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An oration by Goebbels has a beginning, a middle, and a crescendo end; it has form, style, and the language is chosen, the gestures sparing but effective, the voice clear and only now and then distorted by passion. Hitler begins any old way, rambles, digresses, becomes excited, rants, shouts until his voice is hoarse, and frequently breaks into a falsetto scream.

The quality of Hitler’s voice is unpleasant. It is thick in the middle register, guttural in the low, and its high notes are rasping. In every speech at some time he becomes angry and then the tone is either terrifying or embarrassing to the listener, depending upon his relation to Hitler’s power. I speak, of course, of the foreign listener, as it would affect you if you understood German. His anger frequently overpowers him, but he never splutters, he roars. I sometimes felt as I listened to him, and I have heard him fifty times or more, as though he were a wild beast.

Then he can shift in a twinkling to the tone of irony, contemptuous, derisive. Much of his speech is ungrammatical; many of his sentences do not “read,” do not make German. He pays apparently no attention to the structure of his speech. He sometimes ends so abruptly that his audience is shocked, having expected him to finish his thought, or even complete a sentence. His gestures are extravagant, and resemble those of an old-fashioned camp-meeting preacher. He mimics well, and delights in ridiculing his opponents by caricaturing them.

There is scarcely a rule of oratory he does not ignore. He is seldom dignified. All of this, of course, is in reference to his extemporaneous public speaking which brought him to power, not to the speeches he reads, as he has read nearly everything since he took power. As Chancellor of the Reich he can read a speech with dignity, as he read the funeral oration over Hindenburg, which I heard in Tannenberg.

Yet with all the criticism one can bring to bear on his public speaking, he remains the most effective mob master ever to step on a platform. He sweeps his audience with him. Sometimes they are slow to come along, as the time when after seven days of slaughter in Germany he rose in his own uniformed Reichstag to explain the Blood Purge of June 30, 1934. That time he spoke for twenty minutes before he received a single handclap. He had just killed more than a thousand people including leaders of his own party, Ernst Roehm, his closest friend and head of the 2,500,000 Storm Troops; Gregor Strasser, one-time rival for leadership of the Nazis; General Kurt von Schleicher, former Reichs Chancellor, and his wife; Karl Ernst, head of the 250,000 Berlin and Brandenburg Storm Troopers; General von Lossow and former Reichs Commissar von Kahr of Bavaria, who had defeated his first effort at seizing power in Munich, and hundreds of others.

The nation was stunned; the Nazi Party itself was partially paralyzed with fear. Hitler had turned his SS (Schutzstaffel) Black Guards against his SA (Sturmabteilung) Storm Troops, and hundreds of Brown Shirt officers had died before the Black Shirt firing squads, many of them shouting “Heil Hitler!” as they fell. Most of the members of the Reichstag, that curious gesture of Hitler before democracy, were active or honorary officers in the Storm Troops. A score of seats were empty. Their lawful occupants were dead. The survivors were appalled and not less bewildered than the public. Nobody knew what had happened; what to expect. When Hitler began to speak, for the first time in his life he was received in silence.

As I sat in the press gallery of the Kroll Opera House, I noted this with amazement, but I felt the silence was that of stupefaction, not of indifference and certainly not of rejection. The listeners were simply stricken dumb. Yet the silence continued, for five, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes. By then I began to think that Hitler might have made a mistake, that perhaps his dummy Reichstag was actually disapproving their idol. Many of them had close friends among the dead. Then came the breaking point. I think it was the most dramatic moment in any speech I have ever heard of Hitler’s.

In his intolerably repetitious way he had started with a description of Germany’s suffering under the Versailles treaty, and under the “fourteen years of servitude to the traitors of November,” then sketched the events leading up to the Blood Purge, described his discovery of the plot against the State, and then with a leap he shifted into his most passionate style. He had come to the moment of ordering the executions. Raising his right hand, forefinger pointed on high, he stood on his toes and roared: “Meine Herren, at that moment I was the Supreme Court of Germany; I was the Supreme Judge of Germany; I was Germany!”

The silence in the Reichstag broke, and as though hypnotized, the 500 Brown-Shirted members roared: “Heil! Heil! Heil!” There, they had recognized their master. He had spoken as a master. He had consented again to be their master, and from a mood of bewilderment and fear they burst into the joyful acknowledgment of their abasement. Forgotten were the friendships with the dead, blotted out in the keen pleasure of hearing the crack of the lash. From then on his lengthy accounting was constantly punctuated by the traditional applause.

Incidentally it might be pointed out here that there is after all a very significant difference between the tyrants of long ago and the tyrants of today. It is a fact that the tyrants of today exercise greater power over the lives of their subjects than any we can recollect from former times. Historians have to search to find a Ptolemy, a Caesar, or a Mongol Khan who had so complete a discipline over their populations, so profound a control over the individual lives of their subjects as have the despots of the modern totalitarian states.

But all the modern despots find it necessary to report to their subjects, to speak and explain, to take them into their alleged confidence, however mendacious the report may be. They find it expedient, no matter how they spurn the principles of democracy, to pretend to treat their subjects as free to exercise a judgment. Why else does Hitler constantly come before his people to talk? In the western tyrannies of antiquity and the Middle Ages, in the European monarchies of divine right and in the Oriental despotisms, the rulers considered it unnecessary to deliver an accounting to their people.

The conclusion is that the short experience the world has had with democracy, not yet two hundred years in duration, has left with the most imperious ruler a sense of responsibility to the ruled, or is it merely fear? Hitler despises the masses, I know. But he fears them also. If Louis XVI had possessed a fraction of Hitler’s speaking talent, or King Charles of England, or Czar Nicholas of Russia, perhaps they might have had a different fate.

In the preface to Mein Kampf Hitler indicates the paramount importance he attaches to the art of political speaking. He wrote: “I know that one is able to win people far more by the spoken than by the written word, and that every great movement on this globe owes its rise to the great speakers and not to the great writers.” He then wrote a book of 1,000 pages which is said by now to have been distributed to eight million people, but it was still the spoken word. He dictated every line of it. You ask, what kind of public speaker is Hitler? I answer, read Mein Kampf.

It reminds me of a man named Korff. Korff was the brains of the Ullstein Verlag, pre-Hitler Germany’s greatest publishing concern. Korff originated the Berliner Illustrierte, first of the world’s great picture weeklies, forerunner of Life, and Look, and the French Match. He raised his Berliner Illustrierte to more than two million circulation, undreamed of on the continent before. His salary was record breaking, his prestige likewise.

One day in 1931, more than a year before Hitler came to power, Korff came before his board of directors and said, “Gentlemen, I’m through. I am going to resign. I wish you to release me and to make your arrangements accordingly.” Astounded, the board asked why. “Because I’ve read the book, gentlemen,” replied Korff. “What book?” they asked. “Mein Kampf,” Korff said, and began to explain, but couldn’t on account of the laughter. Dear old Korff had to have his joke. But no, it was not a joke. Korff resigned, liquidated his property, got out of Germany and in 1933 when Hitler came to power the Nazis bought out Ullstein’s at forced sale.

