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    Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization
    Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization
    Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization
    Ebook631 pages9 hours

    Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization

    By Nicholson Baker

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    About this ebook

    Bestselling author Nicholson Baker, recognized as one of the most dexterous and talented writers in America today, has created a compelling work of nonfiction bound to provoke discussion and controversy -- a wide-ranging, astonishingly fresh perspective on the political and social landscape that gave rise to World War II.

    Human Smoke delivers a closely textured, deeply moving indictment of the treasured myths that have romanticized much of the 1930s and '40s. Incorporating meticulous research and well-documented sources -- including newspaper and magazine articles, radio speeches, memoirs, and diaries -- the book juxtaposes hundreds of interrelated moments of decision, brutality, suffering, and mercy. Vivid glimpses of political leaders and their dissenters illuminate and examine the gradual, horrifying advance toward overt global war and Holocaust.

    Praised by critics and readers alike for his exquisitely observant eye and deft, inimitable prose, Baker has assembled a narrative within Human Smoke that unfolds gracefully, tragically, and persuasively. This is an unforgettable book that makes a profound impact on our perceptions of historical events and mourns the unthinkable loss humanity has borne at its own hand.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster
    Release dateMar 11, 2008
    ISBN9781416583967
    Author

    Nicholson Baker

    Nicholson Baker is the author of nine novels and four works of nonfiction, including Double Fold, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, and House of Holes, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The New York Review of Books. He lives in Maine with his family.

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    • 4/5
      Nicholson Baker is no stranger to controversy and his latest book is controversial. A collage of snippets from news stories, diaries and other sources, Baker assembles an unflattering portrait of the world from about 1935 through the end of 1941. Anti-Semitism, indifference, profiteering and decisions to bomb residential areas as a way of undermining one's enemies' morale all come to the fore, along with other less attractive aspects of humanity. Baker doesn't always play fair in his display of vignettes but this book is moving and thought-provoking.
    • 4/5
      Baker has turned over his usual microscopic detail to others and let them speak about the era leading to the US declaratio of War. He chooses who will speak, and often comments, nonetheless the book indites all of us, living and dead, for believing war is in anyway a solution to conflict. We may have to wage war, but it is no solution. Baker shreds the whole idea of "a just war" that surrounds WWII--you may not agree with him but you do have to listen carefully and think with him.
    • 4/5
      Picked this up at work. Baker sets out to correct some of the myths that led to WWII.A collection of primary and secondary source accounts from papers, diaries, etc. that illustrate the build up from WWI to WWII. Hitler, of course, was a madman, but Churchill and FDR don't exactly come off smelling like roses. A lot of attention is given to pacifist movements throughout the world and how they were ultimately crushed by the blood lust of war. I was particularly disturbed by the US's positioning to go to war with Japan as early as 1934.
    • 5/5
      A disappointment, although a masterful collection of "soundbites" before the term came into use. How anyone can conclude, as the author does in his "Afterward", that the pacifists were right is beyond me. In a world with a Hitler, pacifism leads only to death. If the Pacifists had prevailed there would be no Jews left at all. I am also concerned about the books treatment of pre-war Japan. Reading only this book one would believe that the peace loving Japanese were forced into war by the conniving west. The single greatest atrocity of the era, the 1937-38 Rape of Nanking with over 300,000 casualties is dismissed with a single soft pedeled sentance. Japanese documents make it clear that Japan had decided on a war of conquest in the late twenties, and nothing America or England could have done, save perhaps abject surrender, would have changed that. The book contains much we should all read and know, but it is not an accurate account of resistance to monsters not faced in many generations.
    • 4/5
      Written in a different style, but an important work in understanding the degradation of human decision making during WWII.
    • 2/5
      This book does explode some cherished myths of "the Good War" fought by the "Greatest Generation". Unforunately the book has simpering tone and the formating with short paragraphs and dates becomes tenious after the first few pages. This book could only be tolerable if read in short doses, perhaps on the tiolet. I will grant that the author writes well and he does provide a fresh perspective on an era most of us feel like we understand. However, the author's thesis that World War II was avoidable and the pacifists had the answer is ridicilous.
    • 4/5
      An unusual and illuminating work. Personally I like the "snippet" approach as it gives a sense of relentless progression that fully rounded historical narratives rarely do. And as an alternative view of the march to war it is an eye opener. Personally I don't think Baker is trying to contend that "the pacificists were right", simply that there were possible paths to peace that were ignored, and the plans to subdue Japan way before Pearl Harbour is probably the most surprising theme. Of course its no surprise that some of the most venerated war leaders were hardly without flaws especially Churchill. And non of the bombing enthusiasts come out of the narrative well.
    • 5/5
      This book was one of the very few works that made me reconsider cherishshed opinions. While I knew that the Allies had not gone to war to save the Jews, I had no idea that prewar opportunities to save millions of lives were rejected because of the antisemitism of Roosevelt and Churchill. This is a tragic story of missed opportunity, and inhumanity on both sides of the war.
    • 5/5
      GoodReads keeps eating my review (including one several paragraphs long). The book is very good. GoodReads is being an asshole.
    • 5/5
      Such a strange book. It's history as haiku, little more than a series of snapshots from the road to war. And while it's bereft of any direct editorializing, Baker manages to select his material in such a way to promote the idea that World War II, "the good war," was actually anything but.

      That said, I'm not sure that I actually buy his argument. Nobody comes off well in the book, especially figures such as Churchill and Roosevelt. But even the pacifists seem more than a little foolish and naive. It's hard not to cringe when Gandhi says, "I can conceive the necessity of the immolation of hundreds, if not thousands, to appease the hunger of dictators ... Sufferers need not see the result in their lifetime." I'm reminded of Nader supporters in 2000, angrily claiming that there was no difference between Gore and Bush; while I can understand their perspective, the eight years since have proven pretty conclusively that their argument breaks down in the face of reality.

