GERMANY'S HITLER

by Heinz A. Heinz

Malui Bryant

Revised Edition

HURST & BLACKETT LTD.

34 Paternoster Row, E.C.4

GERMANY'S HITLER

Herr Heinz A. Heinz' aim has been to draw a picture of the Führer from details supplied at first hand by those friends and helpers and comrades of his who believed in him from the first, who joined him at the beginning, stood by him through the darkest days, and have lived to see one of the most astounding achievements of modern times.

Revised throughout and brought fully up to date.

THE BERGHOF, THE FÜHRER'S COUNTRY HOME IN THE OBERSALZBERG, BAVARIAN ALPS

First Published November 1934 Library edition (revised) October 1938

Made and Printed in Great Britain for Hurst & Blackett Ltd. Paternoster House, London E.C.4, at The Mayflower Press, Plymouth. William Brendon & Son, Ltd.

DEDICATED TO MY SINCERE ENGLISH AND AMERICAN FRIENDS

I am very much indebted to Herrn Hans Rolf Hoffmann, Munich, for his kind support.

CONTENTS

GERMANY'S HITLER

CHAPTER I

BIRTH AND BOYHOOD

RAVELLING from Vienna on a small branch line of the railway tending north, one comes presently to a beautiful hilly and wooded district called the "Waldviertel." The character of the country gives it the name. The foothills and mountains are covered with forest, only broken here and there by the fields and patches of cultivation which have been cleared by Bavarian peasants who with toil and hardihood have wrung a frugal living from the soil in this region for over a thousand years. It has, indeed, bred a sturdy and dogged race, used generations long to a fierce fight with the forces of nature. Every clod of soil, every foot of arable land had to be wrested from the forest at the cost of human sweat and sinew. The country folk of the Waldviertel have gone back no whit to-day from the toughness of their ancestors, neither in physique nor character.

One observes in the rugged weather-beaten face of a man of these parts, bright defiant eyes like those of a falcon under a rugged forehead, and finds himself in the presence of a typical "German," wrought by a lifetime of struggle to the temper of stoutest, finest steel. The realization forces itself upon one what it is that has enabled these people to resist the hardships of a thousand years. They have isolated themselves here in the recesses of the forest from easy access, and the race has been kept absolutely clear of any Slavonian admixture. In the Waldviertel to-day, albeit a part of the racial "mishmash" of the one-time Austrian Empire, the Bavarian dialect is spoken, and life is wholly German still.

In the Lower Austrian Waldviertel, utterly lost to the world, lies a tiny village called Walterschlag.

In one of the white wooden houses in the recesses of this forest, and to a father and mother wearing the lovely old German costumes of Grimm's fairy-tale pictures, a baby was born in 1672 who bore the name of Stephan Hitler. He grew up in the Waldviertel, and came in time to possess the cottage and the clearing which had been his father's, when the latter died. Stephan's son, Johannes, followed him; there was an Uncle Martin—all "Bauern," small peasant proprietors of the soil, and Waldviertel peasant farmers at that.

Martin Hitler's son Georg, however, became the village miller. It was but a poor living he made, very toilsome, and with little result. When he grew too old to carry on any more, he had not enough put by to prevent his becoming a charge on the little community in general.

This Georg, however, possessed a son, Alois, with a streak of originality and ambition in him. Something marked him out among the village children. At the age of thirteen Alois Hitler had made up his mind to clear out of the still and lonely forest and see something of life outside and the big world for himself. He bundled his few little possessions together, and set off on foot for Vienna "to make his fortune," three gulden in his pocket from his mother.

This was in the year 1850. We see a sturdy youngster clad in short leathern breeks, curiously laced at the knee, with green suspenders and an embroidered band across the breast over a linen shirt, low thick heavy nail-studded shoes, and a green Jäger hat with a tuft of chamois hair—a "Gemsbart"—in it, trudging through

the sombre aisles of the pine forests as hundreds and hundreds of boys, from Whittington's time onward, have trudged to the great city with dreams all about their heads.

Vienna in 1850 was a very different place from what it is to-day. The young Emperor Francis Joseph, then only about twenty years of age, had not long acceded to the throne abdicated by his uncle. There had been, in this big outside world, a short-lived revolution going on, and Kossuth's attempt to wrest Hungary away had already called down upon the Emperor's youthful head the terrible curse of the Countess Karolyi which was to pursue him, and the strange Habsburg House, relentlessly for nearly seventy years, and who knows—perhaps to this very day.

Vienna in 1850 was the brilliant capital of an extraordinary Empire which was never a nation at all in the same sense as geographical and national characteristics and aspirations made a nation of the French or of the English. Austria-Hungary was just a medley of races which chiefly detested each other, bound loosely together for the convenience of the rest of Europe as Napoleon left it, and unified only by the fact that the Habsburgs everywhere, were dominant. The Vienna to which young Alois Hitler came in 1850 was the Vienna so soon to be graced by that strange figure of imperial beauty, moodiness and tragedy, the Empress Elizabeth. He, however, cannot be presumed to have had much to do with the great world of the Ballhausplatz and the Ringstrasse. At that time and in that place humanity was held only to "begin at the baron." The peasant boy from the Lower Austrian hinterland was absorbed by the common folk living in the old picturesque but ever windy Gassen, of the working-class parts of the city.

He bound himself apprentice for a couple of years to a shoe-maker, but when his time was out, resolved to try, yet again, for something better. Nothing but poverty and struggle seemed to offer him as a hand-worker in imperial Vienna. rnictory of the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the conding to the condi

Years ago, as he left Walterschlag, Hitler had sworn never to turn up there again until he had made something of himself—got somewhere—but now, when this really seemed to have been accomplished the young fellow was proud and free to recall the girl he had left behind him! So now he said good-bye to Vienna, returned home, married Klara Pölzl, the daughter of a neighbour there with whom he had been playmates, and found himself appointed as Customs Officer to the small Austrian frontier town of Braunau on the Inn.

A daughter was born to the couple, and then, a good many years later, came a boy.

Barely two months before, mysterious and shocking tragedy had overtaken the Crown Prince Rudolph at his hunting-box at Meyerling in the forest not many miles north of Vienna. The whole German world was still ringing with the scandal and wrought up to a fever pitch of curiosity about it.

To recall it, and in connection with the absolutely obscure and unimportant birth of a child to an equally obscure and unimportant functionary in the Customs Service is to contrast the world into which Adolf Hitler came on April 20th, 1889, with the world as he was to refashion it forty-four years later. An heir had appeared, but it was not such an heir as had disappeared! The consequences of the death of Rudolph were to be as

nothing compared to the consequences of the birth of

This little Adolf was a likely youngster, true to stock and type, who throve lustily under his mother's care.

