Dictators Dissected

U. S. Newshawk John L. Spivak set out last year to peek under the lids of Europe's dictatorships. He had a glowing reputation as "America's greatest reporter" based on his books, Georgia Nigger and America Faces the Barricades. Partial to underdogs, he paid calls on Italy, Germany, Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia over a period of five months. Despite radical bias and E. Phillips Oppenheim sensationalism, his findings, published last week as Europe Under The Terror,* gave U. S. readers a good chance to size up both Europe's tyrants and the people they tyrannize.

Italy's tyrants, suggests Spivak, are clowns, its people poltroons. Benito Mussolini has the worst economic situation in Europe and the least rebellion to contend with. Nevertheless, though every Fascist officer says, "There are no strikes in Italy," Spivak dug out records of 153 illegal strikes under Fascism. The humblest Italian is paralyzed with fear by the secret police ("The Bats") headed by an imitation Mussolini. Another imitation Mussolini, handsome President Tullio Cianetti of the Confederation of Labor, conceded that "Fascism has not abolished the class struggle or class distinctions." Mussolini, says Spivak, has smashed the middle classes, degraded the workers and all but bankrupted Big Business. His standbys are the Army, the Fascist! and the War veterans who have been settled on farms.

"The people," writes Spivak, "know that they are hungry but they do not realize that Mussolini, faced with the imminent collapse of his regime because of the condition of Italian industry, the disintegration of the middle class and the increasing unrest among workers reduced to less than a subsistence level, was virtually compelled to make this gamble for Ethiopia. With that land in his grasp Mussolini would have a place for his unemployed, he would have raw materials which Italy sorely needs and could borrow money from the world's bankers on the conquered country's undeveloped resources."

Germany's tyrants Spivak describes as super-efficient grafting gangsters, its people dolts. Spivak quotes an anonymous U. S. businessman as charging Nazi officials with systematic shakedowns of business for "protection" against boycotts. Espionage is carried to the point of ingenious Dictaphone-telephones which record conversations within a room even when the telephone is on the hook.

Hitler's graft, according to Spivak, is more respectable: The Munich publishing firm of Franz Eher publishes the official Nazi organ, Volkischer Beobachter; most school textbooks; and Hitler's best seller, Mem Kampf. Even over Minister of Economics Dr. Hjalmar Schacht's desperate embargo on marks, Nazi leaders are suspected of having smuggled out of Germany millions of marks for a Nazi rainy day.

The workers, say Spivak, do not hate the Jews. "The only people who hate the Jews," said an unemployed German, "are Party people [Nazis]. The Party people hate them because they want their businesses and their jobs. . . . When the Jews had business we had work."

Said a German banker: "We are making large profits in our heavy industries, in our armament works, but we can draw out only 6%. The rest goes into Government bonds besides all the taxes we have to pay-taxes which are always growing bigger. These paper profits are of no value to industry or to ourselves."

Germany's future, as seen by a businessman: bankruptcy within a year; inflation; more unemployment and starvation; a Germany of "marvelous buildings, wonderful roads, a great army and--nothing to eat"; the collapse of the Nazi regime; an Army dictatorship; the return of the Hohenzollerns.

The Nazis are not even one of the two biggest groups in Germany, according to Spivak. These are the pro-Hohenzollerns and the Communists. The underground Communists (about 50,000) are superbly organized. From Paris Spivak made an appointment to meet a high Communist in a Hamburg night club. The man showed up in his uniform as a Nazi official. Said he: ''The Reichswehr is far more shrewd than the Nazi Party. The General Staff is composed of scholars who know not only the military situation but the political and economic as well. . . . Before Hitler is through he will have helped considerably to wreck the already weak capitalist system here."

This Communist in disguise estimated that German prisons now hold some 200,000, concentration camps another 100,000. Communists, once decimated by "our own carelessness," now organize in cells of three, are rarely caught. Suspected Communists are usually murdered in the parks by Nazis, infrequently tried and executed. The German Communists predict the next war will last less than a year, after which a civil revolt will smash the Army and the Nazi regime.

Poland's tyrants, according to Spivak, are amiable, intelligent playboys, its people hopeless serfs. Asked what he most wanted, a Polish peasant subsisting on potatoes replied: "If I could have a little salt for my potatoes." Pressed for a serious answer, he stammered, "Well, if I could have a little sugar I could have sugar in my tea on Sundays." Told by Spivak that these were trifles, he replied with dignity, "Salt in potatoes is no trifle."

Polish Communists seemed more passionate, more vengeful, less efficient than German Communists. They specialized in foreign affairs. Said one: "Poland and Germany are at present trying to draw France away from its pact with the Soviet Union because France and the Soviet Union are well-nigh invincible. Polish enmity against Czechoslovakia and Rumania is based upon its efforts to keep them away from a Russian bloc. The next war is being planned against the Soviet Union."

Members of Poland's small ruling class admit the people's poverty, the sorry state of Polish capitalism, deplore their inability to do anything about it.

Austria, under a foreign-supported and schismatic dictatorship (see p. 20), is the only nation to produce underground rebels with a sense of humor. Their best joke: to distribute an official-looking notice on counterfeit police stationery warning the populace to defend itself against ordinary criminals because all the energies of the police were required to catch political criminals.

The United Front underground organization includes about 75,000 Communists, 75,000 Revolutionary Socialists and 80,000 trade unionists. Wrecked by the Feb. 12, 1934 revolt, the Social Democratic Schutz-bund still has a fearless nucleus and lots of guns. Against these is a Nazi organization of 55,000, chiefly among farmers and students.

Czechoslovakia is a democracy but Spivak included a chapter on its terror because Czechoslovak peasants, like Poles, eat potatoes without salt, give up everything they have to tax collectors to pay for Czechoslovakia's huge Army.

Europe Under the Terror, like the peasants' potatoes, must be taken with a little salt. Readers will be considerably baffled to know how this U. S. investigator, who speaks only English and German, managed to evoke such dangerous confidences from the most illiterate classes in Italy, Poland and Czechoslovakia through interpreters. Author Spivak is a shade too ready to forecast the collapse of tyrannies, to overestimate the potency of the rebellious spirit. His book is valuable as a document of a kind that rarely emerges from the censored murk of dictatorship.

*Simon & Schuster, $2.50.

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