      I don't like war, but it's hard, especially after reading about the vast brutality of Hitler and the Nazi party, to believe that World War II could have or should have been avoided.
    • 4/5
      This is a unique work of history. It resembles a cut and paste job, with snippets arranged chronologically from prior to World War I to December 31, 1941. The short passages are made up of excerpts from correspondence, diaries, newspaper reporting, government documents, and transcripts, and the resulting mosaic reveals how nations and individuals--from pacifists to generals--coped with the onrush of the Second World War. Charles Lindbergh shows an affection from Nazi Germany and a reluctance to confront that is rather appalling. The author seems to be particularly fascinated by those who were against state violence, who were greater in number than previously reported. They, together with American isolationists (like Lindbergh), kept the United States from aiding Britain and France more fully as the world drifted to war, and there are a number of passages describing individuals who were convicted of not registering with the draft because of their philosophy. Ghandi also is quoted repeatedly, and he never sacrificed his non-violent views no matter how barbarous the war became. This is history as impressionism, and expescially sad are the comments of European Jews who did not seem to comprehend the awful fate that awaited them. What's clear though is that they were orphans, with no country willing to take them in as the great murder of a race picked up momentum. Also controversial, was Churchill's strategy of starving Europe immaterial of whether those who suffered were combatants or not. The pacifists sought to aid the hungry--including Herbert Hoover. Yet another facet that was presented was that prior to the "Battle of Britain," in which the Luftwaffe bombed British cities and civilians, England had been doing the same to German, Italian, and French cities for months. This detail seems hidden in the victory of the allies, but it confirms a pacifist truth: that in war no one comes away without blood on their hands and not much is accomplished. In this case, of course, without blood, Hitler and the Nazis would have survived, so sometimes non-violence can self-destructive. Ghandi would say that the lives of individuals who practice non-violence are less important than the principle. Also, that it might take decades to achieve a goal (and how many bodies?) So how rational is non-violence in the face of complete evil?
    • 4/5
      A very interesting look at "The Beginnings of World War II", as the sub-title says.The style is unusual. It's a collection of snippets of information, quotes, anecdotes, etc, in chronological order. Most are just a paragraph or two; few are longer than one page.While it's not an anti-war book per se, it does appear to concentrate on things which make the reader question the justification ofr World War II. It is very selective and misses out much that might support the war, but in my view that is justified as the accepted myths of the war are well known and widely publicised. The counter arguments have received very little attention elsewhere, so this is a welcome attempt to redress the balance. It contains some classic quotes.Far from being a clear cut case of good chaps v evil blokes, the book raises complexities and ambiguities. These include the ambuguity of all nations towards the Jews; the strong feeling by many that Communism was the greatest of all enemies; the pervasive influence of the arms industry; the games that all the great powers were playing; and much more.All in all, an excellent book, and a valuable resource for those who wish to explore non-violent solutions to conflict.
    • 2/5
      This book poses as history but the author uses the technique of juxtaposing bald quotations, ripped out of context, to try to place Churchill on the same moral plane as Adolf Hitler. Dedicated to pacifists who the author claims, "failed, but they were right." The book fails to consider that much of the responsibility for allowing Hitler to believe that the West would not fight belongs to those same pacifists. The bias in this books accumulates inexorably to an astonishing level. If it had been more nuanced, better researched. or more intelligent, then this readers interest might have been sustained. Look elsewhere to historians like Martin Gilbert for the history of World War II.
    • 4/5
      I found Nicholson Baker's unflinching presentation of the events leading up to America's entry into WWII a moving reminder that getting the facts is a slippery matter at the best of times; in war it is impossible. This makes me think that since we're always either leading up to war or in war, we can never hold onto the facts or apprehend the truth which seems to live forever on a metal table dying of multiple stab-wounds.
      There were many moments in this book where I realized everything I knew was wrong. And this disturbed me, how newsreels seen in childhood with their plucky music and exploding skies could allow me to swallow the pattern whole; the template for many myths I never questioned. This book also helped me make sense of the Cold War, which I see now is a refinement of a half-century dedicated to making all out war against civilians acceptable.
      I was also struck, while I read this book, by a sense of observing the barbarism of another time, like reading about a Roman general lining a wide dirt road with a thousand severed heads on sharp sticks. But I recognize this as a dangerous illusion fostered by living in a new century. We are no different. The dedicated pacifists and non-resistants (given rare tribute in this book) know this all too well as they work to convince us that our baser selves are not human nature. That is propaganda. We are better than that, and we are capable of doing less wrong.
      Perhaps, like me, you have put yourself in that civilized club of the less wrong. You do not need such a lesson, and you would prefer such people stop their dull preaching. But pause a moment to count the explosions at the cineplex, and think about the raised middle fingers and audible fuck-yous that pepper any given day among your fellow consumers. The next war lives in those fingers.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      A very interesting look at "The Beginnings of World War II", as the sub-title says.

      The style is unusual. It's a collection of snippets of information, quotes, anecdotes, etc, in chronological order. Most are just a paragraph or two; few are longer than one page.

      While it's not an anti-war book per se, it does appear to concentrate on things which make the reader question the justification ofr World War II. It is very selective and misses out much that might support the war, but in my view that is justified as the accepted myths of the war are well known and widely publicised. The counter arguments have received very little attention elsewhere, so this is a welcome attempt to redress the balance. It contains some classic quotes.

      Far from being a clear cut case of good chaps v evil blokes, the book raises complexities and ambiguities. These include the ambuguity of all nations towards the Jews; the strong feeling by many that Communism was the greatest of all enemies; the pervasive influence of the arms industry; the games that all the great powers were playing; and much more.

      All in all, an excellent book, and a valuable resource for those who wish to explore non-violent solutions to conflict.
    • 4/5
      Consisting of nothing but one paragraph snippets, the work purports to take the reader from the end of World War I to just after then entry of the US into World War II in December 1941. A great deal of what is related is repeated from contemporary sources, particluarly the NY Times.

      Given the format, the writing the tilted a bit to the sensational, and given the author's biases doubtless displayed a bit more prominently than was deserved the thoughts and efforts of pacifists during the period. By the last I mean they were decidedly fringe views, yet Baker gives them more prominence and protrays them as being a bit more prominent than deserved.

      Churchill is uniformly villifed, Roosevelt as well, though probably not to the same extent. Other than that there were some interesting tidbits about the US cheerfully sailing oil tankers by Japan AFTER the embargo was in place for the USSR. Ditto the bits about Japanese efforts to spread plague via dropping poisioned food. Neither of these facts had ever crossed my radar before. I'm inclined to doubt the sloppy hero worship some of whom pass for conservatives send Churchill's way, yet I also cannot but think the characterization here is fair.

