If Hitler Comes

by Christopher Serpell

  I turned to “Odin”. “Several good paragraphs for you here,” I remarked. But he clutched my arm, and made a request that came strangely from the mouth of a gossip-writer. “Look, Fenton,” he said, “I don’t believe they really noticed who I was. Please, please don’t tell anyone I was here.” Then he rushed out as fast as his legs would carry him.

  The wretched mob followed, and some of them were sick on the stairs. I thought I would let them get away first, and lingered for a minute or so in the wrecked lounge. The Germans had done their work thoroughly. Nothing remained unbroken, nothing in place. Only the painting of Adolf Hitler, who gazed steadfastly down upon the broken torso of the Apollo Belvedere.

  Now, I reflected, the Terror had reached its consummation. The tide which had risen to engulf all that was worthy in English life was now sucking in the scum. Only Hitler remained, and he made no distinctions.

  Chapter Eight

  UNDER THE YOKE

  IN three weeks it was all over. Not a vestige of liberty survived; not a man remained in office, be he university don or inspector of gas meters, who had not manifested complete submission to the conquerors. The whole machinery of administration, from top to bottom, was seized and made to serve the ends of tyranny; every free association of Britons collapsed or was dissolved. It was a nation of slaves that ate its breakfast in the morning and trudged off to what work there was for it to do.

  One fine morning we of the foreign Press (and I was accounted “foreign” now) donned our glossy tall hats and morning coats and went along to what O’Flynn described as the funeral. The Führer, his arm still resting in its sling, had gone back to receive the daemonic acclamations of his own people; but the Reich Commissioner had arrived, in pomp and circumstance, and was about to state his will and pleasure concerning the disposal of the body.

  It was the last humiliation to learn that Herr Joachim von Ribbentrop was that Commissioner. One had expected him, that incredibly successful amateur, to remain at his Führer’s side, brilliantly directing the next move in the game of world conquest. He should have given England one contemptuous glance, and moved on.

  But Joachim von Ribbentrop is a single-minded man. He has a strong and narrow will. He knows how to define his ambitions. To be Foreign Minister of so great an empire that there are no foreign countries left to send ambassadors to would be a huge but Alexandrine triumph; frustration would come with the very completeness of it. There are more solid satisfactions to those wise enough to limit and intensify their desires. And to Joachim von Ribbentrop there could be no sweeter reward than to sit and gloat over the sufferings of the great country that had once stood for everything that he could never understand.

  Ribbentrop made a formal entry into London by driving in state, in a carriage with outriders, from Victoria Station, and his vulgar preference for the obvious caused him to choose Buckingham Palace as his official residence. He meant to be a very active Commissioner, and for this purpose must be in the heart of the capital, where all could see and fear him. Pompously he took his seat on the throne before which, not many years ago, he had presented his letters of credence, a parvenu among ambassadors.

  We attended, then, in morning dress, in a room into which white débutantes had once swept, in another world than this. We sat on rococo chairs, uncomfortably. He kept us waiting, but Dr. Schultz was there, smiling, and obviously trying to make us feel at home. “His Excellency is very busy, but that is understood, yes? Please not to accept discourtesy.”

  At last there was a stir, and the guards stiffened. “His Excellency the Reich Commissioner!” We struggled to our feet—and the usurper entered, in black uniform, the centre of a group of about half a dozen. He glanced at us, under drooping eyelids, but not as a man to his fellows. He might have been judging cattle.

  There was nothing ingratiating in his manner. Schultz and his kind might still be using the old blandishments in their dealings with the foreign Press; it was the tradition of their trade. But Ribbentrop had arrived. He was no longer interested in ladders.

  With him were some uniformed German secretaries, alert and cheerful, and three rather strange-looking men in mufti, with walrus moustaches, who did not look German and who hung awkwardly in the background. I had never seen them before.