But few particulars, really, are available about his childhood. The Führer himself has made only the scantiest reference to matters of purely family or biographical interest in Mein Kampf, and obviously attaches little importance to them. The Reichskanzler's elder sister, Frau Angela, kept house for him for many years in the famous retreat Berghof (of which more later). His mother, Frau Clara Hitler, had a sister who married a farmer somewhere near Linz, and it is her children, among them Herr Ludwig Schwatz, farmers also, who are the cousins and relations in Austria to-day.

We know this much, that in the course of a few years, Alois Hitler was posted to a more important town, Passau, at the junction of the Inn and the Danube. Foreseeing, however, that he might constantly be shifted from pillar to post, and being unwilling to incur the expense of removing his household every time, Hitler bought a small holding, a "Bauerngut," in a village called Hafeld, and there established them in modest comfort. For himself he remained in Passau, perforce contenting himself from time to time with such visits to Hafeld as time and duty permitted.

Here, then, in Hafeld, near Passau, young Adolf grew to boyhood. His mother looked after the little farm, and no doubt the child ran wild about the lovely country-side, played in the meadows and paddled in the brook with others of his age. Hafeld is one of those villages which appear to be bigger than they really are, owing to the houses being widely separated from each other by fields or fruit gardens. The Hitler house stands on a little elevation. It is a pretty, small, one-story house absolutely hidden in an orchard. Another orchard runs up by the side. Like all the other dwellings in Hafeld it has stabling built on to it for one or two horses or

cows, and over this is the hayloft—always a happy hunting-ground where children are concerned.

When Alois Hitler reached the age of sixty he was pensioned off. Doffing the two-peaked hat of officialdom, he reverted to the country and betook himself to his little place at Hafeld in Upper Austria, there to revert to the life and occupations of the "Bauer." Hence his son wrote of him many years later: "So it came about that after a long life of work and duty, my father reverted to his original standing."

Previous to this, however, the family had spent two years in Lambach, a small town between Linz and Salzburg with some important-looking buildings. Adolf, now eight or nine years old, was sent to school at the eleventh-century Benedictine Monastery there. Here it was that he learnt the rudiments of music. He figured as a chorister on occasions of festive or of religious solemnity, and naturally aspired to become a prior. Hitler, senior, need not have disturbed himself so much about this notion as he seems to have done. New ideas new contacts, new experiences soon drove all thought of this sort out of Adolf's head.

It is interesting to recall these singing practices of his at Lambach, though, in view of the Reichskanzler's well-known passion for music. A good sketcher, indeed, he did become, and a man of immensely wide and deep reading, but the monastery probably represents all the technical instruction he ever had the opportunity of receiving in music. The modern monastery is a wide-spread picturesque building in simple and restrained Renaissance style, with a deep roof and a well-proportioned clock tower and belfry rising in the midst over an ornate main entrance. It consists of three stories, with rows of eight plain windows the whole length of the façade.

In the courtyard of this institution there is a well with a massively built stone archway over it, the keystone of which displays a shield with a date, 1860, on the upper half, and a swastika below. The swastika figured elsewhere at Lambach, noticeably as the central device in a coat of arms surmounting an elaborately carved priedieu. The Superior here in 1859 had adopted the swastika, and it may be that the force of this boyhood association had something to do with the Führer's thought of it when designing the flag for his Party, later. But it is well known that his final decision to adopt the swastika for the symbol of his movement resulted chiefly from his intensive study of racial development in the history of the world.

The house in which the Hitlers lived in Lambach was but a stone's-throw from the school. It was a solidly built, well-designed block of buildings on the corner of the Linzerstrasse and the Kirchengasse, facing an irregular picturesque square.

The next milestone was reached for Adolf when, rummaging one day through his father's collection of books, he came across some bound copies of an old illustrated newspaper of the time of the Franco-Prussian War. He seized upon these with avidity and made off into the fields, to lie upon his stomach in the sun by the singing brook, as was his wont, there to pore over the fascinating pages undisturbed.

The story gripped the boy's imagination and filled it with heroic aspiration. And to this encounter may be ascribed the beginning of Hitler's Kampf after union with Austria. The first thing that occurred to the child, poring over the story of '70 and '71, was why had Germany to fight alone? Why hadn't the Austrians fought too? Were they not also Germans?

The figure of Bismarck claimed a passionate heroworship, and then it dawned upon this little Austrian Adolf that not every German could pride himself on belonging to the Reich! Disturbing as this was, the problem proved far too abstruse at that period for him to unravel. But it stayed with him, and occupied his thoughts and worried him, for there seemed no jot of

difference to him between an Austrian and a German or rather between one German and another German—with just a frontier between.

With the idea of sending Adolf to the Realschule in Linz, Hitler moved to a village called Leonding, in the neighbourhood of that place. Linz was already at this period the chief town of Upper Austria, very beautifully situated on an open plain on both sides of the Danube Ambitious as he was for the boy, he judged it better to send him to the Realschule than to the Gymnasium deeming it waste of time to spend years over the dead languages, and imagining that Adolf's newly evinced turn for drawing would be better fostered in the more practical type of school. He had set his heart on his son obtaining a desk of some sort in one of the Ministries, "becoming something," as he himself had become, and considered everything to that end.

It never entered into his head to consult Adolf's own inclinations. A boy of his age was not entitled to have anything at all to say in the matter, but just to do as he was bid, and allow his father to know best. Alois Hitler belonged to the old school of authoritative martines parents, and like many another, was destined to encounter fierce, tenacious opposition.

It suddenly appeared that Adolf had no intention whatever of embracing the career designed for him. He was going to be an artist! At eleven he decided that, and launched himself with characteristic impetus into a terrific, if tacit, struggle on the question. It was a case of will against will, neither ready to yield one inch. Adolf was lightning quick at school, and learned with astonishing facility. This fact afforded him ample leisure to spend his time otherwise than at his desk. He was for ever running about in the woods, glorying in fresh air and freedom, and hardening his resolve never to shut himself up in a stuffy office all day, say what his father might!

They scarcely argued it out. "You're going to be an

official, my boy," insisted old Hitler, and would have enlarged on the theme. "I'm not," exploded Adolf, "I'm going to be a painter!" But it was useless to try and explain. "Never, as long as I've a ha'porth of authority in my own house," countered the father, to which all the reply he got was: "You just wait and see!"

Here, then, was where the mother stepped in to heal the breach. These altercations, as obstinate on the one side as on the other, somewhat disturbed the peace of the family for more than a year. It was only because he hated to see his mother distress herself that young Adolf would "shut up" with as good a grace as he did. He devised another means of bringing it home to his father that his mind was set on painting and on nothing else. Purposely he neglected his schoolwork in order that the ever-recurring plaints of "insufficiency" recorded on the pages of his exercise-books, might convince his parent that he meant what he said—he would never become an office quill-driver. But for all this young Adolf could not help coming out top of the class always in the three subjects which did happen to interest him, in drawing, in geography, and above all, in history.

