All this would be worth a report, so the P.A. encouraged his friend to talk freely. The doctor himself had watched experiments at the Dachau concentration camp, which was under the charge of the Death’s Head SS. Lanny had vivid recollections of this camp, where he had once made an attempt to arrange for the escape of his friend Freddie Robin. It was an immense place, with ten or fifteen thousand political prisoners—though that term was never used in Germany, since prisoners were not told what they were there for, and it made no difference. A large hospital just outside the grounds had been set aside for a scientist who was seeking to develop an anti-malaria serum for the troops in North Africa. First he would inoculate the victims with his serums and then with the disease. In all he had given the disease to two thousand persons, and had succeeded in saving about one-third of them—which Dr. Heubach did not consider a notable success. Mostly they were Polish priests, because the head scientist called himself a “neo-pagan” and hated Catholicism.
Next had come the Luftwaffe experiments of Dr. Rascher, an SS major who was disturbed by the number of valuable pilots found frozen when they were rescued from the North Sea in winter. They rigged up a freezing tank, with an iron collar to put around the victim’s neck, and chains with handcuffs to keep him from trying to get out. The water was lowered to the temperature of the North Sea, and so it was learned how long the victim could remain conscious. Then it had to be determined how best to revive him. Some were plunged into hot water, and came out “red as lobsters,” so said Lanny’s informant, who had been present. Sometimes the victim was just left in a room of normal temperature, to live or die as might happen. Other victims had quantities of sea water poured into them, in order to determine how much of the North Sea the Luftwaffe pilots could endure to swallow and how they could be helped to recovery.
No less important to these flying men was the question of air pressure. A number of the wretched inmates of Dachau were put in an iron box and the air pressure was raised or lowered and the effects observed through a quartz window. Sometimes they would take the victim out when his nose started bleeding; at other times they would wait until he was unconscious and then they would experiment in reviving him. Other victims would have fresh made-to-order wounds for the doctors to study; when they died, there was a large crematorium, and the bodies were slid in through the furnace door. Always their gold teeth and fillings were knocked out, and Dr. Heubach remarked in passing that the income from these had paid the cost of the experiments.
XI
The next visitor caused excitement in the tender bosom of Heinrich Jung. An awe-stricken orderly came, announcing that Seine Exzellenz, Reichsminister Himmler, desired to call upon Herr Budd. Herr Budd did not show that he was startled; he replied that the visit would give him pleasure. The orderly departed, and Lanny’s pal exclaimed, “Um Himmel’s Willen, be careful what you say to him!”
“What could I say to him?” inquired the American, affecting surprise he was far from feeling.
“He is such a very suspicious man, Lanny, and you are an enemy alien.”
“He is trying to protect the Führer, Heinrich, and he has reason to be suspicious of many persons. If he wants to make sure about me, I am happy to assist him.”
Seine Exzellenz—he had just been appointed Reichsminister of the Interior—entered the room. He was a man of about Lanny’s age and of Hitler’s height, which was slightly below average. He had pinched features, a receding chin, a mild expression, and wore old-fashioned metal-rimmed spectacles; a perfect picture of a German schoolmaster of the lower grades, so much so that the rich black SS uniform seemed like something put on for an occasion, say an evening of charades or amateur theatricals. Many persons had made the mistake of taking Heinrich Himmler for what he appeared. He was a man of the people and shared their ignorance and childish naïveté. His conduct was guided by an astrologer named Wulf, and his other intimates were his masseur and a jockey, who was also Hitler’s intimate. His SS men adored him, calling him “Reichsheini,” and there were half a million of them ready to commit any horror that his stars might call for.
“Heil Hitler,” said Lanny. “I have often wondered how we happened to miss each other these many years.”
“I have heard a great deal about you, Herr Budd, from the Führer and others.” The speaker’s voice was as mild as his face. If it had been anybody else, Lanny would have said, “I hope nothing bad.” But one did not make jokes with the head of the SS, an official entirely serious in his attitude to life.
