Geli was twenty years old when her mother came to take charge of her uncle’s house; and she certainly had not lost her good looks. So there the Führer spent many contented and even blissful months, enjoying his sister’s homely Austrian cooking and doing his best to thaw those frost-bitten loins of his in his niece’s intimate heat.
Incest (or quasi-incest at least) seems perhaps the obvious theoretical answer in cases of psychological blockage which stem from an overweening solipsism, like Hitler’s. This sexy young niece was blood of his blood, so could perhaps in his solipsist mind be envisaged as merely a female organ budding on “him”—as forming with him a single hermaphrodite “Hitler,” a two-sexed entity able to couple within itself like the garden snail.... At least that sounds all right in theory: practice however had proved less simple, and Geli had found that she had to do curious things for her uncle. She once told a friend “You’d never believe the things which this monster makes me do”; but whatever they were, in time he became so hooked on these deft little things she did that he came to look on his growing addiction as “love”—and even the outside world was soon to mistake it for love, when he started behaving towards her in public like any romantical juvenile moonstruck lover who worships his virginal lady afar. Yet surely (thought those in the know) this moping and mooning contrasted oddly with all those salacious billets-doux he kept sending her, letters adorned with pornographic drawings—depicting her own private parts, and patently drawn from the life!
These keepsakes of course had little attraction for Geli. Often she carelessly left them lying about; but Father Stempfle, or maybe Party-Treasurer Schwarz (for this happened more than once), had found them such very expensive things to retrieve from blackmailing hands that in future they had to be taken from her as soon as she got them, and locked in a Brown House safe where the artist could brood on them—Hitler flatly refusing to hear of his Valentines being destroyed.
So things had gone on for a year or two, with Hitler making most God-awful rows if Geli so much as winked at another man—let alone if she jumped in an alien bed for somewhat robuster forms of fun. But in 1931 she dropped a bombshell: she begged to go back to Vienna. “For singing lessons” was what she said; but rightly or wrongly her mother believed she had lately been got with child by an Austrian Jew from Linz, that she funked the row-to-end-all-rows this revelation must mean and was hoping to meet the man in Vienna and marry him there.... Be that as it may, her uncle by now could not possibly do without her and flatly refused to let her leave him on any excuse.
Whereupon he lost her for good. One September morning, she locked herself in her room at her uncle’s imposing Prinz Regentplatz apartment in Munich, and shot herself dead with her uncle’s pistol.
So ended the sole “romance” in Adolf Hitler’s life. Or so the hermaphrodite snail was sundered, the cynic might say, the addict cut off from his dope; but even so, it is tempting to call the withdrawal-symptoms “natural human grief”—as one would with some lesser man who was able to love—when the news of her suicide sent him nearly out of his mind. Schreck drove him back to Munich at breakneck speed; and the Führer seemed so distraught that the faithful Strasser feared he might do himself a mischief and never once left his side, nor closed an eye, for a couple of days and nights.
But one thing Strasser refused to do for his stricken friend: he refused to be party to trying to kid the world that—whatever the coroner said or the papers printed—this death had been accidental. Then Göring at last saw his chance! He too had rushed to his Führer’s side, and in breaking voice assured him that he at least was convinced this was all a tragic mischance, all came of playing with guns.... Whereupon Hitler turned from the obstinate Strasser to weep upon Göring’s neck: “This shows which one of you two is my real friend!” he sobbed.
Perhaps this is just what the incident did do; but still it ensured that Göring was back in the Führer’s personal favor, and Strasser had one more black mark against his name.
Moreover Reinhold’s forecast was right: next summer’s elections saw Hermann Göring installed—as leading the largest single group—in the Reichstag President’s Palace: a national figure at last as well as a leading Party one.
*
Three weeks after Geli’s death in September 1931, Hitler and Hindenburg met for the very first time; and withdrawal-symptoms were still so acute that the President more-or-less wrote Hitler off as a serious factor henceforth in German politics.
