Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

by William Manchester

  At Chartwell several pots were always boiling on his stove; while researching Marlborough he was finishing My Early Life, correcting galleys for an additional World Crisis volume, on the war’s eastern front, and pouring out a flood of magazine articles. At one point he was contracting to write twelve pieces for a British magazine, contributing regularly to Collier’s and the Hearst Syndicate, and denouncing abuse of wealth in the Daily Mail. Editors were bombarded with his suggestions for topics: “Women and the future. To what heights will the ascendancy of women go? Will there be a woman prime minister? Women and finance. A world controlled by women? If they had lived long ago. Take a number of the world’s most prominent men and imagine their careers in past eras. Henry Ford in Cromwellian days…. Mussolini with Henry VIII, Ramsay MacDonald in the French Revolution, Bernard Shaw with the ancient Greeks, and so on.” In a note to his son he wrote: “I have got a good crop of articles for 1931, and indeed am quite weighed down with work. But that is much better than being unemployed.” And while absent on a research trip he sent Clementine a hasty scrawl: “Am vy remiss writing. Much pressed business. Everything continues satisfactory. Arranged twenty-two new articles in weeklies, all maturing before June and usual terms, monthly in advance, all involving heavy work in return.”298 During the two years between his eviction from No. 11 and the end of 1931 he published 104 pieces, including excerpts from his books, in, among other periodicals, Scribner’s, The Times, the Strand, the Saturday Review, the Sunday John Bull, Nash’s Pall Mall, the News Chronicle, and the Daily Telegraph. His topics ranged from “Government of the / by the / for the Dole-Drawers” to (from him, of all people) “Back to the Spartan Life in Our Public Schools.” He dashed off twelve profiles of famous public figures—MacDonald, Nancy Astor, Bernard Shaw, Baden-Powell, Lloyd George, and Arthur Balfour among them—for which the Sunday Pictorial paid him £200 each. Then he published these sketches in a volume, Great Contemporaries. Another collection of pieces appeared in book form as Thoughts and Adventures in Britain, and in the United States as Amid These Storms. In addition, eight collections of his speeches appeared in the bookstores, including one volume dealing with India and the Raj. Few professional writers, who devote their working lives to their trade, produce as much over entire lifetimes as he turned out during this brief span.

  In protesting the slack press coverage of his parliamentary speeches on India, he had written Rothermere that each of them required “an effort which is equal to that which would enable me to earn £3/400 by writing one of the numerous articles I have or my books.”299 This was no exaggeration. Churchill wrote superb copy, and eager editors on both sides of the Atlantic knew it. As a consequence, he was one of the world’s most highly paid writers. In America his World Crisis volumes had earned him, after Curtis Brown’s commissions, $20,633.10. In one month book royalties, publishers’ advances, and magazine checks brought in £3,750. The Sunday Pictorial paid £2,400 for a series of character studies. A single piece in the Daily Mail sold for £600, and a series for the Mail brought £7,800. George Harrap, the publisher, advanced him £10,000 for the Marlborough; Scribner’s paid £5,000 for the American rights. And his impressions of the United States, set down in twenty-two articles and widely reprinted abroad, eventually earned £40,000. By the end of 1931 his writing income for that year had reached £33,500, and his peak years lay ahead; in less than five years his magazine sales in the United States alone, after commissions, would bring him $35,379.78.

  At fifty-seven he was a skillful literary craftsman, knew it, and rejoiced in his mastery of the language. “I have been reading a good deal on ‘Marlborough,’ ” he wrote Clementine. “It is a wonderful thing to have all these contracts satisfactorily settled, and to feel that two or three years agreeable work is mapped out and, if completed, will certainly be rewarded. In order to make sure of completing the task within three years instead of leaving it to drag on indefinitely, I am going to spend money with some freedom upon expert assistance.” Ashley, who was providing some of that assistance—though £300 a year does not suggest that his employer’s expenditures for expertise were particularly free—had found, as had others, that Winston’s method of composition was beguiling and unorthodox. He remembers how Churchill “would walk up and down the room (and when I worked for him it was usually his bedroom), puffing a cigar while a secretary took it down as best she could in Pitman. Occasionally he would say ‘Scrub that and start again.’ At times he would stop… at others he would be entirely swept on by the stimulus of his imagination.”300

