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

286 DER FUEHRERA second aide of Strasser's was his brother Otto; better educated, lessa man of action and speech, more of a writer; if possible, moreambitious and conscious of his aim than Gregor, whom he drove on.The Strassers and Goebbels now founded a Strasser party in the Hitlerparty. Its program was anti-capitalistic, even nihilistic. Germany mustbe built up in a socialist 'corporate form'; everything opposed to thisgoal would be shattered in a great cataclysm; and it was the aim of theNational Socialists to hasten this cataclysm. What Gregor Strassermeant by the cataclysm was an alliance of Germany with BolshevikRussia, with Gandhi's rebellious India, with the anti-British Sovietsupportedrevolutionary movement of China, with the Kuomintangunder the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek. In short, with all the forces ofdestruction against democracy; with the 'young,' in part colored, peoplesof the East against the declining West; with Bolshevism againstcapitalism; with — as Houston Stewart Chamberlain would have put it— the Tartarized Slavs against Wall Street, with world doom againstVersailles.'The class struggle, like all things, has its two sides,' said Goebbelspublicly, and among friends he insisted that the National Socialist Partymust above all be socialist and proletarian. He wrote an open letter to aCommunist opponent, assuring him that Communism was really thesame thing as National Socialism: 'You and I are fighting one another,but we are not really enemies. Our forces are split up and we neverreach our goal.'Strasser and Goebbels believed in 1925 that the party belonged to theproletariat; Hitler intended that the party should capture the proletariatand hold it in check; especially that fifty per cent of the proletariatwhich 'glorify theft, call high treason a duty, regard courageous defenseof the fatherland as an idiocy, call religion opium for the people.' Theyactually are enemies within: 'Fifty per cent have no other wish but tosmash the state; they consciously feel themselves to be advance guardsof a foreign state' — and rightly so; for 'we must not forget that ournation is racially composed of the most varied elements; the slogan"Proletarians of all countries, unite!" is a demonstration of the will ofmen who do possess a certain kinship with analogous nations of a lowercultural level.'