Otto Strasser smiled when he told me this and added: 'And believe me, Mr. Reed, I know the Germans, and you must believe me when I say that our revolution, too, will have to be ordered, otherwise the generals and others -- I know these people -- will ask: "But who will undertake the responsibility?"'

Now, in January 1933, this man Hitler became ruler of Germany, and everything he has done since then has justified the doubts that Otto Strasser felt about him for so many years, Strasser's parting from, and Strasser's war against him.

With that day, the black years began for the two brothers. Gregor was at first allowed to feel secure in his chemical works in Berlin. He had left the Party and took no part in politics. But Hitler still saw in him a dangerous rival, particularly in the stormy first half of 1934, when dissatisfaction with the achievements, or lack of achievements, of the Hitler Party was rife, and the ghost of that old coalition of Strasser National-Socialists, Reichswehr Generals, and Socialist workers, popped its head up again. For that reason, General Schleicher, and his wife, were shot in their quiet flat in a pleasant suburb. For that reason, Gregor Strasser was dragged away from his midday meal with his family and taken to the Secret Police headquarters.

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HIMMLER AND HEYDRICH

Otto Strasser has never succeeded in obtaining any account of his brother's death which he could completely verify. The version he believes to be true was given to him by another man who was at the Secret Police headquarters at the same time. He says that Gregor Strasser, late in the afternoon, was lying on a bench in his cell when the fair-haired Heydrich, Himmler's chief assistant, and another man, who is not known, thrust aside the grating in the door and fired through it with revolvers, missing Strasser, who jumped up and ran into a corner out of sight of the grating. The two men then opened the door and fired round it, again missing Strasser, who ran to a third corner. They fired again and hit him, so that he sank down, still alive but badly hurt. Then Heydrich entered the cell and dispatched him with a bullet in the neck.

But that, again, is a glimpse into the future, for the sake of keeping the threads of this narrative intact, which is about Otto Strasser, his life, his motives, and particularly the score which he has to settle.

During the three and a half years that elapsed between his breach with Hitler and Hitler's triumph, which began his own exile, Otto Strasser, as I have shown, had been busy with the construction of his Black Front. Its open activities I have described - the campaigning up and down the country, the anti-Hitlerist newspapers, the platform-debates. The Black Front had its own Storm Troop organization, the Black Guard, not to be confused with Hitler's SS, which is sometimes also called the Black Guard because of its black uniform. Strasser's Black Guard actually wore a black shirt, but the adjective Black, as I repeat, did not refer to this, but to the secret nature of the greater Black Front organization. The badge of the Black Front, incidentally, is a sword-and-hammer, crossed.

But these visible activities of the Black Front were the less important back of its work. The vital work was that indicated by the word Black - secret organization. In all political parties in Germany save the Communists, but particularly in the National Socialist Party and its organizations, Otto Strasser had his followers, who had been carefully instructed not to reveal their allegiance. Their part in his organization, planned against a long-distant future day, was to remain where they were, ostensibly good Nazis, enthusiastic Storm Troopers, ardent SS men, and the like, and to devote the knowledge they acquired by this method to promoting the ends of the Black Front.

They are still doing this, and much of their work, many of their exploits, can therefore only be told at a later day. But by this 'black' method, Otto Strasser was able, during the years when he worked against Hitler inside Germany and also during those years when he carried on the war from across the frontiers, to see through doors and walls, to know of orders and conversations that were never meant to be known outside very small Nazi circles.

Thus, when he made his escape from Germany, he had as his chauffeur, for long distances, a senior Storm Troop commander in the brown uniform. I have seen a letter written to him, in exile, by one of the leading SS commanders of to-day, a man famous and popular in Germany, and this letter breathes a fierce hatred of Hitler. I have seen other letters from officers now serving in the Reichswehr.

Through these invisible channels of information, Otto Strasser was able to look into Secret Police headquarters in Berlin itself, to read the report made by a man sent to kill him. He was able to identify other agents of the Gestapo who from time to time approached him, under one pretext or another, on a similar mission. He knows the contents of his own dossier at Gestapo headquarters.

These invisible supporters inside Germany have, by one means or another, supplied him with the money to carry on his campaign in exile; he spent all the money he himself possessed on it, and is, on account of one or other part of his political philosophy, cut off from the normal sources of financial support upon which Hitler's enemies in exile draw. Those friends in Germany, too, have supplied him with false passports, sheltered his emissaries. The men he has sent into Germany, to carry out some exploit against Hitler's regime, have done this at the risk of their lives and without payment.

In the course of this book, the reader will become acquainted with the men who openly helped him -- some of them have appeared already -- and may judge for himself their characters, qualities, courage and patriotism. But the legion of his unknown followers, the men inside Germany who are ready when the time comes to step out of the Brown Shirt or other ranks and avow their allegiance, is more important.

January 30th, 1933, closed a chapter in Otto Strasser's story and opened a new one. Another starting-gun sounded.

The bitterest years of his life were beginning. The man he distrusted and despised had triumphed, was Chancellor of the Reich. His brother was at last disillusioned and was soon to die. What was to become of him, Otto Strasser, of his Black Front, of his hopes, of the German Socialism for which he had laboured so hard.

What did the future now hold?

Chapter Eight

CRAZY ODYSSEY

With Hitler's arrival in the Reich Chancery in Berlin on January 30th, 1933, and the endless torchlight procession of Storm Troopers between delirious multitudes and past the two lighted windows, at one of which old Hindenburg nodded mandarin-like approval while at the other Hitler leaned far out in the spotlight, saluting, with these events another period in the life of our Revolutionary Socialist began - the period of pursuit and escape, plot and counterplot, mantrap and elusion, flight and exile, of a one-man-war waged by an outlaw from across the frontiers against the most powerful man in Europe.

Nothing in Hitler's life is so dramatic as this part of Strasser's life. It is an astounding story of adventure and hairbreadth escape; it is just Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Wallace, Phillips Oppenheim and all the others come true. It suggests that destiny must have something waiting, at the end of this road, for the man who has travelled it; why, otherwise, has destiny always intervened?

On February 4th, 1933, four days after Hitler's triumph Otto Strasser's Black Front newspapers were suppressed throughout the Reich.

For three weeks longer a false lull lay over Germany. As a precaution, all documents and weapons of the Black Front were secreted; plans were made for a second line of regional, and unknown, leaders throughout the country to spring into being, and into inter-communication, if the known leaders were arrested; and at the headquarters office of the Black Front in the Wilhelmstrasse -- not far from Hitler's Chancery itself -- only a telephonist and a couple of Strasser's Black Guards were left.

On February 27th, the docile Reichstag burned. Dr. Goebbels had written prophetically in his diary on the very morning after the National Socialist triumph:

'We set to work at once ... We discuss new measures. In a conference with the Leader we arrange measures for combating the Red terror. For the present we shall abstain from direct action. First the Bolshevist attempt at a revolution must burst into flame. At the given moment we shall strike.'

The Reichstag, as I say, obligingly 'burst into flame' four weeks later, on February 27th, was immediately proclaimed to be 'a Bolshevist attempt at revolution', and the Nazis 'struck' - at the enemies of Hitler throughout the country, not only Reds, but also pacifists, Nationalists, Catholics, Democrats, and The Black Front.

On the next morning, February 28th, the Wilhelmstrasse office of the Black Front was raided and wrecked, the few unfortunate men in it taken away, and all the known leaders and members of the Black Front throughout the country, some thousands in all, were rounded-up and taken to concentration camps, where, as I have already explained, some of them still are.

Otto Strasser, on that evening of February 27th, was on his way to the Anhalter Station to take train for his home outside Berlin, when he saw the glow in the sky, asked a taxi-driver what it was, and received the answer, 'The Nazis have fired the Reichstag'. He did not go home, but turned back and spent the night in an hotel; and in this manner began the fantastic journey which is still continuing to-day, seven years later, and at this moment after innumerable adventures has brought him to Paris.

While the Black Front headquarters in Berlin was being ransacked and demolished, Otto Strasser was on his way to a little Thuringian holiday resort which had already been chosen as the first secret headquarters in such an event as this.

From there, he issued the following order to his followers throughout the country: 'All members of the Black Front who are not known as such to the police are immediately to apply for membership of the Army, the National Socialist Party, the SA and SS, and to continue their political activity in legal guise inside those organizations.' This order became known to the Gestapo, and the members of the Black Front who were known and had been arrested underwent a martyrdom in the concentration camps to force them to betray their associates. Corrosive activity from within was the thing that the Nazis feared more than anything else, because it was so difficult to detect.

Thanks to the precautionary selection of these second-line leaders, who were not known to be his men and were therefore not arrested, Otto Strasser was able from his quiet Thuringian resort, by means of simple telephone calls, to keep all the threads of his organization in his hand, to issue orders and receive reports. The Gestapo took some time completely to clamp down the hatches of their terror, and in these early days local telephone calls were not tapped.

But after a week, he received an urgent call which told him, in a hastily improvised code intelligible to him, that one of his helpers had broken under manhandling in a concentration camp and had revealed the approximate locality of Strasser's hiding-place. This telephonic warning came from the Gestapo itself! That is, it came from one of Strasser's Black Front men who, in obedience to orders, had remained at his Nazi post.

At this moment, the hand of the Gestapo first touched Otto Strasser's coat-tails. On receipt of the warning, he fled at once by road to the second secret headquarters, also chosen long in advance, at a village in Bavaria; the next day, as he subsequently learned, the Gestapo arrived at the Thuringian inn where he had been staying under a false name, to arrest him.

