Part 7
In the rear of his car are four SS men, and on the running boards are two others, and behind Hitler’s car is another identical Mercedes with six to eight more SS men. The SS men, who are the best pistol shots in Germany, lean out of their cars, peering at the crowds, and they keep their right hands always on their pistols. You say that sounds as though he were well guarded? Not at all. The crowd in Nuremberg is so great that it encroaches on the path of the automobiles until they are slowed to a walk. That means Hitler passes underneath your window at a walking speed.
An assassin could lean out of his window and toss a bomb into Hitler’s car with absolute accuracy. He could not miss. I have often leaned out and looked down at Hitler and remarked in a whisper to my comrades, “How easy it would be, wouldn’t it, to drop a grapefruit?” And if you think a bomb is too uncertain, why not try a sub-machine gun? That would be 100 per cent sure. You would have him at a distance of about thirty yards. With one burst you could riddle him, put perhaps twenty bullets into him before the guards could turn around.
You ask how the assassin could get the sub-machine gun or the bombs into the hotel? The Gestapo is good, but it is a long way from being perfect. They overlook a great many things. We were in Vienna when Hitler marched in. The Gestapo had been in control of the city for days. But on the very day Hitler came to Vienna my wife borrowed a radio set from Tess Shirer and had the porter carry it into the hotel and up to our room. It was the size of a large thick suitcase. Nobody stopped her, or asked to investigate it. It might have contained two or three sub-machine guns with sufficient ammunition and a few hand grenades.
You object that the assassin would certainly be caught and executed. I agree. Political assassins almost never escape. But political assassins must always and nearly always are willing to take this chance. You can take it as a rule of political assassination, however, that if the assassin is bold enough, he can always get his man. Remember the Macedonian gunman, Vlada Georgiev, who killed King Alexander and Louis Barthou in Marseilles, October 9, 1934? He was a husky fellow who waited behind the police line until the royal automobile came opposite him and then burst through the line like a football player and with one leap was on the running board of the automobile pumping bullets from his automatic into his two victims. It was all over in thirty seconds. The police had no chance to intervene before Alexander was dead. General Georges, later the unhappy second in command of the French Army, cut down the assassin with his saber.
This is the classic street assassination, resembling in every detail the killing by Gavril Princip of the Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, June 28, 1914, which touched off the first World War. But the Nuremberg situation would give an assassin a chance for his life. You see, the SS guards are constantly watching the crowds in the street. None of them pays attention to the windows of the houses and hotels along the street. The crowds are so thick that between our hotel and the path of Hitler’s automobile would be standing twenty to thirty thousand people.
Now suppose the assassin drops his bomb or fires his machine gun, or to make assurance doubly sure, drops bombs _and_ fires his machine gun. Hitler falls. The crowd panics. How long would it take the SS men or other police to get through the crowd to the hotel entrance, climb the stairs, and search for the assassin? It would take several minutes at least. And in the midst of that howling mob of panic-stricken people it would take minutes more before the police could surround the block. Meanwhile the assassin would have plenty of time to run upstairs to the roof, across to another building, and down a rear fire escape to mingle with the crowd. Whatever the later details of escape, there would be a chance of his getting away from the scene of the shooting if he had laid his plans carefully in advance.
Q. _You haven’t told us yet why nobody ever tried it?_
A. Yes, it has been clumsily tried, but without the proper preparation. Four or five attempts were made on Hitler’s life during his first two years in office, 1933 and 1934, while I was in Berlin. They were all hushed up so closely that we never had more than the skeleton of the story. They were hushed up because the Nazis and especially the Gestapo, and especially its chief, Heinrich Himmler, know that there is nothing so infectious as the idea of political assassination.
The news of an attempt at assassination will set off a series of imitative attempts. Therefore Himmler gave up his original idea which was expressed in his announcement through the German press a few weeks after Hitler took office. Himmler declared in a formal proclamation that if anyone were to assassinate or attempt to assassinate the Fuehrer, there would be, and these are his exact words, “a massacre such as the world has never seen.” He specified that the Gestapo would massacre all of the Nazis’ opponents, and implied they would kill every Jew in Germany.
Himmler’s announcement was calculated to deter assassins, but he never meant to put it into effect unless Hitler were actually killed. We correspondents, however, heard of several attempts on Hitler. One was said to have taken place the day before the great Blood Purge of June 30, 1934, and was believed to have contributed to Hitler’s decision to exterminate his enemies. In this case the assassin fired with a rifle at Hitler’s automobile. Another time his car was narrowly saved from crashing into an obstacle supposed to have been placed in the road with the purpose of killing him. Other attempts were even more vaguely rumored. Himmler took care that the public should learn nothing about these attempts, not only because of the infectious nature of the news of the assassinations, but because the Gestapo considered it undesirable to reveal that anybody in Germany could want to kill the Fuehrer.
