Marinho Pinto visita MARIO MACHADO

Segundo o advogado de Mário Machado, Marinho Pinto vai hoje às 14h30 à Judiciária, na Gomes Freire, onde se encontra o recluso.

«Se o vai visitar é porque deve estar preocupado com a situação prisional do arguído e com a justiça da manutenção da prisão preventiva, até porque Marinho Pinto também esteve preso antes do 25 de Abril».

Mário Machado está preso preventivamente a aguardar julgamento pelo crime de discriminação racial e outras infracções conexas, incluindo crime de dano e ofensas à integridade física.

SOL

31-03-08




Comentário mais que oportuno:

Mas afinal como podemos definir um preso político? Será possível ser-se preso político dizendo algo leviano que a maioria diz? Naturalmente que não! É óbvio que ser preso político significa que se está preso por questões político-ideológicas consideradas de carácter «delicado» por quem governa um país. Ou de que se é alvo de uma condenação completamente desmesurada pela infracção cometida. Se alguém insulta outra pessoa não se espera que aguarde julgamento em prisão preventiva. Aliás, ainda há dias o dirigente do partido de extrema-esquerda Bloco de Esquerda foi condenado pelo tribunal a pagar uma indemnização a Alberto João Jardim... por o ter insultado e não consta que tenha passado 12 meses preso preventivamente.

UMA PEQUENA HISTÓRIA...
Há já alguns anos atrás Francisco Louçã e outros correlegionários do então PSR manifestaram-se publicamente frente a um Estabelecimento prisional exigindo a libertação imediata de um preso que eles consideravam político. Exigiam a libertação de alguém que ordenou a execução sumária de vários empresários e agentes da autoridade com um tiro na nuca. Exigiam a libertação imediata de Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, chefe do sangrento grupo terrorista FP`25 Abril. Poucos meses passou na prisão, Mário Soares encarregou-se de amnistiar este «preso político» que matava quem não pagava o «imposto revolucionário»!
Mário Machado e Vasco Leitão encontram-se presos há 12 meses, não por terem desferido dezenas de tiros na nuca a empresários e polícias para roubarem dinheiro, mas porque são Nacionalistas e porque escrevem dão entrevistas e dizem o que pensam! Se é um disparate para alguns ou se é uma loucura para outros, isso é com cada um! Se o Mário insultou alguém, se deu 1 soco e 2 pontapés a outra pessoa e se passou um sinal vermelho, é completamente irrelevante. Isso e muito mais - principalmente com as leis que temos hoje em dia - não justificaria de maneira nenhuma a prisão preventiva. 2 pesos iguais, 2 medidas muito muito diferentes!

luis7, em 2008-03-31 21:20:08

Direito de resposta do PNR ao Jornal Destak

Em resposta ao editorial da Isabel Stilwel que, no editorial do "Destak" de 6ª feira passada, referiu o cartaz "racista" do PNR, foi hoje publicado o direito de resposta, na página 21, da autoria do Vasco Leitão.

Senhora Isabel Stilwell, venho por este modo exercer o direito de resposta em relação ao editorial do jornal Destak do dia 15-02-2008, escrito por vossa excelência, onde acusa o cartaz colocado o ano passado no Marquês de Pombal de ser um"apelo ao racismo do PNR". O Partido Nacional Renovador não faz apelos ao racismo, bastava ter visto o cartaz para o perceber, ou ter ouvido as declarações do Procurador Geral da República sobre o assunto. O referido cartaz tinha uma mensagem anti-imigração, que é uma opção política legítima, assim como é legítima a opção pró-imigração, mas isso é muito diferente de se falar em "racismo". Só se vossa excelência pretender criminalizar, como sendo "racismo", a opinião de quem se opõe à actual política de imigração não só deste governo mas também dos anteriores.

Aliás, chamar racista a alguém que é contra a imigração é dizer que uma pessoa pró-imigração não é racista, o que é manifestamente disparatado.

Até porque os piores racistas desta sociedade são precisamente os pró-imigracionistas, que exploram a mão-de-obra barata dos imigrantes e fazem destes um objecto ao seu serviço. Mas se queria um exemplo de racismo poderia ter ido buscá-lo às páginas do seu jornal, nomeadamente ao comentário do senhor João Malheiro, que exaltou a alegada ascendência negra de Cristiano Ronaldo com um texto intitulado "black power". Não considera racismo? Imagine-se um qualquer comentador fazer algo parecido mas exaltando o "white power"...

Resumindo, aquele tipo de comentários publicados no seu jornal podem ser considerados racistas, ser contra a imigração não.

De resto, tem toda a razão quando exalta o humor como forma de fazer política. É precisamente por isso que continuo a ler os seus textos, por ser um apreciador quase incondicional do humor.Neste caso "daquele rasca", o tal que criticou, mas de qualquer forma é humor porque sempre dá para rir um bocadinho.

Empresas candidatas ao selo da precariedade

Gandhi e o Luther King que me desculpem mas a forma mais eficaz de mudar a sociedade, e os seus comportamentos, é através do humor.

Do humor inteligente e subtil, não daquele rasca, das anedotas brejeiras ou que humilha e ridiculariza. Os Gatos Fedorentos fizeram mais contra a xenofobia com o cartaz colocado o ano passado no Marquês de Pombal, ao lado do apelo ao racismo do PNR, do que mil discursos de ministros ou presidentes de associações. (...)

(editorial de 15 de Fevereiro)

Um cientista português no coração do nazismo

José Pedro Castanheira
Em Dezembro de 1942, em plena II Guerra Mundial, bolseiro do Instituto para a Alta Cultura, o médico José Ayres de Azevedo regressa à Alemanha.

O seu objectivo é prosseguir os estudos e a investigação em torno das teorias da eugenia, que defendem o aperfeiçoamento da espécie humana por via da selecção genética e do controlo da reprodução e que são um traço essencial do nazismo. Ayres passa a estar no cerne da experimentação que levará a Humanidade a um dos confrontos mais dramáticos da sua história: o Holocausto.

Desta vez, Ayres vai para Berlim. Passa a trabalhar no Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute (KWI), principal centro de investigação científica da Alemanha e do Mundo. Com a chegada de Hitler ao poder, é no Instituto de Antropologia, Hereditariedade Humana e Eugenia do KWI que germinam e são testadas as teorias nazis da superioridade da raça ariana. O cientista português começara por investigar, em 1941, na Universidade de Frankfurt, sob a direcção de Otmar von Verschuer, o orientador da sua tese de doutoramento. Agora, o seu mestre transfere-se para Berlim, onde vai dirigir aquele afamado instituto, e convida-o a acompanhá-lo. Confere-lhe o título de assistente estrangeiro e encarrega-o de dirigir a recém-criada secção de sorologia, com direito a um laboratório privativo e a uma técnica para o auxiliar. Trata-se - como Ayres há-de sublinhar num relatório para o Instituto para a Alta Cultura - de uma «honra dupla» pela qual lhe está «muito grato».

Na vanguarda dos estudos eugénicos em Portugal, Ayres de Azevedo encontra-se agora entre os maiores cientistas que deram corpo à política racial do nazismo. Escreve na principal revista científica de eugenia e participa na elaboração de numerosos pareceres solicitados pelos tribunais nazis sobre matérias altamente controversas, como a esterilização de deficientes ou a determinação da paternidade (envolvendo designadamente judeus). Dedica-se ao estudo da hereditariedade entre gémeos, o mesmo tema das investigações conduzidas quer por Von Verschuer quer por Josef Mengele, o conhecido «anjo da morte» do campo de extermínio de Auschwitz. Entre Janeiro e finais de Maio de 1943, Ayres de Azevedo trabalha no mesmo instituto, com o mesmo mestre e sobre a mesma área científica que o tristemente famoso Mengele.

José Ayres de Azevedo Novaes Basto nasce em 11 de Junho de 1911, na freguesia da Sé, no Porto. O pai, José Novaes Basto, é um negociante de Celorico de Basto, monárquico; a mãe, Maria da Conceição Ayres d’Azevedo Novaes Basto, nascida em Nogueira (Vila Real), é doméstica. Filho único, nasce na casa paterna, no N.º 52 da Rua do Loureiro.

Aluno do Liceu Alexandre Herculano, no Porto, faz o ensino secundário com média de 16 valores. Segue-se, em 1928, a Faculdade de Medicina - porventura influenciado pelo tio paterno, Egídio da Costa Ayres de Azevedo (1887-1957), um respeitadíssimo catedrático da Universidade de Coimbra. Termina a licenciatura em Medicina e Cirurgia em 1935, com distinção e a classificação final de «Muito Bom» (18 valores). Frequenta igualmente os cursos de Medicina Sanitária e Medicina Legal. Paralelamente, tira o curso de Ciências Económicas e Financeiras (no então Instituto Superior de Comércio do Porto).

«Nacional-sindicalista, crítico de Salazar»

Em 1933, Hitler ascende ao poder na Alemanha e torna-se chanceler do Reich. Inspirado nas teorias da eugenia - destinada a melhorar as características raciais das gerações futuras -, o Führer põe em prática as primeiras medidas. Uma lei estabelece a esterilização obrigatória para as pessoas com «defeitos mentais congénitos (…), malformações graves e alcoolismo sério» - norma que irá atingir quase 400 mil pessoas. Segue-se, em 1935, a «lei para protecção ao sangue e honra alemães», proclamada em Nuremberga, a cidade mítica do partido nazi (Partido Nacional Socialista dos Trabalhadores Alemães, NSDAP).

A 22 de Junho de 1935, José Ayres casa-se com Arminda de Sales Castro Lima, de 20 anos, natural de Coimbra. O jovem casal vai viver para o N.º 73 da Rua de Vale Formoso, na freguesia de Paranhos, Porto. É uma vivenda construída pelo pai no princípio do século. Com os estudos médicos concluídos, torna-se assistente voluntário da cadeira de Higiene e Epidemiologia, regida pelo director da Faculdade de Medicina do Porto (FMP), professor António Almeida Garrett. Catedrático de Pediatria, Garrett tem a seu cargo ambas as cadeiras. A 14 de Fevereiro de 1936 nasce, em Coimbra, em casa dos avós maternos, o filho José Manuel. Nesse ano, começa a colaborar no Observatório Meteorológico da Serra do Pilar. Mais tarde, ingressa na Maternidade de Júlio Dinis.

Em finais de 1938, candidata-se a assistente efectivo da cadeira de Higiene. Ao corrente desta candidatura, a reitoria da Universidade do Porto pede, como é norma, informações à Polícia de Vigilância e Defesa do Estado (PVDE). A resposta da antecessora da PIDE é burocrática e refere que o médico «tem bom comportamento moral e não manifesta qualquer ideia política».

Três meses depois, porém, a polícia política dá uma informação bem diferente sobre o jovem Ayres, já que, «segundo informações» não especificadas, «o epigrafado é Nacional Sindicalista, discute demasiadamente a obra de Salazar e não é legionário». Ou seja: está ligado à ala mais extremista do regime, os «camisas azuis», de Rolão Preto, que rejeitam o corporativismo católico de Salazar e são adeptos entusiastas de Hitler e do seu regime. José Manuel Aires Basto, de 71 anos, o filho mais velho de Ayres, cirurgião aposentado e ex-professor na FMP, desconhece a ligação do pai ao nacional sindicalismo; em contrapartida, confirma que «nunca foi legionário nem da Mocidade Portuguesa».

A 1 de Setembro de 1939, a Alemanha invade a Polónia: é o início da II Guerra Mundial. Prosseguindo o plano de aperfeiçoamento da raça, Hitler faz aprovar uma lei sobre a eutanásia, o que irá custar a vida a mais de 70 mil doentes mentais. O método preferido é o envenenamento por monóxido de carbono.

Ayres é pai pela segunda vez em 1940. O filho Francisco nasce na própria casa paterna. Candidato a assistente de Higiene, é aprovado por unanimidade pelo Conselho Escolar - órgão máximo da faculdade, composto por todos os catedráticos, de nomeação vitalícia. Nos anos seguintes, é reconduzido, mas já não por unanimidade: em 1940, tem nove esferas brancas e uma preta; no ano seguinte, duas pretas. Na opinião do filho José Manuel, as esferas pretas «devem-se muito provavelmente a professores da corrente anglófila» que, já em plena guerra, não simpatizariam muito com o jovem assistente, visto como pró-nazi. Datam de 1940 as suas primeiras publicações: População e Império e A Pureza Bioquímica do Povo Português, comunicações apresentadas no âmbito das Comemorações Centenárias. Neste último, sustenta a tese de que a sua elevada pureza «coloca o nosso povo (…) no mais alto lugar da lista das raças de tipo europeu».

Bolseiro na Alemanha

A respirar pujança, ambição e vitalidade, a Alemanha lidera a investigação científica a nível mundial. Não é de espantar, por isso, que muitos estrangeiros queiram prosseguir ali os estudos. É o que acontece com o portuense. Para tanto, candidata-se a uma bolsa do Instituto para a Alta Cultura (IAC). Criado por Salazar em 1936, inclui na sua primeira equipa directiva nomes distintos da academia e do regime, com destaque para Marcello Caetano, futuro Presidente do Conselho. Com funções hoje parcialmente desempenhadas pelo Instituto Camões, uma das suas competências é a atribuição de bolsas de estudo no estrangeiro.

A 11 de Dezembro, Ayres requer ao IAC uma bolsa na Alemanha. O objectivo é triplo: ampliar os «conhecimentos sobre Higiene racial e Biologia da hereditariedade (assuntos até agora ainda não ensinados em Portugal), realizar trabalhos de investigação» e, por último, preparar «a tese de doutoramento». Informa que já contactou «as entidades oficiais alemãs» e propõe-se trabalhar sob a direcção dos professores Dold, Pfannenstiel, Von Verschuer e Kuster, todos nomes sonantes da comunidade científica alemã.

A candidatura à bolsa é reforçada pelo director da faculdade, o professor Almeida Garrett, que confirma o desejo do seu assistente «de efectuar estudos sobre a hereditariedade no género humano e os problemas eugénicos». A bolsa é concedida em 17 de Janeiro de 1941. Aliás, o IAC tem relações privilegiadas com instituições de ensino germânicas. A Alemanha é mesmo o país para o qual concede maior número de bolsas: das 22 atribuídas para o estrangeiro em 1941, sete são para universidades na Alemanha, apesar de a guerra já alastrar há dois anos; além disso, mantém cinco leitorados de português.

A bolsa de Ayres insere-se num programa de troca de bolsas entre o IAC e o Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD, Serviço Alemão de Trocas Académicas). Firmado entre os governos de Lisboa e de Berlim, o acordo prevê a troca de quatro bolseiros em cada ano. O montante mensal é de 1750 escudos (8,75 euros).

Ao bolseiro, o IAC pede um plano dos estudos que deseja efectuar - o que aquele satisfaz de imediato. O plano, redigido em alemão, abrange áreas como «ciências raciais», «higiene racial e demografia», «anormalidades em cruzamentos raciais» e «grupos sanguíneos em anormais». Em matéria de eugenia, o programa apresentado por Ayres é particularmente detalhado: «luta contra a mistura de raças e os casamentos consanguíneos»; «isolamento dos anormais»; «esterilização preventiva»; «tribunais de hereditariedade na Alemanha»; «luta contra as doenças sociais»; e, finalmente, «medidas de eugenia de natureza económica, fiscal e social. Educação e propaganda».

Passaporte de missão especial

O passaporte é emitido pelo Ministério do Interior. Com o N.º 26, é um passaporte de missão especial e inclui o nome dos familiares que o acompanham: a mulher, Arminda, e o filho mais velho, José Manuel, de 5 anos. Notificado pelo consulado alemão de que poderá «seguir quando quiser pela zona ocupada» de França, parte a 13 de Maio, via Paris. Leva «cartas de apresentação» para os professores Von Verschuer, Fischer e Lenz. São os nomes que deram cobertura à política racial do nazismo, ocupando lugares de topo nas principais instituições científicas.

