Adolf Hitler, revolutionist

GEORGE SLOCOMBE

A study of Germany's Fascist leader who would guide his despondent countrymen back to pre-war grandeurs

In a blood-red room in Munich, from which the sunlight is carefully barred by orange curtains, sitting in a high-backed redleather chair under a ceiling patterned with crimson Swastikas, and facing sixty-two other red-leather chairs filled with his lieutenants, a white-faced man in a fantastic uniform, with twitching hands and dark burning eyes, presides over the War Council of the German Fascists. On the wall behind the leader, and stared at in an uncomfortable silence by the sixty-two warriors, is a great tablet of wood on which the sensational achievements of the Fascist Party since its foundation are briefly recorded. The last event on the tablet is last year's capture of a great block of seats in the Reichstag. The next is unprovided for. It is left to the tablets of history. At the entrance to the council chamber exalted youths in green shirts and khaki shorts stand rigidly erect, upholding the black and white standards of the seven national divisions of the Fascist Party. The poles of the banners are iron-shafted. When the Council is not sitting the standards rest in sockets against the outer wall of the chamber, near the roll of martyrs fallen in the German Fascist Revolution, graven in letters of iron on the white wall.

The Council over, the uniformed lieutenants dispersed by the salute of Caesar's legions, the flags returned to their rest, the lights in the crimson chamber extinguished, and the Swastikas on floor and ceiling slumbering again in their red Teutonic twilight, the man of iron receives me in his private room. The room is bare save for a desk placed diagonally in a dark corner, a few chairs so situated that a strong light from two windows falls on the face of the visitor. The walls are bare save for two pictures—a small portrait in oils of Carlyle's hero, Frederick the Great, bland, be-wigged, with smoothly shaven jowl; and the painting of a battle scene on the Western Front in which Adolf Hitler figured, a blurred picture of grey figures scurrying like rats through yellow smoke.

In the dark corner the white-faced man sits nervously. His resemblance to the Charlie Chaplin of the movies is now unmistakable. His black clothes accentuate the pallor of his flesh. He has a short black Chaplin mustache. He has the white, tortured face, the hunted eyes of the screen Charlie. His hands work convulsively. His eyes are never still. He has the look of a man pursued by shadows. He walks as if in a dream. He has not the sardonic and deadly calm which I have seen in moments of crisis in his prototype and model, Mussolini. He is more like the Mussolini of the vagrant, unhappy, youthful days, a hunted and sometimes abject figure, dreaming of revenge. . . .

Hitler has ceased to interrogate me mutely with those dark and brooding eyes, shadowy with suspicion. He has begun to talk. His voice quickens with emotion, and rises steadily to a shrill crescendo. His eyes grow glassy. I lean forward from my chair in the strong Munich sunlight to penetrate the obscurity of the corner in which he is partly concealed. Little beads of perspiration stand out from his forehead and his upper lip. His eyes are absent, communing with an invisible audience, or possibly with the shade of Carlyle's Frederick. His voice has become hoarse, but still some electric quality in it arouses emotion and admiration.

He refers constantly to England and America. "England, in Germany's place, would not have suffered without protest the humiliation that Germany has suffered. America would not have endured the burden of defeat. Do you think we can go on for generation after generation in the slavery which the Reparations debt inflicts on us? Would the English or the Americans have bowed under the yoke?" The hoarse, passionate voice fills the room with a dull thunder. His secretary listens with a bland and enigmatical countenance. A lieutenant, also present at our conversation moves uneasily on his chair.

