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

90 DER FUEHRERspeaking, nobodies, the grouplet itself had been something more in itstime. It was now a remnant of a large movement which, during the war,had counted hundreds of thousands of followers: the pan-Germanmovement of the 'Fatherland Party,' favored by the High Command,paid by the big industrialists, pleading for a 'strong peace' withconquests and annexations. The German Workers' Party had tried, aspart of the Fatherland Party, to win the workers for the idea of the'strong peace,' but this had been a perfect failure as the founder of thesmall grouplet, Anton Drexler, frankly admits in his autobiography.Thus the German Workers' Party, although the influence of itsmembers amounted strictly to nothing, had preserved, from old days,the backing of several more important outsiders. When he first enteredthe party Hitler does not seem to have known that (for instance) ErnstRohm had become a member some time before. Now Dietrich Eckart,the journalist and poet from the Thule Society and a friend of Rohm andhis superior, General von Epp, also joined. For months he had beengoing around with the plan of forming a new 'middle-class party,' andlooking for a leader.The fourth to join them was Gottfried Feder, the engineer, a man witha real, though questionable, political idea: he wanted to do away with'big money' or high finance. It was a time of Socialist ferment; for thebroad masses capital was the root of all evil, and for the purposes of thenew party, Feder had a very fitting answer to the great Socialist questionof the day: yes, abolish that part of capital which is totally superfluous,to wit banking capital, which creates no values, but only lays itsclutches on interest; but productive capital, expressed in objectivevalues, mines, factories, machines, must be retained. These four men,Rohm, Eckart, Feder, and Hitler, now took the German Workers' Partyin hand. With their help Hitler made his way, rather arduously at first,against the resistance of the timid and unimaginative little men whoconstituted the party leadership. Looking back on this period at a laterdate, he forgot the entire plot, except for the personal bickering andirritations, made picturesque by their dwarfish dimensions.'In this year of 1919 my first struggle in the Party began. After longnegotiations I put through the acquisition of three rubber