4. A study by S. M. Lipset defines the typical Nazi voter as follows: “An independent Protestant member of the middle class who lived either on a farm or in a very small town and who formerly had voted for a centrist party or a regional party that opposed the power and influence of big industry and the unions”; cf. Nolte, Theorien, p. 463.
5. Frank, p. 58.
6. Quoted in Heiden, Hitler I, p. 275, and in Kuhnl, Die nationalsozialistische Linke, p. 374.
7. Cf. Albert Krebs, Tendenzen und Gestalten der NSDAP, pp. 138 f.
8. The Daily Mail of September 24, 1930, quoted according to the VB of September 25. Lord Rothermere’s article began significantly by calling on Englishmen to change their conception of Germany which, he said, they remembered chiefly as prisoners of war. He pointed out that Germany was not free as other nations were; that the Allies had made the regaining of her full national freedom dependent upon payments and conditions imposed upon her against her will. And he asked whether it was wise to insist upon the ultimate letter of the law. It would be best for the welfare of Western civilization, he concluded, if there came to the helm in Germany a government permeated by the same healthy principles with which Mussolini had renewed Italy in the last eight years.
9. Quoted from Bullock, p. 163, and Frankfurter Zeitung, September 26, 1930. Cf. also Mein Kampf, p. 345: “The movement is anti-parliamentarian, and even its participation in a parliamentary institution can only imply activity for its destruction, for eliminating an institution in which we must see one of the gravest symptoms of mankind’s decay.”
10. Hitler’s statement is not complete and not recorded in the transcript of the trial; the quotations given here sum up the substance of different texts. See the attempt to reconstruct the exact wording on the basis of press reports in Peter Bucher, Der Reichswehrprozess, pp. 237 ff.
11. Willi Veller’s letter of August 16, 1930, abridged, quoted from Tyrell, pp. 297 f.
12. A. Fran?ois-Poncet, The Fateful Years, pp. 5 ff.
13. J. Curtius, Sechs Jahre Minister der deutschen Republik, p. 217.
14. Report of the British ambassador for July 16, 1931, cited from Bullock, pp. 177 f.
15. The meeting was continued in Berlin shortly afterward. According to the testimony of Ernst Poensgen, Hitler pleaded with the captains of industry to withdraw their support for Bruning, but without success. See Poensgen’s Erinnerungen, p. 4; also Dietrich, Mit Hitler in die Macht, p. 45.
16. Ernst von Weizsacker, Erinnerungen, p. 103, adds to the remark on the postmaster generalship the anecdotal phrase: “Then he can lick my ass on the stamps.” Hindenburg habitually called Hitler the “Bohemian corporal” because he mistakenly assumed that Hitler came from Braunau in Bohemia. But it is also possible that he intended simultaneously to stress a certain foreignness and un-Germanness in Hitler, who struck him as “bohemian” in both senses of the word.
17. Carl J. Burckhardt, Meine Danziger Mission, pp. 340, 346. Hitler made it clear that he could not be considered bourgeois in an interview with Hanns Johst published in Frankfurter Volksblatt, January 26, 1934. Cf. also Tischgesprache, p. 170.
18. Cf. G. W. F. Hallgarten, Hitler, Reichswehr und Industrie, p. 120. Hallgarten gives details on the expenses of the NSDAP and the amount of support contributed by industry. See also Heiden, Hitler, vol. I, pp. 313 f. Some emendations may be found in Henry A. Turner, “Fritz Thyssen und ‘I Paid Hitler’ ” in: Faschismus und Kapitalismus in Deutschland, pp. 87 ff. The magnitude of the sums and the difficulties involved are illuminated by Thyssen’s unsuccessful attempt to withdraw 100,000 marks for the benefit of the NSDAP from the strike fund of the Northwest Group of the Association of German Iron and Steel Industrialists. When Ludwig Grauert, then business manager of the association, undertook the transaction without obtaining Chairman Ernst Poensgen’s consent, Poensgen rebuked him sharply. Krupp actually demanded Grauert’s dismissal, and Grauert was saved only when Thyssen came forward asserting that the 100,000 marks had merely been a loan—which he promptly paid back out of his own pocket. Cf. Turner, “Thyssen,” pp. 101 ff.
