Alfred Hugenberg

Alfred Ernst Christian Alexander Hugenberg (19 June 1865 – 12 March 1951) 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...