He seems to have had a teacher in the latter subject with a singular and original gift for lifting it right out of the dreary atmosphere of the schoolroom. At this time Austrian boys were trained to take an interest in dynastic history by way of stimulating their allegiance to the Habsburg idea. Hitler writes, many years afterwards, in Mein Kampf, of his history master with the greatest possible appreciation and gratitude. This Professor, Dr. Leopold Pötsch, seems to have taken much the view of this subject that Mr. H. G. Wells has always claimed for it in any modern scheme of education.

History for Adolf Hitler was by no means a story of the past, of very dead and gone people, and of happenings long since finished. History was made for him the very basis of the present, with living relationships reaching forward to the future. Adolf's school history began that fundamental and far-reaching preparation in his mind which was to issue later in no less portentous a guise than the "Weltanschauung," upon which the structure of his State is to be built up. He was, demonstrably, a very thoughtful boy. And here again at this point in his development we find the beginnings of that militant nationalism which latterly has so astounded our post-war world.

He has already been cracking his brains over obstructions which are merely territorial and not racial, as between Austrian Germans and German Germans, and now we find him distinguishing between the national feeling of an entire people and a mere dynastic patriotism. As has been already remarked, Austria was never at any time a "nation," merely the happy hunting-ground of a dynasty reaching back to the seventh century.

Austria existed only for the Habsburgs, as Vienna existed for the Court. All this clarified itself in the boy's mind very sharply and distinctly. He saw plainly enough that there could be no question of an Austrian nationality to become enthusiastic about in a great sprawling country inhabited by Czechs, Slavs, Ruthenians, Serbs, Croatians, Rumanians, Poles, Magyars, Italians and Gypsies, all in various stages of culture and civilisation some way behind that of the fortieth part of this numerical whole, the German Austrians just across the borders of the Reich.

It belongs to the history of the period to show how the Hungarians and the non-German races in the unwieldy Dual Monarchy were restive under the administratively Germanising tendencies of the Government. While the idea of nationality and any inclusion in the German Reich was obnoxious to the Austrian Government, which itself did not repose upon a national basis, nevertheless, under the "Bach" system every effort was made to Germanise the Croats and Hungarians most unacceptably to themselves.

The steady opposing growth of non-German feeling and tendency waxed ever stronger and stronger until, indeed, it was this which, together with the growing pan-Slavistic propaganda of Romanoff Russia, set the spark to the gunpowder in Europe in 1914. The heirapparent to the throne of Austria, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, a nephew of the childish old Emperor, was hated by dominant cliques in Government circles on account of his alleged pro-Czech and pro-Croatian sympathies, and his suspected intention of admitting Slavs to a greater share of political power when he should attain the throne.

All this, of course, is common property and past history, but to recall it here and now serves to show what were the formative influences brought to bear upon the mind of that singularly receptive boy, young Adolf Hitler. He brought the test of his history lessons under Dr. Pötsch to bear upon the everyday events and current talk of his own world, and unconsciously laid the groundwork for future activities in the political sphere as yet undreamed of.

The thing, of course, only came home to him then in concrete example.

First of all in the village school, when it came to singing the Austrian National Anthem, this Waldviertel youngster and other intrepid spirits of like mind would substitute a German hymn. Whereupon, instant castigation followed, with the inevitable result of toughening their youthful defiance. And then again in Linz in the Realschule: were a boy to dare to turn up with a cornflower stuck behind his ear—the symbol of Germanic sympathies—the Herr Direktor was down upon him at once like a cartload of bricks, and he was sure of a couple of hours' detention.

If on the occasion of some local junketings a few poor German acrobats from across the border were to make a bid for popular favour, the schoolboys had to use every precaution not to get found out if they hobnobbed with them. If anybody "peached" the delinquents incurred the disgrace of having a mark made against their names for "bad behaviour." The bad behaviour, young Hitler soon realised well enough, was neither here nor there: what mattered was his "Deutschtum." Here, then, and thus early was one point of departure for his universal Kampf.

Adolf's keen study of the Franco-Prussian War and his intelligent interest in history made him even at this age thoroughly conversant with the politics of Middle Europe throughout the preceding century. This fact must be well realised if we are to understand the schoolboy's heat on this question of "Deutschtum," and his ardour about "nationality." Otherwise he comes before us a prig, as a somewhat doctrinaire and precocious youngster. He was not that, in the least, but a boy of flaming enthusiasms and all-devouring intelligence.

It may not be beside the point briefly to refresh the English reader's memory of an involved period of continental politics.

The question of the inclusion of Austria with Germany had been a more or less burning subject of mid-European debate from the time of the German Federation in 1815 (when the Austrian Ambassador occupied the chair of the great Assembly in Frankfurt), right until spring 1938. This loose German Federation of Central European States centred more and more upon Prussia, especially after the Prussian-Austrian War of 1866, ending in victory for Prussia. This and the outcome of the Franco-Prussian War altered the position and the outlook of affairs. In 1879 Austria and Prussia pledged themselves to build up a common future, much after the type foreshadowed by Naumann in his classic work Mitteleuropa, written in 1916.

How strange it is, in the light of to-day, to read such a passage as the following. "For centuries the Empire of the Carolingians . . . has been non-existent. Neither

Imperial Austria nor Royal Prussia, when separated from each other, were quite in a position to carry on the imperial tradition because each only possessed a part of the original power. This will be so until it (the Empire) is born again out of the union of the Habsburgs and the Hohenzollerns "(!)

In 1916 the old Emperor Francis Joseph died, and the succession devolved upon an unfortunate man who himself died miserably in exile only two years later, execrated for his efforts to desert Germany, and to make a separate peace with the Allied Powers on behalf of a demoralised and exhausted Austria. These pitiable royalties, and the musty old concepts they stood for, constituted the political world in which a boy, and then a young man, was growing up who was to sweep them into such limbo of the forgotten as has never yet been known. Nothing at first but a schoolboy at Linz, and then yet but an individual bit of cannon fodder, fighting shoulder to shoulder in the trenches with comrades as indistinguishable as himself, Adolf Hitler was as yet—to come!

No one foresaw Hitler. If anyone had told Francis Joseph in 1916 that the Habsburgs were even then petering out and that it did not matter in the least; if anyone had told the Kaiser William hesitating at Spa in November, 1918, whether or not to flee, that the destinies of the Vaterland were to pass from his incapable hands to those infinitely stronger of one of his soldiers of the line of whom nobody more important than his company officer had as yet ever heard; if anyone a few years ago had told the venerated President of the German Republic that the ex-service man from Munich who had founded such a tiresome and noisy Party was to be the last hope of a country tottering to its final collapse—Emperor, Kaiser, and President alike would have exploded with incredulous and aristocratic scorn.

