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

440 DER FUEHREREbert had dared to accept. Thus a professional officer without personalmeans concluded his career most successfully. While he was serving asPresident in Berlin, Herr Elard von Oldenburg-Janus-chau, a junker inthe province of East Prussia, discovered that an estate which had oncebelonged to the Beneckendorff and Hindenburg family was for sale. Hemade it clear to various other junkers what it would mean if the Chief ofState were to become one of them. They collected money amongthemselves and a few industrialists, and for Hindenburg's eightiethbirthday, on October 2, 1927, the Stahlhelm presented its honorarypresident with the estate and castle of Neudeck. As a precaution,Hindenburg's son Oskar was entered in the property register as owner;thus, if Hindenburg died in the near future, the state would receive noinheritance tax.And so Hindenburg was a junker again, after a lifetime as a salariedprofessional soldier. He became a member of the class which wasliterally the most unproductive in Germany. For most of these Prussianjunkers lived in a barren region, extending from the banks of the Elbe inCentral Germany to the eastern borders of the Reich. The soil is full ofgravel and clay, its chief products rye and potatoes. The land cannotsupport a population of small farmers; only large-scale farming, withlarge unpopulated areas planted to rye, potatoes, and beets, can hope tomaintain itself. The farms are agricultural factories with poorly housedand poorly fed personnel; at harvest time, itinerant workers are broughtin, either unemployed from the cities or impoverished countryproletarians from near-by Poland. The holdings of the junkers are in themain no giant estates, but farms of seven to twelve hundred acres.Within his own petty realm such a landowner is really a lord. Down tothe twentieth century he enjoyed a kind of jurisdiction over his 'subjects.'He decided who should marry whom, and when universalsuffrage was introduced, he told his subjects whom to vote for. By1930, to be sure, the power of the junkers was much weakened by thepolitical progress of Germany; but the memory of it was not yet dead,the big estates were still there, and when the lord drove across the fieldsin his carriage, the workers still doffed their caps and cried: 'Good day,Herr Oberleutnant!' — for the junkers liked to be addressed by theirformer military titles.