Reich Committee divided the funds among the parties and organizations involved. There is no evidence of favoritism towards the NSDAP as some have claimed. The goal was not just to prevent the Young Plan's reparations clauses from being implemented. They believed that accepting the Young Plan meant confessing to the 'war guilt clause', which had not been modified under the Young Plan, and wanted to explicitly reject it. In addition they wished to topple the government led by Hermann Müller of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and to hold new elections. The course of action did not meet with everyone's approval even in the Reich Committee's more conservative camp. Paul Reusch, one of the leading figures in the , a group of twelve leading industries from the Ruhr area, called the initiative "profoundly stupid" because, like large sections of German industry, his association rejected the Young Plan and had no interest at the time in new elections or a political crisis. Reich Committee and the NSDAP After Hitler's failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, the German National People's Party (DNVP) had severed its ties to the National Socialists until Hugenberg restored them by including the NSDAP in the Reich Referendum Committee. Although he was fundamentally opposed to democracy and against popular legislation, Hitler participated because he expected political advantages from it. Until then he had been regarded as a Bavarian beer hall bigwig () who headed a comparatively insignificant party with just twelve seats in the Reichstag and whose members were regarded as bullies. Now he sat with recognized leaders of the bourgeois right and played a role at the Reich level. Participation in the Reich Committee was for Hitler a great success. In the NSDAP's own ranks, especially in the circles around Gregor and Otto Strasser, associating with the conservative right was controversial. Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary: "Under the appeal are names! Oh my God! In Hitler's case one can only say: it hurts my soul to see you in such society." He saw the collaboration as compromising. Hitler too had reservations. The cooperation, as the historian Otmar Jung points out, was not on Hitler's part based on sympathy with the conservative right but was rather purely tactical. Freedom Act By means of the initiative and the subsequent referendum, the political right made use of the particularly progressive plebiscite elements of the Weimar Constitution. According to Article 73,