Hitlerland

by Nagorski, Andrew

  While Putzi was busy cultivating his ties to American correspondents, he certainly didn’t let them in on this story, whether it was the early party gossip and whispers about Hitler and Geli when they were parading around together or her suspicious death. Instead, he was eager to serve as the go-between for American reporters who wanted to interview Hitler, usually for the first time. Even as Hitler’s domestic drama was playing itself out behind the scenes, the Nazi leader was capitalizing on the growing popular discontent that was attracting new converts to his cause. To boost Hitler’s international stature, Putzi urged him to meet American reporters, particularly the most famous ones.

  One of the most famous, of course, was Dorothy Thompson. While she was no longer living in Berlin, she wasn’t really settled with her husband Sinclair Lewis in New York either. Europe—in particular, Germany—kept pulling her back as she churned out lengthy pieces for the Saturday Evening Post and other publications. She had tried to meet Hitler as far back as the aftermath of the failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. Hearing that he had taken refuge at the Hanfstaengls’ place outside of Munich, she rushed to the house “of an American woman” only to learn from Helen that Hitler was already gone. She recalled meeting Helen in New York during World War I and claimed that even then she was “a German propagandist.” Following Hitler’s release from prison, Thompson made a few attempts to meet him but blamed her failure to do so on the fact that he was “lofty and remote from all foreigners.”

  Like many American journalists, Thompson found Putzi Hanfstaengl to be the most colorful member of Hitler’s entourage. “Fussy. Amusing. The oddest imaginable press chief for a dictator,” she wrote. But also like many of her colleagues, she could mock him as “an immense, high-strung, incoherent clown.” To be sure, that didn’t prevent her from enlisting his help when Cosmopolitan gave her the assignment of interviewing Hitler in November 1931. Excited by that prospect, she checked into Berlin’s Adlon Hotel, where she ran into John Farrar of the New York publishing house Farrar & Rinehart. He promptly got her to commit to writing a quickie book about the Nazi leader if her interview went well. After all, it wasn’t just Cosmopolitan that was interested in figuring out whether this bizarre figure could become the leader of Germany and who he really was.

  Thompson made full use of this opportunity, speedily turning out her short book, I Saw Hitler!, which made a big splash when it was published in 1932, just as its subject was figuring prominently in all the political stories flowing from Germany. In the foreword, she expressed no reservations about making sweeping judgments that others might consider more appropriate for historians—quite the contrary. “The times in which we live move too fast for the considered historian to record them for us,” she grandly proclaimed. “They move too quickly to permit the writing of long books about momentary phases. Ours is the age of the reporter.”

  And Thompson wasn’t shy about revealing her emotions and snap judgments as she set up and conducted the interview. She briefly explained Hitler’s shift in tactics after he emerged from prison, abandoning talk of revolt and replacing it with a new strategy: “Gone ‘legal,’” she wrote. “No longer was there to be a march on Berlin. The people were to ‘awaken’ and Hitler’s movement was going to vote dictatorship in! In itself a fascinating idea. Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights.” This would-be dictator, she added, already had his own army and “terrorizes the streets.”

  Little wonder that Thompson was a popular writer: her vivid, succinct prose got right to the heart of the issue. She knew her readers wanted to know about Hitler’s strategy, but, more important, whether it was going to work. And she wasn’t going to disappoint them by equivocating.

  Confessing that she was nervous enough about this encounter to consider taking smelling salts, she waited impatiently in the Kaiserhof Hotel for Hitler to arrive. He did so an hour late, and then kept her waiting in Putzi’s room even longer. Thompson related all this, keeping the reader in suspense as well. But not for long. With a dramatic flourish, she allowed the reader to accompany her not just into her meeting but also into her mind. “When finally I walked into Adolph Hitler’s salon in the Kaiserhof Hotel, I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany,” she wrote. “In something less than fifty seconds I was quite sure I was not. It took just that long to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog.

  “He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones,” she continued. “He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure.” Then, referring to the title of a bestselling novel of that era by German writer Hans Fallada, she added: “He is the very prototype of the Little Man.”