Seeing him as he was then, the old man would find it hard to believe that fifteen months later he’d find himself sending for Hitler to make him Chancellor—even with highly-experienced politicians (ex-Chancellor Papen and Co.) in his cabinet holding his hand and pledged to see he behaved.
In December 1932 came Chancellor General Schleicher’s bid to secure a working majority of the Left, with Socialist help, by detaching Strasser and sixty Nazi deputies with him. But Strasser refused to play: if anyone joined the Cabinet that must be Hitler himself—which Göring and Göbbels strongly opposed.
The fracas was such that the Party seemed to be splitting. All Hitler did to heal the breach was a suicide-threat; and all Strasser got for his loyalty to his Chief was a tongue-lashing row with Hitler. Thereupon Strasser resigned—not to switch his allegiance to Schleicher, but simply to disappear into private life rather than tear the Party in half.
Thus Hitler was once more safely on top. Then Papen the arch-intriguer got busy intriguing with Hitler, with Schröder the banker.... With Göring.... With Oskar the President’s son, and Meissner the President’s chief official adviser.... And Hitler himself got busy on Oskar with certain private promises and/or threats, until the web was woven so tight that Hindenburg saw no other way out.
On Sunday the thirtieth day of January 1933, the Hitler-Papen-Hugenberg-Blomberg Cabinet duly came into being. That “Coalition” Cabinet only contained three Nazis—but three were to prove quite enough, with the aid of Göring and Reichstag Fires and Enabling Acts and everything else which followed.
The nest with only one cuckoo-chick in it soon sees all the legitimate nestlings tumbled out.
17
In England, the post-War “Geddes Axe” had rendered promotion slow for a civil servant who joined in the twenties: allowing for normal retirements and people above him moving up higher, Jeremy knew he’d be lucky to get his first rise in status to “Principal” roughly in 1938 (as if some Army subaltern had to wait thirteen years for his second pip). Thereafter promotion—if any—depended on merit; and meanwhile, to give him a proper grounding, they moved him about from branch to branch. He had started in “M”: from there he was sent to the Registry, filing papers and learning who properly dealt with what: then to “C.E.,” handling internal questions of organization and cutting down everyone else’s staff; and then to Finance, another unpopular branch whose principal job was apparently finding out what Little Tommy is doing and telling him not to.... But 1934 found him back in “M,” a branch on almost affectionate terms with the Naval Staff: which led to a curious, quite unofficial assignment for Jeremy.
Two years ago the “Ten Year Rule” (the directive year after year handed down from On High that there wouldn’t be war for another decade) had been rescinded, and nothing put in its place. But navies must plan ten years ahead at least the fleets they are likely to need. For even when Parliament voted the money, before any warship began to be built its requisite speed and endurance and armament had to be argued out by the Naval Staff (with the First Sea Lord knocking their heads together, if argument lasted too long): then sketches and models must be submitted and argued further about and decided upon before the detailed designing could even begin—and a battleship’s working drawings took two or three years to prepare, after which she was five to seven years in the building....
January last year had seen the Nazis coming to power: so what of the future? Foreign Office reports and forecasts were many and various—far too various, contradictory even; and Diplomats anyway
only come in contact with high-ups (which means with successful liars or else they wouldn’t have got where they are); and nations in any case change their high-ups rather more often than changing their minds. Germany’s dangerous new batch of high-ups could only last as long as Germany wished them to last—they might be out on their ears again in six months.... So some bright lad in Naval Intelligence thought it a possibly useful idea for the Naval Planners to have their own unofficial private assessment anent the “basic mood” of the German man-in-the-street.
Journalists help, but all have their axes to grind. This junior Commander was rather in awe of Jeremy’s brains, and Jeremy knew the language.... If Jeremy chose—mind you, entirely off his own bat—to go take a look-see and put it on paper.... Well, he could rest assured that (naming no names) his screed would be read.
