Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Reed Douglas
Title : The Prisoner Of Ottawa : Otto Strasser
Year : 1953

Link download : Reed_Douglas_-_The_Prisoner_Of_Ottawa.zip
Archive password : www.balderexlibris.com

EXORDIUM. Early in 1940 I sat at a Devonshire window that overlooked the English Channel and wrote a book about a German, Otto Strasser. I had for many years written against time, so that the waiting presses might have their daily record of violent historic events that consummated themselves around me, and once more I felt in me the familiar urgent need to complete my story (this time a book) before an invasion prevented me (I had finished two others, Insanity Fair in 1938 and Disgrace Abounding in 1939, just ahead of such armed incursions). Thus I scanned sea and sky, between writing lines and chapters, for the oncoming shapes of German ships or aircraft. However, I hoped that Germany would lose and my native island survive the Second War and was immensely curious about the shape which the later future would take in that happy event; chiefly for my own sake, no doubt, for the years after the war, if I survived it, would probably include the second half of my own lifetime. I looked ahead, and wondered whether the Second War would restore peace and equilibrium to the world in the second half-century, or whether the Gadarene process of 1914- 39, which in my adult years I had watched and described, would be resumed after it. That, my experience told me, would depend mainly on the treatment of Germany after Germany's military defeat. With such thoughts in mind I wrote my book about Otto Strasser at a time when few, if any friendly books were being written about a German, Germans or Germany. I believed that the only wise course for the military victors would be to restore Germany to the care of men who had proved themselves to be the unpurchasable and incorruptible enemies of the Revolution of Destruction in either of its guises, National Socialist or Communist. Otto Strasser was the sole apparent candidate of importance who fulfilled such conditions. He had fought Hitlerism and Communism impartially (he knew them to be the same) in Germany and from exile for ten years, from 1930 to 1940. On that verifiable record he was a man in whom a truly peace-seeking outer world might put confidence. In him, I judged, men of goodwill everywhere might at last find what they so long had sought: a German ally who would recreate, rebuild, restore, pacify; anyway, no other offered with equal claim to a chance of self-justification. Moreover, he had a great following in Germany and had retained this despite difficulties hardly to be imagined, even when they are described, by people far from the central turmoil. I thought the story of such a man might be of use and showed him as a candidate in the wings, who might well appear centrally on the German stage when events gave the cue. This was logically to be expected, too. After the First War the victors (at least until Hitler appeared) had upheld their allies, succoured their friends, honoured their bonds, and protected helpless civilian populations thrown on their mercy. In 1940 a man could still hope that that course of honour and prudence would be followed again, and this time be pursued to the end. For two years after I wrote that book, until 1942, the shape of the war and of Otto Strasser's political fortunes conformed to that earlier pattern. After many years of perilous adventure he was in an extremity of danger helped to escape his Nazi pursuers and to reach Canada; his very life, probably, was then saved by British and Portuguese help. He was everywhere accorded the respect and sympathy due to his ordeals and to his achievements as the only leading German politician who had long and actively fought Hitler. High responsibility in Germany clearly beckoned to him, once the fog of war had cleared. Thereafter he would justify himself or fail, on his own merit or demerit and the reaction thereto of the German people. An abrupt reversal in the behaviour of his hosts towards Otto Strasser came after Hitler and Stalin fell out in 1941; his prospects, and in my opinion the hopes of the entire West, then suddenly darkened. The great picture of the war from that instant began subtly and ominously to change; it was as if a new painter superimposed the evil outlines of Calvary on a canvas of the Resurrection. Where the scene had been that of the redemption of Europe it was transformed into one of the crucifixion of Europe between two thieves, the fighting-men of the Christian West being cast merely for the part of Roman soldiers. In the sequence things happened such as never stained the story of 'Western civilization' since it began, and in outline they may be recapitulated here because they form that whole, of which Otto Strasser's story is but a part: Fifteen thousand Polish officers were massacred, but in this case no 'war crime' was adjudged by British and American justice at Nuremberg. Ten thousand Frenchmen were shot with British or American weapons donated to French Communists; only seven years after the war's end was their number even established, and then casually included among the lesser 'news items', and no 'war crime' was ever seen in this holocaust. A dozen European countries, and then half of Europe, were thrown to Asiatic wolves, and