Presidential Mission

by Upton Sinclair

  When the visitor had finished such death notices, he turned to the column in which the maidens of Germany competed for the attentions of the Fatherland’s heroes. These latter were growing more scarce, and the bidders were hard pressed. All were racially patriotic, sober, and submissive, but now and then one attempted a note of originality:

  BLOND BDM-GIRL, believing in God, of peasant kin, conscious of race, likes children; with big hips, 1.68 meters tall, would like to be gleeful manageress of the progeny of a real German young man. (Low heels, no lipstick!) Only marriage because of affection is in question with smart wearer of uniform! Offers to “Wigalaweia,” 3807 B, will be forwarded by this newspaper.

  And then another column, full of miscellaneous offers and cries for help, such as this:

  WHO WILL take a woman, who has suffered heavy damage by bombs, with three small children into their house? Empty room would suffice, since some furniture salvaged. Return service: housework, can wash, iron, sew, etc. Schindler, air-raid bunker, Müllerstr by gas works.

  XII

  The Führer’s secretary at the military headquarters had thoughtfully notified Berlin that this mysterious Herr Budd was on his way, and so Lanny didn’t have to wait too long. The police officials apologized and assured him that the Hauptstadt was his. They gave him a proper identification card and a food card, without which he could not have eaten in any restaurant. They offered to drive him back to the Fürstin Donnerstein’s palace, or anywhere else that he pleased; but he assured them that it gave him pleasure to walk in falling Berlin snow—not too deep as yet.

  His way led through the Siegesallee, with its familiar double row of marble statues of old-time German rulers and heroes, each now with a snowcap on his head and a snowcape on his shoulders; Lanny hoped that before this war ended the Allies might have a separate bomb for each of these Prussian grotesques. He came to the fire-gutted Reichstag building, now hit also by bombs. Across the street was the official Residenz of the Reichsluftmarschall, Der Dicke.

  Lanny ascended the steps and informed the SS men on guard that he desired to call upon General-Major Furtwaengler. Informed that this officer was not in Berlin, he said he would see the Reichsmarschall’s secretary, and one of the men took him inside to make sure he was all right. Göring’s secretary knew him well, for Lanny had been coming here off and on for ten years and was the Reichsmarschall’s art expert as well as friend. The secretary was not permitted to say where the great man was, but would try to get him on the telephone; so presently Lanny heard that bellowing voice which made the receiver jangle: “Lanny Budd! Was zum Teufel!” And then: “Woher kommen Sie?” and “Was treiben Sic?” and “Wie lang bleiben Sie?”

  “I’ll tell you all that when I see you,” replied the visitor. “I have just come from the Führer and he told me to talk with you. Do you expect to be in town?”

  “I’ll be there in a couple of days. I am going to Karinhall over the week end with friends. Will you come?”

  “Herrlich! I’ll leave my address with your secretary and he can call me. I have a lot of news for you.”

  “And I have ten thousand four hundred and seventy-one masterpieces of painting. I have just been looking over a list of them.”

  “Wundervoll!” exclaimed Lanny; and the pleased fat man replied: “Auf Wiedersehen!”

  The American strolled, found an inconspicuous restaurant, and bought himself the first meal on his new food card. If you had the price you could get a perfectly good meal, a soup, an entree, two vegetables, a dessert, and ersatz coffee. There was white bread and butter, and, if you cared for it, a foaming stein of beer. Eggs and citrus fruit alone were scarce. The restaurant patrons appeared in all ways like the prewar Berliners; if they had lost weight it did not show, and the women had presumably taken good care of the French silk stockings they had purchased two and a half years ago. Hitler had promised that all the other peoples of Europe would starve before they did, and this was one promise he was making good. Lanny did not enter into any conversation, for he knew that by now Americans were the most hated of all peoples in Germany; the Germans attributed the defeats in Russia solely to American aid.

