The Americans were free and believed in freedom, but their notions of justice were derived from a previous century—or so at any rate Bernhardt Monck believed. It had been possible for workers to be free so long as industry was primitive and tools were few and simple; but when the tools had become billion-dollar corporations, there could no longer be true freedom for the workers until those tools were socially owned and democratically managed. But you would have a hard time telling that to any American who knew that his country was the richest and most productive in the world, and who read in his newspaper every day that this was due solely to the fact that the tools of production were privately owned and managed.
The Americans had come to Germany and overthrown the Nazis; and now they were engaged in restoring that same system of private ownership, overlooking the fact that it was the private owners of industry in Germany—the great steel-cartel masters—who had subsidised and set up the Nazis in power, in order to keep the German workers from passing laws for the socialisation of German industry. Here was Bernhardt Monck, employed and paid a salary by American Military Government in order to find out whether this man and that had been a Nazi; Monck would go to work and learn that some man had been an active Nazi, and then he would discover that the man was being employed anyhow—the reason being that he was the one who knew the most about how to run that industry.
It was a curious fact about modern war, which the Americans were discovering to their embarrassment, that when you had conquered a people you had to keep them alive, which meant that you had to arrange to have food grown and goods manufactured and distributed. When you had taken the horses and tractors off the farms, you had to get new horses and new tractors to get the crops planted. When you had bombed factories, you had to rebuild them, and the same for railroads and ships and other means of transportation. You had to pay for all this yourself until your conquered enemies were able to pay for it themselves, and naturally the quickest and easiest way to get things going was the way they had been before. You couldn’t afford to stop for any Socialist nonsense, and anyhow you didn’t want any Socialist nonsense because it would be such bad propaganda for the rest of the world. If the working people in Germany were to get hold of industry and make a success of running it, what excuse could you find to keep the workers of America from wanting to try the same thing? Much better to take the old cartel masters and give them a slap on the wrist and tell them to be good boys now and go ahead and run industry without setting up any more Hitlers.
Here was a German Social Democrat, speaking in the bosom of his family and to a trusted friend. He couldn’t say things like that at the office, of course. He would get his facts and make his reports, and what use was made of them was none of his business. If he presumed to criticise the decisions of his superiors they would decide that he was a Red—and that was worse than a Nazi.
Most of these superiors knew in a vague way that here was supposed to be a difference between those they called Reds and those they called Pinks, but they were disposed to be sceptical about that difference. The two colours shaded one into the other, and often pink was used as camouflage for red. American officials might be excused for being uncertain, and especially so because they themselves were open to the same suspicions. Congressmen at home were looking for a chance to jump on their necks and were sending committees over to investigate. It was bad enough to see Britain turn pink. In Britain we couldn’t help it, but in Germany we could and we certainly meant to.
XII
Thus Monck, who was very much disturbed by the sight of things going wrong in the world. He had seen them going wrong all his life, he said. He had seen the stupidities and blind greeds of men causing cosmic quantities of human misery and balking those very purposes which the men hoped to achieve. Born into the working classes and having felt the full weight of oppression, Monck could speak for the masses of Europe. He knew that they would not consent to go back to the old system; they would no longer be content with poverty and insecurity. To attempt to force them back would mean simply to drive them into the arms of the Communists. There would be either a Socialist Europe or a Communist Europe—and it was America that would have to make the choice.
Monck had seen one nation after another blundering stupidly and bringing about the opposite result to what it wanted. ‘When Hitler invaded Russia’, he said, ‘the masses of the Russian people were so embittered against the Reds that they would gladly have joined Hitler’s armies and helped to win their own freedom. But the Hitler men of hate behaved with such cruelty that they turned the peasants into partisans, hiding in the forests and making war on the German communications. And now we see the Russians in their turn making the same blunder. They have got hold of Central Europe and can’t make up their minds whether they are conquerors or comrades. One day they make speeches about working-class solidarity and the next day they behave like barbarians’.
The German Socialist told how the Russians had proceeded to strip Berlin of all its manufacturing machinery; they had also rigged the currency so as to draw most of the products of the country to themselves. Only now were they beginning to realise that by this means they had doomed the East Berliners to perpetual poverty and had sacrificed all chance of winning the West Berliners over to their side. If the East Berliners remained poorly dressed while the West Berliners became well dressed, how could you persuade either side that communism meant prosperity and capitalism meant misery?
Lanny saw no harm in stating that he had just had a talk with President Truman and that the President had commissioned him to find out how to persuade the Kremlin to keep its agreements. Monck smiled sardonically and replied, ‘The President might as well send you to India to find out how to persuade tigers to stop eating meat’.
‘You think that the Politburo wants war?’ Lanny asked.
‘No, they don’t want war. All they want is the mastery of the world. They have set their programme forth in a whole library of books’.
‘That’s what I said to Mr Truman, but of course he doesn’t have time to read books; he is the most overburdened man in the world’.