According to partially supported testimony given in court by Friedrich Flick, the Nazis received only 2.8 per cent of the money he spent for political purposes; cf. ibid., p. 20. Partly because of the altogether inadequate source materials, the question of how much financial support Hitler received from industry has become a broad field for speculation colored by ideology. Franz Xaver Schwarz, treasurer of the NSDAP, by his own testimony burned in the spring of 1945 all the documents in the Brown House in order to save them from confiscation by the advancing American troops. In addition, the source most frequently cited—Fritz Thyssen’s I Paid Hitler—has proved to be highly unreliable. Thyssen himself has contested the book’s authenticity. In Monte Carlo, where he was living in exile, he had granted several interviews to the editor, Emery Reves, in the spring of 1940. These interviews were to provide material for a volume of memoirs. The rapid advance of the German armies in France put an abrupt end to the undertaking. Reves fled to England with the documents and later published the interviews, considerably expanded. Reves tells another story which, however, seems a good deal less credible since it was not even accepted by the denazification tribunal in Konigstein/Taunus.
In the above-mentioned study H. A. Turner has demonstrated that the very passages historians have hitherto regarded as especially relevant are among those parts of the book that Fritz Thyssen, the putative author, never saw, a fact Reves himself has confirmed. It further reduces the book’s value as a source that, for example, the passage in which Thyssen speaks of the “deep impression” Hitler’s Dusseldorf speech made upon the industrialists present does not appear in the stenographic record of the interview; thus it is obviously a later addition; moreover, Thyssen explicitly objected to it after the war. The other so frequently cited passage, in which Thyssen gives a figure of 2 million marks as the size of the Nazi party’s annual subsidy, was likewise more or less pulled out of a hat, as Turner convincingly demonstrates. Concerning the size of the actual payments, cf. Turner’s conclusions: “After weighing all the facts we must recognize that the financial subsidies from industry were overwhelmingly directed against the Nazis” (p. 25). We are still justified in assuming that the greater part of the funds available to the NSDAP came from membership dues. According to a police report, these were so high that they kept a good many persons from joining the party; see F. J. Heyen, NationalSozialismus im Alltag, pp. 22 and 63.
19. Thus Eberhard Czichon, Wer verhalf Hitler zur Macht? as one example among many similar writers on the subject; see also the review by Eike Henning, “Industrie und Faschismus,” in: Neue politische Literatur, 1970:4, pp. 432 ff., with many other citations and references. Czichon tends to prefer general references and unpublished documents, so that his sources in many cases can scarcely be checked. Frequently, too, he indulges in apparently deliberate deceptions, inaccuracies, and faulty references. Ernst Nolte has shown that Czichon reports a payment from IG Farben to the NSDAP in such a way that the reader would think the payment had been made before the seizure of power, whereas the document itself shows that the money was paid in 1944 (Ernst Nolte, Der Nationalsozialismus, p. 190). Czichon also asserts, referring to Bracher, Auflosung, p. 695, that after talking with Papen in Cologne on January 4, 1933, Hitler met with Kirdorf and Thyssen; but this passage is not to be found in Bracher. There is a similar misleading reference on Czichon’s part to Die Machtergreifung by H. O. Meissner and H. Wilde. More examples are given by Eike Henning, op. cit., p. 439.
20. The speech was given on January 26, not, as is usually stated, on January 27. Cf. Otto Dietrich, Mit Hitler in die Macht, pp. 44, 46. G. W. F. Hallgarten also stresses the differing attitudes among various branches of industry; see his Hitler; also his Damonen oder Retter, pp. 215 f.; also Fetcher, “Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus: Zur Kritik des sowjet-marxistischen Faschismusbegriffs,” Politische Vierteljahresschrift, 1962:1, p. 55.
21. R. Dahrendorf, Gesellschaft und Demokratie in Deutschland, p. 424. Dahrendorf argues—and he is surely right about the motives—that the big businessmen supported Hitler in the same way that they granted financial aid to every right-wing party that had prospects of coming to power, not at
