the prisoner of ottawa

Early in 1940 I sat at a Devonshire window that overlooked the English Channel and wrote a book about a German, Otto Strasser. I had for many years written against time, so that the waiting presses might have their daily record of violent historic events that consummated themselves around me, and once more I felt in me the familiar urgent need to complete my story (this time a book) before an invasion prevented me (I had finished two others, Insanity Fair in 1938 and Disgrace Abounding in 1939, just ahead of such armed incursions). Thus I scanned sea and sky, between writing lines and chapters, for the oncoming shapes of German ships or aircraft. However, I hoped that Germany would lose and my native island survive the Second War and was immensely curious about the shape which the later future would take in that happy event; chiefly for my own sake, no doubt, for the years after the war, if I survived it, would probably include the second half of my own lifetime. I looked ahead, and wondered whether the Second War would restore peace and equilibrium to the world in the second half-century, or whether the Gadarene process of 1914-39, which in my adult years I had watched and described, would be resumed after it. That, my experience told me, would depend mainly on the treatment of Germany after Germany's military defeat.

With such thoughts in mind I wrote my book about Otto Strasser at a time when few, if any friendly books were being written about a German, Germans or Germany. I believed that the only wise course for the military victors would be to restore Germany to the care of men who had proved themselves to be the unpurchasable and incorruptible enemies of the Revolution of Destruction in either of its guises, National Socialist or Communist. Otto Strasser was the sole apparent candidate of importance who fulfilled such conditions. He had fought Hitlerism and Communism impartially (he knew them to be the same) in Germany and from exile for ten years, from 1930 to 1940. On that verifiable record he was a man in whom a truly peace-seeking outer world might put confidence. In him, I judged, men of goodwill everywhere might at last find what they so long had sought: a German ally who would recreate, rebuild, restore, pacify; anyway, no other offered with equal claim to a chance of self-justification. Moreover, he had a great following in Germany and had retained this despite difficulties hardly to be imagined, even when they are described, by people far from the central turmoil.

I thought the story of such a man might be of use and showed him as a candidate in the wings, who might well appear centrally on the German stage when events gave the cue. This was logically to be expected, too. After the First War the victors (at least until Hitler appeared) had upheld their allies, succoured their friends, honoured their bonds, and protected helpless civilian populations thrown on their mercy. In 1940 a man could still hope that that course of honour and prudence would be followed again, and this time be pursued to the end.

For two years after I wrote that book, until 1942, the shape of the war and of Otto Strasser's political fortunes conformed to that earlier pattern. After many years of perilous adventure he was in an extremity of danger helped to escape his Nazi pursuers and to reach Canada; his very life, probably, was then saved by British and Portuguese help. He was everywhere accorded the respect and sympathy due to his ordeals and to his achievements as the only leading German politician who had long and actively fought Hitler. High responsibility in Germany clearly beckoned to him, once the fog of war had cleared. Thereafter he would justify himself or fail, on his own merit or demerit and the reaction thereto of the German people.

An abrupt reversal in the behaviour of his hosts towards Otto Strasser came after Hitler and Stalin fell out in 1941; his prospects, and in my opinion the hopes of the entire West, then suddenly darkened. The great picture of the war from that instant began subtly and ominously to change; it was as if a new painter superimposed the evil outlines of Calvary on a canvas of the Resurrection. Where the scene had been that of the redemption of Europe it was transformed into one of the crucifixion of Europe between two thieves, the fighting-men of the Christian West being cast merely for the part of Roman soldiers. In the sequence things happened such as never stained the story of 'Western civilization' since it began, and in outline they may be recapitulated here because they form that whole, of which Otto Strasser's story is but a part:

Fifteen thousand Polish officers were massacred, but in this case no 'war crime' was adjudged by British and American justice at Nuremberg. Ten thousand Frenchmen were shot with British or American weapons donated to French Communists; only seven years after the war's end was their number even established, and then casually included among the lesser 'news items', and no 'war crime' was ever seen in this holocaust. A dozen European countries, and then half of Europe, were thrown to Asiatic wolves, and at the end soldiers from remote Mongolian or Tartar lands were halted outside German villages only while they listened to the broadcasts of a harangue recorded in Moscow; in it an alien writer incited them particularly to fall on pregnant women. These things were made possible by the unconditional surrender of money, arms and political support to the Communist rulers by Britain and America. The political leaders there lent themselves to such deeds, as they later affirmed, from fear of losing the war, which they thus could only lose, politically. They submitted equally to the infestation of their own administrations by the agents of the Revolution of Destruction. In the American President's entourage such agents, later exposed, drafted the plans for destroying Europe, and with almost lifeless fingers he signed. Corrupted men appeared even in (and later disappeared from) the British diplomatic service, and in the most secret laboratories of all Western countries other emissaries garnered information to help the future misdeeds of their distant masters. Where Germany and Europe might have been redeemed, a bisected Germany and a chaotic Europe were left. History never saw such a shambles made of an honourable victory. The pieces were rearranged on the chessboard in the order which had enabled the Second War to begin; the world was left in a state of permanent warfare, the climax of which, a Third War, was made as inevitable as any human event can be. Germany was abandoned to the constant temptation (to which Hitler had betrayed it in 1939) to seek revenge and recover lost ground through the help of its natural foe, barbaric Asia; the Communist Empire was given the means to use German hopes and fears at every stage in its design to destroy all Europe. Equally it became probable that the course of a climactic Third War, if one were professedly begun to amend this situation, would similarly be diverted to further the aims of the Revolution of Destruction.

Until Hitler and Stalin came to blows, and this master-plan for the Second War slipped smoothly into gear, Otto Strasser was on all hands given the status due to him as a distinguished German exile and proven foe of Hitler and Hitlerism. He was by deed and avowal as constant an enemy of Communism. When the Communist Empire, being attacked by Hitler, was elected part of 'the free world' by the wartime propagandists of the West, the bait of puppet-employment in Sovietized Europe was dangled before Otto Strasser by an emissary of Moscow. He refused it; thereon his second persecution began, which continues to this day.

It was persecution, this time, by the governments of the West, which connived in it until the end of the war and for more years thereafter than the war lasted! He was in their territory, and they lent their aid as, step by step, from 1942 onwards, his political extermination was attempted. First, he was forbidden to speak publicly, communicate, write or publish, and by such bans, which deprived him of his livelihood, was driven to ever remoter and humbler dwelling places and to that brink of destitution and starvation where a man can only save himself by natural ingenuity. When the fighting ended, in 1945, these bans were nominally raised, but in their place another, openly unscrupulous one was imposed which has made him, for the last eight years, the Man in the Iron Mask of mid-century politics. He was in effect forbidden to return to Germany! Hitler first drove him from it and deprived him of its nationality. The Western Governments, acting in concert at some unacknowledged behest, availed themselves of that useful law of 'the wicked man' to keep his foremost enemy expatriated!

The reason (only admitted many years later) was that in spite of all persecution Otto Strasser's following in Germany, notwithstanding his long absence and the bans, remained large and cohesive; and that someone desired his continued exile. Had he returned to Germany he would have assumed there the political place, whatever it might prove to be, to which his native talents and record entitled him; he would at length have been able to demonstrate his true level, high or low, in his own country. Evidently it was thought, in the curtained quarters whence the enmity to him derived, that his place there would prove to be a very high one, for the natural process was dammed. The American, British, Canadian, French and West German Governments have performed this service, from 1945 to the present day, for those who do not desire his return or the public test of his quality. The might of the effort which has been put forth, through the compliant Western Governments, to keep this solitary man out of his own country is at least proof, convincing enough to surprise even me, of the accuracy of my estimate of his standing in Germany, as I stated it in my book of thirteen years ago.

The campaign against him began on the day, at the turn of the years 1941-42, when he refused the invitation from Moscow to assume the leadership of a 'Free German Movement' under Communist auspices. That fact throws up the obvious question: why do the Western Governments continue to lend themselves to such courses? This question, again, leads into the whole dark complex of events from 1941 to the present day, which also need brief elucidation here for the reader's better understanding of the motives behind the persecution of Otto Strasser:

From the moment when the Communist Empire was by Hitler's act, and not by any better impulse of its own, transformed from his ally into his enemy, Moscow pursued one war aim which was from the start crystal clear (in contrast to such rhetorical professions as those of the Atlantic Charter, which were at once belied by private communications behind the political scenes, and by the ultimate deeds in Europe and Palestine). This aim was perceptibly more important to Moscow than the destruction of Hitler or of Hitlerism itself; indeed, the substance of Hitlerism, being identical with that of Communism, was not meant to be destroyed. This, plainly dominant Soviet aim was: to prevent the rise to power after the war, if possible in any country, of patriotic leaders who had gained large national followings through their distinction in the fight against Hitler. Lenin's dictum that all wars must be turned into civil wars was strictly followed; Moscow always fought the men who might succeed Hitler in Germany, or his Statthalter in the occupied countries, more vindictively than it fought Hitler himself. This was patently the motive for the massacre of the Polish officers, for the betrayal of the Polish Resistance Army at Warsaw, and for the vendettas pursued in all countries against patriotic leaders, such as General Mihailovitch, General de Gaulle, the King of Greece, General Bor, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and all the others. The aim was the obvious and logical one of destroying legitimate claimants to the succession, and of thus leaving in the various countries a chaotic vacuum in which Communism could seize power. The great question, never answered, remains: why did the Governments of London and Washington lend themselves to the promotion of this aim during the war, and after it until the present time?

Otto Strasser was a man of this, to Moscow dangerous type, a proven patriot, a Christian one to boot, a leader with a following, and an undeniable claimant, in the legitimate line, to some eminent responsibility in Germany, once Hitler was gone. His return to Germany would have been a serious setback for Communism. The political leaders of the West prevented it. By that time they were publicly parading in the sackcloth of repentance for their misplaced confidence in 'Uncle Joe', but their deeds, as distinct from their words, showed no genuine reform. Some occult influence continued to mould policy in the West in the shape desired by the tsars of anarchy in Asia, or at least to impede its correction. Long after the fighting in Europe ended the course of events, so puzzling to the masses, first in China and then in Korea pointed to this. The publicly unknown case of Otto Strasser clearly proved it. His treatment was in the straight, or crooked line of those strange and secret wartime arrangements made at Moscow, Teheran and Yalta, in respect of which the Western leaders concerned, by the nineteen-fifties, were crying, 'We have erred! We have most grievously erred!'

For eleven years now Otto Strasser, a man without a stain on any political records save those kept by the Nazis, the Communists and their heirs, the World-Staters, has been in effect kept captive in Canada. Thus his story today has been transformed into something different from the one which I wrote thirteen years ago, and into something then unimaginable. In the tale of human sorrow which has filled the last decade his personal tribulations are but a grain of sand and I do not tell this altered story chiefly on that account, although it is a cause c�l�bre in the annals of human injustice. I tell it because my experience informs me, in 1953 as in 1940 and 1938, that all our tomorrows depend on Germany. Today they depend on the amending, in some form, of the almost incorrigible deed of 1945, in the consequences of which we all might yet be engulfed. If it is to be undone, the undoing will need the help of a man or of men in Germany of the type of Otto Strasser. It cannot be undone with the help of puppet politicians and puppet governments, and even less, unless the central issue be faced, by means of bogus and enforced amalgamations of rump Germany with other remaining European States.

Therefore I think that once more a true record of this man may be useful to a wide range of readers, who will not be allowed to read one unless I write it, and whose own future is involved in the destiny of such as he and of Germany. Apart from all that, it is a most fantastical tale in its own right, even without the moral that I draw from it. We of the twentieth century lead interesting lives, worth any tale-teller's time and pains. Those who follow us might even envy us the excitements and hazards which we have known, for they may be spared the bitter taste of dishonour and betrayal which spoils them for us of today. Otto Strasser's life thus far is exceptional even in this age in its range of adventures and perils survived, in its extremes of perseverance and adversity, in its colours of courage and good humour. It is the story of a German, of Germany, of Europe, and ultimately of the entire West, either on the edge of oblivion or on the threshold of revival; that is to say, it is the story of us all, in the Western world, as we stand at this mid-century.