Hitler does not believe in violence, notwithstanding the daily toll of killed and wounded in street battles between Fascists and Communists, or Fascists and the police. He denies the obvious military organisation of his Party. The War Council in the Red Room, the Storm Divisions, the banners, the uniforms, the despatch riders on motorcycles, the public drilling, the secret stores of arms—all this, he suggests with a wearily polite emphasis, is merely discipline. He claims that he wishes to conquer opinion only, to sweep Germany with the devastating force of a single idea, the idea of national renaissance. The next elections in Germany, he believes, will bring his party to power, as the last brought it to the Reichstag. And then—the return to the proud and self conscious greatness of Frederick. A strong Germany repudiating with scorn the Treaty of Versailles, tearing up the Young Plan, seizing Upper Silesia, the Polish corridor, Memel, Danzig, and possibly other lost provinces, restoring the armaments proscribed at Versailles, subjugating the great bankers who have played a dominant role in German politics since the war, nationalising the banks and the key industries, disciplining the Socialists and the trade unions, and humiliating or expelling the Jews. Particularly humiliating the Jews. Hitler is anti-Semite to a fanatical degree. He is anti-Jewish as only a renegade Jew can be. He denies that he is a Jew.

I look interrogatively at the picture of the battle scene. Hitler, who had been suffering from the emotional reaction of his recent eloquence, rouses from a momentary dejection and becomes animated again. The War. He speaks in the name of the generation of German youth which suffered and died in, or painfully survived, the war. They alone have the right to dictate the future of Germany. All others are exploiters, profiteers, pacifists and Jews. The war has burnt into him. His voice is harsh, rapid, metallic, almost incoherent. In another moment he will foam at the mouth. I recall the shell shock cases I have seen in war hospitals.

But his mind never quite deserts him. The lieutenant, sitting watchfully by like a hospital nurse, interposes a word when the emotional crisis threatens to become acute. And the spring, uncoiled to its uttermost, suddenly snaps back. The Chief's face clouds over with angry suspicion. His eyes, which had almost burst from their sockets, regain their habitual hunted look. There comes a moment even, as in the pictures of Chaplin, when the shadow of a thin disdainful smile threatens to break over those white, tense, unhappy features, that bitter tortured mouth. But Hitler never lets up. He plays his part, morose, ironic, denunciatory and mirthless to the end.

His followers, although unmistakably under the almost hypnotic spell of their leader, are more human. Brown-skinned and bare-kneed youths with clear eyes and an intimidating earnestness, they dash from the purring motorcycles outside the Braune Haus, the Hollywoodesque headquarters of Hitler in Munich, past the great iron battle-axes and spears built into the wall on either side of the oaken door, saluting gravely, talking in statuesque groups with the quick, intent grace of the modern German youth. They show a smiling confidence in their destiny, a rapt adoration for their leader. There are nearly a million of them already. I was shown the index-cards of seven hundred thousand. They come from all classes, but the youth of the lower middle class predominate. In a Germany still sunk in the post-war apathy of defeat, or torn asunder by mutual recriminations and political jealousies, Hitler's Spartan youths alone seem content with their lot and assured of their future. He has given them a mission. They are to be the saviours of Germany.

The wall behind the monument in Munich erected to Leopold of Bavaria bears the passionate but ironic inscription "Gott, mack uns jrei!" It is now covered with the evidence of Germany's defeat. Enormous green wreaths are nailed against the wall, and under them are the names of the territories temporarily or permanently lost to Germany. The list is impressively long—Alsace, Upper Silesia, the Saar, Memel, Eupen, Malmedy, SchleswigHolstein, Bohemia, German East Africa, Togoland, the Cameroons—I had forgotten that there was so much loot. As the wreaths fade they are renewed, and every time Hitler rides by the monument on his way to the obscure, carefully-guarded villa in which he meditates his speeches and designs new uniforms for the Fascist Army, the names of those lost provinces strike him in the face like a whip-lash.

