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friend, and thought the English people ought to understand what the new movement signified.
This, of course, was right down Heinrich's alley; he volunteered to assemble a load of
literature—and even to have the article written and save Rick the bother!
Lanny left his wife in a comfortable family bridge game while he drove out to the suburbs
toward Potsdam, where the young official lived in a modest cottage. Heinrich had chosen
himself a proper deutsches Mädel with eyes as blue as his own, and according to the Nazi-Nordic
principles they had set to work to increase the ruling race. They proudly showed two blond
darlings asleep in their cribs, and one glance at Ilsa Jung was enough to inform Lanny that
another would soon be added. There was a peculiarity of the Nazi doctrine which Lanny had
observed already among the Italian Fascists. Out of one side of their mouths they said that the
nation had to expand in order to have room for its growing population, while out of the other
side they said that their population must be increased in order that they might be able to
expand. In the land of Mussolini this need was known as sacro egoismo, and Lanny had tried
in vain to puzzle out why a quality which was, considered so offensive in an individual should
become holy when exhibited by a group. He hoped that a day might come when nations would
be gentlemen.
Heinrich had invited to meet his guest a sports director of one of the youth groups in Berlin.
Hugo Behr was his name, and he was another exemplar of the Nordic ideal—which oddly
enough a great many of the party leaders were not. There was a joke going the rounds among
Berlin's smart intellectuals that the ideal "Aryan" was required to be as blond as Hitler, as tall
as Goebbels, as slender as Goring, and so on, as far as your malicious memory would carry
you. But Hugo had smooth rosy cheeks and wavy golden hair, and doubtless when in a gym
costume presented a figure like that of a young Hermes. He had until recently been an ardent
Social-Democrat, a worker in the youth movement in that party; not only could he tell all its
scandals, but he knew how to present National Socialism as the only true and real Socialism,
by which the German workers were to win freedom for themselves and later for the
workers of the world.
The human mind is a strange thing. Both this pair had read Mein Kampf as their holy
book, and had picked out what they wanted from it. They knew that Lanny had also read the
book, and assumed that he would have picked out the same things. But Lanny had noted other
passages, in which the Führer had made it clear that he hadn't the slightest interest in giving
freedom to the workers of other nations or races, but on the contrary was determined to put
them all to work for the benefit of the master race. "Aryan" was merely a fancy word for
German—and for other persons of education and social position who were willing to join with
the Nazis and help them to seize power.
However, Lanny wasn't there to convert two Nazi officials. He permitted Hugo Behr to speak
to him as one comrade to another, and now and then he made notes of something which might
be of interest to the reading public of Britain. Hugo was newer in the movement than
Heinrich, and more naive; he had swallowed the original Nazi program, hook, line, and
sinker; that was the creed, and when you had quoted it, you had settled the point at issue.
Lanny Budd, cynical worldling, product of several decadent cultures, wanted to say: "How can
Hitler be getting funds from von Papen and the other Junkers if he really means to break up
the great landed estates of Prussia? How can he be getting funds from Fritz Thyssen and the
other steel kings if he means to socialize big industry?" But what good would it do? Hugo
doubtless thought that all the party funds came from the pfennigs of the workers; that
banners and brassards, brown shirts and shiny boots, automatic pistols and Budd machine guns
were purchased with the profits of literature sales! Heinrich, perhaps, knew better, but
wouldn't admit it, and Lanny wasn't free to name the sources of his own information. Better
simply to listen, and make careful notes, and let Rick write an article entitled: "England,
Awake!"
II
Right after the elections came a trial in Berlin of three officers charged with having made
Nazi propaganda in the army. It attracted a great deal of public attention, and Adolf Hitler
appeared as a witness and delivered one of his characteristic tirades, declaring that when his
party took power the "November criminals," meaning the men who had established the
Republic, would be judged by a people's tribunal. "Heads will roll in the sand," he said. Such
language shocked the civilized German people, and Johannes Robin took it as a proof of what
he had been saying to Lanny, that all you had to do was to give this fellow rope enough and he
would hang himself. There was a demand from many quarters that Hitler be tried for treason;
but probably the government was of the same opinion as Johannes. Why hang a man who
was so ready to hang himself? The three officers were dismissed from the army, and Adi went
on making his propaganda—in the army as everywhere else.
Lanny invited Hauptmann Emil Meissner to lunch with him, and they talked about these
problems. Kurt's eldest brother, a World War veteran, had the younger's pale blue eyes and
close-cropped straw-colored hair, but not his ardent temperament; he agreed with Lanny that
Kurt had been led astray, and that the Führer was a dangerous fanatic. Emil was loyal to the
existing government; he said that would always be the attitude of the army, and was the
obligation of every officer, no matter how much he might disapprove the policies of the
politicians in control.
"Would you obey the Nazis if they should take power?" inquired the American.
Emil shut his eyes for a moment, as if to hide the painful reaction which such a question
caused in him. "I don't think it is necessary to contemplate that," he said.
Lanny replied: "The present election has made me do it." But he didn't press the point.
Emil placed his faith in Germany's symbol of loyalty, Feldmarschall and now Prasident Paul
Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg. The old commander had won the
battle of Tannenberg, the one complete victory the Germans had gained, with the result that
the people had idolized him all through the rest of the war. In every town they had set up
huge wooden statues of him, and it had been the supreme act of patriotism to buy nails and
drive them into this statue, the money going to the German Red Cross. The Hindenburg line
had been another name for national security, and now the Hindenburg presidency was the
same. But the stern old titan was now eighty-three years old, and his wits were growing dim; it
was hard for him to concentrate upon complex matters. The politicians swarmed about him,
they pulled him this way and that, and it was painful to him and tragic to those who saw it.
