The Vengeance of Rome

TWENTY-FOUR

I take Mrs Cornelius to the canal. The council have now paved parts of the towpath, and it is a little easier to avoid the dog muck. Nothing wholesome grows in that sparse manure. They never clean it up. Once every six months some swarthy municipal playboy minces down and dabs a fastidious broom at the stuff. What a privilege to see you, I say. Sarcasm is wasted on him. He would probably understand Turkish if I was willing to compromise with him.

He whines that they are understaffed. Certainly you are, I sympathise. I often see you hiding in the cemetery pretending to work. Occasionally you lack a fourth for poker. But you carry on. You play with cards so faded and damp you depend on complicity and instinct to identify the suits. Sometimes I hear you disputing a flush.

The rain is a filthy drizzle. The grey grass exudes a kind of phlegm. The canal gives off vapours that hang like poisoned ectoplasm in endless valleys of vandalised warehouses. As the pedestrian underclass we have no alternative but to pass through these desolate canyons. The miasma is particularly bad under the bridges and is no good for my chest. Mrs Cornelius complains that it gets in her muscles and arteries ‘like freezin’ slush’. The troglodytes living in the nearby storm drains and sewers have painted warning challenges on the walls. I am reminded of Germany in the early thirties. Advertisements for concerts and lectures are sprayed with gibberish. Some letters have been misremembered or are upside down. Their only coherence is in what they symbolise. Which these days could be anything. William Blake, the famous British lunatic, is their most popular hero. Like all their predecessors they proclaim the triumph of blind faith over reason. The written word becomes a formal image and loses all meaning, no more than a growl or a reassuring croon, a badge. Nowadays more and more of these subterraneans write in Arabic or Persian. Carthage never sleeps.

‘We witness the end of language,’ I say. ’The destruction of memory. The death of culture. This is what your Harold Wilson has done for the country. So much for Labour’s golden promises!’

‘Nobody misses culture much, Ive, love.’ Mrs Cornelius believes she comforts me. ‘Or language.’ With a slender scarlet nail she dabs delicately at the corner of her crimson mouth. ’Just the people ‘oo’ve got time for it. Which isn’t many. If the op’ra went tomorrer most people wouldn’t notice. When was you last at Covent Garden anyway?’

‘That’s scarcely the point.’ I am remembering those great pre-war performances. Those wonderful, gay Viennese.

Yesterday as we came out of the tunnel we found a dead dog lying on the towpath almost in the water, twisted so that its hindquarters were open revealing its genitals, a red erection. Its short black fur had dried into symmetrical muddy spikes. Its eyes and muzzle were half open, releasing the tongue. It stared over the canal with a resigned and melancholy grin.

‘Someone’s fallen out with the Mafia.’

I uttered my first thought. In my circumstances, I am reasonably nervous, never sure if that particular vendetta against me still continues.

She tells me I am loony. ‘Barkin’,’ she says.

But I was once threatened in that way, I insist. In Rome. Nineteen thirty-two, I think. You were there when it happened to me. I told you about it on the train to Vienna.

I now know of course who was actually stalking me. She refuses to believe me. Some people live their whole lives in a permanent state of denial. Half of what I say she dismisses or derides, revealing an unconscious defence mechanism against unpalatable truth. I at least shall not be surprised when Brodmann walks through the door with a gun in one hand and a KGB badge in the other.

I have noticed how a threatened man or woman will unconsciously try to turn into the creature they most fear rather than be destroyed by it. We are so eager to conspire with our masters. We have few alternatives and almost no choices any longer. So it was in Dachau. I have been stripped of my rank, humiliated and abused. Never once have I complained.

Of course, in most circumstances complaint meant an immediate and painful death. Even when you have had the science of the method explained to you (in my case by Himmler and Schnauben themselves) it does not make your response any more rational. You know that any escape plans you make are fantasies. Any hope you entertain is a nonsense. I learned that already in Egypt. Those of you who have never experienced this kind of fear have no business judging us. By denying your own vulnerability, you make yourself further vulnerable to whatever threatens you.

Mrs Cornelius says Brodmann would be eighty at least. She says I live too much in the past. And where else should I live? I ask. How good does the future look to you? And has the future provided you with experience? Why should the present suit you better than the past? Is there something wrong with the past? You can forget. You can. What you must lose is the memory of desire, the sensation of innocence, the inability to tolerate what is disgusting. All these will become virtues enabling you to forget desire, innocence, intolerance, love. You will forget and yet memory will persist as a cold sense of loss, a yearning for something better and sweeter which you have forbidden yourself. For with memory comes loss, with desire comes pain, with hope comes despair. Hell offers an absence of virtue. It offers an eternity when all you yearn for is time.

I am an old man. My only consolations are my memories. I cultivate my past like a favourite garden; I order it like a beloved library. I go back to the years of my youth and my power when my good looks were favourably compared to Rudolph Valentino’s and Cesar Romero’s and my future was golden. I was a la mode.

