At the university, however, where he was still struggling after that degree, he was equally unpopular among the students, the majority of whom were what we should to-day call Fascists or Nazis, and was pilloried as the leader of a 'Red Hundred'. Arriving one morning at the university, he found a notice on the board announcing that he had been debarred from further study there 'pending a disciplinary investigation', and on his furious inquiry for the reason was told that his war record was suspect. By producing the official war history of his regiment, and other documents, he was able to reduce the Rector to a state of contrition and to have the insinuation withdrawn with all ceremony in the presence of the entire Students' Corps of the university, in full regalia.

But an uncompromising man was a lonely man in those days, as now. Disgusted with everything, he left the Socialist Party. The second political period in his life came to an end. For five years he stood aloof from parties, and for three years aloof, almost, from politics; complete abstention from them would be an impossibility for this man.

In March 1921, at long last, he took his degree, at Würzburg, and is thus fated to be known to the end of his days as Doctor Otto Strasser. That opened the door to a minor appointment in the Ministry of Food, where he prosaically represented the interest of authority in artificial fertilizers and the cultivation of moors. This lasted two years. Then, one day, Count von Hertling, his commanding officer in the war, visited the Ministry. He had become head of a big industrial concern, saw Otto Strasser, and offered him an important post in it. Strasser gladly accepted. So, until 1923, as he says, 'ich sass brav in meinem Ministerium und in meiner Industriestellung, and habe eigentlich keine Politik getrieben'. 'I sat like a good boy in the Ministry and in my job, and hardly touched politics.'

November 1923 was to alter that, because it brought the Hitler Putsch in Munich and a change in Otto Strasser's views about Hitler; but a digression is necessary to keep the thread of this story unbroken.

Otto Strasser had first met Hitler in the autumn of 1920, at the time of his embitterment with all parties. He was on holiday, visiting his parents in Bavaria, when his brother Gregor invited him to Landeshut, saying that General Ludendorff, a great hero of Otto's from the war, and one Adolf Hitler, then little known, would be present. At this lunch, says Otto Strasser, 'Ludendorff made a great impression on me. Hitler did not. He was too servile to Ludendorff, and behaved himself like a battalion orderly speaking to a general. Ludendorff was like a block of granite; Hitler, like a nervous, half-hysterical spouter. He used the Jews as a common denominator for all political problems. I told Gregor that I did not want to join the party and would prefer to wait; the only thing I liked about it, I said, was the name, National Socialist, und Du ['and you', that is, his brother, Gregor]. Throughout 1921 and 1922, when I was out of politics, I had many disputes with Gregor about Hitler and the Party. I never felt drawn towards it and would not join. Hitler, after that lunch, always spoke of me as an Intellektbestie.'

Intellektbestie is difficult adequately to translate. 'One of those intellectual cranks', perhaps. It is the sort of term a man of inferior merit may use about another whose arguments have irritated and baffled him. Hitler cannot argue; the slightest hint of contradiction or challenge makes him angry and hysterical. His great good fortune, or skill, is that he never had to join in open debate with an adversary, entering Parliament and becoming dictator only when all opposition had been crushed.

But to resume the thread of the story: Gregor Strasser, several months before this lunch, had heard of Hitler, travelled to Munich, found himself in wide agreement with Hitler's views, and thereupon enlisted his little private army bodily in the National Socialist Party as its independent Gau, or regional organization, for Lower Bavaria. Until then, the National Socialist Party existed only in skeleton form in Munich alone; the recruitment of Gregor Strasser's Verband Nationalgesinnter Soldaten Niederbayerns marked its first extension outside Munich.

Gregor Strasser became Regional Leader, with Heinrich Himmler, the dreaded Secret Police and SS Chief of to-day, as his secretary. Gregor Strasser had already seen that he could not indefinitely keep his private army of foot and artillery together; those days cannot be described as piping ones of peace, but the war was nevertheless receding, the times were growing quieter, the men were getting on with their jobs and forgetting to clean their rifles or turn up on parade, and Gregor Strasser thus realized that he must either disband his organization or turn it into something political. The Reds had been driven from Bavaria, anyway; indeed, in all Germany, Bavaria alone was Red-free; everywhere else the Socialists shared power.