  Like a battlefield veteran who avoids any mention of combat, Winston seldom mentioned politics during his early days in the wilderness. Lloyd George and Bracken were fellow guests at a country weekend in Coombe. So was Harold Nicolson, who wrote in his diary: “LlG begins at once: ‘Now, what about this National Government? We here must form a National Opposition.’ ” George was “throwing out little sparks of compliments to right and left, drawing Winston in,” Nicolson noted. “The impression was that of a master-at-drawing sketching in a fig leaf, not in outline, but by means of shadows around it.” Nevertheless, Churchill, who had always found talk of political maneuvering irresistible, refused to be drawn. He was vivacious, but on other topics. Nicolson concluded: “Winston is very brilliant and amusing but not constructive.”301 However, he continued to follow developing situations at home and abroad. Each morning he and Clementine carefully read newspapers and sent notes to each other, via servants, on significant items. One consequence of this was that Churchill became the first statesman in England to discover that, for the second time in a generation, a strange light had appeared and was growing upon the map of Europe.

  Germany’s Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist Workers’ party), which became famous and then infamous as the Nazi party, began in Munich as one of hundreds of splinter movements spawned in the wake of Versailles. Adolf Hitler, then a police spy, attended a meeting—since only two dozen people were present, it could hardly be called a rally—in September 1919. Hitler came to observe, but, seeing possibilities invisible to almost everyone else, he enrolled as the workers’ party’s seventh member. After the country’s inflationary panic of 1923, he thought he saw his chance to lunge for power, but his attempted coup that November, which turned into a fiasco, was ridiculed throughout the Republic of Germany as the “Bürgerbräu-Putsch” (“Beer Hall Riot”) and his storm troopers’ public tantrums were dismissed as an example of postwar Germany’s black humor. The Nazis were to have the last, mad laugh, but not then; the 1920s were desperate years for Hitler and his movement. Prosperity means thin gruel for revolutionaries, and as long as the boom lasted, life in the Weimar Republic was, on the whole, calm, pleasant, and amusing. American bankers had lent the country seven billion dollars, on terms so generous as to make it almost a gift. Fueled by these loans, Weimar’s economy seemed stable. German business was good; unemployment dropped to 650,000, an irreducible figure which meant that just about everyone in the country who wanted a job had one.

  The Nazis’ hopes had risen at the end of 1924, when their leader was released from Landsberg. Ludendorff had repudiated them, and Göring was in exile, but they believed Hitler’s gifts as a spellbinder would put things right. They forgot that he was only on parole. The judge had warned him against disruptive activities, which was like King Canute instructing the tides. In his first public appearance after leaving prison, the parolee told a crowd that Weimar, like Marxists and Jews, was Germany’s “enemy.” He cried: “In this struggle of ours there are only two possible outcomes—either the enemy passes over our bodies or we pass over theirs.” He was confident the Nazis would win because they would not shrink from wielding “weapons of spiritual and physical terror [geistigen und körperlichen terrors].” The judge decided he had violated his parole and enjoined him from public speaking for the next two years.302