DOUGLAS REED

Ottawa 1952-53

PART ONE

1897 - 1918

Chapter One

FIN DE SI�CLE

A mystic moment impended for the Earthlings. For the nineteen hundredth time since the event by which many of them measured time, the infinitesimal mote, Earth, hurtling through boundless space at sixty-six thousand miles an hour, was about to complete its journey around the insignificant star, Sun. The end of another of their centuries was at hand, one of constantly improving stability, security and prosperity. The Earthlings, on their beginningless and endless voyage between nonentity and infinity, had never felt so firm on their spinning planet or so confident of its place in the universe. The whizzing whirligig seemed to them to be a vehicle set on a fair and propitious course.

It was a good time to be born on Earth, better than any of the eighteen earlier centuries' eves. That, at least, may have been the thought of any bewhiskered Papa of that day, in his good broadcloth suit, and of becorseted Mama, in her flounced gown, as they gazed fondly on a cradle, while at the door Nurse waited for its occupant and in the street the carriage and pair, for themselves. Had they but known, the babe in the cradle would achieve much if it merely survived to manhood, let alone to middle age, in the new century, for this was to be a tick of time of quite a different sort from the one in which they had been born and grown. Most mothers shed a tear of premonition at the thought of those mortal tribulations which await even the luckiest of the small beings born of their travail. The mothers of that particular moment had more cause than most for that prescient pang amid their happiness.

Papa, possibly, might not have flinched, had something of the future been revealed to him, for many men of his age then complained that life was become too secure, humdrum, dull and adventureless. It had not changed very much since the horse was first harnessed and the first wheel invented, save for the violent interruption in France, which seemed to have raged itself out and dissolved like a summer thunderstorm. The first motor cars had been made, but hardly anybody had seen one. Some contraption, rumour said, had lifted itself into the air for a few yards, but few could vouch that they had truly seen space between it and the ground, and the thing was generally disbelieved. The accelerating speed of the daily mortal cruise between nowhere and nothing was yet to come. The conquest of the air was still almost inconceivable and the conquest of space a notion nearly blasphemous; probably most people still felt in their hearts, even if they could answer questions about the movements and measurements of the solar system, that Earth was the centre of the universe.

The affairs of mankind, being ever better conducted, were visibly improving. The dignity of man, during the century nearly done, had become more and more widely recognized, established and protected. Serfdom, then slavery, had gone. The absolutism of kings was ended, and now they ruled on the bit and bridle of constitutional and parliamentary restraint; how admirable a balance had thus been achieved!

There had been wars here and there during the century, true; but they had been fought with chivalry and concluded with forbearance (save for the American civil one; and as for that the outer world knew little and understood less of the barbaric vengeance wreaked by the North on the South). The French Republic, like a courtesan become genteel, seemed to be expiating in maturity the rapine and bastardy of its birth. The American one appeared to be exclusively devoted to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness between the Atlantic and the Pacific (for the Maine had not yet been, though it soon would be mysteriously sunk in Havana harbour; an event as mysterious and momentous as certain assassinations and arsons of the century to come).

During those ten decades Western man had honoured law and order, legality and legitimacy, too; for that reason his affairs were in good shape. Attempts at violent upheavals, of the French kind, when they occurred throughout Europe at the mid-century and in Russia towards its end, had everywhere broken limply on public hostility and resolute resistance. The mortal concern, it seemed, was gaining experience and being ever more prudently run, and Western man assumed from what he saw about him that this ordered progress would continue in the century about to begin.

The great age of institutions and of rulers alike helped to implant this suggestion in the public mind. The Widow at Windsor and the Old Gentleman at Schoenbr�nn had occupied their ancient thrones longer than most people could remember; they were in themselves potent symbols of reassurance and continuity. The Young Man in Berlin was no longer so young (he had already been Kaiser for a decade) and appeared to be mellowing. The Sick Man on the Bosphorus retained only a toehold in Christian Europe and in the lands whence he had been expelled churches, once hidden below ground, now raised their cupolas to the freed heaven. On the most vulnerable boundary of the West, the one that faced Asia, the semi-barbaric Tsardom was becoming Christianized and constitutional; parties and a parliament were taking shape; and the Russian peasants were at last coming into their own land.

The West, the area of Christian civilization, never looked so strong, so united in its deepest and most lifegiving beliefs, or so secure against outer assault. In the West the dignity, liberty and enlightenment of man seemed sure to increase, and from the West to spread eastward, not to be driven back. If, among the myriad stars, the puny planet Earth was destined to shine more brightly, the West was clearly to be the source of that greater radiance.

At that interesting moment the subject of this book, its writer, and many of those who will read it were born.

Chapter Two

... FATHER OF THE MAN

Otto Strasser was born on September 10th, 1897, at Windsheim in Bavaria, the third of four brothers. That was the heyday of the virile, rising and ambitious Reich, founded on military prowess and aspiring to naval might, over which the young Emperor in Berlin ruled with his lieges, the Kings of Bavaria, Saxony and Wuerttemberg and the many hereditary princes and grand dukes. All these lesser rulers were soon to be swept away with the superior one, leaving a gap never yet filled: their blood and domains, and consequently their interests, were also those of their peoples, who thus were happier then than now. Their passing was part of a German drama apprehended by Goethe, when he became engrossed with the theme of Mephisto and Faust, and by Wagner in his thunderous foretellings of Germanic calamity.

Goethe and Wagner were not very long dead, in 1897, but their presentiments were still beyond the range of ordinary minds, and Frau Strasser, in that halcyon time, was probably spared any foreboding of what awaited her four sons in the coming century. The eldest, Gregor, was to be killed by a man called Hitler; the youngest, was to be conscribed into the same Hitler's army and to vanish in Russia. The central two, Paul and Otto, were to be hunted from country to country by this unimaginable Hitler's emissaries and to save their bare lives only by going into exile on the other side of the world. If any chance at that time took Frau Strasser across the Austrian frontier, which was not very far away, and through a village called Braunau, her glance may have fallen indifferently on a nine-year-old boy in the street there who was this Adolf Hitler.

The child is father of the man, but what makes the child? Heredity first, and then the time in which he lives, which expresses itself in his environment, experiences, upbringing and associates. Not enough has yet (or may ever) become known about Hitler's blood and the associations of his formative years for his being to be assayed; he may have been anybody's agent. Everything is known or can be learned about Otto Strasser (subject to the qualification that every man is, ultimately, a mystery, even to himself).

He inherited at birth three things: German blood and an ancestral German homeland which he loved; a deep religious feeling; and strong Socialist convictions. These are the three influences which formed him and have been strengthened by all the experiences and ordeals of his life. Only the third of them needs clearer definition, especially for those many who do not read but merely scan a book, and this one aims to make Otto Strasser's Socialism clear, as the half-century has shaped it. A patriotic and religious man cannot be a Socialist of any of the varieties, from Lenin to Hitler, Mussolini to Stalin, Laski to Tito, or Trotsky to Blum, which these fifty years have produced.

If such a man is to be understood it is not even enough to say that he inherited 'German blood' and 'an ancestral German homeland which he loved'. He was born not only in Germany but in Bavaria, and not only in Bavaria, but in the Franconian part of it. If there is any central stronghold of the West's two-thousand-year old struggle against the destroyers of Christian civilization, it is Franconia. It was the home of the great Emperor of the West, Charlemagne, who first set Christian civilization firmly on its feet in Europe, drove the invading Arabs back into Spain, and founded that enlightened Empire, based on the best achievements of Rome, which lasted a thousand years, until the destructive revolution emerged again in France. Not far away is Vienna, where the Turkish tide reached its high water mark in 1529 and again in 1683 and which the Mongol and Tartar tide has reached again today. No man whose forefathers dwelt in Franconia, unless he be a corrupted one, can have any doubt about the need to keep barbarians out of Europe.

The words 'The West' mean much more to a man born in Franconia than to men born in Brittany, Gloucestershire or Illinois, just as the words 'the trenches' mean more to a soldier in the front line than to his comrades in the reserve ones or at the base; yet the destiny of all of them is equally involved. Western Man, as he grew out of the darkness into an identifiable figure, and the best the planet has yet evolved, is by any definition a product of Western Europe. He could never have founded, and could not today live well and safely in Vancouver and Washington, Melbourne and Cape Town, Auckland and Houston if Western Man, who remained behind, had not through the centuries held that Eastern bastion in Franconia, around Vienna and on the Baltic shores. If that bastion falls, he may not long continue to enjoy his inheritance in those far distant cities oversea, but may sink to the level of a subordinate breed. A man does not need to learn this lesson if he was born in Franconia; it comes with the bloodstream; this is heredity.

Franconia itself is the material inheritance of that heredity. It is as lovely as any countryside in Europe and contains towns as noble as may be found anywhere there. It is a period piece, preserved for the instruction of twentieth century man, of what the West was, and again could be, at its best. Rothenburg,[1] the finest surviving example of a medieval town, lay within its walls and towers a few miles away from Windsheim. Otto Strasser's mother came from Dinkelsbuehl, which in beauty vies with Rothenburg, and grew up there in the famous wooden Deutsches Haus, for her father had an inn in that ancestral home of a Bavarian noble family. He was a well-to-do peasant and owned a brewery. In England good connections with beer have sometimes brought the accolade or the patent of nobility. In Bavaria, though they did not lead to such heights, they were a source of high esteem because of the respect in which the beer itself, deservedly, is held; it is supreme of its kind.

Simple and substantial folk, then, at the turn of the century, and devout Catholics all, the Strassers, their kith and kin, and their neighbours. They were cut to a pattern which had proved its worth. If they differed in any detail from the pattern, as a man's jacket in the 1950s may vary slightly from that of his father's in the 1900s, it was in their Socialism. However, Socialism in the 1900s did not mean what it means in the 1950s, when its survivors from the 1900s might wring their hands, if they are men of probity, to see the shambles they have helped make of the West.

The world and its problems seemed simple to mend, at the start of this century. It was a simple calculation in black and white: merely take away 'feudalism' and 'vested interests' from 'the have-nots' and 'the under-dog', and the resultant sum would be happiness for all. If the bough of a tree enshadowed your house, cut it off, but sit on it before you began to saw. As property was ill-distributed, abolish the right to property, and then all alike would have none. All men being inherently equal, 'classes' were sinful; therefore, incite the under-privileged class against the over-privileged class until the classes changed places, and, the lower becoming the upper, sinlessness would be achieved.

The great masses of people were only beginning to be literate and these primers of political science were adequate to their needs. Throughout the West Liberal parties, already strong, preached this gospel of self-enslavement and called it one of liberation. In their wake came the vanguards of the growing Socialist parties, singing more threatening psalms more loudly. They were both but the bailiffs of the real mortgagor who pressed on them from behind, resolved to foreclose: Communism. They played Faust to the red Mephisto; they were put through the Western window, Oliver Twist-like, to open the door to the Communist Bill Sykes. By the mid-century the Liberal Party was but a mumbling wraith, clanking its chains in the haunted house of oblivion; the Marxist one, with one foot over that same threshold, still tried to look as if the morrow belonged to it.

These developments of the fifty years to come were not to be foreseen in 1900. Men wanted changes. Feudalism, seigneury and privilege in fact were dead or dying and only traces and trappings of them remained; but mature men habitually fight against what aggrieved them in youth, not what injures them in maturity (demagogic politicians of the 1950s, when they become eloquent, often explain that they are determined to redress wrongs which embittered, but vanished with, their own long-vanished childhood). To this habit of mankind the Liberal and Socialist parties of the West probably owe their transient blooming of the twentieth century. (see note, below.)

Thus Otto Strasser's father, in 1900, may have been embittered less by the conditions of that time than by those of 1850. Perhaps he felt cramped by the influence of the Court, and by the continuing power of the purse, of family and of position in Bavarian life. Anyway Peter Strasser was a revolutionary Socialist in 1900; whether he would call himself so, could he survey the West in 1950, one cannot guess. He was the son of a countryside where political thought and discussion are endemic. Franconia has supplied more famous German politicians than any other German land, among them Stein, Metternich, Baron von Dahlberg, Franz von Sickingen, Ulrich von Hutten and Florian Geyer. Peter Strasser was outwardly a diligent, middle-rank civil servant in the judicial service. His mind was discontented with the things he saw, at a time when that eternal human trait, sycophancy, still attached itself to courts (because courts still survived) and he wrote and published under a punning pseudonym, Paul Weger, a book called Der Neue Weg, which set out his ideas for A New Germany. Nearly all Germans, then as subsequently and still, were thinking about new ways and a new Germany.

