Darkness into Light Box Set Page 7

  The service of mourning was held on the Sabbath following Emil’s death, at the

  Oranienburgerstrasse synagogue. Consecrated in 1866, the massive ornate pile was one of the largest synagogues in Europe.

  Every eye was on Rathenau’s imposing figure.

  When the prayer for Emil was finished, he marched out past the stunned ranks of believers, banging the door behind him.

  ‘Jews!’ he yelled to the heavens, in the pale sunshine outside. ‘Jews, Jews, Jews, Jews’ Then he got into the car.

  That night, dressed like a workman with a leather cap, he took every consolation from blond, broad-shouldered Aryan youths. He started at the steam baths at Friedrichstrasse then descended to the wallowing pits of the waste ground off Spandauerstrasse. He paid every one of the boys to answer to the name of Hartmut and imagined they were all his beloved Hartmut Plaas.

  Nothing helped.

  Chapter Twelve

  The war was bringing great changes. These were jittery, gnawing times for Germany. All hope of a quick end to hostilities was gone; the fighting was not going well. Ludendorff led a palace coup against the Minister of War, von Falkenhayn, whose bold setting up of the KRA was used as a lever to propel him from office.

  The quintessential German longing for a strong man in difficult times propelled Ludendorff even further to the fore, still lurking behind the almost meaningless cardboard cut-out of his notional superior, Hindenburg.

  Ludendorff’s influence tipped from significant to profound. Ludendorff – and Hindenburg – embodied Prussian stolidity and strength of character in the public mind. They represented not only the best hope of victory but a cultural ideal.

  Such was his influence that the coming few months were often referred to as ‘The Ludendorff Dictatorship’; more and more responsibility was piled on that brittle military psyche: He was a man who appeared to agree with every civilian he spoke to, only to stab the man when he had turned his back

  Civilian government had ended in Germany. To make matters worse, there were shortages of everything. Germany moved to a command economy. There was an Imperial Price Examination Agency. There was an Imperial Potato Office, whose work of sequestering potatoes was less amusing than its name.

  Government measures became threatening, then draconian: The newspapers swelled with warnings against using grain as animal fodder; anyone doing so was committing treason against the fatherland and they could be punished. Babies – at least poor babies – were to be given boiled rice, porridge or just tea to preserve essential supplies of milk.

  These developments were not connected to the KRA and in any case Rathenau had gone by this time. But the collective unconscious operates below such demanding niceties as accuracy. Rathenau’s former department was identified with the command economy – with government control. German citizens – many of the them – were welling with hate for the rich Jewish industrialist who they assumed to have taken their potatoes and deprived their babies of milk. The hatred would find its expression later; for now, along perhaps with blame, hatred was the only commodity whose store was actually growing.

  There were substitutes for everything, at this time: substitute coffee (531 types on the list of allowables), paper bandages, and wooden buttons. The government decreed 837 registered meat substitutes for the production of sausages. The staple diet of the German people was to be vegetables, no longer meat. 1916-17 brought the infamous Turnip Winter. The English blockade - though not the bitter cold weather – was to be countered by the defiant consumption of turnips. Recipes appeared for turnip-pudding, turnip balls, mashed turnip, turnip jam, turnip soup and turnip salad. Turnips became known as ‘Prussian Pineapples.’

  At the Rathenau household of two, austerity also ruled. Walther instructed his servant, Josef Prozeller, to follow the restrictions placed on the run-of-the-mill population, though in his case there was, of course, no need to. The servant simmered at a point just below open revolt.

  In a sense, so did the master. Walther was in revolt against himself. His ejection from the KRA and the death of his father had been separated only by some eight weeks. He pulled into himself; but continued to deliver a relentless flow of monologues at dinner parties. He became more rash, flirting with danger, courting it and seeking consummation through it.

  One evening toward dusk, the doorbell rang at the Grunewald villa. Josef Prozeller, sulking, stayed in his room without responding. Walther opened it.