The laughing members of the board and stockholders—those not yet dead, shot attempting to escape, or hanged by their belts in concentration camp—received a fraction of one per cent of the value of their holding. Of all the house of Ullstein, only the man who read the book escaped. I advise you to read the book.

As an orator, Hitler has many superiors. I have mentioned Goebbels in Germany. Trotzky was certainly better. I heard Trotzky speak in Moscow the last time he ever appeared on a Russian platform. It was in 1926. He had been in disgrace for more than a year, but was allowed to speak on the innocuous theme, “The United Sates of America and Siberia,” a lecture with paid admissions. The proceeds were to go to the benefit of needy students of Moscow University. Why Stalin allowed it I do not know, but he never permitted a return engagement, for Trotzky’s popularity proved so great that the mounted police had to be called out to move the crowds which, despite the exorbitant admission price, jammed the street before the lecture hall.

I paid thirty roubles for a balcony seat. It was worth the price. Trotzky appeared, dapper in a light-gray whipcord suit, and for an hour and a half in Russian which I only faintly understood, moved me and the three thousand other listeners to intense appreciation of his forensic talents. I was surprised to hear Trotzky’s voice, a clear high tenor. I had expected a deeper, more rotund tone. They said, however, that the clarity of his delivery and its carrying power were such that he alone among Bolshevik orators could speak in the Red Square and without a microphone be heard by half a million listeners. Without being able to understand more than one word in ten, as at that time I had been in Russia less than a year, I was nevertheless convinced by this one hearing of Trotzky that he was one of history’s greatest orators.

Q. What sort of eyes has Hitler? Are they magnetic? What color are they?

A. It seems to depend on who is looking at them. I noticed that Francis Hackett in his useful book, What Mein Kampf Means to America, cites three descriptions of Hitler’s eyes, all different. Otto Tolischus calls them “small, greenish brown and almost poetically introspective eyes.” William D. Bayes calls them “faded blue eyes between colorless brows and puffy sallow cheeks.” John McCutcheon Raleigh wrote: “The fanaticism in his eyes was the most commanding thing about him ... they possess a hypnotic quality that can easily persuade his followers to do anything the mind behind the eyes desires.”

These differences evoked from Mr. Hackett the remark: “If you want to feel discouraged about the art of reporting, consider these three accounts of Hitler’s eyes.” But what about these additions? Dorothy Thompson says in her interview, reprinted in Dictators and Democrats: “The eyes alone were notable. Dark gray and hyperthyroid, they have the peculiar shine which often distinguishes geniuses, alcoholics and hysterics.” In the same book Lothrop Stoddard writes: “His eyes are very dark blue.” Likewise, in the same compilation, I have reported that “He fixed his flat, non-magnetic, China-blue eyes on me....” I will stick to my version. His eyes were certainly not magnetic as far as I was concerned, though I am convinced they would be highly magnetic to any German. As for the color, they are of such an intermediate, shifting shade that it may well be they could show in different lights all the way from greenish brown, faded blue, dark gray, dark blue, to China blue.

Q. Is Hitler really the tough man he claims to be? I remember he was reported in a recent speech to have remarked: “I am the hardest man ever to rule Germany.”

A. When a man talks too much about his strength, it may mean he is not so strong after all. Francis Hackett sorted out in his index of Mein Kampf all the references to “Qualities, concepts or practises Hitler approves,” and to the ones he disapproves. The two lists throw a good deal of light on Hitler’s character, or rather on what he thinks his character ought to be.

The things Hitler approves are: First, “Advance by sections,” by which he means that to achieve, one must concentrate upon one goal at a time, as he has brilliantly exemplified in his conduct of the war so far. Then in alphabetic order, Hitler approves: “Brutality; Discipline; Executions for Treason; Faith; Fanaticism; Force; Hardness; Idealism; Joy in responsibility; Loyalty; Obedience; Passion; Perseverance; Ruthlessness; Sacrifice; Self-preservation; Self-sufficiency, national; Silence and discretion; Social justice; Social responsibility; Terrorism; Toughness; Will power and determination.”

Hitler condemns: “Cowardice; Eroticism; Half measures; Humaneness; Liberty; Pacifism; Passive resistance.”

My impression is that of the qualities he named, Hitler possesses brutality, discipline, faith, fanaticism, force, hardness, idealism, joy in responsibility, passion, perseverance, ruthlessness, sacrifice, discretion, terrorism, will power and determination; but that he does not possess loyalty or a true sense of social justice, or social responsibility, or toughness. He is hard without being tough. That is, I believe he will one day prove brittle. As for loyalty, he is notoriously able to discard a lifelong friend, and if necessary kill him, as he did Roehm, without visible compunction.

Q. What is the secret of Hitler’s power?

A. That is a question that has interested me for eighteen years, since I first saw Hitler and heard him speak. During all this time I have heard hundreds of explanations of his power and have thought of some myself. But the most interesting and plausible discussion of his personality I have ever heard was given me by Dr. Carl G. Jung, the great Swiss psychiatrist, when I visited him in his home in Zurich to ask him to diagnose the dictators. It was in October 1938, and I had come directly from Prague where I had witnessed the death of Czechoslovakia.

Dr. Jung’s analysis of Hitler has been remarkably confirmed by the events since that time. He had been personally fascinated by the problem of Hitler’s personality, and had studied it for years. He said: “There were two types of strong men in primitive society. One was the chief who was physically powerful, stronger than all his competitors, and another was the medicine man who was not strong in himself but was strong by reason of the power which the people projected into him. Thus we had the Emperor and the Pope.

“Hitler belongs in the category of the truly mystic medicine man. His body does not suggest strength. The outstanding characteristic of his physiognomy is its dreamy look. I was especially struck by that when I saw pictures taken of him in the Czechoslovakian crisis; there was in his eyes the look of a seer.”

I asked, “Why is it that Hitler who makes nearly every German fall down and worship him, produces next to no impression on any foreigner?”

“Exactly,” Dr. Jung assented. “Few foreigners respond at all, yet apparently every German in Germany does. It is because Hitler is the mirror of every German’s unconscious, but of course he mirrors nothing from a non-German.

“He is the loud-speaker which magnifies the inaudible whispers of the German soul until they can be heard by the German’s conscious ear. He is the first man to tell every German what he has been thinking and feeling all along in his unconscious about German fate, especially since the defeat in the World War, and the one characteristic which colors every German soul is the typically German inferiority complex, the complex of the younger brother, of the one who is always a bit late to the feast. Hitler’s power is not political; it is magic.

“To understand magic you must understand what the unconscious is. It is that part of our mental constitution over which we have little control and which is stored with all sorts of impressions and sensations; which contains thoughts and even conclusions of which we are not aware. Besides the conscious impressions which we receive, there are all sorts of impressions constantly impinging upon our sense organs of which we do not become aware because they are too slight to attract our conscious attention. They lie beneath the threshold of consciousness. But all these subliminal impressions are recorded; nothing is lost. Someone may be speaking in a faintly audible voice in the next room while we are talking here. You pay no attention to it, but the conversation next door is being recorded in your unconscious as surely as though the latter were a dictaphone record.

