The Vengeance of Rome

Doctor Strasser was nodding his round head rapidly even before I had finished speaking. ‘She told Goebbels things,’ he repeated gravely. ‘And Goebbels isn’t easily shocked, eh? He’s seen and done everything. With women, anyway, what? Nasty little dwarf. He thought she had to be lying. Didn’t want to believe those things of Hitler, hmm? He guessed that Hitler or someone, maybe his driver Emil, who used to flirt with her, showed her magazines, or she’d come across them for herself. You don’t have to be a sicko to find it, that’s true. The stuff’s everywhere. Half the Kinos in Berlin show worse. She could have gone to see anything — animals, golden showers, boys with boys — in one of those clubs. Some of them are live. Women are always trying to get you to take them to that sort of place, aren’t they? But Fräulein Raubal talked to me. She told me she was terrified of what was happening. Her words to me. She said he was a monster. But that’s all she said. Hitler took firmer control of her after that. She became a prisoner, I think. Don’t you?’

He stopped suddenly. Three straight-backed burly Storm Troopers had turned on their bench and, steins in hand, were staring at him.

Strasser had now been recognised. I must admit it did not suit me to be seen with someone identified as a critic of the leadership or, worse, a traitor. When my new friend decided it was prudent to leave, I was only too glad to stand up. Without much incident, we made our way back to Corneliusstrasse and a poorly lit local beer cellar which had sparse custom that night. Only a few old peasant men sat drunk in a corner and sang the same obscure dialect song over and over again.

We found a heavy table under a murky arch, and I drew a sigh of relief, very happy to be clear of that dangerous limelight. Strasser himself was alert again, evidently capable of sudden recovery. His constantly moving eyes now surveyed the place even as he signalled for service.

A big dough-faced girl in a dirty apron, with pigtails that looked as if they had been wiping up Schmalz, arrived to take our orders. Strasser demanded I try a particularly strong brand of beer. Again I pointed out that I had no money, but he was insistent. He’d had a windfall, he said. So we drank the beer, and I told him of my childhood in Kiev and Odessa as the son of an American dentist, of my service with the White Army, my flying experience against the Reds and my invention of the Violet Ray which Petlyura had used to stop the Bolsheviks as they swept upon Kiev, and which would have succeeded if the city’s power supply had been more certain. How I had gone to France and made my fortune in airship construction, only to lose it, the victim of typically French political chicanery, then become a political speaker in the US, developed a steam-car and later worked as a film star. He was fascinated by my accounts of flying in the service of the Caid of Marrakech. I did not tell him about Egypt any more than about Hitler. Some things should never be exposed to the common air or the light of day and should certainly never be passed on to another human being. It is the same as knowingly passing on a disease. Some burdens you can only share with a priest or a psychiatrist.

Doctor Strasser thought at first that I was lying. ‘You’ve had more adventures than Münchhausen, no?’

I explained that my situation was the same as that of many Russian members of the aristocratic intelligentsia driven from their homeland by the Reds. People found it difficult to imagine the fate of the dispossessed intellectual, as he must understand. We were forced to earn our livings as jacks of all trades! The Revolution set Russia back a thousand years. But for Lenin I would even now be pursuing the career of inventor and engineer in Moscow or St Petersburg.

Convinced (for he had himself had a taste of exile), my new acquaintance asked a few more questions and relaxed again. Like Captain Röhm, Doctor Strasser was particularly interested in my Russian experiences, though from a different point of view. He wanted to know how effective Makhno’s anarchist communes had been, how efficient the commissar system was, how popular the Red ideologues had been with the common people and so on. I could only tell him of my own adventures, but for these he was avid. I tried to explain the complicated comings and goings of the various forces in the Ukraine during my time there. The Red organisers were primarily Jewish intellectuals, some of them from Germany. Their organisational skills made the Reds successful in the end.

Doctor Strasser had met the great Krassnoff in Berlin. He had read the General’s moving multi-volume memoir From the Two-Headed Eagle to the Red Flag. The book had convinced him that the Russian model was nothing worth following. Yet an alliance between a united Germany and the Soviet Union would form a solid and natural power block, with Poland under shared dominion.

He was retailing the old German dream, but turned into socialist politics! I said nothing. I valued my new friend too highly to offend him. He had met Skorapadsky, who had settled in Munich. The Hetman claimed now that he would have kept our common Tsar if he had retained his power in Ukraine. None doubted Skorapadsky’s Ukrainian patriotism, but this was the first I had heard of his Russian loyalties! It was true he had been driven from the Ukraine by the Reds. Like many Ukrainians, he was a good friend to Germany, but had no other allies.