Instead of clarifying what he was for, Hitler dwelled on what he was against, including the Jews who had attained, as he put it, wildly disproportionate power and influence. “I am not for curtailing the rights of the Jews in Germany, but I insist that we others who are not Jews shall not have less rights than they,” he said. Any regulations about Jews, he claimed, would be no different from America’s immigration laws that required immigrants to submit to medical examinations to prove they were healthy before they would be admitted. “Germany has no such protective measures,” he complained. “Jewish influence expressed politically has prevented such measures being enacted. We are overrun by the elements that you reject in advance.”
Finally, Hitler told Wiegand he was open to “an entente or understanding” between Germany and England and the United States. But he saw “no hope” that France would change its hostile approach to Germany, allowing for a lessening of tensions between the two.
Although Hitler attempted to sound less strident than he did at his rallies, the message he delivered left little doubt that he remained a committed foe of Germany’s current system of government. Even if he no longer planned to march on Berlin, he wanted to see it come crashing down.
In the conclusion to his article, Wiegand noted that many people in Germany were surprised that Hitler was staging a political comeback. “Just how much of a factor he will be in coming difficulties in Germany, none seems to care to predict,” he wrote. But by giving Hitler and his views so much play, Wiegand was signaling that the Nazi leader should once again be taken seriously.
On one point, Hitler was right on target: many Germans were experiencing “utter confusion,” triggered both by the deteriorating economic situation and their growing anger at the squabbling among the politicians in Berlin as successive governments came and went. “The German people were sick of everything,” Edgar Mowrer wrote. “Treaty fulfillment had not led to national recovery. Russian Bolshevism was not attractive. War was still impossible. Yet the miserable present simply could not go on.”
Contempt for the current rulers cut across all social classes. Charles Thayer, who served in the U.S. Embassy in Berlin both before and after World War II, pointed out that it wasn’t just the far right, big businessmen and former military brass that had failed to support the Weimar Republic. “So had a majority of the professors—a most influential set in Germany, where academic degrees rank second only to military titles in establishing a person’s social position,” he wrote. “Most of them had openly sneered at the little Socialists of Weimar who seldom had a single ‘Dr.’ to put in front of their names.” Their students, he added, shared that contempt for a government that they held responsible for Germany’s humiliating losses of territory after World War I. And when their job prospects began to evaporate as the Depression settled in, “they flocked to the Nazis in droves.”
Mowrer insisted that the lack of faith in liberal democracy extended even to those who were ostensibly its guardians. “The most remarkable feature of the Liberal German Republicans was the scarcity of Liberal republicans,” he wrote. The Weimar governments had not only tolerated numerous “patriotic” private armies but also used them to suppress left-wing revolts. Hitler’s Sturmabteilung, or SA, the Brownshirts, and his elite Schutzstaffel, or SS units, the Blackshirts, were hardly unique when they were formed in 1921.
Early during their stay in Germany, the Mowrers were returning by a night train from a weekend in East Prussia when they were suddenly awakened by loud shouting. The train had stopped at a small station, and two young men had boarded, turned on the light in the carriage where the Mowrers and other passengers were trying to sleep, and opened the window. From the platform, a middle-aged man wearing a trench coat and narrow leather belt was shouting at them “with the raucous voice of a drill sergeant,” Lilian Mowrer recalled. She got up and turned out the light, but one of the young men brusquely switched it back on, clicked his heels and returned to the window. Edgar put a warning finger to his lips, signaling that it was better not to confront them. He explained to her afterward that the men belonged to “a secret army which the government tolerates but does not recognize.”
