If Hitler Comes

by Christopher Serpell

  The industrialists, like the financiers, were bitterly disappointed. “The Germans can’t do without us,” they had said. “We must strike a bargain.” But the Germans could very well do without them, or, at least, compel the more intelligent of them to accept subordinate executive positions in their own businesses. One does not spend ten years building a self-sufficient war economy without learning some of the arts of socialist organization.

  The final blow to the possessing classes came when sterling was declared no longer legal tender. Thus at one blow all monetary savings disappeared; even the well-to-do were then utterly dependent on the Nazis for the means of subsistence. They must perform the tasks allotted to them, or starve.

  And what of the workers? Slowly their standard of living was forced down to the lowest tolerable level. The real value of wages decreased, and hours grew longer. The quality of food deteriorated. Butter and even margarine became scarce, bananas and other tropical fruit were unobtainable, and for a time at least (most cruel blow of all) tobacco and tea were off the market.

  The trade unions, of course, disappeared, and whether Mallory’s young friend at Transport House appreciated the new labour régime when it was actually imposed under the kindly eye of Dr. Ley I cannot tell. The British Labour Front produced neither bread nor circuses. Its officials, as far as I could gather, merely advised the Government on what was the least food on which the British workman could subsist, and it never troubled about May Day parades. Every now and again, however, it sent to Berlin mock resolutions of gratitude and loyalty to the Führer.

  But poverty and long hours are no absolute bar to happiness. Those who were in love, or happily married, or fortunate in their children, might still have made a corner of their lives worth living, without the cakes and ale. But Fate seemed to know no mercy. Britain, according to the Three Years’ Plan, was overpopulated, while Germany was still mobilized. What was there easier, then, than to take the surplus British workmen and drive them, like the helots they were, into German factories, leaving, for economy’s sake, their wives and children behind? The Polish harvest, too, was more important than the British, and Poland was depopulated: once again, the wonders of modern transport organization could be invoked, and a slave ship from Hull reach Danzig with a thousand British farm labourers battened below hatches.

  Here is a mighty supple instrument of tyranny. If a workman shows signs of political activity, or if the Nazi overseer for any reason does not like him, it is the simplest thing in the world to have him conscribed for service oversea. If a whole workshop is suspected of sabotage, or falls in any way below the standard of production demanded, a little bookkeeping at the Central Employment Exchange will suffice for one man in every ten to be sent to Galicia. In that case the hold tightens, for there is no-one but regards the ten in Galicia as anything but hostages for the hundred who remain behind.

  It does not take many secret police to hold down England. One in every factory, helped by a few spies; one in every group of villages; one for every block of streets. Each is protected by an invisible human screen—by the score or so of men, women, and children who would pay with their lives were any desperate attempt to be made on his. Each knows how to corrupt still further the frightened little group he dominates. Each serves at once his own greedy ends and his Führer’s.

  The revolution is complete. The purpose of the humblest life has been changed. One day an historian, in possession of all the facts, will draw a complete picture of the monstrous efficiency with which the Ribbentrop régime has established itself in every strategic position in the course of its subjugation of a people. I confess it has bewildered me; the impact was so tremendous that I never got any real bird’s-eye view of what was happening. Power and authority changed hands; old principles of economics were shown to be irrelevant; a regime that everyone hated had everything its own way. What I chiefly remember is such a case as that of Mrs. Jenkins, our charwoman. She was an excellent soul, who had brought up a large family in thrift and cleanliness, and launched them all in good jobs. One son had been killed at Dunkirk, but at the time she had felt proud of the sacrifice. Now she had reached the age at which she might have hoped to take things more easily and enjoy her port and lemon in peace. But the currency laws deprived her of her few savings, two of her four remaining sons were transported to Germany, and her husband was rapidly succumbing to diabetes because the supply of insulin had been stopped. Life had become hard and even tragic for her, yet she dared not discuss her troubles with her friends; and when she got home she could not even make herself a cup of tea.

