. NMT05-T1170
Volume VI · Page 1170
| National Socialist Party answered the negative attitude of the leading industrialists by harming their enterprises. Who is going to condemn the chiefs because they felt responsible for the prosperity of these enterprises? Why, then, did the Party, with the support of the government, carry out the so-called purge of industry in 1933? Would not this have been unnecessary if industry as such had helped Hitler to power? Upright men, such as the former Minister of the Weimar Republic, von Raumer, my colleague of colonial days, Geheimrat Kastl, and the well-known Dr. Lammers, were removed from the directorate of the Reichsverband. No, Hitler owes his rise to the fact that the trade unions, which in 1920 in the Kapp Putsch defeated by a general strike this movement thought by them to be reactionary, and had been broken down by 1933 through years of unemployment, because they no longer had behind them the masses who had lost their belief in the trade unions. Six million unemployed had been crowding the streets, some of them for years, and the trade unions, which for decades had promised them the Socialist heaven, were unable to help them. Then there rose from the ranks of the proletariat the "saviour" who promised them salvation, salvation from misery, and all these masses of the lower middle class and the proletariat followed this "Pied Piper." Where did the number of votes he received come from? It was the masses that carried Hitler, not the elite, using this expression here in a sociological sense. Please do not think that I am being a snob in using this expression; it is just a technical term. The elite, however, is powerless without the masses. Any regulation in an enterprise which the body of employees and workers would have considered as opposed to national socialism and, consequently, to their beloved Fuehrer, would have resulted in the revolt of the workers and employees, and the chief would have been thrown out. One need only remember the course Aryanization took. Jewish chiefs and higher employees were for the greater part not eliminated by outside action, but by the workers and employees themselves. There were, for instance, some great technical experts, such as the director general of Telefunken, Emil Meyer, whom the Defense Ministry would have very much liked to keep, but the workers and employees asked for his dismissal. Today the legend is spread that the whole of the former electorate of Social Democrats and Communists had been in opposition to national socialism. How mistaken and how untrue this assertion is, is shown from the votes cast at the Reichstag elections. All these facts have been distorted by a maze of myths which today have already assumed the nature of incontestable facts and have become the basis of so-called ideologies. But in criminal proceedings, where |