If anyone, indeed, in 1903 had told the Herr Direktor of the Realschule in Linz that the boy who had just

incurred reproof and punishment for appearing ir school with a cornflower stuck in his hair—that this boy was to rule the German world, leader and saviour he too could not have believed. . . .

But so it was to be. And in consequence of all this historical reading and cogitating came the Austrian "Schulbub" by his concept of the value and dignity of strong national roots and ardent pride. Adolf felt himself German through and through: German to the core. He felt about that cornflower as a British youngster would feel about the Union Jack.

It is a very remarkable thing, in view of the more recent developments in Austria, that the proclamation made at three o'clock on the afternoon of the fateful November 18th, 1918, when the Austro-German National Assembly met in the Herrenhaus on the Franzenring in Vienna, should have confirmed to the letter all this passionate nationalistic feeling on the part of the youthful Hitler. "At this hour," said Dr. Renner (the man who drew up a Constitution for Austria after the collapse of the Habsburgs), "the German race throughout the world shall know that we are a single race with a single destiny." No answer was given in Berlin.

The German Government there was grappling with the hydra of immediate internal problems. Since then the European kaleidoscope has taken on another pattern, but all this brings out for foreigners the force of the impressions and convictions which went to the making of Hitler's mind as a boy and youth, and latterly as a young ex-service man.

In order to obtain a little first-hand information about Hitler's school days, the writer took a trip to Linz, where Hitler attended the Realschule, and had a chat with some of his former school comrades. It was no easy matter hunting these up, for most of them are by now scattered to the four corners of the earth.

^<sup>1 In the "Realschule," chief stress is laid on living languages and sciences.

"I met him," said Herr Joseph Keplinger, now working as an architect in Linz, "in 1901, here in the Realschule. We were thirty-two boys all told, all from the same class of life. There was no private school in Linz at that time.

"Hitler didn't live right in Linz, but just outside, at a place called Leonding. He ate his midday meal somewhere roundabouts, and was generally off home in the afternoon as soon as school was over. That's how it happened we didn't see so very much of him, except during school hours, and playing Indians, when he was always on hand.

"We all liked him, at desk and at play. He was no more hefty than the rest of us, but an enterprising little chap. He had 'guts.' He wasn't a hot-head, but really more amenable than a good many. He exhibited two extremes of character which are not often seen in unison, he was a quiet fanatic. The whole class acknowledged this boy as the leader.

"His favourite lessons were history, geography and German. The history master was often astonished at Hitler's aptitude for this study.—Herr Dr. Huemer was our teacher for German. He always picked on Hitler for Repeater, that is, something would be read aloud to us and then one of the boys had to get up and tell it again in his own words. As a rule Hitler made the Repeat a jolly sight more interesting than the original.

"He was good at gym, too. He topped the gym

"Hitler didn't bother very much about what he'd got to learn, only over what he wanted to learn! When things were taught which did not interest him he read Cooper's Leather Stocking or something of that sort; subjects which he liked, such as history, however, he followed with close attention.

"The accounts of battles we played out for ourselves, in our 'Indians' games, down by the Danube meadows. Hitler loved this sort of thing. He gloried in a scrum,

and always made for the most redoubtable enemy, when the two would have a first-class wrestle. Hitler

"He was very hot, too, like most of us youngsters, about being German. The stricter the measures taken by the Government to suppress this feeling about nationality the more dogged we became. Bismarck was for us a national hero. The Austrian authorities, of course, held his memory in the utmost detestation. The Bismarck song, and lots more German hymns and songs of the same character, were forbidden to be sung. It was a crime even to possess a sketch of Bismarck. Although, privately, our teachers felt well enough that we boys were in the right of it, they had to punish us severely for singing these songs and brandishing our German loyalties.

"Hitler attended our Realschule here for four years, when he suddenly fell ill. Oddly enough I never heard any more of him until I chanced on his name in the paper one day years and years afterwards. It said he

was busying himself with politics in Munich.

"I saw him again in 1926. I went to his lodging there. He was awfully pleased to hear of old Linz again, and told me not to fail to look him up now and again. So, I've done so a few times, and always found him friendly, always the old 'Schul-Kamerad.'"

Herr Keplinger was kind enough to introduce me to another "old boy" of the Linz Realschule, Herr Werner, who had pretty much the same account to give of Adols

Hitler. One particular stands out.

"Once," said Herr Werner, "during his school days, Hitler stayed for a little time with an old lady in Linz. This old lady herself told the tale of how the boy was always buying candles, and she couldn't make out what it was he did always to be needing a light at night. She surprised him on one occasion, and found him doubled up over maps, very busy doing something to them with coloured pencils. She asked: 'Why, Adolf,

what on earth do you suppose you are doing?' and he looked up and smiled and said: 'Studying maps.'"

Herr Werner showed me quite a treasure, a little water-colour he himself had once begun, as a boy at school, and which Hitler had finished for him. The subject was a picturesque little mill among the mountains. It was quite obvious where one artist had left off and the other had taken on. "Hitler was the best boy in the drawing class," said Herr Werner, "he used shades in painting which never occurred to us, and painted things so lifelike we were all astonished."

I went on to Leonding in company with these two friends of Hitler's boyhood. We traversed the same road that he had trudged to and fro for four years, a green "Rucksack" on his back containing his books and pencils. For the most part it was steeply hilly, for Linz lies on the Danube plain. Then we came to fields and meadows set here and there with low but massy towers, relics of a Napoleonic day when watch was kept from these over the river below. The Kürnberg towers aloft on the right, crowned by the famous Kürnburg (Castle) in which the Nibelungenlied is said to have been composed.

We had been walking about an hour when we came upon the outlying houses of Leonding. It is a typical little highland village, only to be found in Bavaria and Upper Austria. In the middle stands the village church, and a few steps further along, just across the street, lies the grass-grown cemetery. Here one discovers the grave of Hitler's parents.

In the immediate neighbourhood stands the peasant house in which the Hitler family lived. It has often changed hands since, hence the present occupant could tell me nothing of the former owners. Here, however, I came across yet a third school companion of young Adolf. Herr Huber had not much to add. "Sometimes we went after apples together," he said, "like the rest of the kids hereabouts," but Hitler never began

munching his before everybody else had got one. Otherwise he tossed his over. Sometimes he'd sit on the churchyard wall, staring up at the stars. No one bothered about the boy staring up into the Austrian night. . . .

But to revert.

