“Those are details,” Hitler declared angrily.
“Not to the people who are starving.”
“They will not starve for long. They will fight for the Fatherland, and be fed by the Fatherland, and if necessary they will die for the Fatherland.”
“You are predicating another war.”
“Oh, not a war, my friend. A matter of adjustment, a cleaning of parts of the world inhabited by savages but possessing all the raw materials of which you speak. You English have done this for two hundred years, and you now possess the greatest empire in the world. Which at this moment includes several German colonies.” He waved his hand. “That is a matter for adjustment, when the time comes. But our future colonies lie out there.” He flung his hand to the east.
“You’re talking about Russia. Don’t you think the Russians might object?”
“Those swine? Communists? They only know how to fight in dark alleys. Slav savages? They have no culture. They have no future. They will become our slaves.”
“So,” Berkeley said, almost unable to believe his ears. “You are planning a war with Russia. Presumably this will be after Germany has re-armed.”
“That is not an insurmountable task.”
“If the Allies ever let you,” Berkeley suggested. “And then you are assuming that the rest of the world, or certainly Britain and France, will sit back and let you do it.”
“If they do not, they will be making a serious mistake. The world is coming up to a crisis point, my friend. Many thought the Great War was the crisis point, and now that it is behind us, the crisis is past. That is a very limited point of view. The crisis is twofold. One is demography. There are too many people and not enough raw materials, and food, as you have pointed out, to go round. Your own Thomas Malthus made this point over a hundred years ago. In these circumstances, survival of the fittest is what counts. And the fittest are the members of the great Nordic races, the original Aryans, men like yourself, Colonel, and me, to be sure. We are the natural rulers of the earth, and if to survive we have to subjugate inferior peoples, well then, so be it. As I have said, you British have been practising this for centuries.
“The second critical factor is the emergence of Communism. For make no mistake, the Bolsheviks intend to take over all of Europe, aided by their Jewish partners. And once they have taken over Europe, they will dominate the world. They must be stopped. It is your business to make your leaders understand this, and join us in preventing it from happening.”
Berkeley supposed that the most irritating thing about this man, and his followers, all of whom seemed to be suffering from an advanced case of megalomania, was the way they kept telling him what his duty was. As if he had any duty to them.
“And also ask them to support the government of Bavaria, and by extension, the government of Germany, when the time comes,” he suggested.
“That is exactly it.”
“I must tell you that it is extremely unlikely they will be supportive.”
“Great ideas always take some time to sink in,” Hitler asserted. “Tell them everything I have told you. Will you remember it all?”
“Oh, I shall,” Berkeley promised. He did not think it was a conversation he could ever forget.
“Splendid. Splendid.” Hitler beamed. “I think this has been a most productive conversation. Now, Colonel Townsend, would you like to join my Party? I invite you to do so.”
“Thank you,” Berkeley said. “But no.”
He was released back into the champagne drinking throng.
“There is someone I would like you to meet,” Frederika said, holding his arm.
“Not another party boss?”
“He is a financier, which is even more important.”
She escorted him across the room, to where a tall, good-looking man was holding forth to a coterie of both men and women.
“Hans,” she said. “May I introduce Colonel Townsend?”
“Ah, the Englander.”
“Herr von Grippenheimer, Colonel Townsend,” Frederika said. “Hans makes things happen.”
“I’m sure he does,” Berkeley said, shaking hands.
“She flatters me,” Grippenheimer said. “But I do my best. If there is anything you desire in Munich, in all Germany, Colonel, you have but to say. A man who is a friend of the Fuehrer can only have the best.”
“Hans maintain a harem for his personal pleasure,” Frederika said. “Is it true there are several hundred of them, Hans, and you sleep with a different one every night?”
“How women like to exaggerate,” Grippenheimer remarked. “Every other night, my dear.”
“But you would spare one, or even two, for Colonel Townsend.”
“But of course. Would you care to come home with me, and make your choice, Colonel?”
“Some other time, perhaps, Herr Grippenheimer,” Berkeley said. “I really am very tired.”
“The Fuehrer likes you,” Frederika confided as they were driven back to the hotel.
“What, even after I refused to become a German Worker?”
“That is not important. He likes you. I could tell it from the way he looked at you. Did you like him?”
“I found him very . . . interesting,” Berkeley said.
“Good. And you will help him? Us?”
“I will make a report when I return to England. I cannot do more than that.”
“That will be sufficient, I am sure. Now . . .” the car had stopped outside the hotel, and she looked at her watch. “Our appointment with Kahr is at ten. I will pick you up at nine-thirty.”
“Ah. Then you aren’t coming in?”
“No,” she said. “It is late, and you need your sleep.”
She was certainly a forceful young woman, and she had done her duty by the party. He wondered if he had interested her at all, as a man?
“What do you reckon?” Lockwood asked, as they went upstairs.
“An odd lot. What did you make of them?”
Throughout his conversation with Hitler, Lockwood had been left circulating amongst the other guests.
“People with a lot of money liking to feel they’re dabbling in politics, without getting too heavily involved.”
