While Schuman insisted he was interested in “explanation, not condemnation,” he left no doubt that any accurate picture of the new movement would inevitably be seen as partisan. “Like every form of highly emotionalized and subjectivized mass mysticism, National-socialism demands acceptance or rejection,” he wrote. “Objectivity is equivalent to rejection.” By the time he produced his book, he would offer a dire—and accurate—prediction about the likelihood of a new war inspired by “pathological hatreds, lusts, and longings for extinction.” His conclusion: “Fascism itself will be consumed by its war-mad sons. With it will perish the remnants of an age that has outlived its time.”
Columbia University sociologist Theodore Abel was also fascinated by events in Germany. When Hitler was appointed chancellor on January 30, Abel wrote in the private notebook where he regularly recorded his observations: “Germany wants to become a world power again, it wants to conquer[,] it wants an emperor. The danger of communism is great and it might come to civil war in Germany. All peace measures will go into the discard meanwhile…”
But Abel was far more restrained—even at times, complimentary—about Germany’s new rulers than Schuman; he also would later question some of Schuman’s findings. On February 2, he wrote: “Struck by Hitler’s manifesto appealing in noble terms to patriotism and setting forth as its goal reestablishment of unity of Germans who he claims are on the brink of dissolution.” He approvingly noted that Hitler had vowed to fight unemployment and boost agriculture, while at the same time emphasizing his commitment to peace and disarmament. “I consider it a noble document and while it sounds genuine I hope it is meant,” he wrote.
As for the means Hitler was using, Abel seemed willing to give him every benefit of the doubt. “Parliamentarianism and dictatorship are not, therefore, antithetical but means of solving problems, adequate for specific conditions,” he wrote on March 7. Even when the Nazis staged their burning of the books in May, Abel was intrigued rather than outraged. Calling the book-burning “a futile but a symbolic gesture,” he asserted: “I am impressed by the vitality and sweeping enthusiasm of the Hitler movement, its idealizations[,] its emotional fervor, its revolutionary aspects. They certainly are swayed by an idea, no matter how ludicrous it may seem to us who have no idea to live for. I envy the fascists, the nationalists, the communists, all those who are working for something to be realized.” This was a stunning admission about what could attract an American intellectual to the most radical movements of the time.
In the summer of 1933, Abel visited Germany and was struck by the willingness of many people, especially Hitler’s followers, to discuss their political experiences. This gave birth to his idea, nurtured during a period when he found it impossible to find a full-time job, to do a major research project on the Nazis. By June 1934, with the backing of Columbia and the agreement of the German authorities, he announced a contest “For the Best Personal Life History of an Adherent of the Hitler Movement.” Only those who had joined the party before January 1, 1933—prior to Hitler’s coming to power—were eligible to submit the autobiographical essays. Prizes ranging from 10 to 125 marks were to be awarded to the best entries. “Completeness and frankness are the sole criteria,” he explained in the announcement.
It was an inspired initiative, attracting 683 submissions before the deadline in the fall of 1934. A series of mishaps delayed shipment of the essays to Abel in New York for two years, and his final product based on his analysis of those submissions—a book entitled Why Hitler Came into Power—wasn’t published until 1938.
Abel was intent on showing what prompted so many Germans to follow Hitler. He took careful note of the disillusionment spawned by defeat in World War I, the Treaty of Versailles and the revolutionary uprisings in Germany that followed. A young soldier wrote: “Heroism had become cowardice, truth a lie, loyalty was rewarded by dastardliness.” Eighteen percent of those who submitted autobiographies had participated in some type of postwar military activities, whether to fight against the rebels of the left or the right or in fighting in Upper Silesia or the Ruhr Valley. Some professed to be shocked by “the spirit of Jewish materialism” and motivated by their nationalist upbringing. “We knew nothing of politics, yet we felt that therein lay the destiny of Germany,” one of them declared.
Then came Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 and his treason trial that only built up his reputation. “From that time on I had no thought for anyone but Hitler,” another essayist wrote. While many of the contributors also mentioned the harsh economic conditions in Germany, Abel offered a somewhat different picture of Hitler’s followers than scholars like Schuman did. “Schuman concludes that at the bottom of the Hitler movement was a collective neurosis, a psychological malady of the Kleinbürgertum [lower middle class]… the disorganized and pathological personality of a whole class of the German population.”
Dismissing this approach as too reliant on group psychoanalysis, Abel maintained that Schuman and other scholars had painted a misleading portrait of Hitler’s core supporters. Based on those who submitted essays, he offered his description of a fictional average Hitler supporter:
He is male, in his early thirties, a town resident of lower middle-class origin, without high school education; married and Protestant; participated in the World War, but not in the revolutionary activities during the revolution of 1918 or later outbreaks; had no political affiliations before joining the National Socialist party and belonged to no veteran or semi-military organizations. He joined the party between 1930 and 1931, and had his first contacts with the movement through reading about it and attending a meeting. He was strongly dissatisfied with the republican regime in Germany, but had no specific anti-Semitic bias. His economic status was secure, for not once did he have to change his occupation, job, or residence, nor was he ever unemployed.