      As an absolute aside and apropos of nothing, I was a bit irritated to see the library of my alma mater, the University of New Hampshire, referred to as, well, "the University of New Hampshire Library," in the afterward. In my day it was always called the "Dimond Library." And yet, there's next to no reference to that name on the current library website. So, while my irritation is legitimate, the object of it was not. Can't blame Baker for that one, it appears.
    • 3/5
      The subtitle for this book is "The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization." I love it when "they" keep subtitles simple, without overstating their case. The first part of the subtitle meant that I wasn't surprised when the book left off at the end of 1941, after World War II had been thoroughly begun, but before things got completely underway in involving the entire world. The second part is a little more problematic, since really it seems that from some of the evidence presented, civilization had ended before the war even started.

      The format of the book was to give information and excerpts from a contemporary source, and then to give the date on which those events occurred or opinions were expressed. I imagine that's repetitive on the page, but in audio format, it also reminded me a bit of the "you are there" series of historical reenactments on TV. (Aside: I don't know when or where those actually aired; we only saw them in my 7th grade history class, but boy were they corny.) The through-lines of the information presented were these: 1. Nobody, including the governments of the US and the UK, were fans of Jews, and they weren't too shy to say it, at least in some contexts. 2. Hitler seemed like a weirdo, but the rest of the world tried to pull some sort of self-esteem-building, parental thing on him and just say publicly that they were sure he'd get a handle on things and stop beating up his own citizens soon. 3. The US (FDR, really) was spoiling for a fight with Japan, and essentially baited the hook of Pearl Harbor with the US Navy.

      And here's a bonus thing I learned: Bombing things was a lot harder than you might think, particularly if you were trying at all to bomb the right things. On the other hand, that ultimately meant that you could make a lot of "mistakes." This was certainly a different perspective on things; whether the picture painted from various sources was entirely accurate, I'll leave for someone else to decide. I take everything I read with a grain of salt, and this is no exception. I will say that whatever interest the material provided was in spite of the format. I can't imagine many more tedious ways to write a book than "X diarist wrote Y about Germany. It was July 3, 1937. President Roosevelt said Z to the American people. It was August 7, 1940. Person A saw planes fly overhead blah blah blah. It was still August 7, 1940." With the right narrator (Ben Stein?), this could put you to sleep in record time.
    • 4/5
      This chronological collection of anecdotes documenting the lead-up into WWII adds up to a profound argument for pacifism. What emerges is not a Good War of Allies vs Axis but rather a global tragedy brought about by warmongers on all sides--Hitler's crazed aggression is joined by the distressingly Cheneyesque lies and manipulations of Churchill and even FDR.

      There's the failure of the allies to allow more Jewish emigration out of Germany before it was too late, the multi-year British naval blockade to starve Germany and then occupied Europe, the American naval oil embargo on Japan and military collaboration with Japan's enemy China, FDR's decision to leave the entire American fleet holed up at Pearl Harbor despite numerous warnings that a Japanese attack was inevitable, and much more. There are also sane and reasonable pacifist voices, notably Gandhi, the American congresswoman Jeannette Rankin and numerous relief societies--even Herbert Hoover, who argued against the food embargos, sounds a note of humanity.

      My one gripe is that the book wholly consists of discrete chunks, usually just a paragraph or so long, which are separated by far too much white space--probably half the paper surface in the paperback edition is blank. Seems like a waste and making the book about 40% bigger and heavier than it need be.

    Book preview

    Human Smoke - Nicholson Baker

    Cover: Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, by Nicholson Baker

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    Also by Nicholson Baker

    Checkpoint

    A Box of Matches

    Double Fold

    The Everlasting Story of Nory

    The Size of Thoughts

    The Fermata

    Vox

    U and I

    Room Temperature

    The Mezzanine

    SIMON & SCHUSTER

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    1230 Avenue of the Americas

    New York, NY 10020

    Copyright © 2008 by Nicholson Baker

    All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

    SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Baker, Nicholson.

        Human smoke: the beginnings of World War II, the end of civilization / Nicholson Baker.

           p. cm.

         Includes bibliographical references and index.

          1. World War, 1939–1945—Causes. 2. Jews—Persecutions—Europe—History. I. Title.

    D741.B255 2007

    940.53'11—dc22                          2007044108

    ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-8396-7

    ISBN-10: 1-4165-8396-3

    Visit us on the World Wide Web:

    http://www.SimonSays.com

    Human Smoke

    ALFRED NOBEL, the manufacturer of explosives, was talking to his friend the Baroness Bertha von Suttner, author of Lay Down Your Arms. Von Suttner, a founder of the European antiwar movement, had just attended the fourth World’s Peace Conference in Bern. It was August 1892.

    Perhaps my factories will put an end to war even sooner than your congresses, Alfred Nobel said. On the day when two army corps may mutually annihilate each other in a second, probably all civilized nations will recoil with horror and disband their troops.

    STEFAN ZWEIG, a young writer from Vienna, sat in the audience at a movie theater in Tours, France, watching a newsreel. It was spring 1914.

    An image of Wilhelm II, the Emperor of Germany, came on screen for a moment. At once the theater was in an uproar. Everybody yelled and whistled, men, women, and children, as if they had been personally insulted, Zweig wrote. The good-natured people of Tours, who knew no more about the world and politics than what they had read in their newspapers, had gone mad for an instant.

    Zweig was frightened. It had only been a second, but one that showed me how easily people anywhere could be aroused in a time of a crisis, despite all attempts at understanding.

    WINSTON CHURCHILL, England’s first lord of the admiralty, instituted a naval blockade of Germany. The British blockade, Churchill later wrote, treated the whole of Germany as if it were a beleaguered fortress, and avowedly sought to starve the whole population—men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound—into submission. It was 1914.

    STEFAN ZWEIG was at the eastern front, gathering Russian war proclamations for the Austrian archives. It was the spring of 1915.

    Zweig boarded a freight car on a hospital train. One crude stretcher stood next to the other, he wrote, and all were occupied by moaning, sweating, deathly pale men, who were gasping for breath in the thick atmosphere of excrement and iodoform. There were several dead among the living. The doctor, in despair, asked Zweig to get water. He had no morphine and no clean bandages, and they were still twenty hours from Budapest.

