This volume perhaps was an afterthought, since at the end of volume 10 the author includes his thoughts about how he came to write the first book, which wrote itself and he thought that was all; and then he mentions how, even though he'd only thought of that one book, the further ones came as well. And this 11th volume being an afterthought is inherent in the title as we..; unlike the other ten titles with their literary references, this is a self explanatory prosaic one, an almost tongue in cheek variation on return of, say, a Sherlock Holmes or a James Bond.
It's set in the aftermath of the WWII taking the reader to Cold War, as far as memory serves, having read it in late 1970s, and beginning it now, after four decades, it's a slight surprise that it takes off with such a flying start. One didn't expect it while giving a day off between finishing the tenth and beginning it now, since after all, WWII is well and over, Nürnberg trials are done with, and Frances is with her father too; and the Cold War, after all, was just that. A slow freeze with never quite off threat of an eruption of a volcano that could wipe out the civilisation.
But take off to a flying start this one does, and how! There is Bertrand Russell on the Peace program to begin with, and promptly a call from Washington asking if Lanny knew Braun, which was one of the aliases for Bernhardt Monck. So Lanny and Laurel drive to Washington and Lanny met the government official, who informed him what the problem was.
To begin with, UNO had problems with Soviets.
"The Kremlin had vetoed three of its proposals in one afternoon, and the Soviet delegate had walked out from the meeting of the Security Council in New York."
And as the Budds had been aware of,
"The most alarming development of all had been in the far South Sea island of Bikini, where the United States had given the world a demonstration of what the new atomic power could do. Eleven old war vessels had been destroyed and twenty-five more crippled. A second explosion, this time under water, had sunk a battleship, an aircraft carrier, and eight other vessels of war. The United States had proposed to the United Nations a plan to ban the manufacture of such weapons and provide that all nations should permit inspection to make sure of the keeping of the agreement. But Russia had announced that she would never accept such a plan; ...."
And now the official told Lanny what Monck had asked them to get him to help with.
"‘Adolf Hitler had all his plans made for the invasion of Britain, and a part of this was the printing of great quantities of English money, so that he could take possession of everything in the country without plain outright confiscation. I was told that he had set up a regular engraving establishment at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp’.
"‘Our information is that at one time he had as prisoners there more than a hundred and forty expert engravers as well as convicted forgers from several countries; they were set to making plates for reproducing the currency of the Allied countries. The neutral nations were refusing to accept Hitler’s marks, they demanded sterling or American dollars. And if these dollars were successfully counterfeited the market would be flooded and prices would be forced up for the Allies. The enemy would get the goods and we would be driven into bankruptcy. The forgeries were so good that they went undetected for some time’.
"‘Our information is that they printed some two hundred million British pounds, nearly a billion dollars. When the invading armies neared Sachsenhausen the Nazis transferred their machinery and slave labour to the Mauthausen concentration camp, on the Danube. When the final collapse came the stuff was scattered over the German-speaking lands. We have recently found a stock of it in a factory at Freising, and another lot sealed up in metal containers and sunk in a lake near Bad Ischl in Austria. What we want most of all is to find the plates. So long as they exist the floods of phoney money may be continuous."
Turner wanted to know if Monck was to be trusted, and Lanny having voucher for him, asked about Stubendorf; it transpired that the forgery plates might be there, and Kurt was there after having been interred during allied occupation of Germany. Turner wanted Lanny to go talk to Kurt, and Lanny warned him about the last time he'd seen Kurt. They talked about Graf Stubendorf too, as a possible source of information. Turner briefed Lanny about Poland being evasive, delays keeping the matter on hold while forged notes entered via Berlin into West, and they weren't sure if it was nazis, communists, or gangsters, although the three 'shaded into one another'
"Turner took him to a microscope near the window and told him what minute errors to look for; even then it was not easy to find them.
"Men had died for the commission of those small mistakes. Turner told him how a group of three or four of these engraver-slaves had conspired to hide minute marks in the plates, whereby the notes could subsequently be identified. This was discovered, and the conspirators were sent to the gas chamber—that is, they were poisoned by cyanogen, their bodies burned in the furnace, and their bones ground up for fertiliser. All the engraver-slaves at Sachsenhausen had worked with this menace hanging over them; if they made a mistake it would be taken for granted that they had done it on purpose; mistakes were simply not permitted."
Lanny was provided with an identification card as a U.S. agent, and they'd provide passport and tickets. Meanwhile Lanny thought of the President telling him to let him know if he was going yo Europe, and called White House to leave a message; he met Truman that evrning, and he didn't ask Lanny about the mission but spoke about Soviet behaviour in bad faith, breaking various agreements and calling U.S. warmonger if U.S. helped governments in countries where Soviets were foaming trouble, not allowing free elections in East Europe and not vacating the ports in Northeast Asian peninsula, Port Arthur and Dairen. Lanny reminded him about the similar situation a decade ago with Hitler, and Lanny had told the baffled people to read his book but no one did; Stalin had written too, Lanny said, and set down his program exactly, only no one outside his domain was reading it.
They discussed the Peace program in light of the communist problematic behaviour and Truman asked Lanny to see him when he was back from Europe, and Lanny returned to Shoreham Hotel. He told her what he could, and they discussed Lanny's trip and other matters with the 'Peace family' when they returned to Edgemere.
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Here the author makes yet another mistake, that of saying that Rick and Nina had their eldest son, Scrubbie, in Edgemere with them; the eldest is actually Alfy, who was born close to when Lanny's half sister Marceline was, and she's ten to twelve years older to Frances, Lanny's own first child from his first wife Irma; Scrubbie might not be the youngest of Rick and Nina, but eldest he certainly is not. This is probably fourth or fifth such mistake by the author, after Lanny telling Ezra Hackabury that his ex wife was still with her second husband who was working at a desk job due to war, when in a previous volume of the series he'd mentioned that Edna was helping Margy at Marceline's debut and was herself in impecunious circumstances due to death of Fitz-Laing. In between the author has changed the name of son of the victim of nazis. Freddi Robin, from Johannes as he was mentioned in the third volume and further, to Freddi as he's reintroduced as a youngster joining the U.S. armed forces. There's probably at least one more such mistake.
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The author gives here a brief introduction of the Budd family of Lanny, the other side being that of his mother Beauty who brought him up in Juan Les-Pins on French Riviera. Funny how easily Lanny has given up not just that home, Bienvenu, but the larger one, France! That was his home not just of childhood and boyhood and years before marriage, but long after, until he married the third wife Laurel. True, he couldn't take Trudi, his second wife, there, but the whole marriage and her identity was a secret not known to even his parents, only to those few whom he told for a reason, until his testimony at Nürnberg. But Bienvenu remained his home until he bought an apartment in NYC where Laurel lived with Agnes Drury, her roommate of years who was a nurse, and the three shared it until the move to Edgemere.
And yet, he isn't divided in his heart at all, seemingly, much less in his loyalty, between the only home he knew growing up and the only home he could call home until he was in his forties, France, and the nation of his ancestors where his father's family and clan lives, U.S.! Even during the years when his now elderly mother was living with her third or second husband who's no spring chicken and taking care of her little grandson Marcel Detaze, named after his grandfather who was her second or first husband, when Lanny could have been more help to her especially during the years when Marceline wasn't known to be alive and war was over, Lanny merely visits Bienvenu when suitable but doesn't consider his childhood - and until as recent as six years ago - home as home at all!
One has to wonder, isn't the author confusing Lanny with himself?
Upton Sinclair lived in Europe in 1911, 1912, 1913, as he mentions in the addendum to the first volume, and moved back when he expected a war. But Upton Sinclair was born and brought up in U.S., not Europe! Lanny was not only born in Switzerland and brought up on Cote d'Azur, he chose to return after WWI which was only natural, choosing France and Beauty over security of Budds and New England. Surely he isn't so heartless as to have forgotten it!
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The author gives a nice but brief description of Andrew Carnegie, occasion being Lanny went to Carnegie Hall to hear Hansi Robin play; and perhaps there is another mistake here. He describes Hansi as German born Jew. But if one read the first volume, the family lived in Holland, were wealthy enough, and only moved to Berlin because the boys, especially Hansi, deserved the best music teacher and training possible, and that was arranged in Berlin. There certainly was never any mention of the family having lived in Germany before, else it would have not been moving but returning to what was once home.
Hansi is depressed after the concert, and he told the family about Bess being too busy. The author discussing communists and Soviets of that era brings very vividly to mind jihadists and other invaders bent on convert-or-kill sprees with an aim of conquering the world and destroying every civilisation, and that's as true today as it has been for well over a millennium and half.
Here is another summing up by the author, in one page, of the conflict in the Hansi and Bess marriage that is a succinct capture of the conflict within left, set in the Hitler and Stalin era but valid on a far more general scale.
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Lanny flew via Newfoundland and Prestwick to Croydon and met Alfy. Here the author as usual describes him as the future baronet, which is clearly only because he's the eldest, not Scrubbie.
In Berlin he was met by an American officer, and Lanny identified himself. The officer spoke on the way about various stories. Lanny had come to expect nazis as criminals. He met the U.S. agents and heard them, and discussed the situation, suggesting it might be Vlasovites who were carrying out the false currency pushing.
"‘Vlasovite is the name for a Russian or Pole who went over to the Nazis and entered their military service. Some did it because they were reactionary; most of them I suppose were just mercenaries. There was a whole division or more of them, commanded by a General Vlasov. Needless to say, to the Reds they are the devil incarnate. Some might have been at Sachsenhausen, as guards or interpreters, even as prisoners if they were engravers or had committed crimes. They might have got away with bales of the money, and the Poles might have fled to Poland; they might have had to change their names and conceal their past, or they might be living as outlaws, hiding in the forest, working as an underground against the Reds."
They told him of Poland circumstances.
"Soviet artillery had blasted towns and villages to pieces, and in many of the towns the streets were not yet cleared of rubble sufficiently to drive a vehicle through them. There were unbelievable shifts of population going on. More than eight million Germans had fled from Poland into Germany; to take their places a million and a half Poles had fled from the provinces which the Kremlin had taken over in the East; they had come into the new lands evacuated by the Germans. In addition nearly a million Poles who had fled from the Russians into Germany and Austria and Western Europe were now coming back to their homeland. The population of Warsaw had diminished from a million and a quarter to half a million. All this meant swarms of half-starved people on the roads, riding in oxcarts or trundling handcarts, or plodding along with their few possessions in bundles on their heads or their backs. It was very depressing, and also very insanitary."
They told him that he was to manage himself hence, since his being an agent wasn't established, not for public consumption. Lanny asked about graft, and was told he'd have to be cautious against hurting pride, but they'd be open to it; Lanny asked about Emil and they said they'd found out he was in Bavarian Alps. He was to have an expense account. He met Monck, who was with CIC, and working for AMG now, investigating persons claiming to have been anti nazi for truth of their claims.
"Monck would go to work and learn that some man had been an active Nazi, and then he would discover that the man was being employed anyhow—the reason being that he was the one who knew the most about how to run that industry. ... If he presumed to criticise the decisions of his superiors they would decide that he was a Red—and that was worse than a Nazi. ... Monck could speak for the masses of Europe. He knew that they would not consent to go back to the old system; they would no longer be content with poverty and insecurity. To attempt to force them back would mean simply to drive them into the arms of the Communists. There would be either a Socialist Europe or a Communist Europe—and it was America that would have to make the choice.
"Monck had seen one nation after another blundering stupidly and bringing about the opposite result to what it wanted. ‘When Hitler invaded Russia’, he said, ‘the masses of the Russian people were so embittered against the Reds that they would gladly have joined Hitler’s armies and helped to win their own freedom. But the Hitler men of hate behaved with such cruelty that they turned the peasants into partisans, hiding in the forests and making war on the German communications. And now we see the Russians in their turn making the same blunder. They have got hold of Central Europe and can’t make up their minds whether they are conquerors or comrades. One day they make speeches about working-class solidarity and the next day they behave like barbarians’.
"The German Socialist told how the Russians had proceeded to strip Berlin of all its manufacturing machinery; they had also rigged the currency so as to draw most of the products of the country to themselves. Only now were they beginning to realise that by this means they had doomed the East Berliners to perpetual poverty and had sacrificed all chance of winning the West Berliners over to their side. If the East Berliners remained poorly dressed while the West Berliners became well dressed, how could you persuade either side that communism meant prosperity and capitalism meant misery?"
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At this point, for no reason one can attribute, there is another reference by author that points to his prejudice, and even more profound ignorance that the prejudice is based in, against India.
Lanny told Monck about his meeting Truman who wanted to know how to make Soviets jeep their promises, and Bernhardt Monck told him Truman might as well have sent him to India to find out how to make tigers stop eating meat.
And yet, neither is eating meat so strange as to be limited to tigers, in fact neither European nor most of the world outside India have so widespread a culture of vegetarian diet as India does, and nor are tigers limited to India, they exist from Siberia to India to southeast Asia, and if they are missing in China it's because few things are not eaten in China. So this is merely a very unlikely place to use so ridiculous a place to insert so racist and colonial imperialist a mindset - it's a supposedly socialist from Germany saying this, not a Brit disdainful about a colony - for no apparent reason.
Or is it because Upton Sinclair was so much an Anglophile, so admiring of British empire and so enamoured of British aristocracy that he would find every possible occasion to insert an insult to India in a book, a series of eleven volumes, because India was struggling for freedom from the imperialist colonial rule that had been looting India, with deaths of millions of Indians on their heads because Churchill deliberately forced them to starve literally to death, first by stealing the harvest, and to clinch it by refusing to allow ships filled with grain sent by FDR for saving Indians dying of starvation enforced by Churchill, to proceed further West after Australia, and declare openly that he saw no reason why Indians should be allowed to survive? Upton Sinclair does criticise Churchill, but not for this, only for having an English rather than American accent!
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"‘You think that the Politburo wants war?’ Lanny asked.
"‘No, they don’t want war. All they want is the mastery of the world. They have set their programme forth in a whole library of books’."
Over and over, what Lanny or others say about totalitarian ideologies of that time, whether communists or nazis, find an echo in jihadists of today and their invading marauding looting ancestors of a millennium and half, set on a conquer, convert or kill, and loot program across the globe.
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Lanny said that he said the same to Truman, but he was too overburdened to read so much.
"‘What you should do is to take him one book and mark the passages for him. Get him Stalin’s Marxism and the National and Colonial Question. That book is the bible for every Russian diplomat and representative abroad. In it Stalin deals with every country of any importance, and he analyses the conditions in that country; he has all the facts and is clear and precise about what he is going to do and how he is going to do it—to undermine the government of that country and place his own kind of people in control. He hasn’t the faintest doubt of his ability to do it. It may take a long time, but he has the patience of a cat watching at a rat hole. He bides his time, and when the time comes he pounces. He makes promises, but they don’t mean a thing—except that the time for the pounce hasn’t yet come. When friendship is to his advantage he can be as charming and warm as a house cat; and he can order the murder of a million human beings without the faintest qualm’.
"‘I suppose’, Lanny ventured, ‘he is really more dangerous to the world than Hitler’.
"‘Hitler was a blusterer and a fool; he was impatient and hysterical. Stalin is quiet and watchful and wise. Also, his camouflage is much better than Hitler’s. Hitler was a nationalist and hater of all other peoples—even of the British and the Americans whom he secretly envied. Stalin is an internationalist and a friend of the oppressed workers, all the oppressed races of the world. He loves them all, his heart bleeds for them, and he sets his poets to writing odes to them and his composers to singing songs for them. He tells the oppressed peasants to kill the landlords and take the land; and when they have done this he invites them to form co-operatives under his guidance; he promises them the benefits of machinery and mutual aid and then sets one of his commissars over them and takes away a part of their product—and lo and behold, they are paying more taxes to Stalin than they ever paid to any landlord. He tells the workers to seize the factories, and when they have done so he sets a commissar over them, abolishes the unions, establishes the death penalty for strikes, and pays such wages that it takes a month’s labour to buy a pair of poorly made shoes. If any peasant or worker ventures to murmur a complaint he is shipped off to Siberia to labour in the gold mines on a diet of eight hundred calories a day. Such is Marx-Lenin-Stalin in action’."
Author here has Monck further describe the occupation of other countries as a program, which again sounds very like both Hitler and jihadists and their invader ancestors of a millennium and half.
"‘We have a story in America’, said Lanny, ‘about a farmer who said he wasn’t greedy for land—he wanted only the land adjoining his own’.
"‘Exactly!’ replied the German. ‘That ought to enable President Truman to understand Stalin. And make plain to him that when I say Stalin I don’t mean an old man who may die any day; I mean a system he has built and that will go on after him. There is the Politburo, and the commissars, and the whole enormous movement. It began as a new religion, like Mohammedanism in its militant days, ..."
Lanny said that that was a grim message to carry to the White House, and Monck said it's what hed been witnessing.
"There are kidnappings over the border going on all the time. The border is less than half a mile from this house, and I never go out at night without company; I wouldn’t go close to the border for a million dollars in perfectly sound American greenbacks. In East Germany they are seizing the workers who show any trace of independence and character and shipping them off to those dreadful slave-labour camps. Men and women of special ability and prominence are being shot in the back of the neck. They are setting the rest to work producing war goods—and of course they control the schools and set out the programmes to educate the children. Give them one generation in any country, and you have a population that doesn’t know what freedom means and is absolutely certain that every American is a gangster, a slave-driver, and a warmonger’.
"Such was the message; and it surely wouldn’t lighten the burdens of an ex-captain of artillery, who to his own great surprise had become President of the United States."
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Monck and Lanny spoke in low tones after dinner, the family were in bed, and they talked about the counterfeit currency. Monck said one of his operative comrades had stolen a bundle of counterfeit British pounds, and they'd decided to use it only against nazis, but it was too risky and they'd burned it.
"Monck told about the British ambassador at Ankara, Turkey, whose official papers had been stolen at night by his butler and photographed. News of this had come to Monck in far-off Stockholm, because in the last days of the war an employee of Himmler’s intelligence service had fled there and had sold the information to Monck for a few real American dollars. The butler in Ankara had been excessively greedy, demanding as much as fifteen or twenty thousand pounds British money for each of his bundles of photographs. The Nazis had obliged him with Himmler money—large lots of it which apparently he never tried to spend, because they had taken the precaution to give him a few real notes, unpacked, and it was these he had used.
"The butler who went under the code name of Cicero, had furnished complete reports of what went on at the Allied conferences at Moscow, Teheran, and Cairo during 1943 and 1944. It was von Papen’s organisation which had achieved this coup. The Nazis had several different spy services, all jealous of one another and waging intrigue against one another. The Himmler organisation had refused to believe that the documents were genuine, and von Ribbentrop’s organisation had done the same. Before they got through with their squabbling over the matter the war had ended."
They talked about Emil who'd been cleared to teach high school and lived near Nürnberg, and Graf Stubendorf who was living near a lake in Bavarian Alps, content to be left alone. His properties were gone, Stubendorf being taken over in Poland and Berlin house destroyed. Lanny thought he'd visit them first, and Monck advised him to repackvand be on the alert.
"‘Be careful and don’t talk about politics’, Monck warned. ‘The Poles hate both the Nazis and the Reds; all the parties hate all the other parties, and everybody is suspicious of everybody else, and especially of strangers."
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Lanny visited East Berlin next morning.
"The position of a young Soviet aide-de-camp toward an American visitor was a complex one. He was very apt to like Americans instinctively; most Russians did. When they had met on the River Elbe the American and Russian soldiers had had a fine time celebrating; it had pleased them to hug one another and slap one another on the back; the officers had shaken hands and drunk a toast and said whatever words they had in common. But now everything was changed. The order had gone out: No fraternising."
It was a question of his career, so he had to be cold, aloof. Lanny told him about having visited Stalin, and being invited to do so again, and the official didn't know whether to believe it, but took him to the colonel who heard it again. Lanny said he'd be happy to pay for the cost of a call to check with Briansky wh is been his escort, but the colonel said the telephone was state owned and busy; Lanny said he'd think Stalin wouldn't be happy if Lanny returned home without having carried out his business of inspecting the paintings in Stubendorf that he'd come so far for, and the colonel said he'd let him know.
Lanny rented a coupe with Monck's help and set forth, having had permits with Morrison's help to drive through to Bavaria. At Landshut he turned off autobahn towards Obersalzberg to see HildeDonnerstein. She was in mourning for her son, and grew her potatoes herself.
The author here says only son, but previously he'd said she'd lost both her sons, before her Berlin palace was bombed.
Hilde was amonst the friends he'd put on mailing list for Peace, and she said he was naive to think he could bring peace to the old continent. She had stories to tell about upper Austria held by reds, but Lanny first took her to the coupe and showed her the food he'd brought as gift from AMG store, and she'd tears in her eyes. Her estates in Pomerania had been taken over. She asked him about his advice to hold onto her stocks and bonds, and he assured her U.S. had every intention of businesses being on track as soon as possible.
Here the author has a passage rather reminiscent of Gone With The Wind, beginning with the paragraph:-
"They had a feast, and Hilde went on chattering. They were all lucky to be alive, she said, and out of the war. Really the peasant life wasn’t so bad; there were friends nearby, and they came to see her, so she got the gossip of the neighbourhood, and indeed of all aristocratic Germany. Her talk was full of that light kind of malice which was considered chic in the fashionable world. You were amused by the weaknesses of human nature, but you didn’t really mean any harm, and you certainly weren’t trying to change anything. You would invite your friends to share your meal of rutabagas, potatoes, bread and cheese; you would recall the good old days and repeat in elegant French the saying about the staircase of history echoing to the sound of wooden shoes going up and silken slippers coming down."
It's even more so when Lanny asks about Graf Stubendorf, and she tells him he's living near Tegernsee, but is a proud Junker who'd never work for the conquering allied forces of democracy, even though -as Lanny told her - he'd been cleared by AMG and could have had a good post.
Lanny tried to see if she knew about the counterfeit currency, but she didn't, and when mentioned promptly assumed nazis had done it. He left for Tegernsee next morning, and lunched at a local inn on arrival, where they were pleased to serve him, had good simple food and answered his queries. They were happy Americans had removed nazis and let normal people run things as before. They directed him to Graf Stubendorf's residence, and Lanny found the stone cottage on the terraced hillside.
Graf received him with genuine pleasure, and Lanny was relieved. They spoke about Germany losing the war, and Graf Stubendorf said he'd never been a nazi; everyone was saying it, but in his case Lanny knew it to be true. Lanny asked him about Kurt. Graf said he'd written to him after being released. Kurt wanted to go live at Stubendorf again, even though it was again in Poland, and expected the government to welcome him since they professed regard for artists.
"‘I haven’t heard from him for some time’, replied the other. ‘I fear he must be having a difficult time financially. I wish I could help him, but I am no longer in a position to do so’."
Lanny asked if he knew anyone who might wish to sell any paintings, and graf said no, most refugees from East had fled for their lives with little. That led to counterfeit currency and Graf said yes, he knew nazis had forged currency and papers of other countries, and he did not approve of such doings. But other than saying that U.S. government would have to deal with the problem, it didn't lead anywhere, although Graf was aware of the black market in Berlin and East Germany forging West German currency as well.
Graf was worried about American army going home, and he asked what they'd do if Stalin took the rest of Germany, for his army wasn't going back. Lanny said they'd have to deal with it, as they had with Hitler. Lanny talked about his program and difficulties of a peace lover having to deal with strife.
‘If you will take your Bible, Herr Budd, and read old Jeremiah, you will find that he talks about “saying, Peace, peace, when there is no peace”.’ Perhaps the day will come when you will repeat the experience of the old prophet. “Then said I, Ah, Lord God! surely thou hast greatly deceived this people and Jerusalem, saying, Ye shall have peace; whereas the sword reacheth unto the soul”.’
"When Lanny thought it over afterwards it seemed to him rather quaint to have heard a commander of Hitler’s Armed Forces quoting the ancient scriptures of the Jews. But he didn’t say that; instead he remarked, ‘I had the privilege of making purchases at one of our government stores. I know that a country diet grows monotonous, and I tried to think of something that might be especially good for your health. I brought along a sack of oranges’.
"‘Oh, I cannot let you do that!’ exclaimed the proud old count. ‘Really—’
"‘Just think, lieber Graf, how much of your hospitality I accepted in the happy old days. Think of the things you fed to me, the venison and pheasants, the hares and trout. Surely I have the right to make a return’.
"‘Well, since you put it that way, Herr Budd—’
"‘Let me help you on with your overcoat and come out and see what else I have in my rolling grocery’.
"The old Junker stalked out; Lanny followed and opened the locked trunk of his little car. He held up a sack of oranges in one hand, and in the other the spectacle that had so thrilled the Fürstin Donnerstein. The count spoke the same words. ‘Ach, du lieber Gott! Ein Schinken!’ He started to protest again, but Lanny silenced him as before. The Graf let his visitor carry the ham into the house, while he carried the oranges. They shook hands, and Lanny promised to send the little Peace paper every week."
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Lanny drove to Nürnberg.
"Emil was living in an upstairs bedroom without any heat; he went to school in the morning and taught his classes, and then he walked home and spent the evenings correcting his students’ work. He was alone, his wife having died during the war, and his sons had no understanding of their father’s action. He discussed the subject with no one and kept himself aloof and serene. There came to Lanny’s mind an ode of the poet Horace, which he had learned as a student in Newcastle, Connecticut, telling of the man who is just and firm in his opinion, and whom neither the cruel tyrant nor the shouting mob can awe; if the whole earth should be shattered in fragments about him they would leave him undismayed. Impavidum ferient ruinae!"
Lanny took him out to dinner and asked about Kurt. Emil wasn't in touch with him. He thought it was possible time helped heal his feelings.
"As to the matter of Kurt’s bitterness against Lanny, it might be possible that time had done something toward the healing of the wound. Emil said that Kurt had staked his whole being upon the Hitler adventure; he had poured out the fervour of his genius in its service, and he had failed. Lanny Budd had helped to cause his failure, and Kurt could probably not forgive that."
Lanny talked about Kurt's difficulty adapting to communists after having been such a fervent Nazi devotee and about bringing up his children.
"Emil admitted. ‘It won’t be easy for him, whatever he does and whatever he believes. I happen to know that his oldest boy, Fritz, has reacted strongly against the Nazis. He is in an Oberschule in East Berlin, where a friend of mine teaches. Kurt may try ever so hard to control his children’s minds, but the environment may be too strong for him. For all I know, he may even have decided to turn Red himself—if only with the idea of punishing the Americans. Thousands of the Nazis have done that’."
Lanny mentioned counterfeit currency and Emil said even his pupils had shown him some; they had pressures pushinh them to get in on.lanny asked if any of them would help the government to track it down, and Emil gave a couple of names. Lanny asked what German youth felt about divided Germany, would East join West or the other way. Emil said they were confused.
" ... Reds had behaved like Huns, but their propaganda was tireless and very clever.
"‘You must understand’, he explained, ‘for a dozen years the German people heard almost no truth about the Western world. This generation which I am teaching has never known what it is to live in a free society, where all facts are reported and all arguments are invited. They hardly know what to make of the idea of hearing both sides; it contradicts the basic principle of their training—to believe that what they are told must be true. The Americans and British have the better case, but the Reds are more expert in presenting theirs. They are tireless propagandists; they have nothing else to do but to spread the faith. The Americans can’t even seem to get started’."
They talked about the new radio program that would eventually go on yo be broadcast as Voice Of America, but at the moment was just beginning.
"Emil said that his brother had a choice to make, a veritable Herculean choice: whether to join the free world or to become a Communist. ‘You know the old-time saying, “Extremes meet.” It was never more true than at present. Kurt hates the British and the Americans; the Reds have the same hate, and so they are drawn together. I see it here among my young people’."
But Kurt was a mature man, Lanny said. Surely he could see that reds do not behave as per their propaganda.
"‘Neither do the Christians, many of them, yet they make converts. Kurt’s home is in Poland, and he can hardly live there and go on hating the Communists. On the other hand, if he yields to their wiles, or pretends to, he can no doubt have honour and fame again. They will invite him to Moscow and welcome him as a distinguished artist. His name would have propaganda value among the Germans. I feel uneasy when I pick up a newspaper, fearing that I may find such an item of news’."
Lanny promised to try and avert such a calamity, and drove back to Berlin in the morning, after persuading Emil to accept the rest of the supply of food, and having promised to let him know.
Back in Berlin his papers were ready and the Russian officer impressed; Lanny collected them and got his visa in the Polish embassy in the western sector. He stocked up on food supply and Polish currency, and took some of the food to Monck at dinner. They discussed Kurt, who represented central Europe for Lanny in the tussle for hearts between free and totalitarian systems.
Lanny drove in the morning, his route to Stubendorf straight East
"The peasants were living in hovels they had put up out of the wreckage. There had been few horses left, and men who had ploughs had hitched their families to them, or else had dug up the land with spades and planted enough to keep themselves alive. For centuries they had been building up this land, over and over again, getting it ready for the next war; but now the wars were getting so much worse it seemed that the human spirit might break completely."
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After going through Breslau, now Wroclaw, he came upon the destroyed remains of the Schloss Stubendorf. He went to where Kurt's cottage built by Graf Stubendorf had been, and that too was in ruins. He heard sound of an axe and went looking, and found an old Polish labourer from the estate that he'd met before. He was happy to see someone from old times and when asked about other people from those times gave name of a Polish school teacher who was in town.
Lanny found a cafe in the village, half destroyed but still in business, where the Polish woman proprietor offered homemade bread, cheese and omelette. As he was eating, a young fellow came in, asked permission to join him, and asked if Lanny was interested in American currency. Lanny examined the bill offered as sample while questioning where he'd got it, and said he'd think about it. He told him he was here to buy art.
"He said that it was too bad that Herr Guzman did not know him and his reputation, so that he would be willing to turn over the thousand dollars or more to Lanny and let him arrange in Berlin to have the money put to Herr Guzman’s credit in a bank, say in Wroclaw. This very idea frightened the man—and that was what Lanny had meant to do."
Lanny paid for his meal and that of Guzmann, and bought a couple of those bills; he asked Guzmann to come to Berlin where Lanny would buy more. Lanny was driving back immediately and Guzmann could ride with him. After Guzmannhad brought the currency packages, Lanny insisted he be searched. He was unarmed, and they set forth. Lanny talked to ease Guzmann, but realised he was shrewder than appeared, and didn't talk about himself.
Before the border he was frightened, the search would be thorough, and he didn't have papers. He said he'd cross the border separately, and Lanny told him to come to Savoy. Guzmann was in a quandary about carrying the currency, and Lanny agreed to do it for him, but Guzmann was unsure; Lanny said he had carried sums several times that, and it didn't matter to him one way or other. Finally Guzmann decided to trust him. Lànny let him off and drove to Savoy after being checked twice, and having arrived in his room called Morrison, and they talked about the operation.
When Guzmann arrived in the morning, Lanny took care of the soaking wet wretch blue with cold, and having reassured him about the currency packages,, bought a couple at the rate agreed before; then he proceeded to lay facts before him about his being aware of the counterfeit currency and Guzmann now being criminal under American military jurisdiction. Guzmann was terrified of the guys he worked for, but saw reason and told about them.
"‘It is the most secret society in the whole world. They call themselves the Völkischerbund; it is a blood brotherhood, and it is death even to speak the name except to a member.
"‘Oh, they are Nazis then?’
"‘They were all high Nazis. Those who founded it all had war wounds. There were six; each of those six was pledged to get three new members, but only one knows the names of those three; each of those three get three more, and so on. It will spread, they say, the way bacteria spread in a broth. It will spread all over Germany, and nobody will know how fast it has gone or how far—until some day it will be like an explosion. Der Tag will come, and it will burst into the open’.
"‘That’s all an old story’, Lanny said. ‘Do they have a propaganda or ideas?’
"‘They send out what they call das Wort. It is one sentence every week, and all Germans are supposed to learn it and remember it. Each man tells it to his three, and so it spreads’."
Guzmann wasn't a member and was terrified about having heard them talking accidentally about all this, which they'd have killed him for if they knew. Head of this organisation was Heinrich Brinkmann of Göring's Luftwaffe who hid in forests near Stubendorf.
"‘I thought all the Germans had been driven out’.
"‘There are Germans who speak Polish and pretend to be Poles. They join the party and talk like Communists, but they work secretly to undermine it. They help others who live in hiding. I suppose they are Communists in East Germany too—and maybe here in the West they are democrats. I don’t know. It is an underground’."
Guzmann usually worked in Berlin where he could vanish, was forbidden to work in Poland, but had taken a chance on Lanny and was grateful he'd been driven to Berlin. Lanny asked about plates, but he knew nothing.
"‘This money, I take it, is being used to undermine the Communists, and these men live on it in the meantime. Is that it?’
"‘I suppose so, Herr Budd. They use it to travel about and spread “the Word” as they call it’.
"‘This word, what is it?’
"‘They don’t tell me, Herr Budd. I am just a poor guy that wanders about peddling their stuff and coming back for more’."