But by the end of the 1920s, it was Hitler’s political power—admittedly, backed by his not-so-secret armies—that was on the rise. When the economic crisis started to hit hard, the Nazis benefited immediately. In the September 1930 parliamentary elections, they won 107 of 577 seats, a spectacular jump from the 12 seats they had won two years earlier. Of the 35 million Germans who had gone to the polls, nearly 6.5 million had voted for Hitler’s party, making it suddenly the second-largest party in the Reichstag after the Social Democrats. In 1928, only 800,000 Germans had cast their ballots for the Nazis. Hitler, it appeared, had good reason to put his faith in “legal methods” of seizing power, as he had indicated to Wiegand. The Hearst correspondent’s nose for news was working well when he had decided it was time to interview him again.
For Americans living in Germany, the growing strength of the Nazis was hard to miss. Berkeley exchange student Enid Keyes arrived in Berlin in the fall of 1931, with a fellowship to study at the University of Berlin. On October 30, she accompanied Lars Mehnert, the younger son of her German hosts, to a Nazi rally in a big indoor sport stadium. She was fascinated by the policemen lined up outside in case trouble erupted, and by the scene she encountered inside. “The seats swarmed with people, old and young, all loyal to Hitler and the National Socialist program,” she wrote her mother back in California. Noting how quickly the Nazis had risen from obscurity to become the largest opposition group, she added that girls passed around red cans “to collect money for the poor, or the imprisoned Nazi people. And people were generous with their pennies.”
What impressed Keyes the most was the atmosphere of the rally. “The noise, the spontaneous cheers, the band, reminded me of a football game crowd,” she wrote. “But the feeling here was deeper, more firmly rooted, and much more significant than a Saturday afternoon football throng. Heart and soul, Germans are concerned with the political destiny of their country. It was stirring to see the vast crowd rise as one man, when the trumpets announced the entrance of the Hitler flags, and the various divisions marched to their place on the platform.” The crowd greeted the Brownshirts with the Nazi salute and “the roof was nearly raised by the Nazi song, a hymn with a catchy tune.” While Keyes didn’t understand much of the speeches, she needed no translation to feel the fervor of the crowd. She wrote her mother that “young Lars” came home decked out with Nazi pins and flags. “Like all the youth of Germany, he is an ardent party member,” she concluded.
The rise of the Nazis wasn’t simply something Americans observed; it also began having a direct impact on their lives. Edgar Mowrer recounted the story of a thirteen-year-old American boy, whom he only identified as Arthur. The boy was attending a Jesuit school in Berlin, and one day in the winter of 1931 he posed a question to his father: “Dad, what do you think of National-Socialism?”
“I don’t think about it,” the father replied evasively, since he knew he was treading on dangerous ground. “National-Socialism is purely a German matter which does not concern you or me.”
But Arthur didn’t give up. A few days later, he asked his question a different way. “Dad, if you were a German, would you be a National-Socialist?”
The father asked what was prompting his questions. “You see, nearly all my friends are National-Socialists,” Arthur explained. “I like to be with them, and if you aren’t one, there are so many interesting things you are shut out of.”
Worried, the father told Arthur that the Catholic bishops had condemned the Nazis. “How can Catholic boys be members of a forbidden organization?”
“I don’t know, Dad,” Arthur continued. “But they are, and if you aren’t a National-Socialist in this school, you aren’t anybody. Do you think as a foreigner I could become one?”
Mowrer reported that Arthur never followed through on that wish. But by 1932, abou
t half of the students in his class openly supported Hitler’s party. Despite efforts by the Jesuits to stop the politicization of their classrooms, even the boys’ rough games reflected the larger battles swirling around them. One of the most popular was “chariot bumping.” Pretending to ride chariots like in the 1925 silent movie Ben-Hur, the boys crashed into each other. At first, the opposing forces in those contests were labeled “Romans” and “Jews.” Then, the labels switched to “Centrists” and “Nazis” and the confrontations became nastier, with boys clearly seeking to hurt their opponents.
