system on the ground that the second to the last man would know that it
was the last man who was delegated to kill him if necessary; and the
last man would not have a gun in his back. True enough mathematically,
but the Imro system was run by practical assassins, not mathematicians.
They never let it get to the last man; the existence of the chain,
incomplete though it had to be, guaranteed that the originally
appointed assassin performed his duty.
Q. _Did the Nazis or the Bolsheviks practice assassination?_
A. They both rather looked down on individual killings as dilettante.
They preferred to do away with their victims en masse; especially the
Bolsheviks. I remember at the time of the Blood Purge of June 30, 1934,
when Hitler had murdered one thousand or more of his opponents, a
Polish correspondent in Moscow was expelled by the Soviet authorities
because he commented in a dispatch from the Russian capital that the
Bolsheviks regarded Hitler’s purge with the same disdain a wholesaler
would have toward the operations of a retailer. One thousand dead would
be retail business for the Bolsheviks. The Communists, however, stood
programmatically on the platform of no “individual terror” as they put
it, because they considered that assassinations of single persons were
ineffective, time and energy wasting.
The Nazis spurned no weapon, and so they murdered right and left from
the beginning. It was their type of young men, whether yet organized
in the Nazi Party or not, who committed most of the political
assassinations of postwar Germany from Rathenau and Erzberger until
Hitler came to power. Meanwhile, they deliberately provoked battles
with the young men of every other faction, Democrats as well as
Communists, in assemblies and on the streets, and the deaths from these
clashes numbered hundreds yearly.
After Hitler came to power you might have expected individual
assassinations to cease. But no, the murders by individual Nazis of
individual enemies, business rivals, or of anyone they happened to
dislike, continued through the year 1933 and it was not until 1934 that
the Gestapo took over the monopoly of murder. No claim of Hitler’s is
more ridiculous than his boast that the Nazi revolution was bloodless.
There is no record of how many Germans perished at the hands of the
uniformed bullies of the Nazi Party for strictly personal reasons, but
the numbers surely ran into thousands. I was a correspondent in Berlin
during that bloody year and I can testify as an eyewitness.
Q. _But weren’t those stories about atrocities exaggerated? You know
we were fed so much propaganda in the last war that later turned out
untrue, like the Belgian baby’s hands being cut off--how much can we
believe of the atrocity stories we hear now?_
A. No, the atrocity stories of today and of yesterday and of the last
war were not exaggerated. The truth is that we shall never learn of
more than the tiniest fraction of the atrocities committed by the
Germans, and I am sure we never learned about more than a fraction of
their atrocities in the last war.
Now by all means let some earnest young man arise and declare that the
British and the French and the Americans also commit atrocities. Do
they? Perhaps, because among our troops as among the troops of every
nation are some exceptionally brutal men, who when they are possessed
of the fury and license of battle become criminals. But only among the
Germans was and is atrocious behavior, torture, and murder, an official
policy, calculatedly carried out upon the authority of the government
to terrorize or exterminate the vanquished. When I came to Germany
I was intensely sympathetic with the Germans and refused to believe
any of the atrocity stories of the last war. It took many years of
residence in Germany and the experience of living through the bloodiest
period of the Nazi revolution to realize that there was almost no
atrocity charged against the Germans which could not have happened.
What a beautiful example of German propaganda the Belgian baby atrocity
story was. Dr. Goebbels must often have jealously admired the person,
whoever he was, who thought up the Belgian baby. Do we wish to cast
in doubt reports about the atrocities our people are committing?
Very well, let us plant a monstrous charge against ourselves, which
we can prove untrue, then we can claim (and many of our softheaded
opponents will believe us) that all other charges are untrue. This was
the effect of the charge that German troops had cut off the hands of
Belgian babies. Strangely enough, it was Northcliffe’s _Daily Mail_
which obliged the Germans by first picking up the story of the Belgian
baby, and then offering a reward for proof, and finally printing as
a journalistic scoop the fact that no proof could be found that the
Germans had ever cut off a Belgian baby’s hands. Thus in the minds of
millions of simple British and Americans the Germans were exculpated of
_any atrocities_. The bombarded British are not likely to make such a
mistake again.
