Berlin Diary (4 page)

This evening at the beautiful old Rathaus Hitler formally opened this, the fourth party rally. He spoke for only three minutes, probably thinking to save his voice for the six big speeches he is scheduled to make during the next five days. Putzi Hanfstängl, an immense, high-strung, incoherent clown who does not often fail to remind us that he is part American and graduated from Harvard, made the main speech of the day in his capacity of foreign press chief of the party. Obviously trying to please his boss, he had the crust to ask us to “report on affairs in Germany without attempting to interpret them.” “History alone,” Putzi shouted, “can evaluate the events now taking place under Hitler.” What he meant, and what Goebbels and Rosenberg mean, is that we should jump on the band-wagon of Nazi propaganda. I fear Putzi’s words fell on deaf, if good-humoured, ears among the American and British correspondents, who rather like him despite his clownish stupidity.

About ten o’clock tonight I got caught in a mob of ten thousand hysterics who jammed the moat in front of Hitler’s hotel, shouting: “We want our Führer.” I was a little shocked at the faces, especially those of the women, when Hitler finally appeared on the balcony for a moment. They reminded me of the crazed expressions I saw once in the back country of Louisiana on the faces of some Holy Rollers who were about to hit the trail. They looked up at him as if he were a Messiah, their faces transformed into something positively in
human. If he had remained in sight for more than a few moments, I think many of the women would have swooned from excitement.

Later I pushed my way into the lobby of the Deutscher Hof. I recognized Julius Streicher, whom they call here the Uncrowned Czar of Franconia. In Berlin he is known more as the number-one Jew-baiter and editor of the vulgar and pornographic anti-Semitic sheet the
Stürmer
. His head was shaved, and this seemed to augment the sadism of his face. As he walked about, he brandished a short whip.

Knick arrived today. He will cover for INS and I for Universal.

N
UREMBERG
,
September
5

I’m beginning to comprehend, I think, some of the reasons for Hitler’s astounding success. Borrowing a chapter from the Roman church, he is restoring pageantry and colour and mysticism to the drab lives of twentieth-century Germans. This morning’s opening meeting in the Luitpold Hall on the outskirts of Nuremberg was more than a gorgeous show; it also had something of the mysticism and religious fervour of an Easter or Christmas Mass in a great Gothic cathedral. The hall was a sea of brightly coloured flags. Even Hitler’s arrival was made dramatic. The band stopped playing. There was a hush over the thirty thousand people packed in the hall. Then the band struck up the
Badenweiler March
, a very catchy tune, and used only, I’m told, when Hitler makes his big entries. Hitler appeared in the back of the auditorium, and followed by his aides, Göring, Goebbels, Hess, Himmler, and the others, he strode slowly down the long centre aisle while thirty thousand hands were
raised in salute. It is a ritual, the old-timers say, which is always followed. Then an immense symphony orchestra played Beethoven’s
Egmont
Overture. Great Klieg lights played on the stage, where Hitler sat surrounded by a hundred party officials and officers of the army and navy. Behind them the “blood flag,” the one carried down the streets of Munich in the ill-fated putsch. Behind this, four or five hundred S.A. standards. When the music was over, Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s closest confidant, rose and slowly read the names of the Nazi “martyrs”—brown-shirts who had been killed in the struggle for power—a roll-call of the dead, and the thirty thousand seemed very moved.

In such an atmosphere no wonder, then, that every word dropped by Hitler seemed like an inspired Word from on high. Man’s—or at least the German’s—critical faculty is swept away at such moments, and every lie pronounced is accepted as high truth itself. It was while the crowd—all Nazi officials—were in this mood that the Führer’s proclamation was sprung on them. He did not read it himself. It was read by
Gauleiter
Wagner of Bavaria, who, curiously, has a voice and manner of speaking so like Hitler’s that some of the correspondents who were listening back at the hotel on the radio thought it was Hitler.

As to the proclamation, it contained such statements as these, all wildly applauded as if they were new truths: “The German form of life is definitely determined for the next thousand years. For us, the nervous nineteenth century has finally ended. There will be no revolution in Germany for the next one thousand years!”

Or: “Germany has done everything possible to assure world peace. If war comes to Europe it will come only because of Communist chaos.” Later before a “
Kultur
” meeting he added: “Only brainless dwarfs
cannot realize that Germany has been the breakwater against Communist floods which would have drowned Europe and its culture.”

