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

HITLER VERSUS NATIONAL SOCIALISM 641Milch had supported Goring in the old days when he had been short offunds. No one had ever heard that Milch was a National Socialist, whileit could not be doubted that he bore a Jewish name; and when ErhardMilch, pursuing a custom which was beginning to gain wide popularity,claimed to be the fruit of his 'Aryan' mother's infidelity, his detractorsfound out that the maiden name of this supposedly Aryan motherallegedly had been Rosenau.The thousand-headed swarm of job-hunters was the human reservoirfrom which the current of radicalism in the party was fed. But it claimedto speak in the name of the farmers and the shopkeepers.Large sections of the rural population, stifling under a mountain ofmortgages, were passionately awaiting the breaking of interest slavery.Darre wanted to reduce all agricultural credits to two per cent.Hugenberg, as Minister of Food Supply, thought he was infringingsufficiently on the sanctity of contracts when he reduced agriculturalinterest from its really insane level to four and a half per cent, and evencanceled some farm debts by decree (June 1, 1933). Schacht, aspresident of the Reichsbank, violently opposed this reduction of interest,which seemed to Darre absurdly slight. Hugenberg clung to his plan; inaddition, he threw Danish butter, which had done so much politicaldamage in Germany, out of the country by means of high customsduties, thereby driving up milk and butter prices. Then Hitler justifiedthis by saying that the peasantry was so important that for their salvationeven unpopular measures, such as the raising of prices, must be taken.Thus began the short-lived era of 'German Socialism.'The different sections of the German economy were linked by a broadand varied network of organizations. There were the Nor-menverbande(associations for the maintenance of industrial standards); there wereorganizations for common purchase of raw materials, for distributingorders, for advising producers, for the rational organization ofproduction, and for maintaining relations between complementaryplants. This highly developed and efficient system of organizationsculminated in the powerful cartels aimed at maintaining high prices.These associations not only did not disappear, but they seemed to theNational Socialist planners like a ready-