Part 1

Transcriber’s Note:

Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).

Additional Transcriber’s Notes are at the end.

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Is Tomorrow Hitler’s?

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H. R. KNICKERBOCKER

IS TOMORROW HITLER’S?

200 Questions On the Battle of Mankind

Reynal & Hitchcock : New York

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COPYRIGHT, 1941, BY H. R. KNICKERBOCKER

_All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form_

Second Printing

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY THE CORNWALL PRESS, CORNWALL, N. Y.

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TO AGNES

CONTENTS

_NOTE: This descriptive table of contents gives only a sampling of the many provocative questions discussed._

CHAPTER PAGE

FOREWORD xi

INTRODUCTION xv

1. GERMANY 1

Have you ever met Hitler? What impression does he make when you meet him? Does Hitler’s personality grow upon closer acquaintance? Is Hitler personally brave? Is it true that Hitler is a homosexual? Are women attracted to Hitler? What kind of public speaker is Hitler? What is the secret of Hitler’s power? Do you think Hitler is personally responsible for the war? Is Hitler the real boss of Germany? Are any of the men around Hitler of a calibre to succeed him? Does Hitler actually direct his battles as did Napoleon? Why didn’t Hitler attack England after Dunkirk? What was Hitler’s second mistake? Isn’t there anything constructive about Hitlerism? How has Hitler run his show without money, without gold, without foreign exchange? Can the Nazi economy continue to run indefinitely? How can you describe the German people as hysterical? What would happen if Hitler were killed? Why doesn’t somebody kill Hitler? What was the explanation of the bombing attempt on Hitler in the Munich Beer Hall? Were the Nazi atrocity stories exaggerated? Do you consider _Out of the Night_ authentic? Hasn’t Hitler proved he is an enemy of Bolshevism by attacking Russia? What should we do with Hitler after he is defeated?

2. RUSSIA 88

What is the best way for the United States to help the Russians? How can the Russian resistance to the German attack be explained? What do the Russians fight for? Is it true that the Soviet government has restored freedom of worship? Are we running a risk if we support the Russians? Can Stalin be trusted? Under what circumstances would Stalin make a separate peace? What would be the effect of such a compromise peace on Great Britain and the United States? What is the NKVD? Are the peasants better off on collective farms? How about the Soviet elections of which we hear? Why do you give so much importance to the Soviet Terror? How do you explain Russian inefficiency and wastefulness? How has the Red Army been able to stand up so well? Could Stalin carry on with the resources of the Urals?

3. ENGLAND 139

What place will Churchill have in history? Is Churchill really backed by the English people? Can Churchill be trusted? What does Churchill think of the United States? What are Churchill’s characteristics as a person? Would the British Navy survive the fall of the British Isles? How can the flight of Hess be explained? What is the secret of Churchill’s success? What are Churchill’s principal interests?

4. WAR AIMS 184

What are Britain’s war aims? What was the meaning of the Churchill-Roosevelt meeting? How can the gains of victory be consolidated? Will the United States come out of the war in a better economic condition than others? What will the peace conference be like? In what sense will the conquered peoples be slaves? How could we compete with Hitler after a German victory? Can’t American labor produce better and cheaper than slave labor? What are Hitler’s plans for Europe? What kind of negotiated peace would be acceptable to the Axis? What is the text of Hitler’s terms? What chance has Communism in a defeated Germany? Is there any way to render Germany impotent? Is the problem of the Germans insoluble? Will England come out of the war with a socialist system? What is to be done with all the former nations of Europe?

5. FRANCE 234

Why did France fall? Were there traitors on the French General Staff? How did treason manifest itself in the operations of the army? Who gave the orders? What is the opinion of informed Frenchmen? Is Pétain a patriot or traitor, or misguided? Is Pétain moved by personal ambition? What would Hitler do if he finally tired of fooling with Vichy? What about Darlan? And Laval? Has Laval a chance to seize power? In what way are we Americans very much like the French? Are there any encouraging differences between ourselves and the unfortunate French? Is there any hope that the French may come back? Will Hitler’s treatment of France be different later? How was the French indemnity fixed? How does this compare with the reparations paid by Germany after the World War? What is Hitler doing with French industry? Should we continue diplomatic relations with Vichy?

6. THE UNITED STATES 293

What is the greatest danger we face as a nation today? Is our morale very bad? What is the state of our armament? If we have nothing to fight with, how can we go to war? Could Hitler succeed in invading the British Isles? Why doesn’t Ireland allow Britain to take over naval bases? Is it true that Hitler wants to destroy the United States? Haven’t we plenty to do at home without getting into a foreign war? Why do you think we ought to go to war with Germany today? Why would a declaration of war be worth so much immediately? What effect would a declaration of war have on the morale of the Army? But weren’t we suckers in the last war? Would an American declaration of war have any effect on the morale of the Germans? Would another A.E.F. be required? Might a new League of Nations be successful?