    When Zweig got back to Vienna, he began a pacifist play, Jeremiah. I had recognized, Zweig wrote, the foe I was to fight—false heroism that prefers to send others to suffering and death, the cheap optimism of the conscienceless prophets, both political and military who, boldly promising victory, prolong the war, and behind them the hired chorus, the ‘word makers of war’ as Werfel has pilloried them in his beautiful poem.

    JEANNETTE RANKIN OF MONTANA, the first woman to be elected to the House of Representatives, voted against declaring war on Germany. It was April 6, 1917.

    I leaned over the gallery rail and watched her, said her friend Harriet Laidlaw, of the Woman Suffrage Party. She was undergoing the most terrible strain. Almost all of her fellow suffrage leaders, including Laidlaw, wanted her to vote yes.

    There was a silence when her name was called. I want to stand by my country, Rankin said. But I cannot vote for war. I vote no. Fifty other members of the House voted no with her; 374 voted yes. I felt, she said later, that the first time the first woman had a chance to say no to war she should say it.

    One of her home-state papers, the Helena Independent, called her a dupe of the Kaiser, a member of the Hun army in the United States, and a crying schoolgirl.

    A YOUNG PRO-WAR PREACHER, Harry Emerson Fosdick, wrote a short book, published by the Young Men’s Christian Association.

    War was not gallantry and parades anymore, Reverend Fosdick said. War is now dropping bombs from aeroplanes and killing women and children in their beds; it is shooting by telephonic orders, at an unseen place miles away and slaughtering invisible men. War, he said, is men with jaws gone, eyes gone, limbs gone, minds gone.

    Fosdick ended his book with a call for enlistment: "Your country needs you," he said. It was November 1917.

    MEYER LONDON, a socialist in the House of Representatives, voted no to President Wilson’s second declaration of war, against Austria-Hungary. It was December 7, 1917.

    In matters of war I am a teetotaler, said London, in a fifteen-minute speech. I refuse to take the first intoxicating drink.

    Representative Walter Chandler walked over to where London sat and stood in front of him as he delivered his rebuttal.

    It has been said that if you will analyze the blood of a Jew under the microscope, you will find the Talmud and the Old Bible floating around in some particles, Congressman Chandler said. If you analyze the blood of a representative German or Teuton you will find machine guns and particles of shells and bombs floating around in the blood.

    There was only one thing to do with the Teutons, according to Chandler: Fight them until you destroy the whole bunch.

    ELEANOR ROOSEVELT and her husband, Franklin D., the assistant secretary of the navy, were invited to a party in honor of Bernard Baruch, the financier. I’ve got to go to the Harris party which I’d rather be hung than seen at, Eleanor wrote her mother-in-law. Mostly Jews. It was January 14, 1918.

    A CAPTURED GERMAN OFFICER was talking to a reporter for The New York Times. It was November 3, 1918, and the German government had asked for an armistice.

    The German officer claimed that his army was not defeated and should have continued the war. The Emperor is surrounded by people who feel and talk defeat, the officer said. He mentioned men like Philipp Scheidemann, the leader of the socialists.

    New tanks were coming, the captured officer observed, and war was expected between the United States and Japan. Japan and the United States would surely clash some day, he said, and we would then furnish both sides with enormous quantities of material and munitions. The ceding of Poland and Alsace-Lorraine, the officer believed, meant social upheaval, the ruin of German industry, and the impoverishment of the working class. Our enemies will have what they have desired—the complete annihilation of Germany. That would be a peace due to Scheidemann.

    WINSTON CHURCHILL, now England’s secretary of state for war and air, rose in Parliament to talk about the success of the naval blockade. It was March 3, 1919, four months after the signing of the armistice that ended the Great War.

    We are enforcing the blockade with rigour, Churchill said. It is repugnant to the British nation to use this weapon of starvation, which falls mainly on the women and children, upon the old and the weak and the poor, after all the fighting has stopped, one moment longer than is necessary to secure the just terms for which we have fought. Hunger and malnutrition, the secretary of war and air observed, had brought German national life to a state of near collapse. Now is therefore the time to settle, he said.

    WINSTON CHURCHILL published a newspaper article. It was February 8, 1920. Churchill had a different enemy now. Now his enemy wasn’t Germany, it was the sinister confederacy of international Jewry.

    This movement among the Jews is not new, Churchill said. It was a world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality. He listed Marx, Trotsky, Béla Kun, Rosa Luxemburg, and Emma Goldman as some of the malefactors. The conspiracy had been, he said, the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century. It had played a recognizable part in the French Revolution. All loyal Jews, he advised, must vindicate the honour of the Jewish name by rejecting international bolshevism.

    AYLMER HALDANE, the commander of British forces in Iraq, telegraphed Winston Churchill for more troops and airplanes. It was August 26, 1920.

    Jihad was being preached with frenzied fervour by the numerous emissaries from the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, Haldane wrote. Churchill, secretary of state for war and air, sent him an encouraging note: The Cabinet have decided that the rebellion must be quelled effectually, and I shall endeavour to meet all your requirements.

    Several days later, Churchill wrote Hugh Boom Trenchard, the head of the Royal Air Force, a memo. Churchill and Trenchard were developing the notion of policing the British empire from above, thereby saving the cost of ground troops—a policy that became known as air control.

    I think you should certainly proceed with the experimental work on gas bombs, especially mustard gas, which would inflict punishment on recalcitrant natives without inflicting grave injury on them, Churchill wrote Trenchard. Churchill was an expert on the effects of mustard gas—he knew that it could blind and kill, especially children and infants. Gas spreads a lively terror, he pointed out in an earlier memo; he didn’t understand the prevailing squeamishness about its use: I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. Most of those gassed wouldn’t have serious permanent effects, he said.

    HALDANE’S MEN BOMBED and strafed rebellious tribes, fired on them with gas-filled shells, burned villages, and repaired the railway. The official death toll on the British side was forty-seven English officers and troops and 250 Indian Gurkhas. It is impossible to give the Arab casualties with any approach to exactitude, Haldane wrote, but they have been estimated at 8450 killed and wounded. Haldane offered his thoughts on how to deal punitively with a village. Separate parties should be detailed for firing the houses, digging up and burning the grain and bhoosa, looting, &c., he advised. Burning a village properly takes a long time, an hour or more according to size from the time the burning parties enter.

    Churchill wrote Haldane a congratulatory telegram: During these difficult months your patience and steadfastness have been of great value, and I congratulate you upon the distinct improvement in the situation which has been effected by you. It was October 18, 1920.

