Putzi provided information on Hitler and other Nazi leaders along with analysis of German radio broadcasts for American intelligence. In 1944, the Americans transferred him back to Britain. After the war ended, he was sent to an internment camp in Germany and finally released on September 3, 1946. He spent the rest of his life in Munich. While Putzi proclaimed his disillusionment with Hitler, he left the impression that the years in his company were the high point of his life. His grandson Eric, who was born in New York in 1954 but grew up in Germany, recalls that Putzi was endlessly telling people about the old days, effectively boasting about how close he was to Hitler. While he could be jovial and entertaining, Eric said, “most of the time he was on the Hitler trip—it was terrible.” In an interview with an American scholar in 1973, a year before his death at age eighty-eight, Putzi declared that Hitler was “still in his bones.”
Helen, who had moved back to the United States in 1938 after their divorce, returned to Munich in the mid-1950s and died there in 1973. She, too, never completely lost her sense of wonderment about Hitler, or about the fact that she had once been so close to the Nazi leader and an object of his awkward affection.
To be sure, most Americans had far less personal involvement with Hitler—and played a far more positive role. Their overall record, not just of the final group that made it to Lisbon but also of many of their predecessors, was impressive. They served as America’s eyes and ears in Germany, and they helped produce the proverbial first draft of history. Like all first drafts, it isn’t always on the mark, but it offers highly unusual, very personal perspectives on Hitler’s rise and Germany’s march to the abyss.
By and large, these Americans helped their countrymen begin to understand the nature of Nazi Germany: how it ruthlessly eliminated its political opponents; how it instilled hatred of Jews and anyone else deemed a member of an inferior race; and how it was preparing its military and its people for a war for global domination. The best of them, listening closely to this drumbeat of German militarism, recognized the looming danger. By so doing, the Americans in Germany gradually eroded isolationist sentiments and prepared their countrymen psychologically for the years of bloodshed and struggle ahead. This was the real contribution of the Americans in Hitler’s Germany.
Photographs
On August 17, 1932, three American correspondents interviewed Hitler at Berchtesgaden. From left on the porch of his Alpine retreat: Hearst’s Karl von Wiegand; famed broadcaster H. V. Kaltenborn; Hitler; AP Berlin bureau chief Louis Lochner.
Wiegand had a separate interview and quickly emerged complaining: “I get nothing out of him.” After the two others had a longer session, Kaltenborn concluded that Hitler “has no capacity for logical consecutive thought.” He added: “I could not see how a man of his type, a plebeian Austrian of limited mentality, could ever gain the allegiance of a majority of Germans.”
Less than six months later, Hitler took power.
At Hoboken’s City Hall in 1912 or 1913, Helen Niemeyer, the daughter of German immigrants, dressed up as “Liberty” holding the American flag. She later married Ernst Hanfstaengl. The couple then moved to Munich, where they befriended Hitler. Hitler developed a particular fascination with Helen. After the Beer Hall putsch of 1923, he took refuge in her home. As the police closed in to arrest him, he despaired that all was lost and picked up a revolver. Helen grabbed it from him, possibly preventing his suicide. He went on trial in early 1924.
General Erich Ludendorff, center, Hitler and the other defendants on April 1, 1924.
Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, who had an American mother and a German father, became Hitler’s propagandist. Hitler and Putzi (right) on a campaign swing during the 1930 elections.
Putzi at his 25th reunion at Harvard in 1934. Those who protested his presence for political reasons, the Crimson wrote, were exhibiting “childish” behavior.
In 1922, Karl von Wiegand was the first American correspondent to interview and write about Hitler, describing him as the leader of a rising “Fascisti” movement and as “a magnetic speaker having also exceptional organizing genius.” But in the mid-1920s when Germany appeared to be recovering and the Nazis faded from prominence, readers were far more interested in stories like the ones Wiegand and fellow Hearst correspondent Lady Drummond-Hay (above) filed about the first trans-Atlantic flight of the Zeppelin, issued in a special booklet by The Chicago Herald and Examiner (below).
