Hitlerland

by Nagorski, Andrew

  Plotkin was far from the only American subscriber to the notion that Hitler and other top Nazis were seeking to restrain their supporters rather than incite them to ever greater violence. Consul General Messersmith initially believed that Hitler had to ride the violent wave of his followers since otherwise he might be replaced by “real radicals.” Growing protests back in the United States, such as the one held in Madison Square Garden on March 27, were only whipping up “what was almost hysteria” among those German leaders who wanted to pursue a moderate course, he warned. Unlike Plotkin, he believed that the subsequent boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany had been ordered from the top, but to contain the popular resentment and control it. When the government officially abandoned the boycott on April 4, he was pleased to report that the number of anti-Semitic incidents dropped quickly.

  Not even the fact that a growing number of Americans were caught up in the violence could shake Messersmith’s belief that the reality of what was happening was far more complicated than it appeared—and that it would be counterproductive to pin all the blame on Hitler. In early March, Nathaniel Wolff, a painter from Rochester, New York, was nabbed by the SA when he was overheard denouncing both Communists and Nazis. Before he was allowed to leave the country, he had to sign a statement promising that he would never return. “I am a Jew,” it read. “I certify that no physical violence has been done to me and none of my property has been stolen.”

  Others were not so lucky. Some, like editor Edward Dahlberg, a visiting Scribner’s Magazine editor, were beaten on the street. The American wife of a German Jew had to watch storm troopers, who had burst into their apartment, beat her husband, ostensibly for having four suits in their closet. “Four suits, while for fourteen years we have been starving,” one of his tormenters shouted. “Jews. We hate you.”

  On March 31, the SA snatched three Americans and took them to a makeshift prison, where they were stripped and left to sleep on the cold floor. The next day, their tormentors beat them unconscious before leaving them out on the street. American correspondents knew of this and other incidents, but Messersmith convinced them to hold off any reporting on what happened to the trio of Americans on March 31 for forty-eight hours. He explained this would allow him to press the authorities to take the proper actions first. As Messersmith reported with evident satisfaction, the police took “rapid action” and the guilty Brownshirts were “sharply reproved” and expelled from the ranks.

  Messersmith and other embassy officials kept protesting when Americans were assaulted, as they continued to be. But they also looked for signs of hope in any case where the authorities seemed willing to help. During the summer of 1933, America’s famous radio broadcaster H. V. Kaltenborn returned to Berlin for a visit with his son Rolf. He told Messersmith that American reporters like Mowrer were surely exaggerating in their stories about incidents of Nazi brutality. A few days later when his son Rolf failed to salute the Nazi banners carried in one of the frequent parades, a storm trooper hit him. Learning of the incident, the Propaganda Ministry promptly issued his father a written apology “in the hope that I would not feature my son’s misadventure in a broadcast,” Kaltenborn recalled. He added, “I had, of course, no intention of exploiting a personal experience.”

  Some Americans, it seemed, didn’t want to see what was really happening, even when it was happening to them.

  There were other American visitors during those early days of Hitler’s rule who were keen to understand just how dramatically the situation had changed in Germany—and not to downplay the implications. James G. McDonald, the head of the Foreign Policy Association who would soon become the League of Nations’ high commissioner for refugees, was alarmed by what he heard from the moment he arrived in Berlin on March 29, 1933. That first day, Putzi Hanfstaengl painted “a terrifying account of Nazi plans,” McDonald recorded in his diary, and didn’t conceal what this would mean for Jews. “The Jews are the vampire sucking German blood,” Putzi told his American visitor with a laugh. “We shall not be strong until we have freed ourselves of them.”

  Later, McDonald was so disturbed by Hanfstaengl’s vitriol that, unable to sleep, he walked around the Tiergarten. It was a beautiful night, the park was peaceful, with lovers scattered about, “and yet these ghastly hatreds breeding such shocking plans for heartless oppression of a whole section of the people,” he noted.

