by Peter Quinn
The interview went smoothly. Possessed of the typical nonchalance of an English gentleman, reinforced by a wry grin, the journalist spoke impeccable German as well. He’d done his homework and knew the strategic context of what had happened to the Dresden and the rest of Admiral von Spee’s South American squadron. Canaris enjoyed reminiscing and talked longer than he planned. Finally, to signal an end, he stood.
Instead of rising, the Englishman took a pipe and tobacco pouch from his pocket. He scooped the bowl full and packed the tobacco down with his thumb. “Last time I was in Berlin, I was working on a book about ‘the new Germany,’ and I met your adjutant.”
“Which one?”
“Colonel Oster.”
“Your research is wide.”
“It wasn’t research alone. I was referred to him for help in facilitating the emigration of acquaintances of mine from Germany. They’re both doctors. The wife is Jewish.”
Canaris looked down at the card the Englishman had handed him at the beginning of the interview. He had no recollection of Oster ever mentioning the name printed on it—Ian Anderson—but knew full well of the assistance Oster gave to those leaving Germany. “That’s Colonel Oster’s affair.”
“It was an act of personal kindness, not official business. I’m told that you’ve also been of assistance to those encountering obstacles to their desire to leave Germany, Jews among them.”
“Emigration isn’t a concern of this office. I believe our discussion is over.” It was possible, of course, that the Englishman was a British agent. Göbbels was only half-joking when he’d said they were all spies. But the British were usually too subtle and experienced to attempt an approach as clumsy as this. There was also the more remote chance that he was an SS plant, there to smoke out disloyalty.
“I was a soldier once myself. But no longer. I work out of New York now, as a professional scribbler.”
Canaris reached beneath his desk to push the button that summoned Gresser. “Then your duty is done, and mine too. Good day.”
As he rose to his feet, the Englishman simultaneously tucked his notebook in his pocket. “But duty isn’t the same as willful blindness, do you think?”
“Duty is the fundamental requirement of a soldier, in your army and ours.”
“Must every order be obeyed, even if it involves the death of innocent civilians?” The Englishman struck a match and lit his pipe. Smoke rose in a thick, lazy coil.
“There’s a duty to defend one’s country, and my country, unlike yours, isn’t an island and doesn’t have an empire to fall back on. We have only ourselves, and unless the Volk stands united and strong, we will be overrun and oppressed by the hostile peoples on every side of us.”
“Inferior peoples, to be turned into chattel or removed, one way or another. Isn’t that the Führer’s view?”
Canaris pushed the buzzer several times to summon Gresser, who was apparently away from his desk. “My orderly will show you out.”
“I’ve told my former colleagues in intelligence that there are still decent men in Germany who, if they see a willingness on the part of the British and French to go to war in defense of the Czechs, will do whatever necessary to prevent their government from provoking such a war.”
“Please, I won’t listen to such drivel.”
“That’s what they said.”
Gresser entered the room. “You summoned me, Herr Admiral?”
It wasn’t until later in the day that Canaris rediscovered Anderson’s card beneath a sheaf of reports on the secret aid being given to Nazi agitators in the Sudetenland. He was about to throw it out when he noticed four carefully scripted lines on the back:We looked for peace
But no good came;
For a time of healing,
But behold, terror.
He stuck the card in his drawer. The New York address, he told himself, was a secondhand souvenir of his long-ago visit, and the stanza of doggerel, a reminder to do no more favors for the Minister of Propaganda.
July 1938
4
“There exists today a widespread and fatuous belief in the power of environment, as well as of education and opportunity to alter heredity, which arises from the dogma of the brotherhood of man, derived in its turn from the loose thinkers of the French Revolution and their American mimics. Such beliefs have done much damage in the past and if allowed to go uncontradicted, may do even more serious damage in the future. Thus the view that the Negro slave was an unfortunate cousin of the white man, deeply tanned by the tropic sun and denied the blessings of Christianity and civilization, played no small part with the sentimentalists of the Civil War period and it has taken fifty years to learn that speaking English and going to school and church do not transform a Negro into a white man. Nor was a Syrian or Egyptian freedman transformed into a Roman by wearing a toga and applauding his favorite gladiator in the ampitheatre. Americans will have a similar experience with the Polish Jew, whose dwarf stature, peculiar mentality and ruthless concentration on self-interest are being grafted upon the stock of the nation.”
—MADISON GRANT, The Passing of the Great Race
or The Basis of European History
WALL STREET, NEW YORK
UNDERNEATH THE MAIL that accumulated while Donovan was away was a large brown envelope, Ian Anderson’s name and return address scrawled in the left corner. He removed two books from inside and ran his hand across the luxurious black leather cover of the top one. The title, Racial Hygiene,was embossed in gold. He scanned the introduction. The text was an English-language reprint of a 1921 German book with a foreword by Nazi bigwig Rudolph Hess. “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology,” stated the opening line of his introduction.
