It was snowing outside, and Goering stopped in the doorway to shake hands. Gianelli had so far recovered that he came out with something Victor Henry considered absolutely vital. Henry was trying to think of a way to hint it to him, when the banker said, shaking hands with the air minister in a slight whirl of snow, 'Excellency, I will have to tell the President that your foreign minister does not welcome the Welles mission and has stated the Fuhrer does not."
Goering's face toughened. 'If Welles comes, the Fuhrer will see him.
That is official." Goering glanced up at the sky and walked through the snow with the two Americans to their car, as a Luftwaffe officer drove it up to the entrance. "Remember this. Germany is like all countries. Not everybody here wants peace. But I do."
Victor Henry sat up most of the night writing his report, so it could go back to the President in the banker's hands. It was a longhand account, poured out pell-mell. After a tale of the facts up to Goering's last words in the snow, Victor Henry wrote: The key question is, of course, whether or not a peace mission by Sumner Welles is now expected in the Third Reich. It seems inconceivable that in an interview with Hitler, Goering, and Ribbentrop, your emissary got no clear-cut answer. I believe that Sumner Welles will be received by Hitler. But I don't think the mission wig achieve anything, unless the Allies want to change their minds and accept some version of the "outstretched hand' formula.
None of the three men seemed to take the interview very seriously.
They have bigger matters on their minds. We were a pair of nobodies. I would guess that Goering wanted it to take place, and that Hitler, being there in Karinhall anyway, didn't mind. I got the feeling that he enjoyed sounding off to a pair of Americans who would report directly to you. All three men acted as though the offensive in the west is ready to roll. I don't think they give a damn whether Welles comes or not. If the British are really as set on their terms as Hitler is on his, you'll have all-out war in the spring. The parties are too far apart.
Goering, it.;eems to me, is playing a side game by his peace talk.
This man is the biggest thug in the Third Reich- He looks like a circus freakthe man is really disgustingly fat and dolled up-but he is the supreme realist in that crowd, and the unchallenged number two man.
He has made a good thing out of Nazism, much more than the others.
Mr. Gianelli will no doubt describe Karinhall to you. It's vulgar but stupendous. Goering may be smart enough, even though he's riding high, he must realize that no string of good luck lasts forever.
If the offensive should happen to go sour, then the man who always wanted peace will be right there, weeping tears over the fallen Fuhrer and happy to take on the job.
Ribbentrop can only he described-if you will forgive me, Mr.
President-as the classic German son of a bitch. He is right out of the books with his arrogance, bad manners, obtuseness, obstinacy, and self-righteousness. I think this is his nature, but I also believe he echoes how Hitler feels. This is just the old Navy business of the commanding officer being the impressive 'old man," while the exec is the mean crab doing his dirty work. Hitler unquestionably hates your guts and feels you've interfered and crossed him up far too much. He also feels fairly safe defying the USA, because he knows how public opinion is divided. All this'Ribbentrop exprd for him in no uncertain terms, leaving the boss free to be the magnanimous German Napoleon and the savior of Europe.
Driving away from Karinhall, I had a reaction like coming out of a trance. I began to remember things about Hitler that I really forgot while I was listening to him and translating his words: the ravings in Mein Kampf, the way he has broken his word time after time, his wild lies, the fact that he started the war, the _Rmesome bombing of Warsaw, and his persecution of the Jews. It's a measure of his persuasiveness that I could forget such things for a while, facing the man who has done them. He's a spellbinder. For big crowds I've heard him do coarse belligerent yelling, but in a room with a couple of nenous foreigners he can be-if it suits him-the reasonable, charming world leader. They say he can also throw a foaming rage; we saw just a hint of that, and I certainly believe it. But the picture of him as a ludicrous nut is a falsehood.
He never sounded more confident than when he said that he and the Germans are one. He simply knows this to be the truth. Take away his mustache, and he sort of looks like all the Germans rolled into one.
