The town of Loudun was reeling from the apparent mass possession of a group of nuns who lived in a local monastery. People were understandably upset to see the good sisters suddenly behaving like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, spouting obscenities with contorted faces and lewdly thrusted hips. Even the mother superior appeared possessed. “My mind was often filled with blasphemies,” related the Reverend Mother, Jeanne des Anges. “I felt a continual aversion against God. . . . My thought was often busy with seeking inventions to displease Him, and cause others to displease Him. Also, [the Devil] gave me a very great aversion against my religious profession, such that, sometimes when he occupied my head, I would tear up all my veils, and those of my sisters that I could get my hands on; I would trample them underfoot, I would eat them while cursing the hour that I entered into religion.”
It is unclear whether Richelieu organized the charade, or whether the nuns really were in some kind of psychotic state. But the cardinal certainly seized upon the episode to accomplish a murderous scheme. A priest named Urban Grandier had offended Richelieu with a scathing tract he was accused of having written.9 It attacked the cardinal’s policies and urged his dismissal. Plus, Grandier was a bit of a libertine who spoke openly against the rule of celibacy for priests.
Grandier was the confessor to the local Ursuline nuns, and it was he, the disturbed women claimed, who conjured the demons that tormented them. The roster of the unholy was most imaginative. Seven of the beings, for example, were said to have resided in the mother superior, including Leviathan, lodged in the middle of her forehead; Balaam, who took up residence in the second rib of her right side; and Behemoth, who sat in her stomach. Grandier, the nuns cried, had welcomed them all. Worse, he had defiled the women when they were under Satan’s spell.
“At that time,” wrote Jeanne des Anges, “the priest I spoke of used demons to excite love in me for him. They would give me desires to see him and speak to him. Several of our sisters had these same feelings without communicating them to us. On the contrary, we would hide ourselves from one another as much as we could. . . . When I didn’t see [Grandier], I burned with love for him . . .”
Richelieu was pleased when Grandier was arrested for sorcery, among other charges. He assigned the Baron de Laubardemont—“a faithful henchman of the central power,” as historian Michel de Certeau described him—to take charge of the process against Grandier and ensure the priest would suffer the state’s most hideous retribution for his unholy crimes. The trial was sure to end with the desired results. That’s because the prosecution had the most powerful piece of evidence possible: the pact Grandier signed with the devil himself. The forged document, extract ex inferis (extracts from hell), still resides in France’s Bibliothèque Nationale. It reads:
I deny God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, Mary and all the Saints, particularly Saint John the Baptist, the Church both Triumphant and Militant, all the sacraments, all the prayers prayed therein. I promise never to do good, to do all the evil I can, and would wish not at all to be a man, but that my nature be changed into a devil the better to serve thee, thou my lord and master Lucifer, and I promise thee that even if I be forced to do some good work, I will not do it in God’s honor, but in scorning him and in thine honor and that of all the devils, and that I ever give myself to thee and pray thee always to keep well the bond that I gave thee.
—Urb. Grandier
The verdict was, of course, guilty. Grandier now faced a terrible end. For the crimes of “magic, enchantments, irreligion, impiety, sacrilege,” and others, the official pronouncement read, the condemned priest was to humble himself in front of several local churches. “Which being done,” the sentence continued, “to be led to the public courtyard of Sainte-Croix of that town, to be tied to a stake on a pile of wood . . . and there his body to be burned alive with the pacts and magic figures remaining with the clerk of the court, together with the book written by his hand, composed against the celibacy of priests, and his ashes cast to the winds.” As he was tied to the stake, Grandier begged to be strangled before the flames started to consume him. That request was denied.
Having been liberated from the clutches of Grandier’s demons, Jeanne des Anges went on a triumphal tour of France. She was feted by some of the most prominent people in the kingdom, including Louis XIII himself, and in Paris stayed at the home of Laubardemont, the man “devoted to the state,” as Richelieu said, who presided over Grandier’s demise. People marveled at the nun’s hand, said to have been “sculpted by the devil” as he departed with the names of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. When Cardinal Richelieu saw the hand, he was most impressed, and exclaimed: “Now this is admirable!” Satan had rendered him a great service.
