The Vengeance of Rome (70 page)

By rights we should have been great friends, but there was some weakness in Reid I could not identify. He tended to avoid me, as if he guessed I could tell there was something fishy about him. I wondered if Reid were his real name. It also occurred to me that, despite his blond good looks, he might carry another secret. As Ludecke points out in his book, the worst kind of antisemite is that wretched creature the
Halb-Jude
, or even a full Jew who so hates himself he is more vitriolic in his expressions of disgust than any Rosenberg or Streicher.

My own understanding of the Jewish problem is, like Strasser's, entirely rational. I have nothing against them as a people. I merely believe they
thrive best in their own desert fiefdoms or the heightened atmosphere of stage, salon and studio! Just as my blood sings to the winds from the steppe and the roaring of the Dnepr, so must theirs long for souk and sand dune.

Reid was no fan of Goebbels, Göring or Hitler but we had a mutual acquaintance in Otto Strasser. He approved of the Strassers and of Röhm. He understood Röhm's reputation as a swaggering adventurer was merely a persona the Stabschef adopted. At heart Röhm was an honourable member of the Reichswehr and wanted nothing more than to be reunited with the army he regarded as a mother and father. He was the right kind of Nazi, said Reid, basically a gentleman. ‘Those others, including Himmler, are gangsters with one solution for all problems.' He drew his fingers across his throat. ‘Simple, effective, but bad economics. It would be foolish to deny a country the benefits which Jews can bring. Cromwell understood that. We should profit from the positive side, as in mathematics and music, but they should not be allowed disproportionate political influence.' There should be citizenship requirements. An oath. Even in America, the cradle of liberty, Jews did not stand for Congress.

Reid had bought the English newspapers before he arrived in Munich and allowed me to glance through them. The first story I read in
The Times
caused me to gasp in horror. I had never hoped to read such a thing, but now, under the headline tragic death in west end, I learned of the fall of Frau Oberhauser from a fourth-floor hotel window! My heart went out to her as a human being, but I must admit that the black shadow which had hung over me since Röhm had visited me last at Corneliusstrasse suddenly lifted. The paper spoke of her recent distress at the failure of Hitler to become Chancellor. There was a hint, in the English manner, that she had committed suicide.

I thought of Kitty, now an orphan, and wondered how she would take her mother's death. And what of the boy who had been with her in London? Had his father come for him? The paper said nothing. In other circumstances I would have been at Kitty's side as soon as possible, but I knew Prince Freddy had the means of comforting her.

I showed Reid the piece in the paper. I told him that I had known the lady and had once been of service to her in getting her out of Russia ahead of the Reds. Reid sympathised with me. Had she been depressed? I gathered, I said, that her ambitions had been thwarted lately. It was always the same with those Russians, Reid informed me. They were an emotional lot of buggers. All soul and no sense. Lenin's rhetorical rubbish seduced them into Bolshevism, perhaps the most senseless political system ever devised
and one of the cruellest. The whole country was run by Jews. That was what he meant when he talked about disproportionate influence! Control the Jews and there would be a Tsar back on the throne in weeks!

I wished I shared his optimism. He slapped me on the arm. ‘Cheer up, old man. Someone should point out to that chap Nietzsche that all his tosh sounds just fine in the abstract, but it doesn't work out at all in real life. Hitler's problem is he has no sense of the practical. How are you going to stop millions of Jews just by snapping your fingers? It can't be done. As long as Jews are identified, we have no problem! It's so much simpler than he makes it out to be.'

Doctor Hugenberg found these views reasonable. Jews should not be allowed disproportionate control of the media, either as producers or contributors. He agreed with me that landscape as well as race memory is in one's blood. The forests and mountains of Germany were as natural to him as were jungles and rivers to an Amazon native.