Neither did one show any trace of nervousness; to do that might be to awaken the impulse of the cat which pounces upon the mouse. Suspicion was the food upon which this onetime poultry raiser lived, and by which he had risen to the status of Number Two in a mighty empire. Hermann Göring had been officially assigned that status some years ago, but had fallen from favor and now rarely saw his master. Himmler was the one who had the task of keeping that master alive, and of putting down every trace of rebellion, or even of dissatisfaction, wherever it might show its head in the Third Reich.
“You have known our Führer a long time, I believe, Herr Budd?” queried the mild voice.
“I first heard him speak more than twenty years ago, in the Bürgerbräukeller on the Rosenheimstrasse in Munich. That won’t seem early to you, who, I am told, hold card Number Seven in the Partei.”
“That is true, Herr Budd.”
“That means you joined a group of six obscure men who were setting out to make the world over. To the learned and powerful of Munich, that seemed an insane idea; but the seven persisted. It must have been early in the year 1919. Would it interest you to know what I was doing at that time?”
“Selbstverständlich, Herr Budd.”
“Because I had lived nearly all my life in Europe I had become secretary-translator to a professor who was on President Wilson’s staff of advisers. Thus I had an opportunity to watch the peace negotiations from the inside; and when I saw that Clemenceau and Lloyd George were prevailing over Wilson and that the settlement was going to be a Diktat, I was one of half a dozen members of the staff who resigned in protest; at least, half a dozen protested and agreed to resign, but several backed out at the last moment. My name was in some of the American newspapers at the time, and it would be no trouble to find it.”
This was “fishing” in a way, for the chief of the SS might have said, “I have already done so.” But he didn’t, and Lanny realized that he was there to listen, not to talk. The P.A. resumed, “From that time on I have been a friend of the German people. When my friends in other nations ask me why, I tell them that the Germans are the least apt to fall victims to the spirit of anarchy which has arisen in our time and threatens to destroy our civilization. The Germans not merely know what discipline and order are, they put them into practice, and for that reason they are the people who have most to offer to our time. I presume that I do not have to defend that idea to you, Exzellenz.”
“Hardly,” replied the other dryly. Could it be that there was a trace of a smile upon the almost blank countenance? Could it by any possibility be that the man who directed the nefarious activities of the Schutzstaffel was susceptible to social charm? The son of Budd-Erling was doing his best to find out!
XII
De l’audace, encore de l’audace, et toujours de l’audace, had been the motto which had carried Danton to the top in a revolution; and now Lanny was giving it a trial. Watching this most dangerous of men, he remarked, “I have heard a story about you, Exzellenz. Most stories about eminent personalities have been made up to fit their character, but this one may be true. I should be interested to know.”
“What is the story?”
“It has to do with Gregor Strasser, whose secretary you became. A group of your inner circle was drinking beer in Munich and the talk fell upon the subject of what qualities were most important in the National Socialist character. Strasser laid his hand upon your shoulder, calling you ‘gentle Heinrich,’ and predicting that you would never get far in th
e movement because you were too mild, you looked and thought ‘like a little bookkeeper.’ Did that happen?”
“Yes, Herr Budd, it happened about as you tell it.”
“No doubt that had an influence upon your career, since Gregor Strasser was the Number Two man in the movement at that time.”
“What has influenced my career is the desire to promote and protect the National Socialist party, as the organ for the building of the world’s future. I can truly say that I have never had any thought about myself.”
“I believe that, Exzellenz. I have sometimes been asked to explain you to the outside world. People imagine you are cruel, a sadist, and so on. I have ventured to make the guess that you are as mild a man as you appeared to Gregor Strasser; that you have no pleasure in the infliction of pain, and think about nothing but the movement.”
“You are correct, Herr Budd. I have never had any emotions in the matter. I couldn’t carry on my work if I did. I am a man with one conviction, and anyone who shares that conviction is my friend, and anyone who opposes it is my enemy, and I do to him what I would do to a scorpion or other deadly insect.”
