I have decided under these circumstances as I already mentioned, to put an end to the hypocritical performance in the Kremlin. I assume, that is to say, I am convinced, that Finland, and likewise Romania, will forthwith take part in this conflict, which will ultimately free Europe, for the future also, of a great danger. General Maras informed us that you, Duce, wish also to make available at least one corps. If you have that intention, Duce—which I naturally accept with a heart filled with gratitude—the time for carrying it out will still be sufficiently long, for in this immense theatre of war the troops cannot be assembled at all points at the same time anyway. You, Duce, can give the decisive aid, however, by strengthening your forces in North Africa, also, if possible, looking from Tripoli toward the West, by proceeding further to build up a group which, though it be small at first, can march into France in case of a French violation of the treaty; and finally, by carrying the air war and, so far as it is possible, the submarine war, in intensified degree, into the Mediterranean.
So far as the security of the territories in the West is concerned, from Norway to and including France, we are strong enough there—so far as army troops are concerned—to meet any eventuality with lightning speed. So far as air war on England is concerned, we shall, for a time remain on the defensive,—but this does not mean that we might be incapable of countering British attacks on Germany; on the contrary, we shall, if necessary, be in a position to start ruthless bombing attacks on British home territory. Our fighter defense, too, will be adequate. It consists of the best squadrons that we have.
As far as the war in the East is concerned, Duce, it will surely be difficult, but I do not entertain a second’s doubt as to its great success. I hope, above all, that it will then be possible for us to secure a common food-supply base in the Ukraine for some time to come, which will furnish us such additional supplies as we may need in the future. I may state at this point, however, that, as far as we can tell now, this year’s German harvest promises to be a very good one. It is conceivable that Russia will try to destroy the Romanian oil region. We have built up a defense that will—or so I think—prevent the worst. Moreover, it is the duty of our armies to eliminate this threat as rapidly as possible.
I waited until this moment, Duce, to send you this information, it is because the final decision itself will not be made until 7 o’clock tonight. I earnestly beg you, therefore, to refrain, above all, from making any explanation to your Ambassador at Moscow, for there is no absolute guarantee that our coded reports cannot be decoded. I, too, shall wait until the last moment to have my own Ambassador informed of the decisions reached.
The material that I now contemplate publishing gradually, is so exhaustive that the world will have more occasion to wonder at our forbearance than at our decision, except for that part of the world which opposes us on principle and for which, therefore, arguments are of use.
Whatever may now come, Duce, our situation cannot become worse as a result of this step; it can only improve. Even if I should be obliged at the end of this year to leave 60 or 70 divisions in Russia, that is only a fraction of the forces that I am now continually using on the eastern front. Should England nevertheless not draw any conclusions from the hard facts that present themselves, then we can, with our rear secured, apply ourselves with increased strength to the dispatching of our opponent. I can promise you, Duce, that what lies in our German power, will be done.
Any desires, suggestions, and assistance of which you, Duce, wish to inform me in the contingency before us, I would request that you either communicate to me personally or have them agreed upon directly by our military authorities.
In conclusion, let me say one more thing, Duce. Since I struggled through to this decision, I again feel spiritually free. The partnership with the Soviet Union, in spite of the complete sincerity of the efforts to bring about a final conciliation, was nevertheless often very irksome to me, for in some way or other it seemed to me to be a break with my whole origin, my concepts, and my former obligations. I am happy now to be relieved of these mental agonies.
With hearty and comradely greetings,
Your ADOLF HITLER
Between Prince Potemkin and Catherine the Great, c.1774
How to settle a row—by letter (or email). Catherine the Great and Prince Potemkin, her brilliant lover and minister, were wildly in love with each other, but he was restless at being at her beck and call: he wanted to be a chief minister, a commander, an empire builder.