Mr Mix of course was not with us, so I could not ask his opinion, but I was sure the same held true for the black race. The real abomination of slavery is that it uprooted the Negro from his natural habitat and put him down in a place where he could never feel at ease, never flourish. Place him in the Congo's forests, for instance, and he becomes a different person. The same slouching, mumbling fellow one sees on a St Louis street corner transforms into the healthy, natural man Schweitzer so admired and wrote about. Transported to the Congo, American blacks would bring a level of civilisation which could only raise the region, as Doctor Schweitzer already hoped to do. I knew a number of idealistic young medics in Munich who spoke of joining Schweitzer. While most subsequently joined the SS, one man did go to Africa. His name was König. He died of dysentery within three months of taking up his post with Schweitzer. Doctoring, as Baldur von Schirach said, was a profession any man of sympathy and conscience might choose, just as lawyering was the careerist's first choice.

During lulls in political life, Schirach again began to seek me out. That young man had grown a little estranged from the rest of his family, especially his sister, none of whom were great admirers of Hitler. He loved to talk with someone of genuine scientific imagination. I must say it gave me enormous pleasure to discuss my advanced ideas and the needs of the future with a fellow spirit who similarly brooded on the nature of technological progress.

Zoyea and I, meanwhile, continued our ‘romance' with the
Kino
, under her father's benevolent eye. Only when absent from the city itself did I
abandon my Italians. Even when there was nothing to repair, they were pleased to see me. I revelled in the ambience and stuffed myself with their cooking. And, of course, I continued to indulge my little princess and became expertly familiar with the film careers of Art Accord, Jack Hoxie, Yakima Canutt, William S. Hart, J.B. Warner, Tom Mix, Ken Maynard and an entire posse of minor cowboy heroes. I saw my own films rather more often than I cared to. We went to triple features with titles like
Branded a Bandit
,
Hell Hounds of the Plains
,
Blue Blazes Rawden
,
Behind Two Guns
,
The Thundering Herd
,
Ace of Cactus Range
,
Jesse James Under the Black Flag
,
Ranchers and Rascals
,
Wild Horse Mesa
,
Fighting Jack
and
Romance of the Wasteland
. I remember those particular titles well. We saw them so many times I could no doubt repeat the captions word for word!

I consoled myself that I would be far more familiar with the genre when I came to play my own part. When making the Masked Buckaroo films, I was unfamiliar with the other cowboy pictures produced in such numbers. I knew many of these heroes to speak to but did not know why they were heroes. Now I saw familiar face upon familiar face, which deeply impressed my Zoyea.

In America the Western was already fading in popularity, not reviving until the singing cowboy created an even stranger version of the myth. But Westerns remained the German favourites.

I loved the boisterous version of
The Taming of the Shrew
with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. Their first talker together was a great success. Unfortunately the real-life marriage of the nation's sweetheart and the nation's dashing hero was rumoured to be over, Mary having discovered evidence of Jewish blood in ‘Doug's' recent past! Suffice to say Fairbanks was not his original name.

Good as they were in their own engaging way, few American films contained the spirit of Karl May. I knew ours would have a quality even the best of Tom Mix's films lacked—a philosophical depth and moral dimension on a different level entirely.

For a while I lost touch with Kitty. She disappeared from Munich as mysteriously as she had appeared. I heard she and Prince Freddy were back in Berlin. I took two short trips to Berlin by train but made only desultory attempts to contact them. At that stage in my life I was rather glad to have some distance between us. I was fairly sure how Doctor Hugenberg would view our association.

I kept to myself in Berlin. I was unimpressed by a city seeming to embody the most grandiose and vulgar characteristics of Chicago and
Communist Moscow. A mélange of beaux-arts classicism and municipal functionalism, it reminded me of a vast Prussian barracks. The studio complex, a short car ride from the city, was bigger than anything I had seen in Hollywood. To demonstrate how deep Jewish culture ran in Berlin, the studio complex was called Neubabelsberg, in honour of the famous Russian low-life writer Isaac Babel who came there once from Paris. I met him casually, and he reminded me of someone. I asked him if he knew Odessa. He had spent some little time there, he said. He had ridden with the Red Cossacks. UfA had some idea of employing him as a scriptwriter.

UfA had made most of the famous German films of the previous fifteen years. Neuebabelsberg film city was UfA's pride and was now equipped with a superb sound system, as I knew from films like
Der Kongress tanzt
and
Walzerparadies
.