In Bavaria, von Epp and his chief-of-staff Ernst Röhm now ruled. After the triumphal eviction of the Reds in May 1919, instead of restoring the legal, exiled Government, they had, against the wish of Berlin and of the Reichswehr regular troops who had helped them, installed a bourgeois government without any Socialists. They wished to use Bavaria as a base from which the rest of Germany could be similarly cleansed.

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ERNST RÖHM

Röhm, an energetic soldier of revolutionary mind, was the real ruler of Bavaria; von Epp was a fine soldier, but not a brilliant thinker. Röhm had all the politics and parties of Munich at his fingertips, and employed an army of agents. Among them was the man Adolf Hitler. One day Röhm (to whom all political meetings in Munich had to be reported) said to Hitler, 'I've an announcement here of a meeting of something called the N.S.D.A.P. (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei). Go along and see what sort of a show it is'.

Here you see how, twenty years ago as I write, the plan or plot was born in an office in Munich that now has let the devil loose on us all again. Von Epp, a remarkably fine figure of a soldier, probably never had an unworthy motive in his life, and simply burned to clean up his country, as he understood cleanliness, and make it a power among nations again. Röhm was a thought too bawdy even for a hardened mind, but by the common judgment of his acquaintances was a good and loyal companion, a brave soldier, and an exceptionally good organizer.

What freakish trick of fate caused him to pick on this epileptic mongrel Hitler, whose virtues are even less than his vices, and he has no vices, this man who cannot prove what he did in Vienna before the war, or even adequately what he did in the war, or what he did in Munich after the war - until Röhm picked on him?

Röhm, sitting at his desk, chose his own executioner in the nondescript fellow standing at attention on the other side of it. More, he chose the man who was to plunge all Europe into war again. More still, he chose the man who, as I am now coming to think, is built entirely of hatreds, but among those hatreds keeps the worst for the people whose destiny he has in his hand. For the strangest passages in the conversations with Hitler which Dr. Hermann Rauschning reports are those verbal orgasms in which he frequently speaks of 'sacrificing the lives of one or two million Germans', of his determination, in some particular circumstances, 'to sacrifice a new German generation', and so on.

Hitler went to the meeting and reported to Röhm (all this information comes from Otto Strasser): 'This is a workman's party. It's something good, the sort of thing we could use, Herr Hauptmann.' Röhm was obsessed with Germany's isolation and defencelessness in the world, with the need for a new army - a secret army. He saw that the old-soldier organizations, like Strasser's Verband and the various Free Corps, deteriorated as the war receded, and he wanted, as did Gregor Strasser, to build a political movement which would reinvigorate them. But his real aim was to create, in the guise of Storm Troopers, a new army under the cloak of that political movement.

Hitler, with his extraordinary instinct, had recognized that the little N.S.D.A.P. was the ideal instrument for the purpose he and his masters had in mind; hence the report, 'We can use this, Herr Hauptmann'. Röhm had already remarked Hitler's talent for propaganda and political agitation, and had chosen him as one of his agents for that reason, and now said to him, in effect, 'Buy the firm out; we can make something of it'.

Röhm's sole condition was the formation of the Storm Troops, the Brown Army. Through this, he counted on remaining the master of the movement. He frequently said: 'All the rest is a matter of indifference to me; I need a well-disciplined private army'.

To this end, he gave Hitler the money to have placards printed, and to buy an obscure little local sporting-sheet, which published racing-tips and football results, called the Völkischer Beobachter. As the man with the money, Hitler was able to throw out the founders of the little party. He never altered its programme, which then already existed, and would never permit any discussion of it - though hardly any of its tenets have been fulfilled by him. The Brown Army was formed, by Röhm; for it Röhm borrowed the brown shirt from one of the Free Corps (Rossbach's) and the swastika from another (Ehrhardt's).

