Soon after he formed his Black Front came the trial, before the Supreme Court of the German Reich at Leipzig in the autumn of 1930, of three young Reichswehr officers who were accused of subversive activities in the interest of the National Socialist Party. This trial will long have been forgotten by the majority of people, but a bell will probably tinkle in their memories when I say that Hitler gave evidence at it and used the phrase 'Heads will roll' - when he should come to power.

These three young officers -- Lieutenant Wendt, Second Lieutenants Scheringer and Ludin -- were typical of the best kind of German of that period, the sort of man represented, in a rather older generation, by Otto Strasser. They wanted, ardently, fervently, and above all things that Germany should become free and mighty again, and if need be, by force of arms. But that was not all they wanted. They shared the longing of eight-tenths of the German people for a new and better and juster social order, for something which they were ready to call 'Socialism' if it were different from the Socialism of the Socialist Party and from the Socialism of Moscow, both of which they intuitively felt to be alien and false and consequently loathed.

These officers had hoped to find what they wanted in Hitler's National Socialism, they had done what they could to enlist the sympathies of their comrades and their men for that party, and they now stood on trial for this offence and Hitler gave evidence on their behalf. The whole issue on which a conviction or an acquittal turned was, whether Hitler's party was a revolutionary one or one which sought to achieve power by constitutional means, and he, in maintaining stubbornly that it would use only constitutional methods, may have wished to do what he could to get the young officers acquitted.

If that was his aim -- I doubt it, myself; he was simply using 'tactics' again -- the three lieutenants did not thank him for it. They had believed in him as a revolutionary National Socialist. His bourgeois methods and tactics in the witness-box antagonized them.

Even 'Heads will roll' he interpreted, on a question from the Public Prosecutor, not as meaning that he would work for a violent and revolutionary overthrow of the existing regime and thus seize power; but that he would take revenge, by 'constitutional means', after achieving power, by 'constitutional means'. (This is exactly what happened, incidentally; the Reichstag fire furnished the 'constitutional means' and the brutalities done to political opponents after the seizure of power, as well as the shooting of several hundred defenceless persons on June 30th, 1934, were nothing but the gangster's revenge in the coldest of blood, without any trace of white-hot revolutionary fervour or resentment-born-of-the-barricades.)

Thus the three lieutenants went to their fortress partly-disillusioned men, and in the loneliness of their imprisonment began deeply to study political questions. All three came from Ulm, in South Germany, and knew little about the North German vendetta. Ludin was sent to Rastadt in Baden; Scheringer and Wendt to Gollnow, where they had the cell once occupied by Major Buchrucker.

Searching their minds and consciences for the political truth, Scheringer and Wendt wrote to Otto Strasser, who did not know them, and asked him to visit them and explain the whole political conflict to them. He visited them three times.

But just about that time the German Communist Party sought to make use of the strong patriotic wind which was blowing by taking patriotism into their own programme and issuing a manifesto which called, not only for the social, but also for the 'national' liberation of the German people. The young officers thus began to wonder if the truth they sought were possibly to he found in the Communist Party, which also strenuously wooed them in their captivity, and during two of Otto Strasser's visits to them representatives of the executive committee of the German Communist Party were also present. The two lieutenants asked Otto Strasser if he would object to a full debate, and he agreed.

An extraordinary scene this, the struggle for the soul of two German subalterns in the dining-room of a prison. I hope it may give readers some idea of the tormenting conflict which racked the minds of such young Germans, of their dogged search for hope, for an ideal, for a better Germany. This state of mind remains; it was only chloroformed by Hitler; and soon it will awake again, more turbulent and clamant than ever.

Picture the scene. On one side of the table, half a dozen of the leading Communist prisoners and their spokesman, the emissary from Berlin. On the other, Otto Strasser. Between them, the two lieutenants. In the background, prison warders, listening enthralled.

On the first occasion the Communists sent down a Jew, Leow, a burly fellow who was commander of the uniformed Communist Storm Troop formations called The Red Fighting Front; after Hitler's triumph, he fled to Moscow and in due course was relieved of further anxieties in this world by Stalin. He was a poor debater and no match for Strasser.

