Brüning’s Failures

Mr. Reich Chancellor, I now wish to present my views to the German public, just as I did before the Young Plan was signed.

1. The opinion that the fourth emergency degree will resolve our people’s political crisis is an illusion.
2. The opinion that our domestic economic crisis and our ability to export German goods will be resolved by the emergency decree is an illusion.
3. The opinion and hope that it will alleviate unemployment is an illusion.
4. The thought that this emergency decree will resolve the crisis in public finance is an illusion.
5. Finally, the opinion that it will overcome the financial crises of individuals and the private sector is an illusion.

Instead of the hoped for results, the opposite of each of these five points will occur. The future will prove it.

There is no reason, Mr. Reich Chancellor, for me to support my opinions any further to a System that is convinced that it is the model of reason, and that calls the opposition “dreamers and wishful thinkers.” I have even less reason to provide a thorough analysis, since I learned some months ago how willing the so-called “reasonable thinking” of the present government is from time to time to borrow from the opposition’s “garden of daydreams and wishful thinking,” presenting to an astonished public what it once said were poisoned fruits, but now are innocuous examples of the “new results of expert thinking.”

I will restrict myself, therefore, Mr. Reich Chancellor, to a thorough refutation of the last part of the emergency decree.

Even the organization shows here that the government is captive to an illusion, namely the crazy belief that the economy could be put back in order before political life. Such a view is emphasized by various statements of our government to foreign countries in which painful questions about the no longer deniable growth of the National Socialist movement are answered by references to the “world economic crisis.” A little thought would lead the government to a different conclusion. If that opinion were really correct, the Economic Party [Brüning was a member of that party] would really have to be in our place! The fact that the opposite is true proves only

That the people have long understood what the governing parties still to not understand. Without a national-political “recovery” within the German people, there will be no economic recovery.

Mr. Reich Chancellor, I assume that you seriously believe that the political appendix to the emergency decree is a suitable means for the “recovery” of the German people, and that one can best entrust such a “recovery” to the police.

I assume, Mr. Reich Chancellor, that you have that opinion, but I further assume that some of your colleagues involved in this major historic law have other possibilities in mind, for example to silence the National Socialist movement and in a larger sense the nationalist opposition, or perhaps even to destroy it. If one takes away a man’s shirt, and his pants, and removes his membership badge, he has ceased to be a National Socialist! It was always remarkable how one-sidedly politically significant German politicians saw the world. That comes about because instead of dealing with the deeper nature of a movement, one pays heed only to the familiar reporters from the Mosse and Ulstein publishing houses, to the editorial staffs of Germania and Vorwärts, seeing them as the political experts who know what the German people should do!