Fiction: The tragic life of Albrecht von Haar in Journal format by Peter Bakke

• Joyous day! Hitler loses to Hindenburg http://www.thestormyabyss.com/?p=401 #wwii #hitler #elections #germany #nazi #resistance #
• In Online Journalism, Burnout Starts Younger – http://nyti.ms/cnBXoo #

In Online Journalism, Burnout Starts Younger – http://nyti.ms/cnBXoo

Ada and I are celebrating this evening with dinner at the Hotel  Excelsior after we learned that Hitler lost the runoff election to old man Hindenburg. Hitler’s additional 2 million votes were not enough to overtake the old general.

There is no word yet how Hitler is taking the defeat, but his communications man, Joseph Goebbels, is said to be stricken with depression. London’s Daily Telegraph predicts the end of Hitler. Let’s hope they are correct.

The fate of the militant arm of the Nazis in the hands of the Weimar government. There are rumors that the stormtroopers will be banned throughout Germany.

Ada and I chose the Excelsior for dinner specifically because Hitler has banned his party from using the hotel. It is not widely known that Nazi officials were turned down by the Excelsior when they asked to use it as  Hitler’s Berlin headquarters. Hitler and his followers operate from the Kaiserhof instead and do not trade at the Excelsior. We should have an excellent evening together at the Askanischen Platz.

The campaign is only a week long and so everything is compressed, including rumors. Via airplane, Hitler and his flying circus are visiting  many cities each day addressing tens of thousands of admiring crowds. Hindenburg holes up at his estate.

Getting back to rumors, the biggest rumor of all is that we haven’t seen old man Hindenburg because he is dying. My sources tell me this has no truth in it. Also, rumors are spreading that his son Oskar has become a socialist and will vote for Hitler. Other rumors fly that Hindenburg’s two middle-aged daughters have become leaders of a Socialist student party.

On the other side of the fence, Hitler supposedly has become a vegetarian because he has stomach cancer. He claims he won’t live long and must win the presidency quickly to implement his plans for the German people.

SA Storm Trooper leader Ernst Roehm is back in the news. The Munich Post has published an unflattering story about the man’s homosexual proclivities. A close source tells me Hitler is enraged, but not at the newspaper. He is furious at the SA leader for once again attracting negative attention, especially during this extremely short campaign season. Hitler dispatched his lawyer, Hans Frank, to talk directly to Roehm to find out the details. Frank was stunned when tough man Roehm admitted to being ‘bisexual.’  Hitler still stands by his old SA friend but has made it clear that in no circumstance must children be involved. If children are involved Hitler told Frank that Roehm ‘Must go!’

An aside: my travels took me to the outskirts of Berlin today and I saw vagabonds at every street corner. Unlike Berlin central where the police keep them out of sight, the periphery of of Berlin is rife with the unemployed and the vagrant. This worries me. These could be Hitler voters.

The undercurrent of civil war continues to bubble on the streets as well. I came across a beggar who was recently blinded in one eye. He told me he was  a communist who had a violent tussle with Nazis who used brass knuckles with spikes. I fear that Hitler will do well tomorrow. But I hope that Hindenburg will keep the fascists from coming to power. Germans prefer order to chaos and I believe Hitler represents the worst political party ever to emerge in German history.

I’ve told Ada to confine her travels  to central Berlin and that I shall accompany her if she needs to go elsewhere in the capital.

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Prussian police have raided Nazi offices in Cologne, Berlin, Hamburg, Koenigsburg, Aachen, Duesseldorf and Frankfort-On-Main. Nazi papers have been seized which indicate the  Nazis expected the Communists to run riot if Hitler had won the election. The Nazis were prepared to go to the streets by the tens of thousands. The National government continues to investigate this near civil war. The Nazis claim the raids are a blatant tactic to prevent them from winning the upcoming run-off election on April 10. The first day of the election is scheduled for April 4. My prediction is that, based on past experience, there will be fighting in the streets on opening day and one or more fanatics, Communist or Nazi,  will be killed.

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Old man Hindenburg missed winning the presidency by a mere .4 of a percent. He polled 18,651,497 votes to Hitler’s 11,339,446 votes. The nationalists and the Communists split the remaining votes.

So, because of a shortage of less than 200,000 votes for the old man,  we’ll suffer through  a run-off election next month.