Then, at the end of March, he moved to a third secret headquarters, in West Germany. It was a lonely house in the Teutoburger Forest, and from here he called a meeting of his chief helpers in West Germany, choosing for the occasion a quiet hamlet on the Steinhuder Lake. When he and his men foregathered there, they found that some thirty thousand Storm Troopers had chosen the same day and place for a Brown Army parade. With these throngs of jubilant Brown Shirts all round them, Strasser's four men (one of them himself in the Nazi uniform) calmly made their way to the lakeside, discussed the situation, agreed their plans, and parted.

The chase grew hotter, the Gestapo network ever closer, and the concentration camps ever fuller. In the middle of April, Otto Strasser made a dash for his native Bavaria - with the uniformed Nazi, a senior Storm Troop commander, now at the wheel of his car!

They had not been long on the road when they heard behind them the tara-tara -- a sound like the post-coachman's horn of old -- of the Flying Squad, and a police-tender with a Berlin number and a load of SS men drew level and overtook them. The brown-shirted Storm Trooper at the wheel gave the Nazi salute and 'Heil Hitler'; the black-uniformed SS men in the tender did not return it, but drove on. 'That's funny,' said the SA man to Strasser.

A little later, they encountered the tender again, halted on the road. The SS men, all armed, watched them intently as they drove past. 'Herr Doktor', said Strasser's brown-shirted companion, 'I don't like this. I believe they're after you'. (The car was Strasser's own, bearing the number known to be his; it was an ancient vehicle with a top-speed of fifty miles an hour presented to him by an admirer. (He had taken the Storm Troop commander, one of his Black Front men who had remained in the Brown Army in accordance with Strasser's orders, with him to disarm suspicion.)

A little further on, and tara-tara sounded again behind them; the SS men overhauled and passed them once more. This cat-and-mouse game was repeated several times, until Strasser sought to trick the pursuers by turning sharply from the main road and pulling up in the market-square of a little town, which was crowded with people come in from the countryside for a political meeting. Strasser dashed to the post office to telephone his wife and tell her of his flight; when he came out the SS tender was parked next to his own car.

The crowds of people in the market place, as he believes, alone prevented a revolver battle at this point. It was getting dark. He drove off, leaving the pursuers out of sight, and told his driver to get the last ounce of speed from the car and turn in at the first farm he came to. Eventually they found one, and swung in, through the great double-doors, into the farmyard, quickly slamming the doors behind them.

A few moments later, they heard again tara-tara, and saw the beam of a searchlight, as the tender flashed by, raking the countryside with its light to discover the fugitives if they should have left the main road. They did not think of stopping to look behind those great wooden doors. Strasser and his men lay doggo until the light and tara-tara had died away in the distance, then came out and, driving without lights and using by-roads, succeeded in reaching the Chiemsee, in Bavaria, their destination.

Afterwards, through his underground channels of information, Otto Strasser learned that these SS men had indeed been after him and had known that he was in the car. In reporting the failure to arrest him on returning to Berlin, their leader wrote that 'Otto Strasser is known as a violent man who habitually carries a machine-pistol; for that reason, my plan was to wait until darkness fell and then blind his oncoming car with the beam of the searchlight before proceeding to the arrest.'

For the last time, Otto Strasser called together his helpers in Germany - those for the South German districts. They met on the green slopes of the Bavarian Alps, within a few hundred yards of the Austrian frontier, and sat, in bathing drawers, with their papers strewn over the rough-hewn table before the Almhütte - one of those simple Alpine huts where the cowherd or the cowherdess lives during the summer, when the cattle pasture in the high meadows which in winter will be snowbound.

At this fantastic Führerbesprechung, or conference of leaders, within sight of freedom, the hand of the Gestapo again rested for a moment on Strasser's shoulder. Strasser and three of his chief South German helpers were there; and two women, his hostess at the lonely farmhouse farther down the slope where he was staying, and her servant.

While the nearly naked men were discussing plots and high politics at the table, armed SS men appeared -- auxiliary frontier guards on patrol -- came across, and demanded to know what they were doing. 'Sun-bathing and having a good time with the girls,' said Strasser, desperately anxious to prevent the SS men from examining the papers on the table. 'Girls?' said his interlocutor, 'I don't see any girls.' 'Why, there they are,' said Strasser pointing to where the two women lay, also in sun-bathing costume, two or three hundred yards away. 'And that's your girl?' asked an SS man suspiciously. 'Of course she is, said Strasser, and, raising his voice, 'Du, Annerl, komm' her. Come here. Here's a gentleman who wants to know what I'm doing and won't believe you're my girl.'

The respectable married lady who was his hostess was quickwitted enough not to be startled by the familiar Du and the insinuation, and played her part nobly. The SS men, obviously suspicious but confused, withdrew and lay down between the four men and the frontier. Then one of them sounded his Trillerpfeife, the shrill whistle they carry, and presently, from neighbouring peaks and slopes, came climbing three other SS frontiersmen. They all foregathered in a group and stood, watching and discussing the four men at the table.

Otto Strasser and his men, feigning nonchalance, sat round the table. Never had the beauties of Austria seemed so superb to them. The situation grew embarrassing, when salvation came out of a heaven that had been brilliantly blue and had contained only a blazing sun. It clouded over and released a sudden and torrential downpour of such force that little rivulets, bearing tiny avalanches of stones with them, in a few moments were careering down the mountainsides. The SS men stood their ground for a while and then suddenly decided that their suspicions were not worth getting so wet for. They made off, down the hill. Strasser and his companions dispersed their various ways, Strasser returning by devious routes to his farmhouse.

But the game was up. Four days later, on May 9th, Gregor Strasser, in Berlin, saw the Minister of the Interior, Dr. Frick, who had remained on good terms with him, and learned from him that Göring's men had wind that Otto Strasser was in the neighbourhood of the Chiemsee. He took aeroplane to Munich, sent a warning and a motor car to Otto, in his hide-out, and begged him to flee. Otto, moved by some premonition, felt he could not go without seeing his brother. He made his way in disguise to Munich and there met Gregor, whom he was never to see again, in the house of a mutual friend who was also a senior SS commander; he too retained his friendship with the Strassers from the earlier days.

Gregor Strasser, says his brother, was already a broken man. His part was played out, he could not forget the way he, who had really made the Party, had been vilified and thrown outside in the moment of its triumph, and more, he felt his coming death upon him. He told Otto: 'Göring will shoot us both.' 'Or we him, that is certain,' answered Otto, and he entreated Gregor to accompany him into exile and resume the struggle from across the frontiers. Gregor would not; he could not bring himself to leave his family and his business.

That same night of March 9th, 1933, Otto Strasser was driven to a place in the Bavarian Alps near the Austrian frontier. About midnight, led by a guide who knew every inch of the way, he began to climb, along narrow and precipitous paths made by the hooves of the chamois. As dawn broke on March 10th, 1933, he crossed the frontier.

In Berlin, an Austrian destitute and neer-do-well was absolute master of the Reich. Across the Reich frontiers, at dead of night, a German officer, anti-Red and Revolutionary Socialist made a weary way into Austria.

After a twenty-hour march, Otto Strasser came, on the evening of May 10th, 1933, into Kufstein. He was free, he had shaken off the pursuers, he could take up the fight. He was wrong in thinking this, for the pursuers had not been shaken off, but were still close behind him and were for years to stay close behind him. But he did not know that, and made his way to the new headquarters of his Black Front - Vienna.

In Vienna, the one-man-war was resumed, only three months after Hitler's advent to power and the descent of the Gestapo terror on Germany. In February, the necessary material for the preparation of Otto Strasser's anti-Hitlerist paper had already been sent to Vienna, and from the middle of that month onward it appeared there and was smuggled in thousands of copies into the Reich.

This was relatively simple because The Black Front covered not only Germany, but also Austria, and its organization there was still intact. Strasser's followers in Austria helped in the printing of the paper and in smuggling it across the frontier. It was called, in anticipation of something that afterwards came true, Der Schwarze Sender (The Black or Secret Sender).

In addition to the paper itself, small-type pamphlets on thin paper were prepared, things which could be screwed into a tiny ball and swallowed, and these were sent across the frontier, 50,000 at a time. They caused more annoyance to the Nazis there than any other form of attack upon their rule, because the author was a man who had played a leading part in their own movement, and because he could neither be called Socialist, Communist nor Jew.

Very soon, for these reasons, the arm of the Gestapo reached out across the frontier into Austria and again Otto Strasser's coat-tails slithered through its fingers. This is one of the most remarkable of his adventures.

By July 1933 he had been in Vienna for nearly two months, living with a beautifully forged passport and under a false name, with a cousin. In these few weeks, with his enormous energy, he had redoubled the anti-Hitlerist campaign of the Black Front from Vienna, and the flood of pungent literature that was pouring across the frontiers was seriously worrying the Secret Police in the Reich.

At this time, too, as I must interpolate to make the story clear, the Austrian Nazis, on orders from the Reich, were conducting their first campaign, which ended in the rising of July 24th, 1934, and the murder of Chancellor Dollfuss, to conquer Austria by terrorism. In Vienna particularly, but also in many parts of the country, bombs were exploding and violent exploits of many kinds were perpetrated; the people knew that the Nazis were the authors of these things and the feeling everywhere was of tension and suspense.