It was his last published book. He wrote another, but his wife intercepted it. The premonitions of women may often be well founded. She rose, as in defence of her young, against anything that might endanger the secure, pensionable life to which her husband might look forward if he kept his views to himself. Peter Strasser, a man of peace, locked his manuscript away. The course of the twentieth century might have been different, had more women thus prevailed on more husbands, or it might not. In any case, this particular source of household dispute goes back to the start of time. The selfsame controversy repeated itself in the life of Otto Strasser and had the opposite outcome; he parted company with his first wife rather than cease from political fight. In his own home, despite the unpublished second book, he and his brothers inevitably absorbed their father's views and grew up in an atmosphere of lively political thought.

That, then, is the background of his earliest years: a South German homeland deeply impregnated with the feeling of Europe's fight for survival against the barbarians; a religious upbringing; and a political interest both inherited and developed from childhood on. It was a time of hard work for little money; good food and drink at cheap prices; diligence, thrift and security; rigid social gradations vexing to the ambitious; stout roofs overhead even for the humble; uniforms and bands; pomp and etiquette; ritual and sycophancy. It was good and bad, like all life at all times; but it was, or seemed, well founded, strong and enduring. It was, by any standard, good in comparison with what was to come.

Otto Strasser, like many men in many countries at that time, felt cramped. He read avidly, underscoring and annotating every third or fourth line (as he still does), thought, talked and seethed with ideas. When he was sixteen he left school. Gregor was at the university and Paul at a grammar school; Peter Strasser could not afford fees for his third son and Otto became an apprentice in a textile factory. That was in 1913, and he remained there a year, six months in the counting house and six months in the workshops. In the counting house he learned only to fill the inkpots, copy the letters, stick stamps on envelopes and fetch food for the clerks and workmen at ten o'clock. In the factory he learned merely packing and today still can 'make a wonderful parcel'.

In spite of all that has befallen him, his family, his home and the world in the forty years that have passed he says reminiscently that it was 'a terrible year'. For the writer of this book, whose memories of 1913 are somewhat similar, those three words cast a brilliant light on the minds of the young men of that time, in all countries. The humdrum corridors of daily life cramped and restricted them and their spirits impatiently awaited release. The tedium of peace lay heavy on them; the monstrous tedium of war they had yet to learn, and when they had learned it they would be unable to impart the knowledge to their sons, so that the process would continue. There is, perhaps there ever was and long will be, in robust young men an impulse towards war just as strong and inquisitive as the first stirrings of a girl's heart towards young men. This will not be denied by those who recall the eager haste with which the youths, on both sides of the conflict, ran to offer themselves in 1914. The words, 'first fine careless rapture', are, or at any rate then were, as true as the later disillusionment was complete; but the disenchantment was never yet bequeathable, and those who profit by war have a useful tool at hand in this recurrent instinct of the young male animal.

Thus the words, 'a terrible year!' uttered as the speaker's eye looked back across four decades at 1913, illuminate something of the human mystery, of our time and of all times. By all rational standards, 1913, contemplated from 1953, might call forth from any Western man the heartfelt cry, 'A wonderful year! May we soon look on its like again!' for no year ever so clearly marked the end of an era in which so much was good. The confident present and untroubled future, the cheapness of home and the ease of travel, the good manners of men and decorum of women, the strength of institutions and the trustworthiness of justice, the spreading dignity and liberty ... ah, life was very good then!

But men are not so. By a divine instinct, men's minds mistrust ensuing danger, and so men, even today, feel it their destiny to press on, heedless of the past, perhaps to a harder future, but anyway: On! On!

Otto Strasser's 'terrible year', like the 1913 of so many millions of other men, was but an interlude. In September 1914 he was to have resumed his studies, for which the fees had become available. In June the event occurred (as mysterious in its origins as the sinking of the Maine) which was to change the lives of most people who will read this book and the whole shape of the twentieth century. The Archduke was shot at Serajevo, and on August 2nd, 1914, the First War began. None of us today, not even those who then were yet unborn, can guess what our lives might have been but for that. Otto Strasser's life then truly began.

NOTE:
I like to construe the misuse of the name 'Liberal' in this century, and the consequent extinction of the 'Liberal' parties, as the fulfilment of prophecy: 'The vile person shall no more be called liberal', Isaiah xxxii, 5. D.R.

Chapter Three

TO THE WARS, MY BOY ...![2]

If greatness is size, not excellence, the Great War was truly great (and for horses it was the war to end wars). Never before had so many young men fought each other over so large an area, and never again, possibly will so many fighting men be destroyed in action (the Second War, its child, brought massacres of defenceless civilians on a scale never before known or imagined to be possible in the future). If greatness is quality, not quantity, the Great War was great only in one respect: the staunchness of the soldiers, in all armies, who endured its ordeals, which today are hardly to be believed even by those who experienced them.

Men who are now in their fifties, when they look at the pictures of those battlefields, may ask themselves incredulously how they, and millions like them, supported the burden of their existence in ditches, potholes and mudholes under constant bombardment, where they merely awaited death or wounds, without the incentive of action, for years on end. The withdrawal of the horse in favour of speedier means of attack, the incorporation of the petrol-driven engine in machines of war on the ground and in the air, brought a war of immobility, a long artillery duel with infantrymen for sitting targets. It remains the unbelievable war and the fortitude of those huddled, anonymous figures in the pulverized ground must remain for ever astounding. They were the young men of 1914, experiencing war. They could not, on either side of the line, guess to what purposes their courage and patience would be put.

Somewhere among them was Otto Strasser. On August 2nd, 1914, when he was not seventeen years old, he became the youngest soldier in the Bavarian forces. The brave or brilliant uniforms of the past were being put off for the last time; they only survive today in the State pageantry of one or two countries. Possibly the memory of them made Strasser apply first for the light cavalry (those long overcoats, shining sabres and clanking spurs!) but after being locked in a riding-school with three hundred other forgotten recruits for three days he broke out and was accepted (on six weeks' probation, because he was weakly!) by the Fourth Artillery Regiment.

This brief period of his life is important for his political thought because he retains from it a vibrant hatred of the fat, red-faced and bullying sergeant-majors of that day. The masses of other countries were at the time also instructed to dislike these traditional figures of the Germanic parade-ground and the tales that Otto Strasser tells of them show that they were tyrants indeed.[3] Strasser considers these illiterate sadists to be an eternal type and holds Hitler's SS-men to have been of the type. 'The SS spirit,' he used to say during the Hitler years, 'was born on those parade-grounds, and I have a hatred of these people which nothing can kill.' Such men are the backbone of any secret police state, Nazi, Communist or other. (Otto Strasser himself, at the front, was driven to draw a revolver against one such tormentor and at his court-martial was acquitted, the sergeant in question being punished; later in the war he was by chance sent to a battery which Otto Strasser was then commanding and, being caught at his old tricks again, was tried by court-martial, degraded, and sentenced to five years' penal servitude.)

Like the other young men of 1914, Strasser feared that the war would end before he saw action, and thus it came about that during its first few weeks he was successively light cavalryman, artilleryman, and then, at his own request for transfer, infantryman-in-action. The Sixth Bavarian Reserve Infantry Division consisted of four regiments, the 16th, 17th, 20th and 21st. Otto Strasser, just seventeen years old, was posted to the 20th and went into the trenches in Flanders, to find first the Sikhs and then British troops facing him, at Wytschaete and Warneton. A barrack-room lawyer named Adolf Hitler was in the 16th, not far away; however, he was a headquarters orderly, well behind the front.

This was Otto Strasser's first action and it is, or was, a legendary one in Germany, comparable with the baptisms of fire of the Honourable Artillery Company and the London Scottish on the other side. Many of the German volunteers were students of his own age or little more and they went into battle singing Deutschland ueber Alles. Strasser's company lost seven-tenths of its men to the British fire at Warneton.

Thereafter his part in the Great War was similar to that of many men, on either side, who served at and not behind the front. In March 1915 his battalion was sent post haste towards the Russian front and then rushed back again to hold the British attack at Neuve Chapelle. He was re-transferred to the artillery, awarded the Iron Cross after a British attack at Armenti�res, seriously wounded by a shell splinter in May 1916, promoted warrant officer in May 1917 and artillery lieutenant in October 1917.

This marked another stage in his life and in the development of his thought. That was the first war in which masses of men, in all the armies engaged, who had grown up in a world where officers represented a superior caste, themselves all unexpectedly became officers. Otto Strasser has never swerved in his Socialism, which, however, is distinctly his Socialism, and excludes class, religious or national prejudices and resentments. Together with his hatred for the bullying Unteroffizier of that time, his respect for the German Officers Corps has survived all the events of these forty years. He found in it in many ways a truer democracy than he had encountered anywhere else. He likes to give this example of its working:

'No candidate was admitted to the Officers Corps, that is, to the rank of lieutenant, without the unanimous agreement of all officers in the unit; this rule was most jealously kept, and without such unanimous support the King of Bavaria himself could not appoint an officer. A Bavarian Minister of that time was much annoyed that his son, the ensign Count X., was not made an officer. The colonel of the regiment asked our battery commander, Count von Hertling (a nephew of the German Chancellor of about that time) why he would not propose Count X, and Hertling replied, "He is incapable, cowardly and useless." Then came an urgent message from the aggrieved Minister in Munich saying that His Majesty wished to make Count X an officer at Christmas. The colonel called a meeting of all officers, hoping to have Count Hertling voted down. He addressed them, saying, "Now, gentlemen, this is the son of a leading Minister and it is the express wish of His Majesty. Count X may be all you think, but this is causing an uproar in the Court at Munich." Count Hertling answered, "The lives of the soldiers whom Count X would command are more important than the feelings of Court circles in Munich," and the officers assembled thereon by large majority endorsed Count Hertling's view. The King and his Minister were left no choice but to find Count X a lieutenancy in some obscure regiment with a very low number, like the 46th. The First Bavarian Artillery Regiment, however, ranked with the Guards. Combatant officers and soldiers of many armies might feel in themselves a sympathetic response to that anecdote.'

The King of Bavaria, his Minister, Ensign Count X and Otto Strasser were soon to have quite other problems forced upon them, for now came the last great convulsions of the Great War. Russia collapsed, and the alien Communists sent there from New York and Switzerland chastised the wretched Russians with scorpions worse than any Tsarist whips. The curtain of the future was impenetrable, and the events in Russia then seemed a blessing for Germany. The German rear was set free, Ludendorff threw his whole strength against the British Fifth Army and once more the German tide flowed towards Paris. On that day, March 21st, 1918, Otto Strasser was in the front wave of the attack, south of Saint Quentin. As a forward observation officer for his battery he took command of some ground troops and captured a British battery, and later a British brigade staff, receiving the Bavarian Distinguished Service Order and a recommendation for the Max Josef Order. This was the rarest German decoration for valour, more highly coveted even than the Prussian Pour le M�rite, and carried the predicate of nobility with it, so that Otto Strasser nearly became Ritter Otto von Strasser, as John Brown may become Sir John Brown, K.C.B. (the recommendation vanished, with much else, in the German collapse).

In those days, for the last time, the young Germans of 1914 seemed to be near to victory; but the advance slowed down, the tide turned, the Americans began to disembark in great numbers at French ports, and on August 25th, 1918, Otto Strasser, who had been falling back from position to position with his battery, saw before him the shape of defeat:

'We had no mail, no trustworthy communications with headquarters or with our flanks. We dug ourselves in by a bridge over the canal near Soissons to hold up the black French Colonial troops whom we expected while the main body of our men retired. Some hours passed and to our surprise we saw no sign of the enemy. With an orderly I rode cautiously across the bridge and into no-man's land, which was a mile broad at that point. Suddenly I saw in front of me, about half a mile away, turning a tree-hidden corner in the road, endless marching columns of troops. Their equipment was brand new from their steel helmets to their boots, and they sang. Four years earlier we had marched off to war looking like that. For the first time fear rose in me, that we should lose the war. Our shells and machine guns mowed down these incautious lads, just as we had been mown down by the British in Flanders in 1914. But of what use was it? This human torrent was so mighty, so relentless, that we were bound to drown in it.'[4]

This was his first sight of the newly-arrived American armies, which, in that war and the next, marched towards a victory which was to be turned into political defeat. As the last months of the war passed he fought one rearguard action after another and brought his guns back home. In September he was so ill from the effects of a wound that he could neither walk nor ride. A sick man on a stretcher returned to a chaotic Germany and as the German collapse drew near he lay in hospital in Munich. On November 6th, 1918, a veteran of twenty-one, he was allowed out, on crutches, for the first time to visit his parents, who were then at Deggendorf. Returning to Munich on November 7th, he heard the roar of a mob and as the train drew into Munich station the rioters swarmed aboard it, arresting all officers save Strasser (because he was crippled). They tried, however, to tear off his officer's shoulder-straps, so that he drew his revolver. At that moment a man unknown to him, who wore the red armband of the revolutionary Soldiers', Sailors', and Workmen's Council, intervened and escorted him to an hotel.

