By then Hitler no longer needed either Hugenberg’s corporate contacts or his Reichstag delegates. The bankers and industrialists who had once shunned the crass, divisive, right-wing extremist had gradually come to embrace him as a bulwark against the pro-union Social Democrats and the virulently anti-capitalist Communists.
Six months earlier, three weeks before Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, the banker Kurt Baron von Schröder had met with Hitler at Schröder’s villa in a fashionable quarter of Cologne. The arrangements were cloak-and-dagger: Hitler made an unscheduled, early-morning exit from a train in Bonn, entered a hotel, ate a quick breakfast, then departed in a waiting car with curtained rear windows to be driven to the Schröder villa while a decoy vehicle drove in the opposite direction.
Hitler walked out of the meeting with a 30 million reichsmark credit line that saved his political movement from bankruptcy. Once Hitler was in power, there was no longer need for secrecy or subterfuge.
Gee, I wonder who else I can think of whose “great victory is a mandate for radical change”.
Seeing any parallels with modern times?
Hehe, we here all already know. We knew it even before he ran for president the first time. He has literally never hidden it, he says out loud his favourite book is mien kampf, his favourite people are dictators, he has specifically said he admires the way they do things. The only time he denies it is when he has to compulsively lie about it because someone asked him a direct question. If no one is talking to him and he is just freely ranting, basically everything he says aligns with nazi ideology.
His compulsive lying somehow seems to throw off his followers, or gives them the ability to pretend they don’t feel the same way as him in public and cite all his lies as the reasons they really voted for him… either way.