The Vengeance of Rome

‘You’ve got hold of some of those Soviet microphones and put them in the flower vases. You’ve got a two-way mirror and a film camera. God in heaven, Ernst, these are the spy fantasies of people like Himmler! Are you buggering the SS chauffeur? Is that how you’re finding all this stuff out?’

Again Röhm could not help grinning broadly. He shook his head. ‘Oh, better than that, Strass,’ he said. ‘I’m buggering her confessor.’

Strasser said something about preferring to see his Schiller onstage, but it was clear Röhm had made an impression.

The mood of the evening became almost sombre. Röhm suggested I retire. He said that there were important party matters he and Strasser had to discuss, and I shouldn’t be burdened with them.

Major Nye was in Berlin while I was in retreat at Röhmannsvilla. He said that he had never known a city not at war in quite such a dither; it was as if there was nothing to do and everything to do. Political strategies had grown so complex there wasn’t a single individual who could be sure of anything. The best they could hope for was a wiping out of the war debt, a chance to start again. Daily the Communists and Socialists introduced increasingly radical bills into the Reichstag, which Hitler would immediately quash. Strasser, working within the system, consistently attempted, sometimes with Communist connivance, to put his socialistic ideas into law. Röhm was behind him. They were now at constant odds with Frick, Göring and Goebbels. Hitler, as usual, was in the middle, unable to make up his mind whom to support. He seemed incapable of uniting his disparate elements. Nye believed Hitler deliberately fostered this bickering between his lieutenants, but I am inclined to agree with Röhm: Hitler hated making decisions. He asked everyone’s advice and then could not reconcile the opposing ideas. So he did nothing. When he was not standing in some remote forest clearing reassuring one of the captains of industry, he was utterly involved with Geli Raubal. Nye had heard this from both Strasser and Himmler. Neither man was happy with the situation.

‘Strasser was the only one I could talk to. Radical as he was, he was sane and fundamentally decent. Of course, he was obsessed with the Jewish Question, like all of them. I told him there wouldn’t be a Jewish Question if there were not a German Question. That was precisely my view about Ireland and England. I mean, you can’t just chuck people out after they’ve stopped being useful to you, can you? No decent firm would do that, let alone a nation. Well, Strasser saw what I meant, and I think he pretty much agreed with me. He didn’t hate anyone, that man. He just wanted to see a bit of decent justice. I think he’d have been perfectly happy with a constitutional monarchy. Chancellor Brüning was trying for that, you know, before General von Schleicher took over.’

Major Nye shakes his head. ‘Now there was an army man I simply could not get on with. Wrong sort altogether. Dabbled in civilian issues. It just isn’t done. The German Army knew that as well as the British or the Americans. But, like the Americans, the Germans always think a man who can run an army or a corporation can run a country. They are precisely the last people to run a country! Well, almost the last. Most of the Nazis were the sorts of people you find in the Blenheim Arms these days. The dropouts and seedy misfits. Imagine them suddenly put in charge of Britain.’

‘Heaven forbid,’ says Colonel Pym.

‘But not the blacks and Jews,’ I say.

‘Oi!’ calls Mrs Cornelius from her kitchenette. ’Are yer still talkin’ abart ther War?’

‘Just the causes, Mrs C.’ Major Nye is apologetic. He winks at us, but it is her approval he desires most.

‘Their allies thought anti-Semitism was an engine they could discard once it had driven them to power,’ says Colonel Pym. ‘They didn’t realise it was the movement’s raison d’être. What? I think the War was incidental to that.’

I have a soft spot for these old English eccentrics.

Röhm admired the English. They were good soldiers, he said, and about as honourable as you could get in the real world, South Africa aside. The best Englishman, he always said, was what the best German aspired to be. He did not by this intend to denigrate his own people. He was a dedicated patriot. He meant that the English were Germans who had had certain historical and geographical advantages. Needless to say, Cromwell was his great hero. I have noticed how all the Continental radicals admire Cromwell (presumably for his stand against the Catholics) while the British show virtually no interest in him at all. To them the Roundheads and Cavaliers are the stuff of Romance alone. ‘The English are self-disciplined in a way which we must educate the Germans to be,’ Röhm said. ‘But what became second nature to John Bull over the course of centuries must be drummed into our honest Michael in a decade. That’s the only way to get real lasting social change. The Russians have made a mess of the whole thing. They are hysterical. It is their weakness.’