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

COUP D'ETAT BY INSTALLMENTS 601gave this body the military name of 'German Labor Front.' A workerwas no longer asked if he wanted to belong to the Labor Front; hesimply belonged; and within a short time twenty-three million Germanworkers were enrolled in this section of the National Socialist machine.How it would function was still not clear; but in its founding congressof May 10, at Berlin, Hitler left no doubt that it would be merely onepillar, and by no means the only pillar, of National Socialist power:'There must arise a state leadership representing a real authority, and notdependent on any one social group.'With the creation of the German Labor Front, co-ordination becamean elemental force, drawing all Germany in its wake. With suddenchanges of name, the organizations of economic and cultural life coordinatedthemselves, and a country, which had always been rich inclubs and societies, was suddenly bristling with 'fronts.' Those milkproducers, who in Schleicher's time had risen against the domination ofDanish butter, formed a 'German Milk Front' and proclaimed an'offensive of German butter'; a German Honey Front called for anoffensive of its own, not to mention the 'Shoe Front' and the 'BowlingFront.'Some of these fronts thought they could merely change their namesand yet remain exactly as they were. Leadership in all of them wasassumed by a National Socialist who, as often as not, had beensomething else the day before; but the goals, the demands on the state,the 'selfish aims,' were far from giving way to 'common aims.' Torenounce freedom was not to renounce private egotism. All were readyto grant the state, which had shown itself powerful enough to destroyall, the right to command all and thereby help all. By adaptation and coordinationmany hoped to preserve their place and failed to notice thatthis very adaptation was their downfall. If their 'Heil Hitler' was a lie, itwas themselves above all that they were deceiving; they did not believein the storm because, themselves carried away by it, they could not feelthe wind. There were the overly wise who, already on the downwardpath, persuaded themselves that they were riding the flood tide towardtheir great aims. Former Kaiser Wilhelm II, in his luxurious Dutch exile,said to an English journalist in the