|
Bruno
Heilig,
NUMBERLESS
NEWSPAPER articles and books have been published on the subject of
Hitler's career and Germany's turning to barbarism. They describe in
minute detail the comings and goings of the actors of that tragedy; they
reveal secrets about political and diplomatic interviews, about
intrigues and conspiracies too. They give you a more or less reliable
picture of the characters of the leading persons and entertain you,
perhaps, with spicy stories about their private lives. You get
splendidly informed, yet you are not satisfied. The more you have
learned about the events the more you are puzzled. There was a country
with a fine democratic constitution built on the ideas of liberty and
self-government. Its people had been glad to get rid of the Kaiser after
the Great War, and had elected for the Weimar National Assembly men
whose records and programmes offered the best guarantee for a radical
extirpation of the hated old Prussian ideas. Then some crooks, some
fools, and some weaklings appeared on the stage of history, and liberty
was thrown away, and democracy became rubbish. Hitler attained power
under observance of a democratic constitution, the fundamental principle
of which was self-government and self-determination of the people. He
became Chancellor just in the same way as any of his predecessors, by
regular appointment. There was no reason why the people should submit to
tyranny against their will. They followed the tyrant voluntarily, many
of them jubilant. How did it happen, how could it happen? There are, I
know, a number of explanations, ranging from the failure of the Allied
nations to implement their pledges in the Versailles Treaty, and their
folly or guilt in thereafter pursuing illiberal policies, to the alleged
innate militarism of the German people which only awaited another brand
to set that spirit in flame. These ideas can be argued to Doomsday,
unavailingly, if one takes no account of the social forces that were
disrupting Germany from within; internal causes so potent that they
deserve far more attention than most students of the German - and of the
European - scene have chosen to give them. THE INDUSTRIAL BOOM After the
disastrous years of the inflation, business revived almost suddenly.
With the re-establishment of the gold value of the mark (equal to the
full gold value of the English shilling) stable conditions for security
of investment became possible, and Germany needed capital badly. The
whole industrial equipment which had been engaged in war work for four
years had been lying practically idle during the inflation period. There
was also an enormous demand for dwelling-houses, not more than some few
hundred houses having been built all over Germany during the previous
ten years, and population had increased in spite of the war, and was
still increasing. German
enterprises got as much support as they wanted from the United States,
where bankers were at a loss to know what to do with the gigantic
amounts of money that had been accumulated during the war. The recovery
which started in Germany in 1924 had all the elements of an investment
boom. Factories scrapped their old plant and replaced it with up-to-date
machines. Germany was going to become the most advanced industrial
country in the world, surpassing even the United States. Busy times drew
millions of people to the big towns, the population of greater Berlin
increasing rapidly by two millions to six and a half millions. The public
bodies rushed in also to participate in the feverish building up of a
new and modern Germany. The whole rail-traffic system was reorganized
and re-equipped. In Berlin rows of houses were demolished to broaden the
streets. In the heart of Berlin the Alexander Platz was to become the
largest square in the world, surrounded by the most modern skyscraper
office buildings. The most urgent
problem to be settled was, of course, that of erecting buildings for
dwelling, industrial, and trading purposes. The technical problem was
speedily solved. They simply made buildings in factories, the concrete
blocks and plates ready-made being assembled and joined together on the
site where the building was to go up. You could see posters on the
growing skyscrapers proclaiming: "A story a day!" Prices and
rents of land soared at once, and so, too, rose the cost of building
materials, with manufacturers protected against foreign competition by
high customs duties. The price of iron was double that in England at the
time, and cement was three times as high. Land prices rose on the
average by 700 per cent in Berlin and by 500 per cent in Hamburg, within
six years. But in some districts of the capital the increase amounted
even to 1000 per cent or more. It was "good business" to be on
good terms with members of the City Council, the Stadtrat. If for