It was a different homecoming from the one which the German soldiers, on the strength of those three victories in the preceding century, had pictured: the traditional, triumphal welcome of flower-tossing maidens, cheering crowds, bands, bugles and beer. The Germany of 1900 and 1914 was crashing and crumbling around him; the future was a wall of fog.

Not only for this man; not only for the other Germans; but also for those who thought they were the victors. Behind the smoke and smother of the Great War ulterior purposes had been pursued which were to breed another war, and of that one, none yet knows what may come, though all can now see that its end was more ominous than the conclusion of the first one.

A strange new world dawned in 1918. Not only the kings and hereditary princes were gone but, with them, the statesmen! In the great American Republic an ailing man, who knew little of the stuff he handled, was President, and that unhappy event was to repeat itself in even more dangerous form in the next war, with results so much the worse. In the British island, for the first time, a demagogic politician with equally little knowledge of Europe held untramelled power; and by his own statements, later published, he had privately made territorial arrangements of the direst consequences in the Middle East. The foundations of the Zionist Empire had there been laid and the seeds of endless embitterment and war had thus been sown among the Moslem millions. The Communist Empire had been set up in Moscow by a horde of conspirators arrived there from New York, and from New York too their funds came; both those things are now on record. Neither of these things was ever admitted to be among the purposes of the Great War when it was begun; both were gravely dangerous to the West, and would prove to be so before another twenty-five years had run.

Towards this new, then unimaginable world, Otto Strasser and millions like him in many lands of the West turned their faces, in 1918.

PART TWO

1918 - 1933

Chapter One

WITHERED GARLAND

Otto Strasser, on two crutches, looked about him and saw vast differences. Indeed, the entire history of the West had never brought about such changes as these which the four years 1914-18 had seen, unless in France during the Revolution and possibly for a brief period, soon overcome, in England during the nearly forgotten one there. No physical ruins met the returning German soldier, in 1918, but there was a spiritual shambles. All values and standards had been turned upside down, and not only in Germany; the future was a dark cloud in the shape of a question mark. The 'barriers' of class and sex, and perhaps of clarity and sense, had gone. Henceforth men would find little in the nature of hereditary privilege to prevent them from rising; they might in time, however, find quite other 'barriers', possibly more onerous. Women, everywhere, had thrown down the last 'barriers'. The womanless textile factory of 1913, with the womanless parliaments and offices of that era, might have been but a dream, so swiftly had they all vanished. The girls of the new century's first decade, who in their bedrooms had vicariously shared in the escapades of Mr. Wells's Ann Veronica, or of her literary counterparts in other countries, themselves had kicked over all traces during the war; in the nineteen-thirties as mothers married or unmarried, and in the nineteen-fifties as grandmothers of uncertain status, they might sometimes wish that they had left all those traces unkicked. They had had the fun of throwing down 'the barriers', but, in the light of experience and mature reflection, might wonder if it had been such fun, and if they had been barriers? Had they not given some spiritual security which, in retrospect, seemed much to be desired? In Germany the old rule for women, Church, children and household, had been swept away, and in its place freedom reigned, or what reigned was so called. It was the time of disenchantment, not much less for the soldiers of the victorious armies than for those of the defeated ones. 'O, wither'd is the garland of the war, the soldier's pole is fallen; young boys and girls are level now with men.'

Out of this German shambles of 1918 many politicians were made, and one of them was Otto Strasser, who in 1913 might have aspired to become a notary, an apothecary, or an office manager. Henceforward politicians would have to be bred out of the events of the day, as they were no longer to be born. The system of ruling families, constantly replenished by the more forceful from below, had had one great advantage; that of cadets who inherited a knowledge of, and from their youth were trained in public affairs. As the conduct of these affairs, called policy, is not the simplest but the most difficult of the sciences, and as no universities exist especially to impart instruction in it, that source of recruitment was of some value to peoples and States. From the time of the First War onward the qualification for a high career in politics was in most Western countries to be success as a lawyer, as a journalist, as a mob orator, in business or in a trade union; and, more important, the favour of powerful groups which sought to control policy, in the various countries, through the advancement of such candidates. The final result of this process, for the West, has yet to be revealed. Lenin, Stalin and Hitler were products of it in Europe and Eurasia; the reader must judge for himself how it has worked in the British island and the American Republic.

Otto Strasser, today, is a product of that process on its reverse side: that of the rejects, or discards. He was never among the favoured candidates. The result of that is that his experience of the last thirty years has given him the equivalent of several university educations, specifically in policy and political science. That training began in 1918, when he never expected to become a politician, and had only such political knowledge as he had acquired in his father's home. The events around him shaped his future; politics were thrust upon him.

Propped on his crutches, he had no thought of a political career, but only of reintegration and a livelihood. First, he meant to resume those studies which had been interrupted in 1913 by lack of money for fees. Curtailed university courses were open to such as he, but he had only his officer's pay, and that only while he was on the sick list; he resolved to complete the one year course, somehow, in six months. The destiny that shapes our ends, intervened even then; he went first for a short convalescence to a Bavarian spa, Bad Eibling, and there found health, but also politics.

By such chances may a man's whole life be given a different shape. Up to that moment Strasser's only active political work (if it can be so called) was towards the end of the war, when General Ludendorff ordered that officers give their men 'patriotic instruction to improve the spirit of the troops', then beginning to crumble. Otto Strasser was among the officers selected for this duty in his unit, and in dugouts and billets sought to dispel his men's doubts about the war and its results, and 'the things' for which they (like other soldiers in other armies) were supposedly fighting. One night he lectured a group of soldiers on their duty to the Fatherland, and one of them subsequently said to him, 'Sehen S', Herr Leutnant, that's all very fine, what you say, but what does "Fatherland" mean to me. My father doesn't own any land, and nor do I; I'm a day labourer. To me "Fatherland" means the land that owns my father. When we defend the Fatherland we defend the rich who own it and who own us. If we were defending our own land our hearts might be in it.'

An incident observed, a snatch of talk overheard, a phrase read, sometimes have the effect of sudden revelation. Strasser never forgot this terse and cogent summing-up of a simple man's thought. It helped to guide and govern his entire political thought, up to the present day. 'Talking with that soldier, I realized that Germany should build a society that would give everybody a stake in the nation, an economic system in which all could participate as co-owners.' These origins of Strasser's political thinking should be kept in the reader's mind when he comes to consider Strasser's plan for 'German Socialism' (now 'Solidarism') as it is summarized in a later chapter.

The question he was asked that night, and other questions which he had to answer in those circumstances and at that time, were put by men who were among the early buyers of the Socialist and Communist goldbrick, the gilt on which was still fresh in 1918; the sons and grandsons of those men would have to find their own way back to the continuing verities of human life. Otto Strasser, who counted himself to be a revolutionary Socialist, understood the working of these soldiers' minds and was wont to discuss such incidents in the officers' mess, where he would urge that the governing classes (which then still survived in Germany) ought to give guidance and leadership to, rather than try to repress, the longing for a just social order which was fermenting in the German soul. This made him somewhat suspect in the Officers Corps so that he (who was to take arms successively against a Communist dictatorship and a reactionary Putsch and was later to be exiled from his own country at Communist behest) became known there as The Red Lieutenant.

That was the total political experience of the man who in December 1918 went to Bad Eibling, in a Bavaria whence the king was gone and where the Republic had been proclaimed, and one evening was catapulted into violent political controversy. He learned that the Communist leader from Munich, Kurt Eisner, was to address a meeting in Bad Eibling and went to see what transpired. Otto Strasser was by then on two sticks and in civilian clothes; he had to conceal the fact that he was an officer from the peat workers of the neighbouring Kolbermoor, many of whom, were Communists and trouble-makers.

That evening the curtain went up on Otto Strasser's political life. This man in the gallery, with his two sticks, called himself a revolutionary Socialist. The man on the platform called himself a Socialist and Communist. That sounds as if there might have been little difference between them. They were in fact worlds apart.

Strasser, whether he then realized it or not, first saw the true and wolfish shape of the force which had used the 'Socialism' of Western man as a stalking-horse. Kurt Eisner was no German, save by form, but derived from that dark Eurasian borderland which from the 1890s to the present day has supplied the leaders of Communism in Russia and in all other countries. He had long hair and beard, spoke defective German and had spent the war years writing for the Socialist Vorwaerts. What this Socialist on the platform said made the Socialist in the gallery 'mad with rage'. Eisner was a master of mob-incitement and shouted that Germany had been guilty of the war, that the officers had swilled and guzzled while the troops were driven into the enemy's fire, and the like more. Both his speech and that of an obese cattle-dealer who followed, one Gandorfer, were directed mainly against 'the officers'. Strasser, in the gallery, boiled over and repeatedly called down, 'Liar, liar'. He was challenged to come down to the platform and went, thus making his first public appearance in politics.

He had never spoken before, was twenty-one years old, crippled, almost incoherent with indignation and faced a hostile audience, but his words took effect. He said that the casualties among officers had in fact been much higher than those in the ranks and that not 'the officers' had enriched themselves but 'the war profiteers, like Herr Gandorfer here; and for the rest, where were you in the war, Herr Eisner? You who sit down there: ask these loud-mouthed gentlemen what they did in the war and if they only had sixpence a day pay'. At this instant Gandorfer, who had been making inquiries, sprang up and shouted, 'Comrades, he's an officer!' The peat-workers, who carried knives in their boots, surged angrily towards the platform. The men on it hustled Strasser towards the back door and threw him out.

Such was the revolutionary Socialist's first introduction to what might lurk behind 'Socialism'. Soon afterwards Kurt Eisner was shot in Munich by a Count Arco.[5] Thereon the Communist Republic was proclaimed in Munich. Until that moment there had been a Left Coalition government (Socialists, Independent Socialists and Communists) of the pattern which became familiar in the Second War as the formal preparatory to the seizure of power by the Communists in many countries; the governments of London and Washington in fact forced Communism on such countries as Poland and China by compelling governments there to form these Communist-containing coalitions, or in other words, to lay their heads on the block. Levine, an emissary from Moscow, was the controlling spirit in the Munich Soviet, and other characteristically un-German figures in it were Ernst Toller and Erich M�hsam.

Two things are important about this short-lived Bavarian Soviet. The first was the shooting of hostages, who were ostensibly arrested as a means of warding off an attack by anti-Communist forces from outside Munich. Among these hundreds of hostages were twenty-two Members, including several women, of the 'Thule Society', a small and unimportant body which fostered the cult of old German literature, traditions, folklore, legends and the like. Its devotees were elderly professors and noblemen and their wives and it had no political importance or the possibility of achieving any. It was anti-Christian and anti-Jewish. Precisely these twenty-two men and women were taken out and shot by the alien governors. There is a deep symbolic significance in this act of discriminate vengeance which is also to be found in several happenings in Europe at the end of the Second War.

The other remarkable thing about the brief Bavarian Communist Republic is that one Adolf Hitler, who disappeared when the Communist armies entered Berlin in 1945, in 1919 was a serving soldier in Munich at the time of the Soviet Republic and stayed there, so that he must have been under its orders! The red regime there lasted from November 1918 until May 1st, 1919. According to his own account in Mein Kampf Hitler, cured and discharged from hospital, reported to his regimental depot in Munich towards the end of November. His battalion there was under the orders of the revolutionary Soldiers' Council. This so disgusted him, according to Mein Kampf, that he contrived to be sent to a camp at Traunstein, a few miles away, but he returned to Munich 'in March'.

