Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

262 DER FUEHRERarbitrary way — this in itself was a success. When he attacked, a fewdrops of his own poisonous spirit dripped on the enemy and infectedhim. In all points of his career, in the most insignificant and the mostimportant situations, this was his most dangerous power, thoughunfortunately least understood: that he lured or forced his opponent toimitate him, to use similar methods and even adopt the qualities whichhe really wanted to combat in Hitler.What sort of ragged company was this that the state was getting soincensed about! In Berlin there was an office clerk who in the eveningafter working hours assembled a few half-drunken figures, borderingclosely on the underworld, in a gloomy beer hall and read them obsceneor bloodthirsty stories about the Jews from ill-printed little pamphlets;this in the pompous jaw-breaking style was called 'Gau Berlin-Brandenburg of the National Socialist German Workers' Party,' and theclerk was the Gauleiter. It was the same in Cologne where an industrialchemist by the name of Doctor Robert Ley carried on the same work,and also in Breslau; the high-sounding title of Gauleiter might fall to anelderly eccentric who raised bees in a tiny provincial city on the Elbe, toa bankrupted landowner in Pomerania, a discharged school-teacher inHanover. Or a pensioned major who, unable to live on his half-pay or tofind any other suitable occupation, made knapsack and bicycle hishome: a political vagabond, he rode from village to village, speakingardently of Adolf Hitler. They nicknamed him the 'knapsack major.'Wherever he went, he found a few like-minded eccentrics to supporthim, found a bed for the night and a breakfast in the morning. Thesesemi-madmen wandered about the country, seeking and finding halfmadsupporters. Again the first tiny cells of a movement formed. Aspirit deprived of all restraint and fear looked behind the revolvingwheels and the striking pistons and sensed the profound helplessnessand inertia of the society which had received so thorough a technicalorganization, sensed that it could be dominated.For the state of the world was such that the fools and misfits wereprofoundly right while the intelligent and normal were fatally mistaken.This world in its main traits had returned to the normalcy of the daysbefore 1914, and this precisely was its profound