Weapons of Peace

by Johnston, Peter D. ;

  “—vulnerable to being anchored by the next thing that comes your way,” she said with a nod. She’d been finishing his thoughts for him more and more. “So where did his beliefs about Jews come from?” They maneuvered their bicycles around the corner and were greeted by the scent of freshly baked bread wafting down the hill from Brydon’s teahouse.

  “I personally believe that Hitler was anchored by the racist mayor of Vienna, a man named Karl Lueger,” Nash said. “Lueger made sure his city was entirely unwelcoming to Jews arriving from the east, building on a long-standing prejudice against Jews in Europe. As an authority figure, the mayor persuaded a highly impressionable Adolf Hitler that all Jews were evil, reinforcing the Catholic doctrine that they’d even killed Jesus. Hitler became anchored to the belief that Jews were responsible for Europe’s woes—and his own—but, unlike most people, he had no close family or friends to un-anchor his more extreme views, so they only grew stronger and uglier with each passing year.”

  “And then he convinced so many others,” Emma said, shaking her head.

  Nash nodded. They went quiet as they walked their bikes up the hill.

  “Our own German clans over there have contributed,” he said softly, breaking the silence.

  “With at least one exception,” Emma said, her voice rising, along with her chin.

  “Who’s that?”

  “My cousin Maria—Alina’s twin sister.”

  Nash perked up. “Really? What’s Maria doing in Germany?”

  “She trained as a fighting nurse like me, but after parachuting into Germany on a mission in 1942 she stayed to fight from the inside. It’s only through Alina that I learned that Maria is now a member of the Resistance in Berlin—I hadn’t even known Berlin had resisters. The two communicate regularly by radio.”

  An old man with chiseled features grunted and swore, forced to leave the sidewalk and move into the street because of their bicycles. Nash apologized, but the man kept swearing.

  “We need more brave souls like your cousin if we’re to win this war,” Nash said, ignoring the man and focusing instead on the smells in the air. His mother had hardly ever cooked, but one of her servants taught her to bake bread when she was a girl and she’d relished showing off this skill to her son whenever she was home long enough, which wasn’t often. Nash sniffed the air, smiling. “How much longer?”

  “Almost there,” Emma said. She looked over at him. He suddenly looked tired.

  She was right: he was tired. But Nash wasn’t going to let anything keep him from administering her final exam. He knew that Emma’s next test, in Germany, would be a real one; she needed to show a strong understanding of his craft, and of the man and the regime on whose territory she would be trespassing. If she wasn’t ready, she’d pay with her life.

  “What’s most interesting to me is how a nation of rational and loving people was persuaded to support him,” Nash said. “Young Hitler, Austrian by birth, rose from the ashes of his youth to become a decorated German soldier in the Great War. In 1932, he became a German citizen and, just a year later, chancellor. He has now wielded power for more than a decade. How is the topic of your final exam.”

  Emma was anxious. But she’d spent every summer after the first war in the Berlin area, visiting her mother’s family, honing the German she’d quietly been taught while growing up in England. Her military training had included intense political and economic briefings. At Nash’s request, Lady Baillie had kindly agreed to share with her confidential briefings the heiress received weekly from the British government regarding Germany. And she’d diligently absorbed Nash’s teachings. She was as ready as she’d ever be.

  Nash pointed to a bench on a patch of grass opposite the teahouse. “Shall we sit for your exam, then have tea afterward?”

  “How long do we have, Professor Nash?” Emma asked as they leaned their bicycles against a tree and moved to sit down.

  With both hands finally free, Nash lit up a Lucky Strike. “I want my cup of tea, not a treatise on German history. I’ll prompt you with questions. So, Emma Doyle, how did Adolf Hitler mesmerize the German people?”

  Emma looked down, took a deep breath, and began to answer.

  —

  “My, my, how convenient,” Moore said, slowing down suddenly, his gaze focused directly across the cobbled road that wound its way through Brydon Hamlet.

  He and Suggs had just exited the hamlet’s only pub, a nondescript structure with a maximum capacity of fifteen patrons. The pair had come for a few pints of beer, killing time before nightfall and their second visit to Leeds Castle.

  Suggs followed his partner’s line of sight. Doing his best not to look into the sun’s glare, all Suggs could make out in the shadows was a wooden bench and a picnic table.

  “I don’t see anything,” he whispered.

  Moore raised his finger, pointing at a second bench well beyond the first. “Christmas has come early,” he said.

  Suggs stared out, grinning when he finally locked onto their target. “I’ll handle this, Moore,” he said, brushing past his partner and moving into the road.

  “Good. We won’t get a better chance than this.”

  The short man crouched down to appear even smaller than he already was.

  “Here, kitty, come to Freddie,” he said, shooting Moore a crooked smile over his shoulder. “Don’t worry, kitty, I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Chapter 14

  Tuesday, September 19, 1944

  4:30 p.m.

