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

HITLER VERSUS NATIONAL SOCIALISM 649fighter' (and for this reason blindly devoted to Hitler personally), he wasa man with National Socialist ideas; but he was forced to forget allabout his two per cent interest. Gottfried Feder, who had promised thatrapacious capital would be brought to its knees, was lucky to get thepost of undersecretary in the Reich Ministry of Economics — ahumiliating position, for here Feder became the subordinate of anotherof National Socialism's unknowns. His new superior was almost astranger to the party, but familiar to the stock exchange and the financialsections of the 'Jewish business press': he was Doctor Karl Schmitt,general director of the largest German insurance company. A morepronounced representative of rapacious capital would have been hard tofind; Schmitt had spent his life lending money and collecting interest;he had literally bought his way into the National Socialist Movement bygiving the party generous aid in hard times. In his new post he wasreally a substitute for a man whose name was a battle-cry against anykind of socialism and who even now refused to join the party: DoctorHjalmar Schacht, president of the Reichsbank.The new policy of July, 1933, was a counter-revolution, as farreachingas the erstwhile revolution supposedly had been. The armedbohemians had been rebuffed; now the middle class was openly betrayed;both, because only in this way did it seem possible to satisfy theproletarian masses. As Hindenburg had said, the 'most urgent task wasto solve the unemployment problem.' What Schleicher had desperatelyattempted 'in opposition to the laws of economic reason,' NationalSocialism had to deliver, if necessary in opposition to its own ideals andprograms. The shortest road to this solution — as the Social Democraticunions had realized for years — was to set capitalism, or rather thecapitalists, in motion again. The employers had to be persuaded toprovide work; masses of jobs had to be improvised and available jobsbroadly distributed. Life or death of National Socialism depended onmaking the workers workers again. And so, as it developed, theuprooted proletariat was the greatest obstacle in the path of a middleclasscorporate state.With all the strength of his changeable nature, Hitler led the campaignfor the protection of the economic age he had so despised. Four daysafter his condemnation of the second revolution, he gath-