Abel played up the differences between his portrayal of Hitler’s supporters and the characterizations of Schuman and others, although there was overlap in many areas. The key difference was that Abel’s average Nazi supporter comes across as more balanced emotionally, and somehow less sinister, than those portrayed by others. In his introduction, he pointed out that many of the contributors “frankly state their disagreement with certain policies, as, for example, anti-Semitism.” But he is conscious of the danger of appearing to accept the declarations of the Nazi contributors at face value. “In presenting these facts and opinions without comment, I do not intend to convey the impression that I agree with them,” he insisted.
The essays Abel collected point to a broad array of factors that contributed to Hitler’s appeal. By giving his followers a chance to present their own narratives, Abel produced a significant addition to the growing body of literature in the United States about the Nazi movement, a resource that would prove to be highly valuable to future researchers. But it isn’t hard to understand why several American publishers rejected his manuscript before Prentice Hall finally agreed to take it on. Abel’s attempt to maintain a nonjudgmental, academic detachment while studying the Nazis felt like an artificial exercise—and he often slipped in judgments anyway. As Schuman had pointed out, Hitler’s movement demanded acceptance or rejection. The problem with Abel was that, just as he had when Hitler first came to power, he still seemed to want to give the Nazis the benefit of the doubt whenever possible.
The American journalists who had witnessed the rise of Hitler firsthand were more interested in his drive for total control at this point than in debating what attracted so many Germans to his movement in the first place. The hardworking Knickerbocker filed a slew of pieces during the spring and summer of 1933 that left no doubt about the extent of Der Führer’s power grab. “Adolf Hitler has become the Aryan Messiah,” he wrote, explaining that he had committed everything to his campaign for “racial purity.” Reporting on the latest anti-Semitic booklet, he noted that it listed six types of Jews: “Bloody Jews; Lying Jews; Swindling Jews; Rotten Jews; Art Jews and Money Jews.” He added: “The
fact that such a publication could appear is best proof of the good judgment of the refugees abroad.” Hitler had emerged as “the supreme boss,” he wrote in another article, and his authority “transcends… that of any political boss known to democratic regimes.”
Drawing on his prior reporting experience in Moscow, Knickerbocker also pointed out how the Nazis were following the Bolshevik lead when it came to new forms of terror. “The latest Soviet method to be taken over by the Nazis is the taking of political hostages,” he wrote. Aside from effectively holding “all the Jews of Germany hostage for the good behavior of their racial compatriots abroad,” he explained that the Nazis now were targeting relatives of any anti-Nazi Germans who fled abroad. As in the Soviet Union, he wrote, this “distasteful” practice was proving highly effective. “The bravest man, willing to risk his own life, will shrink at risking the lives or liberty of his loved ones,” he reported.
Knickerbocker found one exception to all this forced subservience. “German nudists are the only successful rebels against Nazi control,” he wrote. While Hermann Goering and other top Nazis decreed that the nudists put their clothes on, the journalist reported that this was the one area where the authorities appeared to be willing to turn a blind eye at times, inspiring a degree of defiance. “The nude cult has gone the way of all popular movements suppressed by an unpopular law. It has gone bootleg.” But this was hardly total defiance. The committed nudists were joining the Nazi movement, he added, working from the inside for their cause. “They intend to appeal to Adolf Hitler, who, like the nude culturalists, does not drink, smoke or eat meat.” Although Hitler had given no indication he would accept the centerpiece of their agenda—stripping naked—the nudists weren’t giving up hope. “Hitler must understand us,” Knickerbocker quoted them as saying.
The nudists provided a rare lighter subject in an otherwise alarming drumbeat of stories. And nothing was more alarming than the question that Knickerbocker posed in the opening to his book The Boiling Point, based on his crisscrossing of the continent during the year after Hitler’s ascension and published in early 1934. “Europe is in uniform,” he wrote. “Will she go to war?”
Knickerbocker was one of the most astute young journalists of his time, someone whose reputation had already spread far beyond his readers in New York and Philadelphia. Running an interview with him on November 12, 1932, the Polish newspaper Express Poranny called him “the most talked about reporter in the world.” He didn’t pull his punches when reporting on Hitler’s brutal tactics at home, prompting angry protests from the Nazis who claimed he was spreading anti-German slanders. They pressured his editors to send him home early, but initially to no avail. There was little reason to think that Knickerbocker would be any less straightforward in trying to answer the question he was asking about the risk of war—a question that was on the minds of so many people on both sides of the Atlantic.
Yet his book opened with a stunning first chapter devoted to Danzig, the Baltic port with an overwhelmingly German population that had been designated a “Free City” by the League of Nations after World War I. Polish-German tensions over the status of the city, which was surrounded by Polish territory, looked like they could easily spark the next major conflict. Knickerbocker stated a contrary view right from the start:
DANZIG… Ten million lives of Europeans and Americans have been saved in this city of Danzig. That many lives were lost on the battlefields of 1914–1918. At least that many would be lost in the next war. That war was scheduled to begin in Danzig. Today it is evident that war is not going to begin here, and Hitler the Warmaker has become Hitler the Peacemaker as the Lord of Danzig.