After an argument, he calmly apologizes for his tempestuous nature and then on the same piece of paper she answers his complaints in this double letter, concluding “End of quarrel.” It is not unlike an email thread. But even this civilized negotiation did not solve the problem, until she secretly married him and agreed that they would continue ruling like husband and wife—except both would be allowed their own, younger, lovers. The strange arrangement worked, and they ruled Russia together with great success for almost twenty years, ending only with Potemkin’s death in 1791. She survived another five years but she never got over the prince: “There’ll never be another Potemkin,” she often said.
Potemkin
Catherine
Let me my love say this
I allow it.
Which will, I hope, end our argument.
The sooner the better.
Don’t be surprised I am Disturbed by our love.
Don’t be disturbed.
Not only have you showered me With good deeds, You have placed me in your Heart. I want to be There alone, and above everyone else
You are there firmly & strongly & will remain there.
Because no one has ever loved you so much
I see it and believe it.
And I have been made by your hands
Happy to do so.
That you should be happy in being good To me;
It will be my greatest pleasure.
That you should find rest from the Great labors arising from your high Station in thinking of my comfort.
Of course.
Amen.
Give rest to our thoughts and let our feelings act freely. They are most tender and will find the best way. End of quarrel.
Amen.
Folly
Georg von Hülsen to Emil von Görtz, 1892
The courtiers of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the leader of the German empire, tried hard, year after year, to provide the sort of crass entertainment their monarch craved. During his long reign—1888 to 1918—his political and diplomatic antics not only appalled his own officials and ministers, but also alarmed the chancelleries of Europe, thereby raising the tensions that led to the First World War.
Bombastic, brutish, and boastful; narcissistic and vain; nationalistic, inconsistent, and impulsive; obsessed with power and claiming credit for everything while operating under the burdens of a mountainous ego and matching inferiority complex, Wilhelm is in some ways a familiar modern character. He also possessed an extremely childish sense of humor. He delighted in cutting his generals’ braces off with his penknife, or chasing old colonels to bed, or rolling them downhill. Cross-dressing, sausages, and bare bottoms were also royal favorites. As we see in this extract from a letter sent before a hunt in 1892, close friend Count “Em” von Görtz knows exactly what pranks will please the kaiser, planning it with courtier Georg von Hülsen. Their games could go wrong. In 1908, Dietrich von Hülsen, Georg’s brother, danced for the kaiser in full ballerina costume, complete with tutu, feather boa, and satin pumps—until he fell down dead of a heart attack. Such were the entertainmen
ts of the most powerful man in the world: “I can already see H.M. [His Majesty] laughing…”
You must be paraded by me as a circus poodle!—That will “hit” like nothing else. Just think: behind shaved [tights], in front long bangs out of black or white wool, at the back under a genuine poodle tail a marked rectal opening and, when you beg, in front a fig-leaf. Just think how wonderful when you bark, howl to music, shoot off a pistol or do other tricks. It is simply splendid!!…In my mind’s eye I can already see H.M. [His Majesty] laughing with us….I am applying myself with real relish to this “work” in order to forget that my beloved sister—the dearest thing I have on earth—is at this moment dying in Breslau….I feel like the clown in [Ludwig] Knaus’s picture “Behind the Scenes.” No matter!—H.M. shall be satisfied!
The Marquis de Sade “to the stupid villains who torment me,” 1783
A letter of sadism. The philosopher, libertine, and sexual deviant, Donatien, Marquis de Sade spent nearly half of his life in prisons or mental asylums, accused of sodomy and perversion. As a boy, it was a schoolmaster’s thrashing that ignited a fascination with pain and pleasure—and the connection between the two. Abandoned by his aristocratic family, his playful and cruel whims were indulged by servants. He served in the army while he embarked on a spree of seductions, beatings, torments, and sodomy with women and men of all ages, some of them distastefully young. Promoted to colonel during the Seven Years’ War, he married a magistrate’s daughter Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil, with whom he had three children. Their marriage soon failed, and when he was faced with a blizzard of denunciations for perversion that almost led to his execution, his mother-in-law, Mme. de Montreuil, won him some protection from the law by procuring a lettre de cachet, a royal letter that allowed de Sade to be confined indefinitely without trial.
