Hitler Has Won

by Frederic Mullally

  “I suppose we could put in for one, Herr Voegler, but I really have so little to do, with the Professor and Sophie out at work all day. To tell you the truth, I rather enjoy doing my own housework.”

  “There speaks a good German mother,” Voegler said. And, with a smile for Sophie—“How about you, Fräulein Armbrecht? Shall you take on a Ukrainian servant when you get married?” “I haven’t thought about it—mainly, I suppose, because I have no intention of getting married before the war’s over.”

  “So?” Voegler took a spoonful of soup and gave an appreciative little grunt. “But if your father’s opinion has any merit the war might go on for years. Are you going to deny some lucky fellow a beautiful wife, all that time?”

  Flushing slightly as she bent over her plate, Sophie murmured, “I’d rather put it that I don’t want to add to the state’s burden of widows’ pensions.”

  “Liebchen!” her mother protested. “If all our young girls thought that way nobody would ever get married!”

  “Absolutely right, Frau Armbrecht! And may I compliment you on this delicious soup? Even better than we had at Dachau today. Wouldn’t you agree, Kurt?”

  It was a cat-and-mouse game, and Voegler kept it going, with amiable resolution, throughout the longest and most nerve-racking mealtime Kurt could remember. Not once did the SS officer unsheathe his claws or utter anything more threatening than a conversational purr. But his gambits, his smooth switches of topic, were as contrived as his smile. Margit Armbrecht, insulated as ever by her guilelessness, came through the ordeal unscathed and, it almost seemed, once more disarmed by her guest’s flattering attentions. Sophie, unnaturally silent throughout most of the meal, had to face her own moment of decision after they had returned to the sitting room for coffee. The polite brush-off she gave Voegler left Kurt with badly mixed feelings, rather than the wholehearted approval he should have felt.

  “Nine-thirty.” Voegler looked up from consulting his wrist watch. “It means I now have to face one of those tiresome conflicts between personal pleasure and the call of duty.” His pale-blue eyes came to rest on Sophie. “Perhaps Fräulein Armbrecht will help me to decide?”

  Sophie returned his gaze, her lovely face composed and noncommittal.

  “Your next-door neighbor,” Voegler went on, “is the worthy Herr Krenkler, the local branch leader of the Party and a member of Gauleiter Geisler’s headquarters staff. But you know all that, of course.”

  “We’ve met Herr Krenkler,” said Sophie.

  “I’m sure you have. I myself had no idea he lived around the corner until I bumped into him just outside, walking his dog. I’m invited to discuss one of his projects over a brandy. On the other hand, there’s an informal party just started at the Bayrischer Hof, to celebrate an SS colleague’s promotion to Standartenfuehrer. Ladies are welcome, and it would give me the greatest pleasure to take you to the party, Fräulein Armbrecht, and escort you safely home afterward. There! What shall it be —Krenkler, or champagne at Bayrischer Hof?”

  Sophie said, “I’m afraid the decision’s out of my hands. I have to be up at the crack of dawn to catch a train to Nuremberg. In fact, if you’ll all excuse me—” she turned to her mother, her eyes signaling for support—“I’d better clear up the kitchen and get off to bed right away.”

  The car, with its SS driver, was still parked in the street an hour later, when Kurt drew back the curtains in his bedroom to check. He was shrugging awkwardly into his pajama jacket, with its abbreviated left sleeve, when Sophie tapped on the door. She came in, hairbrush in hand, her long tresses looping about the shoulders of the old pink velvet dressing gown she had brought back from Madrid, three years ago.

  “To bed so early, brother dear! I was just going down to fix you and Father a nightcap.”

  “We’ve had it—out of a bottle.” He sat down on the bed, buttoning up his jacket. “How about that crack-of-dawn train you’re supposed to be catching?”

  She frowned. “I'm going to rim out of stories for that one. Can’t you use your influence with the Fuehrer to get him posted to the eastern front of somewhere?”

  “What influence? Voegler could run rings around me. Which is why—” he puffed up his pillow and sprawled back against it—“I wonder if it’s wise to keep giving him such an obvious cold shoulder?”