  But Hitler was more than an orator. He was also an excellent administrator. At that time there were
fewer than 27,000 Nazis in the country. His recruiting drives slowly lengthened the rolls: 49,000 in 1923; 72,000 in 1927; 108,000 in 1928. Subgroups were organized: the Deutsches Jungvolk for children, the Bund Deutscher Mädel for girls, the N.S. Frauenschaften for women, and the Kulturbund for intellectuals. The most visible Nazis were the brawling brownshirts of the Sturmabteilung (SA), but while their leader spoke affectionately of these “alten Kämpfern” (“old fighters”), he relied more heavily on his Schutzstaffel (SS), who swore personal loyalty to him, wore black uniforms in frank imitation of the Italian Fascisti, and were led by a deceptively mild-mannered Waldtrudering chicken farmer, Heinrich Himmler. Hermann Göring (already known throughout Germany as the Fat One) was soliciting contributions from his family’s wealthy friends. And a crippled, twenty-eight-year-old Rhinelander with journalistic aspirations, whose applications for a reporter’s job had been repeatedly rejected by the Berliner Tageblatt, joined the small staff of the party’s fortnightly newsletter, the N.S. Briefe. This was Joseph Goebbels, who would become the Nazi megaphone. As chief of this tightly knit political conspiracy, Hitler invested himself with the title Partei- und Oberster-Sturmabteilung, Führer Vorsitzender der Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Kerband. One word survived: Führer. It means “leader.” History would remember him by it. Later the mere mention of the German Führer would terrify Europe and countries beyond the seas, but during those lean years the Nazis were only impressing one another. In the national election of May 20, 1928, they polled some 810,000 votes—2.6 percent of the 31,000,000 cast. Hitler, now in his fortieth year, found diversion from defeat that summer by falling in love with his blond, beautiful, twenty-year-old niece, Geli Raubal, the daughter of his widowed half sister. Royalties from sales of Mein Kampf—the book had already earned 59,058 reichsmarks—permitted him to keep Geli, Geli’s mother, and Geli’s sister in the Villa Wachenfelt, on the Obersalzberg, overlooking Berchtesgaden. All three women acquiesced in the establishment of this strange household. His niece’s feelings seem to have been ambivalent. She admired her powerful uncle and was flattered by his attentions. Yet she slowly came to resent his tyrannical manner toward her, and she was, and was to remain, sexually passive. Hitler’s infatuation, on the other hand, was absolute. The following year he sent the mother and the sister packing and moved his niece into his nine-room luxury flat on Munich’s Prinzregentenstrasse. There was talk. Several party members suggested to him that this was unwise; the party might pay a heavy political price for it. Infuriated, he forbade them even to mention her name in his presence. His intentions were probably honorable; he gave every sign of preparing for marriage. In retrospect his love for Geli seems to have been the one humane emotion in his life, though it was, of course, incestuous.

  Nazi political prospects brightened after the Crash. The Republic of Germany was a victim of the Crash—the principal victim. No other country was hit so hard. All sources of American largess dried up; every scheduled loan was canceled. Lacking markets for Germany’s export trade, Weimar could not afford imports; not even essentials, including food. The republic’s most prestigious financial institution was the Darmstäder und Nationalbank. When it failed, all other Berlin banks closed, too. Thousands of businesses went bankrupt. The world’s longest breadline stretched down the Kurfürstendamm. Hitler, rejoicing in the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi newspaper, wrote: “Never in my life have I been so well disposed and inwardly contented as in these days, for hard reality has opened the eyes of millions of Germans to the unprecedented swindles, lies and betrayals of the Marxist deceivers of the people.”303 Demoralization in the Reichstag led to legislative paralysis, which was succeeded, in turn, by new elections on September 14, 1930. Hitler furiously crisscrossed the country, promising jobs and bread for all, exposure of bureaucratic corruption, the rebuilding of a strong Germany, ruthless punishment of the Jewish financiers who had precipitated this crisis, and repudiation of the Versailles Diktat.

  The election returns startled everyone, including Hitler. All extremist parties had gained. The Communist vote had risen 25 percent. But 6,409,600 Germans had cast their ballots for Nazi candidates—a gain of over 690 percent. In twenty-eight months, they had vaulted from the smallest party in the Reichstag to the second-largest, second only to the Social Democrats. Until now their leader had been regarded as a wild-eyed, seedy man in a dirty trench coat, consigned to the lunatic fringe of Weimar politics, constantly in trouble with the tax authorities, too humble to enter the halls of the great and powerful. Now he was courting industrialists and senior generals of the Reichswehr, and all of them were listening very carefully. In one of those flashes which demonstrated his political genius, he decided to testify at the trial of three Leipzig lieutenants who, in defiance of a standing order, had smuggled copies of the Völkischer Beobachter into their barracks. Those who expected him to defend the young officers did not yet know their Führer. In the witness box he disowned them and recommended that they be punished. Spectators gasped; they didn’t realize that he was wooing the defendants’ superiors. Using the trial as a forum, he promised that Nazis would “see to it, when we come to power, that out of the present Reichswehr a great Army of the German people shall arise.” The judge asked if the Nazis would reach power through constitutional means. Hitler affirmed it; knowing how the German mind worked, he had abandoned any thought of a coup and meant, instead, to become head of state by legal means, with a formal mandate from the Reichstag. But he was also aware of the Teutonic love for inflammatory phrases. Shifting in his chair, he added: “I can assure you that when the National Socialist movement is victorious in this struggle, there will be a National Socialist Court of Justice, too. Then the November 1918 revolution will be avenged and heads will roll [Köpfe rollen]!”304