  In quick brush strokes, she completed the physical portrait of Hitler: the lock of hair falling over “an insignificant and slightly retreating forehead,” a large nose “badly shaped and without character,” and his movements “awkward, almost undignified and most un-martial.” But his eyes, she pointed out, were notable, because “they have the peculiar shine which often distinguishes geniuses, alcoholics, and hysterics.” At the same time, she confessed he had “the soft, almost feminine charm of the Austrian!”

  She contrasted his “actor’s face . . . capable of being pushed out or in” to President von Hindenburg’s face “cut out of rock” and Chancellor Brüning’s “head of an eighteenth century cardinal-statesman.” This caused her to involuntarily smile and think, “Oh, Adolph! Adolph! You will be out of luck!”

  As Thompson also pointed out, the interview itself was difficult, since Hitler, as usual, spoke as if he were addressing a mass meeting. But it wasn’t the content of her interview that was important; it was her reading of the man and his prospects. While she dutifully marched the reader through his ideas as he spelled them out in the interview and in Mein Kampf (“The Jews are responsible for everything,” as she summed it up—adding “take the Jews out of Hitler’s program, and the whole thing . . . collapses”), the real message was her conclusion that “Hitler’s tragedy is that he has risen too high.” Her prediction: “If Hitler comes into power, he will smite only the weakest of his enemies.” In that case, she concluded, the key question would be who would come after him.

  American readers probably found Thompson’s descriptions and conclusions reassuring. After all, the message was that, in all likelihood, Hitler would never make it to the top—and, if he did, it would be only for a brief, ineffective moment. When I Saw Hitler! was published, Nazi activist Kurt Ludecke, who shared Putzi’s ambitions to educate Hitler about the United States and saw the press chief as a pompous fool, told the Nazi leader that he was going to quote him something from “Mrs. Lewis, the wife of one of America’s most famous novelists.” He then translated the part about how quickly she had realized that he wasn’t going to take power.

  “Who is this Mrs. Lewis anyway?” Hitler asked. Ludecke explained that she was Dorothy Thompson, the correspondent Putzi had brought to him. “Ja, ja, now I remember,” Hitler replied. “Hanfstaengl again! He brought this woman to me . . .”

  But Hitler seemed more amused than irritated by Thompson’s conclusions, much to the disappointment of Ludecke. In fact, he had good reason to welcome and encourage any coverage that downplayed the threat he represented—and he usually did so with Americans when Hanfstaengl was the facilitator, taking advantage of his American and, on occasion, Harvard ties.

  One of Putzi’s classmates and best friends at Harvard was Hans V. Kaltenborn, who would become a nationally famous radio broadcaster. The son of German immigrants who had settled in Milwaukee, he learned German at home, and in college he became the vice president of the Deutscher Verein, the German Union, while Putzi served as its president. In the 1920s, Kaltenborn visited Europe often and, in Germany, Hanfstaengl arranged for him to meet various Nazis. But he hadn’t met Hitler, since he was rarely willing to spend much time waiting around
for a possible interview. As Kaltenborn recalled, though, Putzi “felt that any newspaper correspondent or radio commentator should be willing to waste at least a week in prayerful hope that the Führer might condescend to receive him.”

  But on August 16, 1932, while he was visiting Berlin, Kaltenborn received a telegram from his old classmate, who was in Munich, informing him that an interview was arranged for the next day in Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s Alpine retreat. Louis Lochner, the Associated Press bureau chief in Berlin, called him to let him know he had received a similar telegram so they would be going together. The two took the night train to Munich, and Putzi met them at the station. Both journalists were disappointed to learn from him that Wiegand, the Hearst correspondent, would also be included. The session felt less and less exclusive.

