Hitlerland

by Nagorski, Andrew

  Mowrer didn’t hide his surprise, prompting his host to ask what he was thinking. “Merely wondering how the People of Israel have managed to survive so many thousands of years when they obviously have a strong suicidal urge,” the American responded.

  “But you don’t take this fellow seriously,” his host inquired.

  “Unfortunately I do—and so should you.”

  “Just talk,” the banker declared, and all the others nodded in agreement. As Mowrer noted, they “thought me incapable of understanding the German soul.”

  Schacht, who had once aligned himself with the democratic forces of the Weimar Republic, wasn’t about “just talk.” Shortly before Christmas, Mowrer ran into him and asked politely about his plans for the holidays. “I am going to Munich to talk with Adolf Hitler,” he declared.

  “You too, my fine Democrat!” Mowrer responded, abandoning any pretense of politeness.

  “Ach, you understand nothing. You are a stupid American,” Schacht shot back.

  “Granted. But tell me what you expect from Hitler in words of one syllable and I’ll try to understand.”

  “Germany will have no peace until we bring Hitler to power.”

  Three weeks later, Mowrer met Schacht again, and asked him how his conversation went with the Nazi leader. “Brilliantly,” the German banker replied. “I’ve got that man right in my pocket.”

  As Mowrer recalled in his memoirs, “From that moment I expected the worst.”

  He wasn’t the only one. Bella Fromm, the Jewish social reporter, found herself seated next to Wiegand at a dinner party in Berlin on December 8. The Hearst correspondent wasn’t living full-time in Berlin then, but had a knack for appearing on scene “whenever a political melodrama is about to sweep the stage,” Fromm noted in her diary.

  “When are the National Socialists going to seize the government?” she asked him bluntly, using the old journalistic ploy of asking a question in a way that implied she knew the score already.

  Wiegand looked taken aback but offered a crisp response: “It won’t be long now.”

  And what would that mean? “Hitler intends to abolish the treaty of Versailles,” the American correspondent continued, drawing upon his past meetings with Hitler. “He wants to unite all Germans. He has no desire for the return of colonies if he finds a way for new Lebensraum [living space] within Central Europe, to install all the regained German subjects. One of Hitler’s early associates, Professor Karl von Haushofer, has been studying the Lebensraum problem for years. He has persuaded Hitler that an expansion to the east, peaceful or by force, is an inevitable necessity.”

  On December 22, Fromm attended a reception hosted by American Consul General George Messersmith, who had been stationed in the German capital for the past two years and monitored the Nazi movement. While Ambassador Sackett was increasingly convinced that the Schleicher government had successfully contained the Nazi threat, Messersmith took a different view. “The German government had better act quickly, and strongly,” he said at the reception. “It’s really upsetting to find so many people of importance in the National Socialist party. There are going to be fireworks here pretty soon, unless I’m badly mistaken.”

  Fromm added this final line to her diary entry that night: “I do not think that my friend Messersmith is mistaken.”

  At an “intimate” dinner for twelve guests hosted by Chancellor von Schleicher and his wife six days later, on December 28, Fromm was able to relay Wiegand’s prediction of a Nazi takeover directly to the man currently in charge. Schleicher laughed it off. “You journalists are all alike,” he told her. “You make a living out of professional pessimism.”

  Fromm pointed out that these views were widely held, not just by her and Wiegand. And that everyone knew that Papen and others were “trying to bring the National Socialists to power.”

  “I think I can hold them off,” Schleicher insisted.

  Referring to the aging President von Hindenburg, Fromm cautioned, “As long as the Old Gentleman sticks to you.”

  Later the two of them were briefly alone in Schleicher’s study. The chancellor once again talked about bringing Gregor Strasser into his government. Fromm was hardly reassured. While Strasser represented the left wing of the Nazi Party, he shared the anti-Semitic views of the rest of the leadership. “What about the church and Jew-phobia of the party?” she asked.