instance you had timely information about the plan to connect the
Zehlendorf outskirts with Berlin by a new Underground line, or if you
secretly learned that there was to be a new line to the Reichskanzler
Platz, the shrewd purchase of but a few hundred square feet of ground
would bring you a fortune. And you could become even a millionaire if
you were in the know that Herr Reuter, Berlin's traffic dictator,
intended to enlarge the Alexander Platz and to have a gigantic central
Underground station built beneath it. SPECULATION IN LAND VALUES Land
speculators had a fantastic time, some doubling or trebling their
fortunes overnight. While the common people toiled feverishly and
proudly to build up the new Germany that should be the world's most
advanced community, money poured into the pockets of those who gambled
in land values. The high rents
for flats and premises in the new buildings reacted upon and forced up
the rents in the old ones. During the war, rents had been fixed by law
at the prewar level, and that law had remained in force during the whole
period of the inflation. Suddenly the newspapers began an agitation that
it was unjust to maintain the great difference between the rents in the
new and in the old buildings, and this was so successful that an amended
law permitted the proprietors of prewar buildings to raise rents up to
125 per cent of the prewar level. It was a generous gift. Already the
proprietors had got rid of three-quarters of the burden of their
mortgages, the valorization law passed after the inflation stipulating
that they were responsible for only 25 per cent of the gold value of the
bonds. Thus they were getting more than their full prewar rent in terms
of gold marks and, in addition, quittance of 75 per cent of their
mortgages. Experts
estimated the increase in rents in respect of dwelling-houses alone at
1200 million marks (say, 160,000,000) a year for the whole Reich. It is
impossible, of course, to give any approximate figure of the burden
which was heaped upon production and trade by the enormous rise in the
rents and prices of land used for industrial and mercantile purposes. The people had
not only to pay this tribute to the land monopolists, they also had to
finance the business, thanks to the strange policy of the
representatives and the corporations of the cities and towns. In Hamburg
for example the taxpayers had to subscribe 60 million marks in
compensation to owners, and were further made to pay 40 millions in
subsidies to builders of houses. After these schemes were carried
through, rents all over Hamburg went up by 20 million marks per annum. Berlin spent
upon land-buying no less than 400 million marks, of which 120 millions
were invested in purchases around the Alexander Platz. This business
turned into a big scandal of speculation and corruption. The sites for
which the city paid 120 million marks had been valued at 35 millions
previous to the purchase. The excess of 85 million marks was actually
regarded - in addition to the original 35 million as the rightful
property of the vendors because that would be the value given to the
land by the expenditures of the taxpayers' money on the improvements
about to be made; the vendors should not be deprived of this value added
to their "property." It has to be said, too, that the city
officials of Berlin, entrusted as they were with the defense of the
city's interests, lent a hand to that speculation - and not
disinterestedly. It was a kind of legal corruption and bribery. In cases where
the landowners refused to sell to the city, or would not accept the
price offered, an arbitration committee had to decide. This committee
was composed of two representatives of each party and one neutral
chairman. Many cases came before such committees who regularly declared
that the city council had to pay not only the actual value of the site
but any value the site was likely to have in the proximate future, no
matter what caused the value to increase. I remember the exact data of
one such case which was the most disgraceful of all. The proprietor of
the site valued his property at 400,000 marks. The city council
considered the price too high, and submitted the case to arbitration.
The decision was that the city had to pay, not the 400,000 marks the
owner had wanted, but no less a sum than 1,080,000 marks, this being the
arbitrators' estimate of the value the site would have after the city
had made the traffic improvements it had planned. Now, the scandalous
side of the transaction was this; the fee payable to the members of the
arbitration committees was a certain percentage of the determined price,
and it was therefore in their personal interest that the price should be
as high as possible. What they awarded the vendor was also their reward.