at the end soldiers from remote Mongolian or Tartar lands were halted outside German villages only while they listened to the broadcasts of a harangue recorded in Moscow; in it an alien writer incited them particularly to fall on pregnant women. These things were made possible by the unconditional surrender of money, arms and political support to the Communist rulers by Britain and America. The political leaders there lent themselves to such deeds, as they later affirmed, from fear of losing the war, which they thus could only lose, politically. They submitted equally to the infestation of their own administrations by the agents of the Revolution of Destruction. In the American President's entourage such agents, later exposed, drafted the plans for destroying Europe, and with almost lifeless fingers he signed. Corrupted men appeared even in (and later disappeared from) the British diplomatic service, and in the most secret laboratories of all Western countries other emissaries garnered information to help the future misdeeds of their distant masters. Where Germany and Europe might have been redeemed, a bisected Germany and a chaotic Europe were left. History never saw such a shambles made of an honourable victory. The pieces were rearranged on the chessboard in the order which had enabled the Second War to begin; the world was left in a state of permanent warfare, the climax of which, a Third War, was made as inevitable as any human event can be. Germany was abandoned to the constant temptation (to which Hitler had betrayed it in 1939) to seek revenge and recover lost ground through the help of its natural foe, barbaric Asia; the Communist Empire was given the means to use German hopes and fears at every stage in its design to destroy all Europe. Equally it became probable that the course of a climactic Third War, if one were professedly begun to amend this situation, would similarly be diverted to further the aims of the Revolution of Destruction. Until Hitler and Stalin came to blows, and this master-plan for the Second War slipped smoothly into gear, Otto Strasser was on all hands given the status due to him as a distinguished German exile and proven foe of Hitler and Hitlerism. He was by deed and avowal as constant an enemy of Communism. When the Communist Empire, being attacked by Hitler, was elected part of 'the free world' by the wartime propagandists of the West, the bait of puppet-employment in Sovietized Europe was dangled before Otto Strasser by an emissary of Moscow. He refused it; thereon his second persecution began, which continues to this day. It was persecution, this time, by the governments of the West, which connived in it until the end of the war and for more years thereafter than the war lasted! He was in their territory, and they lent their aid as, step by step, from 1942 onwards, his political extermination was attempted. First, he was forbidden to speak publicly, communicate, write or publish, and by such bans, which deprived him of his livelihood, was driven to ever remoter and humbler dwelling places and to that brink of destitution and starvation where a man can only save himself by natural ingenuity. When the fighting ended, in 1945, these bans were nominally raised, but in their place another, openly unscrupulous one was imposed which has made him, for the last eight years, the Man in the Iron Mask of mid-century politics. He was in effect forbidden to return to Germany! Hitler first drove him from it and deprived him of its nationality. The Western Governments, acting in concert at some unacknowledged behest, availed themselves of that useful law of 'the wicked man' to keep his foremost enemy expatriated! The reason (only admitted many years later) was that in spite of all persecution Otto Strasser's following in Germany, notwithstanding his long absence and the bans, remained large and cohesive; and that someone desired his continued exile. Had he returned to Germany he would have assumed there the political place, whatever it might prove to be, to which his native talents and record entitled him; he would at length have been able to demonstrate his true level, high or low, in his own country. Evidently it was thought, in the curtained quarters whence the enmity to him derived, that his place there would prove to be a very high one, for the natural process was dammed. The American, British, Canadian, French and West German Governments have performed this service, from 1945 to the present day, for those who do not desire his return or the public test of his quality. The might of the effort which has been put forth, through the compliant Western Governments, to keep this solitary man out of his own country is at least proof, convincing enough to surprise even me, of the accuracy of my estimate of his standing in Germany, as I stated it in my book of thirteen years ago. The campaign against him began on the day, at the turn of the years 1941-42, when he refused the invitation from Moscow to assume the leadership of a 'Free German Movement' under Communist auspices. That fact throws up the obvious question: why do the Western Governments continue to lend themselves to such courses? This question, again, leads into the whole dark complex of events from 1941 to the present day, which also need brief elucidation here for the reader's better understanding of the