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

DEFEAT 443to Eastern agriculture and vanished like a drop of water in a giantsponge; in March, 1931, it was decided to pour in another nine hundredmillion marks in the course of the following years. And that was not all,for in the warehouses of the Reich there lay about a billion marks' worthof unsalable potato spirits, which the state had purchased from the bigpotato producers with the taxpayers' money.This was the Osthilfe (Eastern aid). It cannot be said that the smallgroup of junkers received most of this money; it is even true that peracre the small owners received higher sums than the big ones. It was thesingle cases of feudal favoritism that stirred up public opinion. Casescame to light such as that of Herr von Q., who had squandered hiswhole fortune in light company and then applied for Osthilfe; theofficial to whom he applied turned down his request, but his superior,himself a baron, decided that the debts which von Q. had incurred ongambling and women must be paid from the taxpayers' money in orderto preserve his estate, 'since it has belonged to the family for severalhundred years.' The family of the former Kaiser, one of the wealthiestmen of Germany, took their share; old Oldenburg-Januschau used thesum, with which he was supposed to bolster up his three insolventestates, in order to buy a fourth; when the scandal came to light, hewrote indignantly in the German press that everyone else had done thesame, and his article began with the words:'The aged pelican said: "Be fair, You folks, now let me have my share."'But the problem of the German East and its junkers was somethingbigger and more serious than this scandal. That such a group with itspetrified class consciousness should still exist, tearing and tugging at thepolitical body: this was the real problem. For it was actually the lastremaining group in Germany with an exclusive class consciousness. Foryears it had been steadily losing political power; its economic straitswere growing worse and worse, and now it was struggling desperatelyagainst extinction. At first Bruning had believed it unjust to let the bigEastern landowners suffer more than their share from the world crisis;for that reason