Hitler also referred to the fight now going on against his attempt to Nazify the Protestant church. “I am striving to unify it. I am convinced that Luther would have done the same and would have thought of unified Germany first and last.”

N
UREMBERG
,
September
6

Hitler sprang his
Arbeitsdienst
, his Labour Service Corps, on the public for the first time today and it turned out to be a highly trained, semi-military group of fanatical Nazi youths. Standing there in the early morning sunlight which sparkled on their shiny spades, fifty thousand of them, with the first thousand bared above the waist, suddenly made the German spectators go mad with joy when, without warning, they broke into a perfect goose-step. Now, the goose-step has always seemed to me to be an outlandish exhibition of the human being in his most undignified and stupid state, but I felt for the first time this morning what an inner chord it strikes in the strange soul of the German people. Spontaneously they jumped up and shouted their applause. There was a ritual even for the Labour Service boys. They formed an immense
Sprechchor
—a chanting chorus—and with one voice intoned such words as these: “We want one Leader! Nothing for us! Everything for Germany!
Heil Hitler!
”

Curious that none of the relatives or friends of the S.A. leaders or, say, of General von Schleicher have tried to get Hitler or Göring or Himmler this week. Though Hitler is certainly closely guarded by the S.S., it is nonsense to hold that he cannot be killed. Yesterday
we speculated on the matter, Pat Murphy of the
Daily Express
, a burly but very funny and amusing Irishman, Christopher Holmes of Reuter’s, who looks like a poet and perhaps is, Knick, and I. We were in Pat’s room, overlooking the moat. Hitler drove by, returning from some meeting. And we all agreed how easy it would be for someone in a room like this to toss a bomb on his car, rush down to the street, and escape in the crowd. But there has been no sign of an attempt yet, though some of the Nazis are slightly worried about Sunday, when he reviews the S.A.

N
UREMBERG
,
September
7

Another great pageant tonight. Two hundred thousand party officials packed in the Zeppelin Wiese with their twenty-one thousand flags unfurled in the searchlights like a forest of weird trees. “We are strong and will get stronger,” Hitler shouted at them through the microphone, his words echoing across the hushed field from the loud-speakers. And there, in the flood-lit night, jammed together like sardines, in one mass formation, the little men of Germany who have made Nazism possible achieved the highest state of being the Germanic man knows: the shedding of their individual souls and minds—with the personal responsibilities and doubts and problems—until under the mystic lights and at the sound of the magic words of the Austrian they were merged completely in the Germanic herd. Later they recovered enough—fifteen thousand of them—to stage a torchlight parade through Nuremberg’s ancient streets, Hitler taking the salute in front of the station across from our hotel. Von Papen arrived today and stood alone in a car behind Hitler tonight, the first public appearance he has
made, I think, since he narrowly escaped being murdered by Göring on June 30. He did not look happy.

N
UREMBERG
,
September
9

Hitler faced his S.A. storm troopers today for the first time since the bloody purge. In a harangue to fifty thousand of them he “absolved” them from blame for the Röhm “revolt.” There was considerable tension in the stadium and I noticed that Hitler’s own S.S. bodyguard was drawn up in force in front of him, separating him from the mass of the brown-shirts. We wondered if just one of those fifty thousand brown-shirts wouldn’t pull a revolver, but not one did. Viktor Lutze, Röhm’s successor as chief of the S.A., also spoke. He has a shrill, unpleasant voice, and the S.A. boys received him coolly, I thought. Hitler had in a few of the foreign correspondents for breakfast this morning, but I was not invited.

N
UREMBERG
,
September
10

Today the army had its day, fighting a very realistic sham battle in the Zeppelin Meadow. It is difficult to exaggerate the frenzy of the three hundred thousand German spectators when they saw their soldiers go into action, heard the thunder of the guns, and smelt the powder. I feel that all those Americans and English (among others) who thought that German militarism was merely a product of the Hohenzollerns—from Frederick the Great to Kaiser Wilhelm II—made a mistake. It is rather something deeply ingrained in all Germans. They acted today like children playing with tin soldiers. The Reichswehr “fought” today only with the “defensive” weapons allowed them by Versailles,
but everybody knows they’ve got the rest—tanks, heavy artillery, and probably airplanes.