‘What you should do is to take him one book and mark the passages for him. Get him Stalin’s Marxism and the National and Colonial Question. That book is the bible for every Russian diplomat and representative abroad. In it Stalin deals with every country of any importance, and he analyses the conditions in that country; he has all the facts and is clear and precise about what he is going to do and how he is going to do it—to undermine the government of that country and place his own kind of people in control. He hasn’t the faintest doubt of his ability to do it. It may take a long time, but he has the patience of a cat watching at a rat hole. He bides his time, and when the time comes he pounces. He makes promises, but they don’t mean a thing—except that the time for the pounce hasn’t yet come. When friendship is to his advantage he can be as charming and warm as a house cat; and he can order the murder of a million human beings without the faintest qualm’.
‘I suppose’, Lanny ventured, ‘he is really more dangerous to the world than Hitler’.
‘Hitler was a blusterer and a fool; he was impatient and hysterical. Stalin is quiet and watchful and wise. Also, his camouflage is much better than Hitler’s. Hitler was a nationalist and hater of all other peoples—even of the British and the Americans whom he secretly envied. Stalin is an internationalist and a friend of the oppressed workers, all the oppressed races of the world. He loves them all, his heart bleeds for them, and he sets his poets to writing odes to them and his composers to singing songs for them. He tells the oppressed peasants to kill the landlords and take the land; and when they have done this he invites them to form co-operatives under his guidance; he promises them the benefits of machinery and mutual aid and then sets one of his commissars over them and takes away a part of their product—and lo and behold, they are paying more taxes to Stalin than they ever paid to any landlord. He tells the workers to seize the factories, and when they have d
one so he sets a commissar over them, abolishes the unions, establishes the death penalty for strikes, and pays such wages that it takes a month’s labour to buy a pair of poorly made shoes. If any peasant or worker ventures to murmur a complaint he is shipped off to Siberia to labour in the gold mines on a diet of eight hundred calories a day. Such is Marx-Lenin-Stalin in action’.
‘Peace, land, and bread’ said Lanny—the slogan of the Bolshevik revolution. And Monck commented, ‘Peace means the shipping of millions of Russian and non-Russian peoples off to Siberia to make the dictators safe. It means four or five million men impressed into armies. It means the converting of industry into the manufacture of tens of thousands of tanks and guns and planes. It means armed forces at every border, ready to march at the first moment the well-paid and well-trained agitators have succeeded in fanning discontent in a neighbouring country’.
‘We have a story in America’, said Lanny, ‘about a farmer who said he wasn’t greedy for land—he wanted only the land adjoining his own’.
‘Exactly!’ replied the German. ‘That ought to enable President Truman to understand Stalin. And make plain to him that when I say Stalin I don’t mean an old man who may die any day; I mean a system he has built and that will go on after him. There is the Politburo, and the commissars, and the whole enormous movement. It began as a new religion, like Mohammedanism in its militant days, and now it is like an avalanche in motion. If Stalin were to change or try to stop it, it would sweep him away; they would liquidate him and say he had died of a heart attack, and they would give him the most magnificent funeral in history and build him a monument a hundred stories high. But the movement would go on to take the world’.
‘A grim message to carry back to the White House!’ remarked the presidential agent.
‘It is what I have been watching with my own eyes. There are kidnappings over the border going on all the time. The border is less than half a mile from this house, and I never go out at night without company; I wouldn’t go close to the border for a million dollars in perfectly sound American greenbacks. In East Germany they are seizing the workers who show any trace of independence and character and shipping them off to those dreadful slave-labour camps. Men and women of special ability and prominence are being shot in the back of the neck. They are setting the rest to work producing war goods—and of course they control the schools and set out the programmes to educate the children. Give them one generation in any country, and you have a population that doesn’t know what freedom means and is absolutely certain that every American is a gangster, a slave-driver, and a warmonger’.
Such was the message; and it surely wouldn’t lighten the burdens of an ex-captain of artillery, who to his own great surprise had become President of the United States.
XIII
After the family had gone to bed the two men sat in the little living room—once the home of a Nazi and now commandeered by A.M.G. They talked in low tones about the subject of counterfeit money. It wasn’t Monck’s specialty, and all that he had done was to recommend Lanny; he said, with a smile, that he had done that because he wanted so much to see his friend once more. But in the course of his years as an underground worker he had picked up odds and ends of information about the Himmler money. He told how during the war a friend of their cause, a pretended Nazi, had turned over to the Social Democrats a bundle of British pound notes that he had stolen. There had been, first, the ethical problem: Did they have the right to use this bogus money? They decided that it would be all right if they put it off on Nazis and no one else. The Nazis had made it, and presumably had made it to be used. But the problem was: How could they put it off on any Nazi or Nazi enterprise or agency without grave danger to themselves? A British pound was a conspicuous thing, and anybody who tried to pass one would be a conspicuous person, and if he was caught he would certainly be shot. The problem had been too much for them, and they had decided to burn that dangerous package of paper.
Also, Monck told about the British ambassador at Ankara, Turkey, whose official papers had been stolen at night by his butler and photographed. News of this had come to Monck in far-off Stockholm, because in the last days of the war an employee of Himmler’s intelligence service had fled there and had sold the information to Monck for a few real American dollars. The butler in Ankara had been excessively greedy, demanding as much as fifteen or twenty thousand pounds British money for each of his bundles of photographs. The Nazis had obliged him with Himmler money—large lots of it which apparently he never tried to spend, because they had taken the precaution to give him a few real notes, unpacked, and it was these he had used.
