Sieg Heil The Story of Adolf Hitler

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SIEG HEIL!

THE STORY OF ADOLF HITLER

MORRIS D. WALDMAN

Introduction by GEORGE N. SHUSTER

Sieg Heil! was originally published in 1962 by Oceana Publications, Inc., Dobbs Ferry, New York. In the original print version of Sieg Heil!, numerous spelling and grammatical errors were present and were corrected for this ebook edition. Chapter endnotes, present in the print version, were replaced by [bracketed text] following the endnote’s location in the text. The original book does not contain a bibliography but interested readers can search online for more information on cited references.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

INTRODUCTION 5

CHAPTER 1 — A Sullen Childhood 14

CHAPTER 2 — Vienna: Whipped Cream and Hate 22

CHAPTER 3 — War and Aftermath 32

CHAPTER 4 — The Early Days of National Socialism 40

CHAPTER 5 — Treason to the Republic—The Big Lie 51

CHAPTER 6 — Mein Kampf 63

CHAPTER 7 — Der schoener Adolf 69

CHAPTER 8 — Alliance with Respectability 77

CHAPTER 9 — Support from the Streets 87

CHAPTER 10 — Hitler to Power 92

CHAPTER 11 — The Legal Subversion of Freedom 99

CHAPTER 12 — Consolidating the Victory 107

CHAPTER 13 — The Röhm Purge 114

CHAPTER 14 — Wir wollen wieder Waffen 121

CHAPTER 15 — German Watch on the Rhine 129

CHAPTER 16  The Ladies in his Life 136

CHAPTER 17 — Drang nach Osten: Austria 143

CHAPTER 18 — Infamous Munich 154

CHAPTER 19 — The End of Czechoslovakia 165

CHAPTER 20 — At Peace with Poland 171

CHAPTER 21 — The End of Poland 176

CHAPTER 22 — The Phony War 186

CHAPTER 23 — The Sobering War 196

CHAPTER 24 — The Turn of the Screw 209

CHAPTER 25 — The Smell of Defeat 217

CHAPTER 26 — The End of the Third Reich 226

About the Author 237

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 239

INTRODUCTION

First of all, I should like to explain briefly why I am writing the introduction to this book, which certainly can stand on its own feet. Shortly after Adolf Hitler had consolidated his power in Germany, I came to know Morris Waldman, who was then guiding the work of the American Jewish Committee. We worked together effectively and without fanfare to do what lay in our power to oppose Nazism by marshaling such forces as seemed likely at least to warn mankind of the terrible danger which was then in the making. By that time I had behind me most of the twelve years during which I was associated with the Commonweal. Since this was a magazine edited by Catholic laymen, there was a definite affinity between Morris Waldman’s outlook and purpose and my own.

He was wise, tireless and remarkably well informed. It would be his destiny to observe to the bitter end the rise and fall of Hitler, but also meanwhile to witness as few other men could the mounting tragic plight of his people. One should doubtless make two observations at this point. First, Nazism was a very new social disease which did not immediately reveal all its virulence. When it first appeared it was conjoined with a wing of German Conservatism having a strong support from the Army and certain powerful veteran’s organizations. This group seemed to have a chance to curb the Nazi tyrant; and it would only later on be made manifest that it had to begin with been outwitted, and was then to be led by a variety of key human failures into making compromises which sapped the strength of the resistance. Today it is very difficult to imagine what led people into attempting them. But at the time the old order of law and of honor lost all power of initiative or indeed, it sometimes seemed, of movement. Surely the noisy fellows in brown uniforms marching restlessly through the streets would get tired and go home. How could one seriously believe that another generation of young men would be asked to die in vain on battlefields?

Second, the moral forces which were by their very nature opposed to Totalitarianism had, it is true, a measure of respect for each other but they had not been accustomed to working together. Generally the Christian Churches then viewed each other with suspicion and even hostility. And while most of us in the relatively thoughtful part of the Christian community were not anti-Semitic, we often entertained very unrealistic impressions of Judaism and were novices in the art of co-operating with it. Had we begun the conflict knowing what we did later and sensing the import of the way things were going, we could have formed a powerful common front. Much the same can be said of the nations which in the end would have to fight against Hitler for their very lives. Each hoped that a Nazi Germany would have some special advantages for itself. Therefore none would risk anything for others.

