In Europe

a speech as well, but lost track of what he was saying halfway through and stopped. The general's face was saved when the band nearby struck up a fast march. This was followed by a parade of ‘swastika-bearers’: straight-backed older gentlemen carrying umbrellas, but very few veterans, few Iron Crosses, lots of foolish students.
    The Nazis claimed that somewhere between 30–60,000 supporters had come to Weimar, but Kessler estimated that there were no more than 8,000. The reason for that, he said, was clear: a lack of money and a lack of good speakers. ‘No money and no spirit, that's not how one forges a popular movement, let alone a revolution.’ He was right about that. For it was precisely with regard to those two conditions that the Nazi movement was about to change beyond recognition.
    On Black Thursday, 24 October, 1929, the Wall Street stock market collapsed. The crisis was felt everywhere in the world, but for Germany it came as a fatal blow. The country's cautious economic recovery, after all, was being financed largely from the United States. In effect, the Dawes Plan was little more than the forced circulation of money: Germany paid recompense to England and France, those two countries paid off their war debts to America, the United States then lent that money to Germany, and so on and on. From 1929, America suddenly kept the payments for itself, the pump broke down and the German economy collapsed once more.
    In the course of January 1930, German unemployment rose from 1.5 million to 2.5 million. By April, Berlin alone had 700,000 unemployed. Shops closed by the hundred. The members of the lower-middle class, who had only just caught a whiff of prosperity, were forced back into the tenements, and the workers were put out on the street. Count Kessler lost almost his entire fortune, was forced to sell his publishing house, his Renoirs and Van Goghs, and finally even his books. In the woods around the city, thousands of the unemployed set up tent camps with collective kitchens, schools and playgrounds. In 1931, four million Germans were unemployed; by 1933 that figure had risen to six million.
    Looking back on it, it is amazing to see how casually the peaceful Weimar period disintegrated. The first glimpse of decay is seen in the statistics. In summer 1929, Hitler's NSDAP had approximately 120,000 members. One year later, there were almost a million. The Nazis had expected to win a considerable number of parliamentary seats in the elections on 14 September, 1930, but even so were amazed to see their party skyrocket from twelve seats to more than a hundred. The NSDAP had suddenly become the second biggest party in Germany, after the social democrats. Financiers, particularly those from heavy industry, flocked tothe party. The captains of Krupp, Klöckner and IG Farben were good for at least a million marks annually. After 1930, covert funding grew considerably.
    1932 was the year of the great contest. First came the presidential elections. Hitler – after a great deal of hesitation – entered the ring against a fatigued Hindenburg. He lost the first round, but still received 11.3 million votes, which meant his constituency had doubled again in two years. Now the Nazis gave it their best shot. The party applied the most modern campaign techniques. Hitler was flown around the country in his own private plane, allowing him to visit twenty cities a week and speak to a quarter of a million people each day. Goebbels had films made of Hitler's speeches, and 50,000 gramophone records so that even the smallest meeting rooms and cafés could hear him speak. At the height of the campaign, Goebbels had – in today's money – a budget of more than half a million euros a week at his disposal: the industrial financiers had apparently become even more enthusiastic. In the long run, Hindenburg was re-elected (with 19.4 million votes), but Hitler (with 13.4 million) had won an additional two million supporters.
    The Nazi campaign went on nonstop. The focus was now on Prussia, that great social-democrat stronghold where two thirds of the German population would be going to the polls in two weeks’ time. At one fell swoop, the Nazis became the biggest party there. With the support of the communists, they immediately entered a motion of no confidence against the prime minister, Otto Braun. The prudent social democrat withdrew from his post. A provisional government was set up; the SA provoked more and more