Hitlerland

by Andrew Nagorski

  As Thompson also pointed out, the interview itself was difficult, since Hitler, as usual, spoke as if he were addressing a mass meeting. But it wasn’t the content of her interview that was important; it was her reading of the man and his prospects. While she dutifully marched the reader through his ideas as he spelled them out in the interview and in Mein Kampf (“The Jews are responsible for everything,” as she summed it up—adding “take the Jews out of Hitler’s program, and the whole thing… collapses”), the real message was her conclusion that “Hitler’s tragedy is that he has risen too high.” Her prediction: “If Hitler comes into power, he will smite only the weakest of his enemies.” In that case, she concluded, the key question would be who would come after him.

  American readers probably found Thompson’s descriptions and conclusions reassuring. After all, the message was that, in all likelihood, Hitler would never make it to the top—and, if he did, it would be only for a brief, ineffective moment. When I Saw Hitler! was published, Nazi activist Kurt Ludecke, who shared Putzi’s ambitions to educate Hitler about the United States and saw the press chief as a pompous fool, told the Nazi leader that he was going to quote him something from “Mrs. Lewis, the wife of one of America’s most famous novelists.” He then translated the part about how quickly she had realized that he wasn’t going to take power.

  “Who is this Mrs. Lewis anyway?” Hitler asked. Ludecke explained that she was Dorothy Thompson, the correspondent Putzi had brought to him. “Ja, ja, now I remember,” Hitler replied. “Hanfstaengl again! He brought this woman to me…”

  But Hitler seemed more amused than irritated by Thompson’s conclusions, much to the disappointment of Ludecke. In fact, he had good reason to welcome and encourage any coverage that downplayed the threat he represented—and he usually did so with Americans when Hanfstaengl was the facilitator, taking advantage of his American and, on occasion, Harvard ties.

  One of Putzi’s classmates and best friends at Harvard was Hans V. Kaltenborn, who would become a nationally famous radio broadcaster. The son of German immigrants who had settled in Milwaukee, he learned German at home, and in college he became the vice president of the Deutscher Verein, the German Union, while Putzi served as its president. In the 1920s, Kaltenborn visited Europe often and, in Germany, Hanfstaengl arranged for him to meet various Nazis. But he hadn’t met Hitler, since he was rarely willing to spend much time waiting around for a possible interview. As Kaltenborn recalled, though, Putzi “felt that any newspaper correspondent or radio commentator should be willing to waste at least a week in prayerful hope that the Führer might condescend to receive him.”

  But on August 16, 1932, while he was visiting Berlin, Kaltenborn received a telegram from his old classmate, who was in Munich, informing him that an interview was arranged for the next day in Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s Alpine retreat. Louis Lochner, the Associated Press bureau chief in Berlin, called him to let him know he had received a similar telegram so they would be going together. The two took the night train to Munich, and Putzi met them at the station. Both journalists were disappointed to learn from him that Wiegand, the Hearst correspondent, would also be included. The session felt less and less exclusive.

  Putzi had arranged for Hitler’s car and driver to take them to Berchtesgaden. Once they arrived, they were treated to lunch on the terrace of a little hotel, while Putzi went over to Hitler’s “Swiss chalet,” as Kalten-born called it. Wiegand had argued that he had to have a separate interview, and the two other journalists were pleased when Putzi managed to arrange this. They were even happier when the Hearst correspondent angrily returned from a mere fifteen minutes with Hitler. “That man is hopeless,” he told them. “He gets worse every time I see him. I get nothing out of him. Ask him a question and he makes a speech. This whole trip has been a waste of time.”

  Kaltenborn took that as a lesson and decided that he would confront Hitler immediately about his feelings about the Jews. “Unlike Lochner, I wasn’t stationed in Germany and did not need to be discreet to escape expulsion,” he noted later. They walked over to Hitler’s house, and their host, dressed all in black, including his tie, came out to meet them. Hitler’s laundry, hung out by his half-sister Angela, was fluttering in the breeze, the view of the Bavarian Alps was majestic, and despite a few Nazi guards stationed on the paths outside, “everything suggested peace,” Kaltenborn noted. But he also felt an atmosphere of “latent hostility” when Putzi whispered to Hitler who they were.