Moreover, the city council appointed their own representatives upon the
arbitration committees from that city committee which had to decide
which were the cases to be submitted to arbitration. Another case of
flagrant corruption was the leasing of the Berlin river-harbor basin to
a private firm. It took place near the end of the inflation period, -
when well-informed people already knew what was going to happen after
settlement of the money question. The port of Berlin is, after Duisburg,
the largest of its kind in Germany. It is situated on the rivers Spree
and Havel, which fall into the rivers Oder and Elbe respectively, and
thus connect Berlin with the sea. The city council spent millions upon
millions on the completion and equipment of the basin with huge
warehouses and the most modern means for loading and unloading. When all
was finished Herr Schuning, who as city official was in charge of the
basin, reported that it could not be operated with profit to the city
but would require a considerable subsidy, and he therefore recommended
that it be leased to a private firm. An
accommodating firm was soon formed as the Berlin Port and Warehouses,
Ltd., by the Busch Wagon Factory and the transport agents, Schenker and
Co. To that company the council leased the whole basin with all its fine
warehouses and other equipment for fifty years against payment of
369,000 marks, not as annual rent, but as outright purchase of the
lease. The area of the basin was one million square metres and the rent
of the bare land in that neighborhood was one mark per metre per year.
The company, therefore, paid for the fifty-year concession only a 150th
of what they should have paid in rent for the land alone. In addition,
the city council granted to the company a loan of 5,000,000 marks for
working capital. Exactly twelve months after the signing of the
contract, Herr Schuning was appointed director-general of the company.
With the port of Berlin under their control the promoters of this
company controlled all supplies coming to Berlin and the Berliner had to
pay them tribute for every bit of bread he ate. Such in brief
is part of the story of the land racket in the cities and towns. There
remains to give some description of what happened with regard to
agricultural and mineral-bearing land. THE AGRICULTURAL LAND Half the area
of the agricultural land in Germany is taken up by large estates which
are in the hands of the old military nobility, the Junkers. The other
half is cultivated by peasants, the number of peasants being nine times
as great as the number of Junkers. The large
estates employ 2,500,000 persons: by contrast, those engaged in work on
the peasants' farms (peasants and their dependents and paid laborers)
number 7,500,000. The large estates have always been befriended by
governments because they chiefly grow corn, which is so important in war
time. They were protected by high customs duties and were favored by
reduced taxation. After the War
of 1914-1918 the question of land reform was much discussed in Germany.
The republic, peace-loving and led by socialists, was expected to make a
radical departure from the old economic ideas. Millions of soldiers
being demobilized could have been settled and the agricultural output
could have been greatly increased, since according to official
statistics the value of the output of the small farms was up to 47 per
cent higher than that of the large estates; in dairy farming even up to
69 per cent higher. After years of fatigue and starving, the physical
condition of the people also needed improvement. Again, the statistical
data were definitely in favor of the small farms. In countries where
conscription is in force, the state of health of the people is reliably
shown by the proportion of those fit for military service, which on the
small farms exceeded that of the people working on the large estates by
no less than 150 per cent. THE "HELP FOR THE EAST" AND THE JUNKERS But nothing
happened. No land reform was initiated, nothing but some timid steps
towards market gardens and allotments near the cities and towns. When,
later, owing to the competing imports from the grain-growing
transAtlantic countries, and to the fall of corn prices on the world
market, the Junkers got involved in difficulties, the government helped
them handsomely. Customs duties on corn and fodder were raised, which
was a heavy blow to the small farmers, increasing the cost of
stock-farming. In addition, what is known as the _Osthilfe_ (the
"Help for the East" to the landowners of East Prussia) was
granted by Parliament, amounting to 500,000,000 marks (125,000,000) cash
subsidies to relieve the estates encumbered with debts and to modernize
the equipment. Even so the
Junkers were not satisfied; they demanded and got more subsidies. I have
the official figures for the year 1931. In that year alone they were
paid 100,000,000 marks for storing corn, withholding it from the market
in order to keep its price high. That meant that the people had to pay
more taxes in order that they should pay dearer for bread. In the same
year the interest on the debts of the Junkers was reduced by 365
millions and they were given tax relief of 160 millions. With various
other subsidies added, the agrarians were presented with more than 1000