He isn't an aristocrat, or a businessman, or an intellectual, or anything whatever except the German man in the street, somehow inspired.
It's vital to understand this relationship between Hitler and the German people. The present aim of the Allies seems to be to pry the two apart.
I have become convinced that it can't be done. For better or worse, the Allies still have the choice of knuckling under to Hitler or beating the Germans. They had the same choice in 1936, when beating the Germans would have been a cinch. Nothing has changed, except that the Germans may now be invincible.
The glimpse of cross-purposes at the top may have showed a weakness of the Nazi structure, but if so it's all internal politics, it has nothing to do with Hitler's hold on the Germans. That includes Goering and Ribbentrop. When he entered the room they stood and cringed.
If Hitler were the hal&crazy, half-comical gangster we've been reading about, this war would be a pushover, because running a war takes brains, steadiness, strategic vision, and skill. Unfortunately for the Allies, he is a very able man.
Rhoda hugged and kissed Pug when he told her about the weekend.
He didn't mention Steller's part in what Fred Fearing called robbing the Jews. It wasn't precisely that; it was a sort of legalized expropriation, and damned unsavory, but that was life in Nazi Germany.
There was no point in making Rhoda share his uneasy feelings, when one reason for accepting Steller's hospitality was to give her a good time.
The chauffeur sent by Steller drove past the colonnaded entrance to Abendrub and dropped them at a back door, where a maid conducted them two flights up narrow servants' stairs. Pug wondered whether this was a calculated German insult. But the spacious, richly furnished bedroom and -sitting room looked out on a fine snowy vista of laKn, firs, winding river, and thatched outbuildings; two servants came to help them dress; and the mystery of the back stairs geared up when they went to dinner.
The curving ipain staircase of Abendruh, two stories high, balustraded in red marble, had been entirely covered with a polished wooden slide. Guests in dinner clothes stood on the brink, the men laughing, the ladies giggling and shrieking- Down below other guests stood with the stellers, watching an elegantly dressed couple sliding down, the woman hysterical with laughter as her gireen silk dress pulled away from her gartered thighs.
'Oh my gawd, Pug, I'll DIEI" chortled Rhoda. "I can't possimly!
I've practically NOMwGon undemeatbf y don't they wmm a girl!"
But of course she made the slide, screaming with embarrassed delight, exposing her legs-which were very shapely-clear up to her lacy underwear. She arrived at the bottom scarlet-faced and convulsed, amid cheers and congratulations, to be welcomed by the hosts and introduced to fellow weekenders. It was a sure icebreaker, Victor Henry though if a trifle gross. The Germans certainly had the touch for these things, Next day when he woke he found a green leather hunting costume laid out for him, complete with feathered hat, belt, and dagger. The men were a varied crowd: Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht officers, other bankers, the president of an electrical works, a prominent actor. Pug was the only foreigner.
The jolly group took him wamily into their horseplay and joking, and then into the serious business of the hunt. Pug liked duck-hunting, but killing deer had never appealed to him. General Armin von Roon was in the party, and Pug lagged behind with the hook-nosed general, who remarked that to see a deer shot made him feel ill. In this meeting Roon was more loquacious than before. The forest was dank and cold, and like the others he had been drinking schnapps.
They talked first about the Uni
ted States, where, as it.turned out, Roon had attended the Army War College. Then the general discussed the Polish campaign, and the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, which he surprisingly called a disaster, because of all the ground Stalin had gained without firing a shot. His grasp of the field operations was masterly. His estimate of Hitler, Victor Henry thought, was cold-blooded and honest.
Roon scarcely veiled his contempt for the master race theories of the Nazis, or for the Party itself, but he was making out a strong case for Hitler as a German leader, when shots rang out and a nearby hullabaloo drew them to join the party, ringed around a small deer lying dead in blood-spattered snow. A ceremony ensued of horn-blowing and pushing a sprig of fir into the dead mouth over the bloody lolling tongue. Henry became separated from the general. That evening he looked for him before dinner, and was sorry to learn that Roon had been summoned back to Berlin.
