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

COUP D'ETAT BY INSTALLMENTS 581This was something stronger than system. Hardly anything couldhave been worse for the young National Socialist regime than apremature anti-Semitic economic revolution. But no more than Lenin in1917 was able to forbid the Russian peasants to seize the land wasHitler able to curb a human type that demanded economic security andhad learned that this was his right at the expense of an inferior andhostile race.Was this a pogrom, an anti-Semitic blood-bath? In a conversationwith a foreign journalist, Hitler maintained that less than twenty personshad lost their lives in the 'national awakening.' This was doubtless aconscious falsehood. A careful compilation from official reports inGerman newspapers shows that in the time from January 31 to August23, 1933, at least a hundred and sixty opponents of the NationalSocialists were killed, either in street clashes, 'shot while trying toescape,' 'jumping out of the window in an unguarded moment,' or'hanging themselves in prison.' The figure one hundred and sixtyrepresents those admitted by the National Socialists; the true figure mustbe considerably higher, for it has been proved that many murders werenot reported in the press. These atrocities caused widespread indignationabroad. The foreign newspaper reader may well have imagined at timesthat Germany was swimming in a sea of blood. Spontaneous protestsarose; most effectively in the United States, where in some sections aneffective boycott against German goods was organized.There was an attempt at a world protest against something which, itwas felt, might become an attempted world pogrom; for the S.A. manwho killed a Jew in Germany felt, vaguely at least, that he was killing afragment of world Jewry. But the mass of National Socialist atrocities inthe spring of 1933 was directed, not against Jews, but against politicalfoes; most of the Jews murdered or tortured were Communists orSocialists. Social Democrats and Communists, it is true, had a worsetime of it if they were Jews; in the concentration camps they weresegregated and treated with special harshness. But primarily the blowwas directed against 'Marxism,' the socialist and democratic Left; in theNational Socialist formulation, the political weapon of Jewry must bebroken, not yet Jewry itself. But though it was primarily the political foeand