struggle against the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Rhineland and the Ruhr. On September 26, 1923, Bavarian Prime Minister Eugen von Knilling declared a state of emergency and gave Gustav von Kahr, the state commissioner, authority. On September 27, Hitler announced that he would hold fourteen public meetings. Kahr, with the support of Colonel Hans von Seißer, head of the Bavarian State Police, and General Otto von Lossow, banned Hitler’s meetings. Hitler and General Erich Ludendorff wanted von Kahr’s support, but he, Seißer, and Lossow planned to establish a nationalist regime without Hitler.
With the support of his nationalist group, Hitler contemplated a march like Benito Mussolini’s march on Rome from October 22-29, 1922. In this march on Berlin, he was counting on the military or those working in Berlin’s Weimar government to “do the dirty work” and get rid of the “hated republic” and create an “authoritarian regime.” The Bavarians would benefit from a putsch while retaining an autonomous Bavaria. Kahr, Seißer, and Lossow considered their own assault against Berlin and convened on the night of November 8, 1923, in the Bürgerbräu Keller in Munich to strategize.16 Some people claim that Hitler worked with the Bolsheviks and that he selected this date to commemorate their revolution in Russia. Yet it was Kahr, Seißer, and Lossow who chose the date. It was also the date when the November criminals, now part of the Weimar government, had sold out Germany.
Hitler intended to use Munich as a base for a greater offensive against the Weimar government. However, he quickly perceived that Kahr had decided to usurp the movement. Hitler, with about six hundred Sturmabteilung, marched on the beer hall where Kahr was speaking to three thousand people. Hitler’s forces surrounded the hall and directed a machine gun at the doors. Hitler, Hermann Göring, Alfred Rosenberg, Rudolf Hess, Ernst Hanfstaengl, Ulrich Graf, Johann Aigner, Adolf Lenk, Max Amann, Wilhelm Adam, and others entered the building at 8:30 p.m. and marched through the crowd. Hitler fired a pistol shot into the ceiling and announced that his group was going to form a new government in Berlin.
Hitler, Hess, Lenk, and Graf took Kahr, Seißer, and Lossow into another room and pleaded for their support, since their influence could bring in the military and the police. Kahr refused to collaborate. Meanwhile, Göring and others delivered speeches in the main hall in an attempt to keep everyone calm, barring anyone from leaving, though some escaped through the kitchen. Hitler, Hess, and Lenk returned to the auditorium where Hitler delivered a speech while Ernst Pöhner, Friedrich Weber, and Hermann Kriebel guarded Kahr. In his extemporaneous speech, Hitler assured his highly receptive listeners that he did not oppose Kahr and encouraged them to support him, Seißer, and Lossow in a combined battle to save the Fatherland.
He returned to the room where his companions were holding the three men, who had heard what had transpired in the auditorium. Hitler directed Göring and Hess to take Knilling and several other officials of the Bavarian government into custody. Pöhner, Weber, and Kriebel, in Hitler’s absence, tried to persuade Kahr to consider his options, but he remained unaffected. Ludendorff arrived and finally convinced Kahr, Seißer, and Lossow to honor their sense of duty. After Hitler left the hall, Ludendorff, based on their promises, allowed the three men to leave at about 10:30 p.m. Once free, they reneged. When Hitler returned to the hall and realized that the momentum had ceased, he vacillated for several hours about a march on Berlin and failed even to occupy Munich. During that time, Bavarian authorities organized their forces. Units of Kampfbund, a movement with more than fifty thousand members, attempted to seize and to occupy buildings. However, they did not select the right buildings, such as the state offices and the communications centers.
Meanwhile, perplexed military, police, and civilian leaders tried to determine whom to follow. At about 3:00 a.m., officers from the local unit of the Reichswehr observed some of Röhm’s men leaving the hall and called for reinforcements. Hitler ordered the seizure of Munich city council members as hostages. By midmorning on November 9, he recognized that the putsch was not going as planned and that many were ready to abandon it. However, Ludendorff said, “We will march!” Röhm and Hitler had about two thousand men. The general proposed that they go to Munich and take over. He assumed, because of his position during World War I, that no one would obstruct him or fire on him. He also believed that the police and many in the army would join them. However, about a hundred armed policemen halted their march. Both sides fired shots, and within minutes, sixteen NSDAP members and four police officers were dead. The scuffle also injured Hitler and Göring. Hitler’s bodyguard, Ulrich Graf, attempting to shield Hitler, died in the battle.
