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The Nazi Party, a strange alliance of radicals and conservatives, of wealthy men and down-and-outers,
Polish Corridor. It placed in the hands of these backward militarists the lever to start another world war. Otherwise it had no meaning, because in the event, England was unable to give Poland actual
Individually the Germans were remarkably like Americans; he thought it curious that both peoples had the eagle for their national emblem. The Germans were the same sort of businesslike go-getters: direct, roughly humorous, and usually reliable and able. Commander Henry felt more at home with them, in these points, than with the slower British or the devious talkative French. But in a mass they seemed to become ugly gullible strangers with a truculent streak; and if one talked politics to an individual German he tended to turn into such a stranger, a sneering belligerent Mr. Hyde.
My outstanding impression was the way Adolf Hitler follows out what he wrote in Mein Kampf. He says there, in his section on war propaganda, that the masses are “feminine,” acting on feeling and sentiment, and that whatever you tell them must be addressed to the dullest ignoramus among them, in order to reach and convince the broadest possible audience.
I realized only today what utter contempt Hitler has for the Germans. He regards them as bottomlessly naïve and stupid. They follow him and love him. Who am I to say he’s wrong?
“Okay. Germany can have peace if she gets rid of Hitler and his regime. You could even hang on to a lot of your gains. That gang has got to go.” Grobke and his wife looked at each other in the candlelight. “Then it’s hopeless,” he said, playing with his empty wineglass. “If your people won’t understand one thing about Germany, we have to fight it out. You don’t know what this country was like in the 1920’s. I do. If the system had gone on another few years there would have been no navy, no economy, nothing. Germany would have fallen apart. This man stood up and put Germany back on the map. You
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laughter from the diaphragm and not from the face muscles; not a bow or a clicked pair of heels, not
a mannerism that signalled an itch to argue, though his moon face remained placid. He put in, nasally, “Say, Freddy, I happen to think Hitler just wants to reorganize central Europe as a German sphere, peacefully if he can, and that he’ll call off the war if the Allies will agree. Think I should go home, too?”
second to cooperate with him. He just has to strike hard enough in the west to knock out the ins and bring in the outs. He’s already got Stalin cravenly feeding him all the Russian oil and wheat he needs,
move without his nod, had somehow overlooked the slight detail of how one got to England. Here nevertheless was a moment for greatness,
This was what now made Berlin completely intolerable. The Germans had balled themselves into one tight fist. The little tramp had his “one Reich, one people, one leader,” that he had so long screeched for. Victor Henry, a man of discipline, understood and admired the stiff obedient efficiency of these people, but their mindless shutting out of facts disgusted him. It was not only stupid, not only shameless; it was bad war-making. The “estimate of the situation”—a phrase borrowed by the Navy from Prussian military doctrine—had to start from the facts.
“They don’t seem to mind,” Victor Henry said. “By and large, they’re having a good time. They think they’re going to win.” “There is the weakness,” said Dr. Meusse, pulling on his moustache. “National megalomania. When a people loses touch with reality, it is finished.”
Roosevelt had taught Victor Henry what a great man was like; the captain thought time and again of the Bible’s warning, that the clay pot should keep its distance from the iron kettle.