Otmar von Verschuer, com quem irá trabalhar, dirige o Instituto de Biologia da Hereditariedade e Higiene da Raça da Universidade de Frankfurt, criado em 1934. Fischer e Lenz lideram o Instituto de Antropologia, Hereditariedade Humana e Eugenia de Berlim, integrado no KWI (que, após a guerra, será reestruturado e rebaptizado com o actual nome, Instituto Max Planck). Eugen Fischer é um dos principais responsáveis pelas teorias científicas nazis sobre a chamada «higiene racial», que viriam a legitimar o Holocausto. Professor de Medicina, Antropologia e Eugenia, adere ao partido nazi, o NSDAP, pouco depois da sua criação. Algumas das suas teses são mesmo incorporadas por Hitler na sua famosa obra Mein Kampf. Director do KWI desde a sua fundação, Hitler nomeia-o em 1933 reitor da Universidade de Berlim. Quatro anos depois, é doutorado «honoris causa» pela Universidade de Coimbra. Quanto a Fritz Lenz, é outro dos teóricos da superioridade ariana e colaborador empenhado da política racial nazi.

O cientista português chega a Frankfurt a 24 de Maio. O bolseiro recebe 200 marcos mensais, através do DAAD, a que se soma o montante do IAC. A 30, escreve a primeira carta ao IAC. A morada é a da própria universidade, em Gartenstrasse.


O repórter [do Expresso] com a musicóloga Maria Augusta Barbosa, de 96 anos, única testemunha portuguesa ainda viva dos anos de guerra; também bolseira, saiu de Berlim com Ayres

O campo de Auschwitz

Ayres e família instalam-se numa casa junto à estação ferroviária, ao lado do teatro Schumann. O filho José Manuel, apesar de ter então apenas 5 anos, recorda: «Em frente havia um abrigo subterrâneo, onde íamos frequentemente por causa dos bombardeamentos aéreos. Vi também uma coluna de prisioneiros russos a ser levada para o trabalho.» A família está sujeita a um severo racionamento, imposto a toda a população. «Ia com a minha mãe todos os dias às compras, com as senhas. Tudo estava muito bem organizado. Nunca vi fome, nem pessoas a pedir. E tratavam primorosamente os estrangeiros.»

O portuense trabalha diariamente com Verschuer. Num dos relatórios apresentados trimestralmente ao IAC, realça como o mestre o acolheu: «Fui recebido da forma mais afectuosa possível, destinando ele um magnífico e completo gabinete de trabalho para meu uso privativo.» Os 16 assistentes que Verschuer possuía antes da guerra foram reduzidos «a uma só», a que se soma agora o português. O mais famoso foi Josef Mengele, que ali trabalhou entre 1937 e 1940, dedicando-se em especial à hereditariedade dos gémeos. Ayres trabalha nos laboratórios e na clínica e segue dois cursos: Hereditariedade Humana como Fundamento da Higiene da Raça e Política Populacional.

A 14 de Junho de 1941 é aberto na Polónia o campo de Auschwitz, símbolo máximo do Holocausto. Curiosamente, a diplomacia portuguesa tem conhecimento imediato deste campo. O secretário da embaixada, Manuel Homem de Mello, acabado de chegar a Berlim, vai a título oficial até Varsóvia, onde ouve falar do campo de prisioneiros de Oswiecim, isto é, Auschwitz. «Foi essa a primeira vez que ouvi tal nome, embora se lhe referissem unicamente como um campo de concentração», escreve nas suas memórias (Eu Vi Morrer o III Reich, ed. Vega). «Quanto aos campos de extermínio, apenas tive conhecimento da sua existência depois do fim da guerra.» José Manuel Aires Basto acredita que o mesmo terá sucedido com o pai: «Quando se começou a falar dos judeus, ele começou por levantar dúvidas. Estava incrédulo! Depois concluiu que tinha sido assim.»

O primeiro relatório trimestral para o IAC é de 30 de Agosto. Colabora no serviço de consultas de Heredo-biologia e de Higiene da Raça. Nas férias, estuda as técnicas de determinação dos grupos sanguíneos noutros dois institutos germânicos. Nos tempos livres, visita vários hospitais. Da correspondência trocada com o IAC (e depositada no Instituto Camões), a única nota crítica ao nazismo vai para a arquitectura da Nova Clínica Cirúrgica de Heidelberg, «a mais recente da Alemanha e motivo de confessado orgulho do actual regime» - e que irá inspirar o projecto dos hospitais-faculdades a construir em Lisboa e Porto. Em Colónia, quando se prepara para visitar o Museu para a Higiene do Povo, é informado de que «fora destruído pelo bombardeamento» - a primeira das raras referências feitas à guerra.

Entusiasmado com o trabalho e encorajado por Verschuer, pede ao IAC a prorrogação da bolsa. Informa que está a fazer «um trabalho de investigação sobre ‘Grupos e sub-grupos sanguíneos e sua hereditariedade’», que deseja «aproveitar como dissertação» para o concurso a professor agregado.

O segundo relatório é de 30 de Novembro. Informa estar a frequentar dois novos cursos: Teoria da Hereditariedade e Ciência da Raça e Higiene Racial. No Instituto de Röntgen, colabora com o respectivo director, Hans Holfelder; membro do partido nazi e oficial das tropas SS, é um dos responsáveis pela aplicação da lei da eutanásia, tendo estado envolvido na morte de 35 mil polacos com tuberculose. Visita o Centro de Investigação Psiquiátrica do KWI, onde avulta a figura de Ernst Rüdin; psiquiatra suíço, apologista da eutanásia, fora um dos mentores da lei de esterilização. Participa igualmente em vários congressos internacionais na Alemanha e na Áustria, onde é o único cientista português. Verschuer convida-o a traduzir o seu novo livro, Manual para a Higiene da Raça. «Julgo poder, com esta tradução, contribuir altamente para facilitar o ensino, que urge organizar, da Higiene da Raça em Portugal.»

A hereditariedade em gémeos

Chega ao Porto nas vésperas de Natal. Obtida a prorrogação da bolsa, a 20 de Janeiro já está de regresso à Alemanha. Desta vez, leva apenas a mulher, Arminda. A evolução da guerra aconselha a que os filhos fiquem em Coimbra com os avós maternos. Em Fevereiro, Oliveira Salazar nomeia uma nova direcção para o IAC, de pendor pró-nazi. O presidente é Gustavo Cordeiro Ramos. Catedrático da Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa, fora ministro da Instrução em dois governos da Ditadura Militar. Germanófilo assumido, prefaciou uma antologia de textos de Salazar publicada na Alemanha, com uma curta introdução de Goebbels, o ministro da Propaganda de Hitler.

Como vice-presidentes são nomeados Amândio Joaquim Tavares e Luís Cabral de Moncada. Amândio Tavares passa a ser o homem-forte do instituto, aí se mantendo até 1967; catedrático da FMP, é um nome bem conhecido de Ayres. Quanto a Cabral de Moncada, é professor de Filosofia em Coimbra, onde foi vice-reitor; oriundo do Integralismo Lusitano, é um dos mais destacados intelectuais desta corrente ultraconservadora; germanófilo, foi doutorado «honoris causa» em 1936 pela Universidade de Heidelberg. Como secretário, mantém-se António de Medeiros Gouveia, um «cristão-novo» do salazarismo. Doutor em Ciências Geográficas por Coimbra, fora membro do Grande Oriente Lusitano, que abandonou antes de o Estado Novo ilegalizar a Maçonaria.

Convidado para Berlim

No terceiro relatório trimestral, Ayres anuncia um estágio com Albert Ponsold, especialista em sorologia - disciplina científica que trata do estudo dos soros. Ex-juiz do Tribunal para a Saúde Hereditária, Ponsold é outro cientista que pertence ao partido nazi. Explicita, pela primeira vez, que está a investigar sobre gémeos. «Este trabalho» - escreve - «realizado sob a orientação pessoal de Von Verschuer, versa sobre a hereditariedade dos grupos sanguíneos (…) em gémeos. A ele tenho dedicado a maior parte das dez horas diárias que no Instituto tenho trabalhado.» O número de observações contam-se já por centenas. Ao «método heredo-biológico dos gémeos» está ligado o «nome inseparável» de Verschuer, um especialista no estudo desta temática e que até 1940 contou com a preciosa colaboração de Josef Mengele, que entretanto ingressou no Exército como oficial.

A estreita ligação a Verschuer leva Ayres a trocar Frankfurt por Berlim. O seu patrono vai dirigir o Instituto de Antropologia, Hereditariedade Humana e Eugenia do KWI, «como sucessor do professor Eugen Fischer, agora aposentado». Aos 68 anos, principal suporte científico da vertente racista do nazismo, é o próprio Fischer quem designa Verschuer para o substituir. Plenamente satisfeito com o português, Verschuer convida-o para Berlim. Entusiasmado, Ayres aceita. Pudera: vai trabalhar no KWI, que é só o mais afamado centro de investigação da Alemanha e do Mundo. Por ali passaram numerosos Prémios Nobel - da Medicina, da Física, também da Química. Alguns dos seus antigos directores foram mesmo dos maiores vultos da história da ciência, como Max Planck e sobretudo Albert Einstein.

Entretanto, a revista «Portugal Médico» publica dois novos artigos seus. Com a bolsa mais uma vez prorrogada, prepara a mudança para Berlim. Preocupado com o racionamento, cada vez mais estrito à medida que a guerra avança, pede o envio, através da mãe, de alimentos crescentemente raros: arroz, bacalhau, carne fumada, azeite, café, chá.

O quinto relatório é de 14 de Setembro. Continua «incansavelmente e em ritmo cada vez mais acelerado o estudo dos grupos sanguíneos em gémeos». A meta são os 400 gémeos, uns mono-ovulares, outros bi-ovulares. A 1 de Outubro, Verschuer muda-se para Berlim. Aproveitando a transferência dos serviços, Ayres viaja até ao Porto, para umas curtas férias. Visita a mãe, de saúde precária, e apresenta ao IAC uma listagem dos trabalhos que vem realizando - 16 ao todo. «O problema quantitativo das substâncias grupais» é aquele a que mais se tem dedicado e que tenciona transformar em dissertação de doutoramento.

Entretanto, o processo do bolseiro é enviado para o Porto, para o vice-presidente do IAC, Amândio Tavares. Este é colega e amigo do director da faculdade, Almeida Garrett, e conhece bem Ayres. Tavares «é quem mandava de verdade no IAC, especialmente nas bolsas de estudo», recorda Joaquim Pereira Guedes, hoje octogenário, que foi seu assistente de Anatomia Patológica.

No cerne das teorias racistas

De Berlim, o português escreve para o IAC no último dia de 1942 e indica a nova morada: Uhlandstr. 110, II. Por esta altura, no Palácio das Necessidades já não se ignora a caça generalizada aos judeus. Ouve-se até falar em campos de concentração, como o de Dachau, mesmo se se desconhecem as suas proporções. Manuel Homem de Mello confirma, nas suas memórias, que, em 1943, já se podia «falar de uma acção de extermínio - embora não se soubesse absolutamente nada sobre as câmaras de gás nem sobre o que se passava em Auschwitz e nos outros campos».

Em Berlim, a guerra é uma companhia quotidiana e o seu curso já não é favorável a Hitler. O embaixador na capital do Reich, Pedro Tovar de Lemos (conde de Tovar), mantém o Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros (cujo titular é o próprio Salazar) a par da evolução do conflito. À medida que os aliados progridem, diminui o número de portugueses em Berlim. Homem de Mello conta que «costumavam reunir-se numa pensão situada na parte ocidental». Entre eles, Flávio Resende, investigador de biologia, e Maria Augusta Barbosa, doutoranda em ciências musicais. São ambos bolseiros do IAC, tal como Ayres de Azevedo. Deste, porém, não há uma única menção no livro do diplomata nem nas memórias da musicóloga («Expresso», 23/4/2005).

Na Primavera de 1943, Verschuer avança com um projecto chamado «Corpos Específicos de Proteínas», que, segundo o historiador Hans-Walter Schmuhl, constitui, «na prática, o desenvolvimento de um teste racial sorológico». Para Schmuhl, os trabalhos de Ayres «estavam indirectamente relacionados, em termos conceptuais», com aquele teste. Num relatório datado de 1 de Março, Ayres conta que tem trabalhado «com alguns cientistas de renome mundial na especialidade». Cita, entre outros, os professores Wolfgang Abel, Hans Nachtsheim, Peter Dahr, Hans Grebe e Karin Magnussen. São nomes que fazem parte da cúpula científica do nazismo, quase todos militantes do NSDAP e frequentemente membros das próprias SS. Alguns deles, como Abel, virão a efectuar estudos em campos de concentração, designadamente no de Auschwitz. Grebe, por sua vez, trabalhará em órgãos humanos provenientes daquele campo. O mesmo se pode dizer da bióloga Magnussen, que alimentará as suas pesquisas sobre a diferente coloração da íris com olhos humanos enviados por Mengele a partir de Auschwitz.

O português prossegue as investigações em gémeos e em Abril vem até ao Porto. Trata-se de uma viagem «de serviço», com o objectivo de levar a cabo a classificação dos grupos sanguíneos no Instituto de Higiene da Faculdade de Medicina do Porto, onde é assistente. São «as primeiras determinações» de alguns tipos sanguíneos levadas a cabo em Portugal - como salientará na sua tese de doutoramento. Veio a conselho dos seus mestres alemães. Consigo traz todo o material necessário. Durante duas semanas trabalha sobre um universo de uma centena de indivíduos, «recrutados» na faculdade e na Maternidade de Júlio Diniz, onde encontra todos os sangues-padrões, «mesmo os mais raros». O trabalho é «coroado de completo sucesso».

O último comboio de Berlim

Em Julho, a guerra generaliza-se a toda a Alemanha, o que é testemunhado pelos telegramas diários do conde de Tovar para o Ministério tutelado por Salazar. A 20, o embaixador dá «como provável» um desembarque aliado «perto da costa ocidental italiana». A 22, reporta a destruição do consulado português em Colónia. A 26, faz-se eco de notícias sobre a resignação de Mussolini. No mesmo dia, reporta o bombardeamento de Hamburgo, provocando uma «destruição e mortandade pavorosas».

A situação é tal que, a 1 de Agosto, o governo de Hitler decreta a evacuação de Berlim. O conde de Tovar telegrafa para Lisboa, para dizer que foi «distribuído em todas as casas de Berlim» um comunicado aconselhando o abandono da cidade por todos aqueles que não tenham «obrigações imperiosas a cumprir». Assina-o o ministro da Propaganda e governador de Berlim, Joseph Goebbels. A 3, o diplomata verifica que a cidade «está sendo metodicamente evacuada» e que «os comboios são literalmente tomados de assalto». Preocupado com a segurança da minúscula comunidade lusa, o embaixador decide «promover o repatriamento das mulheres e filhos dos funcionários» diplomáticos, assim como dos bolseiros e «algumas criadas de servir». Homem de Mello é designado para acompanhar o grupo até Lisboa.

A pequeníssima comitiva - de que fazem parte Ayres e a mulher - deixa a capital a 10 de Agosto. «Vim no último comboio», escreverá mais tarde. «Saí de Berlim, apenas, em obediência à ordem de evacuação, e no último momento possível.» Viaja na companhia de outra bolseira, Maria Augusta Barbosa, que aos 96 anos, recorda: «Recomendaram-nos que chegássemos à estação duas ou três horas antes do horário, não fosse o comboio ter de arrancar em razão de bombardeamentos iminentes. O nosso comboio passou em Nuremberga pouco antes de um bombardeamento que deixou a cidade em ruínas. Escapámos por pouco!»

A viagem decorre - regista Homem de Mello - «sem incidentes graves». O diplomata fica em Lisboa três dias, após o que ruma de novo a Berlim. Os membros da missão portuguesa só abandonarão a capital do Reich a 14 de Abril de 1945, duas semanas antes de Hitler e Eva Braun se suicidarem no seu «bunker»- o que levará Salazar a decretar três dias de luto nacional.