Guzmann said his wife had left him, and he had no family.
"‘You don’t know any other people connected with this Völkischerbund but those you have named?’
"‘There’s the man who writes “the Word”. I never heard any of his words, but I heard his name. It is Meissner’."
Lanny wasn't surprised, and showed no emotion.
"‘What do you know about this man Meissner?’
"‘I know that he is a musician and his first name is Kurt. They talk a lot about him in Stubendorf. It seems that he is famous, but I don’t know a thing about music.’"
Guzmann said Kurt was living in East Germany in a village called Wendefurth in Harz mountains.
"‘He lives on some of what I bring back from pushing it. And he writes “the Word”. It’s supposed to be some sacred and very inspired word that goes out to the Germans once a week; they are supposed to learn it by heart and renew their faith in the Fatherland and in the duty Hitler taught them. I think it’s crazy myself; I don’t think one German in twenty would pay any attention to it’.
"Lanny was using all this as a test to see if Guzman was telling the truth. It sounded exactly like Kurt Meissner’s fanaticism. Doubtless it had been planned in advance, in the days when the Nazi leaders had seen defeat looming up and had organised what they called the Bavarian Redoubt. They were going to retire to the high mountains, where they had a store of ammunition and food, and were going to hold out forever, but Georgie Patton had been too quick for them. Lanny thought that Harry Truman was being too quick for them too; the Germans were getting democracy.
"‘And has this Meissner turned Communist also?’
"‘I don’t know that, Herr Budd, but he must have come to some understanding with the Communists, else why would they let him have a place to live, and how could he send his children to school and all the rest?’"
Lanny had Guzmann bathe while he got the agents up and they took him to Morrison, and he told everything again; Lanny was convinced he was telling the truth.
"There was nothing improbable about Guzman’s story; G-2, the Intelligence section of the Army, had knowledge of these groups of conspirators meeting and plotting all over Germany. No attention was paid to them unless they took some overt action. ‘Beer-cellar grumblers’, Morrison called them. Lanny said, ‘Watch out—I saw Adolf Hitler starting in a beer cellar’."
Morrison asked Lanny to go see Kurt; Lanny didn't expect to fool him, but Morrison said he'd get some information by doing so. Lanny got a permit this time promptly and drove to Wendefurth, and found Kurt's place. His wife was friendly but afraid; Lanny went to the little cottage behind and listened to Kurt playing with one hand in the process of composing the Götterdämmerung that he was charged with by Hitler as Berlin was bombed and they were in his bunker.
After the music stopped, Lanny knocked, and Kurt was cold and hostile. He allowed Lanny to enter and sit but remained implacable, refusing offer of help saying they weren't objects of charity. Lanny talked of his family and his radio program.
"‘I have heard about it’, said Kurt, his voice still cold. ‘I do not consider that you are competent to express an opinion upon the subject. I consider that you Americans are hopelessly naïve, and that the best thing you could do for Europe would be to retire to your own side of the ocean and attend to your own affairs’."
Lanny tried to argue with him, but Kurt remained implacable and hostile.
" ‘I’m not going to discuss the subject with you, Lanny. All I have to say to you Americans is: Get out of our country and let us alone, and we will solve our problems in our own way. If you had not come here we would have been a free people, and Europe would have had peace for a thousand years, just as the Führer promised us’.
"So that was that. Kurt was an unreconstructed Nazi, and he might become a reconstructed Communist, and Lanny and the rest of his ‘Amis’ might go to the devil."
Lanny tried to point out that shifting to West Germany would be better for his children, but it was no use. Lanny drove away.
"Lanny had become convinced that Kurt had made some kind of deal with the Communists. There was no other way that he could live on here, a German Nazi in the midst of Red revolution. The old Kurt would have spoken boldly against the intruders, who could have been to him no other than bandits. The new Kurt was keeping his mouth shut and looking out for himself and his family.
"Lanny drove back to Berlin and made his report to the Treasury man: Kurt Meissner was there, he was bitter, defiant, and shut up as tight as a clam. Guzman’s story that he was a leader of the Neo-Nazis was in all probability true; it was also probable that he was dealing with the Reds and pretending to have come over to them."
Lanny met Morrison who said theyd have to find someone posing as a Nazi, but Lanny thought Kurt would know all the nazis.
"‘It is going to be a hard nut to crack’, agreed Morrison. ‘We will have to get some man who can pose as a Nazi and who knows the game’.
"‘Kurt knows who the real Nazis are and he has secret sources of information. It will be hard indeed to find a man who has come over to our side and whom Kurt has not heard about or cannot find out about. This further idea has occurred to me—that we might send a man who can pose as a Communist. I don’t know the village, but there’ll be some Red in charge, a commissar or whatever they call him Your man might get in touch with him and stay there a while and make himself useful, and at the same time be making inquiries. He might even start a little intrigue against Kurt and his crowd: not enough to get them arrested but enough to give them a scare. They might put their bales of money and even their precious plates into a car and move. They couldn’t feel safe after that in any Communist territory, and they might come into West Germany, and you’d have them’."
Lanny thought he'd meet Fritz, Kurt's son, and try to see about getting him to turn. He sent a note via a courier who shouldn't attract attention and blend in, and Fritz - named Emil Friedrich after his two uncles - came to meet lanny at dinner. Lanny told him about meeting Emil. After dinner they spoke more freely in privacy of Lanny's room.
"Fritz reported that the Russians had put a Communist in control of his school, but they had not been able to replace all the teachers, and many were independent-minded men, doing what they could to preserve the old German tradition of academic freedom. They had to be careful, of course; they couldn’t say anything against communism without the certainty of being kicked out and arrested, but they could manage to make their point of view clear. The students were a bit more outspoken."
Fritz told him that the students were some old time patriots, some Nazi, some social democrats and some driven to red due to circumstances rather than propaganda, but even they were determined to not be with Russians. Lanny said that might not be easy. Fritz told him hed been reading John Stuart Mill, and Lanny said he wouldnt have that freedom much longer either. At present the students grouped themselves in housing so they shared with like-minded ones to avoid arguments and Fritz was sure nobody reported on others, but this too wouldn't be allowed long.
Lanny asked about his finances, and that brought up Kurt. Fritz was afraid he'd turned red, he spoke about Kurt having to compromise with Russians to support his large family, and Fritz was trying to get his degree so he could work.
Lanny spoke to him about his the U.S. civil war had often split families. He talked about Bess, about the son of Forrest Quadratt, and asked him what he'd do.
"‘I have already thought it out, Herr Budd. I believe in the free world, and I am going to take my stand in it, regardless of what it costs. I have seen Hitler’s fanaticism cost the lives of millions of Germans, not to mention the Jews. I know that Stalin’s fanaticism has cost the lives of millions of Russians, and of the peoples of the border states. I know he has millions of people in concentration camps and in his slave mines. I am not going to stand for that sort of thing, and if it is necessary to give my life to end it I am willing’."
Lanny said he was more fortunate in not having had to struggle thirty years in such dilemma, and said he was going to tell him something Fritz couldn't mention to anyone without Lanny's permission. Fritz gave his word, and Lanny told him about Kurt, the pretense, and the counterfeit currency operation. Fritz felt he could no longer take his money. Lanny said he couldn't let Kurt know he knew, and spoke about what was going to happen to Kurt. Fritz thought Kurt was mad.
Lanny broached the topic of Fritz pretending to be one of them so he could get information for American military government about the counterfeit currency operation, the plates and stocks and people. He explained the risks he'd undertaken while he was an agent, and said it was entirely Fritz's choice whether or not to undertake the job, but if he did he couldn't stop halfway. He gave him time to think, and said Fritz could return to accept it within the couple of days Lanny would be there; meanwhile he toĺd Monck about Fritz. Monck was experienced in running agents, Lanny had worked alone, and Monck spoke the same language as Fritz in more than the literal sense.
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Lanny went to meet the family of Seidl, bringing them food package of things they couldn't get these days. He said Truman wanted to know what German workers thought. Seidl talked to him about German workers' quandary.
"He reported that the Socialists in Germany were in the uncomfortable situation of being in no-man’s land between two warring groups: the Communists in the East and the great cartel-masters in the West, the owners of steel and chemicals and electrical industries. The Social Democrats were all life-and-death opponents of the Communists; but the rank and file of the party would waver, tempted by the promises and the skilled propaganda of the so-called Soviets.
"American propaganda, alas, was not so skilled, and every time the American government did something to help the cartel-masters the Communists shrieked and put it on the front page of their papers, and some Germans wobbled toward the East. But so long as President Truman was really working for a democratic Germany he could count upon the support of all true Socialists. That, alas, might mean the separation of Germany into two parts for a long time; it was hard indeed to believe that the Soviets would ever permit really free elections—at least until they had managed to raise up a new generation, trained so that it could be counted upon to vote Red."
Lanny talked with cartels, who knew he was son of Budd-Erling and talked freely, telling him the problem was workers voted socialist. Lanny talked to various people, workers, lift operator boy and newspaper vendor old woman, waiters and others.
"All agreed that the Americans had behaved well and the Reds had behaved badly; all hoped that the Americans would stay but were not sure the Reds would let them. The old woman compared the position of Germany with the wishbone of a chicken with two hands pulling it apart. Each of the pullers was thinking about his own fate and was not interested in the wishbone."
Fritz called to say he'd made up his mind to doit, and Lanny invited him to lunch. At lunch they talked of American politics. Upstairs in low tones they spoke of Fritz's next move. He'd written to Kurt saying he'd made up his mind Kurt was right, and would return to stay home. His fellow students had berated him, and his tears had made them call him a softie. The few covert nazis were happy to welcome him amongst their midst, since he was the son of the ‘Führermarsch’.
"Lanny had already talked the matter over with Morrison, who agreed that it would be better to have Fritz report to Monck. The youth might find out a lot of matters other than queer money. So Lanny gave the new pupil an account of this friend of German freedom."
Monck came, and proceeded to teach Fritz about the craft of an agent. Fritz was to work not only his fellow students but their parents and others who'd been nazis.
"Not only was there counterfeit money to be traced down, but the Nazis had huge stores of gold and jewels and other valuables which in the last days they had put away in hiding places. There were still many art works that had not been recovered—and so on through a list. The smallest clue might lead to a big discovery, and the wise agent would keep his eyes and ears open all the time."
Morrison told Lanny he was satisfied Guzmann had told everything he knew, and was put on a ship at Bremen, he'd chosen Guatemala because he didn't want to be cold. Lanny flew to Marseille, to see his mother on his way home. He flew to N.Y. after a couple of days, arriving on a Thursday, when they broadcast their program at Edgemere.
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Lanny stopped the taxi, it was a workers' neighbourhood, he rang the bell of the nearest house and introduced himself, and asked if he could hear the broadcast. The visitor was Professor James Alverson Phillips of Department of Sociology at Calthorpe University.
"What the professor was advocating was a spiritual change, but he said that the word spiritual had gone out of fashion, and he was trying to put it on a practical, common-sense basis. He said that the country was being launched on a campaign to generate suspicion of the Russians. He enumerated the agencies that were doing it and quoted some of the things they had said; he declared that was not the way to get peace but the way to get war, and war of the deadliest sort, that which had its basis in fanaticism.
"He said that the Russian people were launched on a colossal experiment in the economic field and had a right to try that experiment if they wanted to. This experiment had begun near the end of the First World War, and then the Allies—Britain, France, and the United States—had manifested the will to put down that Russian experiment and strangle it in the cradle. Winston Churchill had come to the Paris Peace Conference and used all his influence to persuade the Allies to engage in such a repressive campaign. That was where the Russian fear of the Allies had been generated; and only recently that same Winston Churchill had come all the way to Missouri to denounce the so-called ‘iron curtain’ and to revive all those Russian fears. So it was we who had the task of changing the psychological state and convincing the Russians that we were willing to live in a world where every nation was free to make its own social experiments and be guaranteed against attack by its neighbours."
Lanny arrived after the professor had driven off, he went to bed early on account of Laurel's condition and next day he was asked to come to Washington, and he took Laurel along. He asked her what she thought of the professor's talk.
"‘I thought the professor was a little vague. He didn’t get down to cases’.
"‘Did you notice that all the faults he had to find were with our own country, and that all the moral obligations were ours also?’
"‘Well, I suppose that is naturally the way with moral obligations. It is up to us to reform ourselves, and let the other fellow reform himself’.
"‘Yes, but suppose the other fellow doesn’t want to reform himself and has no idea of it? Suppose he is glad to be confirmed in the opinion that the faults are all ours?’"
Lanny, the reader would recall, had experience of Europe through two wars, the manipulations of allies by Germany talking of babies starving to death while they - German government - delayed and refused to pay reparations, but spent huge amounts of gold via agents on propaganda and on disrupting the French economy, and Germany supposedly disarmed had huge caches of arms and ammunition hidden in churches and monasteries. Allied forces as always been eager to go home to peaceful lives with families. So Lanny would find this situation all too familiar, but Laurel is the naive American with honest good faith in honesty of others.
Lanny told her about the people he'd met, and what they thought.
"He had talked to scores of people of all social groups, and everywhere a pall of fear was hanging over them. America was deserting them, or preparing to. America was disbanding its armies while the Soviets were keeping theirs and building them up. Stalin was going ahead as methodically, as irresistibly, as the movement of a glacier. He had all of Poland at his mercy, half of Germany and Austria, all of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria. He had solemnly promised to permit the setting up of democratic governments in all those lands; but now he was making his own definition of ‘democratic’, and what it meant was Communist dictation. They were all going to be turned into satellite states, with governments and armies controlled by Red commissars.
"Also, Stalin was going to bring about a Communist revolution in Greece and in the eastern provinces of Turkey. He had got hold of Azerbaijan and its oil; he had been slow to withdraw and had left his stooges there. He had got access to the Adriatic through Albania and would turn the Baltic into a Russian lake. He was going to get China and from there take Tibet and threaten India. He had got those warm-water ports, Dairen and Port Arthur, for which Russia had fought a war and been defeated by the Japanese. Everything that the old-time Tsars had tried to do and failed, Stalin was going to do with no more than a tap on the wrist from us; and in the meantime college professors would be talking over the radio, telling the American people to improve their morals and spiritualise their foreign policy.
"‘What are we going to do?’ demanded this expectant ‘mom’. ‘Let ourselves be turned into redbaiters?’
"‘Darling, I am tired of these Communist phrases, and I don’t intend to let myself be bluffed by them."
Lanny said he'd seen Stalin being given everything he asked for at Yalta, but he'd been making fools out of U.S. and British, and FDR, having realised it, said as much the last time Lanny met him.
"Vishinsky says that we are dangling the atomic bomb as a sword of Damocles over his head, and that is exactly what we are doing; if we didn’t have it and didn’t dangle it the Red armies would be moving across France today and showering London with a new stock of the V-2 rockets, which the top German scientists are now teaching the Reds to manufacture. It wouldn’t be six months more before Stalin would be in Madrid, sitting on the severed head of Franco and thumbing his nose at us’."
They talked more, and Laurel asked what about Emily Chattersworth's will, what would he do. Lanny said he'd known Emily all his life. He knew what she'd wanted.
"‘She would never accept the idea of Europe’s submitting to a Soviet dictatorship. That wasn’t her idea of peace, and she wouldn’t want us to be sheep led to the slaughter. I’m not calling for war; on the contrary, I think the only hope of preventing war is for us to rearm and do it quickly, to convince Stalin that he cannot take the rest of the world without war."
Laurel asked what he was going to do. He said they should become open forum.
"‘Whenever we get a speaker who takes the fellow-traveller line, get another speaker who takes the opposite line to answer him. For example, let’s get John Dewey to answer Philips; there’s another nice old man, but one who is clear-sighted and knows a fact when it jumps up and hits him on the head’."
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Lanny reported to Truman about German people, and about counterfeit currency operation without specific identities, and then asked if he could read to him a paper he'd prepared, as suggested to him, of quotes from Stalin. Truman asked why the Soviets hated America and what had Americans done to deserve it.
"‘What we have done, Mr Truman, is to be a bourgeois nation, the biggest and richest in the world. Our affairs are run by immensely wealthy capitalists who choose dummy legislators and tell them what to do. The capitalists are automatically driven by the forces of an expanding economy to reach out to every corner of the earth for raw materials and markets. We take these by purchase where possible, but where we encounter resistance we are ready to use force. By this means we reduce all colonial peoples to the status of peons and we keep them there. But now come the heroic Bolsheviks, the followers of the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist line, calling upon the awakening proletariat to arise and expropriate the expropriators. I don’t know whether you understand that jargon, Mr Truman, but you have to learn it, because that is what we have to face the balance of our lives’."
Truman found it hard to digest, and Lanny told him hed been talking to people in the know.
"Even before the war came to an end the Politburo held a meeting, with Stalin present, and threshed out the problems of their policy. There was some opposition, I am told, but Molotov and Malenkov carried the day, and the Bolshevik tempo, as they call it, was ordered to be resumed. What that means is the deadliest kind of war, open and secret, to be pushed on every front and by every device. It means that the whole force of the Communist machine in every country of the world is to be devoted to the spreading of hatred for America. .... You would be willing to die to teach men to love one another, and the Communists are willing to die in order to teach men to hate you. In the process they are willing to tell any lies, and they employ the most highly skilled psychologists to invent the lies which are most plausible and most harmful. It was Hitler who said that the bigger the lie the easier to get it believed; it was Mussolini who taught Hitler that maxim, and it was from the Bolsheviks that Mussolini learned it’."
So very reminiscent of the jihadists, ISIS, and others out to invade, loot, convert or kill, from few centuries ago till date.
Truman said they had to rearm, but there was no reason they couldn't have social progress as well.
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The two main parts of the Peace family - the four Budds and the three Pomeroy-Nielsons - visited Newcastle for thanksgiving, and later Laurel and Lanny stopped off at the Robin family home while Frances drove the rest back home. After a light supper there, Lanny accompanied Hansi on piano, and later Lanny and Laurel brought Hansi home. They sat talking.
Bess came in late and promptly attacked Lanny, relentlessly, from a position of a staunch communist that she'd become, where Soviets were equated with democracy, liberty and freedom while U.S. was warmongering capitalism.
Lanny was reluctant to respond, but she went on attacking, even to the extent of saying he disapproved of russian execution of traitors and spies because he'd been a traitor and a spy himself, and this horrified Laurel, but Bess didn't retract. Bess went on, until Hansi stopped it by saying Laurel needed to rest. Alone in their room, Laurel said Hansi and Bess needed to divorce.
Next day while they were driving home, they talked only about the one unhappy family out of the three they'd visited.
"Lanny noted a curious fact: they no longer agreed even about their language; with Bess it was always the Soviets and the Soviet Union, and to Hansi it was Russia and the Russians. Hansi insisted that the Soviets no longer had any power; in fact, for all practical purposes they had ceased to exist; it was Russia now, Holy Russia, the Russia of Tsarist imperialism; it was the bear that walked like a man. Now the bear had put on a Red costume and walked waving a Red flag with a hammer and sickle on it—but he still desired the territory of his neighbours and insisted on having warm-water ports all around Europe and Asia. He was a bear who no longer wielded a knout—no, he now had a torture chamber devised by modern scientists, with brilliant lights which the eyes could not escape, and concrete walls and floors so shaped that it was impossible to sit down or lie down without torment.
"Highly trained modern psychologists now supervised the most barbarous torturings, and each of the dictators had learned from the last and improved upon his art. Mussolini had learned from Lenin, Hitler had learned from Mussolini, and Stalin had learned from both of them. It was like a virus which increases in virulence every time it is transferred to a new culture medium. So Hansi had talked in the evening before Bess had arrived. Bess hadn’t heard him—but she must have heard him many times before."
Again, so very jihadist except for equipment and tactics, where primitive sort does well enough in torture and terrorising.
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Frances Barnes Budd and Scrubham Pomeroy-Nielson wanted to marry and go on working with the Peace program, and there was no stopping them. Irma sent her mother, who came and scolded everybody, and then wrote to Irma to send just enough so Frances wouldn't starve. The couple got married in Rick and Nina's rented home, had a weekend off for honeymoon and returned to live in a cottage they'd rented in the next village, back to work.
Lanny and Laurel had a daughter three days after Xmas. Lanny met Zoltan Kertezsi and they walked around, looking at paintings. Lanny suggested a better title for a modern work : 'Palette Before Cleaning, which Zoltan got published and Lanny was famous for a few hours. He attended the concert Hansi and Bess gave in NYC for a refugee relief benefit affair, which Lanny was quite sure was a communist front affair, after which they sat talking at a cafe.
"Lanny tried to discuss harmless subjects such as the new infant.
"But it just couldn’t last very long; Bess wouldn’t have it that way. It happened that at this time there was fighting in Azerbaijan. The Russians had at last evacuated, and the Iranian troops had marched in. Bess considered that an example of what happened when the Soviets let the anti-Soviets have their way; there was disorder and chaos. Lanny couldn’t help pointing out that Azerbaijan was the northern part of Iran and that the country was simply imposing order; but Bess insisted that wherever the Soviets were there was order without any fighting. Lanny was mean enough to mention that there was also oil; and so the oil was in the fire.
"It happened that the Atomic Energy Commission of United Nations had that day voted in favour of a project to provide for international control; the vote had been ten in favour and two abstaining—the two being the Soviet Union and Poland. That proved among other things that Poland was a stooge of the Communists—an offensive word that Lanny refrained from using; but Bess used it. It had happened that a couple of weeks earlier the General Assembly of the United Nations, meeting at Lake Success on Long Island, had adopted a resolution in favour of world disarmament, and the Soviets had forced the deletion from that resolution of a provision for a world census of armies. The significance of that seemed obvious to Lanny; the Soviet Union was retaining her armed forces while the United States was disbanding hers, and the Soviet Union didn’t propose to let the fact be demonstrated and published."
Laurel came home and would work from home, and nurse the baby. The speakers were questioned on anything vague.
"General Marshall had just come back from a visit to China, where he had tried to reconcile the warring factions and set up a truly democratic and representative government in that land, so long torn by civil war and foreign invasion. There were people who insisted that the Chinese Reds were not Communists in the Stalinist sense but were agrarian reformers and liberals. All right, if that was true, why were they unwilling to have a government of all classes set up, as the United States was doing in Japan .... "
There were similar questions about Stalin's behaviour regarding U.S..
"There came a letter from Bernhardt Monck, telling how the Reds were still looting their sector of Berlin, regardless of the fact that they had to feed the people; they were looting the peasants of the surrounding country and using the food for their army in Berlin."
Copy of Churchill starving India, except Churchill managed to kill millions of this starvation due to loot, and openly declared that this was of no consequence.
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Esther and Robbie were very unhappy about Bess, and so was Hansi. Lanny asked to meet him, and they met in NYC. They drove, and Hansi told Lanny he'd decided to become a communist because he couldn't live without Bess. He'd applied for membership, and they were suspicious, but he'd managed to convince Bess. He'd play in concerts for them. He was unhappy Lanny would disapprove, and Lanny hastened to reassure him, but knew it was end of another friendship. Lanny went home to tell Laurel, who was in tears.
"During the war when Stalin had of necessity accepted the aid of capitalist allies the rigidity of the party line had been relaxed; but within a month or two after the war’s ending this relaxation had been brought to an abrupt and painful end. All over the world there was ordered an immediate resumption of the class war—that is, war upon the allies who had been helping the Soviets to victory over Hitler’s so-called National Socialism. In all the Communist countries new purges were ordered of all those officials who had been so foolish as to believe in the temporary relaxation.
"The people of the United States had witnessed a curious phenomenon. The Communist party had a devoted secretary by the name of Earl Browder; and in an obscure Communist monthly in France there appeared an article by a man named Duclos, in which it was set forth that Browder had betrayed the workers and the cause of Marxist-Leninism. The article had been taken up and reprinted in the United States, and every Communist had instantly known that here was the voice of authority, here was the Kremlin speaking. Overnight ‘Browderism’ became ‘factional activity’, and Browder ‘a deserter to the side of the class enemy, American monopoly capitalism’. He was shoved out of the party and into the doghouse."
One day there was a personal letter for Lanny, with letters cut from printed material and glued on paper, saying "BESS IS COURIER FOR RUSS SPY". Normally they'd ignore it, but there were too many signs - her being busy with party work and disappearing. There was only one curious mistake, the N in the address had the diagonal stroke go left bottom to right top. Lanny discussed The lettet with Laurel and said he had to report Bess. Laurel said he should talk it over with Robbie, and Lanny consented.
This is another example of the author's abrahmic misogyny so deeply rooted he doesn't see it. When it's Bess, he promptly wants to report her to FBI, and expects Hoover would be fair. But when he saw Kurt spying in Paris, he saved his life at great cost to his own family, mostly to Marceline, while Kurt took charge of the household discipline after Beauty returned from Spain with him, so Marceline was an orphan with no one in her quarter. And yet Germany had been not only implacable enemy of France through history but Kurt himself had been indulging in activities damaging France while they were inclusive of false propaganda and disruption of French law and order; and he not only repeated it, but was indulging in it, against U.S., last time Lanny met him. Yet Lanny pleaded with him to think of him kindly, but with Bess he must report her and with Marceline he pretends he saved her life, rather than the fact that's completely opposite. Marceline risked her life to save Lanny's, and the author is an ungrateful wretch.
Lanny met Robbie, and he agreed, telling Lanny to ask Post to have no publicity unless Bess was guilty. They wouldn't tell Esther, meanwhile. Robbie told Lanny he was responsible for having started Bess on this road, and Lanny said he could argue Bess misunderstood.
Here's Lanny being not man enough to take responsibility.
Lanny walked over to the FBI building, and was looking around, wanting to be not seen by anyone who knew him. And so he saw Post get into the building with Hansi, and followed them into Post's office. He told Post why he was there, and said Hansi's secret would be safe. Laurel was happy. They'd have to be discreet meeting Hansi.
"Hansi had told his wife that he would break entirely with Lanny and Laurel, they being most dangerous persons to Bess and improper persons for any loyal Red to associate with."
Hansi had had a similar letter, and convinced himself after watching her and looking through her desk that he must report Bess.
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Professor Alston came for the program. He came to the house where Laurel was working, Lanny brought Rick, and they talked to him apart from the broadcast; he was very worried about Europe.
"He said that Europe had not been in such peril since the days of Tamerlane in the fourteenth century; or perhaps not since the fifth century when the Huns had got to France. He said that never before had there been such a trap set for the mind and spirit of humanity; that never before had there been such a sudden and frightful degeneration in a mass movement. He said the war-tormented and impoverished workers of Eastern Europe had been promised a heaven on earth and plunged into a hell of cruelty and deception. He said the bosses of the Kremlin were utterly unscrupulous men with no real belief in the ideals they professed; they talked internationalism but they trusted only Russians and were plundering all the other peoples whom they got in their power. They had no thought but to hold power and extend it, and now they believed they had the whole world at their mercy. They were all things to all men—Moslems to the Arabs, Buddhists to the East Indians, pacifists to the Quakers and the Peace Group."
Laurel argued that their lies could be fought with U.S. telling truth.
"‘But what is truth to the men in the Kremlin, Mrs Budd? I assure you they have taken over Hitler’s dictum: the bigger the lie the easier it is to get it believed. They are extremely clever in their lying; they have set the whole machinery of government at home and in all the conquered lands to repeating ingenious inventions. On the other hand, the whole tradition of our government is to leave the spreading of information to private enterprise. All our sources of information tell the public what the public likes to hear—because that is the way to get sales, and to get sales is the way to get advertising revenue’.
"‘Yes, Professor Alston, but that is just why we organised the Peace Foundation: to give the people those facts which they don’t get from the capitalist press’.
"‘But you are telling the people to disarm, and what I have to tell you is that the free people must arm’."
The four argued.
"‘Look at the Swiss’, said Rick. ‘They stand there in their mountain land, and every man in the country has a gun and knows how to shoot. They are armed to the teeth, but they say, “We intend our arms for defence. Let us alone, stay out of our country, and you have nothing to fear from our arms; but if you cross our borders, then you have plenty to fear’. The result of taking that attitude and making it plain to all the world has been that the Swiss lived through two world wars and were untouched’.
"‘That’s all right’, said Lanny. ‘The Swiss have their mountain fortress, and they manage by frugality and hard work to prosper there, but we are a huge country with an immensely long coast line. Are we going to say, “Let us alone and we don’t care what happens elsewhere?” What are we going to say about Canada and Mexico? Are we going to say that we don’t care what happens to the Panama Canal?’
"‘Let me carry on from there’, said Alston. ‘I have just learned from a high Army officer in Washington that the Reds are organising an army of half a million North Koreans. And now face this situation: We have withdrawn our armies from South Korea and have left the pathetic South Korean government a few weapons, just enough for defensive purposes, not for aggressive. The Russian workers are living on a subsistence wage, with prices so high that they have to work for a month to earn a pair of shoes; and meanwhile the Trans-Siberian railroad is crowded with trains carrying tanks, guns, ammunition, and oil to North Korea. Ships laden with supplies are coming by way of the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean, or perhaps through the Arctic Ocean north of Siberia—who knows where Russian ships go? It will take two years, maybe three, to train the North Korean peasant boys and indoctrinate them with the glorious idea of killing their landlords and moneylenders and setting up a free independent democratic republic in the whole of their native land’.
"‘Then some day in midsummer, when the ground is dry and everything is ready, border incidents will be provoked, and the Soviet radio will broadcast to the world that the evil South Korean capitalists have invaded the free workers’ and peasants’ republic of North Korea, and that the workers’ and peasants’ government is gallantly defending the integrity of its native land. It will take a month or two to conquer the whole country, and then it will take another two or three years to get ready for the next step, which is across the narrow strait to Japan. You understand, there are two or three hundred thousand Japanese who were war prisoners and have been indoctrinated with the hope of killing their landlords and capitalists and seizing the wealth of that country. I am convinced that the Soviets mean to take all Asia, perhaps before they take all Europe; and I ask you, at what stage are the American people going to wake up to that situation? Can you see American boys going cheerfully to Korea to die for what they call “yellow bellies?” Can you see an isolationist Congress cheerfully voting the billions of dollars it would take to save South Korea from the Reds?’
"‘What would you have us do?’ asked Laurel. ‘Send an army to South Korea now?’
"‘I would proceed to rearm our country, and then I would make it plain to the Reds that any further expansion of their territory would be resisted by the United Nations. I believe that with wise diplomacy we could persuade the free nations to back us up, and we could make our intentions so clear that even Mr Vishinsky would believe us’."
They agreed that the professor would speak for rearmament while Laurel would speak for boosting budget of Voice Of America.
"They had a lively time on the programme. This man who had inside information scared his large audience by telling them he had reason to believe that the Soviets, with the German scientists they had pressed into their service and with the secrets they had managed to steal from the Western world, were now making rapid progress in the field of atomic fission.
Professor Alston said they'd have atomic weapons in two to three years, not ten to twenty as most people thought.
"‘We have no means of knowing how fast they can make the bomb, but let us assume that at the end of five or six years they have a hundred bombs while we have a thousand. They have other great advantages over us. They have a very active party in our country while we have no party in their country. We consequently know very little about them, while they know almost everything about us; they subscribe to our newspapers, illustrated magazines, and technical journals, which publish a kind of information they keep hidden. They have flooded our country with spies while we have very few, if any, in their country. More important yet, we have a conscience, while they have none. Therefore we have to wait for them to make the first attack. They make a minute scientific study of our whole set up and decide exactly where to place their hundred atomic bombs so as to paralyse us. You understand that bombs can be brought in by merchant ships or submarines. They can be deposited in harbours where they are most deadly; or a hundred heavy bombers can set out one night from bases in northern Russia and head across the North Pole to New York, Washington, Detroit, Chicago, Seattle; also, of course, Hanford, Washington, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee’.
"It is the Soviets who have these masses of men and can produce these primitive weapons, and how can we get to Europe to fight them if the great ports have been ruined with atomic bombs? The victory will be to the primitive mass army that travels on foot and lives off the land it conquers. In that way the Reds will seize the whole of Europe and Asia, and we shall have no way to eject them. They will dig underground, and civilisation will be rebuilt in caves and tunnels—meaning by “civilisation” the ability to build aeroplanes and bombs and to produce poison gases and deadly bacteria. Such a war might well last for a century, indeed it might last forever, becoming the permanent state of life, because men will have reached such a low level morally that it would be impossible to trust one another or even to consider such an idea’.
"Never in the history of the Peace Programme had such a flood of letters poured in as after that broadcast. In one of the early sacks was a letter addressed to Mr and Mrs Lanny Budd, marked ‘Personal’. It was brief and to the point. It read: ‘This is the limit. I am through with you. Bess’. And underneath were three more words in a German-style handwriting: ‘I agree. Hansi’."
Laurel and Lanny were delighted with the last and could imagine the twinkle in Hansi's eyes.
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Lanny was invited at a dinner hosted for Jan Masaryk who was visiting, at the penthouse apartment on Park Avenue, of a client of Lanny's.
