Ein Zwiegesprach by Robert Ley

Inga - Ein Zwiegesprach by Robert Ley, written August 14, 1945

My Wife, how I am thinking of you. I know you are dead, lying under the grass, already for 2 3/4 years, under the knotty oaks, birch-trees and pines in the ancestors' forest at Rettland and yet you are bodily near to me. I am feeling you. You are embracing me with your love, your charm and your beauty. Illegirl how beautiful you were! Beautiful in body, soul and spirit. One did not know, what more one should admire about you, your tall figure, your noble face or your long blonde hair. This external beauty was paired with a clean soul, a true character, high intelligence and a wonderful voice. Your clear soprano enchanted everybody. You were a rare creation of Our Lord. Sometimes one was tempted to believe in a trick of nature, so ethereally transparent was your white skin. And yet you were reality, for you gave me three children who are your image. Are they still alive and how are they? How I worry about them and yet I am completely helpless and unable to protect them. Fate played terribly upon me: first it took the wife from me and now it is taking my children. But I don’t want to write about that now.

You are entering my cell again. You want to talk to me. I am willing. What is life - you ask me - didn’t I give it voluntarily, when I knew, that I am incurably sick and only within a few years would languish away in decay and pain. I wanted to die just as I was born, beautiful and young. You were right, my girl, and yet it isn’t always so. I too tried it once. When catastrophe came over us, I was near despair. There I tempted God, I really did everything, in painful grief for my people, in memory of my dead Führer and in presentiment of my fate, to finish my life. You know, how seriously I meant it. You were also with me that time. And yet, I didn’t succeed. I do not want to continue with the story, how I wandered over snow-fields on the ‘Wilden’ and the ‘Zahmen Kaiser’ 2,500 meters high, climbing steep slopes up and down, without ever having climbed mountains before, I don’t want to describe the tragic drama in the attic of Schleching.

Everything is so unreal and sounds like a novel. And, nevertheless, everything is so true. You know, my Inga, that I took everything extremely seriously. But God did not accept my life. He saved me miraculously, in order to send me then - into captivity - fate.

Dear girl, you are smiling, I see you in your beauty, standing in front of me. You smile kindly and knowingly, like the experienced mother to her boy. In spite of your youth, you always used to call me ‘Bobsie’. You know what a calming effect this always had on me. You say you talked with God, and you also know why God-Father did not yet want my life in Schleching. Therefore tell it to me, that I understand God. For nothing is more terrible, than to become confused about Him. I admit it to you, I cursed God, when all that indescribable misery of disgrace and distress came over all of us, over Germany, and also over me. Do you know that the Führer is dead? He who adored you so very much, and whom you loved so very much. Do you know that all of Germany is occupied, the Reich smashed, and many millions are in captivity; wives and children at home are crying and mourning for them. Do you know that the nation is penniless, all cities destroyed, and the beautiful, irreplaceable treasures of art and culture are totally destroyed. Do you know all that, and in spite of it, you continue to smile. Now your face is getting serious and full of dignity, now you are totally Inga, my wife. You speak: It is not true to believe that the devil created the world and God would only try now and then, to bring a littler order into it. God created the world and everything happens according to his will, also the present time hardly to be understood by us Germans. First of all this world drama has not yet reached its end. The bolshevistic world revolution must necessarily go its way that it started. Even if Stalin, whom one must admire in his consequence and his energy, would like to bring to a standstill the course of events, he will not be more able to do so than Hitler was able to do so, when he took his first step into the National Socialist revolution with the proclamation of his program. Men believe that they themselves are acting and yet they are only the tools in the hand of a higher being. She is silent, I lose myself in meditation, and finally in a deep relaxing sleep and dream: Germany would have become so beautiful, strength through joy, spare time and recreation, new dwellings, the most beautiful cities and villages have been planned, service and just wages, a great, unique health-program, social security for the aged and incapacitated, roads construction and traffic lanes, ports and settlements, - how beautiful Germany could have been if, if, if and always again if. I am awaking, still quite confused from what I have seen. Where is my wife? Gone, and I alone in the dreary, bare and so cold cell. Why?