The butler who went under the code name of Cicero, had furnished complete reports of what went on at the Allied conferences at Moscow, Teheran, and Cairo during 1943 and 1944. It was von Papen’s organisation which had achieved this coup. The Nazis had several different spy services, all jealous of one another and waging intrigue against one another. The Himmler organisation had refused to believe that the documents were genuine, and von Ribbentrop’s organisation had done the same. Before they got through with their squabbling over the matter the war had ended.
Lanny inquired about General Graf Stubendorf and also about General Emil Meissner. Monck reported that his office had investigated both of them and had cleared the latter for a job as a teacher in an Oberschule. He was living near Nürnberg, and the Graf was living in Southern Bavaria in a peasant’s cottage by one of the mountain lakes. He had, of course, lost his castle and estates, which were now again in Poland and confiscated by the Reds. His town house in Berlin had been smashed beyond repair. What he lived on Monck didn’t know, but perhaps he had had some jewels hidden away. He had refrained from having anything to do with the occupation and apparently was content that they let him alone.
Lanny had decided to visit both these men before taking the journey into Poland. Monck advised him to repack his two suitcases, taking only the necessary things and leaving the rest in Monck’s care. The effect of war was always demoralising, and now in Germany were many unemployed persons and children running wild. In Poland conditions would be worse, and Lanny might find that his car was being taken to pieces bit by bit unless he watched it. Monck had seen to it that he was provided with an American-occupation civilian licence from the Provost Marshal’s office.
‘Be careful and don’t talk about politics’, Monck warned. ‘The Poles hate both the Nazis and the Reds; all the parties hate all the other parties, and everybody is suspicious of everybody else, and especially of strangers. You won’t find it a holiday jaunt, I can tell you’.
3 TESTAMENT OF BLEEDING WAR
I
On the following morning Lanny Budd got himself a taxicab and was driven into the East sector of Berlin. It was the unlovely part of the city and had been bombed and shelled the worst; but there was a large group of military buildings left standing in the Karlshorst district, and there the Soviet commander, Marshal Sokolovsky, had set up his headquarters. The buildings, some fifteen or twenty, made a quadrangle and were surrounded by a high fence. There was a sort of kiosk at the gate, and soldiers on duty. Lanny learned that he had to go to the Kommandatura for a pass before he could get by the gate; and so it was a couple of hours before he got to talk with an officer of the marshal’s staff.
The position of a young Soviet aide-de-camp toward an American visitor was a complex one. He was very apt to like Americans instinctively; most Russians did. When they had met on the River Elbe the American and Russian soldiers had had a fine time celebrating; it had pleased them to hug one another and slap one another on the back; the officers had shaken hands and drunk a toast and said whatever words they had in common. But now everything was changed. The order had gone out: No fraternising. The young Soviet officer looked upon this American visitor with conflicting emotions; he admired his elegant appearance and gracious manners, and at the same time he feared him as a mysterious evil force. Keep a cold, aloof attitude toward him—or else a promising yo
ung officer’s career might be nipped in the bud!
However, this was changed quickly when the visitor began talking, for he stated that he had had the honour of paying two visits to Marshal Stalin in the Kremlin and had been cordially invited to return at his convenience. He wasn’t proposing to go now; all he wanted was to visit a village called Stielszcz in Poland to see if he could trace the whereabouts of some painting which had been in Schloss Stubendorf; he was, so he said, an art expert and was thinking about nothing but paintings in the midst of a world at cold war. A most unlikely tale—that he had ever met Stalin; but suppose it was true? Very certainly a young staff officer could ruin himself that way!
He said that he would have to consult his superior; and presently he came back and escorted the visitor into the office of a colonel. No one in the Soviet Union could be entirely free from anxiety, but a colonel does not show it so readily as a lieutenant and this mature gentleman listened impassively to the American’s tale. Unlikely indeed! But when the colonel asked questions the visitor answered promptly and apparently had been well briefed. What he wanted was for the colonel to telephone to the Kremlin and ask for Captain Briansky, who had been his escort during the visit last spring and would confirm his statements. ‘I will be glad to pay the cost of the call’, he said.
The colonel explained that the Soviet telephone system was state-owned, but the lines were of necessity very crowded. The visitor said he could understand that, but that unfortunately his time was limited, and unless he could make the trip in the next two or three days he would have to return home. He was certain that Marshal Stalin would wish him to have the permit and would be vexed to learn that the favour had not be granted. There was a veiled threat in this, and the officer did not fail to get it. The Amerikanetz went on to say that during his visit in the spring of this year the Marshal had instructed Captain Briansky to escort him to the Moscow Ballet School, where he had had the pleasure of demonstrating to the assembled ballerinas the Dalcroze system of eurythmics. The staff colonel had never heard of that system, but he knew that his country was supposed to have kultura, and that when a cultured person piped he had to dance. He promised the gracious visitor that he would make immediate inquiry, and if the Kremlin wished him to have the permit it would be ready for him in a couple of days.