The nationalist group scattered, but many were arrested, including Ludendorff and Hitler, two days later. Göring, Hanfstaengl, and Hess escaped to Austria. On Wednesday, about three thousand students from Munich University rioted until they learned of Hitler’s arrest on Friday. They referred to Kahr, Seißer, and Lossow as traitors. In 1937, Shirer claimed that Ludendorff “refused to have anything to do with” Hitler following the putsch. Yet the Landsberg prison visitors’ book indicates that he visited Hitler numerous times, as reported in Der Spiegel on June 23, 2006.
The authorities of the Bavarian People’s Court charged Hitler with high treason. The head judge, Georg Neithardt, was impressed by Hitler during the five-week trial. Hitler said that Berlin’s government betrayed Germany by signing the Versailles Treaty. Local newspapers daily reported his words, giving wide exposure to his views, which may have influenced the court. On April 1, 1924, he received the lightest “allowable sentence” of five years. He served eight months and paid a fine of five hundred Reichmarks. In Landsberg prison, Hess transcribed and assisted in the editing of Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf. Professor Karl Ernst Haushofer, Hess’s mentor in college, visited them about eight times. Hitler assured Hess that it would require seven to twelve years for the NSDAP to create a new government for Germany.
Göring, who suffered severe wounds in his leg and his groin, ultimately became morphine dependent. During his incarceration, Hitler concluded that revolution was ineffective in producing lasting change and that to legitimize his approach and win the hearts and minds of the German people, he had to seek political office instead of using force. In April 1924, authorities r
eleased Röhm from jail, where he possibly discovered his homosexual proclivities, which Hitler later acknowledged. Hitler appointed him commander of the Sturmabteilung. Preferring to make his own policies, Röhm abandoned Hitler, began gathering allies, spies, and informants, and founded the Frontbann, a new version of the pre-putsch Combat League.
On May 4, 1924, Germany held elections, and despite its leader being incarcerated, the NSDAP, banned by the government and renamed the National Socialist Freedom Movement (NSFB), won 1,918,329 votes and thirty-two seats in the 493-member Reichstag. Two of those seats were held by Ludendorff and Röhm. Under the leadership of the leftist Strasser brothers, Otto and Gregor, the party lost eighteen of those seats in the election on December 7, 1924.17 Hurt by the Strassers’ ideology, the party gained only 907,300 votes.
While at Landsberg, Hitler wrote, “We must not forget that the rulers of the present Russia are low, blood-stained criminals, that here we are concerned with the scum of humanity, which, when favored by circumstances in a tragic hour overran a large state, killed and rooted out millions of its leading intelligentsia in a wild thirst for blood, and which now for almost ten years has exercised the most cruel rule of tyranny of all times.”18 Hitler dedicated Mein Kampf to Dietrich Eckart, who had participated in the uprising and had died of his wounds on December 26. He had been the editor of the anti-Semitic periodical Auf gut Deutsch, published with the assistance of Rosenberg and Feder. In March 1924, using notes found after his death, friends published the pamphlet Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin: A Dialogue between Adolf Hitler and Me, which revealed an extensive Jewish-Bolshevist relationship. Eckart had helped found the NSDAP. He had met Hitler on August 14, 1919, and had introduced him to Rosenberg, who had published a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the Münchener Beobachter, a newspaper he edited that formerly belonged to the Thule Society.
On December 20, 1924, Hitler was released and immediately began to strengthen the party, which he reformed in February 27, 1925, after the ban expired in January. He separated the SA from the Frontbann and removed Röhm. They would part ways in the spring of 1925, reuniting in the autumn of 1930, when Hitler wrote to Röhm, inviting him to be the chief of staff of the SA, a job he would assume on January 5, 1931. By April 1931, Röhm would direct Georg Bell to create an SA intelligence service with the intention of menacing politicians within the NSDAP who desired to manipulate his homosexuality for their benefit.
On February 27, 1925, Hitler gave his first speech since his release. In December, officials seized all of the party’s assets, yet it had twenty-seven thousand members. Paul von Hindenburg, running against the KPD’s candidate, Ernst Thälmann, was voted in as Germany’s president on April 26, 1925, and took office on May 12. The Centre Party and the Social Democrats (SD) attempted to keep Hitler quiet for two years. In 1926, the NSDAP published a series of pamphlets to educate Germans on the party’s political and financial policies and to answer questions. On August 31, 1927, Hitler emphatically announced, “Questions of Programme do not affect the Council or Administration; the Programme is fixed, and I shall never suffer changes in the principles of the movement, as laid down in its Programme.” Germans placed their trust in the NSDAP’s ability to fight international bankers and the Dawes Pact, adopted in August 1924, a plan to impoverish Germany. The NSDAP did not want to “barter the liberty of the German nation” through the League of Nations or the Locarno Pact or through lack of courage or by compromise.19
Officials warned Hitler against speaking publicly but rescinded the order in 1927, and he addressed mass audiences and exposed the deceptions behind the Dawes Pact. SD leaders and the Centre Party, enemies of National Socialism, probably benefited financially from their acceptance of the plan. The Marxists also favored the Dawes Pact, which would have insured their domination but would have destroyed Germany. In retaliation for his exposure of them, they vilified Hitler.20 The NSDAP maintained twelve seats in the elections of May 20, 1928, while Hitler concentrated on building the party. Meanwhile, the KPD won fifty-four seats.
