Chapter II: Part 2

I do not mean to say that Hitler blueprints each battle and determines where each division is to go. He simply determines the grand strategy, names the objective, and sets the time. For instance, in the case of Poland, some time before the German attack, Hitler called his General Staff together and said, “Gentlemen, I want you to work out a plan for the crushing of Poland as swiftly as possible. The problem is how to knock out Poland before the French and British can bring any help or alleviation by attacking in the West. Now, how many divisions can we have fully mobilized within a month? So, and how many do we need to hold the French? So. That will leave us so and so many for the Polish campaign. Now, gentlemen, at how many different points can we attack Poland, from every available entrance? You say five, including East Prussia. All right, now within forty-eight hours I want you to bring me a sketch plan of attack, with the outline of the number of divisions to attack at each point.”

With these data in hand Hitler orders the general disposition of the troops. Then he waits, and takes into account each of a score or hundred other factors besides military factors that may enter into the supreme decision to choose the exact time to strike. He considers the attitude of all the powers involved, the British and French morale, their military strength, the weather, the attitude of Poland’s neighbors, the Polish preparations, and finally when he is ready he gives the fateful order to march at 2 A.M. on September 1, 1939. Before the order reaches the commanding generals probably not more than half a dozen men in the world know the time.

He may meet technical criticism from his generals; he often does. But unlike Mussolini, whose staff is so subservient and sycophantic that they say “Yes” when the Duce has outlined some impossible campaign such as his fiasco in Greece, the German generals voice their objections. If the objections are valid, Hitler may change his plans. As a rule, however, Hitler’s grand strategy is seldom affected, because the great sweeping decisions are based upon Hitler’s appreciation of the problem, the campaign, the scene as a whole. His generals will be thinking of the local problem, and their opinion in this respect carries weight. But Hitler will be thinking in terms first of the whole war, second of the whole campaign, as against Poland. To these great decisions the generals invariably bow.

Q. _Why? How has this man who was able to become only a corporal in the last war suddenly obtained such an ascendancy over the German Army and in particular over the General Staff? I always understood that the General Staff of the German Army was one of the proudest, most professionally capable, and vain and exclusive organizations in the whole world._

A. How has Hitler done it? By being always right. Well, nearly always. He has so far made two mistakes, either or both of which may prove fatal, or not, as destiny will have it. The first was when, instead of launching an all-out assault on Britain immediately after Dunkirk, he pursued the crumbling French Army, which as he later learned, could not have been a danger to him; thus he postponed too late his attack on Britain.

Q. _Why didn’t he attack England at that time?_

A. Because Hitler did not expect France to collapse as speedily as she did. Neither he nor anyone else in the world expected it. He may say he did but the best proof that he did not is the fact that he failed to take advantage of it. When the German armies broke through the Low Countries, and began to press upon the French line at the famous “hinge” at Montmedy, they were like a man who is pressing hard on a locked and bolted door when suddenly the bolt breaks, the door flies open, and the man pitches forward into the room.

So the German armies pitched forward into France when they broke across the Meuse and staggered on, almost losing their balance for lack of the opposition they had expected to find. They lurched on until at the end of five weeks the French Army had dissolved; the French government had surrendered; the nation of France had ceased to exist. Then Hitler pulled his army together, turned it around, started it for the Channel ports. But it takes time to turn an army around; it takes time to establish air bases and collect the thousands of flat-bottomed vessels to ferry an army across the channel.

The time required was fifty-five days from June 17, the day the French asked for an armistice, to August 8, when the Germans made their first mass air attack on Britain as preliminary to invasion. It was those fifty-five days which saved Britain. I arrived in London on June 20, full of the apprehension that Hitler’s army was about to sweep the world. After all it is impressive to have believed all your life that the French Army was the best in the world and then to witness it disappear in thirty-seven days of fighting.

It is more impressive to become a refugee. I had established in Paris the first home I had had in twenty years of vagabond newspaper work. As the German armies came closer to the French capital I congratulated myself that I could now live at home and motor daily to the front. Then one night around midnight the American military attaché, my old friend Colonel Horace M. Fuller, our wisest professional observer of the war abroad, and Lieutenant-Commander Hillenkoetter, our naval attaché, veteran submarine expert, called on me and said: “Knick, you must leave tonight; the Germans will be here by morning.”

In Edgar Mowrer’s overfull Ford, followed by Lilian Mowrer valiantly driving her tiny Simca, we left Paris about three o’clock in the morning, passing through empty streets, the great boulevards stretching wide and forlorn without so much as a policeman in sight, while fog eddied above the paving. We passed through the gates of the city where not even a sentry stood.

Paris was already broken, already humiliated. We fled on down, stopping with the demoralized government at Tours, and then on to Bordeaux where with 1,600 other refugees I found a place on the British India Line S.S. _Madura_, built to accommodate 160. On the way from Paris to Bordeaux we had traveled with six to eight million other refugees, the largest number of fugitives ever to assemble on the roads of the Western World. Flight, flight, flight! Anything to get away! That was the panic spirit which had gripped the whole population of France, as of the Low Countries.