Until you think back you do not understand how much your physical appearance determined your destiny. I hardly realised at the time what I had in common with the early Nazis. More than any other people, Germans celebrated youth as healthy, untainted by the poisons of the past, unburdened with the compromises and struggles of the ‘Men of War’. The Nazis were young. Most of the men who came to run the Third Reich were in their thirties. Their youth, inexperience and idealism were part of their great appeal. Ordinary Germans accepted the Nazis as the vital force to channel that youthful energy back into constructive action. Their idealism united the nation, forming ranks against the common enemy. If their youthful rhetoric was a little fiery, people tolerated it. Watch Things to Come if you want to know how we felt about putting the old ways behind us and building a rational world where technology assured our enduring security. H. G. Wells was not above borrowing the odd idea or two from the despised little corporal!

Most Germans had known only war, disintegration and violent struggle. Perpetual uncertainty is anathema to that honest, amiable German soul yearning to translate its experience of comradeship into a greater community to include all Germans, rich or poor, noble and commoner. They had been told so many lies for so long, they refused to listen. They equated education with the manipulations of the ruling class. They had lost faith in conventional politics. They wanted not a state in the old sense, but a national community of equals: a mighty German family practising the old German family virtues. These sentiments were repeated over and over again. Jews wanted it, too. Those idealists were not brutes.

The Reds and liberals were mostly men of the older generation. They had amply demonstrated their ineptitude in government, their inability to keep their promises. Yet people still yearned for that promised breaking down of class tensions which shackled Germany. They wanted stability first and foremost. Hitler promised a just and ordered future. Nationalism and socialism had failed, but perhaps national-socialism would balance the best of both philosophies. Ordinary Germans had seen Russia collapse into a civil war almost touching their borders, engulfing Poland and Finland, Romania and Ukraine. Germany could well be next. Their hatred of extremists led the German people to vote NSDAP.

Only the Brown Tide could resist the Red. Röhm was convinced of that. He was dedicated to the elimination of Communism and Big Business Capitalism. But he was no fanatic. He was just as dedicated to his pleasures. It had been a long time, he said, since he felt so truly in love. There was something, he said, about my skin. And those dark Mediterranean eyes. He used to joke about my looking too Jewish for my own good. He was by his own admission completely besotted with me. ‘I am a childish and romantic man of a wicked disposition.’ He believed he had his own measure. I, however, found him generous and sensitive, loyal to his friends, faithful to his duty. His modesty would be his undoing. I suppose I loved him, too, a little. I was definitely flattered by his attention. Röhm was even more famous than Hitler in many circles. A light would burn in that oddly vulnerable, horribly scarred face when he tried to explain his feeling for me. ‘There is a quality in you, Max, that I recognise and need.’

I was at once charmed and compromised. I had important business to complete in Rome. For me this interlude was no more than a holiday. I said nothing of Mussolini to Röhm but reminded him how I was not entirely a free agent, that I worked for the Italian aircraft industry.

Röhm had no problem with this. He was, however, deeply interested in my South Russian battle experiences, assuming that, as an American flyer, I had longed for action. He himself had considered joining the Air Corps if only to get out of the trenches, but he was already too old. I had to describe for him in detail the period I spent fighting beside the Cossacks during that ruthless war between Red and White. He was trying to guess what might happen to his Germany in the event of a civil war. He listened with deep sympathy to my stories of capture and torture.

Once or twice Röhm was moved to tears. And the Jews, he said, did this to your manhood? I explained how it had been necessary later to become a Mussulman when I rode with the Tuareg. I was terrified in that synagogue. They were going to set lire to us. They put a piece of metal in my womb. They tore off my Christian flesh. I can still feel the thing. It has six sharp points like a star. Röhm makes fun of me. ‘Are you sure you’re not Jewish?’

I have to lean against the tunnel’s rotten brick. Overhead there is a constant rumble, like tumbrils. ‘Can’t you hear it?’

‘It’s your appendix, Ivan,’ says Mrs Cornelius. ‘You ought to ‘ave it out.’

My appendix is the last thing that should be removed. I have to avoid the doctors at St Charles. They will loot my corpse soon enough. Those Pakistanische butchers will dig the gold from my teeth. Who knows how much precious metal is in me? I am weighed down already. ‘I beg you, Mrs Cornelius — if I die first do not let them melt me for scrap. They’ll try to get me into the crematorium because that is where they steal the metal. Let me be returned to the earth with all my treasures.’

‘I’m not burym’ ya with all them old bits and pieces!’ She is outraged. ‘An indoor junkyard!’

She has always spoken disparagingly of my machine parts. Where else can I keep them but my flat? Has she seen the price of lockups?

‘I was not referring to my engines but to my bones.’

She deliberately misunderstands me. She stands there grinning. The dog is behind her. Its sad, reflective eye contemplates the threatening surface of the canal. Anubis is dead. The grey warehouses and useless factories form a background whose symmetry recalls Dachau.

‘You blokes ‘ave such ‘igh opinions of yourselves.’ She looks back at the dog. ‘You’ll be lucky if the council drags yer off in a plastic bag. We’re just bodies, you an’ me, Ivan. We don’t get no fuckin’ obituaries in ther Times. Wot you so worried about? Immortality? It beats me ‘ow people take you wankers seriously. It’s bad for yer. ‘Errnann lost ‘is grip in an ‘urry. But that ‘Itler was creepy. Clammy.’

