not fight. The British will not fight. We can do as we like with the
Czechs. I only hope they do fight.” Hitler this time got everything
he wanted but one thing. The Czechs, brutally betrayed by their ally
France and bullied by England, did not fight. Hitler was cheated of
his desire to do violence. At Munich the bad temper he displayed when
Chamberlain and Daladier gave in to him on every point was caused by
the fact that he realized these good gentlemen were going to make the
Czechs surrender. He was not going to be given the chance to drop one
bomb. He had to wait a whole year for his bloodshed.
If you doubt this analysis of Hitler’s bloodthirstiness, recollect that
he never gave Poland a chance to imitate Czechoslovakia’s surrender.
Would it not be a matter for wonderment if the German generals
had failed to be impressed by this third example of the Fuehrer’s
infallibility?
Yet when he proposed to destroy Poland even after the British and
French had “guaranteed” her, some of Hitler’s generals still cautiously
offered objections on the grounds that this would inevitably mean
the Great War and maybe they could not win the Great War. For the
fourth time Hitler overcame constantly lessening opposition of “timid”
generals. He explained that he would knock out Poland before the French
or British could strike, if indeed they intended to strike at all.
There was some doubt whether the Allies would really fight. Ribbentrop
insisted Britain was through, and although they might declare war and
mobilize, the British would do so only to save face, and would take
the first opportunity to quit with a negotiated peace. But even if the
British and the French did go to war, Hitler explained, he would finish
Poland swiftly, and then turn such heat on France, bring such terrific
forces to bear on the Western Front, that she would probably also be
ready to negotiate peace, and if not he would knock her out also.
_That_ he was sure he could do, and once he had done that, the British
would capitulate.
If there was any opposition lingering among the generals, it
disappeared upon the signature of the Russo-German Pact, August 23,
1939. This most brilliant of all Hitler’s foreign political coups
convinced his generals first that they would not have to fight a war on
two major fronts, second that they were in the hands of an invincible
military-political genius of the first category.
How gloriously right Hitler seemed to be. At first everything appeared
to depend upon the speed with which Hitler could knock out the Poles,
whether he could finish them off before the French could mobilize for a
great offensive on the West. Optimistic Poles said they could hold out
for three years; pessimistic Poles said one year. The French thought
the Poles could hold for six months. The German generals thought it
would take three months to break the Poles. Hitler gave them six weeks
to do the job. They conquered Poland in eighteen days!
Then came Norway and then came France!
No matter what the German generals had thought before, by May 1940 they
had the feeling Hitler was another Napoleon. Sure enough, on May 10,
they attacked and on June 17 the French Army, the mighty French Army of
4,500,000 men only three generations from Napoleon, surrendered. The
Germans, led by Hitler, had accomplished the greatest victory in the
history of the German Army, and had inflicted upon their age-old enemy
the most colossal defeat in the history of France. Indeed from the
point of view of the numbers of men involved, and the issues at stake,
it may be said to be dimensionally the greatest victory of military
history.
How can anyone now wonder that after the fall of France the German
General Staff with all its professional vanity would be proud to take
and if necessary blindly obey orders from Corporal Hitler?
Hitler had brought his General Staff to this position of unquestioning
obedience when he gave the orders to attack Russia. Here was truly the
place for caution. If Hitler was another Napoleon, here was the same
Russia. It meant a two-front war. It would give time for United States
aid to become effective. At the best it meant lengthening the war by
years.
“No,” Hitler ordered, “we shall conquer Russia before the summer is
out, and conquer England before the year is out and before the United
States can do anything about it. _Vorwaerts!_” Only the prestige built
up by Hitler’s uninterrupted series of victories from the Rhineland to
Crete could have won the acquiescence of the German General Staff to
the Russian adventure.
Q. _Is Hitler personally brave?_
A. It is hard to say. I could put it this way: Hitler is not the sort
of man about whom one would unhesitatingly say that he is personally
brave, as one would say about Churchill, for example. Perhaps we shall
not count the story he told me about his winning the Iron Cross in the
last war, since many Germans say it is not a true story. Yet it is an
interesting one. He told it to me the night of March 11, 1932 on the
eve of the Presidential election when he ran against Hindenburg and
scored eleven million to Hindenburg’s eighteen million votes.