"Catch him off guard, and you saw a face of the profoundest melancholy, even grief. His young country was in deadly danger, and he had come to plead for its life. The Reds had it; and at Yalta they had made the promise that they would leave it in democratic liberty, it would be a republic and the people would rule. But this Yalta promise meant no more than the other Yalta promises, all of which were being broken systematically, by the tested technique of encroachment and terror. In Czechoslovakia there were seven political parties, and the bloc supporting Beneš and Masaryk had a majority, but the Communists would not leave it that way. The propaganda was furious, and secret arrests and torture were frequent. The only hope for the young nation lay in publicity, in appeal to the free world.
"Jan Masaryk was in the free world and he might have stayed; he would have been welcomed and given asylum in America. But he was going back; he was going back quietly, without any fuss, any histrionics. All he said was, ‘I have to go, of course’. He was going as a sacrifice, a demonstration to the whole world; he was known to the diplomats and the newspapermen, and what happened to him could not be concealed. He didn’t say anything about it at the dinner party, but afterward, going down in the elevator, Lanny asked him how long he thought the present situation could endure. He answered, ‘Not very long, Mr Budd. When you hear of my death you will know that I was murdered, and you will know the end has come’.
"Lanny never forgot those words, and they had something to do with his constantly increasing determination to oppose the Stalin dictatorship. From the time he spoke those words Jan Masaryk had little more than a year to live."
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Here the author writes about Lanny and Laurel having visited and travelled through Russia and loved the good, kind, honest people that Russians were, but now The Budds had to decide - and what follows is quite horrible, and moreover not quite true, a description of how Russians were turned into robots without eyes or ears and did what they were told. Not true, as has been known since, but in case of the Budds and the author, it's strange that this is the attitude about Russians while his penchant for loving Germans, the land of Germany and even the most treacherous Nazi like Kurt for that matter, is followed by this blind shutting out his heart for Russians. Fact is Germany was, even now is, far more faithful in loyalty to nazism - after all why wouldnt they be, since it was about being told that Germans were superior to all others, and deserved to rule, and finish off all others? - while Russians simply had to suffer a totalitarian regime as best as they could; some did have faith in the doctrine, and those in power were corrupted thereby, but in comparison to Germany majority stayed much saner and honest.
One has to question if it is not simply a racism that has the author and his protagonist characters go running after and loving the most treacherous Germans while writing off Russians, and disparaging India while singing paens for Chinese who are most, not least, in racism.
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Monck wrote about VOA, still called R.I.A.S., and the R.I.A.S. invited Lanny to Washington. Lanny drove with Rick and when he met the official they talked of R.I.A.S., and invited Lanny to work for it in consultation capacity. They offered a moderate salary, but Lanny said the taxes would cause him financial loss and they could instead increase their budget.
He talked it over with Laurel, who was afraid, but he said "Masaryk went!", and that settled it. Peace program was doing well with the staff including Frances and Scrubbie, Gerald De Groot and now the girl his mother had picked for him, and another chap Rick had found who helped them all. So Lanny flew via northern route, and met the young few in Berlin working for Rundfunk im Amerikanische Sector.
"America was spending tens of thousands where it should have been spending hundreds of millions to make its purposes understood by the peoples of the outside world. How much would it be worth to the American people to keep the Soviets from plunging into a third world war? If war were to come, how much would it be worth to the American people to have the Germans on the side of the free world?"
R.I.A.S. could only respond with facts to counter the red propaganda.
"They gathered information about what was going on in the free world, and especially in the American part of that world. They varied the programmes with music and humour, but mostly they gave just plain news. They were forbidden to answer the Soviets directly; they were permitted only to give facts and more facts.
"Give the German people the information that had been denied them for fourteen years, ever since Adolf Hitler had seized power. ... New discoveries in science, medicine, and hygiene; new achievements in the arts, in music, in poetry and fiction; new developments in politics, in the processes of democracy; and, above all, freedom, the very idea of freedom, of being able to attend public gatherings of unlimited size and hear discussions by speakers of opposing points of view, and even to ask questions of the speakers—the open-forum technique. R.I.A.S. was telling the Germans about this development, the American town meeting expanded to a colossal scale and carried on under the title of ‘Town Meeting of the Air’.
"There was to be a university of the air, Funk-Universitat. All those ideas, theories, and beliefs which the Reds were banning from East Germany, forbidding in its schools, and tearing out of its libraries were here fed to German students who met in their own rooms at night and gathered close to the radio so as to keep the tone low. One of the policies of R.I.A.S. was never to announce itself or to reveal itself by characteristic phrases, slogans, or musical themes. Everybody would know what it was by the content, and it might be heard in whispers, with the ear only an inch or two from the source of the sounds."
Lanny joined in, taking a new name, "Herr Frõhlich; he told them that he was an old friend of Germany, one who had admired and loved the German people since boyhood. He told stories about the Nazi regime and those monstrous figures who had become the symbol of Germany to the outside world. Many Germans had a tendency to look back upon this regime with yearning. ‘We had things better under Hitler’, they would say. Lanny would give them details of the plunderings and the murders done by those Nazi ‘old companions’."
He talked about the art treasures plundered and hidden by nazis, promising reward for information.
"As it was, the treasures were being smuggled out to Spain or South America, where the Nazi bigwigs who had escaped would spend the proceeds on their mistresses and their estates."
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Lanny met Monck a week later when Monck returned to Berlin.
"An American Army officer of Polish descent had got stirred up on the subject of the so-called Katyn massacres and had got permission to work on the problem. When Hitler began his attack on Poland in September of 1939 he had seized the western half of the country, and there had evidently been some kind of deal between him and Stalin, for Stalin had moved into the eastern half without opposition. The Polish armies had surrendered, and the officers had been sorted out from the common soldiers and placed in three immense concentration camps, Katyn, Ostashkov, and Starobielsk.
"There were fourteen or fifteen thousand of them, and in April, 1940, all communications from the prisoners in these camps ceased. The Polish government-in-exile, which was in London, was insistent in demanding information about these missing prisoners and sent something like fifty notes on the subject to the Russian government. The matter was taken up orally with Vishinsky and other Soviet officials by both Polish and British diplomats; some Soviet spokesmen, including Molotov and Stalin, made verbal statements—and all their replies were lacking in frankness. The mystery remained.
"Almost two years later, when Hitler began his attack on Russia, his armies passed through this Russian-annexed territory and in a heavy forest known as Katyn, west of Smolensk, the Germans discovered a mass grave containing some forty-five hundred closely packed bodies of Polish officers in uniform. The Germans of course were glad to make propaganda against the Russians, and Dr. Goebbels’ ministry called for a world investigation of these mass killings. An international commission was invited, and others came, including American war prisoners brought by the Germans and representatives of Polish organisations brought from Katyn. The fact that the Nazis brought these charges tended to discredit them before the court of world opinion. The Nazis themselves had committed so many massacres that it was generally believed they had committed this one.
"But now the truth was being dug out, Monck reported. The Polish-American officer had been interviewing witnesses and getting their depositions. He couldn’t go into Poland, but there were plenty of refugee Poles in West Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Monck said there could no longer be the slightest doubt that it was a Soviet crime, and sooner or later this would be proved to the world. The burial had taken place in April, 1940, as was proved by newspapers which were buried with the Polish officers. The bodies had been so closely packed and the papers so closely pressed that it was impossible to have put them in later as a plant. Moreover, the heavy winter uniforms, which might have been worn in April, would certainly not have been worn in July when the German armies reached the place.
"When the Germans first made the discovery known to the world the Kremlin set up the claim that the Polish officers had been employed on road work at the time of the German invasion and had been abandoned by the retreating Russian forces. It was important to note that they had set up this claim only after the bodies had been discovered; never before had it even been suggested that the missing men had fallen into the hands of the Germans. Stalin’s motives in the matter were obvious; he had wanted to keep the common soldiers to make them into slave labourers, but he did not want the aristocratic and educated classes to survive. He meant to take over the country and render it incapable of revolt, or even of independent thinking. He meant to do this with all the Central European countries and would carry out the programme without the slightest consideration for the rights of any human being."
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Lanny met Fritz who was unhappy about his father. Lanny said Soviets must have a spy in Kurt's organisation, and at the right time they'd publicise Kurt as a ringleader of secret Nazi organisation, and execute him one way or another. Lanny talked to him about communism in theory and in action, as it had been seen since the revolution. Fritz asked about U.S. and imperialism. Lanny admitted that it was so in past, but since democracy by ballot had taken root and been policy and applied to lands taken control of by U.S..
Fritz asked how Lanny would tell Kurt and Lanny said it was no use.
"‘Your father doesn’t believe in the people, in either their right or their ability to control the state. Your father belongs to a superior caste which knows best what is good for the people, and it is the duty of the people to obey him—or else they have to be forced’."
Fritz said Kurt had explained to him that Fritz must be convincingly red on the outside but not give up the Nazi creed within; Lanny told him of 'political radishes' as whites pretending to be red were termed in early days of Russian revolution, and Fritz said being red outside and brown within must make him a rotten apple. Lanny said the two creeds weren't that different, and Fritz said Kurt had told him that too, saying that the difference was nazis were rule by the best and reds that by the worst. Lanny asked if Kurt mentioned him, he didn't, and Lanny cautioned him to never let Kurt know he'd met Lanny.
Monck met Lanny and said he needed Lanny's help, there was a German girl who came to his office asking for work, who was a refugee from Wendefurth, who might be older than she admitted. Lanny saw the point, she could've been a spy sent by Himmler-money people. They arranged so Lanny would come across them at dinner and be introduced as an old friend Monck hadn't seen for years. They did that, and Monck left after dinner, leaving Lanny to assess her. Anna Sudden told a story about poverty, about her brothers forced into SS and killed, her father shot dead after being enforced into army despite his tuberculosis and her mother raped and killed by invading reds. She'd hidden and escaped. Lanny told Monck next morning that he wasn't sure if she was a spy, but if so she was excellent at acting. Between them they persuaded Morrison to hire her to spy in Wendefurth.
A couple of days later Monck called Lanny at R.I.A.S. and talking cryptically informed him that Kurt was in town, and Lanny might catch him at lunch, putting in action the plan they'd spoken of; it was an idea Lanny had about scaring the counterfeiters. Lanny strolled through the bombed city with people living in half wrecked buildings. Lanny met Kurt, and spoke to him despite the other being cold and hostile. Lanny pointed out that Soviets must know all about him, must be spying on him, and were certain to eventually deal with him as an enemy. Kurt paid his bill and left with his food untouched. Monck called to say Anna had got in.
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"Berlin was a great city caught in a fantastic plight. It was half in ruins, especially the important, the ‘downtown’, sections, in which business and industry were housed. More than three million people still lived in its 340 square miles, and they had to have food every day and work when possible. They lived as best they could in the ruins, and hundreds of new people came daily to join them in their discomfort.
"The new arrivals came from countries to the east, many of them walking with no more possessions than they could carry on their backs or their heads. The boundaries of the metropolis measured 144 miles, and all the surrounding territory was Russian. There was no way to keep people from sneaking in, and to send them back to the Reds meant death or imprisonment worse than death. Some could be sent into West Germany, but they would have to pass through Soviet-held territory, so only as many could be sent as could be flown. They were much less than welcome in West Germany, which already had seven million refugees to take care of. So the American Army was kept busy building barracks, and American ships were busy bringing food from home—such were the penalties a civilised country paid for having won a war.
"The four sectors of the city were ruled by four different armies. They were supposed to have one civilian government, elected by the population. This population was Socialist and had elected a Social-Democratic mayor, Ernst Reuter; but the four military administrations had squabbled over him—the Reds wouldn’t permit him to serve because he was anti-Soviet. They had compromised upon his deputy, and so the once-proud capital of imperial Germany had a woman mayor, Luise Schröder.
"The city had been not merely the political but the intellectual and cultural capital of Germany. The Soviets fully intended to take possession of it all; they saw themselves as a Red wave rolling over that populous and important island. They had planned it from a long way back, and an essential part of the plan was to take possession of the minds of the population.
"When their troops had swept into the city one of the places they had seized was the splendid, undamaged building of Radio Berlin. Thus they came into possession of a great library of books, files of clippings, and a stock of recorded music; also a highly trained staff who knew Germany and the Germans and could be kept at work and told what to do. When the division of the city was agreed upon, this radio station was in the British sector, but the Russians held on to it, refusing to share control with their polite allies. They continued to hold on to it even after they had put other stations on the air at Potsdam, Leipzig, and Dresden."
General Clay had forbidden R.I.A.S. to say anything that might displease the Soviets, so the young staff was restricted to factual news and music.
Lanny met Boris Shub, a Russian speaking soldier of American army who'd interrogated Russian speaking prisoners, whom Lanny knew since when he'd interrogated German prisoners. Boris had stories to tell about how Soviets didn't want their people back after having been prisoners, or took them only to brand them traitor and treat them abominably, including women.
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Lanny flew back via northern route this time, stopping to see Alfy and exchanging political news apart from family. He visited Irma and Ceddy for lunch in their townhouse in London to report that Frances was doing well, and Ceddy talked politics.
On the way home he met David Krichevsky who was working with Signal Corps, had been born in Russia and was assigned to the two cables that ran from Berlin to the western sector. He had stories to tell about the Americans guarding the seven repeater stations along the way. They weren't allowed to lock even the bathrooms and were broken into if they did, and were often kidnapped and never heard of again.
"‘They are never going to rest, Mr Budd, until they’ve shut off those cables. In fact I don’t think they’ll rest until they have driven us out of Berlin’.
"‘What would we do if they were to shut off the roads as well as the cables? ‘Do we have the right of access to Berlin in the agreements we made with them’?
"Lanny didn’t know about that. He said, ‘We have a law that the ownership of land carries with it the right of access to it. But of course the Reds may say they have different laws from what we have. Anyhow, I don’t think we’ll let ourselves be driven out without a fight, and I’m sure we won’t let our people be starved there’."
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Lanny visited the Treasury building where Turner brought several sections heads to hear his report on Germany and Soviets. Later he asked if Lanny had time, and took him to a room with microfilm reading apparatus set up.
"The strips were labelled ‘Himmler money—Sachsenhausen’. Turner explained that it was a confidential report by Scotland Yard, giving the results of a study of material in the records of the Nazi S.D., the secret police of the Hitler regime; also from interviewing prisoners of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp who had worked in the enterprise of manufacturing British money. The report filled some thirty pages, and it took Lanny a couple of hours to read it carefully and make notes.
"With German foresight and thoroughness the whole country had been searched for expert engravers, printers, and technicians of every sort having to do with the manufacture of paper money. Only Jews had been chosen, the evident intention being to exterminate them when the job was done and thus to bury forever the truth about the enterprise.
"These unfortunate experts were not invited, nor were they hired at high salaries; they were arrested and sentenced to the Sachsenhausen camp, north of Berlin. Once inside they were assigned to Block 19, a special enclosure carefully fenced off and kept from all communication with the rest of the place. Compared with the other prisoners they were well treated; there was no torture, they had good food and did not suffer from cold. They were under the charge of the S.S., the Schutzstaffel troopers, who treated them politely and even made friends; they got up a drama, in which some of the S.S. took part, and you might have seen the S.S. commander taking part in table-tennis games. But they were never permitted to speak to anyone from outside or to communicate or receive communications. When one became hopelessly ill with T.B., he was taken outside, shot, and burned in the crematorium; later on in the war, some of those brought in were wounded and crippled men, but all were required to work and were held responsible for doing perfect work. There was only one penalty and one kind of punishment—death.
"‘Sonderkommando Himmler’ was the name of this group. It was continually increased in size, until at the end of the war there were a hundred and forty technicians working. They manufactured not merely paper money, but every kind of forged paper that could be of use in the German struggle: stamps, stamped envelopes, war bonds of Tito-Broz, identity cards for American and British airmen, passes for Russian police units of the N.K.V.D., identity cards for spies in Algiers, Russian and Swiss passports, United States certificates of nationality, Red Cross notepaper, passport stamps for all the European states, rubber stamps for all diplomatic offices, reports on legations from foreign agents, and so on without end. In command of the enterprise was Heydrick, chief of the Security Police, and when he was assassinated in May, 1942, Ernst Kaltenbrunner took his place. R.H.S.A. were the initials of the enterprise, meaning Reichs Headquarters of the Security Amt, or Bureau.
"Expert engravers made the plates. The handmade paper was manufactured outside and came in sheets of four. There were four Monopol printing machines; five-, ten-, twenty-, and fifty-pound notes were made. When the printing and drying were done, the sheets were not cut but torn with rulers. This tearing was done in the Reisserei, and then the notes were taken to the Sortierei, where experts with electrical apparatus studied each note, and they were held responsible for this delicate task. First-class product went to the German legations in foreign countries; second-class product went to secret agents; the third was reserved until later, to be used in Britain after Germany had conquered that country.
"Several of the notes were pinned together, that being the British practice. If tiny faults were observed in the notes care was taken to put the pins through those faults. One corner was religiously torn off because that was the way the British did. There were processes to soil some of the notes so that they wouldn’t look too new. Careful records were kept of everything, and these showed that a total of 134,609,945 British pounds was printed. The records showed also that in the spring of 1944 they had begun the manufacture of United States notes made by a phototype printing process. In all, they tried two hundred and twenty experiments before they got this to their satisfaction, and by that time the war was coming to an end—and not in the way they had planned.
"When the invading armies showed signs of bursting through, the whole Sonderkommando Himmler was loaded into a caravan and transported to the concentration camp at Mauthausen, which is on the Danube River. They thought that was safe; but presently Patton’s armies were approaching there, so they fled to the little village of Redel-Zipp. They had barely got their machines set up and ready to start work again when the mechanised raiders were reported nearby, so everything split up in confusion. The machines were taken out and dumped into a lake; the bales of money disappeared in this direction and that. The hundred and forty Jewish technicians were loaded into trucks and started on what they knew was to be their last journey.
"But as it happened two made their escape, and the others started arguing and pleading with their guards. Since two had escaped the secret was out, and what was the good of killing the rest? The Americans were coming and they didn’t approve of wholesale killing of innocent people; it might well be that they would hang all the S.S. men who did the murders. Moreover, there was money involved, and not all of it counterfeit. There had been genuine American and British money used in making imitations and comparing the finished product. The experts had managed to hide a lot of this; one man had a bundle of it wound up in a ball of string. Why shouldn’t the guards share in this and scatter to their homes? This was the way the story ended, and this was how it came about that British agents had been able to locate both Jewish workers and S.S. guards and get the detailed stories for their official report.
"The most curious thing in the report, at least from the viewpoint of Lanny Budd, was the effort the Germans had made to prepare against exposure of this nefarious enterprise. The office of the Herr Doktor, Lanny’s old friend Jüppchen Goebbels, issued a manifesto charging the Allies with the very crime his own gang was committing. In December, 1942, at the time of the American and British invasion of North Africa, the Nazi propaganda bureau gave out a story headlined, ‘Algiers Flooded by Forged Banknotes’. The story first appeared in a Rome paper, to the effect that the British had brought forged Algerian banknotes with the expeditionary force; the Bank of England had printed them and high officials of the government had issued them to British soldiers. Five-franc notes, all new in packets, labelled ‘Emis en France, série 1944’.
"Lanny had heard these reports in North Africa and had wondered if they could be true. Now he called Turner’s attention to the matter, and Turner said, ‘It was a regular Nazi technique, and the Soviets have taken it over. Any time they give out reports that Americans have been violating the laws of war, using poison gas, germ warfare, or what have you, you may be sure the Soviets are doing it or getting ready to do it’."
Lanny was invited at a dinner hosted for Jan Masaryk who was visiting, at the penthouse apartment on Park Avenue, of a client of Lanny's.
"Catch him off guard, and you saw a face of the profoundest melancholy, even grief. His young country was in deadly danger, and he had come to plead for its life. The Reds had it; and at Yalta they had made the promise that they would leave it in democratic liberty, it would be a republic and the people would rule. But this Yalta promise meant no more than the other Yalta promises, all of which were being broken systematically, by the tested technique of encroachment and terror. In Czechoslovakia there were seven political parties, and the bloc supporting Beneš and Masaryk had a majority, but the Communists would not leave it that way. The propaganda was furious, and secret arrests and torture were frequent. The only hope for the young nation lay in publicity, in appeal to the free world.
"Jan Masaryk was in the free world and he might have stayed; he would have been welcomed and given asylum in America. But he was going back; he was going back quietly, without any fuss, any histrionics. All he said was, ‘I have to go, of course’. He was going as a sacrifice, a demonstration to the whole world; he was known to the diplomats and the newspapermen, and what happened to him could not be concealed. He didn’t say anything about it at the dinner party, but afterward, going down in the elevator, Lanny asked him how long he thought the present situation could endure. He answered, ‘Not very long, Mr Budd. When you hear of my death you will know that I was murdered, and you will know the end has come’.
"Lanny never forgot those words, and they had something to do with his constantly increasing determination to oppose the Stalin dictatorship. From the time he spoke those words Jan Masaryk had little more than a year to live."
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Here the author writes about Lanny and Laurel having visited and travelled through Russia and loved the good, kind, honest people that Russians were, but now The Budds had to decide - and what follows is quite horrible, and moreover not quite true, a description of how Russians were turned into robots without eyes or ears and did what they were told. Not true, as has been known since, but in case of the Budds and the author, it's strange that this is the attitude about Russians while his penchant for loving Germans, the land of Germany and even the most treacherous Nazi like Kurt for that matter, is followed by this blind shutting out his heart for Russians. Fact is Germany was, even now is, far more faithful in loyalty to nazism - after all why wouldnt they be, since it was about being told that Germans were superior to all others, and deserved to rule, and finish off all others? - while Russians simply had to suffer a totalitarian regime as best as they could; some did have faith in the doctrine, and those in power were corrupted thereby, but in comparison to Germany majority stayed much saner and honest.
One has to question if it is not simply a racism that has the author and his protagonist characters go running after and loving the most treacherous Germans while writing off Russians, and disparaging India while singing paens for Chinese who are most, not least, in racism.
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Monck wrote about VOA, still called R.I.A.S., and the R.I.A.S. invited Lanny to Washington. Lanny drove with Rick and when he met the official they talked of R.I.A.S., and invited Lanny to work for it in consultation capacity. They offered a moderate salary, but Lanny said the taxes would cause him financial loss and they could instead increase their budget.
He talked it over with Laurel, who was afraid, but he said "Masaryk went!", and that settled it. Peace program was doing well with the staff including Frances and Scrubbie, Gerald De Groot and now the girl his mother had picked for him, and another chap Rick had found who helped them all. So Lanny flew via northern route, and met the young few in Berlin working for Rundfunk im Amerikanische Sector.
"America was spending tens of thousands where it should have been spending hundreds of millions to make its purposes understood by the peoples of the outside world. How much would it be worth to the American people to keep the Soviets from plunging into a third world war? If war were to come, how much would it be worth to the American people to have the Germans on the side of the free world?"
R.I.A.S. could only respond with facts to counter the red propaganda.
"They gathered information about what was going on in the free world, and especially in the American part of that world. They varied the programmes with music and humour, but mostly they gave just plain news. They were forbidden to answer the Soviets directly; they were permitted only to give facts and more facts.
"Give the German people the information that had been denied them for fourteen years, ever since Adolf Hitler had seized power. ... New discoveries in science, medicine, and hygiene; new achievements in the arts, in music, in poetry and fiction; new developments in politics, in the processes of democracy; and, above all, freedom, the very idea of freedom, of being able to attend public gatherings of unlimited size and hear discussions by speakers of opposing points of view, and even to ask questions of the speakers—the open-forum technique. R.I.A.S. was telling the Germans about this development, the American town meeting expanded to a colossal scale and carried on under the title of ‘Town Meeting of the Air’.
"There was to be a university of the air, Funk-Universitat. All those ideas, theories, and beliefs which the Reds were banning from East Germany, forbidding in its schools, and tearing out of its libraries were here fed to German students who met in their own rooms at night and gathered close to the radio so as to keep the tone low. One of the policies of R.I.A.S. was never to announce itself or to reveal itself by characteristic phrases, slogans, or musical themes. Everybody would know what it was by the content, and it might be heard in whispers, with the ear only an inch or two from the source of the sounds."
Lanny joined in, taking a new name, "Herr Frõhlich; he told them that he was an old friend of Germany, one who had admired and loved the German people since boyhood. He told stories about the Nazi regime and those monstrous figures who had become the symbol of Germany to the outside world. Many Germans had a tendency to look back upon this regime with yearning. ‘We had things better under Hitler’, they would say. Lanny would give them details of the plunderings and the murders done by those Nazi ‘old companions’."
He talked about the art treasures plundered and hidden by nazis, promising reward for information.
"As it was, the treasures were being smuggled out to Spain or South America, where the Nazi bigwigs who had escaped would spend the proceeds on their mistresses and their estates."
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Lanny met Monck a week later when Monck returned to Berlin.
"An American Army officer of Polish descent had got stirred up on the subject of the so-called Katyn massacres and had got permission to work on the problem. When Hitler began his attack on Poland in September of 1939 he had seized the western half of the country, and there had evidently been some kind of deal between him and Stalin, for Stalin had moved into the eastern half without opposition. The Polish armies had surrendered, and the officers had been sorted out from the common soldiers and placed in three immense concentration camps, Katyn, Ostashkov, and Starobielsk.
"There were fourteen or fifteen thousand of them, and in April, 1940, all communications from the prisoners in these camps ceased. The Polish government-in-exile, which was in London, was insistent in demanding information about these missing prisoners and sent something like fifty notes on the subject to the Russian government. The matter was taken up orally with Vishinsky and other Soviet officials by both Polish and British diplomats; some Soviet spokesmen, including Molotov and Stalin, made verbal statements—and all their replies were lacking in frankness. The mystery remained.
"Almost two years later, when Hitler began his attack on Russia, his armies passed through this Russian-annexed territory and in a heavy forest known as Katyn, west of Smolensk, the Germans discovered a mass grave containing some forty-five hundred closely packed bodies of Polish officers in uniform. The Germans of course were glad to make propaganda against the Russians, and Dr. Goebbels’ ministry called for a world investigation of these mass killings. An international commission was invited, and others came, including American war prisoners brought by the Germans and representatives of Polish organisations brought from Katyn. The fact that the Nazis brought these charges tended to discredit them before the court of world opinion. The Nazis themselves had committed so many massacres that it was generally believed they had committed this one.
"But now the truth was being dug out, Monck reported. The Polish-American officer had been interviewing witnesses and getting their depositions. He couldn’t go into Poland, but there were plenty of refugee Poles in West Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Monck said there could no longer be the slightest doubt that it was a Soviet crime, and sooner or later this would be proved to the world. The burial had taken place in April, 1940, as was proved by newspapers which were buried with the Polish officers. The bodies had been so closely packed and the papers so closely pressed that it was impossible to have put them in later as a plant. Moreover, the heavy winter uniforms, which might have been worn in April, would certainly not have been worn in July when the German armies reached the place.
"When the Germans first made the discovery known to the world the Kremlin set up the claim that the Polish officers had been employed on road work at the time of the German invasion and had been abandoned by the retreating Russian forces. It was important to note that they had set up this claim only after the bodies had been discovered; never before had it even been suggested that the missing men had fallen into the hands of the Germans. Stalin’s motives in the matter were obvious; he had wanted to keep the common soldiers to make them into slave labourers, but he did not want the aristocratic and educated classes to survive. He meant to take over the country and render it incapable of revolt, or even of independent thinking. He meant to do this with all the Central European countries and would carry out the programme without the slightest consideration for the rights of any human being."
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Lanny met Fritz who was unhappy about his father. Lanny said Soviets must have a spy in Kurt's organisation, and at the right time they'd publicise Kurt as a ringleader of secret Nazi organisation, and execute him one way or another. Lanny talked to him about communism in theory and in action, as it had been seen since the revolution. Fritz asked about U.S. and imperialism. Lanny admitted that it was so in past, but since democracy by ballot had taken root and been policy and applied to lands taken control of by U.S..
Fritz asked how Lanny would tell Kurt and Lanny said it was no use.
"‘Your father doesn’t believe in the people, in either their right or their ability to control the state. Your father belongs to a superior caste which knows best what is good for the people, and it is the duty of the people to obey him—or else they have to be forced’."
Fritz said Kurt had explained to him that Fritz must be convincingly red on the outside but not give up the Nazi creed within; Lanny told him of 'political radishes' as whites pretending to be red were termed in early days of Russian revolution, and Fritz said being red outside and brown within must make him a rotten apple. Lanny said the two creeds weren't that different, and Fritz said Kurt had told him that too, saying that the difference was nazis were rule by the best and reds that by the worst. Lanny asked if Kurt mentioned him, he didn't, and Lanny cautioned him to never let Kurt know he'd met Lanny.
Monck met Lanny and said he needed Lanny's help, there was a German girl who came to his office asking for work, who was a refugee from Wendefurth, who might be older than she admitted. Lanny saw the point, she could've been a spy sent by Himmler-money people. They arranged so Lanny would come across them at dinner and be introduced as an old friend Monck hadn't seen for years. They did that, and Monck left after dinner, leaving Lanny to assess her. Anna Sudden told a story about poverty, about her brothers forced into SS and killed, her father shot dead after being enforced into army despite his tuberculosis and her mother raped and killed by invading reds. She'd hidden and escaped. Lanny told Monck next morning that he wasn't sure if she was a spy, but if so she was excellent at acting. Between them they persuaded Morrison to hire her to spy in Wendefurth.
A couple of days later Monck called Lanny at R.I.A.S. and talking cryptically informed him that Kurt was in town, and Lanny might catch him at lunch, putting in action the plan they'd spoken of; it was an idea Lanny had about scaring the counterfeiters. Lanny strolled through the bombed city with people living in half wrecked buildings. Lanny met Kurt, and spoke to him despite the other being cold and hostile. Lanny pointed out that Soviets must know all about him, must be spying on him, and were certain to eventually deal with him as an enemy. Kurt paid his bill and left with his food untouched. Monck called to say Anna had got in.
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"Berlin was a great city caught in a fantastic plight. It was half in ruins, especially the important, the ‘downtown’, sections, in which business and industry were housed. More than three million people still lived in its 340 square miles, and they had to have food every day and work when possible. They lived as best they could in the ruins, and hundreds of new people came daily to join them in their discomfort.
"The new arrivals came from countries to the east, many of them walking with no more possessions than they could carry on their backs or their heads. The boundaries of the metropolis measured 144 miles, and all the surrounding territory was Russian. There was no way to keep people from sneaking in, and to send them back to the Reds meant death or imprisonment worse than death. Some could be sent into West Germany, but they would have to pass through Soviet-held territory, so only as many could be sent as could be flown. They were much less than welcome in West Germany, which already had seven million refugees to take care of. So the American Army was kept busy building barracks, and American ships were busy bringing food from home—such were the penalties a civilised country paid for having won a war.
"The four sectors of the city were ruled by four different armies. They were supposed to have one civilian government, elected by the population. This population was Socialist and had elected a Social-Democratic mayor, Ernst Reuter; but the four military administrations had squabbled over him—the Reds wouldn’t permit him to serve because he was anti-Soviet. They had compromised upon his deputy, and so the once-proud capital of imperial Germany had a woman mayor, Luise Schröder.
"The city had been not merely the political but the intellectual and cultural capital of Germany. The Soviets fully intended to take possession of it all; they saw themselves as a Red wave rolling over that populous and important island. They had planned it from a long way back, and an essential part of the plan was to take possession of the minds of the population.
"When their troops had swept into the city one of the places they had seized was the splendid, undamaged building of Radio Berlin. Thus they came into possession of a great library of books, files of clippings, and a stock of recorded music; also a highly trained staff who knew Germany and the Germans and could be kept at work and told what to do. When the division of the city was agreed upon, this radio station was in the British sector, but the Russians held on to it, refusing to share control with their polite allies. They continued to hold on to it even after they had put other stations on the air at Potsdam, Leipzig, and Dresden."
General Clay had forbidden R.I.A.S. to say anything that might displease the Soviets, so the young staff was restricted to factual news and music.
Lanny met Boris Shub, a Russian speaking soldier of American army who'd interrogated Russian speaking prisoners, whom Lanny knew since when he'd interrogated German prisoners. Boris had stories to tell about how Soviets didn't want their people back after having been prisoners, or took them only to brand them traitor and treat them abominably, including women.
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Lanny flew back via northern route this time, stopping to see Alfy and exchanging political news apart from family. He visited Irma and Ceddy for lunch in their townhouse in London to report that Frances was doing well, and Ceddy talked politics.
On the way home he met David Krichevsky who was working with Signal Corps, had been born in Russia and was assigned to the two cables that ran from Berlin to the western sector. He had stories to tell about the Americans guarding the seven repeater stations along the way. They weren't allowed to lock even the bathrooms and were broken into if they did, and were often kidnapped and never heard of again.
