War and Remembrance (113 page)

In the first place, he drove home to the entire world, and above all to the German people, the fundamental fact that we were now losing the war. The entire Global Waterloo turnabout was crystallized in those two simple words. This was in itself a stunning propaganda success.

Secondly, he publicly signalled to Stalin an Anglo-American pledge against a negotiated peace in the west. No doubt Stalin remained skeptical, but it was as loud and powerful a commitment as Roosevelt could give him.

Third, Roosevelt reassured the wavering nations like Turkey and Spain, and the subject peoples all over Europe, and the ever-veering Arabs, that the Western powers would not relax at the turn of the tide in Russia, and allow Bolshevism to sweep the continent and the Middle East.

Fourth, he gave his own spoiled and soft nation, in its first moment of success against us, a clear and simple war aim, which appealed to its naive psychology, and discouraged notions of a short war or a compromise peace.

It is objected that the German people were stiffened to resist to the last under Hitler’s leadership; that Roosevelt should have appealed over his head to them and to the army to topple the Nazi regime and make an honorable peace. This objection shows fatuous ignorance of what the Third Reich really was.

Hitler had made Germany over in the only form he ever wanted; a system of headless structures, including the army, with all power concentrated in himself.
There was nobody to topple the Nazis. There was nobody to appeal to.
Our national destiny was bound up with this man. This had been the one aim of all his actions since attaining power, and this he achieved.

He was Germany. The armed forces were pledged to him with their sacred honor. The assassination attempt that failed in July 1944 was witless
and traitorous. I took no part in it, and I have never regretted that decision. It should have been plain to every general, as it was to me, that to order men to die in the field for a Leader, and then to murder this same Leader (however unsatisfactory he might be) was a betrayal of principle.

More than once, at bad moments in Headquarters, I thought of how relatively easy it would be for one of us to shoot Hitler. But he knew he could rely on two pillars in the German character: Honor and Duty.

The German people were in a tragic trap of history, condemned to fight for two and a half more fearful years, simply to keep alive the Head of State who had led them to destruction. Too late did we learn the fatal mistake of the
Fuhrerprinzip.
A monarch can sue for peace and preserve his nation’s honor and stability in defeat, as the Japanese emperor did. A dictator who fails in war is only a beleaguered usurper, who must fight on to the last like Shakespeare’s Macbeth, wading ever deeper in blood.

Hitler could not step down; and none of the Nazis could step down. Their secret massacres of the Jews had rendered that impossible. “Unconditional Surrender” made not the slightest difference either to them or to the German people. Nothing could now sunder Hitler and the Germans, and put an end to the war, but
Gotterdammerung.

TRANSLATOR
’
S NOTE
:
General von Roon’s operational sketch of the fate of the Caucasus Force, which follows the Stalingrad account, he calls “Epic Anabasis of Army Group A.” It is the longest essay in
World Holocaust. I
do not believe the American reader would be as interested in it as Roon’s German readers are. Essentially, once Paulus’s army surrendered at Stalingrad, the Caucasus Force faced a complete cutoff of their line of retreat. After considerable dithering, Hitler put the very able General von Manstein in charge of the northern and most threatened of these luckless armies, to pull him out of the mess. This Manstein did, with some brilliant maneuvering under the worst winter conditions. Another general, Kleist, led the retreat of the southern forces to a bridgehead on the Black Sea. In the end the Caucasus Force got out in good order, inflicting strong blows on the Red Army as it retreated; and the Germans found themselves more or less back on the jumping-off line of Case Blue. It was a stupendously futile military exercise, thanks to Germany’s supreme “intuitive” genius who ordered it and then messed it up. A bitter name for the campaign gained currency in the Wehrmacht: “the Caucasus round trip.”

I had occasion to meet Hitler, so I know how plausible and even amiable he could be, like a gangster boss; he had all the forcefulness and cunning of a master criminal. But that is not greatness in my book. Hitler’s early “successes” were only the startling depredations of a resolute felon become
a head of state and turned loose with the power of a great nation to back him up.

Why the Germans committed themselves to him remains a historical puzzle. They knew what they were getting. He had spelled it all out in advance, in
Mein Kampf.
He and his National Socialist cohorts were from the start a gang of recognizable and very dangerous thugs, but the Germans by and large adored and believed in these monsters right up to the rude Stalingrad awakening, and even long afterward.
—
V.H.

* * *

(from Aaron Jastrow’s manuscript)

FEBRUARY 20, 1943
.

BADEN-BADEN
.

…I shall never forget the moment when the train passed through opened barrier gates over which a large red swastika flag fluttered, and signs in German began appearing along the track. We were in the dining car, eating an abominable lunch of salt fish and rotten potatoes. The American faces all around us were a study. I could hardly bear to look at my niece. She has since told me that she was already in such shock that she scarcely noticed the crossing of the border. So she says now. I saw then on her face the terror of a person being swept over Niagara Falls.

