“HEAR, YE TOWNSFOLK, HONEST MEN”
The public room of the Huntsmen’s Rest, at the corner of Frankfurterplatz and the Mauerweg, is alight tonight and crowded with a company of old soldiers celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of the liberation of the homeland from the chains of Versailles. It is the anniversary of the “Bloody Parade” in Munich, in which the Führer was arrested and imprisoned. The old soldiers are the Home Reserve Troop of the Nazi Sturmabteilung, or SA, and the Huntsmen’s Rest is their regular meeting place.
Their regular meeting night is Friday, and this is Wednesday. But November 9, whatever the day of the week, is the greatest of all National Socialist Party celebrations. January 30 (the day the Führer came to power) and April 20 (the Führer’s birthday) are national celebrations. November 9 is the Party’s own.
The formal celebration was at 7:30 P.M. in the Municipal Theater. There were too many speeches, as usual, and one of the Party’s poets, Siegfried Ruppel, recited too many of his Party poems. Then the four troops of the SA Kronenberg marched in uniform to their regular meeting places, the Reserve Troop to the upstairs room of the Huntsmen’s Rest Promotions were announced, as they always were on November 9, and then the troop followed Sturmführer Schwenke down to the public room for a glass of beer or two. It is ten o’clock.
“HEAR, OUR CLOCK HAS JUST STRUCK TEN”
Ten o’clock, precisely, and if you want to check your watch you may get the hourly beep on the National Radio or the half-minute tone signal on Prime Meridian Time by dialing 6 on the telephone. The mechanically operated Parish Church bell begins to strike the hour after the seventh stroke of the Katherine Church bell, which is also mechanically operated. As the sixth stroke of the Parish bell dies away, the mechanical rooster crows atop the Town Hall, a fleshly rooster here and there in the town responds, a few dogs bark, an ox in a far field lows, and the town is quiet. Tradition has it that the two bells and the Town Hall rooster have been dissynchronous for centuries.
Ten o’clock. The policemen on the beat open their corner telephone boxes and report, “Schmidt speaking. All in order,” and the sergeant on duty says, “Good.” The lights are going out except in the cinemas, the inns and hotels, the university clinics and the students’ rooms and professors’ studies, in the streetcars and the railroad station and the crossings, and at the street corners dimly lighted by one high-hung bulb.
Kronenberg is a quiet little university town of twenty thousand people—two towns, really, the university and the town, although the university, like all Continental universities, is scattered through the town instead of having a campus.
Everything has always been quiet in Kronenberg. In the years that led up to National Socialism there was an occasional street fight, and one or two meetings of Nazis or Social Democrats were broken up. (The Communists were too weak to organize meetings.) In 1930, when Party uniforms were forbidden, the Party paraded quietly in white shirts, and, when the Führer spoke in Kronenberg in 1932, forty thousand people crowded quietly into a super-circus tent on the Town Meadow to hear him. (Nazi open-air meetings were forbidden.) That was the day that a Swastika flag was run up on the Castle; in England or France it might have been taken for a college-boy prank, but in Kronenberg the culprit, who proudly admitted his guilt, was heavily fined.
Kronenberg went quietly Nazi, and so it was. In the March, 1933, elections, the NSDAP, the National Socialist German Workers Party, had a two-thirds majority, and the Social Democrats went out of office. Only the university—and not the whole university—and the hard-core Social Democrats held out until the end, and in nonindustrial Kronenberg there were no trade-unions to hold the mass base of the Social Democrats. The town was as safely Nazi now, in 1938, as any town in Germany.
Of course Kronenberg isn’t Germany. To begin with, it’s in Hesse, and Hesse is conservative, “backward,” if you will; when city people elsewhere want to call a man stupid, they call him a blinder Hesse, a “blind Hessian “ And Kronenberg, so old and changeless, off the main line and the Autobahn, is conservative even for Hesse. But its very conservatism is a better guaranty of the Party’s stability than the radicalism of the cities, where yesterday’s howling Communists are today’s howling Nazis and nobody knows just how they will howl tomorrow. A quiet town is best.