Chicago Daily News correspondent Edgar Mowrer sounded the alarm about Hitler and the Nazis early and often.
Correspondent Dorothy Thompson, here with Sinclair Lewis in 1928 after they were married, totally misjudged Hitler during her interview with him in November 1931. She was struck by his “startling insignificance.” Later, she radically revised her views.
The Brownshirts (in 1926) were soon a rising force. After Hitler took power, Mowrer was threatened and driven out of Germany on September 1, 1933.
On July 13, 1933, William Dodd took the train from Hamburg to Berlin to take up his post as U.S. ambassador. President Roosevelt had tapped the University of Chicago history professor for the job, telling him: “I want an American liberal in Germany as a standing example.” Here Dodd is shown arriving in the German capital with his wife and daughter Martha (right). Martha quickly scandalized the embassy with her procession of lovers.
From left, publisher Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt, Martha Dodd, Mildred Harnack and German novelist Hans Fallada at the Fallada farm on May 27, 1934. Initially enchanted by Hitler, Martha would end up spying for Moscow. Her friend Mildred, along with her German husband Arvid Harnack, would become members of the “Red Orchestra” spy ring. Harnack was the only American woman executed by the Gestapo.
George Messersmith, U.S. Consul General in Berlin from 1930 to 1934, went on to become the ambassador to Austria (left, with Austrian State Secretary General Wilhelm Zehner in Vienna). Messersmith was a fervent opponent of the Nazis, issuing increasingly dire warnings about their intentions.
Truman Smith served twice as a military attaché in the U.S. Embassy in Berlin. In 1922, he became the first American diplomat to meet Hitler, recording his astute impressions in a notebook.
On his second tour, he came up with the plan to have Hermann Goering’s Air Ministry invite Charles Lindbergh (above, with General Erhard Milch) to Germany. As Smith hoped, Lindbergh was granted access to the Luftwaffe’s airfields and factories, providing valuable intelligence that he freely shared with the military attaché. This part of the Lindbergh story was soon overshadowed by the aviator’s pro-German leanings and his campaign to keep the U.S. out of the war.
Kätchen, the daughter of Truman and Kay Smith, with Hermann Goering’s lion after the Luftwaffe commander dispatched the animal to the Berlin Zoo. Its offense, as witnessed by both the Lindberghs and the Smiths: urinating on Goering’s white uniform when he was showing his pet off to his guests. Kätchen recalls that she was “scared to death” while holding the lion, and wore gloves so she wouldn’t touch it. Today, the photo still hangs on her refrigerator door in Connecticut.
Thomas Wolfe in Berlin in 1935. The writer was treated like a literary superhero, and initially he reciprocated the warm feelings of the Germans. But by his next visit in 1936, he became much more aware of the horrors of the Nazi regime, vividly describing them in his novella I Have a Thing to Tell You.
At the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, track star Jesse Owens was the most popular athlete, despite the Nazis’ racist ideology.
After the Anschluss, the annexation and occupation of Austria in March 1938, a triumphant Hitler received a hero’s welcome in Vienna on April 9. Here he is led by the Lord Mayor; Rudolf Hess and Joseph Goebbels are walking behind Hitler. American journalists like William Shirer were stunned by how quickly Vienna was decked out in Nazi flags and took on the look of “any German city in the Reich.”
In March 1938, former President Herbert Hoover visited Berlin (top, with Reichsbank President Hjalmer Schacht and U.S. Ambassador Hugh
Wilson on right). Meeting Hitler, he was subjected to Hitler’s usual tirades. Nonetheless, Hoover continued to argue that “we must live with other nations.” Wilson, the last American ambassador to Nazi Germany, agreed with those sentiments.
Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain is greeted by Hitler on September 15, 1938.
His visit produced the infamous Munich agreement that doomed Czechoslovakia.