    A WING COMMANDER in the Royal Air Force, J. A. Chamier, published his views on how best to deal with tribal rebellions.

    The commanding officer must choose the most inaccessible village of the most prominent tribe, said Chamier, and attack it with all available aircraft. The attack with bombs and machine guns must be relentless and unremitting and carried on continuously by day and night, on houses, inhabitants, crops and cattle, Chamier wrote. This sounds brutal, I know, but it must be made brutal to start with. The threat alone in the future will prove efficacious if the lesson is once properly learnt. It was 1921.

    FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT, now a lawyer in New York City, noticed that Jews made up one-third of the freshman class at Harvard. He talked the problem over with Henry Morgenthau, Sr., and he went to the Harvard Board of Overseers, of which he was a member. It was decided, Roosevelt later explained, that over a period of years the number of Jews should be reduced one or two per cent a year until it was down to 15%. It was about 1922.

    MOHANDAS K. GANDHI was arrested for sedition. He had written an article that began: How can there be any compromise whilst the British Lion continues to shake his gory claws in our faces? It was March 10, 1922.

    That Sunday, John Haynes Holmes, a pacifist preacher, gave a sermon in the Lyric Theater in New York. Gandhi is disciplining three hundred million Indians to struggle for liberty, Holmes said, to throw off the British yoke by nonviolence, and he is doing this with a degree of success which is shaking the empire to its foundations. He would save India in time, and therewith perhaps save the world.

    Gandhi gave a statement at his trial. I am endeavoring to show to my countrymen that violent non-cooperation only multiplies evil and that as evil can only be sustained by violence, withdrawal of support of evil requires complete abstention from violence, he said. He would, he told the court, cheerfully submit to the highest penalty for his crime.

    He was sentenced to a term of six years in jail.

    LORD HUGH CECIL, a member of Parliament for Oxford, rose to say that the Royal Air Force was unnecessarily large and should be smaller. It was March 21, 1922.

    Winston Churchill, the secretary of state for war, secretary of state for air, and secretary of state for the colonies, rose in reply to say that the Royal Air Force should stay large. Churchill recalled the end of the Great War, when British airplanes had been on the verge of bold accomplishments. Had the War lasted a few more months, or possibly even a few more weeks, he said, there would have been operations conducted from these coasts upon Berlin and in the heart of Germany, and those operations would have increased in magnitude and consequence had the campaign been prolonged all through the year 1919. But those operations were not to be. Peace intervened, owing to our having run short of Germans and enemies before the experiments were completed.

    Churchill went on to make a prediction. In an aerial war, he said, the greatest form of defence will undoubtedly be offense.

    STEFAN ZWEIG was on vacation in Westerland, on the island of Sylt in the North Sea. He read in the paper that his friend Walter Rathenau, the foreign minister of Germany, a Jew, had been assassinated. It was June 24, 1922.

    The German mark plunged in value. Now the real witch’s sabbath of inflation started, wrote Zweig. To repair a broken window now cost more than the whole house would have cost before the inflation; a single book now cost more than a printing company with one hundred presses had. The unemployed stood around and shook their fists at the profiteers and foreigners in their luxurious cars who bought whole rows of streets like a box of matches, he said. Towering above them all was the superprofiteer, Stinnes.

    With the collapse of values, Zweig said, Berlin became a Babylon: Every high school boy wanted to earn some money, and in the dimly lit bars one might see government officials and men of the world of finance tenderly courting drunken sailors without any shame.

    Authoritarian countermovements grew amid chaos, said Zweig. Men aligned themselves in readiness for any slogan that promised order.

    BOOM TRENCHARD, head of the Royal Air Force, was chatting with his staff. They were wondering whether it was better to have lots of fighter planes, in order to fight off the enemy, or lots of bombers to bomb the enemy on his home ground. Trenchard said that it was really like playing football. You can’t just defend your own goal, you have to go over onto the other side of the field. The nation that could stand being bombed longest, he said, would win in the end. And, in his opinion, The French in a bombing duel would probably squeal before we did. It was July 9, 1923.

    THE DAILY MAIL, a conservative London paper, published a forged letter. It was October 25, 1924.

    The letter was purportedly signed by Grigori Zinoviev, a Russian communist leader, and addressed to the Communist Party in England. It appeared four days before the general election of 1924—an important race for Winston Churchill, who had lost two previous campaigns.

    The letter, marked very secret, talked of a successful rising in any of the working districts of England. Its prose had faintly Churchillian cadences in places—there were phrases such as strain every nerve and pronounced its weighty word—but with an admixture of bolshevistic pastiche. It would be desirable to have cells (nuclei?) in all the units of troops, particularly among those quartered in large centres of the country, and among factories working on munitions and at military store depots, the letter said. The headline in the Daily Mail was Civil War Plot by Socialists’ Masters.

    Churchill’s devoted supporter Esmond Harmsworth was the son of Lord Rothermere, publisher of the Daily Mail. Churchill’s close ally in Secret Intelligence, Desmond Morton, first forwarded the letter from an obscure Latvian source to the British Foreign Office, attesting to its authenticity.

    Moscow called the letter a clumsy forgery and a crude fabrication and demanded an apology. Members of Parliament said it was a fake and a malicious hoax. How did Conservative headquarters become possessed of that letter? the Labor prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, asked. It is a most suspicious circumstance that a newspaper and headquarters of the Conservative Association seem to have had copies of it at the same time as the Foreign Office, and if that is true, how can I, a simple-minded, honest person who puts two and two together, avoid a suspicion—I will not say conclusion—that the whole thing is a political plot?

    CHURCHILL AND OTHER CONSERVATIVES used the Zinoviev letter to unseat Prime Minister MacDonald. Churchill compared MacDonald to Alexander Kerensky, the weak Russian socialist leader who allowed the Bolsheviks to triumph.

    You all know the story of Kerensky, Churchill said in a campaign speech, how he stood there, like Mr. MacDonald, pretending that he meant to do the best he could for his country, and all the time apologizing behind the scenes to the wild, dark, deadly forces which had him in their grip.

