The Wooden Shepherdess (40 page)

If a rock is too large to be rolled aside then it has to be blasted: only the total destruction of Röhm and his whole monolithic S.A. could satisfy Himmler, and Göring was only too ready to help. Between them, they held the means: Minister-President Göring's control of Prussia, Reichstag-President Göring's Establishment friends, General Göring's Army contacts, Reichsführer Himmler's S.S., Head-of-the-Gestapo Himmler's Secret Police—this five-fold couple between them could furnish the gelignite even for such a vast demolition as this one.... Ah, but only the Führer could fire the charge; and how could they make the Great Non-decider do anything quite so drastic?

The only answer was Fear: once convince him that Röhm had designs on his life he would strike so fast that you wouldn't see him for dust. So the two of them put their heads together, concocting a “Röhm-Strasser Plot” to expose to Hitler—a Left-wing conspiracy aimed at his murder. It hardly mattered to Göring and Himmler that Röhm was no more likely than anyone else at Court to raise a finger against the Führer's person because (like themselves) he was fighting strictly for
second
place.... It would hardly have mattered, that is, if it weren't for Hitler's uncanny knowledge of men.

Meanwhile Hitler paced the unyielding marble floor of the Royal Suite at Venice's Grand Hotel, profoundly wishing he'd never come. He pondered all he'd been forced to endure in the way of humiliation and boredom—
in primis
, the public insult of having to watch someone else spell-binding a crowd.... As he stepped from his plane in those wretched civvies von Neurath had made him wear he'd been met by a Duce out-Göringing Göring in splendor of uniform. Cheering crowds lined the roads—but cheering their Duce: for them the dim little Charlie Chaplin in pork-pie hat and shabby old trench-coat had only shone in their Duce's reflected glory.

Yesterday's lunch at the Villa Pisani.... What joker had chosen that peeling malarial mausoleum for yesterday's top-level tête-à-tête? For there they'd been eaten alive by giant mosquitoes—two hectoring titans bobbing to scratch an ankle with one hand and slapping their necks with the other (he'd got his own back all right, by wittily pointing out to his hosts that this was the insects' very first taste of a white man's blood)! But if yesterday's choice of the Villa Pisani had been sheer folly, today's had surely been prompted by malice—the Duce's crazy proposal to hold their talks in a boat on the open lagoon. That knowing smirk on the Duce's face when the Führer flatly refused.... Some spy must have told him the Führer's fine-strung nerves couldn't bear bobbing about in boats with all that water below him.

Moreover, he hadn't escaped even here from the problem of Röhm and his Brownshirts: the Duce had had the infernal nerve to read him a lecture on cutting them down to size! The man had been got at, of course: though the hands were the Duce's the voice was the unmistakable voice of Papen and Göring—there seemed no end to the way those puny swine underrated their Führer's intelligence....

Hitler flew home next day; and headlines in every paper that Jeremy found in Stuttgart lauded the visit's “historic success.”

On their way to Ulm the English party met with such welcoming loving-kindness at every wayside stop (as well as that all-pervading odor of sunburn-cream) that Jeremy found himself sorely puzzled why: for surely this couldn't be normal—it isn't in human nature to love the whole human race. Suppose it some day went in reverse.... When a barmaid even ran from an inn to give Joan a rose, while three of her customers left their beer to dispute the honor of changing a wheel, he decided the symptoms were downright pathological, marking a very queer kind indeed of euphoric state these people must all be in.

But they presently made a detour. A turning-off to the left was sign-posted ARBEITDIENST. “It must lead to one of their Labor Camps,” said Ludo.

“They don't have women: I wonder whether they'd let me in?” said Joan.

“We can only try.” Then they overtook a bunch of glistening torsos shouldering shovels who told them to go right ahead and ask for the Camp Commandant; and one of them jumped on the running-board to show them the way.

When they got to the huts the Camp Commandant (he was rather a scoutmaster type) raised no objection to Joan, and seemed only too happy to have them talk to his lads. “It's their rest-time now.” A hint of the showman crept into his voice: “Reveille is half-past-five and they work six hours a day. We feed them and clothe them and pay them twenty-five pfennigs. They're all volunteers—except that the students have made their own rule that no one can sit his degree till he's done six months like this on the Labor Front. They come from all walks of life, for we've utterly finished with Class in the Nazi State—and Gott sei Dank!”