I am happy to report that high level Hilterites are despondent, propagandist Herr Goebbels particularly, but that Hitler himself is said to be ready to go at it again next month with renewed vigor. The more he can poll in the elections, the more his Nazis can be represented in the Reichstag.

A source tells me of an alarming development the night before the election. Apparently Ernst Rhoem’s SA stromtroopers, 400,000 strong, cordoned off much of Berlin in case Hitler won the vote,  apparently with the intent to take over the entire government in a coup. The Wiemar government is investigating. If true, this could result in serious repercussions for the Nazis. It rings of the unsuccessful Munich putsch, which is not a favorable impression for Herr Hitler and his minions and once again reeks of treason.

I also understand that Hitler is furious at Chancellor Bruening for setting aside all government radio programming during the election for use only for Hindenburg electioneering. It amazes me that Hindenburg gave only one speech during the entire election and it was a recording played on radio the night before the vote. It shows the old man is still beloved by many of the electorate, even in his dotage – or that the the masses are frightened by the far left and far right fighting it out in the streets and whether the marauders can actually govern if elected.

We’ll watch carefully to see how Hitler and his gang handle the next election round. I am assured the communists will run again, but the nationalists may throw in with Herr Hitler.

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British intelligence has contacted me again. Menzies wants me to be on the lookout for information about the scientific concept of “massively organized information” being developed by International Business Machines (IBM) and it’s German subsidiary Deutsche Hollerith Maschinan Gesellschaft, or Dehomag,  for short.

Apparently, Dehomag is perfecting a census system in Germany using an electronic machine that can tabulate up to 256 pieces of information about an individual on one 5×3 inch punched card. This system will revolutionize the amount of information the  government can collect about its population. What will be done with this information is still a mystery to me.

Technology is not my forte, so Menzies promised to provide more detail on this subject (and Dehomag)  in a package to be delivered tomorrow at our drop location in the Tiergarten.

As predicted, Adolph Hitler was made a German citizen by appointment this week. No major announcement was made so as not to magnify the embarrassing fact that until this week, Hitler was stateless. Very quietly he was made a counselor of Braunschweig (Brunswick) by the Nazi Minister of the Interior and Education of that state, Dietrich Klagges. Hitler is now a low-ranking government official at the Brunswick State Culture and Surveying Office. This is preposterous, but it fulfills the letter of the law. Hitler can now officially run for German President.

A source tells me that Klagges failed earlier this year to appoint Hitler as associate professor of “Politics and Organic Sociology” at the Braunschweig Technical College, which would have also conferred citizenship. The college vehemently opposed the scheme and Hitler was mortified by the local public uproar. Klagges only kept his job because he was needed to complete this week’s blatant coup. He succeeded in the scheme with the help of Nazi big wig  Hermann Goering. Without the help of Goering, Klagges could have lost nor only his position in the NSDAP, but his head as well. Thanks to the Klagges intrigue, we don’t have to call Hitler “Herr professor.”

It has been over three weeks now that the Chinese have fended off the Imperial Japanese Navy and Army.

I am mightily impressed and surprised. The Chinese have taken a beating, with thousands of civilians and soldiers dead in the streets and fields surrounding Shanghai. Despite superior guns, planes and training, the Japanese have failed to break the Chinese and have called for a “strategic retreat,” but have not left the Chinese mainland.

Japanese Admiral Shiozawa has been ‘disgraced’ and replaced by Admiral Nomura. Army General Ueda has been ‘disgraced’  and replaced by General Shirokawa. In the old days, the Japanese military Bushido creed would have required the disgraced officers to kill themselves. The Japapnese have obviously determined that such a practice would result in an unacceptable  loss of line officers and have instead come up with the ‘strategic retreat’ gambit to save face.

What can the German militarists learn from this Japanese debacle? I assume they are studying the results with typical Prussian thoroughness and come to the conclusion that the Japanese did not have enough firepower and troops focused  against the weakest points of the Chinese forces. Or they may conclude that there are just too many damn Chinese to win major land battles.

Instead of victory, the Japanese are licking their wounds and have succeeded in branding themselves as bandits by the international community. They have also strengthened the nationalist hand of Chiang Kai-shek, who is now seen as a hero.