Was there anything in the first World War to equal the deliberate
machine-gunning by German warplanes of the fleeing populations on the
roads of Poland, France, and the Lowlands? I do not believe it has a
counterpart in modern history, and only Genghis Khan and Tamerlane
could have matched it in earlier days. There were thousands of children
including babes in arms among the dead along the roads scarified by
the Luftwaffe. An American diplomat in Paris estimated that in France
and the Lowlands 100,000 civilians, two-thirds of them women and
children, were killed thus by the Germans, or approximately the same
as the number of French soldiers who died in battle. The slaughter of
civilians in Poland surpassed this figure many times.
I do not know why I should boggle at the lopped-off Belgian baby’s
hands, except that nobody could ever find an authentic example, and
I cannot imagine what good it would do the Germans, nor believe that
even Nazi Germans like to torture babies. The machine-gunning of the
roads in Europe had a military object, to cause panic and to clog the
movements of the Allied troops. But I have seen enough purposeless acts
of brutality committed by the Nazis to know what they are capable of
doing.
I wish Anne Morrow Lindbergh, whose sensitivity as a poet I sincerely
admire, could have been with me one day in the women’s ward of a Berlin
hospital as I listened to a woman explain to me why she lay there
bandaged from head to foot, with the blood still oozing through. It
was in the spring of 1933, and the Brown Terror was getting into its
stride, but the Nazis had not yet learned to bar correspondents from
hospitals. After this story they were all barred.
The woman was Frau Marie Jankowsky, forty-eight years old, mother of
five sons. She was a Social Democratic welfare worker. “Night before
last,” she related to me, pausing only when pain made her gasp, “a
group of Storm Troopers came to our flat. One of them backed my husband
and sons into the kitchen and held them at the point of his revolver.
The others took me away to a Storm Troop barracks on the second floor
of a building not far from my house. There they stripped me naked. In
the middle of the room was a table, and covering the table a flag. They
asked me what the flag was.
“I answered it was the Black Red Gold flag of the Republic. They said
‘No,’ and commanded me to repeat that it was Black Red Ordure. I
refused and four Storm Troopers pulled me face down over the table, the
fifth pushed my face into a bundle of rags to stop me screaming, and a
sixth began beating me across the back with a light steel rod.
“It cut the skin and made blood come with every blow. The Storm Troop
Captain said, ‘Give her twenty blows, the Jewish sow.’ I am not Jewish
but that did not make any difference. Then they jerked me off the table
and said, ‘You stole shoes from your welfare section, didn’t you?’ I
said, ‘No,’ and the Captain said, ‘Give her another twenty.’ I was
bleeding badly when they pulled me off the table again and yelled at
me, ‘What’s this?’ and showed me our flag of the Iron Front with three
arrows. I told them, but they demanded that I say it was a manure fork.
I refused and the Captain ordered another twenty blows.
“That made sixty, and I was very weak, but finally when they pulled me
off the table again and yelled at me, ‘You served Communists in your
soup kitchen,’ I still had enough strength left to say, ‘You ought to
be ashamed to say that because I served you and you and you, but no
Communists.’ This made them angrier than ever and the last twenty blows
were the worst, and when I rolled off the table they picked me up, and
the Captain struck me across the face with his riding crop, and then a
Storm Trooper hit me on the jaw with his fist and knocked me across the
room so that I fell and wrenched my knee.”
The livid scar of the riding crop flamed across her face, and the
dressing on her knee confirmed that injury. I asked the medical
attendant to describe her injuries as they were when she arrived and he
confirmed that her back had been cut deep into the musculature. Yes, I
wish Anne Morrow Lindbergh had been with me to see and hear this story,
although it is only one of hundreds of thousands which could have been
related first by German victims of the Nazis and now by the vanquished
of the entire continent.
