Churchill's Wizards (25 page)

At the end of April 1931 Sefton Delmer started getting to know leading Nazis personally. A forger introduced him to Major Ernst Röhm, the beefy soldier with the shrapnel-scarred face who was the new chief of staff of the Nazi party's paramilitary wing, the thuggish brown-shirted Storm Division or
Sturmabteilung
. Röhm and Hitler went way back to the earliest days in Munich, when Röhm had helped raised the money for the Nazi paper
Völkischer Beobachter
and filled the first stormtrooper ranks with men from his Bavarian Freikorps. Over a lavish lunch at the
Daily Express
's expense, Röhm explained that he was removing the rowdier elements from the SA and turning them into an orderly citizen force to protect against Bolshevism, but Delmer knew that as a journalist he was the object of a charm offensive designed to reassure both foreign opinion and the German generals who really ran things. When Röhm said he was inspecting a parade of all the Berlin stormtroopers that night, Delmer asked if could come along. ‘Of course you can, my dear fellow,' said Röhm genially, but told Delmer he must attend in the guise of one of his plainclothes ADCs. There were 3,500 stormtroopers in the Sports Palace, most of them in brown shirts and breeches. A low-browed blond sadist with cherry-red lips was barking orders. This was Edmund Heines, a convicted murderer and one of Röhm's favourites. Delmer shook the assassin's hand (‘a reporter will shake hands with the devil himself on a story'). Röhm made a speech telling the stormtroopers their time would come, and invited Delmer to meet Hitler in Munich.

In May 1931, Sefton Delmer was the first Englishman to visit the NSDAP or Nazi HQ in Munich.
Das Braune Haus
was closely guarded by the black-capped
Schutz-Staffeln
or SS, Hitler's Protection Squad, and its decor was like that of a grandiose railway company. Delmer met Röhm again and spotted the bald, dumpy anti-Semite Julius Streicher, editor of the racist newspaper Der Stürmer, wolfing white sausage and sauerkraut in the canteen. In the statistics department, with its rows of files and Hollerith punch-card machines which could tell you instantly how the party was doing anywhere, Delmer was surprised to see Austria and Czech Sudetenland already treated as part of Germany, six years before the
Anschluss
, seven before Munich. His guide showed him a vast map of Germany and Austria studded with pins: ‘Each of these pins represents a unit of 100 stormtroopers.' Even the Catholic or Communist areas had pins in them. In the last month, 38,500 people had joined the Nazi party, and the
Sturmabteilung
was expanding rapidly too.

Röhm showed Delmer into the Führer's large room with tall windows leading on to a balcony overlooking the street. Hitler was in the corner talking to a bushy-browed man with a strangely simian face, Rudolf Hess, but got up and strode forward in his double-breasted blue suit, clicked his patent leather heels and saluted with a half-bent arm. When Röhm made the introductions Hitler shook hands mechanically, without smiling, and said in a guttural voice ‘
Sehr
angenehm
' which Delmer noted as ‘the German equivalent of “Pleased to meet you” … used roughly by the same class of people in Germany who say “Pleased to meet you” in England'. Delmer found Hitler rather ordinary with his little moustache, his unhealthy skin, his too carefully arranged brown hair. ‘He reminded me of the many ex-soldier travelling-salesmen I had met in railway carriages on my journeys across Germany. He talked like one too.' But none of those bagmen talked with quite ‘the passion, the volubility and the concentration' that Delmer saw now in Adolf Hitler.

The Führer was soon shouting, denouncing France for persecuting the Germans. Delmer got him on to England, and he was ‘off like a bomb'. Hitler claimed to want to cooperate with Britain and Italy in a three-way Axis to checkmate the Poles and the French, raving about Nordic blood and a joint mission for the world; he wanted debt reparations cancelled and ‘a free hand in the east'. ‘Our people must
be allowed to exploit the resources now being wasted by Bolshevik mismanagement.' Delmer reckoned that Hitler would have liked Britain to hold the pass in the west while he exterminated Soviet Russia and marched his country with giant strides towards Fascism. Their conversation was interrupted by his Imperial Highness Prince August Wilhelm, the Kaiser's chinless, knock-kneed second son, bursting theatrically into the room carrying a sheet of paper with the casualty figures of stormtroopers fighting the Marxists in the last four months: 2,400 killed and wounded. ‘
Mein Führer
,' he exclaimed, ‘
das
ist Bürgerkrieg!
' (‘This is civil war!'). When Hitler made the introductions, Queen Victoria's Nazi great-grandson lisped in English, ‘I am enchanted to make your acquaintance, Mr Delmer.'

