Hitlerland

by Andrew Nagorski

  Plettl’s reasoning was that Schleicher was probably using Hitler “as a cat’s paw.” And “Hitler on the downgrade, supplying Schleicher with provocative means for eliminating the Communists, will clear the roads for Schleicher in the coming elections.” When Plotkin indicated he was skeptical, Plettl argued that it was a strategy that could easily work, allowing Schleicher to use the Nazis to destroy the Communists but prompting deeper fissures within the party itself as some leaders would be compromised by joining a coalition government. Hitler’s party would no longer be a pure opposition force, and its base of support would weaken.

  But the previous chancellor, Papen, had by that time already effectively undercut his successor. On January 4, he met with Hitler in Cologne at the home of banker Kurt von Schröder. The two politicians worked out a deal to oust Schleicher, with Papen assigned the task of winning the support of President von Hindenburg. Even when word of their meeting leaked out, Schleicher professed himself “in no way alarmed by the alleged plot against him.” Neither were the top diplomats at the American Embassy, who believed that the meeting was mostly focused on dealing with the Nazis’ ailing finances. The “rapidly increasing” party debt, chargé d’affaires George Gordon reported, was threatening to undermine the movement. Its financial backers, he added, were both trying to solve that problem and encouraging Hitler to participate in the government, not topple it.

  In the last few days of January, those interpretations were proven grievously wrong. Facing a growing political revolt fanned by Papen, Schleicher asked Hindenburg for his support so that he could dissolve the Reichstag. The president refused, triggering the resignation of the Schleicher government. Next, he turned to Papen to negotiate a new arrangement with the political parties. This gave Papen the green light to do what he had been advocating all along. On January 30, Hindenburg formally asked Hitler to form a new government, appointing him chancellor and Papen as vice chancellor. While Ambassador Sackett reported this “sudden and unexpected triumph” for the Nazis, the AP’s Louis Lochner indicated that Papen remained convinced that he had truly outsmarted the new chancellor. “We have hired Hitler,” he told his friends. In other words, Lochner concluded, Papen was still convinced that he would be “in the driver’s seat.”

  Even before the debate about whether Hitler could truly take power was settled by his dramatic ascension, Americans in Germany were split about what such a development would mean. Were Hitler’s speeches and Mein Kampf a true indication of what Nazi rule would look like, or were they merely tools for his emotional campaign? If the latter, it would be logical to believe that, once in power, Hitler would tone down his rhetoric, moderate his program and seek accommodation with many of those he had been denouncing at home and abroad.

  Among the correspondents covering Germany, no one had a longer track record than S. Miles Bouton of the Baltimore Sun. He had arrived in Germany in 1911, working at first for the Associated Press. He had covered World War I, written the book And the Kaiser Abdicates, married a German woman and left no doubt that he considered himself the preeminent authority on the country. “It requires no great skill at reading between the lines to discover that I have no very high opinion of the quality of the reporting done from Germany for the American press,” he declared in an interview for his own newspaper on a visit to the United States in 1925. He claimed he wasn’t blaming his fellow correspondents but only their editors, who were guided by their prejudices. Nonetheless, he was scathing about those colleagues. “Some of them are, it is true, much less well informed about the situation there than they might be.”

  A well-informed correspondent, he emphasized both before the Nazis took power and after, would have no doubt who was to blame for what went wrong in Germany. Speaking to the Rockford, Illinois, Women’s Club in March 1935, he pointed out that he had denounced the Versailles Treaty from the beginning. “Read that treaty and understand the things that are happening today,” he said. “The allies heaped oppressions, humiliations, and exactions upon Germany.”

  Bouton had first encountered Hitler in September 1923 before the Beer Hall Putsch that made the Nazi leader famous. At the party headquarters, he was met by a young man who began explaining how Hitler would restore Germany’s honor, saving it from the Communists and the Jews. “It was several minutes before it occurred to me that this was Hitler, talking about himself in the third person,” Bouton recalled in an unpublished manuscript. “I had never before met and have never since met a man who so completely identified himself with his supposed mission.”