I asked him how he had won his Iron Cross. He always wore it but his
political enemies declared there was no record in the army archives of
its having been awarded him and neither in _Mein Kampf_ nor elsewhere
could there be found any account of how he got it. I was afraid when I
asked the question that it might irritate him, but he seemed amused,
and even pleased.
“You know,” he said, “I was a dispatch bearer in the war. One day,
toward the first of June 1918, I was ordered to take a message to
another part of the front, and had to traverse a section of no man’s
land. Presently I passed a dugout which I thought abandoned, but
suddenly I heard French voices below.
“Being alone, and armed only with a pistol, I stopped a moment, then
drew my pistol and shouted below in my very bad French, ‘Come up,
surrender!’ Then I shouted in German as though to a squad of soldiers,
orders to ‘Fix bayonets! Draw your hand grenades!’ First one French
soldier, and then another, and then another came up with their hands
in the air until there were seven. I marched them to the rear and
turned them over as prisoners of war. Now,” he paused, and smiled at
Tom Delmer of the London _Daily Express_, who was with me, “if they had
been English soldiers, or,” turning to me and continuing to smile, “if
they had been American soldiers, I am not sure I should have been able
to make them surrender so easily, and perhaps I would not have my Iron
Cross or be here today.”
This is the only time I have observed a sense of humor in Hitler,
and of course if his story is correct, it proves that he had on that
occasion a considerable amount of personal bravery.
Then there is the time when, during the 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch,
he threw himself down when the Reichswehr armored car began to fire its
machine gun at him and Ludendorff and Goering and the rest of them.
I was about a hundred yards away, jammed in the crowd, when I heard
that machine-gun fire, the first I had ever heard in my life. That
one whiff of fire killed sixteen of Hitler’s men including the body
servant of Ludendorff standing next to the General whom he had served
throughout the war. Hitler was injured because he had thrown himself
down so violently that he broke his collarbone. Would you consider that
a sign of cowardice? I do not know. It was the proper reaction for a
front-line soldier.
Nevertheless, Ludendorff not only refused to take shelter but
contemptuously stalked across the Odeon’s Platz and, in his uniform
of a Lieutenant General, gave himself up to the Reichswehr Lieutenant
in charge of the armored car, with the words: “Arrest me, Lieutenant.
I shall never wear this uniform again.” Now there was a man about
whom one would unhesitatingly say he is a brave man. You remember how
Ludendorff, then a Colonel, took the fortress of Liege singlehanded,
simply drove in his staff car to the Belgian lines, by amazing luck got
through, drove straight to the entrance of the fortress, knocked, and
walked in. When the Belgian commander saw before him a German Colonel,
he assumed the game was up and surrendered. That won for Ludendorff the
Pour le Merite, Germany’s Victoria Cross.
There was a time when Hitler displayed indubitable personal courage.
That was when he arrested Captain Ernst Roehm, the head of his
2,500,000 Storm Troops, on the famous June 30, 1934, the day of the
Blood Purge. Roehm had been Hitler’s close, if not closest, personal
associate. I cannot use the word friend, because Hitler has never had
a friend. He was the only man in the party, in the world, as a matter
of fact, with whom Hitler exchanged the intimate “Du” or “Thou.” We
Americans can never understand the significance of this continental
custom. If you are on “Du Fuss” or “Thou Footing” with another man, it
means you are brothers, and it is taken very seriously indeed by all
except the proletariat, who in the informal brotherhood of the working
classes, call each other indiscriminately “Thou.” But this intimacy of
Hitler and Roehm did not prevent Hitler from cold-bloodedly ordering
his friend’s execution when once Hitler had convinced himself Roehm was
plotting treason. Cold blood is one of Hitler’s chief characteristics.
It reminds one of Robespierre.
Roehm was hiding out with his staff at the hamlet of Wiessee, not far
from Munich. His guards, heavily armed, had strictest orders to stop
everyone, but _everyone_, and by that underlining emphasis in the
orders, _everyone_ was meant to include Hitler himself. Nevertheless,
on the fateful morning, Hitler with two automobiles containing among
others the canny Goebbels, several high SS officers, and a handful of
SS gunmen, drove into Wiessee at daybreak, and when Roehm’s guards saw
the All-Highest, instead of stopping him they saluted “Heil Hitler!”
