The World полностью

Still a soldier and now twenty-nine, Hitler shared the fury at German defeat, and began embracing German racial supremacy and rabid antisemitism. At an army instruction course, he spoke publicly for the first time. ‘I saw a pale drawn face,’ remembered one of the instructors, ‘underneath a decidedly unmilitary shock of hair with a trimmed moustache and remarkably large, light-blue, fanatically cold, gleaming eyes,’ and heard the guttural voice as he addressed his fellow students: ‘I had the strange feeling that he had got them excited and at the same time that their interest had given him his voice.’ The observer remarked to a colleague, ‘one of your trainees is a natural-born public speaker’. Hitler embraced the ‘stab in the back’ theory, claiming that the traitors were Jews, with whom he conflated the Communists: Judaeo-Bolshevism.

‘We must probe with bayonets,’ Lenin said, ‘whether the social revolution in Poland has ripened.’ In summer 1920, he invaded Poland, appointing his secret policeman Dzerzhinsky as dictator designate. Warsaw seemed doomed. Europe held its breath.

PROBING WITH BAYONETS: THE KINGS OF MUNICH, SYRIA AND IRAQ

On 16 August 1920, Piłsudski, advised by British and French officers, including a young French officer named Charles de Gaulle, shattered the Bolshevik offensive. Lenin absorbed the devastating blow. To the south, Stalin seized independent Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, with its Baku oil.^* The Bolsheviks would not take Europe, not yet anyway, but now Lenin had to make his state work, just as in Munich, bloodily liberated from Communist rule, Hitler, a spy for army intelligence, was monitoring a small völkisch German Workers’ Party. He left the army as Lenin’s forces were routed on the Vistula and took over the Party, renamed the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party. ‘It was a wonderful time,’ he said later. ‘The best time of all.’

Hitler developed his oratory, practising his wild gestures like an actor, mastering the phrases and themes, a mix of racial pseudoscience, fake history, medieval chivalry and religious imagery, that resounded with his audiences in crowded Bavarian cellar bars, attacking the ‘November criminals’, corrupt politicians and Jews. ‘Why are we antisemites?’ he asked, answering that the Jews ‘were parasites on other peoples’, driven by ‘Mammon and materialism … the only Jewish goal – world domination’ and the only solution ‘the removal of Jews from our people’. In early 1921, he formed the paramilitary Sturmabteilung – Stormtroop – fitting them out in brown uniforms, to fight ‘our enemy the Jew’. The Nazis attracted two well-connected war heroes, the thrice-wounded, scar-faced Captain Ernst Röhm and Hermann Göring, son of a governor of German South West Africa and bemedalled star pilot married to a baroness. As hyperinflation, riots and strikes created an atmosphere of dystopic freefall, Hitler became the ‘King of Munich’, and was joined by General Ludendorff himself in a plan to seize power. Their inspiration was Italy.

In October 1922, a bullish, squared-jawed veteran and journalist, Benito Mussolini, leader of his National Fascist Party, backed by the paramilitary Squadrismo, the Blackshirts, threatened to march on Rome to seize power in the kingdom which was falling apart after brutal losses in the war. Mussolini insisted that the ‘plutodemocracies’ (Britain and France) had prevented Italy’s receiving its deserved spoils. Mussolini’s Fascism was named after the fasces, a bundle of wood and an axe that symbolized the authority of Roman consuls; he advocated a new Roman empire to replace democracy and vanquish Marxism. It impressed many businessmen and aristocrats. When Mussolini threatened a march on Rome, King Victor Emmanuel III invited him to Rome, no march being necessary.

The king, five feet tall and nicknamed Sciaboletta (Little Sword), saw Mussolini as an essential ‘strong man’ like Crispi.^* Mussolini, in a characteristically phallic image, disdained the king as his ‘contraceptive’, adding that the king was ‘too tiny for an Italy destined for greatness’. Mussolini believed his bullish libido was an extension of his power, boasting ‘genius lies in the genitals’. He arrived in Rome by train, was appointed premier and went on to use terror to subdue Italy. But the new cult of the superman-dictator was a transcendent rejection of petty routine and projection of the extraordinary in which the mass could share. Hitler believed he could do the same: he planned to seize power.

To the east, Faisal and Lawrence were also trying to overturn Allied decisions. On 7 March 1920, in Damascus, Faisal was hailed as king of a greater Syria that would include today’s Syria, Lebanon and Israel.