Hitler

in part to the NSDAP. Other members of the aristocracy, including Frau Gertrud von Seidlitz, who used monies from foreign stocks and shares, also contributed to Nazi funds. Hitler was almost certainly a co-beneficiary (though probably in a minor way) of the generous gift of 100,000 Gold Marks made by Fritz Thyssen, heir to the family’s Ruhr steelworks, to Ludendorff, but Germany’s leading industrialists, apart from Ernst von Borsig, head of the Berlin locomotive and machine-building firm, showed little direct interest in the Nazis at this time. Police inquiries which remained inconclusive suggested that Borsig and car-manufacturers Daimler were among otherfirms contributing to the party. Some Bavarian industrialists and businessmen, too, were persuaded by Hitler to make donations to the movement.
    Valuable funds were also attained abroad. Anti-Marxism and the hopes in a strong Germany as a bulwark against Bolshevism often provided motive enough for such donations. The
Völkischer Beobachter’s
new offices were financed with Czech Kronen. An important link with Swiss funds was Dr Emil Gansser, a Berlin chemist and long-standing Nazi supporter, who engineered a gift of 33,000 Swiss Francs from right-wing Swiss benefactors. Further Swiss donations followed a visit from Hitler himself to Zurich in the summer of 1923. And from right-wing circles in the arch-enemy France, 90,000 Gold Marks were passed to Captain Karl Mayr, Hitler’s first patron, and from him to the ‘patriotic associations’. It can be presumed that the NSDAP was among the beneficiaries. In addition to monetary donations, Röhm saw to it that the SA, along with other paramilitary organizations, was well provided with equipment and weapons from his secret arsenal. Whatever the financial support, without Röhm’s supplies an armed putsch would scarcely have been possible.
    In November 1922, rumours were already circulating that Hitler was planning a putsch. By January 1923, in the explosive climate following the French march into the Ruhr, the rumours in Munich of a Hitler putsch were even stronger. The crisis, without which Hitler would have been nothing, was deepening by the day. In its wake, the Nazi movement was expanding rapidly. Some 35,000 were to join between February and November 1923, giving a strength of around 55,000 on the eve of the putsch. Recruits came from all sections of society. Around a third were workers, a tenth or more came from the upper-middle and professional classes, but more than a half belonged to the crafts, commercial, white-collar, and farming lower-middle class. Most had joined the party out of protest, anger, and bitterness as the economic and political crisis mounted. The same was true of the thousands flocking into the SA. Hitler had won their support by promising them action. The sacrifices of the war would be avenged. The revolution would be overturned. He could not hold them at fever-pitch indefinitely without unleashing such action. The tendency to ‘go for broke’ was not simply a character-trait of Hitler; it was built into the nature of his leadership, his political aims, and the party he led. But Hitler was not in control of events as theyunfolded in 1923. Nor was he, before 8 November, the leading player in the drama. Without the readiness of powerful figures and organizations to contemplate a putsch against Berlin, Hitler would have had no stage on which to act so disastrously. His own role, his actions – and reactions – have to be seen in that light.
    III
    Hitler’s incessant barrage of anti-government propaganda was nearly undermined by an event that invoked national unity in January 1923: the French occupation of the Ruhr. On this occasion at least, the Reich government seemed to be acting firmly – and acting with mass popular support – through its campaign of ‘passive resistance’ against the occupation. Attacks on the Berlin government at this juncture seemed unpromising. Undeterred, Hitler saw advantage to be gained from the French occupation. As usual, he went on a propaganda offensive.
    On the very day of the French march into the Ruhr he spoke in a packed Circus Krone. ‘Down with the November Criminals’ was the title of his speech. It was not the first time he had used the term ‘November Criminals’ to describe the Social Democrat revolutionaries of 1918. But from now on, the slogan was seldom far from his lips. It showed the line he would take towards the Ruhr occupation.