Thus did a soldier of fortune sign his own death warrant and bring disaster on Europe again, that day in Munich twenty years ago as I write. A few other details about this birth of the Hitler Party, culled from Otto Strasser's special knowledge, deserve to be recorded here:

'One of Hitler's innumerable lies, in the legend he has built up, is that he was "the seventh member" of the N.S.D.A.P. At the time when Röhm sent him to report on it, it already had several hundred members. He became the seventh member of the executive committee, in charge of publicity. Nor did he invent "National Socialism". The party was founded by one Harrar and Anton Drexler; they copied it from an Austrian party of the same name, the National Socialist Party, founded by the Sudeten Germans Jung and Knirsch; and they in their turn took the idea from the Czechs. A young Czech labour leader, Klovacs, in about 1892, seceded with the Czech workers from the Socialist Party in pre-war Austria-Hungary because its leadership and methods were "Jewish, international and German", and founded in Bohemia the first "National Socialist Party", whose most famous members were, later, Masaryk and Benesh. The only man in the party who has no conception of real National Socialism is Adolf Hitler.'

All this information is Otto Strasser's. The last sentence is literally his. It is, in my judgment, literally true.

Such were the beginnings of the movement which took root and grew -- to the misfortune of Europe, under the leadership of a professional perjurer -- while Otto Strasser was 'sitting like a good boy in his Ministry and his job and not bothering with politics'. In 1923 came its first attempt to seize power, and one effect of this was to bring Otto Strasser back into politics.

This was the story. By 1923, von Epp and Röhm no longer ruled Bavaria, but had been displaced in favour of a regime more in sympathy with Berlin. Röhm had already been elbowed aside by Hitler (who later recalled him, from Bolivia, to take over the Brown Army). Hitler, with General Ludendorff and Göring, now Storm Troop commander, attempted to displace the Bavarian Government by force, hoping, as von Epp and Röhm had previously hoped, from Bavaria to reach out and rule the Reich. Gregor Strasser was commander of the Landeshut Battalion in this exploit. Hitler, marching with his Storm Troops in the expectation that he would not be resisted, was received by the bullets of the regular troops. He fled, was arrested and imprisoned; Ludendorff was wounded; Göring was wounded but escaped abroad; Gregor Strasser was sentenced to one and a half years imprisonment. The first Hitler Putsch collapsed.

This brought a complete change in Otto Strasser's opinions about Hitler. Until then, he had not taken the National Socialist Party seriously. He had regarded it as half-reactionary, and therefore no party for a revolutionary Socialist; or, to quote his own words, as a 'cheap edition of reaction, with a red cover on it to delude the buyer'.

But in Munich, on November 9th, 1923, the bullets of a reactionary regime were fired at Hitler and his men. 'My brother was right after all,' thought Otto Strasser. 'This is a revolutionary movement, this is a Socialist movement. Hitler's flirtations with the generals and big business will have to stop now.'

This view was strengthened by Ludendorff's famous subsequent speech -- the fascination of Ludendorff for many German officers must not be forgotten -- in which he said, 'Now I know that the salvation and reconstruction of Germany are not possible in collaboration with the reactionaries'.

Ludendorff at that time solemnly discarded all further caste-fellowship with his kind. Otto Strasser's regiment had sent a circular letter to all its officers, including Strasser, telling them that they must choose between the Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria (the heir to the abolished crown) and General Ludendorff, and make a declaration of loyalty in this sense. Otto Strasser immediately plumped for Ludendorff, and was forthwith excluded from the Officers' Corps of his regiment.

By these means, Otto Strasser, the fervent admirer of the German Officers' Corps, the Free Corps, anti-Red soldier of Munich, the Socialist Hundertschaftler of Steglitz, the undaunted and undeviating seeker after 'German Socialism', was drawn again into the whirlpool of politics. He thought he had found the thing he believed in.

His brother Gregor remained in prison, with Hitler, until at the election of May 1924 he was elected to parliament and thereupon released. Hitler remained in prison, writing Mein Kampf as he says - another untruth. Hitler being in prison, Gregor Strasser took over the leadership of the entire party, including North Germany, whither it had now spread through the recruitment, en masse, of the Völkische movement of Graefe.