"‘They are never going to rest, Mr Budd, until they’ve shut off those cables. In fact I don’t think they’ll rest until they have driven us out of Berlin’.
"‘What would we do if they were to shut off the roads as well as the cables? ‘Do we have the right of access to Berlin in the agreements we made with them’?
"Lanny didn’t know about that. He said, ‘We have a law that the ownership of land carries with it the right of access to it. But of course the Reds may say they have different laws from what we have. Anyhow, I don’t think we’ll let ourselves be driven out without a fight, and I’m sure we won’t let our people be starved there’."
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Lanny visited the Treasury building where Turner brought several sections heads to hear his report on Germany and Soviets. Later he asked if Lanny had time, and took him to a room with microfilm reading apparatus set up.
"The strips were labelled ‘Himmler money—Sachsenhausen’. Turner explained that it was a confidential report by Scotland Yard, giving the results of a study of material in the records of the Nazi S.D., the secret police of the Hitler regime; also from interviewing prisoners of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp who had worked in the enterprise of manufacturing British money. The report filled some thirty pages, and it took Lanny a couple of hours to read it carefully and make notes.
"With German foresight and thoroughness the whole country had been searched for expert engravers, printers, and technicians of every sort having to do with the manufacture of paper money. Only Jews had been chosen, the evident intention being to exterminate them when the job was done and thus to bury forever the truth about the enterprise.
"These unfortunate experts were not invited, nor were they hired at high salaries; they were arrested and sentenced to the Sachsenhausen camp, north of Berlin. Once inside they were assigned to Block 19, a special enclosure carefully fenced off and kept from all communication with the rest of the place. Compared with the other prisoners they were well treated; there was no torture, they had good food and did not suffer from cold. They were under the charge of the S.S., the Schutzstaffel troopers, who treated them politely and even made friends; they got up a drama, in which some of the S.S. took part, and you might have seen the S.S. commander taking part in table-tennis games. But they were never permitted to speak to anyone from outside or to communicate or receive communications. When one became hopelessly ill with T.B., he was taken outside, shot, and burned in the crematorium; later on in the war, some of those brought in were wounded and crippled men, but all were required to work and were held responsible for doing perfect work. There was only one penalty and one kind of punishment—death.
"‘Sonderkommando Himmler’ was the name of this group. It was continually increased in size, until at the end of the war there were a hundred and forty technicians working. They manufactured not merely paper money, but every kind of forged paper that could be of use in the German struggle: stamps, stamped envelopes, war bonds of Tito-Broz, identity cards for American and British airmen, passes for Russian police units of the N.K.V.D., identity cards for spies in Algiers, Russian and Swiss passports, United States certificates of nationality, Red Cross notepaper, passport stamps for all the European states, rubber stamps for all diplomatic offices, reports on legations from foreign agents, and so on without end. In command of the enterprise was Heydrick, chief of the Security Police, and when he was assassinated in May, 1942, Ernst Kaltenbrunner took his place. R.H.S.A. were the initials of the enterprise, meaning Reichs Headquarters of the Security Amt, or Bureau.
"Expert engravers made the plates. The handmade paper was manufactured outside and came in sheets of four. There were four Monopol printing machines; five-, ten-, twenty-, and fifty-pound notes were made. When the printing and drying were done, the sheets were not cut but torn with rulers. This tearing was done in the Reisserei, and then the notes were taken to the Sortierei, where experts with electrical apparatus studied each note, and they were held responsible for this delicate task. First-class product went to the German legations in foreign countries; second-class product went to secret agents; the third was reserved until later, to be used in Britain after Germany had conquered that country.
"Several of the notes were pinned together, that being the British practice. If tiny faults were observed in the notes care was taken to put the pins through those faults. One corner was religiously torn off because that was the way the British did. There were processes to soil some of the notes so that they wouldn’t look too new. Careful records were kept of everything, and these showed that a total of 134,609,945 British pounds was printed. The records showed also that in the spring of 1944 they had begun the manufacture of United States notes made by a phototype printing process. In all, they tried two hundred and twenty experiments before they got this to their satisfaction, and by that time the war was coming to an end—and not in the way they had planned.
"When the invading armies showed signs of bursting through, the whole Sonderkommando Himmler was loaded into a caravan and transported to the concentration camp at Mauthausen, which is on the Danube River. They thought that was safe; but presently Patton’s armies were approaching there, so they fled to the little village of Redel-Zipp. They had barely got their machines set up and ready to start work again when the mechanised raiders were reported nearby, so everything split up in confusion. The machines were taken out and dumped into a lake; the bales of money disappeared in this direction and that. The hundred and forty Jewish technicians were loaded into trucks and started on what they knew was to be their last journey.
"But as it happened two made their escape, and the others started arguing and pleading with their guards. Since two had escaped the secret was out, and what was the good of killing the rest? The Americans were coming and they didn’t approve of wholesale killing of innocent people; it might well be that they would hang all the S.S. men who did the murders. Moreover, there was money involved, and not all of it counterfeit. There had been genuine American and British money used in making imitations and comparing the finished product. The experts had managed to hide a lot of this; one man had a bundle of it wound up in a ball of string. Why shouldn’t the guards share in this and scatter to their homes? This was the way the story ended, and this was how it came about that British agents had been able to locate both Jewish workers and S.S. guards and get the detailed stories for their official report.
"The most curious thing in the report, at least from the viewpoint of Lanny Budd, was the effort the Germans had made to prepare against exposure of this nefarious enterprise. The office of the Herr Doktor, Lanny’s old friend Jüppchen Goebbels, issued a manifesto charging the Allies with the very crime his own gang was committing. In December, 1942, at the time of the American and British invasion of North Africa, the Nazi propaganda bureau gave out a story headlined, ‘Algiers Flooded by Forged Banknotes’. The story first appeared in a Rome paper, to the effect that the British had brought forged Algerian banknotes with the expeditionary force; the Bank of England had printed them and high officials of the government had issued them to British soldiers. Five-franc notes, all new in packets, labelled ‘Emis en France, série 1944’.
"Lanny had heard these reports in North Africa and had wondered if they could be true. Now he called Turner’s attention to the matter, and Turner said, ‘It was a regular Nazi technique, and the Soviets have taken it over. Any time they give out reports that Americans have been violating the laws of war, using poison gas, germ warfare, or what have you, you may be sure the Soviets are doing it or getting ready to do it’."
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Lanny contacted the White House and waited, and the President was out of town but sent him a message to report to Under Secretary of State Acheson. Lanny met the Yale and Harvard guy and had an instant rapport. He told Dean Acheson about the problems and restrictions faced by R.I.A.S., and recommended modifying the restrictions. Dean Acheson was correct in his response, which summed up was that Soviets had been allies and Germany conquered foes; Lanny pointed out that meanwhile Germany was hearing Soviet propaganda while R.I.A.S. had only one third of Germany as audience. Acheson said that might change. Lanny went out and was surrounded by young newspaper men who wanted to to why he was there; he said he could only tell them what he'd said, and did.
He went home to Laurel, Baby Laurel, Lanny Junior and the rest of the Peace family. The Peace family and staff gathered to hear him, and he spoke about R.I.A.S., later on radio.
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Lanny got a note signed Rotterdam and saying he'd be called at home at lunchtime; he picked up the phone and just asked when and where. He picked up Hansi in Manhattan and they drove North while Hansi talked. He was tormented, having personally seen evidence that Bess was spying. He couldn't stand pretending and he still loved her, and he'd come to Lanny because his nerve was breaking. Lanny asked him if Bess had told him what she'd learned at the Lenin Academy in Moscow, and said she didnt tell him everything. He talked to Hansi about sleepers, and Hansi was aware. They talked about Hansi's troubled state, Lanny telling him about his own past until Hansi was calmed.
A couple of days later Bess called Lanny to say she wanted to see him, and he went to meet her in the next village. She accused him of trying to break her marriage and influencing her husband. They had a long drawn battle of wits, Bess not giving information whether she knew they'd met, him not saying anything she didn't definitely know. She was in tears, she'd been miserable due to their differences, and loved Hansi. Lanny said he'd no intention of breaking her marriage, but she was mistaken. He tried telling her about Katyn massacre.
"‘Everybody knows that the crime was committed by the Nazis, and they have been making a frantic effort to pin it on the Soviets’.
"‘That is what the Kremlin has told the world, Bess; but I assure you it is a case of truth crushed to earth, and it is bound to rise again. Stalin deliberately massacred fourteen or fifteen thousand Polish officers because he wanted to make it impossible for Poland ever to be revived as a nation’."
They talked about Poland, Lanny saying Poland was shifted West by Stalin which would necessarily eventually bring war between Germany and Poland. He asked her if she really believed whatever party said, without thinking. She said it was rubbish, and he reminded her of the time she flew into a rage when he talked about Hitler making a deal with Stalin; he told her about Nazi propaganda being shipped from Hamburg in Russian ships to be distributed in U.S. by Nazi organisations to cause strikes to paralyse U.S. and communists cooperating with them by orders from Moscow, and they had a heated argument again until Bess said she wanted him to leave her husband alone. He assured her he had no present plans to see him nor to convert him.
Lanny called Hansi from next town after Bess had dropped him, and using the code, had him call back from a payphone. He told Hansi about the meeting with Bess and Hansi said there was something going on that they couldn't talk about.
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Monck wrote in code to say Anna Sourden had met Fritz and something might be developing. As the old German song went, "‘Rejoice in life while yet the little lamp glows; pluck the rose before it fades away’."
Lanny took to long walks to deal with aftermath of this war.
"Wordsworth wrote of the French Revolution, ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. But to be young was very heaven’. Lincoln Steffens had travelled to what was then Petrograd and talked to Lenin, and had come back to Paris and told Lanny, ‘I have seen the future and it works’. But now poor old Stef was no more; he had died disillusioned and brokenhearted.
"The true Russian Revolution, the Socialist Revolution of the spring of 1917, was no more; it had become just another despotism, old-style with a new-style camouflage. The Soviets were no more; they were just a pretence, a propaganda device.
"With the help of the Western world Stalin had conquered all the states along his western border, beginning with Esthonia and all the way down to Bulgaria. He had blandly promised free, independent, democratic governments for all those states, and then had proceeded, no less blandly, to make them over in his own image by his tools of terror and fraud.
"Thus on the eleventh of June, 1947, the State Department disclosed that it had sent a note to the Soviet authorities in Budapest, charging that the Russians had taken unilateral action ‘in most flagrant interference in Hungarian affairs’. Three days later President Truman, signing peace treaties with Hungary, Bulgaria, and Rumania, rebuked those states for their oppressive measures. Eleven days after that the United States sent a note to Rumania, charging that the arrest of opposition members of the parliament was a deliberate effort to suppress democratic elements by ‘terroristic intimidation’. Two days after that the United States delegate to the U.N. Security Council urged the Council to permit the use of force to prevent Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria from aiding armed bands that were violating Greek territory. So it went day after day, week after week, and all the protests were spitting against the wind.
"At the beginning of June Secretary of State Marshall put forward his plan for American financial aid to European states, provided that they would adopt a uniform plan for recovery. There was nothing in that proposal to threaten the Soviet Union, unless the U.S.S.R. was bent upon conquest of the other states. But the Reds chose to take it as a hostile action and broke up a conference with France and Britain on the subject. Czechoslovakia had eagerly accepted the offer of Marshall aid, but Masaryk was peremptorily summoned to Moscow and commanded to reverse this decision. He went back to Prague and obeyed the order."
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Here in the following paragraph is the author's camouflaged racism in a nutshell.
"In August the British set India free, and that was one of history’s great acts of statesmanship. It was the action of the British Labour party and the Socialist intellectuals who had been for two generations its leaders and guides. If the Soviet Union had been a real Socialist state, with a real belief in democracy and freedom, this action would have met with thunderous applause; but instead there was thunderous silence. The Reds hated Ernie Bevin even more than they hated Churchill; for Churchill was a foe they felt they could beat in the end, but Bevin was the man they really feared, the man who could win the workers of the world away from Stalinism."
So he hasn't mentioned millions in India starved to death by Churchill, or more millions that died due to partition of India planned by Churchill for keeping control of military bases for use of UK and U.S. against Russia in The Great Game of control of the region, and he only mentions independence of India as if on par with freeing a pet from a collar and set free so the master no longer need spend time, money or attention; truth being it was nothing of the kind he states, statesmanship or freeing, but as Clement Attlee told at a public function when asked in India, Brits were scared of the effects of Bose; Gandhi they didn't pay attention to, and would have kept India much longer, but for Bose.
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Professor Goudsmit came for a broadcast, and Lanny exchanged reminiscences from their Alsos days, but these were grim times. Soviets demanded dismantling of atomic weapons every time UNO discussed disarmament, and that meant Russians could sweep right across Germany to channel ports and build more lethal V rockets, since Russian army and air force were not reduced at all. Lanny asked how far along was the Russian atomic program, and Goudsmit said eight to fifteen years, they'd taken away German scientists and had good ones of their own. Lanny wondered if they had spies in U.S., and Goudsmit thought not.
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Monck wrote to say that Anna and Fritz were watching each other and reporting accurately; Boris Shub wrote too, and invited Lanny to Berlin. Lanny had a client whose collection, on its way to being transformed into a museum for his town, could use a Rembrandt. Lanny knew that some two hundred thousand works of art, looted by nazis and taken by Göring etc., had been returned by Monuments people to their previous owners after recovery towards the end of the war. Several of these owners were now not as well off and Lanny got the clients approval on both he sent photographs of, so he was free to acquire either or both, for prices he thought right. So he got clearances and papers, and flew the northern route to Berlin.
"Lanny read in one of the highbrow magazines a sentence spoken by an English statesman, Edmund Burke, something like a hundred and fifty years ago: ‘The arguments of tyranny are as contemptible as its force is dreadful’. Lanny stowed that sentence away in his memory, thinking that it might come in handy at a German Writers’ Congress to be held mostly in the Soviet sector of Berlin. And it did.
"The Congress was an elaborate propaganda stunt, carefully planned in Moscow and controlled by its military authorities. They were going to assemble the well-known German writers from all the four zones, indoctrinate them with the dogmas of Soviet communism, and convince them that it was destined to dominate the rest of the world. By a propaganda trick the enterprise was taking place under the official patronage of all the Four Powers. The sponsor bore the sober name of ‘The Association of German Authors’, a respected body founded before World War I, abolished by Hitler, and now brought to life again. The chairman was the honoured woman novelist Ricarda Huch, now eighty-one years of age, and the honorary president was Heinrich Mann. The main sessions were held in the Kammerspiele, in the Russian sector just around the corner from the headquarters of the Security Police on the Luisenstrasse; they were being run by an Army colonel called the cultural commissar. The Americans had no such official and were paying no attention whatever to the enterprise. No American writers had been invited.
"The affair was in its second day when Lanny stepped off the aeroplane. He had barely time to arrive at the Savoy Hotel before Boris Shub called him up in a state of excitement. He wanted Lanny to come to his place to have dinner and hear about it, and Lanny did so.
"He met several American and German writers, all bubbling over. They had gone quite innocently to the afternoon session, expecting to hear discourses on the announced topics, ‘The Author and Spiritual Freedom’ and ‘The Function of Literary Criticism’. But at that session Colonel Dymschitz had presented a Soviet writer named Vishnevsky, editor of a Moscow magazine and author of a melodramatic Soviet film called We Are from Kronstadt. This gentleman, wearing his three rows of ribbons and decorations, had told the writers of Germany that the United States was planning a war of aggression, but the Soviets knew how to deal with warmongers; he had summoned the German writers and the German people to fight shoulder to shoulder with the Soviets against the American imperialists. His discourse continued:
"‘Reactionary forces in Washington and London are trying to create an “iron curtain”, but the Soviet nation is watchful and cannot be frightened, not even by atomic bombs … Brothers, comrades, we know how to answer. If you need us, call for our help and we will fight together’.
"There had been thunderous applause from the Communists, watched of course by their wizened little cultural commissar out of uniform. The German and American liberals had sat in stunned silence. They had left the hall debating what to do about it and had consulted with the chairman scheduled for the following morning, a German editor named Birkenfeld who happened to be more liberal than the Reds had realised. He had agreed that if an American writer would prepare a speech answering Vishnevsky, he would introduce that writer and give him a hearing."
Young Melvin J. Lasky had volunteered, he was not so known to reds. He worked through the night and Lanny along with others helped. The session began at ten in the morning, with Russian writers in front row, wearing decorations.
"At ten o’clock they were all seated in the second row of the theatre. Leading Soviet novelists and playwrights, all decorated, occupied the front row. There was the embittered Vishnevsky, and there was Kataev, a playwright and novelist who had once written a satire on Russia’s crowded housing conditions that had been a hit on Broadway, but who was writing no satires now. There was Gorbatov, a Soviet writer whom Shub had met on the River Elbe, at which time he had tried lamely to apologise for the dreadful treatment being meted out to the millions of Russians who had been seized by the German Army and were now being taken back and put at slave labour by the Kremlin. Also, of course, there was the cultural commissar, setting the pace for their applause.
"The correspondent Lasky was introduced, and he started tactfully and seductively. He congratulated the Congress upon ‘the spectacle of German authors again meeting freely together, critically exchanging ideas and making plans to defend and extend their newly born liberties’. He waited while the Russian translator rattled off his words, and the Russians all applauded. He told how American writers had been struggling for ‘honesty, frankness, and social realism in literature’. The Russians all nodded approval of that; it was the Soviet formula.
"He went on like that for a while, and if he had stopped there he would have been hailed as a great writer. But among the examples of American wartime censorship he mentioned that we were ‘not allowed to publish Leon Trotsky’s biography of Stalin. The edition had already been printed and distributed, but officials in Washington thought it might embarrass relations with Moscow. During that time many honest and independent books which were critical of the Soviet dictatorship, the Communist one-party system, the Soviet apparatus of political concentration camps and slave labour, were postponed and withheld; but I am glad to say only postponed. They have all since been published’.
"Those, of course, were awful things to be said in the presence of Russian writers; it was literally the first time such words had been spoken in Berlin, for Americans had been forbidden to criticise their Soviet allies. Looking squarely at the decorated Russians in the front row, Lasky continued, ‘We know how soul-crushing it is to work and write when behind us stands a political censor, and behind him stand the police. Think how it must shatter the nerves of a Russian writer to worry constantly whether the new party doctrine of the revised state formula of “social realism”, or “formalism” or ‘objectivism’, or what have you has already become passé and the mark only of a decadent counterrevolutionary tool of the Fascists’.
"The cultural commissar arose and stalked out and was followed by Kataev, the satirist who had stopped satirising ten years ago. Other Communists in the audience began to interrupt. ‘Warmonger! Throw him out! What about Eisler?’ They shouted that again and again—referring to a Soviet secret agent who had been arrested in New York and was soon to jump bail and escape. But Lasky went on to finish his peroration about the function of the writer as a champion of liberty of the mind and spirit, and the opponent of every form of oppression. He included that sentence from Edmund Burke which Lanny had supplied: ‘The arguments of tyranny are as contemptible as its force is dreadful’. So it is that the thoughts of great men survive and re-echo down the ages. So it is that, in the words of Shelley, ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind’.
"The Reds hissed and booed this speech, but the Germans gave the speaker an ovation. As Lasky walked down the aisle people crowded around him and grasped his hand. The aged Ricarda Huch, whose good name the Soviets were trying to exploit, embraced him and thanked him warmly."
Then later Kataev spoke attacking Lasky, as warmonger and unknown as a writer. Attacks in Russian press went on for a long time, giving a false account of the event. Lasky had attempted to address Berlin and Germany, and became a cult amongst young in Berlin, who copied his goatee.
"There were consequences of that Congress among the Americans also. Less than three weeks after the affair General Clay authorised his director of the Information Control Division ‘to attack communism in every form wherever it exists, and to cite each exposed example of its day-to-day work’. So came that change for which Lanny had pleaded with Under Secretary of State Acheson; it became known among the Americans as Operation Back-Talk. One of its developments was the publication of a monthly magazine dignified, cultural, and literary, in the German language. Its title was Der Monat, and the unknown writer Melvin J. Lasky became its editor."
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Monck hadn't been able to attend, Lanny told him about it. He gave news of Fritz, Kurt and Anna. She'd made contact with Hans Schufurt, and was sending information which so far agreed with that from other sources. Heinrich Brinkmann had gone to Hungary, where they had a printing press, so he'd probably taken the plates. Kurt was still in Berlin, and insisted Fritz stay in school. Lanny met Fritz to get his story about Anna, and to keep up the lonely young man's spirits. He then flew to Hanover, Soviets having made driving through difficult in every possible way, and conducted part of the business by buying and shipping one of the two paintings to the client.
Back in Berlin there was a note from Braun, and Monck had bad news - Fritz had been arrested.
"‘I know men who were arrested by the Nazis, and their families had to wait ten years. The same men were taken by the Reds, and some of the families are still waiting’.
"‘We all warned him, and he went in with his eyes open. It’s happening all the time; just a short time ago the Reds took away half a dozen students from the university. It caused an uproar, but the Reds don’t mind that—they want to frighten the rest, including the faculty. They come over into our sector and arrest Germans and carry them off at night, and we don’t know about it unless somebody hears a disturbance and tips us off. They’ve kidnapped a dozen Americans that I could name, and in every case they denied that they ever heard of them. We don’t get them back unless we are able to get exact information as to who they are, where they are, and who arrested them’.
"‘I cautioned you,’ Monck went on, ‘and now I want to make it emphatic. You have to learn what I’ve learned, and don’t go out on the street at night without company. You’re known as a R.I.A.S. man now, and there’s nobody they hate more. You went over to that Writers’ Congress, you’re known to be Lasky’s friend, and now comes this business of Ferdinand. The kid may name us, or they may already know about us, and they’ll tell him what to say about us and he’ll say it, believe me. From now on you must assume that you’re a marked man; and I want you to promise that if anyone lays hands on you, you won’t have any dignity about it, but scream like a wildcat. Make all the noise you can, and shout your name over and over again. That’s your only chance, that somebody may hear your name and take the trouble to go to a telephone and call up AMG. It happens that way often, and then we start raising hell and the Reds have to give up.’"
Monck spoke about Lanny being not tough enough to be in Berlin in particular and Germany in general. He didn't know who else could get as close to Kurt, and Lanny couldn't help. But Lanny found Kurt at his hotel, he'd come asking for help for the rest of his family. Lanny talked with him, and having said he'd try, oarted; then he went to Morrison, who thought it would be better for AMG to watch and catch the gang in their zone, and asked if Fritz said anything about buried treasure. Lanny said he hadn't mentioned it.
"‘He told us he believed his father had knowledge of some of the Nazi caches. No doubt you know that they had great stores of gold and jewels. When the time came for them to scatter and flee they carried it off and hid it in places they thought were safe. We have turned up several lots and we’re on the trail of more. That may possibly be where Kurt gets his living expenses’."
Lanny said Kurt wouldn't touch what hed consider property of the Reich, but counterfeit currency and so on were another matter. Morrison said he'd ask refugee commission to fly out Kurt and his family, and Lanny shouldn't use his own name in communications with Kurt. Lanny didn't wait to see the outcome, but flew instead to Paris to acquire the other Rembrandt, and having checked in at Crillon, wrote to the owner and called Denis De Bruyne, fils. He came and drove Lanny to his home, and Lanny spoke with Denis and Annette. The father had died, Charlot's widow had remarried and taken her children with her.
Denis had been getting Peace and sometimes they got the broadcast on shortwave. He said France no longer wanted a war, and in the atomic age there was no possibility of fighting back. He kept his two cars ready so his family and servants could drive to Bordeaux, thence to Spain and possibly thence to California or Argentina, at a moment's notice; he often just thought of doing it. Maquis had been mostly communist, and now they controlled unions and often striked. France wanted De Gaulle, but what could he do with communists striking? He had left money in Newcastle bank.
Lanny called at the Paris offices of American Federation of Labour next morning on Irving Brown who was trying to keep Europe's labour from going communist, and convince them about honesty of the Marshall plan. He was abused with false propaganda by the reds.
"The Social Democrats of Western Germany, our natural allies, had been reduced almost to impotence by the policy of A.M.G., which had once proposed the policy of threatening Kurt Schumacher with imprisonment because he would not cease his exposure of Communist brutalities.
"Fortunately the British had refused to go along with this. Imagine the British Labour Cabinet consenting to the jailing of a German Socialist leader for criticising Soviet world aggression! Said Irving Brown, ‘I suppose the General’s orders come from Washington. The policy is called “neutrality”; but I tell him there can be no neutrality in the fight between tyranny and freedom. And that’s what we have on our hands’."
Lanny visited the old mansion in St. Germain to buy the Rembrandt, and although he'd met the owner socially, was treated as tradesman this time, not allowed to see the master of the house whom he wrote a cheque for the amount asked, eleven million francs. He'd collect the painting in a couple of days after it was cleared, since there was no telephone in the house. No coffee and cake was served.
He couldn't have shipped the painting out of France anyway, as it turned out, since communists called for general strike. It was nominally against inflation, blaming America and shouting against Marshall plan, with mobs rioting and demanding repeal of the plan and saboteurs damaging docks and bridges and railyards so the goods wouldn't reach people. Ultimate game was paralyzing France until communist takeover making France another satellite.
Lanny attended a red meeting to observe, before going to Irving Brown's office.
"Irving Brown was there for the express purpose of baulking this Communist coup d’état. If it were to succeed it could be repeated in Italy, where the Reds were even more numerous and more powerful; there would be nobody left in Western Europe with any power to resist, and the other countries of the Continent would go down like a row of ninepins.
"Red terrorists were roaming the countryside, breaking the heads of workers who would not obey them; tearing up railroad sleepers, heaping them in bonfires, then twisting the rails; wrecking trains, flooding mines, putting boards studded with nails on the highways to deflate the tyres of trucks."
Léon Jouhaux, the non communist general secretary of General Confederation of Labour, known as the C.G.T., was fighting back this attempted takeover.
"All over France the C.G.T. workers proceeded to organise a new group of resistance. They called it the Force Ouvrière, the working-class force, and during the two weeks it took to break the strike they acquired eight hundred thousand members. The loyal workers organised armed committees to defend the mines from sabotage; they organised groups to patrol the railroads; they guarded the barges on the canals which spread from France all over the lowlands of Europe and had been used by the Reds as a means of conveying spies and saboteurs."
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Lanny saw to packing and shipping of the Rembrandt he'd purchased for his client, and flew to Cannes to see Beauty. Thence to Edgemere, telling his audience about the French general strike and its implications.
Lanny was worried about Fritz, and one day he heard Laurel murmur; she'd gone into a trance, and Madame Zyszynski talked about Fritz who wasn't yet dead.
Lanny and Laurel attended a concert of Hansi. Bess was now a secret worker, off the party members list, not allowed to be seen with Hansi who was used for propaganda. Laurel suggested Lanny see him and they met in central park. Hansi talked about his life, and Lanny talked about Fritz without naming him, and Paris and Berlin. Hansi talked about Bess and the party.
"‘There are some good people among them; people who come in believing the propaganda that they love the workers, that they believe in peace, and that all they seek is the abolition of poverty and exploitation. Sometimes it takes a year or two, but in the end the good people find out what the party really is and get out. But meantime they have joined some of the front organisations, they have let their names be used, they have even taken out party cards—and so they are ruined for life. They have the fear hanging over them that they will be exposed and will lose their jobs, their influence, their careers’."
Lanny left him in town after a day on Hudson, so Hansi could visit someone for alibi.
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"The twenty-fifth of December came; it had been Christmas day precisely sixteen hundred and two times, ever since the Church decided that it was a mistake to celebrate it in the spring, when it coincided with the birthday of Mithras, the god of a rival religion."
Budds of Edgemere visited Newcastle with Frances and Scrubbie following, and the two little Budds thrilled. Robbie made them stay over, so he could talk to Lanny about Bess and about Europe. Later the Budds visited Johannes Robin home where the whole family except Hansi and Bess were together. Their two boys were there. Johannes Robin talked to Lanny. He thought Europe was finished and on its way down.
"He had been reading about the downfall of ancient Greek civilisation; those little states had destroyed one another and themselves by incessant wars, and in the end the more primitive Macedonians from the north had taken them over. In the case of Western Europe it would be the more primitive Russians from the north. There was no possibility of saving the border states; country after country was being devoured, and you could hear the crunching of the bones."
Lanny and Rick read newspapers and heard radio broadcasts, and talked it over.
"During the month of January Pravda announced that the Soviet government had forbidden Dimitrov to carry out his plan for a Balkan Federation. This Dimitrov had been one of the revolutionary heroes; he had been accused by the Nazis of starting the Reichstag fire and had defied them in a sensational public trial in Leipzig. But now the Soviet sat down on him hard. Nations that were to be devoured separately must not be permitted to get together.
"And in that same month the Communist party of France served the demand that their parliamentary deputy Jacques Duclos should be permitted to become the first vice-president of that nation. It was this Duclos whose pronouncement in a French magazine had turned the American Communist party upside down and put Foster in the place of Browder. His request now meant that France was to consent to her own slow death. In that same month the value of the franc in relation to the dollar was officially reduced from a hundred and nineteen to two hundred and fourteen.
"In the month of February the Soviet government protested to the government of Iran against its receiving aid from the United States; and in the same month the Czech government brought on a crisis by protesting against Communist infiltration of the police. Four days later a so-called Communist Action Committee took over all the public offices of Czechoslovakia, all departments, newspapers, and radio stations. In vain did the United States, Britain, and France denounce this setting up of a new dictatorship."
On the other side, North Korea takeover in all but name proceeded.
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Lanny was at office when a girl on staff brought news of Hansi and Bess being arrested for spying, and he turned on the radio. The staff listened, then Lanny went to talk to Laurel. He guessed FBI meant Hansi to go on working for them. A call came for Lanny, Mercy Colfax of Liberal Defence League wanted to see him, and he asked her to come to the house. She sat to talk to him, but he insisted she tell him if she was a communist. She refused to say, and he said he'd speak to her assuming she was, and tell her what he'dtold Bess often. He proceeded to describe the transformation of the noble revolution into a gangster game, with old comrades gotten rid of by their colleagues in scrambling for power - "‘Zinoviev, Rykov, Rakovsky, Kamenev, Bukharin, Krylenko, Smirnov, Tukashevsky, Piatakov, Karakhan—’", and she said she'd wasted her time. He said he'd told her the truth, she might realise it one day, and he'd help.
Lanny called Robbie, Esther had expected as much when she had it out with Bess a while ago; she'd told Robbie to see Bess to make her promise to give it up as a condition for their hiring a lawyer for her defence, and Johannes Robin was going to do the same for Hansi. Lanny said he'd go see Hansi's mother. He did that, and told her about Hansi, making her promise to not tell anyone even in the family, and to go on acting sad. Later Robbie called to report, and Johannes called asking what Lanny had done to his wife.
Virgil Smathers, known to Lanny since he tutored Lanny in Newcastle, came to see him. He was now a priest and said he'd talked to some people, Hansi wasn't a communist but was just pleasing his wife by being one, and Lanny could get him out by approaching FBI to say so. Lanny insisted on knowing names of the high up communist officials who'd been part of the people that talked to Smathers, and since he wouldn't give the names, didn't agree to do their bidding, but called Post later and met him with usual precautions. They discussed Smathers and his proposition. Lanny wondered how they'd found the papers buried in the garden several feet deep and sealed in a washerboiler, and Post said it wasn't Hansi who'd reported them. Lanny wondered who the other spy in the house was that neither Bess nor Hansi knew of.
Smathers made sensational headlines by coming forth to tell about his interview with Hansi who'd refused the offer and said he had his beliefs and was innocent; Smathers defended the buried papers by saying a legitimate political party protecting its papers had that right. The case came up, high bail was promptly paid, and the Russians involved vanished just as promptly. Bess could no longer do underground work, and would do a lecture tour around the country saying papers were planted. Hansi met Lanny and thanked him about telling his mother, and said he was to have a holiday from spying and was going to compose music. Hansi told him about how they were arrested, and about the prison.
"The prisoners were taken to the Tombs. ‘I don’t know about the others’, Hansi said, ‘but they fixed us up comfortably, Johanssen, the accountant, and me—I suppose you read about him in the paper. He is a Dane, a blonde fellow, very quiet and determined, bitter when he talks frankly. It was my business to make friends with him, so I told him about my trips to the Soviet Union and all the wonders I had seen there and how I loved the Russian people I had known—which is true enough. He had every reason to trust me, and he did. He told me the story of his hard life. He got his head cracked in a strike, and that made him into a Communist. He dropped out of party work several years ago, took a new name, and joined the underground. He studied to be an accountant on purpose and then got a job in the Jones plant. He stole the combination to the safe where the classified papers were kept. He was introduced to Bess—he didn’t know who she was. He just knew her as Mary, and she knew him as Jim’."
Lanny asked if they'd see him, and he said communists would shoot him if they suspected.
