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school of representational art had come to the front, they decided that they ought to have at

least one sample of this style in their collections. If they were elderly and retired they came to

the show; if they were middle-aged and busy they sent their wives or daugh ters. Twenty or

thirty thousand marks for a landscape did not shock them, on the contrary it made a Detaze

something to brag about. So it was that the profits of Lanny, his mother, and his half-sister —less

the ten per cent commission of Zoltan—covered twenty times over what they had paid to the

efficient Herr Privatdozent, and Zoltan suggested that they should pay this able promoter and

continue the splurge of glory for another week. Even Irma was impressed, and began to look at

the familiar paintings with a new eye. She wondered if it mightn't be better to save them all for

the palace with modern plumbing which she meant some day to have in England or France. To

her husband she remarked: "You see how much better everything goes when you settle down

and stop talking like a Red!"

IX

The Detaze show coincided in time with one of the strangest public spectacles ever staged in

history. The Nazis had laid the attempt to burn the Reichstag upon the Communists, while the

enemies of Nazism were charging that the fire had been a plot of the Hitlerites to enable them

to seize power. The controversy was brought to a head by the publication in London of the

Brown Book of the Hitler Terror, which charged that the Nazi Chief of Police of Breslau, one

of the worst of their terrorists, had led a group of S.A. men through the tunnel from Göring's

residence into the Reichstag building; they had scattered loads of incendiary materials all over

the place, while another group had brought a half-witted Dutch tramp into the building by a

window and put him to work starting fires with a domestic gas-lighter. This was what the whole

world was coming to believe, and the Nazis couldn't very well dodge the issue. For six or seven

months they had been preparing evidence, and in September they began a great public trial. They

charged the Dutchman with the crime, and three Bulgarian Communists and a German with

being his accessories. The issue thus became a three-months' propaganda battle, not merely in

Germany but wherever news was read and public questions discussed. Ten thousand pages of

testimony were taken, and seven thousand electrical transcriptions made of portions of the

testimony for broadcasting.

The trial body was the Fourth Criminal Senate of the German Supreme Court in Leipzig;

oddly enough, the same tribunal before which, three years previously, Adolf Hitler had

proclaimed that "heads will roll in the sand." Now he was going to make good his threat.

Unfortunately he had neglected to "co-ordinate" all five of the court judges; perhaps he didn't

dare, because of world opinion. There was some conformity to established legal procedure, and

the result was such a fiasco that the Nazis learned a lesson, and never again would political

suspects have a chance to appear in public and cross-question their accusers.

In October and November the court came to Berlin, and it was a free show for persons who

had leisure; particularly for those who in their secret hearts were pleased to see the Nazis

humiliated. The five defendants had been kept in chains for seven months and wore chains in the

courtroom during the entire trial. The tragedy of the show was provided by the Dutchman, van

der Lubbe, half-blind as well as half-witted; mucus drooled from his mouth and nose, he giggled

and grinned, made vague answers, sat in a stupor when let alone. The melodrama was supplied by

the Bulgarian Dimitroff, who "stole the show"; a scholar as well as a man of the world, witty,

alert, and with the courage of a lion, he turned the trial into anti-Nazi propaganda; defying his

persecutors, mocking them, driving them into frenzies of rage. Three times they put him out

of the room, but they had to bring him back, and again there was sarcasm, defiance, and

exposition of revolutionary aims.

It soon became clear that neither Dimitroff nor the other defendants had ever known van der

Lubbe or had anything to do with the Reichstag fire. The mistake had arisen because there was a

parliamentary archivist in the Reichstag building who happened to resemble the half-witted

Dutchman, and it was with him that the Communist Torgler had been seen in conversation. The

proceedings gradually turned into a trial of the Brown Book, with the unseen British

committee as prosecutors and the Nazis as defendants.

Goebbels appeared and denounced the volume, and Dimitroff mocked him and made him

into a spectacle. Then came the corpulent head of the Prussian state; it was a serious matter

for him, because the incendiaries had operated from his residence and it was difficult indeed to

imagine that he hadn't known what was going on. Under the Bulgarian's stinging accusations