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

ADOLPHE LEGAUTE 401the Social Democratic Party with its unions. The Social Democrats—the Communists insisted in dead earnest even as the National Socialistwave was engulfing them — were the chief enemy of the workers.Therefore, the main attack of the Communists was directed, not againstthe National Socialists or, as they put it, the Fascists, but against theSocial Democrats — the 'Social Fascists.'To be sure, the Social Democrats and the unions had no revolutionaryaim and hence no plan for the civil war that was obviously approaching.And even if there had been a plan, up to 1932 they had no suitableorganization. The unions were not organized by factories but by trades;hence a rapid mobilization of the masses was impossible. But thepusillanimity of the Social Democrats merely reflected the condition ofthe working masses themselves. The worker who still had a job did havesomething to lose, Marx and Engels notwithstanding. In this period ofhopelessness his job meant all the world to him. The best way tosafeguard it was to keep his nose to the grindstone, to say nothing andhear nothing. Six or eight millions were standing outside waiting for thisjob; and all that awaited the dismissed proletarian was a place in theendless gray lines at the employment offices. If one day the sirensannounced a general strike, could he be expected to stand up and leavethe little piece of world which he had so painstakingly defended with hissilence and renunciation? Robbed more and more of the mostelementary comforts, cut off more and more by increasing poverty fromthe culture to which he had been so attached, he exhausted himselfmorally in a merciless struggle for existence; unwittingly he himselfwas a fragment of the declining economic age which in Hitler's phrase'filled no one with enthusiasm to die.'The National Socialists, on the other hand, preached death at everyhour to their S.A. These desperate men were not all heroes either. 'Whenyou are scared,' Rohm used to say, 'always remember that the others arcjust as scared as you are!' And Hitler taught them not to be soft, for thesoldiers in the field had borne a thousand times greater hardships. Butcivil war is not won by heroes; it is lost by vacillating weaklings — andthe secret is to frighten these cowards in any way possible. For thispurpose the S.A. was the right tool. Precisely because the NationalSocialists for the present were