"Almost" Part 21: Book 2, Part 11

The Night of the Long Knives

After Tom left Germany, Klaus fell into a depression. He felt as if he were at the bottom of a deep pit, and his friend had just levitated to safety and light. And around him, large pincers were sliding out of a crumbling wall.

Tom had wondered about Klaus’s relationship to Nazism. Klaus wondered this as well. He did not respect reason as an absolute, and so was deeply, tragically susceptible to passion. When reason falls, whoever screams the loudest will rise. It is an iron law.

Klaus did not believe in the supremacy of objective reason, and so he had no choice but to take an anthropological and fate-based approach to his own society. What was ‘right’ was whatever happened. Nothing could be opposed in the face of passion. How could he question passion? With what faculty would he oppose it? More passion? But Klaus was an intellectual, and not given to screaming fits. If he proved that a Nazi’s reasoning was illogical, that meant nothing. Reason was not the essence of life. It was dry, analytic, illusory. It did not touch the heart of things. Only emotions were essential. Reason was an invention of man. Emotions were given by God, the World Spirit, the Essential Animal. Reason divided men. Only passion could unite. Reason was boring. Passion was pleasure! Human reason was limited, pointless. Individual emotions were the endless movements of the Collective Soul.

The rejection of reason also sped up the decision-making process. Rather than get tied down into endless chattering debate – as in the Weimar Republic – the most passionate voice would always win the day. And, to be frank (and this was always understood implicitly), if arguments got out of hand, violence could always resolve matters. And why not? A man willing to maim and kill for a course of action was clearly the most passionate, the most committed to it. And if he won the day, then certainly the World Spirit was behind him. Might was right. Actually, ‘right’ had ceased to exist. ‘Might’ just was.

Now when the terrors of competing tribes descend upon helpless humanity, all the oldest instincts come into play. When dangerous hordes roam the land, individuals begin casting about for a protective group. Klaus fervently hoped that it would not come to that. But things did not look good.

On the night of January 30, 1933, endless columns of torch-bearing Nazi Stormtroopers marched through all the major cities of Germany. They had two main missions in the months that followed: show their might, and destroy the Fuhrer’s enemies. They had pillaged the offices of the Socialist, Fascist, Nationalist and Communist parties, and gathered the names of all members. After that, it was open season. On February 28, the parliamentary Reichstag was set on fire. The Nazis used the event as an excuse for the most bloody persecutions. Herman Goering was in charge of the Prussian police, and he gave them the authority to shoot without consequences. He attached to the police thousands of young Nazis as Hilfspolizi – ‘assistant police’ – and then pointed them at the Communists and Socialists. On March 2, Wilhelm Frick passed Schutzhaft – protective custody – which gave the police powers to imprison citizens without trial or cause, in the newly-formed concentration camps. Hindenburg – then still the titular head of state – suspended civil liberties after the Reichstag fire. Citizens no longer had freedom of the press, of speech, of association or protection from arbitrary arrest...