7. FIFTH COLUMNISTS 339

What makes Lindbergh the way he is? Are we fair in calling Lindbergh a Copperhead? What is the reason for the divorce between Lindbergh and the American people? Why did Lindbergh attack the Jews? What is to be the fate of the Jews? What are Lindbergh’s arguments against our entering the war? What is the answer to America’s Fifth Columnists?

FOREWORD

I met H. R. Knickerbocker way back in 1927 or thereabouts. Those were the good old days. They were the days of the Long Armistice. No one had ever heard of the Rome-Berlin Axis, Stuka dive bombers, or the Haushofer Plan. Mr. Roosevelt was out of politics, Mr. Churchill was a chancellor of the Exchequer, and Mr. Lindbergh had just flown the Atlantic. We talked of such neolithic creatures as Pilsudski of Poland and Alexander of Jugoslavia, and most of us thought that Hitler was a bad Austrian joke, more or less. Those were the good old days. Even so, thunderheads were gathering.

I first met Mr. Knickerbocker in Berlin. This was fitting, since Berlin was his bailiwick. We all had bailiwicks in those days. Duranty was in Moscow, Raymond Swing was in London, and Dorothy Thompson had just left Berlin. I was bouncing all over the place. I didn’t have my bailiwick yet. We were all very good friends. We formed a kind of fluid international community. We were buzzards in every foreign office, and kings on every wagon-lit.

We didn’t meet often, since we lived in different cities, and it took something of a catastrophe to bring us all together. When we did meet, the vault of heaven shook. I remember days--and nights--in Geneva, Bucharest, Cairo, Helsingfors. I think of Sheean, the Mowrers, Webb Miller, Shirer, Jay Allen, Fodor, Whitaker, and many more. Don’t let me sound nostalgic. I am thinking merely that we have all grown up. We are not cameras any longer.

This foreword is not about Mr. Knickerbocker’s book. Let that speak for itself. Knick is the most pertinacious, plausible, and inquisitive question-asker I ever met. In this book he answers questions instead of asking them. I like to see the tables turned. I don’t know that I agree with all his answers. But let him answer them.

This foreword is about Mr. Knickerbocker himself. His flaming red hair, his flaming red personality (I mean “red” chromatically, not politically) are famous on four continents. He needs no introduction. But certain nuggets of memory stay fixed in mind. I remember the time he fed me caviar inside a baked potato, at Horcher’s in Berlin, and I remember the time I fed him a dinner in London that, deliberately, we planned so that it would cost exactly five pounds. I remember the time that he took me to hear Putzi Hanfstaengl hammer out a tornado of Wagner in the Hotel Kaiserhof, and I remember the time I took him across the freezing Danube, on the way to Sofia, in what was supposed to be a rowboat. I remember week-ends on the Semmering, bad oysters in Madrid, evenings in the Café Royal, drinks in Rome, Budapest, and points beyond.

Knick’s career has been spectacular in more than one dimension. He once set out to fly the Atlantic, as a passenger in a German plane, long before the Lindbergh flight; he was the only correspondent during the Ethiopian war to glimpse the front from the air; he has had more interviews with European heads of state, I imagine, than any other newspaper man alive.

Mr. Knickerbocker was born in Texas in 1898. He went to Europe in 1923, and, a student of psychiatry at the University of Munich, walked straight into Hitler’s Beerhall Putsch. He studied briefly in Vienna, and then got a job in Berlin on the _New York Evening Post-Philadelphia Public Ledger_ foreign service. Since then his career has been a calendar of most of the great events of our time. He spent two years in Moscow as correspondent for the International News Service (this was in 1924-26, when Trotsky was declining and the N.E.P. expanding), and in 1928 took over Dorothy Thompson’s job as chief correspondent in Berlin for the _Public Ledger_. He won a Pulitzer prize for distinguished foreign correspondence--a series of articles on Russia’s Five Year Plan, but for almost ten years Berlin was the blazing focus of his life.

Meantime there were trips to take. In 1933 he travelled all over Europe for a series, “Will War Come in Europe?” for I.N.S. He saw the death of Dollfuss in Vienna, and the burial of Hindenburg in Germany. He met Mussolini, Masaryk, King Alexander, King Boris, Otto Habsburg, and hosts of others. He did one series of articles on Russia and the Baltic states, comparing living standards under communism and capitalism, and another surveying economic aspects of the Europe that was crumbling. Came the war in Ethiopia in 1935, which he covered on Haile Selassie’s side. I will never forget the agitated days in London when Knick was accumulating the vast equipment he took along. In 1936 came the Spanish civil war, and the next year the war in China. He saw bombings all the way from Toledo to Nanking. He returned to Europe to cover the Anschluss crisis and the Munich disaster; then he dipped briefly into South America, and reached Peru. Then Europe called again; he saw the beginning of World War II in London and France, and in 1940 accompanied the French armies till they collapsed, and then saw the battle of Britain at its fiercest climax, in September.