Quem já não volta para Berlim é Ayres de Azevedo. À sua frente tem agora o desafio da sua vida: o doutoramento.

Verschuer: a ciência ao serviço do nazismo

Otmar von Verschuer, o patrono de Ayres de Azevedo, é uma figura cimeira da ciência ao serviço do nazismo. Oriundo de uma família da nobreza, o que lhe conferiu o título de barão, nasce em 16 de Julho de 1896. Filho de um general, combate na I Guerra Mundial. Protestante e anti-semita, adere a um movimento de ultradireita. Licenciado em Medicina, especializa-se em Genética e doutora-se com uma pesquisa sobre gémeos. Em 1935, passa a dirigir o Instituto para a Hereditariedade, Biologia e Pureza Racial, na Universidade de Frankfurt. Prossegue o estudo sobre gémeos e investiga as diferenças raciais, procurando demonstrar a alegada inferioridade dos judeus. Adere ao partido nazi em 1940. Dois anos depois é nomeado director do Instituto de Antropologia, Hereditariedade Humana e Eugenia do KWI, em Berlim - núcleo do que já foi designado «racismo científico da Alemanha nazi». A partir de 1943, este instituto colabora com o campo de concentração de Auschwitz, onde pontifica um seu discípulo e ex-assistente, Josef Mengele. Dirige a revista «Der Erbarzt», onde este e Ayres escrevem.

Após a guerra, toda a correspondência com Mengele é destruída, bem como muitos dos dados das suas pesquisas. Preso, é julgado como mero colaborador do nazismo; condenado a uma simples multa de 600 marcos, é libertado. Em 1947, uma comissão de inquérito ao KWI concluiu, no entanto, que Verschuer «não pode ser considerado apenas como um colaborador, mas sim como um dos mais perigosos activistas nazis do III Reich».

Apesar deste juízo, retoma em 1951 a carreira académica e é nomeado professor da Universidade de Münster. Prossegue as pesquisas sobre gémeos no Instituto de Genética Humana, que dirige e transforma na mais importante unidade de investigação alemã daquela área. Morre em 1969, com 73 anos, na sequência de um acidente de viação.Ao noticiar a morte, a grande imprensa alemã ignora o seu passado nazi.

O investigador brasileiro Bernardo Beiguelman registou em Portugal pelo menos três biografias de Verschuer, publicadas na revista «O Médico». Em nenhum dos textos se faz qualquer menção a Ayres de Azevedo e à cumplicidade do barão Von Verschuer com o nazismo.

Os percursos cruzados de Mengele e Ayres

A carreira científica de Ayres de Azevedo na Alemanha cruzou-se com o de Josef Mengele, o mais conhecido dos médicos nazis. Ambos trabalharam, ainda que em momentos diferentes, no mesmo instituto de Frankfurt, sob a direcção do mesmo mestre, Von Verschuer, e sobre áreas de investigação afins: hereditariedade em gémeos. Mais tarde, coincidiram no KWI de Berlim, entre Janeiro e Maio de 1943, a trabalhar de novo com Verschuer e outra vez em gémeos. Ter-se-ão conhecido? Terão colaborado? O filho de Ayres assegura que nunca ouviu o pai falar de Mengele nem das experiências de Auschwitz. «Estou convencido que, enquanto viveu na Alemanha, nem sequer sabia da existência dos campos de concentração», diz José Manuel Aires Basto. A verdade, porém, é que o número de cientistas naquela altura não chegaria a trinta e certamente que o mestre Verschuer não deixaria de pôr em contacto dois discípulos que pesquisavam o mesmo tema.

Mengele nasce em 16 de Março de 1911, na Baviera. Faz um primeiro doutoramento em Antropologia, em Munique. Investigador no Instituto para a Hereditariedade, Biologia e Pureza Racial, na Universidade de Frankfurt, faz um segundo doutoramento. Militante do partido nazi, adere às tropas de elite SS, onde faz carreira. Oficial-médico, participa na invasão de França, Ucrânia e Polónia. É gravemente ferido na frente Leste, o que o obriga a ser transferido para Berlim. Em finais de Maio de 1943, capitão, troca o KWI pelo cargo de médico em Auschwitz, o maior campo de extermínio do III Reich. Realiza inúmeras experimentações em gémeos, anões, ciganos e indivíduos com diversas anomalias. Entre o KWI e Auschwitz estabelece-se uma macabra parceria. O campo abastece o instituto de sangue, olhos e outros órgãos dissecados dos cadáveres, muito especialmente de gémeos e anões. Verschuer, por sua vez, terá obtido fundos para as sinistras experiências de Mengele.

Em 1945, dias antes da libertação do campo pelos soviéticos, abandona Auschwitz. É preso pelos americanos, mas consegue escapar. Não escapa, porém, à condenação a prisão perpétua, determinada à revelia pelo Tribunal de Nuremberga. Três anos depois, foge para a América Latina, onde passa a viver sob falsas identidades. Morre no Brasil, em 1979, afogado numa praia de São Paulo, com o nome de Wolfgang Gerhard. A campa é descoberta e a identidade confirmada pela Mossad.
Na próxima edição, o regresso ao Porto e as peripécias na Faculdade de Medicina

Expresso, 1 de Dezembro de 2007



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Gregor Strasser-Thoughts about the Tasks of the Future

Gregor Strasser

Thoughts about the Tasks of the Future

1926 June 15

Lying on a sickbed for a few weeks and months does have its good side . So much that in the trivialities of everyday life does not get a hearing now has the chance to rise slowly from the unconscious to the conscious mind where it is tested and is winged by imagination, so that it acquires form and gains life . In general, people often make the mistake of assuming that practical action—the incessant preoccupation with daily necessities—is not founded in the mind . They therefore like to set up an invidious comparison between the thinker and the doer ! It is true that the currents of the mind and the soul do not become conscious when one is resolutely grappling with the tasks of the day and trying, by freshly setting to work, to solve all questions in a practical way !

So it is a comfort every now and then to have the leisure to look beyond the tasks of the day and of the near future and to plumb the depths of the question toward whose solution we are resolutely dedicating our life's work . When would this be better than during the many lonely hours of the sickbed, when the hands of the clock seem to stand still and the night never to end—until it becomes finally, finally morning again ! This new dawn, the fact that again and again the dawn comes, is the deep consolation, is the blessed certainty which makes the night of the present bearable for us—and even if the hours, years, never seem to end—the dawn does come, my friends, and the sun comes, the light !

Such thoughts of the lonely nights, thoughts about the National Socialist tasks of the future—I will briefly survey them here—such thoughts have surely occurred to most of our friends in similar hours and in a similar way—thoughts which at the moment are not yet the subject of our work, but whose undercurrents are flowing, whose blood runs through our work .

I. The Spirit of the Economy

We are Socialists, enemies, mortal enemies of the present capitalist economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, with its injustice in wages, with its immoral evaluation of individuals according to wealth and money instead of responsibility and achievement, and we are determined under all circumstances to abolish this system ! And with my inclination to practical action it seems obvious to me that we have to put a better, more just, more moral system in its place, one which, as it were, has arms and legs and better arms and legs than the present one !

And yet it is not enough to change a system, to replace one economic system by another— necessary above all is a CHANGE OF SPIRIT ! The spirit which is to be overcome is the SPIRIT OF MATERIALISM ! ! We must achieve an entirely new kind of economic thinking, a kind of thinking which frees itself from the present conceptions rooted in money, in property, in profit and false success ! It is an indication of the Marxist, the false Socialism, that its way of thinking is exactly that of capitalism . For this reason I have said for years that the two form a spiritual unity, only with reversed signals ! National Socialism, which stems from organic life itself, casts aside the mendacious words of a theory remote from the world, as well as the dead ideas of a declining civilization !

We have to learn that in the economy of a people it is not profit. not gain, which are important—but only satisfying the needs of the members of this people ! ! This and nothing else is the task of a "national economics ! " We have to learn that the ideas "world trade"—"balance of trade"—"export surplus" are ideas of a declining epoch which have in the end reduced themselves ad absurdum, because they violate the eternal law of organic life and were born out of speculation, not out of necessity, not out of the soil ! We have to learn that it is a betrayal when speculative production, with all its means of touting and advertising, creates an artificial need, a betrayal of human labor, of human life ! For artificially stimulated covetousness creates ever-increasing aspirations, and increased aspirations double human slavery, which is slavery of the mind, which instead of the soul has taken up mastery over life ! What do people know today about life ? ! They run around and tire themselves out, torment themselves, strive and drudge like galley slaves—in order to lead a life of horrifying emptiness ! It is not that this new economic system which we want produces more. What is at stake is certainly not higher production, which Marxism demands, but the human soul ! ! And production, economy have only the one task: to meet the economic needs of individuals, rejecting goods which owe their demand only to artificial stimulation, rejecting also the prodding of "profit and gain" !

We have to learn that WORK IS MORE THAN PROPERTY ! ACHIEVEMENT IS MORE THAN DIVIDENDS ! ! It is the most unfortunate heritage of this capitalist economic system that all things are evaluated according to money, according to wealth, property ! The decline of a people is the inevitable result of the application of this standard, since selection according to property is the mortal enemy of race, of blood, of life ! We have never left a doubt that our national Socialism breaks this prerogative of the owner and that the liberation of the German worker shall also extend to SHARING PROFIT, SHARING PROPERTY AND SHARING ACHIEVEMENT! ! But it would mean measuring again with the old standards if one left it at that and did not stress that revolution of the spirit which guides us against the spirit of the present system ! We consciously oppose valuation according to property with VALUATION ACCORDING TO ACHIEVEMENT . This is the only valuation which we recognize ! ! We consciously place WORK higher than PROPERTY ! We focus on ACHIEVEMENT not dividends, and we recognize RESPONSIBILITY, not riches or splendor, as the crowning of human striving . That is a new world view, a new religion of economics . It establishes with certainty that the horrid rule of the golden calf is at an end and that the differences among individuals and the differences among rights—are differences in achievement, differences in degree of responsibility, differences which come from God and which are sacred ! !

II. The Spirit of Society and of the State

And just as our fight against the form of the capitalist economy is at the same time a fight against the spirit of this capitalist economy, which must he rooted out in its outward expression and in the heart of every individual; so our fight against the form of society and of the present state is also a life or death struggle against the SPIRIT of this society, this state : AGAINST LIBERALISM AND FALSE DEMOCRACY !

The spirit of our National Socialist idea has to overpower the spirit of liberalism and false democracy if there is to be a third Reich at all ! Deeply rooted in organic life, we have realized that the false belief in the equality of man is the deadly threat with which liberalism destroys people and nation, culture and morals. violating the deepest levels of our being ! National thinking gnaws at the basis of life itself, destroys the blood, destroys the sacred order which is based on the distance which is created by inequality and which has nothing in common with the present social structure ! For hierarchy, of which I am speaking here, depends exclusively on the achievements of the individual for the community . We have to reject with fanatical zeal the frequent lie that people are basically equal and equal in regard to their influence in the state and their share of power ! People are unequal, they are unequal from birth, become more unequal in life and are therefore to be valued unequally in their positions m society and m the state ! But this inequality in turn has only one standard can and must have only this one standard : the achievement of the individual for society, for the nation, for the state .

And thus I reach a demand which at first glance may seem utopian, but which results inevitably from what I have said, and which has occurred to various friends in a similar way . The demand for unequal distribution of rights according to achievement for the state requires the elaboration of a process of selection according to which such achievements are to be measured . In the folkish movement there is much talk about the emergence of a new group of leaders, and this demand touches what I said, but the ways which are recommended for a solution : these blood tests, Nordicization, and so forth, and so forth, appear to my practical mind somewhat dubious as to possibility, value and even effect ! Another way, however, a thoroughly German, Prussian way of which my friend Pfeffer reminded me on one occasion, is suited as no other : selection by the army !

This requires that military service be voluntary, a right and not a duty . The practical way would be that by law every German Citizen would have to serve the state for one year during this year he would not, as the supporters of a compulsory year of labor service want, build roads or do other mass work, but would learn a trade, so that there would not be a single German who had not had at least a year's training in a trade ! The selection of the best . however, would be reserved to the trade of arms, which would last for TWO years and therefore attract only those most willing to sacrifice and which would bring with it the mortal danger of war and therefore demand all the heroic virtues. Entrance is voluntary and not dependent on any force . Who doubts that those Germans who voluntarily apply for the army, which removes them from private life twice as long the civil service, which further does not, like the latter, include practical advantages for practical life, but on the contrary, after an infinitely more severe service, means danger to life in war-who doubts that these Germans would be the best of their people, the racial best, whose achievements for the state now and in the future would ...

The father of true 'National Socialism' was T.G. Masaryk, and none other. In about 1887 he delivered a crushing attack on Marxist Socialism, his main arguments being that it was wrong because it was international and anti-Christian. He inspired, by these arguments, Klovacs, a young Czech labour leader and Socialist member of the Vienna Parliament, who about 1892 seceded with the Czech workers from the Socialist Party in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire because the leadership of that party was 'Jewish, international and German'. In 1897 Klovacs founded the first National Socialist Party in the world. T.G. Masaryk had a few years earlier founded his Realist Party, of which he was the only member in the Vienna Parliament. This united with Klovacs's party and Masaryk became president of this first National Socialist Party until his death, with Edouard Benesh as his second in command. About 1903 the Sudeten Germans took up Masaryk's idea and founded a second, German National Socialist Party in the Austro-Hungarian Empire under Jung and Knirsch, both members of the Vienna Parliament. In 1907 the Austrians followed suit, with a third, Austrian National Socialist Party. From these Czech, Sudeten German and Austrian models, the Bavarians in their turn took over the idea in 1917, when Harrer and Anton Drexler formed the Bavarian National Socialist Party, the fourth in the line of direct descent. The guiding principle of all these parties was Masaryk's original one: Christian and national socialism, as opposed to anti-Christian and international, or super-national, Marxist socialism.

And from all these thoughts, that filled my mind in the cross-channel steamer, arose a fear of the next peace. Assume for a moment that we can win through to a peace, in the normal understanding of the word, and that this war does not degenerate, as I thought in 1936 that it would if the unnecessary war were not prevented, into a Chinese chaos of warring generalissimos, local dictators and anarchy. Assume that we can somehow reduce Germany, in spite of the help given her by her confederate Bolshevy, to such straits that a peace can be made. Is that peace too to work out to her advantage a few years later?

This is a great danger, because the same minds still rule England that led her through a fools' paradise to this war. Still the peers and politicians and magnates, as I have shown in this book, continue in the midst of war their Crazy Gang chorus: 'No second Versailles'; 'no vindictive peace'; 'we are not fighting for the frontiers of Versailles'; 'we do not wish to pull up the old frontier posts' and so on and so on and so on.

This country has more than forty million inhabitants, I believe; more than forty million people in it have seemingly been led to believe by these imbecile slogans that the Versailles Treaty, and not the muddle-headedness of our own leaders, led to this war; and more than forty million people in Great Britain, I fancy, have never read the Versailles Treaty and do not know what it contained.

The vociferous group of Pall Mall experts who cried for so long that all would be well if France would only give Germany a Fair Deal, is preparing to renew this cry after a new peace.

Here, again, is a great danger to us. The French are very forbearing with us, but they have not forgotten how the rulers of Britain for nearly twenty years believed, or pretended to believe, that only the implacable malice of France stood in the way of a contented Germany and a pacified Europe. They have not forgotten how, when Germany cast off the mask and stood revealed as the mortal enemy, not of France, but of Britain, France was calmly expected to hold the Maginot Line until Britain should have changed out of golf clothes and made ready.

