Part 6

A. In 1934 I talked with President Thomas G. Masaryk of Czechoslovakia in the old Hradzin Palace in Prague. The venerable statesman was eighty-four years old, but he was still able to deliver measured philosophical replies. One of them was to the question: “Aren’t you as head of the Republic of Czechoslovakia which Hitler and his Nazis threaten so violently, afraid he may some day attack you?” The old man slowly replied, “No, because every revolutionary movement such as the Nazis’ has its period of ecstasy, and the Nazis are going through theirs now, but in a little while more they will subside and we will be able to get along peaceably with them.”

I went away with my first example of the fact that no man over seventy ever seems to be able to understand Hitler. I beg the pardon of the grand exception, Senator Glass, whose early and persistent advocacy of effective action against Hitler has distinguished him among Senators, some of whom approach treason in their imbecilic refusal to comprehend the life-and-death issue facing America.

Just five years after the founder of Czechoslovakia had expressed his faith in the fundamental normality of the Nazis, his conviction that they were after all like other people, and that their revolution would follow the natural course of other radical movements and become stabilized, Hitler sat at the very desk in the Hradzin where Masaryk had sat. Czechoslovakia had ceased to exist precisely because Masaryk and all the other heads of states in Europe blindly refused to see that in Hitlerism the world was faced with a brute which always had to move forward, steadily became bigger and hungrier as it was fed, and would never cease to destroy and devour until stopped by force. To the German there is something mystically attractive about this Nazi Wave of Destruction. They feel their fate is being achieved by violence so fierce that it intoxicates them, as the young Nazi Shock Troops are intoxicated by battle lust when they fling themselves upon the enemy.

It is the Nazis’ ability to combine this berserk, mystic rage with cold scientific mastery of the intricate instruments of mechanized war that makes them so formidable. They even loot scientifically, as witness the way they have bled France. I know an amusing and typical example of the German’s aptitude for plundering profitably.

In Spain I met a young German Nazi machine gunner serving with Franco. His name was Franz, and he had been an SS officer in Duesseldorf. He had come to Spain, he declared, for idealistic motives, to fight the Bolsheviks, and now after three months’ service his idealism had been rewarded with a small fortune. I asked him how he had been able to make any money serving as a noncommissioned officer.

“Oh,” he explained, “I have the advantage over these Spaniards and Moors of having an academic education. I did not finish school but I had enough _Naturwissenschaft_ to know my way about in a physics or chemistry laboratory. Now what do these poor ignorant Spaniards and Moors do when they enter a town we have just taken. They go busting around breaking into homes and offices, looking for cash and jewelry and such things, but nobody ever leaves cash and jewelry lying around. What do I do? I go straight to the _Kino_, the motion picture theater, and straight to the projection room, and there I remove the lenses which are worth from ten to twenty thousand pesetas, and I put the lenses in my suitcase when I get back, and now I have two suitcases full of lenses. They are worth a fortune. You see the beauties of education?”

Q. _How has Hitler run his show without money, without gold, without foreign exchange? Can the Nazi economy continue to run indefinitely on its present basis?_

A. The Nazi economy can continue to run only as long as the war lasts. This is the economic compulsion on Hitler to go on fighting. The Nazi economy is one of scarcity. There are not enough workers, since most able-bodied men are in the army; not enough food, or clothing, or fuel, or manufactured articles. Everybody not in the armed forces has to work very hard, very long hours in order to feed the colossal war machine and produce the minimum necessary for the civilians to subsist. Scarcity would normally shove prices upward; but not in the Nazi economy where the Terror makes price control really work. The Gestapo is a more potent backing for the currency than gold. The workings of a totalitarian economy seem queer to us only because we continue to think of Adam Smith’s “economic man,” and because we still believe that man will always act freely in accord with the law of supply and demand. But man under the Nazis is not free, does not act according to the law of supply and demand but according to the Nazi law. This compulsion by Terror makes a different kind of economic unit of him; our economic laws do not apply to him any more. In our bourgeois society when civil law condemns a man to go hungry, appetite is likely to make him break the law. In the totalitarian state the punishments of the concentration camp subdue almost every impulse to rebel.

For foreign trade the Nazis use an infinitely flexible, complex system of barter, often three-way. They confidently assert they have outgrown the use of gold; although one of the reasons Walther Darre advanced for a Nazi conquest of America was to lay hands on the American gold reserve at Fort Knox. The Nazis have demonstrated that they can do without gold, but this is no proof that gold is not more convenient than barter; it is proof only that anything can be used for money as long as the people believe in it, by natural inclination or by compulsion--wampum, cows, brass, paper, or the muzzle of a Gestapo pistol. It is one of our commonest fallacies to believe that financial considerations affect very much the beginning or the middle or the end of a war. Can you recall any war that had to stop because one side ran out of money? In wartime a nation becomes a collective and money a mere bookkeeping item. Only after the war when accounts are presented, does bankruptcy become real. Hitler inherited a bankrupt, bourgeois, peacetime economy and turned it overnight, from the moment he came to power in 1933, into a wartime economy. Real peace would mean the total collapse of Hitler’s totalitarian economic machine.