  Putzi had arranged for Hitler’s car and driver to take them to Berchtesgaden. Once they arrived, they were treated to lunch on the terrace of a little hotel, while Putzi went over to Hitler’s “Swiss chalet,” as Kalten-born called it. Wiegand had argued that he had to have a separate interview, and the two other journalists were pleased when Putzi managed to arrange this. They were even happier when the Hearst correspondent angrily returned from a mere fifteen minutes with Hitler. “That man is hopeless,” he told them. “He gets worse every time I see him. I get nothing out of him. Ask him a question and he makes a speech. This whole trip has been a waste of time.”

  Kaltenborn took that as a lesson and decided that he would confront Hitler immediately about his feelings about the Jews. “Unlike Lochner, I wasn’t stationed in Germany and did not need to be discreet to escape expulsion,” he noted later. They walked over to Hitler’s house, and their host, dressed all in black, including his tie, came out to meet them. Hitler’s laundry, hung out by his half-sister Angela, was fluttering in the breeze, the view of the Bavarian Alps was majestic, and despite a few Nazi guards stationed on the paths outside, “everything suggested peace,” Kaltenborn noted. But he also felt an atmosphere of “latent hostility” when Putzi whispered to Hitler who they were.

  As soon as they sat down, Kaltenborn fired off his first question: “Why does your anti-Semitism make no distinction between the Jews that flooded into Germany during the postwar period and the many fine Jewish families that have been German for generations?”

  “All Jews are foreigners,” Hitler shouted back. “Who are you to ask me how I deal with foreigners. You Americans admit no foreigner unless he has good money, good physique, and good morals. Who are you to talk about who should be allowed in Germany?”

  From then on, Kaltenborn continued tossing in as pointed questions as possible, while Lochner focused on more tactical queries about Hitler’s next political moves. As Kaltenborn noted, Hitler didn’t really answer his questions, no more than the first one, since “he has no capacity for logical consecutive thought.” As usual, he denounced the parliamentary system that, he argued, “has never functioned in Europe,” and called for authoritarian rule. He expected to take power, he maintained, but with the support of the German people. “A dictatorship is justified once the people declare their confidence in one man and ask him to rule,” he insisted.

  Kaltenborn was as interested in Hitler’s behavior as in his answers. At one point, Hitler’s wolfhound came to the porch and approached his master. Instead of petting him, Hitler sternly commanded “Platz!”—the standard German order for a dog to back off and lie down. The dog obeyed, and soon took advantage of Hitler’s absorption in his own rhetoric to slink away. “I could understand that a man with Hitler’s temperament, background and experience might not care to make a friendly gesture towards an American correspondent, but it was surprising to see him observe the same stern aloofness towards his own dog,” Kaltenborn wrote.

  The interview lasted forty-five minutes, and Kaltenborn emerged distinctly unimpressed with the man everyone was talking about. But the conclusion he drew was startling. “After meeting Hitler I myself felt almost reassured,” he recalled. “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.” He arrived at that judgment despite the fact that the Nazis had already garnered more votes and more Reichstag seats than any other party.

  Yet Kaltenborn deserves credit for honestly admitting that he was no prophet. Many others would have been tempted to airbrush their memories; he didn’t. “Most people who met Adolf Hitler before he came to power in January, 1933 were apt to underestimate him,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I was no exception.”

  4

  “I Will Show Them”

  There were those who saw what was coming, those who were blind to it until the very last moment and those who continued to insist that the fears about Hitler and the Nazis had been blown out of all proportion, dismissing all the evidence to the contrary. That was true of Germans; it was also true for Americans who lived and worked in their midst.

  There was also a special category of German politicians: those who believed that they could outmaneuver and outsmart Hitler. On June 1, 1932, Franz von Papen, the newly appointed chancellor, took the AP’s Louis Lochner aside at a lunch in the Reich Chancellery, assuring him that he knew how to more effectively contain the Nazis than his predecessor had. His strategy, he explained, would be to loosen rather than tighten the restrictions on them. “I’ll give the Hitlerites enough freedom to show them up in all their absurdity,” he told the American reporter.

