A STUDY IN TYRANNY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 731, 17 July 1953, Page 12

A STUDY IN TYRANNY

HITLER, by Alan Bullock; Odhams Press. through Whitcombe and Tombs; 31/3.

(Reviewed by

W.B.

S.

ago most students of affairs were reading about Hitler and his Nazis-work by such writers as R. A. Brady, S. H. Roberts, Konrad Heiden. Each, on re-reading, seems remarkable as contemporary history, for Bullock’s study, despite. its greater bibliographical resources, adds no more to the picture of Hitler and his time. Perhaps this is because the author is the kind of historian who prefers to write a study in tyranny rather than to explain the success of Hitler in ‘terms of the forces which supported him. con or seventeen years Nevertheless, there are some clues. For instance, to obtain some working class following, Hitler in 1932 supported strikers at the same time as he received funds from the industrialists. A few months after this episode he and the conservative Papen met secretly at the house of the banker Schroeder, to discuss tactics. There is the account of the meeting with Krupp von _ Bohlen, Schacht, the I. G. Farben group and_

others which agreed to an election fund of 3,000,000 Reichmarks to help_ Hit-ler-after a promise that the selections would be the last for a few years "probably even for the next hundred years." When Hitler took power, virtually his first act was to destroy the trade unions: then came the appointment of the head of the largest insurance firm’ in Germany as Hitler’s Minister of Economy and Trade. Another not irrelevant fact was the 5000 tax-free acres that Hitler added to’ the Hindenburg estate after he Was in control of Germany. Of’ course, it is difficult to draw all the possible conclusions when the story is about a thug rather than about those who hire thugs. But, judged in its own terms-"the first complete life of Hitler ... to be published in any language’"the book is successful, and is likely to be the standard work in English until social philosophy again becomes a popular study in the English-speaking world. TRUE CONFESSION MY LIFE IN CRIME, the Autobiography of a Professional Criminal, reported by John Bartlow Martin; Victor Gollancz. English price, 12/6. T is easy to believe that the publisher is justified in saying of this very strange book that "it may well be the

frankest autobiography of a _ criminal ever published." It is the story of an American who embarked on a varied life of crime when young, and recounted his doings to a writer of established reputation as a crime reporter. The record has exceptional interest for the student of crime and crime _psy-

chology, and of the special conditions which nourish them in the United States. Why this man Eugene became and remained a criminal cannot be fully explained. He came of a perfectly respectable and happy family, none of whose other members went wrong. Yet he confessed to more than

20 categories of crime and scores and perhaps hundreds of, offences. Martin describes Eugene as an. able man of some attractiveness. The core of his persistent criminality seems to have been that he regarded almost everybody as a thief of sorts, and saw no moral difference between without and. within the law. He ‘must have been strengthened in’ this conviction by the connections he observed between politics. and wrong-doing. In respect to property he was completely conscienceless; he stole a family’s life savings without a qualm. He lived with a string of women and financed a brothel. Yet, with his own sisters in. mind, he made it a rule never to draw an innocent girl into his circle. For. all its interest, this record of crime and the dreary round of spending the proceeds on stereotyped pleasure, makes horrible reading. In the intervals of "work," Eugene seems to have had no interests save women, drink and night clubs, and like most of his kind, from the "big shots" downwards, never kept the money he got, much of it in big swags. I am reminded of Leech’s picture in an early Punch, in which one street walker says to another: "How

long have you been gay?"

A.

M.