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

396 DER FUEHRERof some fifty thousand men with military training; and this Prussianpolice was, according to the law, entirely, though in reality onlypartially, in the hands of that group of trade-union secretaries, governmentofficials, and parliamentarians which constituted the leadershipof the Social Democrats and governed Prussia. But against a determinedReichswehr there could be no reliance on this troop.But what was the Reichswehr determined to do, and to what lengthswould it go — this was the question. 'Generals!' cried Hitler to theleaders of the Reichswehr in one of his speeches, 'with a hundredthousand men you cannot wage a foreign war, but you can give the statea new form. It lies partly in the hands of the army which tendency willbe victorious in Germany; Marxism or ourselves.' The Reichswehr'sanswer was that National Socialism began 'to show Russian character,'as one of its spokesmen put it.As a matter of fact, the Nazis began to undermine and to destroy thestate from inside; especially to destroy the loyalty of its servants, armedand unarmed. They had their helpers, most of them carefully concealedin the ministries and other government offices; they gatheredinformation about the inner movements and decisions of the state andaccumulated their treasure of state secrets in a party office which washeaded by a man at that time almost unknown to the outside world:Rudolf Hess, the 'private secretary.' A minister wrote a decree thatNational Socialist meetings must be watched by the secret police; theNational Socialist gauleiter in a provincial city knew this even beforethe police president, and informed the members of the secret police, forthey too were secret National Socialists. One of the most popularministers, in private life rather a good, harmless soul, had a mistress —she actually was a National Socialist spy. To be sure, this minister alsohad his spies among the National Socialists, but it can be said that theresults were disappointing. A spying state against a spying politicalparty — public opinion already took this feature of the silent civil waras a matter of course. Probably by far the most efficient spy system hadbeen built up by Schleicher; he spied on his own superiors, on theministers of the Reich, on Bruning himself, and tapped their telephonewires. One day Bruning, sitting with a visitor in his studio in thechancellery, suddenly sprang up, ran to the door, ran through the