The card-indexes snapped in and out at Bush House. No doubt von Holtz’s came in useful, in a negative sense. By about the middle of the week more than 10,000 people had been apprehended.
Lists were published from time to time. One glanced anxiously down the long strings of names, surprised that the Nazis had been waiting to pounce all this time on so many obscure people, in Leicester or Wolverhampton, that one had never heard of before. Then some household name would leap to the eye—a Jewish scientist, a famous headmaster, a liberal-minded dean. Little by little, it was clear, the effective voice of Britain was being silenced.
The fearless opponents of Hitlerism went first—those who had never wavered in their condemnation of the Nazi evil, on higher grounds than those of patriotism. They were followed by others of the brave and the true, who had trod the simple path of duty until it had been lost in the post-Nuremberg morass. But the cowards were taken too, if being at liberty they might be an embarrassment to the conquerors; and not even the most flagrant compromisers escaped. In vain had certain mayors exhausted the borough treasury in entertaining the Nazi commandant, or civil servants thrown open official secrets to their German “advisers”. Proditores, etiam iis quos anteponunt, invisi sunt. The Nazis had plenty of fun later with people as contemptible as themselves.
Not all, of course, of the former leaders of the nation, whether admirals or street orators, could be accommodated in the centres of “protective custody”. But all could be threatened with such a fate, and made to dance a tune that would ward it off. The Führer’s Government must be carried on, and it could not be done entirely by foreign policemen. I do not for one moment blame those who now accepted minor office under the Nazis. I do not blame them for saluting the Swastika flag, or even for taking an enforced oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler. A sanitary inspector, after all, has as great a responsibility to a conquered as to a free people. The essential betrayal had happened long before, and a man, it is said, must eat. Nevertheless, there were some who faced privation rather than submit, or preferred even suicide to the life the Nazis offered them.
Most of those destined for concentration camps were hurried away on the authority of some minor functionary of the Gestapo; “trials”, such as that undergone by Dorman, were arranged only for special purposes. But the chosen personifications of the spirit that had once flouted Hitler’s will—men like Churchill, Duff Cooper and Eden—were seized upon with a special savagery that demanded a certain formal satisfaction. The horror of the proceedings in Westminster Hall, when these men were made to answer charges that suggested they were the enemies of civilization itself, is well enough known through the official descriptions. But those descriptions, shouted into the microphone by excited Nazi announcers, failed to make one point clear—they never admitted how far the Public Prosecutor was from shaking the proud resignation of the victims.
As for the members of the deposed Evans Government, they were under house arrest at Chequers. There they lived in luxury, walking beneath the summer trees and playing billiards. “Tiny pleasures occupied the place of glories and of duties.” It was very cruel, and one was almost sorry for them.
So, in a few short days, the great superstructure of English life was hacked down, but too much else was happening for us to notice how complete the destruction was. For the Germans there was manly work to be done—the sort of thing that got one the Iron Cross. It was not only to be a question of torturing people in the new concentration camps; there was to be a certain amount of standing people against a wall to be shot.
First there were the remnants of the British army, navy, and air force to be disarmed and demobilized. The quickest way to do this, if ever the slightest resistance was shown, was to take the men by surprise and mow them down with machine guns. This resulted in about 3,000 deaths, chiefly at Chatham and Aldershot, and thirteen Iron Crosses.
Another problem was that of giving adequate security to thouse who went about their Führer’s business. A sergeant of the Gestapo, for instance, was actually shot at Chester-le-Street by the enraged father of a young girl, and at Peterborough a German officer who struck an old man for alleged insolence was thrown by the crowd into the Nene. It was found difficult to bring these crimes home to their real perpetrator, so certain quarters of Chester-le-Street and Peterborough were decimated, one strong healthy man, preferably a father of a family, being taken from every three or four houses. Throughout the country about 4,500 people perished in this way.
