fifteen governments or more, but there are still millions of muddled
sentimentalists in this country who would shudder at the thought of
assassination. There were few, I suppose, who objected to the G-men
shooting the rabid Dillinger, but millions denounced the little doctor,
Weiss, who shot the far more dangerous criminal, Huey Long. So it would
have fared with anyone who would have assassinated Hitler. Imagine how
different the history of Germany and of the world might have been if
Hitler had been among the victims of the machine gun which fired on him
on the morning of November 10, 1923, on the Odeon’s Platz in Munich.
Before this war there were just as many sentimentalists in England, but
you would have to look a long time to find one now. During an air raid
in London I asked an old English lady, one of the gentlest creatures I
have ever known, what she would do if she were driving an automobile
and suddenly Hitler were to appear in front of the car. Would she turn
and save him, or would she drive ahead and hit him? “I would press the
accelerator and drive straight over him,” she said firmly.
Q. _What was the explanation of the bombing attempt on Hitler in the
Munich Beer Hall?_
A. It bore every earmark of being an admirably well thought-out and
executed plan by the British which just failed by a few minutes. I
should think the British government has done all it could to have
Hitler killed. Certainly the British know how supremely important it
would be to do away with the heart and brains of Nazidom. The bomb
attempt on Hitler in the _Buergerbraeu Keller_ in Munich, November
8, 1939, the anniversary of the Hitler-Ludendorff Putsch, nearly
succeeded. To refresh your memory: Hitler and his “Old Fighters” left
the beer hall twelve minutes before a time bomb exploded, killing seven
persons and wounding sixty-three. The Germans blamed it on the British
secret agents, and announced they had captured two such agents, a Mr.
Best and a Captain Stevens, on the day after the bomb explosion.
The Gestapo had gone over into Holland to kidnap the two Britishers who
incautiously made a rendezvous close to the frontier.
Some persons analyzed this affair thus: The Gestapo itself arranged the
bomb to go off after Hitler left. The Gestapo did it for one of two
reasons. Either Himmler wanted to kill Hitler, or Hitler wanted the
bomb attempt in order to arouse sympathy for himself among his people,
and hatred of the English. Neither of these explanations makes sense to
me. No Nazi leader in his right mind wants Hitler to be killed, because
every Nazi is aware that his party, his job, and his very life are
dependent upon the continued existence and leadership of Hitler. I will
not say anything further about the plain fact that most of Hitler’s
subordinates literally worship him. Just on the basis of individual
self-interest, it would be unlikely that any Nazi leader should wish to
weaken the Nazi position so disastrously.
I do not believe Himmler or any other Nazi was behind the attempt. Nor
is it credible that Hitler planted the bomb to arouse sympathy for
himself among the German people. He has all the sympathy he needs, and
German hatred for the English is quite adequate. Neither of these two
reasons could balance the danger involved in the infectious quality
of a public attempt at assassination such as this was. This attempt,
which took place before a large public, could not be concealed.
Finally, it seems that the German capture of the two British secret
agents crippled the British Intelligence Service in Germany for many
months. They were men high in the service and could be presumed to
have known a good deal about the whole Intelligence Service setup
in Germany. With the Gestapo at work on them in the approved style
recently made so vivid and bloodcurdling by Jan Valtin in _Out of the
Night_, it is not likely that many British Intelligence agents in
Germany remained unidentified. At any rate there have not been any
further attempts on Hitler, at least none that we know about.
The time-bomb attempt was compared by some correspondents to the
Reichstag fire, but I fail to see the basis for comparison. The
Reichstag was set afire by the Nazis for the specific, rational purpose
of blaming it on the Communists, suppressing their party, jailing
their deputies, and thus obtaining for the Nazis a majority vote in
the Reichstag. These purposes were achieved to the great profit of
the Nazis. What profit could the Nazis have had in staging a near
assassination of Hitler? When the Reichstag was burned, my cabled
report was censored, the first censorship I had experienced in eight
years of work as a correspondent in Germany.
