Books: Dirty Work

THE BERLIN— DIARIES—Edited by Dr. Helmut Klotz—Morrow ($2.75). Because in Germany today truth is in a state of siege, no one really knows what has been going on inside the lines there. All the world knows for sure is that Hitler has somehow managed to capture the submarine of state. The Berlin Diaries, purporting to be the genuine journal of an anonymous Berlin War Office official, gives an eyewitness day-by-day account of the muddled machinations that made a loud demagog into Germany’s Chancellor. Sure to be labeled propaganda or forgery by indignant Nazis, the essential authenticity of The Berlin, Diaries is vouched for by Edgar Ansel Mowrer, onetime Berlin correspondent of the Chicago Daily News and head of the Berlin Foreign Correspondents’ Bureau until expelled from Germany last year by the Hitler government. Anonymous Author ”General XV diary runs from May 1932 to January 1933— from the fall of Brüning to the accession of Hitler. A War Office official, he was apparently in close touch with most of the main political actors; a soldier but obviously no Prussian, he has little love for Hindenburg. His diary is peopled almost entirely with knaves and fools. Nearest approach to a hero is Schleicher, but as even Schleicher’s intelligence becomes more & more powerless to stop the Nazis. he is written off as a ”trimmer.” Greatest villain of the piece is old Paul von Hindenburg, who is accused of knifing Brü ning, reluctantly abandoning his favorite von Papen, using Schleicher and striking a deal with Hitler—all because of his anxiety to save his own and his friends’ East Prussian estates from an investigation that would have showed up the Junker squires as tax-evaders and misappropriators of government funds. According to Author “X,” Hitler overcame Hindenburg’s dislike and distrust of him by suggested plans of campaign against France, by promising to quash the threatened land-scandals investigation. Author “X,” who is after all a professional soldier, notes with enthusiasm various schemes for launching the next war— one of them a plan to flank the new French frontier fortresses by striking through Dutch South Limburg; another, a bacteriological offensive, to be started before a declaration of war. Many a U. S. reader will be more disagreeably impressed by these frank speculations than by Author “X’s” revelations of political chicanery.