Gröfaz. . . .
March 1943
The monster has been given the evil tidings of Stalingrad. Naturally, it is going to raise itself for one last blow. And so terror has been loosed among us, once more.
Himmler: I met him just once, at a party marking the New Year of 1934, after Clé and I had been whirled through the confusion to land among these rather questionable people. At this point, this individual of strongly middle-class antecedents and the appearance of a bailiff felt called upon to drag me off to a corner and ask me who Herr Arno Rechberg was.
Since Herr Rechberg, an extremely wealthy man and a high-ranking Mason, played one of the key roles in the fall of von Seeckt and in bringing about the Conference of Locarno, and was, in addition, one of the figures behind the scenes at the Herrenklub and in the cabinet of von Papen, and since I knew him only casually, I attempted to extricate myself from the situation by answering Himmler’s question with another question: How did it happen, I asked, that the Fouché of the Third Reich had to turn for information about such a personage to poor me?
He looked at me in surprise out of his short-sighted eyes. I believe that my dialectical parry was lost on him for the simple reason that he did not know who Fouché was. But, not wanting to appear ignorant, he let me alone.
I was very glad to get rid of him. This air of the subaltern he had about him, and the ineffaceable stamp of the petit bourgeois—in combination with his absolute power to kill anyone—were precisely what made him so frightful. This must have been the way Fouquier-Tinville looked: the rigid bureaucrat, Minister in Charge of the Underworld.
This is the man now slowly elbowing his way to the front. And this is how we live now, as people must have lived before Thermidor and the overthrow of Robespierre—underground and essentially illegally, open at any moment to denunciation and the executioner’s axe. The Summary Courts, presided over by sadistic and bloodthirsty Nazi Jacobins, make quick work of sentencing people to death, and five-minute trials suffice. Stamped on the verdict order are the words ‘Liquidate and Expropriate’—which means execution and seizure of all property. The victim is shoved out a back door, where the executioner already awaits him. In fifteen minutes it is all over, trial, sentencing, everything. Next comes the towering guillotine, and in university dissecting rooms the cadavers of the decapitated are piling up so high that university officials have refused further shipments of these silent guests.
Heads roll for a bagatelle: they roll for doubts about the outcome of a war which anyone with half an eye knew was lost long ago. They roll for holding back a pound note, and they roll especially fast because of aspersions cast on the Great General—as though one could cast aspersions on Caesar sitting there atop the Obersalzberg, who last year in the presence of someone I know called himself the present-day ‘Scipio Africanus’, and who falls into a paroxysm of rage if someone dares to doubt his affinity with God! As Lord High Executioner, he has converted the punishment for ‘causing ridicule of the Führer’ from the former six-week jail sentence into death by beheading. And we now have, as I am informed by the Traunstein public prosecutor, eleven guillotines in Germany. Recently, when the one in Munich went out of order, the Stuttgart guillotine was borrowed to help out.
But production has never been better. A Palatinate man was beheaded because he pleaded with his only son not to take unnecessary risks at the Front. A 74-year-old bank director from Stuttgart was beheaded because he was overheard on a train talking to another old man about the fact that the war was going badly. . . . Oh, and they have even cruelly cut off the head of one of the two whorehouse madams in the employ of Herr Christian Weber, that owner of two bordellos and bosom friend of the Greatest General of All Time, the whole crime of this worthy lady being that, probably at the behest of her employer, she had asked for foreign currency in payment for the fleshly pleasures offered, and also that she had withheld for herself a small percentage of each day’s receipts.
Estimates are that in Berlin alone there are sixteen beheadings a week, while in Vienna, where hatred of the Prussians is now white-hot, the figure is twenty a week. The hangman has two jours fixes per week, on which he works on a mass-production basis. Since he receives a commission for each hanging, plus his regular salary from the government, he obviously has a stake in the enterprise. I can imagine a notice in the ‘Personals’ column of a newspaper, composed in the proper New German proportions of sentimentality and sadism, reading something like this:
GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL
Military man, in well-paid, pension-covered position, tall, blond, good appearance, nature-lover with definite views on life, seeks correspondence with like-minded woman, also blonde, with view to marriage. Not less than 5'2" and not over 25.
Gentleman prefers blondes. Non olet: these platinum-blonde Ingrids, Wibkes, Astrids, Gudruns, and Isoldes would never hold their noses at hubby’s profession. After all, this is vital government work. You think I exaggerate the hangman’s social acceptability? Let me cite the following case, an episode of recent occurrence in Vienna:
The well-known actress, M., a lady who was a leading tragedienne during the heyday of the Burgtheater and then became owner of a wine-making establishment, from time to time had to dinner an official whose black market connections were of use on occasion. One day, this official brought with him to dinner an ‘acquaintance’ who was extremely taciturn, seemed almost to avoid human contact, would not look one in the eye, and when asked if he was a resident of Vienna, replied in north German dialect that he maintained no regular residence, but had business in Vienna rather often. Afterwards, when the man had left, the lady learned that her guest at table that evening had been the hangman, in person. . . .