‘You are too cynical, Mrs C. Is it a crime to demand a little recognition? We were trying to save the world. And that makes us wankers?’

She takes me by the arm, and we move towards the next set of arches. Her tone softens. ‘I wasn’t just talkin’ about you.’

‘Well,’ I admit, ‘I can’t defend Hitler in that respect.’

Hitler in truth was a walking pharmacy. That was why his skin was so cold. He had pills and injections for everything. After 1931, when political success was at last a real likelihood, his stomach began to bother him. Even before that he was given to long periods of detachment. The more successful he became, the more he withdrew into himself. He was fundamentally shy.

Röhm said Hitler’s instinct was to keep all his balls in the air. He was a feckless Austrian at heart and hated reaching decisions. Decisions were usually made for him by events. Schlamperei, in Röhm’s view. His friend ‘Alf had become addicted to a cycle of longing, of repressed desire, violent fulfilment, then guilty retreat and denial. ‘Just like his sex life.’

Röhm knew far more than he could say publicly but was often loose-tongued when drunk. Like so many Germans of his generation, Hitler discovered sex in the trenches and knew only extremes. Röhm was by nature a bluff Bavarian, ’open heart and open mouth’, as they say. He hated intrigue as much as he hated secrets. Only on the subject of his friend was he at all reticent. He never revealed the name of the young lieutenant who had opened Hitler’s sexual floodgates. The seducer was in civilian life a well-known painter who had taken an interest in Hitler’s architectural drawings. In turn one night the lieutenant had shown Hitler some of his special etchings. Confusion. Repulsion. Attraction. Yet it had still been rape in the end. Hitler responded with horror. He retreated into denial fearing he would not be able to control such lusts and emotions. Control, even then, was hugely important to him.

‘That’s what made him such a good dispatch runner.’ Röhm and I were relaxing one evening in his hot pool. Röhm drank Bollinger from the bottle and smiled with affectionate reminiscence. ‘He was afraid at any minute he’d again feel Lieutenant Feistfucher’s throbbing bongo up his scrawny jacksie. He fairly flew along those trenches. He was more terrified of his own desires than he was of death. And believe me, Max, he’s pretty fucking scared of death! Fascinated, too. Always running back and forth from the edge. He knows what makes him afraid and therefore knows what works on other people. You could call it the common touch. They love him for it.’

Röhm massages my shoulders, thighs and buttocks. The action is painful to him. He has hard, expectant fingers. He is terrified they will turn into claws. He plays the piano to exercise them. ‘We used to call him “Alfy-run-and-fetch” in the mess. You’re never sure of soldiers like that. But now I respect his talents. He’s special. We’re still a perfect couple, him and me. Sides of the same coin. Yin and yang. Male and female. Talk and action . . .’

Röhm obviously carried, as the Americans say, a torch for Hitler. Almost everything he did was because of those powerful feelings. His obsession with me was strong, but it was of a different quality. ‘Alf and ‘Ernstie’ had parted a few years earlier, ostensibly for political reasons. Röhm had not desired the separation but had accepted the reasoning. I speak of an age when it still meant something to give up personal desire in favour of a higher principle. Those old fighters were bound together by far more than cooling affection.

‘Doctor Diamond finks ‘Itler ‘ad thyroid trouble.’ Mrs Cornelius grows thoughtful. ‘It makes yer eyes bulge.’

‘He didn’t start out looking like that,’ I remind her. ‘He wound up bulging, I agree. Everything changed after ‘31.’

That was before I met him, but his colleagues still complained how distant he was to his old friends, how close to Big Business, the men he had always described as vampires. Had they already bought him? Would they now determine his political direction?

‘He’s a performer, that’s his drawback as well as his advantage,’ Röhm said. ‘Typical actor. Can’t resist an audience. And it loves him. It probably doesn’t matter about the colour of the politics with him as long as the crowd responds. He says the crowd is like a woman. He flatters it, frightens it, fucks it.’ To the end Röhm was inclined to make excuses for Hitler. ‘Besides, Strasser can afford to be snotty. He takes his money from Farben. And he has his own thriving business. We can’t do what we have to do on a few pfennigs in the hat. We have to keep the Nazi balloon up. Hitler has to get his “eggs” from somewhere! At least until we’re ready to strike.’

Röhm believed in the Nazi slogans. No longer a monarchist, he wanted common ownership and what he called ‘a clear battlefield’. He was convinced that Germany’s ills could only be corrected by a violent revolution and an absorption of the regular army into his SA. His classless people’s militia would uphold all the old Spartan values. Meanwhile, if a few foolish tycoons thought their interest lay with the Nazis, the Stabschef didn’t care. He had massive secret stockpiles of weapons and ordnance all over Germany.

I think he rather yearned for the past before he had gone to Bolivia. He spoke warmly of the good times they had all had in the early days. They had been more light-hearted then. ‘Hitler was a great comedian. Professionally, Max, you would have appreciated his talents. On those long drives, he used to keep us in stitches.’

‘I never saw that side of ‘im,’ Mrs Cornelius admits. Hitler of course had tried to court her. He was always attracted to actresses, especially English ones. He couldn’t get enough of Jessie Matthews.

