Is Tomorrow Hitler's? 200 Questions on the Battle of Mankind

by H. R. Knickerbocker

“That made sixty, and I was very weak, but finally when they pulled me off the table again and yelled at me, ‘You served Communists in your soup kitchen,’ I still had enough strength left to say, ‘You ought to be ashamed to say that because I served you and you and you, but no Communists.’ This made them angrier than ever and the last twenty blows were the worst, and when I rolled off the table they picked me up, and the Captain struck me across the face with his riding crop, and then a Storm Trooper hit me on the jaw with his fist and knocked me across the room so that I fell and wrenched my knee.”

The livid scar of the riding crop flamed across her face, and the dressing on her knee confirmed that injury. I asked the medical attendant to describe her injuries as they were when she arrived and he confirmed that her back had been cut deep into the musculature. Yes, I wish Anne Morrow Lindbergh had been with me to see and hear this story, although it is only one of hundreds of thousands which could have been related first by German victims of the Nazis and now by the vanquished of the entire continent.

Mrs. Lindbergh says the “Wave of the Future,” by which she means the wave of collectivism, the wave of Nazism, is irresistible, and hence we would be wrong to try to resist it, because by resisting we would only increase the casualty list. She dismisses the brutalities, atrocities, inhumanities of the conquering Nazis as merely the “scum” on the wave, something which will pass away and leave the clear blue water of the New Order. But she has not viewed this Wave of the Future at firsthand and so she has not been able to perceive that the scum reaches all the way from the top to the bottom of the Nazi wave; that there is no clear water beneath the surface brutality of the New Order, that from its beginning until today and until it is destroyed it has been, is, and will be unqualifiedly evil.

Atrocities? I assure you there are more atrocities being committed this very moment by the hosts of the Gestapo, the Black Guards, the Storm Troops, and all the other ruffians of Hitler throughout prostrate Europe than you have ever dreamed about. If only we could arrange to have all our isolationists, our weasel-worded noninterventionists, and our complaisant converts to the Wave of the Future take a trip to Europe and let them observe the fate of the 150,000,000 under Hitler’s heel. The Wave of the Future is a wave of blood and tears. What American in his right mind can wish to live if this wave engulfs our world?

Q. You mentioned Jan Valtin’s book, Out of the Night. Do you consider the book authentic?

A. It is the most accurate description of Nazi and Bolshevik Terror I have ever seen in print. Valtin tells from the inside of the G.P.U. and the Gestapo what an American newspaperman working in Russia and Germany could observe in fragments from the outside. There is not an incident in the book, however gruesome, which could not have happened, no matter how improbable it may appear to a reader far away from the horrors of totalitarian police methods. I recommend the book to every American, because these two evil weapons of the tyrant states are operating today in our country and Valtin has given us the most authoritative picture of their activities we have ever had. Whatever he was in the past, this strange young German has done more for democracy by writing these grim memoirs than most democrats who have been democrats all their lives.

Q. Since Hitler attacked Russia, don’t you think it is no longer correct to say Nazism and Communism are the same? Hasn’t Hitler proved now that he is really an enemy of Bolshevism and is protecting the world against it?

A. That would be the equivalent of saying that one monarchy would not attack another or that you could not have war between two republics. The war between Hitler and Stalin is a war between two terroristic collectives. The collectivist form of their economy is almost identical, both of them being a form of state capitalism; both are supported by police terror and both found their principle motive power, the fuel to run their society, in hatred.

Both avowed that the end justifies the means and both thereupon employed every conceivable form of fraud, deceit, and violence to attain their ends. Pagan, atheistic rejection of Christianity, deliberate denial of even the desirability of the principle of universal brotherly love was common to the two totalitarian creeds. The fact that the two monsters of malevolence finally turned their hatred upon one another actively only emphasizes the identical character of the fratricidal twins. What of their essential features has changed since they warred upon each other? Nothing whatever. Does the Russo-German war prove Hitler’s thesis that he was an implacable enemy of Bolshevism? Nonsense! Hitler’s brand of Bolshevism is infinitely more menacing to us all than any produced in Russia. The bibles of the twin regimes, Mein Kampf and Das Kapital, preach identical doctrine: Here, hate everybody of a different race; there, hate everybody of a different class. Since Jesus Christ was on earth the Communist Party and the Nazi Party and the states they founded are the first institutions of such dimensions to be built avowedly and officially on hatred.

In Russia they began by saying they had to hate and kill in order to clear the land of all classes hostile to a socialist world, in order to make room for a happier life. But hatred becomes a habit, grows, expands monstrously until it cannot find enough victims. Before the Bolsheviks even gained a far-off glimpse of a happier life their hatred had become an end in itself. They began, by hating, as they thought, rationally; they finished by hating and killing themselves.