4
Tricking a Fight
Otto von Bismarck needed a war. The Prussian prime minister’s dream of a united German empire—a Second Reich—was stalled, and he knew a good old-fashioned clash with France, the perennial enemy, was just the thing to give unification a jump. (Germany at the time was a loose confederation of independent states, the most powerful of which was Prussia.) A contest of “blood and iron,” as Bismarck called it, was guaranteed to arouse the Teutonic spirit and rally those reluctant states, like Bavaria, that were wary of Prussian militarism and dominance.
But, alas, in 1869 the prospects for war were dim. Relations between France and Germany, while not exactly warm, were at least civil, and neither the French emperor, Napoleon III, nor Bismarck’s boss, King Wilhelm I of Prussia, was prepared to disrupt the peace, at least for the time being. “German national feeling is gradually melting away,” warned one of the prime minister’s associates, “and without a new crisis I can see no means of checking the process.” Bismarck hardly needed to be reminded. “I too think it probable that German unity would be advanced by violent events,” he replied. “But it is quite another matter to assume responsibility for bringing about a violent catastrophe and choosing the right time to act. Arbitrary interference in the course of history, on purely subjective grounds, has always resulted in the shaking down of unripe fruit. In my opinion it is obvious that German unity is not a ripe fruit. . . . The gift of waiting while a situation develops is an essential requirement of practical politics.”
Though Bismarck urged restraint, he was far too ambitious a politician to sit around and wait for fruit to ripen when he was hungry. Alert for anything that might precipitate a crisis with France, he found fertile opportunity in Spain. In 1868 a military junta had deposed Queen Isabella II and offered the throne to a member of the Prussian royal house of Hohenzollern, King Wilhelm’s cousin Leopold. Bismarck knew the French would never stand for a Prussian monarch in Spain, which would leave them surrounded by Hohenzollern power. It looked like the perfect chance to provoke a clash, if only he could get his king to cooperate.
Wilhelm I was stubbornly opposed to the Spanish offer, and Leopold himself was disinclined to accept so unstable a throne. Bismarck, who regularly manipulated the royal master he was supposed to serve, badgered Wilhelm relentlessly until, “with a heavy, very heavy, heart,” he agreed. Yet as soon as the French discovered what had happened, and indignantly demanded Prussia’s rejection of the Spanish crown, Wilhelm backed off. Bismarck was furious. “My first thought was to leave the service,” he later recounted. “I regarded this enforced yielding as a humiliation of Germany for which I would not be officially responsible.” But the wily prime minister soon saw a new opportunity in a telegram sent to him by the king.
Wilhelm wired Bismarck with the news that the French foreign minister had met with him at Ems, where the king was on vacation, and presented another demand from Napoleon III. It was not enough that Leopold had renounced the Spanish throne. The emperor also wanted a guarantee from the king that no Hohenzollern would ever accept it. Wilhelm advised his prime minister in the wire that he had firmly but politely refused to make such a promise and declined the French minister’s request for a second interview to discuss the matter further. The king’s telegram,
while reflecting his irritation at France, was essentially diplomatic in tone. Bismarck transformed it entirely with a little editing trick and released it to the press.
Not a word was added to the text of the telegram, but Bismarck excised just enough of it to make it read as if the king had been rudely accosted by the French minister while on vacation and had snubbed him in response. “This will have the effect of a red rag on the Gallic bull,” the self-satisfied prime minister said to his associates as he prepared his version of the telegram for release. And indeed it did. “From a long and shapeless balloon,” historian Emil Ludwig wrote of the edited telegram, “containing too little gas and therefore unable to rise in the air, an empty portion has been ligatured off; the remainder is now a round and well-filled bag which will rise quickly into the firmament and become visible to thousands of eyes.”