Q. _That’s all right about Germans, but why not a Britisher, or a Frenchman, or a Jew?_
A. The question why doesn’t a Jew, or why didn’t a Jew, kill Hitler is one that I have often heard asked of my Jewish friends, and the answer usually is that if a Jew killed Hitler the Nazis would slaughter every Jew in their dominions. The Nazis now have under their despotism in the Reich and the fifteen conquered countries perhaps five or six million Jews still. I agree that it is perfectly possible that the Nazis might try to slaughter them all if a Jew were to kill Hitler, but if Hitler is not defeated these unfortunate victims of Nazi hatred will ultimately perish anyway.
Nevertheless, even the very courageous young Jews who used to operate an organization to counter Arab terror argued the same way with me when I was in Palestine, that if they killed Hitler they would doom hundreds of thousands if not millions of Jews to death. It seems that they can believe rationally that Hitler does intend eventually to exterminate all the Jews in Europe, and so it would not make much difference if they were all or many of them killed as a result of Hitler’s assassination, but emotionally they cling to the subconscious hope that something will happen to save them. Of course, the only thing that can save the Jews of Europe is for Hitler to be defeated before they all die.
As for a young Britisher or Frenchman killing Hitler, before the war began, as I have said, it would have been easy, but consider if a man had killed Hitler before the war, what would the world have said? What sort of judgment would the world have delivered on the assassin? Would he have been considered a hero, a savior of mankind? Not at all, because Hitler up to that time was only a potential menace to Britain, France, and the other peaceful states. If he had been killed, his assassin would have been declared a madman, and his act would have been condemned by all save the small group of persons who perceived the inevitability and the catastrophic course of the war Hitler planned against the world. No assassin kills out of pure idealism. A man who killed Hitler would want a little credit for it, and until the war began he would have received none.
Q. _He would receive plenty of credit now. Why doesn’t the British government organize the killing of Hitler? Haven’t they plenty of agents in Germany?_
A. I have no doubt the killer of Hitler would be decorated by fifteen governments or more, but there are still millions of muddled sentimentalists in this country who would shudder at the thought of assassination. There were few, I suppose, who objected to the G-men shooting the rabid Dillinger, but millions denounced the little doctor, Weiss, who shot the far more dangerous criminal, Huey Long. So it would have fared with anyone who would have assassinated Hitler. Imagine how different the history of Germany and of the world might have been if Hitler had been among the victims of the machine gun which fired on him on the morning of November 10, 1923, on the Odeon’s Platz in Munich.
Before this war there were just as many sentimentalists in England, but you would have to look a long time to find one now. During an air raid in London I asked an old English lady, one of the gentlest creatures I have ever known, what she would do if she were driving an automobile and suddenly Hitler were to appear in front of the car. Would she turn and save him, or would she drive ahead and hit him? “I would press the accelerator and drive straight over him,” she said firmly.
Q. _What was the explanation of the bombing attempt on Hitler in the Munich Beer Hall?_
A. It bore every earmark of being an admirably well thought-out and executed plan by the British which just failed by a few minutes. I should think the British government has done all it could to have Hitler killed. Certainly the British know how supremely important it would be to do away with the heart and brains of Nazidom. The bomb attempt on Hitler in the _Buergerbraeu Keller_ in Munich, November 8, 1939, the anniversary of the Hitler-Ludendorff Putsch, nearly succeeded. To refresh your memory: Hitler and his “Old Fighters” left the beer hall twelve minutes before a time bomb exploded, killing seven persons and wounding sixty-three. The Germans blamed it on the British secret agents, and announced they had captured two such agents, a Mr. Best and a Captain Stevens, on the day after the bomb explosion.
The Gestapo had gone over into Holland to kidnap the two Britishers who incautiously made a rendezvous close to the frontier.
Some persons analyzed this affair thus: The Gestapo itself arranged the bomb to go off after Hitler left. The Gestapo did it for one of two reasons. Either Himmler wanted to kill Hitler, or Hitler wanted the bomb attempt in order to arouse sympathy for himself among his people, and hatred of the English. Neither of these explanations makes sense to me. No Nazi leader in his right mind wants Hitler to be killed, because every Nazi is aware that his party, his job, and his very life are dependent upon the continued existence and leadership of Hitler. I will not say anything further about the plain fact that most of Hitler’s subordinates literally worship him. Just on the basis of individual self-interest, it would be unlikely that any Nazi leader should wish to weaken the Nazi position so disastrously.