Mrs. Lindbergh says the “Wave of the Future,” by which she means the
wave of collectivism, the wave of Nazism, is irresistible, and hence we
would be wrong to try to resist it, because by resisting we would only
increase the casualty list. She dismisses the brutalities, atrocities,
inhumanities of the conquering Nazis as merely the “scum” on the wave,
something which will pass away and leave the clear blue water of the
New Order. But she has not viewed this Wave of the Future at firsthand
and so she has not been able to perceive that the scum reaches all the
way from the top to the bottom of the Nazi wave; that there is no clear
water beneath the surface brutality of the New Order, that from its
beginning until today and until it is destroyed it has been, is, and
will be unqualifiedly evil.
Atrocities? I assure you there are more atrocities being committed
this very moment by the hosts of the Gestapo, the Black Guards, the
Storm Troops, and all the other ruffians of Hitler throughout prostrate
Europe than you have ever dreamed about. If only we could arrange to
have all our isolationists, our weasel-worded noninterventionists,
and our complaisant converts to the Wave of the Future take a trip to
Europe and let them observe the fate of the 150,000,000 under Hitler’s
heel. The Wave of the Future is a wave of blood and tears. What
American in his right mind can wish to live if this wave engulfs our
world?
Q. _You mentioned Jan Valtin’s book_, Out of the Night. _Do you
consider the book authentic?_
A. It is the most accurate description of Nazi and Bolshevik Terror I
have ever seen in print. Valtin tells from the inside of the G.P.U. and
the Gestapo what an American newspaperman working in Russia and Germany
could observe in fragments from the outside. There is not an incident
in the book, however gruesome, which could not have happened, no matter
how improbable it may appear to a reader far away from the horrors of
totalitarian police methods. I recommend the book to every American,
because these two evil weapons of the tyrant states are operating today
in our country and Valtin has given us the most authoritative picture
of their activities we have ever had. Whatever he was in the past, this
strange young German has done more for democracy by writing these grim
memoirs than most democrats who have been democrats all their lives.
Q. _Since Hitler attacked Russia, don’t you think it is no longer
correct to say Nazism and Communism are the same? Hasn’t Hitler proved
now that he is really an enemy of Bolshevism and is protecting the
world against it?_
A. That would be the equivalent of saying that one monarchy would not
attack another or that you could not have war between two republics.
The war between Hitler and Stalin is a war between two terroristic
collectives. The collectivist form of their economy is almost
identical, both of them being a form of state capitalism; both are
supported by police terror and both found their principle motive power,
the fuel to run their society, in hatred.
Both avowed that the end justifies the means and both thereupon
employed every conceivable form of fraud, deceit, and violence to
attain their ends. Pagan, atheistic rejection of Christianity,
deliberate denial of even the desirability of the principle of
universal brotherly love was common to the two totalitarian creeds.
The fact that the two monsters of malevolence finally turned their
hatred upon one another actively only emphasizes the identical
character of the fratricidal twins. What of their essential features
has changed since they warred upon each other? Nothing whatever. Does
the Russo-German war prove Hitler’s thesis that he was an implacable
enemy of Bolshevism? Nonsense! Hitler’s brand of Bolshevism is
infinitely more menacing to us all than any produced in Russia. The
bibles of the twin regimes, _Mein Kampf_ and _Das Kapital_, preach
identical doctrine: Here, hate everybody of a different race; there,
hate everybody of a different class. Since Jesus Christ was on earth
the Communist Party and the Nazi Party and the states they founded are
the first institutions of such dimensions to be built avowedly and
officially on hatred.
In Russia they began by saying they had to hate and kill in order to
clear the land of all classes hostile to a socialist world, in order
to make room for a happier life. But hatred becomes a habit, grows,
expands monstrously until it cannot find enough victims. Before the
Bolsheviks even gained a far-off glimpse of a happier life their hatred
had become an end in itself. They began, by hating, as they thought,
rationally; they finished by hating and killing themselves.
