Part 8

The detectives were there all the time. Luigi came to know them well. If they behaved decently and he liked them, he never gave them any trouble. But if one of them was rude, this is the way Luigi would do. He would get all his newspapers, a dozen or more to read in the morning, and though ordinarily he would take a taxi or walk to his office, now to discipline the detective, Luigi would get on one of the streetcars which circle Rome and he would sit there, going around and around the city for a couple of hours, reading his papers. The detective had to follow him. The detective rode a bicycle. Two hours of hard road work usually corrected the manners of the worst of them. Think of that kind of police “Terror,” and you have a fair idea of the comparative mildness of the Italian kind of totalitarianism. We used to take delight in counting up how many hundreds of thousands of lire it had cost the Italian government to keep three detectives employed for fifteen years.

What has this to do with our theme of assassination? Just this, that during the first twelve years of Mussolini’s dictatorship he was attacked twelve times, and several of the attempts only failed by the narrowest margin.

One of the earliest and most serious attempts was by a former general who hired a room a couple of hundred yards away from the Palazzo Chigi, equipped himself with a sporting rifle fitted with telescopic sights, and waited for Mussolini to come out on the balcony to speak. This event may have inspired Geoffrey Household’s _Rogue Male_. The general was betrayed at the last moment, arrested, and sentenced to life imprisonment on the Lipari Islands. That is another index of the comparatively mild character of the Italian despotism. At that time the Fascist legal code still had no provision for the death penalty for a plot against the life of the head of the State.

Q. _In spite of everything you say it still seems difficult to see why some person half-demented by persecution or the cruelties inflicted upon his family and friends should not have tried to take vengeance against the tyrant. There must certainly be among the victims of Nazi or Bolshevik brutality many persons too tortured in mind to be able to remember all those considerations you have advanced?_

A. Undoubtedly there are, but these persons are generally too demoralized to act. If they are sufficiently distorted by their suffering to forget the consequences to their family and friends of an attack on the tyrant, they are too enfeebled to move. Fear paralyzes them. The modern totalitarian tyranny, as the German and Russian, by reason of the ideology of the ruling party and superior organization of its police force, ferrets out, identifies, and disciplines a larger percentage of its opponents than any tyranny was ever able to do in the past. The ideology of the party makes an ex-officio police agent out of every Communist in Russia and every Nazi in Germany.

The G.P.U. and Gestapo are superior to the police systems of former modern tyrannies because this is the first time that tyrannies have not been ashamed of their political police, but acknowledge, boast of them, and coerce the population to cooperate with them. The amorality of Bolshevism and Nazism, or rather their rejection of the Christian standard of behavior, is best illustrated by the exceptional position of the political police systems. Under a regime such as the Czar’s, the political police, the Okhrana, was likewise an instrument of repression, and as such the regime showed constant evidence of being ashamed of it.

The efficiency of the Okhrana suffered correspondingly. Today, in view of our experience with the G.P.U. and the Gestapo, the Okhrana seems like a benevolent association for the benefit of wayward Russians. It is instructive now to go back and read the memoirs of that great opponent of the Czar, the noble revolutionary, Prince Kropotkin. To note the comparative triviality of the offenses charged by the revolutionaries against the regime, and then to note the comparative leniency of the punishments inflicted by the Czar upon his enemies is to measure the chasm which the Bolshevik Revolution and the Red Terror dug between our New Dark Age and the imperfect, liberal, easygoing Past, the like of which no one in our generation shall ever see again.

Under the Okhrana the number of political assassinations in Russia culminating with the killing of Alexander the Second, reached an all-time high. This fact, like the attempts on Mussolini’s life, corroborate the thesis that mild Terror is ineffective, while extreme Terror may be completely effective. It seems to me to be useful to stress this fact about the Nazi or Bolshevik Terror, because one of our American democratic illusions to which we cling most fondly is that good will always triumph, liberty will eventually win over tyranny, and despots will ultimately be overthrown by their oppressed victims.

This doctrine is not only false, but one of the most harmful of our wishful thoughts, since it leads us to believe that all may come right with this very wrong world without our having to do anything about it. Another instructive pursuit is to get a copy of the old _Who’s Who of the Russian Communist Party_ and observe that there was not a single leading member of the Party who had not been at one time or another, and frequently many times, under arrest by the Okhrana. Stalin, supreme butcher of the lot, was five times in the hands of the men whom he later was to help exterminate. One can conservatively say that if the Okhrana had been operated on the principles of the Soviet Police, not a single leader of the Bolsheviks would have been left alive, and there would have been no Bolshevik Revolution as we know it, and no Soviet Union with its melancholy record of life-taking failure, and perhaps no Nazi party in Germany, and who knows, perhaps no World War now.

