Chapter Sixteen
SPIRIT OF POTSDAM


Oh, did you see? He has quite blue eyes.' A girl, who had been straining her tiptoes to peer between
the helmets of the Reichswehrmen, turned excitedly to her mother. Hitler had just gone by, to join
hands with Old Hindenburg over the tomb of Frederick the Great in the Garrison Church and
pledge Germany to 'the spirit of Potsdam'.


His eyes were about as blue as the Blue Danube, and anybody who ever sees the Danube blue
should take a colour photograph and frame it. The Danube has every virtue that a river should have
and I love it; it is for me a friend and a brother, and a peerless highway; it is magnificent, but it is
not blue.

If Johann Strauss only wanted a rhyme to Au he might just as well have taken Grau.
Donau so Grau, tum-tum, tum-tum,
Durch Tal und Au, tum-tum, tum-tum.
No, you can't do it. You can't waltz to a grey river. It hadderbe blue.


So with Hitler's blue eyes and the young lady of Potsdam. They had to be blue.

It was the beginning
of the cult of Hitler among German women. Nothing succeeds like excess, and the female
population already had a terrific Schwämerei for him. Afterwards I saw women crowding around
him in hundreds, trying to kiss his hand, touch his garment, weeping from a surfeit of bliss at being
in his presence.
Weeping women will accompany Hitler on his way through this vale of tears.

An hour later I sat in the gallery of the Kroll Opera House and watched Hitler take his place in the


Chancellor's chair. He first entered Parliament after every possibility of opposition or counterargument
had been ruthlessly suppressed. I marvelled as I looked down on him, who had changed
into the brown uniform and sat with Papen beside him.

According to his own story he drifted aimlessly about Vienna before the war, as do innumerable
pieces of human flotsam and jetsam to this day, and never found a job he could keep for very long,
never toiled hard with his head or his hands for meagre pay as other men do, to keep themselves
alive and decent. His Socialist fellow workmen threatened to throw him off a scaffolding unless he
went quietly; in private conversation Hitler must be infuriating.

In the war he was an obscure battalion orderly. After the war he was used by the Reichswehr as a
spy to keep the military authorities aware of what political movements were hatching in Munich.

Then, still afire with the Great-German, Anti-Jewish politics he had absorbed in Vienna, he joined
the little group of men that was later to become the National Socialist Party, came to be their leader,
and for the next dozen years spent his time addressing meetings of his own supporters,
accompanied to and from them by an Al Capone bodyguard and surrounded at them by Storm
Troopers. The only difference in them was the degree of applause, which became greater as his
supporters multiplied.

Open debate with an adversary he never knew, except on a small scale at the beginning. He avoided
it, for he cannot debate. It upsets him to be challenged and he gets angry and loses control. In a real
Parliament he could not have lasted, so that the timing of his first appearance in Parliament to
coincide with the suppression of all opposition commands admiration.

The Reichstag on that day felt just like a bomb must feel immediately before it explodes. Only one
thing -- short of the death of Hindenburg, which could not be long delayed -- now stood between
Hitler and absolute power: a Bill giving him authority to do what he liked, without Parliament and
without regard for President or Constitution. Such a bill needed a two-thirds majority in the
Reichstag.

Hitler introduced his Bill, in his famous 'Give us four years' speech. His Parliament was in a
theatre, and all the theatrical trappings of National Socialism surrounded him.

Göring, massive and
glowering, towered over him in the Speaker's chair. High up, the heads of two stalwart SS men
poked through a hole in the wooden curtain over the stage; no doubt good shots, they kept a close
watch on the people in the public galleries. The brown-shirted phalanx of Hitler's deputies, among
them several men whom he was to have shot a year later, tumultuously cheered every sentence.

The
Centre, under Kaas and Brüning, sat prim and decorous, trying to look as if they really dared vote
against the Bill. The Socialists, who had to vote against it or become the laughing stock of history,
were a picture of dejection. Against the wall by them lounged a thick fringe of armed Nazi SS and
SA men. Outside the House masses of Storm Troopers, posted there by a thoughtful stage manager

who forgot no detail, shouted in chorus threats of the things they would do if the Bill were not
passed.

It was the last appearance of the great German Socialist Party, that had fought the Kaisers and
Bismarck, had in the war kept alive the idea of humanity and peace in Germany, and for its pains
had been saddled by the Allied Powers with the task of carrying out the Peace Treaty and kicked
hard in the pants for fourteen years while engaged in doing so.

When Hitler came to power he inaugurated in Germany a military despotism far more menacing for
the outer world than that of the Kaisers, and yet he was treated with infinitely more consideration
and respect than the German moderates by Germany's former enemies. How can Germany fail to
learn the lesson of this? How can the cause of peace and justice and humanity ever flourish in
Germany?

Then the Prelate Kaas got up, a son of that Mother Church which can always yield and always wait,
which in history has so often been on the side of inhumanity and cruelty if only these were arrayed
in the robes of a Most Catholic Majesty or something of that sort. The Catholic Centre, modestly
announced the Prelate Kaas, would vote for the Bill.

The battle was won. The Centre votes just gave the Bill its two-thirds majority and the Nazi regime
the semblance of a constitutional foundation. Absolute power was Hitler's' cloaked for the nonce
only by the thin shroud of a non-committal deference due to a failing President.

I walked through the Tiergarten and Unter den Linden. Hitler, standing bare-headed in his car,
drove between thick hedges of Storm Troopers to the Wilhelmstrasse. The crowds surged to greet
him. The cheering crashed about him like salvoes of gunfire. Germany had 'given him four years'.