Winds of War (49 page)

Stöller was a cordial, clever German, in every way indistinguishable from the hundreds that Victor Henry had met in the military and industrial worlds and at social gatherings. He spoke a fine English. His countenance was open and hearty. He made bright jokes, including bold pleasantries about Göring’s corpulence and theatrical uniforms. He expressed deep regard for the United States (he especially loved San Francisco) and melancholy regret that its relations with Germany were not better. In fact, could he not do something to improve them, he said, by inviting Gianelli and the Henrys for a weekend at his estate? It was no Karinhall, but he could promise them good company. Captain Henry might have the luck to shoot a deer. Game was outside the meat ration, and some venison might be very welcome to Mrs. Henry! The banker’s wife, touching Pug’s hand with her cool jewelled white fingers, crinkled her blue eyes at him in invitation. She had heard that Mrs. Henry was the most elegant and attractive wife in the American diplomatic mission, and she longed to meet her.

Gianelli declined; he had to start his return journey in the morning. Officially there was every reason for Victor Henry to accept. Part of his job was to penetrate influential levels of Germans. He had no stomach for Stöller, but it occurred to him that here was a chance to give Rhoda the kind of fun she complained of missing. There was no telling good Germans from bad Germans. Stöller conceivably might be working for Göring under duress, though his wife in consequence dripped diamonds. Pug said he would come. The look the Stöllers exchanged convinced him that none of this was casual. They were cultivating him.

Stöller took the two Americans on a tour of Karinhall. Again Pug had the feeling that Nazi grandeur usually woke in him: the Hollywood impression, the sense of ephemeral flamboyant make-believe, which persisted no matter how vast and solid the structures, how high the ceilings, how elaborate the decorations, how costly the art. The corridors and rooms of Karinhall seemed to go on for miles. Glass cases by the dozens displayed solid gold objects crusted with gems - vases, crosses, maces’ swords, busts, batons, medals, books, globes - tributes to the field marshal from steel corporations, cities, and foreign governments on his birthday, his wedding, the birth of a child, the return of the Condor Legion from Spain. Italian and Dutch old masters crowded the walls, interspersed with the vapid nudes of living Nazi-approved painters. Other rooms with nobody in them, almost as vast and ornate as the banquet hall, were hung with tapestries and flags, walled in wood, filled with statuary and jewelled suits of armor. Yet it all might almost have been papier-mâché and canvas. Even the food on the banquet table had looked like a Cecil B. De Mille feast, and the pink meat inside the pig might instead have been wax or plaster. But Victor Henry well knew that he was looking at an immense treasure, mostly booty collected through Dr. Stöller. Moral considerations aside, the vulgar edifice disappointed because Göring was supposed to stem from an aristocratic family. Even the admiring comments of Luigi Gianelli had a strong tinge of irony.

The Luftwaffe officer wearing the diamond cross caught up with them and whispered to Stöller.

“Ah, what a pity, now you must go,” said the German banker. “And you haven’t begun to see the wonders of Karinhall. Captain Henry, my office will make all the arrangements to bring you and your dear wife on Friday to Abendruh, though I fear it will look rather pitiful after this. We will telephone you tomorrow.”

Stöller accompanied the two Americans through more rooms and corridors, stopped at double doors of dark wood heavily carved with hunting scenes, and opened them on a timbered room with log-and-plaster walls, hung with antlers, stuffed heads, and animal hides. The dusty smell of the dead creatures was strong in the air. On either side of a roaring fire sat Ribbentrop and Göring. Hitler was not in the room. A long, crudely made wooden table and two low benches took up most of the floor space. Pug thought at once that this must be the main room of the old hunting lodge, around which the field marshal had constructed the banal palace. Here was the heart of Karinhall. Except for the glow from the fire, the room was dank, dark, and cold.

Göring lolled on a settee with one thick white leather-booted leg off the floor, sipping coffee from a gold demitasse - part of a gold service on a low inlaid marble table. He nodded and smiled familiarly at Gianelli. Diamond rings bulged on three of the fingers that held the cup. Ribbentrop stared at the ceiling, hands interlaced across his stomach. The German banker introduced Victor Henry, backed out of the room, and closed the door.

“You will have exactly seven minutes of the Führer’s time to state your business,” said Ribbentrop in German.