In their dispatches, American correspondents were often reluctant to make outright predictions on how far the growing backing for the Nazis could carry Hitler. But in their private exchanges with their editors, they were more willing to be blunt about the connection between the deteriorating economic conditions and its impact on politics. Writing on December 28, 1931, to C. M. Morrison, the editor of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, Knickerbocker painted a bleak picture of the country he was covering. He had just traveled all over Germany for a series of articles he was writing. “I never saw before with my own eyes the degree and extent of real poverty now prevalent here,” he reported. Those conditions, he warned, could lead to another disaster.
Correspondents like Knickerbocker and Mowrer also enjoyed occasional lighter moments even during economically desperate times. The two American reporters were walking down Friedrichstrasse one day when they stopped two streetwalkers. Knickerbocker introduced himself and asked what the women thought of the latest government changes that represented a major setback for the Social Democrats as more conservative politicians took power.
“We are for the new gentlemen,” one of the women responded.
Taken aback, Knickerbocker and Mowrer asked why.
“These damn socialists with their free love have made it almost impossible for an honest whore to earn a decent living,” she said. “The gentlemen will change all that and give us a chance!”
As Mowrer sardonically noted, he and Knickerbocker filed stories on this revealing conversation, but his editors at the Chicago Daily News found it “too hot to publish.”
For the most part, though, what Americans in Germany saw of the lives of ordinary Germans was far from amusing. Enid Keyes, the Berkeley exchange student, wrote home on November 17, 1931, about the “sad side” of life in Berlin: “I can’t ever walk a block without seeing blind men, old women with galoshes stuffed with newspapers for shoes, cripples, white-haired ex-soldiers who are begging or selling matches or shoe strings. Old people with gnarled hands and round shoulders, faces blue with the cold, creep along looking for work, picking up twigs in the threadbare park, or searching the gutters for paper.” The following month she noted that people were looking even more discouraged, and beggars “have increased on the streets in terrible numbers.” Women approached passersby pleading that they were hungry and had children “who are crying for food,” she added.
In his letter to Morrison, Knickerbocker concluded from all this that Germany not only couldn’t pay reparations in the current crisis, “but will not pay reparations ever again.” Any attempt by France to force the issue would backfire, he added. “Germany is like Sampson [sic]. She is prepared to pull the building down about her ears rather than continue paying ‘tribute’ which she, the whole nation from Communists to National Socialists, considers she does not owe.”
He offered this forecast: “If Germany does get rid of reparations, does take up the Hitler banner as it seems likely she will do, and does recover with the general recovery of world business that must sooner or later come, then Germany under Hitler will sooner or later re-arm. The money we remit to Europe, one way or another, goes to increase armaments. But this is only another way of saying that this continent is going to war again.”
Replying to Knickerbocker on January 8, 1932, Morrison thanked his correspondent for his impressions, particularly about German attitudes toward the reparations question. He predicted this would lead the United States to become less sympathetic to their plight. “You see defiance in Germany begets defiance on this side of the Atlantic,” he wrote. But he ignored Knickerbocker’s warnings about a new major conflict, focusing instead on the economic fallout of the rapid rise of Hitler. “This country has grown to expect Hitler to take over power in Germany next month. It will not come as any shock although the effects may be rather disastrous in the financial and economic situation when it does come,” he added. Given Knickerbocker’s far more alarming predictions, Morrison’s worries looked almost sanguine by comparison.
But as the Nazis continued to gain momentum in the early 1930s, even Knickerbocker vacillated in his judgment about how much of a threat Hitler really represented. In a letter to Percy Winner, the editor of the New York Evening Post, on June 18, 1932, he wrote about the increasing speculation that new parliamentary elections the following month would give Hitler the opportunity to become part of a ruling coalition. Knickerbocker still considered him to be a far less powerful figure than Mussolini, in part because of his “feminine” side. And he predicted that President Hindenburg would have no problem keeping him in check.
“Hitler is a homo-sexual, effeminate corporal with a hyper-sensitive political olfactory nerve,” he wrote. “Hindenburg is a granite-faced, bass-voiced Field Marshal with a commanding manner that makes little corporals tremble.”
