Delmer read German at Lincoln College, Oxford, just missing a first, but he spent many of his 1920s vacations in Germany, where he saw his happy adolescent dream shrivel. The subtitle of his book is Democracy on Trial, and from its opening page, in which the Social Democrat leader Friedrich Ebert makes a secret pact with the officer corps of the Reichswehr, the German Army, two days before the Armistice of 1918, Delmer argues that ‘Germany’s democracy was … a democracy with a hole in its heart’. The penultimate illustration of his book is a John Heartfield collage showing three insects on an oak tree: Ebert the caterpillar, Hindenburg the chrysalis and Hitler the butterfly. Delmer thought German democracy was merely a bit of temporary camouflage to trick the Allies. ‘It would vanish when they vanished.’ He also explored the cynical military pact between Germany and Russia. From 1924, Germans built weapons on Russian soil, and trained military personnel there; in exchange, the Russians got access to technical skills, new patents and manufacturing processes.
Dishonesty and self-delusion stalk the pages of Weimar Germany, crackpots, charlatans and Spartacist revolutionaries in a land of rampant inflation where just to buy a cabbage, your money was not counted but weighed. When inflation ended on 20 November 1923, one US dollar was worth 4,200,000,000,000 marks. But Delmer thought inflation was partly a matter of self-interest. Because the war debt was computed in marks, inflation freed Germany from its reparations; it was also something that could be blamed on the wicked Versailles Treaty, democracy and the Jews. Delmer describes how, after the mark stabilised in 1924, there was a five-year ‘golden’ period of art and culture until the Wall Street Crash, but he also sees the work of Weimar artists like George Grosz and Otto Dix as documentary evidence of a rancid stew of resentment and thuggery.
After Sefton Delmer left Oxford in the summer of 1927, he was living with his parents in Berlin and preparing for the Foreign Office exams to become a British diplomat when the course of his life changed. His father was by now the ‘stringer’ for various British and American newspapers, but had gone off on holiday leaving his son to hold the fort. When Tom got a tip-off from the porter of the Adlon hotel that Lord Beaverbrook had arrived, he immediately rang the owner of the Daily Express and offered his services. ‘Come and see me,’ growled Churchill’s friend Max in his rasping voice.
Lord Beaverbrook came accompanied by the novelist Arnold Bennett (who wrote a novel around Beaverbrook as a WW1 propagandist, Lord Raingo) and some aristocrats travelling in connection with a film-project that never got made, cigar-chomping Valentine Castlerosse, Mrs Venetia Montagu and blonde, blue-eyed Lady Diana Cooper. Tom Delmer was slim, dark and tall – he stood six feet one in his socks – and made himself useful answering the telephone and chattering about the erotic and exotic Berlin nightlife. Later Castlerosse toured the transvestite night clubs, and Bennett asked to see some of the nudist and homosexual magazines young Delmer had mentioned. After Delmer’s third trip to buy stacks of porn in Potsdamerplatz, he began to get strange looks from the woman at the news-stand. Delmer showed Lord Beaverbrook around Berlin and told him that the Germans were secretly rearming. When asked what he wanted to be, young Tom replied, ‘I want to be a newspaperman, sir.’ He rewrote one of his stories at Lord Beaverbrook’s dictation, and Beaverbrook’s secretary phoned it through to the Daily Express with a message from the owner: ‘Tell the editor that I advise him to put it on the front page.’ And so ‘D. Sefton Delmer’ got his first byline and joined the Daily Express, for whom, over the next thirty years, he would become a legendary foreign correspondent. Within a year, aged only 24, he was back in Germany running the paper’s new Berlin bureau.
Berlin in the twenties was fun for a young reporter: a fount of good stories, violence and vice mixing ‘in a ferment of ultramodernism and get-rich-quick hysteria’. Delmer’s sense of humour did not always go down well. When he turned up at a fancy-dress ball in a child’s pickelhaube helmet, a toy sword and a popgun with a cork on a piece of string plugging the barrel, he was almost lynched for insulting the German army. And when he presented both weapons ‘in aid of your next war’ he was forcibly ejected. But usually his fluent demotic German and enjoyment of wine, women and song made him liked everywhere, in high society, among the politicians, the rich, the bohemian, in bars and night clubs. Delmer distributed his visiting card to all the petrol-station men in Berlin, and paid them for tip-offs. The efficient German telephone system was the key to his scoops. He had phones in every room and could also put his calls through to whichever nightclub he was visiting so that he could dash off at short notice to the riot or murder scene.
Sefton Delmer witnessed first-hand the rise to power of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). When he first saw Adolf Hitler speaking, in February 1929, in a small hall, Delmer walked out. The man was obviously just another Weimar crank, denouncing oranges as foreign fruit and urging Germans to eat German food. But a year later, the NSDAP or Nazi party had expanded from twelve seats in the Reichstag to 107. When Delmer went again to see Hitler speak, he sat as close as he could, fascinated by the man’s hypnotic staring blue eyes, popping out of his head as he worked himself into a fury. As Hitler shrieked and gestured, sweat poured off him and the dye from his cheap blue serge suit stained his wet collar a dirty purple colour. Delmer looked around at the comfortable middle-class audience: Hitler ‘stirred them into a state of aggressive exultation. It was frightening.’ When Delmer neither sang nor gave the Nazi salute at the end, the man next to him wanted to knock him down: ‘Just you wait till after. We’ll show you. We’ll teach you.’
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.
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 De
lmer 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.’
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