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

HITLER VERSUS NATIONAL SOCIALISM 639bourgeois parties. It was a wave which would carry away all thesemotley remnants of the past, and he was riding the wave. He knew thateven when he struck at the Communists he was hitting Hugenberg andhis crowd at the same time, for both still belonged to that past; to theWeimar Republic, the 'interim Empire.'The German Nationalists, who really had profound contempt forevery outward sign of democracy, still gave the Hitler government thefew votes in parliament which it needed for a majority, but by this veryfact, they prevented it from becoming a full and unlimited dictatorship.However, there were signs that this forced support would soon becomesuperfluous. In the 'Free City' of Danzig, elections to the Volkstag(parliament) were held on May 28; and the National Socialists achievedwhat had previously been denied them in the Reich: an absolute, thoughscant, majority of the votes: exactly 50.03 per cent; but a safe majorityof seats: 38 out of 72. As in Bavaria and in some of the Prussianprovinces, the Nazis set at the head of the Danzig government a manwho had been in the party only a short time. Hermann Rauschning wasone of Hitler's so-called 'latelings,' a type mostly hated by the 'oldfighters,' but absolutely needed to cover that unsavory crowd and theircrimes with a respectable name.What had remained in the end of Hugenberg's following wasessentially a group of inadequately armed intellectuals, connected withGermany's large economic holdings more as business managers andadministrators than as owners. With Hugenberg in the ministries ofeconomics and food supply, this group thought that it held its hand onthe most powerful levers. In reality they had chosen the weakest of allpositions of power, for it was precisely in the economic field that themost perilous conflict developed. And it was not the National Socialistworkers who were demanding revolution in the economic sphere; it wasthose who had passed as the defenders and beneficiaries of the existingeconomic order. The middle class, threatened with ruin byoverwhelming competition, was enraged at big capital; the peasantproprietors, incited by the National Socialists, demanded no less thanthe destruction of the German credit system.In the first months of the regime, the 'anti-capitalist longing' o£