The tension at home over the question of Adolf's future was to resolve itself with tragic suddenness. Returning home one afternoon after a visit to a neighbour the father was seized in the street with a heart attack and died in the arms of a passer-by. This was on January 5th, 1903; Adolf was thirteen years old.

The shock had a characteristic reaction on Frau Clara Hitler. She felt herself bound to further her husband's design for the boy, and so he continued going to school for another three years with officialdom as the goal still before his eyes.

Then Adolf fell ill and was confined to bed for some considerable time with lung trouble. After that the doctor persuaded Frau Hitler that a sedentary life in an office was not going to be the best thing for the boy: in fact, he must not even go back to school for a year. The poor mother had another characteristic reaction, and now promised he should be taught drawing and painting instead.

But even now his hopes were to be frustrated. After a protracted illness Frau Hitler herself died on December 21st, 1908; not before the modest savings amassed by the husband had been exhausted. Nothing remained for Adolf but a negligible "orphan-pension," insufficient to keep body and soul together. The home was sold up, and at eighteen Adolf Hitler came face to face with the problem of earning his livelihood.

He does not seem to have been in any two minds about what he meant to do.

He was going to Vienna to study art—to join the picturesque and adventurous ranks of those who have been content in every age and centre to live on a crust in a garret, upborne by flowering genius and the glorious

comradeship of fellow-students, miserable and enthusiastic as himself.

That he turned his steps to Vienna instead of to Munich, the art capital of Germany, can be accounted for in two ways. During the latter half of the nineteenth century there had been a great flowering of painting and architecture in Vienna. All sorts of princely palaces had recently been erected in that city. It abounded in art galleries and in magnificent collections of pictures from the masterpieces of almost every school in the world, to the works of contemporary men. Vienna was a much bigger capital than Munich, and Hitler had gathered every bit of information he could about the great academy schools there on the Schillerplatz, a stone's throw from the wonderful Hofgarten and the Opernring.

CHAPTER II

VIENNA

THE Führer has often been acclaimed as an artist. In him we have that very unusual combination, an artist and a keen man of practical affairs. His passion for music is well known, especially for Wagner. But, indeed, his highest and most persistent aspiration as a young man was for painting. He had, as a matter of fact, the architect's eye. Grandiose building, imposing vistas, grandly planned elevations, the fine light and shade of dome, architrave, column, lintel, inspired him, as landscape or portraiture inspires others.

It does not appear that young Adolf had ever been in Vienna before the fateful day, when with fifteen gulden in a bag slung round his neck, his sketches clipped under his arm, and all his worldly goods in a small case in his hand, he arrived at the Westbahnhof full of the highest boyish hopes and purpose. Undismayed by the magnificence of one of the most beautiful cities of Europe—perhaps intoxicated by it—or by the stir and traffic in the streets, he made a bee line down the Mariahilferstrasse to the Schillerplatz and the heart of imperial Vienna.

His idea was to apply for entrance to the schools of the Academy of Art.

As he entered the beautiful square, dominated by one of those public statues than which nothing more fittingly artistic is to be seen in any other city, and confronted the imposing academy at last, the young man's spirits could not but sink a trifle. Heavens! here were tens—scores—perhaps hundreds of aspirants

like himself swarming up the steps between the two great bronze Centaurs which flanked the entrance to the vestibule. How would his work stand comparison or competition with so many others? . . . Everybody else seemed full of confidence and energy.

Bracing himself for more of an ordeal than he had quite expected, Adolf joined the throng and presently found himself but a unit of the long queue of candidates awaiting admission to the schools. Everything depended on his sketches now! He thought of them with a fresh access of hope and confidence, and clipped the humble portfolio containing them more closely to his side. With the pride of utter inexperience he could not but reassure himself the examiners would be suitably impressed.

The writer of these pages has been very kindly favoured by the present Director of the Viennese Art Academy with the names of the professors who directed its various activities about this time. It might have been Herr Professor Christian Gripenkerl, Franz Rumpler, Julius Schmidt or another who at length ruffled over the young Hitler's sketches with rapid and none too readily arrested hand. The youth himself was not necessarily aware of the gentleman's identity—who cares on these critical occasions for who the examiner may be? All Adolf knew was that the hand summarily clapped his portfolio to, and pushed it back to him.

"No, my boy," came the verdict crisply, "you're not cut out for a painter. You've come to the wrong place here."

Hitler could hardly believe his hears. But this was incredible—!

"Your aptitude," added the professor, softening the blow, "appears to be for architecture. I should advise you to apply to the School of Building. The porter will show you the way."

Speechless, Adolf had no option but to make way

for the next candidate for summary extinction. Not quite extinguished, though; bewildered, incredulous, unbelievably quenched. Was there really no promise in his work? Hadn't it been worth the pains and hopes and all the fond delight he had taken over it? Had there been any pause, the blow might have sent him stunned and irresolute away, but then and there Adolf found himself being ushered elsewhere down a long, imposing corridor lined with Greek statuary, only to be brought forthwith into the presence of another Herr Professor.

Again the portfolio was lugged forth, and Professor Wagner or Professor Oliman (whichever it might have been), claimed possession.

This time there was less haste; less prompt decision. In fact, one or two of Adolf's drawings rather seemed to take the master's fancy.

"H'm, not bad! Not at all bad!"

A scrutiny, a pause—more sketches turned over then came a sharp bespectacled glance into the candidate's anxious and eager face.

"Where have you studied architecture?"

"Nowhere," Adolf was obliged to own, "I've no had any lessons—"

The examiner seemed loath to credit it. Turning over yet more sketches with an approving eye, he insisted:

"You mean to tell me you were never in a School o Building? Not even at a School of Art Industry?"

"No," repeated Adolf, "never."

The professor shrugged his shoulders disappointedly. "That's unfortunate," he said, "I'm afraid there's nothing to be done, then, here. This is no place for beginners. You must try elsewhere—get some groundwork in first."

And again the portfolio, clapped to, came back to him rejected.

Adolf realised, dully, there was nothing for it but to go. Presumably he suffered all the agonies characteristic of the beginner's experience. The way had failed to open. His pictures had proved no Open Sesame to the career for which he had put up so strenuous a fight at home.

At a total and sudden loss, Adolf came out again into the gay Viennese sunshine, into the proud white and green of the squares and boulevards, nothing now but a stranger, and one at a frightfully loose end. . . .

He made his way, somehow, to the humbler parts of the city and found some sort of a cheap lodging. Then in a few days his money was gone and he came face to face with the fact that to eat he must work and earn.

Adolf wandered about Vienna before he found a job, as indeed he was often to wander about it hungry and workless during the next two years, with nothing but the cold comfort of the city's historicity and beauty upon which to stay his hope and courage. His talent, they said, lay in the direction of architecture—here, indeed, was architecture enough to stare at all day long, and wonderful gardens to sit in, and great galleries to visit.

