Hitlerland

by Andrew Nagorski

  After starting in an almost light conversational tone, Hitler warmed to his subject and sharpened his rhetoric. He attacked the Jews for profiteering and contributing to the misery all around them—“a charge which it was only too easy to make stick,” Hanfstaengl claimed. He denounced the Communists and Socialists, whom he accused of undermining German traditions. And he warned that anyone who was an enemy of the people would be eliminated.

  Putzi saw that the audience was enjoying his speech immensely—“especially the ladies.” As Hitler talked about everyday life, Putzi observed a young woman who could not tear her eyes away from the speaker. “Transfixed as if in some devotional ecstasy, she had ceased to be herself and was completely under the spell of Hitler’s despotic faith in Germany’s future greatness.” When Hitler took a swig from a mug of beer that was passed up to him, the crowd burst into new applause and it was clear he had mesmerized them.

  “Impressed beyond measure,” Putzi later claimed he was already calculating how best he could guide and educate this skillful orator who “was clearly going to go far.” Observing Hitler’s entourage, Putzi saw no one who could “bring home to him the picture of the outside world he manifestly lacked, and in this I felt I might be able to help.” In particular, he saw that Hitler had no idea how critical America’s entry into World War I had been and how Europeans had to take into account the United States as a rising power. As a “half American,” he viewed this as his mission.

  Putzi made his way to the platform, where Hitler stood, drenched with sweat but relishing his triumph. The newcomer introduced himself and conveyed Smith’s best wishes. “Ah, you are the friend of that big captain who called this morning,” Hitler replied, dabbing his wet forehead with a handkerchief.

  Declaring his admiration, Putzi added: “I agree with 95 per cent of what you said and would very much like to talk to you about the rest some time.” In an interview long after the war, he would claim that the 5 percent he was referring to was “of course the Jews and all that,” but he wanted to be careful not to hurt Hitler’s feelings by spelling that out.

  “Why, yes, of course,” Hitler replied. “I am sure we shall not have to quarrel about the odd five per cent.”

  Putzi shook hands with him, feeling that here was someone who was “modest and friendly.” After he went home, he couldn’t fall asleep for a long time as he kept thinking about the evening and what it represented. He saw Hitler as a self-made man who could reach ordinary Germans with a non-communist program. But he hadn’t liked the look of some of his followers, including “dubious types” like party ideologist Alfred Rosenberg—“a sallow, untidy fellow, who looked half-Jewish in an unpleasant sort of way.”

  Nonetheless, Putzi found reassurance in a quote from Nietzsche that he remembered: “The first followers of a movement do not prove anything against it.”

  Putzi’s wife, Helen, or Helene as she was known in Germany, would play a role unlike any other in Hitler’s rise to power. In her fragmentary, unpublished notes about her dealings with the Nazi leader, she wrote that her husband had returned that evening from his first encounter with him full of enthusiasm, talking about “the earnest, magnetic young man.” While Putzi maintained that the second time he heard Hitler speak he was “less impressed,” he quickly threw his lot in with this agitator who he felt could go very far. He started to play the role of his propagandist and press advisor, but his initial involvement was as much social as it was political. And it was very much tied to Hitler’s evident attraction to Helen—an attraction that would not be hurt in the least by the fact that she was an American.

  Putzi claimed that he first introduced Helen to Hitler when he took her to see him speak, striking up a conversation afterward. The future dictator, according to Putzi, “was delighted with my wife, who was blonde and beautiful and American.” In her notes, Helen offered a different recollection, asserting that she met Hitler on a tram. She and Putzi were going downtown when Hitler got on and her husband introduced them. After a brief conversation, she invited him for lunch or dinner whenever he had the time. Whichever version is correct, both Putzi and Helen’s stories agree that the first encounter ended with Helen extending an open invitation for him to come to their home. Hitler soon became a frequent guest in their apartment in Gentzstrasse, where they lived with their young son Egon; the Hanfstaengls jokingly referred to it as the Café Gentz.