Q. _Why do the Nazis call theirs the Third Reich?_

A. Historically the First Reich was the Holy Roman Empire, the second was the one founded by Bismarck, and the third is Hitler’s. When I discussed this once with Dr. Jung, he pointed out deeper meanings. He said, “Nobody called Charlemagne’s kingdom the First Reich, nor William’s the Second Reich. Only the Nazis call theirs the Third Reich, because it has a profound _mystical_ meaning.”

Dr. Jung said the Nazis feel a parallel between the Biblical triad, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and the _Third_ Reich, and that in fact many Nazis refer to Hitler as the Holy Ghost. “Again,” Dr. Jung continued, “consider the widespread revival in the Third Reich of the cult of Wotan, God of Wind. Take the name _Sturmabteilung_, Storm Troops. The swastika is a revolving form making a vortex moving ever toward the left--which means in Buddhistic symbolism sinister, unfavorable, directed toward the unconscious. All these symbols of a Third Reich led by its prophet under the banners of wind and storm and whirling vortices point to a mass movement which is to sweep the German people in a hurricane of unreasoning emotion on to a destiny which perhaps none but the seer, the prophet, the Fuehrer himself can foretell--and perhaps not even he.”

This psychiatric explanation of the Nazi names and symbols may sound to a layman fantastic, but can anything be as fantastic as the bare facts about the Nazi Party and its Fuehrer? Be sure there is much more to be explained in them than can be explained by merely calling them gangsters. They are products of that most hysterical, illogical, emotional mentality in Europe, the German.

Q. _But I thought the Germans were stolid, phlegmatic, sensible people. How can you describe them as hysterical?_

A. The commonest mistake the outside world makes about the Germans is to describe them the way you have done. We Americans seem to have judged most European nations exactly opposite from what they really are. We consider the Italian to be emotional, easily swayed, the Frenchman to be volatile, the Spaniard passionate, and so on. Well, all the Latin races are models of calm, common sense and middle-of-the-road, essentially stable people compared with the Germans. As Dr. Jung put it, “The Italians are stable. Their minds do not roll and wallow and leap and plunge through all the extravagant ecstasies which are the daily exercise of the German mind.” The Germans carry everything to excess.

What other nation in Europe would have been inundated in one decade by a wave of hysteria which was to sweep them into idolatrous worship of a former building-trades laborer and corporal and lift them into conquest of the entire continent of Europe and promise the conquest of the world? Surely this is the most extraordinary yielding by a great people to a mass emotion ever observed in our so-called civilized world.

It is not, however, the first time that similar things have happened in Germany. Hitler has had some notable predecessors in the turbulent period of the Reformation.

The Anabaptists of Munster were forerunners of the Nazis, and their Fuehrer, John of Leyden, was a figure comparable to Hitler in ambition and in his mystic hold over his followers. Leyden and his associates seized the city of Munster in Westphalia in 1532 and, establishing a totalitarian theocracy, set out to conquer the world and make Munster its capital. Is that any more or less fantastic than Adolf Hitler, setting out to proceed from Munich to the conquest of the world?

John of Leyden differed in one respect, however, from Hitler. He not only encouraged polygamy as Hitler’s Black Guards encourage promiscuity, but he had four wives of his own, one of whom he, in a typically Hitlerian fit of rage, beheaded with his own hand in the market place. Munster for three years was the scene of excesses, profligacy, and inhuman tortures committed upon the foes of the medieval Nazis, until they were finally overcome by a coalition of outraged neighbors, comparable in a smaller way, one might say, to the present coalition against the Third Reich.

Q. _Doesn’t the life of Hitler, as far as we know it, show that he suffered very much from poverty in his youth and then when Germany was defeated, he suffered along with his fellow Germans so deeply that we ought to be able to understand and forgive instead of hating and making war upon him?_

A. That seems the equivalent of appealing for sympathy and understanding for a mad dog, because the poor dog had been bitten and given rabies without wanting it. It was not his fault, and he had suffered from it, so why shoot him? Hitler, we know, did suffer as a youth from many disabilities, including extreme poverty, and we ought to be sorry that he did, not merely as Christians from love of our neighbor, but because Hitler is causing us such infinite trouble and misery, partially perhaps, on account of these early discomforts.

