Hitlerland

by Andrew Nagorski

  Gibbs was hardly reassured, but he was convinced that the American woman was utterly sincere in her belief that Hitler and his followers wanted nothing but peace. Like Martha Dodd, she felt the new Germany and its leaders were misunderstood and unfairly maligned—and no one more so than Adolf Hitler.

  7

  Dancing with Nazis

  On Saturday, June 30, 1934, Martha Dodd drove off early with her date, someone she identified as “a young secretary in a foreign embassy,” in a Ford roadster, with the top down, to a private lake in Gross Glienicke on the outskirts of Berlin. It was a beautiful, warm, sunny day, and she and her companion spent it on the lakeside beach, working on getting as much of a suntan as possible, knowing that summer doesn’t normally last long in northern Europe. In the late afternoon, the couple began slowly driving back to the city, “our heads giddy and our bodies burning from the sun,” as Martha recalled, perfectly content. “We were not thinking of yesterday or tomorrow, of the Nazis or of politics.”

  They drove into the city at six. “I pulled down my skirt and sat up straight and proper as befits a diplomat’s daughter,” she wrote. But something looked and felt different in the German capital; the atmosphere had changed since their departure that morning. There were fewer people on the streets, mostly clustered in small groups, and, as they got closer to the center, they saw an unusual number of army trucks and machine guns, along with soldiers, SS men and Nazi police. The normally ubiquitous SA troops—the Brownshirts—were nowhere to be seen. Reaching Tiergartenstrasse, they saw that regular traffic was banned completely, and only their diplomatic plates got them through the thickening military and police checkpoints. The young diplomat dropped Martha off near her father’s ambassadorial residence, and then quickly drove to his embassy to find out what accounted for the tense atmosphere.

  With the sun still beating down hard on her, Martha rushed to her father’s residence, feeling slightly dizzy, her eyes briefly blinded as she entered what looked to her like a dark house. She started up the stairs and saw the murky outline of her brother Bill.

  “Martha, is that you?” he asked. “Where have you been? We were worried about you. Von Schleicher has been shot. We don’t know what is happening. There is martial law in Berlin.”

  General Kurt von Schleicher had served as defense minister and then briefly as the last chancellor before Hitler came to power. He had pursued a policy of trying to split the Nazis by offering Gregor Strasser, the head of the “socialist” faction and a possible rival to Hitler, the post of vice chancellor. Schleicher was one of the politicians who had assured the AP’s Louis Lochner and other correspondents that his government was succeeding in reestablishing “internal peace.” On that morning of June 30 while Martha Dodd and her date were on their beach outing, SS men had arrived at Schleicher’s villa, rung the bell and shot him dead when he opened the door. They then shot his wife as well. At noon, Gregor Strasser was arrested at his house in Berlin and brought to the Gestapo prison on Prinz Albrechtstrasse, where he was shot a few hours later. Strasser had never accepted Schleicher’s offer to join his government and he had withdrawn from politics altogether, but that wasn’t enough to save him from Hitler’s wrath.

  Those murders in Berlin were only one part of the bloody score-settling known as the “Night of the Long Knives.” Bullet-ridden bodies were left scattered in houses and prisons across Germany. Henry Mann, the Berlin representative of the National City Bank, found the body of one of his neighbors on his front steps; the victim had been lured out of his house and murdered in front of the American’s house. The body lay there for an entire day before the police came and took it away, instructing Mann’s servants to wash up the blood. Mann had earlier expressed the belief to Ambassador Dodd that he and other American bankers could work with Germany’s new rulers. But as Dodd noted in his diary, Mann “showed no patience with the Hitler regime now.”

  The primary targets on June 30 were the leaders of the SA, the Storm Troopers who had provided the muscle for Hitler during his rise to power. In particular, tensions had been growing between the Reichswehr, the regular army, and Ernst Röhm, the flamboyant head of the SA, whose numbers had swelled to 2.5 million after the Nazis came to power. Röhm was a famed veteran of the movement, who had teamed up with Hitler even before the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.

