Pattern of Conquest

(See Cover)

To the sad people of Europe, preoccupied with news as near at hand as hunger and cold, Singapore seemed far away. But Singapore was cut from the same pattern of conquest with which the people of Europe had become sickeningly familiar, and there were men in Europe last week who could have told the people of Britain and the U.S. what it means to be conquered--what it costs in brutalization and degradation, what man-made famine is like, what it is to be regarded as slaves of a Herrenvolk. France after 1871 and Germany after 1918 were not like Europe last week. Those post-war French and Germans had been beaten, crippled, humiliated, but they had not been subjected to a blueprinted terror. Last week:

P:In The Hague, 30 Dutchmen were ordered shot unless the persons responsible for blowing up a munitions dump were caught in five days.

P:In Bergen, three Norwegians were shot on charges of possessing arms and attempting to escape to England. Total Norwegians shot to date: 39.

P:In Vichy, French officials tried to negotiate about a death sentence passed on 45 hostages for recent "outrages" at Tours, Rouen and Paris.

P:In Greece, the man-made famine was so dreadful that people died on the street like scorched bugs.

P:In Poland, where starvation was oldest, grotesquely emaciated bodies, like half-clothed skeletons, were picked up off the streets and carted away in heaps (see cut, p. 34). In two and a half years some 120,000 Poles have been hanged or shot.

In Europe food is manipulated as a penal and political weapon, to punish and to bribe. In many places food supplies have been withdrawn or restricted in reprisal for minor infractions of Nazi edicts. When students plastered a French town with De Gaullist placards, meat ration cards were canceled for 40 days. In certain areas marked for German colonization, the Nazis withhold vitamins from the population to foster a slave mentality.

In Europe one penalty of conquest is mass deportation to labor camps. Now working in Germany are some 2,500,000 imported workers, of which nearly 20% are women. Smuggled reports from Germany last week said that 150 such workers had been executed for complaining about long hours and harsh treatment, for undermining the allegiance of German workers.

In Europe the innocent are punished for the acts of invisible rebels, under the principle of "collective responsibility." Another weapon in the arsenal of terror is the deliberate snuffing out of scholars, on the theory that even nonpolitical scholarship breeds a thirst for freedom. Another is torture. When a German policeman was killed in the Czech mining town of Kladno, the Gestapo tortured the mayor and all members of the municipal council to sweat out the name of the killer. By the time it was learned that it was German soldiers who had killed the German policeman, the mayor had committed suicide in prison.

This was the victorious "New Order" in operation.

No Order. Actually the "New Order" is not a plan but a chaotic attempt to rule 150,000,000 people by terror, hunger and propaganda. German propaganda promises a unified Europe; there is nothing Germany wants less. She treats every captive nation differently: Danes the best, Poles the worst, Polish Jews worst of all. This prevents the captives from having any common ground to stand on. Germany is at the center of the web, but there are few cross-threads from nation to nation.

The meaning of the German phrase Neue Ordnung is closer to "new ordering" than it is to "new order." At any one place the Neue Ordnung is simply a series of orders, adapted to local and day-to-day expedients, often countermanded by higher authority. There is no law, no system of penalties and rewards. And, everywhere in Occupied Europe, Nazi officialdom is honeycombed with corruption--which seeps into the petty officialdom of the occupied countries. In Paris anything from a pound of butter to an exit permit can be had for a price. (Price of an exit permit to Unoccupied France: 1,500 francs.)

Against the Grain. Against this orderless order Europe fought back last week with one elbow and one knee.

The captives could not ease their material lot by sabotage and slowdowns in factories, by blowing up railroads, bridges, fuel stores and munitions dumps, by ambushing German soldiers. On the contrary, rebellion meant certain punishment--if not for the rebels, then for someone else. But everywhere in Occupied Europe there were people who could not stand the humiliation of the New Order, who had to fight back to keep their souls intact. They also fought to weaken the German war effort in the hope of that eventual help from outside which Winston Churchill recently promised, in high and hopeful words.

P:In France attacks on German personnel and property amounted to a terror against the terror. A sentry was mauled in Tours, bombs were hurled in Rouen and Paris. Punishment: mass executions.

P:In Norway, whose shipyard and factory workers are masters of the invisible slowdown, hate erupted like hot lava when Vidkun Quisling was installed as puppet Premier. Ready for action stood German troops with fixed bayonets, German tanks with troops inside. Nevertheless, two railway stations and the National Theater in Oslo were set on fire, bombs were tossed into a university building and into the House of Parliament. When arch-quisling Quisling stepped toward a balcony to receive the crowd's plaudits, the searchlights went out. Someone had cut the cables. Thirty-three friends of King Haakon were taken as hostages, including the King's physician and a onetime foreign minister.

P:In Czecho-Slovakia a workman called "Old Vacek" ran a crane at the great Skoda munitions works at Pilsen. One day a big ladle of molten lead being carried on Vacek's crane suddenly flipped over. It happened that a posse of German Army commissioners were passing beneath: 14 of them were burned to death. Old Vacek did not try to pretend accident. He dived out of his cab, 60 feet head first to the concrete floor.

