Hitlerland

by Nagorski, Andrew

  Lilian assented.

  “Mutti, am I a Jew or a Christian?”

  “You are not a Jew, my dear. What makes you ask?”

  The girl said that all the talk at school about who was or wasn’t Jewish had made her wonder about her own identity. “It isn’t good to be a Jew,” she concluded.

  Nineteen thirty-two was a big year for Edgar Mowrer. He would win the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting then, and his deepening fears about where Germany was heading prompted him to write his book Germany Puts the Clock Back, which he finished in November and was quickly published in the United States at the beginning of 1933 just as Hitler was taking power. His book chronicled the disintegration of the Weimar Republic, how Germans had grown “sick of everything” and how “the depression brought voters by the carloads to Hitler.” By way of explanation of the Nazi leader’s appeal, he wrote, “A little man has taken the measure of still smaller men.”

  Yet even Mowrer wasn’t quite sure what Hitler represented—and what to expect if he took power. “Did he believe all that he said?” he asked. “The question is inapplicable to this sort of personality. Subjectively Adolf Hitler was, in my opinion, entirely sincere even in his self-contradictions. For his is a humorless mind that simply excludes the need for consistency that might distress more intellectual types. To an actor the truth is anything that lies in its effect: if it makes the right impression it is true.”

  Sigrid Schultz of the rival Chicago Tribune recalled one incident that proved Mowrer’s point about Hitler’s acting ability, which allowed him to ingratiate himself with those who were normally skeptical. After the Nazis’ string of electoral wins in 1932, Hanfstaengl invited a dozen American and British correspondents to meet Hitler at the Kaiserhof Hotel. Schultz was among them, and she watched with fascination as Hitler greeted the first correspondent in line by clutching his hands and staring into his eyes. Encountering Schultz, he merely shook her hand. When he reached a correspondent who was normally known for his irreverent style, Schultz expected some fireworks. Instead, she recalled, “I could see the man’s face as Hitler went into his routine and, to my horror, those usually cynical eyes responded adoringly to whatever message Hitler was giving out.”

  Mowrer credited Hitler and the Nazis with doing everything possible to achieve the maximum effect at every such opportunity. “While others slept, they had labored. While opponents talked once, they talked ten times,” he wrote. “Hitler believes chiefly in the personal contact, the spoken word, personality.” He added ominously, “In the great game of fooling the public he is an incomparable master.”

  As for the true intentions of his anti-Semitic campaign, Mowrer sounded alarmed in some moments but uncertain in others. “A suspicion arises that Adolf Hitler himself accepted anti-Semitism with his characteristic mixture of emotionalism and political cunning,” he wrote. “Many doubted if he really desired pogroms.”

  In January 1933 after Mowrer had completed his book and Hitler was coming to power, the Chicago Daily News reporter won an election, too. He was elected president of the Foreign Press Association. It was a confluence of events that would ultimately lead to a dramatic ending of the Mowrers’ stay in Germany.

  Putzi Hanfstaengl would claim in his postwar memoir that he had felt “singularly unmoved by that clamour and hysteria of that January 30 in 1933 when the Nazi Party came to power.” He added, “Certainly it was an exciting moment, but I had too many reservations concerning the dangerous turbulence of the radicals to feel unduly confident about the possible march of events.”

  If he really had any reservations then, Putzi disguised them well. He congratulated Hitler when he returned to the Kaiserhof Hotel after his meeting with President von Hindenburg and immediately talked with a steady stream of foreign journalists coming to see him. And soon he was directing propaganda films, publishing a book of “caricatures”—or sketches—of Hitler, and designing his own personalized Nazi Party uniform. Putzi didn’t want to don the standard shirt and trousers that Hitler offered him from the party’s clothing store. Instead, he noted, “I sent for a superb length of chocolate-brown gabardine from a London tailor and had it made up with a delicate little gold epaulette.”