On the same subject, while in Munich recently, I was a spectator at a Summary Court trial, and saw a 65-year-old doctor convicted for possession of foreign currency sentenced to a mere eight years in prison, although he missed the guillotine by a hair. The court-room, a low-ceilinged, ill-lit and musty-smelling place, on the smoke-streaked wall of which a photograph of the old Regent, left hanging by some oversight, looked on as though through a window of another world; the defendant, a trembling and stuttering old man; and the denouncer and chief prosecution witness, a sleek, blonde floozy—Swiss, incidentally—who had been the old man’s housekeeper; the assistant judges, two civil servants; and the chief judge, pinched-faced, resentment in every line, a beast, a piece of filth, a Nazi horror who had climbed out of a fathomless depth in Lower Bavaria somewhere. . . .
No, this man’s name was not Fuchs[59], who sent the Scholls, brother and sister, to the guillotine a few days ago, and whom we will soon drag before our tribunal. This man was called Rossdorfer, and he was until yesterday a counsel-at-law in the town of Plattling. Now, this canaille was getting a chance to vent the accumulation of decades of hatred of the ‘professors’, and this unlucky old doctor denounced by this Swiss harlot was a made-to-order target. The trial itself couldn’t have been faster, the blonde nearly burst with National Socialist loyalty as she reiterated her denunciation; the old man tried to stutter something in defence, but the Lord High Judge roared him down before he could get out three words. The two assistant judges, who recognised me and were ashamed, avoided my somewhat ironical glance and, to give the appearance of legality to what they were doing, asked a couple of questions meant to be objective. The old fellow sensed a change in the air, took courage in hand and began to speak—and was at once given the knockout blow by a frightful intermezzo. . . .
What happened was that our wise and just judge, previously composer of grammatically questionable briefs for knife-wielding peasants and tax-evading pedlars, suddenly roared out the word ‘Baloney’, banged his files down on the table and, purple with rage, engulfed the old man in bellowing. And then he did something which must be unprecedented in jurisprudence. He leaped from his chair, ran over to the old man, and shaking his fist under his nose, roared: ‘Listen, you! If you keep on with this stuff, I’ll punch you one
in the snoot!’
At which the taking of evidence was concluded, and the accused was ready for sentencing. He was given eight years, at his age very likely tantamount to a death sentence.
I left, thinking of many things: of that English parliamentary tribunal whose awe and respect for the brilliance of the crown once worn by Charles Stuart, and for the suffering of a man about to die, was such that it sent him to the block with something like a guard of honour; of that much maligned French tribunal which granted the condemned Charlotte Corday her request for an artist to paint her portrait before she was hanged, because the murderess of Marat wished to leave ‘an example and a warning’ to posterity. This happened exactly 150 years ago, almost to the day, and the world has not only gone to the dogs in the interim, but several degrees worse: it has gone to the likes of this fastidious gentleman, who takes evidence with the aid of his manly fist, and will give the defendant, if he does not confess, ‘one in the snoot’.
I ponder all this as I move heavily about Munich, observing how badly wounded it was in the last air-raid—this city which was once so gay and beautiful. And at just this moment, I learn for the first time of the martyrdom of the Scholls.
I never saw these two young people. In my rural isolation, I got only bits and pieces of the whole story of what they were doing, but the significance of what I heard was such I could hardly believe it. The Scholls are the first in Germany to have had the courage to witness for the truth. The movement they left at their deaths will go on, and as is always the case with martyrdom, they have sown seeds which will raise important fruit in time to come. This young brother and sister went boldly about their work, almost as though they were defying death. Their betrayal came through a miserable university proctor, who was then so afraid of being beaten or otherwise punished, that he had to be taken into protective custody.
They were sentenced to death by a second example of the Rossdorfer-type. They died in all the radiance of their courage and readiness for sacrifice, and thereby attained the pinnacle in lives well lived.
I have learned something of their background from the young people who were with them. These were children who stood apart from the rest, of good Swabian stock, living in quiet, almost cloistered isolation, but even then having about them that special aura which presages early death. Their bearing before the tribunal—that of the girl, especially—was inspiring. They flung their contempt of the court, the Party, and that insane, would-be great man, Hitler, into the faces of their judges, and at the end, did something which carries the icy breath of the Eternal about it for us who survive. For, with their last words, they repeated the warning once given by the condemned Knights of the Temple to their judges, that those who were persecuting them and those who stood behind them would ‘within a year be called to judgement before the throne of God’. The curse pronounced by the Templars was realised to the extent that before a year was past both Pope Clemens V and King Philip IV of France were dead. It remains to be seen what will happen here in the course of the next year. . . .
But the Scholls departed from this life quietly, and gravely and with wonderful dignity gave their young blood. On their gravestones let these words be carved, and let this entire people, which has lived in deepest degradation these last ten years, blush when it reads them: ‘Cogi non potest quisquis mori scit’—He who knows how to die can never be enslaved.
We will all of us, someday, have to make a pilgrimage to their graves, and stand before them, ashamed.
This is the story of these two children of our race: the latest, and God willing, the first Germans of a great rebirth of the spirit.