  “From that day he was a constant visitor, enjoying the quiet, cozy home atmosphere, playing with my son at intervals, and talking over for hours his plans and hopes for the renaissance of the German Reich,” Helen recalled. With more than a trace of pride, she added in her postwar notes, “It seems he enjoyed our home above all others to which he was invited.”

  According to Helen, Hitler was dressed in a cheap white shirt, black tie, a worn dark blue suit and an “incongruous” brown leather vest, topped off by a beige trench coat “much the worse for wear,” cheap shoes and an old, soft grey hat. “His appearance was really quite pathetic,” she wrote. But she found the person in those clothes to be quite appealing: “He was at that time, a slim, shy young man, with a far-away look in his very blue eyes.”

  She maintained that she was able to see Hitler from an “absolutely different” side than others would in later years. “He was a warm person,” she insisted in an interview in 1971. “One thing was really quite touching: he evidently liked children or he made a good act of it. He was wonderful with Egon.” One afternoon as the little boy ran to meet Hitler, he slipped and bumped his head against a chair. With a dramatic gesture, Hitler then beat the chair, berating it for hurting “good little Egon.” Helen remembered this as “a surprise and a delight,” which prompted the boy to ask the visitor to go through the same act each time he came over. “Please, Uncle Dolf, spank the naughty chair,” Egon would plead.

  Helen was fascinated by Hitler’s inclination “to talk and talk and talk,” as she put it. “Nobody else had the chance to say anything. I remember, too, that he couldn’t stand anyone who wanted to talk. He was the one who talked; the others listened. That was why he couldn’t stand some people: because he talked too much.” Whether it was in her home or at rallies in this early period, she continued, “his voice had an unusually vibrant, expressive quality, which it later lost, probably through over-exertion… It has often been said that his voice had a mesmeric quality, and this I can verify, from my own observation.”

  Her fascination was in no way diminished by the main subject that Hitler focused on. “The one thing he always raved against was the Jews,” she admitted. He went on about how Jews had prevented him from getting jobs when he was living in Vienna. Helen believed these experiences generated his anti-Semitism. “It began as personal but he built it up politically,” she said.

  Who was this American who began hosting Hitler in her home on a regular basis, offering him meals or his favorite duo of black coffee and chocolate—seemingly unconcerned about his dark side? Born in 1893 in New York City, Helen Niemeyer was the daughter of German immigrants, who made sure she spoke German and was aware of her German heritage. But her American identity is on full display in family photos of her dressed as “Liberty”—decked out like the model for the Statue of Liberty and holding a large American flag on the steps of Hoboken’s City Hall. Dated 1912–1913, the photos show her as a young woman of nearly twenty, accompanied by little girls in white dresses and sashes bearing the names of different states.

  Soon after they began to see each other socially, Hitler asked Helen: “How do you manage here as an American?” Helen explained about her family roots, noting that she spoke German as fluently as she did English and that she also considered herself “really half and half” in terms of her nationality, despite her U.S. passport.

  Putzi told Kay Smith that Helen had walked into his family’s Fifth Avenue shop one day and he had been immediately smitten. “He had been so struck with her beauty he had followed her home,” she recalled. Helen wasn’t film-star beautiful: s
he was five feet nine inches tall, big-boned, and somewhat matronly looking at an early age. But she had an expressive face with lively blue eyes, kept her hair stylishly back, and wore conservative but chic clothes. Helen and Putzi married on February 11, 1920, their marriage certificate issued by the city clerk in Queens. A year later, after Egon was born, they moved to Munich.

  Their marriage wasn’t easy from the beginning. When the Hanfstaengls came to Berlin for a visit and stayed with the Smiths, Kay found Putzi boisterous to the point where she had to keep him in check. At a dinner party the two couples attended, he played the piano magnificently, she noted. “He might have been a concert pianist had he wished to concentrate on that but… he did not work very hard at anything.” When they returned to the Smiths’ apartment on Olivaer Platz, he swung back into action. With a bottle of cognac at his side, he banged out “Harvard, Fair Harvard,” at the same time declaring, “Ah, there’s nothing like Wagner.”

