by Les Weil
Clearly all this is becoming a mania with me and my like. Clearly we must suffer from some morbid obsession, whereas the others are healthy and normal. But the main symptom of maniacs is that they lose contact with reality and live in a fantasy world. So, perhaps, it is the other way round: perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotics who totter about in a screened fantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts. Were it not so, this war would have been avoided, and those murdered within sight of your day-dreaming eyes would still be alive.
I said. `perhaps', because obviously the above can only be half the truth. There have been screamers at all times--Prophets, Preachers, and Cranks, cursing the obtuseness of their contemporaries, and the result was very much the same. There are always the victims screaming from the jungle, and the people who pass by on the road. They have ears but hear not, they have eyes but see not. So the roots of this must lie deeper than mere obtuseness.
Amos, Hosea, Jeremiah, were pretty good propagandists, and yet they failed to shake their people and to warn them. Cassandra's voice was said to have pierced walls, and yet the Trojan war took place. And in our days, the Ministry of Information and the B.B.C. are on the whole doing a quite competent job. For almost three years they had to keep this country going on nothing but defeats, and they succeeded. But at the same time they have lamentably failed to make people aware of the grandeur and horror of the time into which they were born. The people carried on business-as-usual style, except that the routine of this business included killing and being killed. Matter-of-fact unimaginativeness has become a kind of cult with the Anglo-Saxon nations; it is usually contrasted with Latin hysterics and praised for its high value in an emergency. But they tend to forget what happens between emergencies; and that the same unimaginativeness is responsible for the failure to prevent their recurrence....
Against this nightmare background, my doubts and misgivings about Russia paled to insignificance. When you march in a crusade, even in a losing crusade, you are not in a mood for reflection. Reflection only set in some three years later, when the Russian purges began to assume the proportions of mass terror. 1936-37 was the turning-point, not only in my political orientation but in my whole attitude to existence. In the condemned cell of a Franco prison my former life was to be dissolved and recast in a new shape. But that crisis was still in the future, three years ahead.
The mood of these three years is only partly reflected in the dream of the murderous jungle and the indifferent crowd on the road. That nightmarish quality was one half of the truth. For at the same time these were years of single-minded dedication, filled with purpose, relatively free from doubt, and thus, paradoxically, happy years as well as tormented years. During some weeks of extreme penury I was forced to live on a hayloft in a Paris suburb and to walk every day several miles on an empty stomach to the Party office where I worked without pay. I was lightheaded with hunger and my shoes were falling to pieces, but I was engaged in a useful activity, anonymously and wholeheartedly, and thus knowledge gave me a feeling of spiritual cleanliness, of innocence regained. Work is a powerful drug, and those who become addicted to it develop an almost unlimited capacity for self-delusion. Month after month we assured ourselves that the fall of the Nazi regime was imminent, and this spurious certainty kept us going by dazing us and galvanising us at the same time.
Once again I must remind the reader of the two basic elements of the revolutionary creed: attraction by Utopia and rebellion against a sick society. My years in Russia had made Utopia recede; but when my faith had begun to falter, Hitler gave it a new, immenscly powerful impulse. Thus started my second honeymoon with the Party.
XVII. Blind-Man's-Buff
ARRIVED in Paris in the middle of the Reichstag Fire Trial, which was holding Europe spellbound. The day after my arrival I met for the first time Willy Muenzenberg, Western Propaganda Chief of the Comintern. The same day I started work at his headquarters, and thus became a minor participant in the great propaganda battle between Berlin and Moscow. It ended with a complete defeat for the Nazis--the only defeat which we inflicted on them during the seven years before the war.
The object of the two contestants was to prove that it was the other who had set fire to the German Parhament. The world watched the spectacle with fascination, and with as little understanding of its true meaning as small children have when they watch a complicated thriller on the screen. For the world was not yet accustomed to the stage-effects, the fantastic swindles and cloak-and-daggcr methods of totalitarian propaganda. And in this case there was not one producer of the show, as later in the Moscow trials, but two, who played out their tricks against each other like rival medicine men before the assemblcd tribe.