The proletariat and peasantry, instructed by the Communists, began by
hating the Czar, the aristocrats, bankers, factory managers, engineers,
technicians, schoolteachers, dentists, undertakers, physicians,
lawyers, priests and policemen, everyone who occupied any position
noticeably superior to that of the masses. It took them about ten
years to slaughter this lot, and then they began hating and killing
the better-off farmers. I was there during the final mopping up of the
first victims and again for the extermination of the second group, and
as the last of the identifiable enemies of the Bolsheviks disappeared
in the cellars of the G.P.U., or in the wastes of Siberia, we in Moscow
used to discuss quite seriously what these furious haters were going to
do when they ran out of “classes” to hate.
It was no joke. It had become indispensable to Bolshevik life to have
an object of hatred and when the object was exterminated another had
to be found. We guessed they would have to begin hating and killing
themselves, and we were right. To us it was not surprising. When you
lived among them, you realized that Communist “class hatred” is hatred
of anyone who gets along better than oneself and there is just as much
hatred of Communists by Communists as of capitalists.
In no organization has there ever been more back-stabbing, poisoning,
strangling, murderous mutual hatred of one another than in the
Communist Party, from the malignant Russian Central Committee through
all its verminous offspring in the Comintern. They used to boast of the
“monolithic” character of the Russian Communist Party. It was like a
block of granite without a crevice. The Russian Jacobins declared they
would never commit the error of their French forebears who found they
could not stop killing when once they had started to kill one another.
For years the outside world observed this Bolshevik self-restraint and
there was much fear of it.
Then suddenly the prodigious store of hatred within the Bolshevik
breast burst the bounds of self-preserving sanity and the apostles of
Marx fell to killing each other with bewildering ferocity. Howling
“Wrecker,” “Saboteur,” “Trotzkyist,” “Bukharinist,” “Rightist,”
“Leftist,” “Nazi,” “Fascist,” they shot their own Soviet-reared
professional men, generals, admirals, government officials, in a
whirl of self-destroying madness which left even persistent Soviet
sympathizers unable to explain what was going on because nobody,
possibly including Stalin, understood it. It was like a mad dog biting
himself, tearing out his own viscera. What could be the fate of the
eviscerated animal?
Even before the war, in both Germany and Russia, the omnipotent,
omnivorous State had devoured all but a vestige of happiness. As the
two regimes of hatred went forward along their respective paths each
lost gradually even the desire to promote the happiness of anybody,
even of its own people.
In the land of the Bolsheviks, the bigoted struggle against men of
another class became a struggle against men of another view. The
internal political conflict impaired production, hampered the campaign
against poverty, and protracted the wretchedness of the population.
Nobody ate, drank, slept, lived even decently, much less comfortably,
and there was no security. They had given up liberty for security. Now
security was gone, for to their dismay the Bolsheviks saw that the one
thing for which everything had been sacrificed, the defense apparatus,
was inadequate.
In the land of the Nazis, the attempts of the Supermen to rule the
world led the Germans to forget individual happiness as completely
as the Bolsheviks. The Nazis believed that if they gave up butter
for guns today, they could tomorrow win with their guns more butter;
but the Nazi chief never had any intention of stopping for butter.
In comfort-loving, once-bourgeois Germany, food, clothing, fuel,
transportation deteriorated until it was impossible to find even a
physically happy person outside the young armed forces for whom the
nation sacrificed all. These favored youths found their chief pleasure
in the exercise of a technical skill and lust in combat which enabled
them to crush a continent with playful ease.
Now from the Atlantic to the Pacific, across the greatest continuous
land surface on the globe, from the English Channel to the Sea of Japan
there exists not one comfortable, secure, happy family. Not among the
more than five hundred million persons now in Europe with its neighbor
states could be discovered a trace of the happiness, imperfect though
it was, which used to exist. The Nazi Bolsheviks had achieved triumph
as far as Europe was concerned. The Wave of the Future had swept
happiness from its path.
2. RUSSIA
Q. _What is the best way for the United States to help the Russians
fight the German Army?_
A. The best way for the United States to help the Russians fight the
German Army is for us to go to war against Germany. Our declaration
of war against Germany would be of more value to Russian resistance
than all the war supplies we shall ever be able to send to the Soviet
Union. We ought to try to send the Red Army as much as we can spare
of airplanes and arms and anything else it needs to help it hold the
Germans, but all such aid would be trivial compared with the effect of
our declaration of war.