“Now the secret of Hitler’s power is not that Hitler has an unconscious more plentifully stored than yours or mine. Hitler’s secret is twofold; first, that his unconscious has exceptional access to his consciousness, and second, that he allows himself to be moved by it. He is like a man who listens intently to a stream of suggestions in a whispered voice from a mysterious source, and then acts upon them.

“In our case, even if occasionally our unconscious does reach us through dreams, we have too much rationality, too much cerebrum to obey it—but Hitler listens and obeys. The true leader is always led.

“We can see it work in him. He himself has referred to his Voice. His Voice is nothing other than his own unconscious, into which the German people have projected their own selves; that is, the unconscious of seventy-eight million Germans. That is what makes him powerful. Without the German people he would be nothing. It is literally true when he says that whatever he is able to do is only because he has the German people behind him, or, as he sometimes says, because he is Germany. So with his unconscious being the receptacle of the souls of seventy-eight million Germans, he is powerful, and with his unconscious perception of the true balance of political forces at home and in the world, he has so far been infallible.

“That is why he makes political judgments which turn out to be right against the opinions of all his advisors and against the opinions of all foreign observers. When this happens it means only that the information gathered by his unconscious, and reaching his consciousness by means of his exceptional talent, has been more nearly correct than that of all others, German or foreign, who attempted to judge the situation and who reached conclusions different from his.”

I remarked that if Hitler’s Voice continued to be always right, we were in for a very interesting period. This was five months before Hitler swallowed the whole of Czechoslovakia, and eleven months before he launched the Second World War by assaulting Poland.

Dr. Jung gravely answered: “Yes, it seems that the German people are now convinced they have found their Messiah. In a way the position of the Germans is remarkably like that of the Jews of old.

“Since their defeat in the World War the Germans have awaited a Messiah, a Savior. That is characteristic of people with an inferiority complex. The Jews got their inferiority complex from geographical and political factors. They lived in a part of the world which was a parade ground for conquerors from both sides, and after their return from their first exile to Babylon, when they were threatened with extinction by the Romans, they invented the solacing idea of a Messiah who was going to bring all the Jews together into a nation once more and save them.

“The Germans got their inferiority complex from comparable causes. They came up out of the Danube Valley too late, and founded the beginnings of their nation long after the French and English were well on their way to nationhood. They were too late for the scramble for colonies and for the foundation of empire. Then when they did get together and made a unified nation, they looked around them and saw the British, the French, and others with rich colonies and all the equipment of grown-up nations and they became jealous, resentful, like a younger brother whose older brothers have taken the lion’s share of the inheritance.

“So the Germans slept through the division of the world into colonial empires and thus they got their inferiority complex which made them want to fight the World War; and of course when they lost it their feeling of inferiority grew even worse and developed a desire for a Messiah, and so they have their Hitler. If he is not their true Messiah, he is like one of the Old Testament prophets; his mission is to unite his people and lead them to the Promised Land. This explains why the Nazis have to combat every other form of religion besides their own idolatrous brand. I have no doubt but that the campaign against the Catholic and Protestant churches will be pursued with relentless and unremitting vigor, for the very sound reason, from the Nazi point of view, that they wish to substitute the new faith of Hitlerism.”

I asked Dr. Jung: “Do you consider it possible that Hitlerism might become for Germany a permanent religion for the future, like Mohammedanism for the Moslems?”

“I think it is highly possible,” Dr. Jung replied. “Hitler’s ‘religion’ is the nearest to Mohammedanism, realistic, earthy, promising the maximum of rewards in this life, but with a Moslem-like Valhalla into which worthy Germans may enter and continue to enjoy themselves. Like Mohammedanism, it teaches the virtue of the sword. Hitler’s first idea is to make his people powerful because the spirit of the Aryan German deserves to be supported by might, by muscle and steel. It is not a spiritual religion in the sense in which we ordinarily use the term. But remember that in the early days of Christianity it was the church which made the claim to total power, both spiritual and temporal. Today the church no longer makes this claim, but the claim has been taken over by the totalitarian states which demand not only temporal but spiritual power.

“Incidentally it occurs to me that the religious character of Hitlerism is also emphasized by the fact that the German communities throughout the world far from the political power of Berlin, have adopted Hitlerism. Look at South America.”

Dr. Jung said he had closely observed Hitler at his meeting with Mussolini in Berlin. “I was only a few yards away from the two men and could study them well. In comparison with Mussolini, Hitler made upon me the impression of a sort of scaffolding of wood covered with cloth, an automaton with a mask, like a robot or a mask of a robot. During the whole performance he never laughed; it was as though he were in a bad humor, sulking. He showed no human sign.

“His expression was that of an inhumanly single-minded purposiveness, with no sense of humor. He seemed as if he might be a double of a real person, and that Hitler the man might perhaps be hiding inside like an appendix, and deliberately so hiding in order not to disturb the mechanism.

“With Hitler you do not feel that you are with a man. You are with a medicine man, a form of spiritual vessel, a demi-deity, or even better, a myth. With Hitler you are scared. You know you would never be able to talk to that man; because there is nobody there. He is not a man, but a collective. He is not an individual, but a whole nation. I take it to be literally true that he has no personal friend. How can you talk intimately with a nation?”

Finally Dr. Jung delivered a prophecy which was to prove woefully accurate just five months later. “England and France,” he said, “will not honor their new guarantee to Czechoslovakia any more than France honored her previous pledge to Czechoslovakia. No nation keeps its word. A nation is a big, blind worm, following what? Fate perhaps. A nation has no honor, it has no word to keep. That is the reason why in the old days, they tried to have kings who did possess personal honor, and a word. But you know if you choose one hundred of the most intelligent people and get them all together, they are a stupid mob? Ten thousand of them together would have the collective intelligence of an alligator. Haven’t you noticed at a dinner party that the more people you invite the more stupid the conversation? In a crowd, the qualities which everybody possesses multiply, pile up, and become the dominant characteristics of the whole crowd.

“Not everybody has virtues, but everybody has the low animal instincts, the basic primitive caveman suggestibility, the suspicious and vicious traits of the savage. The result is that when you get a nation of many millions of people, it is not even human. It is a lizard or a crocodile, or a wolf. Its statesmen cannot have a higher morality than the animal-like mass morality of the nation, although individual statesmen of the democratic states may attempt to behave a little better. For Hitler, however, more than for any other statesman in the modern world, it would be impossible to expect that he should keep the word of Germany against her interest, in any international bargain, agreement, or treaty. Because Hitler is the nation.”

Q. Isn’t there anything constructive about Hitlerism? Is it all destructive? Won’t they get over their period of madness and settle down and make good world citizens?

A. In 1934 I talked with President Thomas G. Masaryk of Czechoslovakia in the old Hradzin Palace in Prague. The venerable statesman was eighty-four years old, but he was still able to deliver measured philosophical replies. One of them was to the question: “Aren’t you as head of the Republic of Czechoslovakia which Hitler and his Nazis threaten so violently, afraid he may some day attack you?” The old man slowly replied, “No, because every revolutionary movement such as the Nazis’ has its period of ecstasy, and the Nazis are going through theirs now, but in a little while more they will subside and we will be able to get along peaceably with them.”