  As soon as they sat down, Kaltenborn fired off his first question: “Why does your anti-Semitism make no distinction between the Jews that flooded into Germany during the postwar period and the many fine Jewish families that have been German for generations?”

  “All Jews are foreigners,” Hitler shouted back. “Who are you to ask me how I deal with foreigners. You Americans admit no foreigner unless he has good money, good physique, and good morals. Who are you to talk about who should be allowed in Germany?”

  From then on, Kaltenborn continued tossing in as pointed questions as possible, while Lochner focused on more tactical queries about Hitler’s next political moves. As Kaltenborn noted, Hitler didn’t really answer his questions, no more than the first one, since “he has no capacity for logical consecutive thought.” As usual, he denounced the parliamentary system that, he argued, “has never functioned in Europe,” and called for authoritarian rule. He expected to take power, he maintained, but with the support of the German people. “A dictatorship is justified once the people declare their confidence in one man and ask him to rule,” he insisted.

  Kaltenborn was as interested in Hitler’s behavior as in his answers. At one point, Hitler’s wolfhound came to the porch and approached his master. Instead of petting him, Hitler sternly commanded “Platz!”—the standard German order for a dog to back off and lie down. The dog obeyed, and soon took advantage of Hitler’s absorption in his own rhetoric to slink away. “I could understand that a man with Hitler’s temperament, background and experience might not care to make a friendly gesture towards an American correspondent, but it was surprising to see him observe the same stern aloofness towards his own dog,” Kaltenborn wrote.

  The interview lasted forty-five minutes, and Kaltenborn emerged distinctly unimpressed with the man everyone was talking about. But the conclusion he drew was startling. “After meeting Hitler I myself felt almost reassured,” he recalled. “I could not see how a man of his type, a plebeian Austrian of limited mentality, could ever gain the allegiance of a majority of Germans.” He arrived at that judgment despite the fact that the Nazis had already garnered more votes and more Reichstag seats than any other party.

  Yet Kaltenborn deserves credit for honestly admitting that he was no prophet. Many others would have been tempted to airbrush their memories; he didn’t. “Most people who met Adolf Hitler before he came to power in January, 1933 were apt to underestimate him,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I was no exception.”

  4

  “I Will Show Them”

  There were those who saw what was coming, those who were blind to it until the very last moment and those who continued to insist that the fears about Hitler and the Nazis had been blown out of all proportion, dismissing all the evidence to the contrary. That was true of Germans; it was also true for Americans who lived and worked in their midst.

  There was also a special category of German politicians: those who believed that they could outmaneuver and outsmart Hitler. On June 1, 1932, Franz von Papen, the newly appointed chancellor, took the AP’s Louis Lochner aside at a lunch in the Reich Chancellery, assuring him that he knew how to more effectively contain the Nazis than his predecessor had. His strategy, he explained, would be to loosen rather than tighten the restrictions on them. “I’ll give the Hitlerites enough freedom to show them up in all their absurdity,” he told the American reporter.

  After he was replaced as chancellor by General Kurt von Schleicher, who had served as his defense minister, Papen began prom
oting a new approach. In his dealings with the octogenarian President von Hindenburg—who according to Lochner and others was increasingly “senile”—he argued that the best way to keep Hitler under control would be to appoint him chancellor.

  Schleicher was pursuing a different policy toward the Nazis, trying to split them by luring Gregor Strasser, the head of the “socialist” faction within the party, into his government as vice-chancellor. Although that maneuver failed, the chancellor would prove to be as naïve in his own way as Papen. After taking power in early December, he quickly convinced himself that he had managed to usher in a new era of “Ruhe, Ruhe, Ruhe [Quiet, Quiet, Quiet],” as he told Lochner during the Christmas holiday.

