have given lengthy quotations from this order, because it was issued so long before the war openly began and shows how clearly Otto Strasser and his followers saw the course of coming events. Men who are so well instructed need to be reckoned with.

For that reason I quote something of another document, not this time an order issued by Otto Strasser to his men, but a report on the situation in Germany made by his followers there and smuggled out to him. In its exact forecast of events, and in some of the other things it says, it is even more remarkable, and excellently well illustrates the interplay, between Strasser in exile and his men in Germany, which was kept up until the outbreak of war and still has not quite stopped.

This document knows nothing of the doubts which at the time -- July 28th, 1939, nearly five weeks before the outbreak of war -- racked the British press and Britain's representatives on the score of Hitler's intentions. Was he bluffing, or was he not bluffing? Would he seize Danzig, would he not seize Danzig? Would he stop there, would he not stop there? And all the old dreary litany of the years 1933-39.

It says that Hitler's determination to crush and partition Poland by one means or another, 'à la Munich, or by war', is unshakable. 'None who knows him and his policy can have the smallest doubt that he will in 1939 fulfil his solemn undertaking to incorporate Danzig in the Reich. It is quite certain that he will do this - because by this means he can begin the dissolution of Poland, which is an essential condition of his further foreign policy. The Munich method would of course suit him better; but if this should not be possible he is just as ready for the "little war" with Poland as for the "big war" with the Western Powers.'

The document then goes on to give a precise forecast of the course of the Polish campaign - a concentric attack by four German armies, planned to bring about a Polish collapse and to overrun Warsaw within three weeks. This would enable him, after fortifying his new frontier, to transfer the bulk of the German Army to the West. About the summer of 1940, says the author of this document, the inevitable 'great war' would begin with the lightning-like occupation of Rumania and Denmark, as sources of oil and food supplies, and with an attack on Holland.

'The domestic situation in Germany', says the document, will first show signs of movement at that point, and may rapidly develop in a manner likely to make it a decisive factor in the further course of the war. It is beyond doubt that the German people will at first support the Hitler regime in a war against Poland. Not only the feeling for Danzig and the antagonism to the Poles are responsible for this, but also the expectation that England will remain neutral. This expectation may he illusory, but it must not be forgotten that the speeches and actions of the Chamberlain Government have nourished such illusions until quite recently. The immediate intervention of England in the war would thus at first only lend new popularity to the old tune of perfidious Albion, though it would unquestionably give the German people a mighty jolt. But this shock would have really deep and lasting effects only if the British and French air fleets should bomb German towns. It is true that a people with good nerves and a good conscience is rather provoked into stubborner resistance than cowed by air attack, but it is equally sure that the effect on a people with exhausted nerves and a bad conscience must sow the seeds of panic. But the German people in 1939 has these exhausted nerves, and in its great majority has also a guilty conscience, because it has had to suppress its better instincts and knowledge for so long from fear of the government's terror. As long as tidings of victory come in, they will cancel out the hatred of the enemies of Hitlerism and the latent panic of the masses. But as soon as it becomes clear that an offensive war against the Western Powers impends, a revolutionary situation will immediately develop in Germany, which can only be aggravated by attempts to repress it. The fate of Hitler and the war, of peace, and of Europe depend on the use that is made of that revolutionary situation in Germany.'

This document, also, like Otto Strasser's order, assumes that the great offensive against the Western Powers must come, and I am doubtful of this. Everything would be much simpler if it would come.

But in all other respects these two documents, written so long before the war, seem to me most apt to this story. They show a revolution in the womb. It may be stillborn or it may be a lusty infant, but the embryo is there, and in these papers you see it. They show how clearly, and with what a small margin of error, these unknown men looked into Hitler's mind, into the future of Germany, and into the war, and made their plans accordingly. That is the way a Black Front works.

This is the way that Nemesis stealthily approaches from the shadows. In the story of Otto Strasser and his Black Front these two documents are vivid illustrations.

Chapter Ten

FOURTH REICH?

I have told the story of a German, Otto Strasser, as far as he has lived it. It has taken him to penurious exile in Paris, but he has never ceased to struggle and has never counted the cost. His day may dawn soon.

Hitler's day is already closing. He becomes the prey of the historians; in the tranquillity of a later day they will be able soberly to examine him. For us, who still have our lives to live, he is already yesterday's news, though he will plague us a while yet.

He was the destroyer; as Otto Strasser says, his part in our times was a destructive one, and he has accomplished it. He has wrecked the lives and homes of millions and may yet wreck those of millions more.

But his course is nearly run, and for us, who live in these times, the important things are: what men will succeed him; what sort of Germany will follow his Germany; shall we at last be able to live at peace with that Germany; shall we at last be able to plan our future and live for our countries instead of being called on every so often by elderly gentlemen to die for them; and, above all, is there hope that a better social order will come out of this war, that the high hopes with which the 1914 generation went to war can yet be realized; or is the 1939 generation to be a lost generation, too?

The hopes of a better order, as I think, are still not good, unless new men and new ideals arise in the later stages of the war. At its beginnings, men see far less clearly than at the beginning of the last war, what they are fighting for. Mr. Chamberlain, in the course of his weekly statements about the war, has only once said anything that a plain man could bite on, and then he used four words of French: Il faut en finir.

That is true; that a man can understand; that is the thing our inner voices tell us; we must have done with this nightmare. But after that Mr. Chamberlain always spoke in English, and said of course we did not want to pull up 'the old frontier posts' (are those planted by Hitler after his four invasions 'old'?), that we did not want 'a vindictive peace', and so on, and in the midst of war we were at appeasement.

The awful danger looms ahead that after this war the process of deterioration in all the standards of truth and justice and humanity will continue further; that it will not be used to wipe out the real evils that grew up between 1933 and 1939 and to resume the onward-and-upward movement that came with the nineteenth century and would probably have continued unchecked but for the lamentable discovery of coal and the invention of the new form of slavery, machine-slavery.

This period of destruction, in which Hitler has played the biggest part yet, has been going on for thirty-five years. In all that time Europe has gone from crisis to crisis and from war to war: Morocco crisis, Tripoli war, Balkan crisis, Balkan wars, a World War which left half Europe in ruins, then revolution, anarchy, inflation, Putsches, and gradually more little wars, the Turco-Greek war, the Abyssinian war, the Rhineland crisis, the bloodless Austrian, Sudetenland and Prague wars, the Albanian war, the Polish war, and now, again, the big war.

If this continues, we shall have the 'Chinese conditions' in Europe that I wrote about in a memorandum of 1936; a war would come in Europe soon, if it were not prevented, I said, and this war would either end in a quick victory for Germany or in a protracted struggle which would degenerate into a kind of Chinese chaos in Europe.

If we are to survive at all, we must get back to a stable and an honourable order in Europe, and we cannot do that without Germany. For this reason, the Germany that will come of this war is, once more and yet again, the key to our own lives. You cannot resume the march towards civilization by barbaric methods, as Hitler proclaimed, and as our many influential old wives, terrified of the Reds with whom he presently linked arms, longed to believe.

And this is the greatest danger, as I think, in this war; that our rulers, though disillusioned about Hitler, will seek to establish in Germany a regime of men as much like themselves as possible, without regard for the longing that exists in men's souls for a better, a juster and a stable order - a longing that in perpetual disappointment leads to desperation and anarchy.