    Churchill won his election. Still he couldn’t stop talking about the Zinoviev letter. Conspirators and revolutionaries of every race under the sun had assembled in Russia to plan world revolution, he asserted in the Weekly Dispatch. Everywhere they have endeavoured to bring into being the ‘germ cells’ from which the cancer of Communism should grow, he wrote. There was, therefore, nothing new and nothing particularly violent in the letter of Zinoviev, alias Apfelbaum, to the British Communists. It was November 2, 1924.

    Ramsey MacDonald watched his Labor cabinet pack up. He felt, he said, like a man sewn in a sack and tossed into the sea. Churchill returned to power: He became chancellor of the exchequer in the new Conservative government.

    He reinstated the gold standard, triggering a massive depression.

    JOSEPH GOEBBELS was working on his diary-novel Michael. I lie awake for a long time and think of the quiet pale man of Nazareth, he wrote. Then Adolf Hitler came into his life.

    Hitler had just gotten out of Landesberg prison, where he’d dictated Mein Kampf to his friend Rudolf Hess. Goebbels finished reading Mein Kampf. Who is this man? he asked himself. The real Christ, or only St. John? Hitler offered Goebbels the job of editor of the National Socialist newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter. They spoke at meetings together. He jumps to his feet, there he is, Goebbels wrote in his diary in November 1925. Shakes my hand. Like an old friend. And those big blue eyes. Like stars. He is glad to see me. I am in heaven.

    A few weeks later, Goebbels saw him again. Hitler is there. Great joy. He greets me like an old friend. And looks after me. How I love him! What a fellow! Then he speaks. How small I am! He gives me his photograph. With a greeting to the Rhineland. Heil Hitler! I want Hitler to be my friend. His photograph is on my desk.

    A few months later still, the two of them had another meeting. Goebbels gave a two-and-a-half-hour speech. I give it all I have. They rave, they shout. In the end Hitler embraces me. Tears are in his eyes. I feel something like true happiness.

    They had dinner together that evening—Hitler allowed Goebbels to pay. And even in that, what greatness!

    Goebbels had found his man of Nazareth. Adolf Hitler—I love you.

    REVEREND HARRY FOSDICK gave a sermon in Geneva, at the Cathedral of Saint Pierre. It was September 13, 1925, the opening of the League of Nations Assembly. Reverend Fosdick had renounced his previous fervent militarism; he was a well-known antiwar preacher now.

    Fosdick had seen men come freshly gassed from the trenches, he said. He had heard the cries of those who wanted to die and could not.

    I hate war, he said, for what it forces us to do to our enemies, rejoicing over our coffee cups at the breakfast table about every damnable and devilish evil we have been able to inflict upon them. I hate war for its results, the lies it lives on and propagates, the undying hatreds that it rouses, the dictatorships that it puts in the place of democracy, and the starvation that stalks after it. Fosdick’s speech was quoted in newspapers. Twenty-five thousand copies of it were printed and distributed. Most people agreed with it. Most of the world was pacifist.

    THE ROYAL AIR FORCE dropped more than 150 tons of bombs on India. It was 1925.

    WINSTON CHURCHILL visited Rome. I could not help being charmed by Signor Mussolini’s gentle and simple bearing, and by his calm, detached poise in spite of so many burdens and dangers, Churchill said in a press statement. Italian fascism, he said, had demonstrated that there was a way to combat subversive forces; it had provided the necessary antidote to the Russian virus.

    If I had been an Italian I am sure I should have been entirely with you from the beginning to the end of your victorious struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism, Churchill told the Romans. It was January 20, 1927.

    THE ROYAL AIR FORCE announced the staging of a mock bombing exercise at its annual air pageant in Hendon, north of London. It was June 11, 1927.

    The New York Times described the Hendon event in advance: The ‘town,’ which will be built largely of airplane wings, will be bombed to bits. Airplanes will drop food and ammunition to the European ‘refugees,’ who will be fleeing after having escaped from the citadel in which they have been ‘beleaguered’ by the town’s native inhabitants. The town was located in the imaginary land of Irquestine.

    Two hundred airplanes were going to fly to the music of a song called Chick, Chick, Chick, Chick, Chicken. When the singer sang Lay a little egg for me, the planes were to release their bombs.

    A SQUADRON of British planes bombed the sacred pyramid of the Nuer at Dengkur, in the African Sudan. They blew up herds of cattle—mangled flesh and splintered bones crescendoed high, reported Time magazine—and strafed Nuer tribesmen. One of the tribesmen shot back, wounding a pilot in the thigh. Not more than 200 Nuers were killed, according to an official estimate. It was February 1928.

    WINSTON CHURCHILL published an extraordinary work of history called The Aftermath, the last volume in his history of the Great War. It was March 1929.

    The Great War exhibited novel features, Churchill said. For example: Whole nations were methodically subjected, or sought to be subjected, to the process of reduction by famine. But what had happened was nothing compared to what would have happened if the Germans had kept fighting into 1919, he said. Poison gases of incredible malignity would have ended all resistance. Thousands of aeroplanes would have shattered their cities.

    Instead, suddenly, the fighting ended: In a hundred laboratories, in a thousand arsenals, factories, and bureaux, men pulled themselves up with a jerk, and turned from the task in which they had been absorbed.

    But those whose noncombatant labors had been interrupted would get another chance, sooner or later, to carry forward their plans from 1919, Churchill predicted. Death stands at attention, he wrote, obedient, expectant, ready to serve, ready to shear away the peoples en masse; ready, if called on, to pulverise, without hope of repair, what is left of civilisation. He awaits only the word of command.

    BARON PONSONBY, author of Falsehood in Wartime, remembered something that Winston Churchill had said to him years before. I like things to happen, he had said, and if they don’t happen I like to make them happen. It was March 11, 1929.

    WINSTON CHURCHILL, on a speaking tour in the United States, gave a talk at the Bond Club in New York City. It was October 9, 1929.

    Churchill’s speaker’s fee of $12,500 was paid by Sir Harry McGowan, chairman of African Explosives and deputy chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries, a British conglomerate that made fertilizer, rayon, gunpowder, TNT, bombs, ammunition, and poison gas. Imperial Chemical was the descendant of Alfred Nobel’s explosives company, where McGowan had started working at the age of fifteen; it had agreements with munitioneers DuPont and, in Germany, I. G. Farben.

    McGowan and Churchill had developed a financial intimacy: McGowan was investing some of Churchill’s wealth for him in the American stock market. Sir Harry had, Churchill confided to his wife, Clementine, profound sources of information.

