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

ADOLPHE LEGALITE 403man in high boots and armed with a horsewhip shouted: 'Everyonelisten! ... In the name of the Fuhrer, the chief of staff has ordered . . .'And they marched off. For wherever they might be marching, it couldonly be better. Suddenly one of them had a pistol in his hand, he hardlyknew how it had got there; rushing through a house door with a dozenothers, he found himself in a strange room, he didn't know where; thepistol went off, a man lay groaning on the floor, he didn't know who.This is no fiction, but an account of the notorious murder in the villageof Potempa in 1932. One December night in Berlin boxes in whichsomething seemed to be moving were pressed into the hands of a fewdozen of these men; they were led into a movie house in the center ofthe city; suddenly a whistle shrilled in the darkness, they stood up,shouted, opened their boxes, and hundreds of white mice ran throughthe theater. Women jumped up on chairs and railings, a snake wound itsway through one of the aisles. Outside, uproarious shouts answered thenoise within; thousands who had been standing there in silence suddenlybegan to yell. Joseph Goebbels stood in an automobile, saluting andshouting. With a thousand raised hands the crowd shouted its reply.This went on for several nights, then the government capitulated and didwhat Goebbels had been aiming at with his white mice and snakes: itdistorted the laws to prohibit the picture that was running in the moviehouse. It was an American anti-war picture, written by a German andeagerly awaited by millions of other Germans, a picture revealing war inall its misery and horror: All Quiet on the Western Front, adapted fromRemarque's best-selling novel.Could these rowdies be expected to inspire the officers with confidencethat the gray revolutionary horror of 1918 would not berepeated? On October 14, 1930, the hundred and seven NationalSocialists in parliament, at the behest of Strasser, Feder, and Frick,introduced a bill to limit the interest rates to four per cent; furthermore,'the entire property of the bank and stock exchange princes . . . must beexpropriated without indemnification for the welfare of the Germanpeople as a whole'; the same should be done with the property of alleastern Jews, of all 'persons of foreign race' in general, and 'the largebanks must be taken over by the state with-