‘Frightened people,’ says Röhm, ’are genuinely eager to obey. They are grateful for orders, no matter what they are. We all found that in the trenches. Men would rather be ordered to their deaths than not be ordered at all. Action consumes some of their adrenalin and makes them feel momentarily better. These studies of mass psychology Hitler’s forever reading always come down to the same simple principle: the crowd loves a roller-coaster. It loves to be frightened and it loves to be saved. The crowd is a baby you toss up into the air and catch, a woman you tease with a knife. And that, of course, is what Alf understands in his bones. The common people possess only two controlling emotions — fear and love.’
I remind Mrs Cornelius of this but she is unimpressed. ‘They were all such ‘orrible ordinary little turds, really. That ‘Itler was the worst. Bore the tits off a bull, ‘e would. Everyone complained, even poor little Eva Braun, ‘is girlfriend. An’ she ‘ad a lot more influence over ‘im than you fink. She tol’ me ther fings ‘e made ‘er do to ‘im! Well, to be fair, she said she enjoyed some of it. Like those girls I know up west. You should ‘ear what they ‘ave to wear! More like industrial overalls than bonkin’ gear! An’ the blokes who come to them are mostly bigwigs in the government an’ tycoons. It’s ther showbiz boys who like youngsters. Politicians like ther cane. But it was ‘ard work, Eva said.’
Though she got on a little better with the women, Mrs Cornelius did not enjoy her intimacy with the Nazis. She said the men always sounded like a bunch of estate agents. ‘Total wank artists, Ivan. Ther passengers get it into their ‘eads they’re drivin’ the train. So the first thing they do, o’ course, is sack the driver. In ther case o’ ther Nazis, they went one better. They killed the bleedin’ driver.’
So she reduces the heroic struggle of the twentieth century which ended in the death of all its greatest warriors. Our destiny denied us, our memories forbidden, we descended into the grey mud of socialism. Past and future were abolished. Animals live like that. In an eternal present.
But some of us remember. Stiffly Roland and Arthur and El Cid stir in their hidden caverns. Their flexing fingers reach for their swords. Soon the world will enjoy again the glory and nobility of her golden past. My cities will spring from the depths, splitting open the earth as they thrust towards the calm and comforting skies. They will take us to the heights where the air is pure and we can flourish.
The earth has betrayed us. They have soured it for us. Our legends are made into music-hall jokes and bad films. Our heroes become hobgoblins and devils. We are told that our memories are lies, our history is fiction. Our ideals are mocked. Our values are satirised. The old are ourselves. By failing to protect them, we in turn inevitably fall prey to the predators. The logic is obvious. I tell them this. But you only find it out when your body starts to fail you, when you think twice before crossing the street to your usual newsagent because a gang of youths with shaven heads and football colours are standing outside chortling over copies of the Beano and the Dandy, whose characters they so closely resemble. You have heard their insults for seventy years. You have suffered their threats, and your body can recall every blow they have struck on it. You want no more, so you do without your newspaper. Not that the papers are anything but communist rags.
I am surprised they can read. They wear football caps and scarves like the uniforms I used to see on the Sozis and Nazis. Home-made colours. They enjoy the comforts of collective violence. They slobber after power and fear all responsibility. They lie and they boast and they swagger and they imagine themselves mass murderers and gang bosses. They buy large, vicious dogs. They beat their women. They terrorise their children. And people say the Nazis were bastards.
Franz Stangl led an impeccable private life. Whatever happened at Treblinka and so on was nothing I knew about. His family loved him and were never frightened of him. He was a faithful husband and a responsible father like many of the best Nazis. They were Austrians and South Germans, of course, and disliked the Prussian glorification of war, which was to infect Hitler so badly in his later years. They were solid family men. Whatever they had to do outside, they never inflicted it on their nearest and dearest.
So who suffers most? Or worst? These scalp-heads, these Mohawkiscliers, who bring only noise, filth and violence to society? They are genuinely worthless. They contribute almost nothing in labour or money. They know only to take.
Who suffers worst are the decent men, women and children. Those of us who contribute order and cleanliness to the world. Make those hooligans into pet food, I say to her. Let the kangaroos roam free. Let some faithful family cat feast on their fatty flanks, their beer-fed guts, their coarse meat. Our cities would be quieter. Our dogs content.
We turn into the northern end of the Portobello Road, where the walls of convents and monasteries become an inescapable channel. This is the only stretch where there are no doorways, no depths, nowhere to disappear. The walls of the religious institutions are too tall and too well protected to scale. Yet already the road takes on a different character. Already it is a cut above what we leave behind. The difference is subtle. The stalls still contain the same miscellaneous mixture of false brands, redundant canned goods and hardware looking like loot from some forgotten bombsite. The same hopeless electrics, disintegrating plastic and stained paper, yet here you feel you might just possibly find something you could use. The stallholders are a little more optimistic about their wares. ‘Have a look,’ they say, ‘we can always talk about the price.’
Mrs Cornelius gives this section of the market her considered inspection. You can tell that she feels it worthier of her. She picks up a toy panzer tank bearing a flaking swastika. ‘Your big mistake, Ivan, after you got mixed up with them Nazis, was to get mixed up with them ‘omos. You never ‘ad no common sense, but you ‘ad somethin’ like good luck! All that changed when you started flirting about with ‘Itler.’
