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

CHANCELLOR AT LAST 529a sad proof of the fact that in politics officers can so easily lose thequalities of their profession.'History now played one of its bitterest jokes. It forced the Prussiangeneral, Kurt von Schleicher, to decide whether to governdemocratically — that is, with the National Socialists, the party ofviolence and mass murder — or whether to smash the party of violenceand mass murder; but to do that, he would first have to smash or at leastparalyze parliament. It was perhaps Hugenberg who was mostdetermined to bar the National Socialists from real power; for he wantedto exclude the people itself from power. On January 21, Hugenbergaccused Schleicher, the 'social General' of letting Germany slip intoBolshevist mass rule; above all in agriculture, the Chancellor was'permitting conflicts between big and small to arise.' The color of thisrural Bolshevism which the big landowners were so fond of invokingwas Brown, and its true name was National Socialism. The decisiveaccusation was that Schleicher wanted to govern with parliament; butGermany, said Hugenberg, could 'be saved only by a strong stateleadership.' He meant by his own dictatorship; but he would have beensatisfied if he himself, perhaps under the chancellorship of Papen, couldbe dictator over the economic life, including agriculture; for economiclife, he believed, was the national destiny.The Bolshevist uprising of the small against the great, whichHugenberg feared, was actually in progress; its scene was parliament;its mover, National Socialism. The budget committee of the Reichstagwas investigating the use and misuse of the Eastern Aid funds; it aimedto discover which of the junkers had enriched themselves on thetaxpayers' money. With National Socialist votes the budget committeeresolved, on January 25, that the Reich court of accounts should conducta thorough investigation of the Eastern Aid scandal and issue a detailedreport on its findings; with National Socialist votes it was decided thatthe government should also render a complete report showing whichestates over two hundred and fifty acres in size had received statesupport. With National Socialist votes the committee demanded aninvestigation of whether the gentlemen, for the most part nobles, hadreally used their 'loans to relieve indebtedness'; and whether they couldnot have paid their