Continued on page 68

Continued from page 41

One day, he tells his young men in one of those biting ironical speeches of his, in which he flails his country-men for their torpor, their treachery or their cowardice, those wreaths will come down. The very shades of the men killed in the war will return to tear them down. His hand is raised, menacing, conclusive. That curious electric vibration trembles in his voice, and passes from his voice to his hearers. There is a hoarse roar of assent, and for a moment the enthusiasm is overwhelming. A vital flame runs through the crowded hall, and in it a new Germany seems reborn. And in the communicative ardor kindled by that flame the young Fascists go out to fling themselves valiantly on the truncheons and revolvers of the police who stand watchfully in the vicinity, or more prudently engage in battle the equally young Communists who jeer provocatively as Fascist meetings disperse in Germany.

Nevertheless the victorious march of German Fascism is not all flags and cheering. The very political success of Hitler's party has led to internal disputes which have at times threatened to disrupt it. Walter Goebbels, the leader of the Berlin section of the Nazis, jealous of Hitler's power, issued a program of his own and was recently expelled. Other national leaders have quarrelled with Hitler, and been subdued, or with difficulty conciliated. The spotlight of hostile opinion beats fiercely upon the internal politics, the resources of the Party, and the private lives of its leaders. The charges of receiving subsidies from Mussolini, already angrily repudiated by Hitler himself before a court of law, are periodically revived by his enemies.

Hitler himself has hitherto escaped scandal. His private life is free from reproach. His bookkeeping is bombproof. His accounts are open to inspection. The subscription of 700,000 registered Fascists, and the profits from forty party newspapers, make a war-chest of which any party might not be ashamed. Nevertheless, he is not above receiving financial aid from friendly industrialists. And there is probably a close financial connection between the party of Hitler and that of his political rival and temporary associate Hugenberg, the leader of the German Nationalists. For it is certain that Hugenberg finds in the pseudodemocracy and partial collectivism of Hitler an admirable bait with which to attract working-class converts to the Nationalist cause who would otherwise he repelled by the openly reactionary associates of the official Nationalists.

German Fascism, like Italian Fascism, is the reply of youth to the postwar policy of despair. It is as defiant as Nudism, and has the same psychological bases. Politics in Italy were ravaged by the defeatism of victory. Politics in Germany by the defeatism of the vanquished. Where the strategy of the politicians has failed, the instinct of an orator may be victorious. For Germany has an historic need of emotional saviours. The strength of Hitler is not the strategist, but the poet in him. His weakness is the eternal weakness of the orator. He reads little, and sees nobody. He declares in selfjustification that initiative in politics and strategy is born of instinct, not of instruction. The moment, he says, brings its own inspiration. And for long hours, when he is not addressing meetings or haranguing his war council, Hitler sits alone before a desk empty of documents, idly drawing patterns on sheets of paper, planning new flags, new uniforms, new headquarters, the glittering appanages of his dream of splendor. He is, in truth, a kind of gipsy fiddler who has strayed into politics. He knows but one instrument, and refuses to play any other. As a virtuoso in the subtle music of political oratory he is almost sublime. In that, and in his passionate sincerity, lies all his power. It is his appeal to the disinterested and not to the interested passions of his generation which gives him his supreme influence over German youth. He has succeeded, by his curious mixture of rhetoric and prejudice, of hatred and of idealism, of disdain and of mediaeval chivalry, in awaking the never-long dormant race nostalgia of the Germans. The very Hakenkreuz of his banner is a cleverly chosen symbol. It recalls at once the proudest era of the Teutonic knights and the most primitive traditions of the race. In the dawn of mankind the ancestors of the German nation, wandering among the swamps and forests that covered Europe between the Arctic ice-cap and the not yet flooded Mediterranean valley, used a Swastika charm of crossed hazel twigs or bronze wire to ward off evil and conjure defeat in battle. To the young generation of a stricken nation, in which the martial and the domestic sciences go curiously hand in hand, in which religion and paganism, philosophy and superstition, culture and prejudice are inextricably confused, the hooked crosses on the floor and ceiling of Hitler's red room, and the single Swastika on his white and black standard, may well be a symbol out of Teutonic mythology to bid them arise and conquer.