Despite this stark portrait of the new Germany that he painted, Armstrong asked near the end of his book whether Hitler, “having given the German spirit an opportunity to purge itself of part of its store of resentment and hate and envy,” might chart a more moderate course, more like his predecessors who tried to redress their country’s grievances in a more patient, long-term manner. “The first phase of the revolution is over,” he concluded. “But we cannot pretend that as yet there is any real evidence to cause our fears to diminish, or that our questions can as yet be given any conclusive answers.”
Armstrong was reluctant to give in completely to pessimism—something that he noted with a tinge of regret in his memoirs, since if he had done so he would have been proven completely vindicated by events. But the main import of his slim treatise was clear: Hitler’s Germany was stirring up real fears for good reason—and anyone who downplayed the dangers was dangerously self-delusional.
In early 1933, shortly after Hitler had taken power in Germany, another new leader appeared on the world scene: Franklin D. Roosevelt. Coming to power in the midst of the Great Depression, he was understandably preoccupied with his domestic agenda. In his inaugural address on March 4, 1933, the same day that the Nazis won the most seats in the Reichstag elections, he focused on the need for national recovery, only making a brief mention of “world policy” during which he pledged that the United States would be “the good neighbor.”
But Roosevelt faced an almost immediate decision about whom to send to replace Sackett, Herbert Hoover’s envoy to Germany whose tour ended in late March. Despite the pull of his domestic agenda, Roosevelt understood that this was an increasingly important post and sought to fill it with someone who would have a chance of playing a constructive role there. He first offered the job to James M. Cox, who had been the Democratic presidential candidate in 1920 and shared the ticket with FDR as his running mate. “I regard Berlin as of special importance at this time,” Roosevelt wrote him, imploring him to accept the post. Cox turned him down, citing his need to attend to his business interests, including his publishing company. The president was no more successful in his subsequent overtures to former Secretary of War Newton Baker, businessman Owen D. Young and a couple of prominent New York politicians.
While he struggled to find a new Berlin envoy, Roosevelt signaled his intent to pursue a global disarmament agenda. On May 16, he appealed to world leaders to begin scrapping all offensive weapons and to pledge not to engage in acts of aggression. The next day, Hitler appeared at the Reichstag to deliver his own “Peace Speech.” Calling the American president’s proposal “a ray of comfort for all who wish to co-operate in the maintenance of peace,” Hitler professed his country’s willingness to renounce all offensive weapons and “to disband her entire military establishment” if her neighbors would do the same thing. War was “unlimited madness,” he added, calling for an end to old enmities and insisting that Germany was ready to live in peace with everyone.
“The speech was the best thing I have heard Hitler do,” Lochner wrote to his daughter Betty afterward. He had presided over the AP bureau’s extensive coverage of the event, and he was still feeling optimistic when he wrote his letter on May 28. The Nazis would have been furious if any Weimar chancellor had delivered such a conciliatory speech, he added. “That’s the interesting thing about dictatorships, anyway: When it comes to foreign policy, they are tame as lambs . . . for they know they have so much trouble consolidating their power at home that they want to avoid everything possible that might look like trouble with foreign nations. It is quite obvious that Hitler doesn’t want war.”
Lochner wasn’t completely credulous. “Whether, however, when you instill the military traditions in a people, war won’t come anyway, is another question. Certainly, Germany looks like an armed camp,” he wrote, mentioning the proliferation of uniformed Nazis, paramilitary units and police. “Hitler had to explain that the ‘Private Armies’ are harmless ping-pong affairs!”
Despite the generally positive coverage Hitler’s speech received, Roosevelt was hardly sanguine about relations with Germany and continued to be frustrated by his inability to recruit someone for the Berlin post. But he perked up immediately when, at a meeting on June 7, Secretary of Commerce Daniel Roper suggested his friend William E. Dodd. A professor of history at the University of Chicago who specialized in the Old South, Dodd was born in North Carolina, studied at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and then went on to get a doctorate at the University of Leipzig. Dodd, who was sixty-three, was both a Democratic partisan and “a democrat in the full American sense of the word,” noted fellow historian Charles A. Beard. Beard added that Dodd was a Baptist who believed in “separation of Church and State, religious liberty and freedom of conscience.”
