When Colonel Charles Bennett, the chief of the attaché section of the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department, had asked Smith to return to Germany, he was counting on his getting privileged access to the new regime. “Your past relationship with Hitler, [Minister of War and Army Commander-in-Chief Werner von] Blomberg, and others who are at the head of affairs in Germany, would enable you to do a service that no one else, however well qualified they might be in other respects, could do,” he wrote. Of course, Smith could no longer drop in on Hitler the way he first had in Munich; in fact, his brief encounter with him on the reception line was the only time he spoke to him directly again. But his extensive contacts from those earlier days gave him a tremendous advantage over the other military attachés in Berlin, more than justifying Bennett’s faith in him.
Unlike many of his counterparts in other embassies, Smith had no money in his office budget to pay for spies. What he did have was a long list of German officers he knew, some of whom he had met during his first tour in Germany or later when he was an instructor at the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, from 1928 to 1932. The assistant commandant of the Infantry School was George C. Marshall, then a lieutenant colonel, who treated Smith as an aide and translator when it came to dealing with visiting Germans.
After the Nazis took power, they made a rule that a German officer could not visit the house of a foreigner unless he knew the foreigner previously. This meant most military attachés were effectively prevented from inviting German officers to their homes. But Smith was in a different category. When he and Kay held a party upon their return to Berlin, Kay recalled, “The other attachés were dumbfounded to find so many German officers at our reception. They were green with envy and Truman became their prime target in their attempt to get news.”
By comparison, Kay noted, the British and the French, who relied heavily on paid spies, “were remarkably bare of contacts.” That was true for most of the other attachés as well, making Truman a celebrity in their ranks. Only the Poles, she conceded, may have had better contacts than her husband.
Truman used everything he could to learn about the German military plans and deployments. Early in his second tour, German officers still wore insignia of their regiments on their shoulders. He carefully noted what units were represented, piecing together valuable information, even enlisting Kay and their young daughter Kätchen to help him in this task. “Katchen and I were coached to scrutinize their shoulders well and to describe their marks,” Kay wrote, omitting the umlaut that her daughter has always insisted belongs on her name. “Whenever we drove out in the car together she would take one side and I the other, our faces pressed against the window pane. It made an amusing game for us and we had the feeling of helping solve the riddle.”
Kätchen, who was born in 1924, still relishes similar memories. Her father suspected that their driver Robert was reporting on them, she recalled, so Truman took them out for drives in the country on Sundays when he had the day off. Kätchen would sit in the back with her dog, a chow called Tauila, and Truman would often ask her to be the lookout. “Don’t be too obvious, but turn your head and see if you can see a big building in there,” he told her on one occasion as they were driving on a road surrounded by woods. He was looking for signs that a new factory had been built to produce engines for the Luftwaffe.
When Kätchen traveled to The Hague by train with her friends the daughters of the Dutch ambassador, she observed the gun emplacements on the German side of the border with Holland—and promptly sent a postcard to her parents describing them. “People thought that he must have had spies in Berlin, but I was the only spy,” Kätchen laughed, thinking of herself at about age twelve taking on that role.
But there was one riddle Truman realized early he would have trouble solving. For all his contacts in the army, he had few contacts with the Luftwaffe—and no more knowledge “of air corps organization and tactics than did the average American infantry officer,” as he put it. He also had “negligible” knowledge of the technical side of air power. Captain Theodore Koenig, the assistant attaché who was supposed to monitor Germany’s growing air capabilities, was a capable officer, but Truman was worried that his small team was poorly equipped to do so, forced to rely on “their wits alone” to make up for their lack of resources.
