Berlin Diary (2 page)

Soon there was only scattered firing and about ten minutes after twelve I started sprinting up the Champs-Élysées towards the office to write my story. Near the President’s Élysée Palace I noticed several companies of regular troops on guard, the first I had seen. It is almost a mile up hill along the Champs-Élysées to the
Herald
office and I arrived badly out of breath, but managed to write a couple of columns before deadline. Officially: sixteen dead, several hundred wounded.

L
ATER.—
Daladier, who posed as a strong man, has resigned. He gives out this statement: “The government, which has the responsibility for order and security, refuses to assure it by exceptional means which might bring about further bloodshed. It does not desire to employ soldiers against demonstrators. I have therefore handed to the President of the Republic the resignation of the Cabinet.”

Imagine Stalin or Mussolini or Hitler hesitating to employ troops against a mob trying to overthrow their regimes! It’s true perhaps that last night’s rioting had as its immediate cause the Stavisky scandal. But the Stavisky swindles merely demonstrate the rottenness and the weakness of French democracy. Daladier and his Minister of the Interior, Eugène Frot, actually gave the U.N.C, permission to demonstrate. They should have refused it. They should have had enough Mobile Guards on hand early in the evening to disperse the mob before it could gather strength. But to resign now, after putting down a fascist coup—for that’s what it was—is either sheer cowardice or stupidity. Important too is the way the Communists fought on the same side
of the barricades last night as the fascists. I do not like that.

P
ARIS
,
February
8

Old “Papa” Doumergue is to head the government of “national union.” They’ve dragged him from his village of Tournefeuille, where he had retired with his mistress, whom he married shortly after stepping down from the presidency. He says he will form a cabinet of former premiers and chiefs of parties, but it will be Rightish and reactionary. Still, the moderate Left—men like
Chautemps, Daladier, Herriot—have shown they can’t govern, or won’t.

P
ARIS
,
February
12

A general strike today, but not very effective, and there’s been no trouble.

L
ATER.—
Dollfuss has struck at the Social Democrats in Austria
, the only organized group (forty per cent of the population) which can save him from being swallowed up by the Nazis. Communications with Vienna were cut most of the day, but tonight the story started coming through to the office. It is civil war. The Socialists are entrenched in the great municipal houses they built after the war—models for the whole world—the Karl Marx Hof, the Goethe Hof, and so on. But Dollfuss and the Heimwehr under Prince Starhemberg, a play-boy ignoramus, and Major Fey, a hatchet-faced and brutal reactionary, have control of the rest of the city. With their tanks and artillery, they will win—unless the Socialists get help from the Czechs, from near-by Bratislava.

This, then, is what Fey meant yesterday. I was struck by a report of his speech which Havas carried last night: “During the last few days I have made certain that Chancellor Dollfuss is a man of the Heimwehr. Tomorrow we shall start to make a clean breast of things in Austria.” But I put it down to his usual loud-mouthedness. And what a role for little Dollfuss! It’s only a little more than a year ago that I, with John Gunther and Eric Gedye, had a long talk with him after a luncheon which the Anglo-American Press Club tendered him. I found him a timid little fellow, still a little dazed that he, the illegitimate son of a peasant, should have gone so far. But give the little men a lot of power and they can be dangerous. I weep for my Social Democrat friends, the most decent men and women I’ve known in Europe. How many of them are being slaughtered tonight, I wonder. And there goes democracy in Austria, one more state gone. Remained at the office until the paper was put to bed at one thirty a.m., but feel too weary and depressed by the news to sleep.

P
ARIS
,
February
15

The fighting in Vienna ended today, the dispatches say. Dollfuss finished off the last workers with artillery and then went off to pray. Well, at least the Austrian Social Democrats fought, which is more than their comrades in Germany did. Apparently Otto Bauer and Julius Deutsch got safely over the Czech frontier. A good thing, or Dollfuss would have hanged them.

February
23

My birthday. Thirty. And with the worst job I’ve ever had. Tess prepared a great birthday banquet
and afterwards we went out to a concert. How the French
slide
over Beethoven! Elliot Paul used to say that if the French musicians would stop reading
L’Intransigeant
or
Paris-Soir
during a performance they would do better. Must see Shakespeare’s
Coriolanus
at the Comédie Française, which the Left people charge has some anti-democratic lines. Heard today that Doll fuss had hanged Koloman Wallisch, the Social Democrat mayor of Bruck an der Mur. Claude Cockburn, who should know better, came out the other day in
Week
with an absurd account of the February 6 riots. Described them as a “working class” protest. Curiously enough, his description of that night reads suspiciously like that which Trotsky has written of the first uprising in Petrograd in 1917 in his
History of the Russian Revolution
. The fact is that February 6 was an attempted fascist coup which the Communists, wittingly or not, helped.

P
ARIS
,
June
30

Berlin was cut off for several hours today, but late this afternoon telephone communication was re-established. And what a story! Hitler and Göring have purged the S.A., shooting many of its leaders. Röhm, arrested by Hitler himself, was allowed to commit suicide in a Munich jail, according to one agency report. The French are pleased. They think this is the beginning of the end for the Nazis. Wish I could get a post in Berlin. It’s a story I’d like to cover.

P
ARIS
,
July
14

My sister is here, and the three of us celebrated Bastille Day a little tonight. We took her around
to the cafés to watch the people dance. Later we ended up at Café Flore where I introduced her to some of the Latin Quarterites. Alex Small was in great form. When Alex started to fight the Battle of Verdun again, I dragged the family away, having heard it many times over the years.

It now develops that Hitler’s purge was more drastic than first reported. Röhm did not kill himself, but was shot on the orders of Hitler. Other dead: Heines, notorious Nazi boss of Silesia, Dr. Erich Klausner, leader of the “Catholic Action” in Germany, Fritz von Bose and Edgar Jung, two of Papen’s secretaries (Papen himself narrowly escaped with his life), Gregor Strasser, who used to be second in importance to Hitler in the Nazi Party, and General von Schleicher and his wife, the latter two murdered in cold blood. I see von Kahr is on the list, the man who balked Hitler’s Beer House
Putsch
in 1923. Hitler has thus taken his personal revenge. Yesterday, on Friday the 13th, Hitler got away with his explanation in the Reichstag. When he screamed: “The supreme court of the German people during these twenty-four hours consisted of myself!” the deputies rose and cheered. One had almost forgotten how strong sadism and masochism are in the German people.