The very next day, Roosevelt called Dodd at his University of Chicago office. “I want to know if you will render the government a distinct service,” he told the startled professor. “I want you to go to Germany as Ambassador.”
When Dodd recovered from the initial shock, he asked for some time to think the proposition over. “Two hours; can you decide in that time?” Roosevelt persisted, adding that he was sure the German government would not object to a book he had written about Woodrow Wilson or any of his other writings. “That book, your work as a liberal and as a scholar, and your study at a German university are the main reasons for my wishing to appoint you. It is a difficult post and you have cultural approaches that would help. I want an American liberal in Germany as a standing example.”
Dodd quickly called his wife and talked with university officials, but there was little doubt in his mind what his answer would be. Suddenly, he had received an offer to be a participant in history, not just an observer. Besides, as his daughter Martha pointed out later, the call from the president aroused “an almost sentimental nostalgia for the Germany of his youth, the country that had opened up the tremendous cultural horizons to him, softened his heart by the kindness and generosity of its people, both simple and educated.” Dodd had criticized the harsh terms of the Versailles Treaty when it had been unpopular to do so, and he had admired the attempt by the Weimar-era politicians to construct a democratic system.
If both Roosevelt and his appointee were inclined to believe that a cultured, liberal, democratic American ambassador might have a salutary effect on relations with Germany, they knew that they couldn’t expect miracles. Over lunch at the White House on June 16, the president discussed trade and financial issues, and then turned to the question of the Jews. “The German authorities are treating the Jews shamefully and the Jews in this country are greatly excited,” he said. “But this is also not a governmental affair. We can do nothing except for American citizens who happen to be made victims.”
At the beginning of July, Dodd met with a group of prominent New York Jews, who appealed to him to do what he could to defend their persecuted brethren in Germany. While explaining that he could not intervene officially, he vowed to “exert all possible influence against unjust treatment of German Jews.” But during another call in New York, Dodd received a dramatically different message. Philanthropist Charles R. Crane, who had endowed a chair at the University of Chicago’s history department and also funded the Institute of Current World Affairs, discussed both his hatred of Russia’s Bolsheviks and his admiration for the new regime in Germany, including its treatment of the Jews. “Let Hitler have his way,” Crane advised Dodd.
Little wonder that Dodd boarded the Washington, the ship that would take him, his wife and their grown children Bill and Martha to Hamburg, in a serious mood. He was still excited by this unexpected new opportunity but recognized that Roosevelt’s description of Berlin as “a difficult post” was certainly an understatement. He would have to deal with the Nazis and professional foreign service officers who had a reputation for snobbishness, and he had to try to resurrect his German language skills that had atrophied since his student days. As the ship prepared to depart, a group of
New York newspapermen asked Dodd and his family to pose for photos on the front deck. As the new envoy noted sheepishly in his diary, “My wife, son and I yielded reluctantly and, unaware of the similarity of the Hitler salute, then unknown to us, we raised our hands.” The last image of the departing appointee, then, was one of him and his family seemingly mimicking the Nazi salute.
On the voyage over, Dodd practiced his German and insisted that his son Bill and daughter Martha listen to him read aloud so that they would begin to understand the language. He also read Edgar Mowrer’s new book Germany Puts the Clock Back. After taking the train from Hamburg to Berlin on July 13, Dodd immediately found himself answering questions about the kinds of issues that Mowrer wrote about. The Familienblatt, a Hamburg publication, had written that Dodd had come to Germany to speak up for the Jews. At his first briefing at the U.S. Embassy the next day, he told reporters that this was not the case.
Among the reporters present was Mowrer, who came up to greet him afterward. The new envoy told the famous Chicago Daily News correspondent that he had read his book with interest, but didn’t say anything about the fact that it was banned in Germany and that, as he already knew, the Nazis were demanding that Mowrer resign his post as president of the Foreign Press Association.