Putzi Hanfstaengl, himself a keen fan of the cinema and also something of an amateur comedian, agreed that Hitler was a first-class mimic. Putzi’s main job in the 1920s was to console Hitler at the piano with selections of favourite musical numbers.

‘He could imitate anyone — voices, mannerisms, attitudes, everything. Peasants, politicians, Junkers. But nowadays he relies on me to cheer him up. Me and those endless romantic comedies and cartoons he watches.’

He needs to relax, I said. It is the same for me. Mindless, silly entertainment is what you need when you have such heavy responsibilities.

But Putzi was unconvinced. Left to himself, Putzi insisted, Hitler would do nothing but watch his screens and eat cream cakes. ’Some men are by nature voyeurs. It’s bad for them to have their dreams come true.’

Putzi was a little anxious about the coming revolution. Röhm condescended to Hanfstaengl in a way he did not to me. ‘I think you, too, Putzi, are not ecstatic at the prospect of your prayers being answered.’ There was in Röhm a bit of the jovial sadist.

Privately Putzi told me he wanted to be in movies. If not as an actor, then as a director or producer. A musical arranger even. He had always lived in his dreams. He preferred them to reality. He sought me out whenever he had the chance and pumped me on my Hollywood life.

One day Röhm came back with a French-language version of Buckaroo’s Code, and we watched it together. He was impressed.

‘You have a vocation I think, Max, just as do I,’ Röhm decided. ‘What a pity you gave it up. You remind me a little of Alf.’

His opinion, of course, was coloured by his affection for me.

We mount the steps to the street. Slowly, arm in arm, we turn for home. Friday afternoon in Golborne Road and the lifeless rain falls a little heavier on this decaying tail of the Portobello Market. They sell fake antiques up at the south section now. Tourists shriek with delight at their discoveries of reconstituted scrimshaw and reproduction Brummagen jugs. Here at the north end they find only irreparable fan heaters and profoundly stained kettles. The secondhand tools and yellowing paperbacks are all that’s left of dead old men’s work and dreams. I used to sort through bombed houses which contained better junk. The perpetual rain rusts everything not protected by that mixture of grease blended with nicotine which forms the local varnish. Nothing gets it off. In fire you watch it melt with the metal.

The assembly of stallholders and their listless consumers has the unhappy permanence of a displaced persons camp. Refugees from bleaker interiors, they huddle under sacks, plastic bags, old coats. Rain soaks the grey burlap and tarpaulins over the stalls. It seeps into the shops, streaking the floors with a kind of mucus. Toothless women gape in the cheerless doorways of chip shops. You cannot tell that they were ever anything but hags.

The people are colourless. Even in the grey light they are like simplified drawings, silhouettes. No matter how close you go to them the details of their faces and costume grow no sharper. They puff a thin roll-up into an ember and cough on yellow smoke. From the corners of bloodless mouths they mumble at one another. Their faces are defined by lines of grime, sketch maps of a thousand small disappointments.

Mrs Cornelius pauses to pick through some miscellaneous domestic objects. She gives an enamel saucepan her disdainful onceover.

‘After the War,’ I tell her, ‘I was still in politics. There were no blacks here then. Just Irish and Poles. Perek Rachman brought the blacks in.’ But, of course, I did not blame him. He was good to me. They picked on him during the Keeler business because they thought he was a Jew. It killed him.

‘Wos that when you wos wiv Colin Jordan?’ Spurning the saucepan she picks up a set of rusting knives tied together with fatty string. ‘When you lived in Portland Road?’ She squints down their length.

‘Of course not.’ She listens to nothing. I never lived in Portland Road. She has no interest in politics. Jordan was much later. He took over the League of British Fascists. Leese’s old HQ. They called it the Black House, but it was just a terraced shop. There was a mortician’s next door. Leese’s widow used to live over it. I had tea with her every Tuesday. She hated the BUF. Mosley and her husband had fallen out years ago. Leese thought Mosley was a liberal. I met the Empire Movement people there. G. K. Chesterton was their most famous member, and of course he died. They were pleasant, mostly middle-aged, but they could not muster more than a few hundred supporters even when we went into the Common Market. Hitler’s dream of United Europe became reality. He knew he could not coerce the British. ‘They always have to volunteer,’ he said. ‘They like to think they’re in control.’ But Leese’s Information Service for the Jew Wise, as he called his organisation, was not behind Europe.

Later Leese turned his attentions to the blacks. That was an entirely different struggle and one which he also lost, though his ideas are not forgotten. I have not been down to Portland Road lately. It has an unnatural character with its window boxes, brass knockers and dark green paint. The street is no longer a comfort to me. London was once full of sanctuaries. Today there are fewer and fewer of them.

She flourishes a sawtoothed German carving knife. The colour has worn off the wooden handle. ‘Ten pee! Look at that, Ivan!’ Her outrage swells her. ‘It’s just like mine. You know my bread knife. And there’s a lot more effin’ rust on this one.’ She has found her moral high ground. She replaces the knife and raises her disgusted eyes level with the stallholder’s. He murmurs some stock response and glares shiftily at the dark grey tarmac beneath his sodden boots.