On the night of July 4th, 1933, Otto Strasser returned to Vienna from a visit to Prague, where, with his habitual foresight, he had been surveying the ground in case Austria should fall to Hitler and the Black Front need to seek yet another secret headquarters. At his dwelling in Vienna, all was dark and he found that his key failed, for some reason, to open the door; nor could he obtain any answer to his knocking.

So he went downstairs and knocked-up the porter, who opened his eyes in surprise when he saw the visitor, and said, 'But, Herr Müller, the police were here to-day and arrested your landlady'. Strasser, though he was taken aback, did not connect this incident with himself, for he was convinced that the Viennese police did not know his real identity, or even if they did, that he would be the last man they would seek - for was not the Austria of Dollfuss fighting for its life against Hitler? But he asked 'How is it that my key won't open the door?' and was told 'Oh, the police have sealed the flat'.

'So!' said Strasser, thoughtfully, and after a moment's indecision went into the street. There doubts overtook him and he made up his mind to avoid the house for that night, at least. The drawback to this was that he had returned from Prague with the sum of just one Austrian schilling in his pocket (during all these years, the money problem was an enemy only less mortal than Hitler) and could not afford a lodging. Though the month was July, the night was very cold and he had no overcoat, and not even enough money, as he says, to seek that warmth which the pleasures of the town can provide.

So he walked about all night, and dawn found him waiting eagerly for the first cheap coffee-house to open, where for half of that Austrian schilling he could buy a cup of coffee, with sugar and whipped cream, and a roll.

At last one opened. The sleepy waiter brought him the coffee and the roll and, as every well-trained Viennese Ober must, the morning paper. Otto Strasser sipped his coffee, bit the end off his roll, opened the paper, and saw written across it, in flaring headlines, the news that The Black Front had been identified as the author of the bomb outrages that were going on all over Austria; that all the leaders of this criminal organization, seventeen men and two women, had been arrested during the night; but that the Leader, one Dr. Otto Strasser, had unfortunately escaped.

Otto Strasser was an alarmed and a stupefied man. He could not, at that time, even guess at an explanation - for was not he, Hitler's arch-enemy, in the anti-Hitlerist Austria of Dollfuss? Why for anything's sake should he and his men try to destroy this Austria with bombs? The survival of this Austria meant their survival, its life or death was their life or death. What on earth was the meaning of this ridiculous story? Everybody knew who was throwing the bombs. For what conceivable reason had the anti-Nazi Black Front been saddled with the blame?

Otto Strasser did not know it then, but at his side in the frowsy Viennese café sat an unseen guest - the Gestapo. Its arm was longer than any man would at that time have believed. The explanation only came a year later, in July 1934, when the Nazi rising occurred, Chancellor Dollfuss was murdered, and his own Viennese Chief of Police, Dr. Steinhäusl, was found after the suppression of that revolt to have been one of the Nazi conspirators. He was sentenced to a long term of imprisonment, but after Hitler's invasion of Austria was made Viennese Chief of Police again.

Thus in Vienna, where he thought -himself safe, Otto Strasser only escaped the clutches of the Gestapo by the merest fluke. Hitler's man, Steinhäusl, was out to get him and nearly had got him. If he had been at home that day, when the police called, Otto Strasser would have been 'kidnapped' across the German frontier, or he would have been in an Austrian prison when Hitler invaded Austria, and in either case he would have been sent to join his brother. Here, again, is one of the reasons why I think that destiny must have something in store for this man; why, otherwise, has destiny so often pulled him from beneath the annihilating wheels?

But on that morning Otto Strasser could not even guess at these things and he was a flabbergasted man, who instinctively felt that he was in danger. He could not think what had happened, but his inner voice told him to get out, and get out quickly. But how? He had no money and did not know a soul in Vienna; his few acquaintances had been arrested that night. He had half a schilling, fifty groschen, say sixpence, in his pocket.

He thought, and thought, and at last hit on an idea which held out a faint hope. There was one man whom he knew in Vienna slightly - the man whose secretary his cousin and landlady was, a Jewish journalist in the employ of the Ullstein publishing firm.

To this man's office he went, a long walk right across the city, after a sleepless night and a spoiled breakfast. Giving another false name, he succeeded in gaining admission.

The man behind the table looked up, and horrified surprise suddenly spread over his face. He sprang up, with hands spread before him as if to ward off some awful apparition, and said 'Get out, get out of here, at once'. 'I want a hundred schillings and I'm not going until you give me them,' said Strasser. 'But this is blackmail,' expostulated a frightened and excited man, 'the police are looking for you. Go away.' 'I want a hundred schillings to get to Prague with,' said Strasser, 'and if you don't give them to me I shall stay here and be arrested in your office, and you will be arrested too.'

Frightened though he was, says Strasser, the Jew immediately recalled that the fare to Prague only cost sixty-nine schillings and said so. 'But I want something for a taxi and food, insisted Strasser. 'Here, said the harassed man. 'Here you are, take it and go, go quickly.' Strasser took the hundred schillings and said, 'I'll give you a receipt'. Up came the protesting hands again, 'No, no, don't give me a receipt'. 'Then I'll send you the money from Prague.' 'Do what you like, send it or not, but go away from here, go away quickly, and don't send me a receipt. Just go away, go away.'

Pushed out of the door, Strasser again found himself in the street. He was not, as he had thought, a free man in a free land; he was once again a fugitive, and at that time did not even know why. He only knew that he had to escape quickly, and that he now had the money for his fare. He set his face towards the Ring, and then remembered that he had no clothes whatever but those he wore. The others were in his lodging. He decided to take a taxi, and to drive there. If he saw anything suspicious, he would drive past. If not, he would go in and see if a chance existed to get his clothes.

At the house all was quiet. He stopped the taxi, went in, and rang at the porter's lodge, feeling prickly. The man came out, looked at him in surprise, and said 'Aber, Herr Doktor Strasser!' 'Wieso, Doktor Strasser?' said Strasser,' 'What do you mean, Doctor Strasser?' 'Na, you are Dr. Otto Strasser,' said the man. 'So, and what of it?' said Strasser. The man smiled confidentially. 'Don't worry, Herr Doktor,' he said, 'Ich bin Sozi, I'm a Socialist. I've got your clothes here, packed in a bag. The police were here again and I told them you had gone away. They left the flat open and I packed your clothes in case you came back; it's better for you not to go up.'

Only one problem remained, but a stiff one - to get out of Austria. By this time, Otto Strasser assumed that the police had identified him with Herr Müller and had warned all frontier stations to watch for a man with such a passport. The best chance, he thought, would be to try the tram.

For in the middle of Vienna, in those days, just off the main street, was a tram terminus from which trams ran, straight along the main road, to Bratislava, two hours away. Bratislava had once been Pressburg, and had been to Vienna as Windsor to London; but that was in the days of Austria-Hungary, and now Pressburg was Bratislava and lay just across the frontier, in Czechoslovakia. But - the tram still ran. It still said it was going to 'Pressburg', but it still ran, and there was very little supervision of the travellers that used it; many of them were people who came and went every day. Sometimes, passports were not even examined.

It was a chance. Otto Strasser took it. He walked down the Ring, with his bag in his hand, and got on the tram. An hour or two later, he was in Bratislava, in Czechoslovakia. Once again, he had shaken off the pursuit. He was a free man, in a free land. He had not even been asked to show his passport.

Once more the one-man-war had to be begun again at the beginning. He went to Prague. He had one great advantage - good friends, in and outside Germany, who helped with money when they could, and in other ways, particularly in the vital matter of providing him with false passports. This time, he acquired the passport of a supporter in Germany whose appearance and description approximately resembled his own. This man obtained a photograph of Strasser to substitute for his own. Unfortunately, it showed Strasser in the Brown Shirt of the Storm Troops, and this was undesirable. So the brown shirt was painted out and a white-collar and black-tie painted in; and the photograph was then re-photographed; and the ultimate photograph skilfully substituted for that of the original owner of the passport.

In Prague, where he resumed his Black Front work in the office of a friend, Otto Strasser took lodging with an unsuspecting postman and his family. In spite of the shock he had had in Vienna, he felt perfectly safe in Prague, for the Czechs were a united people. Among them were no admirers of Hitler, and it was impossible to imagine the Police Chief of Prague, or even the last errand boy in Prague, being an agent of the Nazis.

He was only left five months in this illusion of security. On the morning of November 25th, 1933, as he lay abed, his corpulent landlady came waddling in, breathless and excited, exclaiming 'Police', and close behind her pressed two Czech detectives with levelled revolvers, who addressed the sleepy Strasser in harsh and voluble Czech. He asked them to speak German, whereon they asked him, in that language, if he were Herr Müller - the name he had used in Vienna. He denied this, and they demanded his passport.

Fortunately, he had his beautiful new passport, a recent one, issued after Hitler's advent to power and bearing the Reich swastika on it. This completely bewildered the two policemen, who repeatedly exclaimed that Herr Müller must live here, and eventually retired, cursing and puzzled. Strasser's landlady, an enormously fat woman, waddled breathlessly back into the room, exclaiming in comic German, 'Outside two policemen more, with revolver, by big motor car, all very cross'.

On this occasion, too, Strasser was more puzzled than alarmed, for he had on his arrival in Prague immediately informed the authorities of his identity and of the name he was living under; as they knew this, he assumed that some mistake had been made in the address, and went off to sleep again. No Czech policeman, he knew, would want to deliver him up to Hitler.