    During his multicity tour, Churchill praised big navies, large weapons programs, and Anglo-American cooperation. We don’t want all the good people in the world to disarm while the bad ones remain heavily equipped for war, he told the Iron and Steel Institute later that month. You are the friends we would like to see most strongly armed.

    MOHANDAS GANDHI walked to the ocean with his followers. He had decided to resist the British imperial salt monopoly. Watch, I am about to give a signal to the nation, he said, lifting a few grains of sea salt. It was April 6, 1930.

    Lord Irwin, the tall, bony viceroy of India, had already arrested many of Gandhi’s disciples. He hoped he wouldn’t have to arrest Gandhi, though, which would cause unrest:

    I was always told that his blood pressure is dangerous and his heart none too good, and I was also told a few days ago that his horoscope predicts that he will die this year, and that is the explanation of this desperate throw. It would be a very happy solution.

    But Mohandas Gandhi didn’t die. He and sixty thousand followers were imprisoned. In Peshawar, near India’s Northwest Frontier, British troops fired on a crowd of Muslim salt protesters, killing some of them. Air raids cleaned up the Peshawar region afterward, according to The New York Times.

    MUSSOLINI GAVE A SPEECH to a crowd of blackshirted Fascisti in Florence. Words are beautiful things, he said, but rifles, machine guns, ships, and airplanes are more beautiful still. It was May 17, 1930.

    MAJOR FRANK PEASE, the president of the Hollywood Technical Directors Association, a Red-baiting group, saw All Quiet on the Western Front, from Universal Pictures. The movie, about the pointlessness and horror of the Great War, was based on a novel by Erich Maria Remarque.

    Major Pease disliked the movie; he wrote telegrams to President Hoover and others asking them to ban it. Its continued uncensored exhibition especially before juveniles will go far to raise a race of yellow streaks, slackers and disloyalists, he said. Moscow itself could not have produced a more subversive film.

    When the movie wasn’t banned, Pease sent out a newsletter. The mesopotamian mongrels guilty of such a criminal film as ALL QUIET were bound to over-reach themselves some time, and this looks like the time, he wrote. THE TIME TO CALL A HALT IS NOW.

    It was May 24, 1930.

    THE ASSOCIATED PRESS sent in a story from Peshawar. It was August 17, 1930. Chastened by a daily rain of bombs from British planes, raiding Afridi tribesmen were reported today in full retreat to the hills of the northwest frontier, the story said. Punishment inflicted on the villages by raiding airplanes was said by officals to have had a salutary effect. The disaffected sections are expected to sue for peace in a short time.

    The Times of London, in an editorial, blamed the deaths of Afridi tribesmen on Gandhi’s propagandists.

    IN BERLIN, Albert Einstein was talking to reporters. It was September 18, 1930. The Hitlerites had triumphed in an election. There is no reason for despair, Einstein said, for the Hitler vote is only a symptom, not necessarily of anti-Jewish hatred but of momentary resentment caused by economic misery and unemployment within the ranks of misguided German youth. Einstein observed that during the Dreyfus affair most of the population of France had become anti-Semitic. And then that had changed. I hope that as soon as the situation improves the German people will also find their road to clarity, he said.

    JOSEPH GOEBBELS, Reichstag member and party leader of Berlin, led two hundred Brownshirts into a movie theater. It was December 8, 1930. Goebbels had gotten them tickets to All Quiet on the Western Front, which was just out in Germany. Goebbels described Erich Maria Remarque as a slicked-over fashion-monkey. He said that the film was a work of filth. His recruits had weapons—briefcases full of white mice, stink bombs, and sneeze powder. They would defend the honor of the two million who had died in the Great War against naysayers and defeatists such as Remarque.

    As the film played, and as Goebbels observed from the balcony, the Brownshirts leaped up and began shouting, Jews out! Jews out! They freed the mice and flung the stink bombs and the sneeze powder. There was confusion; the film was stopped. The police arrived and emptied the theater.

    The next night, the storm troopers were there again, and there were more of them. Police on horses tried to keep control. Goebbels denounced the film as Jewish, and then the protestors marched toward a fancy shopping district in Berlin, the Kurfürstendamm, where there were Jewish-owned businesses. Many a proprietor of a stylish café trembled for its plate-glass front as he saw the young anti-pacifists approaching, reported The New York Times, but apparently no windows were broken. Twenty-seven people were arrested.

    The next night, there was another disturbance; and the night after that; and the night after that. The theater stood empty. The German government, intimidated, suppressed the film. The film of shame has been banned, wrote Goebbels in his diary. With that action the National Socialist movement has won its fight aginst the dirty machinations of the Jews. It was, he wrote, a victory that could not have been any grander.

    Erich Maria Remarque had been watching the first demonstration. Nobody was older than twenty, he wrote later. None of them could have been in the war—and none of them knew that ten years later they would be in another war and that most of them would be dead before they reached thirty.

    GANDHI HAD REPLACED LENIN as Churchill’s arch-nemesis. The truth is, Churchill wrote, Gandhi-ism and all it stands for will, sooner or later, have to be grappled with and finally crushed. It is no use trying to satisfy a tiger by feeding him with cat’s-meat. It was December 11, 1930.

    A month later, Gandhi was released from jail. He wrote a letter to the viceroy, Lord Irwin. Dear Friend, he said. I have received suggestions from friends whose advice I value that I should seek an interview with you.

    Irwin invited him to the palace. The two men met and talked. They met again and talked—and again. Winston Churchill was disgusted. The British government must, he said in a speech, dissociate itself from this weak, wrong-headed rapprochement: It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor. Such a spectacle can only increase the unrest in India. It was February 23, 1931.

    ALBERT EINSTEIN gave a speech at the Ritz-Carlton in New York. There were two ways of resisting war, Einstein said. In countries where there was a draft, the pacifist could refuse military duty. In countries where no draft currently existed, such as the United States and England, the pacifist could publicly declare that he will not, under any circumstances, take up arms.

    If only 2 percent of the men liable for war service were to refuse, Einstein said, there would not be enough jails in the world to take care of them. He and Mrs. Einstein got an ovation. It was December 14, 1930.