This is the reason why I shiver when I see the figure of Göring advancing upstage. Göring means fire and sword - the Reichstag fire and the present war.

Men who used to think that Hitler was a boon to mankind, or at all events to mankind of their own particular class, are now turning their eyes on Göring. We ought really to have known better about Hitler, they think; was he not a housepainter? Now Göring - ah, that's a man, a sahib. What a pity he was not the Führer! Perhaps he will be yet.

So you read that the Marquess of Londonderry on January 14th, 1940, though he was now convinced of Hitler's 'unbalanced mind', has 'a fairly accurate appreciation of Göring's character'. And this appreciation is that 'Göring is loyal and dependable in a crisis. He is a real German; he could be cruel and ruthless and unscrupulous, but I would sooner deal with Field-Marshal Göring than any German that I have met.'

And so too with Sir Nevile Henderson, whose delusions about Hitler and Hitler's National Socialism ('this great social experiment') persisted long. He did not know Germany well when he became our Ambassador there, a year or two before the invasions began, and took long to learn. 'Göring may be a blackguard,' he said, in January 1940, 'but not a dirty blackguard.' The distinction may seem a fine one to people of simple thought. To subtler minds it contains a great difference. A blackguard is just a man who might murder his fellow-officers and their wives, put thousands of his fellow-countrymen in concentration camps, fire a Reichstag and the like - all black deeds, perhaps, but not dirty. A dirty blackguard is presumably a man who consorts with Bolshevy.

So there we have it, all over again, in the selfsame words. The same illusion; or else, the same wish-to-be-duped. The same danger to this country, to Europe, and to our common future. Göring, the Reichstag fire-man, the shoot-to-kill order man, the executioner of General Schleicher, Frau Schleicher, Gregor Strasser and countless other defenceless people; the secret-rearmament wizard; the man who in his first speech after this war began proclaimed that 'if my soldier's heart had its way I would show these Engländer that they can he beaten'. He is 'unscrupulous', but also 'loyal and dependable in a crisis'.

Il faut en finir. How? We shall never have done with this thing our livelong day, if this mentality continues to govern England. Göring is as bad for us, for Germany, for Europe as Hitler, or worse. A consolation of mine, as a writer, is that nine months before this war broke out, at Christmas 1938, I wrote for an American paper an article which said that, when it broke out, this Göring racket would soon follow. I kept the typescript by me, and it is becoming, as the Germans say, aktuell, or highly topical.

I mention this because I want to say, in time, that any deal with Göring would be disastrous for us. Göring, more than Hitler, has led us to our present pass. He was the man who told Reuter's correspondent in December 1934: 'English anxiety about a threat from the air is senseless, for Germany has not the technical means to attempt an air attack. Of course we have a few experimental machines, but to suggest that we have hundreds of military aeroplanes is ridiculous.' And in that very same month, December 1934, Mr. Baldwin stated: 'It is not the case that Germany is rapidly approaching equality with us. If Germany continues to execute her air programme without acceleration, and if we continue to carry out ours at the present approved rate, we estimate that we shall have in a year's time in Europe a margin -- in Europe alone -- of nearly 50 per cent'. And just twelve weeks later, on March 12th, 1935, Göring, whose secret air force had in the meantime reached the desired point of superiority, ironically told another British newspaper correspondent: 'German aerial rearmament is now completed and an independent Air Ministry has been set up under my leadership'. A few days after that, again, Hitler told Sir John Simon and Mr. Anthony Eden that the German air force was as strong as or stronger than the British forces throughout the British Empire.'

To trust this man, who derisively hoodwinked our leaders, to treat with him on the basis that he is loyal and trustworthy, would be to invite disaster. This is only one of the things about Göring that should make any British statesman shy like a startled foal at any idea of a deal with Göring. I recall this particular incident because the Habsburgs and Bourbons show us that some people never learn.

As long as ill-informed or obdurately unseeing men have a word to say in affairs in England, we are likely to lose this war; that is to say, we cannot now, short of some inconceivable blunder, lose it in the field, but we should lose the peace, again.

For this is the position as I write in February 1940:

We cannot -- failing that gigantic blunder -- lose this war in the field now, because (1) Germany failed to separate us from France, or France from us, and to attack each singly, and (2) because Germany did not find an ally whose military strength, added to her own, would have made a total great enough for the two to attack France and Britain together and overwhelm them both.

The ally with whom she might have done that -- and this was the reason why I so dreaded that our leaders would inveterately pursue the ignoble policy miscalled Appeasement until it brought Germany and Bolshevy together -- was Soviet Russia. But she needed to do it, if she intended to do it all, immediately at the outbreak of war. A full Nazi-Bolshevist military alliance, a joint offensive with the full strength of those two armies, would still be a terrible danger for us, but at the least we can say that we are, or should be, in a much better position to meet it than we were six months ago.

There are two dangers between which we have to steer. The first is that Germany be crushed so completely and reduced to such exhaustion and chaos that she collapse into Communism, and this danger is remote.

The other, and greater danger is that, dazzled by the prospect of Hitler's personal disappearance, and thus of being able to claim that they had 'ended Hitlerism', our rulers should make what, by the three-card-trick method, could be represented as a peace, with somebody in Germany who would be left in possession of an intact German army and air force.

The name of this danger is Göring, and it is a mortal danger. In the Reichstag fire and in the secret-rearmament hoax this man has given proof of the greatest cunning; in the shoot-to-kill order and the mass-murder of people he disliked on June 30th, 1934, he gave the proof of the most complete ruthlessness; his eternal dream is to humble England; and he is quite ready to be bluff and hearty with any influential foreigners he wishes to dupe if bluffness and heartiness will help.

A middle way between these two dangers must be found if we are to be left any hope of peace after this war. A Göring mock-peace would mean more wars; a completely ruined, Communist or anarchic Germany might not mean war, but who wants a heap of ruins in the middle of Europe?

The third way is the best - to support the men in Germany who want to build something new and want peace, and to pave the way for them, somehow, by destroying the German faith in German invincibility and by making Germany feel what Germany has never yet felt - the rigours, within her own walls, of that war which she has carried in the last twenty-five years into the lands of Frenchmen, Britons, Belgians, Spaniards, Czechs, Rumanians, Serbs, Poles and Russians.

This is tremendously difficult now, because of those locust-eaten years, but if we are ever to reach peace in Europe it has to be done.

When this war ends, or perhaps before it ends, when it reaches a certain stage, the men who do not count to-day, whose names are hardly known, will return to their countries - the exiles. That happened in and after the last war. Some of them returned for good, but not for good; their works were evil.

Lenin and Trotsky were plague-carriers, sent to Russia by the Germans to promote their war-aims. They did their work, and achieved what seemed impossible; they created in Russia a far worse tyranny than that of the Tsars, which in retrospect to-day looks positively benevolent beside it. Benesh and Masaryk returned to Prague, and put democracy into actual practice; this was the one example in post-war Europe of a State which truly embodied some of the ideals for which the 1914-18 war was fought - by the men who fought. It was a great achievement. Pilsudski returned to Warsaw, and was less successful.

But all these men had one thing in common - they were, until they returned from their exile, less known in this country than the obscurest, bottom-of-the-bill music-hall comedian, the last outsider at Epsom, or the second reserve man of the Galashiels second eleven. Yet, they played a big part, and if even Britain's most highly educated men, who live in a state of amazement at the things that happen in Europe, had known anything about them, we need not have come to this war.