In 1929, the NSDAP gained its own press to promote National Socialism, which would penetrate into the “national consciousness.” By the end of 1929, the party had 178,000 members. Hitler continued the fight against the Young Plan, foisted on Germany by bankers, including Hjalmar Schacht. Hindenburg favored the plan, saying that it would revitalize the economy. Hitler described these views as fatal to Germany. The NSDAP continued to reveal these deceptions to the public while its opponents responded with falsehoods and animosity. By the end of 1930, the NSDAP had 389,000 members. On Election Day, September 14, 1930, the NSDAP gained 6,406,379 votes and won 107 seats in the Reichstag. By the end of 1931, it had 806,000 members; a month later, there were 862,000, and in another month, the total was 920,000. 21 The most popular party was the SPD, followed by the NSDAP, and then the KPD.
The Party Manifesto of March 6, 1930, addressed the country’s agricultural situation. Before the war, Germany paid for a considerable portion of foreign foodstuffs through industrial exports, trade, and deposits of capital abroad. After the war, Germany paid for imported food with foreign loans, driving the nation deeper into debt “to the international financiers who provided credits.” The only way of altering this situation was for “Germany to produce essential foodstuffs at home.” It was a “question of life and death” for the nation. “An efficient agricultural class was an essential plank” in the NSDAP platform, because the party “considered the welfare of all our people in the generations to come.”22 Further, the NSDAP said that Germans deserved good health and that the nation’s young were the source of its strength.
Hitler felt that current fiscal policies burdened German agriculture and benefited wholesale intermediaries. Farmers also paid excessive fees for electricity and labor, and bank loans left them sinking deeper into poverty to the point where they often had to forfeit their land to the moneylenders. The party wanted to revive agriculture and to improve the conditions of the poor, not with handouts but with opportunities. The NSDAP viewed farmers as the foundation of national identity.23
Hitler wanted to relieve the poverty of the farmers and insisted that bankers decrease the interest on loans to prewar levels and that the government use tariffs to protect agriculture. He wanted to regulate imports and to provide free training to farmers to increase productivity. He also wanted to avoid using foreign labor, to exempt agricultural prices from corporate exploitation and intermediaries, to reduce farm expenses, and to give assistance to organizations that provided agricultural supplies. Germany’s farmers were poor because the whole nation was poor. He felt that economic aid did not produce a permanent improvement. He said, “Political slavery is at the root of our people’s poverty, and political methods alone cannot remove that. The old political parties, which were, and are, responsible for the national enslavement, cannot be the leaders on the road to freedom.”24
Hitler opposed the dole system and the policy of providing aid to those who did not work. He believed that as many as three hundred thousand people would readily return to work if the government removed the dole. He thought that current foreign and domestic policies were idiotic and that citizens should sweep away a state that was unable to produce an economic environment that would allow millions of men to work. The NSDAP did not intend to attack religion or the clergy.25
The NSDAP wanted to revive agriculture and to improve the conditions of the poor not with handouts but with opportunities. The party stipulated that German land must serve the German nation as a home and as a means of livelihood; that only Germans should possess land; that land should be regarded as inheritable; that landowners had an obligation to use their property in the national interest, and that German land should not become an object of financial speculation.26
The NSDAP had twenty-five points:
1.The union of all Germans to form a great Germany on the basis of the right to self-determination enjoyed by nations.
2.quality of rights for the German people in dealing with other nations and abolition of the peace treaties of Versailles and St. Germain.
3.Land and territory for the nourishment of the people and for settling Germany’s superfluous population.
4.Only Germans could be citizens of the nation. No Jew could qualify.
5.Anyone who was not a citizen could live in Germany, but only as a guest subject to foreign laws.
6.Only citizens had the right to vote or to accept official appointments. The party opposed the parliament’s corrupt custom of filling posts merely with a view to party considerations and without reference to character or capability.
7.The state’s first duty was to promote the industry and livelihood of its citizens; officials had the right to exclude foreign nationals if it was not otherwise possible to nourish the entire population of the state.
8.Officials should prevent all non-German immigration; all non-Germans who had entered Germany after August 2, 1914, should be required to depart.
9.All citizens of the state should be equal as regards rights and duties.
10.The first duty of each citizen was to work; the activities of the individual could not clash with the interests of the whole, but must proceed within the frame of the community and be for the general good. Several demands followed from this.