Making History

  “Herr Gloder,” he shouted above the cries of Einheit! Einheit! and the stamping of feet. “My name is Anton Drexler. I founded this party. We need you.”

  MODERN HISTORY

  Firestone

  “I need you, Steve. You have to help me find a library.”

  Steve dropped some dollar bills onto the beer-sodden table and hurried after me.

  “Jesus man, what has gotten into you?”

  “Where’s the nearest?”

  “Library? God’s sake, this is Princeton.”

  “Any good one will do. Please!”

  “Okay, okay. There’s the Firestone on campus, just across the street.”

  “Come on then!”

  We ran past a post office, up the side of Palmer Square and into Nassau, across which I hurled myself without a sideways glance.

  “Heck, Mikey. You ever hear of jaywalking?”

  “I’m sorry, but I have to know.”

  The Firestone Library was a gaunt, stone cathedral of a building, crowned by a huge tower finned with sharp buttresses that launched up from the roof like a rocket. I stood in the doorway and turned to Steve. “This has everything?”

  Steve shook his head with something approaching despair. “Mikey,” he said. “There’s over eleven million books on campus and most of them are here.”

  “And I’m allowed to use it?”

  He nodded with glum resignation and pushed open the door.

  “History,” I hissed to him as we walked towards a massive central desk. “Where’s Modern European History?”

  “I think maybe we’d better reserve a carrel,” was his response.

  “A what?”

  “You know, a carrel . . .”

  I shook my head in puzzlement.

  “A room,” said Steve irritably, plucking a white paper slip from the desk. “A private room for reading. A carrel. What the hell else do you call them?”

  After half an hour’s bureaucratic delay and whispered shelf raiding, we found ourselves in one of these carrels: a small, square room equipped with a desk, a chair and handsome prints of eighteenth-century Princeton on the walls. On the table in front of me lay our hoard of twelve books. I sat down, picked up Chronicle of World History, took a deep breath and turned to H for “Hitler.”

  Nothing.

  “You don’t have to stay,” I said to Steve over my shoulder.

  “That’s okay,” said Steve, who was settling himself in the corner in a lotus position, a pictorial book of military history laid out from knee to knee. “Hey, I might even learn something.”

  Maybe he did learn something. I was too engrossed to pay much attention.

  I turned to N for “Nazi” and after staring for a while at this strange new name, to G for “Gloder.” My fingers scrabbled at the paper, peeling back page after page of the entry, to see how much was given over to this one man. Seventy pages, listed under different headings, each contributed by a different historian. The first entry pronounced itself to be a chronological biography.

  donal. (1894-1966) Founder and leader of the Nazi Party, Reich Chancellor and guiding spirit of the Greater German Reich from 1928 until his overthrow in 1963. Head of State and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, Führer of the German Peoples. Born Bayreuth, Bavaria, on 17 August, 1894, the only son of a professional oboist and music teacher, Heinrich Gloder (q.v.) and his second wife Paula von Meissner und Groth (q.v.), the young Rudolf was encouraged by his mother, who considered that she had married beneath herself, to believe that he came of aristocratic stock. Much has been written about Paula’s connec­tions with the German and Austrian aristocracy (see: Gloder: the Nobleman, A. L. Parlange, Louisiana State University Press, 1972; Prince Rudolf? Mouton and Grover, Toulane, 1982, etc.), but there is little real evidence to show that his background was any­thing but that of a typical middle-class Bavarian family of the period. In later life, when ascending to power, Gloder went to great lengths to stress the ordinariness of his formative years, even hinting at years of poverty and hardship, but these claims bear as little inspection as his later claims of descendancy from a Habsburg line.

  As a child there is no doubt that the young Rudolf was a con­siderable prodigy, proving himself an accomplished musician, equestrian, artist, athlete and swordsman. He was able to read and write in four languages, as well as the obligatory Latin and Greek expected of any Gymnasium student, by the time he was fourteen. Such contemporary accounts as can be trusted show that he was popular with his schoolfellows and teachers and the papers relating to his admission to the military academy at Munich in 1910, when he was sixteen, offer glowing testimonials to the high esteem in which he was held by all who knew him.

