Hitlerland

by Andrew Nagorski

  An anonymous caller had tipped off Hilde Lochner about where her husband and the others were taken, and she had managed to talk her way past the guards to deliver apples, cigarettes, canned food and American magazines. The spirits of the journalists soared.

  Hitler had ordered that the Americans had to be out of Berlin by the end of the week. On Saturday, Kennan was the one who was summoned to the Foreign Ministry, where he was instructed that all the American staffers had to vacate their apartments and report to the embassy with their luggage the following morning. That same day the American journalists were released with the same orders. Returning to their homes to gather up their belongings, several journalists discovered that intruders had already helped themselves to their possessions during their time in detention—everything from canned meat and cigarettes to clothing and silverware.

  When everyone dutifully showed up on Sunday morning, they found the embassy surrounded by troops and occupied by the Gestapo. The Americans were then bussed to the Potsdamer train station, where they boarded a special train. Their destination: Bad Nauheim, a spa town near Frankfurt. They were told they would be held there until an exchange could be arranged for the German diplomats and journalists who were being held in the United States. So began the last act for the Americans in Germany, which, in keeping with many of their earlier experiences, demonstrated that they still maintained a privileged status.

  The detained Germans in the United States fared very well. They did their time, as it were, at the Greenbrier, the plush spa hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, which had no problem accommodating them. By contrast, Jeschke’s Grand Hotel in Bad Nauheim, which eventually accommodated a total of 132 Americans after a few more were added from occupied Europe, was hardly prepared for the sudden influx of boarders. It had been closed at the start of the war in September 1939, and basic services like heat, water and electricity had been cut off. In the interim, heating pipes had burst during the winter months. In January and February 1942, as temperatures dropped, the Americans would keep their overcoats on when they went to the dining room and then rush back to their beds to keep warm. Of course, these were hardly hardships compared to what was happening elsewhere in occupied Europe. Nonetheless, the Americans had been promised special treatment, and they were quick to complain whenever they felt it came up short.

  The most constant complaints were about food. German officials maintained that the detainees were receiving 150 percent of the normal German civilian rations, and the Americans didn’t doubt it. But even that preferential diet was a far cry from what most of the detainees had been used to in Berlin. “This showed us how tightly the Germans had pulled in their belts,” Lochner wrote in an AP dispatch after he returned home. He added that, during the five months they ended up spending in Bad Nauheim, American men on average lost 10 pounds and women 6.7 pounds; in extreme cases, he added, there were losses of 35 pounds. All of which hardly constituted evidence of genuine hardship.

  After they returned home, many of the Americans were reluctant to talk too much about their complaints at the time, recognizing how petty they sounded—particularly as they learned more about how Germans were treating most of their captives. SS Captain Valentin Patzak, who was in charge from the German side, worked closely with Kennan, who became the real leader of the Americans on a day-to-day basis, while Morris took a more passive role. To deal with the constant problems in the accommodations, the Germans simply went out and arrested whoever they needed—an electrician or plumber—assigning them to make repairs at the hotel before releasing them. Occasionally, food supplies from the abandoned U.S. Embassy in Berlin were delivered to the hotel.

  Patzak also allowed the Americans to write letters, although they were subject to censorship. The detainees could not send telegrams, but they could receive them. Kennan and Morris were allowed to call the Swiss officials who represented U.S. interests in Berlin, which was the only permitted use of the phone. Much of the day-to-day handling of the Americans and their complaints was left to the two senior Americans, which minimized direct interactions between the Germans and most of their detainees. Kennan promptly organized a secretariat, which issued a variety of regulations. Morris insisted, for instance, that men had to wear coats and ties in the public rooms of the hotel, and that everyone had to assume responsibility for keeping their rooms clean. Another order read: “It is in the general interest not to listen to or pass on rumors.”