“TEN COMMANDMENTS GOD HAS GIVEN”
The talk in the public room of the Huntsmen’s Rest is (as might be expected of old soldiers) of old times, and Sturmführer Schwenke does more than his share of talking, as usual But you have to hand it to him, he knows how to tell a story; when a character in the story roars, Schwenke doesn’t say he roared—he roars himself. He tells how the SA Kronenberg got its orders fifteen years ago to assemble on November 9 and await word for the Putsch. There were 185 of them, waiting for trucks to take them to Frankfurt. They waited all day. The word never came, the trucks never came.
“I wasn’t too disappointed,” says Schwenke. “The time was too soon. I always said so. That’s the trouble with the men at the top—they stand between the Führer and men like me who know the people and the conditions. N’ja [which in Hessian dialect means “Yep” or “So”], when the Führer got out of prison and reorganized the Party and accepted only those he knew were faithful to him, that was the right principle. With that principle, selecting the best, nothing could stop us.”
The talk turns to another historic November 9, in 1918, and here again the Sturmführer does most of the talking: “I was on duty in Erfurt that night A Bolshevik in civilian clothes came to the post and wanted to talk to the soldiers. The men chose me to represent them. The Bolshevik said we should join the townspeople and form a Workers and Soldiers Council. I said we would form our own Councils without any Reds. He said they had three cannon trained on the post, and I said we had two machine guns trained on them and we’d take our chances. They didn’t have any cannon, and we didn’t have any machine guns, but I hollered him down.” ‘Til bet you did,” says one of the younger SA men, who has drifted in from another troop.
Somehow the talk drags this evening. Something is up, no one seems to know what.
Two days ago the German Councilor of Embassy in Paris, vom Rath, was shot by a Polish Jew. Immediately an intense campaign against the Jews began on the German National Radio. Are Germans to be sitting ducks all over the world for Jew murderers? Are the German people to stand helpless while the Führer’s representatives are shot down by the Jew swine? Are the Schweinehunde to get oft scot free? Is the wrath of the German People against the Israelite scum to be restrained any longer? “If vom Rath dies, the Jews of Germany will answer to the German People, not tomorrow, but today. The German People have suffered long enough from the parasite assassins.”
This was the work of Dr. Goebbels, whom most people hated and nobody loved; even in Schwenke’s loyal circle the Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment was known, quietly, as Jupp der Stelzfuss, Joey the Crip. The university people didn’t listen to this kind of broadcast—or, if they listened, they listened fearfully. The townspeople—the townspeople just listened. They listened as the campaign mounted hourly. Vom Rath’s condition grew hourly worse. He was certain to die, and he died, on November 9, on the anniversary of the greatest day in the history of the German People, the day on which the liberators of the Homeland had shed their blood for liberty in Munich fifteen years ago.
All afternoon and evening the pitch has been mounting over the radio, and by now the Daily Kronenberger has joined in. Everywhere there are rumors. “Something will happen.” What?
At the celebration in the Municipal Theater, earlier this evening, nothing was said about vom Rath or the Jews; strange. The spirit of repression is infectious; at the Huntsmen’s Rest, where, ordinarily, SA men (SA men, particularly) tell stories of Jewish depravity and the SA’s leadership in the Judenkampf, nothing is said this evening about the Jews, or even about the murder in Paris. No one knows why. “Something will happen.” No one knows what.
“WHO OBEYS THEM WILL BE SHRIVEN”
The door of the Huntsmen’s Rest opens, and the commander of the SA Kronenberg, Standartenführer Kühling, enters, in uniform.
“Attention!” says Sturmführer Schwenke.
The SA men stand.
“Heil Hitler!” says Sturmführer Schwenke, saluting.
“Heil. Be seated,” says the Standartenführer, without returning the salute.
The SA men sit.
“Sturmführer, kommen Sie mal her, come here a minute,” says the Standartenführer. Schwenke rises and comes to him.
The Standartenführer says, “Heute geht die Synagogue hoch, The synagogue will be burned tonight.”
It is almost midnight.