motives behind the persecution of Otto Strasser: From the moment when the Communist Empire was by Hitler's act, and not by any better impulse of its own, transformed from his ally into his enemy, Moscow pursued one war aim which was from the start crystal clear (in contrast to such rhetorical professions as those of the Atlantic Charter, which were at once belied by private communications behind the political scenes, and by the ultimate deeds in Europe and Palestine). This aim was perceptibly more important to Moscow than the destruction of Hitler or of Hitlerism itself; indeed, the substance of Hitlerism, being identical with that of Communism, was not meant to be destroyed. This, plainly dominant Soviet aim was: to prevent the rise to power after the war, if possible in any country, of patriotic leaders who had gained large national followings through their distinction in the fight against Hitler. Lenin's dictum that all wars must be turned into civil wars was strictly followed; Moscow always fought the men who might succeed Hitler in Germany, or his Statthalter in the occupied countries, more vindictively than it fought Hitler himself. This was patently the motive for the massacre of the Polish officers, for the betrayal of the Polish Resistance Army at Warsaw, and for the vendettas pursued in all countries against patriotic leaders, such as General Mihailovitch, General de Gaulle, the King of Greece, General Bor, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and all the others. The aim was the obvious and logical one of destroying legitimate claimants to the succession, and of thus leaving in the various countries a chaotic vacuum in which Communism could seize power. The great question, never answered, remains: why did the Governments of London and Washington lend themselves to the promotion of this aim during the war, and after it until the present time? Otto Strasser was a man of this, to Moscow dangerous type, a proven patriot, a Christian one to boot, a leader with a following, and an undeniable claimant, in the legitimate line, to some eminent responsibility in Germany, once Hitler was gone. His return to Germany would have been a serious setback for Communism. The political leaders of the West prevented it. By that time they were publicly parading in the sackcloth of repentance for their misplaced confidence in 'Uncle Joe', but their deeds, as distinct from their words, showed no genuine reform. Some occult influence continued to mould policy in the West in the shape desired by the tsars of anarchy in Asia, or at least to impede its correction. Long after the fighting in Europe ended the course of events, so puzzling to the masses, first in China and then in Korea pointed to this. The publicly unknown case of Otto Strasser clearly proved it. His treatment was in the straight, or crooked line of those strange and secret wartime arrangements made at Moscow, Teheran and Yalta, in respect of which the Western leaders concerned, by the nineteen-fifties, were crying, 'We have erred! We have most grievously erred!' For eleven years now Otto Strasser, a man without a stain on any political records save those kept by the Nazis, the Communists and their heirs, the World-Staters, has been in effect kept captive in Canada. Thus his story today has been transformed into something different from the one which I wrote thirteen years ago, and into something then unimaginable. In the tale of human sorrow which has filled the last decade his personal tribulations are but a grain of sand and I do not tell this altered story chiefly on that account, although it is a cause célèbre in the annals of human injustice. I tell it because my experience informs me, in 1953 as in 1940 and 1938, that all our tomorrows depend on Germany. Today they depend on the amending, in some form, of the almost incorrigible deed of 1945, in the consequences of which we all might yet be engulfed. If it is to be undone, the undoing will need the help of a man or of men in Germany of the type of Otto Strasser. It cannot be undone with the help of puppet politicians and puppet governments, and even less, unless the central issue be faced, by means of bogus and enforced amalgamations of rump Germany with other remaining European States. Therefore I think that once more a true record of this man may be useful to a wide range of readers, who will not be allowed to read one unless I write it, and whose own future is involved in the destiny of such as he and of Germany. Apart from all that, it is a most fantastical tale in its own right, even without the moral that I draw from it. We of the twentieth century lead interesting lives, worth any tale-teller's time and pains. Those who follow us might even envy us the excitements and hazards which we have known, for they may be spared the bitter taste of dishonour and betrayal which spoils them for us of today. Otto Strasser's life thus far is exceptional even in this age in its range of adventures and perils survived, in its extremes of perseverance and adversity, in its colours of courage and good humour. It is the story of a German, of Germany, of Europe, and ultimately of the entire West, either on the edge of oblivion or on the threshold of revival; that is to say, it is the story of us all, in the Western world, as we stand at this mid-century. DOUGLAS REED Ottawa 1952-53. ...

