By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  Roma determined to act. She wrote to Mussolini’s right-hand man, the secretary of the party, Augusto Turati—an ex-fencer who knew and admired Nadi. Turati in turn spoke to Mussolini, and within twenty-four hours the chief of police was “transferred.” Some weeks later the policeman’s corpse was found in a ditch, the victim of a Blackshirt hit squad. When Il Duce decided to act, there were no half measures.

  By now, Mussolini’s interest in Italy’s great champion had been roused. He must have imagined Nadi as some Italian Gary Cooper—tall, unassuming but wonderfully accomplished, with great natural dignity—the perfect representative of the new Italy, if only the obstinate fencer could be made to play his part. Mussolini had recently coined the line “The plow makes the furrow, but the sword defends it.” Nadi was the incarnation of such a slogan.

  Acting on Mussolini’s instructions, Turati invited Nadi to Rome: “He [Mussolini] often asks me about you, he reads the exceptional reports from ambassadors and other Ministers about your fencing in the capitals of the world.… Let me know when you might be able to visit him, and I will set up a meeting.” Nadi ignored the letter. Turati wrote again; once more there was no response. When a third letter came, Roma told her husband he would have to make the journey. “You’re selling me out,” Nadi said angrily; but this time he went.

  Taking Roma with him, Nadi set off in a three-gear car. When he finally met Il Duce, on October 28, 1929, he greeted him not with the Fascist address expected of visitors but with a sharp military salute. He was playing with fire; but Mussolini took a liking to the independent sportsman, and the moment passed. The two men were like a comedy act, Mussolini, barrel-chested and squat, Nadi towering over him, sleek and slim. The meeting, scheduled to last fifteen minutes, went on for forty-five. Mussolini was quite clear as to what he wanted from his guest. He told Nadi he hoped he would come to Rome. He could bring his father down with him, and they would be provided with anything they wanted: their own fencing club, money, the freedom to come and go as they pleased. Mussolini would promote Nadi’s entire program. And Mussolini’s two sons—would Nadi teach them to fence too?

  Throughout the interview, Nadi remained studiously polite, but also adamant: he had no wish to move. Mussolini did not fly into one of his rages—perhaps intrigued that Nadi, unlike other visitors, had not asked for any favors. But he was not yet finished. Over the years, Nadi had received many awards from other governments—a major decoration from Hungary, the Légion d’Honneur from France—and Mussolini was keen to show he could be just as appreciative. As Nadi prepared to leave, Mussolini asked him to accept a photograph of a celebrated Italian actress, Ghitta Garrel. It showed her in a pretty white dress, not at some formal Fascist event. “You’re not going to turn this down as well, are you?” he joked. Slightly abashed, Nadi took the photo. Mussolini hugged and kissed him, and the interview was over. Only later did Nadi turn the photo over. Mussolini had written, “To Nedo Nadi with sympathy and admiration.” It was as if a virus had found a point of entry.

  Waiting in one of the anterooms were Cardinal Ascalesi of Naples and Italo Balbo, one of Mussolini’s main henchmen. Aware of the length of time Nadi had spent with Il Duce, Balbo, who knew Nadi through a family connection, exclaimed, “Hey, Livorno boy! You must have won him over!” Nadi said nothing and walked straight past the two men. He picked up Roma and, still silent, took the elevator down to the palace gardens and walked to the car. They drove through the Corso Umberto until they reached the Campidoglio Gardens; it was only then that Nadi started to talk. “He’s a fascinating man,” he told his wife. “Not like a dictator at all. A friendly eccentric. I felt sorry for him—he’s really passionate in what he believes in: he’s going to have a hard time of things.”

  News of Nadi’s meeting with Mussolini spread quickly, with reports in the newspapers and on the radio. The Fascists in his hometown were dumbfounded. What were they meant to do now? They decided to cross Nadi off their list, and all intimidation stopped. But Mussolini knew that he was on the way to getting what he wanted. Nadi went off to Argentina to become master at the Jockey Club of Buenos Aires—then not only a city with many fine fencers but, with the new wealth of the Argentine aristocracy, one of the world’s capitals of high-quality sports—but Mussolini kept up the courtship, raining a succession of official honors upon Nadi. By 1931 Nadi returned to Italy, to move to Rome to take up a five-year contract under Mussolini’s patronage as coach to the Italian national team—at a reported salary of $3,000 a month, quickly making him a lira millionaire. He would captain the team at the 1932 Games in Los Angeles and again in Berlin. Photos of the 1936 Olympics show him dressed in the infamous black shirt—and giving the Fascist salute.