“How many camps like this have you got?”

“Twelve hundred. That's nearly a quarter-million of lads all told, kept busy draining marshes and making roads instead of propping up lamp-posts. They're all of them young and unmarried, and taking them out of the labor-market has helped a lot with providing jobs at regular wages for older, family men. In the eighteen months since we came to power unemployment has halved—six million workless has dropped to three.”

“I wish we had something like this in England!” said Joan, her mind on all those desolate dole queues: “I simply can't think why we don't. It seems such a simple solution.”

But meanwhile Jeremy did a rapid sum in his head. “All the same, that can't be only because of your twelve hundred camps: the Industrialists must have helped. What about heavy industry in the Ruhr—about Krupp for instance?”

“They are splendid: they all do their bit. Krupp alone has provided three thousand new jobs in the last few weeks: he's an ardent Nazi now.”

Krupp, the Armament King.... “And all making safety-razor blades, I suppose!” thought Jeremy, rather surprised at getting such vital information quite so easily (spying seemed money for jam!).

“Ask the Commandant if he's ever met Hitler in person,” said Joan, whose German was somewhat shaky.

The Commandant turned towards her: “Yes, I indeed have talked with my Führer face-to-face,” he answered slowly in English, then lapsed again into German: “For only five minutes; and yet he is so transparent I feel I have known him the whole of my life.”

“Then tell us about him,” said Joan.

“I shall tell you exactly about him. He's.... Well, to begin with he's what a Christian would call a ‘saint'—there's no other word for the manifest supernatural power working through him; and yet he's as simple and unassuming to meet as you and me. And gentle: all children love him at sight. But he has one fault: so pure and honest himself, he's a little gullible—easily hoodwinked by self-seeking rascals hanging on to his coat-tails. But then he's a man so loyal to all his friends that he won't hear a word against one of them—more's the pity, in certain cases....” He sighed. “But now you must talk to my lads.”

He shouted a word of command and they all came tumbling out of their bunks, their tins of sunburn-cream in their hands. What struck Jeremy most about them—apart from their blooming health—was how almost everything made them laugh, as if something irrepressibly joyous was bubbling up inside them: more like schoolboys than men in their early twenties. Even their “Heil Hitlers” sounded like somebody passing on a wonderful piece of news; and Jeremy commented on it.

“That's just what it is!” said the Commandant: “What Hitler has done for us all is to wake us out of the nightmare we've lived in for sixteen years. He has started us Germans hoping again, when we'd almost forgotten how to hope.”

With a glance to make sure that Ludo was out of earshot, “For
you
—but I don't see very much hope for your Jews,” said Jeremy bluntly: “Why do you hate them so?”

For the fiftieth part of a second a curious flicker had crossed the Commandant's clear blue eyes. “Lads—Go back to your bunks!” he cried, and the audience vanished. Then he went on: “We don't
hate
the Jews, not as individual persons: you mustn't think that. All we ask is justice. In England you've never known what it means to live under a Jewish hegemony: one per cent of the population with more than fifty per cent of all the important jobs—you can't call that fair! But once they're reduced to the one per cent of important posts they deserve....”

“All the same you set about combing them out pretty brutally,” Jeremy ventured: “Your Storm Troops beating them up and looting their shops.”

“Ah, that was the early days—enthusiastic Youth kicking over the traces. It's been put a stop to now.” Then he laid a hand on Jeremy's shoulder: “However your English, French and American Jews don't help us to love ours much by boycotting German goods, and trying to cripple Germany's export trade: you should tell them they're doing their brethren here a very bad turn indeed.”

But even one per cent of the creamy jobs.... “I don't believe a word of it,” Jeremy thought: “And this time, neither does he.”

On the way to Augsburg Anthony sat so silent that Jeremy asked him what was wrong. “Why can't we have an American Hitler?” Anthony burst out at last: “We sure do need him.” He paused. “But I reckon there aren't two born in a thousand years.”