  Chapter Nine

  VALHALLA IN SYDENHAM

  IT sounds incredible, but von Holtz’s forecast came true; in September, one year after the peace of Nuremberg, Hitler duly appointed London to be “the Vienna of the West”. It all happened at a Cultural Congress in a bigger and uglier post-war Albert Hall, which was one of the saddest and dullest congresses I have ever attended. I remember when I came away from it walking most disconsolately through the lifeless streets, and thinking what a strange thing it must be to be a dictator, and yet not to be able to touch anything good and true without making it stop or go wrong.

  The London I had come to six short years before had been a Weltstadt, a mainspring of world civilization. It had been an imperial capital, the source and inspiration of good government in a thousand corners of the globe. Its financial organization had governed that immense system which allowed railways to be built in Argentina and power-houses in Turkey. It had been the place where conflicting interests met and found their levels. Above all it had been teeming with ideas, societies, and causes which, working themselves out through the whole body of human endeavour, had leavened the mass and given zest and purpose to life.

  To-day, in this “Vienna of the West”, there were no spontaneous movements, no grand personal ambitions, no fads and fancies, no enthusiasms; there was only a desire to stand well with the authorities. There were no people struggling ahead with their life’s work in founding hospitals or advocating dress reform; there were only government officials. Instead of the Band of Hope there was the Greater Reich Anti-Alcoholism Bureau; instead of the Sawyer’s Arms Sick and Dividing Club there was the Hampstead Centre for Compulsory Winter Help. No meeting, however small, could be held without a police licence; and it would have taken a brave and importunate man to organize a pigeon-fanciers’ society or a chess club. But the sad thing was that, even had the right of free association been granted, there would have been few who had the heart to take advantage of it.

  A great city lives through its sectional interests. Kindred spirits seek each other out and form groups, wise or foolish. The little wheels revolve, movements grow, the enormous human mass becomes spiritually as well as economically mobilized. In such conditions town life is tolerable; there is more in society than buying and selling and the deadening limits of family or boarding-house life. But when this natural diversification of interests is prevented, as under the Nazis, the sparkling crystals break down, the mass coagulates, and can be stirred only by crude and violent means. In Berlin there were marches and parades, and all the horrible stimulants of mass hysteria. London was now denied even this substitute for life; it could be moved only by fear.

  The spectacle of eight million people together living lives mainly actuated by fear is no pleasant one. Nor, fortunately, is it common, for the circumstances which produce fear usually also give ground for such compensating emotions as the joy of struggle, a sense of comradeship, the excitement caused by external change, or the self-expressive satisfaction of martyrdom. But these sensations were all strange to the dull London crowds of that autumn. As for the struggle, it had been abandoned; and, far from there being a new sense of comradeship in adversity, the hateful tendency to curry favour by informing against one’s neighbours was beginning to rear its head. Since there was no resistance, there was no romance, no material for boyish literature; life in the concentration camps was dull as well as painful. The
re were many martyrs, but they moved forward not as a glorious army.

  The Berlin correspondent of the Wellington Courier, A. P. Hodges, passed through London on his way home on leave. He had just paid a visit to Prague, and he noted the apparent absence in England of that fierce inward flame of patriotism that still burned among the Czechs. “Heaven knows why they still hope,” he said, “but they do, whereas you here seem to have thrown in even your moral hand straight away.” One explanation we thought of was that the Czechs had little to reproach themselves with, while the British had everything; and we agreed that the British had surrendered much more in the way of hopes, ambitions, and ideals.

  Except for the fear of mean but crippling personal disasters (such as losing one’s job or money or being beaten by the Brownshirts), what was there to think about? There was no longer any honourable career for oneself or one’s sons—nothing to do but accept a subordinate position in a Prussian administration or attempt to make money out of the situation (and then not to be allowed to spend it as one wished). Politics no longer existed, either to be engaged in or discussed; the law had become yet another instrument of tyranny; science and learning also were prostituted; and even the consecrated calling of medicine was beginning to be misused in the horrible interests of National Socialist “eugenics”. It was virtually impossible for an Englishman to render any but menial service to his fellow men.