  The Ausländer strolled again, up the familiar Wilhelmstrasse, to that immense and ugly building that Adi had donated to himself at the expense of the German Volk. The New Chancellery, made of granite, resembled a huge barracks, and in its top story the Führer had shown his friend an elaborate set of miniatures of other magnificent structures which he had dreamed up. Adi’s sycophants called him the greatest architect in Germany, and to him that meant the greatest in the world. He was building for a thousand years, not merely architecturally, but constitutionally, educationally, morally—in all ways known to men.

  Again Lanny parleyed with SS guards, and one of them accompanied him into the building and down the long red marble corridor to the bronze doors with the Führer’s monogram, “AH.” The Führer’s secretary had been told to make arrangements for him to meet Professor Salzmann, a name that Lanny had never heard until the Führer had spoken it. Asked when it would be convenient for him, he said the sooner the better, and then sat and read more Völkischer while the secretary telephoned. He was informed that the professor would receive him at the Institute on the following afternoon; he made note of the address and promised to be there.

  XIII

  Lanny’s experience in the Sahara had not caused him to lose interest in walking, and two long plane rides and two train trips had rested him fully. His next destination was the great Staatsbibliothek. This elaborate rococo structure, often compared to a chest of drawers, had its windows boarded up and its base protected by sandbags. No doubt its rare volumes had been carried away and hidden, but its reading-room was still open to the public for limited hours. Lanny consulted the reference work called Minerva, Jahrbuch der Gelehrten Welt, to find out what he could about the important person whom he was to meet next day: a leading physicist, a professor at the University of Berlin, and a research authority at the great Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.

  Seeking to learn more about the learned gentleman, Lanny was informed that his technical publications were on a severely restricted list. The visitor drew out the magic letter which he carried, and was amused to see the excitement it produced. To the head of the library staff he explained that at the Führer’s request he was to interview Professor Salzmann, and thought it a matter of courtesy to know something about his work. The librarian explained that the results of recent research in jet propulsion were never supplied to libraries, they were circulated only among the top persons in that Fach; but such material as was in periodicals prior to the war would be placed at Herr Budd’s disposal.

  Lanny had become expert at learning scientific formulas and principles by heart without understanding the half of them; he could still recite enough about nuclear physics to have filled a small textbook. The “recoil principle,” upon which rockets are based, is easier to understand, and he spent the rest of that afternoon and evening learning about compressors, combustion chambers, fuels, turbines, and the cone-shaped jets of which rockets and rocket motors were, or might be, composed. Most of the professor’s learned articles were of a speculative nature, setting forth what, in 1939 and earlier, he believed to be possible. Lanny could guess that this material would be in American laboratories, and he wasn’t learning it with the idea of carrying it home; he thought that by telling it back to the professor he might impress that gentleman with American backwardness and tempt him to let slip some details about German progress.

  When the library closed, the visitor walked back through the Berlin blackout to the Donnerstein “tenement.” He might have taken a hack, but walking was warmer, and on the way he could recite his lessons. In a freezing cold chamber inside marble walls he spread his coat, trousers, and overcoat on top of the bedcovers, put his shoes where he could reach them in the dark, and then crawled into bed in his underwear and lay shivering until the heat of his body warmed the bed and bedding.

  He
had barely fallen asleep, or so it seemed, before he heard the air-raid sirens. He had been told to hurry down to the second basement of this building, on the theory that it was better to be buried alive down there than to be crushed at once by a falling roof; but he was so sleepy and so warm that he decided to take a chance this once. He lay and listened to the almost incessant banging of the ack-ack, and then the dull “crumping” of the bombs. He could imagine the sky full of searchlights, a very picturesque sight, but he had seen enough of it in London. Presently a blessed silence fell, and tormented Berlin slept again—all save those who had been buried under debris and those who were trying to dig them out.