Morris Waldman was one of the first to realize these things. It was for me personally a fruitful process of education which he inaugurated. This he has continued in the present book, which tells the dreadful story of Hitler from a point of view which no one else could have gained. Being where he was, he could not only follow developments in detail, with the help of special sources of information, but he was able also to discern the reasons why the Nazi plague could spread even after there was ample evidence that it happened to be a plague. No one can at present alter the course of history, but one can see why it ran as it did and at least draw some conclusions which merit being etched in the human memory.

There are of course things we still do not know about Nazism or which are lost in the sheer mass of the accumulated documentation. No book, even if it were of encyclopedic size, could tell the whole story. This one prudently does not attempt to do so. It is a biography written by a man of scrupulous honesty and great discernment who, for the most poignant of reasons, had to watch with an aching heart that biography unfold step by step. Accordingly the reader will find not a memoir or a slice of an autobiography, but rather history written in part on the sound basis of personal experience.

This becomes immediately apparent when one opens the book. Three questions will be asked about Adolf Hitler as long as people wonder about this part of the human past. What manner of man was he? Why did he become so powerful in Germany? And why later on did he come to grief, when the odds were in favor of his succeeding in a mad bid to make Germany the most powerful nation in the world? The first query is here examined in the light of the information we possess. A boy of dubious ancestry, bred in an environment which combined poor medical care with peasant meanness and backwardness, grew up hating everything he saw and taking refuge in dreams of fair ladies or visions of success as an artist. Both remained dreams, and he took refuge at an early age in projections of himself into an historical role as cleanser of the German people.

The cleansing meant to this young and unattractive Austrian casting out all alien minorities as these presented themselves in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, but in particular the Jews. Waldman discounts many of the reasons earlier advanced for Hitler’s anti-Semitism, such as an unhappy love-affair with a Jewish girl. He cites a revealing experience in the life of Hitler, namely his later visit to the Passion Play at Oberammergau and his virtual identification of himself with the Christ there portrayed, chasing money lenders from the Temple and breathing anathemas on those who refused to follow him. We shall not discuss the Passion Play here, which in its earlier versions was very probably in part rooted in old peasant antipathy to Jews viewed as city folk and money lenders. But Waldman’s observation, which has seldom been advanced, seems especially pertinent because of recent research in the anti-Semitic literature Hitler read in Vienna. It will be recalled by readers of Mein Kampf that he professed not having been able at first to credit what he saw. We now know that he was deeply impressed by the pamphlets and periodicals issued by the Ostara Movement, which asserted that Jesus was an Aryan, that the religion He preached was essentially an assertion of Aryan opposition to Judaism, and that the great restorer of Christianity would be one who rediscovered and revived the Aryan cult. I am quite sure that these things were in Hitler’s mind when he sat listening to the Passion Play. He never permitted the high-priest of the Ostara movement to come to Germany while he was in power. But there is every reason to suppose that he saw himself in the role which that discalced Benedictine monk had assigned to his own person.

Once the first World War was over, Hitler found his way back to Munich and to a job as a spy in the rudimentary intelligence agency established by the Germany army to ferret out Communists. These, with the help of Russian agents and dollars, had made an attempt to take over the Bavarian government during the course of which hostages had been murdered. It was first as a witness against alleged agents of subversion that Hitler gained a reputation as a public speaker and became an attraction for wealthy old Bavarian ladies who, like some people currently in Southern California, fancied that had it not been for him the Communists would assuredly have gobbled them up. Quickly Hitler became a popular political speaker and organizer. How he acquired his extraordinary ability to captivate audiences must forever remain a mystery. I have tried my hand at making an explanation, but I think Waldman is wise in simply accepting this gift as a fact. No doubt people of that time were accustomed to assuming that tribunes of the people were queer-looking folk. They had seen pictures of Lenin and Trotsky, and had read about Mussolini and Bela Kun. The impressive thing about the agitator named Hitler was that his revolution was seemingly restoration. He professed to want to rescue the German Army from the morass of opprobrium into which it had been cast by the November criminals—that is, the civilians who had taken over the responsibility for making peace in 1918 when Ludendorff and Hindenburg had capitulated. He wanted to go back to the days before the Treaty of Versailles, except that there was to be no Monarchy.