The freshly appointed censor cut out a paragraph in which I had pointed
out that police when seeking the perpetrator of a crime, always try to
find out first who would have profited by the crime. So in the case of
the Reichstag fire it was only necessary to look for the persons who
would profit by the fire. The answer was as plain as daylight. Only the
Nazis would profit by the fire. The censor deleted this commonplace
but accurate observation. Who would profit by the death of Hitler? The
Nazis? Of course not. The British? Of course! If they had succeeded
they would have earned the thanks of a thousand million beneficiaries
throughout the world.
The fact that Hitler and his staff saved their lives by leaving the
_Buergerbraeu Keller_ earlier than had been their custom in former
years is the basis of the peculiar claim that the whole thing was a
Nazi plot. Why, it is argued, should Hitler have not stayed as usual to
chat with the comrades of the early days? Why indeed? Because this was
wartime, the first anniversary of the Putsch to be celebrated since the
war began. Hitler has not been known to waste much time since the war
began. He could be assumed to have had a number of things to do more
important than chatting with his Beer Cellar veterans. This time his
industry saved his life.
Q. _Why is it there are so few assassinations or attempted
assassinations in any of the totalitarian states? You would think their
cruelties would lead many desperate men to seek revenge._
A. Yes, you would, and this is a matter that many of us in Russia used
to discuss. How odd it was that in the history of the Soviet Union
there were only three known assassinations or attempts at assassination
of Soviet leaders.
Lenin was shot and seriously wounded in 1918 by Dora Kaplan, a Social
Revolutionary; Uritzky, police chief of Leningrad, was killed at the
same time; and sixteen years later, December 4, 1934, Sergei Kirov,
political boss of Leningrad, was shot by a half-demented former
Communist, Nikolaev. I shall not forget the Kirov killing because I was
in Moscow at the time and saw Stalin, in the bitter cold of a Moscow
December, help carry barehanded the coffin of Kirov to its grave on the
Red Square, and then hurry back to his office to plan his revenge, the
most colossal ever enjoyed by a human being since the prophet wrote
that vengeance was reserved to the Almighty.
It was the Kirov killing, of course, which touched off Stalin’s great
purge. It illustrates perfectly the first of several reasons why
assassinations are rare in the totalitarian states. Let me say here
that one of those reasons is not the one most popularly believed. It
is not due to the impenetrable guard kept around the tyrants. There at
the funeral of Kirov, we in the press box were not more than twenty
yards from Stalin as he stood on top of Lenin’s tomb, and when he
walked to the grave he came within almost touching distance of me.
Granted that the correspondents have unusual facilities, and that the
G.P.U. checks all of them to be confident none of them is dangerous.
But there in the Red Square hundreds of thousands of men and women
marched past Stalin, the nearest only a few feet away. Any one of them
could have shot at him or hurled a hand grenade at him before any of
the police surrounding the tomb could have intervened.
Likewise, Stalin could have been killed any time during the two decades
by any person with the initiative to attend the Bolshoi Theater when
Stalin was there, sitting in the rear of his first floor forward box.
He could have been shot from a score of seats in the first two rows of
the orchestra. It would have been even easier to wait for one of the
big Communist meetings in the Bolshoi Theater when Stalin was there
with all the leaders of the party. I have seen him with the entire
Politburo and forty or fifty others, sitting bunched together on the
stage of the Bolshoi Theater, while we in the Press box in the Gallery,
almost overhanging the stage, leaned over the rail and quietly observed
how easy it would be to drop something in Stalin’s lap.
A single bomb small enough to be concealed beneath an overcoat would
have killed Stalin and perhaps the entire top rank of the Communist
Party. Why hasn’t anyone tried it? Stalin surely has more enemies who
would like to see him dead than any man in the world except Hitler.
Stalin probably has more personal enemies than Hitler, because Stalin
has executed more people. When you think of the millions who died as
victims of the Revolution, and of the millions who died in the famine
of 1932-33, when Stalin ordered the peasants of the Ukraine to be
stripped of all their food to teach them a lesson, it seems singular
that no bereaved survivor should have lifted his hand against the
tyrant.