But we can do nothing to correct Hitler’s personal history. By the time he came into our lives his character was fixed in rigid, implacable hatred for every human being on earth not willing or suitable to help him place Deutschland in command of the world with himself the globe’s supreme ruler. He is as little susceptible to reformation today as a rattlesnake. As for the German people and their sufferings after the defeat in the last war, there are several things to say.

First, they did not suffer nearly so much as a nation usually suffers after losing a four-years’ war. I can testify to that from personal observation of the Germans from 1923 on, a period including the most desperate months of the inflation. It is simply not correct to say as Hackett says about the Germans after the war, “They were just as unhappy, as despairing and as demoralized, in the midst of their Reconstruction Period, as the old South in the years after the Civil War.”

The old South was physically devastated by the war. Germany surrendered before the enemy reached her territory; she came off materially scot-free. The people of the old South felt permanently beaten and for a long time hopeless because they had failed in their attempt to defend their right to be independent. The people of Germany felt temporarily frustrated of their ambition to dominate the world; just twenty years later they set forth to try it again. Do you think the old South, if it had wanted to do so, would have been able physically or economically to have resumed the struggle with the North in 1885, twenty years after the end of the Civil War, as the Germans did with the Allies in 1939, twenty years after Versailles?

My second point about the German suffering is that before Versailles they demonstrated their intention in the treaties of Bucharest and Brest-Litovsk, to inflict upon their enemies terms incomparably more severe than Versailles.

Third, in the course of the present war the Germans have proved that the sort of peace they intend to grant the countries they vanquish now will make the Versailles treaty appear to be a dispensation from Heaven.

Fourth, although these facts do not of course excuse the flaws in the Versailles treaty, none of its defects could possibly excuse the bestial behavior of the Germans toward the especial objects of their pathological antipathy, the Jews, Czechs, and Poles, nor provide a reasonable basis for their desire to inflict vengeance upon the entire world.

Finally, it makes no difference what the reasons for present German behavior are, that behavior threatens to destroy us and unless we check it by force, we shall perish.

Q. _What should we do with Hitler after we beat him? Will he be allowed to escape to a lifetime of comfort the way Kaiser Wilhelm did?_

A. When this question is asked I am reminded of an old Texas recipe for cooking rabbit. It begins, “First catch your rabbit.” I do not know what will be done with Hitler. There are many people who say he will never be taken alive; that he will commit suicide. I do not believe that. My guess is that Hitler would either “do a Hess” and escape to England or seek death in battle as the Kaiser once claimed he would do.

If he remains alive, our people being incurably sentimental, we should probably treat him the way the Allies treated Napoleon after Leipzig. They sent him, as you may remember, to Elbe, and gave him an annual income of 2,000,000 francs, which was about $400,000 and equivalent to $1,000,000 in purchasing power today. Perhaps we would not, though, especially if the American people have to live through a great deal of hardship and bloodletting on account of this man. Maybe we will become like the British, who, after all, are going to have something to say about the fate of Hitler if and when he is ever caught.

The _Daily Mail_ of London ran a questionnaire asking its readers what they thought should be done with Hitler after the war. The largest number, twenty-five per cent, wanted him shown about the country in a cage. This is an idea which had been suggested for the former Kaiser, and it shows a surprising insight into the source of the deepest emotions for extremely vain men of the type of Hitler and the Kaiser; they certainly would suffer more from such public humiliation than from any other punishment.

Another twenty per cent wanted him executed by hanging, shooting, or beheading, in that order. Fifteen per cent wanted him exiled to remote, unpleasant places, as Devil’s Island, the Andaman Islands, Ascension Island, Arctic wastes, and the African desert. Another fifteen per cent wanted him condemned to lifelong solitary confinement. Ten per cent wanted to make him live the rest of his life under the same conditions the English are living under now, with bombs, rationing, and so on. Five per cent wanted to hand him over to the Poles or Jews. Five per cent would have him treated as a certified lunatic.

Five per cent suggested all sorts of miscellaneous treatment, including confinement under precisely the same conditions as normally obtain in a Nazi torture chamber. There were no suggestions at all that he should be treated well, as Napoleon was treated. The question is not trivial and the answers of the British are really important, because they throw light on the temper of the British people after the brutal manhandling they have received from Nazi bombers. The most constructive suggestion I ever heard on the subject of what to do with Hitler came from my brilliant friend, Edgar Mowrer, who had a decade of experience in Germany. He suggests that after we have defeated Hitler we put him in a cage and send him about Germany to explain to the Germans how wrong he had been.

Q. _What would happen if Hitler were to be killed?_

A. It would reduce the German war effort by one-half, and would guarantee that Germany would lose. Hitler is irreplaceable, unique, and if he were to be killed, or died, or anyhow left the scene, Germany would not collapse but she would be as an automobile going at top speed, suddenly run out of gasoline. The momentum of the car would carry it forward a certain distance, but it would eventually stop.

