Conspirator

HITLER AND I--Otto Strasser--Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).

Insurrection, said Lenin, is an art. He did not add that the technique of insurrection is conspiracy. But Lenin taught his eager Bolsheviks that, besides every well-behaved, "legal" Communist Party, they must organize an "illegal," underground Communist Party. Its function, like the submerged three-quarters of an iceberg, would be to destroy in secret. Apt students of the Bolshevik art of conspiracy, as Hitler told Hermann Rauschning, were the Nazis. Soon Nazi Alfred Rosenberg modeled his foreign section of the Nazi Party after the foreign section of the Communist International. Soon Heinrich Himmler modeled his Gestapo after Russia's G. P. U. Soon the whole world paid for the Nazis' Russian lessons in the form of fifth columns.

But Hitler has no patent on fifth columns. Ever since Hitler took power, boomerang fifth columns have operated against the Nazis. Most famed, and reputedly the most effective, is the Black Front, an organization of ex-Nazis, ex-Communists, ex-Socialists. Its leader is Otto Strasser, who is widely regarded as the German most likely to destroy Adolf Hitler.

He has had a long training for the job. Strasser fought through all four years of World War I. He led the workers' militia against the generals who tried to over throw the Weimar Republic in the Kapp Putsch. His elder brother, Gregor Strasser, was Hitler's first Gauleiter (district leader). Brother Gregor, whose secretary was Heinrich Himmler, converted reluctant Brother Otto to the Nazi cause. Then both went into Nazi publishing, hired away from their enemies a live-wire propagandist--Paul Joseph Goebbels. Later Otto Strasser broke openly with Hitler. Brother Gregor did not break away. He resigned his Party posts but stayed on. In the June Purge he was liquidated. Otto Strasser escaped from the Third Reich, continued his plotting abroad, was last reported captured in France by the Nazis, who denied they had him.

Last week, under the somewhat ambitious title Hitler and I, was published Otto Strasser's story of Hitler's past. Few books gave promise of being more enlightening. But this one did not quite live up to its promise. Valuable is its firsthand account of the rise of the Nazis and the Strasser role in it. Valuable too were the intimate glimpses and records of Nazi big shots; of Hitler in conversation with Ludendorff, Hindenburg, his sub-leaders; a vivid account of the June Purge, its debunking of Hitler's part in it; the chronicles of the Gestapo at work, with ambushes, escapes, assassinations.

Readers may wish that the book contained less about Author Strasser, more about the activities of his Black Front, more about the political orgies of the Nazi inner circle, less about their personal debauches.

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