  Schultz presented us individually to the new Lord Protector. He greeted us like a king of the days before kings were expected to smile. He was the same to all of us, even to those whom, when he was Hitler’s unofficial agent and still half a champagne peddler, he was pleased enough to meet in London clubs.

  Then, when we had all sat down again, he started to explain, in a businesslike way, what he wanted us to know about his régime, and how he expected us to accommodate ourselves to it.

  “Under German protection,” he said, “Great Britain becomes a totalitarian State, governed by decrees issued in the name of the Reich Commissioner. It is necessary that the foreign Press should appreciate this. The future development of this country will not depend upon political discussions; it will be an expression of the will of the Führer. Consequently, speculation of any kind will no longer form part of visiting Press correspondents’ duties. They will learn to beware of any but authorized sources of information.

  “As from July the nineteenth, the day on which a vile attempt was made on the life of the Führer, the authority of all magistrates and official bodies in this country and its possessions overseas has been automatically abrogated. It is henceforth an act of subversion, attended by heavy penalties, to communicate with any persons who were members of these bodies for any purpose not strictly personal and private. Certain magistrates and official bodies have, however, by special decree, been restored to their functions during the Führer’s pleasure, on taking the oath of loyalty to the Führer. Details of these acts of grace are to be published from time to time in the London Gazette.”

  Some flunkeys rushed in with a map of Great Britain, such as in other circumstances might have inspired youthful patriotism on a schoolroom wall. With relentless pointer the Commissioner divided the proud island into six Gaue—North, Midlands, South, London, Scotland, Wales—in each of which, he said, a Gauleiter, responsible to him alone, would exercise all administrative authority. Representatives of the Gauleiter would be installed in every town and village, where they might be assisted by advisory committees of the local inhabitants. Ireland was to be governed separately by a German “Protector.”

  The British armed forces had been disarmed and demobilized, but the personnel were “rapidly being recruited into the armed forces of the Reich”. All schools, railways, public utility undertakings and banks had become State property, even if privately or municipally owned before; but those persons who had directed them might in some cases be required to continue to do so, subject to control. The old currency would for the time being remain legal tender.

  Civil disputes between natives remained subject to the old courts, in so far as these had been confirmed in their functions. All criminal jurisdiction, however, and the settlement of disputes between Reich Germans and natives, had been transferred to the Special Courts set up under the military law. The Special Police had powers to search domiciles, at any hour of day or night, and to take individuals under protective custody. The former Metropolitan police, borough police, and constabulary were at the service of the Gauleiter for ordinary police duties.

  The State had full powers of expropriation for the common good. An announcement would be made later about the extent to which these powers would be used. It had, however, already been established that the property of all members of the late Warmonger Government was to be confiscated.…

  The Commissioner had been reading all this from a paper in level, yet monitory, tones. He had said no single word of hope or promise for the future. He had offered nothing, demanded all. His hearers visibly shuddered as he put the paper away.

  The Commissioner moved to go. Then his eye fell upon the three queer fellows who had entered so humbly behind him. He t
urned back and said: “I should have announced that, in accordance with the Führer’s express wish, my Advisory Council will be composed entirely of representatives of the British people themselves. Its members are Mr. Smith, representing the employers, Mr. Turner, representing the workers, and Mr. Newton, representing the professions.”

  He strode out, followed by his suite, leaving the dazed and hangdog Mr. Smith, Mr. Turner, and Mr. Newton at a loss to know whether to go after him. Who were those poor devils? Surely they were our ultimate Quislings, the last feeble representatives of that doomed race of compounders and compromisers who had been our downfall. It was strange to trace them back. There had been Sir John Naker and Professor Evans, so comfortably off, the one in a worldly, the other in an unworldly sense. With them were all Dorman’s Unholy Optimists, a varied but such a reassuring tribe. Then, for a brief period, there had been Patrick Rosse, a not ignoble genius, whose appearance and disappearance were equally abrupt. And now there were just Mr. Smith, Mr. Turner, and Mr. Newton, hoping that they could get out of the room before anyone asked them any questions.

