If Hitler Comes (12 page)

“Yes, yes,” I cried, and launched into a passionate plea for my friend. Dr. Schultz interrupted me.

“But we are agreed. Together we may succeed in his
release
, and immediate departure for his native land. We must let the truth be known. You were present at his trial. So fair, was it not?”

“It was nothing of the sort,” I said. “My dear Dr. Schultz, you would have been disgusted if you had been there. It was a sheer farce, and——”

“As you say, Mr. Fenton, it was a fair trial. A fact, no doubt, of some interest to the Antipodes. You must tell your readers, Mr. Fenton, and—don’t you say?—‘Australian papers please to copy.’ Then, no doubt, Mr. Dorman will repay your efforts with a like discretion. You too, I think, would feel less happy at Godalming. I expect you, perhaps, at the Bureau in one hour.”

He rang off. He had made himself quite clear.

If you have lived in London under the Captivity, if you have seen a friend after the Gestapo have had him, if you yourself have been threatened with the concentration camp and have had to reach such a decision as mine in the presence of your wife—then you have a right to judge me. I did what Dr. Schultz asked. Next morning’s issue of the
Wellington
Courier
carried a fuller story of the political changes in
England
than any other paper abroad, and one which, by special arrangement, was afterwards reproduced pretty extensively in Australia and the United States. It was accurate, if strictly censored, but in the middle of it appeared a curious
paragraph
, sharing with the rest the full authority of “Our Own Correspondent”. It read:

“Among some persons who appeared on political charges before the Emergency Courts was Mr. Jack Dorman, the London Correspondent of the
Brisbane Star
. I myself was invited to give evidence of character on his behalf, upon which the Court made no attempt to examine the case against the accused, which presumably had been brought by some false denouncer. Mr. Dorman was released the same day.”

This was a good stroke of German propaganda. The censor left nothing else in my message on the subject of arrests and imprisonments, so that it gave an impression almost exactly contrary to the truth. Thus a day or two passed before the outside world came to believe the worst. It took the usurpers
about that time to climb firmly enough into the saddle to be able to throw away the mask. But I am not really sorry I did it.

Dr. Schultz winked at me. “Very creditable, Mr. Fenton, very creditable,” he said, when he had seen my paragraph. “You understand us Germans so well. What a shame you cannot put down your services at the dispositions of Reichs-minister Dr. Goebbels.” He was just the same old Schultz, sitting back in his padded chair, even though his genial empire now rested openly on torture and blood. The incongruity was terrifying.

The authentic facts about the Terror are by this time too well known; it is hardly necessary any longer for the Germans to conceal them. I myself added my testimony when I got back to New Zealand, in a series of articles which regard for historical truth compelled me to write, but which, I think, made wearisome as well as sickening reading.

Searches and arrests went on steadily for three days. As civilized life contracted and the streets were emptied of ordinary passers-by it was almost as though one could
constantly
hear, from this quarter and that, the sound of
splintered
wood, the cries of men and the screams of women. Perhaps this was an illusion of the nerves, but the records show that at every hour of the day and night the raids and arrests continued.

The card-indexes snapped in and out at Bush House. No doubt von Holtz’s came in useful, in a negative sense. By about the middle of the week more than 10,000 people had been apprehended.

Lists were published from time to time. One glanced anxiously down the long strings of names, surprised that the Nazis had been waiting to pounce all this time on so many obscure people, in Leicester or Wolverhampton, that one had never heard of before. Then some household name would leap to the eye—a Jewish scientist, a famous headmaster, a liberal-minded dean. Little by little, it was clear, the effective voice of Britain was being silenced.

The fearless opponents of Hitlerism went first—those who had never wavered in their condemnation of the Nazi evil, on higher grounds than those of patriotism. They were followed by others of the brave and the true, who had trod the simple path of duty until it had been lost in the post-Nuremberg morass. But the cowards were taken too, if being at liberty they might be an embarrassment to the conquerors; and not even the most flagrant compromisers escaped. In vain had certain mayors exhausted the borough treasury in
entertaining 
the Nazi commandant, or civil servants thrown open official secrets to their German “advisers”.
Proditores, etiam iis quos anteponunt, invisi sunt
. The Nazis had plenty of fun later with people as contemptible as themselves.