So the next time the Communists sent down the very best man they could find, and an astute move this was, for he was a most remarkable figure. Captain Beppo Römer was the Communists' best show-piece. He had been a distinguished German officer in the war; after the war he had been a leader of one of the anti-Red Free Corps (the Oberland Corps), and in that capacity had collaborated with Hitler in the Munich Putsch of 1923; and now, in the course of that unending search for an ideal, he had gone over to the Communists. (Credible reports say that he too is now in the Reichswehr again to-day, a thing only explicable by the saying, on revient toujours à ses premiers amours.)

Captain Beppo Römer was no mean antagonist, and a terrific battle was joined across the deal table in the prison dining-room, with the lieutenants and warders hanging on every word. Otto Strasser violently attacked Hitler, but he attacked the Communists even more violently. The debate continued for hours, quarter neither asked nor given.

At the end of it, Lieutenant Wendt became Otto Strasser's man, and the Black Front had its representative in Gollnow Fortress. When he was released, he openly joined the Black Front and became a member of the executive. After Hitler's triumph he was arrested and no man has ever learned if he is living or dead.

Remember that these three young men, who risked their careers for Hitler, played an important part in bringing him to power; at their trial, the full light of world publicity for the first time shone on him; the party used them prodigally to make the world believe that Hitler had the army with him; but no more mercy was shown to Wendt than to a mongrel dog. Hitler's mission has always been to destroy good Germans - not Jews. Wendt heard the Viennese cheapjack ranting in the witness-box about 'Heads will roll', and didn't like it, because Hitler's conception was not of a clean fight at the barricades, but of cold-blooded vengeance after the achievement of power. But even Wendt cannot have dreamed, that day, that his own head would he among those that rolled.

Scheringer was won over by the Communists at first, by an interesting method. Captain Römer told him that he need not join the Communist Party, but could form his own 'Scheringer Group', a patriotic-Bolshevist group, in loose affiliation with it, and the Communists would finance a newspaper for him. They wished to use his name in the struggle against Hitler and Otto Strasser alike.

Scheringer agreed to this, after telling Otto Strasser privately that he was in sympathy with the Black Front but would like to wean away the most useful men from the Communists for it. Strasser told him he would fail in this, because when the Jewish leaders of the party perceived his little game they would stop publication of the newspaper they were to finance for him. This actually happened, and in 1932 Scheringer broke with the Communists and joined the Black Front. After Hitler's triumph he too disappeared from the scene, and none knows his whereabouts to-day.

The third lieutenant, Ludin, may be heard more of one day. He alone remained a Nazi, and narrowly escaped death on June 30th, 1934, but to-day he stands very high in the Party and is Storm Troop commander for the whole of South-Western Germany, Württemberg, Baden, Hesse, the Palatinate, and the Saar.

Then Otto Strasser campaigned all over Germany, north, south, east and west, speaking, organizing, and writing. He was several times hurt when Storm Troopers attacked his meetings; Major Buchrucker was knifed at Flensburg.

Strasser then introduced the platform-debate type of meeting, challenging Hitler and Goebbels by public placard to confront him at any time or place they chose, but this was ignored. He had many stormy platform-battles with the representatives of many parties: with Willi Münzenberg, the Communist leader, in a working-class district of Berlin; with Kaspar, a later Red Fighting Front leader; with Colonel Duesterberg, of the Nationalist Stahlhelm; and many others. But the Nazis refused all challenges and would never appear on a platform in open debate with the Black Front. They did, however, do their best by violence to crush the Black Front - and they marked down, for future vengeance, all the men who thus defied them.

Otto Strasser is almost the only one of all those men, his chief known helpers, who escaped death, the concentration camp, or prison.

For instance, his Black Front Leader for Schleswig-Holstein was a man who had formerly been one of the most popular National Socialist leaders, Dr. Grantz. Grantz is a small and indomitable man, with the student's slashes all over his face - 'One of the best Germans I ever knew, says Strasser. His fame in the National Socialist Party was chiefly that he had been the hero of a terrific free-fight between Nazis and Communists at Woehrden, when four Storm Troopers were killed and thirty injured.