Now the time for the return of the exiles is approaching again. This time, the German exiles are most important, for us. That is the main reason why I have written this book about Otto Strasser, and about the Fourth Reich that he would like to build.

What would it mean to us? Could we work with it? Would it leave us in peace? Would it stand for peace? How would it compare with the Göring, Reich that threatens us? Would it offer us the hope that reason and justice and humanity and liberty, but not libertinism as in the Germany of 1918-33, would return to Europe?

The answer to this question, What will the next Germany be?, is at once the answer to the question, What will our future be?

Before considering it, Otto Strasser thinks that the outer world should essentially understand a vital factor that it overlooks - what he calls the deutsche Sehnsucht, or German yearning, for something that we will call, in order to give it a name in a few syllables, Socialism, although it is not fulfilled by the Socialism of the present-day Labour or Socialist parties in any country, or by the Socialism of Moscow.

This longing, this yearning, this impulse, he says, is ineradicably present in the souls of the great majority of Germans, and the several incidents I have described in previous chapters show the writhings of this soul in its search for it. It is the product of the hope universally born in the minds of humane and simple men, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for a better social order, for a fairer adjustment of their workaday lives and human relationships.

As yet, he says, the groups in power have always diverted this mighty impulse, at the moment when they thought it dangerous to their own especial position or wealth or influence, into the channel of War. The people wanted something, clamorously; then give them something else, to keep their minds occupied.

As this is the background to Otto Strasser's whole political thought and philosophy, and to his plans for a new Germany, it must be understood. It is not difficult to understand. Simply expressed, this was the development.

In the first decade of this century this deutsche Sehnsucht, this German longing, first expressed itself openly in the rapid growth of the Socialist Party, a phenomenon only eclipsed in history by the still more rapid growth of the National Socialist Party in 1930-33. 'The Kaiser', says Otto Strasser, 'had a mortal shock when, in 1913, a third of the seats in the Reichstag suddenly filled with Socialists. That was why he made the war of 1914. The people needed to have their thoughts turned to something else, and the only thing that serves that end, in such a moment, is the old device of a war of imperialist conquest.

'Thus the deutsche Sehnsucht was disappointed the first time. The Socialists fell into line, voted military credits, cheered the Kaiser. The Sehnsucht, the deep-rooted impulse, was left leaderless and bemused, like a flock of shepherdless sheep. In order to forethwart a revolution, the Hohenzollern monarchy made the war of 1914-18.'

The loss of that war reawakened the revolutionary feeling, the Sehnsucht. 'But the times were chaotic,' says Strasser, and this longing and feeling had a completely chaotic and turbulent character, akin to those of a young man or girl who wants something ardently but does not know what. On all hands were inward despair and disbelief and hopelessness; risings and Putsches; the collapse of confidence; the break-up of the old family order; the licentious exploitation of the young; recurrent financial scandals; the mushroom-like growth of monstrous industrialist concerns, trusts and syndicates; the destruction, through the inflation, of the middle-class and the small manufacturer; anarchist conditions in art; the murder of Ministers.'

But out of this chaos, the old Sehnsucht, the longing, gradually reappeared. The masses still did not see clearly the goal they groped for, but the great bulk of the people were revolutionary-minded. They wanted to be rid of all these pestilent things and to be given something new.

Now came Hitler, and gave a single direction to this revolutionary longing and impulse. Immediately, the old problem raised its head. Was this clamant urge, this social Sehnsucht, to be satisfied, or was it once again to he blindfolded and nose-led in the direction of War? Was all that pent-up hope and energy to be misused once more for the ends of war, in order to preserve the things which the Sehnsucht wished to destroy?

Hitler gave the answer. This, as I have fully shown, was the eternal and unbridgeable gap between him and Otto Strasser. Hitler never admitted what he had done, any more than the Kaiser did, but, after gaining power by promising to fulfil the social Sehnsucht, he gave Germany the stone of war.

People who study these things, and try to look with intelligence into the future, should constantly bear in mind that at Hitler's first election, after the Reichstag fire, the last election to give any indication of the political thought of the German people, that of March 5th, 1933, eighty per cent of the entire electorate voted for Socialist parties. In a house of 647 seats, 502 were held by parties which had promised the electorate, filled with that social Sehnsucht, Socialism: 288 National Socialists, 120 Socialists, 100 Communists. The National Socialists received 17,000,000, the Socialists 7,000,000 and the Communists 5,000,000 votes; all other parties, about 8,000,000 votes between them.

These figures clearly prove the truth of Otto Strasser's statement - that by 1933 the old social Sehnsucht, diverted to the outlet of war by the Kaiser in 1913, was far stronger and far more clamant than ever. It is important to understand this, because he believes that Germany is in the course of a revolution, as was England in the sixteenth and France in the eighteenth century, which must come to its consummation, and that the Kaiser, Hitler and the two diversions of the Sehnsucht are but incidents in a historical process which is inflexibly going on. The task of Europe now, he says, if Europe is to live, is to contrive, (1) that the Sehnsucht should not a third time be used, by Göring or another such man, to bring about war, and (2) to divert it from turning to Communism - and that is where he comes in.

Hitler did just what the Kaiser had done twenty years earlier - he diverted the stream from the social outlet it sought to the outlet of war. Under him, all the mighty energy of the German people was applied to that end, with a ruthlessness and single-mindedness that far outdid the Kaiser's. One of his closest collaborators, General Konstantin Hierl, Commander of the Labour Conscript Army, in his Foundations of German Military Policy, put the whole thing in the proverbial nutshell, and opened the nutshell for our benefit, in these words:

'The terribly pressing burden upon our people of being a people without space will have a continually worsening effect upon the lowest and economically weaker strata of the workers and peasants. Sometime, the flame of indignation will flare up from among these strata. Unless we want the revolutionary will to liberation of the lower strata to lead to an explosion, we must transform it into a driving-force for our national liberation.'

There you have the full confirmation of Otto Strasser's words, and the reason for this war. The thoughts of the German people must he turned from that social Sehnsucht, which might ensure peace and benefit mankind in general, and clamped on War. In this way the Sehnsucht, the revolutionary longing for a better social scheme of things in Germany, was for the second time turned aside and allowed to blow off steam on Spaniards, Poles, Czechs, Britons and Frenchmen.

But, says Otto Strasser, the Sehnsucht is still there, stronger than ever after this second three-card-trick. Soon, in the exhaustion and disillusionment of war, it will break out again, more clamant than ever. Are the militarists, the monarchists, then, to be helped back to power again, so that they can keep up this game for ever? Or, failing that, is Germany to be crushed completely, so that the Sehnsucht will find its outlet in Communism?

These are the two dangers he sees, and of the two, he thinks the first the greater and worse - because the Germans themselves can avert the second if they are allowed.