Golborne Road is our most wretched street. Its gutters abound with filth swept in from the surrounding boroughs. The locals don’t notice or care. Light has no hope of escape from the smeared shopfronts. Mephitic lumps occasionally shift behind the glass. Nothing can lift the fog of desperate nihilism infecting the unwholesome air. I raise my comforter against it. I protect my mouth. Mrs Cornelius says that it will do no good. The stuff gets in through your skin, she says. Through your eyes. It’s like a gas.

Röhm told me he had only a passing acquaintance with Hitler in the trenches. ‘He won his Iron Cross fair and square. We used to say he’d “saddled the nightmare”. You’d give him an order and he’d go into this kind of trance. Next minute he’d just set off through the shell-storm like he was running up the street to get a loaf of bread for his mother. Flak and bullets everywhere. Screaming, our Alf would run on, faithful to the end. They said he captured a bunch of Froggies single-handed once, but that sounds too much like the Mussolini story to me. Initiative was never really Alf’s strong point. Nobody ever promoted him. He was like a lot of soldiers. He preferred taking orders to giving them.’

Röhm runs those hard fingers over his mosaics. We sit on a marble bench beside the wall. The mosaics are still in progress. They are blatantly erotic, reminiscent of Pompeii. He has had experts design them. He knows all the best interior decorators. This is the work, he says, of Sohner, who does the Berliner Film Company’s sets and designed Dietrich’s costumes for Der blaue Engel. ‘That’s what we should keep Jews on for. I don’t mind them as entertainers either. It’s the writers you have to watch. But you won’t convince Hitler of that. Like me, he’s a simple creature. He has an On/Off switch and a Fast/Slow lever.

‘When he was working for me, he was like a tin man, an automaton. I broke the ice eventually. During that trouble in Munich after the War when the Bolshies took over and we had to deal with them, he was working for me as an informant. We soon discovered he was a first-class agitator. He’d go into these camps full of commies and just start talking to them. Not much of a regular soldier but a brilliant orator. We valued him. The Bolshies caught him and were going to shoot him. There was a mix-up. My lads got hold of him and were also going to shoot him. If I hadn’t spotted him in time, old Gregor Strasser wouldn’t be having the problems he’s having now. Running the party would be plain sailing for him without Hitler. But Alfy always dithered if there wasn’t someone directing him. And then, if forced, he’d make absolutely terrible decisions! He lost his nerve in the putsch and ran like a rabbit. Too many choices. He can’t stand it. First whiff of an alternative and he falls apart. Left a lot of comrades for dead, and people were resentful, said he was powder-shy. But I came to understand his virtues. Alf’s special.’

Röhm stands naked in front of his huge mirror. His round, scarred face belies his fitness. Stripped he is a Roman gladiator, his feet slightly apart, his arthritic hands in fists. He suffers badly, he says, with his bones. Too many breaks, too many wet trenches. He continues in his mood of reminiscence.

‘I had to remain independent of Alf. That’s why I resigned the first time in ‘24. But I came back. Alf’s like a wonderful instrument - useless unless regularly played. He gets into a pathetic state before he speaks. He’s got no self-confidence. He sulks. You have to push him on. Then he goes out there and just stands for a bit, as if absorbing the crowd’s vitality. Apparently Jolson’s the same. Works an audience better than he can manage his own life. On top of that Alf knows he’s been singled out by Destiny because he didn’t die in the War when everyone else was going down like ninepins. They used to call him Lucky Alf even then. I’m convinced that what will get us through all this will be Alf’s devilish good fortune. We’ll need it when we finally do take things into our own hands.’

I was reminded of my Negro friend, the massive Mr Mix. He had also thought of me as his mascot, his rabbit’s foot. But what others saw as luck, I saw as judgement. Röhm might be underestimating Hitler. An excellent military strategist who understood the streets, Röhm left the internal politics to others. He always admitted he was more of a visionary than a day-to-day politician. That idealism would be his downfall.

He and Strasser were the first Nazis to be contacted by Kurt von Schleicher, the army’s main political man, who had Hindenburg’s ear. Röhm thought von Schleicher too tricky, too Byzantine, but von Schleicher had not been completely deaf to his proposals for a reformation of the army.

‘Von Schleicher wants Hindenburg to appoint him Chancellor,’ Röhm told me. ‘But Hitler has to be Chancellor. We’ve held out for that all along. We’ve all told Hitler to stick with it.’ The elections for President were due the following year. Hindenburg would run again but was already too old. Hitler would stand and probably wouldn’t beat him. However, it would increase his public status enormously. The Nazis had no one else of Alf’s potential. They were all working to get him up there. Meanwhile, there was no harm in letting von Schleicher think the Nazis could be persuaded to serve his purposes in the Reichstag.

For all his frankness and understanding, Röhm’s loyalty to Hitler was absolute. By force of arms the Stabschef had the power either to make himself Führer or put his friend Strasser on the throne. Röhm was the hand, he told me. Strasser was the brain. But Hitler was the perceptible soul of the movement. An unstable, youthful soul, perhaps, but what the German people responded to.

