Hitler's success in these early vulnerable months came from his genius for the deadly game of political chess, from an eye which saw deeply into the dark, timorous, mean recesses of the human heart, and from his transforming the roughhouse which passed for German society into a disciplined country where everyone knew where he stood. Hitler restored order. And the Germans loved him for it, as Gerda loved her father.
'My dear chappie, you must realize how things are for us in Germany,' explained Dr Dieffenbach, clipping his after-dinner cigar a month after saving an English arm with a German drug. 'The Jews are vastly over-represented in medicine, as in the law. I sometimes wonder if we can truly call these two learned professions German at all. But I would agree that Herr Hitler is being rather hasty. He will have second thoughts, assuredly. You must expect him to be a little headstrong in the first flush of success. Besides, he has to pander a little to his most fervent supporters, who are not exactly the type of person I would invite to dinner.'
Dr Dieffenbach always evaded my questions about the nature of the pills. He did not know that I had seen a letter which Gerda inadvertently left on the pink chenille cloth when filing her father's professional papers. It was a short handwritten note from Domagk, saying they were receiving encouraging reports from 'Streptozon' all over Germany, particularly from Professor Dr Schreus at the medical academy in Dьsseldorf and from physicians in Mьnster and Kiel. In Wuppertal, Professor Dr Klee was using it successfully at the Municipal Hospital for erysipelas and angina of the throat. I supposed I G Farben had good reasons for keeping the drug up its sleeve, though I did not think much about it. Once cured by his doctor, the patient forgets the drug and begrudges the fee
I was already planning to spend Christmas with my parents. I certainly did not see my days in Germany as numbered. In the years ahead, there were plenty of Englishmen to visit Germany curiously and leave it enthusiastically, including Lloyd George. Nazism had a glitteringly superficial appeal, a nation as one folk, all sharing alike-even such privations as the weekly 'one pot' meal-all setting their country above themselves, all healthy, straightforward and comradely, the apotheosis of togetherness, a youth movement for all ages. I missed the full significance of the moral infection round me, as I had missed the full significance of the cured physical one in my hand.
Once a month I had to report to the Polizeiprдsidium on Druckerstrasse, between river and railway, crammed together as they traversed the narrow valley. It was a painless and even an amicable episode. A citizen of the British Empire was a curiosity to break the monotony of Hungarians or Roumanians, Dutch or Danes. A scholarly-looking policeman with pince-nez made a neat copperplate entry in violet ink on the yellowish, lined paper of my file, and that was that.
I was due to appear at the end of October. Hitler had just abruptly withdrawn from the Disarmament Conference at Geneva, and the League of Nations for good measure, which particularly disconcerted the London _Times, _the British Labour Party and President Roosevelt. I was on this occasion shown immediately into a small office containing two men my own age, both in Nazi brown shirts with Sam Browne belts, swastika armbands above their left elbows, breeches and jackboots stuck under a trestle table covered with papers.
They questioned me for two hours, keeping me standing while they smoked cigarettes and drank coffee. Why was I in Germany? I protested that my work permit was in front of them. Yes, but why was I _really _in Germany? I observed that their country was most interesting and educative to visit. Had I any Jewish blood? Did I look it? I asked. Where did I learn to speak German? And why? How much money had I saved in Germany? Did I transfer money to London? What was my father's work? They wanted the names and addresses of all the people I knew in Wuppertal.
They were a pair of jacks-in-office, dressed in an authority which was neither little nor, to the world's pain, brief. But the icicles of my reserve began to melt. A citizen of the British Empire expected to be above the antics of the natives when they grew restive. I had a feeling of always being watched, in reality too dramatic a notion. The Gestapo had been in business only six months, a minor organization confined to the State of Prussia, christened by a clerk at his wits' end for a set of distinctive initials among the hundreds newly proliferating in Germany.
A few days later I encountered Gerda in the hall of the Dieffenbachs' house, below a newer and larger photograph of Hitler. Her face was scarlet, her eyes spilling tears. I had often seen her indignant and sometimes angry, but never weeping. It was Jeff, she explained.
'The school say I must not mix with foreigners. If I do, they tell me I shall lose my job. It's not thought right for a German in my position to ride about in a big American car, when there are workpeople with hardly enough to keep alive.'
'What's it to do with the school, whether you ride in an American car or the Schwebebahn?' I protested, though not displeased.
'My whole life is of concern to the authorities,' she said desperately. 'Everything that anybody does has the Government nosing into it. You never know if the teacher sitting next to you is an agent for the Sicherheitsdienst.' This was the SD, the early State Security Service, under the cashiered former Naval intelligence officer Reinhard Heydrich, whose later extermination in Prague led to the elimination of Lidice and its whole population. 'There're Brownshirts and officials I've never seen before, in and out of the school all the time. I don't want to end up in the Special Court.'
I had heard plenty of the Sondergericht, with three Nazi judges and no jury, established after the March elections to deal with dissenters.
'People have been in trouble you know, quite a lot of them,' Gerda continued, hesitant and fearful of what she was saying. 'Now the police and the Storm Troopers are entitled to go into any house they like, and ferret out whatever and whoever they wish…There are people Papa knows who have just disappeared. Like that.' She snapped her fingers. 'Papa doesn't say much about it, but for all he knows they could be dead and buried. Perhaps they are. All over Germany they're keeping people as long as they like in protective custody…Protective! The camps are far worse than the detention barracks in the Army. Anyway, the Storm Troopers ransom people to be let out, it's a racket like Jeff's gangsters in Chicago.'
'I suppose some lady teacher was jealous of you with Jeff and his car, and told the Brownshirts?'
'No, it was Gunter.'
'Your own brother!' I was horrified.
'He passed the story to his schoolmaster. You know how Gunter thinks absolutely everything about the Nazis is wonderful, just because they organize camps and give him a uniform and they all sing songs round a fire. They tell him it's his duty to inform on anything at home which goes in the slightest against the thinking of National Socialism. You can't blame him. All kids are instructed to put their country first, even before their parents. He doesn't know any better.' She ended charitably, 'I expect he'll grow out of it.'
I decided to guard my tongue carefully within earshot of the young man. I noticed that Gerda took every chance afterwards to slap the cheeks of Hitler's little enthusiast.
These two incidents decided me to quit Germany. I had no knowing who might be itching to report me to the SD, and put me in serious trouble. Or perhaps my mind was already made up, they were the clicks of a shutter admitting light to a sensitized film. Jeff was nettled. He had bought a cosmetics firm in Berlin, and had planned my concocting voluptuously-smelling perfumes and powders from chemicals.