animal!" The more Adolf told the world what he was and what he meant to do, the more the
world smiled incredulously. There were men like that in every lunatic asylum; the type was so
familiar that any psychiatrist could diagnose it from a single paragraph of a speech or a single
page of a book. Sensible men said:
conquer the world. Here and there a man of social insight cried out warnings of what was
going on; but these, too, were a well-known type and the psychiatrists had names for them.
Adolf Hitler got the mastery of the National Socialist Party because of his combination of
qualities; because he was the most fanatical, the most determined, the most tireless, and at the
same time the shrewdest, the most unscrupulous, the most deadly. From the beginning men
had revolted against his authority, and while he was weak he had wheedled and cajoled them
and when he became strong he had crushed them. There had been split after split in his
movement, and he had gone after the leaders of the factions without ruth; even before he had
got the authority of government in his hands, his fanatical Stormtroopers had been beating and
sometimes murdering the opponents of this new dark religion of
soil. Work with Adolf Hitler and you would rise to power in the world; oppose him, and your
brains would be spattered on the pavement, or you would be shot in the back and left unburied
in a dark wood.
Hermann Goring, aviator and army officer, man of wealth, of luxurious tastes and insatiable
vanities, hated and despised Joseph Goebbels, the blabbing journalist, the club-footed little
dwarf with the venom-spitting tongue; and these sentiments were cordially reciprocated. Jupp
would have thrown vitriol into Hermann's face, Hermann would have shot Jupp on sight—if
either had dared. But the Führer needed Hermann as a master executive and Jupp as a master
propagandist, and he put them into harness and drove them as a team. The same thing was
true of hundreds of men in that party of madness and hate: World War victims, depression
victims, psychopaths, drug addicts, perverts, criminals—they all needed Adolf a little more than
Adolf needed them, and he welded them into something more powerful than themselves.
Hardly one who wasn't sure that he was a greater man than Adolf, and better fitted to lead the
party; in the old days many had patronized him, and in their hearts they still did so; but he
had won out over them, because of the combination of qualities. He was the one who had
persuaded the masses to trust him, and he was the one who could lead the N.S.D.A.P. and all its
members and officials upon the road to conquest.
II
Adolf Hitler had watched Lenin, he now was watching Stalin and Mussolini, and had
learned from them all. In June of the year 1924, when Lanny Budd had been in Rome, Benito
Mussolini had been Premier of Italy for more than twenty months, but the Socialists were still
publishing papers with several times as many readers as Mussolini's papers, and there was
still freedom of speech in the Italian parliament and elsewhere; there was still an opposition
party, there were labor unions and co-operatives and other means of resistance to the will of the
Fascists. It had taken the murderer of Matteotti another year and more to accomplish his
purpose of crushing opposition and making himself master of the Italian nation.
But Adolf's time-table was different from that. Adolf had a job to do in the outside world, and
had no idea of dawdling for three years before beginning it. He knew how to wait, but would
never wait an hour longer than necessary, and would be his own judge of the timing; he
would startle the world, and even his own followers, by the suddenness and speed of his
moves.
First, always first, the psychological preparation. Was he going to wipe out the rights of
German labor, to destroy a movement which the workers had been patiently building for
nearly a century? Obviously, then, the first step was to come to labor with outstretched hands,
to enfold it in a brotherly clasp while it was stabbed in the back; to set it upon a throne where it
could be safely and surely riddled with machine gun bullets.
Europe's labor day was the First of May, and everywhere over the continent the workers
paraded, they held enormous meetings, picnics and sports, they sang songs and listened to
speeches from their leaders, they heartened and inspired themselves for the three hundred
and sixty-four hard days. So now, several weeks in advance, it was announced that the Hitler
government was going to take over the First of May and make it the "Day of National Labor."
This was a government of "true Socialism"; it was the friend of labor, it
longer could there be a class struggle or any conflict of interest. The revolution having been
accomplished, the workers would celebrate their conquest and the new and splendid future