  Nadi proved to be an inspiring captain, and at the Berlin Games the Italian fencers won four gold medals, three silver, and two bronze. The Germans, who had put high hopes on the fencing, ended with two bronze medals, a silver, and no gold. The other three gold medals (there were seven in all then) were all won by Hungary, so that the final fencing points table read Italy 68, Hungary 37, Germany 19. The triumph of the three fascist nations was complete.

  Despite Germany’s relatively poor showing in the fencing events, the 1936 Games were a huge propaganda coup for the Nazis. In the overall tally, it came first, well ahead of the United States, having swelled its victories by adding several events such as women’s gymnastics and yachting, in which it was strong, as well as irrelevant “sports” such as arts competitions. Hitler himself came to watch the fencing (where épée was fought electrically for the first time), which, with three hundred contestants from thirty-one nations, was the most cosmopolitan of any sport at the Olympics.

  THERE WAS ONE UNEXPECTED ABSENCE FROM THE FASCIST RANKS AT these games—that of the British épée team’s most infamous fencer: Oswald Mosley. He had been successively a Conservative, Independent, and Labour member of Parliament and a member of the 1929 Labour government, serving as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, with particular responsibility for unemployment. A brilliant speaker, he was often mentioned as a future prime minister—of either of the main parties—but his career came off the rails dramatically in 1931, when, dissatisfied with traditional alignments, he founded the New Party. Following a visit to Italy, he folded his organization into the British Union of Fascists, of which he soon became leader. Violently anti-Semitic, the party foundered at the polls, and Mosley ended in disgrace. He vacillated wildly in his political affiliations, but throughout everything he was consistent in one respect: he was a dedicated fencer.

  He had taken up the sport at fifteen at Winchester College, having reluctantly surrendered his first love, boxing, on medical advice. Nine months later he won the foil and saber public school titles (both the double victory and the early age set records). Later, training as an officer cadet at Sandhurst, he injured his right foot when he fell from an upstairs window, an injury exacerbated by a plane crash. Unable to lunge or flèche, he was forced to give up fencing.

  Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader, at an open-air épée practice in the mid-1930s. His injured right foot, the result of the accident he suffered at Sandhurst, is clearly visible. (illustration credit 14.3)

  When, in February 1931, Mosley started the New Party, many illustrious names followed him, drawn by his personal magnetism. The economist Maynard Keynes assured him of his vote, as did Harold Nicolson, the writer and diplomat; Winston Churchill’s twelve-year-old nephew Esmond Romilly campaigned for him at his preparatory school, and the Sitwell family, lions of the London literary world, were keen supporters. In another sphere Peter Howard, captain of the Oxford Rugby XV and soon to captain England, joined the pack. Leading Labour intellectuals such as John Strachey and Alan Young added weight to the group.

  Early on, Mosley said he was keen that his followers should be “fit” and “in training,” and for that reason he resumed fencing. He joined the London Fencing Club, where he was not popular with older members, most of them Tories who felt he had be
en a traitor to their party. Disregarding them, Mosley was so quick to regain his previous skills that within a year he was joint runner-up in the national épée championships. “To have returned with a gammy leg from a twenty-year lay-off to become runner-up in the British Epée Championship in 1932 was a formidable achievement,” his biographer Robert Skidelsky comments. “It also took up a formidable amount of time. Throughout 1932 he was fencing all over England.”8 His obsessiveness continued to bear fruit: in 1933 Mosley came third in the same championships: he was thus one of the leading épéeists of the time and for at least two years was a regular member of the British team.