  Making his rounds, McDonald found nothing to lessen his fears. At dinner with the Mowrers, he could see that both of them were “highly overwrought.” He wrote in his diary: “I have never seen them so tense. He could talk of little but terror and atrocities.” Since a waiter was hovering within earshot, they could not talk all that freely. When they met again several days later, Mowrer was even more scathing in his remarks. “To him the leaders are thugs, perverts, and sadists,” McDonald wrote. Separately, Knickerbocker reported to McDonald that he believed that the Nazis were already holding more than 40,000 political prisoners.

  During the Jewish boycott, McDonald was chilled by the sight of an old Jew surrounded by a taunting crowd and, on another occasion, “laughing, jeering children making sport of a national shame.” Meeting German officials, he was struck how they refused to acknowledge that there could be anything wrong with what was happening. He was reminded of meetings he had in Moscow with militant Communists. “In each case the discussion was completely dogmatic”—in particular, when it came to their racial theories.

  Two months before his visit to Berlin, McDonald had met with Henry Goldman of Goldman Sachs, who also was planning a trip to Germany. McDonald asked him then whether the intense anti-Semitism of Germany’s new government didn’t signal that something was wrong with the German people. Goldman, the son of the German-Jewish immigrant founder of the company, brushed off McDonald’s question. “No, there is no more anti-Semitism in Germany than in the United States,” he declared. McDonald considered Goldman a longtime “apologist for Germany,” but he was startled by how he looked when they met at the Adlon Hotel on April 8. “I saw that he was a broken old man,” McDonald noted.

  Based on what he had seen and heard, Goldman had radically revised his views of Germany. “Mr. McDonald, I never would have believed that the worst of the fifteenth and sixteenth century would return in this twentieth century and of all places in Germany,” he said. When McDonald asked him how long he was staying, he replied: “Just as long as I can bear it.”

  Later that same day, Hanfstaengl had arranged for McDonald to meet Hitler, giving him the opportunity to ask him directly about “the Jewish question.” As the American visitor entered his office, Hitler “sized me up from head to foot with glances obviously half suspicious,” McDonald recorded. But he appeared almost nonchalant in replying to his queries about his anti-Semitic policies.

  “We are not primarily attacking the Jews, rather the Socialists and the Communists,” Hitler declared. “The United States has shut out such people. We did not do so. Therefore, we cannot be blamed if we now take measures against them. Besides, as to Jews, why should there be such a fuss when they are thrown out of places, when hundreds of thousands of Aryan Germans are on the streets? No, the world has no just ground for complaint.”

  McDonald observed that Hitler had “the eyes of a fanatic, but he has in addition, I think, much more reserve and control and intelligence than most fanatics.”

  That was what McDonald recorded of his encounter in his diary right afterward. Later, when he returned to the United States, he offered an additional description of what Hitler said. “His word to me was, ‘I will do the thing that the rest of the world would like to do. It doesn’t know how to get rid of the Jews. I will show them.’ ”

  5

  “Get Out, and Fast”

  Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of Foreign Affairs who had visited Germany and charted its politics during the Weimar era, showed up in Berlin on Hitler’s birthday, April 20, 1933, less than two weeks after McDonald’s departure. That morning, on his way from
the train station to the Adlon Hotel where he was staying, Armstrong saw groups of boisterous Brownshirts preparing for the festivities. By noon, a crowd was gathered on Pariser Platz in front of his hotel, but sleet and rain kept the enthusiasm level down, despite the attempt to stir up emotions with a loudspeaker that broadcast Nazi slogans.

  Armstrong knew many officials and professors from the Weimar era, along with some of the diplomats and correspondents stationed in Berlin. He found that some of the British and American correspondents were wary of reporting all the stories of Nazi atrocities that were floating about, but they realized that it was enough to quote the statements of the Nazis themselves to convey the draconian nature of their new policies.

  Among the American diplomats, he considered George Messersmith the most knowledgeable—and the most upset about what was happening on a daily basis. “He could hardly restrain himself when he talked about the Nazis, biting his cigar into two pieces and tossing them away in disgust as he catalogued his difficulties in trying to protect American citizens from molestation,” Armstrong recalled. Messersmith expressed his frustration at the powerlessness of government officials to restrain the Nazis; the militarism of the party activists, he continued, was making it increasingly unlikely that peace in Europe would last long.