"‘If you want to hide we will hide you’, Lanny said. ‘You can tell Bess the newspaper reporters are hounding you’.
"‘I wouldn’t have to lie about that; they’ve been trying to bribe the servants’."
Laurel didn't think Hansi could live alone, and set about finding a woman for him
Wonder why they didn't think of Peggy Remsen.
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Monck wrote to say Anna was missing. Lanny wondered if she'd betrayed Fritz or other way round, or she'd just gone off with a man. It was far more likely, considering shortage of men in Germany, that she'd been caught, and if so she'd no reason to not tell about Monck and Lanny.
Lanny reflected on the differences between the two systems, if caught in one there were laws and civil liberties, other you vanished and were never heard of. He turned on the radio and heard of death of Jan Masaryk, pronounced suicide officially.
"It was no surprise when later the story came out that he had been attacked in his bedroom and beaten to death with a piece of furniture and then thrown from the window. ‘When you hear of my death you will know it is the end’, so he had said—meaning, of course, the end of his country."
There was another letter from Monck, mentioning Treasure Island and enclosing a text, in German like his letter, for Lanny to read.
"‘We have a right to salvation, the right of the believers. Our salvation must be won by ourselves. We hold our heads high. Our way was straight and without blame. We ask no man to give us back our honour; we possess it! We have made no terms with the enemy; we are ourselves’."
"Kurt, who had made Lanny a pledge of honour, was not keeping it. He had taken the Nazi will-to-rule and made it into a Mystik, a thing superior to manmade laws and to merely human rights. It was the old notion that the end justified the means. In German it was even more fanatical: Der Zweck heiligt die Mittel. The verb means more than justifies, it means hallows, sanctifies. The German determination to take the mastery of the world became a holy thing; moved by this divinely inspired impulse, they had made three attempts in a period of less than seventy years, and now Kurt was telling them to cherish the impulse in their hearts and get ready for a fourth try."
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Lanny thought Laurel needed a holiday, and together they thought Hansi could use one. They drive via southern route to California, and leaving Hansi resting in a motel, went to meet the Armbrusters, and met a young woman of thirty or so who was a celebrity due to success of her first book. Rose Pippin was plane spoken, tall and strong, with a ranch farming background on the not so rich side. They invited her to hear Hansi, but she recognised him. Lanny told her about the way he'd met Laurel, and that gave her the idea, but Lanny pointed out that she couldn't tell anyone, that would endanger Hansi. She heard him play, and the match was made. The couple got engaged in a couple of days, and Laurel and Lanny went with them to Reno, leaving them and driving back home.
At home, Babe had learned new words, and Junior lamented about their not taking him along.
Monck called from Berlin, which was unprecedented, and in code said that Lanny was needed in connection with Kurt. Lanny asked if it was necessary, and it was. He would fly next day, as Monck needed. His flight and other needs, including his hotel in Berlin, were military arrangements this time, and he could talk with Monck in his room. Monck said Kurt had taken up treasure hunting.
"‘You know how diligent the Nazis were in accumulating treasure. They confiscated everything the Jews had and everything their political opponents had, and when the Allied armies were advancing they loaded it into trucks, and whole treasure trains came up into the south-eastern mountains. They buried it in caves and in salt mines—you were in the salt mines at Alt Aussee and saw it’."
Lanny said he'd seen it, including gold filled teeth of murdered Jews.
"I would wager there must be fifty million dollars’ worth of treasure of one sort or another hidden in the Bavarian and Austrian Alps’.
"‘Make it twice that’, said Lanny. ‘Fifty million might go for Göring alone. He carried a whole trainload that we caught near Berchtesgaden’."
Monck said they were digging it up, and Kurt was in on it. Lanny had thought he wouldnt, but Monck had found otherwise.
"They dig it up and take it away, hidden in trucks; they get it to the ports and carry it to Spain or the Argentine, and invest it in great estates and business enterprises—there’s been a lot of scandal about it and squabbling among the top people. They have accused some of their former chiefs as grafters, but the answer is, What is the use of letting the wealth lie idle? Why not put it to work and make money for the cause? They send back part of the income, and it’s being used to print and circulate propaganda—the kind of stuff that Kurt Meissner is writing, and that they believe is inspired’.
"‘We get tips and send a party and find the stuff, or sometimes we find we are too late. There will be shots up in the hills at night, and we go and find a hole dug in the ground, and the digging tools lying about, and a lot of blood. They carry off the wounded and the dead, but they leave the tools because it wouldn’t do to be caught with them. I suppose they tie weights to the bodies and dump them into the lakes’.
"‘It’s not just a question of the money’, said Monck. ‘It’s a question of the use the Nazis are putting it to. We’ll have to get out of this country sooner or later and leave them behind; they have their plans to win over the new generation and prepare for a comeback. You know what the Germans are saying already, ‘We had it better under Hitler”’.
"The Strelitz family—you know that wholesale killer—is running an electrical business in Austria with branches all over. When we go to arrest such criminals we find they have been spirited away to Egypt or Morocco or Brazil or wherever, and we know that the money for the trip came from the sale of gold bars on the black market. There are regular operators who travel to Salzburg or Bregenz and buy up the stuff and smuggle it out by way of Italy. Sometimes we catch them with gold vases or pieces of jewellery which we can identify from photographs provided for us by the Rothschild family in Paris’."
Monck told him about an episode that occurred at Grundlesee near Bad Aussee.
"‘A convoy of trucks and cars had arrived there. The men hired boats and went out on the lake and began surveying operations. When they found the right spot they anchored the boats. They went down to the bottom of the lake in diving outfits and attached ropes and began hauling up heavy chests. When the local police asked about it they said they were engineers from the French headquarters in Innsbruck, and of course the local police, being Austrians and a conquered people, couldn’t interfere with what French engineers were doing. They pulled up twelve large chests and loaded them on the trucks and went away.
"‘Investigation proved that there were no French engineers. It was a crowd of these Neo-Nazis, and we succeeded in tracing the trucks to the town of Tegernsee. We have an exact description of the man who was in charge of the expedition, and we believe that he was Heinrich Brinkmann, who was Kurt Meissner’s top man. We have reason to believe that this is S.S. General Dollmann, one of the heads of Hitler’s Youth Ideological Training programme. We haven’t a doubt that Kurt Meissner was in on that scheme, and he doubtless had to do with hiding the treasure. The money will be used for carrying on his propaganda here and abroad, and we are going to stop it if we can’."
Lanny asked if they wanted him to get Kurt. Monck said he'd given his word, but broken it, had built an expensive and spacious cottage with amenities that must have come out of counterfeit currency operation, and they could throw him back East if he didn't come clean; Soviets would be only too happy to get him back.
"‘They have a part of Austria right close to Salzburg, and no doubt there is plenty of treasure buried there, and they’d like to get hold of it. They have ways of getting secrets out of people—ways that we are not allowed to use. You can point that out to him, and add that his wife and children will go along with him. The Soviets will take that brood and put them in their schools and make little Reds out of them instead of little Nazis. Personally, I don’t see anything to choose between, but Kurt may, and that is one of the arguments you’ll have to use’."
The army flew him to Munich and gave a vehicle with fuel. Lanny drove to Tegernsee and went first to the Graf Stubendorf, hoping to enlist his help. He told why he'd come, and the Graf said he didn't agree; he said Germany must make her own choice of a system, not adopt one from America or Switzerland where geography was quite different. He pointed out that Nazi movement originated in lower classes and came to power on ballot; Lanny explained why that didn't mean it was democratic, but Graf flat out declared he wouldn't help.
Lanny drove to Kurt's stone cottage with a stone studio off to one side, and took him to the car to talk. He didn't waste time, and Kurt's denials were useless; he told him that the army had proof of Kurt's having broken his word, and Soviets would be only too happy to use Hitler's ways to deal with him, but Kurt should think about his children under their system. He said it was no use going over why Kurt had become Nazi, that dream was dead, and Kurt had a choice between the two opposite sides, democracy and red totalitarian. He had to make a choice. Kurt said the counterfeit currency operation and stocks had moved to Hungary, and he didn't know any names; he justified keeping the treasures, but Lanny told him it was no use denying and justifying the Nazi loot.
Lanny pointed out that Kurt had the choice, but it would be final, and what was not a choice was subverting American attempt to build a democratic nation while Kurt built his stone cottage out of stolen money and went on working to rebuild Nazi movement. He said he'd be back next day for his reply, and Kurt couldn't escape with remaining six children, even if he were to escape. Kurt remained cold and hostile.
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Lanny visited Hilde Donnerstein who was happy to see him. She asked what Russians were going to do, and he said he didn't know, but told her news of people she'd known - Beauty and Bienvenu, Marceline who had a new baby, Irma is tax saving devices, Margy and De Lyle Armbrusters and others, and the Peace Program. Lanny had brought food from PX and noticed the lack of furniture in Hilde Donnerstein's villa which was due to needs of money for food and taxes.
In the morning he went around the neighbourhood to other villas conducting his art business, and drove to Kurt's cottage. Kurt came out and said he'd decided to accept, he couldn't fight the force of American conquerors. Lanny took notes after pointing out that he didn't have authority to make a deal but had come as a friend, that Kurt would remain on probation and army would be watching him.
"Kurt told about the treasures that had been buried in the Alt Aussee district. They had been put under the care of S.S. Generals Stefan Fröhlich and Arthur Schidler. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, chief of the, S.S. who later was convicted at the Nürnberg trials and hanged, had delivered gold bullion, coins, banknotes, and jewels to a value of over ten million dollars. The total amount of the hoards collected and buried amounted to somewhere between forty and fifty million. On the second of May in 1945 the so-called ‘gold transport Strelitz’ had arrived at Alt Aussee, including twenty-two cases of gold teeth collected by the chief of the death camps. There were the cash boxes of Nazi secret agents in several of the Balkan states, and there was a ‘special action fund’ handled by Otto Skorzeny, the man who had been charged with the task of delivering Mussolini from his captors. There were also great quantities of narcotics, worth more than their weight in gold.
"What had become of all these treasures? They had been dug up in small lots and transported by Nazis escaping into the Tyrol, and from there into Switzerland, and from Switzerland by air to points in the Middle East. That route had been used by Strelitz, and also by those high Nazi officials who had been in charge of the wholesale killings of Jews. These men were now serving on the staff of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who was living in the Villa Aida in Cairo.
"Other fugitives had gone by the way of the Brenner Pass to Milan; they had had cars with diplomatic licence plates, and these the Austrian police could not check. Most of them had joined a group known as the ‘Black Hunter’, which had its headquarters in Madrid. This group was under the control of a countess, the former secretary of the German Embassy in Madrid. Lanny said, ‘I met her there’. Otto Skorzeny was prominent in this group, and a relative of Himmler had belonged to it for a time but had gone to the Argentine and set himself up in business.
"This Madrid group was the strongest propaganda agency, and Kurt named a number of its members: a Frenchman, Jean André, who had formerly been a volunteer officer in the Waffen S.S.; also the Belgian Nazi, Leon Degrelle. It was from there that the great mass of propaganda went out all over Europe and South America.
"‘I know’, said Lanny. ‘I have seen the leaflet containing the letter that General Alfred Jodl wrote to his wife from the Nürnberg prison before he was hanged’."
Lanny asked about various nazis known to operate in the area, but Kurt denied knowledge of any, and of any treasure buried in the area. Lanny confronted him about the obvious falsehood of denying any local knowledge and providing details about foreign locations and names which AMG knew but couldn't do anything about, and Kurt remained adamant. Lanny told him about the U.S. civil war and the 'unreconstructed rebels' who'd plotted endlessly after losing the war, with futility; he said he'd let Kurt treat him with patronising attitude because he'd hoped he'd bring Kurt to his self, but now it was over. Lanny said he wouldn't bother Kurt again.
Kurt didn't get out of the car, and said he'd meant his surrender, but couldn't give names, they'd kill and AMG couldn't protect against them. He was hostile and contemptuous in offering money, calling it ransom, and swept aside Lanny's corrections of his deliberately false twist on circumstances. He told Lanny his cottage was built with solid gold bricks, worth eight million dollars, inserted in the foundation, that could be taken out by a competent German mason, and this was the gold buried in Grundlesee, which had come from the gold fillings in teeth of murdered Jews. Then he ordered Lanny to leave, saying he was forced to betray the movement for sake of his children.
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Lanny drove away and called Monck from a cafe in a nearby village, where he spoke in impromptu code using motion picture script scenario and pirates and soldiers, asking Monck where he could take the story before it was stolen; Monck got it, and gave him name of Armstrong, and called him immediately so Armstrong was ready to receive him. Armstrong wasn't surprised about gokd bricks in foundation, it was a known technique of hiding gold, and Monck had arrived, by immediately taking a plane after he'd called Armstrong, by the time Lanny had some food.
Kurt was brought in and told he'd be kept under house arrest in a villa with a large garden, protected by AMG against his Nazi fraternity. Lanny said he'd send music and books, and asked if he'dchange his attitude and see Emil. Kurt assented, and Lanny flew to Nürnberg to see Emil. Having arranged Emil's reunion with Kurt, Lanny flew back to Berlin to work with R.I.A.S., which now had a new large building with the letters R.I.A.S. large on front.
"Little by little, upon one pretext or another, the Soviets had been cutting off the roads leading through their zone to Berlin. They would suddenly decree that trucks needed a different kind of permit and would cause blockades extending back for miles and delaying traffic for days. Obviously they were trying to make the situation as uncomfortable for the Allies as possible, in the hope of wearing them out."
Truman was criticised endlessly for Potsdam agreement in U.S., and unfairly so.
"The agreement had provided for free access of all residents of Berlin to all portions of the city, and that meant continual misunderstanding and clashes. It meant that the people of East Berlin had the opportunity to see how much better the people of West Berlin were being treated."
"Now, at the end of June, 1948, the Reds had apparently made up their minds to put an end to this annoying situation; they suddenly announced a land and water blockade of Berlin. The last railroad freight line, that by way of Helmstedt, was closed down—they said on account of technical difficulties, an entirely fraudulent statement. If the Soviets couldn’t keep a railroad marshalling yard in order the Americans would have been glad to do it for them—but they were not asked."
So Berlin would be dark, cold and starved, without electricity, coal and food. Some officials were for armed convoys forcing it, which would mean war, and if so AMG would be forced to surrender. U.S. could bomb Moscow, but meanwhile Russians would be in control of Europe down to Pyrenees, and U.S. wouldn't bomb all of it!
"Two days after the blockade was begun the C-47s, the two-engine planes of the Army, began hauling supplies to the Tempelhoferfeld. It was announced that this ‘shuttle service’ would be continued and increased. The Communists chuckled, because they were sure the Americans meant to feed and supply themselves and let the Berliners starve.
"The Soviet military withdrew from the Allied Kommandatura in Berlin—the last of the Four Power arrangements. Marshal Sokolovsky refused to lift the blockade, and the city administration of Berlin began cutting down the electrical supply to two or three hours a day. Such was the beginning of a battle of industrial and propaganda power that would continue through the summer and the following winter."
Lanny finished his series of talks and few back to New Jersey.
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Hansi called and gave his news, he wouldn't have to testify; his lawyer had advised them how to manage six weeks without publicity, and he was happy living with Rose, they'd never again live in a city.
The federal case was coming up; Bess's lawyer, Everett, called on behalf of Bess and came to see Lanny. Everett demanded to know where Hansi was and questioned his being away when the trial was coming up. Lanny refused to give up knowledge of his whereabouts and threw up his hands in the French fashion about rest of the arguments, saying Hansi was an artist. After Everett left Lanny called Post and went to see him. They decided Hansi could be their man in the defence and Post said he'd have Hansi flown back. Hansi and Rose had to travel separately, and Rose could stay with the Edgemere Budds.
Hansi came and met Lanny, Post and Frank Stuyvesant at a club where they advised him to go meet Everett for future strategy. Accordingly Hansi reported after a while that the safe breaker was going to plead guilty, while Bess was going to deny it and say she'd been going to parties with friends. Hansi was told to say he'd escorted her. Post and Stuyvesant told him he had to live at his house, say he'd had a breakdown and could tell Bess he couldn't yet resume marital relations.
Rose arrived in Edgemere and didn't like Hansi having to live in his house with Bess. They put her to work in the Peace Program. Charges against Hansi were dropped, and Budds wouldn't attend the trial, but Rose intended to do so, and she'd contacted her publishers who were getting her a celebrity writer publicity luncheon etc. in NYC, and when they found out about her intending to attend the trial they contracted her to write about it for five hundred dollars a day. So she wrote about them all, and interviewed Hansi Robin. Lanny and Laurel were amused knowing that when readers knew Hansi and Rose were marrying they'd think the romance began with the interview.
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At the trial the defence debpnied all criminal charges, and claimed rights of people to be members of a political party. Johanssen admitted to stealing for money, and said he'd met the man who paid him only in dark. Bess had ample opportunities to making speeches despite several warnings by the judge, as did the witnesses who testified to her attending parties. They all claime any evidence and testimony to the contrary were contrived lies. But FBI put on stand neighbours of Bergers, the people claiming Bess had been attending parties, who said there were no such parties, Bergers always went out, and if there were parties neighbours would have called police. Then FBI produced a witness who was an FBI mole in the communist party, and although her testimony was denied by defence, jury brought in a verdict of guilty against all four accused.
Lanny heard it on radio and was in tears remembering Bess as he first met her, then the only sister he had.
"It was perfectly true, as Robbie had said, that Lanny was in good part responsible for the development of Bess’s thought."
Laurel comforted him, but she had no early memories of Bess. Lanny visited Newcastle alone. They wondered about whether the party would pay for further legal services, and Lanny reassured them. Back in Edgemere they got a call from Hansi who met them in next town with Rose, who was driving Hansi with his luggage back to Nevada, and had taken away all his money for legal purposes. She intended to buy a ranch and keep him fenced, and Hansi was taking custody of the sons. Bess being convicted of felony helped.
Hansi had shared their concerts earnings with her equally, so Bess had money, but Hansi wanted to give her the house, and Laurel advised strongly against it, since she'd only donate it to party and Laurel had met enough communists who lived like Russian Grand Dukes of yore. Lanny sat with his heart sad for loss of a sister that couldn't be replaced. Marceline wasn't intellectual.
Legal wrangles of the case proceeded, and judge denied new trials, granted bail for fifty thousand dollars each saying they'd been disappearing, and sentenced others to eight and Bess to ten years. Hansi filed for divorce, and Bess agreed to everything he asked for including custody.
"So once more the conscientious Lanny had to revise his judgments and realise that he hadn’t been accurate when he identified a Communist with a criminal. Bessie Remsen Budd was in truth what he had been calling her since long ago, a granddaughter of the Puritans. She was acting from what to her appeared to be the highest motives; she had convinced herself that the way to end poverty and war forever was for all the peoples of the earth to submit themselves to the dictatorship of the Politburo in the Kremlin. In exactly the same way Torquemada, chief of the Spanish Inquisition, had convinced himself that the way to save millions of souls from burning in the eternal fires of hell was to seize all teachers of heresy and torture them until they confessed and named their fellows, and then to hand all the lot over to the ‘secular arm’, to be burned at the stake with a fire that was soon over."
Funny, Lanny is unable to see his injustice against treatment of Marceline by him and his mother, the deprivation she suffered as a child; he's unable to admire the resilience she developed early as a necessity, or see that he didn't provide her a good role model by marrying Irma either, and no one paid attention to her development of mind, including him, unlike Bess who grew up in New England and went to school.
He is conscientious about not taking money even from U.S. government, let alone Hearst or Göring or Hitler, but he has no thought about taking the one third of proceeds from sales of works of Marcel Detaze, father of Marceline whom he knew and she didn't, even though his own father is rich and sends both him and his mother money apart from the estate and gifts. He fails to appreciate her sensitivity and independence in not bowing to an arranged match with a future earl but want to be pursued for herself, and her spirit in taking charge of her life when she discovers her husband cheating.
He accuses her of being selfish, but doesn't see that she went and stayed to nurse Oskar who was wounded, instead of escaping to U.S. from France when she could. When she did ask him for help, he refused, when he could have easily brought her out of Germany to see their mother and let her stay on.
He constantly belittles or berates Marceline, but isn't appreciative of her saving his life and risking her own. On the contrary he's given credit by the author for helping her recovery from the Nazi tortures she survived, no help from him until she was discovered alive.
Is his preference for Bess and disdain for Marceline all part of a whole slate, his heart and Beauty, his mother, France and his taste for upper class women of fashion, Dalcroze and dance and Marceline, all on one side, as against U.S. and New England, his father and the Budd clan, great uncle Budd's library and Budd-Erling plant on the other? He takes one whole side for granted, and respects the other.
He weeps for Bess who has always had everything, never suffered deprivation much less horrors such as Marceline did, but hasn't any place in his heart for Marceline, so much so he still hasn't admitted gratitude to Marceline despite her risking her life to save his, even though he didn't save her life when he could so easily have. No repentence, no thought about the only person he'sobliged to without any acknowledgements, not a thought about taking one thirds of money from her father's works.
Ingrate or snob?
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Hansi and Rose were married and were going to drive around California looking for a ranch. Bess called Lanny asking to see him and he drove to her house. She'd been ordered out, packed to leave, and gave him the address of her new apartment. She wanted to see her son's, and hadn't been allowed to know where they were. She was very hurt by Hansi leaving her. They had a final, fierce confrontation, he implacable and she accusing him. He left.
"All this time the strange new kind of aerial war was continuing in Berlin. The Americans had taken up the challenge of the Soviets. They were not going to be driven out of the city, and the people of West Berlin were not going to be starved. If the Reds blocked off the railroads, the canals, and the highways, all right; there remained the air and the cargo planes; there was the great Tempelhoferfeld, and in the American zone a field at Frankfurt and in the British zone one at Hanover and one at Hamburg. America would put its great cargo planes to flying food in to Berlin; it would bring new planes from overseas, depleting its own domestic services in order to call the Communist bluff and give the world a demonstration of American might.
"It was a shuttle service to Berlin, with a plane flying every few minutes. The moment a plane landed at the Tempelhoferfeld it would be run off the field and unloaded into the waiting trucks; then it would be wheeled back to the field and take off for the return trip. At the height of the enterprise each plane was making as many as three trips a day and being serviced while the pilots were getting their meals. On holidays and after working hours the population of Berlin would turn out and watch the sight. All day long through the summer the children of the city would perch on the roofs of buildings and on the fences and the rubble heaps to enjoy that marvellous free show, waving their caps and cheering each plane as it came down with its load of food for them.
"Bernhardt Monck wrote about these matters and sent clippings from the Neue Zeitung, the newspaper A.M.G. was publishing in both Berlin and Munich. Now and then for comic relief he would send clippings from papers the Reds published in their sector. They were raging furiously against the blockade; they were indignant because the Americans were violating the most elementary rules of air safety—so concerned they were for American safety, and for the safety of Germans who lived in the houses around the Tempelhoferfeld! They were saying that the Americans might keep Berlin fed and provided during the summer but could not possibly do it in the winter, when the ground would be deep with snow and when furious storms would last for days and nights. Then the West Berliners would require not merely electric light and power, but also heat for their houses and factories, which took immense quantities of coal. But Monck said the Americans were making their plans to do it and were accumulating stocks. He said that West Berlin had become a symbol to the whole of Europe; it was like a flag flying over a fortress, proclaiming the fact that it was still holding out. The free world was surely not meaning to capitulate!"
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Laurel had a feeling, she told Lanny, they should try a seance. Madame Zyszynski came, and said Fritz and Kurt were both there. So we're Göring with Karin, and son of Hilde Donnerstein. Kurt had been hanged by Vehmgericht, and he said Lanny had been right. Göring was laughing and said Lanny could have all his paintings. Hilde Donnerstein's son wanted Lanny to tell his mother that he was happy. Madame said there were too many Germans, she didn't like them.
Lanny told Laurel after she woke, and called Monck in the morning. Monck said Kurt had wanted to go home. Lanny told him, and a few days later Kurt confirmed the news. Lanny contacted Elsa Meissner to commiserate and to inquire if the family was all right.
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Boris Shub wrote to say Lanny ought to be in Berlin during airlift, the great show that was going on, to speak to Berlin. Monck wrote too.
"‘The Russians are coming over to us’, he said; ‘more of them every day, risking their lives. And still more of the East Germans—they have extraordinary stories, and you ought to be here to listen and put them on your radio. We all have such a feeling of impotence; the American people do not understand our problem, they do not understand the importance of education. In America, yes, but not here; they do not realise that this is a world struggle and that your country cannot win it alone’."
Also, Lanny needed to keep up his business. Winstead, an old client, wanted some more paintings, and Lanny got ready. Laurel made him promise not to go to Munich neighbourhood with the evil Vehmgericht. Lanny stopped in London and communicated to Irma that Frances had postponed her trip with Scrubbie to England until Lanny was back, and then talked to Alfy to give news about his parents. Alfy wanted to hear about Bess, too, and talked about British politics.
Lanny flew to Nürnberg and acquired half a dozen impressionist works for Mr Winstead. Having packed and shipped them off, he called on Emil Meissner. Emil said Kurt had really turned, and his killers had not been found, they'd vanished without a trace, perhaps abroad. Elsa had enough, Kurt had saved. Emil had warned his children who had agreed to stay away from neonazis. Emil agreed that it was better for Lanny to be not in that neighbourhood and Emil himself kept an automatic with him at all times.
Lanny told him about his art purchases, and he had similar purchases to carry out in Frankfurt; Emil wanted a favour. A son of an old friend, Heinrich Graf Einsiedel, a great-grandson of Prince Bismarck, had come over from east and was in prison, suspected of being a Soviet spy. Emil wanted Lanny to talk to him, and persuade him if he was a spy; Kurt had told Emil he was a great persuader. Heinrich had been only twenty one when he was shot down, and Russians had him since Stalingrad. Lanny talked to the young man who was frank and told him about his life after being shot down and Russia indoctrination, which he took like he'd done bible and Hitler's Mein Kampf before, a theory of a complete solution to world problems. Lanny talked to him about U.S.and Heinrich said he didn't know any of that. Lanny told AMG officers to give him books.
In Berlin Monck met him in his hotel room. He said he knew who'd killed Kurt but had no evidence, and Bavarian government wouldn't be too eager trying to hunt nazis down. About Einsiedel he wasn't surprised and said large numbers of Germans and others wanted to come West. The airlift did what was lacking in propaganda and Soviets were vexed.
Monck said no information had come about Fritz or Anna. Lanny told him about Emil and Monck said he should be brought to Berlin to talk on R.I.A,S.. Lanny talked to Boris Shub at R.I.A.S., he agreed with Lanny's suggestions, but said Lanny shouldn't say Russians, they were as much dupes by regime as Germans had been.
Truth, though, is that Russians were far less duped or in agreement or deluded than germans with nazis, and Russians were far more victims of a regime that turned totalitarian and suppression oriented, than Germans who were far more behind the nazis.
Boris Shub said Lanny should, since he didn't like saying Soviets, say Stalinists or communists or reds.
This of course presents the problem that the regime in Moscow wasn't monolithic under whoever the leader was, and after Stalin wasn't better; a good example is fate of Raoul Wallenberg, who was kidnapped and died in prison, and his fate was decided by a future leader. Reds or communists on the other hand exist in many countries across the gobe and are as little alike as accents of English speaking people from Texas to Boston to Oxford to Yorkshire and more.
"Very certainly they were not winning the Germans; the free world was winning them! They came day and night from the East sector to visit R.I.A.S. and thank its staff; they telephoned or wrote—a hundred letters a day. Out of that came a spy service which could not have been equalled for a million dollars. People would tell what was going on in the departments of which they had knowledge. They would expose the plans of the self-appointed cold-war enemy; and so the gleeful announcers of R.I.A.S. would be able to warn their public in advance, ‘Be careful if you are travelling on the express from Dresden. The trains are being thoroughly searched, and all passengers must have the proper papers’. Or they would say, ‘There are three spies working for the Communists in the Brehn Chemical Works. We will give their names, listen carefully now’, and they would give the names. This had become a regular department, known as the Spitzeldienst, the spy service."
Lanny spoke on radio giving American policy of trying to set up democratic governments everywhere in Europe and offer Marshall plan to aid people, while reds were blocking it. Two days later Ilya Ehrenberg spoke abusing Lanny and naming him, giving his father's business as evidence that he was warmonger, and proof that he lied. In response Lanny spoke giving facts about Soviet regime blocking every proposal in UNO for disarmament while American army in Berlin was already reduced, and he gave numbers.
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Meanwhile in N.Y. the story of Oksana Kasenkina exploded. She was teaching a school for Soviet consulate, her husband and son had gone missing in Russia, and outside in NYC she met an elderly Russian named Zenzinov, who'd lived the history.
"This old man explained to the teacher in the Soviet Consulate how the revolution had been betrayed and destroyed."
But in the school she had to go on teaching what she no longer believed.
"Soon she could not endure it any more, and she accepted Zenzinov’s suggestion to seek refuge on a farm up the Hudson River near Nyack, which belonged to a daughter of the great Leo Tolstoy and sheltered a group called the Tolstoy Foundation. Alexandra Tolstoy had been the count’s favourite daughter; she had stood by him through all his tribulations and now was trying to preserve and promote his Christian-pacifist ideas."
But the consul accused them of kidnapping her and demanded she be brought back and they be punished.
"Kasenkina, alas, wasn’t happy in the new home. A hundred refugees, lonely and idle, were not the best of company, and she was tormented by the idea that her husband and son might still be living and would be punished for her desertion. She wrote to the Consulate, begging forgiveness, and the consul drove up in haste; he promised her forgiveness for the mistake she had made. Finally she yielded and let him take her back to the Consulate.
"Once there, of course, she found that she was a prisoner and was going to be sent back to Russia. It would mean torture; she would be forced to reveal the names of everyone she had met and who had influenced her, and after that they would shoot her in the back of the neck or send her to a worse fate in a slave-labour camp. In her frenzy the woman threw herself out of a third-storey window of the Consulate and crashed upon the concrete area in front of the building. The case had become known to the newspapers, and court proceedings had been started to set the woman free; so there was a crowd in front of the Consulate. When the area gate was opened and servants started to drag the woman inside, the crowd interfered, police and an ambulance were summoned, and the badly injured Oksana was carried to a hospital.
"That, of course, made a tremendous sensation. Most Americans realised by now that the Communists used torture and that people do not throw themselves from third-storey windows for fun. Certainly all newspaper reporters realised it, and the story took the front pages. The consul gave out the statement that the woman was deranged, and he rushed to the hospital to try to interview her, but the hospital authorities would not let him in."
The story was published in the German newspaper in Berlin published by AMG, and told on R.I.A.S. as dialogue between four voices. In opposite side Zenzinov was abused as White guard.
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Lanny visited Seidl to know what people thought of airlift, and he had a nephew and family refugees living with him. Karl's boss had demanded he spy on colleagues, and Karl had escaped on a stormy night with family. Lanny went to refugee centre to plead his case.
"The refugees were pouring in, not merely from East Germany but from all the border states; the military barracks on the outskirts of the city were jammed, and new shelters were being built. ‘But how can we get materials now? And what will happen, Herr Budd, if we have to leave Berlin?’"
Lanny went to see General Clay, who was in charge of AMG, and asked him if Americans would stay.
"General Clay pushed one of these sheets toward Lanny. ‘This is what I said to the Department of the Army when the blockade began’.
"And Lanny read, ‘When Berlin falls, Western Europe will be next. If we mean to hold Europe against communism we must not budge. We can take humiliation and pressure short of war without losing face. If we withdraw, our position in Europe is threatened. If America does not understand this now, does not know that the issue is cast, then it never will, and communism will run rampant. I believe the future of democracy requires us to stay. This is not heroic pose, because there will be nothing heroic in having to take humiliation without retaliation’.
"‘That was approved’, said the General, ‘and there has been no change. I’m quite sure there will be none’.
"‘Would it be proper for me to quote that?’ Lanny asked, and the answer was, ‘It would be helpful’."
Lanny called on Ernst Reuter, Oberbürgermeister of Berlin. Lanny had met him during the visits to Berlin when Freddi Robin had established a labour college in the city.
"After the ending of World War I, Reuter had left the Social-Democratic party and become general secretary of the Communist party; but he had quickly come to realise the dishonesty of that organisation and had returned to his first love. That made him a renegade in the eyes of the Reds, and when he was duly elected mayor of Berlin they refused to let him serve. Now, during the blockade, the three Allied sectors were being merged and Reuter was on the point of taking his office."
Having spoken with him, Lanny spoke on radio on R.I.A.S., and got a call from Einsiedel.he was few blocks away and wanted to meet. Lanny told of a place he'd been to with Monck. They had dinner, and after that at the hotel Lanny got a call from refugee centre about East Berlin students asking for a university . He met them. They said Soviet teaching was ok when it was about technical things but not about history, philosophy, economics and politics etc., and wanted a free university. He asked if they knew Fritz, and drew a blank.