Absolute Terror not only physically removes the more dangerous opponents of the tyranny but it reduces the survivors to morbid obeisance, to a sort of unwilling, servile, unconscious idolatry of the tyrant. The tyrant, when he attains the stature of Hitler or Stalin, becomes the Omnipotent Father in the subconsciousness of all his subjects, including those hostile to him. This makes it all the more difficult for the rebel to raise his hand in patricide. Those who insist that the modern tyrants are mere gangsters overlook the aura of mystic power which is created around the figure of a ruler daily greeted by choruses of adulation and abasement from tens of millions of his people. It is no more to be resisted than the rhythm of tom-toms.

When the Lion of Judah, Emperor Haile Selassie, declared formal mobilization of his ragged soldiers, he had two batteries of war drums, one in major, one in minor key, beating their defiant message all day and all night from his palace in Addis Ababa. The pulsations of the drums at the Ghibi more than two miles away came to me in my room in the stables of the Imperial hotel with a mesmeric force that made me long to follow their rhythmic directions. The same effect is obtained in the great tyrannies by the mass salutations of the tyrant worshipers.

Never in history have there been such vast numbers of people to add the influence of the multitude to the herd instinct to conform. The greatest tyrannies of long ago, when the human tribe was a fraction of its size today, the Roman Empire, the Mongol Khanates, or even the Indian Mogul Kingdoms, disposed of power over small populations compared with the more than 250,000,000 now ruled by Hitler or the 200,000,000 by Stalin. In this day of electric communications the huge bulk of such aggregates does not become unmanageable. The more territory Hitler conquers, the more loot he has, the more permanent resources to exploit, and the more people to enslave at work useful for the Nazis. Our only hope against him is for his military defeat at the hands of ourselves and our friends.

Q. _You have made discouragingly plain why there are so few political assassinations in Germany, but couldn’t somebody like the fellow who killed King Alexander and Barthou in Marseilles be found?_

A. I do not think so. That fellow, Vlada Georgiev, was a member of the famous Imro, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, which had the only system I ever heard of to guarantee that their members carry out assigned assassinations, no matter what the police terror might be. The Imro’s object was to unify and obtain the greatest possible degree of independence for Macedonia, divided among Bulgaria, Greece, and Jugoslavia. Their chief weapon was assassination, and when the Imro decreed a person’s death it was about as certain to be carried out as any human decision can be. The procedure was to appoint a killer and provide that he be killed unless he fulfilled his task. To make this principle work it was necessary that the appointed assassin realize he would more surely die if he failed than if he succeeded and risked legal execution. A long tradition of killings within the Imro made this fearful compulsion effective.

The mechanics of the system were simple. Like the Russian Nihilists under Boris Savinkov, the Imro used to try and formally condemn their victims to death. Thereupon the committee would draw beans from a bag. The man drawing a black bean was the appointed assassin. He was _A_. He had to leave the room. The others drew again. The man drawing the second black bean, _B_, was appointed to kill _A_ if _A_ didn’t kill the chosen victim. _B_ then left the room and a third black bean, _C_, was appointed to kill _B_ if _B_ failed to carry out his assignment, and so on until the whole committee had lined up, each with a gun in the back of another. No one knew who among his comrades was his potential executioner, but each knew that death was certain if the decisions of the committee were not obeyed. Now this sort of system would work, I believe, even in Nazi Germany, but the democracies are far too squeamish to indulge in such practical methods.[1]

FOOTNOTE:

[1] A German statistician objected to this description of the Imro system on the ground that the second to the last man would know that it was the last man who was delegated to kill him if necessary; and the last man would not have a gun in his back. True enough mathematically, but the Imro system was run by practical assassins, not mathematicians. They never let it get to the last man; the existence of the chain, incomplete though it had to be, guaranteed that the originally appointed assassin performed his duty.

Q. _Did the Nazis or the Bolsheviks practice assassination?_

A. They both rather looked down on individual killings as dilettante. They preferred to do away with their victims en masse; especially the Bolsheviks. I remember at the time of the Blood Purge of June 30, 1934, when Hitler had murdered one thousand or more of his opponents, a Polish correspondent in Moscow was expelled by the Soviet authorities because he commented in a dispatch from the Russian capital that the Bolsheviks regarded Hitler’s purge with the same disdain a wholesaler would have toward the operations of a retailer. One thousand dead would be retail business for the Bolsheviks. The Communists, however, stood programmatically on the platform of no “individual terror” as they put it, because they considered that assassinations of single persons were ineffective, time and energy wasting.