million marks (150,000,000) in that year 1931! And with all that money
in their pockets they eventually extorted from the Reichstag the famous,
or infamous, law which generally prohibited the collection of debts from
the agrarians. Under such
conditions the value of agricultural ground of course rose enormously. I
have no exact figures for those years but data of previous years will
show how, as to one form of subsidy, protective tariffs are reflected in
the increased rent of land. From 1892 to 1906 corn duties were stable in
Germany and ground prices increased during the same period by 18 per
cent, a figure which may correspond to the normal rise resulting from
the increase of population and the improvement of production. In 1906
import tariffs on corn were doubled. At once the prices of ground
belonging to large estates jumped by 200 per cent, with which trebling
of the fortunes of Junkers is to be compared the increase of only 10 per
cent in the land value of the small farms. After the law was passed
prohibiting foreclosure of mortgages there were no ground prices at all
in Germany for the simple reason that no one was so foolish as to offer
to sell a single foot of land. The monopoly was complete. The mines of
Germany have been owned partly by big companies and partly by some
aristocratic families. The masters of that part of the German land were
as effectively buttressed and aided as the Junkers. I have already
mentioned the enormous prices that the people had to pay for iron and
cement. The price of coal in Germany was also twice as high as in
England. In addition, heavy industry also got its millions of marks in
subsidies. I refer to only some outstanding cases: The Upper Silesian
Foundries got 36 millions, the Lower Silesian Mining Co. 11 millions,
the Reihling Concern 37 millions, the Mansfield Co. 16 millions, the
Siegerlender Metal Works 10 millions, and Ruhr Mines 25 millions. You may ask why
the people tolerated all this. The answer is
that he who holds the land holds the real source of power. Germany has
actually been ruled by 12,000 Junkers and some hundred aristocrats. With
their own votes, they would not have succeeded in getting a single seat
in any legislative body. Yet their parties, the German National Party
and the German Peoples' Party, managed to get more than 100 members into
the Reichstag. In Prussia, which covers two-thirds of the Reich, the
relations between the landowners and the people had hardly changed since
the time of serfdom, the people voting as the landlord wished they
should. Skilled in
ruling for centuries, the landowners quickly accommodated themselves to
changing political conditions. After the breakdown of the Hohenzollern
regime they were tolerant of common people occupying government posts,
and they even consented to the Constitution which was said to over-ride
their privileges and make the landlord formally equal to his laborers.
But they maintained their influence undiminished. With the toiling folk
on their estates and in the remote villages, no trouble was to be
feared; the "normal" means of pressure which are at the
disposal of the landowner (and tradition) were sufficient to keep them
down. They used modern and politically democratic methods to harness the
townfolk and the band of republican bosses to their chariot. The biggest
newspaper and news service establishment was theirs. It was the
Hugenberg Concern, which published the well-known Berliner Lohalanzeiger
and some periodicals and the notorious "Generalanzeigers"
(General Advertisers), cheap daily papers made up to the taste and the
level of the man in the street which Hugenberg bought up after the War
and established in every town. Moreover, he organized the Telegraph
Union, which provided thousands of newspapers all over Germany with a
splendid news service, and the service which supplied feature articles
and even entire Sunday-supplements in matrices ready for print and
therefore unalterable. I need not
explain what that propaganda organization meant in operation. Its effect
was to sway public opinion into believing that the interests of the
landowners were the interests of the nation. Subsidizing the landlords
was the accepted policy for preserving and even saving the sources of
subsistence of the people: the higher tariff walls were for the benefit
of the wage-earning population: increase in land values meant increase
in the national wealth: and so on. There were
also, of course, in Germany independent newspapers, some of them of a
high level and distinguished. But on the one hand, none of them realized
the true position, and on the other hand, all of them were, to a certain
extent, terrorized by the ruthlessness of the Hugenberg propaganda which
had monopolized patriotism. INDUSTRIAL COLLAPSE The industrial
boom lasted for about seven years. Again and again, intelligent men
stood up and warned against the inevitable consequences of what was
going on. I remember having read a book discussing the situation as
early as in 1925 only a few months after the great boom had started. The
author was definitely right from a point of view of what is called the
capitalist system. He explained that standardizing industry would mean
the loss of its elasticity of calculation. The invariable part of the
costs of production, that is to say, the debt charges for land,