Author : Reed Douglas
Title : The Battle For Rhodesia
Year : 1967

Link download : Reed_Douglas_-_The_Battle_For_Rhodesia.zip
Archive password : www.balderexlibris.com

Chapter One. INSANITY FAIR, 1966. Respected reader, To those of you who know my books (a diminishing band: but aren't we all?) and to those who know them not, let me recall that in 1936, sitting at a window in Vienna, I wrote a book, Insanity Fair, about the coming Second World War. In 1966, sitting at a window in Salisbury, Rhodesia, I find myself writing this book about the coming of a Third World War. This is where we all came in. The scene has shifted from Europe to Africa, but the new post-war years have seen the same ladderlike process calculably leading to war. In these latter years I did many things, and writing was of the things undone, for my writ, I felt, ran out. There was only the oft-told tale to re-tell and its constant iteration came too near the praising of myself, for every fool can play upon words. If "warnings" were needed, let others warn, and probably in vain, for by a divine instinct men's minds mistrust ensuing danger. So I sought other paths and spent many years in South Africa. Man proposes: looking for pastures new, I found myself in the centre of another world conflict in the brewing. Africa was this time the scene of the preparatory steps, and Southern Africa the last rung of the war-ladder. The British Government's onslaught on Rhodesia, in 1965, returned the world to its plight of 1937, when war was two moves away and could yet have been averted by obvious countermoves. Let me briefly recall those days to you, senior and junior classmates. From 1933 Hitler's patent intention to make war was fore-told by all competent observers in Berlin. Even the date (about five years ahead) was accurately estimated, in its despatches to London, by the Berlin office of The Times (where I was a correspondent). The London government, however, to the end encouraged Hitler on his warpath by the method called "appeasement" (throwing children to pursuing wolves until only the parents remain, in the fleeing sleigh, for the wolves to devour). German rearmament was let pass, then the seizure of the Rhineland, then the recreation of the German air force (in 1935 Hitler personally told the British Foreign Minister of its massive strength, as I then reported). That left two pieces on the board, and they provided the final test. If Hitler kept within his frontiers, "appeasement" would be vindicated. If he forayed out of them, it would collapse and war follow. Seeking to reach the public mind, I wrote in Insanity Fair "Austria means you" and "Czechoslovakia means you". Austria was invaded as the book appeared. One last move remained. If he were allowed to invade Czechoslovakia, world war was certain. I repeated this in a second book, Disgrace Abounding, and also opined that the Second War would begin with a Hitler-Stalin alliance. Six months after the Austrian invasion, the British Prime Minister, from a meeting with Hitler, sent a timed ultimatum to the Czechoslovak President to surrender his defensive zone. M. Benesh, saying "We bequeath our sorrows to the West", capitulated. Mr. Chamberlain, back in Downing Street, announced "Peace in our time". Hitler took the Czechoslovak defences, disclaimed any further "territorial demands", and six months later invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia. Six months after that, punctually to the foreseeable moment, the Second War began. As the German tanks entered Prague, I left (as I left Vienna a year earlier, after telephonic warning from my London office that the Gestapo disliked me, which I knew). Soon I quitted journalism, too, for Insanity Fair was not popular with the highpriests of appeasement, a sacred word at that time. My editor, a Mr. Dawson, was a foremost advocate of it and told me "Insanity Fair is an excellent book, but not one for The Times" (I had submitted it before publication as in duty bound) so I resigned. (The Times, in its later 0fficial History, confessed error about its policy of 1933-1939 and in the same breath unrepentantly sneered at "junior members of the staff" who resigned in protest. The History also admits that The Times had "abandoned the practice of basing a foreign policy of the paper's own upon the dispatches, published and private, of 'our own' Correspondents abroad". Had The Times, then a powerful force in the world, maintained that policy it could, in my judgment, have averted the Second War. Today, 1966, it still does not base policy on the information of trustworthy correspondents abroad: if it did, it could not support the policy pursued by British Governments in Africa since 1945, of destroying order in Africa and thus preparing new war. (Incidentally, the term "junior members", quoted above, should be read in the singular: in fact the resigner was a singular person called Douglas Reed). Insanity Fair, in 1938, gave a true picture of the wrath to come at a time when it could have been averted. It was simply prognostic and not "prophetic". These are my credentials, good reader, for returning, in 1966, to write one more book. I have briefly retold the events of 1933-1939 in Europe to draw the comparison between them and those of 1960-1966 in Africa, and to say: "Rhodesia means you". Ten years ago a major war beginning in Africa was inconceivable. While wars, "hot" and "cold", went on elsewhere, Africa was a continent of order. It was steadily moving to an improving future for all its peoples under the colonial powers, as they pursued the established policy of gradually uplifting the tribespeople towards an increasing part in the management of affairs. With folk separated by millennia from every "Western" concept, gradualism was the only method. Violent interruption of this process meant (as is now being seen) reversion to a chaotic tribalism of slavery, warfare and disease, the things of which Africa was slowly being purged. Only one power in the world admittedly desired this. Lenin, in 1920, decreed that the expulsion of the colonial powers from their territories was vital to the achievement of world communism. In the years 1960-1966 Western "liberalism" openly supported this Leninist aim. This partnership, indeed, between the governments of the "free world" and communism, their professed enemy, is the basic fact of the years 1960-1966 in Africa. Only when that is understood does the picture of what has happened become plain, as a photograph emerges from a film in developing liquid. The "wind of change" speech began it all. I see Mr. Macmillan now, mellifluously addressing the Cape Town Parliament. Icy rejection underlay the courtesy of the Afrikaner Members who listened, and their unspoken comment was, "Here we have it again: perfidy". I recall my own feeling that day: "This is Mr. Chamberlain again". I thought of the days, thirty years before, when British policy towards Hitler was formed by knickerbockered figures at country-house parties, during weekends on grouse moors or beside trout streams, in too-substantial midday meals at the Carlton and Athenaeum Clubs, far from the madding truth of events in Europe. Had, any been there to watch, t'would have been pitiful to see me wring my hands and murmur, Oh dearie, dearie me, here we go again. The "wind of change" speech began the era of Doubletalk, the use of words to disguise, not express intention. These particular words suggested a natural process, uncontrollable by man: the wind bloweth where it listeth. They meant a political decision to abandon Africa to turbulence and war. ...