  “Kurt! What’s that supposed to mean? I should let myself be pawed by that horror, so we can all keep in his good books?”

  “I don’t know, Maedel. Maybe we should dig up a phony fiance for you from somewhere. I don’t think Voegler’s going to let up, and there’s a lot of nastiness there, hidden behind that revolting facade.”

  “Well, let him try it on someone else.” She sat down at his dressing table and went to work on her red hair with long vigorous brush strokes. “I’m much more interested in what’s happening with you and Helga. She’s owed me a letter for about three weeks.”

  He had been prepared for this, but he was still uncertain how to handle it. The memory of that voluptuous night’s excesses with Helga and her brunette girl friend had already begun to fray and fade, leaving only certain disjointed images, sharply remembered, vivid dislocated jump-cuts in an otherwise out-of-focus blue film. But the guilt remained, haplessly enmeshed in the prurience. He had written to Helga only once—a few stilted lines from Warsaw.

  He said, “Helga’s in Berlin and I’m in Bavaria. So, nothing’s happening.”

  “Hm-m. Can’t say I like the sound of that. Girls who are attracted to one-armed fellers don’t grow on trees, y’know.”

  His sister could make cracks like that now with a perfectly straight face, and it was good. But what Helga had done for him in restoring his male ego had been even better.

  She came over to embrace him before she left. “Look after yourself, Herr Captain.”

  “You too. And listen—make sure Father burns those damn books in the morning, promise?”

  “You know Father. I’ll take care of it myself, soon as he’s out of the house.”

  “And about Voegler—” He held her face between his hands.

  “Yes, brother dear?”

  “Tell him to get stuffed!”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I

  WILLIAM SHAW, chief Washington correspondent of the weekly News Summary, had earned his persona grata standing in the White House by scrupulously observing both the spirit and the substance of President Roosevelt’s “off-the-record” briefings. That is to say, he not only took care never to put in the President’s mouth the actual words that had issued from it during the short privileged sessions Shaw enjoyed in the Oval Room, but also so “doctored” his copy as to effectively camouflage its source from all except the President himself, the President’s immediate entourage and just about every other Washington-based newspaper and radio correspondent. As cover for the President, Shaw habitually used a ubiquitous “fly on the wall” in the White House. His publisher, the dyspeptic multimillionaire Hudson Smith, was of course privy to the special relationship between his top Washington man and the White House; had he not been, Shaw would have been out on his ear within a month of taking up his assignment to the nation’s capital back in 1940. For whereas Shaw privately held the President in high esteem, Hudson Smith loathed with an almost radiant intensity everything Franklin Delano Roosevelt stood for. He tolerated Shaw’s nonpartisan coverage from Washington for one good reason: as the acknowledged best-informed weekly summary of the Presidential scene in American journalism it was knocking spots off its nearest rival and bringing in all the prestige advertising a vain and venal publisher’s heart could desire.

  The new Lincoln-Continental waiting for Bill Shaw on the Pennsylvania Avenue side of the White House had been a 1943 Christmas present from the publisher. The long-legged and nubile brunette waiting for him on the rear seat had been Shaw’s 1942 Christmas present to himself. He gave her responsive thigh a quick squeeze as the driver moved off into the traffic.

  “Great stuff, honey. Ready to get
some of it down while its good and fresh?”

  “Why, Mister Shaw, suh—” the notebook flipped open on her knees—“what are those pickets out there gonna think!”

  He dictated rapidly during the short ride to the office—key phrases neatly stored away in their contexts as they had emerged, Harvard-accented, through the smoke curling from the President’s long cigarette holder; phrases and patterns of allusion he would have to work over, transpose, reshape into the impersonal journalese of any good newsman with his ear close to the ground. A stern training kept his secretary silent during the swift ascent from the street to the News Summary suite of offices in the National Press Club building. The same discipline rationed his colleagues in the newsroom to knowing grins as Shaw thumb-upped his way to his own room, to his stripped desk, his uncovered portable typewriter and the neat stack of copy paper. There was a nod and a pursed lip-smack for Mary-Lou as she deposited his vacuum-flask within reach and quickly withdrew to her guard post outside.