buildings, and equipment, would increase enormously, and the variable
part, wages, would decrease correspondingly. The producers would become
quite helpless in time of lessening demand. Normally, they had been able
to meet a crisis by reducing wages and laying off their laborers, but
overhead charges had to be paid without regard to boom or crisis. If
demand fell, the author argued, prices would have to go up and the whole
amount of overhead charge would weigh upon a smaller amount of goods
produced; yet rising prices must inevitably lead to another decrease of
demand and so on, in a vicious circle. The author
demanded that a limit be set to rationalization, and others were just as
emphatic. If right from their point of view, they were absolutely wrong
from the point of view of sound economic thinking. The advance of
industrial production must not and cannot be stopped: it has gone on
ever since somebody made the first primitive tool. To try to prevent men
from improving the means of production is as crazy an effort as to try
to stop men breathing. No doubt under the conditions existing in our
world, rationalization has to lead to a disastrous effect similar to
that predicted in the book mentioned; but the only right conclusion was
to alter the whole structure of German economic life, an idea however
which was taboo. Thus, Germany's destiny took its fatal course. From the
very beginning we can trace how the boom in industry was impelled and
speeded and intensified as land values rose and then bow the further
speculation in land values rendered it definitely absurd. The flow of
capital which came over from America would have been of no use if there
had not been hands to make the new machines. Now in a country where a
large portion of the land is covered with large estates there is always
abundance of people seeking employment. I pointed to the fact that in
Germany 7,500,000 people were engaged in working on the smaller farms
and only 2,500,000 on the large estates though the two parts of the
cultivated land were equal in extent. Thus the existence of big estates
made a difference of 5,000,000 people in the "labor market."
Wages were low and low wages will stimulate industrial investments. The
increase of ground prices proved another incentive to investments and
intensified the rationalization. But high ground prices increase the
cost of living and he who continues to employ labor has to provide for
its regeneration whether he likes to or not. The laborers began to press
for higher wages. The employers were in a difficult position. With high
prices for the ground on which their factories were built, high prices
for building material and coal, increasing taxes weighing heavily on
their budgets, how could they bear the burden of rising wages? They
decided to speed up the modernization of their equipment, to get rid of
those expensive workers as quickly as possible; in other words, "to
rationalize." Yet in doing so they caused ground prices to rise
still higher and the cost of production rose again - another vicious
circle. Germany was in
a state of intoxication at that time. Modernize, modernize at all costs,
was the only idea that people could entertain. In 1930 the first signs
of a crisis became manifest. Laborers stood off by machines met with
difficulties when looking for other employment. Industrialists and
merchants complained of difficulties in selling their merchandise. The
position deteriorated month by month, week by week. In 1931 the crisis
was in full swing. The ordinary means to meet the crisis had failed. By
restriction of production things went from bad to worse. Amortization,
rents, interest, taxes ate up everything. Workers were dismissed en
masse but the employers hardly felt any relief in their budget, and in
any case with every worker lost to employment a consumer bad been lost
as well. The number of unemployed went up by tens of thousands, then by
hundreds of thousands, and the number of bankruptcies mounted
correspondingly. If those wise
men I have mentioned had not stopped thinking at the point where they
left off they might have reached the right remedy instead of
recommending a halt to industrial progress. Had they only reflected a
little upon the meaning of the word "invariable costs"! Whence
came these costs or to whom were they to be paid? Land speculation had
anticipated all possible increase of production and had forestalled all
the value the land might have decades hence. The mine-owners had doubled
and trebled the price of their products so that the bare costs of
building had risen to 180 per cent of the highest prewar costs in spite
of the new laborsaving methods. Taxes were extraordinarily high because
the state and the city had to redeem the costs of dearly bought land and
generously built roads and railways, or a splendid river-harbor like
that in Berlin, the owners of which were now extorting inordinate
transport fees out of the working people. All had gone to the
landowners: that was the true meaning of the term "invariable
costs." One bad worked for them during all those years. The breakdown
of the German banks in the summer of 1931 further proved the truth of
the theory of the invariable costs. The industrialists and the merchants
were unable to meet debts and interest and therefore the banks had to