Less than a week after the publication of the edited dispatch in France on July 14, 1870, Bismarck had his war. The French were defeated and Napoleon III was deposed. King Wilhelm became kaiser of the new German empire, and Bismarck its famed “Iron Chancellor.”
5
The Lies and Fraud of the Third Reich
“The broad mass of a nation . . . will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small lie.”
—ADOLF HITLER, Mein Kampf
The devil, it’s said, wears many disguises. After he finished with the nuns of Loudun, for example, Satan slapped on a silly little moustache and called himself führer. He was most successful in his Hitler guise, helping an evil empire grow atop millions of corpses and a mountain of lies. They were often clumsy lies, unimaginative and easily disproved. Still, they were brazen and relentless enough to draw in masses of people, including a number of world leaders, and sufficient to spread terror and destruction across Europe and beyond.
A bold subterfuge and a failed Nazi coup known as the Beer Hall Putsch first propelled the future dictator to national prominence in 1923. Germany was a mess at the time, still staggering from its defeat in World War I and the humiliating peace terms it was forced to accept in the aftermath. The mark was virtually worthless; billions of them could barely buy a decent meal. France occupied the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heart, while other territorial losses and the hobbling of its once-proud military further sapped the national spirit. Many blamed the democratic government, called the Weimar Republic, that had been established in Germany after the war, and by 1923 the atmosphere was ripe for revolt. Hitler sniffed opportunity.
His Nazi party—based in the conservative state of Bavaria, where hatred of the Weimar Republic ran high—was still in its larval stage in 1923, but Hitler had a daring plan to seize power. He read an announcement that Bavaria’s three-man leadership was to hold a public meeting at a large beer hall outside Munich to discuss the sorry state of the nation. On the night of November 8, Hitler showed up with a gang of Nazi thugs and took over the meeting by threat of violence. He forced the Bavarian leaders at gunpoint into a back room, where he demanded they join his revolt against the Weimar government in Berlin and accept appointments in the new government he would form. The leaders declined, even with a gun pointed at their heads. Hitler was surprised, but not defeated. He raced back into the main hall and announced to the thousands gathered there that the leaders had agreed to join his cause. The throng believed him and roared their approval.
Hitler’s first grab at power came to nothing. The Bavarian leadership slipped away from the beer hall and denounced the bold upstart. During a subsequent clash with government forces, a number of Nazis were killed. Their leader scurried away to safety as they fell around him. Hitler was later arrested and briefly imprisoned, and his nascent Nazi movement appeared to be finished. But the beer hall fiasco was rewritten in the Nazi annals as a glorious moment in the party’s history. In fact, after he came to power in 1933, the führer commemorated the failed coup every year with extravagant rallies and celebrations. There was, of course, no mention of his cowardice under fire.
While in prison Hitler outlined his twisted political philosophy in his autobiography, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). Though the book itself is a toxic collection of myth, distortion, and rabid anti-Semitism, it nevertheless documents one of the rare occasions when Hitler actually told the truth. For in the midst of all the blather about Aryan superiority, he articulated a vision of a new German empire restored to its ancient glory, expanding eastward (at the expense of Poland, Russia, and Czechoslovakia, among other nations), and rid of such subhuman elements as Jews and Slavs. Indeed, Mein Kampf was a blueprint for almost every action Hitler took when he came to power. Too bad few read the tedious tome carefully, because it stood as a clear rebuttal to every lie Hitler told as he struggled to build and maintain the Nazi state.
After the failed Beer Hall Putsch and his stint in prison, Hitler regrouped the Nazi party and reasserted an ultranationalistic political platform that started to draw wide support. He used the democratic process he aimed to destroy to get party members elected to the Reichstag (Germany’s legislative body) and, eventually, himself appointed chancellor in 1933. Having reached this level of power, he immediately set about to do away with the democratic government and establish himself as dictator. The first step was to gain a majority in the Reichstag, at the expense of the Communist Party. Hitler arranged for the Reichstag to be dissolved and new elections held, an ostensibly legal way of seizing power. The Nazis were confident they would sweep the elections. “Now it will be easy to carry on the fight,” gloated Joseph Goebbels, who was about to be appointed minister of propaganda, “for we can call on all the resources of the State. Radio and press are at our disposal. We shall stage a masterpiece of propaganda. And this time, naturally, there is no lack of money.” Yet the propaganda extravaganza Goebbels envisioned, targeted against the Communists, failed miserably. No one seemed to believe a Bolshevik revolution in Germany was a looming threat. It then became clear to the Nazis that a crude deception was in order.
