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

346 DER FUEHRERHitler cried out: 'Eight months ago I stood in the Zirkus Krone inMunich and declared to the masses: If what we predict does not happen;if what our opponents proclaim does happen — you can chase me offthe platform, you can strike me dead. And now a short time has passed,and we face an unprecedented collapse. Now I ask you: who was right?[Cries: "Hitler was right, Hitler!"]' (Speech on July 25, at Nuremberg.)What had he been right about? His judgment of the Versailles Peace,he himself would have said. But the Versailles Peace was already intatters. True, when the treaty punished the German Republic for the sinsof the defeated empire, when Woodrow Wilson, despite all hisweaknesses the greatest prophetic figure of the age, let himself bepressed to the wall in Paris — then that vacuum was created in whichthe armed bohemian would thrive; but the treaty did not create thearmed bohemian. At the time when this peace most stifled Germany,Hitler's putsch shattered against the resistance of the German massesand institutions (1923); but when the treaty had been smashed by itsown impracticability, Hitler came to power (1932). It is therefore alegend to call him a creature of the Versailles Treaty. Hitler himself hassometimes denied 'that the peace treaty is the cause of our misfortune. . .. The Peace of Versailles is itself only a consequence of the innerspiritual confusion that is slowly overcoming us.'In 1923, money in Germany had lost its old majesty. Now, in 1930,work lost its value; three million men could no longer sell their laborand more millions expected to lose their jobs in the near future. Thisnew death of all values struck, not only the proletarian, but also thecapitalist; small shareholders, in Thyssen's Steel Trust, for example,whose stock fell to a third of its original value; holders of Germanmunicipal bonds; landlords trembling for their rents; mortgage-holderstrembling for their interest payments. Property no longer had its oldmeaning; large holdings maintained themselves, even increased; smallproperty slipped away. The big capitalists had always dominated thestock companies through a minority of shares. In the period ofrationalization they had enriched themselves at the expense of the smallshareholders by keeping dividends down, enlarging the plant with thesavings, and