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VI

Lanny missed his inside news about Germany, because the government forbade the

publication of Vorwärts for three days, as a punishment for having published a campaign appeal

of the Social-Democratic Party. Communist meetings were forbidden throughout the whole

nation, and many Communist and Socialist papers were permanently suspended. "In ten years

there will be no Marxism in Germany," proclaimed the Führer. All over Prussia Goring was

replacing police chiefs with Nazis, and the Stormtroopers were now attending political

meetings in force, stopping those in which the government was criticized. Next, all meetings of

the Centrists, the Catholic party, were banned; the Catholic paper, Germania, of which

Papen was the principal stockholder, was suppressed, and then Rote Fahne, the Communist

paper of Berlin. These events were reported in L'Humanite under the biggest of headlines, and

Uncle Jesse denounced them furiously in the Chamber of Deputies; but that didn't appear to

have much effect upon Hitler.

What the Nazis were determined to do was to win those elections on the fifth of March. If

they could get a majority in the Reichstag, they would be masters of the country; the

Nationalists and aristocrats would be expelled from the cabinet and the revolution would be

complete. Papen, Hugenberg, and their backers knew it well, and were in a state of distress,

according to Johannes's reports. A curious state of affairs—the gentlemen of the Herren Klub

defending the Reds, because they knew that Hitler was using the Red bogy to frighten the

people into voting for him! Goebbels was demanding the head of the Berlin police chief

because he wouldn't produce evidence of treasonable actions on the part of the Communists.

"The history of Germany is becoming a melodrama," wrote the Jewish financier. "In times to

come people will refuse to believe it."

He was now beginning to be worried about the possibility of attacks upon his boys; those

gentle, idealistic boys who had been playing with fire without realizing how hot it could get.

Being now twenty-eight and twenty-six respectively, they ought to have had some sense.

Johannes didn't say it was Lanny's half-sister who led them into the worst extremes, but

Lanny knew the father thought this, and not without reason. Anyhow, he had got a trusted

bodyguard in the palace—a well-established and indubitable Aryan bodyguard. Freddi's school

had been closed; such a simple operation—a group of Stormtroopers appeared one evening

and ordered the people out. Nothing you could do, for they had arms and appeared eager to

use them. Everybody went, not even being allowed to get their hats and coats in February. The

building was closed, and all the papers had been carted away in a truck.

The Nazis wouldn't find any treason in those documents; only receipted bills, and examination

papers in Marxist theory. But maybe that was treason now! Or maybe the Nazis would prepare

other documents and put them into the files. Orders to the students to blow up Nazi

headquarters, or perhaps the Chancellery? Such forgeries had been prepared more than once,

and not alone in Germany. Hadn't an election been won in Britain on the basis of an alleged

"Zinoviev letter"?

The headquarters of the Communist Party of Germany was in Karl Liebknecht Haus, and

that was the place where treason was to be sought. The police had seized the documents, and

two days later Herr Goebbels's press service gave details about "catacombs" and "underground

vaults," a secret and illegal organization functioning in the basement of the building, and so

on. Johannes reported an embittered conflict in the Cabinet over these too obvious forgeries;

they were considered beneath the dignity of the German government—but perhaps the

German government wasn't going to be so dignified from now on! The Jewish financier

couldn't conceal his amusement over the discomfiture of the "gentleman jockey," the "silver

fox," and the rest of the Junker crew. They had made this bed of roses, and discovered too

late how full of thorns it was.

The thing that worried Lanny was the possibility that some Nazi agent might produce

letters proving that Hansi Robin had been carrying dynamite in his violin case, or Freddi in his

clarinet case. They must have had spies in the school, and known everything that both boys

had been doing and saying. Lanny said; "Johannes, why don't you and the whole family come

visit us for a while?"

"Maybe we'll all take a yachting trip," replied the man of money, with a chuckle. "When the

weather gets a little better."

"The weather is going to get worse," insisted the Paris end of the line.

VII

Lanny talked this problem over with his wife. She couldn't very well refuse hospitality to

Johannes, from whom she had accepted so much. But she didn't like the atmosphere which

the young Robins brought with them, and she thought them a bad influence for her husband.

She argued that the danger couldn't really be so great as Lanny feared. "If the Nazis are

anxious to get votes, they won't do anything to important persons, especially those known

abroad."

Lanny replied: "The party is full of criminals and degenerates, and they, are drunk with the

sense of power."

He couldn't stop worrying about it, and when the day for Hansi's coming drew near, he said

to Irma: "How would you like to motor to Cologne and bring them out with us?"

"What could we do, Lanny?"

"There's safety in numbers; and then, too, Americans have a certain amount of prestige in

Germany."

It wasn't a pleasant time for motoring, the end of February, but they had heat in their car,

and with fur coats they would be all right unless there happened to be a heavy storm. Irma

liked adventure; one of the reasons she and Lanny got along so well was that whenever one

suggested hopping into a car the other always said: "O.K." No important engagement stood in

the way of this trip, and they allowed themselves an extra day on chance of bad weather.

Old Boreas was kind, and they rolled down the valley of the Meuse, by which the Germans

had made their entry into France some eighteen and a half years ago. Lanny told his wife the

story of Sophie Timmons, Baroness de la Tourette, who had been caught in the rush of the

armies and had got away in a peasant's cart pulled by a spavined old horse.

They reached Cologne late that evening, and spent the next day looking at a grand cathedral,

and at paintings in a near-by Gothic museum. Hansi and Bess arrived on the afternoon train,

and thereafter they stayed in their hotel suite, doing nothing to attract attention to a member

of the accursed race. Among the music-lovers Hansi would be all right, for these were "good

Europeans," who for a couple of centuries had been building up a tradition of

internationalism. A large percentage of Europe's favorite musicians had been Jews, and there

would have been gaps in concert programs if their works had been omitted.

Was the audience trying to say this by the storms of applause with which they greeted the

performance of Mendelssohn's gracious concerto by a young Jewish virtuoso? Did Hansi have

such a message in his mind when he played Bruch's Kol Nidrei as one of his encores? When

the audience leaped to its feet and shouted, "Bravo!" were they really meaning to say: "We are

not Nazis! We shall never be Nazis!" Lanny chose to believe this, and was heartened; he was

sure that many of the adoring Rheinlanders had a purpose in waiting at the stage door and