Doctor Hanfstaengl linked his huge arm in mine. He was pleased to have a new American friend. A German would have made a mighty and completely useless fuss about the matter. Americans took so much in their stride. He wished Germans were more like Americans and Americans a little less like Germans. He laughed heartily at this cryptic sally. I did my best to join in. While I liked the man enormously, half of what he said made no sense at all!
We had become so thoroughly involved with the lost luggage that I did not have to time to see if the Baroness and her party had left the station. They were probably getting the Berlin train. I was relieved. I would soon be back in Italy, and the woman would no longer be a danger to me. What a shame, I thought, that she should live while my poor Esmé was no doubt dead on some shtetl’s dungheap. But I had learned long since that life was neither fair nor very controllable and as often as not the good died in agony while the bad flourished in the lap of luxury. Increasingly, we were seeing the rule of the strong over the weak, the exploitation of the state’s liberal laws by a few rich and powerful businessmen with international links. It was no secret with what inefficiency Berlin’s federal government dealt with local issues.
No wonder the National Socialists were gathering strength. Anyone with a sense of common justice resented such social and economic inequalities and wished to see them overturned. But some of us knew the Bolshevik alternative was even worse. And that was why I have always believed that it was an act of treachery to our shared ideals and culture, our religion and our traditions, to vote for the Reds.
These children who accuse me of condoning every evil have no idea what they mean. A Red Germany would have meant a Red Europe, and a Red Europe would ultimately have engulfed us in the most appalling world war of all time. The Second World War would have seemed as nothing to that war. Armed men were divided between extremes of left and right, recklessly prepared to risk civil conflict. Parties like the National Socialists sought to find a middle ground between the two. The few rough elements who attached themselves to Hitler were no more typical of the average ‘Nazi’ than the brutes who pillaged Belgium in the name of the Kaiser.
Our cab soon swung away from a quaint tangle of medieval streets into the great tree-lined prospects of the outer city, where huge private villas and municipal offices sat back among well-kept lawns and trees. I do not think I had ever seen such a pleasantly ordered conurbation, with parks and squares and pleasure gardens all adding to its air of cultivated tranquillity. It had rightly been called ‘the most civilised city in Europe’. Only then, I think, did I truly realise I was in Germany. Munich, they said, was the heart of Germany just as Berlin was her brain. And what an unexpectedly beautiful heart it was!
At last the cab pulled up outside an imposing four-storeyed house built on classic eighteenth-century lines which would not have been out of place in Washington, save for its colour. It had been erected in a rich, buttery-brown local stone and the woodwork painted in cream with a chocolate trim. Over the huge ground-floor windows and wide mahogany doors the balcony of the floor above formed a kind of porch, set off with elegant wrought iron. On the roof of the building flew a huge ‘Hakenkreuz’ flag in the old imperial colours of red, white and black.
Our cab had trouble pulling in. Cars were coming and going from this building all the time. The glittering white steps vibrated to the polished boots of brown-shirted NSDAP members who possessed a slightly rougher, wilder look than the modern Italian squadristi. They resembled some of the earlier pictures of the fascisti who planned the March on Rome. Clearly our audacious Italian revolutionaries were the model for these men. All wore the same swastika armbands. Many had obviously been sewn on by amateurs. Their kepis strongly resembled ski caps. The NSDAP was still a party of the masses, a huge popular expression of a people’s deepest needs and dreams.
Putzi apologised for not inviting me in. He said he would be a few minutes. I watched him disappear through the door. The guards not only recognised him, they showed him considerable respect.
From the window of the cab I watched the Brownshirts busy as bees coming and going from their hive. They had expressions of grim optimism, and there was quick, energetic purpose in their step. I was privileged to witness a movement on the very brink of political success, when the theories and the rhetoric could become realities at last.
One unpleasant moment occurred, however, when a scowling SA armed with a club and a dog whip ordered the cab to move on. I made a gesture to show that I was waiting for someone inside. The SA man came towards me as if I had threatened him. I wound up and locked the window. He grabbed for the cabby who remonstrated with him trying to let him know we were waiting for Doctor Hanfstaengl. Eventually the driver had little choice but to obey. He was about to set his machine in motion when Putzi came bouncing back down the steps shouting at the trooper.
The Brownshirt slunk off grumbling, and Hanfstaengl opened the door. ‘I’m going to be longer than I thought,’ he told me. ‘You’d better come inside. It’s a nightmare at the moment.’
TWENTY-THREE
I took the catcalls of the Brownshirt lads in good part as I accompanied my new friend up the steps of party HQ. My ivory and lilac summer suit, my wide-brimmed panama and my malacca cane seemed unexceptional in the Roman sunshine but were great entertainment for those simple working-class boys. As fervent a revolutionary as themselves, I was seen by them as a dilettante. They could not quite understand what I had to do with the triumph of the masses.
A couple of cool words from Putzi Hanfstaengl, however, and they turned their grinning attention back to their work. Saluting ‘Storm Troopers’ sprang to open the massive bronze doors. He showed them his party book, but they knew him, treating him with the utmost respect, lifting their arms in the Mussolini salute, clicking their heels and shouting ‘Heil Hitler!’ It was quietly obvious that Doctor Hanfstaengl was more than a minor member of the new Nazi hierarchy. I was reminded of a scene in Ben-Hur when the great Roman general mounts the steps of the senate, saluted by his adoring men.
Thus, with only restrained ceremony, we entered the nerve centre of the movement, not the few shabby rooms of a revolutionary rabble, but the modern appointments of a party ready for the responsibility of government. Decorated in the very latest fashion, they were the epitome of solid, clean, no-nonsense modernity. The finest materials had been used. With over a hundred party members now in parliament, every Nazi knew he was on the brink of destiny. If high morale and boundless optimism could give the Nazis the majority they needed, they already had it with some to spare.
I had not expected anything so impressive. The teak panelling below and the cream walls gave an impression of old-fashioned solidity and of modern airy space. In years to come this style would be copied all over Europe and America.