Jeremy planned his leave to start in the first week of June. Travel by train wouldn’t do: so having no car himself he suggested Augustine coming. Augustine hated the place too much and refused; but asked him at least to lunch, to meet a girl just back from Berlin.
They lunched in Soho: a party of four, for Polly came too (she was now sixteen).
As for the girl herself.... According to Mary, Augustine had got a new girl but she wasn’t at all his class and Mary was not very happy about it: so this couldn’t be the one, for this was a “Lady Jane—Something,” he couldn’t quite catch the rest of her name. No, this was probably merely some friend of Polly’s.... Indeed it soon transpired that Polly and Janey had known each other as children and met again at their Finishing School in Geneva. This also accounted for Polly’s presence: for Janey had grown up a shy and excessively diffident girl, deferring to Polly in everything—even the food she chose—though Polly was two years younger. At just eighteen she seemed to be finding the burden of adult life already too much.... “If they don’t look out” thought Jeremy “sooner or later she’ll swallow a bottle of aspirin.”
Janey indeed had hardly spoken at first; but when she did speak at last it all came out with a rush. Yes, she had been to Berlin and had stood for hours outside the Chancellor’s Residence hoping that Hitler would come to the window, till somebody told her he hadn’t got back from Munich yet. Still, she had kicked off her shoes and stood in her stockings....
“Why?” asked Jeremy.
“This was the pavement his feet had trod,” said Janey reprovingly.
Next day Janey had stood there again—and the next, till at last she had had her reward. As the Führer’s car drove slowly past his eyes had sought out hers in the crowd for a long penetrating look which had pierced to the depths of her soul: she had felt transported.
“I don’t quite get it,” said Jeremy: “What makes you feel like that about him? You aren’t a German yourself.”
Helplessly Janey turned an imploring look on Polly. “You can’t be in Germany twenty minutes without,” said Polly abruptly: “You’ll see for yourself.”
“Your ‘Chameleon Law’ again!” said Jeremy sotto voce.
“You ought to see Polly’s room,” said Augustine accusingly: “Portraits of Hitler all over the walls.”
But Polly was quite unabashed. “One photo is signed!” she exclaimed in triumph.
A pause: then Jeremy asked: “Do you mean to go there again?”
Janey glanced quickly at Polly, and Polly at Janey. “Promise you won’t tell Mother?” They promised. “We thought, on our way back to Mme. Leblanc’s next term, we might give the Dragon the slip and arrive in Munich quite by mistake.... You know—wrong part of the train or something.”
“We want to see some of the Holy Places.”
“The street where the Martyrs died.”
“The inn where Hitler was born.”
After they’d seen the two girls into their taxi, “Christ!” said Augustine (who seldom swore).
“Exactly,” said Jeremy, adding: “I wonder they don’t come out with miraculous Stigmata—swastika marks on their hands and feet.”
*
Jeremy next thought of Ludo. Ludo had cars to choose from; and Jeremy wanted to see how the Nazis behaved to a visiting foreign Jew, if Ludo was willing to face the music.
Luckily, Ludo was willing. His father had business interests there, and Ludo was anxious to wind them up.
Then Joan and Anthony turned up out of the blue to visit the old Archdeacon, so Ludo and Jeremy carried them off as well. It was quite a party that finally set off through France in Ludo’s voluptuous Rolls.
18
They got their first sight of the Nazi flag in the Saar. The Saar had been under Geneva control for the profit of France ever since the War. In six months time they could choose to return to the Reich or belong to France or remain more-or-less as they were; but the swastika banners festooning the village streets left little doubt which way the voting would go.
“They won’t be half as well off,” said Jeremy.
“That, they know; but it won’t affect the issue,” said Ludo. “Germans are not ‘Economic Main,’ in the which-side-your-bread-is-buttered sense: nor are they a ‘nation’—or not in the sense you mongrel British are one. They’re more like a wandering horde who have settled down here and there in Europe almost by chance: their ties are still not so much with any particular patch of soil (or State) as tribal ‘kinship’ ties. Rosenberg’s right that far....”