Germany was then a defeated nation which had been greatly humiliated by callous and somewhat pharisaical declarations by its enemies, which was expected to make reparation far beyond its capacity to pay, and which was quite arbitrarily stripped of portions of its sovereign territory. Possibly, however, the crowning blows were insistence on the abdication of the Emperor and the Royal Family and the reduction of the German army to a level of 100,000 men. The first violated profound pro-monarchical sentiments entertained by the great majority of Germans, who never later on found a substitute for the loyalty they had paid to the old Emperors and Kings. Far worse, it cast the new democratic regime in the role of near-regicide and defeatist. It was a blunder we were to avoid later in Japan. The reduction of the size of the Army meant that many professional soldiers, who had grown up in Germany’s pre-war establishment and had served throughout the War, were now unable to find employment. Naturally they settled wherever they could find a roost. One was provided by Adolf Hitler.

The inflation which followed the precipitate invasion of the Ruhr by the French in order, so it was hoped, to impound reparations as well as possibly to strengthen Separatist movements in the Rhenish territory, impoverished the Middle Class. The few years of prosperity which then followed the adoption of the Dawes Plan, the granting of many private loans to German municipalities and firms, and the expansion of Germany’s export trade would not have been illusory if the Great Misfortune—as I think future historians will call the depression—had not settled on the world after the New York stock market crash in 1929. The impact on Germany was a formidable one. Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, who as Waldman very correctly says was placed in the office of Chancellor by an Army now greatly alarmed about the future of the Fatherland, tried to persuade the United States and its allies that Germany was doing everything in its power to help itself by sponsoring with the help of presidential decrees a program which called for a balanced budget. This is now commonly referred to as deflationary economics. But it was designed to halt the flight of capital from Germany, to suggest that abandonment of Reparation claims was inevitable, and then to enable the Government to take advantage of a sound economy by embarking on a program of public spending. It is arguable today that this policy required far too much sacrifice on the part of the German people. Yet after Brüning had been ousted, all the pleas he had formulated were met by the Great Powers, some of whom indeed continued to curry favor with Hitler after he had come to be chancellor.

It is amazing in retrospect to see how skilfully the psychically unsettled agitator from Braunau played his cards, and how ineptly the opposition dealt with theirs. The weaknesses Hitler exploited were above all the intrinsic instability of Hindenburg, whom a curious destiny had cast in a rôle analogous to that of the Kaiser, and the inability of the anti-Hitler group to reckon realistically with that instability. Brüning himself was the victim of a romantic addiction to the worship of War heroes; and some of the generals, Von Schleicher among them, dreamed of great deeds which could be done after getting hold of the mantle of the victor of Tannenberg. Others, notably Franz von Papen, heritor of a good name but not of the intelligence which ordinarily should accompany it, merely felt good all over when the Old Man nodded. But the truly incredible party to the debacle was Herr Hugenberg, one of Germany’s great industrialists, owner of a publicity empire, and spokesman for any number of varieties of reaction. How such a man could have thought of allying himself with a desperate and dangerous adventurer like Hitler is just as incomprehensible as is the fact that some American businessmen give all their spare cash to the support of the John Birch Society. Without Hugenberg and the Communists, Hitler could never have come to power. The first helped by giving him support when it was most needed. The second assisted by being on the premises and by scaring the bourgeoisie even more than did the Nazis.