Donovan turned to a chapter entitled “Human Rubbish.” The opening paragraph was as blunt as the title: “The Aryan race is faced with an end as certain as the dinosaurs’ unless it can stop the endless multiplication of racial defectives. Sterilization is an important tool in this struggle and must be wielded mercilessly, with the full coercive power of the state. Yet sterilization by itself will never be sufficient. Any adequate answer to the growing burden of disease, deficiency, and racial degeneration requires us to move beyond humanitarian sentimentality and religious superstition and face this most ancient truth of nature: either the strong destroy the weak or vice versa.”
He put the book back in the envelope with its companion, a thinner volume that appeared to be some sort of Nazi handbook. What little he’d learned of eugenics had repelled him and left no desire to know more. Years ago, soon after he’d returned from the war, at the Saturn Club in Buffalo, a scion of one of the city’s leading families gave him a copy of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race. “Everyone’s reading it,” he said. “It’s a clarion call to all concerned and civilized men.” Donovan found it alternately tedious and hysterical. He stopped reading after reaching Grant’s description of Ireland as a country in which “the mental and cultural traits of the aborigines have proved to be exceedingly persistent and appear especially in the unstable temperament and lack of coordinating and reasoning power, so often found among the Irish.”
At first he thought the book might have been intended as an insult but then realized the gift giver was too thickheaded to have read beyond the first chapter and merely assumed anyone wealthy enough to belong to the Saturn Club was racially fit and would be edified by Grant’s eugenical affirmation of Anglo-Saxon superiority.
His secretary returned to announce Mr. Anderson had arrived for his appointment.
“Do me a favor: If I press the intercom, let me know that my next appointment has arrived.”
“You want me to lie?” she said with mock horror.
“Act.”
“As in, ‘Dinner is served in the main dining room’?”
“Tea would be better.”
Sitting across from Donovan, Anderson looked like an Englishman out of Warner Bros. central casting. Slender, long-legged frame draped over the
chair with an air of polished indifference, he planted the elbow of his rumpled linen suit on the armrest to support the pipe he moved in and out of his mouth. He seemed hardly to have aged in the two decades since they’d last met. The only feature Donovan didn’t remember was Anderson’s grin, a subtle curve in his mouth reminiscent of Leslie Howard in The Petrified Forest. He concluded he wasn’t alone in that appraisal when his secretary served them tea and lingered by the desk, visibly taken with the looks and mannerisms of the visiting Englishman, not unlike Bette Davis when Leslie Howard entered her desert café. She exited, however, without attempting a speaking role.
Anderson added milk and several sugar cubes to his tea, stirred and gestured at the surroundings with the spoon. “You’ve done quite well since we last met. I’m told among your clients is the House of Morgan. As I remember, your intent was to return to your home out west, in Buffalo, and be a hometown lawyer. This is quite a leap.” He ceased grinning long enough to take a sip of tea.
Donovan gulped plain, unsweetened tea. “Buffalo is in New York, in the western part. I did return there and practiced law but eventually came here.”
“‘In sh’Allah,’ as the Arabs say. ‘God wills it.’” Anderson dropped another sugar cube in his cup.
“I’ve taken my lumps.” Donovan heard the sharpness in his own voice. He flushed at the imputation that a mick from Buffalo’s First Ward had landed as a partner in his own Wall Street firm through the benevolent dictates of fate.
Nodding agreeably, Anderson sipped his tea. Donovan knew instantly that he’d inferred a meaning to Anderson’s remark that was unintended. “I see you’ve taken up journalism,” he noted, more gently.
“I dabble as a freelancer, which supplements my pension and provides a reason for traveling. I came to New York several years ago on a temporary assignment for the British Information Office. My chums in the British Passport Office, in Rockefeller Center, let me keep a desk. It’s as close to a home as I have. Most of the time I’m on the road. Been all over, but there’s never a dearth of places left to visit.”
“You mentioned your travels in your letter. The role of journalist is a wonderful cover, no doubt.”
“Cover?”
“For your work in the Secret Intelligence Service.”
“Right to the point, Colonel. The American style. In Europe it would take hours, at least, before we could touch upon such matters. In the Orient, it might take a lifetime.”
“I have a very busy schedule.”
“Then I shan’t keep you. I haven’t come as a representative of anyone other than myself and with no purpose other than to renew our acquaintance.”
“Consider it done.” Donovan gently touched his cup to Anderson’s, an ersatz toast. “What about your article?”
“Are you following events in Czechoslovakia?”
“I thought you were writing about the war?”
“I’m thinking more of the one to come.”
“Most Americans believe it’s a question for Europeans to settle and that we should stay out of it. I agree.”
“You may wish to leave the world alone but the world won’t leave you alone. There are forces at large that, if left unchecked, will reduce civilization to a state of undiluted barbarism.”
“I presume you’re referring to the New Deal.”
Anderson’s grin, which hadn’t changed since he arrived, made it impossible to tell if he was amused by the remark. “I’m aware of your Republican loyalties,” he said, “and of the opinions your party has about Mr. Roosevelt’s policies.”
“And Mrs. Roosevelt’s,” Donovan said.