The urgency of such tasks was underscored by Hitler’s push to reassert Germany’s power, which Truman took extremely seriously. When German troops reoccupied the Rhineland in March 1936, reversing the demilitarization that had been mandated by the Treaty of Versailles, he rushed home. “How fast can you and Katchen get away from here?” he asked Kay. Looking around the apartment, she replied that it would probably take movers three days to pack up their things. “Three days!” Truman replied. “Thirty minutes is all you will have if the French react as they must. The bombers will be here in half an hour. Pack two suitcases. Tell Robert to put enough cans of gas in the car to take you to France.” When Kay asked what he would do in that situation, he declared he would “stay with the embassy.” Kay did as she was told, but the French failed to respond at all to Hitler’s calculated gamble.
Two months later, Kay and Truman were having breakfast in their apartment when she pointed out a front-page story in the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune. It reported that Charles Lindbergh had visited an airplane factory in France. Over the next few days, Truman began wondering if the famous airman, whose transatlantic voyage had captured the imagination of people everywhere, couldn’t gain the same kind of access to German airplane factories as he did to French ones. He checked with aides to Luftwaffe Commander-in-Chief Goering, and they reacted as he had hoped they would, saying that they would be pleased to show Lindbergh their combat units and factories. Truman then wrote a letter to Lindbergh on May 25, relaying this invitation. Smith had never met Lindbergh before, but he didn’t hesitate to make a forceful case.
“I need hardly tell you that the present German air development is very imposing and on a scale which I believe is unmatched in the world,” he wrote. Pointing out that the Luftwaffe’s buildup had been shrouded in secrecy until recently, he added that the Germans had already demonstrated an increasing willingness to show more of what they were doing to Americans than to representatives of other countries. “General Goering has particularly exerted himself for friendly relations with the United States,” he continued, emphasizing that the invitation was extended directly by the Luftwaffe commander and his Air Ministry. “From a purely American point of view, I consider your visit here would be of high patriotic benefit,” Smith concluded. “I am certain they will go out of their way to show you even more than they will show us.”
Smith’s appeal to Lindbergh, who at that point was living with his wife, Anne, in England to escape the constant publicity about them in the United States following the kidnapping and murder of their son in 1932, would prove to be a fateful initiative. Lindbergh’s response that he would be “extremely interested in seeing some of the German developments in both civil and military aviation” led to a series of visits to Germany—and charges that the aviator was sympathetic to Hitler’s regime. But it would also prove to be just the kind of breakthrough in military intelligence-gathering that Smith had hoped for.
Smith was certainly aware that the Germans would seek to exploit Lind-bergh’s visit for propaganda purposes, and he hoped to keep the press away from the famous aviator as much as he could. But when the dates for the first visit were set for July 22 to August 1, 1936, that meant the last day coincided with the opening of the Olympics. The Germans insisted that Lindbergh attend the opening ceremonies as Goering’s special guest. Smith understood this would attract just the kind of publicity he was hoping to avoid, but there was nothing he could do to prevent it. Instead, he focused on getting the Germans to agree to a long list of airplane factories, research facilities and Luftwaffe units that Lindbergh would be allowed to inspect, accompanied by either Captain Koenig or him. That way, the American attac
hés would be able to both view these installations and make valuable new contacts.
When the Lindberghs flew to Berlin in a private plane, they were greeted by Air Ministry officials, Lufthansa executives, other representatives of German aviation and the American military attachés. Truman and Kay had offered to put them up in their apartment, and the two couples immediately struck up a friendship. “Colonel Smith is alive, questioning, and talks well,” Anne Morrow Lindbergh recorded in her diary. “She is observant, intelligent, and amusing.”
Anne’s diary entries reflected her newcomer’s credulity about the new Germany (“The neatness, order, trimness, cleanliness… No sense of poverty… The sense of festivity, flags hung out”), but also contained numerous wry asides. At their official greeting, “Everyone is in uniform; lots of clicking of heels. ‘Yah.’ Clipped speech. They hardly notice me; very few women.” When she is separated from Charles, who is driven off in an open car accompanied by German officers while she and Kay and Kätchen Smith “drive behind quietly” in a closed car, she notes: “Ah, yes—subservience of women in Germany!” And as for the formalities: “This raising of the arms business adds to the complications of life. It is done so often and takes so much room.”