  XIV

  Next morning Lanny breakfasted with his hostess by special invitation, of course giving up food tickets to cover what he would consume. Present also was the older sister, the Frau von Ehrenberg, a faded blond lady who looked much older than she was. She had lived in Dresden and Lanny had never met her. She also was in mourning, and listened in silence while her sister asked questions. Lanny could guess that she had her doubts concerning an alien enemy myteriously appearing in the Fatherland. Lanny chatted about the Countess of Wickthorpe and her friends, about Beauty Budd in Marrakech, about Mr. Ford and his wife in Detroit, and Mr. Hearst and his movie lady in California. It was indisputably chic conversation, and you might have heard it without ever suspecting that this world of elegance and fashion was now engaged in tearing itself to pieces.

  The researcher returned to the library and spent the morning at work, stopping only to telephone Heinrich Jung and invite him to lunch. Heinrich was Lanny’s second oldest friend in Germany. Son of the Oberförster of Stubendorf, Heinrich had climbed step by step up the Nazi ladder, until now, in his early forties, he was halfway to the top. In the N.S.D.A.P. he had been a Gruppenführer, a Staffelfübrer, a Scharführer, a Standartenführer, a Rottenführer, a Sturmbannführer, an Oberführer; in the Reichsjugendführung he had commanded first a Kameradschaft, then a Schar, then a Gefolgschaft, then an Unterbann, then a Bann, then an Oberbann, then a Gebiet, and now an Obergebiet, this last composed of 375,000 youths. He sat in an office full of pushbuttons and gadgets, and read reports and dictated instructions to all the lesser Führers of the vast organization which was preparing the young people of Germany to march cheerfully into the slaughterpit. Heinrich saw that they received the proper quotas of inspirational literature, and sometimes he took a trip to various districts and let them hear the living voice of one who had been the Führer’s friend from youth up, had actually visited him in prison at the Fortress of Landsberg, and had once had in his hands some of the original manuscript of Mein Kampf. It was as if Lanny had been able to tell those camelmen in the Sahara that he had trimmed the beard of the living Prophet!

  Heinrich had long seemed to Lanny a dull person, but he was useful because he was a mirror of the Nazi mind. He knew nothing about the outside world but what Doktor Goebbels told him, either through the Völkischer, the radio, or the special bulletins prepared for his organization. A faithful believer, he would never dream of listening to a foreign radio, and all he wanted to hear about the Allied lands was that discontent was spreading, and that the U-boats were sinking half the vessels which set out from America. Lanny said that was why the Americans had been repelled in Tunisia, and he had no doubt that when the SS men had gone into action, the invaders would be forced to withdraw at least as far as Algiers.

  Heinrich admitted that the German people had been terribly depressed by the Stalingrad defeat. “It is hard for them to understand that in winter our transport is helpless, but that we shall make it all up in the spring. I wish that you could tell our Jugend how it all appears to you. Could you not talk to them just once?”

  “Thanks for the compliment, Heinrich; but if I should go around meeting Germans promiscuously, news about me would spread and I couldn’t go back to America.”

  Heinrich had just returned from a visit to one of the so-called Ordensburgen, the schools where young Führers were being trained. “The most marvelous places, Lanny, where you meet the cream of our movement, the lads who are going to run the new Germany, and indeed the new Europe. We shall of course have to do that for many years, perhaps a generation, until we can educate enough National Socialist Frenchmen and Dutchmen and so on.”

  Lanny had heard of these schools, but little was known about them in America, so he said: “Tell me what you saw, Heinrich.”

  Thus for the rest of the meal he listened to enraptured details about Ordensburg-Vogclsang, a combination university and military school. It had dozens of magnificent buildings, designed by the Führer, with walls of reinforced concrete four feet thick and covered with brownstone. It was in the region east of the Rhine, where the legions of the Roman general Varus had been slaughtered by the wild Germans of the forest; a land held sacred by all the devotees of Blut und Boden; the land of Siegfried and Brünnhilde, of Nibelungs and giants and dragons. When the stormwinds blew the mountain mists across the moon, all good Wagnerians saw the Valkyries riding, and hummed a melody that to the skeptical outsider was more suggestive of rocking-horses than of war steeds.