Q. _Why? What practical effect on the Russian war effort would we have
by going to war with Germany?_
A. It would have the moral effect of convincing the Russians that they
would win in the long run; hence it should obviate any chance, however
faint, of Stalin’s capitulating. As we have said before, it would
convince the Germans they would lose the war and hence would halve
their determination to go on. It would triple our war effort overnight,
and result speedily in a vast increase of production here of the
materials the Russians as well as the British need to carry on the war.
It would enable us to base our Pacific Fleet on Singapore and other
British bases in the Far East, and our Air Force, if it were found
expedient, on Russian bases in Kamchatka and near Vladivostok within
bombing distance of Tokyo. This would not only check the Japanese from
advancing farther south but from indulging in any military adventure,
such as attacking Siberia, while the danger existed of our immediate
intervention against them. This would relieve pressure on the Far
Eastern Red Army and permit it to send urgently needed reinforcements
to the troops fighting the Germans in European Russia.
The use of our Atlantic antisubmarine vessels in complete cooperation
with the British Navy in all the war zones would help break the
German counter-blockade and permit a greater quantity of supplies to
reach the British armed forces. It would enable us to seize those
positions we need off the west coast of Africa and on the coast, and
thus provide the first step toward establishing another take-off
place for an expeditionary force against the Reich. The example of
America’s entering the war could lead Weygand, or other authorities in
Morocco, to consider collaboration with us instead of with the Germans;
the north African coast has long been kept in mind as a possible
springboard for invading Europe. America’s entry into the war would for
the first time enable the British to attempt invasion of the continent.
Until now the British have had to keep at home more reserves than they
would need if they knew the American Army would soon be at their side.
Even with our Army in its present state of semi-preparedness, we have
enough completely trained Regular Army and Marine units to be able to
send abroad for active service an important contingent which would
either take its place immediately in an invasion force or replace
British units assigned to that task. The first effect upon the Germans
of the intelligence that the British were seriously preparing to
attempt an invasion would be to compel them to send back troops from
Russia to threatened points in Europe.
Finally, from the broadest strategical standpoint, the entry of the
United States would turn the tables on the Germans who until now have
had the advantage of initiative and surprise. Throughout the world
until now Hitler has kept the world wondering “where is he going to
strike next?” With the United States in the war, it would be the turn
of the Axis powers to wonder where the Anglo-American-Russian forces
were going to strike next, and Hitler would be forced to keep large
numbers of troops stationed at every point where our forces could
possibly attack.
Q. _The Russian resistance to the German attack seems to have surprised
nearly everybody. How do you explain it?_
A. There are many reasons for it. It is true that almost every expert
expected the Russians to collapse within a few weeks after Hitler began
his drive. Walter Duranty is the only one I know who said from the
outset that the Red Army would hold much longer than the outside world
seemed to expect.
The first reason for Russian resistance is that this was the first
time Hitler ever tackled a country with _lives to waste_ and _miles
to waste_. Its 200,000,000 population lived almost like animals, but
most of them flourished like healthy animals on their black bread
and cabbage and made sturdy fighting material. They claimed around
12,000,000 soldiers in their standing army and reserve. Thus they could
lose as many men as the entire German Army and still have left an army
as big as the former French Army. In fighting against the Germans
they could afford to lose two to one and still have superiority in
numbers. Their high command knew this and wasted lives with abandon but
sometimes to advantage. The same advantage in size held with respect to
terrain. They could afford to retreat over distances equivalent to the
width of many European countries and still have room to live in, just
as the Chinese did.
The second reason for Russian resistance is that this was the first
time Hitler had ever struck an army and a generation untouched by the
humanizing influence of Christianity, immune to any form of pacifism,
unsoftened by Western civilization. It was the first time Hitler had
ever struck an army that had been taught that all life is struggle,
that to fight for the Soviet Union was the noblest thing a man or woman
could do, the first time the Nazis had met a fanaticism sharper than
theirs. The Bolsheviks invented totalitarian fanaticism; the Nazis only
copied it.