I went away with my first example of the fact that no man over seventy ever seems to be able to understand Hitler. I beg the pardon of the grand exception, Senator Glass, whose early and persistent advocacy of effective action against Hitler has distinguished him among Senators, some of whom approach treason in their imbecilic refusal to comprehend the life-and-death issue facing America.

Just five years after the founder of Czechoslovakia had expressed his faith in the fundamental normality of the Nazis, his conviction that they were after all like other people, and that their revolution would follow the natural course of other radical movements and become stabilized, Hitler sat at the very desk in the Hradzin where Masaryk had sat. Czechoslovakia had ceased to exist precisely because Masaryk and all the other heads of states in Europe blindly refused to see that in Hitlerism the world was faced with a brute which always had to move forward, steadily became bigger and hungrier as it was fed, and would never cease to destroy and devour until stopped by force. To the German there is something mystically attractive about this Nazi Wave of Destruction. They feel their fate is being achieved by violence so fierce that it intoxicates them, as the young Nazi Shock Troops are intoxicated by battle lust when they fling themselves upon the enemy.

It is the Nazis’ ability to combine this berserk, mystic rage with cold scientific mastery of the intricate instruments of mechanized war that makes them so formidable. They even loot scientifically, as witness the way they have bled France. I know an amusing and typical example of the German’s aptitude for plundering profitably.

In Spain I met a young German Nazi machine gunner serving with Franco. His name was Franz, and he had been an SS officer in Duesseldorf. He had come to Spain, he declared, for idealistic motives, to fight the Bolsheviks, and now after three months’ service his idealism had been rewarded with a small fortune. I asked him how he had been able to make any money serving as a noncommissioned officer.

“Oh,” he explained, “I have the advantage over these Spaniards and Moors of having an academic education. I did not finish school but I had enough Naturwissenschaft to know my way about in a physics or chemistry laboratory. Now what do these poor ignorant Spaniards and Moors do when they enter a town we have just taken. They go busting around breaking into homes and offices, looking for cash and jewelry and such things, but nobody ever leaves cash and jewelry lying around. What do I do? I go straight to the Kino, the motion picture theater, and straight to the projection room, and there I remove the lenses which are worth from ten to twenty thousand pesetas, and I put the lenses in my suitcase when I get back, and now I have two suitcases full of lenses. They are worth a fortune. You see the beauties of education?”

Q. How has Hitler run his show without money, without gold, without foreign exchange? Can the Nazi economy continue to run indefinitely on its present basis?

A. The Nazi economy can continue to run only as long as the war lasts. This is the economic compulsion on Hitler to go on fighting. The Nazi economy is one of scarcity. There are not enough workers, since most able-bodied men are in the army; not enough food, or clothing, or fuel, or manufactured articles. Everybody not in the armed forces has to work very hard, very long hours in order to feed the colossal war machine and produce the minimum necessary for the civilians to subsist. Scarcity would normally shove prices upward; but not in the Nazi economy where the Terror makes price control really work. The Gestapo is a more potent backing for the currency than gold. The workings of a totalitarian economy seem queer to us only because we continue to think of Adam Smith’s “economic man,” and because we still believe that man will always act freely in accord with the law of supply and demand. But man under the Nazis is not free, does not act according to the law of supply and demand but according to the Nazi law. This compulsion by Terror makes a different kind of economic unit of him; our economic laws do not apply to him any more. In our bourgeois society when civil law condemns a man to go hungry, appetite is likely to make him break the law. In the totalitarian state the punishments of the concentration camp subdue almost every impulse to rebel.

For foreign trade the Nazis use an infinitely flexible, complex system of barter, often three-way. They confidently assert they have outgrown the use of gold; although one of the reasons Walther Darre advanced for a Nazi conquest of America was to lay hands on the American gold reserve at Fort Knox. The Nazis have demonstrated that they can do without gold, but this is no proof that gold is not more convenient than barter; it is proof only that anything can be used for money as long as the people believe in it, by natural inclination or by compulsion—wampum, cows, brass, paper, or the muzzle of a Gestapo pistol. It is one of our commonest fallacies to believe that financial considerations affect very much the beginning or the middle or the end of a war. Can you recall any war that had to stop because one side ran out of money? In wartime a nation becomes a collective and money a mere bookkeeping item. Only after the war when accounts are presented, does bankruptcy become real. Hitler inherited a bankrupt, bourgeois, peacetime economy and turned it overnight, from the moment he came to power in 1933, into a wartime economy. Real peace would mean the total collapse of Hitler’s totalitarian economic machine.

Q. Why do the Nazis call theirs the Third Reich?

A. Historically the First Reich was the Holy Roman Empire, the second was the one founded by Bismarck, and the third is Hitler’s. When I discussed this once with Dr. Jung, he pointed out deeper meanings. He said, “Nobody called Charlemagne’s kingdom the First Reich, nor William’s the Second Reich. Only the Nazis call theirs the Third Reich, because it has a profound mystical meaning.”

Dr. Jung said the Nazis feel a parallel between the Biblical triad, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and the Third Reich, and that in fact many Nazis refer to Hitler as the Holy Ghost. “Again,” Dr. Jung continued, “consider the widespread revival in the Third Reich of the cult of Wotan, God of Wind. Take the name Sturmabteilung, Storm Troops. The swastika is a revolving form making a vortex moving ever toward the left—which means in Buddhistic symbolism sinister, unfavorable, directed toward the unconscious. All these symbols of a Third Reich led by its prophet under the banners of wind and storm and whirling vortices point to a mass movement which is to sweep the German people in a hurricane of unreasoning emotion on to a destiny which perhaps none but the seer, the prophet, the Fuehrer himself can foretell—and perhaps not even he.”

This psychiatric explanation of the Nazi names and symbols may sound to a layman fantastic, but can anything be as fantastic as the bare facts about the Nazi Party and its Fuehrer? Be sure there is much more to be explained in them than can be explained by merely calling them gangsters. They are products of that most hysterical, illogical, emotional mentality in Europe, the German.

Q. But I thought the Germans were stolid, phlegmatic, sensible people. How can you describe them as hysterical?

A. The commonest mistake the outside world makes about the Germans is to describe them the way you have done. We Americans seem to have judged most European nations exactly opposite from what they really are. We consider the Italian to be emotional, easily swayed, the Frenchman to be volatile, the Spaniard passionate, and so on. Well, all the Latin races are models of calm, common sense and middle-of-the-road, essentially stable people compared with the Germans. As Dr. Jung put it, “The Italians are stable. Their minds do not roll and wallow and leap and plunge through all the extravagant ecstasies which are the daily exercise of the German mind.” The Germans carry everything to excess.

What other nation in Europe would have been inundated in one decade by a wave of hysteria which was to sweep them into idolatrous worship of a former building-trades laborer and corporal and lift them into conquest of the entire continent of Europe and promise the conquest of the world? Surely this is the most extraordinary yielding by a great people to a mass emotion ever observed in our so-called civilized world.

It is not, however, the first time that similar things have happened in Germany. Hitler has had some notable predecessors in the turbulent period of the Reformation.