The German Army could not even come in contact with the main body of refugees, except in the contact of murder when the Luftwaffe machine-gunned the roads. From the moment, eleven days after the grand assault began, when the Germans reached the sea at Abbeville, May 21, from that moment on French resistance disappeared. But Hitler could not begin to attack England until the British Expeditionary Force and the Northern French Army were destroyed. Actually the B.E.F. escaped from Dunkirk June 4, and from that date on Hitler was free to turn in either direction, and many observers believed he would drive straight at England.

Instead, he chose to pursue the French Army another thirteen days, until it surrendered. If Hitler, immediately after Dunkirk, had concentrated every resource on invading England, nobody can say what would have happened. Dunkirk had shocked the British more deeply than anything in 100 years, but the French capitulation shocked them worse.

By the time I arrived at Falmouth, after four days on deck with my fellow refugees, the British were still dazed, dismayed, not panicky, but desperately aware that they stood closer to national destruction than ever in 1,000 years. The truth was they had no army, or rather their army had no weapons. The B.E.F., which had possessed about 75 per cent of all the weapons possessed by all the British Land Forces, had been compelled to leave behind at Dunkirk all their tanks, cannon, and most of their machine guns and even their rifles. It was terrifying to stand on the curb in London and watch battalions of the Guards march by with only half a dozen rifles to a battalion.

The British Land Forces immediately after Dunkirk were practically weaponless. The R.A.F. which was soon to give so gallant an account of itself, needed reorganization; all the units which had been in France had to be brought back and reintegrated for the defense of the island. If ever the German invasion could succeed, it could have succeeded then, but Hitler did not move until the night of August 8, when he sent over his first mass of 400 bombers and fired the docks of London in a blaze so high I was able to read a newspaper by its light on the roof of the Ministry of Information building, eight miles from the fire. Had that attack been launched June 8 or even June 18, instead of August 8, who knows what the result would have been? By August 8 the British had been transformed.

Three things had happened to them which had not happened for over 100 years, since the time of Napoleon. First, they had become frightened; second, they had become angry; third, they had been forced, again I repeat, for the first time in 100 years, forced to go to work. Until the fall of France the British had been as easygoing as we are now, despite the fact they had been formally at war for eight months; but after the fall of France every able-bodied human being in the United Kingdom went to work at the rate of ten to twelve hours a day seven days a week.

In a miraculously short time they tripled their production of weapons, planes, ammunition; meanwhile we sent them 1,000 cannon, many machine guns, and 750,000 rifles. The R.A.F. trained, reorganized, expanded, laid out new fields. In short, when Hitler attacked he struck a new Britain, aroused as never since 1066. It was a dazzling example of what danger can do to a people. The British of August 1940 were not the British of June 1940.

Historians will wonder why Hitler did not move earlier against England. I suppose they will go on wondering why for centuries, even after Hitler has explained it in his memoirs, for his own benefit, and to the satisfaction of few. My estimate is that he simply overvalued the French Army and undervalued the British spirit. Surprised by the French collapse he was carried along by the momentum of his drive to destroy the possibility of further French resistance before trying to invade England. He lost thereby what may prove to have been his greatest chance when he failed to throw his whole air force, army, and navy at England in the moment of her greatest weakness.

Q. _What was Hitler’s second mistake?_

A. His second mistake was when he went into Russia, apparently expecting the Red Army to fold up at least as fast as the French Army, probably hoping to be able to turn around and launch a second attack on Britain in 1941 before American aid became effective. The initial effect of the invasion of Russia was a disappointment to Hitler, however it may eventually end. So was the First Battle of Britain, but the final outcome of both battles must be awaited to determine how they will affect Hitler’s reputation as a master of war.

Meanwhile his generals have not had reason to change fundamentally the judgment they formed on the basis of their experience with him since 1933. That experience began when he took over the Presidency and obtained the oath of allegiance which, as we have seen, laid at least a legal foundation for his ascendancy over the armed forces. Then he set out to build out of the 100,000-man Reichswehr the mightiest military machine the world has ever known.

He denounced the military clauses of the Versailles treaty, and thus relieved the Army of its crushing sense of being condemned forever to inferiority. He boldly announced the creation of an Air Force, and assigned to it the explosive energies of his first Paladin, Goering. Thereafter, all the resources of the nation were poured into the armed forces. Nothing was too good for the troops. They were given barracks such as no European army had ever had, as good as anything the United States Army has ever known. The food of the army and navy and air force was improved until it was on the average far better, even in peacetime, than anything the German soldier had to eat at home.

Discipline was kept at its highest point, but at the same time a new spirit of comradeship came into the German armed forces. For the first time in the history of the German Navy, officers and men would eat at the same table. All this was bound to have its effect upon the services and to make them think at any rate gratefully of Hitler, but of course the test had still to come. What would this commander in chief order his troops to do? Would he lead them into some impossible adventure prematurely? Would this amateur after building his beautiful machine sacrifice it in some vainglorious maneuver? It seemed as though he would do just that.