Later, he strolled along to Police Headquarters to ask the Chief of Police why his officials had made such a mistake. On his description of the scene, this official immediately answered that some mystery must be present, because the Prague police had no motor cars whatever and never used them. Inquiry then revealed that nothing of the visit was known to the police. Then it was learned that the waiting motor car, with the four ostensible officials from the Criminal Investigation Department in it, had carried a German number, namely, the IIA of Munich; that the two officials who had waited outside had spoken German with the two who had made the raid; and that one of them had held a gag, or chloroform wad, in his hand, which he threw away in disgust when no captive was brought. This was found in the gutter.

This time the Gestapo visited Otto Strasser in his bed and held a revolver under his very nose.

The chain of events was eventually pieced together thus: Otto Strasser had evidently been seen and followed to his lodging by someone who knew him and knew that in Vienna he passed as Müller, and this man had betrayed him to the Gestapo. The familiar abduction-across-the-frontier was then planned, but the Gestapo needed men for this who spoke fluent Czech and could thus, pass themselves off as Czech detectives. To that end they used Sudeten Germans from the mixed-language belt.

These men spoke perfect Czech - but did not know Strasser. The possibility that he would by this time have acquired yet another name and passport had been overlooked, so that the sham agents were completely thrown off the trail by the production of his new, and seemingly good, National-Socialist German passport, and assumed that the informer had made a mistake.

This affair shook Prague badly. For the first time the Czechs realized, in 1933, how near and how daring the enemy was - their enemy, too. Strict precautions were taken to prevent any further exploits of the same kind. But these precautions were restricted to Prague, and for this reason another fantastic stroke of the Gestapo against Otto Strasser and his friends had a bloody end, as I shall tell.

Soon after this, another very remarkable thing happened to Otto Strasser, an adventure the end of which has not yet come, and which may eventually dovetail into the mysterious affair of the bomb explosion which occurred at Munich after the present war had begun.

About the turn of the year 1934, soon after the attempted abduction by the sham Czech detectives, a man called on Otto Strasser in Prague in whom he was astonished to recognize one Constantin, who had for many years been a member of his Black Front.

'Why, how on earth did you contrive to miss being sent to a concentration camp?' asked Strasser.

'They offered me ten thousand marks and a high post in the SA, if I could succeed in killing you,' said Constantin, and gravely handed Strasser a phial, adding 'This is the poison'.

Otto Strasser says that Constantin, whom he regarded as a loyal helper, had had a few drinks, so that he wondered if the man knew just what he was saying. To be on the safe side, he went with Constantin, later, to the political police in Prague, with whom he remained in close touch throughout his stay there, and had the contents of the phial examined. 'It was prussic acid,' he says, 'and enough to poison a regiment.'

Constantin then explained further that the Gestapo had told him Strasser would be sure to invite him to a meal and he should pour the poison in Strasser's beer or coffee. 'I thought the best thing to do was to agree to come to Prague, so that I could see you, and I guessed that you would find a way to get me out of this, for I shall have to have some plausible excuse for returning without having killed you.'

This was easily arranged. The phial was given back to Constantin and he was supplied with an order of expulsion from Czechoslovakia so worded that he appeared to have been detained at the frontier and never to have been allowed as far as Prague. With this in his possession, he went off and from that day to this Otto Strasser has never heard another word of him.

Nevertheless, there was a sequel, and a strange one. A former inmate of the Oranienburg concentration camp, now in France, saw in the press in November 1939, the pictures, issued by the Gestapo, of the mysterious man 'Georg Elser' who is supposed to have planted the bomb in the Bürgerbräukeller at Munich and was alleged by the Gestapo to have been the tool, in this act, of Otto Strasser and the British Secret Service. This man claimed to recognize in the pictures of 'Georg Elser' one Constantin, whom he had known at Oranienburg. Constantin, he said, was one of the better-treated prisoners in the camp and told him one day that he had been sent to Oranienburg by the Gestapo as punishment for his failure in a mission entrusted to him. This mission -- as Constantin told his fellow-prisoner -- was to go to Prague, to gain the confidence of Strasser, and to find out what relations Strasser entertained with the Czechoslovak Government.

If this is true, the man 'Georg Elser' is thus none other than that Constantin who went to Prague, and the handing-over of the poison was actually but another trick to get inside Strasser's guard. And if that is the case, 'George Elser' already stands revealed as an agent of the Gestapo. Unfortunately the chain cannot be quite completed. The missing link in it is that Otto Strasser either does not recognize, or will not admit that he recognizes, Constantin in the picture of 'Georg Elser'. 'I am unable to recognize Constantin in these photographs,' he says, 'but then they do not resemble each other. They give me the impression that either the man in the pictures has been made up -- he might be wearing a wig, for instance -- or that the photographs have been touched up. I cannot recognize anybody; but with the Gestapo, you never know.'

So there is an episode in Otto Strasser's tale of strange adventure that has already had one sequel, and may yet have a second sequel.

In Prague, Otto Strasser continued to work hard at his anti-Hitlerist campaign. His energy is hard to believe. During these crowded years he somehow found time to write several books, which I shall describe later. Some of them are of much interest, and I wonder that none has yet been translated into English. All this time, the production of miniature anti-Hitlerist newspapers, of pamphlets and letters, was going on apace. From Czechoslovakia, as from Austria, they were smuggled in large quantities into the Reich, by reckless men who used the most audacious methods, who continually risked, and on several occasions lost their lives, for no other payment than the hope of contributing to the end of Hitler.

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THREE SPECIMENS OF THE MINIATURE ANTI-HITLERIST NEWSPAPERS PRINTED ON FLIMSY PAPER BY OTTO STRASSER AND SMUGGLED INTO GERMANY FROM AUSTRIA, CZECHOSLOVAKIA AND DENMARK

Germans, Sudeten-Germans, and even Czechs, helped in the work. They crossed the frontiers by secret paths at mid of night with knapsacks on their backs containing thousands of these anti-Hitlerist flimsies, already contained in envelopes, stamped with German stamps, ready for posting. When they reached Leipzig or Dresden, and had posted their burdens at some main post office, they would buy enough stamps for the next consignment and return for more.[3]

Once, Otto Strasser had an envelope of the German Medical Association sent to him in Prague and had fifty thousand facsimiles made there. These he filled with his leaflets, leaving the flap unstuck, and posted them, in Germany, as printed matter! On another occasion, he had the letterheads of the German jurists Association similarly copied; but that piously Hitlerist body must have had a shock when it learned of the literature that was being distributed in Germany on paper bearing its imprint.

Another method used by Otto Strasser in his one-man-war was to smuggle into Germany, and into the hands of his supporters there, millions of glued, stick-on labels, rather bigger than an ordinary postage stamp. These bore the sword-and-hammer badge of the Black Front and some such legend as 'The Black Front will oust Hitler'. One of them is reproduced below. These were pasted all over Germany - on doors, walls, windows, trains, trams, pavements, hoardings, National Socialist Party offices, Brown Shirt headquarters, military barracks and the like. It was so simple to hold one in the palm of the hand and swiftly stick it on in passing that it was almost impossible to catch the distributors of these stamps, which sometimes appeared in the most unexpected places - for instance, on the desks of Nazi leaders and the like.

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At the beginning of March 1934, the shadow of the Gestapo fell across Strasser's path again. He gave a lecture on National Socialism at Prague University, which was widely reported, and the next day received the visit of a well-dressed Dutch gentleman, one Mr. Frank, who in faulty German, interspersed with Dutch and English words expressed his admiration of the lecture and offered Strasser, on behalf of an 'American anti-Nazi organization' which he did not name, his financial support. He was accompanied -- this is a particularly interesting example of the ingenuity of Gestapo methods -- by a Jewish lawyer of Prague, Dr. Soundso, to whose sister he was said to be engaged. The use of Jewish agents by the Gestapo is a chapter to itself, and one of the most interesting, in that dark story.

Mr. Frank offered, without any conditions, to pay for five thousand copies of each number of Otto Strasser's weekly paper, which was being smuggled into Germany in the manner I have described, for a period of three months, in token of his sympathy with the cause; the genuineness of this sympathy was subtly underlined by the presence of his Jewish friend. The money was paid on the spot. (At the end of this episode, Otto Strasser was thus the richer by some 60,000 Czech crowns of Gestapo money, which had gone to swell the floods of anti-Hitlerist propaganda that was crossing the frontier, and this is his happiest memory of the one-man-war.)

At the end of the three months Mr. Frank appeared in Prague again, with a pressing invitation to Strasser to come to Paris and there meet Mr. Frank's 'chief', in the middle of June 1934. In the meantime Strasser had asked the Prague police about both Mr. Frank and his Jewish lawyer, and been told that nothing was known of Mr. Frank save that he had a good British passport, while the Jewish faith of his companion, Dr. Soundso, seemed to speak for Mr. Frank's good faith.

On this, Strasser went to Paris, and met Mr. Frank, who said that his 'chief' had unfortunately had to go to Saarbrücken (in the Saar Territory, not at that time reunited with Germany) to meet Konrad Heiden (the anti-Hitlerist writer) and would await Strasser there. This seemed plausible, for Heiden lived there and an anti-Hitler-Chief might well desire to meet him.

