350-529: Defunct Defunct Alfred Ernst Christian Alexander Hugenberg (19 June 1865 – 12 March 1951) was an influential German businessman and politician. An important figure in nationalist politics in Germany during the first three decades of the twentieth century, Hugenberg became the country's leading media proprietor during the 1920s. As leader of the German National People's Party , he played
700-614: A Führerprinzip within the DNVP, leading to some members breaking away to establish the Conservative People's Party (KVP) in late 1929. More were to follow in June 1930, appalled by Hugenberg's extreme opposition to the cabinet of Heinrich Brüning , a moderate whom some within the DNVP wanted to support. Despite Hugenberg's background in industry, that constituency gradually deserted the DNVP under his leadership, largely due to
1050-402: A brei ("mishmash") of people of different values such as monarchists and republicans, and could only be led by a "strong" leader fanatically devoted to upholding the party's values, who would lead in an authoritarian style, by which he clearly meant himself. Lambach appealed against his expulsion and was allowed back into the DNVP, arguing that he himself was still a monarchist and his article
1400-564: A monarchist platform and was strongly opposed to the Weimar Republic in domestic affairs and Treaty of Versailles in foreign affairs. Typical of the party's views about Weimar was a 1919 pamphlet by Karl Helfferich entitled "Erzberger Must Go!", which was in equal terms violently anti-democratic, anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic. The target of the pamphlet was Matthias Erzberger of the Zentrum , whom Hellferich called "the puppet of
1750-487: A " völkisch study group" under Wilhelm Kube was set up. Despite Kube's best efforts to work out a compromise, the leading völkisch activists' Wilhelm Henning , Reinhold Wulle and Albrecht von Graefe all resigned from the party in October 1922 when the party's leader Oskar Hergt supported by Otto Hoetzsch and Count Kuno von Westarp made it clear that they wanted no more calls for assassinations, which had caused
2100-479: A "big tent" conservative party like the British Conservative Party that combined different interest groups and as a result was toning down its ideology in a favor of pragmatic approach to power. In January 1926, Hugenberg was involved in a plan for a putsch organized by his good friend, Henrich Class , calling for President Hindenburg to appoint as chancellor someone who was unacceptable for
2450-417: A bill was introduced to increase taxes while also increasing government aid to farmers, one of the key groups that voted for the DNVP. The promise of more aid to farmers was popular in rural areas, and several DNVP representatives led by Westarp wanted the party to vote for the bill, which Hugenberg was opposed to on the grounds that some of the tax revenue raised would go to France in the form of reparations. On
2800-593: A boycott of the Scherl newspapers and press owned by Hugenberg while encouraged a strike at the Scherel press.". At a debate at the Berlin Sports Palace between Goebbels and Hugenberg's right-hand man, Otto Schmidt-Hanover, thousands of Nazis showed up to boo Schmidt-Hanover and cheer on Goebbels; who won the debate by being the only one allowed to speak for any length of time. Leopold wrote that; "the DNVP
3150-452: A break with the industrialists who were greatly displeased with Hugenberg's unwillingness to take part in coalition governments. As a result, from 1929 onwards the millionaire Hugenberg spent his own considerable fortune to provide the funding for the DNVP. The dependence of the DNVP on Hugenberg to provide the bulk of the election funds very much strengthened Hugenberg's leadership, making it impossible to challenge. Hugenberg's efforts led to
3500-637: A candidate for chancellor. Former chancellor Franz von Papen and other conservative leaders convinced President Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as chancellor on 30 January 1933. Shortly thereafter, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act of 1933 , which began the process of transforming the Weimar Republic into Nazi Germany, a one-party dictatorship based on the totalitarian and autocratic ideology of Nazism . Upon Hindenburg's death on 2 August 1934, Hitler succeeded him, becoming simultaneously
3850-548: A casual labourer and by painting and selling watercolours of Vienna's sights. During his time in Vienna, he pursued a growing passion for architecture and music, attending ten performances of Lohengrin , his favourite Wagner opera. In Vienna, Hitler was first exposed to racist rhetoric. Populists such as mayor Karl Lueger exploited the city's prevalent anti-Semitic sentiment, occasionally also espousing German nationalist notions for political benefit. German nationalism
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#17327728075924200-552: A challenge to the government in Berlin. Hitler and Ludendorff sought the support of Staatskommissar (State Commissioner) Gustav Ritter von Kahr , Bavaria's de facto ruler. However, Kahr, along with Police Chief Hans Ritter von Seisser and Reichswehr General Otto von Lossow , wanted to install a nationalist dictatorship without Hitler. On 8 November 1923, Hitler and the SA stormed a public meeting of 3,000 people organised by Kahr in
4550-677: A classical high school and become an artist, Alois sent Hitler to the Realschule in Linz in September 1900. Hitler rebelled against this decision, and in Mein Kampf states that he intentionally performed poorly in school, hoping that once his father saw "what little progress I was making at the technical school he would let me devote myself to my dream". Like many Austrian Germans, Hitler began to develop German nationalist ideas from
4900-550: A common candidate for the presidential elections, and on 17 February 1932 Hitler unilaterally announced in a press release that he was running for president. This action effectively destroyed the Harzburger Front as Hugenberg had not been consulted before-hand. Hugenberg had much difficulty in recruiting a DVNP candidate for the presidential election as Prince Oskar of Prussia, the industrialist Albert Vögler, and General Otto vow Below all declined to run. Theodor Duesterberg
5250-594: A consequence, Hindenburg dissolved the Reichstag for an election only two years into its mandate. During the 1930 election campaign, Hugenberg's shortcomings as a speaker were cruelly exposed. He came across as awkward, arrogant and above all very dull. During the campaign, the Hugenberg press largely concentrated its attacks on "Marxism", warning that the SPD was working for a revolution and wanted to increase spending on
5600-598: A controlling interest in the national newsmagazine Die Gartenlaube (The Garden Arbor). In 1914, Hugenberg welcomed the onset of the First World War and resumed his work with his close friend Heinrich Class of the Pan-German League . During the war, Hugenberg was an annexationist who wanted the war to end with Germany annexing portions of Europe, Africa and Asia to make the German Reich into
5950-771: A coup by which the Reich government deposed the SPD-dominated Prussian government of Otto Braun , usurping it by making Papen the Reich Commissar of Prussia. Baron von Gayl, the DNVP Interior Minister played a key role in planning the "Rape of Prussia" together with Chancellor von Papen and the Defense Minister General Kurt von Schleicher as part of the move towards authoritarian government by destroying one of
6300-468: A couple's "racial worth" before allowing them to marry or not, and breaking German citizenship into two grades of those allowed to marry and those who would not. In 1926, under its leader Count von Westarp the DNVP took office by joining the coalition government led by Chancellor Wilhelm Marx with the stated aim of pulling German politics towards the right. After the "betrayal" of the Dawes Plan vote,
6650-470: A crowd of over 6,000. To publicise the meeting, two truckloads of party supporters drove around Munich waving swastika flags and distributing leaflets. Hitler soon gained notoriety for his rowdy polemic speeches against the Treaty of Versailles, rival politicians, and especially against Marxists and Jews. In June 1921, while Hitler and Eckart were on a fundraising trip to Berlin , a mutiny broke out within
7000-487: A crushing burden of reparations for the next sixty years (Hugenberg did not mention the fact that the Young Plan was not scheduled to end until 1988 because the plan had greatly reduced annual reparation payments, which was why the payments had been spread out over sixty years). In pushing for the referendum on the Young Plan , Hugenberg was quite consciously seeking to polarize German politics into two extremes, namely
7350-594: A deep hatred of Hugenberg, initially spoke privately of breaking away from Hitler over the alliance, but he changed his mind when Hugenberg agreed that Goebbels should handle the propaganda for the campaign, giving the Nazi Party access to Hugenberg's media empire. The infamous paragraph four in the proposed "Law Against the Enslavement of the German People" (more commonly known as the "Freedom Law") – as
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#17327728075927700-722: A distraction from what really interested him. These newspapers became the basis of his publishing firm, Scherl House, and, after he added controlling interests in Universum Film AG (UFA), Ala-Anzeiger AG, Vera Verlag and the Telegraphen Union, he had a near-monopoly on the German media, which he used to agitate for opposition to the Weimar Republic amongst Germany's middle classes. Despite his media empire, Hugenberg detested intellectuals and avoided their company as much as possible. A workaholic, Hugenberg rarely went to
8050-503: A general feeling amongst industrialists that Hugenberg was too inflexible, and soon the party became the main voice of agrarian interests in the Reichstag. Hugenberg's unwillingness to have the DNVP enter the Brüning cabinet greatly embittered the industrialists, who complained that the DNVP under his leadership was a perpetual opposition party, and as a result the largest contributor to the DNVP by 1931 had become Hugenberg himself, which had
8400-499: A good idea that was unfortunately abandoned, and made it clear that he wanted a return to Katastrophenpolitik . In seeking a vote on the "Freedom Law", Hugenberg was seeking nothing less than to begin the destruction of all of the middle-of-the-road parties in Germany in order to achieve a situation where the only alternatives for German voters would be the "national" parties and the Marxist parties. Hugenberg had initially planned in
8750-475: A great German patriot who had used his fortune to buy up newspapers to protect the German press from the "alien" Ullstein and Mosse families. Bernhard noted that the Mosse and Ullstein families were Jewish while Hugenberg was not. Bernhard's pamphlet first made Hugenberg well known. It was during this period that Hugenberg's friends such as Class and Leo Wegener started to promote Hugenberg and his business empire as
9100-530: A hysterical campaign warning his papers' mostly middle-class readers that Marxist SPD and KPD were going to mobilize the millions of unemployed created by the Great Depression to stage a bloody revolution and that only an authoritarian regime willing to use the most drastic means could save Germany. The Comintern 's Third Period , which meant that the Communists spent most of their time attacking
9450-473: A letter to Hindenburg. The signers urged Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as leader of a government "independent from parliamentary parties", which could turn into a movement that would "enrapture millions of people". Hindenburg reluctantly agreed to appoint Hitler as chancellor after two further parliamentary elections—in July and November 1932—had not resulted in the formation of a majority government. Hitler headed
9800-738: A major public relations problem. Henning, Wulle and Graefe founded the German Völkisch Freedom Party in December 1922. In September 1923, the DVP Chancellor Gustav Stresemann announced the end of "passive resistance" to the occupation of the Ruhr ( Ruhrkampf ) under the grounds that hyperinflation had destroyed the economy and the Ruhrkampf must end in order to save Germany. As a result,
10150-608: A major surge of interest in the National Socialists. Indeed, for many it marked the first time that they ever heard of Hitler, and it led during the winter of 1929–30 to a huge influx of new members into the NSDAP. Hamilton wrote that it was the 1929 referendum, which the National Socialists had treated as a gigantic 5-month-long free political ad (Hugenberg had paid for the entire referendum out of his own pocket) running from July to December 1929 that had enabled them to enter
10500-435: A majority. Fearing that Marx would win the second round (something made the more likely by the fact that the SPD's Otto Braun had dropped out to endorse Marx), Admiral Tirpitz made a dramatic visit to the home of the retired Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg to ask him to run for the second round in order to "save" Germany by gaining the presidency for the right. Tirpitz persuaded Hindenburg to run, and though Hindenburg won
10850-484: A man unafraid, indeed proud to state his belief that Germany should be the world's greatest power. Finally, President Friedrich Ebert applied more pressure by warning the DNVP that if the Dawes Plan were rejected, he would dissolve the Reichstag for early elections, and the party would then face the wrath of angry voters. After much internal fighting between the pro- and anti-Dawes Plan factions, in order to prevent
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11200-455: A massive motion of no confidence in the Reichstag . In response to losing the motion von Papen dissolved the Reichstag again. In the elections in fall of 1932 the DNVP made overtures to the NSDAP attempting to reform the Harzburg front. The German historian Hermann Beck wrote that the election in the autumn 1932 was the "absolute nadir" of DNVP-NSDAP relations when Hitler had decided to make
11550-702: A matter of debate. His friend August Kubizek claimed that Hitler was a "confirmed anti-Semite" before he left Linz. However, historian Brigitte Hamann describes Kubizek's claim as "problematical". While Hitler states in Mein Kampf that he first became an anti-Semite in Vienna, Reinhold Hanisch , who helped him sell his paintings, disagrees. Hitler had dealings with Jews while living in Vienna. Historian Richard J. Evans states that "historians now generally agree that his notorious, murderous anti-Semitism emerged well after Germany's defeat [in World War I], as
11900-531: A meeting on 20 September 1929. On 24 September 1929 at a gigantic rally in the Berlin Sports Palace, the four leaders of the Reich Committee against the Enslavement of the German People, namely Hugenberg, Hitler, Seldte and Class, formally began the campaign for the "Law Against the Enslavement of the German People". On 30 November 1929, when the "Freedom Law" came up before the Reichstag , 14 DNVP representatives abstained from voting while 3 voted against
12250-469: A meeting with the Prime Minister of Bavaria, Heinrich Held , on 4 January 1925, Hitler agreed to respect the state's authority and promised that he would seek political power only through the democratic process. The meeting paved the way for the ban on the Nazi Party to be lifted on 16 February. However, after an inflammatory speech he gave on 27 February, Hitler was barred from public speaking by
12600-733: A part in helping Adolf Hitler become chancellor of Germany and served in his first cabinet in 1933, hoping to control Hitler and use him as his tool. The plan failed, and by the end of 1933 Hugenberg had been pushed to the sidelines. Although he continued to serve as a guest member of the Reichstag until 1945, he wielded no political influence. Following World War II, he was interned by the British in 1946 and classified as "exonerated" in 1951 after undergoing denazification . Hugenberg's fundamental political and philosophical principles can be traced back to his youth. His university studies and early work organizing agricultural societies led him to view
12950-497: A part of this polarization, he planned to turn the DNVP from a party working within the Reichstag to advance its goals – which was what the DNVP had more or less become under Westarp – into a movement that would work for the destruction of "the System". Hugenberg had initially intended as his wedge issue the subject of constitutional reform, but he dropped it in the spring of 1929 as "too abstract" for most people in favor of opposing
13300-426: A party committed to total opposition to the republic it doomed itself to being an opposition party forever. Many of the DNVP's supporters made it clear by 1924 that they were unhappy about supporting a party whose role was purely negative in opposing everything that the government did while refusing to take part in any of the coalition governments. The British historian Sir John Wheeler-Bennett wrote "At no time during
13650-518: A petition in the fall of 1929 objecting to the section of the "Freedom Law" calling for the prosecution of those politicians who supported the Young Plan as "detrimental" to the workings of politics and stated that a victory for the Yes side in the referendum on the Freedom Law "would frustrate all efforts at improving the German situation for the foreseeable future". Hugenberg's leadership brought about
14000-460: A portion would still vote German-National today, were the party not so stupid to trade in anti-Semitism) and even in merchant circles, this way of thinking prevails." Extremely nationalistic and reactionary and originally favouring restoration of the Hohenzollern monarchy, it later supported the creation of an authoritarian state as a substitute. Its supporters came from dedicated nationalists,
14350-659: A positive goal in and of itself. At the time, Krupp AG was Europe's largest corporation and one of the largest corporations in the world, and Hugenberg's success in raising annual dividends from 8% in 1908 to 14% in 1913 won him much admiration in the world of German business. A more unwelcome appearance in the limelight occurred with the Kornwalzer affair, in which the Social Democrat Reichstag member Karl Liebknecht exposed industrial espionage by Hugenberg. The management of Krupp AG did not even try to deny
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14700-546: A product of the paranoid "stab-in-the-back" explanation for the catastrophe". Hitler received the final part of his father's estate in May 1913 and moved to Munich , Germany. When he was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian Army , he journeyed to Salzburg on 5 February 1914 for medical assessment. After he was deemed unfit for service, he returned to Munich. Hitler later claimed that he did not wish to serve
15050-536: A pseudo-aristocratic lifestyle at his estate at Rohbraken. In 1922, together with the industrialist Emil Kirdorf , Hugenberg created an investment fund known as Webegemeinschaft that served to subsidize groups "very effective politically, but not commercially profitable". Hugenberg was the chairman of the fund, which started out with 600,000 marks and averaged a quarter of million marks in subsidies to any group that Hugenberg and Kirdorf approved of. In January 1923, when Germany defaulted on its reparations to France ,