  Köpfe rollen! A delicious shudder passed through Germany. Here was the imperious voice they had missed since the kaiser had fled. By now the entire country was familiar with the Nazis’ symbol, their Hakenkreuz, or swastika—a black crooked cross imprinted on a white circle against a red background—and their party anthem, “Die Fahne Hoch” (“Raise the Banner”), written by Horst Wessel, a clergyman’s son who had abandoned his family and university classrooms to live in a slum with a retired prostitute, work for the party, and roam Berlin’s streets fighting Communists. In February 1931 the Communists murdered Wessel, making him an instant martyr. Over 100,000 men were now enrolled in the SA and SS, forming a private army larger than Weimar’s Reichswehr, whose senior officers, studying the transcript of the Leipzig trial, decided that they had found their man. Soldiers were no longer disciplined for reading the Völkischer Beobachter. The country’s millionaires conferred with Hitler, Göring, and the financial wizard Hjalmar Schacht, a recent Nazi convert. A majority of them decided that although the Nazi leader was a vulgar demagogue, he had an extraordinary gift for rousing latent patriotism in the people and might be able to suppress Weimar’s weak democracy, stubborn trade unions, and the Socialists and Communists. Contributions from big business, which had been distributed among other conservative parties in the past, were channeled into the Nazi coffers. Gustav Krupp, the munitions tycoon, became, in the word of a fellow industrialist, “ein Obernazi”—“a super Nazi.” As 1931 approached its end, Germany seemed sickened by a disease without a cure. Over five million men were out of work. Crippled veterans of the war were begging on street corners. Farmers’ mortgages were being foreclosed. Inflation had all but wiped out the middle classes. The Reichstag foundered in confusion; its 107 Nazi deputies were using fists and clubs to break up debates and drown out parliamentary motions. President Hindenburg, now eighty-four, was withdrawing into the stupor of senility. Gregor Strasser, who had led the party while Hitler was in prison, told a reporter: “Alles, was dazu dient, die Katastrophe zu beschleunigen… ist gut, sehr gut, für uns und unsere deutsche Revolution [All that serves to precipitate the catastrophe… is good, very good for us and our German revolution].”305

  Adolf Hitler
/>
  At this historic moment Hitler was struck by a personal tragedy. Before their affair Geli had been taking voice lessons in Vienna, which she adored; now she wanted to return and resume them. Her uncle absolutely refused to consider it. They quarreled bitterly. On the morning of September 17, after he had descended the stairs from their apartment and was entering his car, she thrust her head out a window. Neighbors heard her cry: “Then you won’t let me go to Vienna?” He shouted back, “No!” and drove off.306 The next morning her body was found in the flat. She had shot herself through the heart. Hitler was incoherent with grief. In death she achieved what he had denied her in life; she was buried in the family’s Viennese plot. Hitler could not attend the funeral. Six years earlier, to avoid deportation while paroled, he had renounced his Austrian citizenship. Since his application for German citizenship had not been approved, he was staatenlos, stateless—a man without a country. Under these circumstances foreigners, who could not fathom his growing mystique in central Europe, found it difficult to take him seriously.

  Churchill took him seriously. Germany had worried Winston since the Armistice. On September 24, 1924, when Hitler was still in Landsberg, dictating his book to Rudolf Hess, Winston had warned that “the soul of Germany smoulders with dreams of a War of Liberation or Revenge.” It could not, he wrote, “be kept in permanent subjugation.” He read Mein Kampf in its entirety as soon as E. J. Dugdale’s translation became available, but long before that he had studied translated excerpts, and, perhaps because of his own aggressive instincts, he grasped Hitler’s message. The book’s “main thesis,” he wrote, “is simple. Man is a fighting animal; therefore the nation, being a community of fighters, is a fighting unit.” It was Hitler’s argument that the ferocity “of a race depends on its purity. Hence the need for ridding it of foreign defilements. The Jewish race, owing to its universality, is of necessity pacifist and internationalist.” Hitler believed that only “brute force” could assure Germany’s survival. As Churchill understood it, Mein Kampf proposed a sweeping Teutonic political strategy, proposing that “the new Reich… gather within its fold all the scattered German elements in Europe. A race which has suffered defeat can be rescued by restoring its self-confidence. Above all things the Army must be taught to believe in its own invincibility.”307