So Strasser agreed to go to Saarbrücken, but without telling Mr. Frank that he knew Konrad Heiden well; on arrival he visited that writer and learned that he had never heard of Mr. Frank, of the anti-Hitler organization, or of his 'chief'. Strasser then went on to keep his appointment with Mr. Frank, but, having been made suspicious, he noticed with still greater suspicion that between twenty and thirty SS men, whom his expert eye at once recognized by their high boots, their husky appearance, and their general behaviour, were standing about before the hotel. He was made still further suspicious by the manner of Mr. Frank, who was in a state of extreme nervousness, and continually left the room 'to telephone', although the room had a telephone. The fact that the German frontier was but ten minutes distant recurred forcibly to Strasser at this point, and the beauties of Saarbrücken, as the beauties of Austria on a former occasion, suddenly appeared stupendous to him.

He had to think quickly and find a way out of a trap. Telling Mr. Frank that he would gladly wait for the 'chief', who still had not appeared, but must first postpone a meeting which he had previously arranged, he left the room, disarming any suspicion on Mr. Frank's part by leaving his trunk behind. Then he walked calmly down the stairs, through the surprised SS men outside, and drove away in a taxi.

But Mr. Frank was persistent, and at the beginning of the next month, July 1934, appeared in Prague again and overwhelmed Strasser with reproaches for his desertion at Saarbrücken. He invited him forthwith to accompany him in a special aeroplane to London, and Strasser, with a broad smile, declined. On this Mr. Frank said: 'If you don't trust me, I am willing for your friend Dr. Hebrew to pilot the aeroplane'.

This was another most illuminating example of Gestapo methods. Dr. Hebrew, a qualified pilot, was another Jew, the son of the proprietor of a big store in the Leipzigerstrasse in Berlin. He was in Prague as 'a fugitive from Hitlerist oppression' and had there met a school friend of his, one Franke, who was a collaborator with Strasser. By this means, he had come to know Strasser, who finds the Streicher-Stürmer form of anti-Semitism, as practised in Hitler's Germany, as stupid as it is repugnant, but in the Fourth Reich he dreams of would retain, in dignified form, measures of restriction against the excessive spread of Jewish influence. Dr. Hebrew had presented himself to Strasser as a violently resentful 'victim of Hitlerist persecution'.

Put a little off his guard, once more, by this apparent earnest of good faith -- for Dr. Hebrew seemed above suspicion in his anti-Hitlerism -- Strasser nevertheless telephoned the Chief of Police for an interview before making a decision. Dr. Hebrew overheard this telephone conversation, and when the police went to arrest Mr. Frank he was flown. Thereon Dr. Hebrew was arrested and the whole plot came to light. Mr. Frank (whose secretary was also arrested) was actually Dr. Wenzel Heindl, the head of the anti-Black Front section of the Gestapo. The abduction of Strasser at Saarbrücken had only failed through the potential victim's awakened suspicions.

The most interesting figure in this episode was that of Dr. Hebrew, who eventually confessed that he had been promised 'rehabilitation as an Aryan' for his part in the plot. On this bait, he bit. He was to have piloted the aeroplane, with Strasser and Mr. Frank in it, and to have landed in Germany. He received a long sentence of imprisonment from the Czechs, but afterwards became again a Gestapo agent and was last heard of in Copenhagen.

The sympathy which this type of man can claim, and usually enjoy, as a Jew, puts him among the most dangerous of Gestapo agents. Strasser, strangely, bears him no mortal illwill. But Strasser's hatreds are not quite clear to me. Although his war is against Hitler, his personal hatred is less for Hitler than for Göring, whom he regards as the murderer of his brother; Heydrich, the blond assistant of Heinrich Himmler, whom he believes to have been the actual gunman; and Goebbels in whom he sees the traitor who was chiefly responsible for the defeat of the Strassers in the struggle for the soul of the National Socialist Party.

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GOEBBELS AND GÖERING

But the upshot of it all was that the Gestapo, once more, had Otto Strasser in its hands and let him slip through its fingers, and that he chortles to-day at the thought of those 60,000 Czech crowns.

Now came the most dramatic of all the acts in this vendetta of one man against a nation. It is a story that deserves a book or a play to itself.

A lonely inn, with a river flowing by. A lonely exile, fighting the men who outlawed him with the weapons of modern science. Avengers, with revolvers in their hands. The decoy, the beautiful blonde - incredible, but she was blonde and most beautiful. The trap, the exchange of shots, the dying blonde and the dying exile. The startled, cowed innkeeper. The stampeding feet of the fugitive gunmen. The staunching of the blonde's blood in the river near by. The hurtling getaway in a fast motor car. The dash across the frontier.

Does it not all sound too bad to be true? And yet it all happened, just like that, the most fantastic thing in all this crazy Odyssey. This story, alone, justifies this whole book, if nothing else does. When I heard it, I had to write it. I cannot think why anybody can be bothered to read detective stories, when the world about us offers such things. Believe it or not, but I once knew a writer, a first-class writer, who was given a contract to write a series of short stories for a periodical read by masses of English people, and though he needed the money badly he had to send back the contract because his stories were required to conform to these rules, and this side of the grave he couldn't do it: 'They should be about pleasant likeable people; they should have plenty of action; they should tell of passion without sex; they should have a metropolitan setting; and remember that this magazine is much read at Eton and Harrow.'

Can you beat it? What sort of story fits into this frame? One about a castrated Don Juan dashing along Piccadilly with a Glamour Girl in a racing motor car and an old school tie, I suppose. And in a world where such things happen as the story I have now to tell! Listen to the story of Zahori - pronounced, if I may dangerously air my little knowledge, Zahorzhi.

In the autumn of 1934, when Mr. Frank had withdrawn from the chase, the name of Otto Strasser's news paper, The Secret Sender, came true. He built secretly, and secretly operated, a Secret Sender.

At this present moment, when we are at war, this has become a commonplace. The Governments have millions to spend. From dozens of stations, every night, come voices, to which the Reich Germans eagerly listen, telling the tale of Hitler's crimes.

When I was in Paris, talking with Otto Strasser about this very book, the air was fouled every night by something called Der Freiheitssender - The Freedom Sender, or Liberty Radio. This dishonest fake pretended to be operating from within Germany. Every night you could hear the speaker telling how the Gestapo were close behind him, but to-morrow, no matter what the Gestapo did, he would pop up in Cologne, or in Hamburg, or in Breslau, or somewhere else. And anybody who cares to, and has not been in Germany, may believe this, if he be credulous enough. To anybody who knows Germany, and the closeness of the Gestapo net, the thing is farcical. Liberty Radio, when I was in Paris, was operating from Paris, and the Germans must have laughed themselves into fits when they heard it.

But for one man, poor, hunted and friendless, in 1934, to build and operate a Secret Sender, only a few miles from the borders of the Reich itself - that was a feat, if you like. This was the first Secret Sender, and the only Secret Sender that ever deserved the name, for it was operated by real men who risked their lives, as one of them lost his life, not by cosmopolitan buffoons working in the safety of a distant capital.

This was the greatest achievement of Otto Strasser in his one-man-war against Hitler. It was not his own achievement alone; it was only made possible by the skill of another brave man, Rudolf Formis, his close friend and one of the best radio engineers Germany ever had.

Formis, a small, dauntless man, did brilliant service with the Germans in Palestine in the World War (1914-18). He held a diploma for having built the first wireless reception apparatus ever used in Germany, and was the author of many inventions used by the German radio, particularly the short-wave radio, to-day.

His exceptional skill brought him to high office in the German radio organization, at last to the post of chief engineer for the Stuttgart Sender. In this post, he performed audacious exploits which made his name known throughout Germany. One of the earliest members of the Black Front, he demonstrated his contempt of Hitler, when Hitler became Chancellor, by cutting the cable during the transmission of an important speech of Hitler at Stuttgart. The entire Gestapo buzzed with feverish activity after this incident, but the culprit was never found. But when a series of 'technical defects' occurred during the transmission of Hitler's speeches from Stuttgart, Formis was dismissed and arrested. Luck enabled him to escape, and his crazy Odyssey began. It led him, by way of Austria, Turkey and Hungary, to his friend Otto Strasser in Prague. In Rudolf Formis, I commend you again to a German of the type that ought to be at the top in Germany; then, all might be well.

The result of this reunion in Prague was that in the autumn of 1934 Heinrich Himmler, the Gestapo chief, and his assistant Heydrich, an unusually handsome and revolting mass-murderer, called the senior officials of the Gestapo together and told them that The Black Front Sender, which for some time past had been dinning hatred of Hitler into the ears of millions of enchanted Germans, must at all costs be found and destroyed.

This was Formis's work. He had given Strasser the idea of a 'radio-war' against Hitler, and planned it in detail. The main obstacle was the want of money. The Black Front was a purely German organization, without the normal, usually Jewish, sources of financial support which are open to all other, internationally-affiliated, anti-Hitlerist organizations. But somehow these two men managed to smuggle funds from their friends in Germany, in spite of the stringent German supervision, and the work began.

The most important thing was the choice of a site for the Sender. It had to be technically suitable, for transmissions, and yet secret - secret from the Czech authorities, secret from the Gestapo. At last, Strasser and Formis found, about forty miles south-west of Prague, in the valley of the Moldau, that river which in such beauty runs through Prague itself, a lonely weekend inn, bearing the lovely name of Zahori. 'Behind the hills'! It was ideal. The owner did not bother himself overmuch with the strange activities of his new, and permanent, guests. He was a good Czech patriot, anyway; he died, afterwards. Autumn was taking all his other guests away; the valley grew chill. The spot was ideally lonely; or rather, that fatal loneliness then seemed ideal.