The two medicine men were Dr. Joseph Goebbels and Willy Muenzenberg; but few knew at the time, and know to this day, of the existence of the second. The world thought that it was witnessing a classic struggle between truth and falsehood, guilt and innocence. In reality both parties were guilty, though not of the crimes of which they accused each other. Both were lying, and both were afraid that the other knew more of the actual facts than he really did. Thus the battle was really a blind-man's-buff between two giants. Had the world understood at the time the stratagems and bluffs involved, it could have saved itself much suffering. But neither then nor later did the West really understand the psychology of the totalitarian mind.
The dramatic aspect of the trial was epitomised in three scenes. Their style was somewhere halfway between Shakespeare and Gilbert-andSullivan. The first was the duel between Dimitrov and Goering. Georgi Dimitrov, the future Secretary General of the Communist International, was then the secret leader of its Balkan section. Goering was then Prime Minister of Prussia, and Minister of the Interior of the Reich. Dimitrov was one of the five defendants, accused by the Nazis of having set fire to the Reichstag. Goering appeared officially as a witness for the prosecution, in fact as a defendant against the Communist accusation of being the real author of the fire. The Comintern chief in the dock and the Nazi chief on the witness-stand exchanged invective like Homeric fishwives. Never in history had a member of the government of a great power made such a grotesque spectacle of himself in a public courtroom.
Dimitrov: Does Prime Minister Goering know that hundreds of thousands of German workers have found employment thanks to the orders placed by Soviet industry?
Prime Minister Goering: I will tell you what the German people know. The German people know that you are an impudent fellow who has come here to set our Reichstag on fire. In my eyes you are a rascal who belongs straight to the gallows. ... Wait until I can lay my hands on you outside the sanctuary of this court. ...
Dimitrov: You are obviously afraid of my questions, Mr. Prime Minister.
Goering: Get out of here, you swindler!
Another witness for the prosecution was Propaganda Minister Goebbels. He spoke at length about the illegal, deceitful and conspiratorial methods of the Communists.
Dimitrov: Is it known to the Herr Reichsminister that in Austria and Czechoslovakia his National Socialist comrades are also [like the Communists] forced to work underground, to employ illegal propaganda methods, false passports, fictitious addresses and coded messages?
Goebbels: I will answer you with a quotation from Schopenhaucr: Everybody deserves a glance, but not everybody deserves an answer.
Lastly, there was the fantastic confrontation of the Chief of the Potsdam Police, Count Helldorf, with the chief defendant, van der Lubbe.
Helldorf was a dashing, young aristocrat, a Prussian officer, a symbol of the new Herrenmensch--thc Nietzschean masterman, chosen to rule the world. Van der Lubbe was the psychopathic son of an alcoholic street-hawker in Holland. He was twenty-four, and he had been a plasterer's apprentice, then a waiter, then a valet, then a tramp. He was homosexual and, afflicted with a chronic eye disease, lived in the permanent fear of blindness. He was a co
mpulsive liar, and had a pathological craving for fame. He had joined the Communist Youth League, and later the Party, no less than four times, and each time had left again because he found insufficient scope for his ambitions. He then joined an ultra-Leftwing sect that advocated individual terror, and finally, through homosexual friends, fell under the spell of the National Socialist revolution. He had written a pamphlet and had printed postcards with his photograph on them, announcing that he was undertaking a journey round the world, and he had tried to achieve celebrity by swimming the Channel. Defeated by the water, he took to fire. On the night of February 27, 1933, aided by unknown accomplices, he burnt down the German House of Parliament and became a historic figure. If Helldorf symbolised the new elite, the Fascist master-race, van der Lubbe symbolised, in an extreme form, the emotionally unbalanced, mentally unstable generation between the wars, the frustrated and befuddled masses with their latent hysteria, who became the Fascists' dupes and prey.
Count Helldorf, like Goering and Goebbels, appeared in the courtroom for the explicit purpose of refuting the Comintern's accusation that they were the instigators of the fire, and had used van der Lubbe as their tool. Helldorf was confronted in court with Lubbe for the purpose of establishing that they had never met before. This confrontation was one of the climaxes of the trial.