  “You ought to know me better than that, Bella,” Schleicher replied. “All that will be dropped entirely.”

  Once again, Fromm added a line of commentary to her diary entry of that night. “The National Socialist Party is not in the habit of dropping anything that suits its purposes,” she wrote. “They scuttle men quicker than they scuttle doctrines.”

  But even during the fateful month of January 1933, Americans in Berlin were hearing constant reassurances that Hitler and his movement were fading as a threat. Chancellor von Schleicher, they believed, really knew both what he was up against and how to outplay his opponents. On January 22, Abraham Plotkin met with Martin Plettl, the president of the German Clothing Workers’ Union, in a packed Berlin restaurant. Plettl explained to the American labor organizer that Hitler was “dancing between four masters and any one of the four of them may break him.” The four: two camps of industrialists, and two camps within the Nazi Party. As a result, Plettl maintained, Hitler was facing a choice of either accepting a position within the current government or allowing his party rival Strasser to do so. “Hitler will lose either way,” he insisted.

  Plettl’s reasoning was that Schleicher was probably using Hitler “as a cat’s paw.” And “Hitler on the downgrade, supplying Schleicher with provocative means for eliminating the Communists, will clear the roads for Schleicher in the coming elections.” When Plotkin indicated he was skeptical, Plettl argued that it was a strategy that could easily work, allowing Schleicher to use the Nazis to destroy the Communists but prompting deeper fissures within the party itself as some leaders would be compromised by joining a coalition government. Hitler’s party would no longer be a pure opposition force, and its base of support would weaken.

  But the previous chancellor, Papen, had by that time already effectively undercut his successor. On January 4, he met with Hitler in Cologne at the home of banker Kurt von Schröder. The two politicians worked out a deal to oust Schleicher, with Papen assigned the task of winning the support of President von Hindenburg. Even when word of their meeting leaked out, Schleicher professed himself “in no way alarmed by the alleged plot against him.” Neither were the top diplomats at the American Embassy, who believed that the meeting was mostly focused on dealing with the Nazis’ ailing finances. The “rapidly increasing” party debt, chargé d’affaires George Gordon reported, was threatening to undermine the movement. Its financial backers, he added, were both trying to solve that problem and encouraging Hitler to participate in the government, not topple it.

  In the last few days of January, those interpretations were proven grievously wrong. Facing a growing political revolt fanned by Papen, Schleicher asked Hindenburg for his support so that he could dissolve the Reichstag. The president refused, triggering the resignation of the Schleicher government. Next, he turned to Papen to negotiate a new arrangement with the political parties. This gave Papen the green light to do what he had been advocating all along. On January 30, Hindenburg formally asked Hitler to form a new government, appointing him chancellor and Papen as vice chancellor. While Ambassador Sackett reported this “sudden and unexpected triumph” for the Nazis, the AP’s Louis Lochner indicated that Papen remained convinced that he had truly outsmarted the new chancellor. “We have hired Hitler,” he told his friends. In other words, Lochner concluded, Papen was still convinced that he would be “in the driver’s seat.”

  Even before the debate about whether Hitler could truly take power was settled by his dramatic ascension, Americans in Germany were split about what such a development would mean. Were Hitler’s speeches and Mein Kampf a true indication
of what Nazi rule would look like, or were they merely tools for his emotional campaign? If the latter, it would be logical to believe that, once in power, Hitler would tone down his rhetoric, moderate his program and seek accommodation with many of those he had been denouncing at home and abroad.

  Among the correspondents covering Germany, no one had a longer track record than S. Miles Bouton of the Baltimore Sun. He had arrived in Germany in 1911, working at first for the Associated Press. He had covered World War I, written the book And the Kaiser Abdicates, married a German woman and left no doubt that he considered himself the preeminent authority on the country. “It requires no great skill at reading between the lines to discover that I have no very high opinion of the quality of the reporting done from Germany for the American press,” he declared in an interview for his own newspaper on a visit to the United States in 1925. He claimed he wasn’t blaming his fellow correspondents but only their editors, who were guided by their prejudices. Nonetheless, he was scathing about those colleagues. “Some of them are, it is true, much less well informed about the situation there than they might be.”

