Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (47 page)

Thyssen was not the only prominent economic figure who wanted to see the National Socialists claim a share of power. Another was Hjalmar Schacht, who resigned as Reichsbank president in March 1930 when he argued that the conditions of the Young Plan, which he himself had helped negotiate, were being altered to Germany’s detriment.
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Schacht had originally co-founded the left-liberal DDP, but by February 1930 there was no mistaking where his new political sympathies lay. At a social occasion at the home of a banker, Schacht’s wife openly wore a necklace with a swastika pendant. When questioned about this by the society reporter of the
Vossische Zeitung
, Schacht replied: “Why not give the National Socialists a chance? They seem pretty gutsy to me.”
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After the September election, Schacht made his admiration of the NSDAP known publicly, saying that one “could not govern in the long term against the will of 20 per cent of the electorate.”
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In December, Schacht’s old friend, Deutsche Bank chairman Emil Georg von Stauss, invited him to his villa in Berlin’s exclusive Wannsee district to have dinner with Hermann Göring. Stauss was a deputy in what was left of the DVP faction in the Reichstag, and he had extended his feelers to test the possibility of collaborating with the NSDAP. The dinner seems to have gone swimmingly. Schacht recalled Göring as an “urbane and pleasant man of society,” and on 5 January 1931, Schacht was invited to Göring’s apartment. Thyssen, the NSDAP’s new patron, was also in attendance.
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Goebbels, who was present as well, wrote: “Schacht strikes me as something of an
arriviste
, whereas Thyssen is one of the old guard. Excellent. He may be a capitalist, but it’s hard to have anything against captains of industry like this.”
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After dinner, Hitler joined the group. “His manner was neither pretentious nor laboured; on the contrary, he acted naturally and modestly,” Schacht recalled in his memoirs. “There was nothing to betray the fact that he was the leader of the second-strongest party in the Reichstag. After all the rumours we had heard and all the public criticisms we had read, we were pleasantly surprised by the whole atmosphere.”
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As was his wont, Hitler held a long monologue, during which the other guests barely got a word in edgeways. Schacht was nevertheless impressed. After that initial meeting, he already recognised “that Hitler’s propagandistic force has excellent prospects among the German populace, as long as the economic crisis is not solved and the masses are not thereby diverted away from radicalism.” Soon afterwards, Schacht claimed, he had encouraged Brüning to invite the National Socialists to join the governing coalition as a way of “directing the movement into orderly channels.”
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Contact with Schacht was also very important for Hitler. Not only was Schacht held in high regard by industrialists and bankers, Hitler also valued his financial expertise, of which he himself possessed none. The former Reichsbank president was “no doubt the leading mind we have in Germany in the money sector and the financial economy,” Hitler told Wagener.
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Schacht would prove eminently useful when the NSDAP came to power.

“The economic sector is increasingly coming our way,” Goebbels rejoiced, while Hess claimed that “extremely prominent representatives of business” were secretly asking for meetings with the party.
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But in fact, the chummy behaviour of a Thyssen, Schacht or Stauss was not typical of Germany’s economic elites. There is little justification for left-wing claims that the National Socialists owed their electoral triumph to financial support from big business or that Hitler was a lap dog of major industrialists.
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The NSDAP financed their election campaigns largely from the party coffers—from membership dues, entry fees and small private donations. Thus the Nazi breakthrough to becoming a mass movement cannot be attributed to support from big business.
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Nonetheless, with their often unbridled polemics against the Weimar system, trade unions and the social welfare state, large-scale business entrepreneurs contributed indirectly to the success of the radical right. It was no coincidence that industrialist circles welcomed the disempowerment of the German parliament and the establishment of rule by Brüning’s cabinet supported by the president.
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After 14 September, the captains of industry could no longer ignore the National Socialists, but the majority still treated the radical right-wing party with caution. The business classes were justifiably skittish since no one was sure what economic course the party would pursue, and fears that the anti-capitalist strains within Nazi propaganda were not just rhetoric were bolstered by a number of parliamentary motions the NSDAP sponsored in October 1930. They included proposals to nationalise large banks, to ban the trading of securities and to restrict interest rates to 5 per cent. Business circles were particularly concerned that the NSDAP nominated Gottfried Feder as its spokesman in the debates about the 1931 budget. Feder’s constant calls for Germany to “break the yoke of interest slavery” had earned him a reputation as an anti-capitalist eccentric.
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At the end of 1930, the
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
newspaper published an editorial that voiced the concerns of big business about the nebulous policies of the NSDAP. It predicted that the conflict between the anti-capitalist and more moderate wings of the party would become more intense and that the outcome was “fully uncertain.”
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Hitler was at pains to dispel such fears, knowing that resistance from Germany’s major business figures would make it more difficult for him to achieve his political goals. “You underestimate these men’s political influence…and that of the economy in general,” Hitler reprimanded Otto Wagener. “I have the feeling that we won’t be able to conquer [the chancellor’s office in] Wilhelmstrasse over their heads.”
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In September 1930, Hitler met the chairman of the Hamburg–America ocean line HAPAG, the former chancellor Wilhelm Cuno, to assure him that the NSDAP would support entrepreneurial initiative and private capital, and only intervene in cases of illicitly acquired wealth.
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He made similar remarks the following month in Munich to Theodor Reismann-Grone. The publisher noted down his impressions of Hitler in his diary: “An Austrian officer type…I spoke first, but he quickly interrupted and dominated the conversation. The power of his words lies in his temperament, not in his intellect. He shakes things up. That’s what the German people need. You can only beat speed with more speed. He described the destruction of Marxism as his life’s goal.”
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In early December, Hitler spoke for a second time to Hamburg’s National Club of 1919 in the Hotel Atlantik, but he avoided addressing any current issues, instead offering vague promises that once the “tributes” had been eradicated and Germany had regained its political power, the economy would flourish. “I have pledged myself to a new doctrine,” he said at the end of his speech. “Everything that serves the best interest of my people is good and proper.”
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The well-heeled Hamburg audience, who once again showered Hitler with applause, remained pretty much in the dark as to where the NSDAP stood on economic questions and what it intended to do if it came to power.

