AMONG THE GANGSTERS

Evening Star, Issue 23376, 20 September 1939, Page 10

AMONG THE GANGSTERS

AMBASSADOR'S DAUGHTER SPEAKS HITLER'S NEAR-INSANITY IMPRESSIONS OF GOERING AND GOEBBELS When Martha Dodds, daughter of the former American Ambassador, first went to Germany, she was prepared to admire Nazism. But, “by the spring of 1984,” she writes in ‘ My Years in Germany,' “ what I had heard, seen, and felt revealed' to me that conditions of living were worse than in pre-Hitler days, that the most complicated and heartbreaking system of terror ruled the country, and repressed the freedom and happiness of the people, and that German leaders were inevitably leading these docile and kindly masses into another war against their will and their knowledge, and for which they would have to pay not only with their homes, property, and civilisation, but also with their very lives.” One of the things which changed her was a scene in Nuremberg. She was on a motor tour with a friend 1 . CROWD GATHERING. “ As ive were coining out, of the hotel we saw a crowd gathering and gesticulating in the middle of the street. Wo stopped to find out what it was all about. There was a street car in the centre of the road, from .which a young girl was being brutally pushed and shoved. “We moved closer and saw the tragic and tortured face, the colour of diluted absinthe. She looked ghastly. Her head had been shaved clean of hair and she was wearing a placard across her breast. We followed! her for a moment, watching the crowd insult and jibe and drive her . . . the placard said: ‘ I have offered myself to a Jew.’ I wanted to follow, but my two companions were so repelled that they pulled me away.” Martha Dodd's tried to justify the action of the Nazis, but “ here was something that darkened my picture of a happy, carefree Germany. The ugly, bared brutality, I thought, would only make a superficial impression on me, but as time* went on I thought more and more of the pitiful, broken creature, a victim of mass-insanity.” Before her father’s appointment they had been a happy, contented family, living a “ free, constructive life.” Being closely attached they kept together when he had to go to Germany, but they found the pressure, the constant spying, most wearing. Mrs Dodds lost her health through it and never quite regained it. A MEETING WITH HITLER. All the leading figures of the regime and many of the romantic figures of the older Germany came at some time or another either to the embassy or to diplomatic parties, dull, pompous affairs which the Doddses hated. Still, it enabled Martha Dodd's to see a wide cross-section of Nazi Germany and to sea it vividly. She has pen pictures of leading figures, of famous world correspondents. She met Putzi Hanfstaengl, once favourite of Hitler, then disgraced. Through Hanfstaengl she was introduced to the leader. At the Kaiserhof he consented to meet her.

“ I went over and remained standing as he stood up and took my hand. He kissed it very politely and murmured a few words. I knew very little German at the time, so I didn’t linger long. I shook hands again and he kissed my hand again, and I went back to the adjoining table with Putzi and stayed for some tkne listening to the conversation of the two music-lovers, and receiving curious, embarrassed stares From time to time from the leader.” This is her description:— “ A. weak, soft face with pouches under the eyes, full lips, and very little bony facial structure. The moustache didn't seem as ridiculous as it appeared in,pictures—in fact, I scarcely noticed it: but I imagine that is because I was pretty well conditioned to such things by that time. “ As has often been said, Hitler’s eyes were startling and unforgettable—they seemed pale blue in colour, were intense, unwavering, hypnotic. “ Certainly the eyes were bis only distinctive feature. They could contain fury and fanaticism and cruelty; they could be mystic and tearful and challenging. “ This particular afternoon he was excessively gentle and modest in his manners/ Unobtrusive, communicative, informal, he had a certain quiet charm, almost a tenderness of speech and glance. He talked soberly to Jan Kiepura and seemed very interested and absorbed in meeting both of us. The curious embarrassment he showed in meeting me, his somewhat apologetic, nervous manner, my father tells me — and other diplomats as well—are always present when he meets the diplomatic corps en masse. “ As time went on, Hitler’s face and bearing changed noticeably—he began to look and walk more and more like Mussolini. But this peculiar shy strain of character has to this day remained. There were other changes, however, in four .years, which Martha Dodds noticed. _ There developed a “ naughty and supercilious air of self-confidence.” The attitude towards him also changed. “ At one time he seemed to be well loved by the German people; they even broke into spontaneous applause in tho cinema when bis picture was shown. In the last two years I was in Berlin the audiences watched attentively and listened carefully, but there was a tense silence when he had finished speaking or marching. Only once or twice in all that time was there a scattered applause.” And here is her mam conclusion after long and often close observation:—

“ If 1 were to sum up Hitler's character in a few words I would say that he is one of the most fanatical and nearly insane men ruling in any country of the modern world.