The first test of Hitler’s fitness to command his army came on March 7, 1936, when he ordered it into the Rhineland to reoccupy that portion of Germany adjoining France which had been demilitarized by the Versailles treaty. France had insisted that Germany should promise never to quarter troops on the right bank of the Rhine. This was to make up for the fact that France had been prevented from occupying the right bank of the Rhine, and for the fact that the United States in 1919 had refused to join the proposed tripartite pact of France, England, and the United States, to guarantee the French from invasion by Germany.

As long as the Germans kept out of the Rhineland, France was safe. If the Germans ever reoccupied the Rhineland, it meant that they intended sooner or later to use it as a jumping-off-place from which to attack France. France therefore had insisted upon and had obtained this clause in the Versailles treaty, and had thereafter frequently announced that its violation would mean war. Nevertheless, Hitler toward the middle of February 1936 informed his General Staff that in the first week of March he intended to reoccupy the Rhineland. At that moment Hitler met his first opposition from the Army. The generals protested that they could not be responsible for what would happen, because if the French mobilized and fought, the German Army was not strong enough--it would have to retreat. Unspoken was the conclusion that if the German Army retreated, it would mean the end of the Nazi regime, the end of Hitler.

Hitler replied that it was the duty of the Army to obey orders; it was his duty as Fuehrer to give orders which could be successfully obeyed. “I know,” he told them, “that the French will not mobilize. I know the French will not fight. I know the English don’t want them to fight. Don’t ask me how I know. I know. It is my business to know.”

When I was in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, I learned under unusual circumstances something of what went on inside the German General Staff during those days of March 1936, which were to decide the history of the continent. At Burgos, headquarters of Franco’s government, I met Major von der Osten, who was ostensibly in charge of certain economic investigations or negotiations, but as a matter of fact was the chief of the German Gestapo in Spain. He was an agreeable fellow, father of eight children, highly intelligent, amusing, and it did not matter to me that some months before, his organization, the Gestapo, had had me arrested and thrown into a death cell in San Sebastian for thirty-six hours, whence I escaped by the determined vocal and political efforts of my friend and fellow correspondent, Randolph Churchill.

The Major knew that I knew that he was chief of the Gestapo and he knew that I would do all I could to get information from him of value to me, as I knew he would do likewise with me. So we got along famously, and one day he included me in a picnic with several other correspondents. There, on the banks of a clear stream while the Major’s soldier servants served us grilled frankfurters and Rhine wine, I led the conversation into discussion of what the Army thought of Hitler. The theme reached the reoccupation of the Rhineland, and at this the Major became enlightening.

“I was assigned to the Bendlerstrasse [headquarters of the General Staff] then,” the Major said. “I can tell you that for five days and five nights not one of us closed an eye. We knew that if the French marched, we were done. We had no fortifications, and no army to match the French. If the French had even mobilized, we should have been compelled to retire.” He confirmed that the opinion of virtually the entire General Staff was against Hitler; they considered the move suicidal, and when they did move, it was only to obey orders, not because they were convinced it was right.

“And what did they think after the thing was all over and Hitler had been proved right? Did they think that Hitler had proved himself a genius or that he just had extraordinarily good luck?”

The Major smiled. “We thought there was a good deal of kind fortune concerned,” he said.

That was Hitler’s first brush with his army, and his generals may well have put him down as lucky. He won, and later events proved how tremendous his victory was. For the occupation of the Rhineland enabled Hitler to build there his Siegfried line, and the Siegfried line enabled him eventually to hold France until he was ready to fall upon and destroy her as he did in 1940.

This first demonstration that he was “always right,” strengthened his position with the General Staff enormously. The second test was accordingly easier. It was Austria.

Just as in the case of the Rhineland, so in the case of Austria, France had often declared that any German attempt to annex Austria would be a cause of war. This made good sense, just as it had made good sense for the French to have said they would go to war to prevent reoccupation of the Rhineland. Once the Germans had the Rhineland and began to fortify it, they made it difficult for the French to defend Austria. Once the Germans had Austria they made it difficult for the French to defend Czechoslovakia. Once the Germans had Czechoslovakia they made it difficult for the French to defend France.

The German generals understood this series of steps as well as or better than the French, and therefore they could not believe that the French would allow each step to be taken without trying to stop it. Therefore, as Hitler ordered each step taken, his generals protested, since like all generals they did not want to start a war without the certainty of winning.

They protested vigorously over the decision to go into Austria, but once again Hitler said: “Gentlemen, it is your business to take the action I direct. It is my business to direct only action which will be successful. I can assure you now, as I assured you on the reoccupation of the Rhineland, that now also France will not move, the British will not move; we can do as we like.” He was right again, and now with two major victories to his credit, he could face his generals with an even more momentous and critical order--to occupy Czechoslovakia.

This third move, against Czechoslovakia, was the most critical, because here France was pledged by her solemn word of honor to fight for her ally, and because the possession of Czechoslovakia would make it possible finally to attack France herself. These two facts were of course amply known to the German generals and once more they assumed that the French generals and the French government would now awaken and fight for the life of their country.

