Alfred Hugenberg
Alfred Ernst Christian Alexander Hugenberg was an influential German businessman and politician. An important figure in nationalist politics in Germany during the first three decades of the twentieth century, Hugenberg became the country's leading media proprietor during the 1920s. As leader of the German National People's Party, he played a part in helping Adolf Hitler become chancellor of Germany and served in his first cabinet in 1933, hoping to control Hitler and use him as his tool. The plan failed, and by the end of 1933 Hugenberg had been pushed to the sidelines. Although he continued to serve as a guest member of the Reichstag until 1945, he wielded no political influence. Following World War II, he was interned by the British in 1946 and classified as "exonerated" in 1951 after undergoing denazification.
Hugenberg's fundamental political and philosophical principles can be traced back to his youth. His university studies and early work organizing agricultural societies led him to view the independent farmer or small businessman as the ideal German. He believed in social Darwinism, despised communism, socialism and trade unions, and was in general skeptical of big business and finance. He thought that Germany needed an authoritarian government – ideally a monarchy – and strongly supported nationalism and imperialism in the belief that Germany could be secure only as a great power. The fall of the Hohenzollern monarchy at the end of World War I came as a tremendous shock, and from that point until the establishment of the Nazi state in 1933 he focused on bringing down the parliamentary government of the Weimar Republic.
Hugenberg earned degrees in both economics and law. In 1891, at the age of twenty-six, he co-founded the nationalist organization that later became the Pan-German League. He worked in the Prussian civil service and in private business before joining the Krupp steel works where he was chairman of the board of directors from 1909 until 1918. His work there led to seats on other supervisory boards and trade associations. During World War I, Hugenberg was an annexationist who wanted the Empire to expand to the east through German settlements. He blamed Germany's defeat on Jews and socialists who had supposedly stabbed the German army in the back.
After the war, Hugenberg left Krupp to concentrate on politics and building up the media empire that he had started in 1916 when he bought the Scherl publishing house. That purchase was followed by the news agency Telegraphen-Union, numerous newspapers and in 1927 a controlling interest in the Universum-Film-AG, a major film producer. Hugenberg's media outlets provided stiff and sometimes dominating competition to older liberal media companies such as Ullstein and Mosse.
As a representative of the German National People's Party, Hugenberg was a member of the Weimar National Assembly from 1919–20 and then of the German Reichstag until 1945. For many years he provided the majority of the DNVP's funds, and his influence dominated the right-wing press in Germany. As the most influential voice in the DNVP's pan-German bloc, he opposed the Dawes Plan, which attempted to resolve the issues surrounding Germany's reparations payments, in the belief that a return to the economic chaos of hyperinflation would bring down the Republic. Hugenberg became chairman of the DNVP after the party's substantial losses in the 1928 Reichstag elections. He obtained "dictatorial" leadership powers and tried to transform the party into a "Hugenberg movement". He also shifted emphasis to the extra-parliamentary sphere with the aim of forcing the replacement of parliamentary government by an authoritarian regime. His radicalism caused the DNVP to split, with many key industrialists leaving the party.
Hugenberg's first tentative media support of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came following the failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. The relationship deepened in 1929 when the DNVP and Nazis joined forces in an unsuccessful bid to stop the Young Plan, a second attempt to resolve the reparations issue. The two parties were also part of the short-lived Harzburg Front of 1931 that was formed to create a united front against the government of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning. Both efforts at cooperation benefited the Nazis more than the DNVP. The Nazis gained the most from the radicalization of the middle classes, and the moderate elements in the DNVP continued to move away from the party.
By early 1933 Hugenberg realized that his attempt to ally with the Nazis had failed and that they presented a danger to the state and society. He nevertheless became minister of Economics and of Food and Agriculture in the Hitler cabinet. He became increasingly isolated in the cabinet and failed in his attempt to become "economic dictator". He was forced out of the cabinet after five months, on the same day that the DNVP voted to disband. After that he no longer had any political influence and over time also had to cede his media holdings to the Nazis.
After World War II he was interned by the British. He died in 1951.
Early years
Political philosophy
Born in Hanover to Carl Hugenberg, a royal Hanoverian official who in 1867 entered the Prussian Landtag as a member of the National Liberal Party, the young Hugenberg studied law in Göttingen, Heidelberg, and Berlin, as well as economics in Strassburg. As a child, he had a love of writing poetry, which was strongly discouraged by his father who instead raised Hugenberg to be a bureaucrat like himself. In 1891, Hugenberg was awarded a PhD at Strassburg for his dissertation Internal Colonization in Northwest Germany, in which he set out three ideas that guided his political thought for the rest of his life:- The necessity for statist economic policies to allow German farmers to be successful.
- Despite the necessity for the state to assist farmers, the German farmer should be encouraged to act as an entrepreneur, thereby creating a class of successful farmers/small businessmen who would act as a bulwark against the appeal of the Marxist Social Democrats, whom Hugenberg viewed as a grave threat to the status quo.