But let me go back to those days in Berlin. The main point I want to make has to do with Knickerbocker in Berlin. During the turbulent 1930’s he was much more than a journalist covering Germany; he was a definite public character in German political life. After Hindenburg and Hitler, he was practically the best known man in the country. His _réclame_ was fabulous, personally and politically. Everyone knew the lithe, active, red-haired Herr Knickerbocker (pronounce the K, please). Once a musical comedy was named for him--supreme tribute!

Partly this was because he published half a dozen books in German, compiled from the long newspaper articles he wrote, which appeared serially in the _Vossische Zeitung_ or the _Berliner Tageblatt_. The books were extraordinarily successful in Germany; they introduced German readers to a new type of American journalism. Among them were _Der Rote Handel Droht!_, _Der Rote Handel Lockt!_, _Kommt Europe Wieder Hoch?_, _Rote Wirtschaft und Weisse Wohlstand!_, _England’s Wirtschaft und Schwarzhemden!_, _Deutschland So oder So!_, and _Kommt Krieg in Europa?_

Knick knew practically every human being of consequence in Germany. He explored the country from top to bottom. He talked to Hitler, Spengler, Brüning, Goering, Goebbels. Then Hitler came to power. At the time Knickerbocker was in the middle of a German lecture tour that had begun in the Lessing Hochschule in Berlin. Knick watched the Nazi revolution crushingly obliterate all opposition. He wrote a series exposing the Brown Terror that caused violent comment in New York as well as Berlin. Presently he was excluded from the country. There are hate affairs as well as love affairs. The hate affair between Hitler and Knickerbocker is one of the most torrid in political history.

But this should not detract from the main point, which is that Knick knows the real Germany, loves it, and respects it. He is a Nazi-hater, but not a German-hater. His authority on the subject is authentic and complete.

_John Gunther_

INTRODUCTION

There is no such thing as winning a fight without passion. France went to war apologetically; France fought the war without music, and so France lost. Britain went to war apologetically, but Britain had the inestimable advantage of being bombed, and today for the first time in 100 years Britain is angry and is fighting as she has never fought before. We, the United States, are today apologetic, so sorry that it seems we after all are called upon to fight, and some of us still say we should not fight, and others say we must fight only with aviators and sailors, and never with infantrymen, and very few indeed are the strains of martial music throughout the land. From all sides we are called upon to restrain our emotions, and it is said that the cool head is the shrewd head, and that is correct, of course, but a cool head without a hot heart is useless on a battlefield. Without anger there can be no victory and useful anger is based upon understanding. Unless the American people can be brought to understand that our national existence and our individual security are today in peril, and unless the American people become angry at the enemy, we shall become a part of Hitler’s Reich.

History may eventually record that Britain was saved by the bombs Hitler has rained upon her since the fall of France. Unless they annihilate the British, these bombs will have fulfilled a function Hitler never imagined. He thought they would terrorize the British into surrender; instead the bombs aroused a resistance such as no other population has ever shown, for the prolonged punishment of Britain’s cities has been worse than anything we know of elsewhere, including Belgrade, Warsaw, Rotterdam, Madrid, Barcelona, or Chungking. The British required this experience to awaken them. They had been at war eight months when the Germans finally attacked in the West, but they had not given up the grand old British custom of the Friday to Tuesday week end. It took the German break-through on the Meuse, and then the German bombs on London, to shock every inhabitant of the British Isles into the realization that they faced death for their nation and death or slavery for themselves unless they fought with a ferocity even greater than that of their jungle enemies.

We are today as sound asleep as the British were before May 1940. We are as sound asleep as the French were before they saw their fortifications fall and their army of 4,500,000 soldiers with the tradition of Napoleon dissolve between May 10 and June 17, in five weeks of the greatest military debacle of all time. We have had no bombs on America, and presumably shall not have them until it is time to trek for the Rocky Mountains. A sober American patriot remarked, “How fortunate Britain has been to have had the bombs to arouse her martial spirit before it was too late. If Hitler were to have a lapse in judgment and send just half a dozen bombers over New York, and drop just half a dozen bombs, it might be the salvation of America.” But Hitler will do no such thing. He is glad to accommodate those Americans who refuse to believe they are threatened until they are physically attacked. When and if the Germans break through upon America we shall awake to find ourselves alone, cut off, surrounded, outnumbered, outgunned, and outlawed amid a world of enemies.