In the spring of 1932, there were presidential elections in Germany. In the first ballot on 13 March, Field Marshal von Hindenburg and the Social Democrats won 49.6 per cent of the vote, Hitler's Nazis won 30 per cent, Thälmann's Communists 13 per cent, and the lack of an absolute majority meant a run-off on 10 April 1932. Sefton Delmer was invited to join Hitler on his campaign tour, flying around Germany.

Adolf Hitler knew how to exploit the mystique of the air. Two years later, the opening sequence of Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi propaganda film
Triumph des Willens
would linger over the godlike approach of Hitler's aeroplane through the clouds towards Nuremberg. Delmer's place on the air tour was part of a media blitz and had been fixed as an exclusive by Hitler's PR man, Ernst ‘Putzi' Hanfstängl. Hitler was prepared to have Delmer on board because he spoke German like a German, with no interpreter needed.

Adolf Hitler's Flying Circus left Tempelhof airfield on the drizzly morning of 5 April. Club-footed, dwarfish Joseph Goebbels turned up in a brown and beige Mercedes convertible, wearing a white trench-coat and a snap-brim hat, seen off by laughing Magda Goebbels in a luxurious black Persian lamb hat and coat that showed off her blonde hair and blue eyes. Hitler arrived with two black Mercedes full of brutal and camp SS bodyguards, led by Sepp Dietrich. The plane smelt of rubber and petrol and as the fawning courtiers finished their ministrations, Delmer watched Hitler slumped in his seat, cotton wool stuffed in his ears against the noise of the three engines, listless and depressed as an unwanted salesman.

When the plane door opened, however, Hitler pumped up and was
transformed: he stepped on stage as
der Führer
, posturing like Ludendorff, erect, squared, haughty. As the roar of welcome rose, he switched into his second mode, the wide-eyed Messiah. Delmer knew the light in his eyes from his school days: it was called the
leutseliges
Leuchten
, the ‘gracious shining' of the Hohenzollern emperors towards their devoted subjects. Now little Adolf Hitler in his belted mac was doing it for the age of the common man. What impressed Delmer was the range of German provincial dignitaries who had come out to greet the candidate: police, military, judicial, administrative, all calling him ‘
Mein Führer
'. Delmer watched Hitler switching his emotional magnetism on and off like an actor. Hitler's charisma did not win that April election; Field Marshal von Hindenburg got 53 per cent, but the Nazi vote went up to 36.8 per cent, and millions were now voting for Hitler. Three months later, in July 1932, the Nazis won 230 seats in the Reichstag to the Social Democrats' 133 and the Communists' 89.

On the first day of the flying tour, Delmer's overnight bag went missing at Königsberg. He was talking to Hitler and Goebbels on the railway platform when the press officer Putzi Hanfstängl drew him aside and indicated a smiling fellow in a pince-nez holding Delmer's bag. Its grateful owner was about to tip the little man from the lost property office a mark when Putzi hurriedly made the introductions. ‘Mr Delmer, this is Herr Heinrich Himmler, the chief of Herr Hitler's security services.' Himmler had been searching the bag for bombs or assassin's kit.

As a journalist and information-monger, Sefton Delmer was drawn into Nazi intrigues and counter-intrigues, bluffs and double-bluffs, as they continued on their road to power. It all made good stories for the
Daily Express
. The Nazis wondered whether Sefton Delmer was a British spy with direct access to the British government; some Britons thought he was a Nazi spy, others later thought he was a Communist agent. Many people did not trust Delmer, but really good reporters are rarely trustworthy when they are on to a great story. Sefton Delmer was never a Nazi, just a 28-year-old newspaperman who had struck lucky.

Throughout 1932, the Nazis piled pressure on the Chancellor, Franz von Papen, who was replaced by Kurt von Schleicher in December. Street fighting between Communists and Nazis and the collapse of parliamentary government led the 85-year-old President von
Hindenburg to solve the problem by appointing Adolf Hitler as Reich Chancellor,
Reichskanzler
, the equivalent of German Prime Minister, on 30 January 1933. The diplomats told Delmer that Hitler was ‘a Chancellor in handcuffs', because his power was balanced by that of von Papen, who was now the dictator of Prussia and enjoyed privileged access to von Hindenburg. But Hitler's henchman since 1922, Hermann Göring, was Prussian Minister of the Interior, and was Nazifying the entire police force. If Hitler was wearing handcuffs, his fat friend Göring held the keys.

On 27 February 1933, Sefton Delmer ran a mile and half from the
Daily Express
office to the parliament building. His tip-off had come from one of his petrol-station men: ‘The Reichstag is on fire!' Delmer reached the Reichstag at 9.45 p.m., forty minutes after the alarm was given. Smoke and flame were funnelling up through the glass dome, and clanging fire engines arriving. An excited policeman told him they had got one of the men who did it, a man with nothing but his trousers on, who seemingly had used his jacket and shirt to start the fire, but they were still looking for any other accomplices. Delmer reached Reichstag entrance Portal Two just as Hitler went up the steps, two at a time, in his trench-coat and black artist's hat, followed by Goebbels and the entourage. ‘Mind if I come along too?' Delmer asked. ‘Try your luck!' Hitler's bodyguard replied, grinning. Hitler just said ‘
Abend, Herr Delmer
', and that was his admission ticket.

Delmer stood listening avidly as Göring said to Hitler, ‘Without doubt this is the work of the Communists,
Herr Reichskanzler
.' He went on to say that a number of Communist deputies had been in the building twenty minutes before the fire started. Hitler asked, ‘Are the other public buildings safe?' Göring said he had mobilised the police to guard key spots. Delmer was sure that this was not just an act; Hitler and Göring really did fear a possible coup by the Communists.

They set off on a tour of the still burning parliament building, through pools of water and charred debris. Göring picked up some burned rag of curtain as evidence that ‘they' had put cloths soaked in petrol over the furniture, but Delmer thought all of it could have been done by one man. They peered into the blazing furnace of the debating chamber, with flames roaring up into the cupola. Despite the firemen's hoses, the heat was like an oven. Hitler fell back to walk with Delmer. ‘God grant that this be the work of the Communists. You are now
witnessing the beginning of a great new epoch in German history, Herr Delmer. This fire is the beginning.' He stumbled over a hosepipe and recovered. ‘If the Communists got hold of Europe and had control of it for but six months – what am I saying? – two months – the whole continent would be aflame like this building!'

On the first floor they met Franz von Papen, fresh from the
Herrenklub
where he had been dining with President Hindenburg. Delmer, thinking like an English public-school man, focused on the class difference between the two: von Papen very much the aristocrat, with a beautifully cut grey tweed overcoat over his dress suit, a black-and-white scarf round his neck and a Homburg hat in his gloved hand, Hitler the parvenu in his trench coat, soft black hat still on his head. Hitler was excitedly talking in his Austrian German about crushing the Communists. Von Papen withdrew his hand, which Hitler had shaken too hard, and said he was glad that at least the Gobelin tapestries and the Reichstag library had been saved. Hitler invited him to an immediate conference with Göring on what police measures to take, but von Papen declined politely, adding, as a final reminder of his higher authority, that he must first report to President Hindenburg.

Delmer expected congratulations from the
Daily Express
for his world scoop, but did not get any when he rang London. ‘Is the story OK?' he asked, fishing for a compliment. ‘OK I suppose,' said the subeditor. ‘But we don't want all this political stuff. We want more about the fire. United Press reports there are now 15 brigades on the spot and the dome has fallen in.'

Delmer did not believe that the Reichstag fire was set by the Communists, as the Nazis said, or by the Nazis themselves, as the Communists said. He thought the lone Dutch eccentric, Marinus van der Lubbe (later executed for the act), was probably responsible. But he was in no doubt that this was exactly the kind of excuse that Hitler needed to strike out against his enemies. Within hours the Communist Party HQ was raided for damning evidence. Communist parliamentarians and trade union leaders were rounded up by the police, along with left-wing doctors, lawyers, writers. On the morning of 28 February 1933, while newspapers blared ‘Communist Plot' headlines, Hindenburg signed the emergency decree ‘for the Defence of the People and the State' that Hitler and von Papen placed before him.

This is when the experiment of the Weimar Republic ends. The
decree's abolition of free speech and the privacy of post and telephone was the death warrant of German democracy and marked the birth of a police state, for the police now had unrestricted right of search, arrest and confiscation. The Nazis had become unstoppable.