Gianelli stammered, “Excellency, permit me to reply in English. I am here in a private capacity, and I regard that much time as an extraordinary courtesy to my country and my President.”

Ribbentrop sat with a blank face, looking at the ceiling, so Victor Henry ventured to translate. The foreign minister cut him off with a snapped sentence in perfect Oxford accents, “I understand English.”

Göring said to Gianelli, “You are welcome to Karinhall, Luigi. I have tried to invite you more than once. But this time you have come a long way for a short interview.”

“May I say, Field Marshal,” the banker answered in broken German, “that I have seen millions of money made and lost in a conference lasting a few minutes, and that world peace is worth any effort however unpromising.”

“I am in complete agreement with that.” Göring motioned them to chairs placed near him.

Ribbentrop, seizing the arms of his chair and closing his eyes, burst out in high rapid tones, in German, “This visitation is another studied insult by your President to the German head of state. Whoever heard of sending a private citizen as an emissary in such matters? Between civilized countries the diplomatic structure is used. Germany did not withdraw its ambassador in Washington by choice. The United States first made the hostile gesture. The United States has allowed within its borders a boycott of German products and a campaign of hate propaganda against the German people. The United States has its so-called Neutrality Act in blatant favor of the aggressors in this conflict. Germany did not declare war on England and France. They declared war on Germany.”

The foreign minister stopped talking and sat with his eyes closed, the long-jawed haggard face immobile, some strands of the graying blond hair falling over his face. The California banker looked first at Göring, then at Victor Henry, clearly shaken. Göring poured himself more coffee.

Concentrating with all his might, Victor Henry translated the foreign minister’s tirade. Ribbentrop did not correct or interrupt him.

Gianelli started to talk, but Ribbentrop burst out again: “What purpose can be served by this maladroit approach, other than a further deliberate provocation, one more expression of your President’s highly dangerous contempt for the leader of a powerful nation of eighty million people?”

With a trembling wave of his hand at Henry to indicate that he understood, Gianelli said, “May I respectfully reply that –”

The bright blue eyes of Ribbentrop opened, closed again, and he said in still louder tones, “The willingness of the Führer to give you a hearing in these circumstances is a testimony to his desire for peace that history will someday record. This is the sole value this peculiar interview possesses.”

Göring said to the banker in a milder, but no more friendly tone, “What is your purpose here, Luigi?”

“Field Marshal, I am an informal messenger of my President to your Führer, and I have a single question to put to him, by my President’s instructions. To ask it, and to answer it, should take very little time. But by God’s grace it can lead to lasting historical results.” Victor Henry put this into German.

“What is the question?” Göring said.

The banker’s face was going yellow. “Field Marshal, by my President’s order, the question is for the Führer,” he said hoarsely in German.

“It is for the Führer to answer,” Göring said, “but obviously we are going to hear it anyway. What is the question?” He raised his voice, fixing his gaze on the banker.”

Gianelli turned away from Göring’s eyes, which were lazily hard, licked his lips, and said to Henry, “Captain, I beg you to confirm my instructions to the great field marshal.”

Victor Henry was rapidly calculating the situation, including the trace of physical danger which had shadowed his mind since passing through the outer fences of Karinhall. Göring, for all his gross jolly façade, was a tough and ugly brute. If this monstrously fat German, with the rouge-red face, thin scarlet lips, and small jewelled hands, wanted to harm them, diplomatic immunity was a frail shield here. But Pug judged that his talk was cat-and-mouse fooling to kill time. He translated the banker’s answer under the straight stare of Göring, and added, “I confirm that the instructions are to put the question directly to the Führer, as Herr Gianelli already has done to his good friend Il Duce in Italy, where in my presence Il Duce gave him a favorable response.”

“We know all that,” Ribbentrop said. “We know the question, too.” Göring blinked at Henry and the tension broke. The banker brushed his fingers across his brow. The silence lasted for perhaps a minute. Adolf Hitler, pulling a lock of hair across his forehead, came into the room through a side door hung with a tiger skin.