15400-497: A quarter of million; Der Tag was the more prestigious newspaper, but the Lokal-Anzieger was the more profitable one. Hugenberg's biographer, John Leopold, wrote: "This very visible success of the Scherl concern led to the charge that Hugenberg was a war profiteer and an unscrupulous manipulator of the postwar inflation. This was undoubtedly true. During the period from 1914 through 1924, Hugenberg had securely established
15750-681: A recommendation by Lieutenant Hugo Gutmann , his Jewish superior, Hitler received the Iron Cross, First Class, a decoration rarely awarded at Hitler's Gefreiter rank. On 15 October 1918, he was temporarily blinded in a mustard gas attack and was hospitalised in Pasewalk . While there, Hitler learned of Germany's defeat, and, by his own account, suffered a second bout of blindness after receiving this news. Hitler described his role in World War I as "the greatest of all experiences", and
16100-621: A representative of the German National People's Party (DNVP), Hugenberg was a member of the Weimar National Assembly from 1919–20 and then of the German Reichstag until 1945. For many years he provided the majority of the DNVP's funds, and his influence dominated the right-wing press in Germany. As the most influential voice in the DNVP's pan-German bloc, he opposed the Dawes Plan , which attempted to resolve
16450-549: A result of military action in the European theatre . The number of civilians killed during World War II was unprecedented in warfare, and the casualties constitute the deadliest conflict in history . Hitler's father, Alois Hitler (1837–1903), was the illegitimate child of Maria Schicklgruber . The baptismal register did not show the name of his father, and Alois initially bore his mother's surname, "Schicklgruber". In 1842, Johann Georg Hiedler married Alois's mother. Alois
16800-477: A return to monarchy in its manifesto, and participating in centre-right coalition governments on federal and state levels. It broadened its voting base—winning as much as 20.5% in the December 1924 German federal election —and supported the election of Paul von Hindenburg as President of Germany ( Reichspräsident ) in 1925. Under the leadership of the populist media entrepreneur Alfred Hugenberg from 1928,
17150-590: A role organizing agricultural societies before entering the civil service in the Prussian Ministry of Finance in 1903. Hugenberg came into conflict with his superiors, who opposed his plans to confiscate all the non-productive estates of the Junkers in order to settle hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans who would become his idealized farmer-small businessmen and "Germanize" the East. He subsequently left
17500-577: A short-lived coalition government formed by the Nazi Party (which had the most seats in the Reichstag) and Hugenberg's party, the German National People's Party (DNVP). On 30 January 1933, the new cabinet was sworn in during a brief ceremony in Hindenburg's office. The Nazi Party gained three posts: Hitler was named chancellor, Wilhelm Frick Minister of the Interior, and Hermann Göring Minister of
17850-600: A simplistic, philosophic disjunction – a man was either for the nation or he was against it". Hugenberg wrote in 1929 in a memo outlining his planned politics of polarization that "fate is only for the weak and the sick. The strong, healthy man molds his fate and that of his nation with his own will." Hugenberg believed that the same skills that made a successful media magnate would bring down the Weimar Republic as he deliberately pursued his strategy of Sammlung (rallying together) as he called his polarizing strategy. As
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#173277280759218200-423: A sort of brand despite his manifest lack of charm, proudly adopting the label "Hugenberg press" to describe his media empire, and gave him the image of a corporate superhero leader who could save Germany. The fact that Hugenberg rarely spoke in public during this period aided their efforts, giving him an aura of mystery. As the DNVP took part in several coalitions, Hugenberg emerged as one of the leading critics within
18550-515: A special party congress on 29 July, he was granted absolute power as party chairman, succeeding Drexler, by a vote of 533 to 1. Hitler's vitriolic beer hall speeches began attracting regular audiences. A demagogue , he became adept at using populist themes, including the use of scapegoats , who were blamed for his listeners' economic hardships. Hitler used personal magnetism and an understanding of crowd psychology to his advantage while engaged in public speaking. Historians have noted
18900-572: A statement saying Tirpitz as Chancellor would be the end of any effort to improve Franco-German relations while the American and Belgian ambassadors both issued warnings to the German government that Tirpitz as Chancellor would be a source of tension in their relations with Germany. The British Ambassador Lord D'Abernon warned that "If the Germans want to find a closed front hostile to them they cannot do anything better but to make Tirpitz Chancellor of
19250-609: A stolid burgher surrounded by business associates, family and friends who reinforced his basic ideas". For Hugenberg, the great trauma of his life was Germany's defeat in World War One, which he blamed on the November Revolution , the " stab-in-the-back " that was alleged to have defeated the Reich just when it was alleged to be on the verge of victory. Hugenberg was always convinced that Germany would recover from
19600-412: A stunning "lack of realism". The Chancellor Wilhelm Marx rejected all of the DNVP conditions and informed the party that they either vote for or against the Dawes Plan, thereby settling off a bitter factional battle within the DNVP. In addition, Stresemann—who had privately bristled at Admiral Tirpitz's charges that he was conducting a foreign policy of Ohnmachtspolitik (policy of powerlessness) before
19950-465: A time in the mid-1920s to keep Social Democrats out of power. Before its alliance with Nazis, the party sought support of the national liberal German People's Party . Between 1925 and 1928, the party slightly moderated its tone and actively cooperated in successive governments. In the presidential election of 1925 , the DNVP supported Karl Jarres for president, who was defeated in the first round by Zentrum' s Wilhelm Marx , who however failed to gain
20300-513: A vengeance those DNVP deputies who left to form the Conservative People's Party , whom Hugenberg called Weimar-supporting "Tory democrats" (democrat being a term of abuse for Hugenberg) who he believed practiced a watered down conservatism along the line of the British Conservative Party without any völkisch or monarchist convictions. Hugenberg's vendetta against the Conservatives meant that he focused most of his time on attacking them in
20650-481: A young age. He expressed loyalty only to Germany, despising the declining Habsburg monarchy and its rule over an ethnically diverse empire. Hitler and his friends used the greeting "Heil", and sang the " Deutschlandlied " instead of the Austrian Imperial anthem . After Alois's sudden death on 3 January 1903, Hitler's performance at school deteriorated and his mother allowed him to leave. He enrolled at
21000-609: Is that van der Lubbe set the fire alone. At Hitler's urging, Hindenburg responded by signing the Reichstag Fire Decree of 28 February, drafted by the Nazis, which suspended basic rights and allowed detention without trial. The decree was permitted under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which gave the president the power to take emergency measures to protect public safety and order. Activities of
21350-538: Is undeniable", according to Ian Kershaw . Published in two volumes in 1925 and 1926, Mein Kampf sold 228,000 copies between 1925 and 1932. One million copies were sold in 1933, Hitler's first year in office. Shortly before Hitler was eligible for parole, the Bavarian government attempted to have him deported to Austria. The Austrian federal chancellor rejected the request on the specious grounds that his service in
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#173277280759221700-515: The Reichstag , which would lead to a motion of no confidence. Hindenburg would respond by dissolving the Reichstag and resigning while the election campaign was in progress; the Chancellor would become acting president, and Class planned to have him issue a declaration of martial law and become the "Reich Regent". Class planned to have Hugenberg serve as minister of finance in the new government. The Social Democrats controlled Prussia , and
22050-426: The Reichstag , while the Nazis went up from the 12 seats they won in 1928 to 107 seats. On 26 November 1930, Brüning met with Hugenberg to ask him to join his government, only for Hugenberg – who was still following Katastrophenpolitik – to tell him that he would rather see the "collapse which I predicted", and "I must fight you and the entire system". Despite the way that Hitler now overshadowed him, Hugenberg
22400-1028: The Telegraphen-Union , which he founded in 1921 by buying and merging the Dammert Verlag GmbH , the Deutscher Handelsdienst and the Westdeutscher Handelsdienst . The Telegraphen-Union (TU) played a role in the German media analogous to Reuters's in the United Kingdom and the Associated Press in the United States, employing some 250 journalists in thirty offices around the world to report on national and international news for smaller newspapers in Germany that could not afford national and international correspondents. At
22750-403: The Junkers (landed nobility) and the Pan-German League who wanted to destroy democracy with no thought to the consequences. The in-fighting over the Dawes Plan together with the related bad feelings within the DNVP's Reichstag delegation led to Oskar Hergt being ousted later in 1924 as the party's leader and his replacement with the interim leader of Johann Friedrich Winckler who in turn
23100-409: The Reichstag election of 20 May 1928 (the party's share of votes fell from 21% in 1924 to 14% in 1928) led to a new outbreak of party in-fighting. The immediate cause of the in-fighting was an article published in July 1928 entitled "Monarchism" (Monarchismus) by Walther Lambach , a board member of the German National Association of Commercial Employees (DHV). In his article, Lambach stated that
23450-459: The 1932 presidential elections . A speech to the Industry Club in Düsseldorf on 27 January 1932 won him support from many of Germany's most powerful industrialists. Hindenburg had support from various nationalist, monarchist, Catholic, and republican parties, and some Social Democrats . Hitler used the campaign slogan " Hitler über Deutschland " ("Hitler over Germany"), a reference to his political ambitions and his campaigning by aircraft. He
23800-420: The Battle of the Somme in October 1916, he was wounded in the left thigh when a shell exploded in the dispatch runners' dugout. Hitler spent almost two months recovering in hospital at Beelitz , returning to his regiment on 5 March 1917. He was present at the Battle of Arras of 1917 and the Battle of Passchendaele . He received the Black Wound Badge on 18 May 1918. Three months later, in August 1918, on
24150-550: The Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment 16 (1st Company of the List Regiment), he served as a dispatch runner on the Western Front in France and Belgium, spending nearly half his time at the regimental headquarters in Fournes-en-Weppes , well behind the front lines. In 1914, he was present at the First Battle of Ypres and in that year was decorated for bravery, receiving the Iron Cross , Second Class. During his service at headquarters, Hitler pursued his artwork, drawing cartoons and instructions for an army newspaper. During
24500-485: The Bürgerbräukeller , a beer hall in Munich. Interrupting Kahr's speech, he announced that the national revolution had begun and declared the formation of a new government with Ludendorff. Retiring to a back room, Hitler, with his pistol drawn, demanded and subsequently received the support of Kahr, Seisser, and Lossow. Hitler's forces initially succeeded in occupying the local Reichswehr and police headquarters, but Kahr and his cohorts quickly withdrew their support. Neither
24850-403: The Centre Party , governed through emergency decrees from President Paul von Hindenburg . Governance by decree became the new norm and paved the way for authoritarian forms of government. The Nazi Party rose from obscurity to win 18.3 per cent of the vote and 107 parliamentary seats in the 1930 election, becoming the second-largest party in parliament. Hitler made a prominent appearance at
25200-459: The Dawes Plan , and a huge loan to Germany was floated in New York. The American bankers insisted that the state-owned Deutsche Reichsbahn railroad be put up as a collateral for the loan, which in turn required amending the constitution with a two-thirds majority vote in the Reichstag . As the DNVP did well in the elections of May 1924 , to amend the constitution would require the votes of
25550-589: The German Communist Party (KPD) were suppressed, and some 4,000 KPD members were arrested. In addition to political campaigning, the Nazi Party engaged in paramilitary violence and the spread of anti-communist propaganda in the days preceding the election . On election day, 6 March 1933, the Nazi Party's share of the vote increased to 43.9 per cent, and the party acquired the largest number of seats in parliament. Hitler's party failed to secure an absolute majority, necessitating another coalition with
25900-586: The German colonial empire , a concerted effort to build up closer links with German speaking people outside Germany (especially in Austria), a dilution of the role of the Reichstag to that of a supervisory body, a newly established professional house of appointees reminiscent of Benito Mussolini 's corporative state , and reduction in the perceived over-representation of Jews in German public life. Hugenberg also sought to eliminate internal party democracy and instill
26250-598: The German resistance to Nazism and took part in the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944. The party was formed in December 1918 by a merger of the German Conservative Party and the Free Conservative Party of the old monarchic German Empire . It was joined soon afterward by the most right-wing section of the former National Liberal Party , and most supporters of the dissolved radically nationalist German Fatherland Party ,
26600-647: The Habsburg Empire because of the mixture of races in its army and his belief that the collapse of Austria-Hungary was imminent. In August 1914, at the outbreak of World War I , Hitler was living in Munich and voluntarily enlisted in the Bavarian Army . According to a 1924 report by the Bavarian authorities, allowing Hitler to serve was most likely an administrative error, because as an Austrian citizen, he should have been returned to Austria. Posted to
26950-536: The Hohenzollern monarchy at the end of World War I came as a tremendous shock, and from that point until the establishment of the Nazi state in 1933 he focused on bringing down the parliamentary government of the Weimar Republic . Hugenberg earned degrees in both economics and law. In 1891, at the age of twenty-six, he co-founded the nationalist organization that later became the Pan-German League . He worked in
27300-643: The Iron Cross . In 1919, he joined the German Workers' Party (DAP), the precursor of the Nazi Party, and in 1921 was appointed leader of the Nazi Party. In 1923, he attempted to seize governmental power in a failed coup in Munich and was sentenced to five years in prison, serving just over a year of his sentence. While there, he dictated the first volume of his autobiography and political manifesto Mein Kampf ( My Struggle ). After his early release in 1924, Hitler gained popular support by attacking
27650-538: The Locarno Treaties . By serving in a government that signed Locarno, which recognized Alsace-Lorraine as part of France and voluntarily agreed to accept the demilitarized status of the Rhineland, many party activists charged that Westarp had committed another "betrayal" by serving in a government that accepted the "robbery" of what was claimed to be German land. A result of this anger was that even through
28000-594: The National Liberal Party . The party strongly rejected the republican Weimar Constitution of 1919 and the Treaty of Versailles , which it viewed as a national disgrace, signed by traitors. The party instead aimed at a restoration of monarchy, a repeal of the dictated peace treaty and reacquisition of all lost territories and colonies. During the mid-1920s, the DNVP moderated its profile, accepting republican institutions in practice while still calling for
28350-564: The Order of the Red Eagle for his success at Krupp AG, saying that Germany needed more businessmen like Hugenberg. At the ceremony, Hugenberg praised the Emperor in his acceptance speech and went on to say that democracy would not improve the condition of the German working class, but only a "very much richer, very much greater and very much more powerful Germany" would solve its problems. After
28700-531: The Organisation Consul terrorist group. Faced with a possible ban for encouraging terrorism after the Rathenau assassination and a public backlash over its initially jubilant reaction to Rathenau's murder, the party started to crack down on its extreme völkisch wing, who had been the most vociferous in calling for Rathenau's blood. To stop a total break with its völkisch wing, in September 1922
29050-603: The Prussian civil service and in private business before joining the Krupp steel works where he was chairman of the board of directors from 1909 until 1918. His work there led to seats on other supervisory boards and trade associations. During World War I , Hugenberg was an annexationist who wanted the Empire to expand to the east through German settlements. He blamed Germany's defeat on Jews and socialists who had supposedly stabbed
29400-649: The Realschule in Steyr in September 1904, where his behaviour and performance improved. In 1905, after passing a repeat of the final exam, Hitler left the school without any ambitions for further education or clear plans for a career. In 1907, Hitler left Linz to live and study fine art in Vienna , financed by orphan's benefits and support from his mother. He applied for admission to the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna but
29750-400: The Reich ". The clash between Stresemann and Tirpitz over the Dawes Plan marked the beginning of a long feud that was to continue until Stresemann's death in 1929. Right from the moment that Admiral Tirpitz was elected to the Reichstag in May 1924, he emerged as Stresemann's most "tenacious adversary" in the Reichstag and presented himself as the unabashed champion of German power politics,
30100-816: The Reichslandbund , the German People's Party and the Stahlhelm paramilitary organisation briefly formed an uneasy alliance known as the Harzburg Front . Attending the Bad Harzburg rally were most of the figures of the German right ranging from General Hans von Seeckt , Heinrich Class , Franz Seldte , General Walther von Lüttwitz , Admiral Adolf von Trotha, the economist Hjalmar Schacht , Crown Prince Wilhelm, Admiral Magnus von Levetzow, Prince Oskar of Prussia, Prince Eitel Friedrich, and on to figures such as Hugenberg and Hitler. The Harzburger Front
