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

FEW FLAMES BURN IN GERMANY 297In the eyes of these former lieutenants and captains, the storm troopswere a piece of the future army 'waging a victorious war.' They must beready to slip into uniform at once and shoulder arms when theReichswehr called them. The S.A. leaders had changed their viewsabout Seeckt's army. Rossbach, for example, who had previously beenso skeptical, said: 'The Reichswehr in a superhuman struggle of infiniteperseverance has step by step achieved an inner elevation, as we oldsoldiers today can perceive with seeing eyes.' Consequently, the oldsoldiers must forget their old rancor and revise their faulty judgments.Pfeffer desired nothing more and would have liked best to hand over thewhole S.A. to the Reichswehr, calculating that he himself would thenbecome a general, and Hitler, if necessary, could go to the devil. He ledthe SA. back to the drill grounds of the Reichswehr and trained them tobear arms; it was beginning to be a repetition of 1923, which Hitlerrecalled with horror. That must not happen again. The Reichswehr mustnot be allowed to take 'his' S.A. out of his hands, and perhaps look onsmiling while the bourgeois state's attorney prosecuted Hitler for illegalmilitary drilling and the Socialist Minister of the Interior ordered theforeigner deported. He forbade his troop any connection with theReichswehr, on grounds amounting to high treason: 'The NationalSocialist, and first and foremost the S.A. man, has no call to stir somuch as a finger for the present state, which has no understanding ofour outlook and can only perpetuate the misfortune of our people. . . .The coming Reich for which we are struggling alone obligates us tostake our persons.'The Reichswehr Ministry on the other side forbade the army to acceptNational Socialists as soldiers, and even forbade the arsenals and othersupply establishments to employ National Socialist workers, 'since thisparty has set itself the aim of overthrowing the constitutional state formof the German Reich' (1927).Rebuffed by the Reichswehr, uncertain of his own troop, deserted byhis old friends, surrounded by unreliable new ones, Hitler stood like amodest dwarf beneath the wall of his great plans. Even in his personalrelations with the leading circles of reaction and counter-revolution helacked the right introduction; Goebbels in Berlin, despite his firm will tolive in that world where life is not