He applied to the military authorities, and he discovered that his testimony before the court had made him a personality in his own right. Hitherto he had been, first the grandson of Budd Gunmakers, then the son of Budd-Erling; later all wires had been pulled for him by the hidden hand of F.D.R. Now for a few days, perhaps even a few weeks, he was the man who had dealt Hermann Göring a swift kick in the pants and had put the zip into that ponderous international trial that had become something of a bore. “Why, certainly, Mr. Budd, if you want to go back by way of Berlin and London, we can fix it up.”
Lanny had a seat in a plane—they were flying all over this conquered land, and only the conquerors rode in them. The conquerors commandeered whatever they wanted—hotels, apartments, offices, furniture, food—paying for it with paper money which they printed for the purpose. The Germans had done the same thing; indeed, it had become the custom all over the world. The ancient Romans had two words for it: Vae victis! Woe to the conquered!
II
The ex-P.A. was put up in a hotel in Grosser Wannsee and bummed a ride with some of the obliging officers whenever he wanted to get to the center of the city. Almost a year had passed since the war’s end, and all the streets had been cleared of rubble; but oh, the spaces between the streets! Lanny had got used to the sight of ruins by now, but the center of Berlin was in a class by itself. There had been so much here to destroy that the sheer mass of destruction overpowered the senses. All these colossal buildings that had been meant to last a thousand years; these structures of granite and marble and sandstone that had embodied the glories not merely of Adolf Hitler but of Frederick the Great and Bismarck and the Kaisers—all, all heaps of wreckage, with hardly one stone standing straight upon another!
And the beautiful Tiergarten, the park where lovers had strolled, and conspirators too—anybody who wanted to be sure that no spy could overhear his words! It had all been turned into tiny plots for growing vegetables, and these had long since been eaten. The trees that should by now have been showing signs of buds were stumps cut low by people seeking firewood. The huge white marble statues of the Hohenzollern ancestors were mostly lying in the mud.
Lanny went walking in this ruined Hauptstadt. The Kaiser’s Palace was smashed; the opera house was boarded up, and so was the Eden Hotel. The rounded roof of the Friedrichstrasse railroad station was a skeleton of black steel girders. He walked down famed Unter den Linden, as familiar to him as Fifth Avenue in New York. East from the damaged Brandenburger Gate, the American Embassy was only a shell, filled with bricks and girders up to the second story. Next was the Adlon, which had once been Lanny’s home for months at a time; it was smashed halfway down and its front boarded up; you could go in by a rear door, as into a coal mine; about fifty rooms were still in use. There was gap after gap in that great thoroughfare; the Russian Embassy, the Bristol Hotel—and Lanny, who had been in Hilde Donnerstein’s palace when it was hit, kept wondering how many persons of his acquaintance had perished in these various structures?
Spring had been on the way in Nürnberg, but here it was still cold; wind and rain came down from the North Sea, and people walked with their shoulders hunched and their coat collars turned up. You wouldn’t have thought it possible that anyone could be living in these ruins, but every now and then you would see a man or a woman disappear into them, and you would discover that they had dug down into the cellars and devised ways to keep themselves warm. They dug everywhere, and whenever they came upon something of value, be it only a broken doorknob, they would take it to the black market and exchange it for three American cigarettes or a quarter of a pound of bootleg coffee. To that had come these proud, tough Berliners, who had been so full of sophistication, thinking themselves several notches above the rest of Germany. They had marched so gaily into Hitler’s Third Reich, accepting Unser Hermann’s assurance that no enemy bomb would ever fall on German soil.
Lanny had been coming to this city since boyhood. He had been impressed by its splendor and had seen only the good side of the German people, their kindness and hospitality, their cleanness and love of order. The officers in their bright uniforms had been picturesque, and he had been amused by their mustaches, twisted up at the ends in imitation of their Kaiser. World War I had taught him what lay behind that façade, and from that time on he had feared Germany and the German dream which had arrived in the world too late. The Weimar Republic had filled him with naïve hopes; he had longed so for a Socialist world, and he had discovered to his grief that the victorious Allied world didn’t want anything of the sort, and for that matter neither did the Germans. Apparently the tough, grim Bolsheviks were the only kind of reformers who knew how to survive in such a world.
III
As Trudi Schultz had said to Lanny, they had been born at a bad time. They had had to watch the rise of that terrible Fascism, which took the worst pages out of Lenin’s book and used them against Lenin’s movement. Lanny’s art business had brought him into Germany again and again, and he had heard the Nazi rowdies singing their songs about world conquest and had been in position to know just which of the great industrialists were putting up the money to buy uniforms and rubber truncheons and revolvers for the gang. The rich men were so afraid of Bolshevism that they couldn’t imagine anything worse. That old turkey cock, Dr. Schacht, had been helping from the beginning, raising money for the militarists, and raising it for Hitler in Hitler’s turn. Always for Germany, he would say; always for finance capital—and for whoever had it!