30450-632: The Reichstag had limited powers, one of which was the right to pass budgets. In the 1912 elections , the Social Democrats won more seats in the Reichstag than any other party. In 1914, they split into two factions, with the Independent Social Democrats opposing the war and the Majority Social Democrats supporting the war on the grounds that Russia was supposedly about to attack Germany. However,
30800-429: The Reichstag to have a majority. In the summer of 1929, two prominent DNVP Reichstag deputies Gottfried Treviranus and Hans Schlange-Schöningen resigned from the party's caucus in protest against the "Freedom Law" as Hugenberg's referendum bill was known which they called irresponsible in the extreme. They would be joined shortly afterwards by the former chairman Count Kuno von Westarp and 20 other DNVP MdRs leaving
31150-480: The Reichstag . The Reichsausschuß comprised Hugenberg, Heinrich Class of the Pan-German League , Franz Seldte of Der Stahlehlm and Adolf Hitler of the NSDAP. Hugenberg saw himself as the leader of the Reichsausschuß and believed through the Reichsausschuß he would become the leader of the entire right-wing national bloc and in turn the bloc he intended to create would at last win enough seats in
31500-404: The Reichstag building was set on fire . Göring blamed a communist plot, as Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe was found in incriminating circumstances inside the burning building. Until the 1960s, some historians, including William L. Shirer and Alan Bullock , thought the Nazi Party itself was responsible; according to Ian Kershaw, writing in 1998, the view of nearly all modern historians
31850-521: The Ruhrlade , the inner cabinet of the western coal and steel industry, found him increasingly wrong-headed and impossible to work with. When Hugenberg began to attract the political limelight his characteristic slogan was "solid or mash" ( Block oder Brei ). Those who wanted a broad conservative party able to influence republican politics were the mash, his prescription was dynamic force through principled confrontation. In July 1929, Hugenberg decided that
32200-461: The Treaty of Versailles and promoting pan-Germanism , antisemitism , and anti-communism with charismatic oratory and Nazi propaganda . He frequently denounced communism as being part of an international Jewish conspiracy . By November 1932, the Nazi Party held the most seats in the Reichstag , but not a majority. No political parties were able to form a majority coalition in support of
32550-654: The Young Plan for reparations. Taking advantage of a clause in the Weimar constitution that allowed a referendum to be called if enough people signed a petition demanding it, Hugenberg decided in June 1929 to collect signatures for a referendum on the Young Plan, which was intended to discredit the "grand coalition" government led by the Social Democratic chancellor Hermann Müller . Using highly emotional, visceral language, Hugenberg and his newspapers presented
32900-411: The Young Plan , a second attempt to resolve the reparations issue. The two parties were also part of the short-lived Harzburg Front of 1931 that was formed to create a united front against the government of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning . Both efforts at cooperation benefited the Nazis more than the DNVP. The Nazis gained the most from the radicalization of the middle classes, and the moderate elements in
33250-410: The Young Plan referendum on 22 December 1929. The NSDAP were one of the groups which joined Hugenberg's campaign against the Young Plan, and the resulting wave of publicity brought Adolf Hitler back into the limelight after five years of obscurity following his trial for high treason in 1924. After his trial in 1924, Hitler had been largely ignored; the 1929 edition of the diaries of Lord D'Abernon ,
33600-681: The left–right political spectrum , it belonged on the right-wing , and is classified as far-right in its early years and then again from the late 1920s when it moved back rightward. It was formed in late 1918 after Germany's defeat in World War I and the German Revolution of 1918–1919 that toppled the German Empire and the monarchy. It combined the bulk of the German Conservative Party , Free Conservative Party , and German Fatherland Party , with right-wing elements of
33950-421: The parliamentary republic , which faced challenges from right- and left-wing extremists . The moderate political parties were increasingly unable to stem the tide of extremism, and the German referendum of 1929 helped to elevate Nazi ideology. The elections of September 1930 resulted in the break-up of a grand coalition and its replacement with a minority cabinet. Its leader, chancellor Heinrich Brüning of
34300-487: The " Black Horror on the Rhine " occupied much of the DNVP's time in the early 1920s. Kolb wrote that the DNVP played a major role in the "brutalization of politics" in the Weimar Republic with its relentless denigration of its enemies as "traitors" together with its insistence that murder was a perfectly acceptable procedure for dealing with one's political opponents, who the DNVP claimed did not deserve to live. The climax of
34650-405: The "Freedom Law", citing concerns about paragraph four. When Hugenberg tried to impose party discipline, 12 DNVP representatives left the party in protest over his leadership. The Hugenberg newspapers went all-out in support of the "Freedom Law", running glaring headlines in support, but when the referendum was held, only 5,538,000 Germans voted yes for the "Freedom Law", which was insufficient to for
35000-495: The "Nazi Party"). Hitler designed the party's banner of a swastika in a white circle on a red background. Hitler was discharged from the Army on 31 March 1920 and began working full-time for the party. The party headquarters was in Munich, a centre for anti-government German nationalists determined to eliminate Marxism and undermine the Weimar Republic . In February 1921—already highly effective at crowd manipulation —he spoke to
35350-569: The "lawless" method of a general strike to defeat the putsch than it did the putsch itself, which was portrayed as an understandable, if extreme response to the existence of the republic. The outcome of the Erzberger-Helfferich libel trial encouraged the DNVP to engage in a campaign of vituperative and vitriolic attacks on leaders of the Weimar Coalition who supported the republic, usually accompanied with calls for
35700-543: The "liberation of Germany" (i.e. doing away with the Treaty of Versailles), restoring the monarchy under the Hohenzollern family, a return to the policy of pre-1914 navalism in order to make Germany a world power, a "strong state" to combat the Great Depression and a "moral rebirth of our people" by the "deepening of Christian awareness". On 11 October 1931, the DNVP, the NSDAP, the Pan-German League,
36050-417: The "national opposition", to accept the chancellorship and to end the passive resistance in September 1923 was condemned by Hugenberg as a betrayal. Stresemann became a Vernunftrepublikaner ("republican by reason" – someone who was still loyal to the monarchy in his heart, but accepted the republic as the least bad alternative), and insofar as his policies aimed at economic and political stability, he became
36400-544: The "national" camp opposed to the Young Plan and everyone else, believing that such a polarization would work for his own benefit. Hugenberg saw compromise and negotiation as so much weakness that led to DNVP's poor showing in the elections of May 1928 and believed that the best chances for the DNVP to come to power was by creating a political climate where no compromise and negotiation was possible by seeking to divide Germany into two diametrically opposed blocs with no middle ground in between. Hugenberg did not actually expect to win
36750-412: The 1928 election, a DNVP Reichstag member, Walther Lambach, published an article in the journal Politische Wochenschrift , saying that the poor showing of the DNVP in the election was due to its monarchism. Lambach argued that the vast majority of the German people did not pine for the return of the exiled Emperor, and the party's emphasis on this point was alienating the public, which had come to accept
37100-412: The 1930 election, sending the Stahlhelm in to disturb speeches by Westarp and spent little time defending the DNVP against the attacks of the NSDAP. During the 1930 election, the DNVP issued a statement proclaiming that there were no important differences between them and the NSDAP on the "Jewish Question", arguing that the few differences that did exist concerned a small number of the "radical demands of
37450-624: The Allies once Germany won the war. Erzberger sued Helfferich for libel over his statement that Erzberger was "dishonestly combining political activity with his own financial interests". Amid much media attention the libel trial ended on 12 March 1920 with the judge ruling that some of Helfferich's statements were true while fining Helfferich a nominal sum for technical libel for the statements that he declared that Helfferich lacked sufficient evidence to back up with. The German historian Eberhard Kolb wrote none of Helfferich's claims were true, and that
37800-437: The Allies to exiting the Rhineland in June 1930 (which was five years earlier than what Versailles had called for) was irrelevant to Hugenberg. He argued that a properly patriotic government would not pay any reparations at all and would force the Allies to leave the Rhineland at once. As such, Hugenberg drafted "A Bill against the Enslavement of the German People" which declared acceptance of the Young Plan to be high treason under
38150-596: The Allies—asked the German embassies in London, Paris, and Washington to inquire of their respective host governments what would be their reaction to Tirpitz becoming Chancellor. The very negative international response that the prospect of Tirpitz as the Chancellor generated was then leaked by Stresemann to various Reichstag deputies as a way of showing how absurd the DNVP was in demanding that Tirpitz being appointed Chancellor, and how isolated Germany would be with Tirpitz as
38500-475: The Army nor the state police joined forces with Hitler. The next day, Hitler and his followers marched from the beer hall to the Bavarian War Ministry to overthrow the Bavarian government, but police dispersed them. Sixteen Nazi Party members and four police officers were killed in the failed coup. Hitler fled to the home of Ernst Hanfstaengl and by some accounts contemplated suicide. He
38850-570: The Army, which ruled occupied Belgium and France. Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff – both firm annexationists – appreciated Hugenberg's willingness to spend millions of marks to mobilize public support for their cause. In 1918, after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk , Hugenberg founded two corporations, the Landgesellschaft Kurland m.b.H and Neuland AG, which had a combined budget of 37 million marks, to establish cooperative funds that would make loans to
39200-573: The Army. In July 1919, he was appointed Verbindungsmann (intelligence agent) of an Aufklärungskommando (reconnaissance unit) of the Reichswehr , assigned to influence other soldiers and to infiltrate the German Workers' Party (DAP). At a DAP meeting on 12 September 1919, Party Chairman Anton Drexler was impressed by Hitler's oratorical skills. He gave him a copy of his pamphlet My Political Awakening , which contained anti-Semitic, nationalist, anti-capitalist , and anti-Marxist ideas. On
39550-624: The Bavarian Supreme Court, he was released from jail on 20 December 1924, against the state prosecutor's objections. Including time on remand, Hitler served just over one year in prison. While at Landsberg, Hitler dictated most of the first volume of Mein Kampf ( lit. ' My Struggle ' ); originally titled Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice ) at first to his chauffeur, Emil Maurice , and then to his deputy, Rudolf Hess . The book, dedicated to Thule Society member Dietrich Eckart,
39900-404: The Bavarian authorities, a ban that remained in place until 1927. To advance his political ambitions in spite of the ban, Hitler appointed Gregor Strasser , Otto Strasser , and Joseph Goebbels to organise and enlarge the Nazi Party in northern Germany. Gregor Strasser steered a more independent political course, emphasising the socialist elements of the party's programme. The stock market in
40250-475: The Berlin newspaper Der Tag (The Day), which became the flagship paper of his media empire. Der Tag had a daily circulation of 18,000–20,000 when Hugenberg brought Scherl in 1916 and was a "quality" paper mostly read by educated middle-class people. Another Scherl newspaper was the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger , a paper aimed at lower-middle class readership that had a daily circulation of
40600-441: The British ambassador to Germany 1920–26 had a footnote that read: "He [Hitler] was finally released after six months and bound over for the rest of his sentence, thereafter fading into oblivion". At the various campaign rallies against the Young Plan in the autumn of 1929, the charismatic Hitler easily out-shone the stuffy Hugenberg, who as one of his aides Reinhold Quaatz wrote in his diary had "no political sex appeal". Hugenberg
40950-484: The DNVP MdRs voted for the Dawes Plan while the other half voted against. The final vote was 49 DNVP MdRs for acceptance vs. 48 MdRs against. The support of the pro-Dawes Plan DNVP MdRs was just enough to get the Dawes Plan ratified by the Reichstag . The passage of the Dawes Plan produced much turmoil in the Reichstag with considerable cheering and jeering. One of the anti-Dawes Plan DNVP deputies, Alfred Hugenberg
41300-743: The DNVP Reichstag members whom Hugenberg associated with were General Wilhelm von Dommes, the emissary for the emperor in exile; Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz ; Gottfried Gok, a Pan-German leader; and Theodor Duesterberg of Der Stahlhelm . Hugenberg founded a thinktank, the Wirtschaftsvereiningung zur Förderung der geistigen Wiederaufbaukräfte (the Economic Association for the Promotion of Intellectual Forces of Reconstruction) to promote his ideas, while he lived
41650-461: The DNVP Reichstag members, which split the party into two. The industrialists who supported the DNVP were in favor of the Dawes plan and threatened to cut off funding for the party forever if it voted against the Dawes Plan, while another faction still attached to Katastrophenpolitik favored rejecting the Dawes Plan on the grounds that a return to the economic chaos of 1923 was the best way of ending
42000-522: The DNVP and the NSDAP were prepared to co-operate with the Communists when it suited their purposes as in the case of the Prussian referendum. Hugenberg argued that Prussian referendum was necessary to force out the Braun government whom he accused of responsibility for "the decline in the German economy, the bad state of the finances and the chaos in governance". On 9 August 1931 when the Prussian referendum
42350-576: The DNVP co-operated with the Nazis, joining forces in the Harzburg Front of 1931, forming coalition governments in some states and finally supporting Hitler's appointment as Chancellor of Germany ( Reichskanzler ) in January 1933. Initially, the DNVP had a number of ministers in Hitler's government, but the party quickly lost influence and eventually dissolved itself in June 1933, giving way to
42700-467: The DNVP continued to move away from the party. By early 1933 Hugenberg realized that his attempt to ally with the Nazis had failed and that they presented a danger to the state and society. He nevertheless became minister of Economics and of Food and Agriculture in the Hitler cabinet . He became increasingly isolated in the cabinet and failed in his attempt to become "economic dictator". He was forced out of
43050-482: The DNVP found itself joining forces with the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in denouncing the end of the Ruhrkampf as treason and as a cowardly surrender to "a half-sated irreconcilable France". The DNVP announced that if they were in charge that they would continue the Ruhrkampf regardless of the economic costs and misery. At a party conference in early April 1924, the DNVP had come out clearly against
43400-580: The DNVP had promised to vote against the Dawes Plan when it came up for ratification in the Reichstag on the grounds that Germany should not have to pay any reparations at all, resulting in many of the economic lobbying groups that donated to the party such as the Landbund , the Reich Association of German Industry (RDI) and the Chamber of Industry and Commerce threatening to cease donating to
43750-567: The DNVP ministers had served in the Cabinet that had signed Locarno, the party's MdRs voted against ratifying Locarno in the Reichstag , and the DNVP walked out of the government in protest at Locarno. Another problem for the DNVP was the 1926 referendum , in which the Communists proposed to confiscate without compensation all of the property belonging to the former Imperial and royal families of Germany and give it to small farmers, homeless people and those living on war pensions. The DNVP leadership
44100-540: The DNVP parliamentary delegations. When the National Assembly convened to write the new constitution for Germany on 6 February 1919, the DNVP's chief contribution to the debates was a lengthy defence of the former Emperor Wilhelm II by Clemens von Delbrück , and a series of long speeches by other DNVP deputies defending Germany's actions in the July Crisis of 1914, the ideology of Pan-Germanism and
44450-402: The DNVP representatives to vote to cancel the bill on 18 July 1930; 25 DNVP representatives led by Westarp broke with party discipline to vote for the bill and left the party in protest. Bills passed under Article 48 could be cancelled by the Reichstag , but Brüning threatened to have Hindenburg use Article 53 to dissolve the Reichstag for a new election if his bill should be cancelled. As
44800-492: The DNVP the main target in the election. The National Socialist newspaper Der Angriff in an editorial written by Joseph Goebbels called for a "Reckoning with the Hugenzwerg " (a portmanteau of Hugenberg and "pygmy"), and dismissively commented that Hugenberg must be a magician since there was no other way that he could hope to "turn an insignificant heap of reactionaries" into a mass movement. DNVP election meetings were
45150-402: The DNVP to degenerate from its core principles, of which Lambach's article was only the most deplorable and recent example. Hugenberg argued that the DNVP could not change its values, writing: "Only an ideological party which is led and which leads can save the soul and economy of the German people!" Using Lambach as a surrogate for his attack on Westarp, Hugenberg argued that the DNVP could not be
45500-589: The DNVP's Reichstag delegation and with his finger pointing clearly at Helfferich, shouted "The enemy is on the right! Here are those who drip poison into the wounds of the German people!". Wirth, who was shaken by the murder of his friend Rathenau, pushed through the Reichstag the Law for the Protection of the Republic on 21 July 1922. It increased the penalties for conspiring to political assassination and allowed
45850-504: The DNVP's leading economic expert, had published two detailed critiques in Die Kreuzzeitung that purported to prove that the Dawes Plan existed only to "enslave" Germany by allowing the Allies to take control of and exploit the German economy forever. The spring 1924 campaign was largely led and organized by charismatic, media savvy Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz who was presented as the "savior" type figure, able to rally together
