The Vengeance of Rome

We all had a meal together. “Old ‘ome week,’ said Mrs C. He had been happy to rejoin her when she, too, transferred from Berlin to Munich. He had become quite a sophisticate with a taste for good tailoring. Clearly not all the Munich Fräuleins saw him as a mere darkie entertainer. Even I admitted there was something wonderfully masculine about Mr Mix. You felt as if you were in the presence of a wild leopard, always in some degree of danger when he was near. And sometimes I think he knew his power.

He told me how they had performed their act in Frankfurt, Hamburg and Bonn, and had dates already promised for Paris, Amsterdam and even, perhaps, London. It soon became clear to me that it was in my interest to maintain close contact with my old friends. Now here he was, my compañero of cattle truck and Caliphate!

I had greeted Mr Mix with a genuine sense of warmth, feelings he reciprocated when he learned of all my adventures abroad. He enthusiastically exclaimed: ‘Ich liebe Deutschland!’ That is the kind of emotion Germany inspired at the time, even in those not born there.

So, too, said Adolf Hitler and so said the German people. Goebbels, who had only recently condemned Hitler as the bourgeois puppet of the industrialists Strasser still claimed him to be, stood up in the public squares of all the cities in Germany and reminded the people how the country had been stabbed in the back by alien financiers with German politicians in their power, supporting the machinations of Jewish socialism, the Trojan horse of Bolshevik Russia. He pointed out, with surprising eloquence, how their professed pacifism, exhibited in such films as The Game of Guns, was no more than an effort further to weaken the German soldier and turn him into a creature without character or meaning, who had fought for nothing, died for nothing and come home to nothing. Who was now nothing, with nothing to value, nothing to defend. Who was only useful as a puppet, a slave to the forces of Big Business, which would gobble him up unless they were stopped. The only countering force strong enough and wise enough to stop them was Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP Party.

I saw Goebbels give this speech in Munich in early 1932. He had a way of getting the crowd’s sympathy for his deformity, refusing assistance as he climbed to the podium, his spindly arms akimbo as his skull-face regarded the audience. He could have been a villain in a boys’ story, yet within moments he had the audience on his side by joking, appealing to their reason, their sentiments, their love of country.

He had learned from Hitler how to begin quietly and build up, to establish his commonality with the audience, to share its humour and way of seeing the world. But then with a catch in his voice and a tear in his eye, he would remind us what humiliation the great German nation had suffered. ‘Look,’ he would say, ‘I’m just an ordinary chap trying to do his best in the world, trying to understand what’s going on. We have the same questions in common. The same problems.’ He couldn’t help noticing how Germany had been tricked into war and then tricked into defeat. How aliens of every stripe had taken advantage of German hospitality, German goodwill, German honour and who now bled their host nation dry. How only Adolf Hitler, that brave young leader, who had known the same terrors and deprivations as his fellow Germans, could unite the country and make it great again. It was time for dynamic new ideas, fresh will-power, vigorous, healthy Young Germany rising triumphant from the ashes of the Old. A Third Reich, strong and proud, holding dominion over her own lands, the lands the Allies had stripped in their hideous feeding frenzy, rewarding the alien businessmen who had helped them march into Germany and despoil her monuments, her traditions, even her women! Black troops had entered the Rhineland leaving black babies behind. The evidence was there for all to see!

Those troops were the threat the Allies used to control Germany! Whenever they felt like it they could release thousands of Algerians, Somalis, Egyptians and Indians upon the entire country. Germania would then truly know what it was to feel the heel of the black barbarian upon her neck. And, jested Goebbels grimly in a vulgar aside, not only her neck would suffer.

I went to the meeting with Mrs Cornelius, her ‘Baron’ and Seryozha. Mr Mix had also insisted on attending, though the guards controlling the crowd had not allowed him to come in very close. He grinned at me and waved when from the crowd his eyes met mine.

While I now had my friends back, I was still something of a prisoner in Corneliusstrasse. Mrs Cornelius, Mr Mix and Seryozha were not always available to me, and I wondered if the film contract would ever become reality. I was again beginning to resume my earlier plan of getting to Mr Green, my Uncle Semyon’s agent in England, picking up my inheritance and, if possible, settling in the UK for a while.