Author : Reed Douglas
Title : Nemesis ? The Story of Otto Strasser
Year : 1940

Link download : Reed_Douglas_-_Nemesis_The_Story_of_Otto_Strasser.zip
Archive password : www.balderexlibris.com

Preface. This book is about a German, Otto Strasser; having elbowed myself to the front of the stage in two books, I take the part, in this one, of compère - the man who opens the show, is often seen lurking in the wings while it progresses, and from time to time, between the scenes, comes to the front of the stage to remind you that he is there, that he holds the show together, and that it would not be complete without him. Now that war has come, and the great question which engrossed our thoughts for many years has been answered, new thoughts crowd to the foreground of our minds, and foremost among them, the question, 'What Germany will come of this war?' In the search for the answer to it, Otto Strasser, of whom few people in Britain had heard till war came, becomes a figure of importance. He may play a great part in answering this question. I say may, because war is less predictable than peace; it is the high-tension cable broken loose, thrashing about in all directions, you never know where, how, or whom it will strike; the switchboard is no longer in control. Many writers have shown that the events leading to this war, and the war itself, could be exactly foretold: it was their trade, and they were as well able to do this as a doctor is able, from specific symptoms, to foretell the course of some diseases; and Lord Halifax, though he expressed in this phrase the average state of mind of many Britishers, only clothed a fallacy in words that sounded convincing when he once said 'We distrust people who forecast precisely the course of coming events'. This is a useful phrase to justify procrastination and non-exertion, nothing more. Politics, in peacetime, are an exact science - to those who know politicians. War, 'the pursuit of politics with other means', draws a smoke-screen across the future. But this much I would wager now, at the dawn of 1940: that Germany will not emerge from this war a State ruled in absolute authority by Adolf Hitler and victorious over all enemies. Coming months or the next year or two will bring changes in Germany, and new men will begin to take a hand in the leadership of the Reich. That will not be the end of our troubles - perhaps only their beginning. Otto Strasser has many qualifications and some chances, if he seizes them. Not many years ago Hitler, enthroned to-day on the lonely peaks of power, was obscure; Otto Strasser to-day is a littleknown exile, but before long he may tread the upward path. After reaching manhood - which for my non-stop generation meant the first outbreak of the present war, in 1914 - I lived longer, at one stretch, in Germany than in any other country, including my own. The study of that strange Jekyll-and-Hyde country, the bane of our times, engrosses me. Some months before the present instalment of the war broke out, feeling that it was certainly coming, I began to think about and read about Otto Strasser, for I believed that when it came that lost legion of the Germans, the exiles, would immediately begin to grow in importance, and among the most important of them was this Otto Strasser. At that time my mind was already browsing on conjecture about the Germany that would succeed Hitler's Germany; but at that time the British public mind did not look so far forward, or this book might have appeared earlier. When the second outbreak of this war came, his name was, in fact, at once heard, stimulating my interest even more, and an idea became an intention. In evening strolls through subdued, but not blacked-out Paris streets, where shuttered shops showed the way that war, for the third time almost within living memory, had drained the city of its manhood; in quiet meals in Paris restaurants, among elderly gentlemen who wore fine natural tonsures and were accompanied by fur-coated blondes; in long afternoons and evenings of unremitting work in hotel bedrooms I studied and questioned and debated with Otto Strasser, learned of his struggles in the past and his plans for the future. The result engrossed me and left me with an ungovernable itch to write. Not entirely on account of Otto Strasser's political beliefs and plans; not entirely, even, on account of his personality, though I was happy and stimulated in his company, and got along very well with him, as I often do with individual Germans; but on account of the content of his life, which aroused in me all the instincts of the teller-of-tales and made me impatient for my typewriter. I lived again, in those Parisian hours, the life of a man of The Other Side; a life far more adventurous than my own, which has not been dull; the life of another man of our raging contemporary times, buffeted by all the winds that blow. A life, to me, far more absorbing than Hitler's life. With and through him, I felt again the pulse of that seething, turbulent Germany that gives us all no rest, of that repellent and fascinating land where I spent many years. The tale is told in this book. Otto Strasser's adventures and his political thought interest me alike. It is for me a new undertaking to write another man's life and explain another man's mind, for I have so much to say myself. I shall probably have to restrain myself by force from rushing on to the stage from time to time and elbowing the chief player aside. Somebody wrote of an earlier book of mine that my great fault in it was to shake the fist of my personality in the reader's face, and that probably was its chief merit. Nevertheless, short of an apoplexy, I shall achieve some measure of self-effacement this time. The tale I have to tell is an important one. Hitler has nearly played his part. He long has curdled our blood. He has been like a Silly Symphony Napoleon with a live bomb in his pocket; it was as if the grotesque child of some comic artist's pen had suddenly stepped out of the screen and advanced upon a spellbound audience, firing real bullets from his gun. A few more melodramatic postures and gestures and harangues, and he will be gone. From the wings already peep the candidates for the succession, chief among them two men: Göring, fat, Falstaffian, Neronic, ruthless, cunning, world-famous; and Otto Strasser, poor, unknown, outlawed, undaunted. They both mean you, just as Austria and Czechoslovakia and Poland meant you. I wrote that in Insanity Fair and Disgrace Abounding, and it has come true. This is just as true. Your courage, your resolution, your this-and-that, will not help you if your rulers lose the peace. If they do that, your last state will be worse than your first, the going of the man Hitler will not profit you, your sufferings and your sacrifices and courage in this new war will be in vain, even your victory in it will be in vain, the next twenty years will be even worse than the last. The peace-tocome is even more important than the war, and in your own lives you now have seen what it means to lose a peace, or rather, wantonly to throw away a victory, just from dislike of exertion and of a stitch-in-time, from putting your trust in a burglar out of fear of a bogyman. This is the importance of the tale that is told in this book. ...