46200-606: The DNVP. On 21 March 1933, the new Reichstag was constituted with an opening ceremony at the Garrison Church in Potsdam . This "Day of Potsdam" was held to demonstrate unity between the Nazi movement and the old Prussian elite and military. Hitler appeared in a morning coat and humbly greeted Hindenburg. To achieve full political control despite not having an absolute majority in parliament, Hitler's government brought
46550-579: The DNVP. Hugenberg was a poor speaker and devoid of charm. Those who knew well stated he was "not a man, but a wall" owing to his extreme obstinacy, as he loathed any sort of compromise, and it was often stated he was "not an easy man" to deal with. In 1920, Hugenberg founded a populist tabloid, the Berliner Illustrierte Nachtausgabe , which became his most profitable newspaper, having a daily circulation of 216,000 by 1929. The most important of Hugenberg's media properties were
46900-500: The Dawes Plan loan required the Reich government to amend the constitution to put up the Reichsbahn as collateral, which required a two-thirds majority in the Reichstag . At first, the DNVP tried to avoid an internal split caused by the up-coming Dawes Plan vote by insisting upon several conditions in exchange for voting for the Dawes Plan such as the appointment of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz as Chancellor, firing Stresemann as
47250-543: The Dawes Plan while 48 voted against; Hugenberg missed the vote with a doctor's note saying he was too unwell to attend the Reichstag that day. Since the DNVP agreed to support the government of Hans Luther , Hugenberg grew more embittered, writing a series of essays in February–March 1925, later published as a book, that included such lines as "it stinks in the German Reich " and the "false leaders belong in
47600-542: The Fatherland Party into the German National People's Party ( Deutschnationale Volkspartei , DNVP), which he represented in the Weimar National Assembly , which wrote the 1919 Constitution of the Weimar Republic . He was elected to the Reichstag in the 1920 elections to the new body . Hugenberg defined his interests as finding a "cure for the sick and crazy climate" of the Weimar Republic, which for him
47950-487: The French premier Raymond Poincaré ordered the occupation of the Ruhr , marking the beginning of "passive resistance" that led to hyperinflation . As a supporter of Katastrophenpolitik , Hugenberg rather perversely welcomed the inflation as the beginning of the end of the Weimar Republic, arguing that the economic disaster would awaken the furor teutonicus that would lead to the "Third Reich". In an essay he wrote at
48300-548: The German Army made his Austrian citizenship void. In response, Hitler formally renounced his Austrian citizenship on 7 April 1925. At the time of Hitler's release from prison, politics in Germany had become less combative and the economy had improved, limiting Hitler's opportunities for political agitation. As a result of the failed Beer Hall Putsch, the Nazi Party and its affiliated organisations were banned in Bavaria. In
48650-580: The German people the belief in and therefore the will to victory" [By "July action" Helfereich was referring to the Reichstag Peace Resolution of July 1917, which Erzberger played a major role in writing]. Helfferich especially hated Erzberger for making a speech in July 1919 that blamed him for the bad shape of German budget, with Erzberger noting during the war Helfferich had decided not to raise taxes, and instead ran up colossal debts which he planned to pay off by imposing reparations on
49000-415: The German right for a positive program, and instead the "national bloc" was to be united by what it was against instead of what it was for . Hugenberg was vehemently opposed to the Young Plan , and he set up a "Reich Committee for the German People's Petition" to oppose it, featuring the likes of Franz Seldte , Heinrich Class , Theodor Duesterberg and Fritz Thyssen . On 9 July 1929, Hugenberg founded
49350-686: The Germany army in the back . After the war, Hugenberg left Krupp to concentrate on politics and building up the media empire that he had started in 1916 when he bought the Scherl publishing house. That purchase was followed by the news agency Telegraphen-Union, numerous newspapers and in 1927 a controlling interest in the Universum-Film- AG (Ufa), a major film producer. Hugenberg's media outlets provided stiff and sometimes dominating competition to older liberal media companies such as Ullstein and Mosse (both of which were owned by Jews). As
49700-509: The House of Hohenzollern while his party was participating in a republican government. An especially difficult case for Westarp came in 1927 when it became time to renew the Law for the Protection of the Republic, a law passed in 1922 in the aftermath of Rathenau's assassination, and which was clearly aimed at the DNVP for its incitement of murder at the time. Section V of the law had implicitly banned
50050-490: The Hugenberg newspapers had to compete with the liberal newspapers owned by the Ullstein and Mosse families, and the Hugenberg media empire was most influential in the small towns and rural areas of Germany where the newspapers owned by Hugenberg were most people's main source of the news. Even in areas where Hugenberg did not own the newspapers, the local newspapers were dependent upon the Hugenberg-owned Telegraphen-Union for news outside of their areas; about 600 newspapers in
50400-465: The Hugenberg press's anti-Marxist campaign were not the DNVP as intended, but rather the National Socialists who were able to portray themselves as the most effective anti-Marxist fighting force. The DNVP was declining rapidly as many workers and peasants began to support the more populist and less aristocratic NSDAP while upper-class and middle-class DNVP voters supported the NSDAP as the "party of order" best able to crush Marxism. Hugenberg pursued with
50750-403: The Interior for Prussia. Hitler had insisted on the ministerial positions as a way to gain control over the police in much of Germany. As chancellor, Hitler worked against attempts by the Nazi Party's opponents to build a majority government. Because of the political stalemate, he asked Hindenburg to again dissolve the Reichstag, and elections were scheduled for early March. On 27 February 1933,
51100-402: The Jews!". The Dawes Plan vote brought to the surface the conflict between the party's pragmatic wing most closely associated with industrial interests and farmers from the western part of Germany who were prepared to work inside the system within certain limits if only to safeguard their own interests versus those who were mostly closely associated with the rural areas of East Elbia, especially
51450-415: The Jews", and called openly for his assassination to avenge his "crimes" such as signing the armistice ending World War I. Helfferich wrote that Erzberger's career was "a sordid mixing of political activity with his own pecuniary advantage... at the crucial moment of the war, acting for his Habsburg-Bourbon patrons, he cowardly attacked German policy from the rear with his July action, and thereby destroyed in
51800-407: The Krupp family. After buying the Scherl newspaper chain in July 1916, Hugenberg announced, at the first meeting of the board under his management, that he had only bought the Scherl corporation to champion annexationist and Pan-German war aims, and that any editors opposed to his expansionist views should resign immediately, before he fired them. In buying the Scherl corporation, Hugenberg acquired
52150-439: The Lutheran clergy, the Bildungsbürgertum (the upper middle-class), university professors, and Gymnasium (high schools for these destined to go to university) teachers supported the DNVP until 1930, the party had a cultural influence on German life far beyond what its share of the vote would suggest. Because so many university professors and Gymnasium teachers supported the DNVP, everyone who went to university in Germany under
52500-412: The Majority Social Democrats were opposed to the annexationists, and to secure their cooperation in passing budgets, Bethmann Hollweg refused to support the annexationists in public. Bethmann Hollweg's Septemberprogramm – drafted in September 1914 at a time when the fall of Paris was believed to be imminent, as the German armies had almost reached the French capital, and to be issued when Paris fell –
52850-457: The Marxist left consisting of the Social Democrats and the Communists. As part of his strategy of polarization, Hugenberg intended to seize upon wedge issues and present them in a highly inflammatory manner in order to create a situation where one could be either for or against the "national" bloc, which was intended to lead to the electoral decline of all centrist parties in Germany. Leopold noted that Hugenberg "debated political issues in terms of
53200-474: The May elections was a result of the party running on a platform of restoring the monarchy, a goal that most Germans were simply not interested in. Lambach's article with its call for the DNVP to transform itself into a party of conservative republicans set off a storm, with the party's core monarchist supporters successfully pressuring Westarp to expel Lambach. Led by Alfred Hugenberg , the enraged monarchists then turned their sights on Westarp himself, claiming he
53550-406: The Müller "grand coalition" government to defend the Young Plan while Hugenberg as an opposition leader felt free to make extravagant promises about what he would do if he was chancellor, claiming that the Reich would pay no reparations at all if he were in charge. Even at the time, it was widely recognized that Hugenberg's status as an opposition leader free from the burdens of office allowed him
53900-489: The NSDAP and the DNVP MdRs walked out of the Reichstag on 11 February 1931 to protest the high-handed ways of the Brüning government. During the summer of 1931, the DNVP, the NSDAP and the KPD all joined forces in campaigning for a yes vote in the Prussian referendum, which led the liberal Berliner Morgenpost newspaper to write of an alliance of "the swastika and the Soviet star" who were engaging in Katastrophenpolitik . Despite their vehemently expressed anti-communism both
54250-458: The NSDAP" which were "hardly important since in practice they cannot be implemented". Despite the bitterness caused by the 1930 election, in February 1931 Hugenberg met with Hitler to discuss common co-operation on a referendum for early elections in Prussia that were intended to defeat the government of the Social Democrat Otto Braun , and thereby allow a NSDAP/DNVP coalition to win the resulting elections. As part of their efforts to co-operate,
54600-425: The NSDAP's 2.6% of the vote in 1928). This marked the NSDAP's electoral breakthrough to the mainstream. Since the NSDAP did very well in areas that had traditionally voted for the DNVP like East Prussia and Pomerania , the German historian Martin Broszat wrote that would strongly suggest that most of the DNVP voters had deserted their old party for the NSDAP. Broszat argued that what happened between 1929 and 1932
54950-446: The Nazi Party in Munich. Members of its executive committee wanted to merge with the Nuremberg-based German Socialist Party (DSP). Hitler returned to Munich on 11 July and angrily tendered his resignation. The committee members realised that the resignation of their leading public figure and speaker would mean the end of the party. Hitler announced he would rejoin on the condition that he would replace Drexler as party chairman, and that
55300-404: The Nazi regime was responsible for the genocide of an estimated six million Jews and millions of other victims, whom he and his followers deemed Untermenschen (subhumans) or socially undesirable. Hitler and the Nazi regime were also responsible for the deliberate killing of an estimated 19.3 million civilians and prisoners of war. In addition, 28.7 million soldiers and civilians died as
55650-433: The Nazis were products of the twentieth century. Alienated and deprived, inured by the hardships of the war, the frustrations of inflation, and the humiliation of the depression, these were men of action. No Spenglerian historicizing for them; power was the goal". Despite this, the conflict between the Nazis and the Left Wing parties was much more intense. Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945)
56000-400: The Nazis' paramilitary organisation, the Sturmabteilung (SA, "Stormtroopers"), which protected meetings and attacked political opponents. A critical influence on Hitler's thinking during this period was the Aufbau Vereinigung , a conspiratorial group of White Russian exiles and early Nazis. The group, financed with funds channelled from wealthy industrialists, introduced Hitler to
56350-417: The Nazis' single-party dictatorship with the majority of its former members joining the Nazi Party. The Nazis allowed the remaining former DNVP members in the Reichstag, the civil service, and the police to continue with their jobs and left the rest of the party membership generally in peace. During the Second World War , several prominent former DNVP members, such as Carl Friedrich Goerdeler , were involved in
56700-415: The Pan-German League was going to serve in the provisional government, though he backed out later on 13 March 1920 on the grounds that the putsch was "hopeless". Within the party's leadership, Count Kuno von Westarp was in favour of supporting the putsch while Oskar Hergt was opposed. After the putsch failed, the DNVP issued a statement that condemned the government far more harshly for resorting to
57050-460: The Pan-German League, the Colonial League and the Navy League. The women in the DNVP tended to be most concerned with wiping out "trash and dirt" which was their term for pornography and prostitution, and was seen as especially threatening to women. The Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer called the DNVP "...the party of the traditional, often radical anti-Semitic elites...." The writer Kurt Tucholsky wrote in 1924 that "Even in Jewish circles (of which
57400-442: The Plan while the other half had voted against meant the DNVP made only very modest gains in the second 1924 election. The outcome of the second 1924 election together with the appointment of the nonpartisan Hans Luther as Chancellor in early 1925 allowed Count von Westarp to persuade the DNVP to join Luther's government. While it sought the ultimate demise of Weimar Republic, it participated in its politics and ruling government for
57750-416: The Plan. Adolf Hitler was the only realistic candidate, and Hugenberg decided that he would use the Nazi Party leader to get his way. As a result, the Nazi Party soon became the recipients of Hugenberg's largesse, both in terms of monetary donations and of favorable coverage from the Hugenberg-owned press, which had previously largely ignored Hitler or denounced him as a socialist. Joseph Goebbels , who had
58100-443: The Potsdam branch of the DNVP expelled Lambach on its own in July 1928, presenting Westarp with a fait accompli, which showed the way the party's grassroots members felt about the Lambach affair. Hugenberg followed up this triumph with an article saying that the DNVP was "not a parliamentary party in the proper sense of the word, but a grand group of men – a community of opinion, not a community of interests", which in his view had caused
58450-415: The Prussian police arrested those involved in Class's scheme. None of the accused was brought to trial except Class, and the judge dismissed the charges because of a lack of evidence, stating that merely talking about a putsch was not the same thing as planning a putsch. The charges brought Hugenberg much attention, and the spokesman for the Hugenberg press, Ludwig Bernhard, used the case to praise Hugenberg as
58800-555: The Reformation. Protestant spirit must remain strong in our Fatherland." The Anti-Catholic character of the DNVP is traced back to the tradition of Kulturkampf , under which Otto von Bismarck "associated the meaning of being German with Protestantism". Catholicism was portrayed as un-German and associated with foreign and "papist" influence. As such, DNVP focused solely on Protestant voters while marginalising and attacking Roman Catholics - Richard Steigmann-Gall remarks that in Weimar Germany, "the narrative of national identity in Germany
59150-485: The Reich Committee on the German Initiative to campaign against the Young Plan, which the Hugenberg newspapers hailed as the most important political development. Hugenberg saw the referendum as the beginning of the counterrevolution, writing at the time that thanks to him "a front has arisen that knows only one goal: how the revolution [of 1918] can be overcome and a nation of free men can again be made from Germans". To achieve this goal, Hugenberg took 551,000 Reichsmarks from
59500-510: The Republic. Lambach ended his article by writing that the DNVP needed a Volkskonservatismus (popular conservatism) that addressed the concerns of ordinary Germans and that restoring the monarchy was not one of them. Hugenberg was the leader of the DNVP monarchist purists for whom no changes in the party's platform were acceptable, and he started to press for the DNVP to expel Lambach as a way of bringing down Westarp, who only agreed to censure Lambach for his article. At Hugenberg's instigation,
59850-427: The Rhineland (the so-called " Black Horror on the Rhine "), claiming that African and Asian men were genetically programmed to rape white women with DNVP politician Käthe Schirmacher stating in a speech: "The lust of white, yellow and black Frenchmen for German women leads to daily violence!" Schirmacher wrote in her diary in 1919 that: "The only thing uniting us with Poland is our common hatred of Juda". It favoured
60200-413: The Scandinavian nations and the nations of the Balkans, which would be dominated by the Reich. Finally, the Hugenberg–Class memo called for a policy of colonization in Eastern Europe, where the German state would settle thousands of German farmers in the land annexed from the Russian Empire . On 7 November 1914, Hugenberg and Class presented their memo before the Central Association of German Industrialists,
60550-433: The Scherl corporation for discretionary spending and another 400,000 for "special purposes", all of which he spent on the referendum. However, he recognized that the DNVP and their elite band of allies did not have enough popular support to carry a rejection of the scheme through. As such, Hugenberg felt that he needed a nationalist with support amongst the working classes whom he could use to whip up popular sentiment against
60900-422: The Social Democrats as "social fascists" was not reported by the Hugenberg press, which instead portrayed the KPD and the SPD as working together for a revolution. The Hugenberg papers argued that only the DNVP could save Germany from revolution, and that democracy and civil liberties were major impediments to battling the supposed Marxist revolution that was just on the verge of happening. The major beneficiaries of
61250-464: The Social Democrats won the largest number of seats in the Reichstag in the 1912 elections, Hugenberg first became interested in the media. He believed that center-right and right-wing parties such as the National Liberals and the Conservatives needed more newspapers to champion their views. As well as administering Krupp's finances with considerable success, Hugenberg also set about developing personal business interests from 1916 onwards, including