On November 9, 1938, Germany erupted in the frenzy of anti-Semitic violence known as Kristallnacht. Jews flocked to the U.S. Embassy, begging for visas, as consular official Charles Thayer recalled, in the hopes that they could be saved “from the madness that had seized the city.” Above, smashed windows of Jewish shops in Magdeburg.
German troops search the rubble in Danzig after Hitler launched World War II by invading Poland on September 1, 1939.
On September 16, 1940, while Hitler’s armies were on the march in Europe, President Roosevelt signed America’s first peacetime draft legislation (with Secretary of War Henry Stimson on left and Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall second from right).
American correspondents in Germany were already covering the war. From right, the AP’s Louis Lochner, the Propaganda Ministry’s Karl Boehmer and the International News Service’s Pierre Huss.
William Shirer (broadcasting for CBS in 1940) was one of the most discerning American correspondents, anti-Nazi from the beginning.
After Germany declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941, U.S. diplomats and reporters based in Berlin were interned in a deserted spa hotel in Bad Nauheim, outside of Frankfurt. The AP’s Angus Thuermer reads in his room, while other Americans pass the time in the main lobby.
On May 12, 1942, the Americans were released from Bad Nauheim in exchange for the release of the German diplomats and journalists who had been interned in far more luxurious conditions at the Greenbrier, the plush resort hotel in West Virginia. Here, the Americans are arriving at the Bad Nauheim train station where they would begin their journey to Lisbon—and freedom.
Acknowledgments
Sometimes a book idea seems so obvious after the fact that it’s hard to recall where it originated. But I have no such problem in the case of Hitlerland. Christina, or Krysia as family and friends call her, and I were driving back to New York after visiting my parents in Washington when we began discussing what I might write about next. I mentioned that when I had worked on The Greatest Battle, I had particularly enjoyed exploring the activities and perceptions of the foreign community in Moscow as the German forces mounted their drive that nearly reached the Soviet capital. Krysia then asked the question: “Has anyone written about Americans in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s?” She pointed out that so much was written about Americans in Paris and London, but she hadn’t seen a book that recounted the experiences of their counterparts in Germany.
We had lived in Berlin and Bonn when I was reporting for Newsweek, and I thought I was reasonably familiar with the major books depicting the 1920s and 1930s, but I had never thought about that question. I knew of a few individual memoirs and histories written by Americans in Germany but couldn’t think of a book that examined their lives and perceptions in a comprehensive way. I was intrigued and soon confirmed that no such book existed. The next question was whether there would be enough sources of information to tell their story; in fact, I quickly ascertained that there were far more published and unpublished accounts, correspondence and other documents providing firsthand impressions and recollections of Americans than I had imagined.
When I started this project, there were a few people still alive who now figure in these pages, sometimes discovered almost by accident. Ina Navazelskis, a former journalistic colleague who now works at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, alerted me to the letters of Phillips Talbot, an Asian scholar who, as a young man, visited Germany in 1938. I reached Talbot by phone, and he agreed to send me copies, and we talked about his experience. He also urged me to get in touch with his old friend Angus Thuermer, who had been a young AP reporter in Berlin in the late 1930s. With the help of his daughter Kitty Thuermer, I was able to visit him and his wife, Alice, in their home in Middleburg, Virginia, interviewing him at length, obtaining a copy of his unpublished memoirs and going through his remarkable photo albums that include the photos from Bad Nauheim that appear here. Sadly, neither Talbot nor Thuermer lived to see the publication of this book.
There were also the personal acquaintances I hadn’t realized had anything to do with the subject of my book until I started running across their names in my preliminary research. Richard Hottelet, the retired television correspondent who was one of the original “Murrow boys,” was someone I had known for quite some time. But I only discovered when I began my research that he had served in Berlin for United Press in the early period of World War II and ended up imprisoned by the Gestapo; although he was dealing with some health problems, he immediately agreed to be interviewed. Similarly, I hadn’t known that the late Jacob Beam, the father of my friend and journalistic colleague Alex Beam, had served in the U.S. Embassy in Berlin in the 1930s. Alex was able to provide me with his unpublished manuscript.