The Anabaptists of Munster were forerunners of the Nazis, and their Fuehrer, John of Leyden, was a figure comparable to Hitler in ambition and in his mystic hold over his followers. Leyden and his associates seized the city of Munster in Westphalia in 1532 and, establishing a totalitarian theocracy, set out to conquer the world and make Munster its capital. Is that any more or less fantastic than Adolf Hitler, setting out to proceed from Munich to the conquest of the world?

John of Leyden differed in one respect, however, from Hitler. He not only encouraged polygamy as Hitler’s Black Guards encourage promiscuity, but he had four wives of his own, one of whom he, in a typically Hitlerian fit of rage, beheaded with his own hand in the market place. Munster for three years was the scene of excesses, profligacy, and inhuman tortures committed upon the foes of the medieval Nazis, until they were finally overcome by a coalition of outraged neighbors, comparable in a smaller way, one might say, to the present coalition against the Third Reich.

Q. Doesn’t the life of Hitler, as far as we know it, show that he suffered very much from poverty in his youth and then when Germany was defeated, he suffered along with his fellow Germans so deeply that we ought to be able to understand and forgive instead of hating and making war upon him?

A. That seems the equivalent of appealing for sympathy and understanding for a mad dog, because the poor dog had been bitten and given rabies without wanting it. It was not his fault, and he had suffered from it, so why shoot him? Hitler, we know, did suffer as a youth from many disabilities, including extreme poverty, and we ought to be sorry that he did, not merely as Christians from love of our neighbor, but because Hitler is causing us such infinite trouble and misery, partially perhaps, on account of these early discomforts.

But we can do nothing to correct Hitler’s personal history. By the time he came into our lives his character was fixed in rigid, implacable hatred for every human being on earth not willing or suitable to help him place Deutschland in command of the world with himself the globe’s supreme ruler. He is as little susceptible to reformation today as a rattlesnake. As for the German people and their sufferings after the defeat in the last war, there are several things to say.

First, they did not suffer nearly so much as a nation usually suffers after losing a four-years’ war. I can testify to that from personal observation of the Germans from 1923 on, a period including the most desperate months of the inflation. It is simply not correct to say as Hackett says about the Germans after the war, “They were just as unhappy, as despairing and as demoralized, in the midst of their Reconstruction Period, as the old South in the years after the Civil War.”

The old South was physically devastated by the war. Germany surrendered before the enemy reached her territory; she came off materially scot-free. The people of the old South felt permanently beaten and for a long time hopeless because they had failed in their attempt to defend their right to be independent. The people of Germany felt temporarily frustrated of their ambition to dominate the world; just twenty years later they set forth to try it again. Do you think the old South, if it had wanted to do so, would have been able physically or economically to have resumed the struggle with the North in 1885, twenty years after the end of the Civil War, as the Germans did with the Allies in 1939, twenty years after Versailles?

My second point about the German suffering is that before Versailles they demonstrated their intention in the treaties of Bucharest and Brest-Litovsk, to inflict upon their enemies terms incomparably more severe than Versailles.

Third, in the course of the present war the Germans have proved that the sort of peace they intend to grant the countries they vanquish now will make the Versailles treaty appear to be a dispensation from Heaven.

Fourth, although these facts do not of course excuse the flaws in the Versailles treaty, none of its defects could possibly excuse the bestial behavior of the Germans toward the especial objects of their pathological antipathy, the Jews, Czechs, and Poles, nor provide a reasonable basis for their desire to inflict vengeance upon the entire world.

Finally, it makes no difference what the reasons for present German behavior are, that behavior threatens to destroy us and unless we check it by force, we shall perish.

Q. What should we do with Hitler after we beat him? Will he be allowed to escape to a lifetime of comfort the way Kaiser Wilhelm did?

A. When this question is asked I am reminded of an old Texas recipe for cooking rabbit. It begins, “First catch your rabbit.” I do not know what will be done with Hitler. There are many people who say he will never be taken alive; that he will commit suicide. I do not believe that. My guess is that Hitler would either “do a Hess” and escape to England or seek death in battle as the Kaiser once claimed he would do.

If he remains alive, our people being incurably sentimental, we should probably treat him the way the Allies treated Napoleon after Leipzig. They sent him, as you may remember, to Elbe, and gave him an annual income of 2,000,000 francs, which was about $400,000 and equivalent to $1,000,000 in purchasing power today. Perhaps we would not, though, especially if the American people have to live through a great deal of hardship and bloodletting on account of this man. Maybe we will become like the British, who, after all, are going to have something to say about the fate of Hitler if and when he is ever caught.

The Daily Mail of London ran a questionnaire asking its readers what they thought should be done with Hitler after the war. The largest number, twenty-five per cent, wanted him shown about the country in a cage. This is an idea which had been suggested for the former Kaiser, and it shows a surprising insight into the source of the deepest emotions for extremely vain men of the type of Hitler and the Kaiser; they certainly would suffer more from such public humiliation than from any other punishment.

Another twenty per cent wanted him executed by hanging, shooting, or beheading, in that order. Fifteen per cent wanted him exiled to remote, unpleasant places, as Devil’s Island, the Andaman Islands, Ascension Island, Arctic wastes, and the African desert. Another fifteen per cent wanted him condemned to lifelong solitary confinement. Ten per cent wanted to make him live the rest of his life under the same conditions the English are living under now, with bombs, rationing, and so on. Five per cent wanted to hand him over to the Poles or Jews. Five per cent would have him treated as a certified lunatic.

Five per cent suggested all sorts of miscellaneous treatment, including confinement under precisely the same conditions as normally obtain in a Nazi torture chamber. There were no suggestions at all that he should be treated well, as Napoleon was treated. The question is not trivial and the answers of the British are really important, because they throw light on the temper of the British people after the brutal manhandling they have received from Nazi bombers. The most constructive suggestion I ever heard on the subject of what to do with Hitler came from my brilliant friend, Edgar Mowrer, who had a decade of experience in Germany. He suggests that after we have defeated Hitler we put him in a cage and send him about Germany to explain to the Germans how wrong he had been.

Q. What would happen if Hitler were to be killed?

A. It would reduce the German war effort by one-half, and would guarantee that Germany would lose. Hitler is irreplaceable, unique, and if he were to be killed, or died, or anyhow left the scene, Germany would not collapse but she would be as an automobile going at top speed, suddenly run out of gasoline. The momentum of the car would carry it forward a certain distance, but it would eventually stop.

That, in my opinion, is what would happen to Germany if deprived of Hitler. It is not his technical ability that would be missed so much, nor his administrative brains, nor even his incredibly accurate, intuitive knowledge of his enemies, nor even his uncanny sense of timing. What would be missed would be his inspiration to the German people. If they lost their medicine man the faith in his name would flicker on, but the confidence in his infallibility which now upholds the civil population in the hardships of war and promotes the courage of the troops in battle would disappear. The effect would be disastrous.

Q. Why doesn’t somebody kill Hitler?

A. For the last two years that has been the question most frequently asked me on the lecture platform all over America. Sometimes a fourth of all the written questions sent up would be this one. An average of twenty-five persons out of every thousand in the audience would put this question and they have been doing that ever since Hitler’s victory over the Allies in Munich in September 1938. This itself is an interesting light on the American attitude. Most of the time the question was framed, “Why doesn’t some Jew, or some Britisher, or some Frenchman kill Hitler?”