At the burial of these men, Hitler stayed in Grantz's house and assured him in his most emotional manner ('Mussolini, I shall never forget what you have done for me to-day') that he would never forget etc. etc. and would repay and reward Dr. Grantz in the Third Reich. In March 1933, immediately after the Reichstag fire, Dr. Grantz was thrown into a concentration camp and is there now, in 1940; he has never had charges preferred against him or been tried. Seven years in a concentration camp!

But Grantz's spirit is unbroken. In 1937 a fellow-prisoner from the concentration camp, Sachsenhausen visited Otto Strasser in Prague and told him of Grantz's martyrdom. He also described this incident: The commandant told Grantz one day that he would remain in the 'camp as long as he lived. Grantz answered, 'Jawohl, I shall remain here - but as commandant with you as prisoner'. He received fourteen days 'hunger-arrest'.

The tale of Otto Strasser's men is a terrible one, even for these times, when brutality and suffering have become the norm. Dr. Becker, a lawyer who was his Black Front Leader for the populous Halle district, has also been in a concentration camp since 1933, without charge or trial. Dr. Becker, who is also in Sachsenhausen, has, in contrast to Dr. Grantz, become a better-treated prisoner, for the following strange reason. The Prussian SS guard at the camp was relieved one day by Bavarian SS men, who insisted on having their native Bavarian beer -- I said earlier that beer is a religion in Bavaria -- whereas their predecessors had made a contract for the beer supply with a Prussian brewery. An action followed, in which Dr. Becker was put up as advocate for the Bavarian SS men, and won the case. Since then, his lot has improved.

To-day, between six and seven hundred Black Front men are in the concentration camps and prisons. Many of them have been there for seven years. During these years, thousands of others were arrested and released after serving shorter terms. And all these were but the known Black Front men.

I have looked forward a little here, to show the things that happened to the men who openly supported Otto Strasser in his fight against Hitler in the years between the split and the Nazi triumph, 1930-1933. They bore the brunt of the battle, and this glimpse of the future shows how they paid for their convictions.

But most of them still live, and hold their convictions still. Before so very long, they will be free men again. And many others who think like them have always been free and even wear the brown shirt.

The conflict itself seriously shook the Hitler Party, which, indeed, came to the verge of an ignominious collapse. It was only rescued, and enthroned in power, in the nick of time, by those very forces which Otto Strasser and his men regarded as the worst enemies of the new order for which they fought - big business and big landlordry.

The conflict reached its height in 1931 and 1932. In 1931 came the second open revolt in the National Socialist Party. Captain Stennes, the Brown Army commander for the whole of North Germany, also could not stand Goebbels any longer and broke away, taking many of his brownshirts with him. He went the way of Otto Strasser, and joined Otto Strasser and the Black Front.

I shall have to look into the future again to tell the story of Captain Stennes to-day. It is another extraordinary tale; these Germans are almost incredible.

He, too, was an officer with a distinguished war record and subsequently a Free Corps commander. After Hitler's triumph, he, too, was arrested, maltreated, sent to a concentration camp and told that he was to be shot and must dig his own grave. Standing before this empty grave, he was executed four times - with blank cartridges! Later he was released at the mediation of a well-known German general, his former commanding officer, General Watter, on signing a pledge to leave Germany within twenty-four hours. After a visit to Otto Strasser, in exile, he went to China and is to-day commander of the bodyguard of Chiang Kai-shek! I have used more exclamation marks in this book than ever before, but the things I have to tell seem to deserve them.

In 1932 the Black Front was gaining ground and strength. The Hitler Party was going downhill, and fairly fast. But for the great age of Hindenburg, which made him the senile dupe of intriguers and the credulous victim of old wives' tales, it probably never would have come to power.

At the beginning of 1932 one of the first Hitlerist Ministers ever made, Dr. Franzen in Brunswick, gave up his post in protest against the reactionary tendencies of the party, as shown in the Harzburg agreement with Alfred Hugenberg, of big business and big armaments, and Hjalmar Schacht, of big banking.

In August came Hitler's rebuff by Hindenburg, who at that time seems still to have been of clear mind; he gave Hitler a parade-ground dressing-down, and vowed that he would never make him Chancellor. Goebbels, keenly watching to see which way the cat would jump, wrote in his diary of 'deep despondency' in the party; the financial position he said, was 'hopeless, nothing but debts', and so on. In November came elections and another blow for the Hitler Party, which lost over 2,000,000 votes. 'A defeat', wrote Goebbels; and Hitler threatened to commit suicide.