61600-450: The Treaty of Versailles. In fact, the parties of the "Grand Coalition" were in favor of a gradualist, step-by-step approach of doing away with Versailles by negotiation instead of the confrontational Katastrophenpolitik (catastrophe politics) of the early 1920s that led to the disastrous Ruhrkampf and hyper-inflation of 1923, a nuance that did not interest Hugenberg in the slightest. Hugenberg for his part regarded Katastrophenpolitik as
61950-407: The Union of Industrialists and the League of German Farmers to ask for their support, which was granted, albeit with the request that Hugenberg and Class rewrite their memo to remove some of the blunter social Darwinist language. The chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg , was initially an annexationist himself but refused to support the annexationists in public. Under the Constitution of 1871 ,
62300-437: The United States crashed on 24 October 1929 . The impact in Germany was dire: millions became unemployed and several major banks collapsed. Hitler and the Nazi Party prepared to take advantage of the emergency to gain support for their party. They promised to repudiate the Versailles Treaty, strengthen the economy, and provide jobs. The Great Depression provided a political opportunity for Hitler. Germans were ambivalent about
62650-642: The United States . By the end of 1941, German forces and the European Axis powers occupied most of Europe and North Africa . These gains were gradually reversed after 1941, and in 1945 the Allied armies defeated the German army. On 29 April 1945, he married his longtime partner, Eva Braun , in the Führerbunker in Berlin. The couple committed suicide the next day to avoid capture by the Soviet Red Army . In accordance with Hitler's wishes, their corpses were burned. The historian and biographer Ian Kershaw described Hitler as "the embodiment of modern political evil". Under Hitler's leadership and racist ideology ,
63000-410: The Weimar Republic did they make a single constructive contribution to the government of the country". At the same time, there was another equally influential fraction within the DNVP who took it for granted that it was only a matter of time before the republic disintegrated, and that the best thing to do was to maintain the current course of total opposition to the republic, secure in knowing that all of
63350-447: The Weimar Republic. Hugenberg emerged as one of the leaders of the latter faction that wanted to reject the Dawes Plan, writing bitterly at the time that "two-thirds of the German people including those behind the German National People's Party are internally prepared to let the freedom, honor and future of their land be sold in exchange for a few pieces of silver". When the vote occurred on 27 August 1924, 49 DNVP Reichstag members voted for
63700-402: The Weimar System". At the meetings to work out a policy platform for the Harzburger Front, the German historian Karl Dietrich Bracher wrote that Hugenberg made concessions to his partners in the front "with the indulgence born of assured arrogance that is fed by the certainty of being in command". The DNVP hoped to control the NSDAP through this coalition and to curb the Nazis' extremism, but
64050-413: The Weimar republic was exposed in some way to Deutsch-National influence. More women than men voted for the DNVP, and despite the party's traditionalist values, women were very active in the DNVP. The women in the DNVP came mostly from the evangelical Protestant church leagues, associations representing housewives who had become politically active during World War I and women who been active in groups like
64400-411: The Young Plan was rejected, then the French occupation of the Rhineland would continue until the summer of 1935, an aspect of Hugenberg's rejectionist strategy that he never dwelled on. Hugenberg's strategy was a negative one intended to create the "national bloc" that he envisioned meant there could be little discussion of what the "national bloc" intended to achieve, since there were too many divisions on
64750-420: The Young Plan – which actually reduced reparations – in the starkest terms possible as a form of "financial slavery" for "our children's children" which would reduce living standards in Germany down to an "Asiatic" level of poverty (at the time, the term "Asiatic" poverty referred to what today would be called a Third World living standard). By pushing for a referendum on the Young Plan, Hugenberg as intended forced
65100-485: The aim of the government "must unshakably be the removal of the Jews altogether". At the DAP, Hitler met Dietrich Eckart , one of the party's founders and a member of the occult Thule Society . Eckart became Hitler's mentor, exchanging ideas with him and introducing him to a wide range of Munich society. To increase its appeal, the DAP changed its name to the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei ( National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), now known as
65450-422: The allegations of bribery and industrial espionage, with Krupp arguing in a press article that any attack on the firm of Krupp AG was an attack on the ability of the German state to wage war by the socialist-pacifist SPD, and although several junior employees of Krupp AG were convicted of corruption, Hugenberg and the rest of the Krupp board were never indicted. In 1912, Emperor Wilhelm II personally awarded Hugenberg
65800-401: The antisemitic Christian Social Party and German Völkisch Party . Thus, the party united most of the formerly fragmented conservative spectrum of the Empire. The process that led to the DNVP began on 22 November 1918 when an ad appeared in a number of Berlin newspapers calling for a new right-wing party for "which we suggest the name of German National People's Party". The founding of the DNVP
66150-427: The aristocracy, parts of the middle class and big business. The DNVP had little appeal to Catholics and almost its entire support came from Protestant areas. The Lutheran character of the party was stressed early on, with DNVP making direct appeals to Lutheran voters. Party campaigners also made anti-Catholic appeals – a DNVP political leaftlet in Berlin read: "No Romish intrigues are going to rob us of our heritage of
66500-409: The assassination of the "traitors", which was to be DNVP's main contribution to politics for next several years. The DNVP was well known for outrageous, often childish antics such as mailing a dead dog to the French Ambassador to protest against paying reparations to France and for launching a campaign of mailing parcels containing human excrement to Social Democratic leaders. The campaign against
66850-415: The asylums". In the 1925 presidential election , the Hugenberg newspapers supported Paul von Hindenburg for president, despite Hugenberg's private reservations, as he believed Hindenburg as president would give the Republic more legitimacy. Hugenberg's principle fear was that the DNVP under the leadership of Kuno von Westarp was moving in a "Tory" direction, by which he meant that it was starting to become
67200-495: The bail-out. A month later in September 1924 the general Land association passed a resolution calling on Hergt to resign within a month if he could not form a government; as he failed to do this forced him to resign in October 1924. Initially, the change of leadership made little difference. In its platform for the Reichstag election of 7 December 1924 , the party declared the following: ″Our party remains as it was: monarchist and völkisch , Christian and social. Our goals remain
67550-456: The basis of his entire syndicate. His business transactions were filled with plans to buy and sell shares of different companies, the creation of new corporations as holding concerns to take various firms, contracts with confidants acting as middlemen and ever-present schemes to avoid taxes. Hugenberg exploited the corporate law, which he knew so well, and used his own financial acumen, which had been so finely developed, to secure his empire. He knew
67900-437: The best way of regaining popularity was to use the section of the Weimar constitution that allowed upon collecting a certain number of signatures a referendum to be held, in this case on the Young Plan . Hugenberg successfully collected enough signatures to initiate a referendum on his Freedom Law which called for cancelling the Young Plan together with all reparations. The fact that the Young Plan reduced reparations and committed
68250-407: The blame for the current problems would rest with the parties of the Weimar coalition who were willing to assume the burdens of office. In the summer of 1924, these tensions came out in the open with a vigorous display of party in-fighting over the question of whether the DNVP's MdRs (German MdR: Mitglied des Reichstags —Member of the Reichstag ) should vote for the Dawes Plan or not. Initially,
68600-421: The cabinet after five months, on the same day that the DNVP voted to disband. After that he no longer had any political influence and over time also had to cede his media holdings to the Nazis. After World War II he was interned by the British. He died in 1951. Born in Hanover to Carl Hugenberg, a royal Hanoverian official who in 1867 entered the Prussian Landtag as a member of the National Liberal Party ,
68950-442: The campaign against the leaders of the Weimar Coalition occurred in February 1922 when Walther Rathenau became Foreign Minister, which led the DNVP to launch an especially vicious anti-Semitic campaign against Rathenau claiming that "German honour" had been sullied by the appointment of "the international Jew" Rathenau as Foreign Minister, which could only be avenged with Rathenau's assassination. In an article by Wilhelm Henning , it
69300-407: The cinema or the theater, and he spent most of his free time at either his mansion in Dahlem (the most expensive district in Berlin) or his estate at Rohbraken. His only vacations were to visit the spa at Bad Kissingen once every year to treat his obesity and to visit his friend Leo Wegener in Kreuth in Bavaria about twice every year. In the words of his biographer, Hugenberg lived "...the life of
69650-499: The claim that Alois's father was Jewish. Adolf Hitler was born on 20 April 1889 in Braunau am Inn , a town in Austria-Hungary (present-day Austria), close to the border with the German Empire . He was the fourth of six children born to Alois Hitler and his third wife, Klara Pölzl . Three of Hitler's siblings—Gustav, Ida, and Otto—died in infancy. Also living in the household were Alois's children from his second marriage: Alois Jr. (born 1882) and Angela (born 1883). When Hitler
70000-417: The coming of the Great Depression in 1929. By late 1927, it was clear that the increases in agrarian tariffs that the DNVP ministers had forced through had made no impact on the continuing economic decline in the countryside, and as result a mood of palpable anger and resentment had set in the countryside of northern Germany with many DNVP voters damning their own party. The political repercussion of rural rage
70350-413: The constitution that made such a government possible), was to gradually end democracy, and he wanted Hugenberg to be a cabinet minister in the new government. Much to Hindenburg's vexation, Hugenberg refused to take part, maintaining that he would not be a cabinet minister in a government that paid reparations. In an attempt to induce Hugenberg to support the new presidential government of Heinrich Brüning,
70700-424: The costs of installing sound equipment. Between 1930 and 1933, only a limited number of UFA films were the type of "national" films that Hugenberg had envisioned when he brought UFA, and of the "national" films only Flötenkonzert von Sans-souci (1930), Yorck (1931), Im Geheimdienst (1931) and Morgenrot (1933) were successful at the box office. Despite his anti-Semitism, Hugenberg did not fire
71050-439: The country. Many Germans saw the treaty as an unjust humiliation. They especially objected to Article 231 , which they interpreted as declaring Germany responsible for the war. The Versailles Treaty and the economic, social, and political conditions in Germany after the war were later exploited by Hitler for political gain. After World War I, Hitler returned to Munich. Without formal education or career prospects, he remained in
71400-407: The crisis year of 1923 that Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz suggested that Hugenberg should pursue the chancellorship because there was no other "personality in Germany who would be so suited to bring the 'expeditious' understanding necessary for the salvation of our country and so suitable for the situation". The decision by Gustav Stresemann of the German People's Party , until then considered a part of
71750-420: The decision to adopt unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917. None of these had anything to do with the task at hand, namely to write a new constitution. The DNVP made no contribution to the drafting of the new constitution. In June 1919, the Reichstag had to ratify the Treaty of Versailles in the face of a warning from the Allies that World War I would resume if it was not ratified. The DNVP made certain that
72100-411: The defeat of 1918, all the more so as he believed the German military had not actually been defeated in 1918. In his viewpoint, because it was the "stab-in-the-back" that caused the defeat, all that was necessary was merely to remove the "traitors" from the scene in order to win the next world war that he expected to occur sometime in the near future. In Hugenberg's viewpoint, just as the Thirty Years' War
72450-491: The desired rallying together, Hugenberg supported what was known at the time as Katastrophenpolitik (catastrophe politics), believing that the worse things were, the sooner the Weimar Republic would end. After speaking in 1919, Hugenberg would not give a speech again in the Reichstag until 1929, and he rarely spoke at meetings of the Reich Association of German Industry; however, his ability to donate millions of marks to his favored causes made him an important figure within
72800-439: The effect of cementing his control. Hugenberg had purchased the UFA studio – the largest film production company in both Germany and Europe – with the aim of making right-wing "national" films, but in this case, his concern for profits overrode his ideology. The transition from silent film to talkies had imposed significant costs on UFA, which chose to mostly produce films designed for the widest possible audience in order to recoup
73150-407: The election as a non-party candidate, the DNVP strongly supported the Field Marshal. General Otto von Feldmann of the DNVP worked very closely with Hindenburg during the 1925 election as Hindenburg's "political agent". Despite the move to the center at the level of high politics, at the grass-roots of the party the opposite direction prevailed. Starting in 1924, the DNVP's newsletter for women (which
73500-448: The electoral appeal of the party. According to historian Larry Eugene Jones , the DNVP expressed "deeply ingrained anti-Catholic sentiments", and party officials went as far as proclaiming that DNVP was "bound to Protestant structures" and "did not stand for Catholic interests." German Catholics overwhelmingly refused to participate in the 1929 German referendum , displaying their disapproval of Hugenberg and his party. The Catholic clergy
73850-405: The entire nation to both win the election and then restore Germany back as a great power. The ineffectual Hergt had chosen to stay on the sidelines in order to improve his party's chances. Unusually for a DNVP politician, Tirpitz based his campaign in Munich as part of an effort to win Catholic support. In the Reichstag election of 4 May 1924 , the DNVP posted its best showing yet, winning 19% of
74200-455: The extra-parliamentary sphere with the aim of forcing the replacement of parliamentary government by an authoritarian regime. His radicalism caused the DNVP to split, with many key industrialists leaving the party. Hugenberg's first tentative media support of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came following the failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. The relationship deepened in 1929 when the DNVP and Nazis joined forces in an unsuccessful bid to stop
74550-465: The fact that the Pan-German League had taken over many of the DNVP's local branches. When the party congress opened on 20 October 1928, Westarp was on the defensive right from the start as he was forced to apologize for the DNVP's poor showing in the most recent election, and he appealed to the delegates themselves for ideas about improving the party's image, making him look like a weak leader. By contrast, Hugenberg – who while lacking in charm and charisma –
74900-492: The failure of the campaign, but he retained the links with big business that the committee had allowed him to cultivate, and this began a process of the business magnates deserting the DNVP for the Nazis. Hitler's handling of the affair was marred by one thing, and that was the premature announcement in the Nazi press of his repudiation of the alliance with the Strasser brothers , whose left-wing economics were incompatible with Hugenberg's arch-capitalism. On 6 January 1930, Hugenberg
75250-468: The family moved to Lambach. The eight-year-old Hitler took singing lessons, sang in the church choir, and even considered becoming a priest. In 1898, the family returned permanently to Leonding. Hitler was deeply affected by the death of his younger brother Edmund in 1900 from measles . Hitler changed from a confident, outgoing, conscientious student to a morose, detached boy who constantly fought with his father and teachers. Paula Hitler recalled how Adolf
75600-461: The far right was going through a process of reconciliation with the Weimar Republic, but this ended under Hugenberg, who renewed earlier DNVP calls for its immediate destruction. Under his direction, a new DNVP manifesto appeared in 1931, demonstrating the shift to the right. Amongst its demands were immediate restoration of the Hohenzollern monarchy , a reversal of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles , compulsory military conscription, repossession of
75950-406: The field", had been "stabbed in the back" on the home front by civilian leaders, Jews, Marxists , and those who signed the armistice that ended the fighting—later dubbed the "November criminals". The Treaty of Versailles stipulated that Germany had to relinquish several of its territories and demilitarise the Rhineland . The treaty imposed economic sanctions and levied heavy reparations on
76300-463: The first reading of the bill on 12 April 1930, the DNVP split with 31 representatives voting for while 23 led by Hugenberg voted against; on the second reading on 14 April 32 DNVP representatives voted for the bill while 20 voted against. That Hugenberg was incapable of controlling his own Reichstag delegation led Hitler to openly mock him as a weak leader. When the bill was enacted under Article 48 (that is, by presidential decree), Hugenberg ordered
76650-425: The foreign minister and the removal of Otto Braun as Prussian minister-president together with the rest of the Social Democrats from the Prussian government. The British historian Edgar Feuchtwanger commented that the demand that the Anglophobic Admiral von Tirpitz be appointed Chancellor at a time when the British government was applying heavy pressure on France to reduce reparations on Germany showed that DNVP had