  “Hitler’s tiny team of Nazi supporters grew by appealing to losers—especially the ‘little man’ or common Volk . . . workers, farmers, and the middle class. He promised to right wrongs, and return Germany to its former glory,” Emma began. “He needed these supporters, but privately he disdained their low standing. His ideas and language played on people’s worst instincts. He stayed vague on many promises, so that he could build his coalition of losers into a wide-ranging juggernaut—sweeping his followers on board before most of them even knew what they were in for.”

  “A coalition of losers—what a unique way to frame things,” Nash said, smiling wryly.

  “But Hitler needed the right conditions for this coalition of losers to take root as part of his Nazi movement,” Emma said. “Without the dreary, painful years of loss following the Great War, no one would ever have proclaimed ‘Heil Hitler!’—and you and I might never have met.”

  Nash flashed her another smile. She was firmly on track.

  “After Germany’s defeat, it had to borrow huge amounts from U.S. banks to pay its fines under the Treaty of Versailles, while handing its conquerors its colonies and some of its richest areas, like the Rhineland and the Saar,” she said. “The country’s fledgling democracy struggled to pay the bills, its leaders attacked by critics on all sides. This led to high uncertainty—in a nation accustomed to authoritarian rulers, most recently its emperors.”

  “And how did Hitler take advantage of this uncertainty?”

  “He and his National Socialist Party—the Nazis—anchored Germans to the assumption that they lost the war because Jews stabbed their own nation in the back by undermining it from the inside,” Emma said. “Hitler wove this narrative into an overarching story about how God wanted just the Aryan race—made up of perfectly conceived Christian Germans—to defeat all other believers in what he saw as a Darwinian battle of religions.”

  “From an influence perspective, then, how was targeting the Jews important to Hitler’s goal of securing the coalition you mentioned?” He leaned back and sent a billow of smoke across the bench where they sat facing each other. It dissolved into the rapidly cooling air above them.

  “Hitler talked down Jews in a caricatured way,” Emma said, “so he could talk up the Aryan race by contrast, making losers feel like winners—including most Germans, who were hungry to get back what they felt they’d lo
st so unfairly in the Treaty of Versailles.”

  “That’s a refreshingly simple assessment, and sounds about right,” Nash said. “Did Hitler have anything else to gain by going after the Jewish people?”

  Emma stood up, pacing the grass behind the bench to stay warm, the lowering sun having disappeared behind an intruding stretch of clouds.

  “Absolutely,” she said. “Hitler’s deeply anchored personal dislike of Jews alone could have given him pleasure in punishing them, but, sadly, he was much more calculating. The Jews threatened the coalition he needed to claim and hold absolute power. They could act as effective blockers. They had money, ran important businesses, and had a strong voice in the media. But there is one more thing . . .”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Jews are a small percentage of Germany’s population.”

  “Less than two percent,” Nash offered, twisting around to follow her as she paced. “So what?”

  “Well, if they were forty percent of the population Hitler probably would have failed or just stuck to terrorizing Communists, homosexuals, Gypsies, and the handicapped. But, because they were such a tiny minority, Jews were vulnerable. And Hitler knew that persecuting this small, misunderstood group would send a signal to the other ninety-eight percent about the consequences of being seen to undermine Germany’s interests.”

  Nash nodded, impressed. So many people, including statesmen he advised, didn’t ask themselves why tyrannical rulers did things deemed outrageous or idiotic by outsiders—never thinking to assess the hidden dynamics that contributed to an internal coalition.

  “What else do you want to tell me about Hitler’s coalition strategy?”

  “Well, he built his coalition carefully,” she said, “winning over powerful groups who might otherwise upset his plans, especially when he was starting out.”

  “Specifics, please.”

  “Catholics and Protestants are two examples,” Emma said. “As he rose to power, Hitler talked about God and Christ and the sanctity of both churches—even though he only believed in the Church of Hitler—because he needed support from the major religions and their millions of followers. Then, once he had the military on his side, along with gaining the legal right to do as he pleased as chancellor, he didn’t have to worry as much about keeping people in his coalition—most didn’t dare leave. Those who tried were punished—like the Jews.”

  “What about players outside Germany? Why didn’t they intervene to stop Hitler’s abuse of the Jews and break up his growing internal coalition—the Americans, for example?”

  “Because you Americans were quiet members of his far-reaching coalition.”

  “Really?” he said, feigning amazement. “How could that be?”

  “The U.S. had other interests that were well served by Hitler’s strength. America’s real foes after 1918 were the Communists. Americans liked having Germany as a wall between Russia and the rest of Europe. They didn’t like Hitler, but they hated Lenin and Marx, who took from the rich to give to the poor, contradicting America’s belief in capitalism.”

  “Agreed,” Nash conceded with a sigh. “What other interests led my government to implicitly support Hitler’s coalition during the 1930s? Why did the U.S. stay silent rather than intervene, and even maintain—under Ambassador William Dodd—an embassy in Berlin that actively socialized with Hitler and other senior Nazis?”

  “Financial interests, I would think, through those loans the U.S. banks made to Germany,” Emma answered. “As America’s president, you wouldn’t want to risk those big loans not being paid back because you were too critical of Hitler’s policies or his approach to the Jews, right?”

