World War: Durable Dranger

The German Kaiser who died last week (see p. 30) left to the German Reichs-führer not only his dream of Drang nach Osten, but the historical theory behind it, plus one of the very men who worked hardest to make the dream come true. The parallelism was very much in evidence as the Battle of Syria joined (see above).

The Berlin-to-Bagdad Railroad* (which Germans began working on in 1888, left four-sevenths completed in 1914) was intended to make the Kaiser’s dream come true. The mere thought of that 1,850-mile rail line for 15 years kept the British lion sleepless and roaring. To prove his friendship for Sultan Abdul Hamid’s Turkey, owner of the roadbed, Wilhelm II visited Damascus in 1898, dropped a wreath on the tomb of Saladin (Saracen Napoleon during the Crusades), expansively designated himself friend of the world’s then 300,000,000 Moslems, half of whom were living under the Union Jack. Führer Hitler’s Stooge Mussolini did the same thing in 1937.

Intellectual class was lent the Kaiser’s Drang dream by Geopoliticians Paul Rohrbach and Friedrich Naumann. It was Dr. Rohrbach who contended that the British Empire could be attacked and mortally wounded in the Near East. That sounded good to the Kaiser. It has also sounded good to Herr Hitler, whose world-swallowing ideas are formulated by retired Major General Professor Karl Haushofer, a contemporary and fellow ideologist of Herr Doktors Rohrbach and Naumann. In Syria today is a direct human link between the Drang dreams of Hitler and Hohenzollern. He is Baron Max von Oppenheim, 81, who has been snooping around the Near East since 1893. Born of a Cologne banking family, short, fat, bouncy, shoe-button-eyed, he has agreeable manners and an Arctic mustache. A crack archeologist, he discovered and dug up at Tell Halaf in Upper Mesopotamia (now Iraq) a temple-palace stuffed with nightmarish, colossal statuary carved by the Subaraeans, a people flourishing around 3500 B.C. Off & on, the digging continued for more than 18 years: his treasures were split between museums in Berlin and Aleppo.

Excavation of cubistic-faced gods was not all little Baron Max was up to during his half-century in the Near East. He was also pioneering the Berlin-to-Bagdad Railroad, and serving as the Kaiser’s confidential intelligence agent. One of the world’s greatest authorities on Bedouins, Baron von Oppenheim still loves to don their dress and disappear among them for long periods.

“I have two souls,” he declared during a lecture tour of U.S. universities in 1931. “One is that of a man of the world who enjoys ease and comfort and a nice season at Newport. The other is that of a man who likes to squat in a dirty Arab tent, full of Arabs, and eat with his fingers. . . . The desert is my bride. …” Adolf Hitler was fighting only Bolsheviks, Oppenheim added, and nice persons needn’t be afraid: “We are not a people of revenge. . . . We want only a chance to work. …”

The Baron is now getting his chance to work in the Middle East. He is said recently to have been invaluable to Fritz Grobba, roving Nazi diplomat, in stirring up trouble among the Iraqi. Constantly expressing his Hitler loyalty, Baron von Oppenheim raises his hand and heils even when he is talking on the telephone alone in his room. It happens that the little Baron Max is a Jew whom the Führer raised to Honorary Aryan status.

*Really from Constantinople to the mouth of the Persian Gulf.