“We live in dangerous times,” commented the visitor. “It might interest you to know that I once met Gregor Strasser—or rather, I was in the same room with him. It was the first time I went to call on the Führer in the apartment he occupied in Berlin. Gregor came in; the Führer had sent for him, I gathered, and in my presence he proceeded to give the presumptuous man such a dressing down as I had never listened to in all my life. That was when I learned who was the master of the NSDAP and who was going to be the master of Germany.”
“Yes, Herr Budd, and it was unfortunate that Gregor did not learn the lesson when you did. When one starts a political movement, all sorts of men swarm into it, from all sorts of motives. As soon as it shows signs of meeting with success, some of them dream of taking it over and running it their way instead of the Führer’s way. We had our critical time, and Gregor was one of those ill-advised men who had to be stamped on.”
Lanny remarked, “I happened to be in Munich at that time, and I observed the process.” He didn’t say that he had seen an ardent young SA man, friend of Heinrich Jung and himself, shot in the face by one of Himmler’s SS men and left lying where he fell. Lanny didn’t ask whether by any possibility there had been in the mind of the SS head any trace of personal satisfaction at ordering the murder of his former employer, the man who had predicted that his secretary’s “mildness” would keep him from having a career in the National Socialist movement. Lanny didn’t point out that those twelve hundred victims of the Blood Purge had merely been demanding that the Führer should carry out the economic program upon which he had built the party and won the votes of the poor and humble Germans—whereas Hitler had preferred to sell out to the steel and coal men of the Ruhr, who had given him the money and the weapons to seize power and kill off his old associates who had taken seriously the Socialist part of National Socialism.
What Lanny said was, “It was a severe lesson, and it seems to have been learned.”
XIII
The son of Budd-Erling was exhibiting his best bag of tricks, but he had no idea what effect they were having, or what was going on behind that narrow forehead. Placid, blank-faced Heinrich Himmler was inscrutability itself in a Schwartze Korps uniform. Was that his pose? Or was he really a machine that did its work without emotion? Always in the back of Lanny’s thoughts was the realization that this was the greatest killer in the history of the world; the largest-scale wholesale dealer-out of death. Genghis Khan, doubtless had been equally willing to kill, but he couldn’t have had so great a population to work on. This SS Reichsführer had ordered the deaths of several millions of Jews and several millions of Poles—Lanny had no means of estimating how many, but he knew they were being disposed of in immense extermination factories, their bodies shoved into furnaces and their bones ground up to make fertilizer for the German fields. Also there were the hundreds of thousands of Germans and other pure-blooded Aryans who did not happen to agree with Nazi ideology; they were shot, or locked up behind barbed wire to die by slow stages. No outsider knew their number, and it might be that no records were kept.
This was the man who sat in front of the machine and pulled the levers. He said, “Let this one die, and that.” He said, “Let this group die, this class, this race.” No court in the land could stop him, no court had anything to say about the matter—such was the Nazi ordainment. Nobody but Hitler could interfere, and Hitler didn’t. This was Hitler’s man, whom he had put here to do this double job, the extermination of every individual who disapproved of National Socialism, and the extermination of those nations and races whom Hitler considered subhuman. For these purposes they had built the Schutzstaffel and the Gestapo, the secret state police; there were now something over a half million of these, perhaps the most highly organized and most perfectly indoctrinated body in the world. They could go to any place in the Axis domain, seize any person and do anything they pleased with him, without charge or even explanation. They had some five thousand agents in foreign lands, and no doubt many secret agents in Allied lands.
This last was the thing for the son of Budd-Erling to worry about. How closely had these agents been watching him? If they had wanted to do a real job, they could surely have found out where he went to stay when he came to New York, and who was the woman he lived with. They could uncover the fact that she was the author of bitterly anti-Nazi novels and short stories; and possibly even the fact that she had got her material in a Berlin pension, and was that psychic medium whom Herr Budd had brought into the Führer’s home under the name of Elvirita Jones! Whenever that thought popped into Herr Budd’s mind his heart began to thump, and it would surely have gone badly with him if there had been a lie-detector apparatus attached to his wrist or wherever they apply it.
