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

THE AGE OF GOLD 271politics. Seven months after Locarno, Joseph Pilsudski, Marshal ofPoland and national hero, overthrew the rule of the democratic parties.Like Mussolini in his beginnings, Pilsudski continued to rule formallywith parliament; formally he was most of the time only Minister of War;actually he was dictator, expanding his power from year to year. A pieceof the modern world began to die in Poland — as in so many othercountries: the world of national democracy, the epoch of the liberalnational uprising. An ideal was extinguished which had shone for acentury: the association of national freedom with the immortal humanrights of the American and French revolutions. The political leaderswho had brought the Polish state to life with the help of French andAmerican democracy vanished, some in exile, some in prison, a few bymurder. Henceforth the army ruled. 'Army,' here as always, means acircle of officers; it has been called a regime of 'colonels' — invictorious, expanding Poland it was the same human type which inGermany was embodied by retired or active captains and majors. InGermany after the World War the army had disintegrated into an armedparty of freebooters; in Poland it had arisen in the war out of an armedparty of freebooters. In Germany the officers had become politicians; inPoland, the politicians had become officers; Pilsudski, the marshal andhero of this troop, did not start out as a military man, but as a Socialistagitator — in one word: in 1926 armed bohemia had come to power inPoland.In spite of its limitations and shortcomings Locarno was a remarkablesuccess for Stresemann's foreign policy; another step on Germany's wayback to the rank of a great power; it prepared her entry into the Leagueof Nations. Meanwhile, Hitler's business — not a very thankful one —was to convince the masses that they were doing badly while actuallythey were getting along fairly well: 'That the development is downwardin a straight line,' was no very impressive prophecy at a moment whenthe speaker himself had to admit that 'business is temporarily reviving.'Again, as in the early days of 1923, he flayed the 'spineless masseseaten with decay'; their rule, the rule of the majority, he declared, 'couldonly open the door to stupidity and cowardice; it must lead with mathematicalcertainty to the dissolution of the entire foundation of our forceand strength.'