  “As you see, I have succeeded,” he declared. “Germany has for a long time not been as quiet as now. Even the Communists and the Nazis are behaving. The longer this quiet continues, the more certain is the present government to reestablish internal peace.” Lochner later observed that it was “sophomoric” for Schleicher to mistake the normal Christmas lull in Germany as a sign of better times.

  New reports of fissures in the Nazi movement, combined with the dip in their support in the November 6 elections, had led others to nurture such illusions as well. American Ambassador Sackett was more worried about the fact that the third-place Communists had increased their number of seats in the Reichstag, since he viewed the left as more dangerous than the far right. To counter the Communist threat, he argued, “it was obviously important at the moment to have a strongly centralized more or less military Government.” While Sackett had warned Washington that Hitler appeared determined to “rule alone” and that he and Goebbels “are past adepts at twisting events to suit their fancies and purposes, and indefatigable spellbinders,” he still sounded somewhat dismissive of the Nazi leader, calling him “one of the biggest show-men since P. T. Barnum.”

  Abraham Plotkin, the Jewish-American labor organizer who had arrived in Berlin in November, continued going to political rallies to figure out for himself what the Nazis represented. He saw Goebbels perform for the second time in early January. The Nazi propagandist stirred little emotion at first but then fired up the crowd by blaming Jews for the murder of a young Nazi. This prompted Plotkin to reflect in his diary that day about the possible parallels to the Ku Klux Klan back in his home country. The Klan had looked to be ascendant in the mid-1920s, controlling several governorships, he wrote, but then abruptly the movement had collapsed politically. “I am told that in Germany it will not be so easy for the Hitlerites to collapse, but it strikes me that any movement that depends on the intensity of emotion such as I saw tonight must either win power quickly or its foundations of hatred and feeling will collapse,” he wrote.

  The following day, Plotkin returned to the same theme. “The Nazi meetings are dispirited, as if beaten and know it,” he noted. But he added a cautionary note: “The only disquieting factor is the number of killings that are political in their origin.” Three days later, he attended another Nazi rally, where Goebbels once again denounced “the bloody Jews,” whipping up the crowd to such frenzy that Plotkin thought for a moment that it would “run out of his control.” But when the rally was over, the American was struck by the sight of the young Nazi troops in uniform waiting for their orders “like a bunch of schoolboys, and like a bunch of schoolboys bought hot dogs when the hot-dog men started to circulate among them.” The wording of this diary entry suggests he found it hard to believe that these young men eating hot dogs could be truly dangerous.

  Even with the mounting reports of violence by just such young men, some wealthy German Jews didn’t seem all that disturbed by the Nazis either. Edgar Mowrer recalled a dinner at the end of 1932 in the home of “a banker named Arnholt.” Mowrer probably misspelled his host’s name; if so, the banker in question may have been Hans Arnhold, who was forced to flee Germany after Hitler’s takeover (his villa now serves as the home of the American Academy in Berlin). In any case, all the men around the dinner table except Mowrer were Jews.

  Over coffee, several of them boasted that they had given money to the Nazis at the urging of non-Jews like Hjalmar Schacht and Fritz Thyssen. Although Schacht had served as the currency commissioner in the critical year 1923, when he was credited with ending hyperinflation, and then as president of the Reichsbank until 1930, he had become an increasingly vocal supporter of the Nazis; so had industrialist Thyssen.

  Mowrer didn’t hide his surprise, prompting his host to ask what he was thinking. “Merely wondering how the People of Israel have managed to survive so many thousands of years when they obviously have a strong suicidal urge,” the American responded.

  “But you don’t take this fellow seriously,” his host inquired.

  “Unfortunately I do—and so should you.”

  “Just talk,” the banker declared, and all the others nodded in agreement. As Mowrer noted, they “thought me incapable of understanding the German soul.”

  Schacht, who had once aligned himself with the democratic forces of the Weimar Republic, wasn’t about “just talk.” Shortly before Christmas, Mowrer ran into him and asked politely about his plans for the holidays. “I am going to Munich to talk with Adolf Hitler,” he declared.

  “You too, my fine Democrat!” Mowrer responded, abandoning any pretense of politeness.