The first reason, however, why a modern despot enjoys relative security
is the character of totalitarian terror. In a normal democratic country
an assassin has to fear only the loss of his own life, and the lives
of his immediate conspirators, if any. In Russia, after Kirov’s death,
Stalin executed in this wise:
First, 103 persons who were not even accused of having had anything
to do with the assassination but had been held in jail for various
political offenses. This was simply the first gesture of the Terror,
intended to shock the country. Then as the police rounded up Nikolaev’s
family, friends, and acquaintances, and read his diary, they came to
know virtually every human being Nikolaev had known during his whole
life. Every one of these persons was arrested and after being squeezed
dry of information was executed; at any rate they all disappeared.
But that was only the beginning. The purges which were occasioned, not
caused, by the Kirov killing lasted about four years, from 1935 to
1938 inclusive. The Purge became so huge that Nikolaev was forgotten,
but before the G.P.U. finished with the Nikolaev complex, they had
liquidated in this wise: Every relative of Nikolaev to the third
cousins; every acquaintance of Nikolaev and every acquaintance of an
acquaintance of Nikolaev, and every acquaintance of every acquaintance
of every acquaintance of Nikolaev. You think this is an exaggeration?
Not at all. The number of executions ran into thousands.
Now what would be the effect upon a would-be assassin, if, as he
contemplated his deed, he reflected that as a consequence of his
killing Stalin, not merely would he himself be executed, but every
human being in the world with whom he had ever come in contact? Man
experiences the world largely as a series of contacts with other men.
Suppose the assassin knew by just such an experience as the Russian
people had in the case of the killing of Kirov, that his entire world
would be blotted out if he went on with his plans. Would not this deter
almost any man?
He might be motivated by the highest idealism, and would plan to give
his own life in order to rid his country of a cruel despot, but if he
were thinking of helping the people in his own world he would be bound
to admit that far from helping them, he was about to condemn to death
everybody on earth he had ever known. This surely is the most important
deterrent to assassination in despotic states and it is corroborated by
the experience of Italy.
Mussolini’s Fascist state is the least terroristic of the three
totalitarian states. The terror is so mild in comparison with
the Soviet or Nazi varieties, that it almost fails to qualify as
terroristic at all. The best proof I know of this is the experience of
an Italian friend of mine who before Fascism came to Italy was chief
correspondent of one of Italy’s greatest newspapers.
He occupied a position which might be compared with that of chief
Washington correspondent of the _New York Times_. When Mussolini took
power this friend, whom I may call Luigi, was dismissed from his
newspaper because he refused to become a Fascist. If he had wished to
serve Mussolini, he would have been made a Senator, and would have
become a rich man. But no, he was a courageous, passionately sincere
liberal. He used to declare, “I would approve of nearly all Mussolini’s
program (he doubtless would not say that now), but as long as he wants
to compel me to approve, I disapprove. I shall only approve when I am
at liberty to disapprove.”
Now what would have happened to this sort of man in Soviet Russia? A
leading journalist under the Czar defies Bolshevik power! You know
as well as I what would happen to him. He would be shot at once.
They would not even waste on him food for a day’s extra meals. He
would have been shot the moment the Cheka noticed him. And what would
have happened to Luigi in Germany? He would have been sent to a
concentration camp and there he would have been tortured and either
gradually killed or turned out a broken emasculated creature, not a man
any more.
But what happened to him in Italy? First, his newspaper, with which
he had a contract, bought off the contract for a sum sufficient for
him to live on in a modest way the rest of his life. At the same time
the police established a twenty-four hour surveillance of him. Three
detectives working in eight-hour shifts were assigned to watch him.
Mind you, he wasn’t arrested, and was even allowed to become the
correspondent of a foreign newspaper.
The detectives were there all the time. Luigi came to know them well.
If they behaved decently and he liked them, he never gave them any
trouble. But if one of them was rude, this is the way Luigi would
do. He would get all his newspapers, a dozen or more to read in the
morning, and though ordinarily he would take a taxi or walk to his
office, now to discipline the detective, Luigi would get on one of
the streetcars which circle Rome and he would sit there, going around
and around the city for a couple of hours, reading his papers. The
detective had to follow him. The detective rode a bicycle. Two hours
of hard road work usually corrected the manners of the worst of them.