"He went to see General Clay about it, and that officer agreed. There would be the problem of getting a building, but he would find one. He would set aside funds and get some teachers and some books. Wouldn’t Mr. Budd like to become one of the teachers? Lanny was immensely amused by the idea of becoming a university professor—he, with only two years at St. Thomas’s Academy by way of formal education. But he told the general that he had a family at home, also a Peace Programme. He would go home and tell the American public about the embryo Free University of Berlin. Radio listeners would send books, and teachers would volunteer; also, some of the foundations might help; many people who didn’t want to pay income taxes might be willing to have their money used to set up a rival to the great Berlin University which had fallen prey to the Reds. Lanny counted that a good day’s work; he would have been still happier if he had been able to look forward and realise that within three years the Free University of Berlin would have a couple of hundred teachers and five or six thousand students."
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Lanny spoke about it and was returning to his hotel when one car knocked him down and another used to kidnap him, and he came to in a small dark room on floor with alternately freezing cold and blasting hot air. After drifting back and forth from conscious to unconscious, he was taken into a room. A young examiner interrogated him in German, which he didn't know too well, for a full day in bright light focused on his eyes which was painful, accusing him of conspiracy to murder Stalin. He fainted and fell from the stool. He was revived with cabbage soup and was brought back for another session with an older man persuading him to sign a confession.
"‘There is only one certificate that would be of any use, Mr Budd, and that would be for you to sign the list of charges I shall present to you. I am begging you as one man of the world to another to face the facts of the situation and choose the way that is easiest for both of us. I don’t want be to disagreeable or to threaten you, but it is my duty to tell you that you cannot possibly succeed in resistance. I assure you that in my years of experience nobody has ever succeeded in that effort; the possibility has been completely excluded. We have employed some of the world’s top scientists in many different departments, both of physiology and psychology. We know how the human body works, we know its chemistry. We know how the mind works, we understand the chemistry of the brain, and we do not fool ourselves with any idealistic notions. We know how to bring you to a state where your brain cells will be in utter confusion, every one working against all the others. You will not know right from wrong, you will not know truth from falsehood, you will not know whether you are standing on your head or your feet. What you have had so far is just a foretaste. It will go on day and night for weeks, for months if necessary. We have had persons who have stood out for as long as six weeks, but in the end, without exception, they have confessed and signed their confessions. In many cases they have come into open court and made those confessions. They have done this because we have persuaded them that the good of the party is transcendent to their own good, or to that abstract nothing which they call the truth. The truth for Soviet citizens is what the party needs and requires. For you, a foreigner and a non-party member, we desire no such public appearance; for you we desire only the names of the Russians who are guilty’.
"‘Even if they are innocent, Citizen Examiner?’
"‘Whether they are innocent or guilty is for the party to decide, Mr Budd’.
"‘In other words’, said Lanny, ‘there are Russians whom the party intriguers for some reason wish to put out of the way, and they use me as a convenient means of making them appear guilty’.
"The elderly M.G.B. man looked grieved. ‘I am sorry you persist in putting it that way, Mr Budd. I am trying to save you a dreadful lot of suffering, and you should be grateful to me’.
"‘I am sorry too’, said Lanny. ‘I have no appetite for suffering, but I am unwilling to sign my name to charges I know are not true’.
"Said the other, ‘I will give you time to think this over. Examine your own mind and see whether it is pride, or stubbornness, or the intensity of your hatred of our regime which causes you to give this refusal’.
"‘I assure you, Citizen Examiner, it is none of those things. It is a phenomenon which your expert psychologists may have overlooked. We call it conscience’.
"‘We have not overlooked it, Mr Budd’, was the reply; ‘but we have subordinated our conscience to the interest of a party which has been formed for the purpose of helping the proletariat to break the chains of wage-slavery throughout the world’.
"Lanny said, ‘I am sorry, sir, to disoblige you; but I have not joined the party, and I must obey my conscience. I might as well give my answer now. I cannot do what you ask’.
"The inquisitor pressed a button, and the two warders came in."
Next examiner was screaming abuses and threatening. This alternating torture went on until the next time it was elderly man. Lanny proposed to him to scrap the assassination accusations and Lanny would instead give names of spies within communist party in N.Y., and now he was made comfortable while he reeled off names he knew of party members who'd frequented Bess's home making Hansi miserable. When asked how he knew, he named Bess as an FBI agent.
"‘For a long time she was a sincere party member. But she saw so much corruption among the high party leaders; they were living in penthouses and enjoying all the luxuries of the upper bourgeoisie. They spent their time in night clubs, they spent their time chasing women, they made free with the young party girls; they raised money for various causes, for workers’ defence, for aid to refugees, and so on, and they put that money into their own pockets and had a good time. She saw that the party comrades were not like the devoted ones she had known in Russia. At the same time she was displeased by the foreign policies of the Soviet Union; she considered that the policies of the Cominform were not truly international but were becoming more and more nationalist. She heard stories about the great number of persons in concentration camps—in short, she began to lose her enthusiasm. Also, there was family pressure. I think what broke her down more than anything else was her discovery that Soviet agents had been getting the secrets of our father’s airplane factories. You can understand, I am sure, how that displeased her’.
"‘I can understand very easily, Mr Budd. It is a great mistake of the American comrades to put their trust in members of the capitalist class. It would never have occurred to me to trust your sister as a party comrade’.
"‘Nor to trust me either’, said Lanny. ‘Both of us have had easy lives, and we cannot share your willingness to make sacrifices. Anyhow, Bess came to me and told me what she had learned about what was going on at the Budd-Erling plant. I told my father about it, and he took it to the F.B.I. Because Bess had lived in Moscow and been considered a great artist there, the F.B.I. saw this as an opportunity to penetrate the party organisation. They persuaded her to go on posing as a party member and to work her way as high up in the organisation as possible. This is what she has been doing; she has known practically everybody of importance in the party and has reported their secrets to the American authorities. That is the story, and I am sure you will admit that it is really an important one’.
"‘Yes, Mr Budd, I admit that. But, tell me, why are you willing to tell me all this when you refused to admit the truth of the other story?’
"‘The reason is that the other isn’t true and this one is. I think my sister has done her share of hard work, and I don’t relish having everybody I know think of her as a jailbird. When this story is known, her usefulness to the government will be ended, and they will have to turn her loose. If I too am released, we can both of us lead our normal bourgeois lives again’."
This time he was allowed to rest. But he was brought back to the abusive examiner who threatened him, abused him and hit him, saying he had to sign the full confession, not just give old known information. After several such days of torture, he was rescued and brought to West Berlin.
"‘Who are you?’ Lanny asked. And the answer was, ‘My name is Tokaev. I’m a regular officer of the Soviet Army with the rank of engineer lieutenant-colonel’.
"‘But why have you helped me?’
"‘You have a friend. It is better not to ask about him. Suffice it that you are here’.
"Lanny didn’t ask; but he couldn’t keep from thinking, and there could be but one answer in his mind: Heinrich Graf Einsiedel! Lanny had helped him, and he had said that if the chance came he would do as much in return. And the chance had come! They had joked about it. The Untersuchungsgefängnis!
"‘But they will arrest you when you go back!’ Lanny exclaimed.
"‘I’m not going back. I had already made up my mind to come across. They suspect me as an enemy of the regime. I have had four warnings from my friends. The government has ordered me to Moscow, and I know what that means. They don’t want to arrest me in East Berlin, because I’m too well known’. He went on to explain, ‘I’m a colonel of the Soviet Military Administration; I’m employed as an expert on questions of aviation, rockets and reactive technology, and science. There are hundreds of subordinates and students who know me, and if I were arrested here it would make a scandal. but in Moscow it can be done quietly; I will just disappear. So I decided to come across; and it was suggested that I take you with me’.
"‘You have a family?’ Lanny asked.
"‘I have a wife and a child. They are already across. They went for a stroll yesterday’."
"How long had he, Lanny, been in the clutches of the Reds? He had lost all sense of time.
"Tokaev said it had been seven days and nights. Lanny replied, ‘I don’t know if I could have held out much longer. I had just about lost my wits’.
"‘What did they want of you?’ asked the other.
"‘They wanted me to confess that I had plotted to kill Stalin’.
"‘They had prescience!’ exclaimed Tokaev. ‘It may happen any day; but it will not do any good. Malenkov will supplant him, and Malenkov will be worse. Stalin is old and cautious; Malenkov is younger and brash. He looks like a scullion’.
"‘You know them?’ Lanny asked, thinking it was a polite question; and the reply was, ‘I know them both well. I must tell you that I am holder of the Red Banner and Order of Lenin lecturer, and former lecturer at the Military Air Academy in Moscow’.
"Evidently they had taught him English; he spoke formally and precisely, as if out of a book. He continued, ‘For several years I lived and worked in close contact with the highest representatives of the Soviet Communist party, the Soviet youth movement, the trade unions, and our own military oligarchy. I penetrated the inner sanctum of the Politburo and had frequent meetings with Stalin himself. On many occasions I heard from his own lips and those of his closest collaborators direct and frank pronouncements on internal and world affairs, in unofficial as well as official surroundings’.
"‘My God!’ exclaimed Lanny. ‘You will have things to tell our side!’
"‘I will tell them all that I know. I have a lot of technical stuff, for I was acting professor of the Moscow Institute of Engineers of Geodesy and Aerophotography, with the diploma of Engineer Mechanic. I was also subprofessor of construction, soundness, design, and aerodynamics of aircraft. I will look to you to put me in touch with the proper authorities and help me in getting permission to stay in the West’.
"‘I will be happy indeed to do that’, said Lanny, ‘and I am sure I’ll be able to’. Then he added, ‘Tell me, is our mutual friend determined to stay on?’
"‘Our friend is a brave man, and he will stay so long as he thinks he can be of service. You must not speak his name to anyone under any circumstances’."
Lanny said he wouldn't mention it even to him, and added that he was brave too.
"The group to which he belonged had blanks of various documents, permits, and so on, which had been stolen, and it was a fairly simple matter to imitate the scrawled signature of the Marshal of the Soviet Union, Comrade Vasili Danilovich Sokolovsky. ‘Poor Vasili Danilovich, he will feel very much hurt when he finds out about me, because it will give him a black mark that will never be erased from his record. But he has known for some time that I do not approve of his regime; he knows that he himself is no longer a soldier of the people but an executor of the will of tyrants. Mr Budd, I do not have to ask about your experience in that Prenzlauerberg prison. I have been on the Conveyor myself, and I bear on my body the many scars which the N.K.V.D. inflicted. No one in the Soviet Union is safe against their intrigues. If you develop any form of ability and get any position of responsibility there are persons who envy you and spy upon you and tell lies about you. You are not safe if you are inside, because you have rivals in the organisation as well as the enemies you have made outside, and sooner or later you will be pulled down and destroyed. We are both of us out of it and we can count it a good night’s work’."
They were eating at a cafe in West Berlin, open late night. Tokaev had changed inyo a civilian suit before getting into an S-bahn and thrown away his uniform, and the radio was on, R.I.A,S. was now operating all hours; it was startling when he heard -
"‘Mrs Lanning Prescott Budd, wife of the kidnapped American broadcaster, today paid a visit to Marshal Sokolovsky in East Berlin, accompanied by Colonel Slocum of General Clay’s staff. She went by appointment, and the marshal received her courteously and gave her the assurance that he knew nothing whatever about the whereabouts of her husband. Returning to the American sector, Mrs Budd stated that she is unable to accept the marshal’s assurance. She is certain that her husband has been kidnapped and taken to the Soviet zone, and she cannot believe that the marshal is ignorant of such an action. She stated over R.I.A.S. last evening that to make such an assumption would be to accuse the marshal of gross negligence and incompetence’."
They called the hotel, got her on the phone, and she seemed to have fainted. Tokaev called the hotel to see to that.
"It was three o’clock in the morning, but R.I.A.S. was running all night now. Tokaev called and asked for the programme director or anyone who was in charge. He told the news: ‘Lanny Budd has escaped from Prenzlauerberg Prison. He is in West Berlin. He had been questioned for seven days and nights and is exhausted, but after a rest he will come to the station’.
"‘Who is this calling?’ asked the voice. And Tokaev said, ‘It is someone who helped him to escape. Nothing is to be said about me now. You will hear Mr Budd’s voice’.
"So Lanny took the telephone and said, ‘This is Lanny Budd. I am all right. You may announce it. No, I can’t tell how I escaped, but I will tell later’.
"Lanny realised that he had again become famous. The first time was when he had testified against Göring at the Nürnberg trial. He didn’t like it a bit; it was a nuisance. He would have to shake hands with a lot of people, he would have to tell the same story over and over and listen to the same comments. It was one more trouble the Reds had made for him. But they had given him more power, he realised. Many more people would listen to R.I.A.S. now; he would tell them about the Conveyor, he would make it plain to a mystified world how it could happen that man after man would sign statements confessing to crimes they had never committed. Some men had come into open court and sworn to it; they were men apparently in possession of their faculties, not dazed, not under the influence of drugs. It was an amazing phenomenon, a triumph of perverted science."
The cafe owner helped them get to the hotel. She was relieved to see him, in tears, and aghast to see his condition; she insisted Tokaev rest for the night, and didn't wake Lanny up in the morning. He found himself alone and was cautious getting up, and waited for her before he could risk a bath. She called a barber to deal with his hair and shaving, it had been a week. Monck and Shub were waiting in the lobby, laurel had them come up while he rested on bed. He told about the kidnapping and the rescue.
"Shub said that the news of the kidnapping had been telephoned to R.I.A.S. immediately, and R.I.A.S. had been on the air at intervals for the last week, talking about the case and making demands of the Soviet authorities. Monck told of the repeated demands which A.M.G. had made, and of Laurel’s coming, and how he had taken her to see General Clay, and how the general had arranged for her to see Marshal Sokolovsky. From first to last the Soviet authorities had denied that they knew anything whatever about Lanny Budd; they hadn’t even admitted it now, when R.I.A.S. had been reporting his escape for some twenty hours."
Shub hurried back to R.I.A.S., he had to tell his audience who were all eager to know. They had been broadcasting the news of his safe arrival in West Berlin whik e he'd been resting. The hotel now had a guard outside his room, and Laurel now carried an automatic, in her handbag or kept under her pillow.
"They were back in the days of his Puritan forefathers, who had marched to church with muskets over their shoulders—and had not stacked the muskets at the door."
Tokaev came later, having seen his family.
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"Colonel Tokaev came to get his hat. They made much of him, seated him in a comfortable armchair, and ordered a cold drink for him; then they listened to an extraordinary story. He took them into a place seldom visited by Americans, the holy place of Bolshevism, the conference room of the Politburo in the Kremlin, with Stalin, Molotov, Malenkov, and the rest of the inner circle discussing their policies and the date of the inevitable war—la lutte finale!
"But he had got the idea of freedom firmly fixed in his mind and had been revolted by the cruelties practised upon the kulaks, of whom his family was one. He didn’t like being ‘collectivised’, and when he returned to Moscow he spoke frankly about the ruin it was bringing to the peasants; so he got into trouble with his party groups and was severely reprimanded and later on expelled. Then he got into trouble with the N.K.V.D. section in the Military Air Academy. His crime was that he had told a funny story about Stalin; and as the rumour spread it became that he was engaged in a plot against Stalin’s life. That was when he was beaten and kicked into insensibility. He said, ‘My boxer’s physique was reduced to a skeleton, sparsely clothed in flesh and bandages’.
"That had been more than ten years ago, and he had succeeded in having his case reconsidered and his record cleared. He was graduated from the Military Air Academy and taken on in their aerodynamics laboratory. Soon he became its head and a professor of the Academy.
"Then came World War II. Stalin and Hitler made a deal and divided Poland; and then, in less than two years, Hitler attacked Stalin. When the Hitler forces approached Moscow the Academy was moved to Sverdlovsk, and from there Tokaev had watched what he called the ‘fantastic butchery’ of the war and Hitler’s final defeat by that ancient ally of the Russians, General Winter. At the end of the war the colonel had been sent to Berlin as First Soviet Secretary to the Allied Control Council. He had started work in the Karlshorst mansion, soon to be known as the ‘Berlin Kremlin’.
"Then for the first time this Soviet officer had got a glimpse of the outside world. All his life he had been told about the ‘misery’ and ‘poverty’ of that world as compared with the happiness and prosperity enjoyed by Soviet citizens. He was astounded by what he saw. As he told Lanny and Laurel, ‘The average German working-class home was a palace compared with the hovel provided for the Soviet labourer; it was graced by luxuries, such as a radio, which in Russia could have been afforded only by a party boss or a Stakhanovite’.
"The Red armies had plundered and raped, and the inhabitants of Berlin fled and hid at the sight of any Russian; this had greatly hurt the feelings of the gentle colonel of aerodynamics. He watched with dismay the contradictory course of his colleagues, who wanted the Germans to love them, even at the time they were being plundered. The Reds had set up a ‘House of Soviet Culture’ in Unter den Linden; they fed the German population on potatoes and propaganda, while at the same time they took away all the machinery from the factories and left it to rust in the rain on the way to Russia. They had formed the Socialist Unity Party to organise the German people for political purposes; and Lanny remembered the glimpses he had got of this party through the eyes of Karl Seidl.
"After a little more than a year of these propaganda activities the Reds had felt secure enough to call a general election in Berlin. ‘They had to give a gloss of democracy to what they were doing’, said Tokaev. ‘They were astounded when they carried less than twenty per cent of the vote, while the despised and persecuted Social Democrats polled nearly fifty per cent. They spent an enormous amount of both labour and money on the campaign, and they got nowhere’.
One day, he got three calls at his home in East Berlin within a few minutes, each telling him to catch the next flight to Moscow, immediately. This was because of the ‘Sänger report' which Tokaev had found, about a project concerning an enormous piloted rocket plane flying across Atlantic to bomb and return; Tokaev submitted it, and Stalin asked for his opinion. Tokaev thought the project was valuable experience for their scientists but they weren't up to it, and Soviet facilities weren't either, which infuriated them, especially Vasili, Stalin's son. Tokaev looked for German scientists whom everything was promised by Soviets with no intention of keeping any promise, but they refused. Basil wanted to kidnap them and force them, regardless of where they were. Tokaev got called to Moscow, but gave excuses to not go, since he'd be risking vanishing.
Lanny suggested he tell his story, but Tokaev wanted to arrive in England first. Lanny said he'd help through the MP he knew. Laurel called him their deux ex machina, and they had to explain that.
Lanny was taken to R.I.A.S., with an armed guard, to tell his story. They made a recording and played it again. Laurel wanted him to finish with Berlin and return home, but Lanny couldn't tear himself away yet. Stalin was negotiating siege of Berlin, while red goon action squads were raiding council hall in Berlin, attacking journalists, reporters and western Berlin police. Berlin had a meeting at Brandenburger Tor, and Lanny saw to Tokaev's acceptance by England as refugee befor he was ready to go. Einsiedel called him before he left.
Lanny and Laurel rested at at The Reaches before proceeding to cross the Atlantic from Prestwick, and Lanny rested at Edgemere before reporting in Washington. Back home, he went to see Bess, who was being investigated by her party, and asked to go to Moscow. Lanny told her about his own experience and that of others he'd met, and talked about the people who'd been murdered by Soviet regime in Europe and in America. He told her to leave the apartment, pointing out how easy it was to kidnap a woman living alone and ship her off from NYC to Siberia, where she'd wither away to an unmarked grave. He told her to go to Newcastle and break with reds. Robbie could and would protect her. He called Esther to come immediately to get her, and she did.
Lanny Budd junior played games rescuing his father from bad men, while his parents took over from Rick and Nina who needed a vacation; Frances and Scrubbie would meet Irma and Ceddy in Florida.
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Lanny contacted the White House and waited, and the President was out of town but sent him a message to report to Under Secretary of State Acheson. Lanny met the Yale and Harvard guy and had an instant rapport. He told Dean Acheson about the problems and restrictions faced by R.I.A.S., and recommended modifying the restrictions. Dean Acheson was correct in his response, which summed up was that Soviets had been allies and Germany conquered foes; Lanny pointed out that meanwhile Germany was hearing Soviet propaganda while R.I.A.S. had only one third of Germany as audience. Acheson said that might change. Lanny went out and was surrounded by young newspaper men who wanted to to why he was there; he said he could only tell them what he'd said, and did.
He went home to Laurel, Baby Laurel, Lanny Junior and the rest of the Peace family. The Peace family and staff gathered to hear him, and he spoke about R.I.A.S., later on radio.
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Lanny got a note signed Rotterdam and saying he'd be called at home at lunchtime; he picked up the phone and just asked when and where. He picked up Hansi in Manhattan and they drove North while Hansi talked. He was tormented, having personally seen evidence that Bess was spying. He couldn't stand pretending and he still loved her, and he'd come to Lanny because his nerve was breaking. Lanny asked him if Bess had told him what she'd learned at the Lenin Academy in Moscow, and said she didnt tell him everything. He talked to Hansi about sleepers, and Hansi was aware. They talked about Hansi's troubled state, Lanny telling him about his own past until Hansi was calmed.
A couple of days later Bess called Lanny to say she wanted to see him, and he went to meet her in the next village. She accused him of trying to break her marriage and influencing her husband. They had a long drawn battle of wits, Bess not giving information whether she knew they'd met, him not saying anything she didn't definitely know. She was in tears, she'd been miserable due to their differences, and loved Hansi. Lanny said he'd no intention of breaking her marriage, but she was mistaken. He tried telling her about Katyn massacre.
"‘Everybody knows that the crime was committed by the Nazis, and they have been making a frantic effort to pin it on the Soviets’.
"‘That is what the Kremlin has told the world, Bess; but I assure you it is a case of truth crushed to earth, and it is bound to rise again. Stalin deliberately massacred fourteen or fifteen thousand Polish officers because he wanted to make it impossible for Poland ever to be revived as a nation’."
They talked about Poland, Lanny saying Poland was shifted West by Stalin which would necessarily eventually bring war between Germany and Poland. He asked her if she really believed whatever party said, without thinking. She said it was rubbish, and he reminded her of the time she flew into a rage when he talked about Hitler making a deal with Stalin; he told her about Nazi propaganda being shipped from Hamburg in Russian ships to be distributed in U.S. by Nazi organisations to cause strikes to paralyse U.S. and communists cooperating with them by orders from Moscow, and they had a heated argument again until Bess said she wanted him to leave her husband alone. He assured her he had no present plans to see him nor to convert him.
Lanny called Hansi from next town after Bess had dropped him, and using the code, had him call back from a payphone. He told Hansi about the meeting with Bess and Hansi said there was something going on that they couldn't talk about.
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Monck wrote in code to say Anna Sourden had met Fritz and something might be developing. As the old German song went, "‘Rejoice in life while yet the little lamp glows; pluck the rose before it fades away’."
Lanny took to long walks to deal with aftermath of this war.
"Wordsworth wrote of the French Revolution, ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. But to be young was very heaven’. Lincoln Steffens had travelled to what was then Petrograd and talked to Lenin, and had come back to Paris and told Lanny, ‘I have seen the future and it works’. But now poor old Stef was no more; he had died disillusioned and brokenhearted.
"The true Russian Revolution, the Socialist Revolution of the spring of 1917, was no more; it had become just another despotism, old-style with a new-style camouflage. The Soviets were no more; they were just a pretence, a propaganda device.
"With the help of the Western world Stalin had conquered all the states along his western border, beginning with Esthonia and all the way down to Bulgaria. He had blandly promised free, independent, democratic governments for all those states, and then had proceeded, no less blandly, to make them over in his own image by his tools of terror and fraud.
"Thus on the eleventh of June, 1947, the State Department disclosed that it had sent a note to the Soviet authorities in Budapest, charging that the Russians had taken unilateral action ‘in most flagrant interference in Hungarian affairs’. Three days later President Truman, signing peace treaties with Hungary, Bulgaria, and Rumania, rebuked those states for their oppressive measures. Eleven days after that the United States sent a note to Rumania, charging that the arrest of opposition members of the parliament was a deliberate effort to suppress democratic elements by ‘terroristic intimidation’. Two days after that the United States delegate to the U.N. Security Council urged the Council to permit the use of force to prevent Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria from aiding armed bands that were violating Greek territory. So it went day after day, week after week, and all the protests were spitting against the wind.
"At the beginning of June Secretary of State Marshall put forward his plan for American financial aid to European states, provided that they would adopt a uniform plan for recovery. There was nothing in that proposal to threaten the Soviet Union, unless the U.S.S.R. was bent upon conquest of the other states. But the Reds chose to take it as a hostile action and broke up a conference with France and Britain on the subject. Czechoslovakia had eagerly accepted the offer of Marshall aid, but Masaryk was peremptorily summoned to Moscow and commanded to reverse this decision. He went back to Prague and obeyed the order."
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Here in the following paragraph is the author's camouflaged racism in a nutshell.
"In August the British set India free, and that was one of history’s great acts of statesmanship. It was the action of the British Labour party and the Socialist intellectuals who had been for two generations its leaders and guides. If the Soviet Union had been a real Socialist state, with a real belief in democracy and freedom, this action would have met with thunderous applause; but instead there was thunderous silence. The Reds hated Ernie Bevin even more than they hated Churchill; for Churchill was a foe they felt they could beat in the end, but Bevin was the man they really feared, the man who could win the workers of the world away from Stalinism."
So he hasn't mentioned millions in India starved to death by Churchill, or more millions that died due to partition of India planned by Churchill for keeping control of military bases for use of UK and U.S. against Russia in The Great Game of control of the region, and he only mentions independence of India as if on par with freeing a pet from a collar and set free so the master no longer need spend time, money or attention; truth being it was nothing of the kind he states, statesmanship or freeing, but as Clement Attlee told at a public function when asked in India, Brits were scared of the effects of Bose; Gandhi they didn't pay attention to, and would have kept India much longer, but for Bose.
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Professor Goudsmit came for a broadcast, and Lanny exchanged reminiscences from their Alsos days, but these were grim times. Soviets demanded dismantling of atomic weapons every time UNO discussed disarmament, and that meant Russians could sweep right across Germany to channel ports and build more lethal V rockets, since Russian army and air force were not reduced at all. Lanny asked how far along was the Russian atomic program, and Goudsmit said eight to fifteen years, they'd taken away German scientists and had good ones of their own. Lanny wondered if they had spies in U.S., and Goudsmit thought not.
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Monck wrote to say that Anna and Fritz were watching each other and reporting accurately; Boris Shub wrote too, and invited Lanny to Berlin. Lanny had a client whose collection, on its way to being transformed into a museum for his town, could use a Rembrandt. Lanny knew that some two hundred thousand works of art, looted by nazis and taken by Göring etc., had been returned by Monuments people to their previous owners after recovery towards the end of the war. Several of these owners were now not as well off and Lanny got the clients approval on both he sent photographs of, so he was free to acquire either or both, for prices he thought right. So he got clearances and papers, and flew the northern route to Berlin.
"Lanny read in one of the highbrow magazines a sentence spoken by an English statesman, Edmund Burke, something like a hundred and fifty years ago: ‘The arguments of tyranny are as contemptible as its force is dreadful’. Lanny stowed that sentence away in his memory, thinking that it might come in handy at a German Writers’ Congress to be held mostly in the Soviet sector of Berlin. And it did.
"The Congress was an elaborate propaganda stunt, carefully planned in Moscow and controlled by its military authorities. They were going to assemble the well-known German writers from all the four zones, indoctrinate them with the dogmas of Soviet communism, and convince them that it was destined to dominate the rest of the world. By a propaganda trick the enterprise was taking place under the official patronage of all the Four Powers. The sponsor bore the sober name of ‘The Association of German Authors’, a respected body founded before World War I, abolished by Hitler, and now brought to life again. The chairman was the honoured woman novelist Ricarda Huch, now eighty-one years of age, and the honorary president was Heinrich Mann. The main sessions were held in the Kammerspiele, in the Russian sector just around the corner from the headquarters of the Security Police on the Luisenstrasse; they were being run by an Army colonel called the cultural commissar. The Americans had no such official and were paying no attention whatever to the enterprise. No American writers had been invited.
"The affair was in its second day when Lanny stepped off the aeroplane. He had barely time to arrive at the Savoy Hotel before Boris Shub called him up in a state of excitement. He wanted Lanny to come to his place to have dinner and hear about it, and Lanny did so.
"He met several American and German writers, all bubbling over. They had gone quite innocently to the afternoon session, expecting to hear discourses on the announced topics, ‘The Author and Spiritual Freedom’ and ‘The Function of Literary Criticism’. But at that session Colonel Dymschitz had presented a Soviet writer named Vishnevsky, editor of a Moscow magazine and author of a melodramatic Soviet film called We Are from Kronstadt. This gentleman, wearing his three rows of ribbons and decorations, had told the writers of Germany that the United States was planning a war of aggression, but the Soviets knew how to deal with warmongers; he had summoned the German writers and the German people to fight shoulder to shoulder with the Soviets against the American imperialists. His discourse continued:
"‘Reactionary forces in Washington and London are trying to create an “iron curtain”, but the Soviet nation is watchful and cannot be frightened, not even by atomic bombs … Brothers, comrades, we know how to answer. If you need us, call for our help and we will fight together’.
"There had been thunderous applause from the Communists, watched of course by their wizened little cultural commissar out of uniform. The German and American liberals had sat in stunned silence. They had left the hall debating what to do about it and had consulted with the chairman scheduled for the following morning, a German editor named Birkenfeld who happened to be more liberal than the Reds had realised. He had agreed that if an American writer would prepare a speech answering Vishnevsky, he would introduce that writer and give him a hearing."
Young Melvin J. Lasky had volunteered, he was not so known to reds. He worked through the night and Lanny along with others helped. The session began at ten in the morning, with Russian writers in front row, wearing decorations.
"At ten o’clock they were all seated in the second row of the theatre. Leading Soviet novelists and playwrights, all decorated, occupied the front row. There was the embittered Vishnevsky, and there was Kataev, a playwright and novelist who had once written a satire on Russia’s crowded housing conditions that had been a hit on Broadway, but who was writing no satires now. There was Gorbatov, a Soviet writer whom Shub had met on the River Elbe, at which time he had tried lamely to apologise for the dreadful treatment being meted out to the millions of Russians who had been seized by the German Army and were now being taken back and put at slave labour by the Kremlin. Also, of course, there was the cultural commissar, setting the pace for their applause.
"The correspondent Lasky was introduced, and he started tactfully and seductively. He congratulated the Congress upon ‘the spectacle of German authors again meeting freely together, critically exchanging ideas and making plans to defend and extend their newly born liberties’. He waited while the Russian translator rattled off his words, and the Russians all applauded. He told how American writers had been struggling for ‘honesty, frankness, and social realism in literature’. The Russians all nodded approval of that; it was the Soviet formula.
"He went on like that for a while, and if he had stopped there he would have been hailed as a great writer. But among the examples of American wartime censorship he mentioned that we were ‘not allowed to publish Leon Trotsky’s biography of Stalin. The edition had already been printed and distributed, but officials in Washington thought it might embarrass relations with Moscow. During that time many honest and independent books which were critical of the Soviet dictatorship, the Communist one-party system, the Soviet apparatus of political concentration camps and slave labour, were postponed and withheld; but I am glad to say only postponed. They have all since been published’.
"Those, of course, were awful things to be said in the presence of Russian writers; it was literally the first time such words had been spoken in Berlin, for Americans had been forbidden to criticise their Soviet allies. Looking squarely at the decorated Russians in the front row, Lasky continued, ‘We know how soul-crushing it is to work and write when behind us stands a political censor, and behind him stand the police. Think how it must shatter the nerves of a Russian writer to worry constantly whether the new party doctrine of the revised state formula of “social realism”, or “formalism” or ‘objectivism’, or what have you has already become passé and the mark only of a decadent counterrevolutionary tool of the Fascists’.
"The cultural commissar arose and stalked out and was followed by Kataev, the satirist who had stopped satirising ten years ago. Other Communists in the audience began to interrupt. ‘Warmonger! Throw him out! What about Eisler?’ They shouted that again and again—referring to a Soviet secret agent who had been arrested in New York and was soon to jump bail and escape. But Lasky went on to finish his peroration about the function of the writer as a champion of liberty of the mind and spirit, and the opponent of every form of oppression. He included that sentence from Edmund Burke which Lanny had supplied: ‘The arguments of tyranny are as contemptible as its force is dreadful’. So it is that the thoughts of great men survive and re-echo down the ages. So it is that, in the words of Shelley, ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind’.
"The Reds hissed and booed this speech, but the Germans gave the speaker an ovation. As Lasky walked down the aisle people crowded around him and grasped his hand. The aged Ricarda Huch, whose good name the Soviets were trying to exploit, embraced him and thanked him warmly."
Then later Kataev spoke attacking Lasky, as warmonger and unknown as a writer. Attacks in Russian press went on for a long time, giving a false account of the event. Lasky had attempted to address Berlin and Germany, and became a cult amongst young in Berlin, who copied his goatee.