So, in spite of the two lessons Hitler had given them, the German generals once more pointed out the dangers. Their Siegfried line was not nearly complete. If they threw crushing weight at Czechoslovakia, they would have to weaken their West Front so badly that the French, if they wished to plunge, might break through. Hitler this time was beside himself. He not only knew the French and British would not fight if the Czechs asked them to fight, but he believed, and I think he was right, that the French and British would not have fought even if the Czechs had fought.

So he wanted above all things at this juncture to meet a little opposition to blood his sword. He wanted the Czechs to fight, and knowing he would have them alone, he longed for a chance to show what his vast army and air force could do with overwhelming odds on their side. In my opinion it is just the opposite of true to say that Hitler wanted another bloodless victory. He did not. He wanted a bloody one, the blood of course, to be shed by the hopelessly outnumbered enemy. It seemed to him absolutely idiotic that any of his generals should object. They did, but feebly.

Once more Hitler overrode them, with the same arguments. “France will not fight. The British will not fight. We can do as we like with the Czechs. I only hope they do fight.” Hitler this time got everything he wanted but one thing. The Czechs, brutally betrayed by their ally France and bullied by England, did not fight. Hitler was cheated of his desire to do violence. At Munich the bad temper he displayed when Chamberlain and Daladier gave in to him on every point was caused by the fact that he realized these good gentlemen were going to make the Czechs surrender. He was not going to be given the chance to drop one bomb. He had to wait a whole year for his bloodshed.

If you doubt this analysis of Hitler’s bloodthirstiness, recollect that he never gave Poland a chance to imitate Czechoslovakia’s surrender. Would it not be a matter for wonderment if the German generals had failed to be impressed by this third example of the Fuehrer’s infallibility?

Yet when he proposed to destroy Poland even after the British and French had “guaranteed” her, some of Hitler’s generals still cautiously offered objections on the grounds that this would inevitably mean the Great War and maybe they could not win the Great War. For the fourth time Hitler overcame constantly lessening opposition of “timid” generals. He explained that he would knock out Poland before the French or British could strike, if indeed they intended to strike at all.

There was some doubt whether the Allies would really fight. Ribbentrop insisted Britain was through, and although they might declare war and mobilize, the British would do so only to save face, and would take the first opportunity to quit with a negotiated peace. But even if the British and the French did go to war, Hitler explained, he would finish Poland swiftly, and then turn such heat on France, bring such terrific forces to bear on the Western Front, that she would probably also be ready to negotiate peace, and if not he would knock her out also. _That_ he was sure he could do, and once he had done that, the British would capitulate.

If there was any opposition lingering among the generals, it disappeared upon the signature of the Russo-German Pact, August 23, 1939. This most brilliant of all Hitler’s foreign political coups convinced his generals first that they would not have to fight a war on two major fronts, second that they were in the hands of an invincible military-political genius of the first category.

How gloriously right Hitler seemed to be. At first everything appeared to depend upon the speed with which Hitler could knock out the Poles, whether he could finish them off before the French could mobilize for a great offensive on the West. Optimistic Poles said they could hold out for three years; pessimistic Poles said one year. The French thought the Poles could hold for six months. The German generals thought it would take three months to break the Poles. Hitler gave them six weeks to do the job. They conquered Poland in eighteen days!

Then came Norway and then came France!

No matter what the German generals had thought before, by May 1940 they had the feeling Hitler was another Napoleon. Sure enough, on May 10, they attacked and on June 17 the French Army, the mighty French Army of 4,500,000 men only three generations from Napoleon, surrendered. The Germans, led by Hitler, had accomplished the greatest victory in the history of the German Army, and had inflicted upon their age-old enemy the most colossal defeat in the history of France. Indeed from the point of view of the numbers of men involved, and the issues at stake, it may be said to be dimensionally the greatest victory of military history.

How can anyone now wonder that after the fall of France the German General Staff with all its professional vanity would be proud to take and if necessary blindly obey orders from Corporal Hitler?

Hitler had brought his General Staff to this position of unquestioning obedience when he gave the orders to attack Russia. Here was truly the place for caution. If Hitler was another Napoleon, here was the same Russia. It meant a two-front war. It would give time for United States aid to become effective. At the best it meant lengthening the war by years.

“No,” Hitler ordered, “we shall conquer Russia before the summer is out, and conquer England before the year is out and before the United States can do anything about it. _Vorwaerts!_” Only the prestige built up by Hitler’s uninterrupted series of victories from the Rhineland to Crete could have won the acquiescence of the German General Staff to the Russian adventure.

Q. _Is Hitler personally brave?_

A. It is hard to say. I could put it this way: Hitler is not the sort of man about whom one would unhesitatingly say that he is personally brave, as one would say about Churchill, for example. Perhaps we shall not count the story he told me about his winning the Iron Cross in the last war, since many Germans say it is not a true story. Yet it is an interesting one. He told it to me the night of March 11, 1932 on the eve of the Presidential election when he ran against Hindenburg and scored eleven million to Hindenburg’s eighteen million votes.

I asked him how he had won his Iron Cross. He always wore it but his political enemies declared there was no record in the army archives of its having been awarded him and neither in _Mein Kampf_ nor elsewhere could there be found any account of how he got it. I was afraid when I asked the question that it might irritate him, but he seemed amused, and even pleased.