In the memoir she published a few years later, Lilian Mowrer described the sense of solidarity that blossomed among many of the American and British correspondents who gathered in Berlin late most evenings at Die Taverne, an inexpensive Italian restaurant near the Kurfürstenstrasse, during those early months of Hitler’s rule. “No group of professional men co-operate so easily as foreign correspondents,” she wrote. “Spontaneously in those first awful days, each accepted the common task of telling the world, and for the purpose laid aside any thoughts of personal competition.” Sitting on wooden benches at long tables under low ceilings, the reporters swapped stories, including of desperate late night phone calls or visits from Jews, Catholics, Socialists and others who told terrifying tales of arrests, beatings and torture. In one case, the Mowrers met a recently released Jew who showed them “his back beaten to pulp,” as Edgar recalled.
But if most reporters were increasingly aware of the brutality around them, not all reacted the same way—or certainly not the same way the Mowrers did. When the Nazis had announced the boycott of Jewish stores, Lilian took her American passport and “pushed past these bullies” to shop at Kaufhaus des Westens, a Jewish-owned department store that was almost empty of customers, except for a few other foreigners. Edgar made it a point of visiting a Jewish doctor at the same time to have the cast removed from his leg, the result of an earlier skiing accident. The doctor was so frightened that he only reluctantly entered his own consulting room.
Since the publication of Mowrer’s book, the Nazis had been openly angry at him. A senior press official at the Foreign Ministry suggested that he resign from his post as president of the Foreign Press Association; otherwise, he warned, the government would boycott it. Mowrer turned to Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath, a holdover from the pre-Nazi government who routinely tried to assure foreigners of Germany’s good intentions, but received no help. He was as unhappy with Mowrer’s book as were his new masters. Accompanied by Knickerbocker, Mowrer next managed to arrange a meeting with Goebbels, who was equally dismissive. “You claim to have reason to speak with me?” the propaganda chief greeted them.
Unable to stave off a boycott of the Foreign Press Association, Mowrer called a general meeting and offered his resignation. But a large majority of the members voted to refuse his offer, or “to allow social and personal pressure to hinder them in the freedom of their criticism in so far as their work was based on authentic material.” A month later, the Pulitzer Prizes were announced for reporting in 1932, and Mowrer won for “best correspondence from abroad.”
While not changing his mind on the boycott, Goebbels suddenly took a softer line with Mowrer, offering him some journalistic “favors.” He allowed him to join a group of correspondents on a visit to the Sonnenburg concentration camp, with the aim of proving that political prisoners were held in humane conditions. At the time, the early camps of the Nazi regime didn’t have the full range of horrifying associations that they would have later, but stories about brutal treatment were already circulating. Recognizing that they would be given a show tour, Mowrer and Knickerbocker worked out a strategy to find out how one of the most prominent prisoners—Carl von Ossietzky, the editor of a pacifist weekly—was treated. When they asked to see him, Ossietzky was brought out but surrounded by guards. Allowed to ask a few questions, Knickerbocker inquired whether he was able to receive books.
“Certainly,” Ossietzky replied to the satisfaction of the guards.
Knickerbocker asked what kind of books he liked to read, and Ossietzky said: “Whatever you have . . . history perhaps.”
Mowrer jumped in, asking what period interested him the most. “Ancient, medieval, modern—which do you prefer?”
Ossietzky was silent, then briefly looked him in the eyes as he replied in a monotone voice, “Send me a description of the Middle Ages in Europe.”
As Mowrer recalled later, the two American journalists understood his message all too well, and they watched silently as the prisoner was led “back into Europe’s New Dark Age.”