There was at least some bravery in Hitler’s daring to go personally to
arrest Roehm, surrounded by his bodyguards. Once he had penetrated the
sentry lines, there was not much for Hitler to fear, especially not in
his personal encounter with Roehm. He found Roehm in bed with what they
call in German a _Lust Knabe_.
Roehm was a barrel-chested, scar-faced desperado whose only two
weaknesses were his homosexuality and drink. He had grown potbellied,
and invariably woke with a hangover. He slept in a nightgown. When
Hitler flung open his bedroom door at daybreak and routed him out
of bed, Roehm must have been distinctly at a disadvantage. There he
stood, bleary-eyed, nightgowned, potbellied, before his Fuehrer roaring
charges of treason, yelling that he was under arrest, ordering him to
dress and be quick about it.
I passed through Munich on my way from Rome to Berlin to cover the
Blood Purge the next night. From SS officers who boarded my train at
Munich, via the good-looking Italian Wagon-Lit conductor who had been
from time to time propositioned by Roehm, I learned that Major Buch,
Hitler’s chief SS executioner, had that evening gone to Roehm’s cell
where a revolver had been left to let him commit suicide, and had shot
Roehm as he cried, “Tell Adolf to come kill me if he has the nerve!”
Q. _Is it true that Hitler is a homosexual?_
A. No, it is not true. He came seriously under suspicion because of
his intimacy with Roehm, and because for so many years he tolerated
the blatant homosexuality of Roehm and his cohorts. This was a scandal
so colossal that it surely has no counterpart in history. Roehm as
the head of 2,500,000 Storm Troops had surrounded himself with a
staff of perverts. His chiefs, men of the rank of Gruppenfuehrer or
Obergruppenfuehrer, commanding units of several hundred thousand Storm
Troopers, were almost without exception homosexuals. Indeed, unless a
Storm Troop officer were homosexual, he had no chance of advancement.
All this was known to every intelligent observer in Germany and of
course was known in every detail to Hitler. His moral indignation when
he made his Blood Purge and cleaned out this “nest of immorality” was
one of his more brazen pieces of hypocrisy. He purged Roehm not on
account of his distasteful habits but because Roehm was plotting to
seize power, make himself head of the Army, and form what would have
been, incidentally, a homosexual government.
Nobody knows whether he intended to do away with Hitler or merely
force Hitler to go along with him. At any rate Hitler would have
no part of it, and Roehm was killed, though not for his abnormal
love life. Thereafter Hitler passed the most stringent edicts
against homosexuality and this odd feature of German life was driven
underground. It remains, nevertheless, characteristic of the Germans,
that they, outwardly the most brutally masculine of all European
peoples, are the most homosexual nation on earth.
Naturally because Hitler never showed any sign of interest in women,
he came under suspicion, but prolonged observation has convinced all
the witnesses I know, including Germans and foreigners, that Hitler is
simply asexual, has no sex life at all, or rather has sublimated it in
his “marriage to the German people.”
Q. _How do you mean, “marriage to the German people”?_
A. That is precisely the relationship Hitler conceives himself to have
with the Germans, and I must say millions of Germans appear to feel as
though they constituted his wife. Incidentally it was Lord D’Abernon,
long-time British Ambassador to Germany, who remarked that the world
did not properly understand the meaning of masculinity and femininity
as applied to nations, and that in his opinion the Germans were the
most feminine people in Europe and the French the most masculine.
Whether D’Abernon would today be of the same opinion, I do not know.
At any rate Hitler certainly obtains from his contact with the German
people a more than adequate surrogate for normal sex life.
Just imagine what his feelings must be when he stands, as in peacetime
he used to stand, on the platform at the Tempelhofer Field in Berlin,
and before him are a million Germans. This is the largest crowd that
any man has ever had before him in person. You could never assemble
such a crowd in a democracy, because it takes them twelve hours to
march into place and twelve hours to march away.
On the night before the first of May, which the Nazis stole from
the Communists and Socialists and made their own Labor Day, the
Berlin population is herded into line and marched off in battalions.
Everything is meticulously arranged by a General Staff, so that by the
time Hitler appears one million persons, no less, are standing to hear
him. When Hitler appears, from a million throats roars the cry “Heil
Hitler! Heil! Heil! Heil!” time and time and time again.