My Chinese contacts in Berlin tell me that the whole reason for the invasion was the result of militant ultra-nationalist Japanese monks who purposefully attacked Chinese merchants and were shot and killed. This pretext of “killing Japanese citizens” by the Chinese was used as a ruse to invade Shanghai. I am guessing that a similar subterfuge was used in the Mukden incident. This kind of illicit sham by Tokyo will surely gain the attention of Hitler and his cronies. Mark my words. You cannot believe everything you read in the papers. There are Machiavellian forces at work in the world…. across the vast seas and right here in Germany.

My sources tell me that Hitler has decided to dive head first into the presidential race against Paul von Hindenburg. Herr Hitler is putting his political career on the line and perhaps his head on the chopping block. The coming weeks may very well determine his personal political fate as well as that of National Socialism. He is going all in.My instincts tell me that Hitler will be around for quite a while, regardless of the outcome, unless he is assassinated.

Once again I bring the point that in order for Hitler to run in the presidential election, he must become a German citizen. I await some news on this topic shortly. All eyes are on Brunswick as its elected Nazi leadership has the ability to appoint Hitler to a local government post, thus automatically making him a German citizen, rather than the stateless person he is at this hour. It is a rather remarkable phenomenon that most people don’t know Hitler has neither German nor Austrian citizenship.

So, why have I fixated on Herr Hitler and his Nazi followers? To our great national misfortune, I believe National Socialism will emerge victorious from this messy soup of political parties we have today in Germany. Too many people are terrified of the communists and their Soviet puppet masters. That party will go nowhere but down and out. They are checkmated on all sides. Besides, the Soviets are ruthlessly managing their economy, experiencing terrible, devastating famines. The Red Menace is too ingrained in the minds of a majority of working class and aristocratic Germans for those groups to ever turn in the leftist direction.

The Catholic Center party and the so-called conservatives are losing ground and I don’t believe Hindenburg can get a clear majority in the looming presidential campaign. Compared to Hitler’s vigor, the old man appears drained and feeble and will  only appeal to a portion of the electorate desiring a return to the old ways.

In contrast, the energetic Hitler, with populist promises and spectacular parades, is reaching across many political lines to appeal to an electorate hungry for Germany’s return to its rightful place on the world stage. His speeches are imbued with uniting Germany, not tearing it apart, which is a clever tactic. He appeals to the volk and rails against popularized common ‘enemies’ – communists, liberals, parliamentarians, The Wiemar Republicans, foreign capitalists, the strictures of the Versailles treaty and all its signers, and finally, but not least, weak-kneed diplomatic back-stabbers responsible for losing the Great war, which many Germans believe we never lost. My father boasts to this day that his artillery battalion was never defeated on the field of battle by the Russians, French, British or Americans.

My favorable political prediction for the eventual success of the Nazis does concern me enormously, of course, because underlying Hitler’s campaign to legally take control of Germany (vs. his putsch attempt in Munich 10 years ago) is an undercurrent of totalitarianism, ultra-nationalism and antisemitism. No one disputes Hitler is envious of Mussolini’s fascist success. Hitler, like Mussolini, is a rabid bully.

Herr Hitler has toned down his antisemitism as a main thrust in his speeches, but one only has to read passages from Mien Kampf to see that in backrooms he uses parasitic analogies to condemn all ‘foreigners’ in Germany, particularly Jews. I counter than German Jews are not foreigners. My family has been in this country for over 100 years. Nazi philosophy ignores the ‘Germanness,’ loyalty, and integration Jews have enjoyed in Germany, including the fact that Jews fought in the Great War in the same proportion as any other German group. Nazism is a vile philosophy cloaked in a thin veneer of respectability – the underpinnings of which are so heinous that Hitler and his staff must keep its xenophobic origins under wraps during the coming campaign. But the truth of it all will all surface one day. I hope to help make that happen.

On a related note, Ada and I went to see Franz Schrecker’s opera “Der Schmied von Gent” last night. Showing the racist face of Nazism, Brownshirts were outside the opera theater harassing patrons. You see, Schrecker is Jewish. Ada didn’t want to go into the theater when she saw the commotion, but I insisted and we continued on our way. I gripped Ada’s hand tightly and pushed through the throng. The hatred on the faces of the fascist hate mongers took my breath away. I pulled Ada close and we made it safely inside the theater.  These staged Nazi protests are not going to prevent me from supporting  artists in Berlin, regardless of race, and I will not be bullied. I will stand my ground.

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