Was it fate, as Göring insisted? Was modern civilization always going to be at the mercy of one or another kind of wholesale exploitation and its military agents? All the Big Business people Lanny had ever known had insisted that they were men of peace; Lanny had met hundreds of them in the course of his life with Robbie and Johannes and Irma and her friends, and he couldn’t recall one who hadn’t been sure he was a man of peace. Zaharoff, the munitions king of Europe, had been horrified by both World Wars, and had naïvely expected that he could go on manufacturing munitions and selling them to governments and never see them used, except in small wars, like the putting down of savages. Eugene Schneider of Schneider-Creusot, Zaharoff’s royal successor, had expressed the same idea to Lanny. Even Robbie, who considered wars inevitable, put the blame for them on other kinds of men than himself. Robbie was a man of peace, and if only the world would trust him and the rest of the businessmen, the competent, trained executives, the men of experience in affairs—if they could get together and run things they would quickly put the world in order.
What these efficient gentlemen had done was to devise an arrangement whereby the profits of the world’s industry flowed to them, automatically and inevitably; and what they meant by peace was that this system was to continue and that nobody should ever challenge or disturb it. What Robbie meant by order was that the exploiters of the different nations should confer and work out a fair division of the spoils. Flaws in the system, doubts of its permanence, never disturbed Robbie’s mind. American capitalism had provided the world with more plenty than the world had ever known before, and it was a model the other nations would follow as soon as they had arrived at the stage of intelligence in which they understood what was good for them.
IV
Such were Lanny Budd’s reflections, walking among the awful wreckage of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. He had managed to get Monck on the telephone—the Americans had restored parts of the system. The two men had made a date for dinner, and then Lanny strolled into the Russian sector—there were no restrictions as yet. He presented his credentials and asked for a permit to visit the ruins of the New Chancellery. Most of the old sights of Berlin were gone forever, but the one that he wanted to see was indestructible.
A little more than two years and a half had passed since he had last been in this enormous granite barracks—at least it had that shape. It represented Adi Schicklgruber’s idea of architecture, very big, very costly, and perdurable, a monument that could be used and admired si
multaneously. Then the stern, handsome young Aryans of the Leibstandarte had stood at every door, demanding passes and scrutinizing them carefully, accompanying you inside if you were a stranger. There was an enormous long corridor paved with red marble, and by and by you came to large doors with the bronze initials “AH” on them. Here you were questioned some more, then taken inside and thoroughly searched, whoever you might be.
Now the great ugly building was a corpse, sinking into slow decay. Bombed walls and ceilings had fallen, so that you could not get from the great entrance hall to the greater hall beyond. Rain had poured in through all the gaping windows and roof holes, and frost had broken up the panelings and the mosaic floors. The precious marble had been taken by the Russians to build a memorial, and the Soviet sentries at the entrances appeared indifferent and did not even bother to look at the American’s pass.
But the entrance to the garden had been cleared, and here Lanny presented his pass to a Russian officer who knew a little English and who warned him to keep to the paths, because of buried mines. In that part of the garden upon which the Führer’s private offices had looked out there stood an enormous block of concrete, as big as an ordinary cottage. It had one small but heavy steel door, which now had been cut open with a welding torch. Lanny went into a narrow passage which led to a flight of stairs going down into the earth. Overhead in that passage was eighteen feet of solid concrete, and the Führer’s skilled engineers had assured him that would be enough to resist the impact of a direct hit by the biggest bomb ever made. Apparently they had been right, for the block stood intact.
V
Using a torch borrowed from the guard—with three cigarettes by way of thanks—Lanny descended several flights of steps, thirty-five or forty in all, deep under the earth. Two years and a half ago when he had trod them, Hitler had led the way, followed by his Bavarian damsel, Eva Braun; then had come his American friend, then Heinrich Jung, and last of all the Führer’s steward, Arthur Kannenberg, who had been entertaining them with his accordion and the singing of G’stanzln, the folksongs which carried Adi back into his childhood. The sirens had been screaming, and presently the ground had quivered from the impact of bombs. Down there you couldn’t hear them, you felt them in your bones.
Now storms had driven in through the open doorway and the stairs were wet; there was a smell of dampness, burned stuff, and decay. Below was that elaborate place of refuge which had so astonished Lanny; a central hall, which had evidently become a guardroom, for double-decker metal bunks had been installed, and the floor was littered with smashed rifles, cartridges and empty shells, bloody bandages and moldering German uniforms. The steel door leading to the private apartments moved stiffly on its hinges, and Lanny went into the drawing-room where he had sat the air raid through. There was water on the floor, and the deep-pile carpets behaved like sponges under his feet. Apparently an attempt had been made to burn the place by piling the furniture against the paneled walls; the paintings on the walls were charred and blackened, and the overstuffed sofa on which Lanny had sat was turned to charred lumps floating on water.
VI
Lanny explored this place thoroughly, for even at the price of wet feet and dirty clothes he wanted to assure himself as to the truth of the stories he had read about the Führer’s death. Several of the rooms had been burned out, but not Hitler’s bedroom. Here were his plain bed and his desk, and beyond was his bathroom, the door open. He had brought Lanny to the bedroom to show him a lovely painting he had brought from the Bechstein Haus; but that place on the wall was empty now. Under it was another overstuffed sofa, made of some light-colored, highly polished wood, and according to the accounts Lanny had received from the American Intelligence officers at Berchtesgaden, it was on this sofa that Hitler and Eva had shot themselves. Eva had sat at the right end and had shot herself through the heart; her master, now her husband, had sat beside her and had shot himself through the temple, slumping forward.