  A well-informed correspondent, he emphasized both before the Nazis took power and after, would have no doubt who was to blame for what went wrong in Germany. Speaking to the Rockford, Illinois, Women’s Club in March 1935, he pointed out that he had denounced the Versailles Treaty from the beginning. “Read that treaty and understand the things that are happening today,” he said. “The allies heaped oppressions, humiliations, and exactions upon Germany.”

  Bouton had first encountered Hitler in September 1923 before the Beer Hall Putsch that made the Nazi leader famous. At the party headquarters, he was met by a young man who began explaining how Hitler would restore Germany’s honor, saving it from the Communists and the Jews. “It was several minutes before it occurred to me that this was Hitler, talking about himself in the third person,” Bouton recalled in an unpublished manuscript. “I had never before met and have never since met a man who so completely identified himself with his supposed mission.”

  When Hitler’s party regained momentum once the Depression hit, Bouton was at first skeptical of its chances, reporting in 1930 that it “does not come into consideration at all as a government party.” (In 1935, he would claim to have been much more prescient, telling his audience at the University of Georgia: “For the last five years of the Republic I prophesied time and again that Hitler and the National Socialists would come to power.”) But in March 1932, he reported that the strong second-place finish by Hitler in the presidential election “represents a remarkable personal triumph, and it becomes the more astounding when one considers the circumstances in which it was gained.” From there, he launched into an account of what he characterized as the story that his American colleagues had routinely failed to report: it was about “the methods used by both the Reich and the state governments against Hitler, since these methods make a mockery of all protestations by the men in power that they believe in democracy.”

  In other words, the real story that needed to be reported from Germany was not about the brutal methods and ideology of the Nazis but the attempts by the Weimar government to muzzle them, forbidding them to broadcast their message on the radio, suppressing their party newspapers, and banning some of their leaders from speaking in public, as happened to Hitler after he emerged from prison. He scornfully referred to all the talk of the “menace of Hitlerism” that was “disturbing the peace of mind of the outside world in general and of America in particular.” Americans, he added, saw Hitler as “a mere rabble-rouser and shallow demagogue.” Quoting Dorothy Thompson’s description of Hitler as “the very prototype of the Little Man,” he declared that his extensive experience in Germany had taught him to be hesitant about making such judgments about both Hitler and his followers, who were dismissed as “a strange collection of heavy doctrinaires and helpless neurotics.”

  “I am pretty sure that these confident critics are wrong,” he wrote. “There are probably few if any Americans in Germany who have as wide a circle of German friends and acquaintances as I have.” Those acquaintances, he added, were highly educated—“for the greater part academicians, professional men of high standing, high government officials, etc.” At least 80 percent of them had voted for Hitler, he claimed. Of the others, 10 percent refused to vote for Hindenburg, and the remaining 10 percent were Jews. “Even some of them would have voted for Hitler had it not been for the anti-Semitic plank in his platform.”

  At the end of his long article, he tossed in what he called “one more significant fact.” Many of his German friends had American wives who “without any exception are more ardent Hitlerites than their German husbands.” His interpretation of this phenomenon: “Theirs is the American brand of patriotism, the brand which has happily made Marxism and internationalism unthinkable in our country.” His message: Germans supported Hitler for the same “patriotic” reasons, and American readers shouldn’t be swayed by the anti-Nazi accounts of his colleagues in the American press corps.