In prison de Sade wrote his brilliant but demented and obscene novels, such as Justine, which were as maniacally brazen and violently ingenuous as his orgies. Confined to the Château de Vincennes between 1777 and 1784, de Sade amuses himself by writing this vicious letter to his tormentors, especially “the strumpet,” his mother-in-law, for whom he devises sadistic punishments. When the Revolution came, de Sade was in the Bastille writing 120 Days of Sodom and encouraged the crowd to attack the fortress, but he was removed to a lunatic asylum before it fell to the revolutionaries. Nonetheless he was liberated and joined the Revolution, serving as a high official while enjoying his freedoms until he opposed Robespierre’s Terror, which led to his arrest. He was lucky not to be guillotined. Napoleon Bonaparte returned him to the asylum, and while there he seduced the fourteen-year-old daughter of an employee. He died in 1814.
Vincennes,
Vile minions of the tunny-fish vendors of Aix, low and infamous servants of torturers, invent then for my torment tortures from which at least some good may result. What is the effect of the inaction in which your spiritual purblindness keeps me except to curse and lacerate the unworthy procuress who so meanly contrived to sell me to you? Since I can neither read nor write any longer, this is the hundred and eleventh torture which I am inventing for her. This morning as I suffered I saw her, the strumpet, I saw her flayed alive, dragged over thistles and then thrown into a barrel of vinegar. And I said to her:
* * *
Execrable creature that is for selling your son-in-law to the torturers!
Take that, you procuress, for hiring out your two daughters!
Take that for having ruined and dishonored your son-in-law!
Take that for making him hate the children for whose sake supposedly you sacrifice him!
Take that for having wrecked the best years of his life when it rested with you alone to help him after his sentence!
Take that for having preferred the vile and detestable offspring of your daughter to him!
Take that for all the wickedness with which you overwhelmed him for thirteen years, to make him pay for your stupidities!
And I increased her tortures, and insulted her in her pain and forgot mine.
My pen falls from my hand. I must suffer.
Adieu, torturers, I must curse you.
Between Empress Alexandra and Nicholas II, 1916
A wife writes to her beloved husband at the front during the First World War, in quaint upper-class English full of nicknames like Agooweeone (him) and Wify and Sunny (her). But this is no ordinary couple, and it is a letter that shows why Russia is just weeks from the revolution. This is Tsarina Alexandra in the country’s capital, Petrograd, writing to her husband, Nicholas II, who is at military headquarters. She urges Nicholas to be “the master,” like Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible before him. Her advice is backed by the divine authority of “our Friend” Rasputin, whom she sees as the successor of the couple’s earlier healer, a charlatan “doctor” named Monsieur Philippe. Obsessed with autocracy, halting democracy, and judging every political or military decision by whether it was good or bad for Rasputin, she is a catastrophic influence, aggressively proposing political appointments like her candidate for interior minister, Alexander Protopopov, a half-mad, cocaine-addicted syphilitic. She boasts that she is the most powerful woman in Russia since Catherine the Great. Her only redeeming feature is her devotion to her family and “Nicky” himself, whose caresses she longs for—as he does hers.
Alexandra to Nicholas, 14 December 1916
7 of frost and thick snow. Scarcely slept this night again, remaining till luncheon in bed as all aches still and have a slight chill. Such loving thanks for your dear letter.
Be Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Emperor Paul—crush them all under you—now don’t you laugh, naughty one.
I really cannot understand. I am but a woman, but my soul and brain tell me it would be the saving of Russia—they sin far worse than anything the Sukhomlinovs ever did. Forbid Brusilov etc. when they come to touch any political subjects, fool, who wants responsible cabinet.