The German refugees (thouse which even the Evans Government had avoided sending back to Germany) were dealt with by a simple plan. If there was no information required from them by the Gestapo all that happened was that a party of Brownshirts visited their homes and shot them. There was, however, a slight disadvantage in this procedure, as it led to various people being killed by mistake.
But not all the refugees were treated in quite this way. I well remember how worried we were about Mr. and Mrs. Essener, another German couple in our block of flats, living just above us. They were very attractive and pathetic people, not Jews, but professed enemies of the Nazis, and they used to tell us some horrible stories about their sufferings before they escaped. “They’re for it any time now,” I told Elizabeth. Then one evening she ran in to say that she had caught sight of a man in a Brownshirt’s uniform entering their flat. We waited breathlessly on the landing. Within two minutes the door was reopened, and through the bannisters we could see the Brownshirt’s feet and also those of a woman. So Essener was out, and it was his pretty wife that this swine was taking away. Elizabeth drew me back into the doorway, fearing I might do something foolish, and in a moment the couple, descending the stairs, passed across our field of vision. The Brownshirt turned towards us; a smile of recognition lit up his features; and he shot out his hand with a genial “Heil Hitler!” It was our old friend Herr Essener, late a “refugee”, taking his wife out for a walk on the Heath.
Then there were our own Jews—not the rich ones, who for the most part had escaped long ago, but the hard-working professional men and the huddled families of Whitechapel, Leeds, and Cheetham Hill, Manchester. The former, whatever their calling, faced the progressive disasters of a numerus clausus, a general boycott, and then an uncompromising “Aryan clause” which meant penury and sometimes starvation. The latter, now at the mercy of all that was meanest and most cowardly in our diseased national life, cowered hopelessly in their slums.
There is no doubt that the Germans had assigned to the Greyshirts the dirtiest work of all in the process of Nazifying Britain. It costs nothing, after supper, to throw a dog a bone, and the Greyshirts, who were to be the only vocal section of the English public, and were expected to absorb a high proportion of it, were to be thrown the bone of violent anti-Semitism. The Nazi conquerors had attained to a certain refinement of sadism, and in Great Britain they had more interesting quarry than the Jews; but for the right kind of native the cutting of the rabbis’ beards and the gutting of synagogues ought to provide an acceptable consolation prize. It was the art of government, as Hitler saw it.
But I must hasten to say that the Greyshirts now were not quite those passionate crusaders that at Leeds had shown there was “blood in Britain” and had gone blindly on to produce that anarchy which had brought the enemy within the gates. Nor were they those smart paraders that had achieved such an inappropriate respectability as soon as the first of the German police arrived. Herr Meyer had got to work, and he chose his men carefully. While Rosse pirouetted in the polite world, or what remained of it, Meyer was quietly making changes in the personnel. The Grey Army that resulted had lost its spontaneous flair, but gained in brutal purpose. It was staffed by ex-convicts, not by fanatics, and it was much more efficient.
The day came when Patrick Rosse was invited to take high office in the new slave-State—in fact, to become Chief Slave. On the same day he was presented with his reorganized Greyshirts, as a new and more effective instrument of tyranny. It was then, so far as the facts are k
nown, that he came to his senses. Precisely how he reacted I cannot say, though I have often tried to guess. The world he had lived and fought in had always been unreal, but now self-deception was no longer possible, and he was face to face with a very ugly reality. He was, after all, no conscious Quisling, and he disappeared abruptly from the political scene. The new Leader of the Greyshirts was a fat man called Jones, who possessed a criminal record, was a sexual pervert, and had been a Communist before the collapse of the Stalin régime.
I have described, in the articles of which I speak, something of the horrors of the concentration camps, as told me by people who went through them and somehow came out alive. For the great and the good the worst tortures were reserved, but perhaps they had spiritual resources which enabled them best to withstand them. I only know that we who remained outside, whatever our circumstances might be, seemed to live always in the shadow of those cruelties. Sound in wind and limb, digging in our own garden, perhaps, or enjoying a good cigar after dinner, we could never forget that on this same island there were thousands of innocent people—very fine people, some of them—to whom life was all darkness and pain.