“That’s very perceptive of you,” Berkeley remarked. “And they have a leader who dabbles in the fantastic.”
In the bedroom, he outlined his conversation with Hitler.
“As you say, fantastic,” Lockwood agreed. “Do you think there is any chance of that programme being carried out?”
“None at all,” Berkeley said. “As you suggested, Mr Hitler is an amusing toy for the idle Munich rich to indulge, playing politics without actually being involved. They will become bored with him soon enough, and he will just disappear. He’ll probably go back to painting.”
“Did you know he was a soldier, in the War?” Lockwood asked. “That fellow Hess told me. He was a corporal, and got the Iron Cross, First Class. Sounds pretty good. What is that equivalent to in our army?”
“The Military Medal, I suppose,” Berkeley said. “Perhaps a little higher.”
“He was gassed and wounded at the end,” Lockwood said.
“Which could account for a lot,” Berkeley mused. “However, Harry, he is at the very bottom of our list. Come to think of it, he wasn’t on our list at all. We have more important fish to fry.”
But he couldn’t resist asking Kahr about the German Workers’ Party, when they met the following day; Hitler might be a political nonentity, but he had a certain charisma, and the obvious ability to bind people to him, even people like Goering, who certainly possessed a charisma of his own, and the personality to go with it.
And then there was Frederika, at this moment seated demurely on the other side of the room, knees crossed, looking entirely at peace with the world.
None of that could be said of Kahr, who was a big man, somewhat hunched over his desk. Like Hitler he wore a moustache. But his was of the walrus variety. And unlike the leaders of the Natio
nal Socialists he was a man of nearly sixty, who had been a politician all his life, and had earned himself a formidable reputation for ruthless determination by the way he had mobilised right-wing organisations such as the Einwonnerwehren, or Home Guard, to put down the Communists only a few months earlier. Now he burst into laughter. “The German Workers’ Party? You mean that fellow Hitler and his Nazis?”
“Nazis?” Berkeley had not heard the name before.
“It is what they call themselves for short. My dear Mr Smith, Germany is full of such parties. Little men with little ideas. They come and they go.”
“I would have supposed Hitler’s ideas are fairly big,” Berkeley said. “He is thinking of an independent Bavaria.”
And that’s only for starters, he thought.
“Well, we all want that,” Kahr said. “It was my idea first. The matter is under discussion now, with Weimar.”
“And if Weimar does not agree?”
“In politics, Mr Smith, it is best to cross one bridge at a time.”
“You see?” Frederika asked afterwards. “He has feet of clay. He is always waiting on tomorrow.”
Which was not really suggested by his record, Berkeley thought.
“And your Nazi leader believes in making tomorrow happen today,” he suggested.
“He has the will,” Frederika agreed.
The next day they commenced their drive to Berlin. As earlier, for the most part they saw little evidence of any disturbances, although there was every indication of the extreme poverty that was sweeping the nation, with emaciated children standing by the roadside begging for alms from the passing motor car.
“Can’t anything be done for them?” Berkeley asked, genuinely distressed.
“Only when we get a firm government,” she told him.
They also saw a good many heavily-armed policemen, although these did not appear to be very interested in what was going on.
Far more disturbing was the occasional rudely painted sign directed against the Jews.
“I had supposed it was only your Hitler was against the Jews,” Berkeley commented.
“The Fuehrer is only giving expression to the feelings of nearly all good Germans,” Frederika said. “The Jews are a hateful people.”
“What makes you say that?” Berkeley asked. “Has a Jew ever harmed you?”
“Well . . . not personally. But they are still hateful. They have all the money.”
“Ah,” Berkeley said.
“And I am sure that you remember that the first nation to drive them out were your own English.”
Berkeley nodded. “Who wanted their money. But that was six hundred years ago, Frederika. That was a time when men were hanged, drawn and quartered for treason, and women were burned at the stake for witchcraft. Our ideas have advanced a little since then.”
“It might be better for us all if they had not,” she growled.
“And anyway, we are trying to make amends for the past by returning the Jews to Palestine.”
“The best place for them. Let the Arabs have them.”
“Would you be happy to see all the German Jews remove themselves to Palestine?”
“Of course. Providing they leave all their money behind.”
She was becoming increasingly difficult to like, however sexy she might be in bed. But in fact, she had never returned to his bed, although the three of them were sharing hotels as they moved across the country. Definitely she had been doing her duty that first night, making sure he attended the beer hall meeting and thus had a talk with Hitler. If that was an indication of the general moral standards of the post-war Germany there was going to be a lot of trouble ahead. But perhaps it was only the Nazi party.
*
Berkeley had supposed that Ernst Thalmann was probably the most important man on his list – certainly more so than men like Walther Rathenau of the Weimar Government, which was hanging on to power by the barest of majorities and was being condemned on every side for its acceptance of the Versailles Peace Terms – and as Frederika had said, he happened to be in Berlin, although his home was Hamburg. In the event, Berkeley was disappointed. In his mid-thirties, Thalmann was as young as the Nazi leaders and various other politicians Berkeley had already met – with the exception of Kahr – but he was a colourless man who put forward his views rather like a schoolmaster.
