The Vengeance of Rome

A small, delicate man with immense charm, Badehoff-Krasnya’s Mongol ancestry was very evident in his rather devilish features. Röhm found him personable and always willing to help in discreet matters if he could. He had bailed Röhm out once or twice in the old days. I knew also from Major Nye that Prince Freddy was not welcome in many European drawing rooms and received few invitations to receptions. A notorious debauchee, he supported his deplorable habits by putting himself at the service of other rich sensualists. He was the chief means of support of many a degenerate and demi-mondaine in the Berlin underworld.

Kitty was enormously attracted to him. ‘He can make a slave of me, as he does of so many women.’ She told me something of his demands, which she could, she said, only accept under certain conditions and circumstances. He was, however, an easy source of amusement and, of course, of her beloved ‘coca’, but it was her mother’s need for morphine that had first brought her together with Prince Freddy. I was reassured to know Frau Oberhauser had a vice.

Major Nye had told me how Badehoff-Krasnya was famous for supplying English girls to special friends. ‘Distasteful as it is to an Englishman’s mind, the fact remains that the most sought-after dancers, demi-mondaines and entertainers in Berlin are English. So many of our unfortunate little youngsters have fallen into the hands of the Hun traffickers. The procurers know the returns their percentages will bring in Berlin. It’s a filthy trade and that man is at the rotten core of it.’

Major Nye had added that if Prince Freddy’s talents had been turned in a constructive direction, he would have been one of the leaders of his day. Röhm had thought much the same. That combination of Asian and Teutonic was volatile and at the same time cold. His character contained a particular kind of hunger often only satisfied by opium or some other form of narcissistic hedonism. The Mongol had tenacity, analytical genius, personal magnetism but also a fatal taste for depravity. Outwardly a suave and gentle little man, delicate and old-fashioned in his courtesy, exquisitely neat in his person, he secreted beneath his modest exterior the most refined and excessive sadism. Kitty’s mocking cynicism became a kind of fixed grimace when she talked about his vices, but her eyes betrayed her addiction. La vie sensuelle would soon devour her. It was not easy to remember that once I had watched her playing gaily in her short skirts and woollen stockings about the deck of HMS Rio Cruz as we steamed away from Odessa, exiles together. Now her face was already beginning to show signs of dissolution. I think she was twenty-four. But I cannot deny her attractions.

I soon discovered that the reason Kitty hated her mother was because, in her desperation for morphine, Frau Oberhauser had effectively sold her daughter to Prince Freddy. She could do nothing now, she said, because she was weak. But didn’t I think it was wrong for a parent to expose a child to such dangerous company?

Of course, this was, perversely, to my own advantage. In hating her mother, Kitty was inclined to love those her mother hated. No wonder Weimar was a happy hunting ground for Freud’s army of Jewish pseudo-scientists preying upon the wealthy in Berlin and Vienna. Release your repressions! they cried. And a black monster with red jaws and glittering fangs, with grasping paws and a huge scarlet prick, was called into being. With him came the ghosts of those ruins yet to be. The ruins of Cologne, Dresden, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Munich and Berlin. The ruins upon which such monsters thrive. Aggressive carrion willing to seduce when they can or rape if they have to. All innocence is defiled, all belief eroded, all virtue reviled.

The red-and-black monster roars and its saliva is poison dripping upon all that remains of our honour and our wealth. Once there was a power to defend us against the monster. A new Siegfried, we thought, who would drive the dragon of Bolshevism from our midst and establish a bright new order across Europe. Instead, Siegfried took the dragon into himself, or the dragon turned itself into Siegfried. Whatever the result, compromise was the cause. And Hitler’s willingness to compromise, his failure to concentrate on the essential issues led him to his monumental, melodramatic self-destruction.

Prince Freddy was related to the Wittelbachs. This meant that certain fawning nationalist interests in the Bavarian capital were willingly blind and deaf to the rumours about him so long as his royal blood graced them with its acquaintance. As a result he was not living in obscurity. According to Kitty, his habit was to make sure that his private life appeared solidly conventional. I would eventually discover that the rooms to which casual visitors were admitted were full of panelling and leather and baize, with hunting trophies and various other masculine badges with which the average wealthy man advertises his vitality and prowess. He also displayed pictures of relatives whose names were associated with the height of breeding and respectability. The bedroom they might see would be sparse and equally redolent of masculine values. He would subscribe to local political parties, charities, business ventures. People would find him a gentleman through and through and roar in angry defence of him if any hint was offered concerning other practices. Indeed, should they find within themselves a desire to taste these forbidden pleasures, Prince Freddy would warn them of what became of people who developed such habits. If they persisted, they were his for ever. Kitty told me this and shrugged weakly. So it was with her.