Think of that kind of police “Terror,” and you have a fair idea of the
comparative mildness of the Italian kind of totalitarianism. We used to
take delight in counting up how many hundreds of thousands of lire it
had cost the Italian government to keep three detectives employed for
fifteen years.
What has this to do with our theme of assassination? Just this, that
during the first twelve years of Mussolini’s dictatorship he was
attacked twelve times, and several of the attempts only failed by the
narrowest margin.
One of the earliest and most serious attempts was by a former general
who hired a room a couple of hundred yards away from the Palazzo
Chigi, equipped himself with a sporting rifle fitted with telescopic
sights, and waited for Mussolini to come out on the balcony to speak.
This event may have inspired Geoffrey Household’s _Rogue Male_. The
general was betrayed at the last moment, arrested, and sentenced to
life imprisonment on the Lipari Islands. That is another index of the
comparatively mild character of the Italian despotism. At that time the
Fascist legal code still had no provision for the death penalty for a
plot against the life of the head of the State.
Q. _In spite of everything you say it still seems difficult to see why
some person half-demented by persecution or the cruelties inflicted
upon his family and friends should not have tried to take vengeance
against the tyrant. There must certainly be among the victims of Nazi
or Bolshevik brutality many persons too tortured in mind to be able to
remember all those considerations you have advanced?_
A. Undoubtedly there are, but these persons are generally too
demoralized to act. If they are sufficiently distorted by their
suffering to forget the consequences to their family and friends of an
attack on the tyrant, they are too enfeebled to move. Fear paralyzes
them. The modern totalitarian tyranny, as the German and Russian, by
reason of the ideology of the ruling party and superior organization
of its police force, ferrets out, identifies, and disciplines a larger
percentage of its opponents than any tyranny was ever able to do in the
past. The ideology of the party makes an ex-officio police agent out of
every Communist in Russia and every Nazi in Germany.
The G.P.U. and Gestapo are superior to the police systems of former
modern tyrannies because this is the first time that tyrannies have
not been ashamed of their political police, but acknowledge, boast of
them, and coerce the population to cooperate with them. The amorality
of Bolshevism and Nazism, or rather their rejection of the Christian
standard of behavior, is best illustrated by the exceptional position
of the political police systems. Under a regime such as the Czar’s,
the political police, the Okhrana, was likewise an instrument of
repression, and as such the regime showed constant evidence of being
ashamed of it.
The efficiency of the Okhrana suffered correspondingly. Today, in view
of our experience with the G.P.U. and the Gestapo, the Okhrana seems
like a benevolent association for the benefit of wayward Russians.
It is instructive now to go back and read the memoirs of that great
opponent of the Czar, the noble revolutionary, Prince Kropotkin.
To note the comparative triviality of the offenses charged by the
revolutionaries against the regime, and then to note the comparative
leniency of the punishments inflicted by the Czar upon his enemies is
to measure the chasm which the Bolshevik Revolution and the Red Terror
dug between our New Dark Age and the imperfect, liberal, easygoing
Past, the like of which no one in our generation shall ever see again.
Under the Okhrana the number of political assassinations in Russia
culminating with the killing of Alexander the Second, reached an
all-time high. This fact, like the attempts on Mussolini’s life,
corroborate the thesis that mild Terror is ineffective, while extreme
Terror may be completely effective. It seems to me to be useful to
stress this fact about the Nazi or Bolshevik Terror, because one of our
American democratic illusions to which we cling most fondly is that
good will always triumph, liberty will eventually win over tyranny, and
despots will ultimately be overthrown by their oppressed victims.
This doctrine is not only false, but one of the most harmful of our
wishful thoughts, since it leads us to believe that all may come right
with this very wrong world without our having to do anything about it.