The Frenchmen I met, when I was in Paris, were all prepared to go through with this war, but looked with the greatest foreboding to the peace. They all asked me 'Will you be at our side in peace, or will that wrangle begin all over again? Shall we become the scapegoat of your politicians again? Will you nag at us to be nice to Germany until Germany begins another war - and then look to us to hold the Maginot Line until you come along some time later?' I found these men full of misgiving, and this is a perilous thing for us, because, as I write, the war has hardly begun, but French peasants have been for six months standing idly in the Maginot Line and worrying about their farms, French shopkeepers have been standing alongside them for as long and worrying about their shops, and this is a demoralizing business, and all the while German propaganda whispers into their ears that Germany has not the least wish to fight France, only to be done once and for all with these intolerable Engländer. So if there is any man in England who can induce a politician to listen to him, and to read a book or two about Europe, and try to learn something about France and Germany, I hope he will get to work and leave that politician no rest until he has come to understand a little about these things.

These cries, which so worry the French, of 'no second Versailles' and 'no vindictive peace' are seemingly the expressions of that peculiarly British form of Christianity which, hoping to be forgiven its own trespasses, is ready to forgive the trespasses of Germany against Poles and Czechs.

The League of Nations was the golden vision that was held before the people of Britain after the last war. This time it is to be called 'Federal Union'. Another slogan, another disillusionment-in-store, unless the will-to-prevent war is there; words won't stop it.

When this war loomed menacingly ahead, our rulers began to cry that 'The League of Nations' had failed. This is as if the managing director of some great concern were to attribute its bankruptcy to the shortcomings of his lady stenographer. France and Britain held about seventy per cent of the capital in that concern, and had its success or failure in their hands; it failed through their management, and to pretend that the crash was due to the conduct of such small shareholders as Iceland, Costa Rica, Haiti, or Bulgaria is ludicrous.

The League of Nations was a sound idea, if the leading shareholders were prepared to fulfil their duty to it. That duty was to lead the whole body of shareholders in implacable armed resistance to a peacebreaker. If the resolution to fulfil that duty exists, Federal Union can be made a success, but so could the League of Nations have been a success. If the intention is not there, the one slogan is as empty, the one institution as bankrupt at birth, as the other. The change of name will of itself accomplish nothing; and a very sinister gang may he hiding behind this new slogan of 'Federal Union'.

This is the vital issue, always slurred over beneath fine phrases, to which all thought about the future of Europe invariably returns. This is the reason why all these insidious whispers about 'Göring is a moderate', 'we are not making war on the German people', and 'no second Versailles' show that the next peace, if we can win through to one, may be more dangerous to us even than this war.

At the root of them lies that appalling class-and-caste feeling in Britain which is the real cause of our troubles. The awful fear that the idea of social progress might revive in Europe and in this country, that they might one day have one million pounds instead of two, leads influential people in this country to rack their brains for a way to inflict the appearance of defeat on Germany while preserving intact in that country the regime of its real rulers - the magnates and armaments-monarchs who before 1914 nose-led it through Kaiser Wilhelm and in 1933 put Hitler into power.

What sort of people these are, you may see from the case of Krupps. Krupps are foremost among the big-business, big-battalion and big-battle group which put Hitler into power on January 30th, 1933, the day when he openly bade farewell to his social and Socialist promises and became the Chancellor of heavy industry and big landlordry. During the present war, Krupps have been supplying artillery to the Dutch army. If Hitler should invade that country, his soldiers will be killed by German shells. Thus Krupps have no cause to fear overmuch about the result of the war.

The two-mindedness of our rulers, which was a chief cause for the dreary approach and outbreak of the war, may lead to the loss of another peace. Their attitude to their own people, not to the German people, is the real reason for our plight and for the indecision, the uncertainty, the bewilderment about the things-we-are-fighting-for, that plague us and obscure our future. They need to open their minds to the inevitability of social reinvigoration in England, and then they will no longer be in two minds about the peace they would make with Germany. 'We've got to be prepared' said, in execrable English, a bedraggled and rainstained banner at Marble Arch when the war approached. But that is not all. In England, we've got to be repaired.

History, destiny or what you will, played a grim joke on mankind when it invented the machine. Until that time, the development of mankind, at any rate during the centuries of our civilization, as we call it, had been an upward one.

Slowly, slowly, the belief in the dignity of man gained ground, and the dogma that his lot was to be the bondslave of a few lost ground. The claim that he was entitled to be a freeman gained an acceptance which spread and spread until it was on the point of gaining universal acceptance; the opposing theory, that he was born to be the serf of others who were born richer, a landless slave without rights either for himself or his daughters, approached universal rejection. Even some princes and aristocrats saw this; from their ranks came some of the most enlightened men, such as Ludwig I of Bavaria and Kossuth of Hungary.

The liberation of the peasants, the men who farmed the land and were thus the most valuable citizens of the state, gradually came to be a development recognized as inevitable, opposed only in islands of feudalism here and there which grew progressively smaller. The World War continued this development in Bohemia and Poland.

But at that very moment, when mankind seemed to be engaged in an upward march that was slow but yet perceptible enough to satisfy the minds of enlightened men, came the machine, the factory, the coalmine, and brought with them a new age of obdurate privilege-holders, entrenched in money, and a new race of landless serfs without rights - the machine-slaves. The millionaire, the magnate, the managing director, the mass-production monarch, succeeded, by right of wealth, to the barons and the princes. The old, age-long struggle has been resumed in another form.

This is the underlying struggle that explains all our wars, that confuses their issues, and leads to the recurrent bamboozling of the masses. They do not see clearly what is afoot. Their leaders, adept in the art of drilling them, feed them on phrases that satisfy their inarticulate longing for progress, but actually they do not move forward; of low intelligence, they think they march while they actually mark time.

Some men, and I think I am of them, see and regret this three-card-trick. This is what Captain Liddell Hart said in The Defence of Britain:

'The longer I have watched events, from a close-up view, the more I have come to the conclusion that most of our mistakes, and troubles, are not due to natural faults of judgment. But that the real cause lies in the habit -- on all sides -- of saying something less, or something more, than we know to be true. This almost universal practice of distorting simple matters of fact, whether by suppression or exaggeration, is inspired by concern for the interests of party, class, or profession - at bottom this so-called loyalty being too often self-interest. We are intent on "making a case" rather than on finding the truth. We play the part of counsel for the defence or for the prosecution. It is easier, and more popular, than the laborious effort of becoming scientific investigators. The results, as I have observed them in the sphere of governments and of public administration, are an endless chain of decisions taken in avoidable ignorance and of judgments marred by prejudice. The highest attainment of freedom is freedom from prejudice ... Truth may be hard to attain, as we all know; but the best chance of attaining it lies in consistent care to avoid untruth. That is a lesson that mankind has been slow to learn. Yet it is engraved on the whole course of history.'

This, as I think, expresses the truth of our recent history. We are being too clever, our rulers have found that the masses are too easy to delude. Thus we always hear a noble name for a shady transaction. 'Non-intervention' sounded fine; the thing that bore this name was in fact intervention in favour of the side which appealed to the ruling classes in this country. Munich was 'a heroic effort to preserve the peace', and is to this very day. But was it heroic for Britain -- for Britain, of all countries in this world -- to send an ultimatum to a small State, expiring 'at twelve o'clock to-day', that demanded its surrender to a mighty neighbouring power?

Here is the eternal distortion of simple matters inspired by concern for the interests of party, class or profession. 'We were not ready to fight for Czechoslovakia' - yes, no one would quarrel with that. 'Our military preparations were not far enough advanced for us to enter a conflict at that moment on this issue' - none would quarrel with that. 'We believed that if Germany were enabled, at the cost of the independence of a small state, to expand in an eastward direction, she would come into conflict with Soviet Russia and we ourselves should be spared a war which we wish to avoid' - well, even that would command respect. But, 'a heroic effort to preserve the peace'? This is the kind of phrase that makes the seeker after truth, the seeker after better times, retch.

To-day, it is said often enough that the proof of Britain's democracy, of the freedom of speech in Britain, is given by the liberty which writers still have to say such things as I have said in this book - things which seem to me so obvious that they should be above controversy. Perhaps that is a sign that something sturdy and ineradicable remains of the British spirit.

Yet I am not sure of it. I think rather that the rulers of Britain feel so sure of themselves, are so firmly dug-in, have so little respect for the intelligence of the masses, such complete faith in their ability to find a three-card-trick for every emergency, that they do not very much care about anything that is said or written. The House is packed with hundreds of Members of such indomitable compliancy that they will, on Monday, pledge themselves to support the Government to their last breaths in its inflexible determination not to introduce conscription, and, a week later, cheer to the same echo the same Government's announcement of its decision to introduce conscription.

This happened!

It is a great danger for us that the lordly ones, those in high places behind the scenes who so incorrigibly pinned their faith to Adolf (Save-us-from-Bolshevism) Hitler, even now have so much to say in our affairs. Lately I heard the man they call Lord Haw-Haw, Mahomet knows why, quoting some of the things that Lord Lothian wrote and said three years ago. I hoped they had been forgotten, but no, they had been stored up in a Nazi card-index, and now, out they came, and strange sounds they made, in 1940. Lord Lothian is now our Ambassador in Washington.

For such reasons, I fear the peace, if we can win through to a peace - that is, some arrangement reached at a conference table after Germany has intimated that she does not wish to continue the war. And with such thoughts in my mind, I contemplated the homecoming soldiers in that cross-channel steamer and saw, among them, the shadows of the men who came that way twenty years earlier, their hearts glad with victory and big with hope for the world that heroes were to live in.

When I reached London, I stepped out into the black-out, and felt as if I had been plunged to my scalp in a bottle of ink. A terrible thing, this London black-out, and, as I believe, unnecessary, for my experience in the air tells me that nothing but a thick fog could hide London, with the broad silver ribbon of the Thames leading to it, from the eyes of enemy airmen, once they reached it. You cannot hide London from them, if they come. But you can fight them off.

I believe the best means of bewildering raiding airmen would be to floodlight London and its near countryside as brilliantly as possible; then they would have beneath them a dead-white and ghostly picture in which they would be unable to distinguish anything at all.

In the London I returned to, Mr. Chamberlain was speaking at the Mansion House about the dangers of an unbridled rise in wages. I suppose the world-famed British sense of humour causes a British Prime Minister, a rich man himself, to choose as his audience an assembly of other rich men, and as his platform the Mansion House, with its sanctified odour of tradition and turtle-soup, when he wishes to tell the workers not to strive after higher wages. Crumbs from the rich man's table!

Mr. Chamberlain, inevitably, said that 'a vicious spiral' would result if wages, crying 'Excelsior', set out on that hazardous climb after prices. I think all young boys and girls on the threshold of life and its perils should be acquainted by prudent parents with this excellent definition of the word 'vice'. When prices rise, that is a virtuous perpendicular movement. When wages follow them, that is a vicious spiral.

In that England that I found again, a fox-hunter had written to a fox-hunting magazine from his lines in France to complain that the French had refused him permission to hunt foxes across their fields. He evidently felt that they did not take the war seriously. But when he asked them why, they answered, of all things, that they took this war seriously, because it was for their country. How perfectly we love and understand one another, the French and British. My hotel in Paris had advertised a Scots speciality, 'Wels Rarebit'. One of the first British propaganda films, prepared to impress our allies and the remaining world with our might in arms, had just been released in Paris; it began with Crecy and Agincourt.

Ah well!

We are in the roaring 'forties, the fourth decade of the twentieth century, the year 1940, and the future lies more turbulent than ever before the generation, the children of the storm, cradled when the eighteen-hundreds were dying. The war-to-end-war never even ended itself, it has now been resumed. This instalment of it, as I write, has not passed out of the war-to-begin-war stage; it will not grow up.

What kind of a war is it? For freedom? Freedom dwindles every day; though licence grows; in the free henroosts of mass-regimentation, ever more impregnably enclosed, the free foxes of mass-exploitation revel in their increasing liberty.

Is it a war to end 'Hitlerism', to begin Göringism? Is it worth while sacrificing millions of men, in the roaring 'twenties, to take 'ism' off 'Kaiser' and 'Despot', only to allow 'ism' to grow on to 'Hitler' twenty years later; and in the roaring 'forties to sacrifice more millions so that the 'ism' may be transferred from 'Hitler' to 'Göring' or to 'Hohenzollern' again?

Is it a war for The Survival Of The Richest? A gentleman's, or Gentile-man's war, to enthrone the gentle anti-Gentiles? What on Jupiter is it? The man in the moon knows; we do not - yet.

For many centuries Europe moved, slowly but perceptibly, onward and upward towards the ideals of humanity and justice. During the first forty years of this century, Europe has moved steadily backward. Slavery, mass-regimentation and mass-exploitation, injustice, have returned, always masquerading under noble names, chief among them 'Patriotism' and 'Nationalism'; but the parasites, the exploiters, the anti-patriots, the slave-drivers, the murderers of souls, also misused the rise of 'Liberalism', Humanity' and 'Justice' for their own ends and contributed to the process of deterioration. 'What, you would persecute me because I keep a sweatshop or a brothel? What freedom, what justice, what equality is this?'

This war will show, at last, whether the slow progress towards noble ideals which many men, consciously or unwittingly, strive and long for in their souls, can be resumed in Europe; or whether it is itself but a part of the process of degeneration in standards of thought, of living and of behaviour which has uninterruptedly continued for forty years past.

Of freedom, so little now remains that the placards proclaiming the word seem like jests uttered at a grave. Before the 1914 war, a man could put on his hat and take a ship to the ends of the earth, without even a visiting card. Before this war, he needed passports, visas, currency permits, and a whole pocketful of authorizations, recommendations, permissions and what you will. Now, in the countries at war, he cannot leave at all, save he overcome enormous difficulties. He may not send a penny piece abroad without surmounting the same array of obstacles. In one country he cannot obtain tea or coffee; in another, butter; in a third, meat. This is at the beginning of a war to preserve freedom. What will the state of affairs be at its end?

This war had to come - because it was not prevented in time. When it came, we bought it at the top of the market, which is bad business in the commodity war, as in all else. Victory could have been had cheaply on one occasion. On three subsequent occasions, it could have been had, less cheaply, but at a reasonable price. Victory -- in the Waterloo sense -- is now, I think, unpurchasable; but nevertheless, we must pay the price of it.

For the simple commercial reasons I have stated, I watched the approach of this war with feelings of ever-deepening foreboding. For one thing, I was closer to it than most, and my feelings were those of a man who shouts to another man to jump out of the way of the motor lorry which is about to demolish him, only to be rebuked by the cold stare of one who does not care to be addressed by persons to whom he has not been introduced.

When the war came, I experienced, for the first time for many years, a glorious sensation - the rebirth of hope. The foul and unnecessary war had come, but after a few weeks I saw the death of my greatest fear - that we should lose. I still could not see how we could win - but we could no longer lose, and that was much gained.

The reasons were that Hitler's marriage with Moscow, which was clear to foresee and duly came, was not consummated; that the full, two-armies-that-strike-as-one military alliance was not made.

To marry the lady with the scarlet letter on her brow and yet not harvest the nuptial delights? Not the marriage, but the abstention from the marriage bed was the unexpected and inexplicable thing. Hitler seemed to be carrying his vows of abstinence to the point of absurdity. Only an autopsy or his own disclosures can ever explain this farcical denouement.

But it was good enough to me and, jubilant but scarcely daring to believe my eyes, I watched, in the first weeks of the war, the possibility of our defeat vanish.

Many other reassuring things came crowding on the heels of those glad tidings. Firstly, the quality of our Air Force and Navy. I had feared that these would have been infected by the political senility which allowed the country to drift into this war, but I was wrong. The men who had charge of the Services, at all events, had never forgotten their task and their duty, which was to keep Britain's defences strong and efficient.

I knew, from my years in Germany, the great hopes that the Germans reposed in the starve-out, and this was a major, though a secondary, danger for us. The Germans always believed that they brought us to the verge of starvation in 1917 by unbridled submarine warfare, and that we were only saved from it by American intervention. They hoped to reach that end this time by extending the same type of warfare; the four weapons they had were the submarine, the mine, the aeroplane, and the ocean-going raider.