I do not believe Himmler or any other Nazi was behind the attempt. Nor is it credible that Hitler planted the bomb to arouse sympathy for himself among the German people. He has all the sympathy he needs, and German hatred for the English is quite adequate. Neither of these two reasons could balance the danger involved in the infectious quality of a public attempt at assassination such as this was. This attempt, which took place before a large public, could not be concealed.
Finally, it seems that the German capture of the two British secret agents crippled the British Intelligence Service in Germany for many months. They were men high in the service and could be presumed to have known a good deal about the whole Intelligence Service setup in Germany. With the Gestapo at work on them in the approved style recently made so vivid and bloodcurdling by Jan Valtin in _Out of the Night_, it is not likely that many British Intelligence agents in Germany remained unidentified. At any rate there have not been any further attempts on Hitler, at least none that we know about.
The time-bomb attempt was compared by some correspondents to the Reichstag fire, but I fail to see the basis for comparison. The Reichstag was set afire by the Nazis for the specific, rational purpose of blaming it on the Communists, suppressing their party, jailing their deputies, and thus obtaining for the Nazis a majority vote in the Reichstag. These purposes were achieved to the great profit of the Nazis. What profit could the Nazis have had in staging a near assassination of Hitler? When the Reichstag was burned, my cabled report was censored, the first censorship I had experienced in eight years of work as a correspondent in Germany.
The freshly appointed censor cut out a paragraph in which I had pointed out that police when seeking the perpetrator of a crime, always try to find out first who would have profited by the crime. So in the case of the Reichstag fire it was only necessary to look for the persons who would profit by the fire. The answer was as plain as daylight. Only the Nazis would profit by the fire. The censor deleted this commonplace but accurate observation. Who would profit by the death of Hitler? The Nazis? Of course not. The British? Of course! If they had succeeded they would have earned the thanks of a thousand million beneficiaries throughout the world.
The fact that Hitler and his staff saved their lives by leaving the _Buergerbraeu Keller_ earlier than had been their custom in former years is the basis of the peculiar claim that the whole thing was a Nazi plot. Why, it is argued, should Hitler have not stayed as usual to chat with the comrades of the early days? Why indeed? Because this was wartime, the first anniversary of the Putsch to be celebrated since the war began. Hitler has not been known to waste much time since the war began. He could be assumed to have had a number of things to do more important than chatting with his Beer Cellar veterans. This time his industry saved his life.
Q. _Why is it there are so few assassinations or attempted assassinations in any of the totalitarian states? You would think their cruelties would lead many desperate men to seek revenge._
A. Yes, you would, and this is a matter that many of us in Russia used to discuss. How odd it was that in the history of the Soviet Union there were only three known assassinations or attempts at assassination of Soviet leaders.
Lenin was shot and seriously wounded in 1918 by Dora Kaplan, a Social Revolutionary; Uritzky, police chief of Leningrad, was killed at the same time; and sixteen years later, December 4, 1934, Sergei Kirov, political boss of Leningrad, was shot by a half-demented former Communist, Nikolaev. I shall not forget the Kirov killing because I was in Moscow at the time and saw Stalin, in the bitter cold of a Moscow December, help carry barehanded the coffin of Kirov to its grave on the Red Square, and then hurry back to his office to plan his revenge, the most colossal ever enjoyed by a human being since the prophet wrote that vengeance was reserved to the Almighty.
It was the Kirov killing, of course, which touched off Stalin’s great purge. It illustrates perfectly the first of several reasons why assassinations are rare in the totalitarian states. Let me say here that one of those reasons is not the one most popularly believed. It is not due to the impenetrable guard kept around the tyrants. There at the funeral of Kirov, we in the press box were not more than twenty yards from Stalin as he stood on top of Lenin’s tomb, and when he walked to the grave he came within almost touching distance of me.
Granted that the correspondents have unusual facilities, and that the G.P.U. checks all of them to be confident none of them is dangerous. But there in the Red Square hundreds of thousands of men and women marched past Stalin, the nearest only a few feet away. Any one of them could have shot at him or hurled a hand grenade at him before any of the police surrounding the tomb could have intervened.