  Shaw got his pipe going and started to type.

  The pickets parading outside the White House were a microcosm of the nation’s divided conscience, and fears. The slogans on the banners ranged from “WE’RE NOT SAVING STALIN’S SKIN” to “EUROPE TODAY: TOMORROW THE U.S.A.,” with almost every shade of America-Firstism, Catholic neutralism and pro-British sentimentalism represented in between.

  Inside the White House it was another story. The latest Gallup Poll had arrived on the President’s desk. It showed that while 49 percent of the American people still wanted to keep their country nonbelligerent, the “Undecided” portion had shrunk from 9 to 5 percent, and the difference had clearly been picked up by the “Let’s Get In” fraction, now mustering an impressive 46 percent.

  The latest Gallup findings seemed to bolster the growing evidence of a significant shift of opinion in U.S. Catholic circles. And this, combined with the secret report to the White House last week by the President’s personal representative in the Vatican, Myron Taylor, could provide another precious plank for the coffin Franklin D. Roosevelt has been so diligently constructing for American Neutralism.

  With 24 million American adherents, the Catholic Church constitutes the most powerful single religious denomination in the U.S. Until now Catholicism, through its formidable lobbies in Washington, has been one of the mainstays of Congressional resistance to the President’s pro-war politics. Its powerful Irish element is largely unmoved by the plight of its historic enemy, Britain; and its Polish constituency positively rejoiced over every Wehrmacht victory against the hated Russians. Above all Rome, the home of the Vatican, was also the capital city of Hitler’s Axis partner, Catholic Italy, and it was clear that the Holy Father, while presenting a neutralist’s face to the world, was far from displeased by the outcome of Hitler’s death-struggle with atheist Russia. Reflecting the Pontiff’s viewpoint was a formidable front line of lay Catholic leaders in the United States—Clare Booth Luce, United Steelworkers President Philip Murray, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jersey City Mayor Frank J. Hague and John W. McCormack. In any case, there was a concordat still in existence between Berlin and the Vatican, and it was up to the Holy Father himself to decide if and when it had been dishonored.

  The first militant rumblings came from the liberal wing of the United States Catholic press last Christmas when Martin Bormann imposed his obligatory Yuletide prayer on all the churches of the Greater Reich. The rumblings were swelled by outraged growls from the conservative R.C. newspapers at Easter, when the traditional Catholic processions were banned and hundreds of parish priests in Poland and Czechoslovakia flung into concentration camps for such crimes as hearing confessions in their own native languages. When the Bishop of Muenster, Clemens von Galen, was put under house arrest for speaking out against this persecution, for the first time Archbishop Francis J. Spellman of New York came right out and coupled Adolf Hitler with Josef Stalin as agents of the anti-God, thereby earning the pontifical displeasure, it was said, of Pope Pius XII, who stubbornly clings to the belief that in a head-on clash between the Vatican and the Nazi Government the Church can only emerge the loser—a thesis that, to a growing body of American Catholic opinion, is,not only unproven but spiritually irrelevant.

  Hitler’s announcement, before leaving for Madrid, that he would cut by half the state’s next annual subsidy to the Catholic Church was greeted at first with shocked disbelief by the Catholic hierarchy of Spain and Portugal. The timing seemed perverse. Here was the German Fuehrer, about to sit down with those two Iberian pillars of the Holy Catholic Church, Franco and Salazar, to argue them into accepting a Wehrmacht role inside Spain and an extension of the Atlantic Wall to include Portugal’s coastline—and the best preconference sweetener he could dream up was this unilateral breach of his concordat with the Vatican!

  Cardinal Cerejeira, the Archbishop of Lisbon, in Rome for a briefing on the Madrid conference from the Pope’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Maglione, was of two minds whether to bring pressure on President Salazar to withdraw from the conference as a mark of solidarity with the beleaguered Church in Germany. But Maglione counseled restraint. These were among the most difficult, perhaps the most dangerous, days in the Church’s long history. But the Rock of Peter would weather the storm. Meanwhile, patience and conciliation, rather than provocation, were the path they must all tread.