  At the time of the general election of October 1931, the New Party was still attracting major figures: the novelist Peter Cheyney, himself a keen club fencer, Brendan Bracken and Randolph Churchill all joined, while Christopher Isherwood wrote for the Party’s magazine, Action. Although Mosley had not yet adopted the fascist name, his friend Malcolm Campbell carried the fascist colors on his car “Bluebird” when it broke the land speed record. But the election itself was a disaster for the New Party, which could muster only 36,377 votes from twenty-four constituencies. Even the Communists garnered 70,844. Mosley decided that dramatic action was necessary. That April, he adopted the fasces as his party’s symbol, the bundle of rods symbolizing unity, the ax the power of the state as carried by the lictors of ancient Rome. On October 1, 1932, the British Union of Fascists was formed; in 1936 Mosley introduced a new emblem, a flash of lightning within a circle. He also brought in the famous black shirts—black, “not only because it was the opposite to red but because at that time,” he explains in his autobiography, “it was worn by no one else in this country.” As a gesture toward their leader the fascists modeled the new uniform directly on the fencing jacket.9 Mosley, using the language of the catechism, described the dress as “the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.”

  In 1935 Mosley was a member of the British épée team that came fifth at the European Championships at Lausanne and could reasonably have expected Olympic selection in 1936. He gives the background to his exclusion in his memoirs: “It was decided that the British team in the traditional march past should not give the Olympic salute,” which had been invented by the Greeks more than two thousand years before Hitler or Mussolini were born, and consequently long before anyone thought of calling it the fascist salute. “As the French and nearly every other team decided to give the salute, it seemed on the one hand invidious that I should refrain, and on the other that it would show a lack of the team spirit appropriate to the occasion if I had been the only member of the British team to give it. So discretion became the better part of sportsmanship.”10 An unlikely and self-serving story, but not impossible. The following year, he was a team member (at forty-one) for the world championships, after which he drifted away from the sport. One of his last acts connected to fencing, shortly before the war, was to ask the British swordmaker Leon Paul to supply his party with knuckle-dusters (brass knuckles); Paul declined.

  HOWEVER HATEFUL, EVEN MALEVOLENT, MOSLEY’S CAREER WAS, IT pales besides that of the man whom one historian has called “almost certainly the most evil figure in modern history.” Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the internal security section of the SS, was one of the grandees of the Third Reich, the most powerful man in the country after Hitler and Heinrich Himmler. By 1936 he was deputy head of the Gestapo, as well as the Reich Criminal Police, the Frontier Police, and the Counterespionage Police. As Himmler’s deputy, he was directly responsible for implementing the “Final Solution”; Adolf Eichmann, among others, reported to him. Yet Heydrich was an enigmatic and complicated man. The son of an opera singer and composer (he was christened “Reinhard Tristan,” in homage to Wagner), he was a violinist of concert standard, a good chamber musician, and a passable pianist and singer.

  Heydrich had light blond hair, striking blue eyes set close together, and a beak of a nose dominating a long, equine face. His voice was high, and he had an unfortunate bleating laugh, which gained him the nickname “Ziege”—“nannygoat.” At the naval school in Flensburg-Murwick he was a brilliant pupil, one of its best tennis players, a good swimmer and keen sailor. He took up riding and trained for cross-country events, becoming a member of the naval pentathlon team in the mid-1920s. His outstanding skill, however, was as a saber fencer, an aptitude he displayed from the age of eleven. His widow recorded that he trained at least an hour every morning, before the day’s work began. Then on weekends there were competitions. “He became one of the most formidable swordsmen in Germany,” records a French biographer; “at one moment he thought of participating in the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936.”11

  Reinhard Heydrich at the time of the Berlin Olympics, the end of his aspirations as an international fencer. (illustration credit 14.4)

  Heydrich was not, however, of true Olympic caliber, and his attempts to inveigle his way into the German team were never likely to succeed. He would appear at competitions swathed in a freshly laundered white toweling robe emblazoned with Nazi insignia, with junior Gestapo members at hand to attend to his needs—and also, no doubt, to help intimidate opponents. It didn’t work: his fellow fencers would surreptitiously throw fights to each other to ensure that Heydrich never progressed to a stage from which he could seriously lobby for team selection. (When in 1930 Oswald Mosley had visited Italy he had been invited to take part in an épée match and won all his bouts but was aware that his hosts had made sure he would.) Undaunted, Heydrich set about creating the best club in Germany by enticing promising fencers into the SS, and in 1940 the SS club in Berlin won all three weapons in the German championships. Heydrich also recruited Joseph “Pepi” Losert, a 1936 Olympic saber finalist, to give him lessons—an extraordinary commitment for a man known for working all hours and whose range of sinister responsibilities was enormous.‡

  Heydrich displayed a rare benevolence in helping a former fencing champion, Paul Sommer, a Jew, to emigrate to the United States. Other kindnesses have been reported, notably to the Polish 1936 épée champion, Roman Kantor, whom Heydrich is said to have taken to Berlin (where he pumped him for information on Polish training techniques); but the official records show that Kantor was removed to Majdanek concentration camp in 1942 and died there the following year.

