Читать книгу Saviour of the Nation - Brian Hodgkinson - Страница 8

Throughout the night the drum of marching feet

And flickering light from torches held aloft

Engrossed the streets of many German towns;

Whilst in Berlin the aged President

Saluted from his balcony the troops

Of Sturmabteilung, Stahlhelm and S.S.,

Whose banners rose in white and red and black.

And watching, too, with burning eyes of zeal,

Stood Adolf Hitler, now the Chancellor.

In that great land of prehistoric myth,

Of mighty rivers, darkest forest, lakes,

Of Alpine peaks that cast long shades of night

And bar the way to Bacchus’ revelries,

A deep resentment warped the souls of men.

The lust of Mars, the pride of nationhood,

Abruptly had been shamed. For many years,

The warlike Germans could not carry arms.

Their massive guns, steel-plated battleships,

And marching ranks of millions, bold and loyal,

Obedient to fatherland and king,

Had vanished at the word of armistice.

Thus mortal wounds, inflicted by defeat

And violent insurrection, doomed the State

Which followed on the Versailles settlement.

It was an interregnum for all those

Who smouldered with desire to be avenged.

Some, like Stresemann, tried to quench the fire,

But few would stand by Weimar and the law.

Bruning and Streicher struggled to enforce

Their vain attempts at sweeping compromise,

Till Papen came, a former Chancellor,

To woo the careworn President with hope

That, once in office, Hitler would be bound

By cabinet colleagues, like the Nationalists.

“We’ll box him in!” brave Hugenberg had said,

And few, beyond the Nazis, could believe

That Corporal Hitler, but a demagogue,

Would govern long unruly Germany.

Yet soon he showed his innate ruthlessness.

The violence of his language won support

From all those Germans keen to see destroyed

The Treaty of Versailles, and those who feared

That Jews and Marxists threatened Germany.

He called for new elections, claiming these

Would but confirm his own supremacy.

Before the votes were cast the Reichstag fire

Had burnt to ashes hopes of real reform.

The stormtroop legions cast aside restraint.

When Goring sanctioned police atrocities,

The Communists were murdered, or were held

Without due trial, regardless of the law.

A presidential edict had destroyed

All guarantees of personal liberty;

The new Republic, handicapped from birth

By enemies of freedom – Freikorps bands

And revolutionaries of left and right –

Was strangled by the senile Hindenburg.

At Potsdam, where the Prussian kings had sat,

Old memories of the Kaiserreich were stirred

When Hitler bowed before the head of State,

And wreaths were laid on tombs of monarchy.

But two days later all pretence was gone.

The Reichstag met in Berlin’s Opera House

To grant to Hitler unrestricted power.

Before the doors the Sturmabteilung stood,

Jackbooted brownshirts, eyeing delegates.

Inside, their comrades ringed the chamber walls.

Despite such terror, Otto Wells spoke out,

A final voice of liberal Germany,

Against the certain passage of the Bill

That gave to Hitler overwhelming powers.

Wells could not win. Too many absentees,

Deprived of rights, were held in custody.

This overture to German tragedy

Now set the scene for crude dictatorship.

The State would be the instrument of men

Obsessed by hate and racial fantasies.

The road to war was opened to the tread

Of German armies soon revitalised.

To Adolf Hitler war had been a dream,

Which offered him a kind of comradeship

In risk and violence, bravery and will.

When, as a youth, he’d seen so many Jews

Within his Austrian homeland, when he’d read

Hypotheses of racial purity,

And heard condemned the role of German Jews

In business, banking, law and medicine,

His mind was warped by unremitting rage:

Marxism was the Jew’s conspiracy,

Now thriving in that Slavic hinterland

Where Germany demanded Lebensraum.

The Nordic race must claim its destiny

And rid itself of all but German stock.

By war a race survives, by right of strength.

Destroy the rule of parties and of laws

That do not bear the German people’s will.

Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer; thus it was.