As quickly as the Americans, Göring and Ribbentrop rose, assuming very much the lackey look. Göring moved away from the comfortable settee to a chair, and Hitler took his place, gesturing to the others to sit. He did not shake hands. Seen at this close range the Führer looked healthy and calm, though too fat and puffy-eyed. His dark hair was clipped to the bone at the sides like a common soldier’s. Except for the famed moustache he had an ordinary face, the face of any small man of fifty or so walking by on a German city street. Compared to this man of the people, the other two Nazis seemed bedizened grotesques. His gray coat with the single Iron Cross over his left breast contrasted remarkably with Ribbentrop’s gold-braided dark blue uniform and the air marshal’s extravaganza of colors, gems, and medals.

Folding one hand over the other in his lap, he took in the Americans with a grave glance.

“Luigi Gianelli, American banker. Captain Victor Henry, United States naval attaché in Berlin,” said Ribbentrop, in a sarcastic tone emphasizing the unimportance of the visitors. “Extraordinary informal emissaries,
Mein Führer
, from the President of the United States.”

The banker cleared his throat, attempted an expression of gratitude for the interview in German, made a flustered apology, and shifted to English. The Führer, his gaze steady on the banker while Henry translated, kept shifting in his chair and crossing and un-crossing his ankles. With the same prologue on world peace that he had addressed to Mussolini, Gianelli put to the Führer the question about Sumner Welles. As it came out in English, a contemptuous smile appeared on Ribbentrop’s face. Upon Henry’s translation Hitler and Göring looked at each other, the Führer impassive, Göring hoisting his shoulders, waving his thick-gemmed hands, and shaking his head, as though to say, “That’s really it. Unbelievable!”

Hitler meditated. The glance of his sunken, pallid blue eyes was straight ahead and far away. A bitter little smile moved his moustache and his small mouth. He began to speak in quiet, very clear, Bavarian-accented German, “Your esteemed President, Herr Gianelli, seems to feel a remarkable sense of responsibility for the whole present of world history. It is all the more remarkable in that only the United States, among the great powers, failed to join the League of Nations, and in that your Congress and your people have repeatedly indicated that they want no foreign entanglements.

“In my speech of April twenty-ninth, mainly addressed to your President, I acknowledged that your country has more than twice the population of our little land, more than fifteen times the living space, and infinitely more mineral resources. Perhaps therefore your President feels that he must approach me from time to time with stern fatherly admonitions. But of course I am giving my life for the renascence of my people, and I cannot help seeing everything from that limited point of view.”

Victor Henry did his best to translate, his heart pounding, his mouth dry.

Hitler now began reminiscing garrulously about the Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. He spoke at length and seemed to be enjoying himself, slowly waving his hands and using relaxed tones. The justifications were familiar stuff. He grew briefly loud and acid only over the British guarantee to Poland, which, he said, had encouraged a cruel reactionary regime to engage in atrocious measures against its German minority, in the illusion that it had become safe to do so. That was how the war had started. Since then England and France had over and over spurned his offers of a peace settlement and disarmament.

What more could he do, as a responsible head of state, than arm his country to defend itself against these two great military empires, who between them controlled three-fifths of the habitable surface of the earth and almost half its population?

German political aims were simple, open, moderate and unchanging, he went on. Five centuries before Columbus discovered America, there had been a German empire at the heart of Europe, its boundaries roughly fixed by geography and the reproductive vigor of the people. War had come over and over to this European heartland through the attempts of many powers to fragment the German folk. These attempts had often had temporary success. But the German nation, with its strong instinct for survival and growth, had time and again rallied and thrown off foreign encirclements and yokes. In this part of his talk Hitler made references to Bismarck, Napoleon, Frederick the Great, the War of the Spanish Succession, and the Thirty Years’ War, which were beyond Victor Henry. He translated them word for word as best he could.

The Versailles Treaty, said the Führer, had simply been the latest of these foreign efforts to mutilate the German heartland. Because it had been historically unsound and unjust it was now dead. The Rhineland was German. So was Austria. So was the Sudetenland. So were Danzig and the Corridor. The manufactured monstrosity of Czechoslovakia, thrust like a spear into Germany’s vitals, had now become once again the traditional Bohemian protectorate of the Reich. This restoration of normal Germany was now complete. He had done it almost without bloodshed. But for the absurd British guarantee, it would have all been finished in peace; the question of Danzig and the Corridor had been practically settled in July. Even now nothing substantial stood in the way of lasting peace. The other side simply had to recognize this restored normality in central Europe, and return to Germany her colonial territories. For the Reich, like other great modern states, had natural right to the raw materials of the underdeveloped continents.