‘I didn’t exactly volunteer,’ I point out. Her intolerance is unworthy of her. ‘You never used to mind such things.’
‘I’m not talkin’ about buggery.’ She turns suddenly to look at me. ‘I’m talking about ther rest of it. You never knew when to scarper. An’ it wasn’t for want of my warnin’ you every five bloody minutes!’
‘A Greek chorus,’ I say affectionately.
She is amused. ‘A bit less of the Greek,’ she insists. ‘A Greek got me out of England in the first place. I started in the chorus, though.’ And she begins her soothing reminiscence of Kilburn Empire triumphs and glory days in Hollywood.
I find it impossible to watch those films any more. There is no equipment for them. For almost twelve years I have been working on a projector I found in the market. But where are the spares? I have tried to make them or take them from other machines. So far I have had no real luck. The old bulbs and valves are impossible to find. What happened to all those projectors? Hitler had one. Mussolini had one. Stalin had one. Franco had one. Hearst had one. Roosevelt had one. Churchill had one.
In the years between the Wars we were all cinema-crazy. Any man with money wanted his own little theatre where he could watch Mickey Mouse, Douglas Fairbanks, Cuddles McTitty and the milkman to his heart’s content. Industrialists and potentates bought themselves the convenience and privacy which after the War the BBC would try to imitate with TV for the masses. A chicken in every pot, a car in every garage, a cinema in every home. They bribed the electorate. We got Sunday Night at the London Palladium instead of justice. And the masses were content. They are always content until the fantasies on which they feed begin to poison them and then they gaze mindlessly around for some other teat to suck.
‘Look,’ says Mrs Cornelius, taking my arm. She suddenly leans on me and catches her breath. ‘It’s brightening up a bit.’
* * * *
TWENTY-FIVE
The rain has lifted and the sky has grown paler, but that is all. Not exactly cause for unbridled optimism. But I do not say anything. It would be cruel to dash her hopes.
/> We are almost at the train bridge and the flyover. We have two bridges now. The stalls underneath represent a halfway point. They make a miscellaneous collection. White Hindoos in hideous orange nylon offer me garish comic books depicting the mysterious battles of their vast pantheon of gods. They hawk untuned bells and stinking joss sticks. They offer handbills.
‘No thank you,’ I say, ’I have not yet joined the Alternator Society.’ The entire area under the bridges stinks of wet fur, some of it from living dogs and some of it from their ancestors, adorning the lice-ridden bodies of the Love Generation. Through this drift the odours of damp rice, of tea and coffee, of fried fat. We pass perfumed candles and bags of spices, all their ‘gravey booby’ drug materials. Her fingernails a flight of red bees, Mrs Cornelius runs an appreciative hand over the chrome flanks of a massive toaster which looks as if it had once served a significant mechanical function on a Cunarder. ‘They built things to last in them days,’ she says.
‘They were not affordable to most of us.’
‘They’re all right second-hand,’ she assures me. ‘They run for ever.’ But I could see that the elements were destroyed. I picked up a birdcage with some of its bars bent, as if in a sudden fit of strength the occupant had forced its way to freedom.
‘She had a dead canary with her all day,’ said Röhm to me. ‘That was the weird thing. Hess remarked on it. So did Father Stempfle. They were called in by the mother.’
He was talking about Geli Raubal. We were in the middle of the most significant event of 1931, though you would never discover that from any of the history books. The facts were there for all to discover, at least for a while. Of course, they could not interview Father Stempfle. He had confessed her. And passed the information on. They did not make the connection. Röhm, of course, knew exactly what had happened. It is hard for a woman to shoot herself through the heart with a Walther PPK 38 of that model. The weakness, said Röhm, of the case. Nobody thought it worth investigating so they didn’t put many police on it. That gave everyone time to brush over the tracks. Then Hitler became the property of academic authority obsessed with his ‘strategies’, ‘plans’ and war management and his true story faded away. He, however, was never at rest after ‘31. The beginning of his personal decline came just as his public star was rising. Thereafter his public confidence was almost entirely play-acting and pharmaceutical drugs.
After 1934 only two of us still knew the entire sequence of events. I am the last one at liberty. The other is in prison with amnesia, a vegetable. They say he can’t last. I met him during the War, during my internment. British intelligence arranged the meeting. I think they were testing me. He had very little memory left. He knew me and kept trying to warn me, as he had earlier. ‘Those Messerschmitts,’ he whispered, ’are treacherous.’ That, of course, was why he had fled. Unconsciously he had known that he would be his hero’s next victim. The journalists and pseudo-historians make some conventional logic of it, but he was as anxious to escape as I was. His action undoubtedly saved his life. His loyalty to Hitler, however, ensured his silence.