Otto Strasser was fighting the Hitler Party with all his might, doing his best to precipitate its downfall.

Gregor Strasser was in the party, Hitler's chief lieutenant. From the dark forest into which the German Republic had wandered, only two exits offered, as he saw. It could take the path of a Socialist revolution, which would lead to something new; or that of a return to Prussian militarism, which meant war. Some combination of forces had to be found which would give a majority in the motley Parliament, and at this point the old, old dilemma appeared: should National Socialism prove its Socialism and join hands with the Socialists, or should it betray its Socialism and join with the Nationalists?

The choice was clear. The first way would lead to a better Germany and to peace; the second to the disappointment of hopes of a better social order and to war.

Gregor Strasser -- how Goebbels vilifies his former master at this point in his diary -- was for the first way and urged that the National Socialists should follow it. It meant an alliance with the Socialist workers - not with the Communists, and not with the Socialist Party, but with the socialist-minded workers organized in the trade unions. Their representative was Leipart, the trade union leader. General Schleicher, the Chancellor of the day, had avowed himself to be 'a social general' and that meant that the army would play. This meant a Government headed by Gregor Strasser (Hindenburg had said he would never have Hitler), or General Schleicher, and with Leipart, and this was the combination which would have saved Germany.

This coalition is not dead, but only seems dead; its ghost is now appearing to haunt Hitler.

Göring was Gregor Strasser's great antagonist at this moment. He was for the second way out - the alliance with heavy industry and the big landowners which would entail the immediate jettisoning of all Socialist and social ideals, and would inevitably concentrate all Germany's thought on rearmament and militarism and lead to a new Prussian war.

These were the two courses between which a choice had to be made, while Germany's destiny hung in the balance. The vital difference between them was the old one of principles and ideals. The first way meant working for a definite aim. The second meant working to get power, without regard for what came after. This was the gap between the two camps, between Gregor Strasser and Hermann Göring. Hitler's attitude was 'Never mind about what comes afterwards; let us get the power, the rest will take care of itself.'

He allowed both Gregor Strasser and Göring to negotiate, Strasser with Schleicher and Leipart, Göring with Hugenberg and Papen. He approved of both parallel sets of negotiations. Gregor Strasser's chances of success were great. The general, Schleicher, and the trade union leader, Leipart, were in agreement with him; a great part of the Hitler Party was for him; and he was acceptable to Hindenburg, for he was an officer and normal, while Hitler was a corporal and a clown, and Röhm was homosexual, and all this counted with an Old Gentleman who had once disparaged Goethe as a man of immoral habits to Max Liebermann, the painter, and on being reminded, 'But, after all', he wrote Faust, replied, 'Yes, that is his only excuse'.

Gregor Strasser was twice received by Hindenburg in these fateful days. Germany, and the peace of Europe, was almost saved.

The real bitterness of Gregor Strasser's tragedy can only be understood if it be borne in mind that he heard from Hindenburg's own lips, at one of these meetings, that the Old Gentleman 'would never make the Bohemian Corporal Chancellor' (this was the contemptuous term that Hindenburg used for the crossbred, vague-origined Hitler). Thus his very loyalty to Hitler demanded that Gregor Strasser should strive with all his strength to achieve office himself and bring about a coalition in which the National Socialists would be predominant. It would never have occurred to him that the Old Gentleman would, barely two months later, do the very thing he had sworn never to do. This is the eternal weakness of an honest man, such as was Gregor Strasser. Having no untruth in himself, he accepts the word of others, and when they break it, he is undone. Hindenburg, by this means, made it possible for Gregor Strasser's enemies in the National Socialist Party to defame him, to Hitter, as a traitor.

The story of those eight weeks in which the fate of Germany was decided, and Europe doomed again to war, by a few men in Berlin deserves to be told in more detail. The massacre of Poles and Czechs, the blackout of England, the manning of the Maginot Line, the battle off Montevideo, the conscription of British youth - all these things, all these woes of to-day, are the children of those fateful weeks in Berlin at the turn of the year 1932.