One of Gregor Strasser's first actions was to expel the clown Julius Streicher from the party, which he then proceeded to organize and expand. He was its head, and remained its real head for some time, even after Hitler's release from prison, for two good reasons. First, Hitler, though free, was forbidden to speak throughout the whole of North Germany, and could not have taken part in the work for this reason. Second, and this shows the financial plight of the men who made Hitler's party for him, Gregor Strasser, as a Reichstag Deputy, held the coveted free-railway-pass which enabled him to travel to and from Berlin without cost, and this was vitally important. Hitler, as an Austrian, could not, even if he would, have been returned to Parliament, and this is another example of his stupendous luck, for in open debate he would so quickly have been routed, that his rise to power and triumph would have been almost inconceivable; the myth would have been shattered too soon.

Hitler was a discredited and almost forgotten man. Gregor Strasser, far more popular, much better understood, was the leader of the National Socialist Party. But Hitler had one great source of strength. He was the only one of them all with any money. This he obtained from big-business magnates and other interested parties behind the scenes, by selling out piecemeal, in private parleys, the Socialist parts of the National Socialist programme, to which the Strassers and their friends attached vital importance. But that only became known much later.

Otto Strasser, after that Munich Putsch, gingerly began to feel the political waters again with one toe by writing leading articles under a pseudonym for the Völkischer Beobachter. Now his brother Gregor came to him and renewed his urgent appeals. 'We are independent in North Germany now', he said, 'and we can give the party substance and meaning, a countenance and an ideology. Now, lieber Otto, you will have to help me. WE will make and mould this party.'

In this way, Otto Strasser, the revolutionary Socialist in persistent search of revolutionary Socialism, joined the National Socialist Party in 1995. Not Hitler, the political foundling without a clean page in his record, but the two Strassers, men of clear ideas and unimpeachable history, were at that time the real leaders of the party. Believing that he had found the political haven where he fain would be, Otto Strasser set to work.

Chapter Six

HEIL AND FAREWELL

Five years passed from that day when Otto Strasser, joined the Heil-Hitlerists to the day when he bade Hitler farewell, telling him to his face that he was a windbag, a fraud and a humbug, and resumed his lonely fight for a German, revolutionary, Socialism. (Neither he nor his brother Gregor, incidentally, ever used the form of address, 'Mein Führer', in speaking to Hitler. They were both men of sturdy and independent character and called him 'Herr Hitler' to the end.)

These five years were filled with the struggle between the Strassers and Hitler for the power within the National Socialist Party, for the power in Germany. They did not see the struggle in that light, they did not feel themselves to be working against Hitler. They only saw that Hitler was betraying the things he claimed to represent, the promises he had made, and sought to bring him back to them. Inevitably, the men who thought as they did grouped themselves around the Strassers. But they did not consciously struggle for power, only for the soul of Hitler and the principles of the party.

This conflict of itself developed into a struggle for power, because Hitler was not interested in principles he had proclaimed to catch votes; they were for him not principles at all, but tactics, and he implacably sought to get rid of any who tried, by pinning him to principles, to cramp what he regarded as tactics.

In this way he came to look upon all men who had really believed in the professed tenets of National Socialism as his enemies, as intriguing foes within the walls, and he turned on them, to destroy them. But these men naturally resisted, feeling that they were right and that he was wrong, or misled. They had invested time, money, strength and idealism in the party, and would not give way or allow themselves to be brusquely elbowed aside. In this way, the struggle became one for power.

It ended in the triumph of Hitler and the rout of the Strassers. Otto Strasser seems to me to-day, when I look back upon those years in Germany, to be the only man among all the leading National Socialists who both saw that Hitler was a cheap cheat, and had the courage to say so and take up the struggle against him.

Even his brother Gregor seems never quite to have discerned this truth. His loyalty to Hitler survived all tests, and his persistent argument, in his innumerable discussions with the disbelieving Otto, was that 'the horse is bucking, certainly, but it is going the right way and we shall contrive to stay on it', to which Otto invariably replied. 'You are wrong; the horse is not bucking, but travelling in the wrong direction, and we cannot alter that'.

Gregor had an easy-going streak in his pugnacious nature which always led him, in the decisive moment, to give way to Hitler, and this affected the course of European history. For if he had broken away from Hitler with his brother, the National Socialist Party would certainly have split, and Germany and Europe would have been spared the militarist nightmare in which they now live; or, even if the party had not split, the claim-to-the-succession of the two Strassers, to-day, would be irresistible. The one Strasser alone, Otto, has a much harder and longer way to travel, but he is well in the running.