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

494 DER FUEHRERbus and subway employees into a strike; the Brown Shirts joined in thestrike in order not to lose votes to the Communists, and Goebbelstreated Berlin to a wild revolutionary drama. He dressed some S.A. menas workers and put them to work on street-car tracks; other shamworkers stood near-by, reviling them as 'scabs' and threatening them;the police appeared and drove the threateners away. The 'scabs' rippedup the rails under protection of the police who were convinced that thework had been ordered by the transit company. The unions disapprovedthe hopeless strike; Goebbels cried that the Social Democrats werebetraying the workers — just as the Communists had been saying forthirteen years. Bourgeois supporters of the party, especially in thecountry, took fright; in their election speeches the German Nationalistswarned against 'Brown Bolshevism.' At a cabinet session, Schleichersaid that if these two radical streams should ever flow together inearnest and turn against the state, the Reichswehr would not be strongenough to resist them.But the stream was falling. In the elections of July 30, the NationalSocialists and Communists together had won three hundred andnineteen mandates. When the votes were counted on November 6, theyobtained only two hundred and ninety-seven. But of these two hundredand ninety-seven, the Communists alone had a hundred. Alarm spreadthrough Germany. Communism had reached the level at which theNational Socialists had first terrified the world in 1930.But what moved the public even more profoundly was that in theseelections Hitler for the first time had been defeated, as all the prophetshad predicted. He alone had forced himself to be optimistic, predicted a'great psychological success.' Now the defeat was at hand. More thantwo million votes had been lost, thirty-three deputies did not return tothe Reichstag; the National Socialist fraction was reduced from 230 to197.'A somber mood prevails in the Gau of Berlin,' was Goebbels's entryon November 6. 'There is widespread despair among the voters.' The oldStrasser party rose up in every corner; Frick, Gottfried Feder, DeputiesKube, Kaufmann, Erich Koch, demanded a policy of concessions;Gregor Strasser publicly stated that Hitler must abandon any idea of thechancellorship.