  Dr. Schultz came into his own again. He tried to reflect some of the sternness of the Commissioner, but he could not bring himself to abandon altogether his professional geniality. “Well, gentlemen, thank you for your arrival. We understand the other much better now, I suppose?” He bowed us out.

  We had come in taxis, which in our station of life is a ceremonial mode of conveyance, but most of us walked back. Imagine our little heterogeneous group, top-hatted, walking along the Mall, attracting mild remark among the listless passers-by, and feeling like tourists in some great dead city. Behind us the white palace, with the Commissioner’s Swastika flag flying where the Royal Standard ought to be; on the left, St. James’s, where (a long time ago, it seemed now) the pit had suddenly opened before the craven rulers of the nation; and, all among the trees, those imperial towers which still stood up so boldly and yet now were a hollow shell.

  We discussed the prospects of our work in London under the new régime. Was it worth while to stay? Did Ribbentrop mean that we were expected to become mere agents for transmitting German communiqués?

  It was a Brazilian journalist who persuaded most of us to hang on while we could. We had crowded, almost without knowing it, into a little public house in the Strand, where the astonished landlord, noticing our unaccustomed appearance, feared that we were some new infliction from Germany, and was pathetically anxious to please. All the other customers drank up and respectfully left.

  “After all,” said Senhor Diaz, “we may possibly be allowed to describe, if not to interpret. In our descriptions we can be a little—subtle. If Ribbentrop is going to incorporate the British economic system into that of the Reich it will be a great newspaper story. And if we can’t send it, we can save it up and write it when we get home.”

  There was sense in this, and then someone remarked quietly that while we remained the Germans might make some show of moderating the cruelties of the régime. That alone made it our duty to stay.

  So, as the landlord rushed up anxiously with another round of drinks, we made a kind of pact—to stay as long as it was reasonably safe to stay, to get all the truth we could past the censorship, and, if we reached home, to set down on paper everything we had been able to observe. I have not yet kept the last part of the bargain, and this book is no serious attempt to do so; but one day I hope to be able to place at the disposal of historians and economists a mass of strange facts, which, bewildering as they are to me, may be justly interpreted by them.

  It is, however, easy to distinguish two aspects of Herr von Ribbentrop’s régime. It ministers to a sadistic desire for revenge and moral vandalism, a brutish urge to destroy what is not understood; but at the same time it has achieved a miracle of political organization—the merging of the whole mercantile economy of Britain into the self-sufficient economy of the Reich.

  The first aspect is not one to dwell upon, unless by pathologists. To the ordinary mind it would not be instructive, and it would be exceedingly unpleasant, to follow Ribbentrop on those morbid excursions on which he tried to pull to pieces, with his own fingers, the inmost souls of the men he hated. His notorious visits to Mr. Churchill and Mr. Eden at Godalming concentration camp; his attendance incognito at East End pogroms; his cat and mouse game with the panting, perspiring Sir John Naker—these are best forgotten, if they can be. So, too, are his deliberate affronts to the feelings of the vanquished, as when Hitler superseded Nelson in Trafalgar Square and the German Eagle swung like a blasphemous rood beneath the dome of St. Paul’s. But there is just this to be said. Ribbentrop’s evil propensities never achieved complete satisfaction. He might rant and bully and mock, but still in the sorrowful glances that were raised to him, by the once great as well as by the obscure, there was always the sign of that inmost citadel of the spirit that no human savagery can destroy. The consciousness of this must have followed Ribbentrop down his dark career, and driven him to even worse, but ever vain, excesses.