In this secluded spot, Rudolf Formis, German officer, patriot and anti-Hitlerist, built his Secret Sender. It was, as experts tell me, a technical marvel, and is -- or at any rate was, until Hitler invaded Prague and I left Prague -- one of the chief exhibits of the Czechoslovak Postal Museum. It was something entirely new. From this Sender, the news and views of The Black Front were delivered three times daily, in three transmissions of an hour each, into the heart of Hitlerist Germany. The Sender was cunningly built into the rafters of the loft of the little inn; in Formis's bedroom, only the microphone was to be seen. He could lie abed and open his heart to his fellow-Germans.

Neither Strasser nor Formis, after all they had been through, could have forgotten the danger they were in, or have gone in a sense of false security. They knew that their lives were at stake. And nevertheless - the Gestapo found them and struck. The real culprit, as Otto Strasser says, was their chronic need of money, which harassed and hampered them at every move. Formis went armed, and whenever the monetary position allowed, an armed companion went out to Zahori to stay with him, but that was seldom, and Strasser had to be in Prague.

Strasser's opinion is that the second armed companion would have saved Formis. My own opinion is that even the second armed companion, if he had been there, might not have saved Formis. These beautiful blondes! But perhaps I am wrong. Indeed, on second thoughts I think I am. What a tragedy.

On January 16th, 1935, Strasser was at Zahori, and saw Formis for the last time. He brought him new gramophone records of recorded speeches to the German people; these were changed every month.

He also asked Formis if he had noticed anything suspicious. Formis answered that on the previous day, January 15th, a German couple, a pair of lovers, had been there, one Hans Müller, a business man from Kiel, and one Edith Kersbach, who was a games-teacher from Berlin and an exceptionally beautiful girl with golden hair.

Strasser immediately told Formis that he 'didn't like the sound of it', and advised him to have the innkeeper ask the police to check their papers and have a look at them. But Formis said he thought them to have been 'nice, harmless people'.

Consider that, 'nice, harmless people'. Is it not strange that a man who has knocked about the world, and fought in Palestine, who has learned about women from 'er in this country and that, and who knows that the Gestapo is close behind him and is merciless, is it not strange that such a man should be immediately blinded and bereft of all his senses and all his caution, and despoiled of his very life, by some nitwit of a blonde who comes along and smiles challengingly at him and allows her hand artlessly to rest a moment on his arm and her thigh to rub against his and has cold murder in her heart for a man she has never seen before and is saying by signs to some other man, this is the man you want, go on, kill him, all probably because she likes some other, third man - ugh, these lice. But happily, she paid.

Because Formis did not tell Strasser -- perhaps he had forgotten it, or perhaps he held it to be unimportant, or maybe he did not want Strasser to think that he had looked upon the blonde and lo, she was good -- that on the day before she had pretended to be cross with her lover, and had snuggled up to Formis, and said 'Let's be photographed together and make this grumpy fellow jealous'. Whereon Formis and the blonde were photographed together, arm-in-arm, by the smiling, attentive waiter, and the next day, as was later ascertained, the grumpy Hans Müller flew to Berlin with the photograph to make sure that Formis was the right man, and the Gestapo examined the picture and said, 'Yes, this is the man we want, go on, get him'.

(You may be wondering how the Gestapo knew where to look and whom to seek. It is simple. The good Dr. Hebrew, who had been promised 'rehabilitation as an Aryan', told them.)

So Hans Müller of the Gestapo, accompanied now by a friend, whose passport-name was Gerhard Schubert, also of the Gestapo, took aeroplane back to Prague, and with the beautiful Edith the three -- this was also subsequently ascertained -- had a gay time in the bars of Prague, and this is only just, because Edith's gay life was to be a short one. On January 21st they stayed the night at Stechovice, not far from Zahori, and had their fast Mercedes car overhauled, and then they were all set.

On January 23rd, Edith and her Hans Müller returned to Zahori. They were received with cautious reserve by the innkeeper and Rudolf Formis, who had been put on his guard, but not enough -- this was the father and mother of all blondes -- by Strasser.

It was late. Neither the innkeeper nor the local police had a telephone, so that the police check-up recommended by Strasser could not take place that night. It would not have yielded much result, anyway; the passports of these three were as good as platinum.

Hans Müller, moreover, was terribly tired and had a terrible headache, and went immediately to bed. In the picture of the hotel, reproduced below, you will see the layout. His bedroom, which was also that of Edith, was on the first floor; two doors beyond it was Formis's room.

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THE INN AT ZAHORI

The first floor window half hidden behind the left-hand umbrella is that of the room occupied by EDITH KERSBACH; from it she was carried, dying, down the rope ladder by her accomplices. The window beneath the letter 'N' is that of the room occupied by FORMIS. The Secret Sender was built into the loft at the extreme left. In the foreground runs the River Moldau.

Formis and Edith remained together in the Gastzimmer, or sitting-room, for an hour and a half after Müller went to bed. Edith now unburdened herself, told the whole tale of her lovelornness, of the brutality of her lover.

She did not know she was about to die, this strumpet, and she played a marvellous part. The artless pat on the hand; the accidental touch; the lingering glance. At 9.30 in the evening, when the innkeeper and his family made their way to their rooms in the far wing of the hotel, Edith and Formis sat together, the best of friends.

Nevertheless, I think Formis may have been latently suspicious, that his inner man may instinctively have distrusted the whole pantomime, but perhaps he belonged to those men who simply cannot bring themselves to box such a woman's ears. Anyway, at 10 o'clock they rose to go to bed and went upstairs, along the corridor, where Edith and her lover had room Number Three, and Formis the room two doors farther on, Number Seven.

Only Hans Müller and Gerhard Schubert know exactly what happened then; they were inside Room Number Three.

I have studied the layout and the details that are known very closely, and I think that Edith, who held one of Formis's hands in hers, opened the door of her room, as if to say good-night to him, and then tried to pull him in with her.

His latent suspicions awoke and he drew back. She drove her claws into him and tried to drag him in; the lacerations of the she-cat were found carved deep in his wrist.

And then - did he manage to draw his revolver and shoot her, or did she get one of the bullets that were meant for him? That we shall never know, unless Hans Müller or Gerhard Schubert speaks, and that is not likely.

Anyway, about 10 o'clock the obliging waiter, who slept in the basement, was awakened by the noise of many revolver shots. As he rushed upstairs, he was confronted by an unknown man with a revolver in each hand. He fell back, down the stairs, but first he saw Hans Müller dragging the body of Formis along the corridor to Room Number Seven, heard Edith herself screaming in mortal anguish. The unknown man (who was Schubert) drove the waiter and the chambermaid, who had also appeared, in curl-papers, on the scene, down the stairs and into the basement, where he locked the door on them. There, shut in, they heard further bangs and noises, but were too frightened to move. The inn-keeper and his family, in the far wing, neither saw nor heard anything of what was afoot.

Later, as rolling black smoke filled the basement, the captives, in fear of suffocation, broke out through the window and awakened the innkeeper. With the waiter, he rushed through this nightmare inn to the place of the tragedy. In Room Number Seven they found the petrol-soaked body of Formis, with two incendiary bombs, which had been prevented by the masses of smoke from taking full effect; they had only smoked and smouldered, not burst into flame. The microphone had been smashed to pieces by the murderers, but the Secret Sender itself, concealed in the loft, they never found.

A strange scene, now, in the chill and lonely valley. Clouds of smoke pouring from the inn. The waiter, rushing along the dark road to the nearest village. A sleepy and bemused village policeman, rushing back along the dark road to the lonely inn. Telephone calls from the village post office to Prague. Endless delays, before the police of the nearest town, the police at the frontier, could be reached. Meanwhile, the Mercedes car dashed through the night, dashed through the frontier posts without stopping. After that, the Czech frontier police always kept the barriers down - but only after that.

They found, the next day, a rope-ladder hanging from the window of Edith's room. That was how the unknown gunman, Gerhard Schubert, got in. They found, in Formis's head, a bullet, and in his chest two more. They found that petrol had been poured over his body, but had not caught fire. They found blood on the rope-ladder. The two gunmen had lowered Edith that way. In the river that runs past the little inn they washed her wounds; the bloodstained handkerchief was found there.

By a strange chance, the racing Mercedes was stopped in the township of Loboshitz at one o'clock in the morning, because of its excessive speed. The driver's papers were in order, and it was allowed to go. The policeman Boehm says that it only had two occupants, the two men who sat in the front seats. In the back seat was 'a mound of rugs and coats'. That was Edith.

Later inquiries revealed that the Mercedes car crossed the German frontier between 4 and 5 o'clock in the morning. In the Saxon township of Königsstein the two men brought Edith to a hospital. The doctors examined her and told them that she must be taken to Dresden immediately, for an operation. On the way there she died. (All these facts were established through Otto Strasser's subterranean channels of information.)

I apologize to all good strumpets for calling her a strumpet. I have a large vocabulary, but find no word in it for this - for Edith Kersbach, who was young, fair-haired, lovely, and a sports-mistress.

Müller and Schubert received the award of 10,000 marks which the Gestapo had put on Formis's head (as Otto Strasser's informants in Germany reported to him) and have a high place on the list of people with whom scores have to be settled when Hitler's regime is overthrown.

The methods of the German propaganda and Gestapo machine in this exploit are interesting to study. Just as Hitler's invasions and annexations were always heralded by a great press campaign of complaint about the provocation offered by the country to be attacked, whether it was called Austria, Czechoslovakia, or Poland, so was this killing of one man in another country first announced with the usual plaint about intolerable provocation, in the German press.

