The Vengeance of Rome

When in 1930 Röhm returned to Germany in some style, he decided to make up for lost time. He did not know how long he would live or if the revolution would be successful. If it failed, he was sure to be shot. He knew from his reading of history how freebooters, like himself, could become an embarrassment should the war be won. He spoke of himself as Jean Lafitte or Sir Francis Drake, but I think he hoped Fate would make him a Napoleon.

All his experience of life, Röhm asserted, told him that life was a wild hunt. You were lucky if the best you could do was to hang on to your horse. Anything might knock you off at any moment. Luck alone kept you seated when better riders and nobler men fell. ‘That’s why I live to the full. Knowing any hour could be my last!’

A soldier first and everything else second, Röhm enjoyed his leisure as he enjoyed his work, bringing the same self-punishing intensity to both. Finding love for the first time after the War, he had been happy for a while. He had quarrelled with Hitler over a small political matter and had left the movement. Hitler condemned him as a traitor. ‘Alf went into a sulk. Wouldn’t talk to me. Well, I failed to earn a living by any other means. Soldiering’s all I know. So I accepted a commission as a regular officer in the Bolivian Army, training their troops.’ He had learned from them, too. He had picked up much of his understanding of revolutionary warfare from his South American days.

‘But most of my time was spent reading and playing the gramophone,’ he told me. He wrote long, sensitive letters home to close friends. The newspapers got hold of some and published them in hope of damaging Hitler’s standing with the electorate.

Röhm had laughed when telling me the story. ‘The electorate preferred to believe Hitler’s support of me.’ Even when exclusive hotels were turned into public spectacles of unchecked homosexuality, Hitler continued to stand by Röhm. Putzi Hanfstaengl told me that. ‘Hitler couldn’t afford not to. If Alf condemned Röhm, then Röhm might easily break his own silence, eh? They’ve all had to stick together over the years. A few words from the Stabschef and that’ll be the end of Hitler’s career in national politics.’ Hanfstaengl knew how vulnerable Hitler was to blackmail. The party had already paid a vast amount of money for some letters and pictures which had fallen into greedy hands. Nobody at that time knew what else was loose. Hitler’s letter writing was a lot less discreet than Röhm’s, and he tended to embellish his points with detailed anatomical drawings. And photographs. Hitler could deny rumours, but whatever his oldest friend said would have a special authority. They would sink together. And so the alliance held.

‘Frightened people,’ says Röhm, ’are genuinely eager to obey. They are grateful for orders, no matter what they are. We all found that in the trenches. Men would rather be ordered to their deaths than not be ordered at all. Action consumes some of their adrenalin and makes them feel momentarily better. These studies of mass psychology Hitler’s forever reading always come down to the same simple principle: the crowd loves a roller-coaster. It loves to be frightened and it loves to be saved. The crowd is a baby you toss up into the air and catch, a woman you tease with a knife. And that, of course, is what Alf understands in his bones. The common people possess only two controlling emotions — fear and love.’

I remind Mrs Cornelius of this but she is unimpressed. ‘They were all such ‘orrible ordinary little turds, really. That ‘Itler was the worst. Bore the tits off a bull, ‘e would. Everyone complained, even poor little Eva Braun, ‘is girlfriend. An’ she ‘ad a lot more influence over ‘im than you fink. She tol’ me ther fings ‘e made ‘er do to ‘im! Well, to be fair, she said she enjoyed some of it. Like those girls I know up west. You should ‘ear what they ‘ave to wear! More like industrial overalls than bonkin’ gear! An’ the blokes who come to them are mostly bigwigs in the government an’ tycoons. It’s ther showbiz boys who like youngsters. Politicians like ther cane. But it was ‘ard work, Eva said.’

Though she got on a little better with the women, Mrs Cornelius did not enjoy her intimacy with the Nazis. She said the men always sounded like a bunch of estate agents. ‘Total wank artists, Ivan. Ther passengers get it into their ‘eads they’re drivin’ the train. So the first thing they do, o’ course, is sack the driver. In ther case o’ ther Nazis, they went one better. They killed the bleedin’ driver.’

So she reduces the heroic struggle of the twentieth century which ended in the death of all its greatest warriors. Our destiny denied us, our memories forbidden, we descended into the grey mud of socialism. Past and future were abolished. Animals live like that. In an eternal present.