  Rumors flew all the time, of course, especially about how long the detention would drag on. As weeks turned into months, the real challenge was in dealing with what Lochner called “a rather unique American experience in the art of fighting boredom.” But the detainees did pretty well in that department. The AP’s Ed Shanke had smuggled in a small RCA battery-operated shortwave radio, and he invited his friends to “choir practice” in his room at nine in the evenings to listen to the BBC news from London.

  Alvin Steinkopf, another AP reporter, was a source of entertainment one day when he received a surprise visit from Otty Wendell, a waitress at Die Taverne, the journalists’ popular Berlin hangout. She had arranged for her family in Frankfurt to send her a telegram asking her to visit because someone was ill, and she went from there to Bad Nauheim, where she joined the Americans as they were taking a walk around the grounds. She brought liquor that Steinkopf shared with his colleagues, and then spent the night with him. The next morning as she tried to leave, the Gestapo arrested her. But, incredibly, Steinkopf managed to convince them to let her go and to cover up the incident, since the ease with which she had slipped into the hotel would reflect badly upon their guard duties.

  But what really kept morale up was an expanding program of activities that the Americans organized. Two of the military attachés started a gymnastics class, and soon this was followed by the founding of “Badheim University,” with the motto “Education of the ignorant, for the ignorant, by the ignorant, shall not perish from the face of the earth.” For all the self-mockery, many of the classes were quite serious. Kennan taught a Russian history course that attracted a record 60 students, while other detainees taught classes in foreign languages, civics, philosophy and “Plains Indian Dancing.” A chorus attracted 24 members, and the internees also staged occasionally raucous skits, including some in drag.

  The journalists put out several issues of the Bad Nauheim Pudding, which qualified as the only American newspaper left in occupied Europe. But they promptly got into arguments with Kennan about what could or couldn’t be published. The diplomat was intent on not doing anything to offend the German authorities, and he viewed the reporters as the rowdiest and least controllable members of the group.

  The Americans were always looking for new physical activities as well. As the weather improved, they were allowed to take walks along a stream called the Usa—whose name provided fodder for endless jokes. But the real breakthrough came when Kennan won permission for the group to use a municipal athletic field for baseball games. One of the military attachés had brought some basic equipment, but most of the gear was homemade.

  Wrapping champagne corks or golf balls with socks, cotton and other makeshift fillers, the medical staffers used adhesive tape and stitched together balls. Thuermer picked up a bough during one of the walks along the Usa, bringing it back to the hotel. There, United Press correspondent Glen Stadler used his sharp Finnish knife to carve it into a 33-inch bat, complete with a grip. Thuermer insisted on penciling in a “trademark” as well. (After leaving the bat for many years in his garage in Middleburg, Virginia, after the war, Thuermer donated it to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.) Otherwise useless diplomatic pouches served as bases.

  The games became very popular. About 50 men played on four teams—two for the diplomats, one for the military attachés and one for the journalists—and some of the women came to watch and cheer. Kennan, who played catcher for the Embassy Reds, was especially pleased that this activity provided a distraction from the daily carping about conditions
in Bad Nauheim. The diplomat wrote later that he had responsibility “for disciplinary control of this motley group of hungry, cold, and worried prisoners” and “their cares, their quarrels, their jealousies, their complaints filled every moment of my waking day.”

  One reason for those complaints may have been that the war often seemed to be a distant abstraction, despite the sightings of British bombers targeting nearby Frankfurt or Stuttgart. In Berlin, the war and Nazi terror had been a daily reality; in Bad Nauheim, the Americans were largely cut off from the outside world and left to focus only on themselves.

  By the time the arrangements were made for the release of the Germans at the Greenbrier and the Americans in Bad Nauheim, Kennan’s irritation with the countrymen under his charge had reached its peak. The Americans were taken to Frankfurt, and from there boarded two special trains for Lisbon. As they chugged through Spain, Kennan noted that they had to lock the compartments “to keep the more exuberant members of our party (primarily the journalists) from disappearing into the crowded, chaotic stations in search of liquor and then getting left behind.”