  At the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 Gloder joined the 16th Bavarian Infantry Reserve Regiment as an enlisted man, a decision that distressed his mother and puzzled many of his friends. His own account of his wartime experiences (Kampf Parolen, Munich 1923, “Fighting Words” trans. Hugo Ubermayer, London 1924), a masterpiece of false modesty and glamorous self-romanticization, makes the claim that he wished to fight shoulder to shoulder with ordinary Germans. There can be no question, cer­tainly, that had he joined as an officer in any of the smarter regi­ments that would have welcomed a cadet of such impressive qualifications, he would never have been able to match the unex­ampled achievement of his giddy rise through the ranks from Pri­vate Gemeiner to full Staff Major, collecting on the way, among other decorations, the Iron Cross, First Class, in the Oak Leaf and Diamond orders.

  I lowered the book for a moment and stared at the wall facing me. The 16th Bavarian Infantry Reserve. The Regiment List. Hitler’s regiment.

  The Germany to which Gloder returned late in 1918 following the signing of the 11th November Armistice was a nation in political uproar. Assigned the role of Vertrauensmann by Colonel Karl Mayr of the Bavarian Army Propaganda Unit, with a brief to keep an eye on the scores of burgeoning right- and left-wing political organizations springing up almost daily in the politi­cal vacuum left by Munich’s abortive revolution of April 1919, Gloder attended in the September of that year a meeting of the fringe ultra-right faction, the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the Ger­man Workers’ Party, led and founded by Anton Drexler (q.v.), a thirty-six-year-old railway-yard toolmaker. Although numbering fewer than fifty members, Gloder saw the DAP’s apparently self-contradictory blend of anti-Marxist socialism and anti-capitalist nationalism as containing exactly the right ingredients for a party of national unity. Within six months Gloder had cut off all offi­cial contact with the Reichswehr, resigned from Mayr’s propa­ganda unit, joined the DAP, ousted the “National Chairman,” a Thule Society agitator named Karl Harrer (q.v.) and elbowed aside Drexler himself to assume full leadership as Führer or leader of the party.

  In 1921, he added the prefix Nationalsozialistisch to the DAP’s official title. Despite his loathing of socialism and labor unions, Gloder recognized the need for his party to attract ordinary working men who might otherwise be drawn into Marxism and Bolshevism. The NSDAP rapidly acquired, from the German pro­nunciation of the first four letters of its title, the universally ap­plied sobriquet “Nazi,” claiming for its own the Hakenkreuz or swastika as its proprietary symbol, much to the disgust of other right-wing groups who had used it since the previous century in their literature and street banners.

  Gloder’s greatest gifts, in the early days of the party, were of organization and of demagoguery. Known for his ready, caustic wit, early rivals dismissed him as a comedian, but he was able to turn the unkindly meant nicknames of Gloder der ulkiger Vogel, or Rudi der Clown, into weapons of rhetorical attack against his enemies. There is no question, however, that it was his charm that won him the most friends and the steady stream of new recruits from all classes of society to the party, that by the early 1920s had swelled to a flood. Naturally endowed with good looks, an ath­letic bearing and a mov
ie-star smile, Gloder’s ability to cultivate the admiration and trust of natural political enemies was leg­endary. The industrial and military classes had faith in him, the ordinary man admired and envied him and women all over Ger­many (and beyond) openly worshiped him.

  Organizationally, he grouped the party into sections that were to deal with issues that he considered critical to the achievement of the growth of this fledgling party and the wider growth, when the time came, of greater Germany herself.

  Propaganda was of huge importance and the recruitment to the party of Josef Goebbels (q.v.), an academic Rhinelander of strict Catholic upbringing who had been rejected for war service on account of a polio-crippled leg, could not have been more timely. Goebbels’s fear of being considered a “bourgeois intellec­tual” and his own sense of physical inferiority had led him to formulate a sentimental mythology of blond Nordic purity and manly Spartan virtues: in Goebbels’s eyes, Rudolf Gloder was the physical, spiritual and intellectual embodiment of all these Aryan ideals and from their first meeting, Goebbels’s considerable gifts of oratory, and his natural, modern grasp of the techniques of news-reel and radio, were placed entirely at his Führer’s service.