Helldorf was his usual dashing, smiling, commanding self. Lubbe was a horrifying apparition, half man, half beast. Saliva was dribbling from his mouth, and mucus from his nostrils down onto the floor. From time to time his Counsel wiped his face with a paper handkerchief. When standing, Lubbe's hands were dangling down and his head bent on his chest like a chimpanzee's. When sitting, his head hung between his knees like a broken puppet's. He had been kept in chains for seven months before the trial, and during the trial itself. He was in a stupor during the whole proceedings, obviously drugged to prevent him from giving away the show. The symptoms indicated that the drug used was scopolamine, which produces a condition similar to the stuporous form of dementia praecox. It was a clumsy and amateurish method; the technique of processing defendants for show trials was still in its infancy. During the whole trial, this ghost only came to life once or twice, to babble about `voices in my body', and to ask to be sentenced to death without further ado.
So there they stood facing each other in the courtroom, Herrenmensch and Untermensch, the racy leader and the slavering dupe:
The President of the Court: Accused Lubbe, step forward. Lift your head, Lubbe, and look the witness in the face. Now lift your head, Lubbe, come on! Come, look the witness in the face.
Translator (in Dutch): You are asked to look the witness in the face.
The President: Come on, lift your head. Counsel for the Defence: Lift your head, Lubbe. Translator: You must look the witness in the face. Lift your head.
The President: Come on, lift your head. Lift your head, van der Lubbe.
For three full minutes the President, translator and counsel were trying to coax the comatose figure into lifting his dangling head from his chest. Then, suddenly, Helldorf rapped out a single short command:
`Mensch, mach doch den Kopf hoch, los!'
-jerk that head up man, snap to it!'
And up went Lubbe's head, like a sleeping dog's when woken up by his master's voice.
In that scene, not only the whole trial was summed up. It was a tableau vivant representing the new relationship between leaders and led, a new development in European history. Where reasoning and persuasion had failed to move the entranced victim, the whip-hand had jerked him into action.
Both Nazis and Communists agreed that van der Lubbe was the tool who had actually lit the fire. Both parties also agreed that for the formidable task of preparing a conflagration of that size he must have had several expert accomplices. The Nazis cited as accomplices four Communist leaders: three Bulgarians, including Dirnitrov, and a member of the German Reichstag, Torgler. They had been preparing the trial for seven months, but during the trial itself the frame-up became so blatantly obvious that the four Communists had to be acquitted. The acquittal was by implication an indictment of the true instigators of the act. The facts that had emerged during the trial, in spite of the court's efforts to efface the truth, made it clear that the Nazis themselves had burnt down the Reichstag--as a pretext for the dissolution of the Left-wing Parties, and the institution of mass terror.
So far so good. But how was it done? Who had persuaded Lubbe to serve as a stooge, who had conceived the plan, who had been in the know, and who were his physical accomplices? The incendiaries could only have come through the underground tunnel which connected Goering's palace with the Reichstag: this fact and Goering's self-contradictory statements convinced us that the Prussian Prime Minister was in the plot. But how could we make the naive West believe such a fantastic story? We had no direct proof, no access to witnesses, only underground communications to Germany. We had, in fact, not the faintest idea of the concrete circumstances. We had to rely on guesswork, on bluffing, and on the intuitive knowledge of the methods and minds of our opposite numbers in totalitarian conspiracy.
The `we' in this context refers to the Comintern's propaganda headquarters in Paris, camouflaged as the `World Committee for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism.' I arrived in Paris, as I have said, in the middle of the battle, and my part in it was a subordinate one. I had to follow the repercussions of the trial, and of our propagapda, in the British Press and in the House of Commons, to study currents of British public opinion, and draw the appropriate tactical conclusions. For a while I also edited the daily bulletins which we distributed to the French and British press.
When I joined the battle, the first round had already been won; the Nazis were on the defensive. They had been forced to call Goering, Goebbels and Helldorf to the witness-stand in a desperate attempt to whitewash themselves before world public opinion. Their failure, and our final triumph--the sensational acquittal of the accused Communists--was almost entirely due to the genius of one man, Willy Muenzenberg.