77000-494: The former Emperor Wilhelm II from returning to Germany, an aspect of the law that greatly offended the DNVP at the time. By 1927, many of the DNVP's supporters, especially the Junkers had concluded the restoration of the monarchy was not possible, and so successfully pressured Westarp into voting for a renewal of the law rather than see the DNVP walk out of the government and thereby lose a chance for higher tariffs on agricultural imports. Westarp attempted to justify his support of
77350-408: The foundation for a strong German state. For that reason we resist the undermining, un-German spirit in all forms, whether it stems from Jewish or other circles. We are emphatically opposed to the prevalence of Judaism in the government and public life, which has emerged ever more ominously since the revolution. The flow of foreigners across our borders is to be prohibited. The same platform called for
77700-453: The fraction of the DNVP mostly closely associated with the Pan-German League had started a major effort to take over the party's grass-roots to prevent another "betrayal", a slow, but steady process that would ultimately prove the undoing of Count von Westarp. During its time in the government, the DNVP made a major push for higher tariffs on agricultural products from abroad, which pleased the party's powerful rural wing, but came to grief over
78050-401: The government to ban organizations that attempted to undermine the constitutionally established republican form of government. Only the DNVP, the Communists and the Bavarian People's Party (BVP) voted against the law, with every other party voting for it. Wirth would have liked to use the new law to ban the DNVP, but was unable to do so because no links could be established between the DNVP and
78400-410: The government, and chose not to run in 1928, claiming very publicly that the DNVP needed more aggressive leaders than Westarp. The man Tirpitz chose to continue his work of winning Bavaria for the DNVP, General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck did not have the same mass appeal and in 1928, the DNVP won only half the vote in Bavaria that it managed to do in December 1924. The disastrous showing at the polls in
78750-416: The grounds that Germany should not have to pay any reparations, and that those ministers who signed the Young Plan on behalf of the Reich government and those who voted for the Young Plan in the Reichstag should be prosecuted for high treason. Hugenberg made much of the fact that Young Plan was not scheduled to end until 1988, which he portrayed in stark terms as forcing generations of Germans to live under
79100-478: The head of state and government, with absolute power. Domestically, Hitler implemented numerous racist policies and sought to deport or kill German Jews . His first six years in power resulted in rapid economic recovery from the Great Depression , the abrogation of restrictions imposed on Germany after World War I, and the annexation of territories inhabited by millions of ethnic Germans, which initially gave him significant popular support. One of Hitler's key goals
79450-422: The height of its influence, some 1,600 newspapers in Germany subscribed to the Telegraphen-Union , making it an effective competitor to the Telegraph Bureau, owned by the liberal and Jewish journalist Theodor Wolff . Hugenberg had founded the TU to compete with the Telegraph Bureau following complaints from German conservatives of "liberal bias" at the Wolff-owned Telegraph Bureau. Though the Telegraphen-Union
79800-422: The hundreds of thousands of German farmers that he expected to soon be settled in Eastern Europe. After Germany's defeat in 1918 put an end to the plans to settle German farmers in the Lebensraum (living space) of Eastern Europe, Hugenberg used the money that had been allocated to the colonization schemes in Eastern Europe to buy up newspapers. Believing that Bethmann Hollweg was not one of them, Hugenberg, like
80150-554: The hypnotic effect of his rhetoric on large audiences, and of his eyes in small groups. Alfons Heck , a former member of the Hitler Youth, recalled: We erupted into a frenzy of nationalistic pride that bordered on hysteria. For minutes on end, we shouted at the top of our lungs, with tears streaming down our faces: Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil! From that moment on, I belonged to Adolf Hitler body and soul. Early followers included Rudolf Hess , former air force ace Hermann Göring , and army captain Ernst Röhm . Röhm became head of
80500-477: The idea of a Jewish conspiracy, linking international finance with Bolshevism . The programme of the Nazi Party was laid out in their 25-point programme on 24 February 1920. This did not represent a coherent ideology, but was a conglomeration of received ideas which had currency in the völkisch Pan-Germanic movement, such as ultranationalism , opposition to the Treaty of Versailles , distrust of capitalism , as well as some socialist ideas. For Hitler,
80850-588: The immediate demands of industrialists for practical solutions and he reverted to the simplistic solutions espoused by the Pan-Germans since the prewar era". Hugenberg's social Darwinist views remained unchanged as he argued that the "survival of the fittest" should become "the life principle of development", a stance that put him at odds with the leaders of the left wing of the DNVP such as Hans Schlange-Schöningen , Gottfried Treviranus, Walther Lambach, and Gustav Hülser, men who shared his vehement opposition to Marxism, but were opposed to his harsh social Darwinism. Amongst
81200-400: The impression that the belief in the "stab-in-the-back" was the objective truth, while those opposed were people subjectively pursuing their own agenda. To reinforce the point, the Hugenberg papers blamed every conceivable problem in Germany on the defeat of 1918 while painting a counter-factual picture of the Empire being a utopia had the war ended in victory in 1918. In cities such as Berlin,
81550-416: The independent farmer or small businessman as the ideal German. He believed in social Darwinism , despised communism, socialism and trade unions, and was in general skeptical of big business and finance. He thought that Germany needed an authoritarian government – ideally a monarchy – and strongly supported nationalism and imperialism in the belief that Germany could be secure only as a great power. The fall of
81900-401: The issues surrounding Germany's reparations payments , in the belief that a return to the economic chaos of hyperinflation would bring down the Republic. Hugenberg became chairman of the DNVP after the party's substantial losses in the 1928 Reichstag elections . He obtained "dictatorial" leadership powers and tried to transform the party into a "Hugenberg movement". He also shifted emphasis to
82250-439: The keynote speech, in which he stated "Our new party, in which friendly right-wing parties have united, has no past and rejects any responsibility for the past. We have a present, and God willing, a good future", to which the delegates shouted "But without the Jews!" The task of writing out a common platform acceptable to all fell to a committee headed by Ulrich von Hassell . Reflecting a strong anti-Semitic orientation, right from
82600-416: The late 19th century there had been tension on the German right between traditional conservatives and the more radical populist völkisch elements, saying: "Even the German National People's Party, itself with many fascistic characteristics, could only uneasily accommodate the new strength of the populist forces on the radical Right". At the founding convention in December 1918, Siegfried von Kardorff gave
82950-537: The late 19th century, further reinforced his commitment to doing his part in bringing about the revival of Germany. Hugenberg was one of a number of Pan-Germans to become involved in the National Liberal Party in the runup to the First World War . During the war, his views shifted sharply to the right. Accordingly, he switched his allegiance to the Fatherland Party and became one of its leading members, emphasizing territorial expansion and anti-Semitism as his two main political issues. In 1919 Hugenberg followed most of
83300-423: The law he had once opposed by arguing that it was really aimed at the Communists while at the same time claiming the DNVP was opposed in principle to the Law for the Protection of the Republic. A further problem for the DNVP was the rise of rural rage in the late 1920s. By 1927, though Germany itself was overall very prosperous, a steep economic decline had begun in rural areas, which was only to greatly worsen with
83650-466: The law to pass. Hitler was able to use Hugenberg to push himself into the political mainstream, and once the Young Plan was passed by the Reichstag , Hitler promptly ended his links with Hugenberg. Leopold noted that Hugenberg's polarizing strategy to divide Germany into two blocs had, starting with the Young Plan referendum, worked successfully, but the man who benefitted was not Hugenberg as intended, but rather Hitler. Hitler publicly blamed Hugenberg for
84000-450: The leader. In an editorial, the New York World wrote "To any German who wishes his country to enjoy the benefit of an international loan, it must be sufficiently obvious that the mere mention of the bearded hero of the submarine offensive is madness pure and simple" while The Daily Telegraph of London wrote in a leader (editorial) that the prospect of Tirpitz becoming Chancellor was "a masterpiece of folly". The French government issued
84350-461: The local offices "...tended to accept hard-line propaganda literally, but the interest groups which filled the party's coffers insisted on coalition and compromise. Parliamentary leaders schooled in rationalizing varied principles followed the dictates of lobbyists in the Reichstag , but then reverted to an ideological approach when on the stump...Radicals exploited the divergence of principle and practice. Had party leaders instructed their electorate in
84700-402: The luxury of not suggesting a "realistic alternative" to the Young Plan. This was especially the case as the French government had agreed that in exchange for German acceptance of the Young Plan that France would end its occupation of the Rhineland in the summer of 1930, which was five years earlier than the Treaty of Versailles had called for. At the time, Hugenberg's critics pointed out that if
85050-472: The management of Krupp AG was of some interest to the state, and Emperor Wilhelm II did not believe that a woman was capable of running a business. To solve this perceived problem, the Emperor had Bertha marry a career diplomat, Gustav von Bohlen und Halbach , who was regarded by the Emperor as a safe man to run Krupp AG. Gustav Krupp, as he was renamed by Wilhelm, knew little about running a business and so depended on his board to assist him. Hugenberg's role in
85400-417: The management of Krupp AG was thus considerably larger than would be indicated by his title of director of finance; in many ways, he was the man who effectively ran the Krupp corporation during his ten years at the firm between 1908 and 1918. During his time at Krupp AG, Hugenberg was known for his "inflexibility", "stubbornness", and "self-righteousness" as he constantly fought with the two unions representing
85750-429: The many Jews who worked at UFA as directors, script-writers, actors, etc. as he did not want to lose any talent to rival studios. Hugenberg had a grand strategy to bring down "the System" as enemies of the Weimar Republic always called it. Hugenberg believed in the politics of polarization under which German politics were to be divided into two blocs, the right-wing "national" bloc whose leader he envisioned as himself and
86100-455: The meaning "one who lives in a hut". Nazi official Hans Frank suggested that Alois's mother had been employed as a housekeeper by a Jewish family in Graz , and that the family's 19-year-old son Leopold Frankenberger had fathered Alois, a claim that came to be known as the Frankenberger thesis . No Frankenberger was registered in Graz during that period, no record has been produced of Leopold Frankenberger's existence, so historians dismiss
86450-523: The most important aspect of it was its strong anti-Semitic stance. He also perceived the programme as primarily a basis for propaganda and for attracting people to the party. In 1923, Hitler enlisted the help of World War I General Erich Ludendorff for an attempted coup known as the " Beer Hall Putsch ". The Nazi Party used Italian Fascism as a model for their appearance and policies. Hitler wanted to emulate Benito Mussolini 's " March on Rome " of 1922 by staging his own coup in Bavaria, to be followed by
86800-413: The neo-paganism of one of its members, Alfred Rosenberg, and urged voters to choose the DNVP. At the same time, the NSDAP ridiculed the DNVP as the party of monarchist reactionaries without a clue as to how to deal with the Great Depression and who cared only for the rich. On 20 July 1932, during the run-up to the Reichstag election of 31 June, the von Papen government carried out the Preußenschlag ,
87150-472: The officer corps. Brüning's austerity measures brought little economic improvement and were extremely unpopular. Hitler exploited this by targeting his political messages specifically at people who had been affected by the inflation of the 1920s and the Depression, such as farmers, war veterans, and the middle class. Although Hitler had terminated his Austrian citizenship in 1925, he did not acquire German citizenship for almost seven years. This meant that he
87500-413: The onset of intense father-son conflicts caused by Hitler's refusal to conform to the strict discipline of his school. Alois tried to browbeat his son into obedience, while Adolf did his best to be the opposite of whatever his father wanted. Alois would also beat his son, although his mother tried to protect him from regular beatings. Alois Hitler's farming efforts at Hafeld ended in failure, and in 1897
87850-417: The orders of his army superiors, Hitler applied to join the party, and within a week was accepted as party member 555 (the party began counting membership at 500 to give the impression they were a much larger party). Hitler made his earliest known written statement about the Jewish question in a 16 September 1919 letter to Adolf Gemlich (now known as the Gemlich letter ). In the letter, Hitler argues that
88200-407: The other parties in the Reichstag were going to vote for the treaty, and then voted against it. The DNVP was secure in the knowledge that its vote would not cause the resumption of the war while the odium of Versailles would be borne by the other parties. Afterwards, the DNVP started a racist campaign against the presence of Senegalese and Vietnamese troops serving in the French army of occupation in
88550-492: The outcome of the libel case was due to a conservative judge who disliked democracy. The judge's bias could be seen in that the judge went out of his way in his ruling to praise Helfferich for his "patriotic motives" in attacking Erzberger. In the run-up to the Kapp Putsch of March 1920, the DNVP leaders were informed by Wolfgang Kapp in February 1920 that a putsch to overthrow the government would soon occur, and asked for their support. Kapp received an equivocal answer, but
88900-401: The pact only served to strengthen the NSDAP by giving it access to funding and political respectability while obscuring the DNVP's own less extreme platform. The Harzburger Front proved to be a failure, and by the end of 1931 the National Socialists were increasingly lashing out against their nominal allies. In February 1932 over the course of long talks, the DNVP and the NSDAP failed to agree on
89250-441: The parties of the Weimar coalition did not have a two-thirds majority in the Reichstag , it was clear that the DNVP would have to vote for the Dawes Plan to have it ratified. The American banks had demanded as one of the conditions of the loan that the Reich government put up the state-owned Deutsche Reichsbahn railroad as collateral , but the 1919 constitution stated the Reichsbahn could not be used as collateral. Thus to receive
89600-405: The party forever if its MdRs voted against the Dawes Plan. The Dawes Plan was a crucial element in the international attempt to stabilise the German economy after hyper-inflation had destroyed the German economy in 1923, and the economic lobbying groups that supported the DNVP were appalled at the party's intention to reject the Dawes Plan, and thereby risk a return to the economic chaos of 1923. As
89950-435: The party from splitting in two, it was announced that the vote on the Dawes Plan would be a free vote with no party discipline and accordingly DNVP MdRs would vote on the Dawes Plan as they saw fit. The vote on the Dawes Plan on 29 August 1924 was described as "one of the most dramatically moving votes ever experienced by the German Reichstag , since the final result remained uncertain until the very last minute". About half of
90300-518: The party headquarters would remain in Munich. The committee agreed, and he rejoined the party on 26 July as member 3,680. Hitler continued to face some opposition within the Nazi Party. Opponents of Hitler in the leadership had Hermann Esser expelled from the party, and they printed 3,000 copies of a pamphlet attacking Hitler as a traitor to the party. In the following days, Hitler spoke to several large audiences and defended himself and Esser, to thunderous applause. His strategy proved successful, and at
90650-400: The party in December 1929 to form the more moderate Conservative People's Party . The DNVP rebels objected in particular to the part of the "Freedom Law" which called for the prosecution of President Paul von Hindenburg on charges of high treason for fulfilling his constitutional obligation by signing the Young Plan into law after it been passed by the Reichstag . The rebels also objected to
91000-401: The party moved to the far-right and reclaimed its reactionary nationalist and anti-republican rhetoric and changed its strategy to mass mobilisation, plebiscites, and support of authoritarian rule by the president instead of work by parliamentary means. At the same time, it lost many votes to Adolf Hitler 's rising Nazi Party. Several prominent Nazis began their careers in the DNVP. After 1929,
91350-527: The party of the approach of the party's leader, Kuno von Westarp, charging that he was betraying the party's principles. In 1927, the Scherl press published Hugenberg's essays of 1925 as Streiflichter aus Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (Highlights from Past and Present), in which he attacked the policies associated with Westarp and implicitly challenged his competence to be the DNVP's leader. In March 1927, Hugenberg purchased UFA , Europe's largest film studio, which brought him further attention. Hugenberg presented
91700-417: The party's grass-roots ever since the Dawes Plan vote of 1924, and who wanted a return to the politics of the early 1920s. Hugenberg and Heinrich Class , the League's leader had been friends since the 1890s, and Hugenberg was a founding member of the League. Reflecting this background, Hugenberg proved himself to be a consistent champion of German imperialism , and one of the major themes of his time as leader
92050-425: The party's grass-roots, especially the more hardline fraction that disapproved of participation in the government while all the time insisting that he was staying faithful to the party's original platform of relentless opposition to the republic, which made him look both insincere and unprincipled. This was particularly the case because Westarp continued to maintain that he was a monarchist utterly committed to restoring
92400-440: The party's leaders did not inform the government a putsch was being planned. During the Kapp Putsch of March 1920, the DNVP took an ambiguous stance, reflecting a strong sympathy for the aims of the putsch without coming entirely in support out of the fear that the putsch might fail. One of the DNVP leaders, Gottfried Traub served as "Minister of Church and Cultural Affairs" in Kapp's provisional government while Paul Bang of
92750-440: The patriarchal authority to their workers, granting them higher wages and even junior shares in Krupp AG, in exchange for which the workers would be subservient and loyal to die Firma ("the firm") as Krupp AG was always called. Very little came of his plans for a Werksgemeinschaft , and living conditions and wages for the workers at die Firma did not change very much during Hugenberg's time. Hugenberg's interest in having
93100-420: The political mainstream just as the Great Depression was beginning. Hugenberg had wanted to keep the Reichsausschuß going even after the failure of the Freedom Law referendum, but the Reichsausschuß dissolved in the spring of 1930 when the National Socialists walked out of it. When Hugenberg was forced in April 1930 to temporarily vote for the "presidential government" of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning that he
93450-479: The proposed anti-Young Plan bill to be submitted in the referendum was called – stipulating that those Reichstag members who voted for the Young Plan and those civil servants who handed over reparations were to be imprisoned, was inserted by Hitler and accepted by Hugenberg, who believed it would attract voters. Paragraph four of the "Freedom Law" instead divided the DNVP. Westarp and several other DNVP Reichstag members came out in opposition, arguing that paragraph four
93800-417: The proposed restructuring of Germany's reparations payments known as the Dawes Plan , which the DNVP denounced as the "second Versailles". Part of the restructuring was an 800 million Reichsmark loan provided primarily by a consortium of Wall Street banks led by the House of Morgan that would help stabilize the currency after the hyper-inflation of 1923 that had all but destroyed the economy. Helfferich,
94150-442: The prosecution of the entire Cabinet for endorsing the Young Plan and all of the MdRs for voting to ratify the plan, which the rebel faction called the height of demagogy. In the first 15 months of being led by the abrasive Hugenberg the DNVP was to lose 43 out of its 78 MdRs. Many Ruhr industrialists who normally supported the DNVP such as Abraham Frowein , Clemens Lammers , Carl Friedrich von Siemens , and Paul Silverberg signed
94500-510: The public sector to pursue a career in business, and in 1909 he was appointed chairman of the supervisory board of Krupp Steel where he built up a close personal and political relationship with Baron Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach , the CEO of Krupp AG. Krupp had been "in search of a man of really superior intelligence" to run the finance department of Krupp AG and found that man in Hugenberg, with his "extraordinary" intelligence and work ethic. In 1902, Friedrich Alfred Krupp 's homosexuality
94850-501: The purchase of UFA as a political move instead of a business move. The Hugenberg newspapers loudly announced that UFA had been brought to prevent "republicans, Jews and internationalists" from making any more films at UFA. The DNVP suffered heavy losses in the 1928 election , leading to the appointment of Hugenberg as sole chairman on 21 October that same year. Hugenberg moved the party in a far more radical direction than it had taken under its previous leader, Kuno Graf von Westarp . After
95200-419: The realities of politics, the DVNP might have evolved into the dynamic conservative party that some Reichstag delegates belateldly envisioned." In October 1928, Hugenberg, leader of the party's hardliner wing, became chairman. Hugenberg returned the party to a course of fundamental opposition against the Republic with a greater emphasis on nationalism and reluctant co-operation with the Nazi Party . Hugenberg
95550-403: The referendum on the Young Plan, but rather the referendum was intended to be in the modern parlance a wedge issue that would polarize politics and create a situation where one would either be for or against the "national" camp. The American historian John Leopold wrote that "Hugenberg debated political issues in terms of a simplistic, philosophic disjunction—a man was either for the nation or he
95900-442: The rest of his life: Later in 1891, Hugenberg co-founded, along with Karl Peters , the ultra-nationalist General German League, and in 1894 its successor movement, the Pan-German League ( German : Alldeutscher Verband ). From 1894 to 1899, Hugenberg worked as a Prussian civil servant in Posen (modern Poznań, Poland ). In 1900, he married his second cousin, Gertrud Adickes (1868–1960), with whom he had four children. Gertrude
96250-422: The rest of the annexationists, spent the years 1914 to 1917 attacking him as essentially a traitor. In 1915, Hugenberg published a telegram to Class in the name of the united chambers of commerce of the Ruhr , demanding that Wilhelm II dismiss Bethmann Hollweg and if the emperor was unwilling, that the military should depose Bethmann Hollweg, stating that if the Reich failed to achieve the annexationist platform once
96600-401: The restoration of the monarchy was no longer possible and that for almost all Germans under the age of thirty the DNVP's incessant talk of bringing back the monarchy was irrelevant at best and downright offputting at worse. Lambach wrote that for conservative Germans President Hindenburg had long since replaced the former Kaiser as the object of their affections and that the DNVP's poor showing in
96950-413: The rules of the game and manipulated them to full advantage." Hugenberg remained at Krupp until 1918, when he set out to build his own business, and during the Great Depression he was able to buy up dozens of local newspapers. Hugenberg's increasing involvement in Pan-German and annexationist causes together with his interest in building a media empire caused him to depart from Krupp, which he found to be
97300-425: The rural areas and small towns of Germany exclusively reprinted articles written by TU journalists for their national and international news. During the Weimar Republic, Germany had about 3,000 newspapers, of which only 14 were owned by Hugenberg. It was via the TU that some 1,600 newspapers, mostly in rural areas and small towns, used for national and international news that Hugenberg had influence. Although Hugenberg
97650-420: The same as our name: German and national. Our colours remain black, white and red: our resolution is firmer than ever: to create a Germany free of Jewish control and French domination, free from parliamentary intrigue and the populist rule of big capital". Those parties that had voted against the Dawes Plan lost seats while that had voted for the Dawes Plan gained seats, which as half the DNVP caucus had voted for
98000-448: The same time, Hugenberg became involved in a scheme in the Province of Posen in which the Prussian Settlement Commission bought land from Poles in order to settle ethnic Germans there. In 1899, Hugenberg called for "annihilation of Polish population". Hugenberg was strongly anti-Polish, and criticized the Prussian government for its "inadequate" Polish policies, favoring a more vigorous policy of Germanization . Hugenberg initially took
98350-459: The sort of national unity that he wanted, Hugenberg came to define his Sammlungspolitik in negative terms by seeking to find "enemies" to provide a unity in hatred. In his first speech before the Reichstag , Hugenberg called the Finance Minister, Matthias Erzberger , a "traitor" for having signed the Armistice of 1918 , and claimed his policies as Finance minister were meant to bind the Reich to "international economic slavery". To create
98700-494: The start Jews were banned from joining the DNVP. In the elections on 19 January 1919 for the National Assembly that was to write the new constitution, the DNVP produced a pamphlet entitled "The Jews—Germany's vampires!" Generally hostile towards the republican Weimar constitution , the DNVP spent most of the inter-war period in opposition. Of the 19 cabinets between 1919 and 1932, the DNVP took part in only two governments and their total period in office over this 13-year period
99050-410: The state in his efforts to build a media empire, all the more so as the state distrusted the liberal newspapers owned by the Ullstein brothers and by Rudolf Mosse , all of whom were Jewish, leading the state to request that a circle of "patriotic" businessmen lend Hugenberg the necessary funds to buy up newspapers. The most important of Hugenberg's allies in lending him the money were various members of
99400-410: The strongest pillars of democracy in Germany. In this way, the DNVP finally achieved its long sought goal of removing the Braun government. In the Reichstag election of 31 July 1932 , the DNVP posted its worst result ever, winning only 5.9% of the vote while the NSDAP won 37%. On 12 September 1932 the DNVP and the DVP were the only parties to vote for the von Papen government when it was defeated on
99750-459: The subject of immense hatred from Hugenberg. In November 1923, when the Nazis launched the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, they received significant coverage in the Hugenberg newspapers for the first time. Adolf Hitler and the other Nazi leaders were portrayed as well-meaning but misguided patriots who were trying to end the Weimar Republic in the wrong way. In an editorial in the Hugenberg-owned München-Augsburger Abendzeitung newspaper, Hitler
100100-423: The targets of Nazi stink bombs and heckling while the DNVP politician Countess Helene von Watter was threatened with a beating by Nazis. Another DNVP politician (Theodor Duesterberg) was heckled with shouts of "Jew boy!" while Baron Axel von Freytagh-Loringhoven of the DNVP was accused of high treason for having allegedly fought against Germany as an Imperial Russian Army officer in World War I. Goebbels organized
100450-404: The time, he stated that what Germany needed was a leader who had the charisma to "attract the masses behind him like the Pied Piper of Hamelin ...Only a few will and can do this. We, the entire spectrum of non-socialists, can do no more than prepare the way for these few. Hopefully we will find that which we desire." In this spirit, Hugenberg declared one could "not be radical enough". It was during
100800-490: The trial of two Reichswehr officers, Lieutenants Richard Scheringer and Hanns Ludin , in late 1930. Both were charged with membership in the Nazi Party, at that time illegal for Reichswehr personnel. The prosecution argued that the Nazi Party was an extremist party, prompting defence lawyer Hans Frank to call on Hitler to testify. On 25 September 1930, Hitler testified that his party would pursue political power solely through democratic elections, which won him many supporters in
101150-401: The von Papen government was to dissolve the Reichstag two years into its mandate. In a speech on 26 June 1932, Hugenberg designated the Nazis as now being an opponent of the national front . One of the DNVP's members, Count Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin wrote a pamphlet for the election entitled Der Nationalsozialismus – eine Gefahr ("National Socialism—A Menace") that attacked the NSDAP for
101500-600: The vote compared to 30% of the vote won by Hitler while Hindenburg won 49.6% of the vote. In June 1932, the DNVP became the only significant party to support Franz von Papen in his short tenure as Chancellor . Hugenberg wanted to join von Papen's government, but was vetoed by President von Hindenburg who disliked Hugenberg. However, the two DNVP men who did serve in von Papen's government, namely Baron Wilhelm von Gayl as Interior minister and Franz Gürtner as Justice Minister, where both were noted for their hostility to democracy and support for authoritarianism. The first act of
101850-404: The vote. A major problem for the DNVP throughout its entire existence was the tension caused between its tendency towards a policy of total opposition to the Weimar Republic and pressure from many of its supporters for the DNVP to participate in the government. Since the DNVP was unlikely to win the majority of the seats in the Reichstag on account of the proportional representation system, as
102200-399: The war and was central to the perpetration of the Holocaust : the genocide of about six million Jews and millions of other victims . Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn in Austria-Hungary and was raised near Linz . He lived in Vienna in the first decade of the 1900s before moving to Germany in 1913. He was decorated during his service in the German Army in World War I , receiving
102550-407: The war was won, it would cause a revolution from the right that would end the monarchy. It was Hugenberg's interest in mobilizing support for the annexationists and bringing down Bethmann Hollweg that led him into the media, as Hugenberg in 1916 started to buy newspapers and publishing houses in order to create more organs for the expression of his imperialistic views. Hugenberg was secretly assisted by
102900-438: The welfare state as the first step towards "Bolshevism". The Nazis by contrast were treated relatively kindly by the Hugenberg papers with a Der Tag editorial saying there were no differences between the DNVP and the NSDAP on "culture and religion, the attitude towards Jewry and the will towards reconstruction in individual social and economic questions". The election ended with the DNVP being reduced to only 41 seats from 73 in
103250-487: The winter of 1928–29 to use as his wedge issue a plan for constitutional reform, but dropped it in favor of a referendum on the Young Plan when he discovered that the idea of constitutional reform was too abstract for most people, and that portraying the Young Plan as a monstrous form of financial "slavery" for our "children's children" was much more visceral, emotional and effective way of appealing to public opinion. The Canadian historian Richard Hamilton wrote that Freedom Law
103600-408: The workers own their own houses stemmed only from his interest in stopping demands for democracy and socialism. His strong social Darwinist views led him to argue that the problem of poverty was a genetic problem, with the poor inheriting bad genes that made them unsuccessful in life. Improving their living standards for him was only necessary to halt demands for political and social change as opposed to
103950-402: The workers, one allied with the Social Democrats (SPD) and the other with the Centre Party . Hugenberg did not approve of either union and instead sponsored a "yellow" union representing the management, making his tenure a time of endless disputes with the workers. Hugenberg favored the idea of a Werksgemeinschaft ( transl. economic community ), where the Krupp family would act as
104300-525: The world's greatest power. In September 1914, Hugenberg and Class co-wrote a memorandum setting out the annexationist platform, which demanded that, once the war was won, Germany would annex Belgium and northern France, British sea power would end, and Russia would be reduced to the "frontiers existing at the time of Peter the Great". Beyond that, Germany was to annex all of the British, French and Belgian colonies in sub-Saharan Africa and create an "economic union" embracing Germany, France, Austria-Hungary , Italy,
104650-455: The young Hugenberg studied law in Göttingen , Heidelberg , and Berlin , as well as economics in Strassburg . As a child, he had a love of writing poetry, which was strongly discouraged by his father who instead raised Hugenberg to be a bureaucrat like himself. In 1891, Hugenberg was awarded a PhD at Strassburg for his dissertation Internal Colonization in Northwest Germany , in which he set out three ideas that guided his political thought for
105000-448: Was Lebensraum ( lit. ' living space ' ) for the German people in Eastern Europe, and his aggressive, expansionist foreign policy is considered the primary cause of World War II in Europe . He directed large-scale rearmament and, on 1 September 1939, invaded Poland, causing Britain and France to declare war on Germany . In June 1941, Hitler ordered an invasion of the Soviet Union . In December 1941, he declared war on
105350-401: Was stateless , legally unable to run for public office, and still faced the risk of deportation. On 25 February 1932, the interior minister of Brunswick , Dietrich Klagges , who was a member of the Nazi Party, appointed Hitler as administrator for the state's delegation to the Reichsrat in Berlin, making Hitler a citizen of Brunswick, and thus of Germany. Hitler ran against Hindenburg in
105700-399: Was "power and the use of power". Influenced by Otto von Bismarck and Wilhelm II, Hugenberg believed in Sammlungspolitik ("the politics of rallying together") to create a broad national opposition to the Weimar Republic and to hold together the DNVP, which had strong fissiparous tendencies. Unable to find positive goals that were capable of holding the DNVP together, let alone of creating
106050-411: Was 27 months. The party was largely supported by landowners, especially from the agricultural, conservative and Protestant Prussian east ( East Elbia ), and wealthy industrialists, moreover by monarchist academics, pastors, high-ranking government officials, farmers, craftsmen, small traders, nationalist white-collar and blue-collar workers. Because most of the Protestant aristocracy, high civil servants,
106400-474: Was Hugenberg's attempt to create on a more institutional basis the Reichsausschuß of 1929, and under his leadership, thereby form the "national bloc" that he confidently believed would sweep him into power in the near-future. Wheeler-Bennett called the Harzburg rally "the formal declaration of war by the parties of the Right against the Brüning government-a concentration of all the forces of reaction, both past and present, in one great demonstration of hostility to
106750-608: Was a national-conservative and monarchist political party in Germany during the Weimar Republic . Before the rise of the Nazi Party , it was the major nationalist party in Weimar Germany. It was an alliance of conservative , nationalist , monarchist, völkisch , and antisemitic elements supported by the Pan-German League . Ideologically, the party was described as subscribing to authoritarian conservatism , German nationalism, monarchism, and from 1931 onwards also to corporatism in economic policy. It held anti-communist , anti-Catholic , and antisemitic views. On
107100-463: Was a response to the November Revolution of 1918 and the sense of extreme crisis it had engendered amongst the German right, where there were widespread fears that society was on the verge of destruction. As a result of the crisis atmosphere of late 1918, a very wide assortment of different parties came together to form the DNVP. This proved to be as much weakness as a strength as the DNVP had strong fissiparous tendencies throughout its existence, which
107450-418: Was a teenage bully who would often slap her. Alois had made a successful career in the customs bureau and wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. Hitler later dramatised an episode from this period when his father took him to visit a customs office, depicting it as an event that gave rise to an unforgiving antagonism between father and son, who were both strong-willed. Ignoring his son's desire to attend
