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

580 DER FUEHRERin power; he drove them before him and forcibly seized the posts towhich he thought himself entitled. The intellectual proletariat awokefrom its hopelessness. Here was a class which could give impetus to arevolution. They streamed out of the overcrowded universities, took thejobs or created new ones for themselves. For years Germany had beensuffering from a surplus of men with academic training. At the Germanuniversities there were some hundred and forty thousand students. It hadbeen reliably calculated that there were roughly three hundred and thirtythousand positions in Germany for persons of academic training, andsince the professional worker remained active for an average of thirtythreeyears, approximately ten thousand such positions became freeeach year. Setting the average duration of study at five years, this meantthat of a hundred and forty thousand students only fifty thousand had aprospect of employment, while nearly twice that number, or ninetythousand, were without hope. At the end of 1932, some fifty thousandof those graduated from the universities actually were unable to findwork. The great moment had now come for this intellectual mass. At thehead of S.A. squads, young National Socialist lawyers thrashed theirJewish colleagues out of the courtrooms; at the head of brown-shirtedstudent groups, young National Socialist instructors drove Jewishprofessors out of the universities. Behind them pressed those hopelessmasses of the so-called middle class, who thought that the great hour ofvengeance against monopoly was at hand. They, too, were led byintellectuals. Only recently Doctor Theodor Adrian von Renteln, leaderof the National Socialist students, had also been appointed leader of theNational Socialist middle-class movement. This National Socialistmiddle class now began to storm the department stores, occasionallytrying to close them by force, while National Socialist intellectualsappeared in the offices of the big Jewish newspapers, and declared ontheir own responsibility that they were now taking over the wholeenterprise as commissars of the national revolution. Clever businessmenwere sometimes able to bribe these revolutionaries with a well-paid job,and carry on under their protection. But often things were not sopeaceful; louder and louder grew the complaints that despite Hitler's'objective justice' Jews had been mishandled and sometimes beaten todeath.