If the SS or the Gestapo hadn’t done these things it could only have been because of Adi Schicklgruber’s orders. Adi had a sort of religious superstition concerning everybody and everything that had had to do with the early days of his movement. The blood flag, as it was called, the flag which had been carried in the Beerhall Putsch in Munich twenty years ago and which had been dipped in the blood of some of the martyrs who had died in that march—that flag was holy, and all other Nazi flags were touched to that flag in solemn ceremonies, and that made them holy too. It was the same with the few persons who had stood by Adi during his very comfortable incarceration in the Landsberg Fortress after the Putsch; Heinrich Jung had come three times to visit his Führer in that fortress, and that made Heinrich Jung holy, and to doubt his love and honor would have been a sin. It had been Heinrich Jung who had introduced Kurt Meissner and Lanny Budd to the Führer in the old days, and that had been like the touching with the blood flag.
But would that attitude continue, now when Americans were killing German soldiers in Italy and American airmen were bombing German cities and killing men, women, and children? It was hard to believe—and much easier to believe that the very busy Reichsführer of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, had said to himself, “I’ll have a look at this fellow.” And what if he didn’t happen to like the fellow? What if he decided that the risk was too great? Would he order the fellow’s arrest then and there? Was it inconceivable that this most loyal of fanatics might decide to take matters into his own hands and save the Führer even in spite of the Führer’s own wishes? This modern Torquemada—a man who killed wholesale for the salvation of souls, for the overcoming of the Devil and the protection of the Faith—would he suddenly decide to take this too plausible art expert off to a dungeon and wring his secrets out of him?
Not a dark dungeon, in the ancient style, but one of those modern laboratory dungeons that had a brightly shining light, so arranged with mirrors that the victim could never get it out of his eyes! A dungeon made of concrete, in such a shape that the victim could not quite stand up and could not quite sit and could not quite lie, but was tortured in every posit
ion he might choose! And then the relentless questions, by a relay of inquisitioners, keeping the victim always awake and with the bright light in his eyes, for hours, for days, for nights. Whom do you know in Germany, and who has helped you here? Heinrich Jung? and Kurt Meissner? General Emil Meissner? General-Major Furtwängler? Eric Erickson? Graf Stubendorf? The Fürstin Donnerstein? Your half-sister, Marceline Detaze? Her lover, Oskar von Herzenberg? Do you know Bernhardt Monck, alias Vetterl? Do you know his wife and children in France? Do you know Captain Charles de Bruyne, now living in your house at Juan-les-Pins? Do you know his wife and children? And Raoul Palma, alias Bruges, in Toulon? Do you know his wife? So on and on—and with the certainty that every one of these persons had already been seized or would be seized and subjected to the same horrors.
XIV
The military men have a maxim, that the best form of defense is an attack; and this, no doubt, applies to warfare of the mind as to that of the body. Lanny said, “I am extremely glad of having a chance to meet you, Exzellenz, because my position in Germany is such an extremely difficult one, and I have often wondered what your attitude toward me must be. I am an enemy alien and I have come several times into your country and moved freely about at the Führer’s command. It can hardly be that you relish that, and I welcome the opportunity to explain myself to you.”
There was nothing the Reichsführer of the SS could say except, “I shall be happy to hear what you wish to tell me.”
“I have been in an uncomfortable position with my own countrymen ever since this war broke out, and even before that. Americans were divided sharply on the question of National Socialism from the time of Munich on, and most of the wealthy people whom I knew took the British side. I had become known as an ardent defender of the Führer and had been bringing him information for several years; but I saw that I could no longer get information if I kept that attitude and continued to associate with Forrest Quadratt and Hauptmann Wiedemann and other friends of National Socialism in New York. I was forced to take refuge in my role of art expert and pretend to lose my interest in political questions. The Führer understands that attitude, and it has enabled me to circulate among his enemies and bring him facts which he has found of use. But I am not sure if you, the Führer’s friend and protector, realize that situation.”