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

444 DER FUEHRERhe had let them have the Osthilfe. Gradually he became convinced thatthere was something fundamentally rotten. He and his cabinetdeveloped plans for a solution: those large estates which were overwhelmedwith debt and economically untenable should be foreclosed bythe state, divided and settled with peasants; it was hoped that thepeasant with his tenacity and frugality would be able to maintainhimself where the large landholder had failed. The big landownersspoke of 'agrarian Bolshevism' or 'Bolshevism' pure and simple, andbegan to put pressure on Hindenburg, the highest landowner of theReich, to remove Bruning.But in the presidential election Bruning and Hindenburg seemedinseparable. And so the junker class could not vote for the first junker ofthe Reich, in spite of Oldenburg-Januschau, in spite of the estate ofNeudeck. The great virtue of loyalty turned strange somersaults in thiselection. The junkers left the field marshal in the lurch, but did not goover to Hitler. Hitler's comrade of many pacts, Hugenberg, worried thathis comrade might win, knifed him by setting up a candidate of his own.This was the former Lieutenant-Colonel Theodor Duesterberg, thesecond president of the Stahlhelm of which Hindenburg was honorarypresident — comrade against comrade, president against honorarypresident! Enraged, the National Socialists struck back at Duesterbergwith a deadly weapon: they discovered that the unfortunate candidate'sgreat-grandfather had been Abraham Selig Duesterberg, a Jew.Duesterberg answered that he was deeply shaken by this revelation. Heswore on his honor that he had known nothing of his Jewish origin, butthat he would let no revelations drive him out of the political struggle.The junkers also refused to be frightened by revelations. Incensedagainst Bruning, doubting Hindenburg, and thoroughly opposed toHitler, they voted for Duesterberg; most of the princes of the House ofHohenzollern, for instance, were among his supporters.Hitler's adversaries might well have fought back with the reply thatonly yesterday he himself had not been a German. To make hiscandidacy possible at all, National Socialist-controlled government ofthe little 'country' of Braunschweig, in all haste, had made him anattache at the legation which the country, in accordance