He paused, his face tightened and changed, and the pitch of his voice all at once began to rise. “How can they be so blind to realities? I achieved air parity in 1937. Since then I have never stopped building planes, planes, planes, U-boats, U-boats, U-boats!” He was screaming now, clenching his fists and waving his stiff outstretched arms. “I have piled bombs, bombs, bombs, tanks, tanks, tanks, to the sky! It has been a wasteful, staggering burden on my people, but what other language have great states ever understood? It is out of a sense of strength that I have offered peace. I have been rejected and scorned, and as the price of peace they have asked for my head. The German people only laugh at such pathetic nonsense!”
On the shouted litany of “planes… bombs… U-boats” he swept both fists down again and again to strike the floor, bending far over so that the famous black lock of hair tumbled in his face, giving him his more usual newsreel look of the street agitator; and the red face and screeching tones had indeed something of the carpet chewer, after all. Suddenly, dramatically, as at a podium, he dropped into quiet controlled tones. “Let the test of fire come. I have done my utmost, and my conscience is clear before the bar of history.”
Hitler fell silent, then stood with an air of dismissal, his eyes burning and distant, his mouth a down-curved line.
“Mein Führer,” Göring said, lumbering to his feet, his boots creaking, “after this wonderfully clear presentation of the realities you offer no objection to this visit of Herr Sumner Welles, I take it, if the President persists.”
Hitler hesitated, appeared perplexed, and gave an impatient shrug. “I have no wish to return discourtesy for discourtesy, and petty treatment for petty treatment. I would do anything for peace. But until the British will to destroy me is itself destroyed, the only road to peace is through German victory. Anything else is irrelevant. I will continue to hope with all my heart for a last-minute signal of sanity from the other side, before the holocaust explodes.”
In a worked-up manner, with no gesture of farewell, he strode out through the carved double door. Victor Henry glanced at his wrist-watch. The Führer had spent an hour and ten minutes with them, and so far as Henry knew, President Roosevelt’s question remained unanswered. He could see on Gianelli’s pale, baffled face the same impression.
Göring and Ribbentrop looked at each other. The fat man said, “President Roosevelt has his reply. The Führer sees no hope in the Welles mission, but in his unending quest for a just peace he will not reject it.”
“That was not my understanding,” said Ribbentrop in a quick, strained voice. “He called the mission irrelevant.”
“If you want to press the Führer for clarification,” Göring said satirically to him, gesturing at the double doors, “go ahead. I understood him very well, and I think I know him.” He turned again to the banker, and his voice moderated. “In informing your President of this meeting, tell him that I said the Führer will not refuse to receive Welles, but sees no hope in it—and neither do I—unless the British and the French drop their war aim of removing the Führer. That is no more possible than it is to move Mont Blanc. If they persist in it, the result will be a frightful battle in the West, ending in a total German victory after the death of millions.”
“That will be the result in any case,” said Ribbentrop, “and the die will be cast before Mr. Sumner Welles can arrange his papers and pack his belongings.”
Göring took each of the two Americans by an elbow and said with a total change to geniality that brought to Victor Henry’s mind the waiter at Wannsee, “Well, I hope you are not leaving so soon? We will have dancing a little later, and a bite of supper, and then some fine entertainers from Prague, artistic dancers.” He rolled his eyes in jocose suggestiveness.
“Your Excellency is marvellously hospitable,” Gianelli replied. “But a plane is waiting in Berlin to take me to Lisbon and connect with the Clipper.”
“Then I must let you go, but only if you promise to come to Karin-hall again. I will walk out with you.”
Ribbentrop stood with his back to them, looking at the fire. When the banker hesitantly spoke a word of farewell, he grunted and hitched a shoulder. Arm in arm with Göring, the Americans walked down the corridors of Karinhall. The air minister smelled of some strong bath oil. His hand lightly tapped Victor Henry’s forearm. “Well, Captain Henry, you have been to Swinemünde and seen our U-boat setup. What is your opinion of our U-boat program?”
“Your industrial standards are as high as any in the world, Your Excellency. And with officers like Grobke and Prien you’re in good shape. The U-boats are already making quite a record in the Atlantic.”
“It’s only the beginning,” Göring said. “U-boats are coming off the ways now like sausages. I doubt that all of them will even see action. The air will decide this war fast. I hope your attaché for air, Colonel Powell, has been reporting the Luftwaffe’s strength accurately to your President. We have been very open with Powell, on my orders.”
“Indeed he has made reports. He’s very impressed.”
Göring looked pleased. “We have learned a lot from America. Curtis in particular has brilliant designers. Your Navy’s dive-bombing was carefully studied by us and the Stuka was the result.” He turned to the banker and speaking in slow, simple German, asked him questions about South American mining companies. They were walking through an empty ballroom with huge crystal-and-gilt chandeliers, and their clicking steps on the parquet floor echoed hollowly. The banker replied in easy German, which he had not displayed under pressure, and they talked finance all the way to the front doors. Guests walking in the halls stared at the sight of Göring between the two Americans. The banker’s man-of-the-world smile reappeared and color returned to his face.
It was snowing outside, and Göring 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 light 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 Führer does not.”
Göring’s face toughened. “If Welles comes, the Führer will see him. That is official.” Göring 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 Göring’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, Göring, 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 will 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 Göring 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.
Göring, it seems 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 freak—the 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. Göring may be smart enough, even though he’s riding high, to figure that no string of 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 Führer and happy to take on the job.
Ribbentrop can only be 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 expressed 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 this war, the gruesome 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 nervous 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 moustache, 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 Göring and Ribbentrop. When he entered the room they stood and cringed.
If Hitler were the half-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.
22
RHODA hugged and kissed Pug when he told her about the weekend. He didn’t mention Stöller’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 Stöller’s hospitality was to give her a good time.
The chauffeur sent by Stöller drove past the colonnaded entrance to Abendruh 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 lawn, firs, winding river, and thatched outbuildings; two servants came to help them dress; and the mystery of the back stairs cleared up when they went to dinner. The curving main 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 Stöllers, watching an elegantly dressed couple sliding down, the woman hysterical with laughter as her green silk dress pulled away from her gartered thighs.
“Oh my gawd, Pug, I’ll DIE!” chortled Rhoda. “I can’t POSSIBLY! I’ve practically NOTHING on underneath! Why don’t they WARN 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 thought, 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 warmly 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 United 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 Stöller took him in tow to a library, where the actor and Dr. Knopfmann, 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 Stöller. “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 h
ope that the United States will ever allow England to go down.”
“Oh, to hell with all that,” said the banker.
Dr. Knopfmann, 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.”
“What 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.”
Stöller 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. Stöller. Public opinion can shift fast. Nobody should forget that, in dealing with us.”