Lanny looked, and there was the story written in blood on the brocaded upholstery, on the wooden arm of the sofa, and on the floor beside it and in front of it; bloodspots dried and hard but unmistakable. Ten months had passed, but nobody had been interested in scrubbing them away. Lanny took his pocketknife and cut out a section of the stained upholstery and put it into his pocket; he had the idea that he would frame it, mark it “Blood from the brain of Adolf Hitler,” and present it to some museum in America. It might serve as a warning to some ambitious politician of the future who might be tempted to seize power over the sweet land of liberty.
According to the story of Kempke, the chauffeur, he had helped to carry the body of Eva Braun up the stairs, wrapped in a blanket. The two bodies had been laid in a depression of the ground in the garden, left by some construction work. Many cans of gasoline had been poured over them, and when the flames had died down more gasoline had been thrown on, until the bodies had been entirely consumed.
Lanny inspected the rest of that elaborate Führerbuhker—dining-room, kitchen, storerooms, generator plant, engine room, refrigeration room, telephone and telegraph rooms, hospital and operating room, and accommodations for a dozen persons who worked at these various services. The place had been looted and smashed, and the floor was covered with litter of every sort; but one souvenir was enough.
The visitor climbed back to the fresh air and inspected the garden. It had been ripped up by shells—the Russian shelling had been going on while the funeral pyre was blazing. Lanny saw the depression in the ground, the blackened earth, and the charred stuff not yet entirely washed away; there were large gasoline tins, shot through with bullet holes, doubtless after they had been thrown into the flames. At one corner of the garden was an armored concrete watchtower, from which, according to the recorded accounts, a sentry of the SD—Sicherheitsdienst—had stood and watched the cremation. There was no longer any doubt in the ex-P.A.’s mind that the story of the Führer’s death was true in all details.
The Amerikansi returned to the Russian guard post, thanked the officer, and asked permission to dry his shoes and socks by the warm woodstove. They carried on a laborious conversation, while common soldiers stood by, grinning with pleasure over Lanny’s efforts at Russian and expressing wonder over the fine pair of American shoes. They were friendly when you got them alone and they were sure that no MVD man was within hearing. They were happy when an Amerikansi pointed to himself and said “Tovarish.” When he asked if they were sure that Adolf Hitler was dead they all nodded their heads and said, “Da! Da!” He made a sensation when he said that he had known President Roosevelt. When he said that he had visited Kuibyshev four years ago and had talked with Stalin they were too polite to say they didn’t believe him.
VII
Berlin had been divided into four sectors. The Russians had the largest, to the east; it contained most of the industries, and they had been busily carting off the machinery. They had plenty of justification, since the Germans had looted and wrecked the greater part of Russia and all of Poland; but much of the machinery was rusting because they had no place to store it and lacked the skill to put it to use. The Americans had the southwestern part, mostly residential, and the part which had been least destroyed. The British had the west-central, full of lakes and woods, and villas where they could be quite comfortable. The French had the smallest part, to the northwest; that was fair, since they had done by far the smallest part of the fighting.
In course of ten months all four of the groups had made the discovery that it is a complicated matter to govern three million people, most of whom do not understand your language. You couldn’t very well kill them, and you had to give them something to eat; you had to maintain public services, and let the workers have jobs to keep them out of mischief. So the Big Four were discussing the project of holding elections in the autumn and letting the Germans take over the operation of a central government under Allied control. A difficult situation, for even the conquerors didn’t understand one another’s languages, and still
less did they understand one another’s ideas and purposes. They all wanted to keep Germany down and make sure that she would never again try to conquer Europe; they faced the embarrassing fact that the essentials of modern industry, steel and coal and chemicals, including synthetic oil, are also the essentials of war, and plants can be quickly converted.
President Roosevelt had apparently been persuaded to the so-called “Morgenthau plan,” by which Germany was to be turned into an agricultural country. But in modern times the land had never been able to produce enough food for all its population; and who was going to make up the surplus? The Allies were up against the situation which had troubled old Clemenceau, the tiger of France; there were just twenty million too many Germans! They could perhaps be taught to limit their population, but who was going to see to that? They could perhaps be forced to emigrate, but what country would take them and who would pay the cost of transportation?
Or could they be tamed and taught to love democracy and drop their habit of putting on uniforms and marching and shouting Sieg Heil? Apparently that was what the Allies were deciding upon; but how were they to agree on the method? The Russians all wanted to make them into Marxist-Leninist Stalinists. Some British wanted to make them into Clement-Attlee Socialists and others into Winston-Churchill Tories. Some Americans wanted to make them into New Deal Democrats, and others into McKinley Republicans. The French, so far as Lanny was able to ascertain, wanted to make them into Frenchmen, at least those who lived anywhere near the River Rhine, and let the devil take the rest.