Books: Hitler’s Rival

NEMESIS? THE STORY OF OTTO STRASSER —Douglas Reed—Houghfon Mifflin—($2.75).

Douglas Reed (Insanity Fair, Disgrace Abounding) is a supercilious, nervous British journalist, erstwhile correspondent of the London Times. His noisome Nemesis? must be taken with a grain of bath salt, but it has intrinsic interest.

It is the story of the man who, working from exile in Paris through his Black Front in Germany, may yet succeed Adolf Hitler by revolution, to bestow upon his country his own version of that disingenuous paradox, National Socialism.

Otto Strasser was born in Bavaria 42 years ago, of a civil-servant father who was a Socialist at heart, a mother who nagged the Socialism out of him. When he emerged from World War I at 20, Otto was a creditably decorated artillery Lieutenant, already tinged with politics. His Socialism was such that he fought with Von Epp’s Free Corps in 1919, to break Munich’s Communist government. (Hitler did not. But he was in Munich then, may have been with the Communist troops.)

Otto’s brother Gregor knew and trusted Hitler from the first. Otto at first preferred the straight Socialist Party, joined up with Hitler in 1925. Douglas Reed makes of the next five years a picture of spotless, struggling idealism, shows Strasser bearing with Hitler’s sellouts to big business as long as possible, walking out (in 1930) when he was sure once for all that National Socialism was betrayed.

Gregor, less astute, stayed in the Party. In 1933 he was within an ace of the Chancellorship; in 1934 he was murdered. Otto, from 1930 on, set to work organizing his Black Front. The top fourth stayed aboveground. The rest took places high & low in every Party except the Communist, and bored from within. When Hitler came into power the whole Black Front went underground or, by thousands, into concentration camps. Otto, melodramatically helped by various Black-Fronters, fled the country, started his years of writing and smuggling through revolutionary flimsies and stickers. In Vienna, in Prague, in Switzerland, in Saarbrükken, he had a series of escapes from the long arm of the Gestapo.

Strasser repeatedly tried to get into England, but England would not have him. He did get into France, shortly after the Munich bombing last fall. Thence he still manages to keep in touch with the Black Front. If the Allies had bombed Germany during the Polish phase, Strasser might have struck then. As it is, he intends to bide his time till Germans are far less confident, far more sick & tired of war.

Samples of Strasser’s “revolutionary” socialism:

>Land would be expropriated by the State, leased according to modified feudal arrangements.

>Division of capital and profits in industry (his idea in 1930): to the present owners, 49%; to the State, “as representative of the nation,” 41%; to the workers, 10%.

>”We must be equally implacable and hostile in our attitude towards capitalism and towards international Marxism.”

>As for Jews, Strasser “finds the Streicher-Stiirmer form of anti-Semitism … as stupid as it is repugnant, but . . . would retain, in dignified form, measures of restriction against the excessive spread of Jewish influence.”