Röhm thought of Strasser as a more manly equal. They had the same left leanings. But Röhm understood how the common folk responded with religious ecstasy to Hitler. ‘That’s what the likes of General von Schleicher refuse to think about,’ he said. ‘They all see Hitler as an instrument they can play their own tunes on. Alf is so pliable he always lets us think that. He even believes it himself. He hates to say “no”. But he bides his time, and suddenly you discover to your surprise that you are his instrument! It is a kind of psychic ju-jitsu. Uriah Heep, eh?’

Röhm had read Dickens in Bolivia. He shared with Gregor Strasser an intense love of classical literature. One room in his house was utterly different to the others — a soldier’s cell, containing only the SA blood-flag, a shelf of books and some military paraphernalia. This was where he often chose to sleep alone. Of a trusting disposition, he was not a complete fool and was unhappy about Goebbels’s and Göring’s influence on the leader.

Röhm had better things to do with his time than indulge in petty jealousies and refused to get involved in palace intrigue. The Stabschef had his own constituency. He could afford to stand apart. At his chosen moment millions of iron-hard Storm Troopers would spring to his standard. ‘Goebbels in particular hates me,’ he said, ‘because of the old relationship I had with Hitler. He can’t poison that. He can’t make it not have happened. When all’s said and done he knows it’s me Hitler will call on if anything goes wrong. The little doctor’s scared of me and my ideas. His talk of a “new morality” means getting the chance to fulfil all the grubby little conventional wet dreams he’s ever suppressed. And watch that Göring, too. I know you like him but our valiant captain’s a sadist at root. The sweeter the outside, the harder the inside, as we say in Bavaria.’

Mrs Cornelius disagrees. She remains derisive. She defends the Reichsmarschall and attacks the Stabschef. “E was a nasty little boy-buggerer, that Röhm.’

‘He was an idealistic boy-buggerer,’ I tell her, ‘and that’s the crucial difference.’

Röhm confided his dreams to me as we wandered through the half-completed rooms.

‘I intend to build an army of men who are everything to one another, who have no other loyalties, who are softened neither by the company of women nor the responsibilities of fatherhood. A vast Spartan army ready to defend the nation to the death. It frightens them because we would be what they only talk of being. If Hitler refuses to condemn me, what right have they to do it?’

On reflection he also admitted that Hitler had another good reason for not sounding off about ‘degeneracy’ in the SA.

Röhm was proud that scarcely a senior SA commander was not of his persuasion. In turn they promoted their own. Few realise how close Röhm’s dream was to realisation. The SA must soon take over the training and moral education of the Hitler Youth. Meanwhile, I became an honorary captain in the Foreign Intelligence wing of the SA.

What, I asked, was the Foreign Intelligence wing supposed to do? Who did it consist of? My friend was boisterously amused. ‘You, my dear Max! It’s your department.’

As a sworn follower of my Duce, thus unable to tell Röhm all the details, I pointed out that my job as designer for the Italian aircraft industry might conflict with my new rank. He reassured me. The SA position was an honorary one. I need swear no special oath which would compromise my allegiance to Mussolini. Indeed, the rank was conferred very casually by Röhm. He sent a note to an adjutant one July evening. We were still in that bizarre, half-built classical villa. The smell of the Bavarian pine forest and heavy, damp mountain soil blended with rosewater and Havana cigars. It was up to me, he said, to find my own uniform if I wanted one. He gave me a spare cap.

Röhm had drawn up the plans for his villa long before he left Bolivia. ’I had little else to do with my spare time. The entire country is repressed by the bloody Roman Church. Apart from the gorgeous Felipe. And his father soon put a stop to that. Hitler’s telegram came in the nick of time. I was ready to join the priesthood; I suspected it was the only place I’d find a friend.’ He spoke rather tenderly of the Bolivian boy he had known and of another ‘chum’ with whom he had travelled back to Europe.

Röhm used the roughest of soldier’s language in parliament while reserving his cultivated eloquence for his private moments. Probably the best-read of all the Nazis, he shared my enthusiasm for Karl May and Simplicissimus. He and Hitler had both once been passionate fans of Jules Verne, but not of Wells, whom they thought too pessimistic and philo-Semitic. The Stabschef could quote from Dante, Machiavelli and many Latin authors, as well as Goethe and Schiller, but he admitted to having no ear for poetry. ’And no nose for wine!’ He could not, he said, tell one vintage from another. Which is why he nowadays only drank champagne. ‘To be on the safe side.’ He was thinking of equipping Röhmannsvilla with a vomitorium.

‘I went off champagne,’ says Mrs Cornelius. ‘It makes me sick.’ At one time or another she has identified almost every kind of food and drink as the source of her problem. She will not accept the obvious explanation.

‘You have a weak stomach,’ I tell her, ‘and a hard head, as we used to say in Odessa. The worst combination. My cousin Wanda was the same, although that might have been pregnancy, after all.’

‘It’s the stuff they put in the food,’ she insists. ’We’re bein’ poisoned.’

‘What do you expect?’ I ask her. Tesco’s, Safeway, Marks and Spencer’s, Lyons - all our food comes to us from Jews now! Even the Jolly Green Giant is Jewish. I read it only the other day in the grocery press. Our clothing, our medicines, our finances! The United Nations. Is there nothing the modern Jew does not control?

As in Germany.