  Both Truman and Helen slipped off to their respective bedrooms to go to sleep, but Kay only managed to stop Putzi after four in the morning. Kay recalled that it felt like she had barely fallen asleep when she heard the piano again. Throwing on some clothes, she got him to stop, since Truman and Helen were still sleeping. To keep him from returning to the piano, she convinced Putzi to accompany her on a walk through the nearly empty Tiergarten in the cold early morning hours, telling him that he had to give his wife and her husband some time to rest.

  “Ah, the little Helene is always exhausted,” he told her.

  “I don’t wonder. You are an exhausting person,” Kay responded. Once Helen finally left Putzi more than a decade later, Kay observed that she had found him “too exhausting.”

  But when Helen was new to Germany, she shared many of the same feelings as her husband. She was struck by the economic misery of the postwar period and the political turmoil. “What wonder that in all this chaos a man like A.H. should successfully attract the attention of desperate Germany,” she wrote in her precise handwriting. “His plans for the renaissance of the country sounded ideal for most citizens…”

  Among the new American reporters in Germany at that time, there was far from universal agreement that Hitler was a force to be reckoned with. One of the best known was Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker, a red-haired, hard-charging Texan who had already worked in Moscow before moving to Berlin in 1923, although he was only twenty-five when he arrived in the German capital. During the ten years that he was based there, H. R. Knickerbocker, as his byline usually read, published six books in German, wrote regular columns for German newspapers, while still attending to his primary duties initially as a reporter for the International News Service and then for the Philadelphia Public Ledger and the New York Evening Post. As John Gunther, another famous itinerant correspondent and author of that era, recalled, he became “a definite public character in German political life.”

  When Knickerbocker first saw Hitler in August 1923, rallying his supporters at the Cirkus Krone in Munich, his reaction was one of comic disbelief. “The first impression he makes on any non-German is that he looks silly… I broke out laughing,” Knickerbocker recalled. “Even if you had never heard of him you would be bound to say, ‘He looks like a caricature of himself.’” He noted not just the mustache and the lock of hair, but also “the expression of his face, and especially the blank stare of his eyes, and the foolish set of his mouth in repose… Other times he clamps his lips together so tightly and juts out his jaw with such determination that again he looks silly, as though he were putting on an act.”

  There was something else that also gave Knickerbocker and many of his colleagues pause. “He is softly fat about the hips and this gives his figure a curiously female appearance,” he wrote. “It is possible that the strongly feminine element in Hitler’s character is one of the reasons for his violence.”

  By contrast, Putzi Hanfstaengl was in full agreement with his wife about Hitler’s appeal, taking him very seriously. He quickly joined Hitler’s entourage and began regularly playing the piano for him, especially after the Nazi leader’s frequent run-ins with the police, who were increasingly monitoring his activities. The first time Putzi played, he tried out a Bach fugue, but Hitler didn’t show any interest. Then, he launched into the prelude of Richard Wagner’s Meistersinger and he suddenly had Hitler’s full attention. “He knew the thing absolutely by heart and could whistle every note of it in a curious penetrating vibrato, but completely in tune,” Putzi recalled. Hitler started marching up and down, waving his arms as if he were conducting. “This music affected him physically and by the time I had crashed through the finale he was in splendid spirits, all his worries gone, and raring to get to grips with the public prosecutor.”

  Hanfstaengl also introduced Hitler to Harvard marching songs, explaining how the music and the cheerleaders were used to whip up the crowds to the point of “hysterical enthusiasm.” He played Sousa marches, and then some of his own improvisations that added the marching beat of American tunes to German ones. “That is it, Hanfstaengl, that is what we need for the movement, marvelous,” Hitler exclaimed, prancing about the room like a drum majorette. Putzi would later write several marches that were used by the Brownshirts, including the one they played when they marched through the Brandenburg Gate on the day Hitler took power in 1933. “Rah, rah, rah! became Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil! but that is the origin of it and I suppose I must take my share of the blame,” Putzi wrote in his autobiography. In fact, this sounded like a case of scarcely concealed pride of authorship.

