Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

BURNING HEAVENS REFLECTED IN MUD PUDDLE 97'At the beginning of 1920, we succeeded in renting the councilchamber of the Sternecker brewery in Sternecker Alley as a businessoffice. It was a small, vaulted, dark room with brown wooden paneling,about six yards long and three broad. On overcast days everything wasdark.'We brightened up the walls with posters announcing our meetings,and for the first time hung up our new party flag. When we held ameeting, it was spread out on the table — in short, it remained alwaysbefore our eyes.'In this dark back room, Hitler delivered his hour-long speechesseveral times a week to fifteen or twenty persons; a few party comradesand the friends they brought along. There he stood amid the cigarsmokein his gray soldier's uniform. He coughed out of his gas-corroded throat,and shouted: the day will come, 'when the banner of our movement willfly over the Reichstag, over the Castle in Berlin, yes, over everyGerman house.'Among the audience was that twenty-three-year-old student, formerlya war aviator, a volunteer in the List Regiment'. He saw the twenty men,he saw the gray speaker, and he asked himself — as he later reported:Was this man a fool, or was he the man who would save all Germany?He decided the latter. The thundering voice shook Rudolf Hess, andcarried him away. He became a party member and soon a close friend ofthe speaker's.Hess was originally a purer type than most of the avid and brokenfigures in this armed Bohemia. All the greater was his determination tothink his way into their life and activity. To him violence was not anurge, but a principle. Nature had created him to be the mirror andsloganizer of other men's savagery; lending his approval where strongmen entered upon dubious ventures; lending encouragement wheredifficulties caused their determination to flag; and finally lending evenhis hand, when a harder man had transformed his ideas into a command.This flying, shooting, leaflet-distributing student, mathematician andlater geographer embodied in his longing and his attitudes theintellectual who is becoming the new ruler of our age. A lone engineerstands in his control room, high above the mighty gleaming machine; hepresses a button and the machine begins to roar