    TWO EDITORS from a conservative newspaper presented themselves at a house on an elegant street in Munich. It was May 4, 1931. The house was called the Brown House, and it was the headquarters of the National Socialist German Workers Party—the Nazi Party. A steel magnate, Fritz Thyssen, had helped the party leader, Adolf Hitler, buy it. There was a swastika flag flapping on the roof. Guards checked the two editors’ papers, and then Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s longtime private secretary, greeted them. Hess had an odd look, one of the visitors thought: in his face there were traces of fanaticism and mental turmoil. Hess was the man to whom, some years earlier, Hitler had dictated the long monologues that became Mein Kampf.

    Hitler was busy for the moment, so Hess took the two of them on a tour. They went down to the basement and saw the fireproof cabinets that held files on half a million party members. They went back upstairs and saw swastikas in the ceiling stucco and swastikas in the window glass. They saw a room called the Hall of the Senators, which held sixty-one chairs covered in red leather. Its ceiling was of marble, and it bore an image of the party emblem done in mosaic; on its floor were vast priceless carpets into which were woven innumerable swastikas. Hess took them up to the courtroom of the National Socialist Party, which had a table in it bearing a gold swastika and a figure of Christ.

    After an hour, Hess showed the guests into Hitler’s office and made the introductions. Hitler was friendly. He shook hands with them and said, genially, I know the part which you and your paper play among the German intelligentsia and bourgeoisie. There were two pictures visible: a small one of Mussolini on the desk and a big one of Frederick the Great, in oil, on the wall. Hitler began talking—sometimes banging his fist on the table, sometimes shouting—about the communists, the Vatican, the Jews, Freemasonry, the press, Karl Marx, Trotsky, and the city of Berlin, which he called an international muckheap. One of the editors, Richard Breiting, had worked as a shorthand recorder in the Reichstag, the German Parliament, so he was able to keep up with this stream of excited speech.

    We can achieve something only by fanaticism, said Hitler. We do not intend to nail every rich Jew to the telegraph poles on the Munich-Berlin road, he said. That is nonsense. But there will be cases of hardship. If you use a plane, there will be shavings.

    Breiting asked who would supply the administrative brains to run the government, assuming the National Socialist party came to power. Hitler eyed him intently. I am the master mind and my secret General Staff will produce the brains we need, he said. He flushed and grew angry. Any resistance will be broken ruthlessly. I will tolerate no opposition. They finished the interview.

    Afterward, Breiting wrote a summary. Hitler exerts over his staff semi-hypnotic influence, he noted. I was told he sometimes rages around the Brown House like a madman. He was, Breiting thought, a neurasthenic, a man of enormous egotism, with a tendency toward megalomania. Sometimes, it was said, he burst into tears. He left a strong impression, in any case; his chin, under the centerpiece of the mustache, showed great energy. As he speaks he frequently grimaces as if he would like to crush his opponent with his teeth.

    RICHARD BREITING returned to the Brown House for a second interview. It was June 1931. Hitler began to talk quickly. He talked about the need for monumental architecture and beautiful cities and new highway systems, and about the decadence of art. Also about the Jews in Parisian finance, and about election returns, about the Viennese Jews who had interfered with his ambitions to be an architect, about the imprisonment of Dr. Goebbels for slandering the Jews, about the usefulness of brutality in politics, and about the ugliness of the Reichstag building. The Reichstag, Hitler said, looked like a synagogue. The sooner the Reichstag was burned down, he said, the sooner will the German people be freed from foreign influence.

    The greatest threats to Germany, Hitler said, were the Soviet Union and the United States. The German nation must complete its reconstruction soon, before the Soviet Union becomes a world power, before the three million square miles possessed by the United States turns into an arsenal for world Jewry. That was the danger. These two colossi are still asleep, he said. When they wake up, that is the end of it for Germany.

    Breiting ventured to say, rather daringly, But, Herr Hitler, one should not see Jewish conspiracies behind every tree. People have to work things out, he said; nothing will be accomplished merely by whipping up anti-Semitism.

    Hitler became indignant. The Jews wanted to divide people. Henry Cabot Lodge was a tool of the Jews. Woe to Germany if the Jewish string-pullers were to get their way. There were forces in New York behind Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt.

    The Jews should tremble before us, he said, not we before them.

    A GERMAN FIRE ENGINEER, Hans Rumpf, wrote about the future of firebombing. One hundred airplanes, he said, each carrying a few thousand firebombs, might fly to the capital of an enemy country—for instance, Paris or London. They might release the bombs, starting one hundred thousand fires simultaneously. The hot air rising from the innumerable centers of conflagration, Rumpf wrote, would cause the so-called fire wind, which would carry the flames to points not yet affected. And in the end, all the fires would flow together into one roaring conflagration, against which no firefighting organization or machinery could stand up. The city, the whole city, would burn to the ground, from one single well planned and well executed attack.

    Rumpf ended his hypothetical air raid with: Der rote Hahn hat fliegen gelernt. Which means: The red rooster has learned to fly. It was 1931.

    THE JEWISH TELEGRAPHIC AGENCY issued a news dispatch, which was published in The New York Times. In the Grenadier-strasse in Berlin, where there was a synagogue, a group of Nazis had gathered. They had shouted Down with Judea! and attacked some pedestrians. A Jewish crowd soon collected, however, and offered resistance to the attackers, causing their retreat.

    The news dispatch also quoted from a plan to rid Germany of the Jews, without arousing foreign opinion. When the Nazis came into power, according to this plan—published in a legal journal—they would make lists of Jewish citizens. Once the Jews were listed, their citizenship could be withdrawn. When the government is sufficiently strong it will introduce the fullest measures against the Jews with the customary ‘Nazi’ severity. It was December 2, 1931.

    MOHANDAS GANDHI arrived in England. It was September 12, 1931. He chose to stay at Kingsley House, a home for the poor in London’s East End. He made a live broadcast to the United States on CBS radio. I personally would wait, if need be for ages, rather than seek to attain the freedom of my country through bloody means, he said. The world is sick unto death of blood-spilling. The world is seeking a way out and I flatter myself with the belief that perhaps it will be the privilege of the ancient land of India to show the way out to the hungering world.

    Gandhi talked to the king and queen, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Master of Balliol, George Bernard Shaw, Lord Lothian, textile workers in Lancashire, and leading Quakers.

    He wanted to talk to Winston Churchill, but Churchill declined to meet him.

    LILIAN

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