dying bourgeoisie; on the contrary, he would eliminate it and would, at any rate, find it much easier to handle than Marxism. Hitler openly flaunted his present aloofness from bourgeois culture: “If a proletarian brutally tells me what he thinks, I can cherish the hope that some day this brutality can be turned toward the enemy. When a bourgeois indulges in daydreams of culture, civilization and aesthetic joys for the world, I say to him: ‘You are lost to the German nation! You belong in Berlin’s West End! Go there, dance your nigger dances till you’re worn out, and croak!’ ”
He occasionally referred to himself as a “proletarian,” but with an emphasis that made it appear as though he were talking not so much of his social status but of a social renunciation. “I can never be understood in terms of the bourgeoisie,” he declared. Even in his hope of winning over the working class—to which he referred occasionally as a class of “true nobility”—he seemed to be agitated not so much by any fondness for the workers than by his abiding hatred of the bourgeoisie, which had rejected him. There was an incestuous element in his hatred of the bourgeoisie, with the resentment of a would-be bourgeois who had been first rejected, then deceived, constantly erupting. The type of low-class bully he preferred for his immediate personal entourage, the crude “chauffeur types” like Schaub, Schreck, Graf, and Maurice, reflected in an extreme fashion this prejudice, which could be overcome only temporarily by a few individuals: by Ernst Hanfstaengl, for example, or by Albert Speer, or by Carl Jacob Burckhardt, League of Nations commissioner for Danzig, to whom Hitler said “sadly” in 1939: “You come from a world that is foreign to me.”17
No genuine bond with this foreign world was possible; as the meeting at Harzburg had demonstrated, not even a tenable tactical relationship could be established. Nothing came of the plan for a joint opposition; nothing came of the previously much-discussed shadow cabinet or of agreement on a common candidate for the impending presidential election.
Much has been made of the “Harzburg Front.” Those who like to see history in terms of conspiracies and clever wirepulling find Harzburg convenient proof of their thesis that Hitler was nothing but a t<ol of finance capital. However, a closer look at the incident reveals the very opposite. Far from lending himself to the schemes of his would-be manipulators, Hitler treated these people insultingly and disappointed all their hopes. It might be more correct to say that Harzburg proved Hitler’s independence of these interests.
Undeniably, there did exist a network of relationships between the leader of the Nazi party and a number of important businessmen. The party actually obtained considerable funds as well as increased prestige from these connections. But it was only inheriting the contributions that had gone earlier, and in considerably greater sums, to the parties of the Center. Neither the gains in votes of the Nazi party nor the losses of the Center parties can be ascribed to the presence or absence of wealthy patronage. As late as April, 1932, as Hitler was disturbed to learn, the shrunken Deutsche Volkspartei (German People’s Party) was receiving larger sums from industry than his own party. And when Walther Funk, toward the end of 1932, went on a begging tour in the Ruhr district, all he came back with was a single contribution of some 20,000 marks. The total of such aid has often been estimated far too high. Some 6 million marks is probably a fairly realistic estimate of industry’s gifts to the Nazi party up to January 30, 1933. For those who consider such a figure too low it must be pointed out that even twice that sum could not have financed a party organization of some 10,000 local groups, with a large corps of functionaries, a private army of nearly half a million men, and twelve expensively conducted election campaigns in 1932. In fact, the annual budget of the NSDAP, as Konrad Heiden discovered, amounted at this time to between 70 million and 90 million marks. Conscious that he was dealing in sums of this magnitude, Hitler would sometimes refer to himself jokingly as one of the foremost German captains of industry.18
It suits the purposes of pseudoscientific polemic to be broad and imprecise concerning the links between the Nazi party and finance capital. According to this school of thought, Hitler was the “rigorously manipulated and dearly paid political implement” of a capitalistic “Nazi clique” that needed him for “public relations.”19
But the very categories are misleading here. There were, for instance, clearly divergent interests among capitalists and among various branches of Industry Club on January 26, 1932, was intended specifically to overcome department stores, also the chemical industry and old family enterprises, such as the firms of Krupp, Hoesch, Bosch and Klockner had great reservations about the Hitler party, at least before 1933. They were usually motivated by economic considerations. In addition, there was the rather significant number of Jewish enterprises. Otto Dietrich, who arranged some of Hitler’s contracts with Rhenish-Westphalian industry, noted that the leaders of the economy refused “to believe in Hitler… in the period of our hardest struggle.” As late as early 1932 there were “strong foci of industrial resistance.” And Hitler’s famous speech to the Dusseldorf Industry Club on January 26, 1932, was intended specifically to overcome this opposition.20 After that speech the party was in fact granted larger subsidies, which took care of its most pressing concerns; but the sums were by no means as large as expected. At the end of 1932 Hjalmar Schacht, former president of the Reichsbank, Albert Vogler, general manager of the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel), and Kurt von Schroder, the banker, drew up a petition to President Hindenburg asking him to appoint Hitler Chancellor. But this move was a failure; the majority of businessmen who were approached refused to give their signatures.