The passion of the German mind for self-justification-in-advance, whether the potential victim be a State or an individual, is ineradicable. It is strange that Otto Strasser and Rudolf Formis, who were Germans themselves and knew the men and the methods they had to fear, did not hear the warning bell in that violent attack on Strasser and his 'intolerable Secret Sender' which appeared in the Völkischer Beobachter on January 12th, 1935 - the day before the murderers crossed the frontier in search of Formis!

Though the number of the Mercedes car, with full details of its occupants and their papers, was given, the German Government blandly answered that it had never heard of such a car, of such persons, or of such passports and triptychs, and when the Czechoslovak Government renewed its formal protests, the reply was that all research had been fruitless; no trace whatever of such a car, or of the passengers supposed to have travelled in it, could be found.

But four and a half years later, when the present war had begun and the Munich bomb explosion occurred, the Völkischer Beobachter, in accusing Otto Strasser and the British Intelligence Service of causing this, stated that his Secret Sender 'was destroyed on January 26th, 1935, by two SS leaders in execution of their orders'.

Actually, the Sender was not destroyed, but confiscated by the Czech police. Otto Strasser lost in Formis one of his most valuable and valorous helpers, as well as a weapon against Hitler which had become the talk of Germany.

Although the Gestapo had once more failed to kill him, it had dealt him a heavy blow, and Formis was also one of his closest personal friends. In the picture below, you see Otto Strasser, and another Black Front man, at Formis's grave.

click for full size image

OTTO STRASSER (right) AT THE GRAVE OF RUDOLF FORMIS

Once again, he had to start the one-man-war from the beginning. The episodes of Dr. Pollack and Dr. Hebrew had shown him that no man was to be trusted, the murder of Formis had proved how close the Gestapo still were behind him.

In Prague, the German Minister repeatedly inquired of the Czechoslovak Government 'when Dr. Otto Strasser is to be tried for operating a Secret Sender'; the harassed Prague Government, too, was paying for the hospitality it had given such refugees-from-Hitlerist-tyranny as Dr. Hebrew.

On January 6th, 1936, Strasser was duly sentenced to four months hard labour, without alleviating circumstances. The sentence was confirmed on appeal. It was never served, because under Czech law, if a plea for the quashing of a sentence were lodged on some legal grounds, the highest authority in the State had to confirm or quash it. The law, however, apparently laid down no time-limit for such a decision, and President Edouard Benesh just put the document back in his 'Pending' file each time it was put before him.

Two Czechoslovak years remained to Strasser and he used them to the full. He continued to publish his paper, until the hard-pressed Czechoslovak Government suppressed it. He continued the leaflet-war across the frontier. Unfortunately, some of the most stirring episodes of the one-man-war in this field cannot yet be told; this would imperil the lives of men who still live. Some were caught, brought before the People's Court and sentenced to death. Some were killed. Exploits were planned and carried out which still cannot be recounted.

Strasser spared neither his nerves, his strength, nor his affections; he used them all unsparingly, as a man should, and remained in spite of everything a merry fellow, a citizen of the world, a good German, a good European, and a Revolutionary Socialist.

Then came Munich and the British ultimatum to the Czechoslovaks to surrender to the German demands. Once again, the pursuers reached out a hand that nearly touched Strasser's shoulder. If he had stayed in Czechoslovakia after that, he would six months later have been caught like a rat in a trap, on that day, March 15th, 1939, when Hitler's armies closed in on Prague from all sides; even destiny would have needed to rack its brains to get him out of that. So, while those armies were taking their first slice of Czechoslovakia -- the Sudetenland -- he took an aeroplane, together with Wenzel Jaksch, the Sudeten-German Socialist leader, and flew away, over their heads.

In the country he left behind him, the tragedy of Zahori continued. It was not finished, is not yet finished. Formis's life was not the only life that was destroyed by it. The innkeeper, already a sick man, had his death hastened by the events of that January night and the days that followed it. His wife and daughter came to Prague and leased a little inn there. When Hitler arrived, the Gestapo sought them out. The daughter, a good friend and admirer of Strasser, was put in a concentration camp. A bomb was planted in the inn.

Otto Strasser, now in almost-penury, found quarters, with his wife and children, in a little hamlet, Herrliberg, near Zürich. The German frontier was not much more than a stone's throw away, and this, again, impressed the beauties of Switzerland on his mind. Here he had, from respect for Swiss hospitality, to curtail operations in his one-man-war, though his friends in Germany continued to smuggle news and reports out to him; but the war was continued on a small scale from Copenhagen, where one of his chief helpers held the strings of the Black Front together, and issued orders to the Black Front in Germany.

From Switzerland, Otto Strasser tried vainly to get to France or England. None would have him. The 'refugees from Hitlerist oppression' were admitted and petted in thousands, everywhere. For a man like this, the doors were closed. Here was 'a Red', a man who was 'too anti-Hitler'. None would ever have dreamed of describing this man as 'a victim of persecution'. He was this, though it would never occur to him to think of himself in such terms; he is, as I say, a man.

The war came and, a few weeks after its beginning, on November 8th, 1939, when the anniversary of that first Hitlerist Putsch of 1923 was being celebrated, according to tradition, by the Old Guard of National Socialism in the Bürgerbräukeller at Munich, the bomb exploded which was either meant to kill Hitler or, like the Reichstag Fire, was the act of his own men, a new blood-curdler for the German masses, who simply cannot live without the feeling that they are being encircled and plotted against by secret and sinister foes. Like Tartarin of Tarascon, the Germans love to feel that 'they' are lurking in the shadows, waiting to spring.

Within a few hours of the bomb explosion the German police informed the Swiss authorities that Otto Strasser was the organizer of the plot (Himmler's statement issued on November 21st said that Georg Elser, the man arrested for complicity in the night of November 8th-9th, only 'confessed', and incriminated Strasser, after six days of obstinate denials, namely, on November 14th; but he apparently knew on November 9th what Elser would admit a week later.)

As I write, no light whatever has been cast on this dark affair. The German Secret Police announced that the culprits were: Georg Elser, the completely unknown individual arrested in Munich; Otto Strasser, the instigator and instrument of 'the British Secret Service'; and the 'British Secret Service' itself, which was described as having given Strasser the order to prepare the bomb explosion and the money for it; two British consular officials serving in Holland, Messrs. Richard Henry Stevens and Sigismund Payne Best, were on the day after the Munich explosion, November 9th, 1939, enticed to the German-Dutch frontier, there kidnapped by Gestapo agents, and held captive. They, Elser and Strasser were announced to be the accused men in a coming Munich Bomb Trial.

As a student of the Reichstag Fire Trial, which ended in a farce, I may draw attention to the extraordinary resemblance between that mock-trial and the Munich Bomb Trial which the German Government contemplated; whether it will actually be held, remains to be seen. In the Reichstag Fire Trial the half-witted Dutch vagrant, van der Lubbe, was the actual incendiary; in this case another equally obscure individual, Georg Elser, is supposed to have been the actual bomb-layer. In the Reichstag Fire Trail, Ernst Torgler, the German Communist Parliamentary leader, was supposed to be the German instrument of the malignant foreign foe that sought to destroy Germany - International Bolshevism. In this case, Otto Strasser is supposed to be the German instrument of the malignant foreign foe - Britain, bent on the destruction of Germany, and the British Secret Service. In the Reichstag Fire Trial, three Bulgarian Communist exiles, who chanced to be in Berlin at the time and had been earmarked for the part, were put in the dock as the actual, foreign-born representatives of the malignant foreign foe - Bolshevism. In this case, Messrs. Stevens and Best appear as the foreign-born representatives of the malignant foreign foe - Britain.

It is an extraordinary mentality, which runs in a rut. It is cunning up to a point, and childish after that point. Just as Germany, in the murder of Formis, used precisely the same method as in the invasion of Czechoslovakia, so is the same old bogyman fairytale being used for the Munich bomb plot.

I ought to add that I do not believe the Munich Bomb Trial will be held. After the farcical end of the Reichstag Fire Trial, which ordered the beheading of a mental deficient and had to acquit the other four men, because the possibility that world publicity would enable them to play the anti-Nazi trick of proving innocence had been entirely overlooked, no great mock-trial was ever again held in Germany. Instead, the People's Court, with a majority of officers, Storm Troop commanders, and high Secret Police officials among the judges, was formed, and such trials were held in secret, so that the trick of proving innocence could no longer be worked. This was much more satisfactory. I cannot believe, after that experience, that the Germans will again make themselves a laughing stock by staging another such judicial comedy.

But the Munich bomb itself remains a mystery. Otto Strasser has regretfully to deny all knowledge of a bomb which he would probably have liked to plant.

I happen to know, as I was in loose communication with him at the time about the then vague project of this book, that his financial circumstances were desperate; nobody, least of all the British Secret Service, showed any anxiety to relieve them. I know also that he had repeatedly been refused permission to come to England, and though no reason was given, it is most probable that this was withheld in the desire to avoid offending that German Government, and particularly its Führer, whose desire for peace remained until the end the incorrigible illusion of our own leaders. It is another illuminating commentary on our arrangements and our times that such a man should be implacably denied admission to England at a time when undesirables in thousands have been let through, welcomed, and even given preferential treatment over the native-born citizens.

Strasser is himself convinced that the bomb was planted by the Nazis themselves, from the same motive that led them to fire the Reichstag - to give the German people visible proof of the existence and implacable hatred of that malignant foe whom they accused of beginning the war, Britain.

