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

500 DER FUEHRERHe wanted to save the party itself. If it did not get its share of powerat once, it was headed for ruin. Then the proudest dream of the armedintellectuals would be at an end, and a horde of bohemians, no longerarmed, would wander through Germany, literally begging.This had already begun. 'Financial worries make all well-directedwork impossible,' wrote Goebbels. He reported that the party wascutting the wages of its employees; that the National Socialist deputiescould give the Reichstag porters no tips for Christmas. He sent the S.A.out on the street to beg for money. In their thin shirts, shivering with thecold, the storm troopers stood on the corners by twos and threes, rattlingtheir tin collection boxes and crying lamentably: 'Give something forthe wicked Nazis!'The party's trusted backers were dropping away; many belonged tothat type of rich men who were always on the brink of financialdifficulties themselves. In November, Fritz Thyssen had definitelydeclared that his strength was at an end; he would buy one more carloadof political pamphlets from the Volkischer Beobachter, but after thatthey should cease to count on him. Even Adolf Muller, the printer of theVolkischer Beobachter, threatened several times in the course ofNovember and December to stop printing unless he got some money.Hitler trembled and courted Adolf Muller's favor scarcely less than thatof Hindenburg; he often yelled at him, to be sure, but Muller was halfdeaf and hard to perturb. He calmly replied that the VolkischerBeobachter was ruining him, but luckily he was doing a good businessin Catholic church notices. This printing order he owed to CardinalMichael Faulhaber, who more or less dominated Bavarian politics;Adolf Muller, who often held Hitler's financial fate in his hands, was noNational Socialist, but a member of the Catholic Bavarian People'sParty which ruled Bavaria.Amid these dangers Strasser and Goring set out on their race tocompromise. Schleicher reproached Papen for not seeing the mostobvious thing of all: the venality of the National Socialists, theirbankruptcy, the crumbling of their power under the pressure of financialstringency. He reproached him for setting too much