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

394 DER FUEHRERbound to bring loss at a time when the masses whom they did nptemploy had no money with which to purchase. The sight of thisworthless wealth breathed a spectral life into men's doubts about theexisting society. So the employer lost money if he put men to work;well, then, let him lose money. Production just had to be given a push;in this time of universal want there could be no lack of use for whateverwas produced. This production might not be so carefully calculated asbefore; it might cost more; the state could stretch its credit, increase thecirculation of money — this could be called inflation, but it would fillstomachs. German labor leaders seized on the new gospel of Americanemployers: the capitalist economy, they said, would find markets andprosper if it paid higher wages to more workers, thus giving thempurchasing power — though Karl Marx had taught that a capitalisteconomy throve precisely by paying the workers as little as possible.The German Socialists who demanded the increase of mass purchasingpower actually did admit their desertion from Marxism indirectly, bysaying that at the moment they did not want to destroy capitalism, but tobe the doctor at its sickbed; thus, far better than the founders ofMarxism, they saw the true sense of the class struggle, which is wagedto win a larger share in capitalism for the proletariat.Bruning and his advisers, however, were stricken with panic by thespecter of a new inflation, and were prepared to accept any other,equally catastrophic, destruction of the economy, provided only that theReichsmark remained the Reichsmark. Thus Germany was governedagainst the masses, who did not inwardly accept the crisis, who had'discovered' the bluff. As Gregor Strasser expressed it in the Reichstag,they expected the state 'to be able to restore an honest living for workhonestly performed'; they expected this state to exert a power it did notpossess, and so the time was ripe for a new state.This was the profoundest reason why the majority of the Reichstag nolonger followed any government. Bruning was conducting a businesswhich presumably ran counter to his own nature. The solemn,embittered man, who let no one, least of all the people, see the thoughtshidden behind his spectacles, must sometimes have shuddered inwardlyat his own attempts to preserve the economic