Another instructive pursuit is to get a copy of the old _Who’s Who of
the Russian Communist Party_ and observe that there was not a single
leading member of the Party who had not been at one time or another,
and frequently many times, under arrest by the Okhrana. Stalin,
supreme butcher of the lot, was five times in the hands of the men whom
he later was to help exterminate. One can conservatively say that if
the Okhrana had been operated on the principles of the Soviet Police,
not a single leader of the Bolsheviks would have been left alive, and
there would have been no Bolshevik Revolution as we know it, and no
Soviet Union with its melancholy record of life-taking failure, and
perhaps no Nazi party in Germany, and who knows, perhaps no World War
now.
Absolute Terror not only physically removes the more dangerous
opponents of the tyranny but it reduces the survivors to morbid
obeisance, to a sort of unwilling, servile, unconscious idolatry of
the tyrant. The tyrant, when he attains the stature of Hitler or
Stalin, becomes the Omnipotent Father in the subconsciousness of all
his subjects, including those hostile to him. This makes it all the
more difficult for the rebel to raise his hand in patricide. Those who
insist that the modern tyrants are mere gangsters overlook the aura
of mystic power which is created around the figure of a ruler daily
greeted by choruses of adulation and abasement from tens of millions of
his people. It is no more to be resisted than the rhythm of tom-toms.
When the Lion of Judah, Emperor Haile Selassie, declared formal
mobilization of his ragged soldiers, he had two batteries of war drums,
one in major, one in minor key, beating their defiant message all day
and all night from his palace in Addis Ababa. The pulsations of the
drums at the Ghibi more than two miles away came to me in my room in
the stables of the Imperial hotel with a mesmeric force that made me
long to follow their rhythmic directions. The same effect is obtained
in the great tyrannies by the mass salutations of the tyrant worshipers.
Never in history have there been such vast numbers of people to add
the influence of the multitude to the herd instinct to conform. The
greatest tyrannies of long ago, when the human tribe was a fraction
of its size today, the Roman Empire, the Mongol Khanates, or even
the Indian Mogul Kingdoms, disposed of power over small populations
compared with the more than 250,000,000 now ruled by Hitler or the
200,000,000 by Stalin. In this day of electric communications the
huge bulk of such aggregates does not become unmanageable. The more
territory Hitler conquers, the more loot he has, the more permanent
resources to exploit, and the more people to enslave at work useful for
the Nazis. Our only hope against him is for his military defeat at the
hands of ourselves and our friends.
Q. _You have made discouragingly plain why there are so few political
assassinations in Germany, but couldn’t somebody like the fellow who
killed King Alexander and Barthou in Marseilles be found?_
A. I do not think so. That fellow, Vlada Georgiev, was a member of
the famous Imro, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization,
which had the only system I ever heard of to guarantee that their
members carry out assigned assassinations, no matter what the police
terror might be. The Imro’s object was to unify and obtain the greatest
possible degree of independence for Macedonia, divided among Bulgaria,
Greece, and Jugoslavia. Their chief weapon was assassination, and
when the Imro decreed a person’s death it was about as certain to be
carried out as any human decision can be. The procedure was to appoint
a killer and provide that he be killed unless he fulfilled his task. To
make this principle work it was necessary that the appointed assassin
realize he would more surely die if he failed than if he succeeded and
risked legal execution. A long tradition of killings within the Imro
made this fearful compulsion effective.
The mechanics of the system were simple. Like the Russian Nihilists
under Boris Savinkov, the Imro used to try and formally condemn their
victims to death. Thereupon the committee would draw beans from a bag.
The man drawing a black bean was the appointed assassin. He was _A_.
He had to leave the room. The others drew again. The man drawing the
second black bean, _B_, was appointed to kill _A_ if _A_ didn’t kill
the chosen victim. _B_ then left the room and a third black bean, _C_,
was appointed to kill _B_ if _B_ failed to carry out his assignment,
and so on until the whole committee had lined up, each with a gun
in the back of another. No one knew who among his comrades was his
potential executioner, but each knew that death was certain if the
decisions of the committee were not obeyed. Now this sort of system
would work, I believe, even in Nazi Germany, but the democracies are
far too squeamish to indulge in such practical methods.[1]
FOOTNOTE: