Monday, July 12, 2010

WHEN DID HITLER ACCEPT CAPITALISM?

According to The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy by Hans Mommsen, it was in early 1926. There was a referendum to seize the property of the dynastic families in Germany and Hitler, along with the NSDAP (the Nazi Party), strongly opposed it.

From Mommsen, page 241:
Whereas the DVP and the DDP were more moderate in their argumentation and warned that the conflict might lead to a presidential crisis, the DNVP unleashed a wild propaganda campaign that conjured up the specter of Bolshevism and carried markedly anti-Semitic overtones. In this respect, the DNVP fell in line with the NSDAP, which had reconstituted itself after Hitler's premature release from prison and now added extra fuel to the campaign by calling for the expropriation of property belonging to east European Jews who had immigrated to Germany after i August 1914. Hitler, who characterized the expropriation of the princes' property as a "Jewish swindle," unfalteringly led his party into the camp of the German Right. At a hastily convened leadership conference in Bamberg in February 1926, Hitler prevailed over Gregor Strasser, who argued on behalf of the party's district leaders (Gauleiter) from the northern and western parts of the country that the NSDAP should support the referendum. Hitler's triumph marked the beginning of the NSDAP's expressed support for the continued existence of the capitalist economic system, a course that Hitler explicitly endorsed in a speech before a contingent of Ruhr industrialists in the summer of 1927.

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