For me it was not quite such a plunge. My memories of pre-Hitler Germany were pleasant enough; and during my brief reluctant trip to the 1936 Olympics to write a magazine piece, when swastikas were flying wherever the eye turned, I had encountered no problems beyond my own uneasiness. I knew some Jews who travelled in Hitler’s Germany on business, and a thick-skinned few for perverse pleasure. Nor were they at much risk. The German moves on tracks; that is at once his virtue and his menace. The travelling Jews were on the track of tourism, as I was on the track of journalism, and therefore safe. I am counting much on this Teutonic trait. Even if the worst stories of German brutality prove true, we are on the diplomatic track. I cannot see anti-Semitism jumping its track and harming us on this one, especially since we are being bargained off for Nazi agents, probably at a rate of four or five to one.

All the same, in our first days here I did not draw a quiet breath. Natalie did not sleep or eat for a week. The defiant haunted gleam in her eyes when she held her son on her lap seemed not quite sane. But after a while we both calmed down. It is the old story, nothing is as terrifying as the unknown. The thing you have most feared, once it is upon you, is seldom as bad as imagined. Life here in Brenner’s Park Hotel is dismal enough, but we are used to it now and mainly bored to death with it. If ever asked whether
fear or boredom oppressed me more in Baden-Baden, I shall have to reply, “Boredom, by a wide margin.”

We are quarantined off from the local inhabitants. Our shortwave radios have been confiscated, and we hear no news except the Berlin broadcasts. Our only newspapers and magazines are Nazi publications, and a couple of French papers full of the crudest German lies, set forth in the language of Moliere, Voltaire, Lamartine, and Hugo. It is a prostitution worse than any poor French whore’s submission to the pumping and thumping of a hairy Hun. If I were a French journalist, they would have to shoot me before I would so stain my own honor, and the honor of my elegant language. At least I hope that is true.

With so little to read, and no news, and nothing to do, all the Americans immured in Baden-Baden are deteriorating, myself perhaps more than others. In five weeks I have not written in this journal. I, who once prided myself on my work habits; I, who produced words as unfailingly as Anthony Trollope; I, who have nothing else to do, and worlds to tell; I have let this record slide like a schoolgirl who starts a diary, then slacks off and lets the almost empty notebook molder in a desk, to be found and giggled over by her own schoolgirl daughter twenty years later.

But sound the trumpets! The first Red Cross food packages came in yesterday, and everybody has snapped out of the doldrums.
Canned ham! Corned beef! Cheese! Canned salmon! Canned sardines! Canned pineapple! Canned peaches! Powdered eggs! Instant coffee! Sugar! Margarine!
I love just writing down the words. These American staples are beautiful to our eyes, exquisite to our palates, reviving to our fading physiques.

How on earth do the Germans fight a war on their everlasting black bread and potatoes and spoiled vegetables? No doubt the soldiers get whatever good food there is; but the civilians! Our ration, we are told, is fifty percent more than the average German’s. One can fill up on starch and cellulose, but eating such food a dog could not thrive. I say nothing of the disgusting cookery in this famous hotel. The Swiss representative assures us that we are not being mistreated, that hotel food all over Germany nowadays is worse than ours. Another time I shall describe what we have been eating, the strange dining room arrangements, the wretched wine, the black-market potato schnapps, the whole way we live under our German “hosts.” It is all worth recording. But first I want to make up lost ground.

It is eleven in the morning, and very cold. I am out on the balcony in pale sunshine, well wrapped up as I write. Those Red Cross proteins and vitamins are coursing through my system, and I am myself again, craving the sun, the fresh air, and the moving pen. Thank God!

My digestion has been poor since we left Marseilles. In Lourdes I thought it was only nervous tension. But I was taken terribly ill on the train
after that awful lunch, and my bowels have been in grave disorder ever since. Yet today I feel fit as a boy. I have had (ridiculous to set down, but true) a gloriously normal stool, over which I felt inclined to crow like a hen over her egg. It is not just the nourishment, I am sure, that has worked such healing magic. There is something psychic to it; my stomach recognizes American food. I could congratulate it on its sensitive politics.

About Louis.

He is the pet of the hotel. He grows in dexterity, vocabulary, and charm from week to week. He began to cast his spell over the group on the train. In Lourdes nobody had seen much of him; but at the station someone gave him a fine toy monkey that squeaked, and he went toddling up and down the train, keeping his balance admirably as our car swayed, offering his monkey to people to squeeze. He was having such fun that Natalie let him roam. He quite broke up the glumness in the car. He even brought the monkey to our uniformed Gestapo man, who hesitated, then took the monkey and unsmilingly made it go
Squeak!

It would require another treatise like Meredith’s on the comic spirit to explain why it was that everyone in the car burst out laughing. The Gestapo man looked around in embarrassment, then he laughed, too; and the horrible absurdity of the war seemed to strike us all, even him, for just that moment. The incident was talked about all over the train, and the little boy with the monkey became our first celebrity at the Brenner’s Park Hotel.

I have given more space to a trivial incident than it perhaps warrants, to suggest the beguiling nature of the child. In my bouts of illness in recent weeks (some have been severe) one cardinal thought has kept me from sinking into apathy. I cannot and will not go under until Natalie and Louis are safe. I will guard them to the death, if I must, and I will fight depression and illness to be able to protect them. Our flimsy journalists’ credentials rest on my few magazine pieces. The special treatment we are getting — this two-room suite on a high floor with a balcony, overlooking the hotel garden and a public park — can only be due to my literary standing, such as it is. Our lives in the end may hang on my jump, with a book-club selection, from academic obscurity to a name of sorts.