“But the threat arising out of Germany dwarfs any differences between the political parties in this country. You cannot make peace, because the present regime’s whole existence is predicated on waging war.”
“Not according to John Foster Dulles. Are you aware of the articles he’s written on the subject?”
“Aware, yes, but I haven’t read them.”
“He contends that the National Socialists are ‘wild in word but conservative in deed.’ Twenty years from now, he says, the Nazis will be nothing more than a German version of the Tories.”
“Possibly, I suppose, if in twenty years the Tories have become a mass movement of fanatics led by homicidal gangsters.”
“Which is pretty much what the Labour Party thinks, no?”
“Democracies are perpetually rife with rhetorical excess.” Anderson put down his cup and lit his pipe. “However, I’m not employing politically inspired exaggerations. I’ve been to Germany. What is unfolding there is of a different order.”
“The Germans have a legitimate grievance. The Sudetenland as a German majority. Self-determination was one of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, remember?”
Anderson shifted in his chair, as if in search of a comfortable position. “If only the world were so neat, in which borders are perfectly congruent with ethnic groups. Few borders, however, are so clear. Listen, the Sudetenland is a prelude rather than a conclusion, a confirmation of the naïveté of his opponents. No offer by the Czechs, however generous, will be acceptable.”
“If the British and French won’t fight, the Czechs will. They’ve built their own version of the Maginot Line.”
“Not alone, they won’t.”
“Stalin will never allow Hitler a free hand in the East.”
“Russia has no direct access to Czechoslovakia, nor any treaty obligation to defend it unless the French do so first.”
“Your government seems not to share your bleak opinion. According to the newspapers, Britain and France might press the Czechs to make concessions.”
“Quite right.” Anderson puffed on his pipe.
Donovan brushed away the smoke. “If you’re seeking some insights into the position of the American government, I’m afraid I can’t be of much help. I’m a Republican, and the Democrats are calling the shots, at least until the next election. We’re the last to know what’s on the mind of the present administration.” During his business trips to Chicago and Detroit, Donovan had found unanimous agreement against American involvement in the unfolding crises over Czechoslovakia. At dinner with a group of corporate lawyers in Grosse Point, a former assistant secretary of the Treasury under Hoover said loudly, “If Roosevelt tries to take the country to war, he’ll be removed, by hook or by crook!” His colleagues nodded in agreement.
“I admired you as a soldier, Colonel.”
“And I you.”
“It seems far longer than just twenty years ago. I suppose you’ve forgotten everything we discussed.”
“I remember your pessimism,” Donovan said.
“I’m known to some of my acquaintances as ‘Reverend Gloom.’ They think I’m a frustrated theologian, clothing the ordinary contests among nations and men in the motley of good and evil. Perhaps they’re right. Do you believe in prophecy, Colonel?”
“Can’t say I’ve been to any fortune tellers lately.”
“That’s not the kind of prophecy I had in mind.” Anderson’s eyelids fluttered, as if calibrating the thinking going on behind them. “The last day before the armistice I was posted with a regiment of Welsh Fusiliers. We knew the war was about to end and the men were relaxed. Toward dusk, one of the subalterns, a devout Methodist chap and biblical scholar, decided to sit atop the parapet. He was working on his own translation of the Bible. Been at it for several years, having mastered Hebrew and Greek. He worked in the quiet twilight, eerie in its quietness, when a sniper drilled him in the eye, a marksman’s shot. He was among the very last of the ten million killed in the war. I was smoking my pipe only a few feet away when he was hit. I retrieved the papers he’d dropped. There, splattered with blood and brains, was the last verse he’d translated.”
Anderson took out of his pocket what at first appeared to Donovan to be a business card. But printed on it, instead of a name and address was a biblical verse:“We looked for peace
But no good came;
For a time of healing,
But behold, terror.”
—JEREMIAH 14:19
Donovan went to his desk, put Anderson’s card in the drawer and picked up one of his own, touching the intercom button as he did. He handed the card to Anderson. “We should stay in touch. Perhaps we could continue this conversation over dinner sometime.”
The intercom buzzed. Donovan reached and flicked it on. His secretary’s voice had a helpful hint of urgency: “Colonel, it’s almost time for your next appointment.”
“Do you suppose my friends are right?” Anderson said. “Maybe I’m straying into theology. If that be the case, I suppose what I’m really interested in is your soul.”
“It’s not for sale.” Donovan leaned back on his desk, half-sitting.
The grin on Anderson’s face no longer reminded Donovan of Leslie Howard but of other faces from another time: the antic smile of men who’d been in combat too long. Concussed by incessant shelling, overwhelmed by the ubiquity of death, they went slowly mad, holding it in until that expression of perpetual amusement impressed itself on their lips, the imprimatur of a man whose mind had become unhinged. Some threw themselves into an attack, inviting certain death. Others dissolved into shaking, weeping invalids and were shipped to the rear before their insanity turned infectious. A few simply carried on, jumpy, isolated, grinning.
“I wasn’t intending to buy your soul,” Anderson said. “Merely borrow it.”