Then he speaks and at every possible opportunity comes again the bellow
from a million German voices “Heil! Heil! Heil!” Sounds silly? Oh no,
not any more than the German goose step is silly. It looks silly only
in the movies. In real life it is tremendously impressive--ten thousand
steel-shod boots striking the ground with all the force ten thousand
muscular legs can put into it. They shake the ground, and when the
million Germans shout “Heil!” they make the firmament quiver. I defy
anyone to hear such a mass yell without trembling at the sheer brute
power of it.
Suppose you were the recipient of this ovation! Hitler obtains his
life’s satisfaction from this sort of power orgasm. Now, of course, he
has the whole continent of Europe to trample upon. Every man who loves
power for its own sake as Hitler does, has a strong streak of sadism,
of enjoyment in the infliction of pain or humiliation upon others. So
now Hitler has a double stream of enjoyment in which to wallow. I do
not think he will ever marry.
Q. _Are women attracted to Hitler?_
A. Soon after he came to power he had to pass an edict forbidding
German women to crawl out of the crowd and attempt to kiss the hem of
his raincoat as he passed by. This was forbidden partially for the
same reason as the _Verbot_ against throwing flowers, which was issued
because it would be easy to conceal a bomb in a bouquet. Whenever he
appeared in public, scores of German women tried to get near enough to
him to touch his raincoat or come into some kind of personal contact
with him.
It is, regrettably, impossible to record that this is a purely German
phenomenon. An American woman distinguished herself at the Olympic
Games, and incidentally brought about a disciplinary shake-up among
Hitler’s bodyguards, by brushing past his gunmen and kissing him on
the cheek. All this is, perhaps, only evidence of the traditional
regard women have for strength, whether exhibited by the champion prize
fighter, wrestler, chess master, millionaire, or by the Fuehrer of
Germany.
Q. _I have heard scores of you fellows, foreign correspondents and
others, say they “know the truth about Hitler,” and constantly
recommend that we find out what he means, but that seems to be a pretty
complicated business, and we cannot all live in Germany long enough to
find out about it. Can you tell us in a few words just what he does
mean, for us?_
A. Yes, in the fewest words: Hitler means exactly what he says. He
says the German people are a master race, destined to rule the world.
He says the German people have the power to enforce their rule on the
world. He intends that they shall rule the world during his lifetime.
He includes the United States in the world he intends to rule.
Finally, he does have the power to carry out his world conquest unless
we fight him in time. That is the shortest way to put it. The reason
you think it hard to understand or find out what Hitler means is that
you refuse to believe these things because they upset you, and if
you believed them then you might have to work harder, or sacrifice
something such as your automobile, or blood, or maybe your life. Read
_Mein Kampf_. It is all there.
Q. _What kind of public speaker is Hitler? Is he truly a great orator?
How does he compare with others?_
A. He is probably the greatest spellbinder of all time. He literally
talked himself into power in Germany and thereafter he talked the great
German nation into becoming his blindly obedient and fanatically loyal
Herculean slave. With his slave he has laid a continent in chains. But
he never delivered an oration in his life, because an oration according
to Webster is “An elaborate discourse, delivered in public, treating an
important subject in a formal and dignified manner,” and that Hitler
never did. In this respect, Goebbels is incomparably his superior.
An oration by Goebbels has a beginning, a middle, and a crescendo
end; it has form, style, and the language is chosen, the gestures
sparing but effective, the voice clear and only now and then distorted
by passion. Hitler begins any old way, rambles, digresses, becomes
excited, rants, shouts until his voice is hoarse, and frequently breaks
into a falsetto scream.
The quality of Hitler’s voice is unpleasant. It is thick in the middle
register, guttural in the low, and its high notes are rasping. In
every speech at some time he becomes angry and then the tone is either
terrifying or embarrassing to the listener, depending upon his relation
to Hitler’s power. I speak, of course, of the foreign listener, as
it would affect you if you understood German. His anger frequently
overpowers him, but he never splutters, he roars. I sometimes felt as I
listened to him, and I have heard him fifty times or more, as though he
were a wild beast.