“A bit like you Jews,” interrupted Joan.
“Except that the German Tribes have focused their kinship ties in a single, godlike Paramount Chief.”
“But you do too—except that you keep your Führer up in the sky, which is very much safer for all of us.”
Jeremy nudged his aunt, glancing at Ludo in some alarm.
“Where do we eat?” asked the practical Anthony: “Some of these Gasthauses look pretty good to me.”
It was hard to believe these smiling meadows and woods housed one of the major coalfields of Europe, Jeremy mused, when you thought of the needless degradation and ugliness Coal had inflicted on Wales. For “wandering tribes” the Germans were pleasingly tidy people.... But then a Poilu lifted a pole which barred the road: a German policeman saluted with outstretched arm, looked at their passports and smilingly waved them on into Germany proper. He hadn’t batted an eyelid at Ludo’s name or at Ludo’s nose.
They crossed the Rhine on a bridge of boats where the anxious Rolls seemed to walk like an overweight cat on a slender twig, and passed through peaceful country where pine forests skirted the fields. Peasants were carting their hay in ox-drawn wagons, or spraying their fruit; and the gentle breezes of June barely ruffled the growing wheat. Young men stripped to the waist and burned a mahogany-brown were laying pipes. There weren’t many cars on the dusty road, or even lorries: only occasional motor-cycles ridden two-or-three-up, and a single trio of holiday cyclists sweating over their pedals—including a fat white woman in shorts. There wasn’t much sign of political ferment here—only an overweening friendliness, everyone making these foreigners welcome and going out of their way to be helpful; and a pleasant but all-pervading scent of anti-sunburn cream.
True, in the village streets there were Nazi flags and bunting inscribed with slogans: GERMANS—A NATION OF AIRMEN (without one single airplane in the sky), or YOUNG MEN! VOLUNTEER FOR THE LABOR SERVICE; but no one seemed ever to lift his eyes to look at them.
Stuttgart was Ludo’s first port of call. There he disappeared for a while; and after they’d toured the partly burnt-out castle the rest of them sat in the Railway Hotel, watching an S.A. Parade in front of the brand-new station. The Troopers drilled with a Guards-like precision, but looked rather jolly young men with peeling cream-daubed noses and hardly the sort to go beating-up Germany’s Ludos.... They presently drove away in lorries, singing their heads off.
Jeremy talked in the bar to a young man wearing a Nazi badge, and smelling of sunburn-cream like everyone else. Why all this soldierly drilling and marching by two or three million men still called civilians? The French were bound to t
hink it a threat....
The young man smiled, turning such candid and almost affectionate eyes on this total stranger that Jeremy felt embarrassed. “It’s just that they don’t understand us, poor dears.... Yet it’s perfectly simple: why do you English play football? Because you enjoy it—and nobody looks on a match between Chelsea and ’Spurs as threatening civil war! We long to make friends with the French: hasn’t Hitler said so again and again? No German wants a new war: our fathers have told us too much about the last one....” But then his brow clouded. “No, but the French might start one.... They’ve evil men at the top; and when they do overrun us what have these ‘two or three million men’ got to fight with?—This!” (and he brandished a table-fork). “That’s why we want the whole world disarmed like ourselves.”
The man was transparently truthful and honest. “It isn’t me he is trying to kid so much as himself; and I wonder why?” thought Jeremy.
Just then two Hitler Youths came round, shaking collecting-boxes “For Aircraft”; and everyone put in a coin in exchange for an aircraft badge, like a charity flag-day. “That’s only for building civil aircraft of course” said their Nazi friend; but he added “The French could blast us out of the skies!”—a mental connection more likely than logical, Jeremy thought. He remembered the red-and-white model bomb in the square outside with a slit for similar contributions. A placard on it had read: A SINGLEFOLK A SINGLE DANGER A SINGLE DEFENSE.
The Wooden Shepherdess Page 30