It is bewildering to reflect that up until September 1939, any young man, Jew or Gentile, British, French, or of any of the thirteen nations Hitler has conquered, any brave, intelligent man could have killed Hitler within two months of making the resolution to do so. Only one requirement was essential—that the assassin be willing to give up his life. Now, however, it may cost the lives of millions of young men on the battlefield before this author of evil is destroyed.

Q. But wasn’t he always too closely guarded to be killed?

A. Not at all. Now it is another matter. Since the war began he is so well guarded that it might be impossible to get at him. Before the war began it would have been easy to kill him. It might even have been possible for a bold and shrewd assassin to have killed him without being captured. I give you one instance.

At every Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg there are hundreds of thousands of strangers in the city. The Gestapo with all its resources cannot possibly check on them all. A resourceful foreigner, speaking German and posing as a German, could obtain a room in a hotel facing the main street down which the parades pass. During the course of the Congress Hitler appears in at least one parade a day down this street. He always uses a long black Mercedes car and he stands in the front, next to his chauffeur. Hitler stands there holding on now and then with his left hand, and giving the Nazi salute with his right.

In the rear of his car are four SS men, and on the running boards are two others, and behind Hitler’s car is another identical Mercedes with six to eight more SS men. The SS men, who are the best pistol shots in Germany, lean out of their cars, peering at the crowds, and they keep their right hands always on their pistols. You say that sounds as though he were well guarded? Not at all. The crowd in Nuremberg is so great that it encroaches on the path of the automobiles until they are slowed to a walk. That means Hitler passes underneath your window at a walking speed.

An assassin could lean out of his window and toss a bomb into Hitler’s car with absolute accuracy. He could not miss. I have often leaned out and looked down at Hitler and remarked in a whisper to my comrades, “How easy it would be, wouldn’t it, to drop a grapefruit?” And if you think a bomb is too uncertain, why not try a sub-machine gun? That would be 100 per cent sure. You would have him at a distance of about thirty yards. With one burst you could riddle him, put perhaps twenty bullets into him before the guards could turn around.

You ask how the assassin could get the sub-machine gun or the bombs into the hotel? The Gestapo is good, but it is a long way from being perfect. They overlook a great many things. We were in Vienna when Hitler marched in. The Gestapo had been in control of the city for days. But on the very day Hitler came to Vienna my wife borrowed a radio set from Tess Shirer and had the porter carry it into the hotel and up to our room. It was the size of a large thick suitcase. Nobody stopped her, or asked to investigate it. It might have contained two or three sub-machine guns with sufficient ammunition and a few hand grenades.

You object that the assassin would certainly be caught and executed. I agree. Political assassins almost never escape. But political assassins must always and nearly always are willing to take this chance. You can take it as a rule of political assassination, however, that if the assassin is bold enough, he can always get his man. Remember the Macedonian gunman, Vlada Georgiev, who killed King Alexander and Louis Barthou in Marseilles, October 9, 1934? He was a husky fellow who waited behind the police line until the royal automobile came opposite him and then burst through the line like a football player and with one leap was on the running board of the automobile pumping bullets from his automatic into his two victims. It was all over in thirty seconds. The police had no chance to intervene before Alexander was dead. General Georges, later the unhappy second in command of the French Army, cut down the assassin with his saber.

This is the classic street assassination, resembling in every detail the killing by Gavril Princip of the Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, June 28, 1914, which touched off the first World War. But the Nuremberg situation would give an assassin a chance for his life. You see, the SS guards are constantly watching the crowds in the street. None of them pays attention to the windows of the houses and hotels along the street. The crowds are so thick that between our hotel and the path of Hitler’s automobile would be standing twenty to thirty thousand people.

Now suppose the assassin drops his bomb or fires his machine gun, or to make assurance doubly sure, drops bombs and fires his machine gun. Hitler falls. The crowd panics. How long would it take the SS men or other police to get through the crowd to the hotel entrance, climb the stairs, and search for the assassin? It would take several minutes at least. And in the midst of that howling mob of panic-stricken people it would take minutes more before the police could surround the block. Meanwhile the assassin would have plenty of time to run upstairs to the roof, across to another building, and down a rear fire escape to mingle with the crowd. Whatever the later details of escape, there would be a chance of his getting away from the scene of the shooting if he had laid his plans carefully in advance.

Q. You haven’t told us yet why nobody ever tried it?

A. Yes, it has been clumsily tried, but without the proper preparation. Four or five attempts were made on Hitler’s life during his first two years in office, 1933 and 1934, while I was in Berlin. They were all hushed up so closely that we never had more than the skeleton of the story. They were hushed up because the Nazis and especially the Gestapo, and especially its chief, Heinrich Himmler, know that there is nothing so infectious as the idea of political assassination.

The news of an attempt at assassination will set off a series of imitative attempts. Therefore Himmler gave up his original idea which was expressed in his announcement through the German press a few weeks after Hitler took office. Himmler declared in a formal proclamation that if anyone were to assassinate or attempt to assassinate the Fuehrer, there would be, and these are his exact words, “a massacre such as the world has never seen.” He specified that the Gestapo would massacre all of the Nazis’ opponents, and implied they would kill every Jew in Germany.

Himmler’s announcement was calculated to deter assassins, but he never meant to put it into effect unless Hitler were actually killed. We correspondents, however, heard of several attempts on Hitler. One was said to have taken place the day before the great Blood Purge of June 30, 1934, and was believed to have contributed to Hitler’s decision to exterminate his enemies. In this case the assassin fired with a rifle at Hitler’s automobile. Another time his car was narrowly saved from crashing into an obstacle supposed to have been placed in the road with the purpose of killing him. Other attempts were even more vaguely rumored. Himmler took care that the public should learn nothing about these attempts, not only because of the infectious nature of the news of the assassinations, but because the Gestapo considered it undesirable to reveal that anybody in Germany could want to kill the Fuehrer.

Q. That’s all right about Germans, but why not a Britisher, or a Frenchman, or a Jew?

A. The question why doesn’t a Jew, or why didn’t a Jew, kill Hitler is one that I have often heard asked of my Jewish friends, and the answer usually is that if a Jew killed Hitler the Nazis would slaughter every Jew in their dominions. The Nazis now have under their despotism in the Reich and the fifteen conquered countries perhaps five or six million Jews still. I agree that it is perfectly possible that the Nazis might try to slaughter them all if a Jew were to kill Hitler, but if Hitler is not defeated these unfortunate victims of Nazi hatred will ultimately perish anyway.

Nevertheless, even the very courageous young Jews who used to operate an organization to counter Arab terror argued the same way with me when I was in Palestine, that if they killed Hitler they would doom hundreds of thousands if not millions of Jews to death. It seems that they can believe rationally that Hitler does intend eventually to exterminate all the Jews in Europe, and so it would not make much difference if they were all or many of them killed as a result of Hitler’s assassination, but emotionally they cling to the subconscious hope that something will happen to save them. Of course, the only thing that can save the Jews of Europe is for Hitler to be defeated before they all die.