Author : Reed Douglas
Title : Insanity Fair
Year : 1938

Link download : Reed_Douglas_-_Insanity_Fair.zip
Archive password : www.balderexlibris.com

Chapter One. JOURNEY'S BEGINNING. My first glimpse of Insanity Fair was of uniforms and warlike preparations, a fitting introduction for a male of my generation. The jingle-jangle, clip-clop of horse artillery riding out of St. John's Wood barracks are the first sounds I remember hearing. I was being held up at an opposite window to watch the troops leave for South Africa; I think the arms that held me were those of a nurse, so that I must have been in better circumstances then than later. Nineteen years afterwards I leaned against the wall of a Flanders farmhouse, in a drizzling dusk, and watched horse artillerymen with streaming rubber cloaks drive their guns by. The war had finished that morning. The jingle-jangle, clip-clop took me back to the window in St. John's Wood. The years between those two wars look to me, in retrospect, like a street in Westbourne Grove or some other Victorian suburb. One day like another, one house like another, a grey vista of ugliness and repression. Many Londoners who were born around 1900 must have similar memories. The Berliner has the woods and lakes waiting for him half an hour away. The Viennese carries with him through life the picture of his native hills golden in the sun or white with snow, of becandled Christmas trees in the windows, of priestly processions chanting their way to the Stefansdom with banners of red and gold. The Budapester has his Danube and does not need to be rich to know music, wine and song. London was too big, you could not escape it. I bicycled furiously, at the week's end, in search of a green and pleasant land. Marble Arch, Maida Vale, Kilburn, Brondesbury, Cricklewood, Hendon, Edgware, Stanmore and other bosky names fell behind me, but when the time came to turn back the promised land still lay over the next horizon. I had found only a belt of pseudo-countryside, flowerless, dusty, with stunted trees. Wherever a green meadow or a shady wood offered a notice forbade me to approach it. Of country pursuits little was to be seen. The countryfolk devoted their energies to stifling the teadrinking mania of my compatriots. Every hut and hamlet bore the sign 'Teas'. Once I rode in search of the Thames, the chief river of my native land. After some hours I discovered it at Staines and spent a week's salary on the hire of a punt. This I propelled, until I tired, between a double row of notices offering me tea, forbidding me to land, and threatening me with prosecution. I came back believing that I had had a good day. The lot of a Londoner did not then seem to me insufferable. I knew nothing else. Long afterwards, when I saw other cities and countries, my gorge began to rise. Am I right now or was I right then? Anyway, when people speak longingly of their childhood and youth I feel superior to them, because my own were so dull that the present is infinitely preferable. I feel that I am living on an ascending, they on a descending scale of happiness. Those grey London years, before I sailed down Southampton Water bound for France, are like the wasteful blank pages that inexplicably begin most books. For I am a Londoner. My father came from the West Country and my mother from Ireland, but I was born in St. John's Wood and spent nearly all my days before the war between Shoot Up Hill, a pleasant name, strangely bestowed before the Petrol Age, and St. Paul's. Only once, when I was very young, did we go to live at Southend, where the sea at stated times retires out of sight. On these vast mud flats I wandered, and saw with quaking heart a drowned man fished out of the sea. Here my infant sister fell face downward while paddling in the fringes of the sea, during one of its rare visitations, and my mother with piercing cries rushed in her heavy flounced skirts and petticoats to rescue her, and, scarlet-faced and shamed by so much commotion, I drove home with them in a brougham. Here my father told me how he had kicked his top hat all the way down Queen Victoria Street on Mafeking Day and on Mafeking Night had transplanted a 'To Let' board from the garden of an empty house to the forecourt of the little church which we attended on Sundays. I was certainly in better circumstances then, for I went to a school which now claims to rank among the public schools of England, and in England public schools draw their scholars from a narrow moneyed class. The head master habitually dressed like a Scottish dominie caricatured by Punch. With long hair and beard, a tam o'shanter, and a cloak streaming behind him, he stalked about the windy streets, a picture of stern and wild Scottish righteousness, and deeply impressed the matrons of Southend. One morning he assembled the whole school in the main hall for an unknown purpose and, gaunt and terrifying, to my uneasy surprise called for 'Douglas Reed' to step forward. I was about nine years old. I stepped out and stood, the focus point of invisible dotted lines running from the curious eyes of a hundred schoolfellows. In a breathless silence the dominie spoke. I had in my possession a toy cannon; where had I got it? I had indeed a small toy cannon, worked by a spring, which I had found during playtime the day before behind a tree in the playground and had shown with much glee to other boys. I told him this. 'You lie,' said he. 'No, it's true,' I answered. 'You lie.' 'No, it's true.' 'You lie,' thundered the dominie, 'you took it from another boy's desk.' A figure of righteous wrath, he pointed a long bony finger at me, and shouted, 'Tell the truth, tell the truth!' The deity that punishes bad boys seemed to have taken earthly shape. I had an awful feeling of guilt. So holy a man could not be wrong. He roared louder, 'Did you take it from another boy's desk? Say yes!' 'Yes,' I said. I was thrashed before the school. I dared not tell my parents; they would never believe me, I thought. Some distrust of myself, which I only conquered many years later, dated from this time. We came to London. I went to another school, in Kilburn. This school was public, but not a public school. All might attend it. It was free, though for the benefit of those who strove after superiority it had a separate department where the scholars paid two shillings a week, and to this I belonged. Although we had a common playground and fell over each other's legs a great social gulf was fixed between the two-shilling boys and the free boys and we never mixed. The head master was an estimable man who habitually stood at the door through which we filed after playtime and at random picked a boy here and a boy there for a box on the ears that sounded like a pistol shot. To receive one of these unmerited buffets from the good Dr. Nairn counted on balance as a distinction. We never bore him malice and thought of him in after years with mild affection. If boys feel that a master is mean in his soul and hates them they loathe him but if their instinct tells them that he is ultimately a just man they respect him and don't give a hoot for his canings. Stands St. Augustine's where it stood? Red brick Gothic in a grey Georgian world of Avenues and Terraces, that in their drooping lace curtains and coy aspidistras belie these fair and verdant names. Cross housewives and pinched servants toiling on their knees to give a transient whiteness to the sacred front steps, their behinds turned to the blue sky and the trees. All else could be ugly and dingy, the house could be dirty without and dark within, but the front steps had to be white and the woman who did not laboriously hearthstone them in the morning was a slattern and the butt for her neighbours' malice. Is the 'recreation ground' with its sparse grass and tortured shrubs still there, and the bright yellow cake with gaudy pink icing, a slab even bigger than a man's hand for a penny? ...