That, in my opinion, is what would happen to Germany if deprived of Hitler. It is not his technical ability that would be missed so much, nor his administrative brains, nor even his incredibly accurate, intuitive knowledge of his enemies, nor even his uncanny sense of timing. What would be missed would be his inspiration to the German people. If they lost their medicine man the faith in his name would flicker on, but the confidence in his infallibility which now upholds the civil population in the hardships of war and promotes the courage of the troops in battle would disappear. The effect would be disastrous.

Q. _Why doesn’t somebody kill Hitler?_

A. For the last two years that has been the question most frequently asked me on the lecture platform all over America. Sometimes a fourth of all the written questions sent up would be this one. An average of twenty-five persons out of every thousand in the audience would put this question and they have been doing that ever since Hitler’s victory over the Allies in Munich in September 1938. This itself is an interesting light on the American attitude. Most of the time the question was framed, “Why doesn’t some Jew, or some Britisher, or some Frenchman kill Hitler?”

It is bewildering to reflect that up until September 1939, any young man, Jew or Gentile, British, French, or of any of the thirteen nations Hitler has conquered, any brave, intelligent man could have killed Hitler within two months of making the resolution to do so. Only one requirement was essential--that the assassin be willing to give up his life. Now, however, it may cost the lives of millions of young men on the battlefield before this author of evil is destroyed.

Q. _But wasn’t he always too closely guarded to be killed?_

A. Not at all. Now it is another matter. Since the war began he is so well guarded that it might be impossible to get at him. Before the war began it would have been easy to kill him. It might even have been possible for a bold and shrewd assassin to have killed him without being captured. I give you one instance.

At every Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg there are hundreds of thousands of strangers in the city. The Gestapo with all its resources cannot possibly check on them all. A resourceful foreigner, speaking German and posing as a German, could obtain a room in a hotel facing the main street down which the parades pass. During the course of the Congress Hitler appears in at least one parade a day down this street. He always uses a long black Mercedes car and he stands in the front, next to his chauffeur. Hitler stands there holding on now and then with his left hand, and giving the Nazi salute with his right.

In the rear of his car are four SS men, and on the running boards are two others, and behind Hitler’s car is another identical Mercedes with six to eight more SS men. The SS men, who are the best pistol shots in Germany, lean out of their cars, peering at the crowds, and they keep their right hands always on their pistols. You say that sounds as though he were well guarded? Not at all. The crowd in Nuremberg is so great that it encroaches on the path of the automobiles until they are slowed to a walk. That means Hitler passes underneath your window at a walking speed.

An assassin could lean out of his window and toss a bomb into Hitler’s car with absolute accuracy. He could not miss. I have often leaned out and looked down at Hitler and remarked in a whisper to my comrades, “How easy it would be, wouldn’t it, to drop a grapefruit?” And if you think a bomb is too uncertain, why not try a sub-machine gun? That would be 100 per cent sure. You would have him at a distance of about thirty yards. With one burst you could riddle him, put perhaps twenty bullets into him before the guards could turn around.

You ask how the assassin could get the sub-machine gun or the bombs into the hotel? The Gestapo is good, but it is a long way from being perfect. They overlook a great many things. We were in Vienna when Hitler marched in. The Gestapo had been in control of the city for days. But on the very day Hitler came to Vienna my wife borrowed a radio set from Tess Shirer and had the porter carry it into the hotel and up to our room. It was the size of a large thick suitcase. Nobody stopped her, or asked to investigate it. It might have contained two or three sub-machine guns with sufficient ammunition and a few hand grenades.

You object that the assassin would certainly be caught and executed. I agree. Political assassins almost never escape. But political assassins must always and nearly always are willing to take this chance. You can take it as a rule of political assassination, however, that if the assassin is bold enough, he can always get his man. Remember the Macedonian gunman, Vlada Georgiev, who killed King Alexander and Louis Barthou in Marseilles, October 9, 1934? He was a husky fellow who waited behind the police line until the royal automobile came opposite him and then burst through the line like a football player and with one leap was on the running board of the automobile pumping bullets from his automatic into his two victims. It was all over in thirty seconds. The police had no chance to intervene before Alexander was dead. General Georges, later the unhappy second in command of the French Army, cut down the assassin with his saber.

This is the classic street assassination, resembling in every detail the killing by Gavril Princip of the Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, June 28, 1914, which touched off the first World War. But the Nuremberg situation would give an assassin a chance for his life. You see, the SS guards are constantly watching the crowds in the street. None of them pays attention to the windows of the houses and hotels along the street. The crowds are so thick that between our hotel and the path of Hitler’s automobile would be standing twenty to thirty thousand people.