  Hanfstaengl boasted that his first appearance in his new uniform, at a dinner party hosted by the AP’s Lochner and his German wife, Hilde, “was, needless to state, the talk of the town.” Lochner remembered the evening well. It was April 27, 1933, and his guests included U.S. Consul General George Messersmith, Sigrid Schultz, some former German officials and banker Curt Sobernheim and his wife, Lilli, who were Jewish. In typical German fashion, all the guests had arrived promptly at eight, except for Putzi. Hilde was ready to seat them at eight-fifteen when the Nazi press officer suddenly appeared. “In strode an enormous bulk of masculinity in a brand-new Nazi brown uniform,” Lochner recalled. “It was Putzi, who had hitherto made sarcastic remarks about the official Nazi garb and had never dressed in one.”

  Lochner added that Lilli Sobernheim—“a short stubby person who was nearly as round as she was small”—nearly fainted. Trembling, she whispered, “The Gestapo.” Putzi bowed to Hilde and apologized for his tardiness, explaining that his butler hadn’t properly prepared his evening dress suit, which was why he had to wear his party uniform. As Louis noted, nobody believed him; Putzi’s own account of that evening makes clear that his appearance in uniform was fully planned, although he never mentioned his lie. Nor did he mention what happened next. According to Lochner, he politely bowed and kissed the hand of Lilli Sobernheim. Her husband, Curt, then stated, with a look of professed innocence: “I believe, Dr. Hanfstaengl, we are somewhat related.”

  Putzi was visibly startled. After all, a Jew was telling him that he was related to him. “How interesting! What do you mean?” he asked.

  Sobernheim began explaining that a relative had married someone in Hanfstaengl’s family, and the two men retreated to a corner where they talked further. Lochner recalled that this had everyone chuckling since “it seemed like accusing someone of treason to tell a Nazi he was related to a Jew.”

  As the evening progressed, the tension appeared to dissipate. Hanfstaengl even spent time chatting amicably with former Minister of Defense Wilhelm Groener, who had supported a ban on the SA during his term in office. “Only you unofficial people can stage a dinner like this,” Messersmith, the U.S. consul general, told Lochner. “There ought to be more like it. Maybe they would exert a good influence upon the Nazis.”

  But as Hanfstaengl made the rounds of the parties hosted by diplomats and journalists during those early days of the new government, he charmed some of his hosts and alienated others. Messersmith soon concluded that he was “a court jester,” but one who “thought that his position as Hitler’s favorite and his uniform permitted him to do anything.” Since the consul general had become increasingly critical of the new regime, Hanfstaengl registered his displeasure by what was meant as a pointed put-down at an American Embassy dinner party. “Oh, so this is the famous Messersmith who knows everything that is going on and doesn’t like it,” he told him.

  Putzi’s rudeness didn’t stop there. He began rubbing the leg of the woman seated next to him at the dinner table. As Lilian Mowrer pointed out later, “I knew he was crazy about women and could not keep his hands off them.” Most guests pretended not to notice Putzi’s antics, but Messer-smith bluntly and openly reprimanded him. The consul general reported with evident satisfaction that Putzi acted like “an exemplary guest” from that point on.

  Later, Hanfstaengl would seek to take revenge by spreading rumors that Messersmith was Jewish. He had used the same tactics against Edgar Mowrer when the correspondent began reporting on attacks against Jews during those first months of the new regime, claiming that Mowrer was a “secret” Jew. Meeting with James G. McDonald, the visiting head of the New York–based Foreign Policy Association, Putzi declared: “Of course, he is a Jew and so is his wife”—and then proceeded to name other reporters who he claime
d were Jews or served Jewish interests.

  Mowrer’s friend Knickerbocker heard a group of Nazi leaders repeating this story. “Edgar a Jew? Of course!” he replied. Then referring to the revered general from World War I who had marched with Hitler in the Beer Hall Putsch, he added, “As Jewish as Ludendorff!”

  Those kinds of personal battles were hardly surprising given the escalating political tensions from the moment that Hitler took power. According to Putzi, Hitler initially liked Knickerbocker, not for his reporting but for his excellent German, lively personality and red hair—although, of course, none of that would matter later when his dispatches became increasingly irritating to the Nazis. Knickerbocker was on hand for all the major events in early 1933, including “the greatest torchlight procession in its history” on January 30, when Hitler became chancellor.