Author : Reed Douglas
Title : Fire and Bomb A Comparison between the Burning of the Reichstag and the Bomb Explosion at Munich
Year : 1940

Link download : Reed_Douglas_-_Fire_and_Bomb.zip
Archive password : www.balderexlibris.com

Foreword. Seven years ago the reign of Adolf Hitler over Germany and the regime of National Socialism in the German Reich began, as they are now likely to end, with a holocaust. The Reichstag, the German Parliament-house, went up in flames one night; the enemies of National Socialism were proclaimed to have fired it; they were immediately and ruthlessly suppressed; the power of National Socialism in Germany was thus made absolute; and subsequently a great trial was held, with five men in the dock, to convince the world of the truth of the original assertion - that the enemies of Hitlerism had committed a deed so timely and welcome to Adolf Hitler and his lieutenants. The hastily-built structure of the trial, put together by men who underrated the difficulties of such a task, was not proof against the infra-red rays of world publicity. Four of the accused men were proved innocent and had to be acquitted; the fifth was a half-witted dupe who was proved (1) to have been in the Reichstag, and (2) to have been incapable of causing this great conflagration without many accomplices. He was beheaded. The burning question 'Who fired the Reichstag?' was left unanswered by the trial. Every avenue of investigation which led in the direction of the National Socialists themselves was blocked by the German Supreme Court. Nevertheless, and in spite of every effort to conceal them, trails were several times uncovered during the trial which would have led to that quarter if they had been pursued. The same chance which made of me a journalist, and a journalist working in Berlin, took me past the Reichstag at the moment it broke into flames. I entered it at the same moment as Hermann Göring himself; followed every detail of the long judicial investigation that was made known; and attended every sitting of the trial. Thus I came to know this particular subject more thoroughly than any other foreigner. I felt that it was one of major historical importance and made the study of it an especial hobby. Yet, in the years that have lapsed since then, I have, in reading and re-reading the evidence, repeatedly found something new, discovered fresh discrepancies in the evidence, fitted missing pieces to the jigsaw puzzle that the trial left half-finished, until to-day I am convinced of a very strange thing: in the very Supreme Court of the German Reich itself, assembled to vindicate National Socialism, that truth was actually revealed which will surely emerge if a second Reichstag Fire Trial is ever held - that the National Socialists fired it themselves! The main reasons for this conviction are set out in the following account. But they are not the only reasons for writing it. Another motive is that a second spectacular trial - The Munich Bomb Trial - may soon be staged, this time with the British Empire, instead of the Communist International, in the dock! In 1933 Adolf Hitler wished to convince the world that Russian Bolshevism, his ally today, was the mortal enemy of National Socialist Germany; in 1940, apparently, he hopes to persuade the world that Britain fills that part. In 1933 three Bulgarian Communist exiles, a German parlour-Bolshevist, and a mentally deficient Dutch destitute were put in the dock. In 1940, if the Munich Bomb Trial is held, the accused, according to the statements of the German secret police, are to be an exiled German, once one of Adolf Hitler's own chief supporters; a German of whom none had ever heard and of whom nothing is known, apparently a second van der Lubbe; and two British officials who by a trick were decoyed to the Dutch-German frontier and there kidnapped by German agents. The chief result of this Munich Bomb Trial, if it come about, is already clear to see - that, like its predecessor, it will leave unanswered the main question, in this case, 'Who planted the Munich bomb? But for an understanding of the methods by which such mock-trials are staged, a knowledge of the Reichstag Fire Trial is essential. To that end it is worth while briefly to resurrect from the mists of derision into which they have long since disappeared, the Crazy Gang of witnesses - lunatics, convicts, drug-addicts, self-confessed murderers, police-spies, stool-pigeons, garrulous charwomen, and sycophants - which was paraded before the Supreme Court of the German Reich in the endeavour to conceal the truth and whitewash National Socialism; to show how the proof of National Socialist guilt could have been obtained if every recurrent possibility of this had not been sternly repressed; and to recall how a German court of law was turned into an obscene harlequinade by warping its procedure to gain a political end. But even the harlequinade is a thing of dignity compared with the things that happen behind the scenes, while it is being prepared, and while it is in progress. There the torturers, the third-degree men, and the drug-experts hold sway. The products of their work have been seen often enough in the great Soviet show-trials, but only once in Germany - in the unforgettable figure of van der Lubbe, the dupe. These are the men, these masked figures behind the scenes, who make such trials possible. Without them, not even the flimsiest screen of plausibility could be put together, for the delusion of the credulous and the baffling of the sceptics. Such men made the Reichstag Fire Trial. Such men will make the Munich Bomb Trial. The course of the Munich Trial, if it be held, will be much clearer to follow if the method, the technique, of staging a great political trial be understood. The Reichstag Trial offers the perfect example. ...

