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However, Lanny wasn't there to convert two Nazi officials. He permitted Hugo Behr to speak

to him as one comrade to another, and now and then he made notes of something which might

be of interest to the reading public of Britain. Hugo was newer in the movement than

Heinrich, and more naive; he had swallowed the original Nazi program, hook, line, and

sinker; that was the creed, and when you had quoted it, you had settled the point at issue.

Lanny Budd, cynical worldling, product of several decadent cultures, wanted to say: "How can

Hitler be getting funds from von Papen and the other Junkers if he really means to break up

the great landed estates of Prussia? How can he be getting funds from Fritz Thyssen and the

other steel kings if he means to socialize big industry?" But what good would it do? Hugo

doubtless thought that all the party funds came from the pfennigs of the workers; that

banners and brassards, brown shirts and shiny boots, automatic pistols and Budd machine guns

were purchased with the profits of literature sales! Heinrich, perhaps, knew better, but

wouldn't admit it, and Lanny wasn't free to name the sources of his own information. Better

simply to listen, and make careful notes, and let Rick write an article entitled: "England,

Awake!"

II

Right after the elections came a trial in Berlin of three officers charged with having made

Nazi propaganda in the army. It attracted a great deal of public attention, and Adolf Hitler

appeared as a witness and delivered one of his characteristic tirades, declaring that when his

party took power the "November criminals," meaning the men who had established the

Republic, would be judged by a people's tribunal. "Heads will roll in the sand," he said. Such

language shocked the civilized German people, and Johannes Robin took it as a proof of what

he had been saying to Lanny, that all you had to do was to give this fellow rope enough and he

would hang himself. There was a demand from many quarters that Hitler be tried for treason;

but probably the government was of the same opinion as Johannes. Why hang a man who

was so ready to hang himself? The three officers were dismissed from the army, and Adi went

on making his propaganda—in the army as everywhere else.

Lanny invited Hauptmann Emil Meissner to lunch with him, and they talked about these

problems. Kurt's eldest brother, a World War veteran, had the younger's pale blue eyes and

close-cropped straw-colored hair, but not his ardent temperament; he agreed with Lanny that

Kurt had been led astray, and that the Führer was a dangerous fanatic. Emil was loyal to the

existing government; he said that would always be the attitude of the army, and was the

obligation of every officer, no matter how much he might disapprove the policies of the

politicians in control.

"Would you obey the Nazis if they should take power?" inquired the American.

Emil shut his eyes for a moment, as if to hide the painful reaction which such a question

caused in him. "I don't think it is necessary to contemplate that," he said.

Lanny replied: "The present election has made me do it." But he didn't press the point.

Emil placed his faith in Germany's symbol of loyalty, Feldmarschall and now Prasident Paul

Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg. The old commander had won the

battle of Tannenberg, the one complete victory the Germans had gained, with the result that

the people had idolized him all through the rest of the war. In every town they had set up

huge wooden statues of him, and it had been the supreme act of patriotism to buy nails and

drive them into this statue, the money going to the German Red Cross. The Hindenburg line

had been another name for national security, and now the Hindenburg presidency was the

same. But the stern old titan was now eighty-three years old, and his wits were growing dim; it

was hard for him to concentrate upon complex matters. The politicians swarmed about him,

they pulled him this way and that, and it was painful to him and tragic to those who saw it.

Emil Meissner had been on the old field marshal's staff during part of the war, and knew his

present plight; but Emil was reserved in the presence of a foreigner, especially one who

consorted with Jews and had a sister and a brother-in-law love to Adolf Hitler, and reported

that the President refused to recognize this upstart even as an Austrian, but persisted in

referring to him as "the Bohemian corporal," and using the name of his father, which was

Schicklgruber, a plebeian and humiliating name. Der alte Herr had steadily refused to meet

Corporal Schicklgruber, because he talked too much, and in the army it was customary for a

non-commissioned officer to wait for his superior to speak first.

Emil expressed his ideas concerning the disorders which prevailed in the cities of the

Republic, amounting to a civil war between the two sets of extremists. The Reds had begun it,

without doubt, and the Brownshirts were the answer they had got; but Emil called it an

atrocious thing that anybody should be permitted to organize a private army as Hitler had

done. Hardly a night passed that the rival groups didn't clash in the streets, and Emil longed

for a courageous Chancellor who would order the Reichswehr to disarm both sides. The Nazi

Führer pretended to deplore what his followers did, but of course that was nonsense; every

speech he made was an incitement to more violence—like that insane talk about heads rolling

in the sand.

So far two cultivated and modern men could agree over their coffee-cups. But Emil went on

to reveal that he was a German like the others. He said that fundamentally the situation was

due to the Allies and their monstrous treaty of Versailles; Germany had been stripped of

everything by the reparations demands, deprived of her ships, colonies, and trade—and no

people ever would starve gladly. Lanny had done his share of protesting against Versailles, and

had argued for helping Germany to get on her feet again; but somehow, when he listened to

Germans, he found himself shifting to the other side and wishing to remind them that they had

lost the war. After all, it hadn't been a game of ping-pong, and somebody had to pay for it.

Also, Germany had had her program of what she meant to do if she had won; she had

revealed it clearly in the terms she had forced upon Russia at Brest-Litovsk. Also, there had been

a Franco-Prussian War, and Germany had taken Alsace-Lorraine; there had been Frederick the

Great and the partition of Poland; there had been a whole string of Prussian conquests—but

whose redness was notorious. On the other hand, an officer of the Reichswehr owed no you had

better not mention them if you wanted to have friends in the Fatherland!

III

Three evenings a week Freddi and Rahel went to the school which they helped to support.

Freddi taught a class in the history of economic theory and Rahel taught one in singing, both

subjects important for German workers. Lanny went along more than once, and when the

students old and young discovered that he lived in France and had helped with a school there,

they wanted to hear about conditions in that country and what the workers were thinking and

doing. Discussions arose, and Lanny discovered that the disciplined and orderly working people

of Germany were not so different from the independent and free-spoken bunch in the Midi.

The same problems vexed them, the same splits turned every discussion into a miniature war.