rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

120 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICHwas followed on July 13 by the failure of one of Germany’s principal banks,the Darmstaedter und Nationalbank, which forced the government in Berlinto close down all banks temporarily. Not even President Hoover’s initiativein establishing a moratorium on all war debts, including German reparations,which became effective on July 6, could stem the tide. The whole Western worldwas stricken by forces which its leaders did not understand and which they feltwere beyond man’s control. How was it possible that suddenly there could beso much poverty, so much human suffering, in the midst of so much plenty?Hitler had predicted the catastrophe, but no more than any other politiciandid he understand what had brought it about; perhaps he had less understandingthan most, since he was both ignorant of and uninterested in economics. But hewas not uninterested in or ignorant of the opportunities which the depressionsuddenly gave him. The misery of the German people, their lives still scarred bydisastrous experience of the collapse of the mark less than ten years before, didnot arouse his compassion. On the contrary, in the darkest days of that period,when the factories were silent, when the registered unemployed numbered oversix million and bread lines stretched for blocks in every city in the land, hecould write in the Nazi press: ”Never in my life have 1 been so well disposedand inwardly contented as in these days. For hard reality has opened the eyesof millions of Germans to the unprecedented swindles, lies and betrayals of theMarxist deceivers of the people,” 140 The suffering of his fellow Germans wasnot something to waste time sympathizing with, but rather to transform, coldbloodedlyand immediately, into political support for his own ambitions. Thishe proceeded to do in the late summer of 1930.Hermann Mueller, the last Social Democrat Chancellor of Germany and thehead of the last government based on a coalition of the democratic parties whichhad sustained the Weimar Republic, had resigned in March 1930 because of adispute among the parties over the unemployment insurance fund. He had beenreplaced by Heinrich Bruening, the parliamentary leader of the Catholic CenterParty, who had won the Iron Cross as a captain of a machine gun companyduring the war and whose sober, conservative views in the Reichstag had attractedthe favorable attention of the Army and in particular of a general bythe name of Kurt von Schleicher, who was then quite unknown to the Germanpublic. Schleicher, a vain, able, ambitious ”desk officer,” already acknowledgedin military circles as a talented and unscrupulous intriguer, had suggested Bruening’sname to President von Hindenburg. The new Chancellor, though hemay not have realized it fully, was the Army’s candidate. A man of sterlingpersonal character, unselfish, modest, honest, dedicated, somewhat austere innature, Bruening hoped to restore stable parliamentary government in Germanyand rescue the country from the growing slump and political chaos. It was thetragedy of this well-meaning and democratically minded patriot that, in tryingto do so, he unwittingly dug the grave for German democracy and thus,unintentionally, paved the way for the coming of Adolf Hitler.Bruening was unable to induce a majority of the Reichstag to approve certainmeasures in his financial program. He thereupon asked Hindenburg to invokeArticle 48 of the constitution and under its emergency powers approve his financialbill by presidential decree. The chamber responded by voting a demandfor the withdrawal of the decree. Parliamentary government was breaking downat a moment when the economic crisis made strong government imperative. Inan effort to find a way out of the impasse, Bruening requested the President in