Waldman does not attribute guilt to the whole German people for Hitler’s rise to power, nor does he endorse any such thesis that Germany is hereditarily addicted to Nazism. He is far too good an historian to attempt the first, and too deeply religious to do the second. Hitler did create the largest party in the Germany of his time, but he succeeded in doing so only in a period of grave economic crisis by weaving the spell of his oratory round the dispossessed, the disillusioned and the socially miscast. We may marvel at the man’s power as a speaker. He had that mysterious resource those destined to rule the masses with words seem to possess by nature—the power to divine what is in the minds and hearts of his listeners and then move them to anger and to no longer suppressed hatred of their lot. Waldman sagely reminds his American readers that they witnessed in this country a comparable phenomenon, Father Charles Coughlin, likewise gifted in the oratorical sense and likewise anti-Semitic. Only in Germany the obsessed and possessed suddenly reached out and took the whole power of the State into their hands. It is agonizing in retrospect to see how meekly some of his opponents stepped aside—Monsignor Ludwig Kass, for example, who announced on an historic day in Potsdam that the Catholic Center Party, which he led, would vote to give the Nazi Führer the unlimited powers he requested.

But it was not only in Germany that the ambitions of this demonical man were misjudged. The major Allied powers, sensing in their own populations a ground swell to the Right, tried desperately to find in Nazism a movement with which they could live. This is of course best documented from the history of the Czech crisis and its ultimate resolution. Waldman therefore tells the story in full detail, drawing on a wealth of personal experience. To have sacrificed the strong Czech army and the fortifications it had developed seems in retrospect a foolhardy enough deed. But to have torn asunder the Czech Republic on the ground that the demands Hitler made upon it were reasonable appears still more incredible today. With the equipment eventually seized without a firing a shot Hitler carried on war against Poland—unhappy land ruled by dilettantes who at that solemn moment could think of nothing better to do than to annex the area of Teschen. And with Czechoslovakia out of the way, Hitler had an unimpeded route to Hungary, the Balkans and eventually the Dardanelles. The repercussions of this indefensible deed were to prove formidable also after peace had been restored. For with the truncated state Benes had, in a mood of resentment, steered away from a pro-Western orientation given over to the Kremlin, the satellite empire Stalin and his precursors had dreamed of became an ominous reality. The Russian dictator now needed only Berlin to hold in his hands all the routes of power in Central Europe.

The Czech crisis had of course been preceded by the invasion of the Rhineland and the annexation of Austria. At the time the Locarno Pact was signed, Germany had solemnly pledged itself never to station troops on the left bank of the Rhine. It seemed to many of us who were observing the progress of events in those days that the Government of France could not permit this agreement to be broken, since in many respects it offered the best assurance of its security against attack. Indeed, some thought that so long as the Pact was in force Hitler could not wage war. Their reasoning was so convincing that the German General Staff strenuously opposed the action. But the French were at the time in no mood for martial deeds. Keenly aware of the bloodletting which had so weakened their nation during the First World War, they were willing to risk almost anything that seemed at all likely to keep the peace. Therewith Hitler not only immeasurably strengthened his defenses in the West but seemed to have demonstrated that his intuitions were always to be trusted. Henceforth the sober, matter-of-fact views of his generals would appear to him scarcely worth consideration. Necessarily also the thinking of those who reasoned that Hitler’s influence would wane as soon as he met with stern opposition had to be revised. Mussolini concluded that the defense of Austrian independence was hopeless. The Anschluss, achieved without firing a shot at anyone, was not only the spectacular aftermath of the Rhineland invasion but also the prelude to the Czech crisis.

Waldman is correct in estimating that there was far more support for Nazism in Austria than had been assumed. The scenes which followed the taking over of the country were marked almost by unbelievable frenzy and fanaticism. In particular the youth of the country had become addicted to the swastika and all it represented. Shouting their hatred for whomsoever had opposed the seizure of power, Austrian Nazis proved more venomous and unbridled than even their counterparts in Germany had been in 1933. It was only later on, when so many young men were mowed down on distant battlefields to the East, that a change of heart set in. Meanwhile the old Jewish population of the city was decimated and the bones of many other Austrians rotted in concentration camp cemeteries.