Then he offered this prediction: “If Hitler came to Hindenburg and said ‘Now is the time to do away with the Republic,’ Hindenburg would cry out ‘Was!’ and the little corporal would wilt like a lettuce leaf in hot water.”
And that wasn’t the end of it. He gave Hitler high marks for his ability to exploit discontent. “Hitler is a cork,” he wrote. “He floats on the crest of every wave of popular sentiment. No man in Germany can smell the trend of mass feeling and respond to it as Hitler can.” This ability, he continued, made Hitler indispensable to the party. But within that same party “he is pulled from pillar to post by his lieutenants in the most astonishing way.”
Finally, Knickerbocker pointed out that all the indications in Germany were pointing toward “militarism.” The inclusion of the National Socialists in a coalition government, he added, would lead to “the disappearance of their ‘socialist’ character,” leaving only the nationalist part. Still, Hitler’s role would be important but limited, he insisted. He’d continue to be “the olfactory sense of the party, but I cannot see him as Germany’s Mussolini, even though he may remain the official head.”
The man Knickerbocker couldn’t imagine as Germany’s Mussolini had challenged the country’s aging President Paul von Hindenburg when he ran for a second term in the spring of 1932. Hitler came up short, but placed a strong second in the first round, forcing a runoff the following month. In that round, Hindenburg won the support of more than 19 million Germans, while Hitler won more than 13 million votes. Hindenburg tried to curb the violence of the Nazis by agreeing to dissolve the SA and the SS, but his efforts to check the broader unrest failed. Triggered by the worsening economic conditions, strikes and other protests multiplied. Soon the president decided to dismiss Heinrich Brüning’s government, name Baron Franz von Papen as his successor as chancellor, and call new elections. A member of the Catholic Center Party who believed he could control the Nazis, Papen convinced Hindenburg to agree to the lifting of the ban on the SA and the SS, which only intensified the bloody clashes between them and the Communists.
In the elections on July 31, 1932, the Nazis emerged victorious, winning 230 seats, more than doubling their total from two years earlier. This made them the largest party in the Reichstag, leaving the Social Democrats in second place with 133 seats. They were followed by the Center Party with 97 seats and the Communists with 89. Chancellor von Papen—whom correspondents like Mowrer labeled as dictatorial and reactionary—simultaneously weakened the left by dismissing Social Democrats from top positions and dispatching Defense Minister Kurt von Schleicher to negotiate a deal with Hitler
. But emboldened by his party’s stunning results, the Nazi leader wasn’t ready to settle for anything less than Papen’s job. Their talks ended in failure, and new elections were called on November 6, 1932. This time, the Nazis came in first once again, but lost 34 seats and 2 million votes. They won 196 seats, with the Social Democrats still in second place with 121, and the Communists gaining ground by winning 100.
As late as it was in the endgame of the Weimar Republic, many observers saw the drop in support for the Nazis as a sign that the movement was losing momentum. Their violent rhetoric and actions were backfiring with some of the electorate, and there were also new signs of splits within the party’s top ranks. Schleicher, who took over the job of chancellor from Papen in early December, wanted to take advantage of those divisions by trying to lure Gregor Strasser, a popular Nazi who was considered the leader of the party’s relatively moderate “socialist” wing, into his government as vice chancellor. That proved to be fatal to Strasser, whom Hitler had always viewed as a possible rival. Instead of joining the government, Strasser ended up resigning his party posts.
Americans trying to sort out the meaning of the swirl of elections and political maneuvering were often understandably uncertain what to make of all this. Abraham Plotkin was a Jewish-American labor organizer who arrived in Berlin in November 1932, with the avowed goal of studying workers’ conditions and the German labor movement. He would end up spending six months in Germany, witnessing the demise of the Weimar Republic and the first months of Nazi rule. But during his early days in Berlin, he was far from convinced that Hitler would prevail.
Hitlerland Page 9