Hitler's peace

Moritz Schlick, my near neighbor in Vienna and the Vienna Circle’s leader, had invited me to join the group. The circle’s aim was to make philosophy more scientific, and while I had found it hard to feel much in common with them-several of the circle’s members were theoretical physicists, about as easy to talk to as men from Mars-it soon became clear that just to be involved with philosophy and the Vienna Circle was in itself a political act. The Nazis were set on the persecution of all those who didn’t agree with them, including the Vienna Circle, quite a few of whom were Jews. And after the election of the pro-Nazi Engelbert Dollfuss as chancellor of Austria, I decided to join the Communist Party. It was a party to which I belonged until the long, hot, and, for me, promiscuous summer of 1938.

By then I was living and lecturing in Berlin, where I was engaged in an affair with a Polish aristocrat, the Princess Elena Pontiatowska. She was a close friend of Christiane Lundgren, a UFA film studio actress who was herself sleeping with Josef Goebbels. Through Christiane I ended up meeting Goebbels socially on several occasions and, because of my Communist Party membership, of which neither Goebbels nor the princess was aware (nor, for that matter, did they know anything of my being half Jewish), it was not long before I found myself approached by the Russian People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the NKVD, and asked if I would spy on the German minister.

The idea of spying on the Nazis held considerable appeal. It was already clear there was going to be another European war. I told myself I would be doing my anti-Fascist bit in the way others had done during the Spanish Civil War. And so I agreed to report on any conversations I had with Goebbels. But after the Munich agreement in September of 1938, I became more actively involved. I agreed to accept an invitation to join the Abwehr, the military intelligence wing of the German army, with a view to supplying more detailed information to the NKVD.

In order to magnify my informal standing in the Abwehr, the NKVD provided me with some information that, at the time, I thought to be harmless. Later on, I discovered, to my horror, that the NKVD had used me to give the Nazis the names of three members of the Polish Secret Service. These three agents, one of them a woman just twenty-two years of age, were subsequently arrested, tortured by the Gestapo, tried by a German People’s Court, and guillotined at the notorious Plotzensee Prison in November 1938. Sickened at having been used by the Russians to rid themselves of people they regarded with no less hatred than they regarded the Germans, I severed my contacts with the NKVD, resigned my lectureship at Berlin University, and returned home to Harvard with my tail between my legs.

The plane lurched again and then seemed to wallow like a small ship in the trough of an invisible wave.

I now regarded my former membership in the German Communist Party as a youthful indiscretion. I told myself that if I was ever in Berlin or Vienna again it would be because the war was over, in which case what the OSS might think of my former political allegiances would hardly matter very much.

At last the plane landed at Shannon, where we stopped to refuel, stretch our legs, and say good-bye to the naval commander, who was to fly north to Larne in another plane to meet his new ship. The rest of us flew east to Stranraer, where I sent telegrams to some of the people I hoped to see before catching the train south to London. I even sent one to Diana back in Washington, informing her that I had arrived in Britain safely. And forty-five hours after leaving New York, I arrived at Claridge’s.

Though buttressed with heavy timbers and sandbags, all building windows crisscrossed with tape to cut down on flying glass, the West End of London still looked much as I remembered it. The bomb damage was confined to the East End and the docks. The Americans I saw on leave were nearly all Air Force, kids most of them, just as Roosevelt had said. Some didn’t look old enough to be served alcohol, let alone fly a B-24 on a bombing mission to Hamburg.

Although it was comparatively early when I checked into my hotel, I decided to go straight to bed and drank a glass of scotch to help me find oblivion. I was finally drifting off to sleep when I heard the air-raid siren. I put on my dressing gown and slippers and went down to the shelter, only to find that few of the other hotel guests had bothered to do the same. Returning to my room when the all-clear sounded, I had just closed my eyes again when there was another warning; this time, walking along the landing toward the emergency stairs, I met a small, piggy-looking man wearing evening dress, with red hair, round glasses, and a large cigar. He resembled a cherub thickened with alcohol and pinched with disappointment, and was quite unperturbed by the high-pitched purr-like a heavenly choir of dead cats-of the siren.