Likewise, Stalin could have been killed any time during the two decades by any person with the initiative to attend the Bolshoi Theater when Stalin was there, sitting in the rear of his first floor forward box. He could have been shot from a score of seats in the first two rows of the orchestra. It would have been even easier to wait for one of the big Communist meetings in the Bolshoi Theater when Stalin was there with all the leaders of the party. I have seen him with the entire Politburo and forty or fifty others, sitting bunched together on the stage of the Bolshoi Theater, while we in the Press box in the Gallery, almost overhanging the stage, leaned over the rail and quietly observed how easy it would be to drop something in Stalin’s lap.
A single bomb small enough to be concealed beneath an overcoat would have killed Stalin and perhaps the entire top rank of the Communist Party. Why hasn’t anyone tried it? Stalin surely has more enemies who would like to see him dead than any man in the world except Hitler. Stalin probably has more personal enemies than Hitler, because Stalin has executed more people. When you think of the millions who died as victims of the Revolution, and of the millions who died in the famine of 1932-33, when Stalin ordered the peasants of the Ukraine to be stripped of all their food to teach them a lesson, it seems singular that no bereaved survivor should have lifted his hand against the tyrant.
The first reason, however, why a modern despot enjoys relative security is the character of totalitarian terror. In a normal democratic country an assassin has to fear only the loss of his own life, and the lives of his immediate conspirators, if any. In Russia, after Kirov’s death, Stalin executed in this wise:
First, 103 persons who were not even accused of having had anything to do with the assassination but had been held in jail for various political offenses. This was simply the first gesture of the Terror, intended to shock the country. Then as the police rounded up Nikolaev’s family, friends, and acquaintances, and read his diary, they came to know virtually every human being Nikolaev had known during his whole life. Every one of these persons was arrested and after being squeezed dry of information was executed; at any rate they all disappeared.
But that was only the beginning. The purges which were occasioned, not caused, by the Kirov killing lasted about four years, from 1935 to 1938 inclusive. The Purge became so huge that Nikolaev was forgotten, but before the G.P.U. finished with the Nikolaev complex, they had liquidated in this wise: Every relative of Nikolaev to the third cousins; every acquaintance of Nikolaev and every acquaintance of an acquaintance of Nikolaev, and every acquaintance of every acquaintance of every acquaintance of Nikolaev. You think this is an exaggeration? Not at all. The number of executions ran into thousands.
Now what would be the effect upon a would-be assassin, if, as he contemplated his deed, he reflected that as a consequence of his killing Stalin, not merely would he himself be executed, but every human being in the world with whom he had ever come in contact? Man experiences the world largely as a series of contacts with other men. Suppose the assassin knew by just such an experience as the Russian people had in the case of the killing of Kirov, that his entire world would be blotted out if he went on with his plans. Would not this deter almost any man?
He might be motivated by the highest idealism, and would plan to give his own life in order to rid his country of a cruel despot, but if he were thinking of helping the people in his own world he would be bound to admit that far from helping them, he was about to condemn to death everybody on earth he had ever known. This surely is the most important deterrent to assassination in despotic states and it is corroborated by the experience of Italy.
Mussolini’s Fascist state is the least terroristic of the three totalitarian states. The terror is so mild in comparison with the Soviet or Nazi varieties, that it almost fails to qualify as terroristic at all. The best proof I know of this is the experience of an Italian friend of mine who before Fascism came to Italy was chief correspondent of one of Italy’s greatest newspapers.
He occupied a position which might be compared with that of chief Washington correspondent of the _New York Times_. When Mussolini took power this friend, whom I may call Luigi, was dismissed from his newspaper because he refused to become a Fascist. If he had wished to serve Mussolini, he would have been made a Senator, and would have become a rich man. But no, he was a courageous, passionately sincere liberal. He used to declare, “I would approve of nearly all Mussolini’s program (he doubtless would not say that now), but as long as he wants to compel me to approve, I disapprove. I shall only approve when I am at liberty to disapprove.”
Now what would have happened to this sort of man in Soviet Russia? A leading journalist under the Czar defies Bolshevik power! You know as well as I what would happen to him. He would be shot at once. They would not even waste on him food for a day’s extra meals. He would have been shot the moment the Cheka noticed him. And what would have happened to Luigi in Germany? He would have been sent to a concentration camp and there he would have been tortured and either gradually killed or turned out a broken emasculated creature, not a man any more.
But what happened to him in Italy? First, his newspaper, with which he had a contract, bought off the contract for a sum sufficient for him to live on in a modest way the rest of his life. At the same time the police established a twenty-four hour surveillance of him. Three detectives working in eight-hour shifts were assigned to watch him. Mind you, he wasn’t arrested, and was even allowed to become the correspondent of a foreign newspaper.