  Outside in the frosty winter darkness dangled a baker’s apprentice, dressed in white working clothes smudged with flour and clogs on his feet. He held out a covered basket containing freshly baked rolls, still warm from the oven. He smiled at Walther. He was skinny but pretty; broad shouldered, blue eyed and blond.

  ‘We have bread delivered in the morning,’ Walther said, aware his voice was betraying the feelings that stirred within him.

  The boy grinned, eyes widening. ‘Not any more you don’t, guv’nor. New state restrictions on the use of flour. We’re not allowed to bake at night any more. Bake during the day, deliver at dusk. Can I tempt you?’

  The boy, hands full of bread, nodded toward Walther’s groin. Walther gazed at the bosky scene behind the boy. The villa was not overlooked, in any way. All was silent. His mouth went dry.

  ‘Come in.’

  The boy laughed, merrily enough. ‘Ho ho ho sir. Very funny. And who would buy

  all my bread then, eh? If I may be so bold.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘What all of it?’

  ‘I have an enormous appetite.’

  ‘Well, you’re big enough, guv’nor. I’ll give you that. You that size all over?’

  Walther’s heart melted.

  Next morning, the servant, Josef , demanded that his salary be doubled. He not only knew the baker-boy’s name but his address. Walther negotiated him down to one- and-a-half times his previous wage.

  Josef was furious, but accepted.

  PART III: THE FIGHT FOR PEACE 1918-1922

  Chapter Thirteen

  After the Great War, an army major called Kurt von Schleicher devised an ingenious plan to keep the German army intact by splitting it into small units called Freikorps. Only right-wing, disciplined and loyal veterans were accepted into a Freikorps group. Each was organised into an independent highly mobile ‘storm battalion’, with its own lorries, armoured cars and artillery.

  Many of the returning soldiers and sailors joined a Freikorps unit. One such unit was originally called the Freikorps Ehrhardt, later the Ehrhardt Brigade after its commander, Hermann Ehrhardt.

  Ehrhardt was an ex-navy corvette captain. Tall and full-bearded, he demanded and received unquestioning obedience from his men. He built his brigade into an army two-thousand strong. It had uniforms, military ranks, insignia. It also had a vast armoury of weaponry, up to and including armoured cars. It was the first paramilitary group to adopt the swastika. The second-in-command was Ernst von Salomon, a decorated Freikorps lieutenant, though not yet twenty.

  Hermann Ehrhardt’s illegal stay in Munich was facilitated by false papers provided by the Chief of Police, Ernst Pöhner, who was later to play a vital role when the Nazis seized Munich in 1933.

  Ehrhardt’s link to Ludendorff dates from 1920 and their joint attempt to take power in Berlin in what became known as a Putsch. This Putsch closely foreshadowed Hitler’s failed Putsch in Munich three years later, in which Ludendorff was even more prominent.

  *

  The following account is based on the journal of Ernst von Salomon, recovered in London by Bernhard Weiss’s son.

  Ehrhardt had agreed to wait until seven in the morning to give the government time to accept their demands. So the soldiers of the Brigade stopped for a while at the Pichelsdorfer Bridge. Young Ernst von Salomon could still remember the taste of the coffee they brewed there. The best of his life. It tasted of hope. The soldiers marched past the Marmorhaus on the Kurfürstendamm, then up Budapesterstrasse into the Tiergarten. Their leaders were o
n horses two by two. Their flags were the flags of the Imperial Eagle with the Iron Cross, flags of the real Germany, the old Germany, the Germany before the shame of the Versailles Treaty and this so called Weimar Republic.

  There were hundreds of them, filling the wide boulevards. They were all fully uniformed, rifles shouldered, pistols belted, white swastikas proudly gleaming on their tin helmets. They were smiling in their triumph, good humoured. For some reason there were posters plastered on every wall asking ‘Who has the Prettiest Legs in Berlin?’

  It was a madly happy time. And they were madly happy.

  Von Salomon remembered a fully-kitted soldier who climbed up a tree, somewhere between Leipziger and Potsdamer Platz. A friend of his, Erich von Jagow, shouted out ‘Look, we’re growing soldiers.’ They all laughed.