Here I first met Doctor Goebbels in Hugenberg's private office. He was courting Alfred Hugenberg. The good opinion of my employer's press and newsreels were crucial to the NSDAP cause. Because Hugenberg was a prominent Catholic he could therefore help them gain the blessing of the Church. In spite of his ugliness, Goebbels had a certain charm. I soon found myself telling him how I had seen him speak in Munich, how impressed I had been by what he had to say.

He had a way of taking you by the elbow and seeming to draw you into his confidence. Certain kinds of women were fascinated by him. Many years later Jack Trevor told me his technique for picking up women. He cultivated an interesting disease or wound. Women were always attracted to medical conditions. Far from being a handicap, Goebbels's twisted foot was a sexual asset! It always struck me as odd that he should be such an enthusiast for euthanasia, a sign, no doubt, of his euphoric retreat from reality. This was a characteristic in almost all the Nazis after 1934. The world began to slip out of their control almost as soon as they thought they had it. That was why they had to demonstrate control more and more, to prove their power to themselves. That mindset simplifies the world in order to understand it, thereby understanding less and less. By use of force they can for a time prove their version of the world. As the world refuses to comply, throwing up more and more surprises, they are forced to grow increasingly violent to sustain their ‘truth'.

Such men rarely understand how large a part luck has played in their careers. That failing becomes almost every eminent man's Achilles heel.

I think Hitler realised his luck. He was a natural chancer, as Mr Mix put it, the ultimate opportunist, like a flea who lies dormant until a lucky
wind or a useful rat comes by. Then he jumps, hoping for the best. Hitler remained in bed, reading light novels, listening to operetta on the gramophone, until his instincts recognised an opportunity. A chameleon, he would say anything, take any position, certain that the Führer Principle or blind instinct directed his changes of approach. A beautifully simple system needed a beautifully complex man like Hitler to run it. Terrified by his own complexes, Hitler disguised his fear well in company. ‘That ‘Itler could seduce ther Archbishop o' Canterbury, slimy bugger. Ol' Gobbles is in love wiv ‘im,' thought Mrs Cornelius.

Doctor Goebbels had no idea, of course, that I was familiar with his leader's foibles. Like a loyal, half-despairing wife, he retailed much gossip with a kind of mocking admiration of Hitler. This made a fellow conspirator of you, drawing you in until you were involved in supporting Hitler in spite of knowing the reality.

‘The Little Doctor' had been talking to Schirach about me. He knew I had invented the famous Violet Ray of Kiev. Some thought that story a myth, he said slyly. I laughed. A few more watts and we should have wiped out the Reds in minutes. The power station was the first thing they hit. We were overwhelmed. While admiring my acting, Goebbels was especially interested in my engineering projects. He and Göring were great champions of air travel. Again I glimpsed a golden future for myself. I was the twentieth-century Leonardo, as familiar with the arts as I was skilled in the sciences. Goebbels clapped me on the shoulder. Men like me were flocking to Berlin because they sensed their bold ideas might at last become reality. ‘I'm so glad you're one of us.'

He must have had my background checked out, discovering not only my political stance but my ancestry. I had been circumcised for clinical reasons but had to explain, for simplification's sake, how I had been forced to convert to Islam by the Tuareg in the Sahara. My enforced captivity by the Musselman and his imposition on me of his religion and its practices was, for some reason, a more acceptable explanation than the simple truth. At least I did not have to mention my dastardly father forcing his scientific notions on me. No wonder I have been suspicious of abstraction and perverse idealism all my life! I prefer actions, not words, to speak for me!

In spite of Goebbels's invitation to his parties, I did not engage with Berlin's infamous
demi-monde
. I had been kept far too busy by Munich's. My Spartan visits to the capital helped demonstrate my conservative values to Doctor Hugenberg, who became less and less suspicious of me and much happier about leaving Mrs Cornelius in my company. I sensed my ambitions
coming to fruition, even by such a strange route. The cinema had always been good to me. Ultimately it would lead me back to my true destiny. I remained baffled about who had been responsible for blocking those same ambitions in Italy! Happily, I had never turned over to Il Duce the full details of my inventions.