Hitler refused to commit himself to an economic programme for the future because he wanted to keep his options regarding German industry open and because he did not want to alienate the “socialist” wing of his own party. In the spring of 1931, Hans Reupke—a lawyer working for the Confederation of German Industry who had secretly joined the NSDAP in May 1930—published a pamphlet entitled “National Socialism and the Economy” in which he assured his readership that the party had refined its anti-capitalist slogans into anti-materialist ones. Goebbels was outraged, writing: “This is a crass betrayal of socialism.” He complained to Hitler and later noted with satisfaction: “Reupke dressed down by the boss.”
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But in truth what bothered the NSDAP chairman was less the content of Reupke’s pamphlet than the idea of a fight being carried out in public. Wagener also bore the brunt of Hitler’s vacillations. In 1932, the director of the NSDAP’s economic-political division wanted to publish a collection of essays under the title “The Economic Programme of the NSDAP,” but Hitler killed the idea of Eher Verlag bringing out the volume. The collection was internally circulated and stamped with the words “For official use only.”
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The industrialists who did donate money to the NSDAP after 14 September regarded it as a kind of political insurance in case the party’s rise continued and it gained a share of power. But as a rule, the donations were made not to the party as a whole, but to individuals thought to exercise “moderating” influence. Along with Göring, the prime recipient was Gregor Strasser, who was considered the second most powerful Nazi after Hitler. Also receiving money was the former business editor of the
Börsen-Zeitung
in Berlin, Walther Funk, who had given up that post to devote himself to improving relations between the NSDAP and captains of industry. Funk, who officially joined the party in June 1931, quickly advanced to become Hitler’s most important economic adviser, putting himself in direct competition with Wagener.
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As far as we know, Hitler himself did not receive any donations from businessmen, nor did he solicit any. He had no need for them. Since 1930, royalties from
Mein Kampf
increased dramatically, and he seems to have paid taxes on only a fraction.
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At public events, Hitler liked to brag that he did not receive a salary from the party, but he claimed expenses for his numerous appearances as well as fees for his articles in the
Völkischer Beobachter
and the
Illustrierter Beobachter—
significant sources of side income. He also demanded substantial payments for interviews he granted to the foreign press as well as the occasional articles he wrote for the Hearst newspaper empire.
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The party covered the costs for Hitler’s personal staff: his private secretary, chauffeur and bodyguard. Hitler had enough money at his disposal to keep up his large apartment on Prinzregentenstrasse and his holiday home on the Obersalzberg, pursue his passion for expensive Mercedes and, as of February 1931, reside in the elegant Hotel Kaiserhof on Mohrenstrasse, diagonally across from the Reich Chancellery, whenever he was in Berlin.
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The Nazis benefited more from the policies of the Brüning government than from the big-business donations. Despite the fact that the number of unemployed was rising from month to month, the chancellor continued his deflationary economic policies. Brüning was willing to accept mass unemployment and impoverishment in favour of his primary goal of eradicating German reparations payments. “Since the spring of 1931,” the historian Heinrich August Winkler has written, “the thread running through Brüning’s policies was not how to overcome but how to politically exploit the Depression.”
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As hard currency poured out of the country, the government was approaching insolvency. On 20 June 1931, U.S. President Herbert Hoover suggested imposing a one-year moratorium on German reparations payments. Brüning welcomed Hoover’s initiative as an intermediary step towards getting rid of reparations once and for all. After protracted negotiations, France also agreed to the moratorium, but that move failed to have the expected calming influence on the financial markets. On 13 July, one week after the moratorium’s imposition, one of Germany’s largest commercial banks, Danatbank, collapsed. There was a widespread run on banks and savings institutions, forcing the government to suspend all banking operations for two days. “Ominous days for Germany…” the diarist Thea Sternheim wrote. “Panic everywhere.”
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The worsening of the financial crisis in the spring and summer of 1931 was wind in the sails of the NSDAP. In Landtag elections in Oldenburg on 17 May, the Nazis polled 37.2 per cent. For the first time ever they were the largest faction in a regional parliament. They also took 26.2 per cent of the vote in the city parliament election in Hamburg, becoming the second-strongest party in the city after the SPD. In Landtag elections in Hesse on 15 November, the NSDAP captured 37.1 per cent of the vote, which put the party well ahead of the rest of the pack.
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But despite this series of electoral successes, Hitler was no closer to his goal of taking power. As early as January, Goebbels had expressed his fear that “everything is taking too long and the party’s momentum could freeze up.” After the Nazis’ triumph in Oldenburg, Goebbels noted: “Hitler is always a source of strength and optimism. You have to be an optimist to lead our cause to victory.”
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