  Nash rose from the bench to keep the circulation going in his bad leg. “But why would America put money ahead of the rights of German Jews? America has many Jewish citizens and they get to vote—or not—for their president.”

  She stared at him. “That’s a good point. I don’t know.”

  “Well, let me help you out,” he said, looking her in the eye as she stood directly opposite him on the other side of the bench. “After seeing their young die in the first war, followed by complete economic collapse in 1929, Americans didn’t want another war. So the U.S. looked the other way while Hitler violated the Treaty of Versailles and began rebuilding his military. As for his escalating attacks against Jews, these weren’t even viewed as a negative by many in America.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, her forehead lined in confusion.

  “I’m embarrassed to say it, but there is still anti-Jewish sentiment in the United States, right up to the highest levels. Protecting Germany’s Jews would never have caused America’s leaders to put all their other major interests at risk.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “Well, now you do,” Nash said. “Tell me, how else did Hitler grow his support inside Germany?”

  She winced, her lips tightening. “Hitler went after his nation’s easiest targets by creating proud Nazi youth groups—the only youth groups allowed—and insisted on a single school curriculum that pushed his Nazi agenda,” Emma said, her voice faltering. “He anchored children early in their development as soon-to-be soldiers, robbing them of objectivity, knowing they could help influence any skeptical parents—or squeal on them if they were breaking Nazi rules.”

  Emma stopped where she stood.

  She stared back at Nash blankly, her sharp mind distant.

  She was no longer with him.

  —

  She’d seen news footage at the movies of Hitler’s little soldiers—young children, some just a few years out of diapers, wearing gray woolen uniforms and caps, swastikas on armbands, smiling, saluting their führer in complete compliance.

  Her son, Axel, would no doubt be one of them now.

  Imagining him in a Nazi uniform, as Emma had done so many times, always sent her reeling.

  She had been alone at a run-down East London hospital for his birth—scared, ashamed, terrified of telling her parents that she’d become pregnant out of wedlock and that the baby’s father had conveniently disappeared, even though he’d promised to be there with her.

  Emma had grown increasingly disgusted with her predicament and with herself as she approached the end of her term, her body bloated, contorted from its previous fighting form into a misshapen collection of swollen limbs, breasts, and belly.

  Shouting up at the peeling, pale-blue hospital ceiling as labor pains racked her body, with only a doctor and a nurse in attendance, she cursed herself, she cursed the man who’d done this to her, and she cursed the child who was about to be born.

  But as soon as that tiny person was placed in her arms, a bob of blond hair curled onto the crown of his head, his eyes blue, his red cheeks glowing, she fell in love—for the second time.

  She lay gazing at him, enraptured, refusing to let go when the nurse wanted to take him to the infirmary. Emma quickly became lost in her new creation, vowing to protect him with her life, reveling in what they would do together, dreaming of the kinds of things he might accomplish. With his father’s physical prowess—and hers before she became pregnant—perhaps their son would be an athlete, competing for his nation like the athletes who were beginning to gather in Berlin for the 1936 Olympic Games.

  Then, as she lay prone in that hospital bed with her newborn feeding at her breast, the darkness returned. She began thinking about Hitler and how he’d started to re-arm the year before, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, retaking the Rhineland just months earlier; how he’d even barred German Jews from competing in the upcoming Games. It was in the air. War was coming.

  What a world to bring her child into!

  Her gorgeous bundle of joy had no idea what lay ahead, or that, despite his birthplace, he was more German than Hitler himself. One day she knew there would be a price to pay for that. But just how high a price or when,
exactly, she couldn’t have imagined at the time.

  Before finally agreeing to hand her baby to the hospital nurse, Emma touched her son’s forehead and anointed him Axel. That had been her late, much adored grandfather’s name, and she’d always liked the meaning of it: father of the peace.

  —

  The high-pitched screech launched her forward into the present.

  Her head swiveled, as did Nash’s, neither seeing anything to explain the frightful noise. The primal sound that filled the air around them had come from down the cobbled street and around the corner. It wasn’t human. She assumed that a cat had lost a fight or been hit by a car, because the horrid wailing stopped as suddenly as it had started.

  In the silence that ensued, Nash turned back to Emma. “Are you all right?” He was standing at her side. He’d moved there to help support her during her brief trance.

  Emma smiled, nodding, stroking her neck, pulling her mind away from Axel, aware that her legs felt weak, her hands white from clenching the back of the bench to keep her body upright.

  For Christ’s sake, Doyle, find a better time to disappear into your past. Focus—and finish this damn exam.

  The creases in Nash’s face began to ease. He smiled, too, tentatively. He’d seen her drift off on other occasions, but never like this.

  “We can finish another time—” he began, as they both took a seat on the bench.

  “No, I insist, I’m fine. Um, where was I?”

  “You just told me how Hitler targeted and brainwashed his nation’s children to bring them into his fold of supporters early on—”

  “Yes, that’s right,” she said, jumping in to take back control of the conversation. “But how do you communicate with their parents—who don’t attend school or youth groups—and so powerfully that they’ll be willing to sacrifice their lives for you?”