  Some of those colleagues had come to their own conclusions about why Bouton was offering such contrarian views. Writing on December 11, 1932, to his daughter Betty, who was a student at the University of Chicago, the AP’s Lochner recounted an incident triggered by a photograph of Chancellor von Papen and a few journalists, including Lochner and Bouton, that ran in the Nazi weekly Illustrierter Beobachter. The caption read: “Von Papen und die jüdische Weltpresse” (Von Papen and the Jewish world press). “That they put me down as one of the Chosen People doesn’t matter much, but the unkindest cut was that Miles Bouton, of all people—he who himself is an ardent Nazi—should have been put down as ‘Sally Bouton-Knopf.’ The whole American colony is laughing about it,” Lochner wrote.

  Lochner explained that the Nazi publication listed Bouton’s first name as Sally “as that is a favorite Jewish name” and that they had translated Bouton as Knopf (German for “button”) and hyphenated his last name. “Miles nearly hit the roof,” Lochner added with evident glee. “He was furious—all the more so as he had travelled around with Hitler in an airplane. We both protested not because we were called Jews—we both have very dear friends among the Jews and neither of us are anti-Semitic—but because from the whole ideology of the Nazis it is evident they meant to insult us by calling us Jews.”

  Lochner reported that he heard Hitler was furious about this “boner” by the Nazi weekly, and several Nazi leaders called him to say they were “ashamed” that someone from their camp had played such a dirty trick on them. Lochner wrote to the editor of the weekly demanding he print a retraction. “He did—but in a way that makes the readers think we objected to being called Jews, when our point was that we objected to being insulted by the Nazis,” he reported to his daughter. Nonetheless, Lochner was pleased that the Nazis had made Bouton squirm. “We’ve had lots of fun,” he concluded.

  No issue crystallized the question of Hitler’s intentions more than what Nazi rule would mean for the Jews. A correspondent like Edgar Mowrer, who was Bouton’s polar opposite when it came to his assumptions about the party and what it represented, had covered the attacks of Brownshirts on “foreigners and Jews,” in some cases going out in armored police cars. His wife Lilian recalled anxiously waiting for hours until he returned from “the front.” The young thugs wearing heavy leather boots and carrying revolvers were “always insolent and swaggering,” she added, and they would gather at a number of cafés and beer houses, hanging huge swastika flags outside. The owners of these establishments had no choice but to tolerate “these invasions.”

  Before the Nazis came to power, Edgar made a habit of going into such hangouts to buy the brawlers beers and try to learn more about their views. As Lilian described it, these young toughs rallied to slogans like “We spit on freedom” and “Beat the Red Front to pulp.” Their favorite toast: “Germany awake, perish the Jew!”

  “But just where did you learn all this interesting stuff about the Jew?”
Edgar asked on one occasion.

  “Aber Herr, everybody in Germany knows that the Jews are our misfortune,” one of the Nazis replied.

  “But just how? Why?” Edgar persisted.

  “There are too many of them. And then, Jews are not people like the rest of us.”

  “But in my country the proportion of Jews is much higher than in Germany. But we lost no war, have not starved, not been betrayed to foreigners; in short, have suffered none of the evils you attribute to the presence of the Jews in Germany. How do you account for this?”

  “We don’t account for it. We simply know it is true,” the Nazi replied, complaining that the Jews were getting the best jobs for themselves by “stealth and fraud.” Germans were waking up to that, he added, “and no matter how hard the Jew works, he won’t be on top long.”

  “Then you admit the Jew works harder?” Edgar asked.

  “Of course.”

  “But doesn’t the hardest worker deserve the best jobs?”

  His interlocutor suddenly sounded uncertain. “Yes—that is, no; not if he is a Jew.”

  “Is that logical, is that clear thinking?”

  “Ach, thinking!” the exasperated Nazi replied. “We are sick of thinking. Thinking gets you nowhere. The Führer himself says true Nazis think with their blood.”

  And this kind of lack of thinking was everywhere. The Mowrers’ young daughter, Diana Jane, came home from school one day and said, in German, that she had to ask her mother a question. Lilian insisted, as always, that she speak English at home. “But I have only heard about these things in German and I must know if I am saying the right words,” she replied.