On the first full day of his visit, Charles was the guest of honor at an Air Club luncheon attended by senior German officials and American diplomats. Knowing that he would be asked to speak, he had prepared a text and showed it to Truman ahead of time. His message was a somber one. “We, who are in aviation, carry a heavy responsibility on our shoulders, for while we have been drawing the world closer together in peace, we have stripped the armor from every nation in war,” he declared. “The army can no more stop an air attack than a suit of mail can stop a rifle bullet.”
Air power had changed “defense into attack,” and made it impossible “to protect our families with an army. Our libraries, our museums, every institution we value most, are laid bare to bombardment.” All of which underscored the importance of how the “revolutionary change” of aviation would be handled. “It is our responsibility to make sure that in doing so, we do not destroy the very things which we wish to protect,” Lindbergh asserted. His speech received widespread international coverage; the German press printed the text without offering any comments. According to Kay, “the Germans were not too pleased with the speech.” Later, while discussing plans for Lindbergh’s subsequent visits, one Air Ministry official added, “But no more speeches.”
The most important social event during Lindbergh’s visit was a formal luncheon at Goering’s official residence on Wilhelmstrasse. It was attended by many of the most important aviation officials, including the legendary World War I pilot Ernst Udet. Arriving in a black Mercedes escorted by several motorcycles, the Lindberghs and the Smiths were treated as honored guests. For Truman, this was the first time he had the chance to talk with the Luftwaffe’s chief—and he took full advantage of the occasion to observe him. “Goering showed many facets of his personality,” he noted. “In turn he was magnetic, genial, vain, intelligent, frightening, and grotesque. Despite excessive corpulence, it could be seen that in his youth he had been both handsome and formidable looking.”
Anne Lindbergh wrote that the forty-three-year-old Goering was “blazoned in white coat, with gold braid, good-looking, young, colossal—an inflated Alcibiades…” The host shook her hand but didn’t look at her. Anne was seated on Goering’s and his wife Emmy’s right and Kay on their left, but the host focused all his attention on Charles. When he asked who had been his copilot and checked his instruments on one of his longer recent flights, Kay volunteered that it was Anne. In response, he used a familiar German expression that directly translates as: “I find that to laugh to death.” In other words, he didn’t believe her.
Lunch was an elaborate affair, with five different wines, one for each course, leaving Kay to marvel: “I have never tasted such nectar.” But if this display suitably impressed Goering’s guests, they were also curious about some of his stranger habits. Charles asked if they could see his pet lion cub, and the host happily obliged. They walked through large halls, decked out with old tapestries, illuminated as if they were pictures, and other artwork. Then they assembled in a library, and the doors were dramatically opened for the young lion. Kay estimated he was about three feet tall and four feet long, and “not too happy” when he saw the large gathering of people there. “I want you to see how nice my Augie is,” Goering announced. “Come here Augie.”
Goering was sitting on a sofa and the lion bounded to him, jumping up into his lap and licking his face. Kay kept a safe distance, with a table between her and this scene, but could clearly see what happened next. One of the German aides laughed. “The startled lion let loose a flood of yellow urine all over the snow white uniform!” Kay recalled. “A wave of red flowed up Goering’s neck.” The host pushed off the lion and jumped up, “his face red with anger, his blue eyes blazing.” Emmy Goering rushed over, putting her arms around him. “Hermann, Hermann, it is like a little baby,” she pleaded. “There are too many people!” Goering calmed down, conceding that the animal was like a little baby.
Truman had turned away, pretending not to witness all of this, and Anne had the same instinct. “I see and say nothing,” she recorded in her diary. While the guests studiously admired the library’s artwork, Goering rushed off to change. Returning, he was dressed “in a pongee suit, whiffs of eau de Cologne, and a diamond pin,” Anne wrote.