Gregor Strasser, in November 1932, went into the fray with these thoughts in his mind: The Party was going downhill, heading for disaster. The Old Gentleman had told him he would never make Hitler Chancellor. He himself was entirely loyal to Hitler - for that reason he had not followed his brother Otto at the breakaway. The country had had a taste of government by a little group of reactionaries -- Papen and his Cabinet of Barons -- and had repeatedly shown, by overwhelmingly hostile votes, that it loathed this and was approaching the point at which it would violently erupt against them. How could the National Socialist Party and Germany be saved? Not, thought Gregor Strasser, by alliance with this self-same group. The only alternative was a coalition between the National Socialist Party and the masses of the trade-unionist workers, who must be weaned away from their discredited Socialist leaders, with the benevolent backing of the Reichswehr. Leipart and General Schleicher were willing to collaborate with him -- but not with Hitler -- in such a coalition. The way to save both country and party seemed clear.

Gregor Strasser, as the organizer of the party, knew better than any other man the disastrous plight in which it was (a plight revealed after Hitler's triumph in the diary of Goebbels). He knew that it was breaking under a load of debt, that it could not face another election -- and Germany was having an election about every three months at that time -- because nobody would even print electoral placards for it. The time had come, he thought, to save what could be saved.

At the end of November, just eight weeks before Hitler's triumph, General Schleicher brought him to President von Hindenburg, who gave his word of honour as a Prussian general that he would never make the 'Bohemian Corporal' Chancellor. Gregor Strasser immediately reported to Hitler, telling him that the Chancellorship was beyond his reach, but might possibly be obtainable for himself, Gregor Strasser. The Vice-Chancellorship, in a cabinet headed by General Schleicher, could certainly be had.

As Gregor Strasser told him of Hindenburg's pledge never to make the Bohemian Corporal Chancellor, Hitler interjected that he had different information from another source. Strasser, puzzled, informed General Schleicher of this, who expressed great annoyance - and set his private police to watch his predecessor in the Chancellorship, the man he had made and unmade, the Puckish Mephistopheles of our unhappy Europe, von Papen. (The police agents afterwards took a photograph of Papen leaving the house, in Cologne, of the banker Schroeder, where he had just had a talk with Hitler that was arranged by the present German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. This was the meeting at which Papen agreed to recommend Hitler to Hindenburg for the Chancellorship, on the understanding that he would remain the prisoner in his cabinet of a majority of non-Nazi Elder Statesmen none of whom he would dismiss. Schleicher bitterly reproached Papen that he had been intriguing with Hitler. Papen gave his word of honour as a Prussian officer that he had not spoken with Hitler. Schleicher produced the photograph. General Schleicher then proposed the expulsion of Papen from the Count Schlieffen Society (the members of this body were restricted to the Officers' Corps) on the ground that he had given a perjured word. The disciplinary investigation has never been concluded: the instigator of it was shot on June 30th, 1934, as was Gregor Strasser.)

But while Schleicher was trying to defeat the intrigues of Papen, Hitler appeared to be convinced by Strasser's report and to be half-ready to accept the solution he proposed. He made certain conditions -- that the party's debts should be paid, that the Reichstag should not be dissolved without his sanction, that three other National Socialist leaders (Frick, Stöhr and Hierl) should enter the cabinet with Gregor Strasser -- and on this basis was prepared to agree to the Strasser-Schleicher-Leipart coalition, to the coalition of National Socialists, Reichswehr, and Socialist workers. All was ready for the written agreement between Hitler, Strasser and the ruling Chancellor, Schleicher. On December 7th, 1932, Gregor Strasser, in Berlin, spoke by telephone with Hitler in Munich, and Hitler agreed to come to Berlin the next day to conclude the negotiations.

On the morning of December 8th Gregor Strasser stood on the platform of the Anhalter Station and waited for Hitler. The night express from Munich arrived. Hitler's compartment was empty. The conductor explained why. 'Herr Hitler', he said, 'got out at Weimar.'

The reason why he got out was also the reason why the coalition was never made, why Germany embarked on a new period of militarism and war, and why Gregor Strasser was later killed. This reason, or rather these reasons -- for their names were Göring and Goebbels -- only became clear subsequently, but can be explained now, in Otto Strasser's words.