  When Hitler’s party regained momentum once the Depression hit, Bouton was at first skeptical of its chances, reporting in 1930 that it “does not come into consideration at all as a government party.” (In 1935, he would claim to have been much more prescient, telling his audience at the University of Georgia: “For the last five years of the Republic I prophesied time and again that Hitler and the National Socialists would come to power.”) But in March 1932, he reported that the strong second-place finish by Hitler in the presidential election “represents a remarkable personal triumph, and it becomes the more astounding when one considers the circumstances in which it was gained.” From there, he launched into an account of what he characterized as the story that his American colleagues had routinely failed to report: it was about “the methods used by both the Reich and the state governments against Hitler, since these methods make a mockery of all protestations by the men in power that they believe in democracy.”

  In other words, the real story that needed to be reported from Germany was not about the brutal methods and ideology of the Nazis but the attempts by the Weimar government to muzzle them, forbidding them to broadcast their message on the radio, suppressing their party newspapers, and banning some of their leaders from speaking in public, as happened to Hitler after he emerged from prison. He scornfully referred to all the talk of the “menace of Hitlerism” that was “disturbing the peace of mind of the outside world in general and of America in particular.” Americans, he added, saw Hitler as “a mere rabble-rouser and shallow demagogue.” Quoting Dorothy Thompson’s description of Hitler as “the very prototype of the Little Man,” he declared that his extensive experience in Germany had taught him to be hesitant about making such judgments about both Hitler and his followers, who were dismissed as “a strange collection of heavy doctrinaires and helpless neurotics.”

  “I am pretty sure that these confident critics are wrong,” he wrote. “There are probably few if any Americans in Germany who have as wide a circle of German friends and acquaintances as I have.” Those acquaintances, he added, were highly educated—“for the greater part academicians, professional men of high standing, high government officials, etc.” At least 80 percent of them had voted for Hitler, he claimed. Of the others, 10 percent refused to vote for Hindenburg, and the remaining 10 percent were Jews. “Even some of them would have voted for Hitler had it not been for the anti-Semitic plank in his platform.”

  At the end of his long article, he tossed in what he called “one more significant fact.” Many of his German friends had American wives who “without any exception are more ardent Hitlerites than their German husbands.” His interpretation of this phenomenon: “Theirs is the American brand of patriotism, the brand which has happily made Marxism and internationalism unthinkable in our country.” His message: Germans supported Hitler for the same “patriotic” reasons, and American readers shouldn’t be swayed by the anti-Nazi accounts of his colleagues in the American press corps.

  Some of those colleagues had come to their own conclusions about why Bouton was offering such contrarian views. Writing on December 11, 1932, to his daughter Betty, who was a student at the University of Chicago, the AP’s Lochner recounted an incident triggered by a photograph of Chancellor von Papen and a few journalists, including Lochner and Bouton, that ran in the Nazi weekly Illustrierter Beobachter. The caption read: “Von Papen und die jüdische Weltpresse” (Von Papen and the Jewish world press). “T
hat they put me down as one of the Chosen People doesn’t matter much, but the unkindest cut was that Miles Bouton, of all people—he who himself is an ardent Nazi—should have been put down as ‘Sally Bouton-Knopf.’ The whole American colony is laughing about it,” Lochner wrote.

  Lochner explained that the Nazi publication listed Bouton’s first name as Sally “as that is a favorite Jewish name” and that they had translated Bouton as Knopf (German for “button”) and hyphenated his last name. “Miles nearly hit the roof,” Lochner added with evident glee. “He was furious—all the more so as he had travelled around with Hitler in an airplane. We both protested not because we were called Jews—we both have very dear friends among the Jews and neither of us are anti-Semitic—but because from the whole ideology of the Nazis it is evident they meant to insult us by calling us Jews.”