As for a young Britisher or Frenchman killing Hitler, before the war began, as I have said, it would have been easy, but consider if a man had killed Hitler before the war, what would the world have said? What sort of judgment would the world have delivered on the assassin? Would he have been considered a hero, a savior of mankind? Not at all, because Hitler up to that time was only a potential menace to Britain, France, and the other peaceful states. If he had been killed, his assassin would have been declared a madman, and his act would have been condemned by all save the small group of persons who perceived the inevitability and the catastrophic course of the war Hitler planned against the world. No assassin kills out of pure idealism. A man who killed Hitler would want a little credit for it, and until the war began he would have received none.

Q. He would receive plenty of credit now. Why doesn’t the British government organize the killing of Hitler? Haven’t they plenty of agents in Germany?

A. I have no doubt the killer of Hitler would be decorated by fifteen governments or more, but there are still millions of muddled sentimentalists in this country who would shudder at the thought of assassination. There were few, I suppose, who objected to the G-men shooting the rabid Dillinger, but millions denounced the little doctor, Weiss, who shot the far more dangerous criminal, Huey Long. So it would have fared with anyone who would have assassinated Hitler. Imagine how different the history of Germany and of the world might have been if Hitler had been among the victims of the machine gun which fired on him on the morning of November 10, 1923, on the Odeon’s Platz in Munich.

Before this war there were just as many sentimentalists in England, but you would have to look a long time to find one now. During an air raid in London I asked an old English lady, one of the gentlest creatures I have ever known, what she would do if she were driving an automobile and suddenly Hitler were to appear in front of the car. Would she turn and save him, or would she drive ahead and hit him? “I would press the accelerator and drive straight over him,” she said firmly.

Q. What was the explanation of the bombing attempt on Hitler in the Munich Beer Hall?

A. It bore every earmark of being an admirably well thought-out and executed plan by the British which just failed by a few minutes. I should think the British government has done all it could to have Hitler killed. Certainly the British know how supremely important it would be to do away with the heart and brains of Nazidom. The bomb attempt on Hitler in the Buergerbraeu Keller in Munich, November 8, 1939, the anniversary of the Hitler-Ludendorff Putsch, nearly succeeded. To refresh your memory: Hitler and his “Old Fighters” left the beer hall twelve minutes before a time bomb exploded, killing seven persons and wounding sixty-three. The Germans blamed it on the British secret agents, and announced they had captured two such agents, a Mr. Best and a Captain Stevens, on the day after the bomb explosion.

The Gestapo had gone over into Holland to kidnap the two Britishers who incautiously made a rendezvous close to the frontier.

Some persons analyzed this affair thus: The Gestapo itself arranged the bomb to go off after Hitler left. The Gestapo did it for one of two reasons. Either Himmler wanted to kill Hitler, or Hitler wanted the bomb attempt in order to arouse sympathy for himself among his people, and hatred of the English. Neither of these explanations makes sense to me. No Nazi leader in his right mind wants Hitler to be killed, because every Nazi is aware that his party, his job, and his very life are dependent upon the continued existence and leadership of Hitler. I will not say anything further about the plain fact that most of Hitler’s subordinates literally worship him. Just on the basis of individual self-interest, it would be unlikely that any Nazi leader should wish to weaken the Nazi position so disastrously.

I do not believe Himmler or any other Nazi was behind the attempt. Nor is it credible that Hitler planted the bomb to arouse sympathy for himself among the German people. He has all the sympathy he needs, and German hatred for the English is quite adequate. Neither of these two reasons could balance the danger involved in the infectious quality of a public attempt at assassination such as this was. This attempt, which took place before a large public, could not be concealed.

Finally, it seems that the German capture of the two British secret agents crippled the British Intelligence Service in Germany for many months. They were men high in the service and could be presumed to have known a good deal about the whole Intelligence Service setup in Germany. With the Gestapo at work on them in the approved style recently made so vivid and bloodcurdling by Jan Valtin in Out of the Night, it is not likely that many British Intelligence agents in Germany remained unidentified. At any rate there have not been any further attempts on Hitler, at least none that we know about.

The time-bomb attempt was compared by some correspondents to the Reichstag fire, but I fail to see the basis for comparison. The Reichstag was set afire by the Nazis for the specific, rational purpose of blaming it on the Communists, suppressing their party, jailing their deputies, and thus obtaining for the Nazis a majority vote in the Reichstag. These purposes were achieved to the great profit of the Nazis. What profit could the Nazis have had in staging a near assassination of Hitler? When the Reichstag was burned, my cabled report was censored, the first censorship I had experienced in eight years of work as a correspondent in Germany.

The freshly appointed censor cut out a paragraph in which I had pointed out that police when seeking the perpetrator of a crime, always try to find out first who would have profited by the crime. So in the case of the Reichstag fire it was only necessary to look for the persons who would profit by the fire. The answer was as plain as daylight. Only the Nazis would profit by the fire. The censor deleted this commonplace but accurate observation. Who would profit by the death of Hitler? The Nazis? Of course not. The British? Of course! If they had succeeded they would have earned the thanks of a thousand million beneficiaries throughout the world.

The fact that Hitler and his staff saved their lives by leaving the Buergerbraeu Keller earlier than had been their custom in former years is the basis of the peculiar claim that the whole thing was a Nazi plot. Why, it is argued, should Hitler have not stayed as usual to chat with the comrades of the early days? Why indeed? Because this was wartime, the first anniversary of the Putsch to be celebrated since the war began. Hitler has not been known to waste much time since the war began. He could be assumed to have had a number of things to do more important than chatting with his Beer Cellar veterans. This time his industry saved his life.

Q. Why is it there are so few assassinations or attempted assassinations in any of the totalitarian states? You would think their cruelties would lead many desperate men to seek revenge.

A. Yes, you would, and this is a matter that many of us in Russia used to discuss. How odd it was that in the history of the Soviet Union there were only three known assassinations or attempts at assassination of Soviet leaders.

Lenin was shot and seriously wounded in 1918 by Dora Kaplan, a Social Revolutionary; Uritzky, police chief of Leningrad, was killed at the same time; and sixteen years later, December 4, 1934, Sergei Kirov, political boss of Leningrad, was shot by a half-demented former Communist, Nikolaev. I shall not forget the Kirov killing because I was in Moscow at the time and saw Stalin, in the bitter cold of a Moscow December, help carry barehanded the coffin of Kirov to its grave on the Red Square, and then hurry back to his office to plan his revenge, the most colossal ever enjoyed by a human being since the prophet wrote that vengeance was reserved to the Almighty.

It was the Kirov killing, of course, which touched off Stalin’s great purge. It illustrates perfectly the first of several reasons why assassinations are rare in the totalitarian states. Let me say here that one of those reasons is not the one most popularly believed. It is not due to the impenetrable guard kept around the tyrants. There at the funeral of Kirov, we in the press box were not more than twenty yards from Stalin as he stood on top of Lenin’s tomb, and when he walked to the grave he came within almost touching distance of me.