“Of course Germany will become a Communist state,” he said. “That is a natural progression of what is happening in Soviet Russia. We are designed by nature to be a Russian satellite.”
“Do you think the German people would go along with that?” Berkeley asked.
“We are the German people,” Thalmann declared. “The Communist Party.”
“Even if that entails you owing allegiance to a non-German group?”
“How ignorant you are,” Thalmann declared. “There are no nationalities in Communism, my friend. We are an international pyramid. At the top, is Herr Lenin. Then there is the Politburo. Then there are the satellites whose business it is to propagate the word.”
“Which is the destruction of all things to do with capitalism.”
“Of course. Is that not the course of history as we are taught by Herr Marx? First there is the thesis. The thesis of capitalism has existed for too long. Then there comes the antithesis, the overturning of the established order. This is what is happening now. And lastly there is the synthesis, when the old order has been destroyed, and a new order set up in its place.”
“A new thesis, in fact,” Berkeley suggested.
“Exactly.”
“So the whole process can start all over again.”
“Not this time,” Thalmann said. “The new thesis will be the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. It will last forever.”
*
“I hate to tell you this, Frederika,” Berkeley said, as they sat at an open-air café and drank beer. “But I shall be very glad to see the back of Germany.”
“Germany is very beautiful,” she said.
“I’m sure it is. But the people are not. Present company excepted, of course.” And even that was a lie, he reflected.
“You have formed that opinion because you have never been defeated,” she said. “You have never suffered the loss of national pride, as well as the crippling economic consequences of having lost a war. When that happens, you will have a different perspective.”
“I won’t, because that is never going to happen.”
“You suppose Britain is invulnerable?”
“Not at all. But Britain has no intention of ever fighting another war.”
She blew a raspberry. “I will take your word for it. But at least we Germans know how to enjoy ourselves. Would you like to go to a night-club?”
Berkeley considered. Things like night-clubs had largely passed him by, in his busy and somewhat exotic life; there had been no such things in Sabac, at least when he had lived there with the Slovitza family. So . . . “Why not?” he asked.
She giggled. “You will be shocked.”
“Try me.”
They had dinner before going to the club, where apparently Frederika, as usual, was well known. A large bouncer admitted them, and they descended a flight of stairs into a smoke-filled cellar, filled with tables, nearly all occupied, amidst which extremely attractive young women, revealing all the leg possible encased in black stockings, while wearing primly torso-concealing costumes, moved with trays of cigarettes.
At the rear of the room there was a stage, presently unoccupied, but beside it there was a piano and drums, at which two musicians were keeping up a background throb.
Frederika was apparently even better known here than Berkeley had supposed, or she had arranged the evening in advance, which was quite in keeping with everything else she had done on this trip, for they were shown to a table immediately below the stage. As they sat down, a bottle of champagne was placed before them, with three glasses.
“Actually, Frau Lipschuetz, I’d prefer a beer,” Lockwood said.
“It will have to be champagne,” Frederika said. “They only serve champagne.”
“When in Rome,” Berkeley said, and surveyed the chit. “Two hundred marks?”
“Well, that is only ten pounds in your money,” Frederika pointed out.
“I suppose it is,” he agreed. “Still that is quite a lot for a bottle of . . .” he tasted the drink. “Shit!”
“I beg your pardon?” Frederika asked.
“A bottle of cheap sparkling wine?”
“So? Imagine it is champagne. Do you know what a bottle of French champagne would cost in Berlin? And you know what, you will get drunk on this just as quickly. Possibly more quickly.”
“And have a bigger hangover.”
“I will give you an aspirin. Here is the show.”
The drums had given a roll, and on to the stage there pranced six startlingly beautiful young women, again with classically shapely legs but well concealed bosoms. They proceeded to dance for several minutes, linking arms for their high kicks, then performing individually for a while, before leaving the stage to thunderous applause.
They really had been very attractive to watch, and Berkeley absent-mindedly drank some of the ‘champagne’, as did Lockwood. Frederika merely sipped hers.
“Did you enjoy them?” she asked.
“Well, yes, frankly,” Berkeley admitted,
“Would you like to have one of them?”
“Well . . . I suppose you can arrange that too.”
“Everything, and everyone, has their price. But . . . you must be prepared for something exotic.”
“Such as?”
“A large dick.”
He frowned at her. “You’re not serious.”
“Of course. They are all men.”
“Shit!” Lockwood commented.
“Do you fancy one as well, Mr Lockwood.”
“I think we’ve had enough of your games for tonight,” Berkeley said. “We’ll be off.” He stood up. “Are you coming?”
“I think I will stay here for a while,” Frederika said. “Who knows, a pretty girl might turn up. I mean, a real girl.”
“Who I’m sure you’d prefer to me.” He brought out his roll, peeled off some notes and laid them on the table. “Have another bottle on me. I’m afraid you will have to pay the young lady’s fee yourself.”
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