  Propaganda was for Gloder the means to achieve and maintain political power, but over the years he came to the view that an almost equal significance lay in the potential of science, engineer­ing, and technological innovation. Swallowing his natural anti-Semitism, Gloder went out of his way to court the physicists of Göttingen University and other centers of scientific excellence, where developments in atomic and quantum physics were reach­ing far ahead of any comparable institutions outside Germany. It was Gloder’s belief, prophetic as it turned out, that the good faith of the scientific community was essential for the future of Germany. This firmly held view ran counter to the instincts of ideologues such as Dietrich Eckart, Alfred Rosenberg and Julius Streicher (q.q.q.v.) and even his close friend Goebbels, who be­lieved, with the others, that “Jew Science” could only pollute a new Germany. Dietrich Eckart, the title of whose poem Deutschland Erwache! became the first slogan of Nazism, had helped fund the purchase of the Völkischer Beobachter, the official newspaper of the NSDAP, but fell out with Gloder over what he now saw as his leader’s soft-pedaling tactics against the Jews and the two never spoke again before Eckart’s death in 1923. At the time of Eckart’s funeral, Gloder complained to Goebbels that Eckart never understood that to frighten the Jews away early would be a tacti­cal error (Am Anfang, Rudolf Gloder, Berlin 1932, “My Early Life,” trans. Gottlob Blumenbach, New York 1933). Gloder would use anti-Semitism among the workers as a unifying slogan, but not at the expense of wasting the vital resources of Jewish sci­ence and banking. In secret meetings with the Jewish community throughout his early years, meetings of which even his most trusted allies were unaware, Gloder was able to convince promi­nent Jews that his party’s anti-Semitism was public posture and that Jews in Germany had less to fear from him than from the Marxists and other rightist factions.

  Gloder’s third plank of policy in these early days was to orga­nize an inner cadre, under the ruthless leadership of Ernst Röhm (q.v.), which used violent techniques of street-fighting and intimi­dation to frighten off opponents and to quell heckling and counter demonstrations from the left. Although these lawless squads of ex-servicemen and unemployed manual workers inspired fear and contempt in the liberal intellectuals of the time, Gloder managed privately to disavow and deprecate, to those who mattered, the brutal methods of his own party. He personally made friends with many writers, scientists, intellectuals, industrialists and jurists for whom Nazism seemed anathema, apparently convincing them that the tactics of Röhm, the party’s second-in-command and Gloder’s personally appointed deputy, were a temporary expedient, a price worth paying for the defeat of communism.

  At the same time, Gloder traveled regularly and extensively, visiting France, Britain, Russia and the United States, making great use of his linguistic gifts and charm of manner. Although during this period (1922-1925) the Nazi Party had not run in a single election, it had grown within four years to become, after the Social Democrats (q.v.) and Communists, the third largest party in Germany and a real force to be reckoned with. Gloder’s journeys abroad, in his famous red Fokker airplane (trading none too sub­tly on the universally respected image of Baron von Richthofen with whom he also later claimed kinship) were designed to demon­strate to the world and to Germans back home that he was a rea­sonable, civilized man, a man of culture and statecraft who cut a credible figure on the world stage. He explained to those foreign politicians who would receive him (and there were many) that he could not put his party up for election until he was able to amelio­rate the terms of the Versailles Treaty (q.v.). In this way he out­flanked the Social Democrats, forged links with power brokers in Europe and America and made a name for himself in the inter­national arena at a time when Germany was an almost entirely inward-looking nation, still dealing with the shame of military defeat and the humiliation of the enforced peace. During these years of travel, Gloder appeared in a Hollywood silent picture, guying his own reputation for oratory and wit (The Public Speaker, Hal Roach, 1924), played golf with the Prince of Wales (q.v.), danced with Josephine Baker (q.v.), climbed the Matterhorn and forged many friendships and alliances that were to prove crucial in the years to come.