Some of the children and grandchildren of the protagonists in this book offered valuable insights and materials about those who are no longer with us. In Middletown, Connecticut, Katharine (Kätchen) Truman Smith Coley freely shared her memories of her parents, Truman and Katharine Smith, and vivid recollections of her time in Berlin in the mid-1930s as a young girl. She also allowed me to use the remarkable photo from that period showing her uneasily holding Goering’s lion; the photo had been hanging on her refrigerator. In Munich, Eric Hanfstaengl talked about his grandparents Ernst (“Putzi”) and Helen, and allowed me to use the photo of his grandmother dressed up as the Statue of Liberty and holding the American flag on the steps of Hoboken’s City Hall. Two granddaughters of Louis Lochner—Anita Lochner, who lives in Berlin, and Barbara Roth, who lives in Geneva—extended their assistance, too. To everyone with those kinds of personal connections, I’m especially grateful.
Given the passage of time, though, I had to rely mostly on the written testimonies left behind by the American eyewitnesses. Many were published at the time, although now largely forgotten. But others had never appeared in print. To track down the latter, I received help from numerous archivists and librarians at a broad array of institutions that contain the papers and other records of many of these Americans.
As in the past, I found an amazing assortment of original documents in the archives of the Hoover Institution. Thanks to the hospitality of Dave Brady and Mandy MacCalla of the Media Fellows Program, I was able to make several trips there. On my visits, archivists Carol Leadenham, Brad Bauer, Irena Czernichowska, and Zbigniew Stanczyk provided me with invaluable assistance that allowed me to keep discovering new materials. And even from afar, Brad, who is a remarkable German specialist, helped me connect the dots and fill in missing pieces. He also first put me in touch with Anita Lochner and Kätchen Coley.
I want to thank another former journalistic colleague, John Daniszewski of the Associated Press, for connecting me with Valerie Komor, who runs that organization’s archives. Valerie immediately offered her help, and so did her colleague Sam Markham. It was a particular pleasure to find Sam there; he was a young boy when his family and ours were friends and neighbors in Bonn in the mid-1980s. I want to thank Carol Kahn Strauss at the Leo Baeck Institute for putting me in touch with Frank Mecklenburg, the chief archivist, who immediately tipped me off to a fascinating travel diary. I also received help from many others in places like the Library of Congress and Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library; I apologize for not listing everyone here.
As I would tell others about what I was doing, I would often get valuable leads from unexpected sources. In the Hoover archives, I was changing places at the copying machine with John McLaughlin, who, it turned out, had written his Ph.D. dissertation on Albert Wedemeyer—and promptly helped me loc
ate Wedemeyer’s records from his time at the German War College. David Marwell, the director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, shared his dissertation on Ernst (“Putzi”) Hanfstaengl. Richard Wilson, who teaches architectural history at the University of Virginia, tipped me off to Philip Johnson’s experiences in Germany in the 1920s, and Bill Ury led me to explore the early days of the Experiment in International Living in Germany. John Birkelund urged me to check out the warnings of Ferdinand Eberstadt on the German debt deals as the Depression hit.
Several close friends, like David Moore and Arlene Getz, helped me locate other sources. I owe thanks to many others—Steve and Ardith Hodes, Francine Shane, Robert Morea, Victor and Monika Markowicz, Jeff Bartholet, Fred Guterl, Sandra and Bob Goldman, Eva and Bart Kaminski, Alexandra and Anthony Juliano, to name just a few—for their encouragement and moral support. As usual, David Satter, who has been such a good friend since we first met in Moscow in the early 1980s, was always ready to read my chapters as I produced them, offering spot-on critiques and suggestions.
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