Chapter 3

(AUG 1939 GERMANY AND STALIN SIGN PEACE PACT)

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”

― George Orwell, 1984 (First published in 1948)

I returned to my centrally located base of operations in a former Jewish neighborhood in Berlin that was virtually deserted for reasons graphically described in “Mein Kampf” by the Fuhrer himself. The systematic destruction of an entire culture had already begun long before this seminal year of 1939 only the world was poorly informed and the German people were basically in the dark.

There was little doubt in my mind that I was in a partial fugue-like state and totally depressed after witnessing the opening round of Nazi evil flexing its muscles in a supposed future neutral state where neutrality was merely a word to cover its ass when the chips were down. I remembered the same feeling right after a bloody battle in the American Civil War and again when I was seriously down in the frozen cold of Valley Forge. It was time for me to ease up a bit and gave some TLC (tender loving care) to my brain-housing group in order to get back on track with the original purpose of my visit into the past.

When the news of the new Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact flashed over the teletype wires in my study, I at first had a hearty laugh because the whole thing was a bit surreal in a time of stark reality. It was like seating a lion next to a tiger and telling them that they were actually cousins of a sort with the same mission to rule the world with an iron fist and no mercy for the innocent and the less favored.

It was just a matter of time before the lion ate the tiger or the tiger bit off the head of the lion with little sense of guilt or hesitation for the niceties of diplomatic accord.

I had to smile thinking of the German representative sitting down across the table from the Soviet representative and actually smiling like they were two ordinary human beings and not monsters gleefully dividing up the imagined spoils of war like rogue bandits totally out of control in a frightened world.

I huddled in my warm little hotel room thinking of frozen corpses stacked like cordwood in a deserted forest. The images of the Holocaust haunted my reverie like ghosts of Christmas past. I had to get away from the makeshift newsroom and decided to go to one of the few remaining Cabarets in a bad part of the city seldom visited by officialdom.

The place was murky and dark.

The darkness was a blessing in disguise because it helped to soften the harsh patterns of disrepair and the rotting fabric in the curtains. It did not look at all like the promised new paradise of the “New Germany” described in the travel brochures at the airport and in travel agencies all across the European Continent.

I listened to the music and even bought a drink for a pretty creature with sparkling eyes. It looked like a female, acted like a female and talked like a female but my gut told me “beware” because this was only an imitation woman. The truth was in the size of the thick wrist that held the concoction of unknown ingredients. Then, there was the ridiculous price that made me the fool and the creature my accomplice in fostering a lie.

I was in an Orwellian world where the Truth was really a Lie and where what you saw was not what you got with all things considered.

The music was sharp and vulgar as was the dancing and the jokes were truly obscene when one understood the double meaning. It was that concept of “doublespeak” that was the true joke because only the dense escaped the sorrow and the despair of the unfortunate intelligent.

They were my hidden enemies, these Germans, vile Nazis, and the Soviets, masters of genocide far greater than Hitler himself, but I could understand the newsworthiness of the moment and the unrequited hope of a generation wishing for peace but knowing war was on their doorstep.

Strangely, I saw some red-striped high ranking officers lurking in the shadows along with the serpent-eyed little men that enjoyed the job of interrogating more than life itself. Soon, the other customers would have to face up to the fact of facing the bleak prospects of global war once again in their lifetime. They had my sympathy because I was born in war, grew up in war and spent the better part of my original lifetime in the midst of war without end. At least, I had been far enough down on the totem pole to be an order follower, a trigger puller and did not have the responsibility of sending men out to die without ever actually knowing the real reason why.

The “Non-Aggression Pact” was a big deal to the rest of the world but the two signers of the agreement preferred that their own people stayed fairly ignorant of the contents because it would only confuse them after years of propaganda that the other party was the boogie man in the closet waiting to eat them up as a snack before bedtime.