  It would be a mistake to underestimate Heydrich as a fencer. The expert coaching he received bore fruit. In November 1936 he came in fifth in épée and third in saber in the first SS Fencing Masters Tournament. In December 1941 a match was scheduled between Germany and Hungary, and at the last minute one of the German team dropped out. Heydrich took his place and performed second best of the German sabreurs. A sports journalist covering the match commented that this was “an almost unimaginable result when one considers the amount of other work he still managed.”

  Testimonies about Heydrich’s swordplay are of slight relevance set against his enormous crimes, but one senior officer in the SS, Walter Schellenberg, has provided an intimidating portrait in which the qualities he picks out could, in a different context, describe a fencing champion: “[He] had an incredibly acute perception of the moral, professional, human and political weaknesses of others,” Schellenberg records. “His unusual intellect was matched by the ever-watchful instincts of a predatory animal always alert to danger and ready to act swiftly and ruthlessly. Whatever his instincts pinpointed as useful he adopted, exploited and then if necessary dropped with equal swiftness. Whatever seemed redundant or to offer the slightest threat or inconvenience was thrown out.” The emphasis on simplicity and effectiveness would have certainly appealed to the great masters of the nineteenth century. Less so Schellenberg’s conclusion: “He was inordinately ambitious. He had to be the best in everything, regardless of the means.”12

  Imbued with his services’ dogma of Aryan superiority and utterly convinced of his own invincibility, Heydrich hated to lose. Civilians in particular tried to avoid fencing him. One evening in the late
1930s, a more-than-capable Austrian sabreur, Dr. Arthur Ferrarres-Waldstein, on a visit to Berlin, came to the SS club for practice. “There’s a new face—come here,” Heydrich said. The two men took to the strip, where the Austrian, unaware of Heydrich’s reputation, hit his opponent at will. Later he told another club member that he couldn’t understand the cold anger of his adversary. “You are expected to lose against him,” his friend said.

  Heydrich was a notoriously bad sport. “He can never lose, only complain,” a fellow fencer noted. In 1927, when the armed services failed to invite him to take part in their championships, he seethed for months. When, a year later, he finally did enter the naval pentathlon, he came only third out of five and took it characteristically badly, blaming the referee.13 Around this time he, his instructor, and two other naval officers took part in the second German officers’ tournament, held in Dresden. Heydrich was eliminated in the preliminary rounds and, in public view, flung his sword angrily to the floor after his final defeat and stomped away, swearing. His teammates looked on aghast.14

  His longtime master eventually had to take him aside and remind him that he was supposed to be a role model for SS fencers. Heydrich got the point and asked his master to let him know at once if at any future competition he acted in an unsporting way. Not long after, during the elimination rounds of a saber event, he again started to grumble at a judge’s decision. The referee reprimanded him publicly, saying, “On the fencing strip the laws of sporting fairness apply and nothing else.” Heydrich bit his tongue.

  When the occasion arose, he could swallow his beliefs. At the 1936 Olympics, in the negotiations over the jury just before a saber team match involving Germany, Heydrich made it clear that he wanted to have four Americans as side judges. “But they’re Jews!” he was told. “Yes, I know,” he replied, “but they’re still the fairest.” He favored a hierarchy of criteria, in which what was best for Germany took pride of place. Not only as a competitor did he feel he had to win. In 1937, he traveled as nonplaying captain to a tournament at Brussels. In a key team match the Belgian referee became aware that the German judges were cheating. He changed the entire jury, and the Germans lost. That evening the competition ended with a dinner dance, and one of the young British fencers, Mary Glen Haig, who would be an Olympic finalist in 1948, found herself waltzing with the German captain. “I said to him, ‘Bad luck on losing this afternoon.’ He said, ‘What do you mean, losing? We won.’ ”