I do not know. I have not yet received the indictment, and I don’t know why I should receive one. I have not committed murder and have not ordered any. I did not start a war, I had no power to do so, I did not even know about it. To the contrary, for me the war came at the most inopportune moment. I was in the midst of my social reconstruction, which I now had to interrupt. God in heaven, what have I done that I am treated under such conditions as a criminal? Lord God, give me an answer, I have a right to it. Here Inga, my dearly beloved wife, comes to me again and says:

Are you quarreling with God, with your fate? Don’t do it, everything has its purpose, even your grief and the grief of the millions of German people, but before I continue these thoughts, I would like to end my preceding dialogue, otherwise you will go to sleep over it again. I had begun with (I) Stalin cannot change the course he has already taken and I continue secondly: Stalin also does not want to change his course because Russia was never yet as close to the realization of the testament of Peter the Great as it is just now. This testament like all Russian thought is based on two - one would like to say tragic factors - once on the passion absolutely to become a naval power, secondly on the mystic belief that the East is called upon to bring the true belief in God to the West, even with the opposite symbol of atheistic Bolshevism. Italy thinks in the same way as Peter the Great, Tolstoy, Dostrojewsky, and others. Stalin is Great Russian, he intends to go his way and he must. Will the new bomb - one calls it uranium bomb - not hinder him, I answer. My intelligent girl laughs at me. Did you not always keep repeating yourself, against every weapon there is a defense. That is right, I answer, however we were not able to resist any more the immense air superiority of our adversaries by using the jet fighters. A quarter of a year too late. There she becomes serious, very serious and says: that was bitter and pathetic at the same time, however Stalin now has jet fighters and the factories in addition. Besides you know yourself, that with regard to research work in atomsmashing all belligerents were equally advanced; who tells you that Stalin does not have the same bomb. Or how is it with regard to the death rays? Whatever may be the case Stalin will follow his course, will have to and will want to do so. He cannot retrace his steps or he himself would be consumed by the fire of the revolution.

I become very thoughtful and look at her keenly and steadily and ask; Then we have misjudged Bolshevism and its bearer Stalin? Yes and no my Inga answers and with her beautiful voice continues, thus I come to your own personal fate and to the common fate of the entire German people. Now she smiles again and caresses me and looks questioningly upon me with her expressive eyes. Haven’t you always said and maintained that success is the only proof of the soundness of an idea. To judge by the complete collapse, the unconditional surrender, the imprisonment of all German leaders and by your own fate, my dear Bobsie, National Socialism would have to be completely wrong, Hitler a fool and all of you bewitched. That, however, is incorrect. Few know you and the Führer as I do. You yourself, my dear husband, have only recently set forth in a pamphlet ‘Thoughts about the Führer’ that to the end the Führer was completely master of himself, that all rumors of brain hemorrhages and hallucinations were untrue and founded on malicious reports. You have thus courageously portrayed the Führer as he really is: The greatest German of all times, and just as persistent you stick to your idea to which you owe your great successes in the social-political sphere. You are quite correct in this and the same holds true in many other spheres.
What enormously positive things National Socialism has achieved and yet suffered.

____________________________________________________________

Robert Ley was the Reich Labor Leader (DAF), which was the largest organization in the Third Reich. On October 24, 1945 he hanged himself in his cell, rather than be murdered by his enemies for crimes he did not commit.
Robert Ley's beloved wife, the beautiful Inga Ley, was cherished by many, including Adolf Hitler. She volunteered her time helping wounded soldiers and other acts of charity. Suffering from an illness, Inga Ley shot herself on December 29, 1942.

____________________________________________________________

[click to enlarge]

[Below: Max Amann, far left front, Robert Ley, front-right, Inga Ley, back-left]