  The Brownshirts were responsible for much of the violence that followed Hitler’s rise to power—the attacks on Jews, Socialists and anyone else seen to be an opponent of the regime, along with the random American or other foreigner who failed to greet the Brownshirts with a Nazi salute. While there was no doubt that they saw themselves as carrying out Hitler’s will, the Nazi ruler would later claim that they were threatening to spin out of control. He was receiving constant complaints from the Army, and even from the ailing President Hindenburg, about their lack of discipline. And Röhm was increasingly defiant, portraying his thugs as the vanguard of an ongoing revolution. “The SA and the SS will not allow the German Revolution to fall asleep or be betrayed half-way there by non-fighters,” he proclaimed, vowing to carry on “our struggle.” Hitler responded in blunt terms, although not mentioning Röhm by name. “Only fools thought the revolution was not over,” he declared.

  The opulent living of the SA leaders, with widespread stories of heavy drinking and open homosexuality, hardly helped their cause. Röhm occupied a villa on Prinzregentenplatz in Munich, outfitted with centuries-old Florentine mirrors and French armchairs. A truce negotiated between the Reichswehr and the SA in early 1934 did little to lessen the rising tensions. Early in the morning on June 30, Hitler personally led a small armed contingent of police that drove in three cars from Munich to Bad Wiessee, the lakeside resort where Röhm and other SA leaders were sleeping off another night of partying.

  Breaking into Röhm’s room, they declared him a traitor; in another room, they found Edmund Heines, the leader of the Breslau SA, in bed with a young male lover. Rounding up Röhm’s contingent, they took them back to a Munich prison in a bus. Several were shot immediately. Hitler initially appeared undecided about his old comrade Röhm, and it was only the next day that the SA leader was offered a pistol so he could shoot himself. He refused, and two SS men dispatched him. The regime issued a terse announcement about the man who was once a key figure in Hitler’s rise to power: “The former Chief of Staff Röhm was given the opportunity to draw the consequences of his treacherous behavior. He did not do so and was thereupon shot.”

  Appearing at the Propaganda Ministry on that same day, Hermann Goering told a group of hastily assembled foreign correspondents that the Nazis were forced to act to prevent a planned rebellion against Hitler. As the Chicago Tribune’s Sigrid Schultz recalled, the Luftwaffe (Air Force) commander had arrived “in full regalia, with his officers, strutting as stiffly as he could.” After making his terse declaration, Goering started to march out, but, spotting Schultz, whom he knew from earlier social encounters, he stopped short. “And by the way, General von Schleicher was shot, trying to escape,” he told her loudly. He then looked at her “piercingly,” Schultz recalled. It was his way of saying, she concluded, that the Nazi brass could get away with anything they wanted.

  The sweeping nature of the killings and the disparate backgrounds of the victims indicated that Hitler and the SS, whose leaders hated Röhm and the SA, had decided to eliminate anyone they regarded as a past or potential opponent. The body of Gustav von Kahr, the Bavarian leader who had presided over the suppression of the Beer Hall Putsch before retiring from politics, was found hacked to pieces. Other victims included the secretary and several associates of Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen, the scheming former chancellor who had helped undermine Schleicher and give Hitler his shot at total power.

  Papen was the politician who had assured the AP’s Lochner that “we have hired Hitler” and that he and other veteran politicians would keep him under control. He was personally spared, although roughed up and briefly placed under house arrest until he was di
spatched as Hitler’s envoy to Vienna. On July 25, 1934, less than a month after the Night of the Long Knives, Austrian Nazis assassinated Chancellor Engelbert Doll-fuss, who had amassed dictatorial powers but opposed Hitler’s movement. Still, Papen didn’t hesitate to accept his new assignment, which would involve preparing the way for Austria’s Anschluss (unification) with Germany in 1938.

  His willingness to continue serving the regime he had helped maneuver into power earned him broad contempt from those foreigners and Germans who were alarmed by what they saw happening. At the American Embassy’s Fourth of July Party at the Dodds’ residence, the Jewish journalist Bella Fromm noted that everyone was on edge, but there was agreement on one thing: “There was general regret that Schleicher was the one to lose his life while Papen only paid with a couple of teeth.”

