Never in history have there been such vast numbers of people to add the influence of the multitude to the herd instinct to conform. The greatest tyrannies of long ago, when the human tribe was a fraction of its size today, the Roman Empire, the Mongol Khanates, or even the Indian Mogul Kingdoms, disposed of power over small populations compared with the more than 250,000,000 now ruled by Hitler or the 200,000,000 by Stalin. In this day of electric communications the huge bulk of such aggregates does not become unmanageable. The more territory Hitler conquers, the more loot he has, the more permanent resources to exploit, and the more people to enslave at work useful for the Nazis. Our only hope against him is for his military defeat at the hands of ourselves and our friends.
Q. You have made discouragingly plain why there are so few political assassinations in Germany, but couldn’t somebody like the fellow who killed King Alexander and Barthou in Marseilles be found?
A. I do not think so. That fellow, Vlada Georgiev, was a member of the famous Imro, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, which had the only system I ever heard of to guarantee that their members carry out assigned assassinations, no matter what the police terror might be. The Imro’s object was to unify and obtain the greatest possible degree of independence for Macedonia, divided among Bulgaria, Greece, and Jugoslavia. Their chief weapon was assassination, and when the Imro decreed a person’s death it was about as certain to be carried out as any human decision can be. The procedure was to appoint a killer and provide that he be killed unless he fulfilled his task. To make this principle work it was necessary that the appointed assassin realize he would more surely die if he failed than if he succeeded and risked legal execution. A long tradition of killings within the Imro made this fearful compulsion effective.
The mechanics of the system were simple. Like the Russian Nihilists under Boris Savinkov, the Imro used to try and formally condemn their victims to death. Thereupon the committee would draw beans from a bag. The man drawing a black bean was the appointed assassin. He was A. He had to leave the room. The others drew again. The man drawing the second black bean, B, was appointed to kill A if A didn’t kill the chosen victim. B then left the room and a third black bean, C, was appointed to kill B if B failed to carry out his assignment, and so on until the whole committee had lined up, each with a gun in the back of another. No one knew who among his comrades was his potential executioner, but each knew that death was certain if the decisions of the committee were not obeyed. Now this sort of system would work, I believe, even in Nazi Germany, but the democracies are far too squeamish to indulge in such practical methods.[1]
FOOTNOTE:
[1] A German statistician objected to this description of the Imro system on the ground that the second to the last man would know that it was the last man who was delegated to kill him if necessary; and the last man would not have a gun in his back. True enough mathematically, but the Imro system was run by practical assassins, not mathematicians. They never let it get to the last man; the existence of the chain, incomplete though it had to be, guaranteed that the originally appointed assassin performed his duty.
Q. Did the Nazis or the Bolsheviks practice assassination?
A. They both rather looked down on individual killings as dilettante. They preferred to do away with their victims en masse; especially the Bolsheviks. I remember at the time of the Blood Purge of June 30, 1934, when Hitler had murdered one thousand or more of his opponents, a Polish correspondent in Moscow was expelled by the Soviet authorities because he commented in a dispatch from the Russian capital that the Bolsheviks regarded Hitler’s purge with the same disdain a wholesaler would have toward the operations of a retailer. One thousand dead would be retail business for the Bolsheviks. The Communists, however, stood programmatically on the platform of no “individual terror” as they put it, because they considered that assassinations of single persons were ineffective, time and energy wasting.
The Nazis spurned no weapon, and so they murdered right and left from the beginning. It was their type of young men, whether yet organized in the Nazi Party or not, who committed most of the political assassinations of postwar Germany from Rathenau and Erzberger until Hitler came to power. Meanwhile, they deliberately provoked battles with the young men of every other faction, Democrats as well as Communists, in assemblies and on the streets, and the deaths from these clashes numbered hundreds yearly.
After Hitler came to power you might have expected individual assassinations to cease. But no, the murders by individual Nazis of individual enemies, business rivals, or of anyone they happened to dislike, continued through the year 1933 and it was not until 1934 that the Gestapo took over the monopoly of murder. No claim of Hitler’s is more ridiculous than his boast that the Nazi revolution was bloodless. There is no record of how many Germans perished at the hands of the uniformed bullies of the Nazi Party for strictly personal reasons, but the numbers surely ran into thousands. I was a correspondent in Berlin during that bloody year and I can testify as an eyewitness.