Hitler

that he eventually backed, and the total priority for rearmament laid down at the outset, helped to shape a climate in which economic recovery – already starting as he took office as Chancellor – could gather pace. And in one area, at least, he provided a direct stimulus to recovery in a key branch of industry: motor-car manufacturing.
    Hitler’s propaganda instinct, not his economic know-how, led him towards an initiative that both assisted the recovery of the economy and caught the public imagination. On 11 February, a few days before his meeting with the industrialists, Hitler had sought out the opportunityto deliver the opening address at the International Automobile and Motor-Cycle Exhibition in Berlin. That the German Chancellor should make the speech was itself a novelty: this alone caused a stir. The assembled leaders of the car industry were delighted. They were even more delighted when they heard Hitler elevate car manufacture to the position of the most important industry of the future and promise a programme including gradual tax relief for the industry and the implementation of a ‘generous plan for road-building’. If living standards had previously been weighed against kilometres of railway track, they would in future be measured against kilometres of roads; these were ‘great tasks which also belong to the construction programme of the German economy’, Hitler declared. The speech was later stylized by Nazi propaganda as ‘the turning-point in the history of German motorization’. It marked the beginning of the ‘Autobahn-builder’ part of the Führer myth.
    Hitler had, in fact, offered no specific programme for the car industry; merely the prospect of one. Even so, the significance of Hitler’s speech on 11 February should not be underrated. It sent positive signals to car manufacturers. They were struck by the new Chancellor, whose long-standing fascination for the motor-car and his memory for detail of construction-types and -figures meant he sounded not only sympathetic but knowledgeable to the car bosses. The
Völkischer Beobachter
, exploiting the propaganda potential of Hitler’s speech, immediately opened up to its readers the prospect of car-ownership. Not a social élite with its Rolls-Royces, but the mass of the people with their people’s car (
Volksauto
) was the alluring prospect.
    In the weeks following his speech, there were already notable signs that the car industry was picking up. The beginnings of recovery for the automobile industry had spin-off effects for factories producing component parts, and for the metal industry. The recovery was not part of a well-conceived programme on Hitler’s part. Nor can it be wholly, or even mainly, attributed to his speech. Much of it would have happened anyway, once the slump had begun to give way to cyclical recovery. It remains the case, however, that the car manufacturers were still gloomy about their prospects before Hitler spoke.
    Hitler, whatever importance he had attached to the propaganda effect of his speech, had given the right signals to the industry. After the ‘gigantic progamme’ of road-building he announced on 1 May had met substantial obstacles in the Transport Ministry, Hitler insisted that the‘Reich Motorways Enterprise’ be carried through. This was eventually placed at the end of June in the hands of Fritz Todt as General Inspector for German Roadways. In the stimulus to the car trade and the building of the motorways – areas which, inspired by the American model, had great popular appeal and appeared to symbolize both the leap forward into an exciting, technological modern era and the ‘new Germany’, now standing on its own feet again – Hitler had made a decisive contribution.
    IV
    By the time Hitler addressed the leaders of the automobile industry on 11 February, the Reichstag election campaign was under way. Hitler had opened it the previous evening with his first speech in the Sportpalast since becoming Chancellor. He promised a government that would not lie to and swindle the people as Weimar governments had done. Parties of class division would be destroyed. ‘Never, never will I depart from the task of eradicating from Germany Marxism and its accompaniments,’ he declared. National unity, resting on the German peasant and the German worker – restored to the national community – would be the basis of the future society. It was, he declared, ‘a programme of national revival in all