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

638 DER FUEHRERbeen a circumcised Jew. When Bodelschwingh and his clergymenresisted this idea, Goring ordered his subordinate, Bernhard Rust, thePrussian Minister of Education, to use force; hesitandy and reluctantly,Rust set a taskmaster over the Protestant Church, a civil servant by thename of Jaeger. High and low clergymen were thrown out. Muller wasmade head of the Protestant churches, and Bodelschwingh was forced toresign. On July 2, 1933, the swastika flags were raised over theEvangelical churches of Germany.It was the flood tide of the Nazi revolution. In this moment it stillseemed uncertain how far National Socialism would go in the breakingof resistance; whether it would submit to the limitations whichMachiavelli advises the reformer to accept. Hitler himself was not clearhow far he could go and how far he wanted to go. At first he hadcounted on a slow but persistent overcoming of resistance; but thenthere had been great and unexpected successes, and his confidence roseabove all difficulties. On June 15, he assembled the National Socialistleaders in Berlin and commanded them to intensify their struggleagainst those adversaries who were still present. The last months, hesaid, had strengthened him in the conviction that the National Socialistgovernment would master foreign and economic difficulties with thesame success that it mastered domestic difficulties. It was hisconviction, firm as a rock, that the mighty movement of NationalSocialism would outlive the centuries and that nothing could end it. Butthe watchword for the present was: 'The law of the National SocialistRevolution has not yet expired. Its dynamics still dominate thedevelopment of Germany.' He had learned much from Leon Trotzky,whose slogan of the permanent revolution he now adopted: 'TheGerman Revolution will not be concluded until the whole Germannation is given a new form, a new organization, and a new structure.'He never called this new Germany by the name which had been madepopular by Goebbels: the 'third Reich' — meaning that it came after the(first) Holy Roman Empire (962-1806) and the (second) BismarckianEmpire (1871-1918 A.D.). This perhaps was due to his desire to make aclean break with the past. It was a time when he thought of himself asleading a revolution against everything reactionary, whether it was theChurch, the economic age, or the