Basilisk. To combat rebellion in Europe, it seemed logical that Germany should choose its bloodiest man. Reinhard Heydrich is six feet tall, lean, trim, yellow-haired, 37. He is pale, thin-nosed, thin-lipped. His features might be those of a great brutalitarian or a great ascetic. He is no ascetic. Within the Gestapo he has a fancy nickname, "The Green Basilisk." Most Germans call him simply der Henker (the Hangman).

At the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, Hangman Heydrich has a spacious, bare-walled office with a big desk for himself, comfortable chairs, a sofa and cigarets for visitors. Foreign diplomats who used to visit him there, to plead or protest for fellow nationals, found him polite, attentive, even affable. But they noticed one thing about him--he never smiled.

Heydrich managed to keep his name out of the papers until three or four years ago. He stood in the shadow behind the lurid light of Heinrich Himmler, head of all the German police. Himmler's top man for the uniformed police is General Kurt Daluege; for the Gestapo, Heydrich. But Heydrich is much more powerful than Daluege, and he might, if it came to a test, prove more powerful even than Himmler. He knows everything that Himmler knows and he has spies everywhere, even in the lairs of his closest associates. For the time being all three of the police chiefs work in harmony, often against the Army, which hates them and which has, they believe, deliberately sacrificed some of their best SS (Elite Guard) troops at the front. The Army blames Heydrich for persuading Himmler to persuade Hitler to attach a Gestapo man to every Army unit from a battalion up.

Up Gestapo. In the hidden strife between the Army and the Gestapo, which stands for the Nazi Party generally, the Gestapo was on top last week. The number of purged generals was reported to be 100 or more,* and though Hitler had been forced to reinstate the three biggest vons (Bock, Runstedt, Leeb) in Russia to mount his spring offensive, he had gone out of his way to decorate Elite Guard heroes. The Army cabal was quiescent. Score one for Reinhard Heydrich. Himmler took the credit.

Himmler has been portrayed by some as a sadistic weakling, a fretful schemer who rose to power through loyalty to Hitler. A onetime official of the Berlin Gestapo, now a refugee in England, described the situation thus: "Without him [Heydrich], Himmler would be just a senseless dummy. . . . Heydrich is young and intelligent, brutal, despotic and merciless. He uses Himmler cleverly. . . . Himmler shines while Heydrich works. Himmler betrays loyalties and friends, Heydrich annihilates them."

Up Henker. This may have been the animadversion of a man who hated them both. But Reinhard Heydrich is the man of brains and the man of action of the Geheime Staatspolizei, better and more darkly known as the Gestapo.

Most of the execution warrants for the Blood Purge of June 30, 1934 were signed in the clear, steady hand of Reinhard Heydrich. Sending two of his lieutenants to keep tabs on the Munich murders, Heydrich supervised the Berlin end of the massacre, found time to take personal care of Gregor Strasser, firebrand adherent of the Roehm rebels.

Heydrich has always been reticent about his birth and youth: it is possible that this man with the viciously Nordic head had a Jew for father. He was born at Halle to a musical-academy director, listed in an old musical directory as "Bruno Richard Heydrich (properly Suss)." Suss is a common Jewish name in Germany.

Too young for the war, Heydrich joined a radical and terrorist youth organization after the peace, was reputed at 15 a proficient killer. He joined the Navy as a cadet, won several promotions as an officer, was cashiered when a drunken brawl over a woman reached the courts. Then he entered the Nazi movement, looked about for a chance to rise. A chance appeared--blackmail. Learning that a Prussian official named Koch was in correspondence with the dissident Gregor Strasser, Heydrich courted Koch's wife and stole the letters. Armed with these, he extorted a recommendation to Himmler, who gave him a post with the Munich Elite Guard. Thereafter his rise was rapid. Just before the war insiders estimated that Heydrich grafted $150,000 a year, spent it mostly on women, horses, a twelve-room apartment on Berlin's Kurfurstendamm.

Such is the man who now confronts Europe's rebellious millions. Last summer Der Henker stated his theory of police work: "The complete understanding of the opponent in his fundamental intellectual element, complete understanding of and police inquiry into his organization and its leading personalities, and finally the systematic opposition, crippling, destruction and abolition of this opponent by the Executive power."

The Degradation. The New Order has degraded and brutalized the captive nations of Europe, but the first nation the New Order captured was Germany. The numbing sickness of conquest has infected Germany, too. Nine years of incessant, pulverizing propaganda, liberally sprinkled with lurid obscenities concerning the private lives of Jews and others not in Nazi favor, have so poisoned and fevered the German mind that the filth-on-the-air technique has been turned against certain Nazi officials by such mysterious enemies as "The Chief," who operates an outlaw radio station somewhere in or near Germany and tells of the private vices of his victims with salacious gusto.

Suffering themselves from such methods, the people who produced Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven and Einstein are in danger of becoming as brutalized as their captives. For those people who still, thanks to their fortitude or their good fortune, remain outside the Nazi web, the lesson is painfully clear.

* Cracked one English-speaking Russian: "The Germans are losing their generals von by von."

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