The Nazis spurned no weapon, and so they murdered right and left from the beginning. It was their type of young men, whether yet organized in the Nazi Party or not, who committed most of the political assassinations of postwar Germany from Rathenau and Erzberger until Hitler came to power. Meanwhile, they deliberately provoked battles with the young men of every other faction, Democrats as well as Communists, in assemblies and on the streets, and the deaths from these clashes numbered hundreds yearly.

After Hitler came to power you might have expected individual assassinations to cease. But no, the murders by individual Nazis of individual enemies, business rivals, or of anyone they happened to dislike, continued through the year 1933 and it was not until 1934 that the Gestapo took over the monopoly of murder. No claim of Hitler’s is more ridiculous than his boast that the Nazi revolution was bloodless. There is no record of how many Germans perished at the hands of the uniformed bullies of the Nazi Party for strictly personal reasons, but the numbers surely ran into thousands. I was a correspondent in Berlin during that bloody year and I can testify as an eyewitness.

Q. _But weren’t those stories about atrocities exaggerated? You know we were fed so much propaganda in the last war that later turned out untrue, like the Belgian baby’s hands being cut off--how much can we believe of the atrocity stories we hear now?_

A. No, the atrocity stories of today and of yesterday and of the last war were not exaggerated. The truth is that we shall never learn of more than the tiniest fraction of the atrocities committed by the Germans, and I am sure we never learned about more than a fraction of their atrocities in the last war.

Now by all means let some earnest young man arise and declare that the British and the French and the Americans also commit atrocities. Do they? Perhaps, because among our troops as among the troops of every nation are some exceptionally brutal men, who when they are possessed of the fury and license of battle become criminals. But only among the Germans was and is atrocious behavior, torture, and murder, an official policy, calculatedly carried out upon the authority of the government to terrorize or exterminate the vanquished. When I came to Germany I was intensely sympathetic with the Germans and refused to believe any of the atrocity stories of the last war. It took many years of residence in Germany and the experience of living through the bloodiest period of the Nazi revolution to realize that there was almost no atrocity charged against the Germans which could not have happened.

What a beautiful example of German propaganda the Belgian baby atrocity story was. Dr. Goebbels must often have jealously admired the person, whoever he was, who thought up the Belgian baby. Do we wish to cast in doubt reports about the atrocities our people are committing? Very well, let us plant a monstrous charge against ourselves, which we can prove untrue, then we can claim (and many of our softheaded opponents will believe us) that all other charges are untrue. This was the effect of the charge that German troops had cut off the hands of Belgian babies. Strangely enough, it was Northcliffe’s _Daily Mail_ which obliged the Germans by first picking up the story of the Belgian baby, and then offering a reward for proof, and finally printing as a journalistic scoop the fact that no proof could be found that the Germans had ever cut off a Belgian baby’s hands. Thus in the minds of millions of simple British and Americans the Germans were exculpated of _any atrocities_. The bombarded British are not likely to make such a mistake again.

Was there anything in the first World War to equal the deliberate machine-gunning by German warplanes of the fleeing populations on the roads of Poland, France, and the Lowlands? I do not believe it has a counterpart in modern history, and only Genghis Khan and Tamerlane could have matched it in earlier days. There were thousands of children including babes in arms among the dead along the roads scarified by the Luftwaffe. An American diplomat in Paris estimated that in France and the Lowlands 100,000 civilians, two-thirds of them women and children, were killed thus by the Germans, or approximately the same as the number of French soldiers who died in battle. The slaughter of civilians in Poland surpassed this figure many times.

I do not know why I should boggle at the lopped-off Belgian baby’s hands, except that nobody could ever find an authentic example, and I cannot imagine what good it would do the Germans, nor believe that even Nazi Germans like to torture babies. The machine-gunning of the roads in Europe had a military object, to cause panic and to clog the movements of the Allied troops. But I have seen enough purposeless acts of brutality committed by the Nazis to know what they are capable of doing.

I wish Anne Morrow Lindbergh, whose sensitivity as a poet I sincerely admire, could have been with me one day in the women’s ward of a Berlin hospital as I listened to a woman explain to me why she lay there bandaged from head to foot, with the blood still oozing through. It was in the spring of 1933, and the Brown Terror was getting into its stride, but the Nazis had not yet learned to bar correspondents from hospitals. After this story they were all barred.