  Lanny knew this region, having motored through it with Laurel Creston at the time when the Gestapo was looking for her, and Lanny was trying to figure a way to get her out of the country. But the P.A. didn’t say anything about that; he learned about a place where the Nazi Mystik was being taught to two thousand super-Aryan youths, and where new buildings were going up even in the midst of war. The institution stood on the slope of a mountain, arranged in vast terraces; the administration buildings, the guest house, and the mess hall stood on the highest level, forming a court and enclosing a fountain flanked by German war eagles and a circle of sculptured heroes with big muscles and horses with even bigger ones. Having just walked down the Siegesallee, Lanny could have no trouble in imagining these.

  Broad steps led down the slope to classrooms and dormitories; still farther down were drill grounds and game fields, gymnasiums, open-air theater, and swimming pool; below these was the cold black Urfstausee, a mountain lake, where young Nazi heroes might look for the Rhine maidens. They wouldn’t be maidens much longer, for the Hitler religion was a fertility cult, and it was considered disloyal and decadent for any German female of the proper age to refuse herself to heroes. The world could be possessed only by a race that reproduced quickly and replaced the losses of war. This was part of the lore for which Adi had erected a “Tower of Wisdom” at Ordensburg-Vogelsang, and all the elite students were thrilled by the promise he had made, that he would deposit in this tower the original manuscript of the sequel to Mein Kampf, embodying the wisdom that was to guide his thousand-year Reich.

  “Eine frohe Botschaft!” exclaimed the admiring Lanny; and the worshipful Heinrich asked, not without bitterness: “How can it be possible for intelligent people to fail to understand what we are doing, and combine with us to save the world from the Asiatic hordes? Has America gone entirely Bolshevik, Lanny?”

  23

  Enemy within the Gates

  I

  The new Physics Building of the world-famed Kaiser Wilhelm Institute was situated in the Dahlem district, near the other Institutes. Oddly enough, it had been paid for with Rockefeller money. It was on a corner, an impressive structure with a rounded entrance, a tall tower above, and many small dormer windows. As Lanny Budd walked by its semibasement windows, he saw that he was under the observation of guards with tommy guns, and realized that he was approaching one of the most carefully guarded buildings in Germany.

  But when he gave his name at the window of the booking-room, he discovered that the way had been prepared for him. A polite SS man escorted him to the private office of the Herr Professor Doktor Salzmann, who proved to be an old-style stoutish Prussian with white military mustaches and scanty close-cropped hair; he was clad in black broadcloth and wore gold pince-nez. He must have been surprised by the order to meet an American, but he had had time to prepare, and no doubt had looked u
p Robert Budd in Who’s Who in America, and the Budd-Erling Aircraft Corporation in Moody’s Manual. He was polite, but reserved, and his manner said: “I am here to listen.”

  Lanny’s first move was to show his letter. Then he told his story, so well rehearsed, his stock in trade in Naziland for almot ten years: how he had come to know Kurt Meissner and Heinrich Jung nearly thirty years ago, how he had come to know the Führer nearly twenty years ago, and Göring and so many others nearly ten years ago; how he had become a convert to National Socialism and had labored to explain it to his British and French and American friends; how through the years, the Führer had asked him to take messages to this and that sympathizer abroad; and how recently, being in possession of what he believed to be important diplomatic information, he had found a way to get into Germany and had been flown to the Führer’s headquarters on the eastern front.

  Lanny was aware that many of Germany’s top scientists were not Nazis at heart; but nearly all of them were Germans before they were scientists, and if the head of their government told them to believe a certain story, they would believe it. When Lanny explained that his father was in a position of great delicacy, being held as it were in bondage by his government, the Herr Professor Doktor could understand perfectly, because he, too, did research according to order, and if he had any private wishes or even thoughts he would reserve them for his wife and one or two trusted friends. When Herr Budd said: “You understand that I am in position to hear my father’s conversation with those technical men whom the government has assigned to his plant,” the Professor nodded and said: “Ja, ja.” When Lanny said: “I have to ask you to give me your word that you will never name me or my father as the source of any information,” the Professor replied: “Auf mein Ehrenwort, Herr Budd.”