On the evening of February 27, 1933, just one month after Hitler was sworn in as chancellor, the Reichstag building in Berlin erupted in flames. It is almost certain that the Nazis started the fire, but they immediately blamed the Communists. “This is the beginning of a Communist revolution!” Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second-in-command, shouted outside the burning building. “We must not wait a minute. We will show no mercy. Every Communist official must be shot, where he is found. Every Communist deputy must this very night be strung up.” The next day, Hitler prevailed upon the German president, Paul von Hindenburg, the once mighty leader now weakened by old age and encroaching senility, to sign a decree “for the protection of the People and the State” that essentially abolished individual and civil liberties in Germany. With this flimsy legal sanction, a terror campaign against the Communists began. Mass arrests, torture, and murder were accompanied by the official suppression of Communist newspapers and political gatherings. The party was shattered, but still the Nazis failed to get the necessary majority in the elections that followed. No matter. Hitler had a simple solution. He would pave the way for his dictatorship by arranging for the Reichstag to legislate itself out of existence.
He proposed the Enabling Act, which gave all the Reichstag’s legislative powers to him for a period of four years. The act required a constitutional amendment, but with the Communist Party suppressed, and members of others parties forcibly barred from voting, the amendment easily passed with the necessary majority. “The government,” Hitler declared, “will make use of these powers only insofar as they are essential for carrying out vitally necessary measures.” He declined to mention that those “necessary measures” included the destruction of democracy, the subjugation of the individual German states, and the establishment of a fascist dictatorship. With the passing of the Enabling Act, author William Shirer wrote in his history of the Third Reich, “parliamentary democracy [was] finally interred in Germany. . . . Parliament had turned over its constitutional authority to Hitler and thereby committed suicide.�
�� And, as Hitler loved to boast, it was all legal.
As he consolidated his dictatorship at home, Hitler sent tidings of goodwill to the rest of the world. On May 17, 1933, before the now impotent Reichstag, he delivered his “Peace Speech,” for which he put on a mask of perfect benevolence. It was a soothing, reassuring message issued by a coiled snake poised to strike at its neighbors. War was “unlimited madness,” declared the man who would soon plunge the world into the bloodiest conflict humanity has ever known. As if to distance himself from the territorial ambitions of Germany’s past—and his own words in Mein Kampf—Hitler asserted that the Nazis had no wish to “Germanize” other peoples: “The mentality of the last century, which led people to think that they would make Germans out of Poles and Frenchmen, is alien to us. . . . Frenchmen, Poles, and others are our neighbors, and we know that no event that is historically conceivable can change this reality.” Shirer called this speech one of the greatest of Hitler’s career, “a masterpiece of deceptive propaganda that deeply moved the German people and unified them behind him and which made a profound and favorable impression on the outside world.” Over the next four years, Hitler would make more false peace speeches as he rearmed Germany, in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, and prepared to conquer his neighbors.
Austria was first. “Germany neither intends nor wishes to interfere in the internal affairs of Austria, to annex Austria, or to conclude an Anschluss [Union],” Hitler said of his native land in a 1935 speech. He even signed an agreement with the small nation in 1936 in which he promised to respect Austria’s independence and not interfere with its internal affairs. Less than two years later, Austria was swallowed whole. It should have come as no surprise. “German-Austria must be restored to the great German Motherland,” he wrote in the first chapter of Mein Kampf. “People of the same blood should be in the same REICH. The German people will have no right to engage in a colonial policy until they shall have brought all their children together in the one State.”
A Treasury of Deception Page 8