  On July 1, Dodd and his daughter Martha had made the point of driving by Papen’s residence. Martha spotted the young son of the vice chancellor standing behind the curtains, and he later told the Dodds that his family was grateful for this sign of solidarity at a time when no other diplomats dared to venture near their house. Ambassador Dodd also sent his card with a message: “I hope we may call on you soon.” According to Martha, her father had no sympathy for Papen, whom he viewed as “black with cowardice, devious with espionage and betrayal.” But this was his way of expressing his displeasure with the brutal methods of Germany’s new rulers.

  At the Fourth of July party, the Dodd residence was festooned with red, white and blue flowers that artfully decorated the tables, along with small American flags. While the orchestra played American music, the American expats, both diplomats and journalists, mingled with the German guests. Martha and her brother Bill sardonically greeted the German arrivals with what had become the most frequently asked question since the Night of the Long Knives: “Lebst du noch?” Translation: “Are you still alive?” Some of the Nazis were visibly irritated.

  At one point, the butler told Martha that Papen’s son, the one they had seen in the window three days earlier, had arrived. Visibly nervous, he talked with Ambassador Dodd, protesting how ludicrous were the charges that his father was somehow involved in a conspiracy with Röhm, Schleicher and the others against Hitler. A few days later, once his father was freed and out of immediate danger, the two Papens openly came to visit Dodd, prompting the American journalists to rush over for information about the politician who was still formally in Hitler’s government but had come so close to becoming one of his early victims. Despite Dodd’s personal misgivings about Papen, it was a way for the vice chancellor to demonstrate that he had American support. As Martha put it, this indicated “that the Germans were still respectful, and a bit awed by American public opinion at this time.”

  Her father was reaching a different conclusion, even if he had contributed to Papen’s salvation so that he could go on serving his new masters. That same week a professor from the University of Berlin came to see him, ostensibly to discuss a lecture Dodd was supposed to give to the History Department on July 13. Given the tense situation, they agreed to call off the lecture. The German was despondent about the savagery the Nazis were arousing among his countrymen, stunned that they were capable of such barbaric behavior. He made a point of praising an editorial in London’s Times that described the Night of the Long Knives as a return to medieval practices. “Poor Germany, she cannot recover in decades to come. If I could go to any other of the greater countries, I would leave the university at once,” he declared.

  In his diary entry of July 8, Dodd admitted to feeling a similar deepening pessimism. He hosted a visiting American delegation, but they had asked that no press be allowed to cover the event because they didn’t want to be attacked at home for their presence in Germany. Hitler’s killing spree had hardened hostility to the country in the United States and elsewhere. As for Germany itself, Dodd noted, “I can think of no country where the psychology is so abnormal as that which prevails here now.”

  The ambassador was increasingly questioning the sense of his own mission. “My task here is to work for peace and better relations,” he wrote. “I do not see how anything can be done so long as Hitler, Goering and Goebbels are the directing heads of the country. Never have I heard or read of three more unfit men in high place.” Reading the diary at this point, you can almost hear Dodd sigh as he concluded, “Ought I to resign?”

  On February 23, 1934, William Shirer, who was living with his Austrian wife, Tess, in Paris, turned thirty—but he wasn’t exactly thrilled by his situation. Back in 1925, he had left Cedar Rapids, Iowa, right after college and pursued the adventurous life of a young reporter eager to explore the world. He worked for the Chicago Tribune out of Paris, where he got to meet the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Isadora Duncan; he also snagged assignments that allowed him to wander all around Europe and as far afield as Afghanistan and India, where he befriended Mahatma Gandhi and contracted malaria and dysentery. In 1932, as the Depression worsened, he lost his job and he had a skiing accident that caused him to lose sight in one eye. He and Tess then tried to live off his savings in Spain while he worked on a novel and an early memoir, failing to publish either. When they returned to Paris, he got a job offer from the Paris edition of the New York Herald in January 1934. But as he noted in his diary on his birthday the following month, it was “the worst job I’ve ever had.”