The kidnapping of the two British officials is a very strange affair indeed. In its planning and execution it exactly follows the familiar methods of the Gestapo, as I have shown them in the repeated attempts to capture Strasser and in the killing of Formis. But one aspect of it is most important.

The two men, as our own authorities stated, were enticed to the frontier by the proposal of peace-parleys, put forward in the name of some important personage or group of personages in Germany. This tallies so closely with the devices used to disarm Strasser's suspicions (for instance, the offer of financial and other support in his anti-Hitlerist campaign) that I am convinced it was a Gestapo trick. A second, though less likely possibility, however, is that there was a peace offer, of which the Gestapo got wind and which they intercepted. In that case, the point of engrossing interest would be - who was the man in Germany who wanted to talk peace?

But I do not believe in this theory. All the details about former abductions point to my first explanation. In that case, the authorship of the Munich bomb explosion is clear to see. It was the work of the Gestapo, who timed the abduction of the two British officials for the very next day: they were to play the part of culprits.

For Strasser, the clutch of the Gestapo loomed murderously near, again, when the Munich bomb exploded. He was but a mile or two from the German frontier. War was in progress. The Gestapo had chosen him for the fourth man-in-the-dock, was demanding his extradition. By methods which I cannot yet describe, he succeeded, in this moment of danger, in breaking through the French refusal to have him in France. He obtained permission to go there, and in the twinkling of an eye he put Switzerland behind him and crossed yet another frontier.

He came to Paris, convinced that the end of Hitler's regime was now approaching, that the time for him to return to Germany and build his Fourth Reich was now drawing near. He had a very modest lodging, and few weapons with which to resume the one-man-war and conquer. But, bursting with energy, as ever, he set to work; wrote; negotiated; interviewed and was interviewed; tried to invigorate other men among the exiles in whom he had some faith, to form a German National Council, as a kind of shadow-government for The Day; and even found time to exercise his affections, which he never neglected. As I say, a man of enormous energy and unflagging enthusiasm.

In those circumstances, I met him. He had a crazy Odyssey behind him - well worthy of our Insanity Fair.

Chapter Nine

NEMESIS IN THE SHADOWS

In the spring of 1939, Otto Strasser, in his Swiss retreat, felt the imminence of the war he had foretold for many years as the inevitable result of Hitler's abandonment of a social policy for a militarist one. For the second time in his life, he felt, the starting-gun was about to sound. The first war found him a young man, burning to be first in the field, then shattered his scheme of things about him and left him floundering in chaos. The second war would find him an exile and outlaw, with a price on his head; but he felt, too, that it would bring him homecoming, and the belated fulfilment of his dreams for Germany.

So he set about, in that spring of 1939, to overhaul his secret organization within Germany as best he could through his headquarters in Copenhagen, to instruct those waiting shadows what they should do and how they should act when war came. The order was 'Clear decks for action'; but the captain was on a distant shore, and the crew were stowaways.

In this book, I have not been able to give more than a hint, here and there, of the kind of man, in Germany, who is pledged to Otto Strasser, but I know some of their names, and I have seen letters from others, and can say that one day, if the enemies of Germany are skilful in their handling of this war, Hitler and his henchmen may receive a most unpleasant shock.

Now the moment has come, I think, to show in these pages how the Black Front worked, when the threat of war came near.

In Great Britain, the public was completely confused until the last moment. Many people felt intuitively, perhaps, that war was coming, but did not understand why or know that it would inevitably come. This was because the public was misled or misinformed by those whose duty it is to lead and inform it - the government and the press. One newspaper until the last moment repeated, moron-like, 'There will be no war in which Britain will be involved this year, some time, any time, ever'; to-day it could better prophesy that there will be no peace in which Britain will be involved this year or next, but it does not say that. At least two other newspapers kept up the same lunatic chorus until war actually came. Orgies of ostrichism, of wishbone politics, were celebrated.

This was unnecessary, unpatriotic and mendacious. The men whose business it was to study politics knew, or should have known, long before how events would move. To show this, I am going to quote at length the Order-of-the-day which Otto Strasser, from exile, issued to his Black Front, inside Germany, long before war broke out.

The war began, or began for this country, on September 3rd, 1939, and ever since then the people of this country, misinformed now as they were before it began, have been shaking their heads and saying they couldn't understand this war at all. At the beginning of May 1939, four months before the war began, Otto Strasser issued this order to his men:

'The course of events since March 15th, 1939 [when Prague was invaded] shows clearly that our old forecast, "Hitler means war", is rapidly approaching realization. Important signs, particularly the question of food supplies, suggest that the war will not break out until the late summer; an earlier or later moment is possible, but this is irrelevant to the main development.

'As far as it is possible to foresee the course of such a war, it seems likely to be a defensive war in the West and an offensive one in the East; in other words, it will be waged against England and France only at sea and in the air, but against Poland on land. Contrary to Polish hopes, it may be confidently anticipated that the German attack in the east will be rapidly successful and that the Poles, possibly after heavy fighting and loss of life on both sides, will within six or eight weeks be pushed back behind the line which in the World War for years formed the German Eastern Front, and which probably satisfies the military and political aims of Berlin to-day. The air war, on the other hand, may lead to heavy losses for Germany and a rapid decline in the strength and efficiency of the German air arm, whereas the Western Powers, partly through American help, will be able currently to make good their losses. With the end of the Polish campaign, therefore, the situation of Germany in the air would have changed to the sensible disadvantage of Germany, and this would be of the greatest importance for the further development.'

The last two sentences contain one of Otto Strasser's few miscalculations in this remarkable order. He assumed immediately -- as Ribbentrop is said not to have believed -- that Britain and France would at once go to the help of Poland, but he further assumed, from that, that they would help Poland in the only way they could - by attacking Germany from the air. This, he foresaw, would cause the German air force heavy losses, and the further development of the war would be affected by such a deterioration in her air position. Actually, Britain and France, though they declared war in support of Poland, delivered no attack at all from the air, and thus the end of the Polish campaign, from which the German air force emerged almost intact, left Germany in a better position, at that stage of the war, than Otto Strasser foresaw.

The order, issued in May, 1939, continues:

'Even if Italy should fight at Germany's side, it may confidently be anticipated that the French and British fleets will quickly secure complete mastery of the Mediterranean. With the collapse of Poland, a new political and military stage in the war will be reached. Hitler will have no more success than Ludendorff had in 1917 in obtaining the hoped-for separate peace, and will, whether he likes it or not, have to prepare for an attack against the West. Whether he try the direct attack on the Maginot Line, or his darling idea of a landing in England, or the indirect form of attack through the northern neutral States, or a combination of these, is unimportant. The decisive thing is that he can no more avoid the attack in the West, after the crushing of Poland (and possibly Rumania) than Ludendorff was able to avoid it after crushing Russia and Rumania, and that this attack is just as certainly doomed to failure.'

I am not sure, as is Strasser, that Hitler will make this great attack in the West. I always gathered, when I was in Germany, that the West Wall was built for a war of this very kind, a war in which Germany had neither been able to find mighty allies nor to separate Britain and France, and the idea was in that event to sit down behind the West Wall, with an intact army and air force, and wait for the Western Powers, if they wished, to come and beat Germany. Rather than attempt that, the Germans thought, they would be inclined sooner or later to make peace, which would leave Germany in possession of that mighty, and intact, army, and ready to start again on new conquests after a breathing space. But perhaps Strasser is right; we soon shall see, if we have not seen by the time this book appears.

His order continues:

'At this moment [namely, between the collapse of Poland and the attack on the West] our task moves from the preparatory to the acute stage: we must overthrow Hitler through a domestic revolution in Germany, in order to save Germany. The whole strategy of our campaign, from the first hour of the war onward, must be ruled by the principle: "Only the rapid overthrow of Hitler can save Germany from partitioning". For only if the German Army is still strong, and capable of carrying on a defensive war for years, will there be a chance that the growing desire to destroy Germany can be thwarted. Our most urgent task is to spread understanding of this fact, by every possible means, in the German army, the National Socialist Party, and the German people.'

Proceeding with his order, Otto Strasser says:

'Our tactics must be governed by circumstances to some extent. The things to aim for are the early formation abroad of a German National Council, composed of men of various political parties "between Fascism and Bolshevism"; the groups of the Black Front in Germany must work with other enemies of the regime towards the common end of its overthrow, and they should also preach this doctrine: "Neither Fascism nor Bolshevism, but the alliance of army, workers and youth".

'Our first task is to overthrow Hitler, probably between the defeat of Poland and his attack against the West. We know that only the possession of a strong army can save us from a second Versailles. But alongside that intact army, our best weapon against an excessive lust for imperialist conquest will be the establishment of a German Socialism. This is essential to our self-preservation in post-Hitler Germany. It is important, too, in relation to the questions of Austria and the Sudetenland. The just solution, advocated by us, of free self-determination in these territories will be favourably influenced in our favour by a reshaping of the economic and political order in Germany. The world will be distrustful of us, and the argument we must use is: "Do not partition Germany and preserve Prussia, as you did before, but partition Prussia and preserve Germany". This would necessarily bring with it the breaking-up of the Prussian administration, the big Prussian estates, and the Prussian army, and also a Federal system in all branches of German life.

'We must be ready to reject an Entente dictate, even if we should by this action be excluded for the time being from power in Germany. The development of the social question in Germany and in other countries would even in that event soon produce a favourable situation for us.'