Nuremberg, 6th September 1938
No one in the press pack had the stomach for an entire week of Nazi grandiosity, and so they set off for Nuremberg a day after its opening, a small motorcade of cars, with Rod and Georgie’s posse in the lead car and a new driver; Rod was fervent in his opposition to anti-Semitism, but had the good sense to know when it had the potential get Rubin in serious trouble – or worse.
Tired and desperate for a bath after a 400-kilometre drive, Georgie was unprepared for the circus facing her. The mediaeval castle town of Nuremberg had already been transformed by the thousands of Nazi flags dripping from its gabled buildings, further still by shoals of brown and black shirts moving through the narrow streets, singing and chanting, drunk on beer and rhetoric, all waiting for just one man, one true icon to worship. Georgie watched their driver’s eyes widen at the increasing intimidation of the crowds as they inched slowly through, eyes fixed firmly on the road until the hotel came in sight.
Bill and Rod were veterans of Nuremberg and took it in their stride. Max, however, stepped out of the car and echoed Georgie’s reaction – a pair of rabbits in the headlights.
‘And I thought an English cup final was bad enough,’ he uttered as they headed through the hotel door.
It was the tip of a large iceberg. In the next days, rally upon rally was attended by the German High Command, whipping up the already converted crowds – Hess, Himmler, Goebbels and Göring as the stage stars. Hitler rationed his appearances, despite the throngs baying for his presence outside his hotel, gaggles of BDM girls shrieking for just a glimpse. He kept the early day speeches to a minimum, an expert at stoking the excitement and anticipation. And on his plinth at every event, overseeing the spectacle, Joseph Goebbels acted as the master puppeteer, smiling at his perfect pageant.
Georgie wrote copious notes and wondered how she would ever make sense of them in her own head, let alone on the page. It was like being taken to the circus as a child; overwhelmed by the display, wanting to see everything and yet always looking around corners for any leering, scary clown to jump out. As with any Nazi affair, order was paramount, but with the volume of beer consumed, tongues were inevitably loosened. It meant that, at times, she was glad Rubin wasn’t present, wincing as she heard with her own ears the intense hatred aimed at Jews, ugly mouths spewing with venom and laughter. The Stormtroopers gaily burst into song at regular intervals, ‘When Jewish blood spurts from my knife’ sung with particular gusto. Georgie wished then her German was not quite so acute.
Each day, she and the pack filed their reports home. The Nazis were spouting the same rhetoric as in past years, Rod and Bill reported, but even they sensed a heightened zeal among the devotees, a total belief that Hitler’s projections for a true, vast Fatherland could be realised. And soon.
On their last night, the rally was orchestrated as the ultimate finale and the global press were out in force. Despite their sometimes irritable relationship, Georgie sensed she and Max had again reached some understanding in Nuremberg – this time, a form of continued astonishment. They were driven close to the Zeppelin field outside of the city and Max nudged at her, half in joke. ‘Hold on to your hat,’ he said. ‘Prepare to be blown away.’
Old Joey did not disappoint. Where the Olympic stadium in ’36 had been built to house spectators, here there were 100,000 participants alone – row upon row of marching SS, Stormtroopers, Wehrmacht army, Jungvolk, with the BDM girls in their distinctive white shirts and neat, golden plaits, standard bearers and flocks of static eagles swaying in the air. Those armies of flag-making women had been busy again.
Georgie screwed up her eyes as the SS formation trooped past, wondered if Kasper was among the moving swarm below. But he would have been impossible to single out – an ant in the ranks. It was the precise symmetry that fascinated her the most; every platoon in strict formation, blocks of colour and people, yet not one straying from the lines, not a foot out of step. People in containment, not allowed to move freely. Or think independently. That’s his secret – keep them all in the box.
Amongst the crush of spectators, there was less reserve; a continual cascade of emotion for the Reich as solemn Wagner and rousing Beethoven pumped out of the numerous speakers. Before the sun went down, Georgie eyed the crowds, the women especially as they thrust the Heil Hitler salute in unison, gaping in a trance of ecstasy at a huge eagle icon spiked like a dead butterfly to the back of the speaker’s platform. It was where he would appear. Then, the sun’s glow fading rapidly, Joey put his light spectacle into operation – a fan of military searchlights, scores of them, shooting from ground level into the sky, strobing to a central point and creating his ‘cathedral of light’. An intense beat of drums began, almost tribal, gaining pace to charge the air with man-made electricity amid the deafening drub of noise.
Into this drove the emperor Adolf, standing and saluting, the women shrieking with delirium. If she hadn’t been there, rooted in the reality of it, Georgie might have read it as fiction – verging on a horror story. How do I ever relay this to any reader back in England? she wondered. Who would ever believe me?
The Führer, though, proved himself all too human up close – small and inconsequential at first glance, his angry, hateful rhetoric was soon projecting into the air, his body rigid with animosity towards Jews, the West, Communism. Anything not purely Germanic. Flecks of his spit cast against the light from their nearby position in the press box, and yet his inner circle only gazed with outward adoration. At each pause, the crowd went wild with applause. Max turned his head towards Georgie, and she felt their fears align.
Oh Lord, his look said. Look what’s coming.