Then he can shift in a twinkling to the tone of irony, contemptuous,
derisive. Much of his speech is ungrammatical; many of his sentences
do not “read,” do not make German. He pays apparently no attention to
the structure of his speech. He sometimes ends so abruptly that his
audience is shocked, having expected him to finish his thought, or even
complete a sentence. His gestures are extravagant, and resemble those
of an old-fashioned camp-meeting preacher. He mimics well, and delights
in ridiculing his opponents by caricaturing them.
There is scarcely a rule of oratory he does not ignore. He is
seldom dignified. All of this, of course, is in reference to his
extemporaneous public speaking which brought him to power, not to the
speeches he reads, as he has read nearly everything since he took
power. As Chancellor of the Reich he can read a speech with dignity,
as he read the funeral oration over Hindenburg, which I heard in
Tannenberg.
Yet with all the criticism one can bring to bear on his public
speaking, he remains the most effective mob master ever to step on a
platform. He sweeps his audience with him. Sometimes they are slow to
come along, as the time when after seven days of slaughter in Germany
he rose in his own uniformed Reichstag to explain the Blood Purge of
June 30, 1934. That time he spoke for twenty minutes before he received
a single handclap. He had just killed more than a thousand people
including leaders of his own party, Ernst Roehm, his closest friend
and head of the 2,500,000 Storm Troops; Gregor Strasser, one-time
rival for leadership of the Nazis; General Kurt von Schleicher, former
Reichs Chancellor, and his wife; Karl Ernst, head of the 250,000 Berlin
and Brandenburg Storm Troopers; General von Lossow and former Reichs
Commissar von Kahr of Bavaria, who had defeated his first effort at
seizing power in Munich, and hundreds of others.
The nation was stunned; the Nazi Party itself was partially paralyzed
with fear. Hitler had turned his SS (_Schutzstaffel_) Black Guards
against his SA (_Sturmabteilung_) Storm Troops, and hundreds of Brown
Shirt officers had died before the Black Shirt firing squads, many of
them shouting “Heil Hitler!” as they fell. Most of the members of the
Reichstag, that curious gesture of Hitler before democracy, were active
or honorary officers in the Storm Troops. A score of seats were empty.
Their lawful occupants were dead. The survivors were appalled and not
less bewildered than the public. Nobody knew what had happened; what to
expect. When Hitler began to speak, for the first time in his life he
was received in silence.
As I sat in the press gallery of the Kroll Opera House, I noted this
with amazement, but I felt the silence was that of stupefaction, not of
indifference and certainly not of rejection. The listeners were simply
stricken dumb. Yet the silence continued, for five, ten, fifteen,
twenty minutes. By then I began to think that Hitler might have made
a mistake, that perhaps his dummy Reichstag was actually disapproving
their idol. Many of them had close friends among the dead. Then came
the breaking point. I think it was the most dramatic moment in any
speech I have ever heard of Hitler’s.
In his intolerably repetitious way he had started with a description
of Germany’s suffering under the Versailles treaty, and under the
“fourteen years of servitude to the traitors of November,” then
sketched the events leading up to the Blood Purge, described his
discovery of the plot against the State, and then with a leap he
shifted into his most passionate style. He had come to the moment of
ordering the executions. Raising his right hand, forefinger pointed on
high, he stood on his toes and roared: “_Meine Herren_, at that moment
_I_ was the Supreme Court of Germany; _I_ was the Supreme Judge of
Germany; _I_ was Germany!”
The silence in the Reichstag broke, and as though hypnotized, the 500
Brown-Shirted members roared: “Heil! Heil! Heil!” There, they had
recognized their master. He had spoken as a master. He had consented
again to be their master, and from a mood of bewilderment and fear they
burst into the joyful acknowledgment of their abasement. Forgotten were
the friendships with the dead, blotted out in the keen pleasure of
hearing the crack of the lash. From then on his lengthy accounting was
constantly punctuated by the traditional applause.
Incidentally it might be pointed out here that there is after all a
very significant difference between the tyrants of long ago and the
tyrants of today. It is a fact that the tyrants of today exercise
greater power over the lives of their subjects than any we can
recollect from former times. Historians have to search to find a
Ptolemy, a Caesar, or a Mongol Khan who had so complete a discipline
over their populations, so profound a control over the individual lives
of their subjects as have the despots of the modern totalitarian states.