  Reconnecting with Germans he had known earlier, Armstrong heard a very dubious take on the new Hitler regime. Foreign Ministry officials like Hans Dieckhoff, who would later serve as the German ambassador to Washington, “were holding on to their offices and keeping quiet,” he noted. Their message to him was that the Nazis were “a flash in the pan,” and these officials insisted that they were trying to minimize the damage to German interests and foreign policy, waiting until a new government would take over. If Hitler did stay in power, they added, he could end up charting a more moderate course as he came to grips with the realities of the world. “They were not unintelligent men but I knew in my bones that they were wrong,” Armstrong wrote later.

  Part of the reason for Armstrong’s pessimism was his realization that so many of the people he had consulted on previous visits—academic luminaries like agricultural expert Karl Brandt, economist Moritz Bonn and Ernst Jäckh, the founder of the Hochschule für Politik, some of whom had contributed articles to Foreign Affairs or worked closely with the Council on Foreign Relations, its parent organization—were nowhere to be found. “They had disappeared, I was told, and in any case it was better for them that I should not try to look them up,” he recalled. Many members of the intellectual elite in such fields as medicine, science and literature had already lost their jobs, and several had fled the country to avoid more serious persecution. “It was staggering to think of what the resulting intellectual vacuum would mean in a country bled white and defeated in a devastating war,” Armstrong later noted.

  Like McDonald, the visiting editor was determined to meet the man who was responsible for these dramatic changes, the new leader who was the focal point of all the speculation about the country’s future. As a first step, he went to meet Hjalmar Schacht, whom Hitler had reappointed to his old job as president of the Reichsbank as a reward for his support. It was a bizarre experience. Arriving at the Reichsbank, Armstrong was led to the big empty kitchen. Schacht was posing for a sculptor who was making a bust of him. Since the sculptor wanted to view him from an angle from below just as others would view the bust later, he had him seated on a chair placed on a large table. So while the sculptor worked and struggled, as Armstrong recalled, with shaping a likeness of his “screwed-up ugly face,” Schacht explained to Armstrong how the Nazis were going to correct the excesses of capitalism, providing a more stable, reliable economic system. He also promised to write an article for Foreign Affairs, which he did a year later.

  Armstrong was bemused by what he considered to be this moralizing about capitalism from a man who had drummed up support of German capitalists for Hitler, but he wasn’t about to show it. His goal was to get the banker’s help in lining up an interview with Hitler. If that meant playing to Schacht’s “great vanity,” as Armstrong put it, he was happy to do so.

  Those tactics worked. On April 27, a week after his arrival in Berlin, Putzi Hanfstaengl showed up at the Adlon to take him to his interview. Armstrong was startled to see Putzi in his new Nazi uniform, the one that he would wear that evening to the Lochners’ dinner party. As Armstrong recalled, “nothing matched” in the bizarre outfit: the tunic, shirt and breeches were all different shades of brown—“olive drab,” “yellowish brown” and “a rather sickly greenish brown.”

  “Why, Putzi, I’ve never seen you in uniform before. How magnificent!” Armstrong declared.

  Hanfstaengl took his compliment deadly seriously. “Yes, it is rather good, isn’t it?” he replied. “Don’t tell anyone, but it’s English stuff. That does make a difference.”

  When he was escorted into Hitler’s office at the Chancellery, still filled with potted flowers that had been birthday gifts, the German leader greeted him with a handshake, motioned him to a table and, as Hanfstaengl and another aide looked on, quickly launched into an opening monologue stressing his commitment to peace. “His general appearance was insignificant,” Armstrong recalled, noting his large nose and small wrinkles about his eyes. But if those wrinkles made him appear inquisitive, that was totally misleading. “Although I had come from the West where his policies had aroused such fierce antagonism,” Armstrong pointed out, “he did not ask me a single question or by any remark or reference reveal that he was in the least concerned by what the world thought of him or of the position in which he had placed his country.” When Hitler spoke, he didn’t look at Armstrong, instead keeping his eyes “fixed on the upper distance, which made it seem as though he were in communication with God.”