“You know,” he said, “I was a dispatch bearer in the war. One day, toward the first of June 1918, I was ordered to take a message to another part of the front, and had to traverse a section of no man’s land. Presently I passed a dugout which I thought abandoned, but suddenly I heard French voices below.

“Being alone, and armed only with a pistol, I stopped a moment, then drew my pistol and shouted below in my very bad French, ‘Come up, surrender!’ Then I shouted in German as though to a squad of soldiers, orders to ‘Fix bayonets! Draw your hand grenades!’ First one French soldier, and then another, and then another came up with their hands in the air until there were seven. I marched them to the rear and turned them over as prisoners of war. Now,” he paused, and smiled at Tom Delmer of the London _Daily Express_, who was with me, “if they had been English soldiers, or,” turning to me and continuing to smile, “if they had been American soldiers, I am not sure I should have been able to make them surrender so easily, and perhaps I would not have my Iron Cross or be here today.”

This is the only time I have observed a sense of humor in Hitler, and of course if his story is correct, it proves that he had on that occasion a considerable amount of personal bravery.

Then there is the time when, during the 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch, he threw himself down when the Reichswehr armored car began to fire its machine gun at him and Ludendorff and Goering and the rest of them. I was about a hundred yards away, jammed in the crowd, when I heard that machine-gun fire, the first I had ever heard in my life. That one whiff of fire killed sixteen of Hitler’s men including the body servant of Ludendorff standing next to the General whom he had served throughout the war. Hitler was injured because he had thrown himself down so violently that he broke his collarbone. Would you consider that a sign of cowardice? I do not know. It was the proper reaction for a front-line soldier.

Nevertheless, Ludendorff not only refused to take shelter but contemptuously stalked across the Odeon’s Platz and, in his uniform of a Lieutenant General, gave himself up to the Reichswehr Lieutenant in charge of the armored car, with the words: “Arrest me, Lieutenant. I shall never wear this uniform again.” Now there was a man about whom one would unhesitatingly say he is a brave man. You remember how Ludendorff, then a Colonel, took the fortress of Liege singlehanded, simply drove in his staff car to the Belgian lines, by amazing luck got through, drove straight to the entrance of the fortress, knocked, and walked in. When the Belgian commander saw before him a German Colonel, he assumed the game was up and surrendered. That won for Ludendorff the Pour le Merite, Germany’s Victoria Cross.

There was a time when Hitler displayed indubitable personal courage. That was when he arrested Captain Ernst Roehm, the head of his 2,500,000 Storm Troops, on the famous June 30, 1934, the day of the Blood Purge. Roehm had been Hitler’s close, if not closest, personal associate. I cannot use the word friend, because Hitler has never had a friend. He was the only man in the party, in the world, as a matter of fact, with whom Hitler exchanged the intimate “Du” or “Thou.” We Americans can never understand the significance of this continental custom. If you are on “Du Fuss” or “Thou Footing” with another man, it means you are brothers, and it is taken very seriously indeed by all except the proletariat, who in the informal brotherhood of the working classes, call each other indiscriminately “Thou.” But this intimacy of Hitler and Roehm did not prevent Hitler from cold-bloodedly ordering his friend’s execution when once Hitler had convinced himself Roehm was plotting treason. Cold blood is one of Hitler’s chief characteristics. It reminds one of Robespierre.

Roehm was hiding out with his staff at the hamlet of Wiessee, not far from Munich. His guards, heavily armed, had strictest orders to stop everyone, but _everyone_, and by that underlining emphasis in the orders, _everyone_ was meant to include Hitler himself. Nevertheless, on the fateful morning, Hitler with two automobiles containing among others the canny Goebbels, several high SS officers, and a handful of SS gunmen, drove into Wiessee at daybreak, and when Roehm’s guards saw the All-Highest, instead of stopping him they saluted “Heil Hitler!” There was at least some bravery in Hitler’s daring to go personally to arrest Roehm, surrounded by his bodyguards. Once he had penetrated the sentry lines, there was not much for Hitler to fear, especially not in his personal encounter with Roehm. He found Roehm in bed with what they call in German a _Lust Knabe_.

Roehm was a barrel-chested, scar-faced desperado whose only two weaknesses were his homosexuality and drink. He had grown potbellied, and invariably woke with a hangover. He slept in a nightgown. When Hitler flung open his bedroom door at daybreak and routed him out of bed, Roehm must have been distinctly at a disadvantage. There he stood, bleary-eyed, nightgowned, potbellied, before his Fuehrer roaring charges of treason, yelling that he was under arrest, ordering him to dress and be quick about it.

I passed through Munich on my way from Rome to Berlin to cover the Blood Purge the next night. From SS officers who boarded my train at Munich, via the good-looking Italian Wagon-Lit conductor who had been from time to time propositioned by Roehm, I learned that Major Buch, Hitler’s chief SS executioner, had that evening gone to Roehm’s cell where a revolver had been left to let him commit suicide, and had shot Roehm as he cried, “Tell Adolf to come kill me if he has the nerve!”