The end of the second stage in the German Revolution, the two stages of frustration and misuse is coming. 'Hitler', says Otto Strasser, 'made it the epoch of destruction and in that sense may have played an essential part. He introduced a medley of half-conceived ideas which he never carried through. The State of Germany was to be organized anew, on the basis of the old German tribal divisions, or Gaue. He has never done it. The State divisions remain, with Prussia dominant as ever. The Reich Parliament and the various State Parliaments stand to-day as they stood when he came to power - empty shells, but still they stand, with their Cabinets, Ministers and deputies. The Reichstag, which meets once a year or less to be drilled by Sergeant-Major Göring, who tells the 800 SS men and Yes Yes men when to stand up, when to sit down, and when to go home, is larger than it ever was, and every one of these men draws a large salary. Göring even has a body called the 'Prussian State Council', formed six or seven years ago, the members of which draw the handsome sum of 1,000 marks a month for their services - and have never met! The same thing happened with the Church. The Evangelical and Catholic Churches were to be dethroned in favour of a national church, a German Christian Church, under a Reich Bishop. Some confusion was introduced in the Church at the beginning, and the militant Pastor Niemöller, who protested, was interned; but to-day the position of the two great Churches remains completely unchanged. The State pays large subventions to the one, collects taxes for the other, and has done both an enormous service by appearing to be antagonistic to them, for this has driven masses of people who before Hitler had stopped going to church into those very deserted temples. The same thing happened in every other department of German life. Germany to-day is in the condition of a half-ruined house of which the foundations still stand - the old State divisions, the old Reichstag and State Governments, and capitalism.'

The only things that were completely destroyed were liberty of thought, the organizations of the working-classes, and the hope, that Sehnsucht, for a better social order. The only things that were completely effected were rearmament, remilitarization and war. The entire strength of the nation was turned to forging swords, in the interest of armaments makers and those who grow rich through wars, and the war duly came.

'When Hitler goes', says Strasser, 'the period of destruction will come to an end. The Sehnsucht will break through for a third time, and this time it must be fulfilled, if Germany and Europe are to find peace.' For this reason, he sees the greatest present danger to Germany and Europe, not in Communism -- the old bogy which was used to bring about this war -- but in the efforts which are now being made behind the scenes to restore the old, war-obsessed militarism in Germany under some new name.

Strasser sees three possible endings to this war, and thinks the fate of Europe in this century rests upon the choice that is made between these three:

(1) A fight-to-a-finish which would after a long, long time lead to a revolution from below in Germany; that is a violent eruption of the old, reawakening Sehnsucht among the exhausted and tormented masses and - Soviet Germany. He does not think this likely.

(2) A deal behind-the-scenes between monarchists, leading financiers, and the old ruling-classes generally, led by such people as Göring and Schacht, and men of the same kind in other countries, for the abdication of Hitler, the enthronement of Göring or another of his kind and possibly the recall of the Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs. This he thinks more likely and fears greatly; in it, he sees the forcible repression of the old social Sehnsucht for a third time, the beginning of a new period of great wars, and a continuation of the Gadarene gallop in Europe.

(3) The overthrow of Hitler by men of civic and social conscience inside Germany who would not be the instruments of international capitalism, big business, monarchism and the rest. These men he sees in a part of the Army, a part of the National Socialist Party, and a part of the workers; in other words, the men of his own Black Front. This would in effect mean that the development which, was broken on January 30th, 1933, when Hitler decided for collaboration with big business and big landownership and against the Schleicher-Strasser-Leipart coalition, would be resumed, the threads picked up and joined together where they were severed, the promise of a German Socialism fulfilled.

He hopes for this ending to the war, in which he sees the fulfilment of the Sehnsucht, and the promise of peace. He calls this the revolution from above, and when I asked him if he, as a good revolutionary, thought that revolutions could be made from above, he answered: 'In Germany, only from above.' I had to admit the truth of this.

These three ways out of the war are worth closer study. The first, Otto Strasser does not take very seriously, because of the detestation of the majority of Germans, who long for their Socialism, of Communism. He sees it only as a possibility of an anarchic but as yet distant future, and thinks that, before that time comes, the men in Germany who think as he thinks will have intervened to prevent it - unless they are tripped up by cosmopolitan intriguers before then.

The second possibility he does take very seriously, and I know enough about what is going on behind the scenes to know that he is right. One of the most depressing thoughts to-day is the thought of that preliminary peace conference which is in progress between all sorts of ancient aristocrats, Jewish politicians, international bankers and moneyed wire-pullers generally; most of them are in Paris, London, and New York, and the spectacle of these people, none of whom will ever hear a shot fired, playing about with the jigsaw puzzle of Europe again, and fitting in the pieces in the way they think best for their own particular rackets, does not augur well.

The time is coming when these groups may achieve the substitution of Göring or some other man for Hitler, and they would then present him to the world, after his previous consent to various plans of their own, as the man to end Hitlerism, the man to avert chaos, possibly as the man to restore Hohenzollernism, and, quite conceivably, as the man to save the world from Bolshevism. The isms would come into their own again, and the old dreary-go-round of regimentation, militarism and war would begin again.

This is the three-card-trick that Otto Strasser most fears. 'To say, "After Hitler, chaos" is nonsense', he says. 'Hitler was chaos, and the end of Hitler is an end to chaos. The world is in danger, from fear of the future, of falling back on the past, which it fought the first World War to vanquish - on the Hohenzollerns, the Habsburgs, Göring, the Prussian generals. This is wrong. The thing to do is boldly to face the future and build something new.'

'For that reason' -- continues Otto Strasser -- 'I should not propose a return to the past in anything, neither in the colonial question nor in anything else, but offer a constructive plan to build a new order. This war came out of the old war; and Hitler and all the other misery came out of that; so that recourse to the old is no cure, no solution, offers no promise of peace or security or tranquillity. A restoration of 1913 means a restoration of the first World War. At first sight it may seem an alluring idea, because easily-frightened people tend to turn to the devil that they know rather than the devil that they do not know. By means of force -- inside Germany the German Army, and outside Germany the Allied armies -- it might be possible to set up a new order of this kind in Germany. But it would not satisfy Germany domestically and it would not secure peace in Europe. For the new Kaiser or new ruler would mean a return to 1914, when the social Sehnsucht first became acute which now exists in far more acute form; and in order to turn the people's thoughts to other things this new Hohenzollern Germany would, once again, immediately revert to its imperialist policy - a big navy, colonies and all the rest. Similarly with the Habsburgs in South Germany. A Habsburg cannot renounce the Habsburg claim to Slovakia, Croatia, Galicia, Trieste, Lemberg. They have to sign on the dotted line in Budapest that they will never renounce these claims. Precisely because they had been installed after a lost or half-lost war, they would energetically defend themselves against the reproach, which their own people would level at them, that they were Kaisers by the grace of London or Paris, and would immediately set about to prove how patriotic and imperialist they were - as they have always done. Any such manoeuvre would mean that the legacy of this war would be worse than that of the last. It would defeat the only end worth fighting for - a real pacification of Europe.'

These words of Strasser are true. I have lived long enough in the countries of the Hohenzollern and Habsburg monarchies to know that they are true. Whether anybody in this country can understand their truth, I do not know. I have just read a book in which a professed expert on foreign politics reproaches President Benesh of Czechoslovakia with his stupidity in opposing the restoration of the Austrian monarchy, and as long as Britain has a mighty word to say in the affairs of Europe, but remains at this level of knowledge of them, I cannot see clearly how peace can ever be assured in Europe.

These are Otto Strasser's arguments against a deal, with some man or group of men in Germany, of the kind which may threaten us before long. It might be on the basis of a monarchist restoration, or on that of a common front against Bolshevy, but no good could come of it, only more and more crises, more and more wars, a further deterioration in conditions everywhere. We should find that we had been tricked again.