107800-418: Was a weak leader who let republican elements into the party. Hugenberg was helped by the fact that only 15% of DVNP voters were party members, and the local party offices were dominated by members of the local aristocracy, retired civil servants from the Wilhelmine era and professional lobbyists, making the membership of the DVNP far more right-wing than its voters. The American historian John Leopold noted that
108150-405: Was able to present himself as a man with a definite plan to restore the party's fortunes. The fact that the members of the Pan-German League were overrepresented at the party congress further favored Hugenberg, who was elected the DNVP's new leader on 21 October 1928. As part of his campaign against Westarp, Hugenberg stressed his success as a businessman, but at the same time he also stressed that he
108500-449: Was against it". This was especially the case because the "Grand Coalition" government of the Social Democratic Chancellor Hermann Müller was composed of the left-wing SPD, the right of center Catholic Zentrum , the liberal DDP and the moderate conservative DVP—in short all of the parties that Hugenberg was seeking to destroy by forcing them to defend the Young Plan, and therefore making it seem they were in favor of paying reparations and
108850-430: Was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 until his suicide in 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party , becoming the chancellor in 1933 and then taking the title of Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934. His invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 marked the start of the Second World War . He was closely involved in military operations throughout
109200-428: Was an autobiography and exposition of his ideology. The book laid out Hitler's plans for transforming German society into one based on race. Throughout the book, Jews are equated with "germs" and presented as the "international poisoners" of society. According to Hitler's ideology, the only solution was their extermination. While Hitler did not describe exactly how this was to be accomplished, his "inherent genocidal thrust
109550-437: Was brought up in the family of Hiedler's brother, Johann Nepomuk Hiedler . In 1876, Alois was made legitimate and his baptismal record annotated by a priest to register Johann Georg Hiedler as Alois's father (recorded as "Georg Hitler"). Alois then assumed the surname "Hitler", also spelled "Hiedler", "Hüttler" , or "Huettler" . The name is probably based on the German word Hütte ( lit. ' hut ' ), and has
109900-452: Was claimed Rathenau was somehow involved with the assassination of Count Wilhelm von Mirbach , the German ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1918, and that the fact that Rathenau did not mention Mirbach's assassination during his visit to the Soviet Union in April 1922 being presented as proof that Rathenau had a hand in Mirbach's death. When Rathenau was assassinated on 24 June 1922, the Zentrum Chancellor Joseph Wirth angrily turned towards
110250-512: Was convinced that Hitler still owed a debt of some sort which he would have to repay by deferring to him. On 10 February 1931 Hugenberg joined the Nazi Party in walking with the DNVP out of the Reichstag altogether as a protest against the Brüning government. By then, the two parties were in a very loose federation, known as the National Opposition. German National People%27s Party Defunct Defunct The German National People's Party ( German : Deutschnationale Volkspartei , DNVP )
110600-470: Was critical of the German Right and was hostile towards the DNVP; the party was openly denounced and attacked by members of the Catholic clergy, such as the Archbishop of Breslau Adolf Bertram or Bishop of Trier Franz Rudolf Bornewasser . German Catholics were also prohibited from joining right-wing paramilitary organizations such as the Young German Order and DNVP-affiliated Stahlhelm , and Catholic bishops barred Catholics and clergymen from sitting in
110950-451: Was depressed but calm when arrested on 11 November 1923 for high treason . His trial before the special People's Court in Munich began in February 1924, and Alfred Rosenberg became temporary leader of the Nazi Party. On 1 April, Hitler was sentenced to five years' imprisonment at Landsberg Prison . There, he received friendly treatment from the guards, and was allowed mail from supporters and regular visits by party comrades. Pardoned by
111300-473: Was described as "non-partisan", its coverage of both national and foreign news tended to be very sympathetic towards right-wing political parties opposed to the Weimar Republic. The Hugenberg papers constantly hammered home the message that the Weimar Republic was born of the " stab-in-the-back ", and its leaders were the "November criminals". Those who endorsed such views were always described as "the experts" while those opposed were "partisan politicians", creating
111650-693: Was even more widespread in the Mariahilf district, where Hitler then lived. Georg Ritter von Schönerer became a major influence on Hitler, and he developed an admiration for Martin Luther . Hitler read local newspapers that promoted prejudice and utilised Christian fears of being swamped by an influx of Eastern European Jews as well as pamphlets that published the thoughts of philosophers and theoreticians such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain , Charles Darwin , Friedrich Nietzsche , Gustave Le Bon , and Arthur Schopenhauer . During his life in Vienna, Hitler also developed fervent anti-Slavic sentiments . The origin and development of Hitler's anti-Semitism remains
112000-399: Was followed by the rise of Brandenburg/Prussia, and the crushing defeat of Prussia by Napoleon in 1806 was followed by the War of Liberation in 1813–1814 , so too would the Prussian-German state rise again to emerge victorious over its enemies. Hugenberg's devotion to the "social Darwinist and Nietzschean philosophies ", with their emphasis on the power of willpower that he had embraced in
112350-409: Was going too far, while the Reich Association of German Industry declared its neutrality, despite Hugenberg's efforts to have the association support him. Several industrialists such as Albert Vögler and Fritz Thyssen supported the "Freedom Law", but the majority were opposed, favoring the Young Plan since it promised economic stability; rather than risk a split, the association declared itself neutral at
112700-409: Was held, the NSDAP, DNVP and the KPD failed in their effort to force an early election in Prussia with yes side winning 37% of the vote. In its September 1931 platform adopted at a convention in Stettin laying out the party's principles, it was stated as follows: Only a strong German nationality that consciously preserves its nature and essence and keeps itself free of foreign influence can provide
113050-431: Was intended only to spark discussion. However, the Lambach case had galvanized the DNVP's membership against Westarp and for Hugenberg, who knew that the DNVP would be calling a party congress later that year that would have the power to elect a new leader, and that the Lambach affair was a godsend. Using the Lambach case as his rallying cry, Hugenberg campaigned aggressively amongst the party's membership, greatly helped by
113400-449: Was needed a "bloc" of like-minded people that would be solid as stone in upholding its values. About Hugenberg, British historian Edgar Feuchtwanger wrote: Hugenberg was an abrasive, stubborn, difficult personality, opinionated and confrontational. His emergence into a central position in right-wing politics had a very divisive effect which in the end benefited only Hitler. Many on the right, from Hindenburg downwards, including members of
113750-406: Was often described as representing the interests of the industrialists, John Leopold wrote: "His nationalist insistence on autarchy and his diametrical opposition to all forms of unionism represented not the attitude of most businessmen, but the ideology of the Pan-German League. No longer concerned with the profits and losses of any industry other than his media empire, Hugenberg was free to criticize
114100-510: Was one of the first politicians to use aircraft travel for campaigning and used it effectively. Hitler came in second in both rounds of the election, garnering more than 35 per cent of the vote in the final election. Although he lost to Hindenburg, this election established Hitler as a strong force in German politics. The absence of an effective government prompted two influential politicians, Franz von Papen and Alfred Hugenberg , along with several other industrialists and businessmen, to write
114450-463: Was otherwise opposed to, in order to prevent the entire rural wing of the DNVP from seceding over the issue of tariffs, Hitler accused Hugenberg of weakness, and terminated the NSDAP's co-operation with the DNVP. Reflecting the changed political dynamics caused by the Young Plan referendum, in the election of 14 September 1930 the DNVP's share of the vote dropped dramatically to 7% while the NSDAP's share rose up equally dramatically to 18% (compared to
114800-436: Was praised as an "exceptionally popular speaker" who had "liberated" the minds of "innumerable workers from international socialism", but the putsch was condemned on the grounds that "You must gather together and not scatter! You must bind together and not tear apart!" To end the hyperinflation of 1923, a new currency, the Reichsmark was created to replace the worthless Papiermark , reparation payments were lowered through
115150-407: Was praised by his commanding officers for his bravery. His wartime experience reinforced his German patriotism, and he was shocked by Germany's capitulation in November 1918. His displeasure with the collapse of the war effort began to shape his ideology. Like other German nationalists, he believed the Dolchstoßlegende ( stab-in-the-back myth ), which claimed that the German army, "undefeated in
115500-416: Was pure demagoguery since rejection of the Young Plan would not mean the end of reparations as Hugenberg claimed, but rather Germany would continue to pay higher reparations under the Dawes Plan. As part of his polarizing gambit, Hugenberg created the Reichsausschuß (committee) for the People's Rebellion Against the Young Plan in the summer of 1929, which was intended to be a sort of counter-parliament to
115850-422: Was recruited as the DNVP presidential candidate more by default as he was the only one willing to run for the DNVP. In the first round of the presidential election on 13 March 1932, the DNVP supported Theodor Duesterberg , and after he withdrew from the race following his dreadful showing, endorsed no candidate for the second round on 10 April 1932. In the first round of the election, Duesterberg won only 6.8% of
116200-449: Was rejected twice. The director suggested Hitler should apply to the School of Architecture, but he lacked the necessary academic credentials because he had not finished secondary school. On 21 December 1907, his mother died of breast cancer at the age of 47; Hitler was 18 at the time. In 1909, Hitler ran out of money and was forced to live a bohemian life in homeless shelters and the Meldemannstraße dormitory . He earned money as
116550-415: Was remarkably similar to the Hugenberg–Class memo. Aside from his membership in the Pan-German League, Hugenberg had a more personal reason for being an annexationist. Together with his industrialist friends Emil Kirdorf , Hugo Stinnes and Wilhelm Beukenberg, Hugenberg in 1916–1917 founded a number of corporations to exploit the occupied parts of Belgium and northern France. These companies were favored by
116900-413: Was replaced by Count Kuno von Westarp . In the bitter aftermath of the Dawes Plan vote, the influential Land associations of Pomerania , East Prussia and Schleswig-Holstein all passed resolutions attacking Hergt for his "betrayal" of the party's principles by allowing a free vote on the "second Versailles" of the Dawes Plan, instead of imposing party discipline to force the entire caucus to vote against
117250-406: Was revealed to the public. He killed himself or died from illness shortly after the Social Democratic newspaper Vorwärts published love letters he had written to his Italian male lovers. After Krupp's death, the entire firm of Krupp AG was left to his eldest daughter, Bertha Krupp . As Krupp AG was one of the world's largest arms manufacturers and the chief supplier of weapons to the German state,
117600-441: Was rooted in the attitudes and traditions of the nineteenth century. It comprised men of property and education who patronized inferiors while scorning democratic idealism and loathing socialistic egalitarianism. Older men raised in the prewar era of peace and prosperity, the German Nationals identified their superiority as social, intellectual and racial. Hugenberg himself typified their Pan-German idealism and expansionism. Hitler and
117950-412: Was so enraged by the passage of the Dawes Plan that he screamed on the floor of the Reichstag that those DNVP MdRs who voted for the Dawes Plan should be expelled from the party. The National Socialist MP General Erich Ludendorff shouted at the pro-Dawes Plan DNVP MdRs that "This is a shame for Germany! Ten years ago I won the battle of Tannenberg . Today you have made a Tannenberg victory possible for
118300-482: Was so wealthy that he was independent of big business and could follow his own line. Hugenberg gave the impression that the DNVP would not need any more donations from big business as he was so wealthy that he would fund the DNVP entirely out of his own pocket. He hoped to use radical nationalism to restore the party's fortunes and eventually to overthrow the Weimar constitution and install an authoritarian form of government. Up to this point, right-wing politics outside of
118650-433: Was such an inept speaker that he almost never spoke before the Reichstag because his speeches induced laughter amongst those who listened to them. The fact that Admiral Tirpitz of the DNVP appeared alongside and spoke with Hitler at the anti-Young Plan rallies was taken by many of the DNVP voters as a sign that Hitler was now a respectable figure who was rubbing shoulders with war heroes. The referendum of 1929 brought about
119000-414: Was summoned to meet President Paul von Hindenburg, who told him that now the Young Plan had been passed, he had no more need for Müller, and he was planning to bring in a new presidential government very soon that would be "anti-parliamentary and anti-Marxist". Hindenburg explained the intention behind the presidential government, which would be based on the "25/48/53 formula" (a reference to the articles in
119350-419: Was that the supporters of the radical right-wing DNVP had abandoned it for the even more radical right-wing NSDAP. Hugenberg had decided to use as his next wedge issue to destroy the middle-of-the-road parties that supported the Weimar Republic the theme of anti-Marxism (in the Weimar Republic the term Marxism was to describe both the SPD and the KPD). The media mogul Hugenberg used his vast press empire to wage
119700-543: Was the call for Germany to resume overseas expansion and to regain the lost colonies in Africa. The other theme that he first set out in an article in the autumn of 1928 entitled "Party Bloc or Mush" (Block oder Brei) was that the DNVP should transform from a broad but heterogeneous and divided party of notables (in Hugenberg's words "mush") into a coherent and clear-cut force with a hierarchical leadership ( Führerprinzip ) and mass appeal, stressing plebiscitary action rather than parliamentarianism. Hugenberg declared that what
120050-444: Was the daughter of Franz Burchard Adickes, Mayor of Frankfurt. The son of an upper-middle-class family, Hugenberg initially resented the Junkers (landed nobility), but over time he came to accept the idea of "feudal-industrial control of Germany", believing in an alliance of Junkers and industrialists. Alongside these beliefs, Hugenberg maintained an ardent belief in imperialism and opposition to democracy and socialism. At
120400-431: Was the product of the various different streams of conservatism that found themselves flowing uneasily together in one party. There was much disagreement about who was to lead the new party, and Oskar Hergt was chosen as leader on 19 December 1918 very much as the compromise candidate, being a little-known civil servant who was thereforth acceptable to all the factions. British historian Ian Kershaw wrote that ever since
120750-529: Was the rise of a number of small parties representing rural voters in northern Germany such as the Agricultural League , German Farmers' Party and the Christian-National Peasants' and Farmers' Party , which all took away traditional DNVP voters, a development that contributed significantly to DNVP's poor showing in the 1928 elections. Finally, Admiral Tirpitz who had done so much for the DNVP's good showing in elections in 1924, had often come into conflict with Westarp over his policy of half-hearted participation in
121100-472: Was three, the family moved to Passau , Germany. There he acquired the distinctive lower Bavarian dialect , rather than Austrian German , which marked his speech throughout his life. The family returned to Austria and settled in Leonding in 1894, and in June 1895 Alois retired to Hafeld, near Lambach , where he farmed and kept bees. Hitler attended Volksschule (a state-funded primary school) in nearby Fischlham . The move to Hafeld coincided with
121450-499: Was totally against the idea of expropriating the property of royalty, but many of its voters, especially small farmers, were not and voted yes on 20 June 1926, a development that strongly suggested that many DNVP voters were starting to feel that the party leadership was not representing them effectively. Westarp's efforts to include the DNVP within the government tied himself and the party in many knots since he had to engage in compromises with his coalition partners that offended much of
121800-434: Was utterly devoid of personal charisma or charm, but he was a successful industrialist and media magnate, a fabulously wealthy man whose talents at devising business strategies which had made him a millionaire many times over were felt to be equally applicable to the arena of politics. Hugenberg was elected leader largely through the support of the faction associated with the Pan-German League who had been steadily taking over
122150-483: Was written entirely by female volunteers) started to vehemently insist that German women only marry a "Nordic man" and raise their children to be racists. From the mid-1920s onwards, the women party activists started to draft plans calling for the end of all "Jewish cultural influence" in Germany, banning Jews from working as teachers and writers, making eugenics into state policy with a new class of bureaucrats to be called "racial guardians" to be created in order to assess
122500-409: Was written in a distinctly Protestant language". The DNVP opposed establishing relations with the Vatican and rejected the Prussian Concordat of 1929, arguing that Germany should not make formal agreements with the Catholic Church. The party refused to court Catholic voters, and Alfred Hugenberg rejected ideas to establish local Catholic committees of the DNVP, even when advised that this may damage
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