Q. _Is it true that Hitler is a homosexual?_

A. No, it is not true. He came seriously under suspicion because of his intimacy with Roehm, and because for so many years he tolerated the blatant homosexuality of Roehm and his cohorts. This was a scandal so colossal that it surely has no counterpart in history. Roehm as the head of 2,500,000 Storm Troops had surrounded himself with a staff of perverts. His chiefs, men of the rank of Gruppenfuehrer or Obergruppenfuehrer, commanding units of several hundred thousand Storm Troopers, were almost without exception homosexuals. Indeed, unless a Storm Troop officer were homosexual, he had no chance of advancement.

All this was known to every intelligent observer in Germany and of course was known in every detail to Hitler. His moral indignation when he made his Blood Purge and cleaned out this “nest of immorality” was one of his more brazen pieces of hypocrisy. He purged Roehm not on account of his distasteful habits but because Roehm was plotting to seize power, make himself head of the Army, and form what would have been, incidentally, a homosexual government.

Nobody knows whether he intended to do away with Hitler or merely force Hitler to go along with him. At any rate Hitler would have no part of it, and Roehm was killed, though not for his abnormal love life. Thereafter Hitler passed the most stringent edicts against homosexuality and this odd feature of German life was driven underground. It remains, nevertheless, characteristic of the Germans, that they, outwardly the most brutally masculine of all European peoples, are the most homosexual nation on earth.

Naturally because Hitler never showed any sign of interest in women, he came under suspicion, but prolonged observation has convinced all the witnesses I know, including Germans and foreigners, that Hitler is simply asexual, has no sex life at all, or rather has sublimated it in his “marriage to the German people.”

Q. _How do you mean, “marriage to the German people”?_

A. That is precisely the relationship Hitler conceives himself to have with the Germans, and I must say millions of Germans appear to feel as though they constituted his wife. Incidentally it was Lord D’Abernon, long-time British Ambassador to Germany, who remarked that the world did not properly understand the meaning of masculinity and femininity as applied to nations, and that in his opinion the Germans were the most feminine people in Europe and the French the most masculine. Whether D’Abernon would today be of the same opinion, I do not know. At any rate Hitler certainly obtains from his contact with the German people a more than adequate surrogate for normal sex life.

Just imagine what his feelings must be when he stands, as in peacetime he used to stand, on the platform at the Tempelhofer Field in Berlin, and before him are a million Germans. This is the largest crowd that any man has ever had before him in person. You could never assemble such a crowd in a democracy, because it takes them twelve hours to march into place and twelve hours to march away.

On the night before the first of May, which the Nazis stole from the Communists and Socialists and made their own Labor Day, the Berlin population is herded into line and marched off in battalions. Everything is meticulously arranged by a General Staff, so that by the time Hitler appears one million persons, no less, are standing to hear him. When Hitler appears, from a million throats roars the cry “Heil Hitler! Heil! Heil! Heil!” time and time and time again.

Then he speaks and at every possible opportunity comes again the bellow from a million German voices “Heil! Heil! Heil!” Sounds silly? Oh no, not any more than the German goose step is silly. It looks silly only in the movies. In real life it is tremendously impressive--ten thousand steel-shod boots striking the ground with all the force ten thousand muscular legs can put into it. They shake the ground, and when the million Germans shout “Heil!” they make the firmament quiver. I defy anyone to hear such a mass yell without trembling at the sheer brute power of it.

Suppose you were the recipient of this ovation! Hitler obtains his life’s satisfaction from this sort of power orgasm. Now, of course, he has the whole continent of Europe to trample upon. Every man who loves power for its own sake as Hitler does, has a strong streak of sadism, of enjoyment in the infliction of pain or humiliation upon others. So now Hitler has a double stream of enjoyment in which to wallow. I do not think he will ever marry.

Q. _Are women attracted to Hitler?_

A. Soon after he came to power he had to pass an edict forbidding German women to crawl out of the crowd and attempt to kiss the hem of his raincoat as he passed by. This was forbidden partially for the same reason as the _Verbot_ against throwing flowers, which was issued because it would be easy to conceal a bomb in a bouquet. Whenever he appeared in public, scores of German women tried to get near enough to him to touch his raincoat or come into some kind of personal contact with him.

It is, regrettably, impossible to record that this is a purely German phenomenon. An American woman distinguished herself at the Olympic Games, and incidentally brought about a disciplinary shake-up among Hitler’s bodyguards, by brushing past his gunmen and kissing him on the cheek. All this is, perhaps, only evidence of the traditional regard women have for strength, whether exhibited by the champion prize fighter, wrestler, chess master, millionaire, or by the Fuehrer of Germany.

Q. _I have heard scores of you fellows, foreign correspondents and others, say they “know the truth about Hitler,” and constantly recommend that we find out what he means, but that seems to be a pretty complicated business, and we cannot all live in Germany long enough to find out about it. Can you tell us in a few words just what he does mean, for us?_

A. Yes, in the fewest words: Hitler means exactly what he says. He says the German people are a master race, destined to rule the world. He says the German people have the power to enforce their rule on the world. He intends that they shall rule the world during his lifetime. He includes the United States in the world he intends to rule.