After dinner, a string quartet played Beethoven in a cream-and-gold French music room, and a fat-bosomed famous soprano sang Schubert songs. The guests listened with more attention than Pug could muster; some, during the lieder, had tears in their eyes. Rhoda felt in her element, for in washington she was a patroness of music. She sat beaming, whispering expert comments between numbers. Dancing followed, and one German after another danced with her. From the floor, she kept darting sparkling looks of gratitude at her husband, until Steller took him in tow to a library, where the actor and Dr.
Knopfinann, the head of the electrical works, sat over brandy.
As yet, on the weekend, Pug had not heard a word about the war.
Conversation had stayed on personal chatter, business, or the arts.
'Ah, here is Captain Henry," said the actor in a rich -ringing voice.
"What better authority do you want? Let's put it to him." A gray-moustached man with thick hair, he played emperors, generals, and older men in love with young women. Pug had seen his famous King Lear at the Schauspielhaus. His face just now was purple-red over his stiff collar and buckling starched shirt.
'It might embarrass him," Dr. Knopfmann said.
"No war talk now. That's out," said Steller. "This weekend is for pleasure." "I don't mind," Pug said, accepting brandy and settling in a leather chair. "What's the question?"
"I create illusions for a living," rumbled the actor, 'and I believe illusions should be confined to the stage. And I say it is an illusion to hope that the United States will ever allow England to go down."
'Oh, to hell with all that," said the banker.
Dr. Knopfrnann, a twinkling-eyed, round-faced man like the captain of the Bremen, but much shorter and fatter, said, 'And I maintain that it isn't 1917. The Americans pulled England's chestnuts out of the fire once, and what did they get for it? A bellyful of ingratitude and repudiation. The Americans will accept the fait accompli. They are realists. Once Europe is normalized, we can have a hundred years of a firm Atlantic peace."
'IMat do you say, Captain Henry?" the actor asked.
"The problem may never come up. You still have to lick England."
None of the three men looked very pleased. The actor said, "Oh, I think we can assume that's in the cards-providing the Americans don't step in. That's the whole argument."
Steller said, "Your President doesn't try to hide his British sympathies, Victor, does he? Quite natural, in view of his Anglo-Dutch ancestry. But wouldn't you say the people are against him, or at least sharply split?"
"Yes, but America is a strange country, Dr. Steller. Public opinion can shift fast. Nobody should forget that, in dealing with us."
The eyes of the Germans flickered at each other. Dr. Knopfmann said, "A shift in public opinion doesn't just happen. It's manufactured."
"There's the live nerve," Steller said. "And that's what I've found difficult to convey even to the air marshal, who's usually so hardheaded.
Germans who haven't been across the water are impossibly provincial about America. I'm sorry to say this goes for the Fuhrer himself. I don't believe he yet truly grasps the vast power of the American Jews. It's a vital factor in the war picture."
"Don't exaggerate that factor," Henry said. "You fellows tend to, and it's a form of kidding yourselves."
"My dear Victor, I've been in the United States nine times and I lived for a year in San Francisco. Who's your Minister of the Treasury?
The Jew Morgenthau. Who sits on your highest court, wielding the most influence? The Jew Frankfurter."
He proceeded to reel off a list of Jewish officials in Washington, stale and boring to Pug from endless repetition in Nazi propaganda; and he made the usual assertion that the Jews had American finance, communications, justice, and even the Presidency in their pockets.
Steller delivered all this calmly and pleasantly. He kept repeating 'Der jude, tier jude' without a sneer. There was no glare in his eye, such as Pug had now and then observed when Rhoda challenged some vocal anti-Semite. The banker presented his statements as though they were the day's stock market report.
"To begin with," Pug replied, a bit wearily, "the Treasury post in our country has little power. It's a minor political reward.