  But there remains the other aspect of his régime, the exploitation of all the resources of Britain—a policy brilliantly, almost incredibly, successful. In the slough of his moral degradation the Reich Commissioner never lost the mastery of those ruthlessly efficient methods by which the Nazis, from being a little conspiratorial group in Munich, have by relentless stages come to dominate the world. He had clever lieutenants, no doubt, men like Himmler (for a time), Schacht, the inevitable Seyss-Inquart, and a new star, Fritz Ostenhammer, the Commissioner for Industry. But the Reich Commissioner himself can fairly claim the major share of the credit for a very remarkable achievement.

  The devilishly complete subjugation of the whole machine of national life—the preliminary programme so frigidly announced to us in Buckingham Palace—happened exactly as planned. One must imagine that, months before, a minor but fanatical Nazi in Darmstadt was told to brush up his English and his knowledge of Fen drainage because he would one day be entrusted with the administrative oversight of the Isle of Ely; well, sure enough, the day arrived when this gentleman, properly escorted, presented himself at Wisbech, showed his authority to the clerk to the county council and the mayor, and got to work simultaneously on the necessary purges and on a pet plan for deepening the outfall of the Nene. It happened just like that. One day you might be in exasperating correspondence with Mr. Jones, of the local electrical undertaking, about additional power for your factory; by the next, you had received a businesslike letter stating that an engineer would be calling on you on Wednesday, and signed by the Herr Oberelektrizitätstundige Schmidt.

  “There is one thing about these Germans,” nervously remarked the heads of big business, trying to whistle up each other’s courage; “they do get things done.” They do indeed. Once they had gained control of the Board of Admiralty, as of Snoring Parva Parish Council, they passed rapidly on to the next phase. They made it clear that they had not come to England merely to teach the art of efficient administration. They showed us how simple it was to turn us into slaves.

  We were to be a German colony—and a colony in the old, bad sense. All our resources, of men and material, were to be at the service of the German State, without regard to human rights or dignity. Our very lives were to depend on their usefulness to Hitler.

  Overnight we were swallowed by the Nazi autarky. Lenin had not led a greater revolution than that. Masters and men, borrowers and lenders, buyers and sellers—in a moment these various relationships which had so completely governed our lives were dissolved and rebuilt into a State socialism designed to serve the needs of another empire.

  The City’s collapse was complete. Its leading strings of world finance suddenly went slack; an invisible wall arose to isolate it from the non-German world; and the pound sterling became a meaningless cipher. Fortunes vanished, shares ceased to be quoted. That vast system of credit on which had floated the trade of more than half the world burst like a toy balloon. Henceforth, the Square Mile was to b
e but a minor Nazi counting-house.

  Thus England became a poor country, without those great financial resources which had enabled her to live like a lord among the nations. It was no longer a question of juggling with stocks and shares and sitting back and receiving dividends from foreign parts; all that now could be done was to dig the coal from the bowels of the earth, smelt the ore, forge the weapons, faster and ever faster; and then to barter them for the bare necessities of life. A large part of the great middle-class, who had been working all this while in the artificial world of credit, found themselves with nothing to do but work miserably with their hands.

  The cosmopolitan financiers had miscalculated. They thought that Germany would take over British capital resources, and make use of them in an orthodox way. They thought that they themselves could batten on the new world as on the old. They forgot that international confidence depended on international security, and that paper relationships and paper wealth mean nothing to Nazis on the march.

  Finance capital, in fact, was doomed. The world’s new masters were to grow rich, not by lending money and keeping the peace, but by making war and seizing the booty. The bomber and the police machine gun had confounded the economists.

  As far as Great Britain was concerned the Nazi aim was simple. Here was a highly industrialized country, organized for foreign trade, and having certain mineral resources that Germany lacked. Let her continue to produce, let the products be bartered abroad for whatever Germany might want, and let all the surplus raw materials be sent to Germany. The whole of British industry was to be reorganized to further these ends. Dr. Schacht instituted his Three Years’ Plan, and effectively abolished the old commercial criterion of whether an enterprise was likely to pay. The notion of profit, like that of taxation, soon became obsolete in England; all that happened was that England produced the goods, and Germany either used or bartered them.