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 Klöckner 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 Düsseldorf 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 Schröder, 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 Düsseldorf 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 Düsseldorf 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 Brüning—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 democracy:
When the capable minds of a nation, which are always in the minority, are regarded as only of the same value as all the rest, then genius, capacity, the value of personality are slowly rendered subject to the majority, and this process is then falsely named the rule of the people. For this is not rule of the people, but in reality the rule of stupidity, of mediocrity, of half-heartedness, of cowardice, of weakness, and of inadequacy. It is more the rule of the people to let a people be governed and led in all the walks of life by its most capable individuals, those who are born for the task, rather than… by a majority who in the very nature of things must always find these realms entirely alien to them.
The democratic principle of equality, he continued, was not an inconsequential idea with merely theroretic bearing. Rather, in the short or long run it would extend into all the aspects of life and could slowly poison a nation. Private property, he told the industrialists, was fundamentally incompatible with the principle of democracy. For the logical and moral rationale for private property was the belief that people are different in nature and achievement. At this point, Hitler came to the heart of his argument: