If Hitler Comes (13 page)

True, I was out of favour with the authorities, but I was hardly an object of their vengeance, and, apart from Dorman, no representative of the foreign Press had been molested. Still, I tried to persuade Elizabeth to go back to New Zealand, taking Julia with her, but she would not hear of it. I fancy she thought that if she stayed she might restrain me from
running into trouble. But, believe me, no-one could have taken greater care about that than I did.

I have even to confess that in the midst of all these horrors I spent an evening at the Nibelungs Club. I hated the place—more, now, of course, than ever. A sense of mere decency, you may say, should have led me to avoid even passing its doors. But put it this way. I was a journalist, whose duty it was to keep contacts bright with those who mattered. The Nibelungs Club, I imagined, being the really top-drawer expression of Anglo-Germanism, was now a very important centre indeed. Moreover, to be seen there, I thought, would be enough to wipe out any disfavour I had fallen into with the authorities, and so perhaps lead the censors to deal with me more kindly. Therefore, when “Odin”, one of the few surviving gossip-writers in London, invited me to join him there for a brandy after dinner, I was rather pleased to go.

But, as I say, I hated the place. There was something about its atmosphere which suggested a ruddy apple rotten at the core. It made me think of Nietzsche in evening dress, of political religiosity pursued in a boudoir, of the athleticism of Captain Röhm. It had been founded shortly after Nuremberg by a group of cadets of notable English families who had found, in an uncertain world, one very easy way to the illusion of self-respect—the flattering attentions of their kind,
hochgeboren
also, in the Nazi ranks. Young men and women who owed their high privileges to an English past, and yet wished to feel that they were on the crest of the wave that was thundering on towards a German future, there learnt the art of being feudal and Fascist at the same time. They worked hard in the gymnasium, but drank rather too much; they read Spengler and Rosenberg, but produced a pseudo-Byronic literature of their own; they talked much of awaking the British worker to a new sense of his dignity, but they loved it when blood flowed in the East End.

The women were strange. Some were intense and earnest, simply dressed, with a perverse kind of appeal; they were in love with Hitler, or Ribbentrop, or (unconfessedly) with Patrick Rosse. Others did not dispense with the more
customary
feminine charms, which they freely exerted upon the Nazi visitors as they swept through the well-appointed rooms in clothes which, as one might have said in the old days, would have kept a German workman’s family for years.

But the men, I thought, were all contemptible. They were time-servers and petty bullies, without wit, perseverance, or courage, and the lack of moral stamina which brought them to such a place revealed itself in all they said and did. Yet,
as the German influence in England grew, there were plenty who thought that to be on good terms with the Honourable Graham Medlincote, Lord John St. Neots, or Mr. Peter de Courcy was to have a friend at court.

I had expected on this occasion to find the rooms
swarming
with Germans, but there was hardly one to be seen. “Strange,” mused “Odin”, “I hope the counts and barons are not at some function elsewhere that I ought to have known about.”

The company had certainly lost much of their accustomed assurance. As I remembered them, they had been given to much decorous back-slapping, as being all superior Naziphils together. They would stand looking down through the
plate-glass
on the still unregenerate crowds, throw out their pigeon chests, and wink knowingly at some brownshirted princeling, or even at the assiduous von Holtz, as though to say, “We have a great task in front of us.” Now they tended to turn aside from that window when a Black Guard patrol went by, and drifted into the library to read the
Tatler
.

The change was startling. It certainly seemed to worry “Odin”, who began to hint that we might finish the evening elsewhere. But by this time Mr. Medlincote and Lord John had joined us, and were much more their old selves. The cause of their revival was, to be frank, champagne.

As a matter of fact, everyone now seemed to be drinking rather heavily. There was nothing much else to do. After some time a girl with short hair began discussing in a loud voice the merits of three distinct techniques for liquidating non-Aryans, as described to her by Himmler; and a still more odious woman quoted with relish certain private
witticisms
of the Führer made at the expense of British
personalities
now in concentration camps.

Medlincote leant his flushed face towards me. “My dear boy,” he said, “d’you know where we are? Centre-of-
the-world
! Thish club, shtandard bearer Anglo-German culture, what? Great future. Marvellsh!”

He struggled to his feet, and, glass in hand, approached the huge portrait of Hitler that dominated the room.

“Marvellsh man, Hitler,” he said. “Great frien’ of mine. Makesh us all sit up. Conquer the world. Captain New
Zealand
to-morrow. Poor ol’Nzealand.” He hurled his glass at the portrait. “Heil, ol’ boy!” he shouted.

Then the double doors were flung open, to disclose one of the club’s most distinguished honorary members, Karl Adolf, Graf von und zu Kissingen-Schwalbach, now a high officer in the S.S. A moment’s uneasy silence followed, as he stood
in his uniform, motionless, unpleasantly sober. Then
Medlincote
turned round.

“Schwalbach, my dear fellow,” he cried, staggering
towards
him. “Jusht talking about Adolf. Great frien’ of mine. Great fellow. Come in. Tell us more about him. Tell us how he treats the bloody Jews.”

He put his two hands on the Count’s shoulders. But the Count shook him off, and looked round at the odd assembly, which had begun to laugh rather nervously.

“What is the meaning of this?” he thundered.

Lord John came up, tall, wavy-haired, fatuous.

“Celebration,” he said. “Hitler’s birthday, or somethin’.”

Kissingen-Schwalbach turned on his heel. He shouted an order over the balustrade. Up the wide curved staircase marched fifty Black Guards, armed with revolvers, rubber truncheons, and axes.

Some of the women screamed. The men looked about them in blank amazement. But Medlincote, now lolling on a sofa, had a brainwave of interpretation. “Thash ri’, Schwalbach,” he shrieked; “give ush demonstration. Show ush how to treat the bloody Jews.”

He was silenced with a blow from a truncheon. Ten guards had detached themselves from the ranks with the prearranged purpose, apparently, of apprehending Mr. Medlincote, along with Lord John, Mr. de Courcy, and two other prominent members of the club.

Lord John screamed as his arms were pinioned behind him: “You can’t do this to me. You’re mad. I’m Lord John St. Neots, and my father is the Duke of Hereford.” But all the same he was frogmarched down the stairs.

While the rest of us stood trembling round the walls the remaining Black Guards began systematically to smash up the premises of the club. They broke the chairs, ripped open the sofas, shattered the statues, overturned the vases, flung the wireless set out of the window, shivered the glasses into the fireplace, and occasionally aimed a truncheon blow at one of the cowering male members of the club, while
Kissingen-Schwalbach
looked satanically on. At length a word of
command
was given; they re-formed and marched out down the stairs again. Kissingen-Schwalbach remained to give one last contemptuous look at his clubmates, white and staring amid the ruins of their synthetic Valhalla. Then he raised his arm, cried “Heil Hitler!” and left also.

I turned to “Odin”. “Several good paragraphs for you here,” I remarked. But he clutched my arm, and made a request that came strangely from the mouth of a
gossip-writer
.
“Look, Fenton,” he said, “I don’t believe they really noticed who I was. Please, please don’t tell anyone I was here.” Then he rushed out as fast as his legs would carry him.

The wretched mob followed, and some of them were sick on the stairs. I thought I would let them get away first, and lingered for a minute or so in the wrecked lounge. The Germans had done their work thoroughly. Nothing remained unbroken, nothing in place. Only the painting of Adolf Hitler, who gazed steadfastly down upon the broken torso of the Apollo Belvedere.

Now, I reflected, the Terror had reached its consummation. The tide which had risen to engulf all that was worthy in English life was now sucking in the scum. Only Hitler
remained
, and he made no distinctions.

I
N
three weeks it was all over. Not a vestige of liberty
survived
; not a man remained in office, be he university don or inspector of gas meters, who had not manifested complete submission to the conquerors. The whole machinery of
administration
, from top to bottom, was seized and made to serve the ends of tyranny; every free association of Britons collapsed or was dissolved. It was a nation of slaves that ate its
breakfast
in the morning and trudged off to what work there was for it to do.

One fine morning we of the foreign Press (and I was accounted “foreign” now) donned our glossy tall hats and morning coats and went along to what O’Flynn described as the funeral. The Führer, his arm still resting in its sling, had gone back to receive the daemonic acclamations of his own people; but the Reich Commissioner had arrived, in pomp and circumstance, and was about to state his will and pleasure concerning the disposal of the body.

It was the last humiliation to learn that Herr Joachim von Ribbentrop was that Commissioner. One had expected him, that incredibly successful amateur, to remain at his Führer’s side, brilliantly directing the next move in the game of world
conquest. He should have given England one contemptuous glance, and moved on.

But Joachim von Ribbentrop is a single-minded man. He has a strong and narrow will. He knows how to define his ambitions. To be Foreign Minister of so great an empire that there are no foreign countries left to send ambassadors to would be a huge but Alexandrine triumph; frustration would come with the very completeness of it. There are more solid satisfactions to those wise enough to limit and
intensify
their desires. And to Joachim von Ribbentrop there could be no sweeter reward than to sit and gloat over the sufferings of the great country that had once stood for everything that he could never understand.

Ribbentrop made a formal entry into London by driving in state, in a carriage with outriders, from Victoria Station, and his vulgar preference for the obvious caused him to choose Buckingham Palace as his official residence. He meant to be a very active Commissioner, and for this purpose must be in the heart of the capital, where all could see and fear him. Pompously he took his seat on the throne before which, not many years ago, he had presented his letters of credence, a
parvenu
among ambassadors.

We attended, then, in morning dress, in a room into which white débutantes had once swept, in another world than this. We sat on rococo chairs, uncomfortably. He kept us waiting, but Dr. Schultz was there, smiling, and obviously trying to make us feel at home. “His Excellency is very busy, but that is understood, yes? Please not to accept discourtesy.”

At last there was a stir, and the guards stiffened. “His Excellency the Reich Commissioner!” We struggled to our feet—and the usurper entered, in black uniform, the centre of a group of about half a dozen. He glanced at us, under
drooping
eyelids, but not as a man to his fellows. He might have been judging cattle.

There was nothing ingratiating in his manner. Schultz and his kind might still be using the old blandishments in their dealings with the foreign Press; it was the tradition of their trade. But Ribbentrop had arrived. He was no longer
interested
in ladders.

With him were some uniformed German secretaries, alert and cheerful, and three rather strange-looking men in mufti, with walrus moustaches, who did not look German and who hung awkwardly in the background. I had never seen them before.

Schultz presented us individually to the new Lord Protector. He greeted us like a king of the days before kings were
expected to smile. He was the same to all of us, even to those whom, when he was Hitler’s unofficial agent and still half a champagne peddler, he was pleased enough to meet in London clubs.

Then, when we had all sat down again, he started to explain, in a businesslike way, what he wanted us to know about his régime, and how he expected us to accommodate ourselves to it.

“Under German protection,” he said, “Great Britain
becomes
a totalitarian State, governed by decrees issued in the name of the Reich Commissioner. It is necessary that the foreign Press should appreciate this. The future development of this country will not depend upon political discussions; it will be an expression of the will of the Führer. Consequently, speculation of any kind will no longer form part of visiting Press correspondents’ duties. They will learn to beware of any but authorized sources of information.

“As from July the nineteenth, the day on which a vile attempt was made on the life of the Führer, the authority of all magistrates and official bodies in this country and its possessions overseas has been automatically abrogated. It is henceforth an act of subversion, attended by heavy penalties, to communicate with any persons who were members of these bodies for any purpose not strictly personal and private.
Certain
magistrates and official bodies have, however, by special decree, been restored to their functions during the Führer’s pleasure, on taking the oath of loyalty to the Führer. Details of these acts of grace are to be published from time to time in the
London Gazette
.”

Some flunkeys rushed in with a map of Great Britain, such as in other circumstances might have inspired youthful
patriotism
on a schoolroom wall. With relentless pointer the
Commissioner
divided the proud island into six
Gaue
—North, Midlands, South, London, Scotland, Wales—in each of which, he said, a
Gauleiter
, responsible to him alone, would exercise all administrative authority. Representatives of the
Gauleiter
would be installed in every town and village, where they might be assisted by advisory committees of the local
inhabitants
. Ireland was to be governed separately by a German “Protector.”

The British armed forces had been disarmed and
demobilized
, but the personnel were “rapidly being recruited into the armed forces of the Reich”. All schools, railways, public utility undertakings and banks had become State property, even if privately or municipally owned before; but those persons who had directed them might in some cases be
required to continue to do so, subject to control. The old currency would for the time being remain legal tender.

Civil disputes between natives remained subject to the old courts, in so far as these had been confirmed in their
functions
. All criminal jurisdiction, however, and the settlement of disputes between Reich Germans and natives, had been
transferred
to the Special Courts set up under the military law. The Special Police had powers to search domiciles, at any hour of day or night, and to take individuals under protective custody. The former Metropolitan police, borough police, and constabulary were at the service of the
Gauleiter
for ordinary police duties.

The State had full powers of expropriation for the common good. An announcement would be made later about the extent to which these powers would be used. It had, however, already been established that the property of all members of the late Warmonger Government was to be confiscated.…

The Commissioner had been reading all this from a paper in level, yet monitory, tones. He had said no single word of hope or promise for the future. He had offered nothing, demanded all. His hearers visibly shuddered as he put the paper away.

The Commissioner moved to go. Then his eye fell upon the three queer fellows who had entered so humbly behind him. He turned back and said: “I should have announced that, in accordance with the Führer’s express wish, my Advisory Council will be composed entirely of representatives of the British people themselves. Its members are Mr. Smith,
representing
the employers, Mr. Turner, representing the workers, and Mr. Newton, representing the professions.”

He strode out, followed by his suite, leaving the dazed and hangdog Mr. Smith, Mr. Turner, and Mr. Newton at a loss to know whether to go after him. Who were those poor devils? Surely they were our ultimate Quislings, the last feeble representatives of that doomed race of compounders and compromisers who had been our downfall. It was strange to trace them back. There had been Sir John Naker and
Professor
Evans, so comfortably off, the one in a worldly, the other in an unworldly sense. With them were all Dorman’s Unholy Optimists, a varied but such a reassuring tribe. Then, for a brief period, there had been Patrick Rosse, a not ignoble genius, whose appearance and disappearance were equally abrupt. And now there were just Mr. Smith, Mr. Turner, and Mr. Newton, hoping that they could get out of the room before anyone asked them any questions.

Dr. Schultz came into his own again. He tried to reflect
some of the sternness of the Commissioner, but he could not bring himself to abandon altogether his professional geniality. “Well, gentlemen, thank you for your arrival. We understand the other much better now, I suppose?” He bowed us out.

We had come in taxis, which in our station of life is a ceremonial mode of conveyance, but most of us walked back. Imagine our little heterogeneous group, top-hatted, walking along the Mall, attracting mild remark among the listless passers-by, and feeling like tourists in some great dead city. Behind us the white palace, with the Commissioner’s Swastika flag flying where the Royal Standard ought to be; on the left, St. James’s, where (a long time ago, it seemed now) the pit had suddenly opened before the craven rulers of the nation; and, all among the trees, those imperial towers which still stood up so boldly and yet now were a hollow shell.

We discussed the prospects of our work in London under the new régime. Was it worth while to stay? Did Ribbentrop mean that we were expected to become mere agents for transmitting German communiqués?

It was a Brazilian journalist who persuaded most of us to hang on while we could. We had crowded, almost without knowing it, into a little public house in the Strand, where the astonished landlord, noticing our unaccustomed appearance, feared that we were some new infliction from Germany, and was pathetically anxious to please. All the other customers drank up and respectfully left.

“After all,” said Senhor Diaz, “we may possibly be allowed to describe, if not to interpret. In our descriptions we can be a little—subtle. If Ribbentrop is going to incorporate the British economic system into that of the Reich it will be a great newspaper story. And if we can’t send it, we can save it up and write it when we get home.”

There was sense in this, and then someone remarked quietly that while we remained the Germans might make some show of moderating the cruelties of the régime. That alone made it our duty to stay.

So, as the landlord rushed up anxiously with another round of drinks, we made a kind of pact—to stay as long as it was reasonably safe to stay, to get all the truth we could past the censorship, and, if we reached home, to set down on paper everything we had been able to observe. I have not yet kept the last part of the bargain, and this book is no serious attempt to do so; but one day I hope to be able to place at the disposal of historians and economists a mass of strange facts, which, bewildering as they are to me, may be justly interpreted by them.

It is, however, easy to distinguish two aspects of Herr von Ribbentrop’s régime. It ministers to a sadistic desire for
revenge
and moral vandalism, a brutish urge to destroy what is not understood; but at the same time it has achieved a miracle of political organization—the merging of the whole mercantile economy of Britain into the self-sufficient economy of the Reich.

The first aspect is not one to dwell upon, unless by pathologists. To the ordinary mind it would not be
instructive
, and it would be exceedingly unpleasant, to follow
Ribbentrop
on those morbid excursions on which he tried to pull to pieces, with his own fingers, the inmost souls of the men he hated. His notorious visits to Mr. Churchill and Mr. Eden at Godalming concentration camp; his attendance
incognito
at East End pogroms; his cat and mouse game with the panting, perspiring Sir John Naker—these are best
forgotten
, if they can be. So, too, are his deliberate affronts to the feelings of the vanquished, as when Hitler superseded Nelson in Trafalgar Square and the German Eagle swung like a blasphemous rood beneath the dome of St. Paul’s. But there is just this to be said. Ribbentrop’s evil propensities never achieved complete satisfaction. He might rant and bully and mock, but still in the sorrowful glances that were raised to him, by the once great as well as by the obscure, there was always the sign of that inmost citadel of the spirit that no human savagery can destroy. The consciousness of this must have followed Ribbentrop down his dark career, and driven him to even worse, but ever vain, excesses.

But there remains the other aspect of his régime, the
exploitation
of all the resources of Britain—a policy brilliantly, almost incredibly, successful. In the slough of his moral
degradation
the Reich Commissioner never lost the mastery of those ruthlessly efficient methods by which the Nazis, from being a little conspiratorial group in Munich, have by
relentless
stages come to dominate the world. He had clever lieutenants, no doubt, men like Himmler (for a time), Schacht, the inevitable Seyss-Inquart, and a new star, Fritz
Ostenhammer
, the Commissioner for Industry. But the Reich
Commissioner
himself can fairly claim the major share of the credit for a very remarkable achievement.

The devilishly complete subjugation of the whole machine of national life—the preliminary programme so frigidly
announced
to us in Buckingham Palace—happened exactly as planned. One must imagine that, months before, a minor but fanatical Nazi in Darmstadt was told to brush up his English and his knowledge of Fen drainage because he would
one day be entrusted with the administrative oversight of the Isle of Ely; well, sure enough, the day arrived when this gentleman, properly escorted, presented himself at Wisbech, showed his authority to the clerk to the county council and the mayor, and got to work simultaneously on the necessary purges and on a pet plan for deepening the outfall of the Nene. It happened just like that. One day you might be in exasperating correspondence with Mr. Jones, of the local
electrical
undertaking, about additional power for your factory; by the next, you had received a businesslike letter stating that an engineer would be calling on you on Wednesday, and signed by the Herr Oberelektrizitätstundige Schmidt.