  Lochner reported that he heard Hitler was furious about this “boner” by the Nazi weekly, and several Nazi leaders called him to say they were “ashamed” that someone from their camp had played such a dirty trick on them. Lochner wrote to the editor of the weekly demanding he print a retraction. “He did—but in a way that makes the readers think we objected to being called Jews, when our point was that we objected to being insulted by the Nazis,” he reported to his daughter. Nonetheless, Lochner was pleased that the Nazis had made Bouton squirm. “We’ve had lots of fun,” he concluded.

  No issue crystallized the question of Hitler’s intentions more than what Nazi rule would mean for the Jews. A correspondent like Edgar Mowrer, who was Bouton’s polar opposite when it came to his assumptions about the party and what it represented, had covered the attacks of Brownshirts on “foreigners and Jews,” in some cases going out in armored police cars. His wife Lilian recalled anxiously waiting for hours until he returned from “the front.” The young thugs wearing heavy leather boots and carrying revolvers were “always insolent and swaggering,” she added, and they would gather at a number of cafés and beer houses, hanging huge swastika flags outside. The owners of these establishments had no choice but to tolerate “these invasions.”

  Before the Nazis came to power, Edgar made a habit of going into such hangouts to buy the brawlers beers and try to learn more about their views. As Lilian described it, these young toughs rallied to slogans like “We spit on freedom” and “Beat the Red Front to pulp.” Their favorite toast: “Germany awake, perish the Jew!”

  “But just where did you learn all this interesting stuff about the Jew?” Edgar asked on one occasion.

  “Aber Herr, everybody in Germany knows that the Jews are our misfortune,” one of the Nazis replied.

  “But just how? Why?” Edgar persisted.

  “There are too many of them. And then, Jews are not people like the rest of us.”

  “But in my country the proportion of Jews is much higher than in Germany. But we lost no war, have not starved, not been betrayed to foreigners; in short, have suffered none of the evils you attribute to the presence of the Jews in Germany. How do you account for this?”

  “We don’t account for it. We simply know it is true,” the Nazi replied, complaining that the Jews were getting the best jobs for themselves by “stealth and fraud.” Germans were waking up to that, he added, “and no matter how hard the Jew works, he won’t be on top long.”

  “Then you admit the Jew works harder?” Edgar asked.

  “Of course.”

  “But doesn’t the hardest worker deserve the best jobs?”

  His interlocutor suddenly sounded uncertain. “Yes—that is, no; not if he is a Jew.”

  “Is that logical, is that clear thinking?”

  “Ach, thinking!” the exasperated Nazi replied. “We are sick of thinking. Thinking gets you nowhere. The Führer himself says true Nazis think with their blood.”

  And this kind of lack of thinking was everywhere. The Mowrers’ young daughter, Diana Jane, came home from school one day and said, in German, that she had to ask her mother a question. Lilian insisted, as always, that she speak English at home. “But I have only heard about these things in German and I must know if I am saying the right words,” she replied.

  Lilian assented.

  “Mutti, am I a Jew or a Christian?”

  “You are not a Jew, my dear. What makes you ask?”

  The girl said that all the talk at school about who was or wasn’t Jewish had made her wonder about her own identity. “It isn’t good to be a Jew,” she concluded.

  Nineteen thirty-two was a big year for Edgar Mowrer. He would win the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting then, and his deepening fears about where Germany was heading prompted him to write his book Germany Puts the Clock Back, which he finished in November and was quickly published in the United States at the beginning of 1933 just as Hitler was taking power. His book chronicled the disintegration of the Weimar Republic, how Germans had grown “sick of everything” and how “the depression brought voters by the carloads to Hitler.” By way of explanation of the Nazi leader’s appeal, he wrote, “A little man has taken the measure of still smaller men.”

  Yet even Mowrer wasn’t quite sure what Hitler represented—and what to expect if he took power. “Did he believe all that he said?” he asked. “The question is inapplicable to this sort of personality. Subjectively Adolf Hitler was, in my opinion, entirely sincere even in his self-contradictions. For his is a humorless mind that simply excludes the need for consistency that might distress more intellectual types. To an actor the truth is anything that lies in its effect: if it makes the right impression it is true.”