I began to exult when I studied the young Naval and Air Force officers and men I saw about. I had a good standard of comparison -- 1914-18 -- and soon saw that they were better than their predecessors of that day. They were, indeed, as good as they could be, and the way the Navy quietly but tenaciously mastered the submarines, and then began to master the mines, and the Air Force fought off the German raiders when they tried to bomb the fleet at anchor made me feel that I was being reborn.

But to be reborn is one thing, and to regain your birth-right is another. I felt that I had regained mine, which with many other Britishers I felt I had lost at Munich, on the day the Graf Spee ran for Montevideo harbour.

I had seen this ship, in Germany, and talked to the officer who eventually scuttled her. I saw her sister-ship, the Deutschland, launched. I knew that all Germans put some of their greatest hopes for the humbling of Britain in these ships. I knew that they had been especially designed and built for the starve-out. They were designed to make the quick kill and quick getaway. They were armed to outgun ships that could catch them; they were given speed to outrun ships that could destroy them.

By all paper calculations, they should have done enormous damage. The French and British navies, together, had only four ships which, on paper, could both catch them and outgun them. In the Great War the raider Wolf cruised the seven seas for fifteen months, sank 135,000 tons of Allied shipping, laid hundreds of mines - and she was but a 6000-ton passenger steamer of 11 knots, armed with 5.9 inch guns. The pocket-battleships, especially built for their task, could steam at 26 knots, had 11 inch guns. How could they be found; when found, how could they be overtaken; when overtaken, how could they be destroyed? Germans confidently foretold that they would sink a million tons of shipping each.

Yet those British ships caught, fought and vanquished the Graf Spee. The last dreams of the starve-out faded. Italy, if she ever thought of taking Germany's side, probably changed her mind that day. Of this magnificent exploit can it be said, more truly than it was said on another occasion in the last war, that 'Nelson came again'.

The men of our Air Force and Navy showed, what I had begun to doubt before the war, that the spirit of the British people stood as high as ever. They had this advantage - that from the word go they knew exactly what their job was, to fight Britain's enemies. That is a thing a man can understand; there is no ambiguity about it. The contrast remained, between this valiancy and clarity, and the mists that shrouded everything as soon as the gaze was shifted from Montevideo to Westminster.

What was the war about? Why was the trustworthy statesman of yesterday suddenly become the perjured villain of to-day, after only one more fib? Would to-day's enemy become the friend of to-morrow? Whither were we going?

I could never forget this contrast between the fighting-men of Britain and the politicians, never understand why men of their type could not win through to the control of civic affairs. Would this generation, too, be elbowed aside after this war, I wondered. In the Government, as a member stated in the House, only two Ministers of military age went off to the war they had undertaken. To me, it was incongruous that such a nation should be led by elderly gentlemen who took umbrellas to go flying in closed aeroplanes. The new Ministries, Institutes, Councils and whatnot, too, were filling up, once more, with the children of influence, with alien-born 'specialists' and other limpets. These two scenes did not attune. The repugnant old profiteer-and-soft-job racket of 1914-1918 was beginning again.

Two other sunbeams fell on me out of a sky still overcast. The first was the response of the Empire, which, I think, surprised many people who had consistently had less forebodings than I. I suppose only men who knew France in 1914 and 1915 can understand the feelings with which I saw the Australians, Canadians, South Africans and New Zealanders of 1939. They, too, were better than ever. The exalting effect of their appearance was like that of champagne.

The other inspiring thing was that we did not make the one mistake that could have lost the war. The ghosts of Passchendaele and the Somme, where millions of Britishers were thrown without rhyme or reason or hope of victory against impregnable German fortifications, still prowled about the West Wall. I had a nightmarish apprehension that the longing of Wall Street for 'action' or 'a token of good faith', or the obsession of some text-book-bred commander, would lead to this. No man can say how we can win this war; but we could certainly lose it like that. It has not happened, praise be. If I did not, of all communities of men, most detest the Lettuce Brotherhood ('Lettuce hope that ...'; 'Lettuce not forget that ...'; 'Lettuce not think that we are fighting the German people'; 'Lettuce thank God for Mr ...' ad nauseam) I should say, let us hope that it will not happen.

For in this war, luck or what you will has placed us beyond the danger of defeat; now, we could only defeat ourselves, by impaling ourselves upon a proffered sword, or by allowing our enemy to find mighty allies, and as to this second possibility, even Russia, after that fantastic debacle in Finland, looks less formidable.

Our enemy cannot defeat us - but his mighty army and air force are still intact, behind an impregnable West Wall. He longs for nothing more than that we should attack him - it would give him a last chance of victory. He will not attack us, in full force. Do not believe the people who told you he would do this in the autumn of 1939: who now tell you that he will do it in the spring of 1940; and who will tell you, if he does not do it then, that he will do it in the autumn of 1940. These voices are criminally suspect; they are the voices of armament rings rabid for their profits, they want to accustom you to the idea that there must be a big slaughter, somehow, somewhere, somewhen. Probably there will be, with so many ghouls around, but it will not help any save those ghouls.

For in this war, for us, the best form of attack is defence. Captain Liddell Hart foretold it all, long before the war broke out. The great blood-bath would not win the war; it would increase profits; there is just a hope that the war can be ended -- not won -- without it. For our best ally, our best hope of victory, is the enemy within Hitler's walls: the pinch of hunger, the enemies of his regime, the captive peoples, and, ultimately, the effect of attack from the air, which we should not defer a day longer than we can help.

Hitler will not attack us with all his strength. I know, from my years in Germany, that the Nazi strategy, laid down long before the war began, was only to launch that great-attack-with-everything-that-Germany-has if (1) France and Britain could be sundered from each other, and this has not happened; or, (2) if Germany could find allies strong enough to overcome them both together, and that has not happened.

Failing either of these, that Nazi strategy, long prepared, is to sit tight behind the West Wall and wait for Germany's enemies to come and take Hitler's ill-gotten gains from her, snapping up the while any unconsidered trifles that may be lying about. That is the meaning of the West Wall; that is why the West Wall was built; that is why Hitler calls it the West Wall - not the Siegfried Line.

Behind that West Wall stand a mighty army and air force, and a mighty nation as yet strong and united. I do not know whether they can be tamed without a great military defeat, but I think there is a chance of this after a long time, and after enough air-bombing.

I do not see how a great military defeat can be inflicted on them, even after a long time. They already know they cannot defeat us, have known this since the beginning of the war; but they think we cannot beat them. I think the best hope of ending this war, since our privations would in any case be less than theirs, is to tire, squeeze, bore and bomb them into compliance.

Such an ending to the war might be a real victory, for peace. In 1918 we had a military victory, but no peace. It is a fallacy to think that the more bloodshed there is, the better the outcome of the war will be. That is military theory as preached by the armament rings.

If the German-Russian agreement was for a series of alternating, westward-moving blows, to be merged in a joint grand-slam at a given moment, it has suffered dislocation through the Bolshevist debacle in Finland. But for that, Rumania would have been partitioned between Germany and Bolshevy by now, Germany getting the oil, and if the Bolshevists eventually succeed in Finland this scheme may conceivably be taken up. That would mean new conquests in South-Eastern Europe. But after the Finnish debacle, even a joint German-Russian grand offensive against Britain is hardly possible. Hitler's generals, now, would hesitate to carry it out, if he were to order it.

Two victors of this war already stand clear to see - the United States armament interests; and Italy. The Roman Umpire has given a masterly performance; never did a man sit a prettier fence than Mussolini. He had a hand in every warlike exploit as long as these were cheap, and acquired territory by them. They were not costly enough to imperil his popularity with his people; and when they threatened to become expensive and dangerous, he became, for his people, the Prince of Peace.

In the 1914-18 war Italy had a secret clause in her agreement with her ally, Austria-Hungary, that she should not take part in any war involving Britain, and that enabled her to keep out, and come in on the other side, as soon as the issue became clear, and reap the fruits of victory in territorial expansion.

She is not yet satisfied; she has a territorial grievance still outstanding from that war. This time, according to Count Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law, the secret understanding behind the alliance with Germany, made in May 1939, was that it should not involve Italy in a European war in less than three years' time. Again, she stands aside. Again, she watches intently the course of the struggle. Again, she will either intervene, to ensure her further aggrandizement, when she sees how the struggle is going; or she will at the peace conference stake a claim difficult to withstand.

So how do we stand? There are only two possibilities. Either powerful groups in Germany will unseat Hitler, within a year or so, and make a bargain with France and Britain, on the basis that 'Hitlerism' has been destroyed. Or we are in for a long, long, long siege of the West Wall, for the extension of the war in this and that direction without direct influence on its outcome, for the gradual exhaustion of the peoples, for the further spread of disillusionment, disbelief and desperation - in short, for deterioration and the achievement of those conditions in Europe which I described as 'Chinese' in the memorandum I wrote for my paper in 1936: odd dictators all over the place, holding pieces of territory by means of armed bands, like the robber barons of old, a militarist chaos.

The first of these two alternatives would be the better - if the men who succeeded Hitler were better, and more trustworthy than he. But only one method exists to find Germans better and more trustworthy, and that is to make them so.

In other words, we should be back where we were after the last war. We should make an arrangement with Germany and we should preconcert measures to be jointly taken against her if she broke her undertakings.

If we then were resolute, and kept to our word, and did not condone her repeated breaches of her undertakings, if we always maintained enough force to defeat any attempt of hers violently to repudiate them and were always ready to use it - then she would strictly observe them, to the letter and even to the dot on the i. If we began wrangling with the French, she would begin feeling her muscles and throwing her weight about again. We should have another war a few years later.

We are at the beginning of the year which will begin to show us which way the die will fall - and always remember that the armament rings do not want a short war. I want now to cast a glance at the two countries chiefly concerned, for me: England, where I was born, and Germany, which will be with us all until we die.

In England, we have taken up arms 'to defend Freedom'. Our own ancient liberties however, have already been abolished, on paper, by one Home Secretary because 'the Irish Republican terrorists' recommended him to this, apparently; by another Home Secretary, because 'an anti-Semitic organization' instructed its members to 'make fun of the defence regulations' and 'a sudden attack on London' might then 'bring the Jews to their knees'. Not much about Germany and Hitler in all this.

But the liberties have gone - on paper. In practice, they exist, as yet, to a great degree. They could be abolished in practice at any moment, or by stages; and the reason given need not be any more worthy of belief than the two I have quoted.

Now, already, at the beginning of 1940, with the war only four months old, the 'manufacturers' of Britain, through their spokesman Sir Patrick Hannon, one of Mr. Chamberlain's most ardent admirers in the House of Commons, who is President of the National Union of Manufacturers and therefore a Field Marshal in big business, drew attention to the 'grave danger of a so-called spiral being created between prices and wages levels'. The Times, similarly, wrote that 'the financial demands of the war may compel resort to a lower standard of living ... what happened in the last war is a warning of what will happen again unless prevented. Wages soared to unprecedented heights but they never overtook prices, and the wage-earning classes as a whole were not placed in a better position. War sacrifices will have to be made ...'

These arguments were directed against the possibility that the Mineworkers' Federation would demand a sliding-scale, wages-to-follow-prices, for the war period. I commend them to close attention. A 'spiral' is a dangerous thing. A 'spiral' is an attempt of wages to catch up with rising prices. But, as war has already shown that they do not succeed, they should not try it in this one - for this would represent 'a grave danger', and do not 'the financial demands of the war compel resort to a lower standard of living'? In other words prices should, may, must rise - but not wages. The wage-earners as a whole in the last war 'were not placed in a better position' when they obtained higher wages; obviously, in this war, they will be in a better position if they do not obtain higher wages.

Was ever a mean thought clothed in nobler words? Does not the contrast between this sort of thing and the battle of Montevideo hit you in the eye?

We are fighting 'for freedom', 'to end Hitlerism' - over the North Sea, before the West Wall, in the South Atlantic. What are 'we' fighting for at home?

These quotations, and many other things I could say, suggest very strongly that the home-front-fighters are fighting to keep wages down. And what if the demand - that wages should try and climb after prices, disgusting thought, becomes more clamant, if the workers, some of whom fought in the last war, some of whom are specifically in 'reserved occupations', think that the profit-takers, as well as the wage-takers, should 'resort to a lower standard of living', should make 'war, sacrifices'? Is that what those special powers are lying on the table of the House of Commons for?

Remember that the sympathy of our rulers for National Socialist methods, now called Hitlerism -- we are fighting to end it, by the way -- was chiefly responsible for the we-are-in-two-minds policy that led to this war. Remember that the most vindictive enemies of the British working-classes are in England, nowhere else, and not always even among the moneyed-classes; did not a conscientious objector from Suburbia say that the British working classes were 'dirty, lazy, foolish and sub-normal in physique and mentality', though he certainly added that 'the upper classes are ridiculous figures of egoism, snobbishness and irresponsibility'.

Now, if you are interested in cause and effect, in the sequence of events, turn to an official booklet, The British Case, written by Lord Lloyd. Lord Lloyd is Chairman of the Executive Committee of the British Council, a body which is said to promote British relations with foreign countries. Among other things it sends peers' daughters to display British fashions to the bewildered natives of Croatia, gives 'sherry parties' to Austrian Jews in London, and dispatches English-language-teachers to Rumania, where Jews of mixed cosmopolitan origins learn the language before coming to this country, and all this costs the British taxpayer, including the British working-man, £386,000 a year, according to the press. Lord Lloyd's booklet, The British Case, invites perusal, because its title promises the reader an answer to the oft-asked, never-answered question, 'What are we fighting for?'

Lord Lloyd (who as the head of a body dedicated to foreign affairs should be an expert on foreign affairs, but does not distinguish between the head of a foreign state and the head of its government and speaks of 'President Schuschnigg of Austria') says, twice and with emphasis, that 'we are not fighting for frontiers'. He is disillusioned with National Socialism, (sorry, 'Hitlerism'), but not with Fascism. This, he says, 'threatens neither religious nor economic freedom, nor the security of other European nations'. (Albania is in Europe, but Lord Lloyd does not bother with unconsidered trifles when he is making a case.) Lord Lloyd also states that 'the political machinery of Fascism is, indeed, built up on trade unionism', and so on.

Here you have the same old story, that was told to you for years about Hitlerism (sorry, it was then National Socialism). 'This great social experiment' - Sir Nevile Henderson, etc. etc.

I have quoted these things to show that the minds of some of Britain's rulers have not changed. The war came because they liked some things in Hitler's Germany so much that they simply could not bear the idea of being bad friends with her, and would not believe that nothing on earth could prevent Hitler's Germany, at the given moment, from turning on Britain. The things they particularly liked were the disciplining of the working-classes, the regimentation, the lowering of wages, the destruction of the trades unions, the enthronement of big business and dividends. They still have that idea enshrined in their hearts. Fascism? Ah, now, that's something like; Mussolini never made a pact with Russia.

So much for England, at the beginning of this war. On all the fighting-fronts, Britishers are doing their duty better than ever. On the home-front, the Government has in its pocket absolute powers; it can at any moment make itself 'totalitarian', to use the beastly jargon of our times; one more mysterious Irish Republican document like that produced by Sir Samuel Hoare, or mysterious anti-Jewish plot, like that produced by the equally diligent Sir John Anderson, would do the trick.

The warning, 'wages must not rise, though of course prices must', has already been uttered. The grisly contrast between the things the people are told, the things they think they are fighting for, and the truth, the use that is being made of their enthusiasm, their devotion, their lives, is as great as ever. The old, old men behind the scenes, grabbing with vulture-like hands.

The greater contains the lesser - and the class-war seemingly is greater than the Great War, of which this is the second instalment.

In this coming year we shall see whether the British Government, in order to keep wages down, will exercise more and more of the dictatorial powers it has in a pigeon-hole. I don't know whether this sort of thing can be successfully done in wartime. In peacetime, it is like falling off a log. But in war? It has not yet been tried.

I think it would be dangerous. Watch and see. That is one side of the picture, England. And now for Germany.

