Alfred Hugenberg (19 June 1865 – 12 March 1951) was a German right-wing newspaper magnate who led the national conservative German National People's Party (DNVP) during the Interwar period.
Biography[]
Alfred Hugenberg was born in Hanover on 19 June 1865, the son of a National Liberal Party politician. His dissertation at Strassburg set out the need for the German Empire to implement statist economic policies to allow for German farmers to be successful, the creation of a business class of small farmers to oppose the rise of Marxism and the erosion of the status quo, and a Social Darwinist policy of imperialism to benefit the prosperity of the "German race" and challenge Britain, the United States, and Russia for world supremacy. In 1891, Hugenberg co-founded the ultranationalist General German League and then a pan-German league in 1894. Hugenberg worked as a civil servant in the Province of Posen and called for the "annihilation of the Polish population" there in 1899, supporting vigorous Germanization. In 1909, Hugenberg was appointed to the supervisory board of Krupp Steel, and he stubbornly fought against the socialist and Christian labor unions which fought for workers' rights. After the SPD's victory in the 1912 federal election, Hugenberg came to believe that the National Liberals (to which he belonged) and the German Conservative Party needed more newspapers to champion their right-wing views, and he welcomed the onset of World War I while building a media empire.
Hugenberg's 1933 election poster
After Germany's defeat in 1918, Hugenberg blamed the defeat on a "stab-in-the-back" from within, and his views shifted sharply to the right as a result of the war, realigning himself with the German Fatherland Party (DVLP) and emphasized territorial expansion and anti-Semitism as its two main issues; in 1919, he merged this party into the new German National People's Party (DNVP). Hugenberg was elected to the Reichstag in 1920, and he became known for accusing rival politicians of having been "traitors" during the November Revolution and the Treaty of Versailles negotiations. Hugenberg gave no speeches in the Reichstag from 1919 to 1929, and he was infamously a poor speaker who was devoid of charm. In 1920, Hugenberg founded a populist tabloid which came to have a circulation of 216,000 by 1929. Hugenberg's right-wing newspapers were able to challenge rival liberal newspapers in Berlin, while dominating the small towns and rural areas of Germany. In 1923, he welcomed the onset of inflation as the beginning of the end for the Weimar Republic, believing that Germany needed a charismatic leader to rise to power and defeat socialism. In January 1926, Hugenberg supported his friend Henrich Class' plan to seize power in a putsch and declare himself "Reich Regent", but he evaded prosecution due to his image as a "patriot" who was the only major ethnically-German publisher; the Jewish Ullstein and Mosse families were labelled as "aliens" by Hugenberg's supporters.
In 1928, after the DNVP suffered heavy losses in that year's election, Hugenberg became the party's sole chairman. He was a staunch monarchist and seized control of the party from the anti-monarchist and populist Walther Lambach in October 1928. Hugenberg hoped to use radical nationalism to restore the party's fortunes, and he eliminated internal party democracy in favor of a fuehrerprinzip within the DNVP; this led to the split of the Conservative People's Party (KVP) in 1929. Germany's leading industrialists found the arrogant Hugenberg to be too inflexible, and their desertion from the DNVP left it as an agrarian party. The counter-revolutionary Hugenberg sought a powerful ally who could rally the working classes to join his elitist DNVP in overthrowing the Weimar Republic, so he used his vast wealth and media power to advertise Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party, which he felt he could control. The collapse of the German banking system in 1931 enabled Hugenberg and Hitler to form the "Harzburg Front" to fight the Great Depression, the gold standard, and the interests of international capital, supporting economic self-reliance, protectionism, and imperial expansion. However, Hitler soon eclipsed Hugenberg as the leader of the German right, and, in the 1932 presidential election, Hugenberg refused to endorse Hitler. In the November 1932 election, however, the DNVP increased its share of the vote at the expense of the Nazis. Hugenberg and Hitler reconciled ahead of the March 1933 election, and Hugenberg backed Hitler's rise to power as Chancellor of Nazi Germany that same year. Hugenberg made no effort to prevent Hitler's establishment of an authoritarian state, and he supported Hitler's elimination of civil liberties after the Reichstag fire. The DNVP also supported the Enabling Act of 1933, which established a one-party state led by the Nazi Party, and Hugenberg remained a "guest" member of the Reichstag until 1945. Hugenberg served as Minister of Economics and of Food and Agriculture from January to June 1933, but he was soon sidelined and reduced to being a powerless ally of the Nazi Party in the German legislature.
During World War II, Hugenberg's publishing house was sold off, his son was killed in action on the Eastern Front, and his newspaper plant was destroyed by a British Royal Air Force bombing raid. Hugenberg was arrested by British military police on 28 September 1946, but he was allowed to keep his property and business interests, as he was not himself a Nazi. He died in Extertal, North Rhine-Westphalia in 1951 at the age of 85.