For about two months, therefore, he was in Munich, a serving soldier under the rule of a commissar sent from Moscow. Hitler's book, which devotes so much space to abuse of the Communists and Communism, calmly passes over these two months of his life in Munich. It says no word about events there, though it rails at length about massacres in distant Moscow. The only reference to this period is the unintelligible remark that Hitler was 'nearly arrested' three days before the Communists were driven out; from that he passes to a sentence beginning 'A few days after the liberation I was ...' There is nothing about the horrors of a Communist regime personally experienced or about the severe fighting that preceded the liberation, and nothing about the triumphal entry of the liberators. The man who says he had already taken an oath to fight Bolshevism when he was in hospital at Pasewalk is silent about those days and happenings!

This remarkable period in Hitler's life becomes more remarkable still when it is related to the striking incompleteness of published information about the associations of his formative years in Vienna and to the mystery of his disappearance in 1945. These facts are clear: that serving soldiers who did not accept the Communist Republic escaped from Munich to join the exterior forces which were preparing to overthrow it, and that Hitler, who stayed in Munich, presumably stayed of his own will. The inference is equally clear: that he must, as a serving soldier under discipline, have worn the red armband and in some capacity have taken part in the resistance to the liberating troops. Otto Strasser himself first drew the present writer's attention to this singular gap in Hitler's story, which might be of such great significance, and added that in later years there was often much puzzled shaking of heads among the National Socialist leaders if any of them ever ventured to ask, 'What was Adolf doing in Munich in March and April of 1919?' The answer was always a perplexed shrug of the shoulders or shake of the head, and a change of topic.

The revolutionary Socialist who is the subject of this book, however, clearly realized that Eurasian Communism was not what he had ever conceived as revolutionary Socialism. Otto Strasser was also in Munich, in convalescent hospital. He slipped out and at the risk of his life made his way to the anti-Communist force which was being improvised at Ohrdruf in Thuringia by General von Epp, a famous German officer who had commanded such elite troops as the Bavarian Guard and the Bavarian Alpine Corps. When the Epp Free Corps took shape, Otto Strasser was in it. So was Gregor Strasser, an immensely popular man whose own life was once more to embody the German tragedy. Gregor brought together a troop of 2000 infantrymen, 3 field batteries and a 15cm. howitzer battery, with full war equipment and munitions (such things were possible in the Germany of that day). Gregor Strasser was for a while Lord of Lower Bavaria, but as he had to tend his apothecary's shop by day and could only become a Free Corps leader at night he took a helper, a young man who was to be his own murderer: Heinrich Himmler. Gregor Strasser and a large part of his miniature army at once joined with von Epp (Himmler did not; here is another characteristic mystery, similar in its nature to that of Hitler's unexplained presence in Munich).

Then the Epp Free Corps and a regular Prussian division began the march on Munich. In two days of fighting, while Hitler lurked somewhere in the city and Himmler watched from far away, the battle was fought and won. Munich was taken; the commissar from Moscow, Levine, was court-martialled and sentenced. Otto Strasser, the revolutionary Socialist, was in the van of those who fought to rid Munich of the Communists and became entitled to wear on his left sleeve, when in uniform, the golden lion of the Epp Free Corps.[6] Among those whom he and his comrades liberated (or who changed sides after the liberation), was the man yet unknown to him: Adolf Hitler, the arch anti-Communist.

On May Day, 1919, came the triumphal entry into Munich. The Bavarian soldiers had dreamed for four years of such a home-coming, and in November 1918 had found awaiting them instead an alien-led mob which spat at every soldier who did not wear a red armband and tore off the officers' shoulder-straps. But on this day, with the promise of summer in the air, Munich was a mass of flowers and cheering people. The red ghouls had been driven from the stricken field; now Germany could rebuild. The returning troops did belatedly get posies for the muzzles of their rifles and for their helmets. Otto Strasser and his comrades seemed to have recaptured a broken dream; a little later, the dream came true.

Or so it seemed, that May Day of 1919.

Chapter Two

IN SEARCH OF SOCIALISM

Bavaria was free and Otto Strasser was twenty-one. Despite lost war and wretched peace,[7] life had to be lived and, for such men as he, lived to the full in success or adversity. It was an urgent matter of bread and a roof, of a livelihood and a future, of adjustment to the new scheme and shape of things German. Like millions of other men, of all the countries which had fought each other, he had to elbow his way back into a society that showed little interest in making room for him and his like.

This is the place to give some picture of the man whom the reader will accompany through the rest of this story. Otto Strasser is of middle stature and homeric spirit. His astonishingly sanguine outlook could only survive, after so many years of pursuit and persecution, in a man deeply and inherently religious; he has perfect faith in the future, no matter whether triumph or disaster is to be his own ultimate lot. His energy is astounding and would exhaust most companions, though it leaves him quite unconsumed. These qualities, which in any circumstances would be remarkable, shine the brighter against the drab background of lonely exile and victimization which has so long been his. He is a fighter to the last gasp, a lover of women and laughter and a judge of wine, a scholar, and a talker so endlessly zestful that he would tire all listeners, had not his life, experiences and reading given him so much to tell that is worth hearing.

He and his brothers set out to make up for the lost years, in the Germany of 1919. Paul, the Benedictine priest, says that the lost war only impelled them to intensify their studies 'without giving way to the widespread hopelessness of that time, which later provided so fertile a seedbed for the teaching of Hitler'.

Gregor completed his university studies and then gave his days to his pharmacy and his evenings to his private army. His part in the liberation of Munich and his leadership of this force brought him much in contact with General Ludendorff, then honorary patron of all such semi-military formations, which held themselves ready to suppress any new Communist ventures, and also with one, Captain Roehm, chief-of-staff of the Epp Free Corps. General von Epp and Captain Roehm had installed a non-Socialist government in Bavaria after the liberation, against the wishes of Socialist-ruled Berlin; they hoped to use Bavaria as a base from which the rest of Germany could be similarly rid of leftists.

Roehm was the real ruler of Bavaria and thought he had found a way to establish himself there permanently when he sent an agent (a nondescript fellow called Hitler, whom he had found somewhere in liberated Munich) into the little National Socialist German Workers Party there, with enough money to gain control of it. Roehm counted on remaining master of the movement through the Storm Troops; he made the formation of this Brown Army a condition of his support. Things then unimaginable were germinating; Roehm's petty hireling was to become his executioner, and Gregor Strasser was to be murdered by the henchmen of the bespectacled young man he had taken on to do the orderly-room work of his Lower Bavarian Storm Battalion. But in 1919 Gregor Strasser was the most powerful man in Lower Bavaria, the trusted comrade of those famous German soldiers, General Ludendorff and General von Epp. None could guess what ill-omened lesser figures those were, that attached themselves to the three great men.

The vacation came at Munich University, and while all this went on in Bavaria Otto Strasser hastened to Berlin to continue his studies there. He was twenty-two, in that autumn of 1919, had no time to waste, no money, and one paramount problem; his daily bread. It was the first chaotic era in Berlin, and few who saw and shrank from it would have believed that a worse one would come twenty-five years later. Young Englishmen and Americans, when they arrived in the Berlin of that time, were taken aback to hear older compatriots, who had known it before 1914, speak respectfully and even longingly of that former period of tidiness, stiff decorum, sycophancy at the Court, parade-stepping Grenadiers, besworded policemen, and, above all, Order. The younger men began to wonder; they had fought for four years to change the behaviour of Germans and thought they had succeeded; were they now to be told that they were wrong and had made it worse instead of better?[8]

All conventions and standards, had been broken down. 'Regimentation', which the peoples of the West had set out to destroy while they themselves marched, like somnambulists, towards similar regimentation, had given way to a licence that was libertine; youth was the prey of the free foxes in the liberated henroost. Religion, patriotism, the family, chastity and tradition were all pilloried in books, on the stage and on the screen; Berlin was full of newcomers from Eastern Europe. Inflation was beginning; the mark was worth but twenty pfennigs and in another three years would be rated at 4,200,000,000,000 to the pound, so that incomes, pensions and savings would vanish and anybody who had a cousin in New York with a 100-dollar bill to spare might buy an apartment house. The moneylenders were at the helm. 'Glamour' was openly bought and sold in the marts of sexual perversion which plied their trade beneath blazing electric signs; youth, of both sexes, was the prey. Financial scandals multiplied as one trickster after another decided that the time for bankruptcy was ripe. In the West the Allied armies held the Rhineland; in the distant but ever-dangerous East the Cossack nightmare was become the Communist nightmare.

Amid this turmoil Otto Strasser groped his way towards the future. He studied from eight in the morning until noon at the university and then, to earn money, went to the Reichstag to work as stenographer for the parliamentary correspondents of the Socialist provincial newspapers. This went on until six or seven o'clock, when he hurried out for his meal at Aschinger's, one of the cheap chain-restaurants operated by that firm in Berlin. From eight until ten he took unpaid evening classes for workmen, to whom he taught German history and stenography, and after that he had to prepare his next morning's work for the university. When the evening classes were discontinued he used the hours thus set free to study Japanese at the Oriental Institute. Astonishingly, he found time for love.

Even so his mania for work was not sated. Conditions at the university led him to organize a League of ex-Service Students on behalf of men whose studies had been interrupted by the war. The universities were overcrowded and even the compressed emergency courses introduced for such men were being swamped by women, immigrants and others who had not served. Otto Strasser, at the head of his League, raised loud plaints and succeeded in having these conditions improved. Another aspect of the students' misery at that time was the plight of thousands of young men who starved themselves to finish their studies and could then obtain no employment. Leading German industrial concerns joined to form a Students Emergency Association, charged to find employment for these masses of despondent young men who were wandering aimlessly about. The secretary of this body was Dr. Heinrich Bruening, the later Chancellor who fought and failed to keep Hitler from power, and Otto Strasser worked in close collaboration with him. These early experiences and experiments in organizing his fellows for some cause, though they were not political, were of practical value to Strasser later, and they also show something of his mind.

Then, in the spring of 1920, came his second brief appearance in politics. He calls himself a revolutionary Socialist and was in search of socialism as he understood it; that is, a just social order on a religious and patriotic basis. He thought he would look for it in the Socialist Party, which he joined. The Socialists in Berlin then formed an Einwohnerwehr, or Civilian Defence Corps, as an answer to the Communist threat of violent uprising. Otto Strasser strongly advocated membership of the Einwohnerwehr, arguing that if the Socialists did not keep it firmly under their wing the reactionaries would take it over. In his district, the populous quarter of Berlin called Steglitz, he carried the day. Steglitz joined, and Otto Strasser became the commander of Steglitz's Hundertschaft, or Hundred.

He was not destined to lead his Socialist Hundred against the Communists. Something quite different happened. There was a march on Berlin, as there had been a march on Munich, but the marchers were reactionaries, not Communists, and this time Otto Strasser was among the defenders, not the besiegers. Strasser, before he was twenty-three, thus gave proof of that constancy to his beliefs which he has always shown.

The Kapp Putsch was 'the first attempt of the old ruling classes to sweep away by armed force the newcomers who had succeeded to power in Germany'. The writer of this book has quoted the kind of description which was used at the time and which may be an over-simplification. In this century of infiltration and counter-infiltration it is hard ever to know just who is behind such an exploit as the Kapp Putsch and whose ambitions would truly be served by its success. If it really was organized by 'the old ruling classes', they chose strangely in selecting as their Press Chief so typical a figure of Communist conspiracy as the ex-Jew from Hungary, ex-Anglican clergyman, ex-British Member of Parliament, convicted traitor and Buddhist-monk-to-be, Trebitsch Lincoln!

However, that is the comment of time and experience. At the moment, in 1920, the Kapp Putsch seemed to Otto Strasser plainly to be a reactionary rising, and perhaps it was. At all events, the difference between it and the march on Munich in 1919 was clear. In Munich there had been an illegitimate revolutionary government led by an emissary from Moscow. In Berlin there was a predominantly Socialist government which was undeniably legitimate; it was German Socialist and contained no imported Moscovites. The Kappists were what would today be called Fascists, that is, Communists in differently-coloured shirts; a few years later, in Germany, they would have been called Hitlerists. Otto Strasser had no doubt what to do; he stood to arms against them, and this is the second evidential episode in his political life.

The Kappists ruled Berlin with their machine-guns for five days; then the general strike called by the fugitive Berlin Government caused their discomfiture and withdrawal. While they were in Berlin, however, they never cared to attack Steglitz, where Otto Strasser, once more armed and in uniform, and his Socialist Hundertschaft waited to receive them. Steglitz, surrounded but never occupied, was left a peaceful Socialist island in Kappist Berlin.