stop payment. Yet the debts in question were nothing other than the
capital invested during the prosperity, that is the money the landowners
had swallowed. The invariable costs had quickly become insupportable and
were simply not paid. The Government
rushed in to help the banks, which got accommodation at the expense of
billions of marks drawn from the people's taxes. Then began the flow of
other subsidies, as those to the Junkers and the heavy industry to which
reference has been made, and light industry had also to be subsidized by
way of helping it to meet those "invariable costs." The crisis
grew, ever deepening. Futile expedients were adopted in the effort to
stem it. Although it was obvious that the "invariable costs" -
i.e. the tribute land monopoly exacts from the working people - were
eating into all production, the responsible men and the leading
exponents of what was taught as economics kept their eyes, as if under
some hypnotic influence, fixed upon the worker's pay-packet. Herr
Braining, then Chancellor, declared for the so-called deflation policy
which involved a general reduction in rates of wages, and wages were
reduced by 15 per cent. This it was contended would decrease commodity
prices, so stimulating consumption and decreasing unemployment. Herr
Braining and his advisers failed to see (1) that, even if the decrease
in prices was equivalent to the decrease in wages, the amount of goods
produced would remain as before and such a scheme could never result in
finding new employment for the workers who were in search of it; and (2)
that reduction in wages cannot induce a corresponding reduction in
prices since prices are so largely determined by factors other than
wages. Herr Braining ought to have cut down the rents of land and rather
raised than lowered wages, which would have loosened the Gordian knot
and brought the needed relief. FROM POPULAR GOVERNMENT TO DESPOTISM Seven million
men and women (one-third of the wage-earning people) unemployed, the
middle class swept away: that was the position about one year after the
climax of prosperity. Progress, conditioned as it was, had rapidly
produced the most dreadful poverty. Germany, it
seems to me, has provided a striking example supporting the theory that
the private appropriation of the rent of land is the fundamental cause
of industrial depression and of distress among those who labor in the
production of wealth - the theory expounded by Henry George in his Progress
and Poverty, a theory that some professed teachers of social science
have been strangely slow in accepting, whether from ignorance or
prejudice is for them to say. For my part, a conclusion has been arrived
at not by prior theoretical study but rather by attendance upon the
circumstances I have recounted. It was not until I had arrived in
England as a refugee journalist that by good fortune the book fell into
my hands, to be read with increasing interest and excitement for the
light it shed upon what I had seen taking place. The economic
demonstration was complete, at least I could discover in it no defect.
Yet why had Germany taken the road from individual political liberty
through mass hysteria to the surrender of all liberty and the despotic
"leadership" of one man? Was there a link between the economic
and the political collapse? Emphatically, yes. For as unemployment grew,
and with it poverty and the fear of poverty, so grew the influence of
the Nazi Party, which was making its lavish promises to the frustrated
and its violent appeal to the revenges of a populace aware of its wrongs
but condemned to hear only a malignant and distorted explanation of
them. In the first
year of the crisis the number of Nazi deputies to the Reichstag rose
from 8 to 107. A year later this figure was doubled. In the same time
the Communists captured half of the votes of the German Social
Democratic Party and the representation of the middle class practically
speaking disappeared. In January 1933 Hitler was appointed Reichskanzler;
he attained power, as I said before, quite legally. All the forms of
democracy were observed. It sounds paradoxical but it was in fact
absolutely logical. This I realized
with all the more conviction from my reading - after the event - of that
book written sixty years ago. It was as if history had been written in
advance, the thought impressing me that, by simply altering the tense of
verbs from the future to the past, one could turn the form of prophecy
into a narrative of fact and get a correct story of the situation in
civilized countries as it actually develops. With my intimate
acquaintance of life and labor in Germany, those passages were naturally
most absorbing which seemed to me to portray the kind of men who would
become the leaders of starving and desperate peoples. In the
Introductory to the book you already meet them in the reference to the
fallacious ideas in current economic teaching which "bring great
masses of men, the repositories of ultimate political power, under the
leadership of charlatans and demagogues"; and in the chapter
"How Modern Civilization may Decline" there is hardly a page
or a paragraph which does not apply almost literally to the happenings
in Germany itself. The inevitable
effect of poverty on political developments under popular government is
stated in this quotation: To put