  When they reached a small Portuguese border station, Kennan got off the train to meet Ted Rousseau, the assistant naval attaché from the U.S. Embassy in Lisbon, leaving everyone else locked up in the train. Upon hearing that breakfast was available at the station, he exacted payback for the months of complaints he had endured about the food in Bad Nauheim. At the breakfast buffet, he ate alone, stuffing himself with eggs. As he confessed in his memoir, this was especially satisfying because he was “leaving the rest of them to nurse their empty bellies over the remaining six or seven hours of rail journey.”

  Kennan had another reason to be bitter. The State Department had informed the Americans who had spent five months in Bad Nauheim that they would not be paid for that period. “We had not, you see, been working,” as Kennan acidly observed. Then there was the initial news that many of the Americans would not be boarding the ship from Lisbon since those spaces would be given to Jewish refugees. Kennan blamed congressmen who were anxious to please their constituents by bringing over the refugees, considering the fates of these noncitizens “more important than what happened to us.” In this respect, he, too, appeared to have little concern for the broader context of the times—especially for the plight of European Jews.

  Kennan and Morris managed to get the State Department to reconsider both of those directives. But their anger only grew when, upon arriving in Lisbon, a new telegram ordered several of the diplomats to report for duty the very next day in Portugal instead of going home. “The department obviously had not the faintest idea of the condition, nervous and physical, in which these people found themselves, and had not bothered to use its imagination,” Kennan wrote. At that moment, he found himself defending the same people who had tested his patience in Bad Nauheim.

  Whether the Americans who reached Lisbon stayed on for new assignments in Europe or, as most did on May 22, boarded the Drottningholm, a white Swedish ship that had the word diplomat painted in large dark letters on both of its sides to assure safe passage to New York, they knew that fortune had smiled upon them. As they reemerged into the larger world—a world at war because of the course of events in Nazi Germany, the country they had called their temporary home—they began to put their personal experiences in perspective again. “Yes, for us there was an end to the pall of the Geheime Staatspolizei [Gestapo],” Thuermer recalled. “We were lucky. We happened to be foreigners, American foreigners.”

  That is a fitting epithet for most of the Americans who lived in Germany during this period. They were lucky to be able to observe firsthand the unfolding of a terrifying chapter of the modern era; they were even luckier to be Americans, which meant they could do so from a protected vantage point. They were truly privileged eyewitnesses to history.

  Afterword

  Early in his political career, long before he became the all-powerful ruler of the Third Reich who was the target of assassination plots, Adolf Hitler narrowly escaped death. On November 9, 1923, when he and General Ludendorff led their followers in the final act of the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, they were met by a hail of machine-gun fire from the police. One of the bullets struck down Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, a close confidant of the Nazi leader; the two men had been marching arm-in-arm, and a slight difference in the trajectory of that bullet would have changed the course of history.

  That was pure chance, but what happened the next day was something else. It is impossible to know whether Hitler was really about to shoot himself when he picked up his revolver in Helen Hanfstaengl’s house as the police were arriving to arrest him. But by grabbing the gun away from him and berating him for even thinking of such a thing, the American wife of Hitler’s propagandist Putzi Hanfstaengl may have played as pivotal a role as chance had the day before. If so, this was a clear case of the wrong person appearing at the wrong time.

  All of which raises the biggest “what if” question of history: without Hitler, what would have happened to Germany after World War I? The Americans who lived through the collapse of the Weimar Republic, Hitler’s rise to power and the Nazi era did not explicitly address that question, which can never have a definitive answer. But the common thread that runs through so many of the Americans’ accounts is their fascination with Hitler. Their experiences and observations strongly suggest that, without Hitler, the Nazis never would have succeeded in their drive for absolute power. The country still might have embarked on an authoritarian course, possibly a military dictatorship. But whatever might have emerged would not have been on the terrifying scale of the Third Reich, with all its terrifying consequences.