Later Hitler violently reproached Otto Strasser for his part in foiling the Kapp Putsch, and thus showed whose child it truly was. Yet in the sequel to it (and this is typical of the twentieth century, wherein a true man is always a lonely one), Strasser later left the Socialist Party. The withdrawal of the Kappists left the Berlin Government greatly strengthened and with ample power to carry out its Socialist programme; equally, it left the Socialists clamant for that fulfilment. The coalition government (Socialist-Centrist) gave the Socialist delegates, at Bielefeld, a written undertaking to dismiss the Police Minister, Noske (whose weakness towards 'the reactionaries' was held responsible for the Putsch), to socialize heavy industry, and to partition big estates. The Socialists thereon laid down their arms. That being accomplished, the government disavowed the promises, made at Bielefeld.

Otto Strasser was in search of his national and Christian socialism and for him those promises were important. He was never and is not now a socialist of the universal-confiscation creed; had he been that he could long since have found a political home in the Communist Party. But he did and does see the essence of a just social order in the community-ownership (as distinct from 'State control'; his theory is explained later) of land and industry. In 1920 it appeared to him that a great opportunity for necessary reforms had been basely betrayed by the disavowal of the Bielefeld agreement. Indeed, the 'betrayal of Bielefeld' played a part in the controversies of German Socialists somewhat comparable with that of the 'MacDonald betrayal' of 1931 in the recriminations of British Socialists. In both cases the question of perfidy is arguable, in the light of passing years, but at the time seemed beyond doubt. Otto Strasser was among the loudest and bitterest critics and consequently was attacked by the Socialist Party leaders, who even denounced him as 'a police spy' (a curiously illogical charge, as both the Police Minister and the Police Chief were Socialists). Thus it came about that Otto Strasser, having commanded a Socialist Hundertschaft against Fascist besiegers, left the Socialist Party in disillusionment and disgust!

The course of truth in politics never runs smooth and the Socialist Hundertschaftler from Steglitz found himself equally unpopular when he returned to the university, where most of the students had favoured the Kappists. One morning Otto Strasser found a notice on the board announcing that he had been debarred from further study 'pending a disciplinary investigation'. When he angrily asked the reason he was told that his war record was suspect. The production of the official war history of his regiment quickly settled that question, so that a contrite Rector withdrew the insinuation in the presence of the entire Students' Corps in full regalia. In such a matter as this 1920 was better than 1950; by that time the newspapers of the world habitually published equally false statements about Otto Strasser and consistently ignored requests to print the disproof.

After these experiences he felt that he was homeless in politics and for three years stood aloof from them. His first meeting with Hitler, in the autumn of 1920, in no wise changed his mind about that. This was the encounter at which Hitler rebuked him for his part in foiling the Kapp Putsch.

Hitler, using the money with which Roehm supplied him, had by this time succeeded in shouldering aside the original leaders of the insignificant National Socialist Party in Munich and in gaining control of it. He had taken over its programme (the famous '25 points') and was busy perverting it and the little party. He had acquired a small local sporting-sheet, the Voelkische Beobachter, and through the use of it and his own talent for mob oratory was beginning to attract public attention. He had thus come to the notice of General Ludendorff, who was striving to amalgamate all the semi-military and ex-servicemen's organizations and to associate them closely with political groups of similar views. From Ludendorff's point of view the most important man to enlist was Gregor Strasser, and one day the General took Hitler to visit Gregor at his home in Landshut. Gregor asked Otto to be present, and Otto, who by chance was on holiday at his parents' home, went to Landeshut to see what was afoot.

It was a fateful day for both brothers, and a fatal one for Gregor. General Ludendorff was as great a hero to any German officer then as Generals Alexander or Montgomery, MacArthur or Eisenhower to British or American officers of the Second War; to meet him was something not to be missed. Otto Strasser recalls today that General Ludendorff, in the flesh, made a deep impression on him. Hitler repelled him. 'He was too servile to Ludendorff and behaved like a battalion orderly before a general officer. Ludendorff was like a block of granite; Hitler was nervous and half-hysterical. I told Gregor that I did not want to join the party; the only thing I liked about it, I said, was the name, National Socialist, und Dich ("and you"). Throughout 1921 and 1922, when I was out of politics, I had many disputes with Gregor about Hitler and the party. I never felt drawn towards it and would not join. Hitler, after that lunch, always spoke of me as an Intellektbestie' (roughly, 'an intellectual crank').

However, Hitler achieved something that day which may have sealed the fate of Germany for the next twenty-five years and much longer. He had persuaded Ludendorff either of his merit or of his usefulness; generals are often much more easily beguiled in politics than they would allow themselves to be in battle. As a result, Ludendorff prevailed on Gregor Strasser, who undertook to place his Lower Bavarian Storm Battalion under the overriding military command of General Ludendorff and under the political leadership of Hitler. Gregor also took over the leadership of the National Socialist Party in Lower Bavaria; until then it existed in skeleton form only in Munich and this was its first extension outside that city. Gregor Strasser brought it the first substantial accretion of strength.

This step, which in the sequel was to prove suicidal, appeared perfectly logical then. Gregor Strasser knew that he could not much longer keep his private army of foot and artillery together. The war and the Red Republic in Munich were both receding, the men were settling down to civilian life, forgetting to clean their rifles or to turn up on parade. Gregor Strasser knew that he must either disband his organization or turn it into a political one. He would have done better to transform it into a political party under his own leadership, and if he had done that might have been Chancellor of a peaceful Germany today. But he had his pharmacy and family, his livelihood and his dependants, to consider; he could not give all his time, and here was a man who lived only for politics. Thus the die was cast; Gregor Strasser became Gauleiter for Lower Bavaria and his little army passed into Hitler's grasp.

Otto Strasser returned to his studies and in March 1921 took his doctorate in law at Wuerzburg. That opened the door to a minor appointment in the Ministry of Food in Berlin, where he prosaically represented the interest of authority in artificial fertilizers and the cultivation of moorland. In 1923 he was found at his departmental desk by Count von Hertling, his commanding officer in the war, who had become head of a big industrial concern, in which he offered Otto Strasser a promising post. Thus, for two years, Otto Strasser, as he says, 'sat quietly in the Ministry or got on with my job in industry and hardly touched politics'.

He was twenty-six, rising now, and successful. He was financially secure and settled, for the first and last time in his life. As his brother Paul writes, 'He heard the call of politics once more; from that hour on Otto was never again a prosperous man.' Nor was he ever again, until the present day, to be secure, comfortable or carefree; only insecurity, struggle, flight, pursuit, exile, hardship and persecution awaited him.

What was it all for, and what was it all about? What impelled Otto Strasser to give up prosperity and security and set out again in search of his socialism? When the reasons are told that which happened in November of 1923 will be easier to understand.

First, his heredity, his father's house and his historic homeland bore and bred him to be a national Christian Socialist, and the war and what followed confirmed him in being that. Then there was the seething, prescient unrest of Germany in the 1920s, which perhaps can only be comprehended by those who experienced it. Was it nobler in the mind to suffer, or to take arms against a sea of troubles ...? Most Germans were racked by this dilemma, by the wretchedness of the present and the darkness of the future, and by the restless impulse to take the sorry scheme of things and put it right, for each man's own sake, for his children's sakes, for his country's sake. Strasser was not the man to suffer in the mind; it was his nature to oppose troubles; and he believed that the way to end them was through a national Christian socialism.

Today's reader, then, must consider (if he does not already know) that in 1923 national socialism was already a thing of some age. It had existed long before Hitler, had nothing to do with Hitler, and had not yet been perverted by Hitler; it is necessary to know that to understand the thought of a man like Otto Strasser in 1923 and long before. Mr. Churchill correctly says (The Gathering Storm, page 15), 'As Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism.' Both Fascism and Nazism are derivatives of Communism and bear the same recognizable features. The continuing failure of conservative people to grasp this fact, and their continuing delusion that Fascism and Nazism were opposites of Communism, is a great source of weakness in the West.

The father of true 'National Socialism' was T.G. Masaryk, and none other. In about 1887 he delivered a crushing attack on Marxist Socialism, his main arguments being that it was wrong because it was international and anti-Christian. He inspired, by these arguments, Klovacs, a young Czech labour leader and Socialist member of the Vienna Parliament, who about 1892 seceded with the Czech workers from the Socialist Party in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire because the leadership of that party was 'Jewish, international and German'. In 1897 Klovacs founded the first National Socialist Party in the world. T.G. Masaryk had a few years earlier founded his Realist Party, of which he was the only member in the Vienna Parliament. This united with Klovacs's party and Masaryk became president of this first National Socialist Party until his death, with Edouard Benesh as his second in command. About 1903 the Sudeten Germans took up Masaryk's idea and founded a second, German National Socialist Party in the Austro-Hungarian Empire under Jung and Knirsch, both members of the Vienna Parliament. In 1907 the Austrians followed suit, with a third, Austrian National Socialist Party. From these Czech, Sudeten German and Austrian models, the Bavarians in their turn took over the idea in 1917, when Harrer and Anton Drexler formed the Bavarian National Socialist Party, the fourth in the line of direct descent. The guiding principle of all these parties was Masaryk's original one: Christian and national socialism, as opposed to anti-Christian and international, or super-national, Marxist socialism.

Hitler, the destroyer of the idea, intercepted the process in 1919 when, at the bidding of Roehm, he attended a meeting of the little Bavarian party, subsequently gaining control of it by purchase. He changed the whole idea and outlook of the party under the influence of Italian Fascism, which had a quite different history and other antecedents, and was inspired by Communism. Hitler turned the National Socialist movement into 'Hitlerism'; in its original form it was something entirely different. Nor was Hitler, as he claimed in Mein Kampf, the party's 'seventh member'. Apart from the other, earlier parties, the Bavarian one already had several hundred members when this Mephisto was sent to report on it and became the seventh member of its executive committee, in charge of publicity.

Thus national socialism, as Otto Strasser continued in search of it, was quite unlike what Hitler later made of it, but in 1923 Strasser could not foresee that. He later explained what he sought in his book, The Structure of German Socialism, published in 1930. It joins up with original and genuine national, Christian socialism, and was then, and remains today, fully consistent with all his words and deeds; although he has changed the name to Solidarism, he has not sensibly changed the content, which is summarized later in this book. It is a political theory deriving directly from Masaryk's idea, as developed by Strasser's own life and experience.

In 1923 he could not know what this newcomer Hitler would do with national socialism. Nobody knew, for the thing had not been put to the test. Then something happened to make him wonder if he had been right in his distrust of the new man, Hitler, and to awaken in him the hope that the party led by this Hitler might, after all, lead to the Christian, national socialism which he sought.

In November 1923 there was yet another 'march', this time again on Munich, but not against Communists. General von Epp, the liberator of 1919, had long since been outmanoeuvred by men more versed in politics and no longer controlled affairs there. His eclipse was also that of his chief-of-staff, that soldier of misfortune, Captain Roehm (who, having started Hitler on his demoniac course, had gone to continue his soldiering and his sexual aberrations in Bolivia). The politicians were in control in Bavaria again and they had set up in Munich what, to such men as Otto and Gregor Strasser, seemed plainly to be a reactionary government, composed of persons akin to those who had made the Kapp Putsch in Berlin. It may be hard today to recall, or realize, that Hitler's first bid to seize power (this Munich march of November 1923) to many Germans looked like a praiseworthy attempt to rid Bavaria first, and Germany next, of men who embodied the most detestable characteristics of the old regime; but so it was, and they could not then know what sort of man Hitler would prove to be. Men like Gregor and Otto Strasser, although they would have fought Communism anywhere and at any time, and although they respected many things of the earlier system, were appalled at the idea that the old idols should be restored intact, and were as resolved to fight 'reaction' as Communism.

They came of the fin de si�cle generation which in its youth had inwardly rebelled, not against monarchy and its manifestations in themselves, but against the stiff, stifling and cramping forms of life in Wilhelmine Germany in particular. The symbols of that era, when they looked back, still repelled them: the frock-coats, 'stand-up collars', whiskers and stovepipe hats, the whaleboned mamas, the dark dwellings and unlovely entertainments of the rigidly segregated middle class, the ossified caste distinctions, the inelegant formality, the whole lifelessness of life. Things of this kind, their mind's eyes saw when they thought of 'reaction', and they did not want them back. They felt, in this respect, that the lost war had in a sense been a sacrifice on the altar of the future. It had brought them for the nonce to a worse state of affairs, which they wanted to put right; but in amending it they were resolved not to restore the social structure which had so galled and irked them in their youth.