*

Augsburg they found a blazing sunset of red with its Nazi flags, which vied with the natural sunset behind its steepling gables: banners hung out to welcome some World War Veterans' group. But the party seemed to be over, with veterans filing out of the Rathaus and wandering off in twos and threes. Jeremy couldn't see very much “hope” in the eyes of these middle-aged men who had fought one war already; and beer seemed only to make them sadder.

In Munich, Jeremy went by himself to look at the famous “Brown House,” the Nazi headquarters. Some buildings next door had just been torn down, and whatever was being done to the site was securely hidden by ten-foot palings; but Jeremy found a knot-hole to peep through. “There's somebody
here
who doesn't set very much store by the Ten Year Rule,” he thought: for those massive concrete domes could be nothing else than underground air-raid shelters.

After Munich, Ludo still had business to do in Leipzig, and then Berlin. But June was running out, and so was Jeremy's leave: so he left the others at Nuremberg, traveling west by train. As he sat in his second-class carriage he pondered what kind of report to write. He had seen enough of the public mood to know that the Nazis had certainly come to stay; but what else could he put? Talk about “pathological friendliness” wouldn't make very much sense to the D.N.I.! Increased production at Krupp's would be more his line....

Just then, through the open window, he heard a distant burst of firing. “Ah, Saturday rifle-practice” he thought: “I must put that in.” But he wasn't quite right. What he really had heard, that peaceful last day of June, was the sound of a firing-squad in some lonely place; and it wasn't the only one.

Hitler had got back from Venice to find that the crisis had not been dispelled simply by shutting his eyes to it. S.A. brawlers showed scant respect for anyone, even the sacrosanct Army. Then Göring had met him with ominous whispers of Party plots for a left-wing Putsch; and Himmler had dropped particular hints about Röhm and Strasser, promising more revelations to come as soon as his men reported. Berlin, moreover, was full of rumors that Hitler was slipping; and Count Lepowski was not alone in believing that Strasser would soon be Chancellor, Röhm at Defense and the S.A. absorbed in (or rather, absorbing) the Army.

But outside the Party, Conservative piper-players were claiming to call the tune. The day after Hitler's return Vice-Chancellor Papen's Marburg speech—an oration so well and carefully written that no one believed he'd composed it himself—had called for an end to S.A. excesses so openly Göbbels forbade the papers to mention it, let alone print it. There-upon Papen had dared to complain of the ban to Hitler himself as insulting his next-to-the-Chancellor status, declaring the President backed every word he had said and threatening resignation.... This at least was too much to be stomached. Pygmy Papen's place was to wait to be sacked, not to talk of resigning; and Hitler decided to fly to Neudeck forthwith and have things out with this senile meddling President.

Hindenburg flatly refused to discuss things with him however. Hitler was met at the door by an icy General Blomberg deputed to act as Hindenburg's mouthpiece and carrying Hindenburg's ultimatum: if Hitler couldn't or wouldn't curb the S.A. and ensure public order instanter the Civil Government would be suspended, Martial Law be declared and all authority placed in the Army's hands.

Hitler was hardly tempted to linger on Hindenburg's doormat: he hadn't even been offered a chair. He flew straight back to Berlin, where Göring and Himmler got busy at once with the “new revelations” they'd promised. Röhm and Strasser meant murder (they said); and had fixed on Saturday next for their coup, the day of his June-the-thirtieth meeting at Wiessee. As soon as Hitler had left for Wiessee, Karl Ernst's Troopers would seize Berlin; and if Hitler ventured his head in the Wiessee hornets-nest he would never get out alive, his only hope lay in striking first.

Inwardly Hitler rejected this cock-and-bull story as totally out of character. Röhm he knew through and through. Debauched and brutal and mulish his old friend might be, but that was a far cry from wanting to bypass a murdered Führer and stand at the apex himself: for he lacked the exceptional urge for
absolute
power, not having the brains (and he knew it) to cope with the endless problems which absolute power entails. And Strasser too was another congenital runner-in-second-place.... Ideally, now that the days of street-fighting were over Hitler himself could do very well without Röhm just as already he did without Strasser—except that without Röhm the Storm Troops would break into open revolt, which would spell the end. The boiling Storm Troops themselves were still the genuine danger.