Emil Meissner had been on the old field marshal's staff during part of the war, and knew his
present plight; but Emil was reserved in the presence of a foreigner, especially one who
consorted with Jews and had a sister and a brother-in-law love to Adolf Hitler, and reported
that the President refused to recognize this upstart even as an Austrian, but persisted in
referring to him as "the Bohemian corporal," and using the name of his father, which was
Schicklgruber, a plebeian and humiliating name. Der alte Herr had steadily refused to meet
Corporal Schicklgruber, because he talked too much, and in the army it was customary for a
non-commissioned officer to wait for his superior to speak first.
Emil expressed his ideas concerning the disorders which prevailed in the cities of the
Republic, amounting to a civil war between the two sets of extremists. The Reds had begun it,
without doubt, and the Brownshirts were the answer they had got; but Emil called it an
atrocious thing that anybody should be permitted to organize a private army as Hitler had
done. Hardly a night passed that the rival groups didn't clash in the streets, and Emil longed
for a courageous Chancellor who would order the Reichswehr to disarm both sides. The Nazi
Führer pretended to deplore what his followers did, but of course that was nonsense; every
speech he made was an incitement to more violence—like that insane talk about heads rolling
in the sand.
So far two cultivated and modern men could agree over their coffee-cups. But Emil went on
to reveal that he was a German like the others. He said that fundamentally the situation was
due to the Allies and their monstrous treaty of Versailles; Germany had been stripped of
everything by the reparations demands, deprived of her ships, colonies, and trade—and no
people ever would starve gladly. Lanny had done his share of protesting against Versailles, and
had argued for helping Germany to get on her feet again; but somehow, when he listened to
Germans, he found himself shifting to the other side and wishing to remind them that they had
lost the war. After all, it hadn't been a game of ping-pong, and somebody had to pay for it.
Also, Germany had had her program of what she meant to do if she had won; she had
revealed it clearly in the terms she had forced upon Russia at Brest-Litovsk. Also, there had been
a Franco-Prussian War, and Germany had taken Alsace-Lorraine; there had been Frederick the
Great and the partition of Poland; there had been a whole string of Prussian conquests—but
whose redness was notorious. On the other hand, an officer of the Reichswehr owed no you had
better not mention them if you wanted to have friends in the Fatherland!
III
Three evenings a week Freddi and Rahel went to the school which they helped to support.
Freddi taught a class in the history of economic theory and Rahel taught one in singing, both
subjects important for German workers. Lanny went along more than once, and when the
students old and young discovered that he lived in France and had helped with a school there,
they wanted to hear about conditions in that country and what the workers were thinking and
doing. Discussions arose, and Lanny discovered that the disciplined and orderly working people
of Germany were not so different from the independent and free-spoken bunch in the Midi.
The same problems vexed them, the same splits turned every discussion into a miniature war.
Could the workers "take over" by peaceable processes? You could tell the answer by the very
words in which the speaker put the question. If he said "by parliamentary action," he was
some sort of Socialist; if he said "by electing politicians," he was some sort of Communist. The
former had the prestige of the greatest party of the Fatherland behind him, and quoted Marx,
Bebel, and Kautsky. His opponent in the controversy took the Soviet Union for his model, and
quoted Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. Between the two extremes were those who followed the
recently exiled Trotsky, or the martyred Karl Liebknecht and "Red Rosa" Luxemburg. There
were various "splinter groups" that Lanny hadn't heard of; indeed, it appeared that the nearer
the rebel workers came to danger, the more they fought among themselves. Lanny compared
them to people on a sinking ship trying to throw one another overboard.
At the school the "Sozis" were in a majority; and Lanny would explain to them his amiable
idea that all groups ought to unite against the threat of National Socialism. Since he was a
stranger, and Freddi's brother-in-law, they would be patient and explain that nobody could
co-operate with the Communists, because they wouldn't let you. Nobody talked more about
co-operating than the Communists, but when you tried it you found that what they meant was
undermining your organization and poisoning the minds of your followers, the process
known as "boring from within." Any Socialist you talked to was ready with a score of
illustrations— and also with citations from Lenin, to prove that it was no accident, but a policy.
Members of the Social-Democratic party went even further; they charged that the
Communists were co-operating with the Nazis against the coalition government in which the
Social-Democrats were participating. That too was a policy; the Bolsheviks believed in making
chaos, because they hoped to profit from it; chaos had given them their chance to seize power
in Russia, and the fact that it hadn't in Italy did not cause them to revise the theory. It was
easy for them to co-operate with Nazis, because both believed in force, in dictatorship; the one
great danger that the friends of peaceful change confronted was a deal, more or less open,
between the second and third largest parties of Germany. To Lanny that seemed a sort of
nightmare—not the idea that it might happen, but the fact that the Socialists should have got
themselves into such a state of hatred of another working-class party that they were willing to
believe such a deal might be made. Once more he had to sink back into the role of listener,
keep his thoughts to himself, and not tell Hansi and Bess what the friends of Freddi and Rahel
were teaching in their school.
IV
Once a week the institution gave a reception; the' Left intellectuals came, and drank coffee
and ate great quantities of Leberivurst and Schweizerkase sandwiches, and discussed the
policies of the school and the events of the time. Then indeed the forces of chaos and old night
were released. Lanny decided that every Berlin intellectual was a new political party, and every
two Berlin intellectuals were a political conflict. Some of them wore long hair because it
looked picturesque, and others because they didn't own a pair of scissors. Some came because
they wanted an audience, and others because it was a chance to get a meal. But whatever their
reason, nothing could keep them quiet, and nothing could get them to agree. Lanny had always
thought that loud voices and vehement gestures marked the Latin races, but now he decided
that it wasn't a matter of race at all, but of economic determinism. The nearer a country came to a