Finally, he does have the power to carry out his world conquest unless we fight him in time. That is the shortest way to put it. The reason you think it hard to understand or find out what Hitler means is that you refuse to believe these things because they upset you, and if you believed them then you might have to work harder, or sacrifice something such as your automobile, or blood, or maybe your life. Read _Mein Kampf_. It is all there.

Q. _What kind of public speaker is Hitler? Is he truly a great orator? How does he compare with others?_

A. He is probably the greatest spellbinder of all time. He literally talked himself into power in Germany and thereafter he talked the great German nation into becoming his blindly obedient and fanatically loyal Herculean slave. With his slave he has laid a continent in chains. But he never delivered an oration in his life, because an oration according to Webster is “An elaborate discourse, delivered in public, treating an important subject in a formal and dignified manner,” and that Hitler never did. In this respect, Goebbels is incomparably his superior.

An oration by Goebbels has a beginning, a middle, and a crescendo end; it has form, style, and the language is chosen, the gestures sparing but effective, the voice clear and only now and then distorted by passion. Hitler begins any old way, rambles, digresses, becomes excited, rants, shouts until his voice is hoarse, and frequently breaks into a falsetto scream.

The quality of Hitler’s voice is unpleasant. It is thick in the middle register, guttural in the low, and its high notes are rasping. In every speech at some time he becomes angry and then the tone is either terrifying or embarrassing to the listener, depending upon his relation to Hitler’s power. I speak, of course, of the foreign listener, as it would affect you if you understood German. His anger frequently overpowers him, but he never splutters, he roars. I sometimes felt as I listened to him, and I have heard him fifty times or more, as though he were a wild beast.

Then he can shift in a twinkling to the tone of irony, contemptuous, derisive. Much of his speech is ungrammatical; many of his sentences do not “read,” do not make German. He pays apparently no attention to the structure of his speech. He sometimes ends so abruptly that his audience is shocked, having expected him to finish his thought, or even complete a sentence. His gestures are extravagant, and resemble those of an old-fashioned camp-meeting preacher. He mimics well, and delights in ridiculing his opponents by caricaturing them.

There is scarcely a rule of oratory he does not ignore. He is seldom dignified. All of this, of course, is in reference to his extemporaneous public speaking which brought him to power, not to the speeches he reads, as he has read nearly everything since he took power. As Chancellor of the Reich he can read a speech with dignity, as he read the funeral oration over Hindenburg, which I heard in Tannenberg.

Yet with all the criticism one can bring to bear on his public speaking, he remains the most effective mob master ever to step on a platform. He sweeps his audience with him. Sometimes they are slow to come along, as the time when after seven days of slaughter in Germany he rose in his own uniformed Reichstag to explain the Blood Purge of June 30, 1934. That time he spoke for twenty minutes before he received a single handclap. He had just killed more than a thousand people including leaders of his own party, Ernst Roehm, his closest friend and head of the 2,500,000 Storm Troops; Gregor Strasser, one-time rival for leadership of the Nazis; General Kurt von Schleicher, former Reichs Chancellor, and his wife; Karl Ernst, head of the 250,000 Berlin and Brandenburg Storm Troopers; General von Lossow and former Reichs Commissar von Kahr of Bavaria, who had defeated his first effort at seizing power in Munich, and hundreds of others.

The nation was stunned; the Nazi Party itself was partially paralyzed with fear. Hitler had turned his SS (_Schutzstaffel_) Black Guards against his SA (_Sturmabteilung_) Storm Troops, and hundreds of Brown Shirt officers had died before the Black Shirt firing squads, many of them shouting “Heil Hitler!” as they fell. Most of the members of the Reichstag, that curious gesture of Hitler before democracy, were active or honorary officers in the Storm Troops. A score of seats were empty. Their lawful occupants were dead. The survivors were appalled and not less bewildered than the public. Nobody knew what had happened; what to expect. When Hitler began to speak, for the first time in his life he was received in silence.

As I sat in the press gallery of the Kroll Opera House, I noted this with amazement, but I felt the silence was that of stupefaction, not of indifference and certainly not of rejection. The listeners were simply stricken dumb. Yet the silence continued, for five, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes. By then I began to think that Hitler might have made a mistake, that perhaps his dummy Reichstag was actually disapproving their idol. Many of them had close friends among the dead. Then came the breaking point. I think it was the most dramatic moment in any speech I have ever heard of Hitler’s.

In his intolerably repetitious way he had started with a description of Germany’s suffering under the Versailles treaty, and under the “fourteen years of servitude to the traitors of November,” then sketched the events leading up to the Blood Purge, described his discovery of the plot against the State, and then with a leap he shifted into his most passionate style. He had come to the moment of ordering the executions. Raising his right hand, forefinger pointed on high, he stood on his toes and roared: “_Meine Herren_, at that moment _I_ was the Supreme Court of Germany; _I_ was the Supreme Judge of Germany; _I_ was Germany!”