  Hitler’s presentation about Germany’s peaceful intentions quickly was transformed into his standard denunciation of the Versailles Treaty and of the “impossible and intolerable” border with Poland. He portrayed the eastern neighbor as a monster hovering over Germany. “Poland holds a naked knife in her teeth,” he said, clenching his teeth for added effect, “and looks at us menacingly.” Germany had been forced to disarm and was surrounded by such threatening neighbors, he insisted. The armies of France, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Belgium had fifty soldiers for every German soldier, he added, which meant that if there was any outbreak of fighting, the responsibility would clearly be theirs.

  As Armstrong recalled, a lock of Hitler’s hair came down menacingly over his eye as he forcefully punctuated his argument with what he believed was irrefutable logic: “To say the contrary is to say that a toothless rabbit would start a battle with a tiger.”

  Hitler had no problem combining his withering attacks on Poland, the most anti-Bolshevik country in the region, which had fought a war with Russia in 1920, with his thesis that the world’s key countries should unite to defend themselves against the threat of Bolshevism. “We are armed today with spears, bows and arrows and swords,” he continued. “Does that condition represent a danger to the peace of the world? Or does the danger of war come from the vast arms produced by Poland?” The only means to right those wrongs, he insisted, was for Germany to rearm. “We cannot and will not wait longer. The sine qua non of any agreement which Germany will join must be, at the very minimum, equality in arms.”

  Armstrong tried to interject other questions during the rare moments when Hitler paused in his monologues, but the German leader had no interest in anything resembling a give-and-take. As Hitler escorted him to the door, Armstrong slipped in his barbed thanks for addressing him rather than the usual millions of Germans. The German leader missed the irony completely and declared he had enjoyed their “animated talk.”

  On the way back to the Adlon, Hanfstaengl was effusive, claiming that Hitler was more open than he had ever been with a foreign visitor. “Wasn’t he lovely to you?” he asked rhetorically. Besides, he added, it was such a great compliment that he had escorted his guest to the door, whic
h he normally didn’t do.

  But Armstrong was feeling anything but “lovely” about the new Germany, which was so different than the country he had visited in the 1920s. Returning to New York, he quickly wrote a slim volume called Hitler’s Reich: The First Phase, which was published in July 1933. Its opening words offered a dramatic—and devastatingly accurate—description of the country’s brutal transformation:

  A people has disappeared. Almost every German whose name the world knew as a master of government or business in the Republic of the past fourteen years is gone. There are exceptions; but the waves are swiftly cutting the sand from beneath them, and day by day, one by one, these last specimens of another age, another folk, topple over into the Nazi sea. So completely has the Republic been wiped out that the Nazis find it difficult to believe it ever existed . . .

  Anyone who did not accept Hitler’s rule, pledging full allegiance to the man and his movement, wasn’t just wiped out: “It is pretended that he never was. His name is not mentioned, even in scorn. If one asks about him, a vague answer is given: ‘Oh, yes—but is he still alive? Maybe he is abroad. Or is he in a nursing home?’ This does not apply merely to Jews and communists, fled or imprisoned or detained ‘for their own protection’ in barbed-wire concentration camps . . .” Then he went on to mention several national, state and city officials who were also in the category of the persecuted, the broken or now in exile. “The men who ruled Germany in these fourteen years have been swept away, out of sight, out of mind, out (according to the program of Dr. Goebbels, propagandist-in-chief) of history.”

  Armstrong neatly conveyed the strategy of the Nazis as they resurrected “Teutonic mysticism” and the notion of “the German super-man,” but had to explain why the superior warrior was defeated in the previous war. “Either he is not a super-man, or there is an alibi,” he wrote. “The alibi is furnished by the Jew, the traitor within the gates.”