For today Danzig is Nazi, and for the first time in thirteen years Danzig is at peace with the Poles. For the first time since the war Danzig has been eliminated from its number one place in the list of the probable seats of war.
As Knickerbocker explained, the Nazis won the city elections on May 28, 1933, sweeping into power “a tornado of Brownshirts that drove fear through the heart of every Pole and Jew in the city and made Europe hold its breath.” But while the Nazis quickly consolidated their hold on the city, Hermann Rauschning, the president of the Danzig Senate and Hitler’s lieutenant, immediately went to Warsaw and signed agreements on trade and rights for Polish citizens in the Baltic city. “The Poles were amazed, suspicious, but pleased,” Knickerbocker reported. Danzig and Warsaw played a friendly soccer match, and suddenly tensions eased all around. Hitler had ordered a truce for Danzig, he added, and it was working—at least so far.
What should readers make of this? “Its lesson for Europe is that Hitler can keep the peace if he wants to,” Knickerbocker wrote. But he warned that this could be merely a tactical truce to buy time for Hitler to rearm. Still, “it means peace in this corner of the European cockpit at least for years to come.”
But as Knickerbocker chronicled the other parts of his journey—through Central Europe, the Balkans and Western Europe—he emphasized the caveats as well as the cold calculations. Hitler doesn’t want war because his country wasn’t prepared for a new conflict, he maintained. “The odds are too great against Germany for anyone but a mad German to consider making war now against France and her allies,” he wrote. “Contrary to a considerable body of opinion abroad, it may be positively asserted that there are no madmen running Germany today.”
While he deplored the racial doctrines and terror tactics of the Nazis, he called them “masters of power politics.” Which meant that they were trying to change the balance of power before they would consider triggering a new war. The key, he warned, would be how soon Hitler would feel confident about winning an eventual conflict. Among the experts he consulted, the consensus was that the answer was five to ten years. Knickerbocker ascribed Europe’s pessimistic mood to the fact that the new arms race was already under way. Hitler was insisting over and over again that he wanted only peace. “It is the peace to make the world safe for armaments,” Knickerbocker wrote, ending on a far more ominous note than in his opening section. “Armaments have never kept the world safe from war.”
Hitler launched World War II by attacking Danzig only five years later, and Knickerbocker would certainly have liked the chance to pull back that opening chapter. Still, his book is instructive, including in that section. It demonstrates how much a highly critical journalist felt compelled to hedge his bets—even when, as the final chapters indicate, he shared much of the pessimism about where Hitler’s policies would ultimately lead.
Knickerbocker’s critical faculties were certainly still intact, which is much more than could be said about some other Americans living in Berlin. At about the same time that The Boiling Point appeared in print in early 1934, Sir Philip Gibbs, a famed British correspondent during World War I and later a novelist, visited the German capital. He, too, was asking the question whether Europe would go to war. Observing marches of the SA and the Hitlerjugend, along with the shouts of Heil Hitler, he admitted: “It was impossible not to be impressed by the splendour of that German youth… There was something stirring in the sight of this army of young men.” But he also felt a sense of apprehension. “This pride and discipline of youth could be so easily used by evil minds for sinister purpose, later on.”
There was little doubt in his mind that Hitler could be the one to push the country to disaster again. “He was the mesmerist who had put a spell on the German people so that they followed him blindly,” he noted. The German leader kept insisting he wanted peace, but this veteran journalist observed that every German magazine he picked up was full of pictures of soldiers in steel helmets and scenes from the last world conflagration.
Among the most notable meetings he had on his visit to Berlin was with an American woman who had been married to a German for a long time. At tea with her in the Fürstenhof Hotel, where he was staying, Gibbs came straight to the point. “Most people in England and everybody in France believe Germany is preparing for a new war,” he told her.
“Bu
t that is impossible! It’s ridiculous!” she replied with genuine astonishment. “Why should they believe such an absurdity?”
He recounted his observations about the militarism of the Nazis, their belief in racial dogmas and persecution of Jews, their crude anti-intellectual theories and all the talk in Mein Kampf and elsewhere about Germany’s expansive dreams. Men like Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg were preaching barbarism and the reign of instinct and biological force, he added.
“My German friends laugh at Rosenberg’s nonsense,” the American woman said. “As for all this marching and drilling, it means nothing as far as war is concerned. Germans like it, just like the English like football and cricket.”
She assured him she knew plenty of young Nazis. “They talk very freely to me, because I am the wife of a German and therefore, in their minds, German. They never talk of wanting war. On the contrary, they hate the idea of it.” They only talk about war, she continued, when discussing the possibility that they might be attacked by France and her allies. In that case, they would “naturally” defend the fatherland. “Wouldn’t any other nation feel the same?”
By then, Gibbs was keenly aware of several waiters hovering around their table. He suggested they move to a quiet corner. “We are having an audience,” he pointed out.
Once they had switched tables, the American woman talked about Hitler, whom she knew and admired. “He is all for peace,” she declared. “Foreigners don’t believe in his sincerity. But I’m certain he wants to make a friendship with France. It is his strongest wish… Why doesn’t France accept the offer?”
Hitlerland Page 18