- Finally, allowing German farmers to be successful required a policy of imperialism, as Hugenberg argued on social Darwinist grounds that the "power and significance of the German race" could be secured if Germany colonized other nations. Hugenberg maintained that Germany's prosperity depended upon having a great empire, and argued that, in the coming 20th century, Germany would have to battle three great rivals, namely Britain, the United States and Russia, for world supremacy.
The son of an upper-middle-class family, Hugenberg initially resented the Junkers, but over time he came to accept the idea of "feudal-industrial control of Germany", believing in an alliance of Junkers and industrialists. Alongside these beliefs, Hugenberg maintained an ardent belief in imperialism and opposition to democracy and socialism.
At the same time, Hugenberg became involved in a scheme in the Province of Posen in which the Prussian Settlement Commission bought land from Poles in order to settle ethnic Germans there. In 1899, Hugenberg called for "annihilation of Polish population". Hugenberg was strongly anti-Polish, and criticized the Prussian government for its "inadequate" Polish policies, favoring a more vigorous policy of Germanization.
Hugenberg initially took a role organizing agricultural societies before entering the civil service in the Prussian Ministry of Finance in 1903. Hugenberg came into conflict with his superiors, who opposed his plans to confiscate all the non-productive estates of the Junkers in order to settle hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans who would become his idealized farmer-small businessmen and "Germanize" the East.
Chairman at Krupp Steel
He subsequently left the public sector to pursue a career in business, and in 1909 he was appointed chairman of the supervisory board of Krupp Steel where he built up a close personal and political relationship with Baron Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, the CEO of Krupp AG. Krupp had been "in search of a man of really superior intelligence" to run the finance department of Krupp AG and found that man in Hugenberg, with his "extraordinary" intelligence and work ethic. In 1902, Friedrich Alfred Krupp's homosexuality was revealed to the public. He killed himself or died from illness shortly after the Social Democratic newspaper Vorwärts published love letters he had written to his Italian male lovers. After Krupp's death, the entire firm of Krupp AG was left to his eldest daughter, Bertha Krupp. As Krupp AG was one of the world's largest arms manufacturers and the chief supplier of weapons to the German state, the management of Krupp AG was of some interest to the state, and Emperor Wilhelm II did not believe that a woman was capable of running a business. To solve this perceived problem, the Emperor had Bertha marry a career diplomat, Gustav von Bohlen und Halbach, who was regarded by the Emperor as a safe man to run Krupp AG. Gustav Krupp, as he was renamed by Wilhelm, knew little about running a business and so depended on his board to assist him. Hugenberg's role in the management of Krupp AG was thus considerably larger than would be indicated by his title of director of finance; in many ways, he was the man who effectively ran the Krupp corporation during his ten years at the firm between 1908 and 1918.During his time at Krupp AG, Hugenberg was known for his "inflexibility", "stubbornness", and "self-righteousness" as he constantly fought with the two unions representing the workers, one allied with the Social Democrats and the other with the Centre Party. Hugenberg did not approve of either union and instead sponsored a "yellow" union representing the management, making his tenure a time of endless disputes with the workers. Hugenberg favored the idea of a Werksgemeinschaft, where the Krupp family would act as the patriarchal authority to their workers, granting them higher wages and even junior shares in Krupp AG, in exchange for which the workers would be subservient and loyal to die Firma as Krupp AG was always called. Very little came of his plans for a Werksgemeinschaft, and living conditions and wages for the workers at die Firma did not change very much during Hugenberg's time. Hugenberg's interest in having the workers own their own houses stemmed only from his interest in stopping demands for democracy and socialism. His strong social Darwinist views led him to argue that the problem of poverty was a genetic problem, with the poor inheriting bad genes that made them unsuccessful in life. Improving their living standards for him was only necessary to halt demands for political and social change as opposed to a positive goal in and of itself.
At the time, Krupp AG was Europe's largest corporation and one of the largest corporations in the world, and Hugenberg's success in raising annual dividends from 8% in 1908 to 14% in 1913 won him much admiration in the world of German business. A more unwelcome appearance in the limelight occurred with the Kornwalzer affair, in which the Social Democrat Reichstag member Karl Liebknecht exposed industrial espionage by Hugenberg. The management of Krupp AG did not even try to deny the allegations of bribery and industrial espionage, with Krupp arguing in a press article that any attack on the firm of Krupp AG was an attack on the ability of the German state to wage war by the socialist-pacifist SPD, and although several junior employees of Krupp AG were convicted of corruption, Hugenberg and the rest of the Krupp board were never indicted. In 1912, Emperor Wilhelm II personally awarded Hugenberg the Order of the Red Eagle for his success at Krupp AG, saying that Germany needed more businessmen like Hugenberg. At the ceremony, Hugenberg praised the Emperor in his acceptance speech and went on to say that democracy would not improve the condition of the German working class, but only a "very much richer, very much greater and very much more powerful Germany" would solve its problems. After the Social Democrats won the largest number of seats in the Reichstag in the 1912 elections, Hugenberg first became interested in the media. He believed that center-right and right-wing parties such as the National Liberals and the Conservatives needed more newspapers to champion their views.