"But what you could perhaps do with in these days is a word of most sincere sympathy. Your movement is carried internally by so strong a truth and necessity that victory in one form or another cannot elude you for long"
About this Quote
A banker speaks like a political augur here, offering not policy advice but consolation and certainty. The tone is intimate and strategic at once: a word of most sincere sympathy to steady a leader through a rough patch, followed by a prediction of inevitable success. The key claim is that the movement possesses an inner propulsion, a truth and necessity that make victory unavoidable. That framing shifts politics from the realm of persuasion and contingency into the realm of fate. If your cause is borne along by history itself, resistance becomes not only futile but irrational.
Hjalmar Schacht was uniquely positioned to talk this way. As Germanys most prominent banker in the Weimar era and later Hitlers economics chief, he fashioned himself as a realist who could read the currents beneath events. In the early 1930s, he courted Adolf Hitler and vouched for the National Socialists to industrialists and conservative elites, arguing that they answered a deep national need in a time of mass unemployment, fear of communism, and parliamentary paralysis. The language of strong truth and necessity radiates that conviction. It reassures the addressee that setbacks are tactical, not strategic; that power will come, whether by electoral surge, elite coalition, or presidential appointment.
There is a revealing ambiguity in victory in one form or another. It acknowledges multiple routes to control while treating the outcome as fixed. That is precisely how many German elites thought in 1932: if not through ballots, then through deals. Schachts sympathy thus functions as permission and encouragement, helping to normalize a radical movement as an inevitable solution to crisis.
The irony is stark. Schacht later clashed with Hitler and lost influence, yet his early endorsements helped open the door. The words show how technocratic confidence and talk of historical necessity can launder moral danger into political common sense.
Hjalmar Schacht was uniquely positioned to talk this way. As Germanys most prominent banker in the Weimar era and later Hitlers economics chief, he fashioned himself as a realist who could read the currents beneath events. In the early 1930s, he courted Adolf Hitler and vouched for the National Socialists to industrialists and conservative elites, arguing that they answered a deep national need in a time of mass unemployment, fear of communism, and parliamentary paralysis. The language of strong truth and necessity radiates that conviction. It reassures the addressee that setbacks are tactical, not strategic; that power will come, whether by electoral surge, elite coalition, or presidential appointment.
There is a revealing ambiguity in victory in one form or another. It acknowledges multiple routes to control while treating the outcome as fixed. That is precisely how many German elites thought in 1932: if not through ballots, then through deals. Schachts sympathy thus functions as permission and encouragement, helping to normalize a radical movement as an inevitable solution to crisis.
The irony is stark. Schacht later clashed with Hitler and lost influence, yet his early endorsements helped open the door. The words show how technocratic confidence and talk of historical necessity can launder moral danger into political common sense.
Quote Details
| Topic | Hope |
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