At Weimar, Captain Hermann Göring and Gauleiter Dr. Goebbels had intercepted Hitler's train. They saw that the formation of the coalition would mean the end of their own ambitions. In a mass coalition reaching from Leipart's trade unionists on the left by way of the Reichswehr to Gregor Strasser's National Socialists on the right, there would be no place either for a Propaganda Minister or for a terrorist.

They travelled by car to Weimar, awakened Hitler, and fetched him from his sleeping-car. The whole thing, they told him, was a plot, a plot made by Gregor Strasser and Schleicher. It was not true that Hindenburg had pledged himself not to make Hitler Chancellor. Strasser's aim was simply to become Chancellor himself, to keep Hitler on a nose-lead, and if necessary to smash the party.

Thus enlightened, Hitler came later to Berlin, hurled the accusations of Göring and Goebbels in Strasser's face and called him a traitor. Strasser asked if Hitler really thought him capable of such infamy. Hitler answered, yes. Without a word Gregor Strasser went away, wrote out his resignation from all his offices in the party, and his wish to continue as 'a private soldier' in the National Socialist Party, and went off with his family to Bavaria. He was broken-spirited from this moment, and never appeared in politics again.

Meanwhile Papen, intent on the overthrow of his detested rival Schleicher, went lobbying in Berlin with his rival proposal for a cabinet in which he should be Chancellor, Hitler Vice-Chancellor, Göring his own (Papen's) deputy as Prussian Premier, big-business Hugenberg Minister for Economics. Another word-of-honour (they were cheap) was given about this time - Hitler's word of honour that he would change nothing in the composition of such a cabinet for four years. Hitler on January 30th, the night of his triumph, reaffirmed this particular word of honour from the balcony of the Reich Chancery in the Wilhelmstrasse.

Gregor Strasser's disappearance put an end to General Schleicher's hopes of retaining power and saving Germany, though he did not realize this himself. He continued to try and build that coalition, though its main prop was gone. He placed too much faith in the fighting spirit, and anti-Nazi fervour, of Leipart's five million organized trade unionists. He announced himself to the nation by radio as 'a social General' on December 15th, 1932, and thus strengthened Papen's hand in the negotiations with the big-business group in the west of Germany and with the big-landlord group in the east.

Nevertheless, Hitler on that day -- six weeks before his triumph -- seemed to have not the remotest chance of attaining power. Goebbels on that very day wrote in his diary: 'It is high time for us to gain power; for the present, however, not the slightest prospect of that offers'. Hitler talked of committing suicide, as he had once before actually sworn to do - on November 9th, 1923, the day of his abortive Putsch in Munich.

Just at this juncture came the meeting at Cologne between Papen and Hitler. The banker Schroeder filled up the bankrupt Nazi treasury, and Goebbels's diary began again to take a more optimistic note. Now came Schleicher's fatal mistake, that helped to cost him his life.

Schleicher could probably have saved Germany and Europe at that juncture by a bold stroke. The stroke he made was not bold enough. He attacked the most powerful and vindictive groups in Germany without covering his rear.

What he did was to release, for the use of the press, material collected by a parliamentary committee of investigation into the misuse of the famous Osthilfe, or Eastern Help Fund. To make this matter clear to British readers, it is worth while remarking that 'Help for the Farmers' in Britain usually means financial subsidies at the cost of the taxpayer for great landowners who rent land to farmers. So in Germany, immense sums which had been budgeted as 'relief for suffering agriculture in Eastern Germany' (the Osthilfe) had actually gone in large part to great landowners who were already hopelessly indebted to the State and whose estates were badly run.

These facts had come out in the parliamentary inquiry but had been suppressed until General Schleicher revealed them. The investigators stated among other things that some of the great but bankrupt landowners had 'whored, drunk and gambled' away the money they received from the State. (Chancellor Brüning's downfall had been directly caused by his attempt to foreclose on these insolvent landlords and use the land for small-holdings. The Hindenburgs, father and son, themselves belonged to these squires, having been presented with a large property by them, and President Hindenburg had dismissed Brüning on a charge of introducing 'Bolshevism' in Germany, on this very account.)