  This was sufficiently demoralizing, but added to it there was that complete devastation of intellectual life which deprived people of all but dangerous forms of escapism. The Vienna of the West was singularly devoid of mental stimulus; the German and English “cultures”, so rudely united, proved a barren pair.

  Everyone, of course, was busy learning German, and to unwilling pupils this was a severe enough task. “We have the greatest respect for the language of Shakespeare,” shrieked Dr. Goebbels at the Cultural Congress, using an unpleasant guttural form of it, “but its rôle as a universal tongue has passed by. In course of time it will become a dead language—a fruitful field of research, perhaps, for our great German scholars, and a medium in which certain poetry may continue to be written, but no language of practical affairs. A generation of Anglo-Germans will arise who will know it not, except as a means of recapturing, as a mental discipline, the spirit of that distracted world which waited it knew not for what—which waited, as we now know, for Adolf Hitler.” (Regulation cheers.) “The English tongue will become sacred in the lecture-room, but it will be forgotten in the market and the street. It will certainly”—and here Dr. Goebbels raised an admonitory finger and was greeted by the most frantic cheering from the Brownshirts—“it will certainly be no language for political discussion.”

  It was announced that official German translations would be approved of all the great English classics, like Shakespeare, Byron, and Wilde, and that in course of time the original versions would be confined to the learned libraries. No English would be taught to children now entering school for the first time, and in another five years all public examinations would be conducted in German. The People’s Observer, now the only remaining daily newspaper, would in a year or so become the Völkischer Beobachter again, with only a small English supplement for the “illiterate”. Hitler himself, though lapped in the Tudor traditions of Hampton Court, proposed not to burden his great mind with one word of the captive tongue, except the three with which, of a hideous incongruity, he sometimes concluded his venomous speeches—“God bless you”.

  Such was the conquerors’ linguistic programme, one of the most savage known to history. It will defeat itself, for to proscribe a great and noble tongue which still flourishes in other parts of the world is to invest it with enormous revolutionary power. In London soon one will have only to whisper, in English, “Pass the salt”, to utter a challenge; “I beg your pardon” will be a defiance; and “Thanks, chum” will stand for Harry, England, and St. George.

  Still, there we were, then, learning the Common Terminations and the Declension of Adjectives, and feeling all the time as though we had been kept in. What was there to distract us? The theatre was dead; apart from certain propagandist plays, which those who had accepted official employment felt bound to see, every theatre left open was running a revival of some sort, usually Shakespeare or an Edwardian musical comedy. The cinemas were used only for holding hands in the dark; no-one looked at the screen. Artists hesitated to paint; they waited to be quite sure what was decadent and what was not. There was nothing to talk about, nothing to look forward to, nothing to read.

  So the one common resource, naturally, was gossip, often the kind of gossip that was capable of taking a very sinister turn indeed. One would not have thought that the sneak, the denouncer, would ever play an important part in English life; but there it is, it has happened, and we in New Zealand must try to understand rather than condemn.

  Imagine forty million people, the greater part of them acknowledging in their hearts little more than the pagan virtues and sentimentalities, suddenly bereft of the symbols and fetishes which had held together their common life and governed their social behaviour. They are faced, almost to a man, with unbelievable adversity. Their standard of living is forced down, but that is the least of their troubles. They are entirely without security; on any day major disaster may overtake them, in the form of unemployment, imprisonment and torture, loss of house and home, separation from their families, transportation, and even death from lack of food. Every horror which has in the centuries swept over the patient masses of China is in a month or two confronting a people among whom respect for private rights, as well as pride of race, has been developed to the highest degree. Each man is left to face his particular misery alone; he is denied the right of consulting with his fellows, and there is none to speak for him in high places. All human standards are cast down; a man’s individual conscience alone can be heard above the confusion.