  On they went, marching, triumphant. General Ludendorff himself took the salute. On through the Brandenburger Tor, wheel right toward the Chancellery. They stormed into the empty building. Then came the happiest moment of von Salomon’s life, at least the happiest since his first day as an army cadet in Karlsruhe, aged thirteen. They hauled down the black, red and gold flag of the Weimar Republic, that soiled rag, raising up instead the old Germany’s own true standard.

  Then they set up a machine-gun nest at every intersection. Von Salomon personally put a 105mm machine gun at the corner of Unter den Linden and Wilhelmstrasse. He positioned the gun crew in their steel helmets behind armoured cars with the Imperial Eagle as their insignia. They put up huge signs, it took two men to hold them - Stop! Anybody Going Further Will Be Shot.

  By noon they ruled Berlin. Not a shot fired.

  For a while they had the democratic politicians on the run, decamping as far as Dresden. But their soldiers counter-attacked in the end. The Brigade lost more than thirty men and four-hundred were wounded in front of the Reichstag. Von Salomon, Ehrhardt and the others were defeated in the battle for Berlin.

  The Ehrhardt Brigade was allowed to march away in formation, just as the German army had done after the war, before it broke up into Freikorps bands.

  March 1920. He would never forget it.

  He had been captured, so he was not there on the march out of Berlin. He charmed his way out, as he always did. He persuaded his guards to play poker with him, first for matchsticks, then for small sums, then for large sums. Of course the guards knew he was cheating, of course they could have ignored their debts to him. But they didn’t. They let him go. Because von Salomon made them laugh. And because in their hearts they had sympathy for his cause.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Every day, Ernst von Salomon, now a bulky, dark and handsome young man, sat in a small wooden kiosk in the entrance-hall of the Friedrichstrasse railway station. The kiosk was a fat block of wood breaking the stream of travellers who hurried past. The company’s name was worked into the woodwork of the kiosk’s gable in black Gothic lettering: Goldblatt et Cie Financial Advice.

  The company had been established by Hermann Erhardt and the Organisation Consul command in Munich. The choice of a Jewish name, Goldblatt, was von Salomon’s. It was one of his many private jokes.

  Von Salomon’s little world was a bare one, redolent, as he saw it, of his shrunken status since Germany’s defeat in the Great War. Other than a narrow desk, a chair, a telephone, a currency conversion chart and a safe, there was nothing. There was no room for anything else, even if he had wished for more.

  Ostensibly, he gave financial advice about the desperate inflation to anyone who wished to enter the kiosk. In practice, his wooden booth quickly evolved into a Bureau de Change. A man would come in and wanted dollars changed. Von Salomon would ring for the latest rate and give him a quotation.

  ‘Change or notes?’ he would ask blandly, leaning his bulk into the client, to impose himself. ‘Thank you’ he would say, with a professional smile, having made the exchange massively under par.

  Von Salomon was not supposed to cheat the customers, to avoid drawing attention to an outwardly legitimate business. But the temptation was too much for him. He viewed his fellow creatures so gullible that he believed it was his duty to dupe them and send them this way and that, like ridiculous geese.

  Here a Pole with dirty fingernails, literally short-changed. There a silent Englishman with his nose in the air who waved a crackling white ten-pound note only to receive very little in return. More often than not, they were regaled with a charming babble of completely imaginary anecdotes about von Salomon’s private life to accompany the transaction. Difficulties with the planned celebration of his sister’s wedding was a favourite line of conversation. Often the poor sister had succumbed to a serious malady just as the party was due to start. Ernst von Salomon did not have a sister.

  Von Salomon’s real work, as he saw it, started when he locked the kiosk and left it for an extended break for luncheon between half-past twelve and three o’ clock. At this time, he would make his way south along Friedrichstrasse, where he would buy cigarettes from a street vendor. He would pause to listen to the barrel-organs, which were back by this time, after the street-battles of last March. They only stopped when there was a new outbreak of firing.