  “Hitler stationed himself at the window of the Chancellor’s palace and Hindenburg at another window,” Knickerbocker wrote. “From eight o’clock in the evening until midnight the thirty-five thousand Brownshirts of Berlin marched past and their flaming torches turned the streets into rivers of fire. The aged president stood in a bath of searchlights, the young Chancellor in another. All Berlin tried to reach them to cheer them and the music and the shouting brought many stout Teutons to tears.”

  At first, the representatives of the new regime reached out to Americans to deliver messages of reassurance. “The Nazis will make no attempt to carry out any of their well-known demagogic reforms,” Hjalmar Schacht, the former president of the Reichsbank who would soon regain his old post, told Alfred Klieforth, the embassy’s first secretary, over dinner. Sackett, who would end his posting in Berlin in March, initially believed that the government was genuinely divided in its responsibilities, with the Nazis taking charge only of “the purely political and administrative departments” while others would continue to deal with the economy, finance and the remaining daily chores of government. He believed Papen, the vice-chancellor, was continuing to play a major role, along with Nationalist Party leader Alfred Hugenberg, who had been appointed minister of agriculture and economics. The ambassador described him as “practically economic dictator.”

  But the next rapid sequence of events would dispel all such illusions about competing power brokers. On February 27, the Reichstag was set ablaze by Marinus van der Lubbe, a twenty-four-year-old Dutchman who had been a member of a Communist youth group. Suspicions were immediately aroused that the arsonist was “a dupe of the Nazis” and that he had been set up to provide them with an excuse for a massive crack-down. Subsequently, many historians have concluded that the Dutchman may have indeed acted alone. But whatever the case, Hitler seized on the opportunity to lash out against the Communists and other alleged conspirators, and to transform Germany into an absolute dictatorship.

  Based on a hastily prepared emergency decree “For the Protection of People and State,” Hitler banned opposition publications and rallies, and ordered the arrests of thousands of Communists and Social Democrats, claiming they were plotting more attacks. SA troops wreaked havoc, breaking into homes, beating and torturing the victims they dragged out. With new elections scheduled for March 5, everything happened so fast that it ensured that opposition parties wouldn’t have a chance to mount effective campaigns.

  On February 28, the day when Hitler had convinced the increasingly feeble President von Hindenburg to sign the emergency decree that suspended the key civil liberty sections of the Weimar constitution, Fromm attended a reception at Sackett’s residence. Everyone was abuzz with the latest speculation about how far the crackdown would go. It was then, according to Fromm, that Sackett revealed he had asked Washington to send him home. He was disappointed by the failure of American efforts to stabilize the German economy, the Jewish reporter wrote in her diary, and “deeply displeased with German domestic politics.”

  Despite the Nazis’ rampage against their opponents, the party garnered only 43.9 percent of the votes in the March 5 elections. That made them the strongest party in the Reichstag but still not the majority party. They had to include Hugenberg’s Nationalists in the government to give them the majority they needed. But Hitler had no intention of allowing anything to slow him down. On March 23, he had the Reichstag approve the “enabling act,” effectively shifting all key powers from the legislative body to him. As chancellor, he would draft the laws that would be enacted by the cabinet—even, as the act specified, when they “might deviate from the constitution.” There would be no more restraints on his power.

  Or on the attacks on anyone deemed a political opponent and on Jews. April 1 marked the official start of a boycott against Jewish businesses, allegedly as a response to slanderous campaigns against Germany by Jews abroad. Calling what happened next “a tragedy,” Knickerbocker reported: “The nation turned into a huge hunting party and for another fortnight all attention was absorbed in chasing the Jews.”