The theory of a close, pragmatic alliance between Hitler and the major capitalists also fails to explain the time lag between the explosive growth of the party and the injection of, funds from industry. By the time Hitler delivered his Dusseldorf speech the Nazi party had more than 800,000 members and could command between 6.5 million and 13 million votes. The party’s strength depended on these legions of little people, and Hitler had to keep in mind their “enormous anticapitalist nostalgia.” All in all, he was more attuned to them than to the proud, pigheaded businessmen. To the industrialists he sacrificed little more than that troublemaker Otto Strasser, for whom he too had no love. When his followers joined in the Berlin metalworkers strike, Hitler explained the situation tersely by telling the employers that striking Nazis were still better than striking Marxists. But the thesis that Hitler’s party was in the pay of capitalism is most unsatisfactory in its failure to answer the key question: why this novel mass movement sprung from nothing could so effortlessly outstrip the splendidly organized German Left with its depth of tradition behind it. To call Hitler a tool of capitalism, as Marxist theory does, is merely to fall back on belief in demons. Marxist orthodoxy is prone to such simplifications. Such demonology is, as it were, “the anti- Semitism of the Left.”21
But it is one thing to speak of an outright plot between industry and Nazism, quite another to speak of the atmosphere of “partiality” or sympathy that surrounded Nazism. Many elements within industry were frankly in favor of Hitler’s becoming Chancellor, even though they were not themselves disposed to do anything about it. And many who were not prepared to offer him material support nevertheless regarded his program with some approval. They expected no concrete economic or political gains from it and never entirely lost their distrust for the socialistic, antibourgeois sentiments within the NSDAP. But they had never really accepted bourgeois democracy with its consequent rights of the masses. The republic had never been their state. To many of them Hitler’s promise of law and order meant a larger scope for enterprise, tax privileges, and restraints upon the unions. Implicit within the slogan, “salvation from this system,” coined by Hjalmar Schacht were vague plans for restoring the old order of things. Petrified remnants of the authoritarian state paradoxically survived more obstinately in the dynamic business world than in almost any other stratum of the German social structure. If we are to blame “capital” for the rise of the Nazi party, it was not so much on the basis of common aims, let alone of some dark plot, but on the basis of the antidemocratic spirit, the rancor against the “system,” emanating from big business. It is true that the spokesmen for business were deceived about Hitler. They saw only his mania for order, his rigid cult of authority, his reactionary features. They failed to sense the peculiar vibrations he threw off, the pulse of futurity.
Hitler’s above-mentioned address to the Dusseldorf Industry Club was one of the most masterly samples of his oratorical skill. Appearing in a dark pin-striped suit, behaving skillfully and correctly, he expounded the ideological foundations of his policies to an initially reserved group of big businessmen. Every word of the two- and-one-half-hour presentation was carefully adapted to his audience. Not only did he understand how attached these people were to law, order, and authority, but he was able to turn that attachment toward himself.
Early in the speech, Hitler outlined his argument for the primacy of domestic politics. He explicitly disagreed with the view—elevated to a kind of dogma by Chancellor Bruning—that Germany’s fate was largely dependent upon her foreign relations. Foreign policy, Hitler maintained, was, on the contrary, “determined by the inner condition” of a people. Any other view would be resignation, surrender of self-determination, or a dodge on the part of bad governments. In Germany the caliber of the nation had been undermined by the leveling influences of