Hitler, much sooner than I expected, is finished. The fairytale of Adolf in Plunderland may have a few more chapters yet, but its end is in sight. I cannot tell how long he will last, whether he will take an unconscionable time in departing, but his end is written clearly on the wall, and he put it there himself. It is an extraordinary thing, or rather, a thing for which no adequate adjective exists. The marriage with Moscow - without the wedding night. To make an honest woman of the Red Lady - and then not take the dowry? Some of the most powerful Reichswehr generals were always for military collaboration with Bolshevy - but collaboration without the military alliance, what in the name of duplicity is that? And then the Bolshevist military farce in Finland, where the Soviet Generals, chief among them the Jewish General Stern, made war as little Tommy makes war with his tin-soldiers in the nursery?

An amazing development - and, ultimately, the end of Hitler.

And, on top of that, the case of the Graf Spee. Adolf Hitler gave himself the name he will deserve in history - Adolf Scuttler. To order a great ship, with a good fighting chance, to sink herself in a Uruguayan harbour?

From that moment, Hitler is old news. Of our Calvary, no end is in sight, but among the gargoyles that flank it, we soon shall leave Hitler behind us. Assuming, that is, that if a Deal be made with Germany -- a Fair Deal, of course, at a square deal table -- our rulers do not make it with Hitler. But even I cannot imagine that.

Hitler is a yellowing page. Long enough he has absorbed our thoughts. The time is coming to consign himself to an upper shelf in the library, to look round for a book about his successor.

His successor will come either from inside or from outside Germany. If he is unseated by those powerful groups within Germany, the man will almost certainly be Göring. If he outlasts that danger, and is dethroned by some eruption of mass discontent in Germany, the man will come from outside. Then he may be Otto Strasser.

Consider Göring first. I wrote earlier that these developments are harder to forecast in wartime than in peacetime, because the factor of the bullet plays a large part, and bullets are incalculable; they ricochet, they strike at a tangent. But I would say that Göring's chance of being the next ruler of Germany is greater than any other man's.

In his self-commiserating mood, Hitler once, years ago, announced that he had already chosen his successor; he thought that a harmless polyp in his throat, afterwards removed, was an incurable, malignant growth. He did not then say that Göring was the man, but I hazarded the guess, in an article which nobody then found important enough to publish, though I was paid an exaggerated sum for it. At the outbreak of war, Hitler stated that Göring actually was Führer-Elect Number Two.

In making that choice, Hitler only forethwarted the inevitable and, probably foreseeing this, may have saved his own life, for by this move he made it possible, when the time comes, for him to he bowed-off and not bumped-off, by his successor. A chaotic, Communist Germany would be needed for himself to be able violently to remove Göring; but I cannot imagine Hitler himself remaining at the head of that Communist Germany, because too many Germans have been in concentration camps for seven years only because they are Communists.

A better picture of Göring is given by the Life of his first wife, Karin, than by any book about himself. That book contains letters written by Karin when Hitler was in prison, after the unsuccessful Putsch of 1923, and Göring was lying wounded, in exile at Innsbruck, and Hitler's triumph of ten years later seemed only a vision for lunatics, yet these letters show the most perfect faith in Hitler. Such loyalty alone, if loyalty meant anything to Hitler, would have predestined Göring to be his closest helper and his chosen successor - but that was not Hitler's motive.

But now Hitler, little though his Germans imagine yet, is preparing to go. He has no chance to remain. He cannot win the war; even if he were to turn on Bolshevy, none would trust him now. Plenty-of people would like to do a deal with Germany on that basis - but not with Hitler, he might change his mind again a little later.

So, enter Göring. They always preferred him to Hitler, because he comes of the officer caste; his career was the army, his father was the first Governor of German South West Africa. They never really forgave Hitler his house-paintership, although they were glad to forget it until he made that pact with Bolshevy. How many of those influential people tried to get Göring to England, for instance; this, they thought, is a man very much like ourselves, with him we can do business.

Strange, you may think, if the war to end Hitlerism turned into a war to begin Göringism. Not in the least. It all boils down to the ism, in the end.

Just look at Göring's qualifications. As soon as he came to power, he put off the brown shirt and put on the Reichswehr or Air Force uniform; that puts him in the right drawer at once. Did he not so admire the British Air Attaché's mess-kit that he copied it for the evening-uniform of his own air officers? The man, is clearly a gentleman. Or, as the disillusioned big landowners of Germany say, as they glance apprehensively over their shoulders at the Bolshevists, given them as their next-door-neighbours by Adolf (Save-us-from-Bolshevism) Hitler, 'Er ist doch wenigstens ein Herr'.

Now Göring advances upstage. He did not make the pact with Bolshevy (did he not tell the British Ambassador that none of them mattered a row of pins when the Führer was making a major decision). Perhaps he can get us out of the mess. What about levering Adolf out of his shoes and putting Hermann into them? And then, what about a reconciliation with Britain and France, ('Hitlerism' having been ended) and a common front against Russia?

Consider Göring's friends at court, at many courts. He has been Mussolini's friend since his exile-days in Italy in 1924. Prince Philip of Hesse, who married the King of Italy's daughter, was a very close friend of his, and was given a high Prussian appointment by him. The former Kaiser liked him and invited him to Doorn. The former Crown Prince pinned on his coat the very Iron Cross he wears. The Princeling whom the Hohenzollern family sent into the National Socialist Party, on the off-chance of a catch in the slips, August Wilhelm, is his friend since many a long day. The Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Queen Victoria's grandson, Old Etonian and aristocratic showpiece of the National Socialist Party, is a very close friend; the Duchess of Coburg even travelled especially to Austria to be present at the birth of his sister's child. Wales-Edward-Windsor played trains with him on the marvellous model railway in the loft at Karinhall.

He has not spoiled his chances with any of these people. He might be a King-maker; a common-front-against-Bolshevy-maker.

Almost a miracle would be needed, as this war is developing, to prevent this man from becoming the next ruler of Germany. He is, in private life, the most jovial, back-slapping, friendly fellow you could wish for, who loves children, flowers, and animals, animals so much that he forbade vivisection, dancing bears, and fox-hunting with hounds. This last is the only serious objection to him, in British eyes; a man who does a thing like that, think the friends-of-man in Leicestershire, must have a cruel streak in him somewhere.

One or two other things about him are interesting. He is the father of the concentration camps. The author of the shoot-to-kill order to the Storm Troops. The man who had a Prussian general and his wife shot in their drawing-room on a fine Saturday afternoon in June. The man who fired the Reichstag and threatened to hang a Bulgarian communist exile for it. The man who, if and when Hitler goes, may have the German army and air force intact, and Hitler's territorial gains in his pocket. He would probably be glad to lead a crusade against Bolshevy - but not at the price of giving up what Hitler filched.

The loveliest picture of Göring that I have in my mind is of him sitting enthroned in the Speaker's Seat of the Reichstag on September 12th, 1932, the day when he was elected Speaker, and giving an unforgettable performance as The Grand Young Man of Parliamentary tradition and usage.

As soon as he had taken his Speaker's seat, the Communists, ostensibly the archest enemies of the Nazis, tabled a motion for the immediate quashing of the decrees by means of which Franz von Papen, Hindenburg's protégé, was then ruling the land. Papen confidently expected the Nazis to oppose this motion and sat smiling in the Chancellor's seat with the Reichstag dissolution order -- he had obtained this in advance from Hindenburg in order to intimidate the Reichstag and be able to quell any outbursts -- in its traditional red portfolio on the desk before him. But the Nazis, having telephoned quickly to Hitler, decided to let the motion go through, and before Papen knew where he was Göring had ordered a division and vote. Now Papen, who knew that a vote, if one were allowed to be taken, would make him the laughing stock of the world (the actual result was 512 votes against and 42 for him) jumped up and presented Göring with the dissolution order, so that the vote might be thwarted. Göring motioned him aside, and when the red portfolio was placed on his desk pushed it aside again. 'No, no', he said, 'the vote is now in progress, and must be completed. I am not interested in the contents of your red portfolio. To interfere with the vote now would be a breach of faith, a breach with all parliamentary tradition, why, good heavens, it would be unconstitutional!' The discomfited Papen had to withdraw and suffer ludicrous defeat in Parliament (afterwards, of course, the dissolution was declared legal). When he had gone Göring, with grave and honest mien, declared:

'I am firmly resolved to maintain both the prestige of Parliament and, above all, the right of this elected assembly of the German people to continue its work in accordance with the Constitution.'

Five months later he fired this same Reichstag.

So, from the point of view of the outer world, the rose that is Hermann Göring possibly has a few thorns. That will not prevent him from becoming the next ruler of Germany - if the change comes about fairly soon, and is the work of the same, powerful, big-business and big-estate groups which put Hitler into power.

But if the change is delayed in coming, and the German people begin, like Vesuvius in a good sightseeing week, to show signs of simmering and boiling over, the man to follow Hitler will probably come from outside the country, he will be chosen from that group of men, now in the shadows of exile, who seem so obscure to-day, as Hitler seemed obscure only yesterday.

Then other men's names will come up, and foremost among them Otto Strasser's. For these reasons, because he may be important to us, because he may mean you, I began to think, in the summer of 1939, before war began, of writing a book about Göring and Otto Strasser. But then I thought, Göring has been written about nearly enough already, and anybody who still cherishes illusions about him is incurable anyway; I'll write about Otto Strasser.

So, when I came back to England, with the intention of writing a book, about this war and the next peace and Germany and Otto Strasser and the like, I went to a place on the south coast, and into a big hotel there.

It had an enormous apartment, called a Lounge, where a few people sat stiffly about in leather arm-chairs. In the middle was a glass-sided tank filled with water in which tropical fish swam bemusedly about, wondering, as I thought, what the devil they were doing in that galley, and from time to time one of the other occupants of the larger aquarium -- for The Lounge was a chilly, greenish place, where invalid ladies and water-proofed gentlemen languidly swam in and out, so that you started when you found one near you -- would occasionally approach this tank and contemplate its population, uttering faint sounds which might have expressed pleasure or surprise. I wondered what the other fish, inside the tank, thought of them.

There was an elderly gentleman of military bearing who knitted (Brig.-Gen., ret., late 1st Knitwits, I thought at random) and who was sometimes visited by his son, to whom he would snort complaints about things he had read in the paper ('Pampering these militiamen, I don't hold with it'. 'Yes, father'). There was an elderly lady who tottered from chair to chair and, between totters, nourished herself on the humour which Punch distils from that inexhaustible source of fun - the distinctions between the classes. Once a child came into The Lounge and was made much of by a Dutch lady, so that it began to laugh loudly; the elderly lady sent a waiter over with a reproof.

After a day or two, I swam out of The Lounge, which was unsympathetic to me.

So I took train and came, after a long walk on a very cold day, to my deserted village. The old lady with the gleaming eye was there, surrounded by her chickens and the wreck of the hamlet.

'Here I am, I said. 'I'm coming in for a day or two.'

'Well, I didn't expect you back again, Master, she said.

'Why not?' I asked, 'I said I was coming.'

'Well, I didn't think you'd come,' she said, 'this is a lonely place, and a cold place in winter, and I never had any visitors at this time before, and it's not very cheerful for you, with all these ruins.'

'It's the only unruined place in England,' I said. 'You haven't a radio, or a film-hell, or a fish-and-chip den, or a British Imperial Union Jack Corporation for the assembly of all-British gimcracks made by Polish Jews in New York; you haven't a Glamour Girl, or a Mayfair Man, or an air wardress; horoscopes, football pools and jitterbug dancing are unknown to you; cold it may be here, but think how much colder it is in Finland, or even in London at a full-dress rehearsal of a nude revue, and here you have no nude revues, and I saw enough of that racket in Free Germany and know what it means; you haven't a refugee, save myself, and I am the only real refugee in England; you haven't an Olde Antique Shoppe for the sale of mass-produced brass candlesticks from Birmingham; you haven't even a Tea Shoppe or a Pauper's Arms, where I should be sold warm whisky and cold port, if I were prepared to drink them standing, at certain hours of the day; you even speak English, which is a rare thing in this country; you haven't a Petrol-Station-and-Kozy-Kaffee combined; you haven't a crooner or a swing-singer, you need never listen to your own countrymen and countrywomen, in their blindness, singing 'Oh my bewdaful, yore so bewdaful'; your chickens don't even carry gasmasks; why, I never saw a place so unruined.'

'You talk queerly, Master,' she said, doubtfully, but her strange eye gleamed more indomitably than ever, 'there's enough ruins here, all round you.'

'Ah,' said I, 'you should see Chaucer's Canterbury and Drake's Plymouth.'

'Why?' she said, vaguely 'have they been bombing them?'

'No' said I. 'We have.'

'Oh,' she said, 'well, are you going to write your book here, Master?'

'Some of it, anyway,' I said, 'out of this very head. I'm bitten badly, by this book. I didn't know what to think about it when I left you, but now I'm all caught up in it, and I think Otto Strasser is a remarkable man, and a good German, and a man of peace, so lead the way, I want to work.'

And we went in.

Appendix One

THE BOOKS OF OTTO STRASSER

I was surprised to find, when I learned to know Otto Strasser better and discussed with him at length his life and work, that he is the author of many books, not one of which, as I believe, has been translated into English. Two or three I had read myself, when I was abroad, and assumed that they had long since appeared in this country, but I had no idea of the number of his works, nor can I understand to-day how a man of his many activities ever found time to write them. But I have mentioned, among the first of his attributes, his enormous and almost unbelievable energy, a thing not uncommon among Germans which he possessed in rare measure. Somehow he contrived, while campaigning up and down Germany for or against Hitler, while campaigning against Hitler in exile, while moving from place to place and from country to country in escape from the ever-pursuing Gestapo, to write dozens of books and pamphlets. He says he is the only author who does not know how many books he has written, and he may be right.

His Structure of German Socialism (Aufbau des Deutschen Sozialismus) I have mentioned in this book. I find it among the most striking essays in constructive political thought, elaborated in detail, that I have ever read; and at the end of it, overlooked by the great world of readers for so many years, lay the record of the two long conversations with Hitler which give so much insight into that man's mendacity and hysteria. This book was published in 1931.

Another of his political books was European Federation (Europäische Föderation) published in 1935; to-day, everybody speaks about European Federation, and this book alone would put Otto Strasser among the prophets. Then he wrote The German St. Bartholomew's Night (Die Deutsche Bartholomäusnacht) an account of the Hitlerist massacre of June 30th, 1934, in which his own brother Gregor, killed on that day, plays the leading part. I was particularly surprised to learn that this book was never translated into English, because that bloody day belongs to history and the comments upon it of a man so well acquainted with all the leading figures in the tragedy and so closely related to one of them as Otto Strasser must be invaluable to historians.

In 1938 (I am not giving these books in chronological order) he published, in Zürich, under the pseudonym D.G., Erlebte Weltgeschichte, which might be approximately translated as World History in My Tine. This is a well-written and quite absorbing story of the events that began on June 28th, 1914, when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was murdered at Serajevo, and continued by way of the World War to the triumph of Hitler, in 1933. Its last words are 'The Hitler system was born, which will shake Germany and Europe to their foundations'.

At one time and another came also We seek Germany (Wir suchen Deutschland), Whither Hitler? (Wohin reibt Hitler?), Europe of To-morrow (Europa von Morgen). The last of these is an interesting work, based on the ideals of T. G. Masaryk.