What, then, is Otto Strasser's own conception of an ending to the war that would be good for Germany and good for Europe?

Quite frankly, and it is difficult for a German to admit this, he does not hope for much at all until Germany feels the pinch of hunger and the rigours of war. But when that stage has been reached, as I said, he believes that Hitler, and not only Hitler but the equally dangerous men around him, can be overthrown by a movement representing Germans in all camps - and his own Black Front alone has its men in all camps, save the Communist camp but including the Nazi camp.

The coalition which could have saved Germany and Europe on January 30th, 1933, but for those intrigues of Papen, Göring and the panic-stricken rich men, was one of the Reichswehr, the socially-minded National Socialists and the trade unionist workers; this coalition was represented by the three names, General Schleicher, Gregor Strasser, and Leipart. After eighteen months of Hitlerism, and of public disillusionment, this coalition became a practical possibility again, and was again crushed, this time by killing its leaders, by Göring and his associates. Now, in the midst of war, it is raising its head again; its name now is The Black Front. Its greatest enemy is still Göring - for Hitler is finished.

Otto Strasser believes that this time the sound solution will come true, that this combination of forces in Germany can and will rise to destroy Hitlerism and, at long last, really build a new Germany. But -- how well he knows his Germans -- to that end these men in Germany need a man over them, a word of command. And to that end again, the German National Council, formed among the exiles, is in his view essential. As yet, he has failed to form it. He is one man alone, he has not the powerful financial backing available to any man who will make himself the tool of interested groups, and these groups, as I said, which have their own especial interests and not those of Europe or Germany at heart, are at present much attracted by the person of Hermann Göring.

The German National Council which Strasser is seeking to form, so that the men in Germany who await the word should have some organized body to look to, ready to give orders and accept responsibility for them when Hitler's house showed signs of cracking, would be formed of men of the type I have so often described in this book, men of his own type, of the type of Gregor Strasser, Rudolf Formis, of the three Reichswehr lieutenants, of the members of the Black Front - men, that is, of patriotic, Christian, and Socialist feeling.

Men whom Otto Strasser would like to enlist in a German National Council, when the war has developed further, are, to quote a few names, Heinrich Brüning, the former German officer and Catholic Chancellor who fought and failed to keep Hitler out; Dr. Hermann Rauschning, Hitler's former President of the Senate in Danzig, a former officer and Conservative politician, who, like Strasser, turned to Hitler and then away from him; Wilhelm Sollmann, one of the few clear heads in the old Reich. German Socialist Party; Lieutenant Commander Treviranus, a Conservative politician who was one of Dr. Brüning's chief collaborators. All these are men who have proved three things: their common humanity, their hatred of Hitlerism, and, in peace and war alike, their German patriotism.

Such a group of men, if it could be brought together in a German National Council, would be the keyboard from which the development for the overthrow of Hitler inside Germany could be controlled, when the war has developed further. Its other members, its active instruments, would be the men inside Germany who, like Otto Strasser's Black Front men, wait and long for the formation of such an alternative authority.

At present its formation is delayed, first by the protracted prelude to the war, and secondly by the rivalries and cross-currents among the exiles themselves. For there is, among these exiles, another anti-Hitlerist group which has its eye on the succession - the group consisting of the International Socialists, the Communists, the Jews, and assorted intellectuals. They would prefer the complete, and even annihilating defeat of Germany, her division into two or more pieces, and would not be averse from the chaotic, Soviet Germany. There is a wide gulf between the two groups, but their ideas and interests occasionally interlap and hinder, as yet, the emergence of a clearly-defined German National Council. Moreover, one or two of the men Otto Strasser would like to co-opt may be in two minds about that Göring peace. The prospect of Germany being left in possession of most of Hitler's ill-gotten gains, and also an intact army and air force, under Göring's leadership, can only dazzle any German. Well, he thinks to himself, if the world is as silly as all that, who am I to struggle further?

So that, as matters stand, Otto Strasser has as much to fight against, in exile, as he ever had to fight against in Germany. But if he succeed, what sort of a peace would he work for? This is what he says:

'The immediate evacuation of the Polish and Czechoslovak lands seized by Hitler, with the exception of the Sudetenland and the northern part of the Polish Corridor, as a pledge of goodwill. Then, peace negotiations, a new Vienna Congress. For this conference, the following proposals:

'The non-recognition in principle of all Hitlerist annexations and, in consequence, a referendum in two of the territories seized by him which would not be automatically and immediately evacuated - the Sudetenland and Austria. Direct agreement between Germany and Poland about the Polish Corridor and Danzig. The help of German arms in the reconquest of Eastern Poland from the Bolshevists, in exchange for the retention by Germany of the northern part of the Corridor. A German proposal for the expulsion of the Bolshevists from Finland and the Baltic area, as well as White Russia and the Ukraine, by a German-Polish army, with French and British collaboration in the command. War compensation to Poland and Czechoslovakia. Acknowledgment of Germany's old foreign loans, but not payment of interest; the reduction of the capital sum by yearly payments guaranteed by the leasing of a German tobacco monopoly to an international company.'

Only two of these points need any explanatory comment.

Otto Strasser envisages the immediate rendition, before peace negotiations begin, and as a pledge of good faith, of those territories which Hitler annexed in defiance of his own oft-proclaimed theory of national independence - the Czechoslovak and the Polish lands. That means, the lands inhabited by Czechs, Slovaks and Poles not those parts of the former Czechoslovak and Polish States which were largely populated by Germans - the Sudetenland and the top part of the miscalled Corridor. To this extent, and also in the case of Austria and Danzig, he thus thinks of retaining something of what Hitler took, against the qualification that a referendum would be held in Austria and the Sudetenland and that the Poles would be helped to regain their eastern possessions in return for allowing Germany to retain the Corridor.

In respect of this last proposal, Otto Strasser was always an uncompromising enemy of any proposal for a war against Bolshevist Russia - as long as Bolshevist Russia remained where she was and kept the peace herself. He believes that by her recent actions she has lost the claim to be regarded as an enemy of aggression, and more particularly that she has come further into Europe than is good for the peace of Europe, and should be pressed back.

I have shown in this chapter how he hopes to see this war ended, and on what foundations he would, if he had the power, set about to build his Fourth Reich. The peace he envisages should appeal to the sensitive feelings of those good people in this country who believed that Germany would never have made this war but for the Versailles Treaty, which they never read; that Germany did not in that Treaty have 'a fair deal'; that Hitler 'had a good case' in wanting slices of adjoining countries; and that after this war there must not be 'a second Versailles' - not that they would read a second Versailles Treaty anyway, but that doesn't matter.

His proposals seem to me to be cleverly put together. Our own Lord Lloyd, head of that British Council which is said paternally to foster our relations with foreign peoples, has in explaining 'The British Case' said that we are fighting for the 'independence of nations' but that we are not fighting for 'the Versailles frontiers'; that is, we are not fighting for the one thing in the Versailles Treaty worth fighting for. A seeker after the truth might look for a very small needle in several large haystacks with more hope of success than he would have of discovering, from this definition, what is The British Case or what we are fighting for.

But Otto Strasser's proposals would even fit in with Lord Lloyd's definition, which only shows that Otto Strasser is, as I have indicated in this book, a remarkable man, who can not only discover needles in haystacks but even make camels leap gaily through their eyes.

