The Vengeance of Rome

Then, shrugging his shoulders, he took me by the arm, pointed me back into the street, closed and locked the door behind us with his key, and led us in a graceful stroll towards the Viktualienmarkt.

‘Herr von Schirach didn’t seem to like you.’ Automatically I looked up and down to make sure we were not being followed.

‘Oh, he’s all right. But he has to take Hitler’s side in everything. I enjoy embarrassing him a bit. He’s not a bad lad. Just an idiot. He thinks the sun shines out of Hitler’s bottom!’

We walked slowly towards the market while Strasser explained at length and rather obscurely why he had split with Hitler who, in his view, had made the party into the means of getting personal power at any cost. Hitler had abandoned all their published principles. He would betray everyone who had trusted him, as well as those who had not. He was the reason why Strasser had left and was now based in Prague, where he could publish his refutations of Hitler’s lies. ‘That bastard Göring, the gimpy snake in the grass, set up a rival paper and Hitler backed it. We had no choice but to sell our interests. I got next to nothing. I have still to see the puny sum I eventually settled for. But it’s much worse than that.’ Hitler had sold out all the Nazi principles and spat in the face of his supporters. His obsession with the pursuit of power for its own sake would be the end of us.

I had heard similar opinions from Röhm, by no means a slavish supporter of the Führer. A couple of years earlier there had been some kind of split in the NSDAP ranks. The Strasser brothers had taken the side of the more revolutionary party members, who wished to tear down the entire structure of the state and start afresh. Goebbels had initially been on their side but later shifted over to Hitler’s camp. Money talked and Goebbels clearly had his price. But Hitler’s debt to Big Business, Strasser argued, would mean that the industrialists would continue to control Germany. The situation would be worse than in Italy where Mussolini had sold off all the wealth of the country to the Pope and a few of his cronies. These businessmen, like Thyssen, Krupp and the rest, were the very people, according to Strasser, who had already brought the country down.

‘I’m not denying there exist interests forever alien to the German nation, but we weren’t stabbed in the back. We had bad generals and a bunch of businessmen who were doing very well out of selling munitions and supplies to the army. Believe me, I love Ludendorff, but he was an idiot. Wars are won by the side which makes the least mistakes. Ludendorff made mistake after mistake, and every mistake cost a hundred thousand German lives. Those must never be repeated. These powerful people Hitler’s talking to will insist on mistakes being repeated. And they’ll probably make a load of new ones as well! Two kinds of people should never be allowed near the politics of a country. One is businessmen, the other is soldiers. Whenever those interests start to climb into bed with each other, death and destruction follow for the common people. The creeps will be the ruin of us!’All of this Otto Strasser offered in a light-hearted tone which seemed at odds with his words. He continued to laugh as he walked beside me, a dapper figure in his bow tie and loose coat. Some years later John Betjeman, the BBC rhymester, would remind me of him.

While I had not been surprised at von Schirach’s lack of insight into Hitler’s character, I was thoroughly astonished at Strasser’s understanding and hoped I did not show it! Strasser had no illusions. Hitler filled a vacuum. But it was a vacuum within a vacuum!

‘Time was he knew himself better than he does now. He’s started believing the publicity stories. Hitler’s a feminine type, with a destructive mission, not a constructive masculine one. When I met him just after the War, he saw himself as a drummer, a showman. I remember his saying how he felt like a sleepwalker. The crowd determines who he is. He says the crowd is his mistress, but in some ways the crowd is all he is. Nothing is real or genuine about him. Even the title Führer was imposed on him. The Nazis are creating a monster. What the Jews call a golem.’

Suddenly Otto Strasser grabbed my sleeve and dragged me down some basement steps into the dark panelled wood of a restaurant with peeling walls and faded floral pictures just visible through a haze of delicious steam. The narrow room was crammed with heavy stained wooden tables and poorly lit by oil lamps. Two grey-haired women were selling cakes from behind a counter display but abandoned their customers when they saw Otto Strasser, greeting him with glad, maternal cries, sitting us down at the best table, getting us a clean menu, telling us not to have the Rotkraut but that the dumplings were fresh.

A wild barking, and from the back of the kitchen came a little dachshund which somehow reminded me, in its perky manner, of my new friend. He petted the dog. He giggled at its antics. He gave it a lump of sugar. His soft, elegant hands stroked its happy head. Our meal arrived, working-class food, wholesome and filling. Strasser ate with considerable relish, talking between bites and I, also, found the food very much to my taste, similar to Russian food in many ways. My muscles and bones relaxed for the first time in days. The strain of the previous night had left its mark.