The English are content to complain. They never want anything to come to a head. As a consequence they are sliding into historical oblivion. Churchill warned them of it. So did Hitler. They have no Catholics worth worrying about. Cromwell stamped out that particular canker then, as if to compensate for it, he invited the Jews to return to England! There were no Jews for hundreds of years. Cromwell was very much at odds with Martin Luther, who knew his Jew through and through. Consequently the English had no defences against what happened. Within a few generations the aliens had infiltrated everywhere until by the last quarter of the nineteenth century they even controlled Parliament! People turned them into heroes. If that is not a lesson, what must it take? Not that I have any prejudice, especially against Catholics.

Mrs Cornelius comes across a plastic crucifix smothered with some mysterious dirt. ‘People don’t give nothin’ respect, these days,’ she says. ‘I mean, ‘oo they got to look up ta? The Archbishop of Canterbury?’

They say the Pope helped all the ‘war criminals’ get away Yet it was impossible at that time to know who were good and who were bad Nazis. Vatican passports got Stangl and Eichmann and the others to South America, but they did not give them automatic absolution!

When in 1930 Röhm returned to Germany in some style, he decided to make up for lost time. He did not know how long he would live or if the revolution would be successful. If it failed, he was sure to be shot. He knew from his reading of history how freebooters, like himself, could become an embarrassment should the war be won. He spoke of himself as Jean Lafitte or Sir Francis Drake, but I think he hoped Fate would make him a Napoleon.

All his experience of life, Röhm asserted, told him that life was a wild hunt. You were lucky if the best you could do was to hang on to your horse. Anything might knock you off at any moment. Luck alone kept you seated when better riders and nobler men fell. ‘That’s why I live to the full. Knowing any hour could be my last!’

A soldier first and everything else second, Röhm enjoyed his leisure as he enjoyed his work, bringing the same self-punishing intensity to both. Finding love for the first time after the War, he had been happy for a while. He had quarrelled with Hitler over a small political matter and had left the movement. Hitler condemned him as a traitor. ‘Alf went into a sulk. Wouldn’t talk to me. Well, I failed to earn a living by any other means. Soldiering’s all I know. So I accepted a commission as a regular officer in the Bolivian Army, training their troops.’ He had learned from them, too. He had picked up much of his understanding of revolutionary warfare from his South American days.

‘But most of my time was spent reading and playing the gramophone,’ he told me. He wrote long, sensitive letters home to close friends. The newspapers got hold of some and published them in hope of damaging Hitler’s standing with the electorate.

Röhm had laughed when telling me the story. ‘The electorate preferred to believe Hitler’s support of me.’ Even when exclusive hotels were turned into public spectacles of unchecked homosexuality, Hitler continued to stand by Röhm. Putzi Hanfstaengl told me that. ‘Hitler couldn’t afford not to. If Alf condemned Röhm, then Röhm might easily break his own silence, eh? They’ve all had to stick together over the years. A few words from the Stabschef and that’ll be the end of Hitler’s career in national politics.’ Hanfstaengl knew how vulnerable Hitler was to blackmail. The party had already paid a vast amount of money for some letters and pictures which had fallen into greedy hands. Nobody at that time knew what else was loose. Hitler’s letter writing was a lot less discreet than Röhm’s, and he tended to embellish his points with detailed anatomical drawings. And photographs. Hitler could deny rumours, but whatever his oldest friend said would have a special authority. They would sink together. And so the alliance held.

‘Frightened people,’ says Röhm, ’are genuinely eager to obey. They are grateful for orders, no matter what they are. We all found that in the trenches. Men would rather be ordered to their deaths than not be ordered at all. Action consumes some of their adrenalin and makes them feel momentarily better. These studies of mass psychology Hitler’s forever reading always come down to the same simple principle: the crowd loves a roller-coaster. It loves to be frightened and it loves to be saved. The crowd is a baby you toss up into the air and catch, a woman you tease with a knife. And that, of course, is what Alf understands in his bones. The common people possess only two controlling emotions — fear and love.’

I remind Mrs Cornelius of this but she is unimpressed. ‘They were all such ‘orrible ordinary little turds, really. That ‘Itler was the worst. Bore the tits off a bull, ‘e would. Everyone complained, even poor little Eva Braun, ‘is girlfriend. An’ she ‘ad a lot more influence over ‘im than you fink. She tol’ me ther fings ‘e made ‘er do to ‘im! Well, to be fair, she said she enjoyed some of it. Like those girls I know up west. You should ‘ear what they ‘ave to wear! More like industrial overalls than bonkin’ gear! An’ the blokes who come to them are mostly bigwigs in the government an’ tycoons. It’s ther showbiz boys who like youngsters. Politicians like ther cane. But it was ‘ard work, Eva said.’

Though she got on a little better with the women, Mrs Cornelius did not enjoy her intimacy with the Nazis. She said the men always sounded like a bunch of estate agents. ‘Total wank artists, Ivan. Ther passengers get it into their ‘eads they’re drivin’ the train. So the first thing they do, o’ course, is sack the driver. In ther case o’ ther Nazis, they went one better. They killed the bleedin’ driver.’

So she reduces the heroic struggle of the twentieth century which ended in the death of all its greatest warriors. Our destiny denied us, our memories forbidden, we descended into the grey mud of socialism. Past and future were abolished. Animals live like that. In an eternal present.