The woman was Frau Marie Jankowsky, forty-eight years old, mother of five sons. She was a Social Democratic welfare worker. “Night before last,” she related to me, pausing only when pain made her gasp, “a group of Storm Troopers came to our flat. One of them backed my husband and sons into the kitchen and held them at the point of his revolver. The others took me away to a Storm Troop barracks on the second floor of a building not far from my house. There they stripped me naked. In the middle of the room was a table, and covering the table a flag. They asked me what the flag was.

“I answered it was the Black Red Gold flag of the Republic. They said ‘No,’ and commanded me to repeat that it was Black Red Ordure. I refused and four Storm Troopers pulled me face down over the table, the fifth pushed my face into a bundle of rags to stop me screaming, and a sixth began beating me across the back with a light steel rod.

“It cut the skin and made blood come with every blow. The Storm Troop Captain said, ‘Give her twenty blows, the Jewish sow.’ I am not Jewish but that did not make any difference. Then they jerked me off the table and said, ‘You stole shoes from your welfare section, didn’t you?’ I said, ‘No,’ and the Captain said, ‘Give her another twenty.’ I was bleeding badly when they pulled me off the table again and yelled at me, ‘What’s this?’ and showed me our flag of the Iron Front with three arrows. I told them, but they demanded that I say it was a manure fork. I refused and the Captain ordered another twenty blows.

“That made sixty, and I was very weak, but finally when they pulled me off the table again and yelled at me, ‘You served Communists in your soup kitchen,’ I still had enough strength left to say, ‘You ought to be ashamed to say that because I served you and you and you, but no Communists.’ This made them angrier than ever and the last twenty blows were the worst, and when I rolled off the table they picked me up, and the Captain struck me across the face with his riding crop, and then a Storm Trooper hit me on the jaw with his fist and knocked me across the room so that I fell and wrenched my knee.”

The livid scar of the riding crop flamed across her face, and the dressing on her knee confirmed that injury. I asked the medical attendant to describe her injuries as they were when she arrived and he confirmed that her back had been cut deep into the musculature. Yes, I wish Anne Morrow Lindbergh had been with me to see and hear this story, although it is only one of hundreds of thousands which could have been related first by German victims of the Nazis and now by the vanquished of the entire continent.

Mrs. Lindbergh says the “Wave of the Future,” by which she means the wave of collectivism, the wave of Nazism, is irresistible, and hence we would be wrong to try to resist it, because by resisting we would only increase the casualty list. She dismisses the brutalities, atrocities, inhumanities of the conquering Nazis as merely the “scum” on the wave, something which will pass away and leave the clear blue water of the New Order. But she has not viewed this Wave of the Future at firsthand and so she has not been able to perceive that the scum reaches all the way from the top to the bottom of the Nazi wave; that there is no clear water beneath the surface brutality of the New Order, that from its beginning until today and until it is destroyed it has been, is, and will be unqualifiedly evil.

Atrocities? I assure you there are more atrocities being committed this very moment by the hosts of the Gestapo, the Black Guards, the Storm Troops, and all the other ruffians of Hitler throughout prostrate Europe than you have ever dreamed about. If only we could arrange to have all our isolationists, our weasel-worded noninterventionists, and our complaisant converts to the Wave of the Future take a trip to Europe and let them observe the fate of the 150,000,000 under Hitler’s heel. The Wave of the Future is a wave of blood and tears. What American in his right mind can wish to live if this wave engulfs our world?

Q. _You mentioned Jan Valtin’s book_, Out of the Night. _Do you consider the book authentic?_

A. It is the most accurate description of Nazi and Bolshevik Terror I have ever seen in print. Valtin tells from the inside of the G.P.U. and the Gestapo what an American newspaperman working in Russia and Germany could observe in fragments from the outside. There is not an incident in the book, however gruesome, which could not have happened, no matter how improbable it may appear to a reader far away from the horrors of totalitarian police methods. I recommend the book to every American, because these two evil weapons of the tyrant states are operating today in our country and Valtin has given us the most authoritative picture of their activities we have ever had. Whatever he was in the past, this strange young German has done more for democracy by writing these grim memoirs than most democrats who have been democrats all their lives.

Q. _Since Hitler attacked Russia, don’t you think it is no longer correct to say Nazism and Communism are the same? Hasn’t Hitler proved now that he is really an enemy of Bolshevism and is protecting the world against it?_

A. That would be the equivalent of saying that one monarchy would not attack another or that you could not have war between two republics. The war between Hitler and Stalin is a war between two terroristic collectives. The collectivist form of their economy is almost identical, both of them being a form of state capitalism; both are supported by police terror and both found their principle motive power, the fuel to run their society, in hatred.