  Sigrid Schultz of the rival Chicago Tribune recalled one incident that proved Mowrer’s point about Hitler’s acting ability, which allowed him to ingratiate himself with those who were normally skeptical. After the Nazis’ string of electoral wins in 1932, Hanfstaengl invited a dozen American and British correspondents to meet Hitler at the Kaiserhof Hotel. Schultz was among them, and she watched with fascination as Hitler greeted the first correspondent in line by clutching his hands and staring into his eyes. Encountering Schultz, he merely shook her hand. When he reached a correspondent who was normally known for his irreverent style, Schultz expected some fireworks. Instead, she recalled, “I could see the man’s face as Hitler went into his routine and, to my horror, those usually cynical eyes responded adoringly to whatever message Hitler was giving out.”

  Mowrer credited Hitler and the Nazis with doing everything possible to achieve the maximum effect at every such opportunity. “While others slept, they had labored. While opponents talked once, they talked ten times,” he wrote. “Hitler believes chiefly in the personal contact, the spoken word, personality.” He added ominously, “In the great game of fooling the public he is an incomparable master.”

  As for the true intentions of his anti-Semitic campaign, Mowrer sounded alarmed in some moments but uncertain in others. “A suspicion arises that Adolf Hitler himself accepted anti-Semitism with his characteristic mixture of emotionalism and political cunning,” he wrote. “Many doubted if he really desired pogroms.”

  In January 1933 after Mowrer had completed his book and Hitler was coming to power, the Chicago Daily News reporter won an election, too. He was elected president of the Foreign Press Association. It was a confluence of events that would ultimately lead to a dramatic ending of the Mowrers’ stay in Germany.

  Putzi Hanfstaengl would claim in his postwar memoir that he had felt “singularly unmoved by that clamour and hysteria of that January 30 in 1933 when the Nazi Party came to power.” He added, “Certainly it was an exciting moment, but I had too many reservations concerning the dangerous turbulence of the radicals to feel unduly confident about the possible march of events.”

  If he really had any reservations then, Putzi disguised them well. He congratulated Hitler when he returned to the Kaiserhof Hotel after his meeting with President von Hindenburg and immediately talked with a steady stream of foreign journalists coming to see him. And soon he was directing propaganda films, publishing a book o
f “caricatures”—or sketches—of Hitler, and designing his own personalized Nazi Party uniform. Putzi didn’t want to don the standard shirt and trousers that Hitler offered him from the party’s clothing store. Instead, he noted, “I sent for a superb length of chocolate-brown gabardine from a London tailor and had it made up with a delicate little gold epaulette.”

  Hanfstaengl boasted that his first appearance in his new uniform, at a dinner party hosted by the AP’s Lochner and his German wife, Hilde, “was, needless to state, the talk of the town.” Lochner remembered the evening well. It was April 27, 1933, and his guests included U.S. Consul General George Messersmith, Sigrid Schultz, some former German officials and banker Curt Sobernheim and his wife, Lilli, who were Jewish. In typical German fashion, all the guests had arrived promptly at eight, except for Putzi. Hilde was ready to seat them at eight-fifteen when the Nazi press officer suddenly appeared. “In strode an enormous bulk of masculinity in a brand-new Nazi brown uniform,” Lochner recalled. “It was Putzi, who had hitherto made sarcastic remarks about the official Nazi garb and had never dressed in one.”

  Lochner added that Lilli Sobernheim—“a short stubby person who was nearly as round as she was small”—nearly fainted. Trembling, she whispered, “The Gestapo.” Putzi bowed to Hilde and apologized for his tardiness, explaining that his butler hadn’t properly prepared his evening dress suit, which was why he had to wear his party uniform. As Louis noted, nobody believed him; Putzi’s own account of that evening makes clear that his appearance in uniform was fully planned, although he never mentioned his lie. Nor did he mention what happened next. According to Lochner, he politely bowed and kissed the hand of Lilli Sobernheim. Her husband, Curt, then stated, with a look of professed innocence: “I believe, Dr. Hanfstaengl, we are somewhat related.”