I commend this conception of a European peace to careful study. It would leave Germany still much greater than she was before 1914. It would do the utmost justice, indeed more than justice to the principle of 'the independence of nations' in her own case. It would still leave unanswered the question how, if the rulers of Britain and France were no more resolute in the years after this war than they were after the last one, 'the independence of nations' could be ensured for such small nations as those of the Czechs and Poles, who live on Germany's borders. But then, if our rulers in those years should be no more resolute than in the past, there is no hope of peace anyway, and the peace that comes of this war does not much matter.

But if they should be resolute, then these proposals of Otto Strasser could form the basis of a good peace between the nations, a lasting peace in Europe. That, again, would depend on conditions within the German house itself. What of them? How does Otto Strasser envisage them? How would Germany be constructed and governed? What would his Fourth Reich be?

NOTE

I feel entitled to add a brief comment of my own to Otto Strasser's outline of a good peace for Europe, or at any rate to one point in it. He proposes that German troops should automatically withdraw, before peace negotiations began, from a Little Czechoslovakia and Little Poland, as a token of good faith and practical acknowledgement that all Hitler's annexations were immoral in principle. These would leave Germany still in possession of the following territories which Hitler annexed: that part of Western Poland which German propaganda had labelled the Polish Corridor, the Sudeten-German part of Czechoslovakia, Danzig, and Austria. The feeling of the populations in these areas would then be ascertained by plebiscites.

Of these, I would say that, in my view, such a proposal should only be entertained for Danzig. The word 'plebiscite' or 'referendum' exercises a hypnotic effect on that part of the British character which is dignified by the name of 'a sense of fair play'. Actually, there is no such thing as a free plebiscite or referendum in a country occupied by foreign troops, and it is most difficult to ensure one in a country not so occupied. In the case of Austria, I should say, on the strength of my knowledge of that country, that the withdrawal of German troops from it should be as automatic and unconditional as in the case of Czechoslovakia. In the case of Czechoslovakia, the 'national independence' of that country, for which we are said to be fighting, cannot be ensured without possession of the ancient Bohemian frontiers, which include the Sudetenland; without them, the country cannot be defended, and the real infamy of Munich was that it took from the Czechs the possibility of defending themselves against the next attack. Poland, though I do not see that it has a sound claim to the eastern provinces annexed by Soviet Russia, cannot remain independent without its outlet to the sea. In fact, the garrulous ignoramuses who have been shaking their wise old heads in recent years about the wickedness of the Versailles Treaty will find themselves in much trouble when the European map has to be redrawn again - for those frontiers were, and remain, about the best that can be devised in Europe. They were the only good things in the Versailles Treaty, and they were also the most important things in that treaty.

Also, if Germany is left in possession both of a mighty army and of some of Hitler's ill-gotten gains, Germany will also be left with the feeling, once again, that she is the real winner of the war, that war pays her, and that the best policy for her will be to start again, soon, on the chase after world domination. Her next ruler, whether he were Otto Strasser or any other, might be a man of the best will, but he would in such circumstances soon be overthrown again by the warmakers inside Germany, as was Brüning, unless he himself reverted to the policy of militarism and war. In these circumstances, such a peace as that outlined would be wise only if the counterbalancing certainty existed that Germany would immediately be opposed by overwhelming might if she attempted to upset the new treaty - and what hope can any man have of such certainty, after the events of the years 1933 to 1939?

I feel that if I were to expound these proposals of Otto Strasser without comment I might be assumed to endorse them, and that would be the denial of everything I believe and have written about Germany. His proposals would, in effect, leave Germany greater, after two world wars, than she was in 1914. That, in my view, would so convince the Germans of the utility of war, and so steel them in the belief that their destiny is to conquer the world, that the last hope of peace and national freedom in Europe would perish. The destruction of Prussia would avail nothing to secure the peace if Germany were shown that war pays. If I were Otto Strasser, and were negotiating peace, I should certainly try for a settlement of this kind; but if I were a British negotiator I should not agree to it.

Chapter Eleven

'A GERMAN SOCIALISM'

Otto Strasser, a German exile now in his forty-third year, has spent his manhood days, as I have shown, in search of his 'German socialism'. I have gone to great pains to show what sort of a man he is, and shall now try to show what sort of Socialism he seeks, because, in the country where this book is due to appear, many people are spellbound or fascinated by words, and do not trouble to examine the things they describe.

This is particularly the case with the word Socialist. The Island Race, as one of our foremost satirists currently says, is mentally in its fourteenth year, or thereabouts, and the majority of people cannot picture anything other, behind the word Socialist, than an unmoneyed man who wants to take their money from them. Most of them do not even think as far as that. They just hate the word, and do not trouble about its meaning.

Otto Strasser, as this story has shown, had his Socialism partly bequeathed to him and partly bred in him by the world he grew up in. The war developed it: he detested the bullying brutes who put him through his first drills and to the present day retains his loathing of this class of man, whom he sees incorporated in the leaders of the National Socialist regime; but at the same time he took with him from the war an affectionate respect for the Officers' Corps of the old Imperial German Army and a deep sympathy for the doubts and perplexities of his men. He never for a moment saw the hope of his German Socialism in the Communist Party: indeed, he could not, for that Party is an international one and his Socialism is a patriotic Socialism; and he fought to turn the Communists out of his native Bavaria. Then, in search of his German Socialism, he went in turn to the Socialist Party and to the National Socialist Party, and left both in disgust.

He claims for himself the name of a revolutionary Socialist. But in one of his books I noticed that he called himself, just once, a Conservative revolutionary, and I think this name, coupled with the story of his life, actually gives the British reader a better idea of the man he is.

His loathing of those parade-ground tyrants of 1914 is equalled by his deep hatred of officialdom; he sees no merit in dispossessing one class of over-propertied and over-privileged people in order to put an aristocracy of officials in its place, as the Bolshevists have done, as the average Socialist would do. This is to exchange one tyranny for another, without improving the lot of the submerged masses.

He sees no remedy for the social evils of to-day, no hope of social progress, in the simple confiscation of wealth from the wealthy, in making all poor and calling the result, which in practice is one nest-feathering gang in place of another nest-feathering gang, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. On the contrary, that is the negation of Socialism' as he understands it.

He sees Socialism in the gradual upraising of the unpropertied masses towards the level of those more fortunate; not in the violent depression of the propertied classes towards the level of the proletariat. Not the enthronement, real or illusory, of the proletariat (which my dictionary describes as 'the lowest class of the community') but the abolition of proletarianism is the aim he fixes his gaze on. To give this lowest class, this submerged mass, the feeling of independence, of co-ownership, of co-responsibility in the State is the ideal he fights for. Not to put a new despot, the Socialist State with its horde of limpet-officials, in the place of the other despots -- Kaisers, Hitlers, money-magnates and the like -- but to reduce the divisions between all classes is the goal.

Otto Strasser differs from most other aspirants to mould the future of Germany in that he has a detailed plan of his German Socialism, which has been on paper and in print for ten years. It is called The Structure of German Socialism, and he has never seriously modified it. This is the plan which, as he says, came to him, complete in all its details, almost vision-like, during a long railway journey between Berlin and Munich. His 'German Socialism' is therefore no nebulous thing, but a political programme which all may study, and if he wins through to power in Germany it will be of the first importance. For this reason, I am going to give a summary of it here.

