Stalin полностью

All surrounding streets and other approaches had been sealed, of course, but the British military attaché in Berlin, Colonel Noel Mason-MacFarlane, had an apartment overlooking the reviewing stand. “Easy rifle shot,” he had said to a colleague in the run-up to the Munich Pact. “I could pick the bastard off from here as easy as winking, and what’s more I’m thinking of doing it. . . . There’d be all hell to pay, of course, and I’d be finished in every sense of the word. Still . . . with that lunatic out of the way . . .”²⁷⁷ His superiors at the war office would have none of it. Again in March 1939, at the time of the invasion of rump Czechoslovakia, Mason-MacFarlane had urged headquarters in London to take energetic action, warning of catastrophe if Hitler was not “unexpectedly wafted to Valhalla.” Now, during preparations for Hitler’s birthday, he had been able to observe the swastika banners and other decorations going up. Assassination by a high-velocity rifle from his apartment remained feasible: his drawing-room window was no more than 100 yards from the reviewing stand. The noise of the crowds, not to mention the blare of the military band, could drown out any shots and allow an assassin a decent chance to escape. Again, however, the war office demurred.²⁷⁸

Following the parade, safely inside the Chancellery hall where Bismarck had presided over the Congress of Berlin in 1878, Hitler’s inner circle presented him with bronze casts, Meissen porcelains, oil paintings (including a Titian), tapestries, antique weapons, rare coins, and kitschy Nazi memorabilia.²⁷⁹ “The Führer is fêted as no other mortal has ever been,” gushed Goebbels, the instigator of the grandiosity. A collector’s luxury anniversary edition of Mein Kampf was published in both dark blue and red cases with stamped gold sword. Hitler, as state propaganda noted, had arisen from the lower ranks, and for his birthday, low-income Germans received 15 reichsmarks, plus 5 more for each dependent, as a onetime gift. Whatever the daily life hardships, Germans could be proud again. “A great man,” one seventeen-year-old girl observed, speaking for millions, “a genius, a person sent to us from heaven.”²⁸⁰

On April 28, 1939—two days after the British government had informed Berlin that it would not accept Soviet proposals for an alliance—the Führer denounced his nonaggression declaration with Poland as well as the Anglo-German naval accord, blaming the two countries, in a blistering two-hour speech at one of the fewer than a dozen Reichstag sessions since he had claimed power.

Hitler was furious over another letter from U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt pleading for assurances from the Nazi leader that he would not commit aggression against a long list of specified countries, promising him access to raw materials in return. The message had been disclosed to the New York Times before reaching Hitler, and he had summoned the 855 Reichstag deputies to the Kroll Opera House. “For the past six and a half years, I have lived day and night for the single task of awakening the powers of my people in the face of our desertion by the rest of the world,” he gloated, in front of an immense Nazi eagle. “I have conquered chaos in Germany, reestablished order, immensely increased production in all branches of our national economy, produced, by strenuous efforts, substitutes for numerous materials which we lack, prepared the way for new inventions, . . . caused magnificent roads to be built and canals to be dug, created gigantic new factories.” He congratulated himself for overcoming Versailles and reunifying Germany as well: “I have likewise endeavored to rid them of that treaty, page by page, which in its 448 articles contains the vilest oppression which has ever been inflicted on men and nations. I have brought back to the Reich the provinces stolen from us in 1919. . . . I have reunited the territories that have been German throughout a thousand years of history—and, Mr. Roosevelt, I have endeavored to attain all this without bloodshed and without bringing to my people, and so to others, the misery of war.”²⁸¹

Hitler’s speech drew hearty applause and laughs, including when he implied that he would refrain from attacking the many countries that remained under the British colonial yoke or had already been invaded by the United States over the course of its existence. His twisted thinking—calling dictatorship “order” and the Weimar Constitution “chaos”—did not vitiate the fact that Germany’s vast pool of 6 million unemployed had been returned to the dignity of work, with an economic boom absent inflation (or strikes, which were outlawed), and that Germany had incorporated Austria, the Sudetenland, the Saarland, and Memel. A once great but prostrate country had in Nazi fashion become great again, in a single generation; a lifelong nonentity had become the world’s central figure.²⁸²