Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

THE DEATH OF MONEY 145speaking to the masses, however, he had to content himself with sayingthat the dictator did not exist for the people, but the people for thedictator: 'It is our task, when the dictator comes, to give him a peoplethat is ripe for him.'The generation which had led Germany into the war and lost the warwas beginning to step aside. The famous and defeated generals werebeing pensioned, the captains and majors were taking their places in thekey posts, Hitler's generation was climbing upward; and as theirspokesman he cried: 'The force which will conquer in the end is the fireof German youth. They will have to uphold the state that theythemselves have created. Today new claimants to power are arising inGermany, men who have shed their blood for Germany and areconvinced that this blood flowed in vain, through the fault of the menwho ran the government.'The new claimants: A youth creating for itself a new state. A newspecies of man — the army of the armed bohemians, of heroes andmurderers by conviction. Since 1919 it has been flowing back and forththrough Germany, splitting like quicksilver into innumerable fragmentsor gathering into a heavy mass, but always present as a social factor ofdecisive power; too big to vanish in the general disintegration; toostrong and influential to be extinguished by force. It was 'the beautifulold freebooter class of war and postwar times,' as later one of the leadersof this band, Lieutenant Gerhard Rossbach, declared in melancholyreminiscence. Ross-bach, friend of Rohm, resembling him in manyways, including his unnatural inclinations, less hard and reliable, butjust as outspoken and self-critical, gave a frank picture of thismurderers' army: '. . . organizing masses and losing them just as quickly;tossed this way and that way just for the sake of our daily bread;gathering men about us and playing soldiers with them; brawling anddrinking, roaring and smashing windows — destroying and shatteringwhat needs to be destroyed. Ruthless and inexorably hard. The abscesson the sick body of the nation must be cut open and squeezed until clearred blood flows. And the blood must be left to flow for a good long timetill the body is purified. . . .'Hitler was practically a mollycoddle when he said that he didn't wantto train his young freebooters 'for aesthetics and humanitarian-