The Führer has written at some length in Mein Kampf upon art.

It is quite obvious that the Führer adheres in his taste to the strictly academic in painting. He has no sympathy whatever for "Bolshevism in art" by which he designates its modern post-War tendencies. This fact may certainly be ascribed to the impressions he received at this period in Vienna from his wanderings at a loose end through the great collections there. In the Historical Museum of Art he could follow all that is finest in painting from the Italian Primitives down to the great Dutch land-scapists of the seventeenth century, and at last to Velasquez.

It would require more space than is at the writer's disposal to offer here any notes on the reaction of

German and Austrian art over the turn of the century to the influence of the various new schools in Paris which were already developed far ahead of those in any other country, and which had already laid the foundations for those wildest departures from the accepted (the academic), which only really soared into complete incomprehensibility after the Great War.

Had Adolf succeeded in passing the august Renaissance portals of the Art Academy in Vienna, it is possible he might have viewed some of the expressions of contemporary art with the insight which only comes of technical artistic training, and of interest in technical artistic problems. For although the first decade of the twentieth century was marked by no particular "ism" in the art life of Vienna, the students there were yet quite free to follow the dictates of their own inspiration, to make their own incursions into the unknown and as yet unattempted.

As it was, Adolf Hitler remained outside, as the Führer may remain a "groundling." The problems of art are not exercising the credulity of the public and the ingenuity of the critics to-day as they exercised both perhaps a decade ago. The Führer in Mein Kampi has delivered himself of an indictment of extravagance, decadence and insanity in painting, not so much as an artist as a moralist. He does not like the type of mentality expressed by that art which has thrown overboard all the aspiration and the technique of the painting he saw as a boy in Vienna. He hopes little from modernism in art as an educative factor in the life of the sound nation. There will be hundreds of people who can endorse his forceful pages on painting, who cannot, perhaps, see eye to eye with him on all other matters.

As we shall have occasion to relate later on, Adolf by no means abandoned his drawing after the rebuff he received on his arrival in Vienna. He persevered with his pencil, confining himself almost exclusively to architectural subjects, and attained sufficient proficiency to fall back upon this sort of work for a living when all else failed. During the War he had done some sketching in the trenches. Some of his things are likely to be seen in the Brown House at Munich to-day.

The late Professor Troost designed the Brown House after a rough design and plan of the Führer. It was to the Studio of this artist that Adolf Hitler always betook himself in later years when affairs of State permitted. Hitler personally drew the plans for the various alterations which became necessary at the Berghof (his country place near Munich) after his assumption of office. He is still keen about architecture and building, notwithstanding the immense press of affairs which otherwise occupy his time and attention. His artistic talent lies chiefly in this direction. Instead of becoming an architect in bricks and mortar, however, he has become the architect of rebuilt Germany.

. . . . .

Wandering about Vienna, wondering what on earth he was to do, penniless and alone, Adolf noticed that everywhere building seemed to be going on. Enormous palaces were in course of construction all over the city. It occurred to him one day in some such busy spot to beard the foreman and ask to be taken on, bricklayer, mortar mixer, hod carrier—anything—for a daily wage. The foreman eyed him over, bethought himself a moment, then with a nod assented.

There could not have been much unemployment in Vienna at that date. Adolf, at any rate, was fixed up for a while. They took him on as a day labourer, liable any time to dismissal, and paid him scarcely enough to keep body and soul together. It was a mere pittance. He found a lodging, but a pretty wretched one, in a dim, damp, sunless hovel, shared with a work-mate at the back of a cellar used as a dwelling-place. The work was hard, and for five solid years Hitler never knew what it was not to go hungry, daily.

The story of these years in Vienna has been more fully and more biographically recounted in the Kampf than anything preceding them. To many students of Hitler's life they are the most significant of all. It was in Vienna, in constant need and poverty, losing a job as soon as finding it, rubbing shoulders with want and vice and misery in every form, having endless political wrangles with fellow-workmen, none too friendly disposed towards one, somewhat hard of persuasion, tramping the streets, observant of all who passed—that Adolf Hitler sensibly or insensibly laid the foundations for all his future thinking, study, and activity.

Still a lad in his teens, he had these hard times to pass in the school of adversity. As a result he laid it down afterwards in one of the stressed passages in his book that the Social Problem must be tackled from below and not from above. That is the dictum of the man who has been through the mill, not of the theoretical economist.

His mind was acutely busy, taking in every problem that presented itself, from the problem of the despairing woman who on pay day fails to wring a coin from the still more despairing and therefore drunken father of her starving children, to the most philosophical problems of impossible political expediencies. The Vienna of that time furnished an extraordinarily strong and analytical young mind with an amazing human phantasmagoria upon which to exercise itself. Hitler confronted, as a boy of sixteen and seventeen, the Gordian knots which as Führer and Chancellor he cuts without further ado. But it was as that boy under twenty that his decisions were reached how these things were each and severally to be dealt with.

He came face to face with Communism, Marxism, Jewdom, with Capital and Labour, with problems of race deterioration, immorality and disease, and instead of accepting the proffered panacea of any already existing theories of betterment, he smashed, as it were, every one of these hard stones to powder in the powerful

machine of his own thought, and began afresh, from the very beginning and with very far-reaching vision, to build up in his own mind the entire State afresh as a State fit for decent human beings to live in.

He tells of a discussion, one day, on a scaffolding high up on one of the palaces of Vienna, between himself and some Communist fellow-workmen. The young Hitler had not yet made up his mind as to his own political creed. The Communists were impatient and offered him the alternative of joining their lot or of being summarily stood off the job. It was in the midday pause: they had been arguing and munching bread on the scaffolding.

When the hour struck for turning to again young Hitler found he wasn't wanted any more. The foreman dismissed him. . . . He could not persuade himself that these Marxist mates of his were in the right of it. Merely, so far, from observation, it seemed to him that the Marxist theory offered a paradise quite impractical in reality; he had no sympathy with its anti-religious side, and no faith in its message to the working man.

So things went from worse to worse. Presently he could no longer afford to share the hovel behind the cellar. He crept at night into some more or less sheltered corner of a courtyard or alley in any one of the narrow streets in the older quarter of the city, if any such spot could be called sheltered in notoriously "windy Vienna." His sleep, there, on the cold hard ground, was broken by the noises of the town and by the sound of distant military music in the cafés and the parks.

By day the gorgeous panorama of the gay and polished life of the great Viennese thoroughfares of pleasure offered itself to his moody contemplation. He contrasted not only his own wretched lot and hopeless outlook with that of the bespangled men and women of the Graben, the Kaerntnerstrasse, the Ring, but the lot of the hundreds, nay, thousands of others in like cases with himself. Instead of driving Hitler into the ranks of the Reds, the spectacle had the opposite effect upon him.