Willy was the grey eminence and invisible organiser of the anti-Fascist world crusade. He had escaped from Germany on the night of the fire, had set up his headquarters in Paris and started his campaign, a unique feat in the history of propaganda.
First, he founded the `World Committee for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism,' with branches all over Europe and America. It was camouflaged as a philanthropic organisation, and had in every country a panel of highly respectable people, from English duchesses to American columnists and French savants, who had never heard the name of Muenzenberg and thought that the Comintern was a bogey invented by Dr. Goebbels.
This World Committee, with its galaxy of international celebrities, became the hub of the crusade. Great care was taken that no Communist-except for a few internationally known names, such as Henri Barbusse and J. B. S. Haldane--should be connected in public with the Committee. But the Paris Secretariat which was running the Committee, was a purely Communist caucus, headed by Muenzenberg, and controlled by the Comintern. Its offices were at first in the Rue Mondetour near the Halles, and later at 83, Boulevard Montparnasse. Muenzenberg himself worked in a large room in the World Committee's premises, but no outsider ever learned about this. It was as simple as that.
Next, he founded his own publishing house in Paris--'Editions du Carrefour'--and set his staff to compile the famous first Brown Book of the Hitler Terror and the Burning of the Reichstag. The Brown Book probably had the strongest political impact of any pamphlet since Tom Paine's Common Sense.
It was published anonymously. The front page said: `Prepared by the World Committee for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism, with an introduction by Lord Marley.' The book contained the first comprehensive report on the German concentration camps (including statistics and lists of victims), on the persecution of Jews, the repression of literature, and other aspects of the terror. The documentation had been assembled by the Comintern's Intelligence apparat. The
Brown Book further contained the `complete inside story' of the fire, starting with a detailed biography of Lubbe, unearthed by the apparat in Holland, his contacts with the homosexual circles around the Leader of the Brownshirts, Captain Rochm, and ending with a convincing description of how the incendiaries penetrated into the Reichstag through the underground tunnel. Several direct participants in the action were named: Count Helldorf, S.A. Leaders Heines and Schultz.
All this was based on isolated scraps of information, deduction, guesswork, and brazen bluff: The only certainty we had was that some Nazi circles had somehow contrived to burn down the building. Everything else was a shot in the dark. But it went straight to the target. Within a few weeks, the Brown Book was translated into seventeen languages and circulated in millions of copies. It became the bible of the anti-Fascist crusade. It was smuggled into Germany in large quantities, bound in the cover of Reklam's cheap classics series, disguised as Schiller's Wallenstein and Goethe's Herman und Dorothea.
The anonymous author of the Brown Book was Muenzenberg's chief lieutenant, Otto Katz, alias Andre Simon--who was to be hanged as one of the accused in the Slansky trial in 1952. I shall have more to say about him later on. While the Brown Book was being prepared, Muenzenberg branched out into other activities. Always under cover of the philanthropic `World Committee for Relief,' he and Katz orgauised the `Committee of Inquiry into the Origins of the Reichstag Trial'. It was composed of lawyers of different nationalities and of international repute, among them the former Italian Prime Minister Francesco Nitti; the son of the former Swedish Prime Minister, Senator George Branting; Counsel for the defence of Sacco and Vanzetti, Arthur Garfield Hayes; mattres Moro Giaffery and Gaston Bergery, France; D. N. Pritt, England, and others. On September 14th, 1933, the first public session of the Committee of Inquiry was opened in the courtroom of the Law Society of London, by Sir Stafford Cripps. The Committee cross examined witnesses, sifted evidence, and acted in fact as `an unofficial tribunal whose mandate was conferred by the conscience of the world'--as Katz, the invisible organiser of the Committee, wrote in the Second Brown Book.' The proceedings of the Committee came to be known as the `Counter Trial'. A public shadow-trial of this kind was a novelty for the West and gained worldwide publicity. Muenzenberg had struck on the idea when, in search of a new propaganda stunt, he had remembered the `secret courts' of Russian revolutionaries in Czarist days.