  The big stories seemed to be happening elsewhere—in Germany, Russia, Italy, where strong leaders were all in command. France was buffeted by strikes and unrest, but looked rudderless by comparison. “The Paris that I came to in 1925 at the tender age of twenty-one and loved, as you love a woman, is no longer the Paris that I will find day after tomorrow,” he wrote right before his return in January 1934.

  On June 30, he excitedly recorded in his diary that the phone lines to Berlin were down for several hours. “And what a story!” he exclaimed. He cited the reports of the arrest of Röhm by Hitler in person, and the shooting of several SA leaders. “The French are pleased. They think this is the beginning of the end of the Nazis,” he continued.

  While Shirer didn’t record any judgment of his own, he realized that the biggest story of his life was unfolding nearby. “Wish I could get a post in Berlin,” he concluded. “It’s a story I’d like to cover.” Two weeks later, after more details about the breadth and brutality of the purge had come to light, Shirer added: “One had almost forgotten how strong sadism and masochism are in the German people.”

  In his largely forgotten novel The Traitor that he wrote after the war, Shirer expounded on his feelings at the time. His protagonist, the aspiring American journalist Oliver Knight, discusses his plans to go to Europe with his college instructor. The instructor tells him that Paris would be great fun, but he would be just “another young American in Paris,” likely to spend endless hours with wine and women, “babbling about a Europe you were woefully ignorant of.” Besides, France is “too static,” he continued, and “nothing very world-shattering is likely to come out of France in our time.”

  Not so with the Germans, the instructor continued. Despite Bach, Beethoven, Schiller and Goethe, their culture was “a mere veneer so thin that their barbarism—the pagan barbarism of the German forests—is continually threatening to break through and engulf them.” The big story was developing in Germany, his instructor insisted, and any young man who wanted to make his mark in journalism should go there, not Paris. To be sure, Shirer wrote his novel with the benefit of hindsight, but it undoubtedly reflected his gut feelings in 1934. He desperately longed to get to Berlin.

  On August 2, President von Hindenburg died at the age of eighty-six. Once considered a towering figure, he had looked largely irrelevant and impotent once Hitler had become chancellor. “Who can be president now? What will Hitler do?” Shirer asked in his diary when he heard the news. The next day he knew the answer: Hitler had announced he would take over all presidential powers along with his current ones, and the Army would be required to
swear an oath of “unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces.” It wasn’t an oath to serve the country; it was deliberately fashioned as an oath to serve one man whose power was now unquestioned and unlimited.

  Shirer was impressed with the sheer audacity of such a move. “The man is resourceful,” he wrote in his diary on August 4. Hitler also announced that a plebiscite would be held on August 19 to approve his seizure of all political and military powers. He justified his actions in large part by the alleged plot against him and the Army that he claimed triggered the June 30 crackdown. After attending a meeting of the American Chamber of Commerce in Berlin, Fromm noted in her diary: “Nobody believes that Hitler’s life was endangered or that a counterrevolution was planned.”

  But on August 3, Knickerbocker, the veteran correspondent who had been so perceptive in many of his earlier dispatches, reported that Röhm’s Brownshirts had planned “what would have been the most extraordinary massacre in modern political history.” Its supposed victims: the leaders of the Reichswehr, including the chiefs of the General Staff—which, according to Knickerbocker, was why the generals were willing to accept “a one-time corporal” as their commander-in-chief and swear a personal oath to him. While Knickerbocker indicated he was relaying a version of events from Berlin sources, presumably top Nazi officials, he didn’t include anything to suggest he was skeptical of this interpretation.

  Wiegand, the Hearst correspondent, didn’t comment on Hitler’s claims but offered a more critical view of his power grab on the same day. Noting that “Hitler has attained a position quite without parallel in any country in the world,” he added: “Until yesterday it was possible to say he was the instrument of the Reichswehr. Today the army is his weapon. Fear, not freedom, promises to rule the voters Aug. 19.”