'Socialism', as it has been put into practice, wholly or in part, in various countries since the war, has, as I imagine, repelled most men who in their hearts long for something, as I do, which this word should represent. The Moscow form of Socialism, which has put the Russian masses under the oppression of an imported alien regime for twenty years and has worsened instead of bettering their lot, is repulsive enough to be disgusting. The Socialist parties in other countries have mostly degenerated into bodies of mutually squabbling professors and trade union leaders whose domestic and foreign policies cannot usually be distinguished from the policies of the Conservative and other parties in these countries. Miss Jennie Lee's book, Tomorrow is a New Day, faithfully reproduces the feelings of an undeviating and idealistic mind about the degeneration of such a party, the British Socialist or Labour Party.

But even if such parties as these had untrammelled power to-morrow and Socialized everything, it is most difficult to imagine that any real improvement in social conditions would result. As far as the human mind can foresee, this would again be the regime of taking from those that have, without giving to those who have not, and I am not even sure about the taking from those that have.

In Berlin, predominantly Socialist rule meant chiefly an enormous increase in the Jewish influence in the city and the grant of 'freedom' in the sense of unchecked licence and libertinism; that is, there was unlimited freedom for the exploiters of human misery. A great improvement in social conditions, there was not. The only Socialists, in my experience, who really did anything to improve the lot of the masses, who actually did things which I recognize as Socialist -- that is, for the good of the whole community -- were the Socialists of Vienna, with their magnificent workers' settlements.

I think, after all that I have seen of politics and politicians all over Europe in the last twelve years, I am the last man to develop a facile enthusiasm for the theories or programme of any one politician, old or new.

Rather have I tended, after watching the brewing of this war for so many years, to think that they were all alike, from the politician of the poorest Balkan peasant country to the politician of the wealthiest Western State, men without steadfastness or truth towards their countrymen, and I held them all jointly responsible for the Gadarene gallop. Not one of them but could be convicted out of his own mouth of preaching one thing and doing another. Hardly one of them who, in the moment of crisis, played a man's part. Strange that he who, in such a moment, played the manliest part was one of the poorest politicians, in the tactical sense, of them all - Kurt von Schuschnigg. His bearing on that day makes him a greater man than all the rest.

But I, as compère and commentator, do find Otto Strasser's German Socialism a most stimulating and provoking idea. We do not know yet whether worse tyrannies and greater chaos are to come out of this war, or whether it will at last reopen the way to reason and humanity. It may lead him to power and I commend it to the closest study. I can only give it in outline, and here it is:

Otto Strasser begins his 'German Socialism' with a brief philosophical study of the roots of his thought. He has no theory of a superior race of Nordic supermen; he protests vigorously (in 1930!) against 'the idolatry of race'. He believes the peoples of Europe (from which he excludes Russia) to be a mixture, in varying proportions, of four or five races; this at any rate is the verdict of science.

Out of these racially-mixed groups, all interrelated, landscape, climate and history have made the various 'peoples'. And growing consciousness of their own individuality has made of some of these peoples 'nations'. The World War, says Otto Strasser, fashioned the German people into a nation, the latest of the nations thus to take shape in the area of what we call, with dubious right, Western civilization'.

This brief summary shows how different is Otto Strasser's view of the 'family of Europe' (his own expression) from that of Hitler, and how much more akin to the feeling of well-meaning men.

In the history of the Europe that he thus pictures as a community of interrelated nations, Otto Strasser perceives a rhythm of recurrent epochs, epochs of communal or belonging-together feeling, and of individualist or egoist feeling. He sees such epochs recurring every hundred or hundred-and-fifty years, from the Reformation around 1500, to the English Revolution of 1640-49, and the French Revolution of 1789-99.

In each of these Revolutions he sees the recurrent conflict between these two primitive instincts - the instinct of self-preservation, and the instinct of preservation of the species. For him, the first of these is identical with that which we call Liberalism - each man for himself. The second, he identifies with that which he calls Conservatism - each man for the community.

The pendulum of history, he writes, swings continuously to and fro between these ideas of self and species. The English Revolution, he says, brought the victory of the Conservative, the French Revolution the victory of the Liberal, idea. The epoch of Liberalism, he wrote (in 1930), is inevitably approaching its end, and carrying with it that of Socialism as it was then understood, for the Socialist Sehnsucht, or yearning, first manifested itself at a time when the Liberal idea of each-man-for-himself was in its heyday and took so much from Liberalism -- for instance, internationalism, the doctrine of the class-struggle and materialism -- that it was bound to founder with it. (In 1930, when he wrote this, the forecast was a farsighted one; the disasters suffered by the Socialist Parties in Germany, Austria and Spain subsequently confirmed it.)

Thus Otto Strasser sees a new epoch of the second idea, each man for the community, or the preservation of the species, approaching. Since 1914, he writes, the pendulum of history has been swinging over towards a new era of Conservatism and its associated ideas -- Socialism, patriotism and national idealism -- and the violent eruption of these ideas in Germany will be the German Revolution.

Starting from these convictions, Otto Strasser sees the approaching end of capitalism, as we have known it, which he identifies with the Liberal era. (The reader must differentiate between his correct use of the terms 'Conservative era' and 'Liberal era' and the current use of these words in relation to two parties in England which seem to have no perceptible difference of principle or policy.)

Capitalism he regards as the child and the economic expression of the Liberal era, and he finds the economic system which existed, in Germany, before the Liberal era to have much in common with his Socialism, just as he finds Socialism, as it has been preached and partly tried in Europe in our time, to be but another form of capitalism - State-capitalism. The armies of unemployed, alone, are proof enough that capitalism has failed, he says. It is the ideal economic expression of 'Liberalism' - of the theory of each-man-for-himself, of the free-fox-in-the-free-henroost, of the democratic exploiter democratically exploiting the democratic exploitees in the name of Liberty. Its motto is 'the sanctity of private property', and the condition of its existence is that four-fifths of the people should have no property. The public mind instinctively feels that a system is immoral and unjust under which the community is divided into exploiters and exploited, and the overwhelming majority of the people dispossessed.

Thus Otto Strasser in his 'German Socialism', in his 'Fourth Reich', would abolish the 'sacred rights of private property' - in his own way.

How would he set about it?

He makes a sharp distinction between what he calls 'Monopoly goods' (that is, the land, coal, other products of the earth, and the means of production) which are only existent in limited quantities; and goods which can be produced without limit. The existence of the people, he writes, is based first and foremost on these monopoly-goods, and the fact that they are in private ownership, and that the owner may do with them what he will, places the population in a relationship of dependence to him which is 'the real curse of capitalism'. He would therefore abolish private ownership of land, or mineral resources and the products of the earth, and of the means of production.

This he calls the main demand, the cornerstone, of his 'German Socialism'. It is, as he emphasizes, identical with the demand of Marxist Socialism, - but his proposal for the further development is entirely different. That is where 'German Socialism' comes in.

His solution is derived from study of German history and the German character. It is not, therefore, an attempt to force an economic theory down the German throat; but an attempt to distil from the German nature and its traditions a practical economic system which suits the German.

The German, says Strasser, carries deep in his soul the Sehnsucht, the longing for an independent and creative existence. The lack of all means and all hope of fulfilling that Sehnsucht is the very cause of the dissatisfaction and aimlessness which the life of the German of to-day reveals. (This was written in 1930, and since then Hitler has given the German something to think about; but Strasser's whole argument, as I have explained, is that Hitler simply diverted the Sehnsucht towards rearmament, militarism and war, and that the hopelessness of winning the war will now soon send it streaming back towards the demand for Socialism.) The German -- says Strasser -- suffers under the feeling of his indigent existence, his unpropertied lot, the hopelessness of his old age and the dependence of his present.

