Aside from a prince representing Wilhelm II, who could not return to German soil, Hitler was the only public figure at Chamberlain’s funeral. In reporting the death of the Englishman the Voelkischer Beobachter said that the German people had lost “one of the great armorers whose weapons have not yet found in our day their fullest use.” Not the half-paralyzed old man, dying, not even Hitler, nor anyone else in Germany, could have foreseen in that bleak January month of 1927, when the fortunes of the Nazi Party were at their lowest ebb, how soon, how very soon, those weapons which the
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