That there was opposition to Hitler in Germany, Waldman has long accepted as an obvious fact. His analysis of the position of the Churches seems in the main correct. They would protest against invasions of their rights and privileges, but on larger issues they were silent. Thus for a long and fateful time no opposition to the government’s anti-Semitic policies was voiced by them, on the often repeated ground that they could as a result do more for individual Jews. Germany and indeed the world at large was not then used to the saving idea of a common front. But I believe there was a change as time passed. Certainly among the glories of the Lutheran Confessional Church will always be the fact that it courageously banned Racism from the creed.

The opposition of the Army and the Conservative Right collapsed in the weird night of murder organized by Hermann Göring during June of 1934 to liquidate the revolutionary wing of the Storm Troopers. This meant that Hitler would in cold blood watch and indeed condone the murder of his once indispensable friend Röhm—for suicide in such cases is also murder. The Army, in part payment for the removal of brash contenders for military power, was forced to swallow the foul shooting down of generals. Here there would begin that strange sundering of military leaders which would henceforth mark the going of Germany to its doom—the brushing aside of those who could not stomach the mad venturing of Hitler across the brink of disaster, and the coming to power of those who for this reason or that did what they were bidden to do. It was June 1934 which sealed the fate of the German Resistance. Too late and too amateurishly the attempt of July, 1944 would be made, though this illustrates once more and tragically the extraordinary personal luck that was the lot of the Führer. On the fateful July day Hitler was seated with some of his officers at a table supported by two solid end pieces. Had Claus von Stauffenberg placed the satchel containing the bomb on the inner side of one of these supports, the attempt at assassination would in all probability have succeeded. But he did not and so a wounded Hitler could once again take bloody revenge on his opponents. Among the victims was Rommel, one of the most dashing and widely admired of German generals.

Hitler’s wars carried him to dizzy heights of success. The campaign in Poland was quickly won by aircraft and Czech tanks. The debacle in France was a result of correctly managed technology. Germany’s General Heinz Guderian put into practice the principles of tank warfare France’s Charles de Gaulle had vainly tried to teach his own general staff. The great campaigns in Russia brought Hitler’s armies within sight of Moscow. They could also very probably have taken Leningrad with ease if the command to do so had been given. But the Führer himself had forgotten to think about what would happen if the attack were stopped. And halted it was by inevitable obstacles which many of his military leaders had diagnosed correctly. There was the Russian winter, and to cope with it the German Army had neither clothing nor equipment. There were the heavy losses incurred during the fighting, which could not be replaced with levies of Romanians and Hungarians. There was the failure to press on and seize Moscow—a failure dictated by Hitler’s desire to march to the Caucasus and lay hands on its treasures. And finally there was the impressive power of recuperation manifested by Russia’s fighting men and Russia’s industry. General Guderian reluctantly reported that new tanks sent to the front by Stalin were better than those which had won such spectacular successes for the Germans. The almost incredible advance was slowly grinding to a halt even as had Napoleon’s.

The fate of Nazism and of the world now hung in the balance. Hitler would not admit that the Russians had massed tremendous power to the East of Stalingrad. He refused stubbornly to allow the onslaught of that power to be met in wisely conceived of defensive operation. And at this very moment, when the situation in the East was difficult if not as a matter of fact yet wholly desperate, he chose to declare war on the United States, believing that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had immobilized this country insofar as operations in Europe were concerned. He had had no advance knowledge that the attack would be made. He had not studied its import or long-range strategic significance. The mere fact that the Japanese had seized the offensive was enough to convince him of their invincibility.

The decision was not merely a gamble. It was the height of folly and welled up out of the insane megalomania which had characterized him since his dreamy youth. In a few days he threw away everything so far gained. There was no one to stop him, though many would have greatly loved to do so. With appalling suddenness, the tide of battle turned. Again, because he would not think of retreat, he sacrificed an army in North Africa and another, foolishly and savagely, at Stalingrad. Relying on dreams of wonder weapons, he sat in his bunker while German cities were being destroyed in the most awesome, pitiless rain of bombs mankind had so far seen. The end was coming, but he could not visualize it. Yet there dawned the day on which he and the mistress he had oddly enough married after all died by their own hands just as the last frenzied resistance of German troops had been broken outside the ruined city of Berlin.