  Dorothy Thompson, who was back on the continent but no longer living in Berlin, had arrived in the German capital on the night of the Reichstag fire and stayed long enough to witness some of the rampages that followed. When the Jewish boycott started on April 1, she wrote from Vienna to her husband Sinclair Lewis, who was back in New York: “It is really as bad as the most sensational papers report . . . the S.A. boys have simply turned into gangs and beat up people on the streets . . . and take socialists and communists & Jews into so-called ‘Braune Etagen’ [brown floors] where they are tortured. Italian fascism was a kindergarten compared to it.” She also despaired of “incredible (to me) docility” of the liberals and confessed she felt the urge to go around Berlin reciting the Gettysburg Address. And she was worried about her colleagues who were still stationed there, particularly Mowrer. “Edgar is constantly threatened, but has no intention of leaving Berlin & doesn’t think he is in actual danger.”

  Thompson sent another letter to a friend in London, the pianist Harriet Cohen, who knew British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. She explained that she had seen many victims of Nazi violence with her own eyes. The SA thugs had gone “perfectly mad” as they hunted down new victims, she wrote. “They beat them with steel rods, knock their teeth out with revolver butts, break their arms . . . urinate on them, make them kneel and kiss the Hakenkreuz [the swastika].” Noting the silence of the German press and the exodus of such writers as Thomas Mann, Erich Maria Remarque and Bertolt Brecht, she let loose with her frustration. “I keep thinking what could be done . . . I feel myself starting to hate Germany. And already the world is rotten with hatred. If only someone would speak . . .” Cohen understood this to be an appeal for her to show the letter to MacDonald, which she did.

  Not that such messages had any impact. The Nazis continued to usher in their new order with new drama. On the evening of May 10, propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels presided over the infamous “burning of the books”—“the auto da fé of ‘un-German literature,’” as Knickerbocker described it, “when throughout the Reich 100,000 students gathered to destroy ‘Jewish, Marxist, anti-German, immoral’ publications of 280 authors, many of them bearing world-famous names.” It was “a circus of historical significance but one that furnished immense entertainment for the participants.”

  Addressing the crowd, Goebbels declared: “These flames do not only illuminate the final act of the old era, they also light up the new. Never before have the young men had so good a right to clean up the debris of the past . . . Oh, my century, it is a joy to be alive.” Along with the predictable volumes of Marx, Engels and Lenin, books by Remarque, Brecht, Hemingway and even Helen Keller (How I Became a Socialist) went up in flames, all part of an estimated total of 20,000 copies incinerated that night while the crowd cheered and sang.

  Several correspondents witnessed the spectacle, and the cumulative effect of the Nazi actions was a growing sense of repulsion among many of them. Even the Baltimore Sun’s Bouton, whom Lochner had scornfully referred to as “an ardent Nazi” earlier, underwent a fundamental transformation and starte
d filing increasingly hard-hitting stories, warning “that the truth [about the Nazis’ tactics] is ten times worse than the reports.” Just over a year after Hitler took power, the German Foreign Ministry ordered Bouton to “change his style of reporting or leave the country.” Within a short time, he was gone.

  Most of Bouton’s colleagues, including Lochner, very much wanted to keep covering what was the most exciting story of the moment. Besides, their home offices didn’t want dramatic exits—they wanted to keep their reporters in Berlin. “Our orders from our bosses were to tell no untruth, but to report only as much of the truth, without distorting the picture, as would enable us to remain at our posts,” Lochner wrote in his memoirs. Cautious by nature, the AP veteran would follow those instructions.

  Other Americans exhibited even greater caution, but sometimes for other reasons. Despite all the violence and intimidation—in fact, directly because of the seemingly unbridled nature of the almost daily attacks on anyone deemed a political opponent—the outsiders were often puzzled and still suspended judgment on what exactly was driving this fury.

  Writing in the American Federationist, the house organ of the American Federation of Labor, Abraham Plotkin summed up the desperate situation of his German counterparts in an article that he published shortly after his return to the United States in May 1933. “The Nazis have turned loose forces that they themselves do not understand,” the Jewish-American labor organizer insisted. “It may surprise many to learn that the most exciting things that have happened in Germany have come as an upsurge from below, and not from the government itself.” Citing as an example the anti-Jewish boycott in Munich, which was formally disavowed by Hitler’s government, he claimed it had been started by SA troops and “it gained such momentum within a few hours that not one among the Nazi leaders dared to make an effort to head it off.”