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

656 DER FUEHRERsured that they had nothing further to fear, and some were prevented bythe authorities from emigrating or liquidating their businesses— forsuddenly they had ceased to be Jews and become employers, andemployment was what mattered most to the regime. Consequently therewas a tendency to persecute and dismiss Jewish employees and whitecollarworkers.In the middle of 1933, the first Jewish refugees appeared in foreigncapitals with exposes of conditions in Germany. But from withinGermany, from the Jewish masses who had remained behind, the reportsbecame more and more reassuring: things were not really so bad. Insome cities, it was true, as in Julius Streicher's Nuremberg, therestaurants and cafes were closed to Jews and in general it was madehard for them to leave their houses; these cities achieved world fame bytheir brutalities. But in most towns the treatment of the Jews becamemore moderate; and their businesses, like all businesses in Germany,were flourishing again in the economic revival.This was the end of the talk about hunger and frugality, saving andsimplicity, not to mention spinning wheels. The people should havegrounds for economic satisfaction with the new regime. AddressingGerman captains of industry in August, Hitler sharply attacked'primitivism and frugality' as the expression of an 'envious attitude.' InNovember, he boasted to Ferdinand de Brinon, the Frenchnewspaperman: 'I have restored to the German people the concept oftheir honor' — by means of National Socialist victory celebrations. 'Iwill also give back to them the joy of living.'He knew the sources of this joy of living. He had once promised theunmarried women that under the Third Reich they would get husbands;and he kept this promise. The story that National Socialism favored freelove and illegitimate births is a childish fantasy. Since 1933, the Reichhas given young couples applying for it a loan of a thousand marks onmarriage, all or a part of which did not have to be returned if a numberof children were produced within a specified time; during the first fiveyears of the regime, approximately 880,000 marriages were promotedby this financial aid, at times as much as thirty per cent of all marriages,and actually the greater part of this money was not repaid. Familieswere