"There were consequences of that Congress among the Americans also. Less than three weeks after the affair General Clay authorised his director of the Information Control Division ‘to attack communism in every form wherever it exists, and to cite each exposed example of its day-to-day work’. So came that change for which Lanny had pleaded with Under Secretary of State Acheson; it became known among the Americans as Operation Back-Talk. One of its developments was the publication of a monthly magazine dignified, cultural, and literary, in the German language. Its title was Der Monat, and the unknown writer Melvin J. Lasky became its editor."
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Monck hadn't been able to attend, Lanny told him about it. He gave news of Fritz, Kurt and Anna. She'd made contact with Hans Schufurt, and was sending information which so far agreed with that from other sources. Heinrich Brinkmann had gone to Hungary, where they had a printing press, so he'd probably taken the plates. Kurt was still in Berlin, and insisted Fritz stay in school. Lanny met Fritz to get his story about Anna, and to keep up the lonely young man's spirits. He then flew to Hanover, Soviets having made driving through difficult in every possible way, and conducted part of the business by buying and shipping one of the two paintings to the client.
Back in Berlin there was a note from Braun, and Monck had bad news - Fritz had been arrested.
"‘I know men who were arrested by the Nazis, and their families had to wait ten years. The same men were taken by the Reds, and some of the families are still waiting’.
"‘We all warned him, and he went in with his eyes open. It’s happening all the time; just a short time ago the Reds took away half a dozen students from the university. It caused an uproar, but the Reds don’t mind that—they want to frighten the rest, including the faculty. They come over into our sector and arrest Germans and carry them off at night, and we don’t know about it unless somebody hears a disturbance and tips us off. They’ve kidnapped a dozen Americans that I could name, and in every case they denied that they ever heard of them. We don’t get them back unless we are able to get exact information as to who they are, where they are, and who arrested them’.
"‘I cautioned you,’ Monck went on, ‘and now I want to make it emphatic. You have to learn what I’ve learned, and don’t go out on the street at night without company. You’re known as a R.I.A.S. man now, and there’s nobody they hate more. You went over to that Writers’ Congress, you’re known to be Lasky’s friend, and now comes this business of Ferdinand. The kid may name us, or they may already know about us, and they’ll tell him what to say about us and he’ll say it, believe me. From now on you must assume that you’re a marked man; and I want you to promise that if anyone lays hands on you, you won’t have any dignity about it, but scream like a wildcat. Make all the noise you can, and shout your name over and over again. That’s your only chance, that somebody may hear your name and take the trouble to go to a telephone and call up AMG. It happens that way often, and then we start raising hell and the Reds have to give up.’"
Monck spoke about Lanny being not tough enough to be in Berlin in particular and Germany in general. He didn't know who else could get as close to Kurt, and Lanny couldn't help. But Lanny found Kurt at his hotel, he'd come asking for help for the rest of his family. Lanny talked with him, and having said he'd try, oarted; then he went to Morrison, who thought it would be better for AMG to watch and catch the gang in their zone, and asked if Fritz said anything about buried treasure. Lanny said he hadn't mentioned it.
"‘He told us he believed his father had knowledge of some of the Nazi caches. No doubt you know that they had great stores of gold and jewels. When the time came for them to scatter and flee they carried it off and hid it in places they thought were safe. We have turned up several lots and we’re on the trail of more. That may possibly be where Kurt gets his living expenses’."
Lanny said Kurt wouldn't touch what hed consider property of the Reich, but counterfeit currency and so on were another matter. Morrison said he'd ask refugee commission to fly out Kurt and his family, and Lanny shouldn't use his own name in communications with Kurt. Lanny didn't wait to see the outcome, but flew instead to Paris to acquire the other Rembrandt, and having checked in at Crillon, wrote to the owner and called Denis De Bruyne, fils. He came and drove Lanny to his home, and Lanny spoke with Denis and Annette. The father had died, Charlot's widow had remarried and taken her children with her.
Denis had been getting Peace and sometimes they got the broadcast on shortwave. He said France no longer wanted a war, and in the atomic age there was no possibility of fighting back. He kept his two cars ready so his family and servants could drive to Bordeaux, thence to Spain and possibly thence to California or Argentina, at a moment's notice; he often just thought of doing it. Maquis had been mostly communist, and now they controlled unions and often striked. France wanted De Gaulle, but what could he do with communists striking? He had left money in Newcastle bank.
Lanny called at the Paris offices of American Federation of Labour next morning on Irving Brown who was trying to keep Europe's labour from going communist, and convince them about honesty of the Marshall plan. He was abused with false propaganda by the reds.
"The Social Democrats of Western Germany, our natural allies, had been reduced almost to impotence by the policy of A.M.G., which had once proposed the policy of threatening Kurt Schumacher with imprisonment because he would not cease his exposure of Communist brutalities.
"Fortunately the British had refused to go along with this. Imagine the British Labour Cabinet consenting to the jailing of a German Socialist leader for criticising Soviet world aggression! Said Irving Brown, ‘I suppose the General’s orders come from Washington. The policy is called “neutrality”; but I tell him there can be no neutrality in the fight between tyranny and freedom. And that’s what we have on our hands’."
Lanny visited the old mansion in St. Germain to buy the Rembrandt, and although he'd met the owner socially, was treated as tradesman this time, not allowed to see the master of the house whom he wrote a cheque for the amount asked, eleven million francs. He'd collect the painting in a couple of days after it was cleared, since there was no telephone in the house. No coffee and cake was served.
He couldn't have shipped the painting out of France anyway, as it turned out, since communists called for general strike. It was nominally against inflation, blaming America and shouting against Marshall plan, with mobs rioting and demanding repeal of the plan and saboteurs damaging docks and bridges and railyards so the goods wouldn't reach people. Ultimate game was paralyzing France until communist takeover making France another satellite.
Lanny attended a red meeting to observe, before going to Irving Brown's office.
"Irving Brown was there for the express purpose of baulking this Communist coup d’état. If it were to succeed it could be repeated in Italy, where the Reds were even more numerous and more powerful; there would be nobody left in Western Europe with any power to resist, and the other countries of the Continent would go down like a row of ninepins.
"Red terrorists were roaming the countryside, breaking the heads of workers who would not obey them; tearing up railroad sleepers, heaping them in bonfires, then twisting the rails; wrecking trains, flooding mines, putting boards studded with nails on the highways to deflate the tyres of trucks."
Léon Jouhaux, the non communist general secretary of General Confederation of Labour, known as the C.G.T., was fighting back this attempted takeover.
"All over France the C.G.T. workers proceeded to organise a new group of resistance. They called it the Force Ouvrière, the working-class force, and during the two weeks it took to break the strike they acquired eight hundred thousand members. The loyal workers organised armed committees to defend the mines from sabotage; they organised groups to patrol the railroads; they guarded the barges on the canals which spread from France all over the lowlands of Europe and had been used by the Reds as a means of conveying spies and saboteurs."
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Lanny saw to packing and shipping of the Rembrandt he'd purchased for his client, and flew to Cannes to see Beauty. Thence to Edgemere, telling his audience about the French general strike and its implications.
Lanny was worried about Fritz, and one day he heard Laurel murmur; she'd gone into a trance, and Madame Zyszynski talked about Fritz who wasn't yet dead.
Lanny and Laurel attended a concert of Hansi. Bess was now a secret worker, off the party members list, not allowed to be seen with Hansi who was used for propaganda. Laurel suggested Lanny see him and they met in central park. Hansi talked about his life, and Lanny talked about Fritz without naming him, and Paris and Berlin. Hansi talked about Bess and the party.
"‘There are some good people among them; people who come in believing the propaganda that they love the workers, that they believe in peace, and that all they seek is the abolition of poverty and exploitation. Sometimes it takes a year or two, but in the end the good people find out what the party really is and get out. But meantime they have joined some of the front organisations, they have let their names be used, they have even taken out party cards—and so they are ruined for life. They have the fear hanging over them that they will be exposed and will lose their jobs, their influence, their careers’."
Lanny left him in town after a day on Hudson, so Hansi could visit someone for alibi.
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"The twenty-fifth of December came; it had been Christmas day precisely sixteen hundred and two times, ever since the Church decided that it was a mistake to celebrate it in the spring, when it coincided with the birthday of Mithras, the god of a rival religion."
Budds of Edgemere visited Newcastle with Frances and Scrubbie following, and the two little Budds thrilled. Robbie made them stay over, so he could talk to Lanny about Bess and about Europe. Later the Budds visited Johannes Robin home where the whole family except Hansi and Bess were together. Their two boys were there. Johannes Robin talked to Lanny. He thought Europe was finished and on its way down.
"He had been reading about the downfall of ancient Greek civilisation; those little states had destroyed one another and themselves by incessant wars, and in the end the more primitive Macedonians from the north had taken them over. In the case of Western Europe it would be the more primitive Russians from the north. There was no possibility of saving the border states; country after country was being devoured, and you could hear the crunching of the bones."
Lanny and Rick read newspapers and heard radio broadcasts, and talked it over.
"During the month of January Pravda announced that the Soviet government had forbidden Dimitrov to carry out his plan for a Balkan Federation. This Dimitrov had been one of the revolutionary heroes; he had been accused by the Nazis of starting the Reichstag fire and had defied them in a sensational public trial in Leipzig. But now the Soviet sat down on him hard. Nations that were to be devoured separately must not be permitted to get together.
"And in that same month the Communist party of France served the demand that their parliamentary deputy Jacques Duclos should be permitted to become the first vice-president of that nation. It was this Duclos whose pronouncement in a French magazine had turned the American Communist party upside down and put Foster in the place of Browder. His request now meant that France was to consent to her own slow death. In that same month the value of the franc in relation to the dollar was officially reduced from a hundred and nineteen to two hundred and fourteen.
"In the month of February the Soviet government protested to the government of Iran against its receiving aid from the United States; and in the same month the Czech government brought on a crisis by protesting against Communist infiltration of the police. Four days later a so-called Communist Action Committee took over all the public offices of Czechoslovakia, all departments, newspapers, and radio stations. In vain did the United States, Britain, and France denounce this setting up of a new dictatorship."
On the other side, North Korea takeover in all but name proceeded.
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Lanny was at office when a girl on staff brought news of Hansi and Bess being arrested for spying, and he turned on the radio. The staff listened, then Lanny went to talk to Laurel. He guessed FBI meant Hansi to go on working for them. A call came for Lanny, Mercy Colfax of Liberal Defence League wanted to see him, and he asked her to come to the house. She sat to talk to him, but he insisted she tell him if she was a communist. She refused to say, and he said he'd speak to her assuming she was, and tell her what he'dtold Bess often. He proceeded to describe the transformation of the noble revolution into a gangster game, with old comrades gotten rid of by their colleagues in scrambling for power - "‘Zinoviev, Rykov, Rakovsky, Kamenev, Bukharin, Krylenko, Smirnov, Tukashevsky, Piatakov, Karakhan—’", and she said she'd wasted her time. He said he'd told her the truth, she might realise it one day, and he'd help.
Lanny called Robbie, Esther had expected as much when she had it out with Bess a while ago; she'd told Robbie to see Bess to make her promise to give it up as a condition for their hiring a lawyer for her defence, and Johannes Robin was going to do the same for Hansi. Lanny said he'd go see Hansi's mother. He did that, and told her about Hansi, making her promise to not tell anyone even in the family, and to go on acting sad. Later Robbie called to report, and Johannes called asking what Lanny had done to his wife.
Virgil Smathers, known to Lanny since he tutored Lanny in Newcastle, came to see him. He was now a priest and said he'd talked to some people, Hansi wasn't a communist but was just pleasing his wife by being one, and Lanny could get him out by approaching FBI to say so. Lanny insisted on knowing names of the high up communist officials who'd been part of the people that talked to Smathers, and since he wouldn't give the names, didn't agree to do their bidding, but called Post later and met him with usual precautions. They discussed Smathers and his proposition. Lanny wondered how they'd found the papers buried in the garden several feet deep and sealed in a washerboiler, and Post said it wasn't Hansi who'd reported them. Lanny wondered who the other spy in the house was that neither Bess nor Hansi knew of.
Smathers made sensational headlines by coming forth to tell about his interview with Hansi who'd refused the offer and said he had his beliefs and was innocent; Smathers defended the buried papers by saying a legitimate political party protecting its papers had that right. The case came up, high bail was promptly paid, and the Russians involved vanished just as promptly. Bess could no longer do underground work, and would do a lecture tour around the country saying papers were planted. Hansi met Lanny and thanked him about telling his mother, and said he was to have a holiday from spying and was going to compose music. Hansi told him about how they were arrested, and about the prison.
"The prisoners were taken to the Tombs. ‘I don’t know about the others’, Hansi said, ‘but they fixed us up comfortably, Johanssen, the accountant, and me—I suppose you read about him in the paper. He is a Dane, a blonde fellow, very quiet and determined, bitter when he talks frankly. It was my business to make friends with him, so I told him about my trips to the Soviet Union and all the wonders I had seen there and how I loved the Russian people I had known—which is true enough. He had every reason to trust me, and he did. He told me the story of his hard life. He got his head cracked in a strike, and that made him into a Communist. He dropped out of party work several years ago, took a new name, and joined the underground. He studied to be an accountant on purpose and then got a job in the Jones plant. He stole the combination to the safe where the classified papers were kept. He was introduced to Bess—he didn’t know who she was. He just knew her as Mary, and she knew him as Jim’."
Lanny asked if they'd see him, and he said communists would shoot him if they suspected.
"‘If you want to hide we will hide you’, Lanny said. ‘You can tell Bess the newspaper reporters are hounding you’.
"‘I wouldn’t have to lie about that; they’ve been trying to bribe the servants’."
Laurel didn't think Hansi could live alone, and set about finding a woman for him
Wonder why they didn't think of Peggy Remsen.
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Monck wrote to say Anna was missing. Lanny wondered if she'd betrayed Fritz or other way round, or she'd just gone off with a man. It was far more likely, considering shortage of men in Germany, that she'd been caught, and if so she'd no reason to not tell about Monck and Lanny.
Lanny reflected on the differences between the two systems, if caught in one there were laws and civil liberties, other you vanished and were never heard of. He turned on the radio and heard of death of Jan Masaryk, pronounced suicide officially.
"It was no surprise when later the story came out that he had been attacked in his bedroom and beaten to death with a piece of furniture and then thrown from the window. ‘When you hear of my death you will know it is the end’, so he had said—meaning, of course, the end of his country."
There was another letter from Monck, mentioning Treasure Island and enclosing a text, in German like his letter, for Lanny to read.
"‘We have a right to salvation, the right of the believers. Our salvation must be won by ourselves. We hold our heads high. Our way was straight and without blame. We ask no man to give us back our honour; we possess it! We have made no terms with the enemy; we are ourselves’."
"Kurt, who had made Lanny a pledge of honour, was not keeping it. He had taken the Nazi will-to-rule and made it into a Mystik, a thing superior to manmade laws and to merely human rights. It was the old notion that the end justified the means. In German it was even more fanatical: Der Zweck heiligt die Mittel. The verb means more than justifies, it means hallows, sanctifies. The German determination to take the mastery of the world became a holy thing; moved by this divinely inspired impulse, they had made three attempts in a period of less than seventy years, and now Kurt was telling them to cherish the impulse in their hearts and get ready for a fourth try."
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Lanny thought Laurel needed a holiday, and together they thought Hansi could use one. They drive via southern route to California, and leaving Hansi resting in a motel, went to meet the Armbrusters, and met a young woman of thirty or so who was a celebrity due to success of her first book. Rose Pippin was plane spoken, tall and strong, with a ranch farming background on the not so rich side. They invited her to hear Hansi, but she recognised him. Lanny told her about the way he'd met Laurel, and that gave her the idea, but Lanny pointed out that she couldn't tell anyone, that would endanger Hansi. She heard him play, and the match was made. The couple got engaged in a couple of days, and Laurel and Lanny went with them to Reno, leaving them and driving back home.
At home, Babe had learned new words, and Junior lamented about their not taking him along.
Monck called from Berlin, which was unprecedented, and in code said that Lanny was needed in connection with Kurt. Lanny asked if it was necessary, and it was. He would fly next day, as Monck needed. His flight and other needs, including his hotel in Berlin, were military arrangements this time, and he could talk with Monck in his room. Monck said Kurt had taken up treasure hunting.
"‘You know how diligent the Nazis were in accumulating treasure. They confiscated everything the Jews had and everything their political opponents had, and when the Allied armies were advancing they loaded it into trucks, and whole treasure trains came up into the south-eastern mountains. They buried it in caves and in salt mines—you were in the salt mines at Alt Aussee and saw it’."
Lanny said he'd seen it, including gold filled teeth of murdered Jews.
"I would wager there must be fifty million dollars’ worth of treasure of one sort or another hidden in the Bavarian and Austrian Alps’.
"‘Make it twice that’, said Lanny. ‘Fifty million might go for Göring alone. He carried a whole trainload that we caught near Berchtesgaden’."
Monck said they were digging it up, and Kurt was in on it. Lanny had thought he wouldnt, but Monck had found otherwise.
"They dig it up and take it away, hidden in trucks; they get it to the ports and carry it to Spain or the Argentine, and invest it in great estates and business enterprises—there’s been a lot of scandal about it and squabbling among the top people. They have accused some of their former chiefs as grafters, but the answer is, What is the use of letting the wealth lie idle? Why not put it to work and make money for the cause? They send back part of the income, and it’s being used to print and circulate propaganda—the kind of stuff that Kurt Meissner is writing, and that they believe is inspired’.
"‘We get tips and send a party and find the stuff, or sometimes we find we are too late. There will be shots up in the hills at night, and we go and find a hole dug in the ground, and the digging tools lying about, and a lot of blood. They carry off the wounded and the dead, but they leave the tools because it wouldn’t do to be caught with them. I suppose they tie weights to the bodies and dump them into the lakes’.
"‘It’s not just a question of the money’, said Monck. ‘It’s a question of the use the Nazis are putting it to. We’ll have to get out of this country sooner or later and leave them behind; they have their plans to win over the new generation and prepare for a comeback. You know what the Germans are saying already, ‘We had it better under Hitler”’.
"The Strelitz family—you know that wholesale killer—is running an electrical business in Austria with branches all over. When we go to arrest such criminals we find they have been spirited away to Egypt or Morocco or Brazil or wherever, and we know that the money for the trip came from the sale of gold bars on the black market. There are regular operators who travel to Salzburg or Bregenz and buy up the stuff and smuggle it out by way of Italy. Sometimes we catch them with gold vases or pieces of jewellery which we can identify from photographs provided for us by the Rothschild family in Paris’."
Monck told him about an episode that occurred at Grundlesee near Bad Aussee.
"‘A convoy of trucks and cars had arrived there. The men hired boats and went out on the lake and began surveying operations. When they found the right spot they anchored the boats. They went down to the bottom of the lake in diving outfits and attached ropes and began hauling up heavy chests. When the local police asked about it they said they were engineers from the French headquarters in Innsbruck, and of course the local police, being Austrians and a conquered people, couldn’t interfere with what French engineers were doing. They pulled up twelve large chests and loaded them on the trucks and went away.
"‘Investigation proved that there were no French engineers. It was a crowd of these Neo-Nazis, and we succeeded in tracing the trucks to the town of Tegernsee. We have an exact description of the man who was in charge of the expedition, and we believe that he was Heinrich Brinkmann, who was Kurt Meissner’s top man. We have reason to believe that this is S.S. General Dollmann, one of the heads of Hitler’s Youth Ideological Training programme. We haven’t a doubt that Kurt Meissner was in on that scheme, and he doubtless had to do with hiding the treasure. The money will be used for carrying on his propaganda here and abroad, and we are going to stop it if we can’."
Lanny asked if they wanted him to get Kurt. Monck said he'd given his word, but broken it, had built an expensive and spacious cottage with amenities that must have come out of counterfeit currency operation, and they could throw him back East if he didn't come clean; Soviets would be only too happy to get him back.
"‘They have a part of Austria right close to Salzburg, and no doubt there is plenty of treasure buried there, and they’d like to get hold of it. They have ways of getting secrets out of people—ways that we are not allowed to use. You can point that out to him, and add that his wife and children will go along with him. The Soviets will take that brood and put them in their schools and make little Reds out of them instead of little Nazis. Personally, I don’t see anything to choose between, but Kurt may, and that is one of the arguments you’ll have to use’."
The army flew him to Munich and gave a vehicle with fuel. Lanny drove to Tegernsee and went first to the Graf Stubendorf, hoping to enlist his help. He told why he'd come, and the Graf said he didn't agree; he said Germany must make her own choice of a system, not adopt one from America or Switzerland where geography was quite different. He pointed out that Nazi movement originated in lower classes and came to power on ballot; Lanny explained why that didn't mean it was democratic, but Graf flat out declared he wouldn't help.
Lanny drove to Kurt's stone cottage with a stone studio off to one side, and took him to the car to talk. He didn't waste time, and Kurt's denials were useless; he told him that the army had proof of Kurt's having broken his word, and Soviets would be only too happy to use Hitler's ways to deal with him, but Kurt should think about his children under their system. He said it was no use going over why Kurt had become Nazi, that dream was dead, and Kurt had a choice between the two opposite sides, democracy and red totalitarian. He had to make a choice. Kurt said the counterfeit currency operation and stocks had moved to Hungary, and he didn't know any names; he justified keeping the treasures, but Lanny told him it was no use denying and justifying the Nazi loot.
Lanny pointed out that Kurt had the choice, but it would be final, and what was not a choice was subverting American attempt to build a democratic nation while Kurt built his stone cottage out of stolen money and went on working to rebuild Nazi movement. He said he'd be back next day for his reply, and Kurt couldn't escape with remaining six children, even if he were to escape. Kurt remained cold and hostile.
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Lanny visited Hilde Donnerstein who was happy to see him. She asked what Russians were going to do, and he said he didn't know, but told her news of people she'd known - Beauty and Bienvenu, Marceline who had a new baby, Irma is tax saving devices, Margy and De Lyle Armbrusters and others, and the Peace Program. Lanny had brought food from PX and noticed the lack of furniture in Hilde Donnerstein's villa which was due to needs of money for food and taxes.
In the morning he went around the neighbourhood to other villas conducting his art business, and drove to Kurt's cottage. Kurt came out and said he'd decided to accept, he couldn't fight the force of American conquerors. Lanny took notes after pointing out that he didn't have authority to make a deal but had come as a friend, that Kurt would remain on probation and army would be watching him.
"Kurt told about the treasures that had been buried in the Alt Aussee district. They had been put under the care of S.S. Generals Stefan Fröhlich and Arthur Schidler. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, chief of the, S.S. who later was convicted at the Nürnberg trials and hanged, had delivered gold bullion, coins, banknotes, and jewels to a value of over ten million dollars. The total amount of the hoards collected and buried amounted to somewhere between forty and fifty million. On the second of May in 1945 the so-called ‘gold transport Strelitz’ had arrived at Alt Aussee, including twenty-two cases of gold teeth collected by the chief of the death camps. There were the cash boxes of Nazi secret agents in several of the Balkan states, and there was a ‘special action fund’ handled by Otto Skorzeny, the man who had been charged with the task of delivering Mussolini from his captors. There were also great quantities of narcotics, worth more than their weight in gold.
"What had become of all these treasures? They had been dug up in small lots and transported by Nazis escaping into the Tyrol, and from there into Switzerland, and from Switzerland by air to points in the Middle East. That route had been used by Strelitz, and also by those high Nazi officials who had been in charge of the wholesale killings of Jews. These men were now serving on the staff of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who was living in the Villa Aida in Cairo.
"Other fugitives had gone by the way of the Brenner Pass to Milan; they had had cars with diplomatic licence plates, and these the Austrian police could not check. Most of them had joined a group known as the ‘Black Hunter’, which had its headquarters in Madrid. This group was under the control of a countess, the former secretary of the German Embassy in Madrid. Lanny said, ‘I met her there’. Otto Skorzeny was prominent in this group, and a relative of Himmler had belonged to it for a time but had gone to the Argentine and set himself up in business.
"This Madrid group was the strongest propaganda agency, and Kurt named a number of its members: a Frenchman, Jean André, who had formerly been a volunteer officer in the Waffen S.S.; also the Belgian Nazi, Leon Degrelle. It was from there that the great mass of propaganda went out all over Europe and South America.
"‘I know’, said Lanny. ‘I have seen the leaflet containing the letter that General Alfred Jodl wrote to his wife from the Nürnberg prison before he was hanged’."
Lanny asked about various nazis known to operate in the area, but Kurt denied knowledge of any, and of any treasure buried in the area. Lanny confronted him about the obvious falsehood of denying any local knowledge and providing details about foreign locations and names which AMG knew but couldn't do anything about, and Kurt remained adamant. Lanny told him about the U.S. civil war and the 'unreconstructed rebels' who'd plotted endlessly after losing the war, with futility; he said he'd let Kurt treat him with patronising attitude because he'd hoped he'd bring Kurt to his self, but now it was over. Lanny said he wouldn't bother Kurt again.
Kurt didn't get out of the car, and said he'd meant his surrender, but couldn't give names, they'd kill and AMG couldn't protect against them. He was hostile and contemptuous in offering money, calling it ransom, and swept aside Lanny's corrections of his deliberately false twist on circumstances. He told Lanny his cottage was built with solid gold bricks, worth eight million dollars, inserted in the foundation, that could be taken out by a competent German mason, and this was the gold buried in Grundlesee, which had come from the gold fillings in teeth of murdered Jews. Then he ordered Lanny to leave, saying he was forced to betray the movement for sake of his children.
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Lanny drove away and called Monck from a cafe in a nearby village, where he spoke in impromptu code using motion picture script scenario and pirates and soldiers, asking Monck where he could take the story before it was stolen; Monck got it, and gave him name of Armstrong, and called him immediately so Armstrong was ready to receive him. Armstrong wasn't surprised about gokd bricks in foundation, it was a known technique of hiding gold, and Monck had arrived, by immediately taking a plane after he'd called Armstrong, by the time Lanny had some food.
Kurt was brought in and told he'd be kept under house arrest in a villa with a large garden, protected by AMG against his Nazi fraternity. Lanny said he'd send music and books, and asked if he'dchange his attitude and see Emil. Kurt assented, and Lanny flew to Nürnberg to see Emil. Having arranged Emil's reunion with Kurt, Lanny flew back to Berlin to work with R.I.A.S., which now had a new large building with the letters R.I.A.S. large on front.
"Little by little, upon one pretext or another, the Soviets had been cutting off the roads leading through their zone to Berlin. They would suddenly decree that trucks needed a different kind of permit and would cause blockades extending back for miles and delaying traffic for days. Obviously they were trying to make the situation as uncomfortable for the Allies as possible, in the hope of wearing them out."
Truman was criticised endlessly for Potsdam agreement in U.S., and unfairly so.
"The agreement had provided for free access of all residents of Berlin to all portions of the city, and that meant continual misunderstanding and clashes. It meant that the people of East Berlin had the opportunity to see how much better the people of West Berlin were being treated."
"Now, at the end of June, 1948, the Reds had apparently made up their minds to put an end to this annoying situation; they suddenly announced a land and water blockade of Berlin. The last railroad freight line, that by way of Helmstedt, was closed down—they said on account of technical difficulties, an entirely fraudulent statement. If the Soviets couldn’t keep a railroad marshalling yard in order the Americans would have been glad to do it for them—but they were not asked."
So Berlin would be dark, cold and starved, without electricity, coal and food. Some officials were for armed convoys forcing it, which would mean war, and if so AMG would be forced to surrender. U.S. could bomb Moscow, but meanwhile Russians would be in control of Europe down to Pyrenees, and U.S. wouldn't bomb all of it!
"Two days after the blockade was begun the C-47s, the two-engine planes of the Army, began hauling supplies to the Tempelhoferfeld. It was announced that this ‘shuttle service’ would be continued and increased. The Communists chuckled, because they were sure the Americans meant to feed and supply themselves and let the Berliners starve.
"The Soviet military withdrew from the Allied Kommandatura in Berlin—the last of the Four Power arrangements. Marshal Sokolovsky refused to lift the blockade, and the city administration of Berlin began cutting down the electrical supply to two or three hours a day. Such was the beginning of a battle of industrial and propaganda power that would continue through the summer and the following winter."
Lanny finished his series of talks and few back to New Jersey.
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Hansi called and gave his news, he wouldn't have to testify; his lawyer had advised them how to manage six weeks without publicity, and he was happy living with Rose, they'd never again live in a city.
The federal case was coming up; Bess's lawyer, Everett, called on behalf of Bess and came to see Lanny. Everett demanded to know where Hansi was and questioned his being away when the trial was coming up. Lanny refused to give up knowledge of his whereabouts and threw up his hands in the French fashion about rest of the arguments, saying Hansi was an artist. After Everett left Lanny called Post and went to see him. They decided Hansi could be their man in the defence and Post said he'd have Hansi flown back. Hansi and Rose had to travel separately, and Rose could stay with the Edgemere Budds.
Hansi came and met Lanny, Post and Frank Stuyvesant at a club where they advised him to go meet Everett for future strategy. Accordingly Hansi reported after a while that the safe breaker was going to plead guilty, while Bess was going to deny it and say she'd been going to parties with friends. Hansi was told to say he'd escorted her. Post and Stuyvesant told him he had to live at his house, say he'd had a breakdown and could tell Bess he couldn't yet resume marital relations.
Rose arrived in Edgemere and didn't like Hansi having to live in his house with Bess. They put her to work in the Peace Program. Charges against Hansi were dropped, and Budds wouldn't attend the trial, but Rose intended to do so, and she'd contacted her publishers who were getting her a celebrity writer publicity luncheon etc. in NYC, and when they found out about her intending to attend the trial they contracted her to write about it for five hundred dollars a day. So she wrote about them all, and interviewed Hansi Robin. Lanny and Laurel were amused knowing that when readers knew Hansi and Rose were marrying they'd think the romance began with the interview.
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At the trial the defence debpnied all criminal charges, and claimed rights of people to be members of a political party. Johanssen admitted to stealing for money, and said he'd met the man who paid him only in dark. Bess had ample opportunities to making speeches despite several warnings by the judge, as did the witnesses who testified to her attending parties. They all claime any evidence and testimony to the contrary were contrived lies. But FBI put on stand neighbours of Bergers, the people claiming Bess had been attending parties, who said there were no such parties, Bergers always went out, and if there were parties neighbours would have called police. Then FBI produced a witness who was an FBI mole in the communist party, and although her testimony was denied by defence, jury brought in a verdict of guilty against all four accused.
Lanny heard it on radio and was in tears remembering Bess as he first met her, then the only sister he had.
"It was perfectly true, as Robbie had said, that Lanny was in good part responsible for the development of Bess’s thought."
Laurel comforted him, but she had no early memories of Bess. Lanny visited Newcastle alone. They wondered about whether the party would pay for further legal services, and Lanny reassured them. Back in Edgemere they got a call from Hansi who met them in next town with Rose, who was driving Hansi with his luggage back to Nevada, and had taken away all his money for legal purposes. She intended to buy a ranch and keep him fenced, and Hansi was taking custody of the sons. Bess being convicted of felony helped.
Hansi had shared their concerts earnings with her equally, so Bess had money, but Hansi wanted to give her the house, and Laurel advised strongly against it, since she'd only donate it to party and Laurel had met enough communists who lived like Russian Grand Dukes of yore. Lanny sat with his heart sad for loss of a sister that couldn't be replaced. Marceline wasn't intellectual.
Legal wrangles of the case proceeded, and judge denied new trials, granted bail for fifty thousand dollars each saying they'd been disappearing, and sentenced others to eight and Bess to ten years. Hansi filed for divorce, and Bess agreed to everything he asked for including custody.
"So once more the conscientious Lanny had to revise his judgments and realise that he hadn’t been accurate when he identified a Communist with a criminal. Bessie Remsen Budd was in truth what he had been calling her since long ago, a granddaughter of the Puritans. She was acting from what to her appeared to be the highest motives; she had convinced herself that the way to end poverty and war forever was for all the peoples of the earth to submit themselves to the dictatorship of the Politburo in the Kremlin. In exactly the same way Torquemada, chief of the Spanish Inquisition, had convinced himself that the way to save millions of souls from burning in the eternal fires of hell was to seize all teachers of heresy and torture them until they confessed and named their fellows, and then to hand all the lot over to the ‘secular arm’, to be burned at the stake with a fire that was soon over."
Funny, Lanny is unable to see his injustice against treatment of Marceline by him and his mother, the deprivation she suffered as a child; he's unable to admire the resilience she developed early as a necessity, or see that he didn't provide her a good role model by marrying Irma either, and no one paid attention to her development of mind, including him, unlike Bess who grew up in New England and went to school.
He is conscientious about not taking money even from U.S. government, let alone Hearst or Göring or Hitler, but he has no thought about taking the one third of proceeds from sales of works of Marcel Detaze, father of Marceline whom he knew and she didn't, even though his own father is rich and sends both him and his mother money apart from the estate and gifts. He fails to appreciate her sensitivity and independence in not bowing to an arranged match with a future earl but want to be pursued for herself, and her spirit in taking charge of her life when she discovers her husband cheating.