In the end he did what he had advised me to do. He escaped by plane. He knew, though his faith was as powerful as ever, that he was a marked man. His beloved, infallible master intended to murder him. In his rejection of conventional religion and his taking up of occultism, his faith in Hitler was his only stability and he could not afford to let it go. But he naturally did not want to die. Hess reconciled the conflict in his typical way. If he was of no further use to his master, then he would leave. And find a way to be of use again. Hess escaped into a kind of limbo. I did not really envy him. I believe I kept my perspective. I have never denied the real issues that lay at the heart of the Nazi cause. My quarrel was with the application of the principles. Many had the same misgivings as time went on. My own experience, of course, might have prejudiced me, but I always prided myself on my openness both to ideas and to fresh experience.
My experience at the Villa Röhm was, I will admit, dreamlike. As if I was in a perpetually running Hollywood epic. Some of Röhm’s rivals thought it vulgar, but I was reminded of Hearst’s famous Castle of San Simeon and of the Hollywood homes, such as Chaplin’s.
Putzi called Röhmannsvilla ‘De Mille Bon Marche’. Silks and fine cottons hung everywhere. Marble statuary of boys and young men, fountains, tiled baths and erotic mosaics were all drawn from classical models. A perfect setting for the elaborate parties Röhm liked to throw for his top lieutenants who never failed to bring fresh guests, many of them recruited from the Hitler Youth’s finest. The newcomers were always wonderfully impressed. A great morale booster.
I saw something so noble, clean and healthy about those young bodies that only a person with a twisted mind would observe anything perverse in what went on there. True, we tested ourselves and others to certain extremes, but this served to harden us more. Röhm himself explained how we emulated the greatest Greeks and Romans. Whenever heterosexuality was made a faith, he said, civilisations collapsed. Hitler understood that as well as he did. Only homophobes like Himmler and Goebbels feigned disgust. They were addicted to sentimentality and women the way Hitler was addicted to his cream cakes and his dog whips. Their own weakness was why they always railed against him. Göring, with his weight, and Goebbels, with his club foot, had not exactly put the purest sperm into circulation, and as for Hitler, he possessed serious drawbacks, as we said in Kiev, to his stuffing any chicken with his particular pudding.
Röhm had no time for women except as mothers. The rest were sluts and parasites. He found it hard to be polite to most of them. He said they were a distraction, incapable of higher brain functions. They were natural prey to Jews and other vermin. He had loathed Rosa Luxemburg, whom he described as a hermaphrodite and an abomination. He tolerated the army politician von Schleicher precisely because he understood him to have been involved in the execution of Luxemburg and Leibnitz.
Ultimately, Röhm told me, he saw a time when women would hardly be needed at all, and those we had left could be hardened up like Amazons, as auxiliaries and breeders. Hitler’s weakness for Geli Raubal was a sure sign things were going wrong. Röhm had nothing against his Chief having a sentimental interlude, but Raubal had become an unhealthy obsession and was getting them both into trouble. She was likely to destroy Hitler’s political career. The party couldn’t afford much more scandal around him.
Röhm insisted that the light of his old friend’s life was nothing but a whore. ‘She fucks anything that moves. She’d fuck a turd if it was stiff enough. She’s had two of his chauffeurs behind his back and half the damned SS. Everyone knows about her and that SS fellow Zeiss. Yet Alf won’t hear a word against the bitch. He’s broke because of her. She’s getting him to buy her singing lessons and send her to fucking Vienna to become an opera star! No, Mashi, we really don’t need young Geli around at the moment. I’m all for her going to Vienna to follow her vocation. I know a nice house on Rosenstrasse. They’ll employ her. She can take her pictures with her.’
Röhm, Putzi and Schultz, the Nazi Party treasurer, had been responsible for buying back Hitler’s drawings and letters. The go-between was the ubiquitous Hieronymite priest Father Bernhard Stempfle, a sometime contributor to Völkischer Beobachter and Der Stunner. The letters, Röhm said, were graphic. The photos were steamy. But the drawings were amazing. Better than his usual doodles. Putzi had wondered what kind of man would make a woman pose like that. And he had come to understand about the dog whips they all carried. He was not grateful for the knowledge, he said. It gave him a rather different idea of the Chief.
‘He’s completely addicted to the bitch,’ Röhm complained. ‘And she’s blackmailing him, believe me. She could well have corrupted that seedy priest, though I know for a fact he’s not interested in grown women. The commies will use her, if they can.’
By coincidence that same evening he presented me with a marvellous costume, a fantasy of lace and silk, and said he would be touched if I would wear i
t for him. Röhmannsvilla was a kind of Hollywood in itself, and I felt secure there. I was never afraid of make-believe in its place. In this case, of course, I had hardly any choice. I indulged him. I love the sensation of silk. I gave myself up to it and did not really mind the pain at the end. ‘Slut,’ he said. ‘You gorgeous little slut.’
I always believed it pure folly to assume that what a consenting adult does in the privacy of his own apartments has any bearing on his public life. No true historian bothers himself with such questions. A man should be judged by his public actions, not on his taste in suits, sex or soup.
Mrs Cornelius, of course, was involved in the Christine Keeler business, though she never went to Cliveden. Mandy Rice-Davies was her good friend, and they often spent afternoons together. ‘The only problem with all o’ that,’ she says, ‘was Chrissy and that loony Schwarze, whatever his name was . . .’