political power in the hands of men embittered and degraded by poverty
is to tie firebrands to foxes and turn them loose amid the standing
corn; it is to put out the eyes of a Samson and to twine his arms around
the pillars of national life. When the
disparity of condition increases, so does universal suffrage make it
easy to seize the source of power, for the greater is the proportion of
power in the hands of those who ... tortured by want and embruted by
poverty are ready to sell their votes to the highest bidder or follow
the lead of the most blatant demagogue; or who, made bitter by
hardships, may even look upon profligate and tyrannous government with
the satisfaction we may imagine the proletarians and slaves of Rome to
have felt, as they saw a Caligula or Nero raging among the rich
patricians. To turn a
republican government into a despotism the basest and most brutal, it is
not necessary to formally change its constitution or abandon popular
elections [for] forms are nothing when substance has gone, and the forms
of popular government are those from which the substance of freedom may
most easily go. Extremes meet, and a government of universal suffrage
and theoretical equality may, under conditions which impel the change,
most readily become a despotism. For there despotism advances in the
name and with the might of the people. No doubt in all
political changes the national character also plays its part. Yet
particular circumstances really provoke the reaction. I do not believe
that the Germans would have followed Hitler in his hates and revenges if
the people had been living under reasonably good social conditions
instead of being as they were under the lash of so much unemployment and
privation. True, Adolf Hitler may be the particular German specimen of
what Henry George calls the most blatant demagogue. But do you consent
to Mussolini, the Latin-speaking tyrant? And what about Norwegian,
Dutch, French, Hungarian, Roumanian and Bulgarian fascists? The German
people - or a large proportion of them - were only the first to follow
Hitler. Others joined in later under the lead of their most blatant
demagogues. All Europe is either Communist or Fascist, with few
exceptions. It was not fear or downright political stupidity that
prevented so many European countries from joining in the fight against
Hitler and it was not mere incompetence that defeated France. It was the
strong Fascist forces existing in those countries and the influence of
the respective blatant demagogues (though not yet in official power)
that paralyzed the peoples; and the outcome is that the superlative of
all the blatant demagogues has become the leader of the lot. Thus,
national character is but of subordinate effect. The circumstances are
the determining factor. THE LESSON - DEMOCRACY DESTROYED BY SOCIAL INEQUALITY The unequal
distribution of wealth makes government corrupt, and "a corrupt
democratic government must finally corrupt the people, and when a people
become corrupt there is no resurrection." I have dealt
with only some outstanding cases of corruption and have not mentioned
any of the many cases not directly connected with the land question. But
I believe I have shown that corruption was the essence of what was
called German economic life, and corruption naturally became the feature
of political life as well. Money also was
the chief weapon the enemies of democracy applied to overthrow
democracy. Germany's masters, the owners of agricultural and industrial
land, the Junkers and the Ruhr industrialists, had no actual love for
Nazidom as such, but they were willing to use it to destroy the hated
Republic. "A mere aristocracy of wealth will never struggle while
it can hope to bribe a tyrant," which is just how the German
landlords behaved. Nazidom was financed as everyone knows by the heavy
industry in the first place, but the Junkers also contributed to the
millions of marks which were paid to the leaders of the Nazi Party. It
is interesting to notice bow quickly the old German aristocracy had
accommodated itself to customs that had been strange to them. They did
so because with the abolition of privileges they had really turned into
a "mere aristocracy of wealth," and it proves their highly
developed political instinct that they at once realized the new position
and acted accordingly. It is a particularly ironical side of the story,
that the landlords bought Nazidom with part of the money they obtained
from the Republic both in cash subsidies and through the rise in land
values. The State had provided its enemies with everything they needed
for its destruction: with progress, with popular government, and with
the material funds necessary to achieve the thorough organization of
tyranny. The wall painter and corporal was of course not to the taste of
the German landlords but in the most important problem be has not
betrayed his sponsors. He did not touch the land problem. He only added
to the class of Junkers that of the "Erbbofbauern" (peasants
owning land under entail and prohibited from mortgaging), thus creating
a new hereditary class of middle-sized land monopolists. So we see bow
the land question repeatedly got into the hub of political life at every
turn as the German Republic drove to its fate.
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