Otto did not take any part in the new march on Munich; he was out of politics and merely watched from Berlin. Gregor marched on the Feldhernhalle as commander of his Landeshut Battalion. In the front rank, side by side, marched General Ludendorff and Hitler, still a little known, untested quantity. They were met by the bullets of regular troops. Hitler ducked, fled, was arrested and imprisoned. Ludendorff, continuing erect, was hit, and never again would have anything to do with Hitler. Gregor was sentenced to imprisonment.

This, to many Germans almost unbelievable event (German soldiers firing at Ludendorff!) shook Otto Strasser in his opinions of the National Socialist Party. He was convinced that the regime in Munich was a reactionary one. Until then he had held the National Socialist Party, under Hitler, to be half-reactionary itself. 'A cheap edition of reaction with a red cover on it to delude the buyer.' But those bullets persuaded him to the contrary. 'My brother was right after all,' he thought, 'this is a revolutionary socialist movement. Hitler's flirtations with the generals and big business will have to stop now' (such terms, 'the generals' and 'big business', which again look like over-simplifications today, were the current coin of politics then).

He was strengthened in this view by Ludendorff's famous subsequent words, 'Now I know that the salvation and reconstruction of Germany are not possible in collaboration with the reactionaries', and still more by the fact that Hitler was now out of the way for five years; he was in prison! LudendonT solemnly discarded all further caste-fellowship with his kind. Otto Strasser's regiment sent a circular letter to all members of its Officers Corps telling them they must choose between Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, the heir to the abolished crown, and General Ludendorff, and must make a declaration of loyalty in this sense. Otto Strasser chose for Ludendorff and was forthwith excluded from the officers' association of his regiment.

In this way Otto Strasser, the fervent admirer of the German Officers Corps, the anti-Communist soldier of Munich, the Socialist Hundertschaftler of Steglitz, was drawn once more from the shelter of his substantial post in industry towards the whirlpool of German politics. It did not happen all at once, but in another two years, by 1925, he was in the net, for better or for worse. It was to be the crowning misfortune of his life, if comfort and material success are taken as the standards of judgment; but it was his destiny and may in the end work to his own good, that of his country and of others.

The course of events was slow, but the deadly certainty of destiny can be traced in it. Nobody yet knew what National Socialism would do or prove to be; the outer world as yet barely knew the name. It would be what it was made, and that would depend on the men who made it. Hitler was in prison, apparently for five years, that is, until 1928! The events of Munich had shaken Otto's aversion for the Party. In 1924 (and here is the first intervention of destiny) Gregor Strasser was elected to the Bavarian Diet and this carried with it his release from imprisonment. Soon afterwards he was elected to the Reichstag in Berlin. Hitler was still in prison, so that Ludendorff, the great man whom Otto admired, and Gregor, his own brother, took over the leadership of the National Socialist Party, and extended it at once by absorbing the Folkist Party of von Graefe. One of their first acts was to exclude from the party two of its most ill-omened men, Julius Streicher (who was executed at Nuremberg) and Hermann Esser; later, when they had been readmitted by Hitler, the hatred of these two helped to bring about Gregor's murder.

Thus Otto, in 1924, looked out on a completely different picture. He was a national Christian socialist; he saw a growing National Socialist Party led by one of the most famous living Germans and by his own brother; the man who was later to pervert it was behind bars. Here was an opportunity to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them; in fact, to find the socialism he sought and make National Socialism what he wanted it to be.

Even then he did not join the Party, but he set to work to give it the guidance it needed. First, he took the famous '25 Points', which were merely large statements of principle without any defined methods of practical application to practical problems of economics, industry, agriculture and foreign policy. Otto worked out these rules for practical application, which became known under the name, famous in German political history, of 'the Bamberg Programme'; it formed the basis for the embittered conflict between 'Strasserism' and 'Hitlerism' which ended only with Otto's flight into exile and Gregor's murder. Gregor fully approved this Bamberg Programme, and the reader who studies Otto Strasser's 'Solidarism', as it is summarized later in this book, may see what National Socialism would have become in Germany, had the Strassers prevailed. Otto carried on his work through a series of articles which appeared under the pseudonym Ulrich von Hutten in the Voelkische Beobachter. This produced the spectacle, inconceivable in the later days of that journal, of a violent running controversy between the apostle of true Christian national socialism, 'Ulrich von Hutten', and one Alfred Rosenberg (also executed at Nuremberg), who in the enforced absence of his master upheld the Hitlerist conception.

At that moment the future looked more promising for Germany, and therewith for the world, than at any other in the years between the two wars; had the Strassers been able to guide the party, there would have been no Second War. And at that very moment destiny, which appears to have been incurably malignant but no doubt is working in mysterious ways towards some good end, intervened again. It used for its fell purpose, this time, an obscure politician named Guertner, Bavarian Minister of Justice in Munich.

Dr. Guertner, in 1924, released Hitler from his imprisonment at Landsberg, where he had been sentenced to remain until 1928! The reasons have never to this day been learned; the persevering reader may notice that, with all the development of newspapers, broadcasting and other means of public information, the public is seldom informed about those questions of our century, the answers to which would explain its apparently fore-ordained and mechanical progress, like that of Greek tragedy, from bad to worse.[9] However, when Hitler came to power a decade later the obscure Dr. Guertner received his reward; he was made Reich Minister of justice (and died comfortably in bed during the 1939-45 war).

The demon king popped up through the political trap door. General Ludendorff at once resigned. The Strassers were left far out on a limb. Looking back, and considering the matter merely from the aspect of their own comfort, they would have done better to follow General Ludendorff's example. But that was not then clear, and anyway, it would have been to choose the alternative of suffering nobly in the mind; neither of the Strassers were men of that kidney. Moreover, the reappearance of Hitler at that time did not appear fatal to all their hopes and work. There were many good reasons to think they could still hold and guide the party and preserve Germany.

For instance, the Austrian Hitler, though free, was not allowed to travel freely, or to approach the central scene of the political battle; he was restricted to Bavaria. The Western Allies, in destroying 'Prussian militarism', had been careful to preserve Prussia (and to destroy the benevolent Austro-Hungarian monarchy). Prussia formed two-thirds of Germany and contained the Reich capital and parliament; in Prussia the great decisions would be made. Gregor could travel freely whither he wished (in more than one sense; as a Reichstag Deputy he held the coveted free railway-pass, which was most important in those impoverished days). It looked as if the Party could be developed in North Germany more or less independently of Munich, where Hitler was exiled. Gregor decided to take up the fight for the soul of national socialism and of Germany, and at last prevailed on Otto to join him.

Such were the circumstances in which the third political period of Otto Strasser's life began. It was a bid by these two brothers to save the party for Christian 'national socialism. Today, because somebody wants to keep Otto Strasser out of Germany (this is another question to be added to those on the previous page) he is often portrayed as just another of 'Hitler's gang', which is the reverse of the truth. There seemed a fair chance to save the party from Hitler, and the future of Germany was at stake.

At last Otto allowed Gregor to prevail on him. He gave up his lucrative post in industry and nominally joined the Party (he never wore its shirt or badge), in 1925. He used the substantial sum which he received from his firm to found in 1926, with Gregor, a publishing house in Berlin, the Kampfverlag. They began to issue two weeklies, the Berliner Arbeiterzeitung and Der nationale Sozialist.

The name of the second (The national Socialist) is significant. It was a direct intimation to Hitler that if the Strassers prevailed the party would be The national Socialist Party. Hitler and Rosenberg violently protested and demanded that the name be changed to Der Nationalsozialist (The National socialist); the Strassers refused. There is much more than a squabble about initials in this. It was a matter of life and death, as the sequel showed. For the Strassers the social content of the party's programme was always the dominant thing, and that was the whole essence of their dispute for the leadership (when Otto Strasser later withdrew the headline of his announcement to his followers was, 'The Socialists leave the National socialist Party!')

All that was in 1925 and 1926. The years of chaos were receding; the German genius for order reasserted itself. The political struggle for the soul of Germany, however, grew daily more violent. Save for the cosmopolitan crowds on the Kurfuerstendamm, Germans thought and talked of little else but politics. They ran to and fro between the parties like lost sheep and some of them bleated 'Heil, Heil, Heil!' and others, 'Rot Front, Rot Front, Rot Front!'; in an illumined moment of despondent foreboding one of them sat down and wrote, as the title to a novel, 'Little Man, What Now?' The memory of the past and dislike of the present oppressed that nation, and in its loins it already felt the pains of the monstrous future. It was a moment when men of goodwill and statesmen were needed; for some reason which only time can reveal men of illwill everywhere prevailed. One of the worst of them was Hitler in this troubled, anxious Germany. Otto Strasser set to work to wrest the party from him.

He was twenty-eight and had had a remarkable political career, having adamantly and constantly upheld his beliefs at all costs through every change of circumstance. As a German he had fought against an alien Communist regime in Munich; as a Socialist he had taken arms against Fascist (or 'Kappist') invaders in Berlin. He had joined the Socialist Party, been embittered by its default on measures which he held to be vital, and left it. Now he gave himself wholly to politics and resumed the fight, within the National Socialist Party and against its titular, exiled head, who had been prematurely released from prison but still could not appear anywhere in Germany outside Bavaria.

Chapter Three

TO GAIN OR LOSE ...

The fight lasted just four years, from March 1926, when the Strassers founded their publishing house in Berlin, until May 1930, when Hitler at last succeeded in destroying it and them, and also the last hope of saving the National Socialist Party and Germany.

It can be seen now that the fight was lost, for the Strassers, at its start, when Dr. Guertner in Bavaria released Hitler from prison; but that was not to be foreseen then. Otto Strasser fought to the end, as he had before and has ever since, and he stands today, on the verifiable record, as the only leading personality who openly and adamantly and on a clear principle opposed Hitler inside the National Socialist Party. Strasser did not fear his fate too much; he put it to the touch without regard to personal loss or gain.

The present writer must repeat that it is all on the record. There is no room for question about the part that Otto Strasser played in those years and the obscuration of it in today's newspapers and political literature can only derive from the deliberate intention to obscure, for the facts can be verified from the abundant records of the time. The files of the innumerable newspapers, books and pamphlets published by the Strassers from 1926 to 1930 prove the undeviating fight they waged against Hitlerism.

The idea for which they fought was that of Masaryk's true Christian national socialism as applied to the needs of Germany and of Europe. Otto Strasser had incorporated it in his 'Bamberg Programme', which laid down rules of practical application for the rhetorical and imprecise '25 Points'. This book cannot be extended to include all the documents, but the Bamberg Programme is accessible to all present-day writers who wish to verify the facts; however, the aspect of today's newspapers suggests that the verifying breed is extinct. The Bamberg Programme was equally the basis for Otto Strasser's German Socialism, published when he left the National Socialist Party and summarized later in this book.

The differences between the Bamberg Programme and Hitlerism were vital, and the whole 'historic struggle' of those four years turned on them.[10] Otto Strasser advocated, above all, the federalization of Germany, and passionately opposed centralization, in which he clearly saw the danger of the totalitarian State and dictatorship. Here, at once, he incurred the mortal enmity of Hitler. It may seem almost humorous today (but could not then be foreseen as hopeless) that the Strassers should have hoped to convince Hitler of the evils of dictatorship. Probably Otto had no such illusion, and only hoped to guide the party away from that fate; Gregor, a more confiding character, may have thought that 'Herr Hitler' (the two brothers never used the form of address, 'Mein Fuehrer') could by sweet reasonableness be persuaded.

In the field of foreign policy, again, Otto Strasser was an equally ardent advocate of a European Federation, whereas Hitler argued that Germany must be supreme on the European mainland. (Otto Strasser's conception of federation, for Germany and for Europe, is the exact opposite of the 'World State' idea, either in its total form or in that of its subdivisions. Federation, to him, is the means of preserving the individuality of nations and of different breeds within nations such as the Scots and the Welsh, the Bavarians and Rhinelanders, the Bretons and the Provencals. The plan for a World State, and for its regional substitutes, is clearly designed as a weapon to destroy nations and breeds.)

