Why The German Repubic Fell
Bruno Heilig
[1938]
An Austrian journalist, Bruno Heilig had been
resident in England since 1938. He spoke with the authority of
one who worked for thirty years at his profession as editor or
foreign correspondent of leading newspapers in Austria Germany,
Hungary and the Balkans. For five years preceding the collapse
of the Weimar Republic he was in Berlin, at first on the staff
of the Vossische Zeitung and later as correspondent of
the Vienna Wiener Tag and the Prague Prager Presse.
The succeeding five years he spent in Vienna, where he was
leader writer and foreign editor of Der Wiener Tag and
the influential Monday paper Der Morgen. Thus he twice
had the opportunity of following the development of modern
tyranny. More intimate is the acquaintance he made of it as
prisoner for thirteen months within the concentration camps of
Dachau and Buchenwald, a life described by him in his book Men
Crucified, published by Eyre & Spottiswoode.
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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 principIe 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 Reichs kanzler 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 pre-war 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 pre-war buildings to raise rents up to 125 per cent of the pre-war
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 stipulatmg that they were responsible for
only 25 per cent of the gold value of the bonds. Thus they were
getting more than their full pre-war 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, 60,000,000 Pounds) 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 l20 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
millions -- 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 & 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 trans-Atlantic 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 (25,000,000 Pounds) 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 (50,000,000 Pounds) 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 Rochling Concern 37 millions, the Mansfield Co.
16 millions, the Siegerlander 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 Lokalanzeiger 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 how 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 had 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 pre-war costs in spite of the new labor-saving method. 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 had 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 milliards 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 "invariab1e
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 Bruning, 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 Bruning, 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 Bruning 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 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 and 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 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 landlord 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 how 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 he has not betrayed his
sponsors. He did not touch the land problem. He only added to the
class of Junkers that of the "Erbhofbauern" (peasants owning
land under entail and prohibited from mortgaging), thus creating a new
hereditary class of middle-sized land monopolists. So we see how the
land question repeatedly got into the hub of political life at every
turn as the German Republic drove to its fate.
Similar conditions will be of the same effect everywhere. What
happened in Germany will inevitably happen anywhere that similar
conditions prevail. In some Continental countries it has happened
already. The Nazi regime is not Hitler's, the man's, achievement.
Nazidom has grown organically out of a rotten democracy, and the
rottenness of that democracy is the natural consequence of unequal
economic conditions; and unequal economic conditions obtain all over
the world owing to the instituted private appropriation of the rent of
land. Therefore every country is potentially a Fascist country.
Germany is but the type of a development which no country can escape
except by the establishment of the equal right to the occupation and
use of land. Therefore also there can be no lasting peace even after
the defeat of Nazism if the present economic structure of the
civilized countries remains. The private appropriation of the rent of
land is the deadly enemy of mankind.
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