“ He obviously has his charming and

■ .PcrVitful moments, though he has never been known to be either witty, brilliant, or wise in bis conversations. “ With his manias, obsessions, and fantasies, he seized on a German population bitter in defeat, torn asunder by the squabbles and criminal disunion of its democratic parties. He came back to power with a poorly-concealed arson trick, backed by irresponsible gangsters, whom the world war had displaced in the German social set-up, promised freedom to the working class, and prosperity to the bourgeoisie. “ One sees the madness, the betrayals, the complete lack of wisdom or intellectuality in Hitler’s face. ... In bis gestures, in his pompous strutting before bis troops, in bis saluting of wildly cheering crowds which works like a drug on his diseased brain,_ one recognises a man of psychiatric treatment, who is now the head of ’a power-

ful State, and who menaces, sometimes effectively, sometimes hollowly, the modern world.

“His dreams of power and glory have shaped his face and figure; they must have shaped his mind as well. He himself thinks his will and wisdom irreproachable, peerless, indomitable, because they -have worked so many times —orie triumph leads to another.

“ Hitler has sometimes the wiliness of a cat, at other times the blundering and brutality of a bull; he constructs the carefully-designed plots, deviously and intricately devised, that madmen are known to create; he has the plans of a wishful thihker, a malevolent child.

“ He will seek his Holy Grail of a Nazified Europe and a Hitlerised Nazidom if, in his fevered dreams, he must first wade through the mire, blood, and the war-infemo of a devastated Europe. These things are to be read in his face, still soft and degenerate despite its harsher lines of power, and in the fatal Napoleonic strut._ These are facts rfvosmised by every diplomat and student who has observed the German scene from the inside for any length of time. Europe and the world must see that an answer is given before it is too late. OTHER MEN. “In this brooding, tantrum-tom creature, whose model for himself and for his nation he finds in the barbario dark legends Wagner has put to music, there is a perverse logic, and an uncanny power to play upon mass psychology. Though the overwhelming blame must be laid upon his shoulders, and upon those who made possible his seizure of power for the return of Germany to barbarism and medievalism, tiie whole story cannot be told without examining the men around him, incii whose lives are as distorted and maimed as his own.” , . ~ Of the men around Hitler she writes with equal sharpness of definition. Goering “ looks podgy and ridiculous from afar, but close up he is more than that. Of medium height, his once slender body has been transformed into a huge, paunchy blob of flesh, lumpy and protruding in places. The once finely-cut face is now lost in rolls of fat: the cheeks like swollen growths under wide-set blue eyes, which are cold as snake’s; the chin a curious protuberance; all line, beauty, or bona structure vanished in a coarse and florid cushion euphemistically named a face. . SO-CALLED BRAINS. Goering’s vanity and egotism are colossal, his mind and emotions as morose and grandiose as those of Hitler himself. Goering is quite the opposite of the picture he tries to draw, of himself and which is drawn of him . . . he is the most vicious, reckless, and dangerous man in Nazi Germany. Ambitious on a grandiose scale,, brutal and ruthless, cold and full of vengeance, fanatic and conscienceless, ha would lead Germany into possiblv further extremities of misery and bloodshed.” . Gocbbels is “ the so-called brains of the Nazi movement. Sharp, sardonic, unscrupulous, playing first with the right-wing Nazis and_ then with the left-wing ones,* affecting a sort of Socialism which fools no one, he is the most hated and distrusted man in the Nazi camp. This official Jew-baiter, newspaper editor, and mentor of the people in propaganda and public enlightenment, has the rodent’s face as well as the rodent’s mind.” Von Ribbentrop is a “ snob,” Himmler “ mincing and sly,” and von Neurath “ simply putty in the leader’s hands.” Martha Dodds, for a diplomat’s daughter, does not mince her words.