  Putzi contributed to Hitler’s movement in other ways, too. After selling his share of the family art gallery in New York to a partner, he put up $1,000 to turn the four-page Nazi propaganda weekly Völkischer Beobachter into a daily. Hitler complained that regular newspapers ignored him and believed that such a transformation could help overcome that problem. Aside from providing the funding, Putzi hired a cartoonist to design a new masthead. He also claimed credit for thinking up its slogan Arbeit und Brot, work and bread. Although Putzi told Hitler that the $1,000 was a no-interest loan, he would never get it back.

  As part of Hitler’s circle of advisors, Putzi tried to act on his initial impulse to explain more of the world to this young firebrand—particularly the growing importance of the United States. Pointing out that it was America’s entry into World War I that determined the final outcome, he told Hitler, “If there is another war it must be inevitably won by the side which America joins.” All this, he continued, made it vital for Hitler to advocate a policy of friendship with the United States. While Hitler conceded his point, he didn’t really seem to register it. Putzi concluded that his ideas about America were “wildly superficial.” The only American who interested him then was Henry Ford, since he saw him as a fellow anti-Semite who might be tapped for funds. He was equally interested in the Ku Klux Klan. “He seemed to think it was a political movement similar to his own,” Putzi noted.

  By the fall of 1923, Hitler was openly calling for a revolt against the government. Inflation had turned into hyperinflation, and Putzi recalled that when he pushed his way into the Bürgerbräukeller on November 8, the night of what would go down in history as the beginning of the Beer Hall Putsch, the price for the three beers he ordered was 3 billion marks. He handed one to Hitler, who took a sip even though he already considered himself a nondrinker. With three top Bavarian officials sitting at the speaker’s platform, Hitler—wearing his Iron Cross over his trench coat and grasping a whip—ordered his Brownshirts to seize control of the hall. “Quiet!” he shouted. When the crowd continued to talk in the general confusion that followed, he jumped on a chair and fired a shot into the air. “The national revolution has broken out. The hall is surrounded!” he proclaimed.

  Even greater confusion followed. Hitler marched the Bavarian officials out to a side room, telling them he wouldn’t accept anything but their support for his putsch. He would reward them with top positions, he vowed; if they refused, the alternative woul
d be grim, he warned. “Gentlemen, not one of us shall leave this hall alive! There are three of you, and I have four bullets. That will be enough for all of us if I fail.” By some accounts, he held a pistol to his head as he said so. No one seemed impressed, and General Ludendorff, who had arrived late but dressed in his full Imperial Army uniform, allowed the Bavarian officials to slip away after supposedly securing their assurances that they were on the plotters’ side.

  Hanfstaengl held an impromptu press conference, telling foreign correspondents that a new government had been formed. Cabling from Berlin, Wiegand accepted that version of events as fact and ran with it. “REBELS IN COUP SEIZE BAVARIAN RULE, BEGIN ARMED MARCH AGAINST BERLIN” proclaimed the giant two-line headline across the front page of the San Francisco Examiner in its November 9, 1923, edition over his story. He reported that after “the long expected coup,” Hitler’s storm troopers were in control of key communications in Munich and had cut off contact with Berlin, Ludendorff had taken charge of the army, and Hitler had proclaimed the end of the republic.

  In reality, Hitler and Ludendorff had lost control of events as soon as the Bavarian officials had left the beer hall. Overnight, the officials made arrangements to put down the rebellion. Although they had largely tolerated Hitler’s movement up till then and sympathized with some of its aims, they weren’t about to let him dictate to them. By the time Hitler and Ludendorff had ordered their troops to march from the Bürgerbräukeller to the center of the city around noon on November 9, the state police was lined up to stop them, with two machine guns at the ready. Confident that they wouldn’t open fire on a war hero like Ludendorff, both the general and the ex-corporal proceeded with their plan, leading the march. They were met with machine-gun fire. Fourteen Nazis died on the spot, along with four policemen.