It was Götterdämmerung insofar as Germany was concerned. The spirit of a great people had been unable to break through the cordon of response to military duty, of docility, of mesmerism and of concentration camps which had so skillfully been raised round it. As one looked about at the almost endless mounds of rubble into which proud cities had fallen and on the ruin which in part had been decreed by Hitler in a last day of rage—the breaking up of bridges and the rendering impassible of roads—one saw what his legacy to the country of his adoption in all terrible truth was. This was not, however, the ultimate horror. That lay in the stigma which his limitless brutality had placed on Germany—a stigma so profoundly burned into the flesh of its history, so many-sided in its meaning, and so awful to contemplate that only one who is able to rise above it can properly write the chronicle of these times.

Morris Waldman does so. I can do no better than quote from him:

The majority of the German people were not Nazis. The Party, even in its most successful election campaigns, had never polled more than one third of its voting strength. Among the majority were a large number of industrial and agricultural workers who could have been moulded into a formidable, and perhaps successful resistance had labor leaders been stronger and more militant. That leadership, discouraged by the failure of the Western Democracies to hold the Nazi Government to account for its defiance of the Versailles Treaty, preferred futility to resist Nazi power with legality instead of force.

But the younger and more determined elements among the people went into underground resistance. That resistance also proved ineffectual. Many of these splendid young men and women during the succeeding period of twelve years paid an agonizing price for their patriotism as victims of punishment ferocious beyond imagination and human endurance. Hundreds of thousands fled the country.

This, I am sure, is the truth. The finest flower of German manhood and womanhood perished in Stadelheim prison, in Dachau, Buchenwald and elsewhere. And among the almost countless host of those who were slaughtered on battlefields so that the Führer’s ambition might be sated were serried ranks of brave and honorable men. But this was only part of the sacrifice paid, as the world well knows. It was the Demon who decreed that Racism was to be the central gospel of the Reich to last a thousand years who exacted the most ghastly of holocausts, first among the enslaved folk of the Polish and Russian territories and then among the detested Jews. No one will ever be able to imagine the agony of women and children herded into boxcars, shipped to places where efficient gas chambers had been erected, and there asphyxiated in numbers which add the dizzying total of millions to other millions. The mad lust to extinguish the Jew knew no bounds. Even a convert from Judaism, who became a Carmelite nun and writer of books about philosophy, was ferreted out of her convent in Holland and shipped to a loathsome death. No one can ever plumb to the depths of the moral disease which made all this possible, staining the pages of history as they have never previously been, not even in Stalin’s Russia.

Waldman comes in the end to contemplate that ultimate triumph which the Führer visualized would complete his destiny when all the military battles had been won. This was to be the destruction of Christianity. The Nazi conviction that the blight of Jesus had lain on all the Party thought, said and did had never been concealed. The young Hitler, so it is reported, had once spat out the Host after Communion; and as he became more depraved and glutted with power, even the old theory that the Galilean had been an Aryan no longer appealed to him. Nothing in what this Man had said failed to challenge every act of horror and degradation of which the Party was guilty. The specific plans to blot out Christianity were slowly ripened in the weedy garden of Himmler’s mind. These plans have an odd quality of diseased fantasy as one considers them today. But, and I shall quote the last lines of Morris Waldman’s book:

The finale of the horrendous drama whose curtain rose in 1889, on the scene of the birth of a sickly child in humble surroundings in the remote, tiny town of Braunau, Austria, and descended in 1945 over the fantastic scene in the elaborate catacombs fifty feet below the streets of Berlin, Germany, confirmed the eternal truth voiced by the Hebrew prophet, Zechariah, not my might nor by power but by my spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts.