The second great field of dispute between the Strassers, with their Bamberg Programme, and Hitler was that of economics, where the question of socialism arose. The Strassers took their socialism seriously, and the root of this controversy lay in the suspicion that Hitler was selling out the socialist items of the '25 Points' to certain interested parties in return for monetary subsidies; one of the aims of the Bamberg Programme was to nail him to these socialist undertakings. Point 13, for instance, demanded 'the nationalization of all jointly-owned concerns' and Point 14, 'profit-sharing in the great industries'. The most controversial Point, however, was 17, 'We demand a land-reform suitable to our national requirements, the passing of a law for the confiscation without compensation of land for communal purposes, the abolition of interest on mortgages, and prohibition of all speculation in land'.

Hitler had added a rider to this Point 14 which in effect annulled it (long afterwards the surmise that he had received payment for so doing was confirmed by the German heavy industrialist Thyssen, after his flight from Germany). The writer of this book is conscious that readers at this point, if they are new to the subject, might conclude, that the issue was between the Strassers, intent on Marxist confiscation, and Hitler, resolved on moderation. That assumption would be the opposite of the truth. Hitler had no respect for property, though he was ready to pretend such respect if it were made worth his while. His policy was bound to lead, and did lead, to the destruction and confiscation of property on a scale never before thought possible. The Strassers' socialism, though earnestly intended, was contained within a prudent framework of reform (witness the German Socialism) which was devised above all to extend, not to diminish, the benefits of property.

In this connection, the kind of question which agitated opinion within the party in those days, and played a part in this particular controversy, was that of the property of the former reigning dynasties. On the ground that war-disabled men, inflation victims and others had received no compensation, the Strassers and their supporters were for expropriation. Hitler, who was constantly bargaining with interested parties behind the scenes, was against it.

The third, and possibly the deepest dissension between the Strassers, embattled in Berlin, and Hitler, secluded in Munich, turned on religion as the basis of national socialism. The Strassers believed in God and would have put Christianity and the interests of the Christian churches in the forefront of the party's programme. Hitler, the racial mongrel from the Vienna Destitutes' Home, looked disdainfully on religion and the churches as subjects of his total State to come, only to be tolerated if they submitted to its authority. Whatever his heredity may have been (and it may have been anything at all, in the Bohemian borderlands whence he derived) he had no inner understanding for, but only an outcast's spite against the Christian West. In this, too, he was the complete antithesis of the Strassers.

Such, then, was the shape of the conflict; federalization against the total State ruled from Berlin; Christian socialism against Nationalism without socialism; Christianity against paganism.

It was not a struggle for power. None could then guess whether the party would ever attain to power. What was important was that it should stand by its principles; for these principles, and for the soul of the party, the Strassers fought. It became a struggle for supremacy within the party itself only because Hitler, as all the world saw long afterwards, was never interested in principles, but only in tactics, so that he invariably tried to get rid of any who, by seeking to pin him to principles, cramped his tactics. To him, they were intriguing foes within the walls and he turned on them, to destroy them. They naturally resisted, believing that they were right.

The struggle shaped very well for the Strassers at first. Gregor was the real head of the party, for he controlled it in North Germany, from which Hitler was barred, and Otto was its guiding brain. Victory seemed even to have been won at the famous Hanover Meeting of October 1925, when all North German Gauleiter (with the lone exception of Robert Ley, who in 1945 committed suicide, if report was true, on his way to Nuremberg) voted to substitute the Bamberg Programme for the '25 Points'. Dissatisfaction with Hitler was openly expressed at 'this meeting and Rust, the later Schools Minister, declared, 'We will not tolerate a Pope in our party'. The conference resolved that all North German branches of the party (that is, in North German States outside Prussia) should amalgamate under Gregor Strasser, and that the Strassers' publishing house should take over all press and publicity work for the party in North Germany.

This apparent triumph soon dissolved in a discomfiture which was mainly brought about, once more, by one of the jackals who prowled around the party camp. Hitler called a counter-meeting at Bamberg, Bavaria. None of Gregor Strasser's fellow-leaders from North Germany obeyed the summons to attend, but he went himself and took with him his secretary, whom he paid two hundred marks a month. For this post the ill-fated Gregor had chosen a malignant hobgoblin named Dr. Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels then for the first time saw Hitler and his attendant panoply of salaried officials and motor cars. Promptly Goebbels declared his repentance for proposing, at Hanover, that Hitler be expelled from the party. In a packed meeting Gregor Strasser was left completely isolated (later, at his downfall, Goebbels was to prance round him with jeers and taunts).

However, that was by no means the end. From 1926 to 1928 the Strassers controlled the National Socialist Party in North Germany and through their publications carried on the struggle for the mind of Germany. They were already lost but could not know that, for the reasons were beyond their range of vision. That strange and sinister process had begun, which continued until the very outbreak of the war: potent and invisible forces supported Hitler in everything he did. The reader may recall the later, more apparent manifestations of that process: his march into the Rhineland was tacitly approved; in London The Times gently encouraged his designs on Austria and Czechoslovakia (and in 1952 candidly confessed that the editor of that day had somewhat erred); President Roosevelt thanked him by telegram for graciously deigning to accept the gift of Munich; Mr. Chamberlain flew to bestow it on him; the German generals who were about to overthrow him fell back, stunned by the news.

All that was later, but it was all in the same line. In the years 1926 to 1928 the money power and what other support he needed was at Hitler's disposal. In 1927 he appointed Goebbels Gauleiter for Berlin and supplied him with the funds to start a newspaper, Der Angriff, in opposition to the Strassers' publications. Gregor Strasser was still Hitler's deputy, and as head of the North German party the real leader of National Socialism. The dwarf whom he had helped was sent to undermine him. The vendetta was carried on with tremendous bitterness, and the vendors of the rival newspapers fought each other in the streets.

Then the decisive blow fell. Just as Hitler had formerly been released from imprisonment by the mysterious Guertner, now he was liberated from his enforced seclusion in South Germany. Through the years he had been building up his Brown Army, the Storm Troops. This was another point in dispute between him and the Strassers, who demanded that the Storm Troop detachments should be under the orders of the local party branches, and be members of the party. Hitler refused both demands and insisted that the Storm Troops be organized as a Brown Army independent of the political party and its political programme. The subsidies he received from big industrialists at that time enabled him to make this, originally somewhat ludicrous private army into a force impressive enough to attract the approving notice of the regular army, the Reichswehr. The Reichswehr, in the suicidal spirit which seems to inspire so many activities of the West in this century, prevailed on the Prussian Government to raise the ban on Hitler; thenceforth he was free to travel and speak where he liked. At once he appeared in North Germany and Berlin and joined battle with the Strassers.

It took him another two years to destroy the Strassers' publishing house, which continued its crusade. He came in person one day to Otto Strasser's office in the Nuernbergerstrasse and tried by threats to induce him to suspend publication of the Berliner Arbeiterzeitung, asking what Strasser could do if Goebbels's Storm Troopers came along one day 'and smashed the place up'. That interview ended, with Hitler shouting abuse, when Strasser opened a drawer and showed him a loaded revolver. Strasser regrets today that he did not at that moment openly break with the party, for the brothers were in a very strong position. Once more Gregor prevailed on him to avoid the open conflict.

In 1929 and 1930 came the first great increase in strength of the party, which in 1930 caused the outer world at length to turn uneasy eyes towards Germany and it. The circulation of the Strasser publications grew so rapidly that several weeklies had to be transformed into dailies, and Hitler's anger rose in proportion. At last he sent for the Strassers and their partner, one Hinkel, to come to Munich, where he 'behaved like a madman. He shrieked and roared at us one moment and flattered us the next. He offered to buy the Kampfverlag at any price we liked to name and offered Hinkel and myself deputy's seats in the Reichstag. Gregor was ready to sell, but his share was only a third. I refused point blank and contrived to get Hinkel to refuse also. The conversation lasted many hours and I felt I was in bedlam. At one point I remarked mildly, "You are wrong, Herr Hitler", whereon Hitler shouted, "I cannot be wrong, everything that I do and say is history".'

At the third attempt, on May 21st and 22nd, 1930, the Strassers' stronghold fell, with Otto Strasser as the only non-capitulant. Hitler came to Berlin and had two very long meetings with Otto; at the second Gregor was also present. These two encounters seem to the present writer also to be of some historic importance, because as far as his knowledge extends, they are the only occasions on record when Hitler ever entered into debate! Possibly the most extraordinary thing about his rise, from petty political spy in Munich to Fuehrer of the German Reich, is that he never once in all that time stood question and answer. In his private conclaves he alone spoke, while his captains and lieutenants leaned forward, reverently and assiduously ready to say 'Ja, mein Fuehrer'; at his public meetings his Storm Troopers saw to it that any interjections were answered, but not from the platform; he never entered Parliament until he was Chancellor and all questioners there had been stilled; to these three assertions the present writer can testify from personal observation. Finally, when he was Fuehrer of the Reich he would receive foreign heads of State, emissaries, ministers and ambassadors with tempests of one-way oratory from which they would emerge amazed, bemused and bursting with retorts which they had not been allowed to make; the present writer was also witness of such humiliating and red-faced exits.

Thus Otto Strasser's two homeric arguments with Hitler seem to be unique, first because they occurred, and second because they are recorded in print. The irrepressible Otto put them down immediately afterwards, as literally as he could remember them, and published them as an appendix to his Structure of German Socialism, which appeared a little later. The mere fact that Hitler, who detested debate above all things, nerved himself to these two tremendous altercations shows how vital to his plans he held the destruction of the Strassers and their Kampfverlag to be. If there were room they would be reproduced in this book, but they are much too long; Hitler could say a lot in two days. They are of permanent, if melancholy interest, and should be published in English. The historian may reflect that they were available for study years before Hitler even came to power and ask himself what possessed the politicians of the West, that they encouraged such a man.

The engagement began with shouted complaints about the tone taken in the publications of the Kampfverlag and a demand for its immediate dissolution. When Otto Strasser rose and said he was ready for a discussion, but not for an ultimatum, Hitler at once became calm and friendly. Thereafter the discussion ranged to the ends of the earth and to extremes of irrelevance, with Otto Strasser, in the manner of a rodeo cowhand on a steer, always trying to bring it to the point. The point was the programme and principle of national socialism, and that was precisely what Hitler, the tactician, did not want to debate.

He complained of an article which, he said, had 'differentiated between the Idea of National Socialism and the Fuehrer, and even subordinated the Fuehrer to the Idea'. Strasser, while disclaiming any respect for Hitler, said that was in fact his belief, a Fuehrer 'might become ill, or die, or conceivably deviate from the Idea, but an Idea is of divine origin and eternal'. That, said Hitler on a rising note again, was 'bombastic nonsense hatched out at a debating table and the worst sort of democratic bunkum. The Fuehrer and the Idea are one and every National Socialist must obey the orders of the Fuehrer, who embodies the Idea and alone knows its ultimate aim'. 'That, Herr Hitler', rejoined Otto Strasser, 'is the doctrine of Rome, and equally of Papist and of Fascist Rome. For me, the Idea is the vital thing, the Idea of national socialism, and my conscience decides when a gap appears between Fuehrer and Idea.' Hitler's answer to this was inevitable: 'Discipline!' He asked, 'Do you intend to submit yourself to this discipline, as your brother does, or not?'

That was Otto's Achilles heel: Gregor, who in spite of everything thought that he could remain with Hitler, guide Hitler, and direct the party in the spirit of the Bamberg Programme. His next brother, Paul, says today that 'Looking back, I find it hard to understand how Gregor, after this meeting, could still have yielded to this hope'. However, Gregor was gigantic in good nature and optimism, as well as stature, and the satanic spirit that invested Hitler was probably beyond his power even to imagine.

The hours of recrimination, cajolery and attempted bribery went on. Hitler offered to make Otto Strasser Press Chief of the party (the man who became Press Chief, Dietrich, was gently handled at Nuremberg and later was remuneratively employed in German heavy industry) if he would come to Munich and work there under Hitler's supervision. Strasser said he would only do that if they could agree about fundamental principles of policy, and to that end an exhaustive discussion of all questions, particularly those of foreign policy and socialism, would be necessary; he would be ready to come to Munich for that purpose for four weeks and thrash out all such matters with Hitler himself and with Alfred Rosenberg (the spiritual prompter of Hitlerist National Socialism).

The answer was one later to become familiar: 'My patience is exhausted', and an ultimatum. Hitler threatened, if Otto Strasser would not accept unconditionally, to expel him and his associates from the party and formally to excommunicate the Kampfverlag. Otto Strasser re