The silence in the Reichstag broke, and as though hypnotized, the 500 Brown-Shirted members roared: “Heil! Heil! Heil!” There, they had recognized their master. He had spoken as a master. He had consented again to be their master, and from a mood of bewilderment and fear they burst into the joyful acknowledgment of their abasement. Forgotten were the friendships with the dead, blotted out in the keen pleasure of hearing the crack of the lash. From then on his lengthy accounting was constantly punctuated by the traditional applause.

Incidentally it might be pointed out here that there is after all a very significant difference between the tyrants of long ago and the tyrants of today. It is a fact that the tyrants of today exercise greater power over the lives of their subjects than any we can recollect from former times. Historians have to search to find a Ptolemy, a Caesar, or a Mongol Khan who had so complete a discipline over their populations, so profound a control over the individual lives of their subjects as have the despots of the modern totalitarian states.

But all the modern despots find it necessary to report to their subjects, to speak and explain, to take them into their alleged confidence, however mendacious the report may be. They find it expedient, no matter how they spurn the principles of democracy, to pretend to treat their subjects as free to exercise a judgment. Why else does Hitler constantly come before his people to talk? In the western tyrannies of antiquity and the Middle Ages, in the European monarchies of divine right and in the Oriental despotisms, the rulers considered it unnecessary to deliver an accounting to their people.

The conclusion is that the short experience the world has had with democracy, not yet two hundred years in duration, has left with the most imperious ruler a sense of responsibility to the ruled, or is it merely fear? Hitler despises the masses, I know. But he fears them also. If Louis XVI had possessed a fraction of Hitler’s speaking talent, or King Charles of England, or Czar Nicholas of Russia, perhaps they might have had a different fate.

In the preface to _Mein Kampf_ Hitler indicates the paramount importance he attaches to the art of political speaking. He wrote: “I know that one is able to win people far more by the spoken than by the written word, and that every great movement on this globe owes its rise to the great speakers and not to the great writers.” He then wrote a book of 1,000 pages which is said by now to have been distributed to eight million people, but it was still the spoken word. He dictated every line of it. You ask, what kind of public speaker is Hitler? I answer, read _Mein Kampf_.

It reminds me of a man named Korff. Korff was the brains of the Ullstein Verlag, pre-Hitler Germany’s greatest publishing concern. Korff originated the _Berliner Illustrierte_, first of the world’s great picture weeklies, forerunner of _Life_, and _Look_, and the French _Match_. He raised his _Berliner Illustrierte_ to more than two million circulation, undreamed of on the continent before. His salary was record breaking, his prestige likewise.

One day in 1931, more than a year before Hitler came to power, Korff came before his board of directors and said, “Gentlemen, I’m through. I am going to resign. I wish you to release me and to make your arrangements accordingly.” Astounded, the board asked why. “Because I’ve read the book, gentlemen,” replied Korff. “What book?” they asked. “_Mein Kampf_,” Korff said, and began to explain, but couldn’t on account of the laughter. Dear old Korff had to have his joke. But no, it was not a joke. Korff resigned, liquidated his property, got out of Germany and in 1933 when Hitler came to power the Nazis bought out Ullstein’s at forced sale.

The laughing members of the board and stockholders--those not yet dead, shot attempting to escape, or hanged by their belts in concentration camp--received a fraction of one per cent of the value of their holding. Of all the house of Ullstein, only the man who read the book escaped. I advise you to read the book.

As an orator, Hitler has many superiors. I have mentioned Goebbels in Germany. Trotzky was certainly better. I heard Trotzky speak in Moscow the last time he ever appeared on a Russian platform. It was in 1926. He had been in disgrace for more than a year, but was allowed to speak on the innocuous theme, “The United Sates of America and Siberia,” a lecture with paid admissions. The proceeds were to go to the benefit of needy students of Moscow University. Why Stalin allowed it I do not know, but he never permitted a return engagement, for Trotzky’s popularity proved so great that the mounted police had to be called out to move the crowds which, despite the exorbitant admission price, jammed the street before the lecture hall.

I paid thirty roubles for a balcony seat. It was worth the price. Trotzky appeared, dapper in a light-gray whipcord suit, and for an hour and a half in Russian which I only faintly understood, moved me and the three thousand other listeners to intense appreciation of his forensic talents. I was surprised to hear Trotzky’s voice, a clear high tenor. I had expected a deeper, more rotund tone. They said, however, that the clarity of his delivery and its carrying power were such that he alone among Bolshevik orators could speak in the Red Square and without a microphone be heard by half a million listeners. Without being able to understand more than one word in ten, as at that time I had been in Russia less than a year, I was nevertheless convinced by this one hearing of Trotzky that he was one of history’s greatest orators.

Q. _What sort of eyes has Hitler? Are they magnetic? What color are they?_

A. It seems to depend on who is looking at them. I noticed that Francis Hackett in his useful book, _What Mein Kampf Means to America_, cites three descriptions of Hitler’s eyes, all different. Otto Tolischus calls them “small, greenish brown and almost poetically introspective eyes.” William D. Bayes calls them “faded blue eyes between colorless brows and puffy sallow cheeks.” John McCutcheon Raleigh wrote: “The fanaticism in his eyes was the most commanding thing about him ... they possess a hypnotic quality that can easily persuade his followers to do anything the mind behind the eyes desires.”