Upton Sinclair - Dragons’s teeth

The radio orator went on to tell what had been happening in Berlin. "Our party comrade, General Göring, has not hesitated. With a firm hand he has cleared up a nest of reactionaries and their incorrigible supporters. He has taken steps that were hard but necessary in order to save the country from immeasurable disaster."

There followed two newspaper columns of denunciation in which the Reichsminister of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda used many adjectives to praise the nobility and heroism of his Führer, "who has again shown in this critical situation that he is a Real Man." A quite different set of adjectives was required for the "small clique of professional saboteurs," the "boils, seats of corruption, the symptoms of disease and moral deterioration that show themselves in public life," and that now have been "burned out to the flesh."

"The Reich is there," concluded Juppchen, "and above all our Führer."

Such was the story told to the German people. Lanny noticed the curious fact that not once did the little dwarf name one of the victims of the purge; he didn’t even say directly that anybody had been killed! As a specimen of popular fiction there was something to be said for his effusion, but as history it wouldn’t rank high. Lanny could nail one falsehood, for he knew that Hugo Behr had been shot at a few minutes after nine on Friday evening, which was at least three hours before the Führer had given his orders, according to the Goebbels account. The jail buzzed with stories of other persons who had been killed or arrested before midnight; in fact some had been brought to this very place. Evidently somebody had given the fatal order while the Führer was still inspecting labor camps.

It was well known that Göring had flown to the Rheinland with his master, and had then flown back to Berlin. Hermann was the killer, the man of action, who took the "steps that were hard but necessary," while Adi was still hesitating and arguing, screaming at his followers, threatening to commit suicide if they didn’t obey him, falling down on the floor and biting the carpet in a hysteria of bewilderment or rage. Lanny became clear in his mind that this was the true story of the "Blood Purge." Göring had sat at Hitler’s ear in the plane and terrified him with stories of what the Gestapo had uncovered; then, from Berlin, he had given the orders, and when it was too late to reverse them he had phoned the Führer, and the latter had flown to Munich to display "a courage that has no equal," to show himself to the credulous German people as "a Real Man."

The official statement was that not more than fifty persons had been killed in the three days and nights of terror; but the gossip in the Ettstrasse was that there had been several hundred victims in Munich alone, and it turned out that the total in Germany was close to twelve hundred. This and other official falsehoods were freely discussed, and the jail buzzed like a beehive. Human curiosity broke down the barriers between jailers and jailed; they whispered news to one another, and an item once put into circulation was borne by busy tongues to every corner of the institution. In the corridors you were supposed to walk alone and not to talk; but every time you passed other prisoners you whispered something, and if it was a tidbit you might share it with one of the keepers. Down in the exercise court the inmates were supposed to walk in silence, but the man behind you mouthed the news and you passed it on to the man in front of you.

And when you were in your cell, there were sounds of tapping; tapping on wood, on stone, and on metal; tapping by day and most of the night; quick tapping for the experts and slow tapping for the new arrivals. In the cell directly under Lanny was a certain Herr Doktor Obermeier, a former Ministerialdirektor of the Bavarian state, well known to Herr Klaussen. He shared the same water-pipes as those above him, and was a tireless tapper. Lanny learned the code, and heard the story of Herr Doktor Willi Schmitt, music critic of the Neueste Nachrichten and chairman of the Beethoven-Vereinigung; the most amiable of persons, so Herr Klaussen declared, with body, mind, and soul made wholly of music. Lanny had read his review of the Eroica performance, and other articles from his pen. The S.S. men came for him, and when he learned that they thought he was Gruppenführer Willi Schmitt, a quite different man, he was amused, and told his wife and children not to worry. He went with the Nazis, but did not return; and when his frantic wife persisted in her clamors she received from Police Headquarters a death certificate signed by the Burgermeister of the town of Dachau; there had been "a very regrettable mistake," and they would see that it did not happen again.

Story after story, the most sensational, the most horrible! Truly, it was something fabulous, Byzantine! Ex-Chancellor Franz von Papen, still a member of the Cabinet, had been attacked in his office and had some of his teeth knocked out; now he was under "house arrest," his life threatened, and the aged von Hindenburg, sick and near to death, trying to save his "dear comrade." Edgar Jung, Papen’s friend who had written his offending speech demanding freedom of the press, had been shot here in Munich. Gregor Strasser had been kidnaped from his home and beaten to death by S.S. men in Grunewald. General von Schleicher and his wife had been riddled with bullets on the steps of their villa. Karl Ernst, leader of the Berlin S.A., had been slugged unconscious and taken to the city. His staff leader had decided that Göring had gone crazy, and had flown to Munich to appeal to Hitler about it. He had been taken back to Berlin and shot with seven of his adjutants. At Lichterfelde, in the courtyard of the old military cadet school, tribunals under the direction of Göring were still holding "trials" averaging seven minutes each; the victims were stood against a wall and shot while crying: "Heil Hitler!"

About half the warders in this jail were men of the old regime and the other half S.A. men, and there was much jealousy between them. The latter group had no way of knowing when the lightning might strike them, so for the first time they had a fellow-feeling for their prisoners. If one of the latter had a visitor and got some fresh information, everybody wanted to share it, and a warder would find a pretext to come to the cell and hear what he had to report. Really, the old Munich police prison became a delightfully sociable and exciting place! Lanny decided that he wouldn’t have missed it for anything. His own fears had diminished; he decided that when the storm blew over, somebody in authority would have time to hear his statement and realize that a blunder had been made. Possibly his three captors had put Hugo’s money into their own pockets, and if so, there was no evidence against Lanny himself. He had only to crouch in his "better 'ole"—and meantime learn about human and especially Nazi nature.

The population of the jail was in part common criminals—thieves, burglars, and sex offenders—while the other part comprised political suspects, or those who had got in the way of some powerful official. A curious situation, in which one prisoner might be a blackmailer and another the victim of a blackmailer—both in the same jail and supposedly under the same law! One man guilty of killing, another guilty of refusing to kill, or of protesting against killing! Lanny could have compiled a whole dossier of such antinomies. But he didn’t dare to make notes, and was careful not to say anything that would give offense to anybody. The place was bound to be full of spies, and while the men in his own cell appeared to be genuine, either or both might have been selected because they appeared to be that.