  How many of us can swear that, deprived of our accustomed moral support, we would consistently obey that voice? The ship sinks, the boat drill is pronounced useless by those who should have led it. Is it not then every man for himself, or at least for his loved ones?

  Left alone in cottage parlours, suburban sitting-rooms, or the faded drawing-rooms of country houses, fathers and mothers wonder about the future of their children. They may forget about their country, for it belongs to the past, and there is no means left to express their loyalty to it. But John and Joan and Robert belong to the future, if the Germans will only let them survive. Maybe, when they are grown, they will win their country back again. But if they can’t get enough food, or if they are transported to Poland, or if the hospital refuses their admission for the operation for appendicitis, all patriotic dreams will be in vain. So it is as well to co-operate, for the time being; and if one’s old friend next door seems to be a little obstinate, and behaves in a way which may bring down the Nazi wrath on the whole street or village, he is really not doing much good, either to himself or to others. Perhaps the Gestapo agent will be asking questions about it. Well, we can at least make it clear to him that we have nothing to do with subversive activities next door. And suppose he drops a hint about “protection” for us and the children, might we not tell him the little we know? After all, it is not sufficient to condemn the man.…

  This, dear civilized readers, is temptation indeed, and the armoury against it is often pathetically inadequate. Think of those obsolete weapons, which no ammunition will now fit—the public school spirit, trade union solidarity, intellectual integrity, respectability, family pride. Not one of them now functions. It remains to be shown what deeper resources there are in a once Christian England. Who now carries the shield of faith and the sword of the Spirit? Who has put on, in the evil day, the panoply of God?

  The external practice of religion survives. At first sight, perhaps, it bears the repellent aspect of a corpse, like a number of other institutions that have incongruously lingered on in Nazi England. Just as Hitler’s “law” is still largely
administered under ancient forms, by new judges in old wigs; just as the universities, though mere institutes of prostituted and vergoebbelt learning, largely retain their inherited organization of colleges and terms: so the Anglican Church remains, still drawing its tithes and husbanding its endowments. The Nazis evidently regard it as a stabilizing influence, in the new as in the old State; and they only ask that preachers who allude too pointedly to the rulers of the darkness of this world should be taken for a time under “protective custody”. The Nonconformist churches they are less sure about; so much might be going on behind the multifarious façades of Dissent. A system of registration has accordingly been established. Services may be held only in the larger churches and at appointed times, in the presence of a Nazi inspector—and woe betide the local preacher who introduces the slightest reference to current politics into what is licensed as an orthodox exposition of Lutheran or Calvinist theology, as the case may be. The smaller and less explicable denominations have impatiently been told that they must merge into one or other of the larger. It is hard if you think that you and your few friends alone compose the Elect to be told by a policeman to join the lost congregation in the next street, but Hitlerism and sectarianism are clearly at opposite poles. The Salvation Army has been demobilized, or at any rate has lost its uniforms and its right to march; Christian Science is considered “politically unreliable”. But the only groups that are actively persecuted and expropriated are the Quakers and the Papists; both are uncomfortable people for Nazis to melt outside a concentration camp.

  But church services under the British captivity have, as I have admitted, a first appearance of insincerity. The formal readings in the parish churches, the stiff, united worship in the chapels under the eye of a Nazi spy, the mumbling of masses in barns and warehouses are, on the surface, unconnected with any protest against the tyranny to which Englishmen not only submit but in which they to some extent take part. They are certainly no revolutionary assemblages, and the tocsin will never be rung by the curate of St. Simon’s and St. Jude’s up the street. But remember this. They provide the only pretext, not imposed by the Nazis, upon which Englishmen can with relative impunity meet together. It would be possible to argue that, if the country has been saved from complete degradation, if there are still remnants of honour and restraint and some gleams of charity among a people more cruelly and hopelessly persecuted than any in history, this is because when they meet it is in God’s name.