Christians hold all the other cabinet posts. Financial power lies with the banks, the insurance companies, the oil, rail, lumber, shipping, steel, and auto industries, and such. They're wholly in Christian hands. Always have been." "Lehman is a banker," said Dr.
Knopfmann.
"Yes, he is. The famous exception." Pug went on with his stock answers to stock anti-Semitism: the all but solid Christian ownership of newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses, the Christian composition of Congress, the cabinet, and the executive branch, the eight Christian judges out of rune on the Supreme Court, the paramount White House influence of a Christian, Harry Hopkins, and all the rest.
On the faces of his hearers appeared the curious universal smirk of Germans when discussing Jews: condescending, facetious, and cold, with superior awareness of a very private inside joke.
Steller said in a kindly tone, "That's always the Jewish line, you know, how unimportant they are." 'Would you recommend that we take away what businesses they do have? Make Obiekte of them?"
Steller looked surprised and laughed, not in the least offended.
"You're better informed than many Americans, Victor. It would be an excellent idea for the health of your economy. You'll come to it sooner or later."
"Is it your position," the actor said earnestly, "that the Jewish question really has no bearing on America's entry into the war?" 'I didn't say that. Americans do react sharply to injustice and suffering." The smirk reappeared on the three faces, and Knopfmann said, "And your Negroes in the South?"
Pug paused, "It's bad, but it's improving, and we don't put them behind barbed wire."
The actor said in a lowered voice, "That's a political penalty. A Jew who behaves himself doesn't go to a camp."
lighting a large cigar, his eyes on the match, Steller said, "Victor speaks very diplomatically. But his connections are okay. One man who's really in the picture is Congressman Ike Lacouture of Florida. He fought a great battle against revising the Neutrality Act." With a sly glance at Pug, he added, "Practically in the family, isn't he?"
This caught Pug off guard, but he said calmly, "You're pretty well informed. That's not exactly public knowledge."
Steller laughed. "The air minister knew about it. He told me.
He admires Lacouture. What happened to the dance music? Ach, look at the time. How did it get to be half past one? There's a little supper on, gentlemen, nothing elaborate-" He rose, puffing on the cigar. 'The American Jews will make the greatest possible mistake, Victor, to drag in the United States. Lacouture is their friend, if they'll only listen to him. You know what the Fuhrer said in his January speech-if they start another world war, that will be the end of them. He was in deadly earnest, I assure you."
Aware that he was butting a stone wall, but unable to let these things pass, Pug said, 'Peace or war isn't up to the Jews. And you grossly mis
understand Lacouture."
"Do I? But my dear Captain, what do you call the British guarantee to Poland? Politically and strategically it was frivolous, if not insane. All it did was bring in two big powers against Germany on the trivial issue of Danzig, which was what the Jews wanted.
Churchill is a notorious Zionist. All this was clearly stated between the lines in Lacouture's last speech. I tell you, men like him may still manage to restore the peace and incidentally to save the Jews from a very bad fate they seem determined to bring on themselves.
Well-how about an omelette and a glass of champagne?"
On Christmas Eve, Victor Henry left the embassy early to walk home. The weather was threatening, but he wanted air and exercise.
Berlin was having a lugubrious Yuletide. The scrawny newspapers had no good war news, and the Russian attack on Finland was bringing little joy to Germans. The shop windows offered colorful cornucopias of appliances, clothing, toys, wines, and food, but people burned sullenly along the cold windy streets under dark skies, hardly glancing at the mocking displays. None of the stuff was actually for sale. As Pug walked, evening fell and the blackout began. Hearing muffled Christmas songs from behind curtained windows, he could picture the Berliners sitting in dimly fit apartments in their overcoats around tinsel-draped fir trees, trying to make merry on watery beer, potatoes, and salt mackerel. At Abendruh, the Henrys had almost forgotten that there was a war on, if a dominant one, and that serious shortages existed. For Wolf Steller there were no shortages.
Herman Wouk - The Winds Of War Page 42