  Even those Americans who initially dismissed the Nazi leader as a clownish figure came to recognize that he possessed an uncanny ability to mesmerize his followers and attract new ones. He knew how to tap into his countrymen’s worst instincts by playing on their fears, resentments and prejudices more masterfully than anyone else. He possessed a combination of peculiar personal qualities and oratorical skills that fueled his movement’s rise. No other leading Nazi was as effective a mobilizing force as he was. Not Goering, not Goebbels, not his early rival Gregor Strasser. They, too, would have tried to exploit their countrymen’s anger and confusion following their defeat in World War I and the successive economic crises, but without the same results.

  As the less than noble ending to their saga makes clear, the Americans in Hitler’s Germany were prone to all the normal human failings, including a certain amount of self-centered pettiness during a time of epic tragedy. Many were superficial in their observations, some were deliberately blind, and a few became Nazi apologists. But most of the Americans came to understand what was happening around them, even if they often found it hard to grasp the full implications. This was hardly surprising. After all, they came from a country that was democratic and pragmatic and were plunged into a society undergoing a horrific transformation in the name of a demented ideology.

  Among the journalists, William Shirer stood out in terms of his ability to discern the meaning of events as they happened, avoiding the trap of wishful thinking. Little wonder that his Berlin Diary, published in 1941, propelled him to initial fame, and that he cemented his reputation as a distinguished author with The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. First published in 1960, this masterful account was an immediate bestseller and continues to be essential reading for anyone trying to understand Hitler’s Germany.

  Shirer was far from alone, however. Edgar Mowrer and Sigrid Schultz also were journalists who were rarely fooled. Consul General George Messersmith stood out among the American diplomats for the same reason, and for his passion and courage. Truman Smith, the first American official to meet Hitler, proved to be both an astute political observer and a remarkably able military attaché, taking the measure of Germany’s rapidly growing military might. Many others served in the Berlin embassy with distinction, including young staffers like William Russell and Jacob Beam.

 
; Several of the Americans would reach the apogee of their careers long after they left Hitler’s Germany. Beam became a top-level diplomat, serving as U.S. ambassador to Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. George Kennan would not only become famous as the architect of containment and then ambassador to the Soviet Union, but also as a historian and frequent critic of American foreign policy during the later decades of the Cold War. Richard Helms rose to the top of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Howard K. Smith became the coanchor of ABC Evening News when network television reigned supreme.

  All of the Americans—whether journalists, diplomats, academics or simply family members—were profoundly affected by their time there, and some far more than others.

  After her return to the United States and marriage to the wealthy financier Alfred Stern in 1938, Martha Dodd continued as a Soviet agent, following the path that she had first embarked on in Berlin with her lover Boris Vinogradov, the Soviet diplomat. In 1953, when she heard that she was about to be summoned to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, she and Alfred fled to Mexico. They moved to Prague in 1957, the year they were indicted for espionage back home. The indictment was dismissed upon review in 1979 for lack of sufficient evidence, but the couple never returned to the United States. Long after his tenure as CIA director, Helms concluded from Soviet intelligence cables that came to light in the 1990s that they both were indeed part of a Soviet spy ring. “She continued to serve as a spy throughout her life,” he wrote, pointing out that her work in Berlin “was probably the peak of her spy career.” Alfred died in Prague in 1986, and Martha died there in 1990.

  Putzi Hanfstaengl was among the Germans living in Britain who were rounded up as potential security threats at the beginning of World War II. Transferred to an internment camp in Canada, he managed to get a letter smuggled out that reached the desk “of my Harvard Club friend, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” as he grandiosely put it. In the summer of 1942, he was transferred to American custody. Arriving in Washington, he was met by his son Egon, who had been studying at Harvard but then dropped out to join the U.S. Army. Now a sergeant, he greeted his father in uniform.