But some of us remember. Stiffly Roland and Arthur and El Cid stir in their hidden caverns. Their flexing fingers reach for their swords. Soon the world will enjoy again the glory and nobility of her golden past. My cities will spring from the depths, splitting open the earth as they thrust towards the calm and comforting skies. They will take us to the heights where the air is pure and we can flourish.

The earth has betrayed us. They have soured it for us. Our legends are made into music-hall jokes and bad films. Our heroes become hobgoblins and devils. We are told that our memories are lies, our history is fiction. Our ideals are mocked. Our values are satirised. The old are ourselves. By failing to protect them, we in turn inevitably fall prey to the predators. The logic is obvious. I tell them this. But you only find it out when your body starts to fail you, when you think twice before crossing the street to your usual newsagent because a gang of youths with shaven heads and football colours are standing outside chortling over copies of the Beano and the Dandy, whose characters they so closely resemble. You have heard their insults for seventy years. You have suffered their threats, and your body can recall every blow they have struck on it. You want no more, so you do without your newspaper. Not that the papers are anything but communist rags.

I am surprised they can read. They wear football caps and scarves like the uniforms I used to see on the Sozis and Nazis. Home-made colours. They enjoy the comforts of collective violence. They slobber after power and fear all responsibility. They lie and they boast and they swagger and they imagine themselves mass murderers and gang bosses. They buy large, vicious dogs. They beat their women. They terrorise their children. And people say the Nazis were bastards.

Franz Stangl led an impeccable private life. Whatever happened at Treblinka and so on was nothing I knew about. His family loved him and were never frightened of him. He was a faithful husband and a responsible father like many of the best Nazis. They were Austrians and South Germans, of course, and disliked the Prussian glorification of war, which was to infect Hitler so badly in his later years. They were solid family men. Whatever they had to do outside, they never inflicted it on their nearest and dearest.

So who suffers most? Or worst? These scalp-heads, these Mohawkiscliers, who bring only noise, filth and violence to society? They are genuinely worthless. They contribute almost nothing in labour or money. They know only to take.

Who suffers worst are the decent men, women and children. Those of us who contribute order and cleanliness to the world. Make those hooligans into pet food, I say to her. Let the kangaroos roam free. Let some faithful family cat feast on their fatty flanks, their beer-fed guts, their coarse meat. Our cities would be quieter. Our dogs content.

We turn into the northern end of the Portobello Road, where the walls of convents and monasteries become an inescapable channel. This is the only stretch where there are no doorways, no depths, nowhere to disappear. The walls of the religious institutions are too tall and too well protected to scale. Yet already the road takes on a different character. Already it is a cut above what we leave behind. The difference is subtle. The stalls still contain the same miscellaneous mixture of false brands, redundant canned goods and hardware looking like loot from some forgotten bombsite. The same hopeless electrics, disintegrating plastic and stained paper, yet here you feel you might just possibly find something you could use. The stallholders are a little more optimistic about their wares. ‘Have a look,’ they say, ‘we can always talk about the price.’

Mrs Cornelius gives this section of the market her considered inspection. You can tell that she feels it worthier of her. She picks up a toy panzer tank bearing a flaking swastika. ‘Your big mistake, Ivan, after you got mixed up with them Nazis, was to get mixed up with them ‘omos. You never ‘ad no common sense, but you ‘ad somethin’ like good luck! All that changed when you started flirting about with ‘Itler.’

‘I didn’t exactly volunteer,’ I point out. Her intolerance is unworthy of her. ‘You never used to mind such things.’

‘I’m not talkin’ about buggery.’ She turns suddenly to look at me. ‘I’m talking about ther rest of it. You never knew when to scarper. An’ it wasn’t for want of my warnin’ you every five bloody minutes!’

‘A Greek chorus,’ I say affectionately.

She is amused. ‘A bit less of the Greek,’ she insists. ‘A Greek got me out of England in the first place. I started in the chorus, though.’ And she begins her soothing reminiscence of Kilburn Empire triumphs and glory days in Hollywood.

I find it impossible to watch those films any more. There is no equipment for them. For almost twelve years I have been working on a projector I found in the market. But where are the spares? I have tried to make them or take them from other machines. So far I have had no real luck. The old bulbs and valves are impossible to find. What happened to all those projectors? Hitler had one. Mussolini had one. Stalin had one. Franco had one. Hearst had one. Roosevelt had one. Churchill had one.

In the years between the Wars we were all cinema-crazy. Any man with money wanted his own little theatre where he could watch Mickey Mouse, Douglas Fairbanks, Cuddles McTitty and the milkman to his heart’s content. Industrialists and potentates bought themselves the convenience and privacy which after the War the BBC would try to imitate with TV for the masses. A chicken in every pot, a car in every garage, a cinema in every home. They bribed the electorate. We got Sunday Night at the London Palladium instead of justice. And the masses were content. They are always content until the fantasies on which they feed begin to poison them and then they gaze mindlessly around for some other teat to suck.

‘Look,’ says Mrs Cornelius, taking my arm. She suddenly leans on me and catches her breath. ‘It’s brightening up a bit.’