A few of us, chiefly correspondents formerly in Germany, have been trying to do duty for German bombs on America, and for the German break-through. We have been called alarmists. For years the world of international observers was divided into two groups: the one composed of nearly everybody on earth outside of Germany, who understood nothing of the true character of Hitler’s Third Reich; and the second tiny group, small enough to be contained within a lecture hall, composed of correspondents, diplomats, and a few businessmen who had firsthand knowledge of what the Nazis mean. Today a good many persons without this intimate knowledge of Nazi Germany have been able to decide for themselves about the character of a regime which has overrun fifteen countries in three years, but the danger to America still looks very remote and impersonal to millions of patriotic citizens. I have been talking to about 100,000 of these citizens, during a lecture series.

My thesis was in brief: That the United States should be in a state of formal, shooting war with Germany as speedily as possible because only by this means can we make the world safe for America; and that we must realize that after going to war we have only begun a task which may last for many years and one which we can fulfill only by learning to fight with even more fervor than the demoniac Nazi shock troops, and by greater national self-sacrifice than we have ever been called upon to make.

On this thesis I was asked around 3,000 questions during the question period following the lectures. For this book I have chosen around 200 as representative of what the American people are thinking. I have arranged the questions in categories and have added many recent ones to bring the Forum up to date. Eager, painful, almost agonizing concern for the future of America was the background of these queries from audiences in 128 communities, including two-thirds of all cities of more than 100,000 population and scores of towns and villages. The people with whom I talked ranged from millionaire winter tourists in Florida to coal miners in Pennsylvania, applegrowers in Yakima, oilmen in Oklahoma, college boys in the Great Lakes states, farmers in the Midwest, workers, bankers, club ladies, teachers, cowhands, Catholics, Jews, Protestants, atheists, Yankees, Southerners, Texans, Westerners--Americans.

I am convinced that these earnest Americans, representing through their family and friendly connections at least ten times their number, or more than 1,000,000 persons, are far in advance of the President’s moves toward active defense, just as the President has always been far ahead of the Congress. They wanted action even before the President offered it. Among 3,000 questioners there were not more than six openly hostile hecklers from the floor. Would it be too hopeful to say that America is 2,994 to 6 in favor of liberty?

1. GERMANY

Q. _Have you ever met Hitler?_

A. Many times. From 1923 until today I have watched and studied him and a good part of that time I was close enough to have opportunities for firsthand observation. I first heard him speak in August 1923, not long before his unsuccessful attempt to seize power, in the famous Beer Hall Putsch, and then I witnessed the Putsch, and reported his trial with Ludendorff for treason. He was released from Landsberg Prison in December 1924 where he had been held in comfortable “fortress confinement” just long enough for him to have time conveniently to write _Mein Kampf_. I interviewed him for the first time in the Brown House in Munich in 1932. Thereafter I had a series of interviews with him, and was present at many of the great moments of his career.

Q. _What impression does he make when you meet him?_

A. The first impression he makes upon any non-German is that he looks silly. Not to a German, mind you, and I suppose he did not look silly to any of those heads of European states who crawled to Berchtesgaden to get their orders. But to a foreigner not subject to his commands he certainly looks silly. I know that is a strong word to use about a man who has already conquered a continent but it fits.

I remember well the first time I ever laid eyes on him, in August 1923, when he was speaking at the Zirkus Krone in Munich--I broke out laughing. Even if you had never heard of him you would be bound to say, “He looks like a caricature of himself.” The moustache and the lock of hair over the forehead help this look, but chiefly it is the expression of his face, and especially the blank stare of his eyes, and the foolish set of his mouth in repose. Sometimes he looks like a man who ought to go around with his mouth open, chin hanging in the style of a surprised farm hand. Other times he clamps his lips together so tightly and juts out his jaw with such determination that again he looks silly, as though he were putting on an act.

Indeed Hitler is, more than anything else, an actor. He will go on being one the rest of his life, a great actor who in his role as tyrant conqueror will have affected the destinies of more millions of people than any other human being in history, but an actor to the last, a tragedian whom no one would take seriously until he began shooting at his audience. Even in the midst of his triumphs he manages to look silly to any outsider capable for the moment of detaching himself from horrified contemplation of the fate inflicted upon his victims.

I remember watching him roll down the Ringstrasse in Vienna standing beside the chauffeur in a cream-colored Mercedes car, with his arm outstretched in the stiff salute he affects on such occasions, the hand rigidly held at a slight angle downward. It was the moment of his conquest of Austria. The streets were crowded with half a million people, a few cheering sincerely, many cheering out of fear, and hundreds of thousands grim-faced, weeping inwardly.