Hitler Warns of a Bolshevist Germany in an Interview with The Times (October 15, 1930) The Russian Revolution had loomed large in the minds of many Germans following the First World War. It provided a beacon of hope to the Spartacists and later German communists, but also posed a threat to both the more conservative parties of Weimar Germany and those who supported the democratic republic. It was indeed the fears of the latter which prompted the Ebert-Groener Pact in which Friedrich Ebert aligned the provisional Weimar government with the military to put down the revolutionary fervor of the immediate postwar period. The fear of a Bolshevik revolution also extended beyond Germany and across Western Europe. Germany had the strongest communist party outside of the Soviet Union; and as Weimar politics became increasingly polarized in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, the threat of a communist Germany seemed ever more plausible. Manipulating these anxieties domestically and on the international stage, Hitler portrayed the Nazi Party and a National Socialist Germany as a bulwark against communism. In this October 1930 interview with the London Times, Hitler claimed that National Socialism would not only prevent the spread of communism, but would bring order to Germany and enable it to uphold its financial obligations to the Entente powers.
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[…] If economic developments continued as at present, before the winter was out Germany would be like a powder barrel that a single spark could set off. The Middle parties in the Reichstag would be hopelessly split, and the world would have the choice between a Bolshevist Germany and a National-Socialist Germany. A Bolshevist Germany would repudiate everything – Reparation debts and private obligations too. Those who, with a helpless shrug of the shoulders, had signed the Treaty of Versailles and the Dawes Plan and the Young Plan had been giving bad cheques. A National-Socialist Germany would never sign cheques it could not honour. It would not make the political payments, because it would not honestly be able to; but, like any honest merchant, it would honour all obligations to repay private foreign loans and investments. If the world insisted on the political payments being made, then Germany would go under. The Bolshevization of Russia had already given the civilized world a jolt; if Germany became an annex of Bolshevist Russia, Western civilization would get a much worse and probably fatal jolt. Even Oswald Spengler, who had at least given the decline of Western civilization 300 years to complete itself, would then prove to have been an optimist. Source: The Times (London), October 15, 1930. Reprinted in: Hitler. Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen: Februar 1925 bis Januar 1933, IV/1, ed. Institut für Zeitgeschichte (München: Saur, 1992), 22-23.
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