  It was a cat’s spring to the Aschinger Restaurant, opposite the Winter Garden Theatre. Short though the distance was, more often than not, a band of soldiers or sailors had flung up a barricade somewhere. You had to show your identity-card before they let you through. This was the shameful green Noske Ausweis, the identity document which proclaimed you a member of the awful Weimar Republic.

  Most of the men at the barricades knew von Salomon, though the groups shifted frequently. Right-wing organisations were springing up like mushrooms. Nobody could keep up with them all.

  Von Salomon settled down at his regular corner table in the Aschinger, sipping at a beer, a Berliner Weisse. He liked the Aschinger. You could say anything there. The band belted out Viennese waltzes, even at lunchtime; nobody at the other tables could hear you. You could even write at the Aschinger, which is exactly what von Solomon did, pulling out a pen and a much-folded school exercise book. Von Salomon’s handwritten study of political assassination was two inches thick. In essence, it was a detailed treatise on political assassination in history. He was designing his own assassination manual.

  He began with Julius Caesar, revelling in the twenty-three stab wounds that ended the statesman’s life. He had read Suetonius on the subject, with some enjoyment. Next, there was a lengthy chapter on John Wilkes Booth. Van Salomon approved of Booth’s decision to kill Lincoln, not merely kidnap him as per the original plan. The Booth section also contained nearly twenty pages on the consequences of the assassination. Van Salomon was clearly fascinated by Booth’s idea of continuing the Civil War by assassinating the president.

  The theme of the consequences – the successful consequences – of political assassination was continued in his inevitable section on Archduke Franz Ferdinand. For von Salomon, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand was the epitome of successful assassination, as it led so directly to the Great War. Nevertheless, much of his interest in the murder centred on the mechanics of it. He was fascinated by the fact that Franz Ferdinand was killed in a car. He acknowledged that the technique of getting alongside a car allowed the use of small low calibre pistols which the assassin could conveniently conceal. (Gavrilo Princip, Franz Ferdinand’s assassin, used a Browning 32). But he clearly had his doubts. In a section headed ‘Princip was Lucky’ he concluded that Franz Ferdinand could easily have been saved by faster, more effective medical intervention. ‘These days,’ he concludes laconically, ‘we would use machine guns and grenades.’ But murder in a car finds favour: ‘The victim is essentially trapped.’ Von Salomon does not limit his treatise to real murders from history. In a chapter headed ‘Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts’, he studies what he calls ‘the aesthetics of murder’. There is a study of the plays of Schiller, in particular; there are pages on the political murder in Wilhelm Tell and there is a piece on how murd
er can make the personal political, centring on Schiller’s Die Räuber.

  Von Salomon always blended reality and unreality; perhaps one had to, or at least loosen one’s hold on objective reality, to plan a murder at all.

  Von Salomon had read all Rathenau’s books, most more than once and annotated them heavily and by no means always negatively. He had also read many of Rathenau’s articles, taking out a subscription to the magazine Zukunft, solely for that purpose.

  Rathenau appears in one of von Salomon’s novels, entitled Freikorps, about his experiences fighting in the Erhardt Brigade against Red Guard groups everywhere from Silesia to Munich. Rathenau appears not as a character but under his own name as himself – very unusual in novels of the period.

  Freikorps is subtitled ‘A novel about the struggle of the Freikorps and Organisation Consul.’ On page 170, the main character, von Salomon, finds a copy of Rathenau’s book In Days to Come. A critique follows, centring on the lack of historical background in Rathenau’s work.

  On page 180, he lends In Days to Come to Kern, one of the main conspirators in the real plot to kill Rathenau. Kern is also given his real name in the novel. On page 232 von Salomon and Kern go to a lecture by Rathenau about his Politics of Fulfilment – his attempt to establish peace in Europe.

  Von Salomon complains that they cannot get a seat and have to stand at the back, such is the demand to hear Rathenau speak. At the end of the talk, the author von Salomon has Kern making his way through the throng, then looking Rathenau in the eye. Kern is an attractive man. Von Salomon has Rathenau responding to him.

  Von Salomon put his exercise book and pen away, there in the Aschinger, and sighed. He waited to see who would turn up. It could be ten men, it could be nobody.