Not all, of course, of the former leaders of the nation, whether admirals or street orators, could be accommodated in the centres of “protective custody”. But all could be threatened with such a fate, and made to dance a tune that would ward it off. The Führer’s Government must be carried on, and it could not be done entirely by foreign policemen. I do not for one moment blame those who now accepted minor office under the Nazis. I do not blame them for saluting the Swastika flag, or even for taking an enforced oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler. A sanitary inspector, after all, has as great a responsibility to a conquered as to a free people. The essential betrayal had happened long before, and a man, it is said, must eat. Nevertheless, there were some who faced privation rather than submit, or preferred even suicide to the life the Nazis offered them.

Most of those destined for concentration camps were
hurried
away on the authority of some minor functionary of the Gestapo; “trials”, such as that undergone by Dorman, were arranged only for special purposes. But the chosen
personifications
of the spirit that had once flouted Hitler’s will—men like Churchill, Duff Cooper and Eden—were seized upon with a special savagery that demanded a certain formal satisfaction. The horror of the proceedings in Westminster Hall, when these men were made to answer charges that suggested they were the enemies of civilization itself, is well enough known through the official descriptions. But those descriptions, shouted into the microphone by excited Nazi announcers, failed to make one point clear—they never admitted how far the Public Prosecutor was from shaking the proud resignation of the victims.

As for the members of the deposed Evans Government, they were under house arrest at Chequers. There they lived in luxury, walking beneath the summer trees and playing billiards. “Tiny pleasures occupied the place of glories and of duties.” It was very cruel, and one was almost sorry for them.

So, in a few short days, the great superstructure of English life was hacked down, but too much else was happening for us to notice how complete the destruction was. For the
Germans
there was manly work to be done—the sort of thing that got one the Iron Cross. It was not only to be a question of torturing people in the new concentration camps; there
was to be a certain amount of standing people against a wall to be shot.

First there were the remnants of the British army, navy, and air force to be disarmed and demobilized. The quickest way to do this, if ever the slightest resistance was shown, was to take the men by surprise and mow them down with machine guns. This resulted in about 3,000 deaths, chiefly at Chatham and Aldershot, and thirteen Iron Crosses.

Another problem was that of giving adequate security to thouse who went about their Führer’s business. A sergeant of the Gestapo, for instance, was actually shot at Chester-
le-Street
by the enraged father of a young girl, and at
Peterborough
a German officer who struck an old man for alleged insolence was thrown by the crowd into the Nene. It was found difficult to bring these crimes home to their real
perpetrator
, so certain quarters of Chester-le-Street and
Peterborough
were decimated, one strong healthy man, preferably a father of a family, being taken from every three or four houses. Throughout the country about 4,500 people perished in this way.

The German refugees (thouse which even the Evans
Government
had avoided sending back to Germany) were dealt with by a simple plan. If there was no information required from them by the Gestapo all that happened was that a party of Brownshirts visited their homes and shot them. There was, however, a slight disadvantage in this procedure, as it led to various people being killed by mistake.

But not all the refugees were treated in quite this way. I well remember how worried we were about Mr. and Mrs. Essener, another German couple in our block of flats, living just above us. They were very attractive and pathetic people, not Jews, but professed enemies of the Nazis, and they used to tell us some horrible stories about their sufferings before they escaped. “They’re for it any time now,” I told Elizabeth. Then one evening she ran in to say that she had caught sight of a man in a Brownshirt’s uniform entering their flat. We waited breathlessly on the landing. Within two minutes the door was reopened, and through the bannisters we could see the Brownshirt’s feet and also those of a woman. So Essener was out, and it was his pretty wife that this swine was taking away. Elizabeth drew me back into the doorway, fearing I might do something foolish, and in a moment the couple, descending the stairs, passed across our field of vision. The Brownshirt turned towards us; a smile of recognition lit up his features; and he shot out his hand with a genial “Heil Hitler!” It was our old friend Herr Essener,
late a “refugee”, taking his wife out for a walk on the Heath.