The AP’s Lochner was also part of the group, but he came to a somewhat different conclusion. After questioning the prisoners, he was convinced that some of them “were indeed badly beaten up, but that apparently all cruel treatment has now stopped,” he wrote in the same letter to his daughter Betty where he had described Hitler’s “Peace Speech.” He was troubled, though, by the lack of charges against the prisoners, and the uncertainty they faced about their fate. “Hence, if the purpose of our visit to Sonnenburg was to convince us that no bodily harm was being done to the prisoners, the purpose was served,” he concluded. “But if the Nazis think that any of us came away enthusiastic over Sonnenburg, they are far mistaken.”
During the visit to the camp, the Nazi officer in charge put on a show of friendliness for the visiting correspondents—and made a special point of singling out Mowrer. “You know, Herr Mowrer, we were very angry at you at one moment,” he said, implying that this was no longer the case. “We even thought of sending a detachment of SA lads to beat you into reason. What would you have done about that?”
“If there had been anything left of me, I suppose I should have staggered to a typewriter and written what I thought about it,” the American replied.
The Nazi wanted to know what he would have thought exactly. Mowrer promptly told him: “That it was a typical Nazi victory.”
“And what do you imply by that?” the Nazi persisted.
“Fifteen armed men against one unarmed man,” Mowrer noted, bringing their exchange to an end.
The “sugar period” in relations between the correspondents and the Nazis, as his wife, Lilian, called it, didn’t last long. Certainly not for her husband, who continued to pursue the stories that only deepened his gloom about where Germany was headed. He wasn’t just saddened—he was angry and increasingly impatient with those who refused to see the danger signals the way he did. When two prominent American editors visited him in Berlin—Oswald Garrison Villard of the Nation, and George Shuster of Commonweal—he tried to convince them that Hitler was really intent on war, but only antagonized them instead. “If such intelligent Americans refused to face the facts, how be confident that the West would react in time to prevent the worst?” he wrote.
One of Mowrer’s sources was a doctor who was the son of the Grand Rabbi in Berlin. Every couple of weeks, the American would phone and complain of a pain in his throat, asking for an appointment. When the doctor would start to examine his “patient,” he would find an excuse to send his assistant out of the room. As soon as she stepped away, he would quickly push a rolled-up piece of paper into Mowrer’s breast pocket, chronicling the latest assaults and arrests. On one such visit, the doctor
told him: “You are a marked man and were followed here. I can’t afford to see you any more.”
But see each other they did. Mowrer suggested an alternative scheme, whereby each Wednesday at 11:45 A.M. they stood at adjoining urinals in the public restroom under Potsdamer Platz. The two men never spoke, and they left by separate entrances so no one trailing them would suspect anything. But the doctor would drop messages on the floor that Mowrer picked up as he continued to gather information on the plight of the persecuted. When Jews asked him for advice, he was unhesitating in his answer: “Get out, and fast,” he’d say—even providing those who listened with a map of the border between Germany and Czechoslovakia.
Despite all the rising tensions, Mowrer didn’t completely lose his sense of humor. It was a tradition of the Foreign Press Association to hold a dinner for the German foreign minister each June where the minister would expound on his policies. Since the Nazi government was still boycotting the association in June 1933 because of its anger at Mowrer, the association decided instead to hold a lunch for the diplomatic corps. To the surprise of the correspondents, along with almost all the foreign ambassadors, two German officials they had invited showed up: Reichs-bank president Schacht and Heinrich Sahm, Berlin’s famously tall (6 feet 6) mayor.
When Mowrer rose to greet everyone, he pretended to encounter difficulties with German grammar. “In this country where we are—I mean have been—so happy . . . that some of us have sought relief—I mean recreation—abroad . . .” he said, reeling off a string of such “corrections” of his wording that soon had all the ambassadors laughing uproariously.
An angry Schacht demanded the right to reply. He charged that the foreign press should report facts, not opinions, implying that the latter was the reason why Germany’s image was tainted in the world. Mowrer thanked him with the same kind of ironical humor he had used before, saying that he was pleased that Schacht so valued American journalism, which was justifiably famous for its factual reporting. Once again, he left the diplomats chuckling while Schacht fumed.
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