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

FIRST TRIUMPH 351the increase in Hitler's adherents. In autumn, 1929, when Hitler wasemerging from the years of defeat and preparing the 'popular decision'against the Young Plan, a German miner earned an average of 602marks in a quarter of a year (third quarter, 1929). Hitler was still of littleimportance. A year later, the miner's wage had gone down to 548 marks,and Hitler achieved his first great electoral success; one more year andthe miner's pay had dwindled to 497 marks, and Hitler's vote increased.We shall see that Hitler's strength began to fall off as soon as wagesstarted to rise a little.Some observers maintain that Hitler's successes were, in part at least,due to the enormous financial aid given him by German and foreigncapital. Actually the funds were attracted by success, rather than theother way around. There is also a widespread theory that the pettybourgeoisie, ruined by 'monopoly capital,' 'dispossessed' and reduced toa proletarian condition they themselves did not understand, created thepseudo-revolutionary solution of fascism. It is true that this class foughta desperate struggle against its doom; but the class was alreadyvanishing, while other allegiances and lines of demarcation weredeveloping.In 1930, 4,600,000 new German voters went to the polls; most ofthese were young people, a new mass in the life of the nation. Withthese young people came a new human type: the man who could not anddid not want to be counted among any definite social class. This youthhad not lost its class like the lieutenants of 1919; it had never had aclass. Those born in 1910 and later came of age at a time when workwas rare, when the crisis had thrown millions out on the streets; theyoungest, in particular, found virtually no jobs. The young man,beginning his adult life without work and remaining unemployed foryears, became perhaps the most heartbreaking of social types. Betweenfourteen and seventeen he may have learned a trade, or he may havestudied until twenty-two if his parents had the means; in both casesthere was great possibility that he would then begin to vegetate withoutwork or hope, or, if he was employed, that his wages would be less thanhe needed to live. These young people had frequently grown up infamilies which had fallen from one catastrophe into another; the fatherhad often been killed in the war, the mother found herself unable to