Josephine
Herbst was born in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1897. Educated at the University
of California she became a freelance writer with her material appearing
in several journals including the radical, New
Masses.
In 1928 Herbst published her first novel, Nothing
is Sacred. This was followed by Money
for Love (1929), Pity Is Not Enough
(1933) and The Executioner Waits
(1934).
In 1935 Herbst went to Germany as a special
correspondent for the New York Post.
She also reported on the Spanish Civil War
for the newspaper.
After returning to the United States she published Satan's
Sergeants (1941) and Somewhere
the Tempest Fell (1947). Other books include The
Burning Bush, a literary and personal history of the 1920s
and Hunter of Doves, a collection
of novelettes. Josephine Herbst died in 1969.
(1)
Josephine
Herbst, The German Underground War, The
Nation (8th January, 1936)
How long will the psychological reasons for submission to Hitler hold
in the face of continuing economic instability for the great mass
of people? Hitler has been successful in selling to the Germans the
idea that he saved the country and all Europe from bolshevism, and
that bolshevism is a destructive force, a strictly Jewish movement.
Lately the term bolshevism with too much use has begun to lose its
sharp edge. The Catholics also have been accused of bolshevism. The
result has been to throw them into the opposition movement. In the
Saar one of the illegal papers of the underground movement appears
with the hammer and sickle combined with the Catholic cross. A priest
about to be arrested was warned by the underground route; his house
was surrounded by workers and peasants from the neighborhood, few
of whom were Catholic, and the troopers coming to arrest him turned
back at the sight of the dense crowd.
The existence of the underground
movement is denied in the legal press, but twenty illegal papers come
out regularly in Berlin alone. Hundreds of others appear irregularly.
The papers are distributed by children and by workers during their
working hours. The penalty for distributing such contraband may be
the concentration camp; it may be death. Strikes are treason, and
leaders are punished by death at the hands of a firing squad or by
sentences to concentration camps. Yet strikes go on. Dozens occurred
last summer, especially in the metal trades. Sometimes the strike
consisted in a passive laying down of tools for an hour. Sometimes
work was merely slowed up, "sticking," as they term it,
"to the hands." Demonstrations used to be made for the release
of Thälmann, the Communist leader, but lately there have been
none, and it is not known for certain whether he is alive or dead.
Only Germans who get their information from the legal press have any
illusions about the so-called "bloodless revolution" of
the Nazis; blood has flowed and is flowing. But if this last year
was marked by the further concentration of wealth in the hands of
the big industrialists, it is also notable that in the same period
the underground movement made its greatest progress.
The outside world is always
impatient of the predicament of a particular nation. Other people
are always stupid and gulled by their leaders. Even within Germany
itself some underground workers still puzzle at the suddenness of
Hitler's blow. How could the powerful trade-union movement have been
so easily crushed? The German worker, they say, was ideologically
the best-informed worker in the world; he read economics, was versed
in Marxist theory. The German worker was also patient and endowed
with power to wait and endure. His very virtues became a trap for
him. His long training under an earlier militaristic Germany in which
order was a god made him an easier dupe.
It has taken time to recover
from the blow of Hitler's seizure of power. At first Socialists and
Communists did not work together and had no association with outside
groups. But conversion is not the aim of the underground. Communists
are willing to work with Catholics for religious liberty, and if,
as an underground worker told me, half of a group of Socialists working
with Communists in getting out a paper turn Communist, such an event
is the outcome of an experience and not the focus of the movement.
That neutrals have become weary of the parades, the constant orders
to beflag houses, to appear on streets for "spontaneous"
demonstrations has made it a little easier for the underground to
work. The spying eye may not be so willing to see all that goes on
around it. Moreover, the circle of Hitler's enemies widens every month.
New recruits for the underground are made by Hitler himself. When
he dissolves the Stahlhelm he suddenly touches many a family not formerly
antagonistic. As yet they may merely not be so ready to hang out flags;
they may smother their resentment and grow only a trifle more angry
at the rise of prices; but by these tokens they serve the opposition
whether they know it or not.
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