  After he was replaced as chancellor by General Kurt von Schleicher, who had served as his defense minister, Papen began promoting a new approach. In his dealings with the octogenarian President von Hindenburg—who according to Lochner and others was increasingly “senile”—he argued that the best way to keep Hitler under control would be to appoint him chancellor.

  Schleicher was pursuing a different policy toward the Nazis, trying to split them by luring Gregor Strasser, the head of the “socialist” faction within the party, into his government as vice-chancellor. Although that maneuver failed, the chancellor would prove to be as naïve in his own way as Papen. After taking power in early December, he quickly convinced himself that he had managed to usher in a new era of “Ruhe, Ruhe, Ruhe [Quiet, Quiet, Quiet],” as he told Lochner during the Christmas holiday.

  “As you see, I have succeeded,” he declared. “Germany has for a long time not been as quiet as now. Even the Communists and the Nazis are behaving. The longer this quiet continues, the more certain is the present government to reestablish internal peace.” Lochner later observed that it was “sophomoric” for Schleicher to mistake the normal Christmas lull in Germany as a sign of better times.

  New reports of fissures in the Nazi movement, combined with the dip in their support in the November 6 elections, had led others to nurture such illusions as well. American Ambassador Sackett was more worried about the fact that the third-place Communists had increased their number of seats in the Reichstag, since he viewed the left as more dangerous than the far right. To counter the Communist threat, he argued, “it was obviously important at the moment to have a strongly centralized more or less military Government.” While Sackett had warned Washington that Hitler appeared determined to “rule alone” and that he and Goebbels “are past adepts at twisting events to suit their fancies and purposes, and indefatigable spellbinders,” he still sounded somewhat dismissive of the Nazi leader, calling him “one of the biggest show-men since P. T. Barnum.”

  Abraham Plotkin, the Jewish-American labor organizer who had arrived in Berlin in November, continued going to political rallies to figure out for himself what the Nazis represented. He saw Goebbels perform for the second time in early January. The Nazi propagandist stirred little emotion at first but then fired up the crowd by blaming Jews for the murder of a young Nazi. This prompted Plotkin to reflect in his diary that day about the possible parallels to the Ku Klux Klan back in his home country. The Klan had looked to be ascendant in the mid-1920s, controlling several governorships, he wro
te, but then abruptly the movement had collapsed politically. “I am told that in Germany it will not be so easy for the Hitlerites to collapse, but it strikes me that any movement that depends on the intensity of emotion such as I saw tonight must either win power quickly or its foundations of hatred and feeling will collapse,” he wrote.

  The following day, Plotkin returned to the same theme. “The Nazi meetings are dispirited, as if beaten and know it,” he noted. But he added a cautionary note: “The only disquieting factor is the number of killings that are political in their origin.” Three days later, he attended another Nazi rally, where Goebbels once again denounced “the bloody Jews,” whipping up the crowd to such frenzy that Plotkin thought for a moment that it would “run out of his control.” But when the rally was over, the American was struck by the sight of the young Nazi troops in uniform waiting for their orders “like a bunch of schoolboys, and like a bunch of schoolboys bought hot dogs when the hot-dog men started to circulate among them.” The wording of this diary entry suggests he found it hard to believe that these young men eating hot dogs could be truly dangerous.

  Even with the mounting reports of violence by just such young men, some wealthy German Jews didn’t seem all that disturbed by the Nazis either. Edgar Mowrer recalled a dinner at the end of 1932 in the home of “a banker named Arnholt.” Mowrer probably misspelled his host’s name; if so, the banker in question may have been Hans Arnhold, who was forced to flee Germany after Hitler’s takeover (his villa now serves as the home of the American Academy in Berlin). In any case, all the men around the dinner table except Mowrer were Jews.

  Over coffee, several of them boasted that they had given money to the Nazis at the urging of non-Jews like Hjalmar Schacht and Fritz Thyssen. Although Schacht had served as the currency commissioner in the critical year 1923, when he was credited with ending hyperinflation, and then as president of the Reichsbank until 1930, he had become an increasingly vocal supporter of the Nazis; so had industrialist Thyssen.