But Herr Hitler is occupied elsewhere at the moment; Herr Hitler is concerned, now while our cathedrals and national monuments are being turned into dust, with the teaching of counterpoint and the rules of harmony—Herr Hitler is laying the foundations of National Socialist music. And recently, Herr Göring was seen entering a party he was giving for his cronies wearing a fur coat that reached to his ankles, girdled by a red morocco belt studded with stolen diamonds, and with red morocco boots on his feet. I am sure he looked grand—this field marshal who never commanded in battle. But there is a precedent here in history: that unlucky Roman, Caligula, also appeared before his gaping subjects in red morocco boots, shortly before he became unmistakably insane.
August 1943
I found Kleeblatt,[60] my doctor, grieving over the death by the guillotine of his stepson, who wrote the leaflets distributed by the Scholls, and was beheaded with those two youthful martyrs: with great effort, he had managed to forestall the corpse’s being dismembered and put into bottles of Lysol in anatomy classes.
But the ghosts of the dead have begun their work, and already the effects are felt in the systematic demoralisation of the Nazi ruling structure. For weeks now, the lower echelons of hierarchy, district officials, township leaders, and bastions of the regime generally have been making gestures, meant to be noticed, of disillusionment with the Nazis. Their general demeanour is now supposed to convey disgust, so that everybody may know their dissatisfaction, their unhappiness about the present state of things. Now, in the post office, for instance, the clerk is liable to fling official notices contemptuously to one side, muttering that he has ‘had enough of this swindle’.
The secret behind this transformation? All these gentlemen have in recent days received a letter from a certain ‘revolutionary executive’, informing them that they will be held responsible for their official actions; that previous denunciations and similar crimes have been duly recorded against them, and that the continuation of such activities will further worsen the consequences for them. By great good luck, I got hold of one of these missives:
We possess documentary evidence regarding your activities since 1933, and you will be held responsible for them following the collapse of Hitlerism. The Executive Committee hereby informs you that you will henceforth remain under the most intensive observation. If there should occur a single further instance of activity on behalf of the present regime, or if any additional reports are confirmed of harm done to political opponents, the sentence of death which has been pronounced against you for future execution will be extended to include your entire family. Execution will be by hanging on the day of overthrow of the regime.
It had its effect. These letters were in some incomprehensible way sent registered mail from widely separated places, so that those sent to Bavaria originated in Insterburg, while the letters mailed to East Prussia evidently came from Baden or Württemberg.
In any case, the effect was salutary. The minor satraps have simply stopped functioning, schoolteachers are once again to be seen in church, the women’s leader has quieted down, and the local ‘Party bastion’ gets ill with unfailing punctuality when called upon to hold a meeting. I drove into Munich with the wife of a Trostberg doctor, who told me that in 1938, her husband, then head of the local medical organisation, had stopped treating Jews—including accident cases. Now, the woman related, her husband had trouble with his nerves, complained constantly about the purposelessness of life and the unreality of the Party pronouncements, and was even toying with ideas of suicide. And why? Because one of these mysterious Executive Committees had sentenced him to be removed from the medical rolls for ‘inhumane conduct unbecoming to a physician’, effective ‘the day of the overthrow’ when the sentence ‘might be supplemented by further punishment’.
Incidentally, the couriers who carried these letters halfway across Germany risked their lives on every trip.
The day before yesterday, W., who is the leader of this organisation of students, artists, and intellectuals, came to my house: a man deeply embittered by the death of his soldier son; sixty-three years old, with the elasticity of one in his thirties, and a face so haggard it is the very picture of death. And so I have been enrolled in a phalanx whose members’ lives are from now on balanced on a razor’s edge.
We talked through the whole of a midsummer night and well into the bright morn
ing—about future propagandising, about the English radio broadcasts (unfortunately so often misinformed about the trend of German public opinion), about points to be added to our program in future.
Herewith, a small sampling:
Immediate and definitive elimination of Berlin and Prussia as political centres of gravity.
An organisation to be launched at once, which will take over the task of cleansing the area of southern Germany immediately upon the overthrow of the Nazis.
Immediate expulsion of all Prussians arrived here since 1920. Immediate destruction of all war industry established in Bavaria since 1933.
Further, in order to ensure the emergence of a new Germany: immediate and complete expropriation of all heavy industry; immediate nationalisation of factories; immediate indictment for high treason for all those who have joined in dividing the spoils of the Hitler regime, with the very first trials to be of the von Papens, Meissners, Neuraths, Hindenburgs, Schröters, and their like.
Immediate indictment of all the generals responsible for the continuance of the war.
Not a bad beginning; not entirely devoid of hyperbole, certainly, and yet not without its germs of ideas as to how to end the mistakes of the last eighty years.
And are we bad Germans because we deliberate these things? This depends on which Germany you mean. If by ‘Germany’ is meant that gigantic heresy of Bismarck’s which is today in extremis, if it is forgotten that before that there existed a Reich which was the cradle and focus of the great ideas, and that this Reich lasted a thousand years, while the newcomers from Potsdam lasted a few decades before they failed, dragging down with them into the dust all the cultural treasures, the irreplaceable artefacts, the very memory of that earlier thousand years—then we are bad Germans!
Diary of a Man in Despair Page 17