Godalming, among the Surrey hills, was the largest camp, and had perhaps the most distinguished register of guests. At one time it held seven judges, two Anglican and four Catholic bishops, and many more than a quorum of the old House of Commons. Himmler used to remark dreamily that it was in very lovely country. Nearly as important was the establishment at Haworth (Hitler, it seems, had once read a translation of Jane Eyre), where the landscape was different but the sufferings were the same. There was also a camp at Watersmeet, so that Brendon Water sometimes ran with blood, and there were others among the Scottish heather and the proud valleys of South Wales. But the most dreaded of all was the camp at Stoke Poges, within a stone’s throw of the elegiac churchyard; its commandant was, I think, insane. I shall never forget the frantic plea of a Reader in Classics at London University, on being told that he would be held in “protective custody” there. “Stoke Poges!” he screamed. “No, no, not Stoke Poges! Anywhere but Stoke Poges! Please don’t send me to Stoke Poges!” Was there ever a transfer of associations so cruelly ironic? The sword of Damocles hung over everybody’s head. It hung over mine, but I did not regard the risk as serious.
True, I was out of favour with the authorities, but I was hardly an object of their vengeance, and, apart from Dorman, no representative of the foreign Press had been molested. Still, I tried to persuade Elizabeth to go back to New Zealand, taking Julia with her, but she would not hear of it. I fancy she thought that if she stayed she might restrain me from running into trouble. But, believe me, no-one could have taken greater care about that than I did.
I have even to confess that in the midst of all these horrors I spent an evening at the Nibelungs Club. I hated the place—more, now, of course, than ever. A sense of mere decency, you may say, should have led me to avoid even passing its doors. But put it this way. I was a journalist, whose duty it was to keep contacts bright with those who mattered. The Nibelungs Club, I imagined, being the really top-drawer expression of Anglo-Germanism, was now a very important centre indeed. Moreover, to be seen there, I thought, would be enough to wipe out any disfavour I had fallen into with the authorities, and so perhaps lead the censors to deal with me more kindly. Therefore, when “Odin”, one of the few surviving gossip-writers in London, invited me to join him there for a brandy after dinner, I was rather pleased to go.
But, as I say, I hated the place. There was something about its atmosphere which suggested a ruddy apple rotten at the core. It made me think of Nietzsche in evening dress, of political religiosity pursued in a boudoir, of the athleticism of Captain Röhm. It had been founded shortly after Nuremberg by a group of cadets of notable English families who had found, in an uncertain world, one very easy way to the illusion of self-respect—the flattering attentions of their kind, hochgeboren also, in the Nazi ranks. Young men and women who owed their high privileges to an English past, and yet wished to feel that they were on the crest of the wave that was thundering on towards a German future, there learnt the art of being feudal and Fascist at the same time. They worked hard in the gymnasium, but drank rather too much; they read Spengler and Rosenberg, but produced a pseudo-Byronic literature of their own; they talked much of awaking the British worker to a new sense of his dignity, but they loved it when blood flowed in the East End.
The women were strange. Some were intense and earnest, simply dressed, with a perverse kind of appeal; they were in love with Hitler, or Ribbentrop, or (unconfessedly) with Patrick Rosse. Others did not dispense with the more customary feminine charms, which they freely exerted upon the Nazi visitors as they swept through the well-appointed rooms in clothes which, as one might have said in the old days, would have kept a German workman’s family for years.
But the men, I thought, were all contemptible. They were time-servers and petty bullies, without wit, perseverance, or courage, and the lack of moral stamina which brought them to such a place revealed itself in all they said and did. Yet, as the German influence in England grew, there were plenty who thought that to be on good terms with the Honourable Graham Medlincote, Lord John St. Neots, or Mr. Peter de Courcy was to have a friend at court.
I had expected on this occasion to find the rooms swarming with Germans, but there was hardly one to be seen. “Strange,” mused “Odin”, “I hope the counts and barons are not at some function elsewhere that I ought to have known about.”
