Who set Hitler against Stalin?. Nikolay Starikov

of the Communist and Nazi banners, or their similar ways of propaganda that matter. It’s another thing: both Communism and National Socialism, albeit antagonistic, are revolutionary doctrines!

      We demand that profits not earned by labour and the slavery of interest rates be made away with.

      We demand that military profits be confiscated without pity.

      We demand that industrial concerns be nationalised.

      We demand that industrial and office workers have their shares in the profits of large commercial enterprises.

      We demand that a healthy middle class be brought up and supported; that large commercial stores be immediately withdrawn from private ownership and leased at moderate fees to small entrepreneurs.

      We demand that a land reform be enacted that would meet the interests of the German nation; that a law on irrevocable confiscation of land for public needs be adopted; that land lease interests and land speculation be forbidden.

      If you thought you were reading an extract from a communistic brochure, you are mistaken. These are all clauses from a Nazi political programme. These are the “protectors of the national capital”. They were even prepared to deprive owners of their land irrevocably. Some Bolsheviks, you would say! So again – would you give money to such radicals whose slogans are so much like those of your hated communists? Or would you instead try to reinforce the existing Weimar Republic? Say, inject money into the police and increase their size, and raise salaries in the army. I imagine you would be more at rest if your life and your private savings and enterprises were protected by government bodies and not Brownshirts, right?

      If that be so, then go on with your propaganda and make a hero of Gustav Noske who brought down the communists in 1919. He is a defence minister as one should be, with his heavy hand, iron nerve, and readiness to answer for his actions. But no – already in 1920, the “Bloodhound” is made to retire, never to reappear on the political stage. Why would anyone want an even bloodier ruler in the person of Hitler who would evidently make even the “bloody” Noske look like a blue-eyed boy scout? You would do well to create images of the “true German courage” from the police who have proved so efficient in depleting Thälmann’s gunmen at the Hamburg barricades. Here’s a good replacement to Gustav Noske. These policemen were surely commanded by someone who had guts.

      Why would you pay Adolf Hitler? When will he be capable of putting down riots and crush the German Communist Party? How would you know at all if he can do that? As of 1920-ies, Hitler is not even “a bird in the hand”, not to say “two in the bush”; he is a crocodile, so far a little one, but with sharp teeth. And you house is already alive with rats… You could, of course, take up taming the croc, teaching him to catch rats. But this is a dangerous enterprise – someday your new “pet” will devour yourself together with (or instead of) the rats. And so he did. Together with the Communists, all the other parties were disbanded – the Social Democratic party; the Independent Social Democratic party; the Economic party; the German Centre party; the Bavarian People’s party; the German Democratic party; and even the German National People’s party, as well as all the smaller ones – all at the same time[24]. The Nazi packed all these into concentration camps “to think better”. Do you really need this, you German industrial magnates?

      Ironically, after their almost synchronic attempts to overthrow the government, the Nazi and the Communists waxed strictly law-abiding, again almost at a time. When out of prison in 1924, where he had been kept but a short time, Hitler took a once-and-for-all pledge to gain power by purely legal means. A clandestine Ninth Convention of the German Communist party held in April 1924 also adopted a completely legal roadmap. From then on, the Communist party made its presence in the Parliament and struggled for power by legal elections, discarding the idea of a coup d’état. Communists were now occupied by propaganda, public demonstrations and meetings, and the manufacturing of red banners and flyleaves. True, they did have their own armed squadrons, just the same as the Nazi, but they never conspired for another coup. At least, there is no dependable historical document to prove the opposite – none at all!

      The “Red menace” in Germany had subsided. Communists could hardly come to power, even by parliamentary elections. The best result that these followers of bearded Karl Marx could achieve was on November 6, 1932, when they garnered 5,980,200 votes, or 16.9 % of the electorate. Was that a risk? Not at all. A Communist majority in the Parliament was definitely out of the question. Knowing that, one would wish nothing more than to let them keep their quiet struggle for the rights of the proletariat, sitting, as it were, in the Parliament. Why would one think of fuelling the Nazi who would then ban all the other parties and declare themselves the best protectors of the German working society?

      Most ironically, the German “Red menace” was not believed even by its prime antagonist, Adolf Hitler. “Such a danger [Bolshevism in Germany] does not exist, and has never existed”, he told in his conversation with Hermann Rauschning. “I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once. The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist always will”[25].

      And so they did. A great many former communists entered the NSDAP. Such immigrant party members were later dubbed “beefsteaks”, being “brown” on the outside, but “red” inside.

      Germany would see no other riots from that time – neither from the right wing, nor from the left one, which to us is of special importance. Once there was no fear of poison, there was no need for an antidote. It would have been reasonable to start fortifying the law and its enforcing bodies, cracking down on the left and right radicals. Yet someone did want to see Hitler in power very badly. And that “someone” was surely not a group of German industrialists.

      So far we have found no good ground for German magnates to finance the Nazi. There were, of course, some of them who did give money to the Nazi, but this is by way of exception. Those who did so had evidently been ignorant of the Nazi political programme, or had failed to see in it a heavy socialistic bias. But even putting aside the programme, the very name of Hitler’s party – the National Socialist German Workers’ Party – would suffice to rule out the question of being favoured by large capital owners. Have you known a tycoon sponsor a socialist workers’ party, while there are others out there, and more respectable too?

      There is another point to mention. Let’s ask when those “German industry magnates” could have been actually financing the Nazi. It took Adolf Hitler fifteen years to rise to power, from 1919 to 1933. When reading literature on the road of the Nazi leaders to the very top of German political Olympus, one can but observe one striking fact – the closer is Hitler to victory, the more information on his sponsors is given by historians. True, when Hitler had already been made Chancellor, only the silly or the lazy wouldn’t contribute to the budget of the NSDAP. As the Nazi took another long stride to power, still more were willing to support them. The party’s leader could now negotiate financing affairs on a par with any German magnate. Hundreds of thousands of storm troopers and regular party members stood at his back, as well as the sympathy of millions of voters. It was at that moment that Hitler could really address “German industry magnates” and receive their material help. However, historians would rather overlook one very important detail. Almost all the evidence of such financial support refers to the last two years preceding the power grab by the Nazi. The well-known German industrialist August Thyssen declares in his book I Paid Hitler that the accumulated financing Hitler received from industrial companies totalled two million Deutschemarks[26]. The North Rhine-Westphalia group of industrialists also gave Hitler over one million Deutschemarks during 1931–1932, as testified by Funk at the Nuremberg Trials[27].

      But the winners of the Second World War somehow closed their eyes on that. None of Germany’s industrial élite was ever tried for having financed the party who had the blood of millions of people on their hands. For example, in 1947, Alfried Krupp (Alfried Felix Alwyn Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach) was convicted to twelve years

24

The Weimar Republic had a total of 38 active political parties.

25

Rauschning, H. The Voice of Destruction (Hitler speaks). M., 1993. P. 107.

26

Melnikov, D.; Chernaya, N. Criminal Number One. M., 1982. P. 138.

27

Ibid.