Author : Reed Douglas
Title : Disgrace Abounding
Year : 1939

Link download : Reed_Douglas_-_Disgrace_Abounding.zip
Archive password : www.balderexlibris.com

Preface. All the fictions in this book are characteristic. None of the characters is fictitious, though some are disguised. A multitude of opinions is expressed. They may be poor things; in any case, they are mine own. If the book were to have a dedication it would be, in the words of the furniture removal man, to you - from me. While I was finishing the book, Insanity Fair, to which this is a sequel, events began to move so fast, and myself with them, that I never had time to go through the proofs with a microscope for the misprints of others and the mistakes of myself. The first thirty-odd impressions thus contained a large but dwindling number of slips. That they dwindled was largely due - I hardly stopped running about in the subsequent nine months for long enough meticulously to examine a single chapter - to readers in many countries, who wrote to me, or even called on or telephoned to my publishers, to point them out. To them my most cordial thanks are due. The same thing may happen, in a lesser degree, in this book. If it does, I tender thanks in advance. Those spacious and leisurely days are gone when a writer, at any rate a writer in my field, might sit in a quiet house, looking over green English wealds, weigh and apportion his words in long and tranquil meditation, and with measured gesture dip his quill pen into the ink and transfer them to paper. A writer of my type, in the mid-twentieth century, is always rushing off to catch a train or aeroplane, to keep abreast of the rush of events, and between journeys has quickly to tap his thoughts on paper. He who runs may read. To write, you have to run still faster. Possibly some of the things I have written about will begin to happen before the book is out. I shall not alter it if they do. I think, by leaving it as it was written, you get a more plastic view of the march of events. The direct form of address, 'You', is intended in most cases for British readers. ...

Author : Reed Douglas
Title : A prophet at Home
Year : 1941

Link download : Reed_Douglas_-_A_prophet_at_Home.zip
Archive password : www.balderexlibris.com

AUTHOR'S NOTE. When I had written two-thirds of this book I decided to call it 'The Decline To Fall of the British Empire', as I felt by that time able, with grateful glee, to bury the foreboding which led me to say, in its predecessor, Disgrace Abounding, that, by all the portents of that disastrous time, the title of the third book would have to be 'The Decline And Fall Of the British Empire'. My publisher, however, tells me that the title, 'Decline To Fall', would certainly be misunderstood and would lead to confusion, and as I always bow to his excellent judgment in such things the cover and the title-page of the book bear the title, A Prophet At Home. For me, nevertheless, the book remains 'The Decline To Fall', as I feel that this best expresses my mind, and the reader will find several passages which allude to this title. I owe him this explanation. ...