POLITICS AND MYTHS I Knew Hitler. By Kurt G. W.
Ludecke. (Jarrolds. ros. 6d.) HERR LUDECKE has written an interesting and valuable book, though it may disappoint those who hope for sensational revelations. There are none ; Herr Ludecke throws no new light on Herr Hitler's character and his book will not assist anyone who is undecided whether the Fiihrer is an angel, a puppet, or a monster. Here he appears in all three parts, an angel when first met, a puppet when intent on the path to power, a monster when he puts Herr Ludecke in a concentration camp. Herr Ludecke's political insight may be judged from this • his most severe criticism of Herr Hitler is that, after the failure of the Bierhalle Putsch in Munich, he took the Reich by intrigue and compromise and not by storm. In so doing, in Herr Ludecke's view, Herr Hitler sacrificed the idealism of the National Socialist movement to the sordid lust for power. It is amusing to read this Nazi " idealist's " accounts of his conversations with the Fiihrer. Thus, for instance, Herr Ludecke expounds to him at great length his conception of Nazi foreign policy ; after listening patiently, the Fiihrer abruptly assures him that once the ruling classes in other countries realise National Socialism's hostility to Bolshevism, Germany need fear them no more, and Herr Ludecke leaves in despair at the Fiihrer's crude notions of foreign affairs, and more convinced than ever of the necessity for a Party Foreign Affairs Bureau controlled by Rosenberg and Ludecke.
Much indeed of this book is uproarious farce, because of the immense vanity and self-importance with which Herr Ludecke describes his own often ludicrous activities. Yet the farce somehow conveys a convincing picture of Herr Ludecke him- self, the Party, and many of its leaders. When with ridicule and distaste Herr Ludecke enumerates the Leader's advisers, we unconsciously add Herr Ludecke's name to the list ; when he describes the atmosphere of intrigue by which Herr Hitler is surrounded, the delays, flaws, confusion of the Party machine, we notice how much his own activity must have added to them. In this way, his story carries a kind of conviction. We believe Herr Ludecke when, for instance, he says that the only way to get things done is by personal influence and intrigue, because he himself advances his plans by approaching the Fiihrer through his doorkeeper, by giving expensive luncheon parties to industrial magnates, by talking to Gobbels' wife. We under- stand why devoted Nazis ended in concentration camps or before the firing squad, because Herr Ludecke's own activities could so obviously not be prevented in any other way. And we realise why 'bureaucracy flourishes, why offices multiply, why Nazi propaganda abroad is so clumsy, by watching Herr Ludecke's feverish attempts to hive himself appointed to command a Bureau of Foreign Affairs, a Press agency in Wash- ington, to win America for National Socialism through quiet chats with Henry Ford and the head of the Ku Klux Klan. But what is so engaging is that with naive self-satisfaction Herr Ludecke describes his own activities as a contrast with what is being done by everyone else, the intriguers, the place-hunters, the careerists. The pleasure of studying Herr Ludecke's struggles with Herr Hitler and others is that of watching a battle in which neither side has our sympathy.
Herr Ludecke's career, indeed, despite his personal idio- syncrasy and vagaries, acquires a general significance, and in this 'lies the real interest of his book. He is the very type of those who joined the party in its first days and later had to be disposed of. Adventurous and idealistic, he was convinced that some change was necessary in Weimar Germany. Vain,. conscious of his social position (again and again he impresses on us how well dressed he was, in " English " clothes, yet how idealism allowed him to surmount this barrier between him and the party), he could not possibly sympathise with a revolu- tion from the Left. Thus his revolution had to be a spiritual one, that is, it must be " Socialist " but not destroy the class or property system, it must allow for personality, that is, for Herr Ludecke, and for leadership, that is, the masses could not be allowed to have power. On this basis, with the help of German tradition, of the Versailles treaty, of Herren Hitler and Rosenberg, it was easy to concoct and believe in the myth of the Nordic man perpetually at war with and temporarily currupted by the Marxists and the Jews. And because of the personal revolution worked in despairing individuals by the myth as preached by Herr Hitler, it seemed that Germany also would be revolutionised when the myth finally triumphed, and beCause of the delicious sense of freedom, of release, of happi- ness, which arises from personal conversion, it was easy to believe that Germany would be free and happy when all had been converted.
Politics, however, are concerned with facts, with material conditions, as well as myths, and when the two do not fit, it is the facts that have their way. Probably Herr Ludecke is right in saying-that the Bierhalle Putsch was a turning point in Herr Hitler's career ; brought then so brutally face to face with facts, he did not forget their power again and became a politician ; Herr Ludecke, who was not there, did not But for Herr Hitler, once he had power, and especially since he identified himself with Germany, with the State, with the Nordic man, it was easy to blind himself to any discrepancies between the myth and any actions he was forced to take.
For Herr Ludecke it is not so easy, especially since one of the discrepancies is that Herr Ludecke was sent to a concentration camp. But to surrender the myth is to surrender the illusions of a lifetime, and to face the most brutal fact of all, one's own folly. So Herr Ludecke meets with strange antinomies. The Nordic man is pure, is gentle, is brave, his victory will regenerate Germany ; then how explain that his victory involves the beating, torture and murder of innocent men, that the Nordic man is Gobbels and Goring and Hixrunler, above all that in the person of Herr Ludecke the Nordic man is now in prison? The Jews and the Marxists are corrupt, cowardly, degenerate ; then how explain, as Herr Ludecke gravely tries to do in a comic scene with Herr Hitler, that there are "good " Jews, that men like Miihsam, whom Herr Ludecke met in prison, after beatings with rods, exposure to cold and wet, humiliated in ways it has been the historical privilege of the Nazi to invent, with eyes struck blind and ears struck dumb, remain gentle, brave, honest and intelligent? From such problems there is only one way out, and Herr Ludecke takes it : it is all Herr Hitler's fault, he has betrayed " the Idea." The most pitiful thing in this pitiful book, after all its rhapsodies about Herr Hitler, Nordic men, leadership, the Jewish problem, is that Herr Ludecke thinks of the Process by which he reaches this illuminating
conclusion as a great spiritual struggle. GORONWY REES.
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