This ineradicable Sehnsucht, writes Strasser, can only be cured by ending his proletarian state, and that is only possible if every German comes to share in 'the sacred right of private property', because this feeling of ownership alone gives that independence of thought, feeling of responsibility and creative energy which allow a man to feel that he is a man.

This brings Otto Strasser to the two first definitions of his German Socialism in relation to property. They seem contradictory at first sight, but are extremely interesting on closer examination.

No German shall in future own as private property land and estate, mineral resources, or the means of production;

Every German shall come to possession of land and estate, mineral resources, and the means of production.

(The distinction between 'ownership', which is a conception without any limits, and 'possession', which signifies an occupancy subject to limits, is important for the further understanding of this cardinal tenet of 'German Socialism'.)

Otto Strasser's solution of this main problem is the introduction of the hereditary fief, or fee. This is his own idea, derived from German history before the Liberal era, and is to my mind a most interesting attempt to devise a system which would retain the merits of the Socialist idea without its chief disadvantages.

'The Nation, that is, the community of Germans' -- continues his programme -- 'becomes the sole owner of land and estate, mineral resources and means of production, the management of which will be entrusted to individuals according to their ability and merits.'

By this proposal, Otto Strasser aims at finding a reasonable and practical middle-way between the unbridled right of one man to exploit, close, mortgage, or sell abroad, say, a great coalfield or coalmine, of immense value to the community, and the monopolistic, official-ridden Socialist State of the Marxists and Communists. His proposal is, of course, a reversion to a feudal practice, with the State or the community of the nation, in place of the prince or baron.

'To own a thing' -- he writes -- 'means to be able to do anything you like with it - to sell it, to damage it, to destroy it. To possess it means to administer it, to have its use and enjoyment, to hold it in usufruct, on behalf of another, namely, the "Owner".'

'The Owner will in future be exclusively the community, the Nation. But the Nation, through its outward form, the State, will not itself operate or manage; it will give the land to individuals or groups in Erblehen (hereditary fief), to operate.'

Here, then, is the solution which Otto Strasser offers for the age-old problem of the haves and the have-nots, of the wealthy few and the penurious many, of the community and the parasites. I find it extraordinarily interesting, and I believe many men who search for a practical Socialism, but see nothing to attract them either in Marxist or Moscovite Socialism, will also find it worthy of long thought. I particularly like its joining-up with old tradition and with old historical forms.

The abolition of the legal conception of 'the sanctity of private property', and the substitution, in the things vital for the nation, of this system of the hereditary fief, Otto Strasser describes as the foundation stone of his whole 'Structure of German Socialism'. It alone, he says, enables that marriage of private profit and general welfare which fufils the Socialist Sehnsucht and does not outrage the law's of human nature. The capitalist system wrote its own death warrant when it made it impossible for the masses to lead their own lives in it, to progress, to come to possessions. The division of all possessions among the community of the nation, whether in individual or in collective holding, is necessary to abolish the evils to which capitalism has led. The system of the hereditary fief, which for centuries was the legal form of the German economic system, alone offers this possibility.

'German Socialism', says Otto Strasser, 'is at one with State Capitalism, to-day miscalled State Socialism, in the demand for the transfer of the entire rights of ownership to the community, as represented by the State, but it is passionately opposed to the operation of concerns by the State or its officials, because this would be the opposite of Socialism. It would neither raise the masses from their proletarian state, nor unloose their creative energy, nor give them a feeling of responsibility. On the contrary, it would aggravate all these existent evils, and the workers would have even less rights in relation to their employer -- the State -- than to the private capitalist. And I know all too well' -- he continues -- 'the annihilating effect of officialdom upon the individual. I know so well the longing for independence of the German peasant and the middle-class German, and I should regard any reform as disastrous which condemned this striving for independence to be crushed under the steamroller of officialdom. I see the real torment of a proletarian existence in this deficient, or eternally repressed, urge for independence, and hold the most important task to be the creation of this feeling of independence for the worker, not the worsening of the lot of the peasant and middle-class man.'

Moreover, under State Socialism -- which, as Otto Strasser correctly points out, is really State Capitalism, one big capitalist in place of the few hundred or thousand who actually rule the countries to-day -- the worker has even less rights than under private capitalism (Jewish Bolshevy has clearly proved this), for the State is at once employer and lawmaker. Under private capitalism the State always has to keep up some pretence of impartiality, for the worker is after all a citizen, taxpayer and soldier. This fact, Otto Strasser continues, the revolutionary Marxists try to confute by representing the State as 'the dictatorship of the Proletariat', by pretending that the State is identical with the workers and that there can thus be no antagonism between them. Actually, their system leads to the rule of a new privileged class -- officialdom -- in place of the old privileged classes-aristocrats, money-barons, tsars, and the like.

This argument of Strasser's is correct. I have seen the thing in practice in Moscow. The working masses there have been driven deeper into the mire of ignorance and oppression than they were before, which is almost incredible and just shows what a Soviet State can do if it tries.

The only class in the land that enjoys privilege and preferment and perquisites and bodily comfort is that of the new tyrants, the officials; the majority of these are Jews, and Jews who not even by the longest stretch of the imagination can be called Russian. They are the equivalents of those recent newcomers to Britain who are already 'one hundred per cent British', whose incomplete knowledge of our language and ineradicable difference from ourselves is shown in the magazines and books they publish and the plays and films they make. Bolshevist Russia offers, I should think, the most astonishing example in history of an alien tyranny introduced into the land by sleight-of-hand and masquerading as something Russian. Even the general who led the unfortunate Russian soldiers in the farcical and calamitous operations against Finland, Stern, was a foreign Jew; he is a poor advertisement for that superior ability which the apologists of anti-Gentilism claim to be the chief attribute of the Jews.

I have tried at some length to make clear Otto Strasser's inveterate hostility, in his conception of 'a German Socialism', to the idea that social evils can be cured, the lot of the peasant and worker bettered, and the general condition of the whole community improved, simply by the creation of some monstrous thing called 'The State', which is supposed to symbolize the liberation and triumph of the submerged masses, but actually is as great a tyrant as any other.

For him, that inflated official-State is just a super-capitalist; and it represents for him the triumph, not of the submerged masses, but of the classes he particularly hates from his parade-ground days - the mean-souled and bullying nitwit dressed in a little brief authority, the ignorant clown who thinks himself a little god because he has the might of the State behind him, is undismissible, and has a pension waiting for him at the end of his service. 'Fascism and Communism alike', says Otto Strasser, 'vie with each other in the glorification of the State, in the repression of economic and individual independence, in the exaggeration of the might and success of organization, decrees, umpteen-year-plans and, particularly, the police!'

So, as the foundation of his German Socialism, Otto Strasser lays down his chief proposals: the cancellation of the dogma of 'the sanctity of private property'; the transfer to the State, as representative of the community of all Germans, of the title of owner of the things most precious to the nation - land and estate, mineral resources, and the means of production; and the re-conferment, upon the previous owners, of the hereditary usufruct of their possessions, which they would hold and administer in fee from the State.