  From the Segreteria dello Stato, Cerejeira paid a call on Eugene Cardinal Tisserand, Secretary of the Eastern Congregation and the only non-Italian member of the Curia. The Frenchman was not among Cerejeira’s best-loved brothers-in-Christ. His politics were, in fact, decidedly to the left of the Vatican center, to which Cerejeira believed he belonged. The cardinal from Lorraine made no bones about his contempt for Italian fascism and his dislike of practically everything Hitler stood for. He had even been reported as asserting that Bolshevism represented a much less serious danger for the Church than National Socialism. However, his views on Hitler’s extraordinary diplomatic gaffe might be worth hearing.

  “It’s no gaffe, my dear Cerejeira,” Tisserand said firmly. “There’s a well-thought-out motive behind every one of Hitler’s crude and bombastic démarches. When he can’t use a carrot to get his donkeys moving, he picks up the stick. Hitler wants something Spain and Portugal are rightly unhappy to give—Wehrmacht bases throughout the peninsula. But he’s not going to Madrid empty-handed. His timing is perfect. ‘Let my men in,’ he’s going to say, ‘and I’ll lay off the Church in Germany, and the Vatican.’ And if the Caudillo and your president fall for that, my dear Cerejeira, they deserve to be treated as donkeys, because no deal Hitler ever made has been worth the paper it was written on.”

  Kurt was spared the ordeal of a personal confrontation with Hitler on his return to the Berghof from Munich. For one thing, the Fuehrer had already begun an intensive study of Roman Catholic doctrine and dogma, with the object of isolating all articles of faith inimical to the New Order and preparing a common ground upon which National Socialism and a reformed Catholic Church might coexist. This would require radical changes in the Catechism and New Testament and a “purging of Jewish mumbo jumbo” from the Old Testament. It was to be an open question, according to leaks from Bormann’s secretariat, whether Jesus was the son of God, but an accepted fact that he was not Jewish but Aryan—the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier. The doctrine of transubstantiation was out—“a metamorphosis that is a mockery of all that is divine.” Divorce would be permitted within the Church for Aryans married to Jews. The doctrine that all men are created equal in the sight of God would be rewritten “to conform with biological reality and National Socialist truth.”

  In addition to his theological preoccupations, the Fuehrer was bent on completing the security of Europe—in particular the Atlantic Wall—as the prelude to a final all-out assault on the shrunken but still vast territories held by Stalin and the Red Army. From Norway down to the French Pyrenees he had no worries. The fact that Britain, his last European enemy, had four and a half million me
n under arms gave him no restless nights. Even with her still-formidable Navy and impudently aggressive R.A.F., she utterly lacked the resources for a successful invasion of Nazi Europe and would be annihilated if she tried. The threat, if one existed, lay in the poorly defended Atlantic coastlines of Spain and Portugal—that and the imponderable twists and turns of Japanese foreign policy. Hitler distrusted his Oriental ally. He was convinced that when General Tojo deemed it opportune he would break his word and invade the Philippines. America would then launch the global war so dear to Roosevelt’s heart, and Germany would have no option but to take sides with Japan. The stepping stones to a United States invasion of Europe were clearly marked on the map: The Azores, Madeira, the Canary Islands, the West African coast. Thence, an Anglo-American amphibious invasion practically anywhere they chose on the Iberian peninsula.

  Two days after Kurt had set out on his tour of the New Order, Hitler had sent Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Wehrmacht Intelligence Bureau, on a mission to Madrid. He was to sound Franco out about an early heads-of-state meeting in the Spanish capital to discuss Iberian security, linked with the prospect of German aid for the crumbling Spanish economy. From Madrid, Canaris was to proceed to Lisbon—provided that Franco raised no objections—to seek the participation of President Salazar.

  From Madrid, Canaris had reported that Franco was more than ready to discuss German economic and military aid, provided that the sovereignty of Spain was not at issue. Similar sentiments were expressed by Portugal’s dictator, and the conference was set for the week beginning May 15.

  “The Fuehrer wants you in his Madrid entourage,” Martin Bormann informed Kurt in a brisk two-minute interview. “You have two weeks in which to brief yourself about Spanish politics. I suggest you spend them at the Berlin Foreign Ministry.”