He believed that the hideous contrast he saw between rich and poor in Vienna was due to "Marxismus" a radical (and later on he came to believe it was a purposeful) misdirecting of the proletariat.

From time to time he got a job. But sooner or later the question was sure to crop up whether he would join a Workers' Union. It speaks volumes for the young man's conscientiousness, that in spite of the inevitable consequence of refusal, he was immensely chary of committing himself. He always got involved in the lunch hour in hot political discussion with his mates. He braced himself to refute such postulates as that the "Nation" was nothing but a concept invented for the advantage of the ruling classes, that the "Law" was only a means of oppressing the poor, that the "School" was a system of punishment, and that "Religion," and "Morality" only amounted to an opiate for the common folk.

It was all new and strange to him, since hitherto he had heard nothing of Karl Marx and his theories, or of the system of Trade Unions. These debates helped him to hammer out his own ideas on the hard anvil of theses utterly repugnant to his personal sense and feeling. He began now to distinguish between the different party programmes of the time, but viewed them each and every one with reserve and criticism. For one thing, he distrusted the universal vote of the Social Democrats to better the state of things just as profoundly as he distrusted Communism.

We get the impression of a fearfully serious and responsible-minded young man debating these things as youths of his age in England might debate the chances of the cup-tie. Undernourished and wretchedly clothed, there was nothing he could afford by way of interest in life except these wordy arguments—no fun, no recreation, no friendships,—no girls. As soon as it appeared to him demonstrable that the Trade Unions were nothing but the tools of "Marxismus," he decided absolutely against

them. It was no use bothering him to join any such

"All right, then," his mates would greet him as he turned up at work next day, "you won't join the class-conscious Workers' Front?—you're a traitor. We've only short shrift for the likes of you. You can clear——"

Once an older man, sorry for the youth, mumbled in his ear as he turned to go:

"What's the use? It's no good holding out against 'em. They're in the majority, they are—— You've got your grub to earn."

Out on the streets again. Adolf found a queer shelter in the lamp-room of a sort of labourers' barracks. He could roll up here among a collection of indescribable lumber, and, sleepless in the dirt and fetid air breathed over and over again by a number of wretched companions in the night, cudgel his brains as to the outlook. Not the least of his misery came from neighbouring sounds of children crying and of a wife being beaten by her drunken husband.

Everything around him, especially this screaming and these blows, convinced him that these were the consequences and the victims of a teaching criminally false in essence. In the reek and dirt of that place Hitler's youthful resolution hardened to fight "Marxismus" tooth and nail.

But, meanwhile, for himself something else must be tried. Two years of these experiences had sufficed to make it clear that there was no place for him as an unskilled workman and a political free thinker in the ranks of Viennese labour.

He harked back to his old love—drawing. In spite of the death blow to his artistic ambitions with which he had been greeted on arrival in the capital, Adolf felt that this after all offered the only way out of his difficulties. He scraped together somehow or other the few Groschen necessary to buy the most essential

tools of the poor painter's trade, and hit on a fourthstory attic in a third-class lodging house by way of a studio.

For the next three struggling, saving, starving, working years Adolf Hitler's life took on a strange complexion. His was not the picturesque and harrowing story of the garret artist living on the flame of his own unrecognised genius with which we are so familiar. What sketches he made, he sold, and so managed to live, but neither his talent nor his market led to much. His interest in politics, so rudely awakened, really coloured all this period. Now that he had time to read, he read, he studied! He laid hands on every pamphlet, paper, book or manifesto going which might throw light for him on the theories and principles by which the working lives of his former associates were determined, and to whose ruthlessness his own experience bore witness.

Hitler's serious political study began in this studio of his in a Viennese attic.

And then something else attracted his attention, infinitely far-reaching in its consequences.

Prior to his arrival in Vienna Adolf Hitler had never seen a Jew. In Vienna at that time, however, out of a population of some 1,364,500 inhabitants, 118,000 were Jews. One of their synagogues, a brick building in Moorish style, stood in the Tempelgasse, not far from the great Praterstrasse, and in the same Bezirk or quarter of the city, Leopoldstadt, was to be found the synagogue of the Turkish Jews.

It was the odd appearance of a passer-by in his gaberdine caftan which arrested the country youth's eye. He was standing looking in a bookshop window at the moment. Was this tall black figure with the sharp black eyes and queer locks pendant on either side of the face a Jew? Well, then, what was a Jew? Was a Jew a German?

In Linz there had been but few, and these so indistinguishable from the rest of the townsfolk that Adolf knew no other distinction than that they professed a different religion. That they had often been oppressed and persecuted on account of this was also within his knowledge, and the fact was capable of calling up his sympathies. He thought such a thing as Jew-baiting was barbarous. The sudden encounter with this Rabbi gave a new turn to his all-devouring political curiosity, and he determined, next, to study some of the anti-Iewish literature disseminated by the anti-Semite Party.

All the time it hardly satisfied him. He saw in it mere propaganda. Only later when the "Judenfrage" came to be identified in his mind with the "Marxismus," about which it was already fully made up, did he develop that attitude towards the Jews which it has been so particularly hard for English people to understand.

Those who have had no occasion to study the long-standing question of anti-Semitism in Europe, and to whom the Jewish question as it may present itself in England presents no particularly urgent or dangerous features, must turn to the pages of Mein Kampf to learn the reasons for Hitler's hatred of the machinations of the Jews in Germany. As a youth he had opportunity enough for observations on this head in Vienna.

The first unpleasant discovery he made was that most of the pornography to be observed in the book shops, photo-shops, films, etc. etc. (and Vienna could rival Paris in this respect), in nine cases out of ten issued from Jewish sources. He turned his attention to the Viennese press, and from respect and admiration passed to contempt for the venality and partisanship. He pursued his solitary and brooding studies and enquiries, as the questions arising out of these observations assumed ever more and more importance for his comprehension of the Social-Democratic system which appeared to be responsible for much that struck him as politically iniquitous. He traced everything ultimately to Marxismus, and Marxismus itself to Jewish support and sponsorship.

The National-Socialist case against the Jews has been set forth lucidly enough over and over again. It has received much attention abroad at the hands of friendly or unfriendly exponents of the Third Reich. It would serve little purpose to cover the ground again here especially as we have only to do with those interests of the young Hitler in Vienna, which had so great a share in the formation of his political ideas. It was in these years of bitterness and poverty he came to hate the Jew for his financial stranglehold on all classes of the population, and for the cosmopolitan and materialistic influence he exercised, fatal to the existence of a healthy national growth and sentiment.