Now Schleicher returned to this self-same, dynamite-laden issue. He thought so to discomfit the embattled forces of reaction by publishing this material in the press that their intrigues against him would be broken, their further opposition to his coalition-making plans neutralized. He under-estimated them. He aroused in them a mortal enmity that brought Hitler to power within a fortnight. One of the squires alone, their leading spokesman, the aged Oldenburg-Januschau, had had rather more than £30,000 from the fund for the alleviation of his distress, and such an attack on his hereditary prerogatives and perquisites was bound to make him apoplectically angry.

This card that Schleicher held was a strong card, if played properly. It was even the ace of trumps, properly played. But if he meant to play it, he should first, and before revealing his intention, have obtained from President Hindenburg power to dissolve the Reichstag, and then he should have arrested the chief intriguers, Papen, Hitler, Oskar von Hindenburg, the leading Junkers, Göring, and a few others, and have rallied the masses of Gregor Strasser's National Socialists and of Leipart's trade unionists behind him by a manifesto explaining the reasons for his action.

By such means, he might have saved Germany and Europe - for these insatiable squires were also the hereditary war-makers of Europe. Instead of giving orders to Leipart, he consulted and debated with Leipart - and the German Socialists, like all other Germans except the little militarist clique, can do nothing without a word of command. Leipart's reaction to such plans was: 'What on earth will Herr Bumke say?' The good Herr Bumke was at that time President of the Constitutional Court of the Weimar Republic, a tribunal before which all nice questions of constitutional procedure had to be brought and decided. The awful vision of an enraged and avenging Bumke was enough to destroy the last hope of a right and reasonable policy in Germany.

So the end came. At the last moment one last intrigue succeeded in obtaining for Hitler, not the Vice-Chancellorship, but the Chancellorship itself. This was the story, brought to Hindenburg by an agent of von Papen (Werner von Alvensleben) and supported by Göring; that General Schleicher intended to march on Berlin with the troops of the Potsdam garrison. After all the other bogies that had been paraded before him -- especially that bogy of 'Bolshevism on the land' -- this one was enough to stampede the old gentleman who had been presented with an estate and who, eight weeks earlier, had pledged himself never to make the Bohemian Corporal Chancellor. He signed the birth-certificate of Hitler's Government, and all was over.

President and Field-Marshal von Hindenburg signed, on the dotted line, the order for the new war, the death warrant for thousands, possibly yet millions, of Germans, Spaniards, Czechs, Poles, and, short of a miracle, Britons and Frenchmen.

I have explained these events in some detail because they explain much in the life of the two Strassers, in the death of Gregor, and in the implacable campaign against Hitler of his brother Otto.

While Gregor Strasser's last struggle with Hitler for the soul of the National Socialist Party and of Germany was in progress, Otto Strasser, Hitler's inveterate enemy, stood aside, watched, and did all in his power to thwart Hitler. A day or two before Hitler's triumph, he sat in a restaurant Unter den Linden at supper with that Madame Geneviève Tabouis who to-day writes about the political mysteries of Europe in the French and British Press. Madame Tabouis came from General Schleicher. That over-astute, and ill-fated Chancellor, a few hours before his overthrow, had held his clenched fist out for her to see, and said, 'I've got Hitler like that'. Madame Tabouis told Otto Strasser of this remark, and he answered, Well, if Herr Schleicher really has got Hitler like that, he had better be quick and crush him, or it will be too late'.

Hitler became Chancellor. Otto Strasser has not the same unrelenting personal hatred of Hitler that he has of Göring, Goebbels, and Heydrich. He does not feel the same bitter loathing of the man to whose destruction he has consecrated his life. This surprised me at first, but I think I understand it now. Strasser regards Hitler as a curiosity, a freak. He cannot take him quite seriously, in spite of everything, and cannot help laughing a little when he looks at him. Hitler is something outside Strasser's ken.

'A feminine type, with a destructive mission, not a constructive one,' he says. 'Hitler gave the best description of himself - a drummer, or showman, and a sleepwalker. Nothing is real or genuine about him. Not even the title Führer grew on him; it is not the product of any inner impulse or wish of the German people or even of Hitler himself. It is the result -- and this is so typical of Germany -- of an order couched in military language and signed by an officer, Röhm, who in the later part of 1931 issued this command to the Party: As from the Nth, the supreme commander of the SA, and Leader of the Party, Adolf Hitler, is only to be addressed or referred to as The Führer.'