The company had certainly lost much of their accustomed assurance. As I remembered them, they had been given to much decorous back-slapping, as being all superior Naziphils together. They would stand looking down through the plate-glass on the still unregenerate crowds, throw out their pigeon chests, and wink knowingly at some brownshirted princeling, or even at the assiduous von Holtz, as though to say, “We have a great task in front of us.” Now they tended to turn aside from that window when a Black Guard patrol went by, and drifted into the library to read the Tatler.
The change was startling. It certainly seemed to worry “Odin”, who began to hint that we might finish the evening elsewhere. But by this time Mr. Medlincote and Lord John had joined us, and were much more their old selves. The cause of their revival was, to be frank, champagne.
As a matter of fact, everyone now seemed to be drinking rather heavily. There was nothing much else to do. After some time a girl with short hair began discussing in a loud voice the merits of three distinct techniques for liquidating non-Aryans, as described to her by Himmler; and a still more odious woman quoted with relish certain private witticisms of the Führer made at the expense of British personalities now in concentration camps.
Medlincote leant his flushed face towards me. “My dear boy,” he said, “d’you know where we are? Centre-of-the-world! Thish club, shtandard bearer Anglo-German culture, what? Great future. Marvellsh!”
He struggled to his feet, and, glass in hand, approached the huge portrait of Hitler that dominated the room.
“Marvellsh man, Hitler,” he said. “Great frien’ of mine. Makesh us all sit up. Conquer the world. Captain New Zealand to-morrow. Poor ol’Nzealand.” He hurled his glass at the portrait. “Heil, ol’ boy!” he shouted.
Then the double doors were flung open, to disclose one of the club’s most distinguished honorary members, Karl Adolf, Graf von und zu Kissingen-Schwalbach, now a high officer in the S.S. A moment’s uneasy silence followed, as he stood in his uniform, motionless, unpleasantly sober. Then Medlincote turned round.
“Schwalbach, my dear fellow,” he cried, staggering towards him. “Jusht talking about Adolf. Great frien’ of mine. Great fellow. Come in. Tell us more about him. Tell us how he treats the bloody Jews.”
He put his two hands on the Count’s shoulders. But the Count shook him off, and looked round at the odd assembly, which had begun to laugh rather nervously.
“What is the meaning of this?” he thundered.
Lord Joh
n came up, tall, wavy-haired, fatuous.
“Celebration,” he said. “Hitler’s birthday, or somethin’.”
Kissingen-Schwalbach turned on his heel. He shouted an order over the balustrade. Up the wide curved staircase marched fifty Black Guards, armed with revolvers, rubber truncheons, and axes.
Some of the women screamed. The men looked about them in blank amazement. But Medlincote, now lolling on a sofa, had a brainwave of interpretation. “Thash ri’, Schwalbach,” he shrieked; “give ush demonstration. Show ush how to treat the bloody Jews.”
He was silenced with a blow from a truncheon. Ten guards had detached themselves from the ranks with the prearranged purpose, apparently, of apprehending Mr. Medlincote, along with Lord John, Mr. de Courcy, and two other prominent members of the club.
Lord John screamed as his arms were pinioned behind him: “You can’t do this to me. You’re mad. I’m Lord John St. Neots, and my father is the Duke of Hereford.” But all the same he was frogmarched down the stairs.
While the rest of us stood trembling round the walls the remaining Black Guards began systematically to smash up the premises of the club. They broke the chairs, ripped open the sofas, shattered the statues, overturned the vases, flung the wireless set out of the window, shivered the glasses into the fireplace, and occasionally aimed a truncheon blow at one of the cowering male members of the club, while Kissingen-Schwalbach looked satanically on. At length a word of command was given; they re-formed and marched out down the stairs again. Kissingen-Schwalbach remained to give one last contemptuous look at his clubmates, white and staring amid the ruins of their synthetic Valhalla. Then he raised his arm, cried “Heil Hitler!” and left also.
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