While he was still in Germany, and fighting against Hitler, Otto Strasser published another pseudonymous book, about his brother, called simply Gregor Strasser by 'Michael Geismeyer'. It was a delicate and difficult subject for him, because Gregor was still Hitler's chief lieutenant; he, Otto, was Hitler's chief antagonist. This played a part in a characteristic episode of those days. One day Otto Strasser appeared on the platform of the well-known Spichern Säle in Berlin in one of the famous debate-meetings which he introduced in Germany at that time. On this particular evening, his adversary was a Communist speaker, one of the weird alien 'intellectuals' who adorned the then German Communist Party, a 'Professor' Witfogel of the Lenin University. The Professor came off badly in this debate, before an audience consisting of three-fourths of uproarious Communists, and sought to turn the tables and discomfit Otto Strasser by asking him, suddenly, 'Are you the author of Michael Geismeyer's book on Gregor Strasser?' This was an unpleasant question for Otto Strasser, who had written the book from two motives: first, to earn some money, since Hitler's purchase and closure of his publishing house had bankrupted him; and secondly, by a skilful artifice to strengthen Gregor Strasser's position, and the Strasser cause generally, within the National Socialist Party. It was, in fact, a little piece of Black Front strategy. Professor Witfogel had learned of this and knew that if he could convict Otto Strasser of the authorship of the book its purchase would immediately be prohibited for National Socialists by Hitler, and Gregor Strasser's position in the party would be seriously shaken. After a brief hesitation, Otto Strasser answered: 'You know very well that if I answer yes to your question the book will be boycotted and my income from it cut off, and you know that it contains nothing that is different from what I have said to-night and have always said. So you wish only to injure me financially. Nevertheless, the answer is yes, I wrote the book, and you are a swine.'

The unexpected result of this encounter was that the 2000 people present broke into loud applause and Professor Witfogel was not allowed to continue the debate.

Apart from these books, which are all that he can remember, if not all that he has written, Otto Strasser in these crowded years wrote innumerable pamphlets, all in the sense of and about the topics I have touched on in this book with one strange exception, a pamphlet, which I have unfortunately been unable to procure, on the Revolution in Male Attire. He thinks the male clothing of to-day, and I agree, to have touched the lowest depths of ugliness, drabness, discomfort and unsuitability that man's dress has ever reached, and, while pursuing doggedly his ideal of a German Conservative Revolution, he even found time to advocate in print another revolution - that in the habiliments of the men of our time.

The thing that strikes me about his books, especially the Erlebte Weltgeschichte, is that he writes very well, and I find it particularly strange, for this reason alone, that none of them appeared in England. Apart from that, he was, of course, in unique position to know Hitler and the other Nazi leaders, and all the other men who have played a leading part in Germany in the last twenty years, and had information about the inner truth of great events that was available to no other man. It is a curious comment on the state of the world's literature to-day that his books never reached a larger public, when scores of men who had no better sources of information than a file of newspaper cuttings were turning out the most sensational keyhole stuff about Hitler, Göring and the rest.

Appendix Two

THE MILITARY SERVICE OF OTTO STRASSER

I have been at pains to check Otto Strasser's military and civil history - his record of service, that is to say, during the Great War of 1914-18, and his activities in civilian life, particularly his political activities, in the years that followed it.

For one thing, I have a passion for facts. For another, I have usually found that a man's past record gives the best key to his character. For instance, if our rulers had been guided by this principle, and if they desired to do the best for their country, Britain, they could never have fallen into the absurd error of believing -- if they really believed this, and I doubt it -- that Adolf Hitler was a man good at heart but misunderstood, a man who, handled with indulgence, would prove to be an honest treaty-partner, a champion of peace, and a first violin in the sweetly harmonious concert of Europe.

His record is too bad for any British statesman to have believed that. There are far too many gaps in Hitler's record, and they can have no other explanation than that he has something to conceal. He has never given a single detail, that can be corroborated, of his doings in Vienna in the years before the war. Of his service in the war itself much less is known than would be known if all was well; it is significant that towards its end, when it was going badly, he was lying in a distant hospital suffering from some affliction, vaguely attributed to 'gas', which strongly recalls the familiar tactics of the malingerer in that war. The most sinister gap of all in Hitler's record is that which I have discussed at some length in this book - the absence of all explanation for his presence in Munich at a time when it was under Jewish-Communist rule and when all good anti-Reds were gathering afar off to expel this Red regime by force of arms.

The known things about Hitler are even more damning than these damning gaps, for the whole record of his political career, before he came to power and afterwards, has been one of pledges given in order to dupe others and broken immediately the end was attained, without a single exception.

Thus Hitler's record contained not one single thing that could justify any foreign statesman in trusting him, and the gaps in it were even more ominous than the things that were known. Close study of this man's past enabled many writers accurately to state what his future acts would be, and this is the enormous importance, to us, to you, to me, of knowing a man and his past.

The same thing applies exactly to Göring. In Göring's record there are no gaps whatever. Everything is known about him. Everything he has done is creditable - judged as the acts of a man whose lifelong ambition is to humble Britain and to put Germany at the head of the nations of the world. To that end, Göring will use any means whatever; he will stick at nothing. The Reichstag fire; the shoot-to-kill order to the police; the murder of hundreds of his fellow-Germans; the stupendous 'black', or secret, rearmament of Germany, blandly denied to every British and other foreign statesman until a long lead had been established; all these are the unmistakable signs and proofs of Göring's implacability, ruthlessness and lack of all scruple in pursuing the end which he considers patriotic.

If British statesmen a second time ignore these things, and dupe the British public by pretending that Göring, or another man like him, will become the friend of Britain if he be gently and 'tactfully' handled, more disasters await us. Göring's life is an open book compared with Hitler's; but his only law is Germany and Germany's domination in the world, and to that end the destruction of all, chief among them Britain, who stand in the way.

For these reasons I have gone in detail into Otto Strasser's record in this book, and have also described his service in the war of 1914-18. Here is no ambiguity, here are no gaps, any more than there are in the record of his political life after that war. Chapter and verse are contained in the History of the First (Prince Regent Luitpold) Bavarian Field Artillery Regiment. The fourth volume of this history, which was published by the Bavarian War Museum at Munich in 1931, covers the years 1911-20, and therefore includes the war we once called Great. Otto Strasser is one of the most oft-mentioned of the hundreds of officers who appear in its pages. I give below the chief extracts concerning him. The first relates to the last and greatest German offensive in that war, that of March 21st, 1918. It says:

'The 24th Bavarian Infantry Regiment took the enemy first line in thick fog. Its left battalion, the First, had been allotted the task of taking Urvillers from the south-east. Lieutenant Strasser was with it and devoted himself to his especial mission, which was to keep the infantry pressing forward hard behind the curtain of fire. At this point in the line, the method was successful. He found the first enemy trenches flattened out and the few survivors offered little resistance ... Lieutenant Strasser and the scout officer of the First Battalion, Lieutenant Sailer (being held up in their advance by a British machine-gun nest), collected a few volunteers and with them pushed along a trench by means of which they were able to reach the British troops, whom they attacked with hand grenades. They captured the three machine-guns and their crews without loss ... Lieutenant Strasser pushed on some hundreds of yards farther and suddenly saw to his left British guns in action. He decided to take these. He surprised the British artillerymen with a quick attack from the north -- they were firing towards the east -- and killed some of the gunners, who had been reinforced by some infantry. He made prisoners of the remainder, whom he gathered in a dugout. Two British guns were thus put out of action ... Lieutenant Strasser then rejoined the staff of the First Battalion which, with one company of the battalion, was in a captured British trench. Five hundred yards away they saw a British battery in action and Lieutenant Strasser offered to attack it with Lieutenant Sailer. Taking a platoon of men with him, he was able to cover the five hundred yards of open ground and to reach cover midway between two British guns. Four guns, two machine-guns and a complete brigade staff were captured in this engagement. Machine-gun fire hindered a further advance, and Lieutenant Strasser decided to turn one of the captured guns upon the machine-gunners. But as the British artillerymen had rendered their guns useless, two hours' work was needed to make one of them ready for action. Lieutenant Strasser then served this gun himself, shooting over open sights.

'Lieutenant Strasser was nominated for the Max Josef Military Order for his work on this day.'

*

This was the first big engagement in which Otto Strasser took part as an officer (he received his commission towards the end of 1917).

By August the German advance had ceased, American troops were pouring into France, and the German armies were on the defensive. On August 9th the great Allied counter-offensive (which ultimately led to the German collapse and the alleged end of the war) began. Of this day the History of the First Bavarian Field Artillery Regiment says:

'The news of the British attack east of Amiens made a deep impression on us. Lieutenant Strasser, who was carrying on in spite of severe sciatica, at this time wrote in his diary: "When I think of the feeling at home and of the condition of our infantry, I am filled with anxiety, the deepest anxiety. If only the whole army were like the artillery and particularly the artillery officers - ah, then!"'

On August 20th, 1918, the German line began to break and the German retreat began. The History describes how Otto Strasser saved his guns:

'When the advancing enemy was only eight hundred yards distant, Lieutenant Strasser ordered the withdrawal of all his guns save one, and sent an orderly with an appeal for limbers to get this gun away. He took command and fired all his remaining ammunition at the advancing French Colonial troops. At 6.15 p.m. he removed essential parts from the gun and ordered all his men save two bombardiers to retreat, giving one of them a message to say that the limbers must be sent at the gallop. He then went to a point on the road to await the coming of the limber, and saw there three Prussian guns which were bound to fall into the enemy's hands. Lieutenant Hieber, whom he had left in command of the gun, then arrived to report that masses of black troops had captured the battery position vacated by the other guns, and were advancing on the last gun. At this moment the limbers appeared at the gallop. They had already passed the last of the retreating infantry, who had tried to prevent them from coming on, saying that they would only fall into the hands of the French. Lieutenant Strasser succeeded in harnessing six-horse teams to two of the Prussian guns and then went to help Lieutenant Hieber rescue the last of his own guns. The enemy was now within bombing range. The noise of the explosions alarmed both men and horses, and escape seemed impossible. Lieutenant Hieber says: "I attribute our success in saving the gun at the last moment to the coolness and courage of Lieutenant Strasser, who called to the men: 'Steady, don't hurry. Just let them go on throwing their bombs', so that in the end all four guns, his own and the three Prussian guns, were saved". Lieutenant Strasser was the last man to leave the battery position, and came away cursing the French'.

Strasser, says the regimental history, was for his work on this day nominated a second time for the Max Josef Military Order. (He had been wounded, incidentally, on June 6th, but not seriously and did not leave his battery.)

Appendix Three

THE COLONIAL PLAN OF OTTO STRASSER

The thing that has particularly impressed me about Otto Strasser's proposals for the reorganization of Germany is that they do not belong to the legion of such schemes hatched, or half-hatched, since this war began in September 1939. Since that happened, all sorts of people, among them many who earlier denied that the war would come, that Hitler would invade Austria, or Czechoslovakia, or Poland, and particularly that he would ever join hands with Bolshevy, have begun to offer their plans for the re-mapping of Germany and Europe after the war. The history of all their past pronouncements, if anybody remembered it, would show how ill-qualified they are to win a new peace, for they are the people who lost the last one.

Otto Strasser's chief proposal -- the preservation of Germany but the dismemberment of Prussia -- was made before this war began, before Hitler began his swoops, before he even came to power. It was first made immediately after Otto Strasser's breach with Hitler, in 1930, and was published in 1931, and the fact that it has become to-day, in 1940, of such enormous political importance shows that he is a man of the most exceptional farsightedness and a master of his subject. That proposal is the most important thing in this book. It has to be considered in conjunction with his other, domestic proposal for the expropriation of the great Prussian landowners. Strasser would ensure peace by destroying the forces inside Germany that recurrently and incorrigibly work for war, the forces that put Hitler in power and made this war.

It is the most striking proposal, and the most worthy of long examination, that I have seen, and puts him, as I believe, in the first rank of the political thinkers of our time, which can show barely a single statesman of quality, unless Mussolini is one. It entitles Strasser's whole political programme to earnest consideration, and gives weight to his ideas about colonies and Germany's title, to colonial activity.

Otto Strasser's proposals about colonies also date from many years back and were published in January 1938. These proposals, and the arguments with which he supports them, deserve comparison, once more, with Hitler's record in the same matter.

Hitler, in Mein Kampf and for many years after the publication of that book claimed to be an inveterate enemy of German colonial activity, on the ground that ambitions in this direction would bring Germany into antagonism with Britain, whose friendship was vital for her. This professed view about colonies was as mendacious as his hostility to Bolshevy and all his other avowed opinions; it was an attitude assumed to lull Britain into a sense of false security while German rearmament was being rushed forward, and our rulers inevitably succumbed to the blarney.

By the time of Munich, Hitler had got so far as to state his claim to colonies (to Mr. Chamberlain) and in the last years before the present war, indeed, this claim was an open and official one of Hitler's Germany. The Roman Umpire, too, proclaimed the right of Germany to a colonial empire in Africa in October 1937, and this nobly selfless act of brotherly love, which was better calculated than any other to cut off any possible German retreat to London, was one of the astutest of Mussolini's moves.

Otto Strasser was at that time in exile, and fighting Hitler, but he did not, for the sake of financial support in his campaign or of political backing in foreign countries, take the line of least resistance, attack Hitler for his falsehoods in the matter of colonies, and call on his followers to fight against any proposal for a German share in colonial activity. Instead, he put forward his own proposals, in these words:

'Nothing could be more unjust and senseless than to declare the present distribution of colonial territory unchangeable. German emigrants of the Left make themselves ridiculous when they emphatically declare themselves against Germany's colonial claims and thus make themselves the spokesmen of the British or French colonial empires. Mussolini's phrase about the "proletarian nations", the have-nots, and their antagonists the "capitalist nations", the haves, is simply the Marxist idea of class-warfare translated into terms of colonies. But the enemy of such class-distinctions must also be the enemy of such nation-distinctions. He cannot acknowledge that there are "privileged nations" with colonial territories ten, a hundred, or a thousand times as large as the mother country, while other countries pine in the confinement of their space and the meagreness of their raw-material sources. Who can deny that the high standard of living of the British and Dutch peoples, the sound basis of French and Belgian industry, in predominant measure rests on their wealth of colonies, while the low standard of living of Italy and Austria, the raw-material poverty of Switzerland and the Sudetenland is in large degree due to their lack of colonies? By what writ does Portugal, with a stationary population of six to seven million, dispose of a colonial empire of over two million square metres, or more than five times the area of Germany, while Poland, with an ever-growing population of thirty-eight millions, has no colonies?

'But' -- adds Otto Strasser -- 'this objective and just examination of the problem shows the monstrous mendacity of Hitler's colonial claims and their completely reactionary motive and aim, for he is not concerned about a useful solution of the whole problem, about justice, or about a new and better order among the nations. For him, the question is solely one of might, of a share in the booty. That achieved, his Germany would immediately rank itself with the haves and against the have-nots. So might a workman profess Socialist principles until he acquired property, and then with the utmost speed become a defender of the capitalist system against the other Socialists, thus proving that he was never a Socialist!

'The colonial problem cannot be solved by such means. The result would be but an eternal struggle for shares in the booty, while the prevailing order would undergo no change whatever. But it is not only a matter of a share of the booty. Only a fundamental change in the colonial system can lead to that durable settlement of the problem which is so important a condition of European pacification.

'How would the government of a new Germany, after Hitler, envisage such a new system, what would it strive for? The conception immediately arises of a joint colonial activity of all European states, especially the industrial states, that is, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Poland. This would remove from the problem those factors of prestige and might and rivalry which envenom it.'

(I ought to intervene at this point to mention that since Otto Strasser drew up his proposals for the colonial participation of European States, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland have been swallowed up by Hitler, and that even Otto Strasser's conception of a European peace would leave the industrial regions of the last two States, and probably all of Austria, within the Reich, so that a share in colonial activity based on industrial strength would work out very much to Germany's advantage. I also mentioned earlier in this book that I was not in agreement with Otto Strasser's proposals for Austria, the Sudeten-German area of what was Czechoslovakia, and that part of Poland which the Germans miscalled the Polish Corridor. I simply recorded his proposals.)

On the strength of these arguments, Otto Strasser proposes, as the practical means of ensuring a just distribution of colonial activity, the formation of a European Colonial Company, comprising all European states, with the exception of Britain, France, Italy, and Holland, which would be unlikely to join. The chief members, he wrote in January 1938, would thus be Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Hungary, Portugal, Austria, Switzerland, and the Scandinavian and Balkan States if they wished to join. They would participate in the Company in proportion to the size of their populations. The territory to be put at the disposal of this Company would be the former German territories in Africa and the African colonies of Belgium and Portugal. The Company would be under the supervision of the League of Nations.