Even after the drastic steps recently taken to reduce the number of Jews in Germany and to curtail their disproportionate activity in every sphere of German life a high percentage of the Jewish population of the Reich still remain.

"I am an ex-Service man," a Jew in Munich recentited the writer, "and a strictly orthodox Hebrew. But I have all the rights of a German because I fought in the War. Hitler is against us but he is as just as anybodican be." This ex-soldier is in fact actually living in shouse once occupied by the Führer for eight years. He showed the writer Hitler's room, and spoke of him with extraordinary appreciation. "He did more for his people than any man before him has done," he observed "and made a favourable exception for all of us extended a favourable exception for all of us extended of the present book is for more to offer the present book is for more to offer the present book is for more to offer the present book is for more to offer the present book is for more to offer the present book is for more to offer the present book is for more to offer the present book is for more to offer the present book is for more to offer the present book is for more to offer the present book is for more to offer the present book is for more to offer the present book is for more to offer the present book is for more to offer the present book is for more to offer the present book is for more to offer the present book is for more to offer the present book is for more to offer the present book is for more than the present book is for more than the present book is for more than the present book is for more than the present book is for more than the present book is for more than the present book is for more than the present book is for more than the present book is for more than the present book is for more than the present book is for more than the present book is for more than the present book is for more than the present book is for more than the present book is for more than the present book is for more than the present book is for more than the present book is for more than the present book is for more than the present book is for more than the present book is for more than the present than the present the present than the present the

human picture of the Führer, than to make any furthe contributions (from the Nazi standpoint or any other on matters which are looked upon outside the Reicle as highly contentious. But should the reader, especially the English reader, desire to arrive at some real under standing of the grounds upon which Adolf Hitler as young open-minded man, new to the "Judenfrage" is all its aspects, conceived so deep a hatred of the Jewis.

race, he cannot do better than spend the inside of five minutes over a statement of the case against the Jews in Austria and in Vienna which precedes Nazi sources altogether.

It was written, in fact, just about the very time Hitler first turned his attention to the question. In The Modern Jew, by Arnold White (Heinemann, 1899), two works are quoted which put the matter in a nutshell, and put it beyond dispute, the Antisemiten Katechismus of Theodor Fritsch, and Die Judenfrage in Oesterreich, by Cremieux.

It was not Hitler who discovered that "the Jews ... form in reality a political and commercial company ... which aims at the subjugation and exploitation of non-Jewish peoples. ... By the practice of usury they have completely ruined many ... and by dishonourable means and secret co-operation have so undermined established trades and industries, and have got so many branches of business into their own hands that honest non-Jewish tradesmen can scarcely remain in them any longer."

Hitler discovered, and with truth, "that they have obtained possession of the public press and use it for their own purposes." Even his observations about pornography and prostitution were not wrongfully ascribed. The contemporary indictment continues: "One would scarcely assert too much if one said that the majority of unfortunate girls who form the prostitutes of the larger towns have fallen through Jewish depravity: also that the notorious 'girl-commerce' will soon be carried on exclusively by the Jews."

"The trouble," commented the English author, grows as the years roll by, and the time is not far listant when Jewish ascendency in Austria will bring new forces of resistance into being."

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

On the western side of the Ring in Vienna, facing the Volksgarten, itself part of the gardens of the Imperial

Palace, stand the Houses of Parliament. The curving sweep of a broad approach leads to a fine Greek portico with fluted columns and majestic tympanum above. The Chamber of Deputies on the left and the Uppe House on the right form two independent building adorned with marble statuary and bas-reliefs and great bronze quadrigæ.

Adolf Hitler, out of a job, came here, pencil in hand to distract his thoughts with the problem of these classic and dignified perspectives. It was a great change of subject from the wonderful Gothic of St. Stephen's of the cheerful baroque of the Pigtail¹ Period represented in the old Rathhaus in the Wipplingerstrasse. But at the young man's preoccupation with political idea came to account for more and more of his time, he found himself rather concerned with what might be going on within the Parliament House than with it exterior attractions.

One day, in fact, he essayed to enter the peristyle A functionary enquired his business.

"I would like to hear a debate," replied Hitler that's all."

"You can't go in without a ticket," the man replied indicating a notice to this effect, "you must obtain on the day before."

So that was that! Hitler departed, bought his ticket and turned up promptly on the morrow, full of interest respect and anticipation. This was a tremendou occasion for him, actually to be going to witness some thing of history in the making.

"You'll find a seat in the Second Gallery," he wat told, and up he found his way. Along a corridor with endless doors, on the one side he went. Opening on of these with noiseless care, he peeped within. Yes this seemed to be it, all right—this was the Second Gallery. Hitler went down a steep little gangway and

^<sup>1 Zopfzeit, Anglicé Georgian.

insinuated himself into the first vacant seat which offered itself without inconvenience to anybody. . . .

But, after all, was this the right place? Things seemed rather odd. Down there in the Chamber people were jostling each other in the most unruly sort of groups, shouting, laughing, joking, gesticulating like an excited mob on 'Change. All was inattention and confusion. It took the astonished young man quite a few moments before he was able to distinguish that somebody actually seemed to be addressing the House! A Member occupied the Rostrum and was short-sightedly reading from a paper held close to his face, while his right arm made sundry gestures by way of emphasis and accompaniment. Only by this token, however, could it possibly be supposed that he was speaking! No one took the remotest notice.

The universal uproar around suggested nothing so much as an annual fair. Then suddenly the Member finished: stuck his speech in a case, and came down the few steps which led from the Präsidium to the floor. A few of his partisans, apparently, chancing to notice the fact, applauded perfunctorily. Whereupon an extraordinary individual, half-hidden behind stacks of books and papers, rose up behind the Rostrum and rang a delirious little bell for silence.

For the space of a moment the universal cachinnation died down; a few heads were turned in the direction whence the new noise came. A second Member sprang up the steps, two at a time, and burst into a flood of extempore speech. Hitler could not understand a word of it. Then it suddenly occurred to him—this wasn't German. This was some Slavonic tongue! "What the deuce is it all about?" he wondered, "and however many of them follow him?"

Hitler had scarcely been sitting in the Second Gallery an hour before he discovered that here in the Austrian Parliament were represented four or five nationalities, no Member of which understood a word of what the others in turn might chance to orate about. Now it was a Czech speaking, now a Ruthenian, now a Serb, now a Croatian, and none but the Czechs, Ruthenians, Serb or Croatians in the House understood each orator in turn

The speeches were punctuated by wild outcries of approval or disapproval as the case might be from the parties concerned. Not infrequently a hand-to-hand fight seemed imminent, when the piercing clamour of the little bell did what it could to call the House to order Whereupon the speaker would resume, and again work himself up to oratorical frenzy, when the chance passing of a German Member across the floor would provide an opportune diversion.