That is, I think, a fitting way to end a book which all who read it will find an ennobling experience, despite the dire and unplumbable evil which it must describe. For, written as it is with care and color, so that from a literary point of view it will long be thought a work of great price, it is also a tribute to the human spirit which, when immersed in that awareness of the Holy One which brings integrity and holiness, can be delivered of all evil. There is much more in this volume than my words of introduction have indicated. Perhaps it sins—if that be the proper word—in one respect only. Though some pages indicate actions in which Morris Waldman played an important part, the modesty of the author suffers no indication to be given of the tireless and often heroic service to his people and to the cause of humanity rendered by him during so many years. And so no doubt I should stress this here, as a sort of tribute to him for not only having written but also for having been.

The lesson, for there surely is one? That the totality of the civilization by which we live and which normally defends us against such inroads by evil forces as were made by Adolf Hitler cannot effectively survive if its defense is undertaken by small groups living and working in isolation. We cannot each go to his club and ignore the fellowship and comradeship which must bind us effectively in one service. It is not because Germany was especially anti-Semitic that Hitler’s Racism could thrive there. The reason was a lack of solidarity in the overall human sense of the term. Germany had become from the spiritual and intellectual point of view a fragmented society, just as the whole of the Western world had so become. Nazism broke piece from piece and walked to power over the scattered fragments. We cannot undo what has happened. But we can, perhaps learn how to make a repetition impossible.

At any rate, I esteem it a great privilege to have been asked to write what I have written for such a book.

George N. Shuster

University of Notre Dame

April, 1962

CHAPTER 1 — A Sullen Childhood

Die Drei Glocken, the village inn of Leonding, Lower Austria, hugged the river Traun at the edge of a short bridge across the narrow stream whose loose planks groaned and creaked under the big wagons heavily laden with timber for the sawmill a hundred yards farther south on the shore and rattled merrily under the lighter and swifter impact of peasant carts bringing produce to the village market. At this vantage point the innkeeper was in the position to observe much of what was going on about without interruption of his daily chores. Often the drivers would pause to water their beasts at the cypress trough in the broad yard of the inn, sometimes to quench their own thirst with a mug of home brew. Usually a little gossip would be indulged in. The thumping, plodding hoofs of the giant dray horses was music to the ears of the innkeeper.

It was Saturday night when, as usual, the tavern was occupied to its capacity by the male villagers, who between puffs of smoke from their long curved cherry-wood pipes and draughts of beer, passed judgment on crops and the weather and also on their absent neighbor’s behavior or recounted strange stories and hoary legends of local history. Laurenz Poelzl who had recently returned after an absence of many years, obviously already in his cups, his stumpy legs stretched out at full length, was holding forth boastfully about the superior advantages he had enjoyed in his wide travels. Now in his early sixties he was employed as a stableman at the Schloss, the baronial mansion of the local titled landlord. Obviously pleased to be the object of rapt attention, his small squinting eyes took on a sly, lascivious look as he launched into a lewd recital of his gallantries among the women he had met. An equally elderly spare, gray-haired man of severe mien, wearing a gold bordered velvet cap that marked the dignified office of a subordinate functionary in the imperial-royal civil service was one of the group whom Laurenz regaled with the fascinating conquests of his bachelorhood.

This man was not at all impressed; on the contrary he showed signs of decided displeasure—less in distaste of the filthy recitals than in resentment over the interest and admiration they had evoked from the bucolic audience.

Accustomed to holding the center of the stage in village gatherings he was piqued to have his place pre-empted by this tipsy, loquacious lecher. His choler rising to the boiling point, he rose from his bench and fixing his cold eyes sternly on the rustic braggart he exclaimed you are drunk, Laurenz, go back to your stable where you belong. You’re not fit to be in decent company.

Unperturbed, Laurenz drawled Go to the devil, Alois; I have as much right to talk as you or anybody else.

His anger mounting, the wearer of the gold bordered cap said you should be ashamed, a man of your age, telling such stories. If you have no sense of decency you might at least respect the uniform of his imperial Majesty which I have the honor to be wearing.

Leering over toward him and in a derisive tone, Laurenz answered thickly "Why so hoity-toity, Alois? You weren’t so gentle with my cousin, Klara, when she lived under