Remember even M. Philippe said one dare not give constitution, as it would be your and Russia’s ruin, and all true Russians say the same.
Months ago I told [Premier] Sturmer about Shvedov to be a member of Council of the Empire to have them and good Maklokov in they will stand bravely for us. I know I worry you—ah, would I not far, far rather only write letters of love, tenderness and caresses of which my heart is so full—but my duty as wife and mother and Russia’s mother obliges me to say all to you—blessed by our Friend.
Sweetheart, sunshine of my life, if in battle you had to meet the enemy, you would never waver and go forth like a lion—be it now in the battle against the small handful of brutes and republicans.
Be the Master, and all will bow down to you. Do you think I should fear, ah no—today I have had an officer cleared out from [their daughters] Maria’s and Anastasia’s hospital, because he allowed himself to mock at our journey, pretending Protopopov brought the people to receive us so well; the Doctors who heard it raged—you see Sunny in her small things is energetic and in big ones as much as you wish—we have been placed by God on a throne and we must keep it firm and give it over to our son untouched—if you keep that in mind you will remember to be the Sovereign—and how much easier for an autocratic sovereign than one who has sworn the Constitution.
Beloved One, listen to me, yes, you know your old true girly. “Do not fear,” the old woman said and therefore I write without fear to me agooweeone. Now the girlies want their tea, they came frozen back from their drive—I kiss you and hold you tightly clasped to my breast, caress you, love you, long for you, can’t sleep without you—bless you.
Ever your very Own
Wify
Nicholas’s replies to Alexandra are equally a mix of misguided arrogance and intimate sentimentality. In this earlier letter he dreams of making love to her again—using the nickname “Boysy” for his sex: in her letters she calls hers “Lady.” His lo
athing of Miechen, wife of his cousin Vladimir, reveals the growing feud with the rest of the Romanov family.
Nicholas to Alexandra, 16 June 1916
My own darling Wify,
Today the messenger is a little late, probably on account of new movements of troops fr north to south. I send you a telegram which [their son, Tsarevich] Aleksei got fr his regiment. Again good news thank God fr Lechitsky! Yesterday his army made 221 officers & 10,200 men prisoners! So many new hands working in our fields & manufact[ories]. Miechen [Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna] wrote me a cold letter asking me why I have not approved the polozhenie [Regulation]? I sent it through Alekseev to the Verkh. Soviet. Perhaps you will let Ilin [president of the Russian Red Cross] know that they are to look at it though [sic] & send me their opinion. She is really insufferable—if I have time, I shall answer her sharply.—We have finished lunch & on coming up to my room I found your dear letter No. 520….How I miss your sweet kisses! Yes, beloved One, you know how to give them! Oh, how naughtily! Boysy hops from remembrances. It is very hot & now a few drops of rain fell out of an isolated cloud. I hope to bathe in the river higher up while Aleksei runs about with naked legs. Did he describe to you how the small peasant boys play all sorts of games before us? Now, my precious Darling, I must end. God bless you & the girlies.
With many fond kisses ever your own Nicky.
Decency
Maria Theresa to Marie Antoinette, 30 July 1775
No child enjoys a strict telling-off from their mother, especially on the subjects of manners and morality. Here Empress Maria Theresa scolds her daughter Marie Antoinette, queen of France, for her high-handed rudeness to diplomats and ministers and for running around with flirtatious flatterers while ignoring her dull, weak husband, King Louis XVI. The mother is fifty-eight, the daughter nineteen. Maria Theresa has struggled through incessant wars to keep her vast empire together since she inherited it at the age of twenty-three. Then, thirty years later, in 1756, she has pulled a diplomatic coup by marrying her pretty daughter to the king of France. It is clear that the mother glimpses something so dangerous in her daughter that she foresees catastrophe. Maria Theresa would die in 1780; she never saw the “misfortune” she had feared—the French Revolution and the execution of her daughter.
Written in History Page 14