  “Ach, you understand nothing. You are a stupid American,” Schacht shot back.

  “Granted. But tell me what you expect from Hitler in words of one syllable and I’ll try to understand.”

  “Germany will have no peace until we bring Hitler to power.”

  Three weeks later, Mowrer met Schacht again, and asked him how his conversation went with the Nazi leader. “Brilliantly,” the German banker replied. “I’ve got that man right in my pocket.”

  As Mowrer recalled in his memoirs, “From that moment I expected the worst.”

  He wasn’t the only one. Bella Fromm, the Jewish social reporter, found herself seated next to Wiegand at a dinner party in Berlin on December 8. The Hearst correspondent wasn’t living full-time in Berlin then, but had a knack for appearing on scene “whenever a political melodrama is about to sweep the stage,” Fromm noted in her diary.

  “When are the National Socialists going to seize the government?” she asked him bluntly, using the old journalistic ploy of asking a question in a way that implied she knew the score already.

  Wiegand looked taken aback but offered a crisp response: “It won’t be long now.”

  And what would that mean? “Hitler intends to abolish the treaty of Versailles,” the American correspondent continued, drawing upon his past meetings with Hitler. “He wants to unite all Germans. He has no desire for the return of colonies if he finds a way for new Lebensraum [living space] within Central Europe, to install all the regained German subjects. One of Hitler’s early associates, Professor Karl von Haushofer, has been studying the Lebensraum problem for years. He has persuaded Hitler that an expansion to the east, peaceful or by force, is an inevitable necessity.”

  On December 22, Fromm attended a reception hosted by American Consul General George Messersmith, who had been stationed in the German capital for the past two years and monitored the Nazi movement. While Ambassador Sackett was increasingly convinced that the Schleicher government had successfully contained the Nazi threat, Messersmith took a different view. “The German government had better act quickly, and strongly,” he said at the reception. “It’s really upsetting to find so many people of importance in the National Socialist party. There are going to be fireworks here pretty soon, unless I’m badly mistaken.”

  Fromm added this final line to her diary entry that night: “I do not think that my friend Messersmith is mistaken.”

  At an “intimate” dinner for twelve guests hosted by Chancellor von Schleicher and his wife six days later, on December 28, Fromm was able to relay Wiegand’s prediction of a Nazi takeover directly to the man currently in charge. Schleicher laughed it off. “You journalists are all
alike,” he told her. “You make a living out of professional pessimism.”

  Fromm pointed out that these views were widely held, not just by her and Wiegand. And that everyone knew that Papen and others were “trying to bring the National Socialists to power.”

  “I think I can hold them off,” Schleicher insisted.

  Referring to the aging President von Hindenburg, Fromm cautioned, “As long as the Old Gentleman sticks to you.”

  Later the two of them were briefly alone in Schleicher’s study. The chancellor once again talked about bringing Gregor Strasser into his government. Fromm was hardly reassured. While Strasser represented the left wing of the Nazi Party, he shared the anti-Semitic views of the rest of the leadership. “What about the church and Jew-phobia of the party?” she asked.

  “You ought to know me better than that, Bella,” Schleicher replied. “All that will be dropped entirely.”

  Once again, Fromm added a line of commentary to her diary entry of that night. “The National Socialist Party is not in the habit of dropping anything that suits its purposes,” she wrote. “They scuttle men quicker than they scuttle doctrines.”

  But even during the fateful month of January 1933, Americans in Berlin were hearing constant reassurances that Hitler and his movement were fading as a threat. Chancellor von Schleicher, they believed, really knew both what he was up against and how to outplay his opponents. On January 22, Abraham Plotkin met with Martin Plettl, the president of the German Clothing Workers’ Union, in a packed Berlin restaurant. Plettl explained to the American labor organizer that Hitler was “dancing between four masters and any one of the four of them may break him.” The four: two camps of industrialists, and two camps within the Nazi Party. As a result, Plettl maintained, Hitler was facing a choice of either accepting a position within the current government or allowing his party rival Strasser to do so. “Hitler will lose either way,” he insisted.