"We can have him to ourselves for several months, maybe for a year; and if we can persuade him to back us, we can do the job on a big scale and make a real go of it. Won’t you come and help? You can answer his questions so much better than I, and I believe you could put it through."
This was a greater temptation than any Utopian dreamer could resist. Rick said, "All right," and Lanny telegraphed the decision to Johannes. He was tempted to repeat the quotation from Tennyson’s Ulysses which he had used a few years ago on a similar occasion—"My purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset and the baths of all the western stars, until I die." But he reminded himself that the Fatherland was now Hitlerland, and a sense of humor has never been a prominent German characteristic. What might not a Nazi party censor make out of eight or ten lines of English blank verse telegraphed from the French Riviera!
BOOK FOUR
As on a Darkling Plain
16. Root of all evil
I
A WORLD conqueror had appeared in modern times. Alexander, Caesar, Attila, Genghis Khan, Napoleon—another such as these, appearing in the age of electricity, of rotary presses and radio, when nine men out of ten would have said it was impossible. A world conqueror has to be a man of few ideas, and those fixed; a peculiar combination of exactly the right qualities, both good and bad—iron determination, irresistible energy, and no scruples of any sort. He has to know what he wants, and permit no obstacle to stand in the way of his getting it. He has to understand the minds of other men, both foes and friends, and what greeds, fears, hates, jealousies will move them to action. He must understand the mass mind, the ideals or delusions which sway it; he must be enough of a fanatic to talk their language, though not enough to be controlled by it. He must believe in nothing but his own destiny, the glorified image of himself on the screen of history; whole races of mankind made over in his own image and according to his will. To accomplish that purpose he must be liar, thief, and murderer upon a world-wide scale; he must be ready without hesitation to commit every crime his own interest commands, whether upon individuals or nations. He must pave the highway for his legions with the bones of his enemies, he must float his battleships upon oceans of human blood, he must compose his songs of glory out of the groans and curses of mankind.
The singular advantage enjoyed by Adolf Hitler was that his own people believed what he said, while other peoples couldn’t and wouldn’t. The attitude of the outside world to him was that of the farmer who stared at a giraffe in the circus and exclaimed: "There ain’t no sich animal!" The more Adolf told the world what he was and what he meant to do, the more the world smiled incredulously. There were men like that in every lunatic asylum; the type was so familiar that any psychiatrist could diagnose it from a single paragraph of a speech or a single page of a book. Sensible men said: "Nut!" and went on about their affairs, leaving Adolf to conquer the world. Here and there a man of social insight cried out warnings of what was going on; but these, too, were a well-known type and the psychiatrists had names for them.
Adolf Hitler got the mastery of the National Socialist Party because of his combination of qualities; because he was the most fanatical, the most determined, the most tireless, and at the same time the shrewdest, the most unscrupulous, the most deadly. From the beginning men had revolted against his authority, and while he was weak he had wheedled and cajoled them and when he became strong he had crushed them. There had been split after split in his movement, and he had gone after the leaders of the factions without ruth; even before he had got the authority of government in his hands, his fanatical Stormtroopers had been beating and sometimes murdering the opponents of this new dark religion of Blut und Boden, blood and soil. Work with Adolf Hitler and you would rise to power in the world; oppose him, and your brains would be spattered on the pavement, or you would be shot in the back and left unburied in a dark wood.
Hermann Goring, aviator and army officer, man of wealth, of luxurious tastes and insatiable vanities, hated and despised Joseph Goebbels, the blabbing journalist, the club-footed little dwarf with the venom-spitting tongue; and these sentiments were cordially reciprocated. Jupp would have thrown vitriol into Hermann’s face, Hermann would have shot Jupp on sight—if either had dared. But the Führer needed Hermann as a master executive and Jupp as a master propagandist, and he put them into harness and drove them as a team. The same thing was true of hundreds of men in that party of madness and hate: World War victims, depression victims, psychopaths, drug addicts, perverts, criminals—they all needed Adolf a little more than Adolf needed them, and he welded them into something more powerful than themselves. Hardly one who wasn’t sure that he was a greater man than Adolf, and better fitted to lead the party; in the old days many had patronized him, and in their hearts they still did so; but he had won out over them, because of the combination of qualities. He was the one who had persuaded the masses to trust him, and he was the one who could lead the N.S.D.A.P. and all its members and officials upon the road to conquest.
II
Adolf Hitler had watched Lenin, he now was watching Stalin and Mussolini, and had learned from them all. In June of the year 1924, when Lanny Budd had been in Rome, Benito Mussolini had been Premier of Italy for more than twenty months, but the Socialists were still publishing papers with several times as many readers as Mussolini’s papers, and there was still freedom of speech in the Italian parliament and elsewhere; there was still an opposition party, there were labor unions and co-operatives and other means of resistance to the will of the Fascists. It had taken the murderer of Matteotti another year and more to accomplish his purpose of crushing opposition and making himself master of the Italian nation.
But Adolf’s time-table was different from that. Adolf had a job to do in the outside world, and had no idea of dawdling for three years before beginning it. He knew how to wait, but would never wait an hour longer than necessary, and would be his own judge of the timing; he would startle the world, and even his own followers, by the suddenness and speed of his moves.
First, always first, the psychological preparation. Was he going to wipe out the rights of German labor, to destroy a movement which the workers had been patiently building for nearly a century? Obviously, then, the first step was to come to labor with outstretched hands, to enfold it in a brotherly clasp while it was stabbed in the back; to set it upon a throne where it could be safely and surely riddled with machine gun bullets.
Europe’s labor day was the First of May, and everywhere over the continent the workers paraded, they held enormous meetings, picnics and sports, they sang songs and listened to speeches from their leaders, they heartened and inspired themselves for the three hundred and sixty-four hard days. So now, several weeks in advance, it was announced that the Hitler government was going to take over the First of May and make it the "Day of National Labor." This was a government of "true Socialism"; it was the friend of labor, it was labor, and no longer could there be a class struggle or any conflict of interest. The revolution having been accomplished, the workers would celebrate their conquest and the new and splendid future which lay before them. All these golden, glowing words —and all the power of press and radio to carry the message to every corner of the Fatherland. Also, of course, the power of the police and the private Nazi armies to terrify and crush anyone who might try to voice any other idea.