  In 1923 Gloder repelled the advances of Erich Ludendorff (q.v.), whose dreams of power encompassed the dismantling of the Weimer Republic (q.v.) and the installation of a military-style junta in its place. Ludendorff had attempted to seize power once before in Berlin during the abortive Kapp putsch of 1920, and Gloder distrusted the veteran General’s political judgment. He distrusted even more the extreme forms of paranoia against Free­masonry, Jesuitism and Judaism exhibited by Ludendorff’s insis­tence that “supranational powers” had caused the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand (q.v.) in Sarajevo as well as the military defeat of Germany in 1918. The General had even gone so far as to claim that both Mozart and Schiller had been murdered by “the grand Cheka of the supranational secret society.” Gloder gave orders that no Nazi should assist Ludendorff in this new attempt to take the reins of power, and it is probable he tipped off the Weimar authorities in November when, at the head of an army of barely two hundred, Ludendorff rode into the center of Munich from the Bürgerbräukeller, to be summarily arrested on a charge of treason.

  This ability on the part of Gloder to wait for the right moment was best tested five years later in 1928, when he once more refused to allow the NSDAP to run in the national elections. He persuaded the upper echelons of his party that they could not expect to win such an election and that even were they to do so, the economic conditions were not propitious. An element of pros­perity was entering German life and the Social Democrats were riding high in public opinion. It was far better to exercise patience and to wait.

  A few months later, the Wall Street Crash (q.v.) and the onset of the Great Depression (q.v.) was to prove the acumen of this political judgment. Hjalmar Schacht, Fritz Thyssen, Gustav Krupp, Friedrich Flick (q.q.q.q.v.) and other wealthy German industrial magnates quickly gauged the incompetence of the Social Democrats in the face of this unprecedented world slump and began to pour money into the coffers of Gloder’s Nazi party, by now convinced that only he possessed the necessary combination of sophisticated statecraft and popular backing to lead Germany out of its spiraling economic crisis.

  By the Fall of 1929, with hyperinflation rampant and unem­ployment reaching epidemic proportions it was clear that . . .

  “Christ, Mikey, how much longer are you gonna be?”

  I looked up, startled. “What time is it?”

  “Damn near six o’clock.”

  “Hell, I’ve only just begun. Can I take these books away with me?”

  Steve shook his head. “Not the reference stuff, not the encyclope­dias and all. They have to stay on-site. Guess you can take out these okay . .
.”

  He went to the table and picked up two smaller books. Textbooks on European history.

  “I’ll take them then,” I said and stood and stretched. “Christ, I’m sorry. You must have been so-o-o bored, Steve. Why didn’t you go? I reckon I know my way back to Henry Hall by now.”

  Steve tucked the books under his arm. “I’ll tag along,” he said.

  “Honestly, you don’t have to.”

  He looked down at the carpet, embarrassed. “Fact is, Mikey . . .”

  “What?”

  “See, Professor Taylor, he told me not to let you out of my sight.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Yes. I see. Thinks I’m dangerous, does he?”

  “Maybe he figures you might get lost. You know, get yourself into trouble, do yourself some more damage.”

  I nodded. “Well, it’s awful for you. I’m sorry.”

  “Hey, will you do me a favor? Will you stop apologizing all the time?”

  “It’s an English habit,” I said. “We’ve so much to be sorry for.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  As I opened the door into the corridor, Steve stopped. “Gee! I just had a thought. Does it have to be books?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “How about carts?”

  “Carts?”

  “Yeah, if you wanna study history you can take out carts.”

  “I don’t want to sound stupid,” I said, “but what the hell is a cart?”

  Ten minutes later we were walking out of the Firestone building, two borrowable library books and a stack of carts under my arm.

  “So,” said Steve. “You going to tell me what this is all about? This sudden need to know all about the Nazi Party?”

  “I wish I could tell you,” I said. “But I know you’d just think I was mad.”

  Steve stopped and considered for a moment. “Here’s what we do. See that building over there? That’s the Chancellor Green Student Center. We go in. We pick up some pizzas and some doughnuts and some soda and whatever stuff else we feel like and we take it back to your place. Then you tell me everything that’s in your mind. Deal?”