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 Königstein/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 Düsseldorf 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, Auflösung, 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 Dämonen 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 all as part of a plot. Their attitude, that is, was largely defensive; they were thinking only of reinsurance or, to quote a famous remark by Hugo Stinnes in 1919, they were paying “a social-insurance premium against uprisings.” Hallgarten, too, concludes that although Hitler was vigorously supported by industry’s funds, this by no means signified that he was “made” by industry; Hallgarten, cf. Dämonen, p. 113. We might say, then, that although “industry” did not put Hitler in power, he would scarcely have attained power against its declared will.
22. The full text of the speech is given in Domarus, pp. 68 If.
23. Speech to the Hamburg Nationalist Club in the ballroom of the Hotel Atlantic, February 28, 1926. The transcript notes at this point “tempestuous applause”; cf. Werner Jochmann, Im Kampf um die Macht, pp. 103, 114.
24. Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939, 2nd series, vol. I, p. 512, n. 2.
25. Arnold Brecht, Vorspiel zum Schweigen, p. 180, points out that the authors of the Constitution deliberately renounced taking over the provision in the American Constitution that only native-born citizens can become candidates for the highest office in the land. Ironically, they did so in order not to exclude their Austrian brothers. Incidentally, the efforts to obtain citizenship for Hitler began as early as the autumn of 1929. At that time Frick unsuccessfully attempted to have him naturalized in Munich. Six months later, by which time Frick had advanced to the position of a Minister in Thuringia, Frick tried to obtain German citizenship for Hitler by appointing him to a civil-service post. The post Frick had in mind was that of a police inspector in Hildburghausen, which happened to be vacant. But the situation seemed a bit ludicrous, and Hitler called off the effort. Next Klagges tried to have Hitler appointed to a teaching post at the technical college in Brunswick, but this too failed. A solution was finally found: Hitler was appointed Regierungsrat with the Berlin delegation from Brunswick.
26. Goebbels, Kaiserhof, pp. 22 ff.
27. Ibid., pp. 120 f.