Then there were our own Jews—not the rich ones, who for the most part had escaped long ago, but the hard-working professional men and the huddled families of Whitechapel, Leeds, and Cheetham Hill, Manchester. The former,
whatever
their calling, faced the progressive disasters of a
numerus clausus
, a general boycott, and then an uncompromising “Aryan clause” which meant penury and sometimes
starvation
. The latter, now at the mercy of all that was meanest and most cowardly in our diseased national life, cowered hopelessly in their slums.

There is no doubt that the Germans had assigned to the Greyshirts the dirtiest work of all in the process of Nazifying Britain. It costs nothing, after supper, to throw a dog a bone, and the Greyshirts, who were to be the only vocal section of the English public, and were expected to absorb a high proportion of it, were to be thrown the bone of violent anti-Semitism. The Nazi conquerors had attained to a certain refinement of sadism, and in Great Britain they had more interesting quarry than the Jews; but for the right kind of native the cutting of the rabbis’ beards and the gutting of synagogues ought to provide an acceptable consolation prize. It was the art of government, as Hitler saw it.

But I must hasten to say that the Greyshirts now were not quite those passionate crusaders that at Leeds had shown there was “blood in Britain” and had gone blindly on to produce that anarchy which had brought the enemy within the gates. Nor were they those smart paraders that had achieved such an inappropriate respectability as soon as the first of the German police arrived. Herr Meyer had got to work, and he chose his men carefully. While Rosse pirouetted in the polite world, or what remained of it, Meyer was quietly making changes in the personnel. The Grey Army that
resulted
had lost its spontaneous flair, but gained in brutal purpose. It was staffed by ex-convicts, not by fanatics, and it was much more efficient.

The day came when Patrick Rosse was invited to take high office in the new slave-State—in fact, to become Chief Slave. On the same day he was presented with his reorganized
Greyshirts
, as a new and more effective instrument of tyranny. It was then, so far as the facts are known, that he came to his senses. Precisely how he reacted I cannot say, though I have often tried to guess. The world he had lived and fought in had always been unreal, but now self-deception was no longer possible, and he was face to face with a very ugly reality.
He was, after all, no conscious Quisling, and he disappeared abruptly from the political scene. The new Leader of the
Greyshirts
was a fat man called Jones, who possessed a criminal record, was a sexual pervert, and had been a Communist before the collapse of the Stalin régime.

I have described, in the articles of which I speak, something of the horrors of the concentration camps, as told me by people who went through them and somehow came out alive. For the great and the good the worst tortures were reserved, but perhaps they had spiritual resources which enabled them best to withstand them. I only know that we who remained outside, whatever our circumstances might be, seemed to live always in the shadow of those cruelties. Sound in wind and limb, digging in our own garden, perhaps, or enjoying a good cigar after dinner, we could never forget that on this same island there were thousands of innocent people—very fine people, some of them—to whom life was all darkness and pain.

Godalming, among the Surrey hills, was the largest camp, and had perhaps the most distinguished register of guests. At one time it held seven judges, two Anglican and four Catholic bishops, and many more than a quorum of the old House of Commons. Himmler used to remark dreamily that it was in very lovely country. Nearly as important was the establishment at Haworth (Hitler, it seems, had once read a translation of
Jane Eyre
), where the landscape was different but the sufferings were the same. There was also a camp at Watersmeet, so that Brendon Water sometimes ran with blood, and there were others among the Scottish heather and the proud valleys of South Wales. But the most dreaded of all was the camp at Stoke Poges, within a stone’s throw of the elegiac churchyard; its commandant was, I think, insane. I shall never forget the frantic plea of a Reader in Classics at London University, on being told that he would be held in “protective custody” there. “Stoke Poges!” he screamed. “No, no, not Stoke Poges! Anywhere but Stoke Poges! Please don’t send me to Stoke Poges!” Was there ever a transfer of associations so cruelly ironic? The sword of Damocles hung over everybody’s head. It hung over mine, but I did not regard the risk as serious.