Although Kay had worried that Goering would hold this incident against Truman and the others in the room, the luncheon started a relationship that allowed the military attaché to maintain contact with the Luftwaffe chief for the rest of his tour in Berlin. When Goering’s lion grew too difficult to handle and was sent back to the Berlin Zoo, Truman arranged for his daughter to see the animal there and even hold it on her lap. In the photo of that scene, Kätchen is looking at the camera, flashing a weak smile while wearing gloves to avoid touching the lion directly. “I was scared to death,” she recalls. “My father loved that picture.”
The lunch wasn’t the only occasion where Truman didn’t know what to say in Goering’s presence. As he recalled, during a meeting at the Air Club a year later, Goering kept going on about his devotion to Hitler. His eyes were moist when he declared: “Smith, there are only three truly great characters in all history: Buddha, Jesus Christ, and Adolf Hitler.” Referring to himself as usual in the third person in his writing, Truman noted: “This remark reduced the military attaché to speechlessness.”
But the real payoff of Lindbergh’s visit came in the form of the daily visits to Germany’s air installations. At Rostock, for instance, Lindbergh and Koenig, the assistant attaché, were allowed to inspect the new Heinkel He 111 medium bomber. Lindbergh concluded that it was comparable to British and American bombers, and superior to French ones. They also watched Udet fly the He 112, the prototype of a new fighter—and saw the plane disintegrate during a dive, forcing the famed pilot to parachute to safety. Still, based on what they saw of those and two other Heinkel planes (the He 70 observation plane, and the He 118 dive bomber), along with the company’s modern factory for navy planes at Warnemünde, the Americans were suitably impressed. “I have never seen four planes, each distinct in type and built by one manufacturer, which were so well designed,” Lindbergh told Smith when he returned to Berlin that evening.
Writing to the banker Harry Davison, Lindbergh pointed out that “we have nothing to compare in size to either the Heinkel or Junkers factories.” In another letter, he professed he was struck by “a spirit in Germany which I have not seen in any other country,” and the fact that the country’s new rulers had already built up “tremendous strength.”
Captain Koenig continued to be allowed to visit more airfields and factories after Lindbergh’s first visit, which meant that his reports about Germany’s air capabilities were packed with increasingly detailed rundowns. Based on such observations and the second visit by Lindbe
rgh in October 1937, Smith reported to Washington that, if current trends continued, Germany would “obtain technical parity with the USA by 1941 or 1942.” If the United States slowed down its program for any reason, he warned further, “German air superiority will be realized still sooner.”
Goering may have deliberately exaggerated some of his claims to Lindbergh about Germany’s capabilities, but his guest was inclined to take them all seriously. At a cocktail party hosted by Ambassador Dodd’s wife, the society reporter Bella Fromm overheard Lindbergh telling Udet: “German aviation ranks higher than that in any other country. It is invincible.” And German officials boasted that Lindbergh would prove to be “the best promotion campaign we could possibly invest in.”
Smith and Koenig remained convinced that Lindbergh’s visits provided them with crucial information about Hitler’s aviation buildup, which they regularly conveyed to Washington. At the end of World War II when some columnists attacked Smith for his close ties to Lindbergh, FDR advisor Bernard Baruch wrote to then Chief of Staff General George Marshall on June 13, 1945: “How well and how timely were his [Smith’s] warnings about German preparations! And what little attention we paid to them!”
Of course, the reason why the Smith-Lindbergh relationship became controversial in the first place was the political trajectory of the aviator and his wife that can be traced to that first visit to Germany, which ended with his brief appearance at the opening ceremony of the Olympics in a VIP seat. By inviting Lindbergh and rolling out the red carpet for him everywhere, the Nazis hoped to demonstrate the strengths of the new Germany—both political and military. They would continue to do so during his subsequent four visits before the outbreak of the war in 1939.
Hitlerland Page 24