He accuses her of being selfish, but doesn't see that she went and stayed to nurse Oskar who was wounded, instead of escaping to U.S. from France when she could. When she did ask him for help, he refused, when he could have easily brought her out of Germany to see their mother and let her stay on.
He constantly belittles or berates Marceline, but isn't appreciative of her saving his life and risking her own. On the contrary he's given credit by the author for helping her recovery from the Nazi tortures she survived, no help from him until she was discovered alive.
Is his preference for Bess and disdain for Marceline all part of a whole slate, his heart and Beauty, his mother, France and his taste for upper class women of fashion, Dalcroze and dance and Marceline, all on one side, as against U.S. and New England, his father and the Budd clan, great uncle Budd's library and Budd-Erling plant on the other? He takes one whole side for granted, and respects the other.
He weeps for Bess who has always had everything, never suffered deprivation much less horrors such as Marceline did, but hasn't any place in his heart for Marceline, so much so he still hasn't admitted gratitude to Marceline despite her risking her life to save his, even though he didn't save her life when he could so easily have. No repentence, no thought about the only person he'sobliged to without any acknowledgements, not a thought about taking one thirds of money from her father's works.
Ingrate or snob?
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Hansi and Rose were married and were going to drive around California looking for a ranch. Bess called Lanny asking to see him and he drove to her house. She'd been ordered out, packed to leave, and gave him the address of her new apartment. She wanted to see her son's, and hadn't been allowed to know where they were. She was very hurt by Hansi leaving her. They had a final, fierce confrontation, he implacable and she accusing him. He left.
"All this time the strange new kind of aerial war was continuing in Berlin. The Americans had taken up the challenge of the Soviets. They were not going to be driven out of the city, and the people of West Berlin were not going to be starved. If the Reds blocked off the railroads, the canals, and the highways, all right; there remained the air and the cargo planes; there was the great Tempelhoferfeld, and in the American zone a field at Frankfurt and in the British zone one at Hanover and one at Hamburg. America would put its great cargo planes to flying food in to Berlin; it would bring new planes from overseas, depleting its own domestic services in order to call the Communist bluff and give the world a demonstration of American might.
"It was a shuttle service to Berlin, with a plane flying every few minutes. The moment a plane landed at the Tempelhoferfeld it would be run off the field and unloaded into the waiting trucks; then it would be wheeled back to the field and take off for the return trip. At the height of the enterprise each plane was making as many as three trips a day and being serviced while the pilots were getting their meals. On holidays and after working hours the population of Berlin would turn out and watch the sight. All day long through the summer the children of the city would perch on the roofs of buildings and on the fences and the rubble heaps to enjoy that marvellous free show, waving their caps and cheering each plane as it came down with its load of food for them.
"Bernhardt Monck wrote about these matters and sent clippings from the Neue Zeitung, the newspaper A.M.G. was publishing in both Berlin and Munich. Now and then for comic relief he would send clippings from papers the Reds published in their sector. They were raging furiously against the blockade; they were indignant because the Americans were violating the most elementary rules of air safety—so concerned they were for American safety, and for the safety of Germans who lived in the houses around the Tempelhoferfeld! They were saying that the Americans might keep Berlin fed and provided during the summer but could not possibly do it in the winter, when the ground would be deep with snow and when furious storms would last for days and nights. Then the West Berliners would require not merely electric light and power, but also heat for their houses and factories, which took immense quantities of coal. But Monck said the Americans were making their plans to do it and were accumulating stocks. He said that West Berlin had become a symbol to the whole of Europe; it was like a flag flying over a fortress, proclaiming the fact that it was still holding out. The free world was surely not meaning to capitulate!"
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Laurel had a feeling, she told Lanny, they should try a seance. Madame Zyszynski came, and said Fritz and Kurt were both there. So we're Göring with Karin, and son of Hilde Donnerstein. Kurt had been hanged by Vehmgericht, and he said Lanny had been right. Göring was laughing and said Lanny could have all his paintings. Hilde Donnerstein's son wanted Lanny to tell his mother that he was happy. Madame said there were too many Germans, she didn't like them.
Lanny told Laurel after she woke, and called Monck in the morning. Monck said Kurt had wanted to go home. Lanny told him, and a few days later Kurt confirmed the news. Lanny contacted Elsa Meissner to commiserate and to inquire if the family was all right.
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Boris Shub wrote to say Lanny ought to be in Berlin during airlift, the great show that was going on, to speak to Berlin. Monck wrote too.
"‘The Russians are coming over to us’, he said; ‘more of them every day, risking their lives. And still more of the East Germans—they have extraordinary stories, and you ought to be here to listen and put them on your radio. We all have such a feeling of impotence; the American people do not understand our problem, they do not understand the importance of education. In America, yes, but not here; they do not realise that this is a world struggle and that your country cannot win it alone’."
Also, Lanny needed to keep up his business. Winstead, an old client, wanted some more paintings, and Lanny got ready. Laurel made him promise not to go to Munich neighbourhood with the evil Vehmgericht. Lanny stopped in London and communicated to Irma that Frances had postponed her trip with Scrubbie to England until Lanny was back, and then talked to Alfy to give news about his parents. Alfy wanted to hear about Bess, too, and talked about British politics.
Lanny flew to Nürnberg and acquired half a dozen impressionist works for Mr Winstead. Having packed and shipped them off, he called on Emil Meissner. Emil said Kurt had really turned, and his killers had not been found, they'd vanished without a trace, perhaps abroad. Elsa had enough, Kurt had saved. Emil had warned his children who had agreed to stay away from neonazis. Emil agreed that it was better for Lanny to be not in that neighbourhood and Emil himself kept an automatic with him at all times.
Lanny told him about his art purchases, and he had similar purchases to carry out in Frankfurt; Emil wanted a favour. A son of an old friend, Heinrich Graf Einsiedel, a great-grandson of Prince Bismarck, had come over from east and was in prison, suspected of being a Soviet spy. Emil wanted Lanny to talk to him, and persuade him if he was a spy; Kurt had told Emil he was a great persuader. Heinrich had been only twenty one when he was shot down, and Russians had him since Stalingrad. Lanny talked to the young man who was frank and told him about his life after being shot down and Russia indoctrination, which he took like he'd done bible and Hitler's Mein Kampf before, a theory of a complete solution to world problems. Lanny talked to him about U.S.and Heinrich said he didn't know any of that. Lanny told AMG officers to give him books.
In Berlin Monck met him in his hotel room. He said he knew who'd killed Kurt but had no evidence, and Bavarian government wouldn't be too eager trying to hunt nazis down. About Einsiedel he wasn't surprised and said large numbers of Germans and others wanted to come West. The airlift did what was lacking in propaganda and Soviets were vexed.
Monck said no information had come about Fritz or Anna. Lanny told him about Emil and Monck said he should be brought to Berlin to talk on R.I.A,S.. Lanny talked to Boris Shub at R.I.A.S., he agreed with Lanny's suggestions, but said Lanny shouldn't say Russians, they were as much dupes by regime as Germans had been.
Truth, though, is that Russians were far less duped or in agreement or deluded than germans with nazis, and Russians were far more victims of a regime that turned totalitarian and suppression oriented, than Germans who were far more behind the nazis.
Boris Shub said Lanny should, since he didn't like saying Soviets, say Stalinists or communists or reds.
This of course presents the problem that the regime in Moscow wasn't monolithic under whoever the leader was, and after Stalin wasn't better; a good example is fate of Raoul Wallenberg, who was kidnapped and died in prison, and his fate was decided by a future leader. Reds or communists on the other hand exist in many countries across the gobe and are as little alike as accents of English speaking people from Texas to Boston to Oxford to Yorkshire and more.
"Very certainly they were not winning the Germans; the free world was winning them! They came day and night from the East sector to visit R.I.A.S. and thank its staff; they telephoned or wrote—a hundred letters a day. Out of that came a spy service which could not have been equalled for a million dollars. People would tell what was going on in the departments of which they had knowledge. They would expose the plans of the self-appointed cold-war enemy; and so the gleeful announcers of R.I.A.S. would be able to warn their public in advance, ‘Be careful if you are travelling on the express from Dresden. The trains are being thoroughly searched, and all passengers must have the proper papers’. Or they would say, ‘There are three spies working for the Communists in the Brehn Chemical Works. We will give their names, listen carefully now’, and they would give the names. This had become a regular department, known as the Spitzeldienst, the spy service."
Lanny spoke on radio giving American policy of trying to set up democratic governments everywhere in Europe and offer Marshall plan to aid people, while reds were blocking it. Two days later Ilya Ehrenberg spoke abusing Lanny and naming him, giving his father's business as evidence that he was warmonger, and proof that he lied. In response Lanny spoke giving facts about Soviet regime blocking every proposal in UNO for disarmament while American army in Berlin was already reduced, and he gave numbers.
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Meanwhile in N.Y. the story of Oksana Kasenkina exploded. She was teaching a school for Soviet consulate, her husband and son had gone missing in Russia, and outside in NYC she met an elderly Russian named Zenzinov, who'd lived the history.
"This old man explained to the teacher in the Soviet Consulate how the revolution had been betrayed and destroyed."
But in the school she had to go on teaching what she no longer believed.
"Soon she could not endure it any more, and she accepted Zenzinov’s suggestion to seek refuge on a farm up the Hudson River near Nyack, which belonged to a daughter of the great Leo Tolstoy and sheltered a group called the Tolstoy Foundation. Alexandra Tolstoy had been the count’s favourite daughter; she had stood by him through all his tribulations and now was trying to preserve and promote his Christian-pacifist ideas."
But the consul accused them of kidnapping her and demanded she be brought back and they be punished.
"Kasenkina, alas, wasn’t happy in the new home. A hundred refugees, lonely and idle, were not the best of company, and she was tormented by the idea that her husband and son might still be living and would be punished for her desertion. She wrote to the Consulate, begging forgiveness, and the consul drove up in haste; he promised her forgiveness for the mistake she had made. Finally she yielded and let him take her back to the Consulate.
"Once there, of course, she found that she was a prisoner and was going to be sent back to Russia. It would mean torture; she would be forced to reveal the names of everyone she had met and who had influenced her, and after that they would shoot her in the back of the neck or send her to a worse fate in a slave-labour camp. In her frenzy the woman threw herself out of a third-storey window of the Consulate and crashed upon the concrete area in front of the building. The case had become known to the newspapers, and court proceedings had been started to set the woman free; so there was a crowd in front of the Consulate. When the area gate was opened and servants started to drag the woman inside, the crowd interfered, police and an ambulance were summoned, and the badly injured Oksana was carried to a hospital.
"That, of course, made a tremendous sensation. Most Americans realised by now that the Communists used torture and that people do not throw themselves from third-storey windows for fun. Certainly all newspaper reporters realised it, and the story took the front pages. The consul gave out the statement that the woman was deranged, and he rushed to the hospital to try to interview her, but the hospital authorities would not let him in."
The story was published in the German newspaper in Berlin published by AMG, and told on R.I.A.S. as dialogue between four voices. In opposite side Zenzinov was abused as White guard.
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Lanny visited Seidl to know what people thought of airlift, and he had a nephew and family refugees living with him. Karl's boss had demanded he spy on colleagues, and Karl had escaped on a stormy night with family. Lanny went to refugee centre to plead his case.
"The refugees were pouring in, not merely from East Germany but from all the border states; the military barracks on the outskirts of the city were jammed, and new shelters were being built. ‘But how can we get materials now? And what will happen, Herr Budd, if we have to leave Berlin?’"
Lanny went to see General Clay, who was in charge of AMG, and asked him if Americans would stay.
"General Clay pushed one of these sheets toward Lanny. ‘This is what I said to the Department of the Army when the blockade began’.
"And Lanny read, ‘When Berlin falls, Western Europe will be next. If we mean to hold Europe against communism we must not budge. We can take humiliation and pressure short of war without losing face. If we withdraw, our position in Europe is threatened. If America does not understand this now, does not know that the issue is cast, then it never will, and communism will run rampant. I believe the future of democracy requires us to stay. This is not heroic pose, because there will be nothing heroic in having to take humiliation without retaliation’.
"‘That was approved’, said the General, ‘and there has been no change. I’m quite sure there will be none’.
"‘Would it be proper for me to quote that?’ Lanny asked, and the answer was, ‘It would be helpful’."
Lanny called on Ernst Reuter, Oberbürgermeister of Berlin. Lanny had met him during the visits to Berlin when Freddi Robin had established a labour college in the city.
"After the ending of World War I, Reuter had left the Social-Democratic party and become general secretary of the Communist party; but he had quickly come to realise the dishonesty of that organisation and had returned to his first love. That made him a renegade in the eyes of the Reds, and when he was duly elected mayor of Berlin they refused to let him serve. Now, during the blockade, the three Allied sectors were being merged and Reuter was on the point of taking his office."
Having spoken with him, Lanny spoke on radio on R.I.A.S., and got a call from Einsiedel.he was few blocks away and wanted to meet. Lanny told of a place he'd been to with Monck. They had dinner, and after that at the hotel Lanny got a call from refugee centre about East Berlin students asking for a university . He met them. They said Soviet teaching was ok when it was about technical things but not about history, philosophy, economics and politics etc., and wanted a free university. He asked if they knew Fritz, and drew a blank.
"He went to see General Clay about it, and that officer agreed. There would be the problem of getting a building, but he would find one. He would set aside funds and get some teachers and some books. Wouldn’t Mr. Budd like to become one of the teachers? Lanny was immensely amused by the idea of becoming a university professor—he, with only two years at St. Thomas’s Academy by way of formal education. But he told the general that he had a family at home, also a Peace Programme. He would go home and tell the American public about the embryo Free University of Berlin. Radio listeners would send books, and teachers would volunteer; also, some of the foundations might help; many people who didn’t want to pay income taxes might be willing to have their money used to set up a rival to the great Berlin University which had fallen prey to the Reds. Lanny counted that a good day’s work; he would have been still happier if he had been able to look forward and realise that within three years the Free University of Berlin would have a couple of hundred teachers and five or six thousand students."
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Lanny spoke about it and was returning to his hotel when one car knocked him down and another used to kidnap him, and he came to in a small dark room on floor with alternately freezing cold and blasting hot air. After drifting back and forth from conscious to unconscious, he was taken into a room. A young examiner interrogated him in German, which he didn't know too well, for a full day in bright light focused on his eyes which was painful, accusing him of conspiracy to murder Stalin. He fainted and fell from the stool. He was revived with cabbage soup and was brought back for another session with an older man persuading him to sign a confession.
"‘There is only one certificate that would be of any use, Mr Budd, and that would be for you to sign the list of charges I shall present to you. I am begging you as one man of the world to another to face the facts of the situation and choose the way that is easiest for both of us. I don’t want be to disagreeable or to threaten you, but it is my duty to tell you that you cannot possibly succeed in resistance. I assure you that in my years of experience nobody has ever succeeded in that effort; the possibility has been completely excluded. We have employed some of the world’s top scientists in many different departments, both of physiology and psychology. We know how the human body works, we know its chemistry. We know how the mind works, we understand the chemistry of the brain, and we do not fool ourselves with any idealistic notions. We know how to bring you to a state where your brain cells will be in utter confusion, every one working against all the others. You will not know right from wrong, you will not know truth from falsehood, you will not know whether you are standing on your head or your feet. What you have had so far is just a foretaste. It will go on day and night for weeks, for months if necessary. We have had persons who have stood out for as long as six weeks, but in the end, without exception, they have confessed and signed their confessions. In many cases they have come into open court and made those confessions. They have done this because we have persuaded them that the good of the party is transcendent to their own good, or to that abstract nothing which they call the truth. The truth for Soviet citizens is what the party needs and requires. For you, a foreigner and a non-party member, we desire no such public appearance; for you we desire only the names of the Russians who are guilty’.
"‘Even if they are innocent, Citizen Examiner?’
"‘Whether they are innocent or guilty is for the party to decide, Mr Budd’.
"‘In other words’, said Lanny, ‘there are Russians whom the party intriguers for some reason wish to put out of the way, and they use me as a convenient means of making them appear guilty’.
"The elderly M.G.B. man looked grieved. ‘I am sorry you persist in putting it that way, Mr Budd. I am trying to save you a dreadful lot of suffering, and you should be grateful to me’.
"‘I am sorry too’, said Lanny. ‘I have no appetite for suffering, but I am unwilling to sign my name to charges I know are not true’.
"Said the other, ‘I will give you time to think this over. Examine your own mind and see whether it is pride, or stubbornness, or the intensity of your hatred of our regime which causes you to give this refusal’.
"‘I assure you, Citizen Examiner, it is none of those things. It is a phenomenon which your expert psychologists may have overlooked. We call it conscience’.
"‘We have not overlooked it, Mr Budd’, was the reply; ‘but we have subordinated our conscience to the interest of a party which has been formed for the purpose of helping the proletariat to break the chains of wage-slavery throughout the world’.
"Lanny said, ‘I am sorry, sir, to disoblige you; but I have not joined the party, and I must obey my conscience. I might as well give my answer now. I cannot do what you ask’.
"The inquisitor pressed a button, and the two warders came in."
Next examiner was screaming abuses and threatening. This alternating torture went on until the next time it was elderly man. Lanny proposed to him to scrap the assassination accusations and Lanny would instead give names of spies within communist party in N.Y., and now he was made comfortable while he reeled off names he knew of party members who'd frequented Bess's home making Hansi miserable. When asked how he knew, he named Bess as an FBI agent.
"‘For a long time she was a sincere party member. But she saw so much corruption among the high party leaders; they were living in penthouses and enjoying all the luxuries of the upper bourgeoisie. They spent their time in night clubs, they spent their time chasing women, they made free with the young party girls; they raised money for various causes, for workers’ defence, for aid to refugees, and so on, and they put that money into their own pockets and had a good time. She saw that the party comrades were not like the devoted ones she had known in Russia. At the same time she was displeased by the foreign policies of the Soviet Union; she considered that the policies of the Cominform were not truly international but were becoming more and more nationalist. She heard stories about the great number of persons in concentration camps—in short, she began to lose her enthusiasm. Also, there was family pressure. I think what broke her down more than anything else was her discovery that Soviet agents had been getting the secrets of our father’s airplane factories. You can understand, I am sure, how that displeased her’.
"‘I can understand very easily, Mr Budd. It is a great mistake of the American comrades to put their trust in members of the capitalist class. It would never have occurred to me to trust your sister as a party comrade’.
"‘Nor to trust me either’, said Lanny. ‘Both of us have had easy lives, and we cannot share your willingness to make sacrifices. Anyhow, Bess came to me and told me what she had learned about what was going on at the Budd-Erling plant. I told my father about it, and he took it to the F.B.I. Because Bess had lived in Moscow and been considered a great artist there, the F.B.I. saw this as an opportunity to penetrate the party organisation. They persuaded her to go on posing as a party member and to work her way as high up in the organisation as possible. This is what she has been doing; she has known practically everybody of importance in the party and has reported their secrets to the American authorities. That is the story, and I am sure you will admit that it is really an important one’.
"‘Yes, Mr Budd, I admit that. But, tell me, why are you willing to tell me all this when you refused to admit the truth of the other story?’
"‘The reason is that the other isn’t true and this one is. I think my sister has done her share of hard work, and I don’t relish having everybody I know think of her as a jailbird. When this story is known, her usefulness to the government will be ended, and they will have to turn her loose. If I too am released, we can both of us lead our normal bourgeois lives again’."
This time he was allowed to rest. But he was brought back to the abusive examiner who threatened him, abused him and hit him, saying he had to sign the full confession, not just give old known information. After several such days of torture, he was rescued and brought to West Berlin.
"‘Who are you?’ Lanny asked. And the answer was, ‘My name is Tokaev. I’m a regular officer of the Soviet Army with the rank of engineer lieutenant-colonel’.
"‘But why have you helped me?’
"‘You have a friend. It is better not to ask about him. Suffice it that you are here’.
"Lanny didn’t ask; but he couldn’t keep from thinking, and there could be but one answer in his mind: Heinrich Graf Einsiedel! Lanny had helped him, and he had said that if the chance came he would do as much in return. And the chance had come! They had joked about it. The Untersuchungsgefängnis!
"‘But they will arrest you when you go back!’ Lanny exclaimed.
"‘I’m not going back. I had already made up my mind to come across. They suspect me as an enemy of the regime. I have had four warnings from my friends. The government has ordered me to Moscow, and I know what that means. They don’t want to arrest me in East Berlin, because I’m too well known’. He went on to explain, ‘I’m a colonel of the Soviet Military Administration; I’m employed as an expert on questions of aviation, rockets and reactive technology, and science. There are hundreds of subordinates and students who know me, and if I were arrested here it would make a scandal. but in Moscow it can be done quietly; I will just disappear. So I decided to come across; and it was suggested that I take you with me’.
"‘You have a family?’ Lanny asked.
"‘I have a wife and a child. They are already across. They went for a stroll yesterday’."
"How long had he, Lanny, been in the clutches of the Reds? He had lost all sense of time.
"Tokaev said it had been seven days and nights. Lanny replied, ‘I don’t know if I could have held out much longer. I had just about lost my wits’.
"‘What did they want of you?’ asked the other.
"‘They wanted me to confess that I had plotted to kill Stalin’.
"‘They had prescience!’ exclaimed Tokaev. ‘It may happen any day; but it will not do any good. Malenkov will supplant him, and Malenkov will be worse. Stalin is old and cautious; Malenkov is younger and brash. He looks like a scullion’.
"‘You know them?’ Lanny asked, thinking it was a polite question; and the reply was, ‘I know them both well. I must tell you that I am holder of the Red Banner and Order of Lenin lecturer, and former lecturer at the Military Air Academy in Moscow’.
"Evidently they had taught him English; he spoke formally and precisely, as if out of a book. He continued, ‘For several years I lived and worked in close contact with the highest representatives of the Soviet Communist party, the Soviet youth movement, the trade unions, and our own military oligarchy. I penetrated the inner sanctum of the Politburo and had frequent meetings with Stalin himself. On many occasions I heard from his own lips and those of his closest collaborators direct and frank pronouncements on internal and world affairs, in unofficial as well as official surroundings’.
"‘My God!’ exclaimed Lanny. ‘You will have things to tell our side!’
"‘I will tell them all that I know. I have a lot of technical stuff, for I was acting professor of the Moscow Institute of Engineers of Geodesy and Aerophotography, with the diploma of Engineer Mechanic. I was also subprofessor of construction, soundness, design, and aerodynamics of aircraft. I will look to you to put me in touch with the proper authorities and help me in getting permission to stay in the West’.
"‘I will be happy indeed to do that’, said Lanny, ‘and I am sure I’ll be able to’. Then he added, ‘Tell me, is our mutual friend determined to stay on?’
"‘Our friend is a brave man, and he will stay so long as he thinks he can be of service. You must not speak his name to anyone under any circumstances’."
Lanny said he wouldn't mention it even to him, and added that he was brave too.
"The group to which he belonged had blanks of various documents, permits, and so on, which had been stolen, and it was a fairly simple matter to imitate the scrawled signature of the Marshal of the Soviet Union, Comrade Vasili Danilovich Sokolovsky. ‘Poor Vasili Danilovich, he will feel very much hurt when he finds out about me, because it will give him a black mark that will never be erased from his record. But he has known for some time that I do not approve of his regime; he knows that he himself is no longer a soldier of the people but an executor of the will of tyrants. Mr Budd, I do not have to ask about your experience in that Prenzlauerberg prison. I have been on the Conveyor myself, and I bear on my body the many scars which the N.K.V.D. inflicted. No one in the Soviet Union is safe against their intrigues. If you develop any form of ability and get any position of responsibility there are persons who envy you and spy upon you and tell lies about you. You are not safe if you are inside, because you have rivals in the organisation as well as the enemies you have made outside, and sooner or later you will be pulled down and destroyed. We are both of us out of it and we can count it a good night’s work’."
They were eating at a cafe in West Berlin, open late night. Tokaev had changed inyo a civilian suit before getting into an S-bahn and thrown away his uniform, and the radio was on, R.I.A,S. was now operating all hours; it was startling when he heard -
"‘Mrs Lanning Prescott Budd, wife of the kidnapped American broadcaster, today paid a visit to Marshal Sokolovsky in East Berlin, accompanied by Colonel Slocum of General Clay’s staff. She went by appointment, and the marshal received her courteously and gave her the assurance that he knew nothing whatever about the whereabouts of her husband. Returning to the American sector, Mrs Budd stated that she is unable to accept the marshal’s assurance. She is certain that her husband has been kidnapped and taken to the Soviet zone, and she cannot believe that the marshal is ignorant of such an action. She stated over R.I.A.S. last evening that to make such an assumption would be to accuse the marshal of gross negligence and incompetence’."
They called the hotel, got her on the phone, and she seemed to have fainted. Tokaev called the hotel to see to that.
"It was three o’clock in the morning, but R.I.A.S. was running all night now. Tokaev called and asked for the programme director or anyone who was in charge. He told the news: ‘Lanny Budd has escaped from Prenzlauerberg Prison. He is in West Berlin. He had been questioned for seven days and nights and is exhausted, but after a rest he will come to the station’.
"‘Who is this calling?’ asked the voice. And Tokaev said, ‘It is someone who helped him to escape. Nothing is to be said about me now. You will hear Mr Budd’s voice’.
"So Lanny took the telephone and said, ‘This is Lanny Budd. I am all right. You may announce it. No, I can’t tell how I escaped, but I will tell later’.
"Lanny realised that he had again become famous. The first time was when he had testified against Göring at the Nürnberg trial. He didn’t like it a bit; it was a nuisance. He would have to shake hands with a lot of people, he would have to tell the same story over and over and listen to the same comments. It was one more trouble the Reds had made for him. But they had given him more power, he realised. Many more people would listen to R.I.A.S. now; he would tell them about the Conveyor, he would make it plain to a mystified world how it could happen that man after man would sign statements confessing to crimes they had never committed. Some men had come into open court and sworn to it; they were men apparently in possession of their faculties, not dazed, not under the influence of drugs. It was an amazing phenomenon, a triumph of perverted science."
The cafe owner helped them get to the hotel. She was relieved to see him, in tears, and aghast to see his condition; she insisted Tokaev rest for the night, and didn't wake Lanny up in the morning. He found himself alone and was cautious getting up, and waited for her before he could risk a bath. She called a barber to deal with his hair and shaving, it had been a week. Monck and Shub were waiting in the lobby, laurel had them come up while he rested on bed. He told about the kidnapping and the rescue.
"Shub said that the news of the kidnapping had been telephoned to R.I.A.S. immediately, and R.I.A.S. had been on the air at intervals for the last week, talking about the case and making demands of the Soviet authorities. Monck told of the repeated demands which A.M.G. had made, and of Laurel’s coming, and how he had taken her to see General Clay, and how the general had arranged for her to see Marshal Sokolovsky. From first to last the Soviet authorities had denied that they knew anything whatever about Lanny Budd; they hadn’t even admitted it now, when R.I.A.S. had been reporting his escape for some twenty hours."
Shub hurried back to R.I.A.S., he had to tell his audience who were all eager to know. They had been broadcasting the news of his safe arrival in West Berlin whik e he'd been resting. The hotel now had a guard outside his room, and Laurel now carried an automatic, in her handbag or kept under her pillow.
"They were back in the days of his Puritan forefathers, who had marched to church with muskets over their shoulders—and had not stacked the muskets at the door."
Tokaev came later, having seen his family.
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"Colonel Tokaev came to get his hat. They made much of him, seated him in a comfortable armchair, and ordered a cold drink for him; then they listened to an extraordinary story. He took them into a place seldom visited by Americans, the holy place of Bolshevism, the conference room of the Politburo in the Kremlin, with Stalin, Molotov, Malenkov, and the rest of the inner circle discussing their policies and the date of the inevitable war—la lutte finale!
"But he had got the idea of freedom firmly fixed in his mind and had been revolted by the cruelties practised upon the kulaks, of whom his family was one. He didn’t like being ‘collectivised’, and when he returned to Moscow he spoke frankly about the ruin it was bringing to the peasants; so he got into trouble with his party groups and was severely reprimanded and later on expelled. Then he got into trouble with the N.K.V.D. section in the Military Air Academy. His crime was that he had told a funny story about Stalin; and as the rumour spread it became that he was engaged in a plot against Stalin’s life. That was when he was beaten and kicked into insensibility. He said, ‘My boxer’s physique was reduced to a skeleton, sparsely clothed in flesh and bandages’.
"That had been more than ten years ago, and he had succeeded in having his case reconsidered and his record cleared. He was graduated from the Military Air Academy and taken on in their aerodynamics laboratory. Soon he became its head and a professor of the Academy.
"Then came World War II. Stalin and Hitler made a deal and divided Poland; and then, in less than two years, Hitler attacked Stalin. When the Hitler forces approached Moscow the Academy was moved to Sverdlovsk, and from there Tokaev had watched what he called the ‘fantastic butchery’ of the war and Hitler’s final defeat by that ancient ally of the Russians, General Winter. At the end of the war the colonel had been sent to Berlin as First Soviet Secretary to the Allied Control Council. He had started work in the Karlshorst mansion, soon to be known as the ‘Berlin Kremlin’.
"Then for the first time this Soviet officer had got a glimpse of the outside world. All his life he had been told about the ‘misery’ and ‘poverty’ of that world as compared with the happiness and prosperity enjoyed by Soviet citizens. He was astounded by what he saw. As he told Lanny and Laurel, ‘The average German working-class home was a palace compared with the hovel provided for the Soviet labourer; it was graced by luxuries, such as a radio, which in Russia could have been afforded only by a party boss or a Stakhanovite’.
"The Red armies had plundered and raped, and the inhabitants of Berlin fled and hid at the sight of any Russian; this had greatly hurt the feelings of the gentle colonel of aerodynamics. He watched with dismay the contradictory course of his colleagues, who wanted the Germans to love them, even at the time they were being plundered. The Reds had set up a ‘House of Soviet Culture’ in Unter den Linden; they fed the German population on potatoes and propaganda, while at the same time they took away all the machinery from the factories and left it to rust in the rain on the way to Russia. They had formed the Socialist Unity Party to organise the German people for political purposes; and Lanny remembered the glimpses he had got of this party through the eyes of Karl Seidl.
"After a little more than a year of these propaganda activities the Reds had felt secure enough to call a general election in Berlin. ‘They had to give a gloss of democracy to what they were doing’, said Tokaev. ‘They were astounded when they carried less than twenty per cent of the vote, while the despised and persecuted Social Democrats polled nearly fifty per cent. They spent an enormous amount of both labour and money on the campaign, and they got nowhere’.
One day, he got three calls at his home in East Berlin within a few minutes, each telling him to catch the next flight to Moscow, immediately. This was because of the ‘Sänger report' which Tokaev had found, about a project concerning an enormous piloted rocket plane flying across Atlantic to bomb and return; Tokaev submitted it, and Stalin asked for his opinion. Tokaev thought the project was valuable experience for their scientists but they weren't up to it, and Soviet facilities weren't either, which infuriated them, especially Vasili, Stalin's son. Tokaev looked for German scientists whom everything was promised by Soviets with no intention of keeping any promise, but they refused. Basil wanted to kidnap them and force them, regardless of where they were. Tokaev got called to Moscow, but gave excuses to not go, since he'd be risking vanishing.
Lanny suggested he tell his story, but Tokaev wanted to arrive in England first. Lanny said he'd help through the MP he knew. Laurel called him their deux ex machina, and they had to explain that.
Lanny was taken to R.I.A.S., with an armed guard, to tell his story. They made a recording and played it again. Laurel wanted him to finish with Berlin and return home, but Lanny couldn't tear himself away yet. Stalin was negotiating siege of Berlin, while red goon action squads were raiding council hall in Berlin, attacking journalists, reporters and western Berlin police. Berlin had a meeting at Brandenburger Tor, and Lanny saw to Tokaev's acceptance by England as refugee befor he was ready to go. Einsiedel called him before he left.
Lanny and Laurel rested at at The Reaches before proceeding to cross the Atlantic from Prestwick, and Lanny rested at Edgemere before reporting in Washington. Back home, he went to see Bess, who was being investigated by her party, and asked to go to Moscow. Lanny told her about his own experience and that of others he'd met, and talked about the people who'd been murdered by Soviet regime in Europe and in America. He told her to leave the apartment, pointing out how easy it was to kidnap a woman living alone and ship her off from NYC to Siberia, where she'd wither away to an unmarked grave. He told her to go to Newcastle and break with reds. Robbie could and would protect her. He called Esther to come immediately to get her, and she did.
Lanny Budd junior played games rescuing his father from bad men, while his parents took over from Rick and Nina who needed a vacation; Frances and Scrubbie would meet Irma and Ceddy in Florida.
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