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

FIRST TRIUMPH 335into tax offices. The freebooters, the former army lieutenants, who hadbeen unemployed since the beer-hall putsch, found a congenialoccupation in organizing these peasant bands. A new opportunity for theNational Socialist leaders to split over an issue; Strasser hailed thebomb-throwings as the beginning of the great catastrophe in which theWeimar Republic would perish; but Hitler, always afraid of police andpublic prosecutor, forbade his followers to have any share in the attacks.All the same, the moment had come for him to alter his unalterableprogram once again. For Germany was faced by something new: by anuprising of peasants and big landowners against cities and industry; andnowhere in German politics was this new development so wellrecognized and exploited as by the National Socialists.In the beginning of his movement (1919-1923) and in his 'immutable'program, Hitler had not considered the peasants at all; the hungry citydwellers who filled his meetings up to 1923 even hated them. One pointin the 'unalterable' program advocated 'expropriation of the soil withoutindemnity for community purposes.' In 1928, Hitler withdrew this threatto the landowners: 'Since the N.S.DA.P. stands on the basis of privateproperty,' it planned only 'to expropriate, if necessary, land which wasacquired in an unjust way or which is not administered according to theneeds of the popular welfare. This is chiefly directed against the Jewishspeculators.' With this shift in program began the systematic, arduousrecruiting of a section of the population which envied the metropolitanmasses, blaming them for their own misfortunes. The discovery of thepeasants was a master-stroke of National Socialist propaganda. TheCommunists, rigidly following the Marxist principle of class struggle,tried to incite the small peasants against the large landholders. In thisthey followed the Russian example of Lenin, which, like so many of theCommunist International's methods, proved totally unsuitable forexport. In Germany they met with no success, because the biglandowners and the peasants had the same interest: higher prices; aslong as sweat and toil on the field did not bring them there could be no'hunger for land' among the poorer peasants.