Granted that the correspondents have unusual facilities, and that the G.P.U. checks all of them to be confident none of them is dangerous. But there in the Red Square hundreds of thousands of men and women marched past Stalin, the nearest only a few feet away. Any one of them could have shot at him or hurled a hand grenade at him before any of the police surrounding the tomb could have intervened.

Likewise, Stalin could have been killed any time during the two decades by any person with the initiative to attend the Bolshoi Theater when Stalin was there, sitting in the rear of his first floor forward box. He could have been shot from a score of seats in the first two rows of the orchestra. It would have been even easier to wait for one of the big Communist meetings in the Bolshoi Theater when Stalin was there with all the leaders of the party. I have seen him with the entire Politburo and forty or fifty others, sitting bunched together on the stage of the Bolshoi Theater, while we in the Press box in the Gallery, almost overhanging the stage, leaned over the rail and quietly observed how easy it would be to drop something in Stalin’s lap.

A single bomb small enough to be concealed beneath an overcoat would have killed Stalin and perhaps the entire top rank of the Communist Party. Why hasn’t anyone tried it? Stalin surely has more enemies who would like to see him dead than any man in the world except Hitler. Stalin probably has more personal enemies than Hitler, because Stalin has executed more people. When you think of the millions who died as victims of the Revolution, and of the millions who died in the famine of 1932-33, when Stalin ordered the peasants of the Ukraine to be stripped of all their food to teach them a lesson, it seems singular that no bereaved survivor should have lifted his hand against the tyrant.

The first reason, however, why a modern despot enjoys relative security is the character of totalitarian terror. In a normal democratic country an assassin has to fear only the loss of his own life, and the lives of his immediate conspirators, if any. In Russia, after Kirov’s death, Stalin executed in this wise:

First, 103 persons who were not even accused of having had anything to do with the assassination but had been held in jail for various political offenses. This was simply the first gesture of the Terror, intended to shock the country. Then as the police rounded up Nikolaev’s family, friends, and acquaintances, and read his diary, they came to know virtually every human being Nikolaev had known during his whole life. Every one of these persons was arrested and after being squeezed dry of information was executed; at any rate they all disappeared.

But that was only the beginning. The purges which were occasioned, not caused, by the Kirov killing lasted about four years, from 1935 to 1938 inclusive. The Purge became so huge that Nikolaev was forgotten, but before the G.P.U. finished with the Nikolaev complex, they had liquidated in this wise: Every relative of Nikolaev to the third cousins; every acquaintance of Nikolaev and every acquaintance of an acquaintance of Nikolaev, and every acquaintance of every acquaintance of every acquaintance of Nikolaev. You think this is an exaggeration? Not at all. The number of executions ran into thousands.

Now what would be the effect upon a would-be assassin, if, as he contemplated his deed, he reflected that as a consequence of his killing Stalin, not merely would he himself be executed, but every human being in the world with whom he had ever come in contact? Man experiences the world largely as a series of contacts with other men. Suppose the assassin knew by just such an experience as the Russian people had in the case of the killing of Kirov, that his entire world would be blotted out if he went on with his plans. Would not this deter almost any man?

He might be motivated by the highest idealism, and would plan to give his own life in order to rid his country of a cruel despot, but if he were thinking of helping the people in his own world he would be bound to admit that far from helping them, he was about to condemn to death everybody on earth he had ever known. This surely is the most important deterrent to assassination in despotic states and it is corroborated by the experience of Italy.

Mussolini’s Fascist state is the least terroristic of the three totalitarian states. The terror is so mild in comparison with the Soviet or Nazi varieties, that it almost fails to qualify as terroristic at all. The best proof I know of this is the experience of an Italian friend of mine who before Fascism came to Italy was chief correspondent of one of Italy’s greatest newspapers.

He occupied a position which might be compared with that of chief Washington correspondent of the New York Times. When Mussolini took power this friend, whom I may call Luigi, was dismissed from his newspaper because he refused to become a Fascist. If he had wished to serve Mussolini, he would have been made a Senator, and would have become a rich man. But no, he was a courageous, passionately sincere liberal. He used to declare, “I would approve of nearly all Mussolini’s program (he doubtless would not say that now), but as long as he wants to compel me to approve, I disapprove. I shall only approve when I am at liberty to disapprove.”

Now what would have happened to this sort of man in Soviet Russia? A leading journalist under the Czar defies Bolshevik power! You know as well as I what would happen to him. He would be shot at once. They would not even waste on him food for a day’s extra meals. He would have been shot the moment the Cheka noticed him. And what would have happened to Luigi in Germany? He would have been sent to a concentration camp and there he would have been tortured and either gradually killed or turned out a broken emasculated creature, not a man any more.

But what happened to him in Italy? First, his newspaper, with which he had a contract, bought off the contract for a sum sufficient for him to live on in a modest way the rest of his life. At the same time the police established a twenty-four hour surveillance of him. Three detectives working in eight-hour shifts were assigned to watch him. Mind you, he wasn’t arrested, and was even allowed to become the correspondent of a foreign newspaper.

The detectives were there all the time. Luigi came to know them well. If they behaved decently and he liked them, he never gave them any trouble. But if one of them was rude, this is the way Luigi would do. He would get all his newspapers, a dozen or more to read in the morning, and though ordinarily he would take a taxi or walk to his office, now to discipline the detective, Luigi would get on one of the streetcars which circle Rome and he would sit there, going around and around the city for a couple of hours, reading his papers. The detective had to follow him. The detective rode a bicycle. Two hours of hard road work usually corrected the manners of the worst of them. Think of that kind of police “Terror,” and you have a fair idea of the comparative mildness of the Italian kind of totalitarianism. We used to take delight in counting up how many hundreds of thousands of lire it had cost the Italian government to keep three detectives employed for fifteen years.

What has this to do with our theme of assassination? Just this, that during the first twelve years of Mussolini’s dictatorship he was attacked twelve times, and several of the attempts only failed by the narrowest margin.

One of the earliest and most serious attempts was by a former general who hired a room a couple of hundred yards away from the Palazzo Chigi, equipped himself with a sporting rifle fitted with telescopic sights, and waited for Mussolini to come out on the balcony to speak. This event may have inspired Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male. The general was betrayed at the last moment, arrested, and sentenced to life imprisonment on the Lipari Islands. That is another index of the comparatively mild character of the Italian despotism. At that time the Fascist legal code still had no provision for the death penalty for a plot against the life of the head of the State.

Q. In spite of everything you say it still seems difficult to see why some person half-demented by persecution or the cruelties inflicted upon his family and friends should not have tried to take vengeance against the tyrant. There must certainly be among the victims of Nazi or Bolshevik brutality many persons too tortured in mind to be able to remember all those considerations you have advanced?

A. Undoubtedly there are, but these persons are generally too demoralized to act. If they are sufficiently distorted by their suffering to forget the consequences to their family and friends of an attack on the tyrant, they are too enfeebled to move. Fear paralyzes them. The modern totalitarian tyranny, as the German and Russian, by reason of the ideology of the ruling party and superior organization of its police force, ferrets out, identifies, and disciplines a larger percentage of its opponents than any tyranny was ever able to do in the past. The ideology of the party makes an ex-officio police agent out of every Communist in Russia and every Nazi in Germany.