The former owners in the African territory thus administered by the European Colonial Company, proposes Otto Strasser, should receive from it annually a payment equal to the average of their earnings during the preceding ten years, this to be guaranteed by the League. All colonial services would be taken over by the Company, and would retain their pension and other rights. Flags and official languages would remain unchanged, but the Company's flag would be hoisted alongside, and bilingual speech (French and German) would be gradually introduced in all the Company's territory. New administrative staffs would be trained in colonial schools in the participating countries.

Such were the proposals for 'a just solution of the colonial problem' drawn up by Otto Strasser before Hitler's annexations had begun. To-day, regarded as 'just proposals', they are still attractive. Their practical possibility seems to have receded. They depend, for instance, on the readiness of Belgium and Portugal to place their great African empires under the administration of a 'European Colonial Company', and there is no likelihood of this unless some future peace conference develops in a way that now seems quite improbable. They depend, too, on the readiness of Britain to place the former German colonies in Africa under similar administration, and if Germany loses this war, or better said, if she does not contrive to win it, that seems less likely still. At one point -- by abstention from his last adventure, the attack on Poland -- Hitler could almost certainly have had some such concession in respect of the former German colonies in Africa; I have the strong impression that that card was always held far up the sleeve of our governments. But now?

To-day, these proposals even seem too kind to Germany, which has given the world cause only for ill-will, and none whatever for good will, since March 1938, ten weeks after Otto Strasser drew up this plan. At the time they were written, they were certainly reasonable, and who would say that they were not just? To-day, they remain to throw another light on the mind of a man who may yet play an important part in German affairs.

Appendix Four

THE TWENTY-FIVE POINTS OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM

In order that the theme of this book, the dispute between Otto Strasser and Hitler, may be better understood I give here the 'Twenty-Five Points' - the programme of the National Socialist Party. This programme was already in existence when Hitler, acting as police-spy and agent of Röhm, discovered the little National Socialist Party in Munich in 1919. Afterwards, when he had ousted the first leaders of the party by means of the money with which Röhm supplied him, and had himself become its leader, the 'Twenty-Five Points' were proclaimed as the official programme of the party at its first large meeting, on February 25th, 1920, at the Hofbräuhaus in Munich. At the first congress of the party, on May 22nd, 1920, they were declared to be 'unalterable'. They thus represent the programme which was offered to the electors and show what the millions who voted for Hitler wanted.

The first ten and the last eight of the 'Twenty-Five Points' represent the national, or patriotic, part of National Socialism; to understand them, it should be borne in mind that Germany was at that time a chaotic land, groping in the dark aftermath of defeat; that an enormous number of alien immigrants, chiefly Jews, similar to that which has appeared in England and the British Empire in recent years, had come to Germany, swamped many trades and professions, made itself prominent in politics and dominant in the press, and was prospering while the German masses were nearly starving; and that many Germans detested these conditions and hoped against hope to remedy them.

The first ten Points were:

1. We demand the union of all Germans, on the basis of the right of the self-determination of peoples, to form a Great Germany. [This demand was far more than fulfilled by force, and not in virtue of self-determination, by the invasions of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland.]

2. We demand equality of rights for the German people in its dealings with other nations, and abolition of the peace treaties of Versailles and St. Germain. [This demand was fulfilled in respect of the Treaty of Versailles, which Germany repudiated, while her equality of rights was established by the passive acquiescence of others in this repudiation.]

3. We demand land and territory [colonies] for the nourishment of our people and for settling our surplus population.

4. None but members of the nation may be citizens of the State. None but those of German blood, whatever their creed, may be members of the nation. No Jew, therefore, may be a member of the nation. [This demand was fulfilled by the laws restricting the activities of Jews.]

5. Anyone who is not a citizen of the State may live in Germany only as a guest and must be regarded as being subject to the alien laws.

6. The right of voting on leadership and legislation is to be enjoyed by the citizens of the State alone. We demand therefore that all official appointments, of whatever kind, whether in the Reich, the provinces, or the small communities, shall be granted to citizens of the State alone. We oppose the corrupt parliamentary custom of the State, of filling posts merely with a view to party considerations, and without reference to character or capacity.

7. We demand that the State shall make it its first duty to promote the industry and livelihood of the citizens of the State. If it is not possible to nourish the entire population of the State, foreign nationals (non-citizens of the State) must be excluded from the Reich.

8. All further non-German immigration must be prevented. We demand that all non-Germans who entered Germany after August 2nd, 1914, shall be required forthwith to depart from the Reich. [The first part of this demand was fulfilled, the second part was not, although scores of thousands of the detested immigrants had actually come to Germany since 1914.]

9. All citizens of the State shall possess equal rights and duties.

10. It must be the first duty of every citizen of the State to perform mental or physical work. The activities of the individual must not clash with the interests of the whole, but must proceed within the framework of the community and must be for the general good.

At this point begin the vital seven Points, numbers 11 to 17, which comprise the Socialist part of National Socialism and, with the patriotic part, gave the Party its dual appeal to the electors. Without these socialist clauses, the party could never have attained power. They were taken over by Hitler precisely for that reason; his long debate with Otto Strasser, recorded in this book, shows that he never regarded them seriously. But Otto Strasser, and many more of his followers, did take them seriously. These were the parts of the programme which irresistibly appealed to that social Sehnsucht in the German people of which I have written at length. Not one of these Socialist promises was fulfilled. They were:

11. We demand the abolition of incomes not earned by work. [No step whatever in this direction was ever taken.]

12. In view of the enormous sacrifice of life and property demanded of a nation by every war, personal enrichment through war must be regarded as a crime against the nation. We demand therefore the ruthless confiscation of all war profits. [No action of this kind was taken; the armament-makers in Germany to-day, and during this present war, thrive as freely as those in other lands.]

13. We demand the nationalization of all jointly-owned concerns. [Nothing to this effect was ever done.]

14. We demand that there shall be profit-sharing in the great industries. [No measure to this end was ever enacted.]

15. We demand a generous development of provision for old age. [To the best of my recollection, no improvement was ever made in the old-age insurance or pensions schemes which existed when Hitler came to power.]

16. We demand the creation and maintenance of a healthy middle class, immediate communalization of wholesale warehouses, and their lease at a low rate to small traders, and that the most careful consideration shall be shown to all small purveyors to the State, the provincial administrations, or smaller communities. [This vision of multiple-stores, chain-stores and one-price-stores converted into small-tradesmen's bazaars particularly appealed to the hard-pressed small shopkeeper in the days of Hitler's fight for power and brought him much support from this class. No move to fulfil this promise was ever made.]

17. We demand a land-reform suitable to our national requirements, the passing of a law for the confiscation without compensation of land for communal purposes, the abolition of interest on mortgages, and prohibition of all speculation in land. [This demand was really the most important and vital in the whole programme. 'Confiscation without compensation' was aimed directly at the great warmongering landlords of Prussia, many of them incurably insolvent. The aim was to settle a sturdy stock of peasant smallholders on those bankrupt acres. 'Abolition of interest on mortgages and prohibition of all speculation in land' was aimed at the Jewish banker and usurer in the other rural districts, whose slave the peasant had become. This is still, to-day, a burning issue in the whole German problem, as I have shown in the chapter about Otto Strasser's 'German Socialism'. Not only was nothing ever done to fulfil this Point of the programme, but it was actually discarded long before the Party came to power, for Hitler, as an equivalent for the financial subsidies he received from the lords of land and industry -- one of them, Herr Thyssen, admitted to this in a statement he made after his flight from Germany not long ago -- on April 13th, 1928, added a rider to the famous Point 17 which said. 'It is necessary to reply to the false interpretation on the part of our opponents of Point 17. Since the National Socialist Party admits the principle of private property, it is obvious that the expression "confiscation without compensation" refers merely to the creation of possible legal means of confiscating, when necessary, land illegally acquired, or not administered in accordance with the national welfare. It is therefore directed in the first instance against the Jewish companies which speculate in land.']

[No land-reform was made, no confiscation-law passed, mortgage-interest was not abolished, nor was speculation in land made impossible. On the contrary, the great landowners were chief among the powers behind the scenes which made Hitler dictator.]

This comparison between Hitler's preaching and practice in the social section of his programme is necessary for the understanding of this book and of the German situation as it will take shape in the later stages of the present war.

The remaining eight Points are less important. They are:

18. We demand ruthless war upon all those whose activities are injurious to the common interest. Common criminals against the nation, usurers, profiteers, etc., must be punished with death, whatever their creed or race. (No 'profiteers or usurers' have ever been punished with death in Hitler's Germany, to the best of my knowledge, and very few of them have been punished at all, only a showpiece here and there for propagandist purposes. The only people who have been put to death were those who were charged with treason in one form or another - that is, with endangering the secrecy of Germany's rearmament.]

19. We demand that the Roman Law, which serves the materialistic world order, shall be replaced by a German common law.

20. With the aim of opening to every capable and industrious German the possibility of higher education and consequent advancement to leading positions, the State must consider a thorough reconstruction of our national system of education. The curriculum of all educational establishments must be brought into line with the requirements of practical life. Directly the mind begins to develop, the schools must aim at teaching the pupil to understand the idea of the State. We demand the education of specially gifted children of poor parents, whatever their class or occupation, at the expense of the State. [Nothing was done to fulfil the first and last sentences of this Point.]

21. The State must apply itself to raising the standard of health in the nation by protecting mothers and infants, prohibiting child labour and increasing bodily efficiency by legally obligatory gymnastics and sports, and by extensive support of clubs engaged in the physical training of the young. [Germany, under all regimes, is among the leading States of the world in these matters, and very much was done after Hitler came to power to fulfil the second part of this claim, but chiefly from the motive of militarization and war.]

22. We demand the abolition of mercenary troops and the formation of a national army. [This Point has been completely, unreservedly, exuberantly, and enthusiastically fulfilled, and more than fulfilled. The history of German high-speed rearmament is a whole encyclopaedia in itself.]

23. We demand legal warfare against conscious political lies and their dissemination in the press. In order to facilitate the creation of a German national press we demand: (a) that all editors of, and contributors to, newspapers employing the German language must be members of the nation; (b) that special permission from the State shall be necessary before non-German newspapers may appear, these not necessarily to be printed in the German language; (c) that non-Germans shall be prohibited by law from participating financially in or influencing German newspapers, and that the penalty for contravention of the law shall be the suppression of any such newspaper, and immediate deportation of the non-German involved. It must be forbidden to publish newspapers which do not conduce to the national welfare. We demand the legal prosecution of all tendencies in art and literature of a kind likely to disintegrate our life as a nation, and the suppression of institutions which militate against the above-mentioned requirements. [Readers may judge for themselves how far falsehood was expelled from, and truth enthroned in, the German press by the regime of Goebbels. As for the last sentence of this Point, a good deal that was necessary and healthy was accomplished through elimination of alien and meretricious influences.]

24. We demand liberty for all religious denominations in the State, so far as they are not a danger to it and do not militate against the morality and moral sense of the German race. The Party, as such, stands for positive Christianity, but does not bind itself in the matter of creed to any particular confession. It combats the Jewish-materialist spirit within and without us, and is convinced that our nation can achieve permanent health from within only on the principle that the welfare of all comes before the welfare of the individual.

25. That all the foregoing requirements may be realized, we demand the creation of a strong central power of the Reich. Unconditional authority of the politically central parliament over the entire Reich and its organization in general. The formation of Diets and vocational chambers for the purpose of executing the general laws promulgated by the Reich in the various States of the Confederation. The leaders of the Party swear to proceed regardless of consequences -- if necessary at the sacrifice of their lives -- towards the fulfilment of the foregoing Points.

[Of this last Point, I need only say that the demand for a strong central power was most amply fulfilled, and that the leaders of National Socialism have not proceeded regardless of consequences to the fulfilment of any of the Points other than numbers 1, 2, 4, 22, and 25, while none of them has yet found it necessary to sacrifice his life - unless Ernst Röhm or Gregor Strasser were among those present at the meetings of February 25th and May 22nd, 1920, and I have not been able to ascertain this. If they were, they have kept their word, though not quite in the way they expected.

NOTES

1: Lady Oxford, writing in the ~Daily Sketch~ about the time war broke out, gave the perfect example of the British sense of humour and of the difference between these fortunate people, the British, who possess it, and those others who have it not.

She found herself one day -- she wrote -- seated next to Joachim von Ribbentrop at a luncheon table and said to him inevitably -- deary, deary me the horror of this inevitability -- 'The fault I have to find with the German race is that they have never had a sense of humour'. Neither Goethe nor Wagner, she added, had possessed one; the only great German writer who a famous humorist was the Jew Heine. Herr von Ribbentrop replied that Herr Hitler and himself had often rolled on the floor in uncontrollable laughter. 'Had he not said this seriously', remarked Lady Oxford, 'I would have suspected that he was pulling my leg. I said: "And do you really think that ~this~ shows a sense of humour? I can only say that if any of my children had done it I would have sent them to bed".'

2: In the German Republic of those days, the various states had substantial independent powers. Prussia was bigger than all the other sixteen states together; having 38,000,000 inhabitants of a total of 62,000,000 and an area of 113,000 square miles of a total area of 181,000, Prussia comprised over three-fifths of the entire Reich. Prussia and other North German states had at that time banned Hitler, as a once-convicted Putschist, from entering their territory, so that his activity was in practice restricted to the largest South German state of Bavaria, with 7,500,000 inhabitants. The political battle, however, was naturally waged first and foremost in North Germany, particularly Prussia, which was not only preponderant in size and population but also contained the capital, the seat of the Reich Government, and that of the powerful Prussian Government. Because he was thus unable to conduct his campaign on what was actually the battleground -- Prussia -- Hitler delegated the leadership there to Gregor Strasser (in this narrative the term 'North Germany', as indicating the area of Gregor Strasser's authority, for practical purposes may be taken to mean Prussia, although other small states in the North were also included). This meant that Gregor Strasser, although nominally Hitler's representative, was in a position of enormous power in the party throughout the greater part of the Reich. As his views differed from those of Hitler in essential principles, this led to a state of conflict between Gregor Strassor, at the head of the party in North Germany, and Hitler in Munich, and the history of his party's struggle for power and ultimate triumph cannot be understood without a knowledge of this simultaneous struggle between Gregor Strasser, supported by his brother Otto, and Hitler. It was actually a struggle for the soul of the party. Some years later, the ban on Hitler's appearance in Prussia and North Germany was lifted. Gregor Strasser's personal hold on the party was then gradually broken, by means which will be shown in the course of this narrative. The final encounter came on the eve of the attainment of power on January 30th, 1933, when the policy advocated by Gregor Strasser was rejected in favour of that recommended by Göring, and Gregor Strasser's rivals in the party, Göring and Goebbels chief among them, accused Strasser, to Hitler, of treachery. His relegation and disgrace followed; and his murder on June 30th, 1934, was the sequel, and the closing act in the drama.

3: This buying of German postage stamps, which had to be smuggled back to Otto Strasser in Prague and used for stamping new consignments of postal propaganda, which in their turn had to be smuggled into Germany and posted there, was in itself a most dangerous undertaking, for the Secret Police were doing their utmost to trace the source of the leaflets, and had probably instructed the post offices to keep a watch on anyone buying large quantities of stamps.

This very danger, as it is interesting to recall, caused the British authorities, in the 1914-1918 war, to forge German, Austrian and Bavarian stamps, so that the agents who carried the British propaganda leaflets across neutral frontiers for posting inside the enemy countries should not need to endanger their lives by buying large quantities of stamps at the post offices. These 'propaganda forgeries' were apparantly never actually used, because the war ended just when they were ready, and for that reason none bearing a postmark has ever been discovered. But unused specimens found their way through underground channels to the stamp-dealing market and are to-day sought by collectors.