Often, American visitors would exhibit no more than a vague uneasiness. Future novelist Wright Morris, then only twenty-three, hopped a freighter from New York to Antwerp in October 1933, setting off to explore Europe. During his sojourn there, he briefly passed through Germany, checking into a youth hostel in Heidelberg. The dormer window of his room looked out on a park where blond children were playing, the weather was beautiful, and, as he walked about the city, he was keenly aware of its romantic tradition. “On the bridge over the Neckar I stood long and long, looking at the castle, my fancy on the Rhine maidens and the mists behind it,” he wrote in his travel memoir.
But he also felt his “first presentiments that something was rotten in this picture of perfection. Behind the light and the shadow, the trilling voices of the children, lurked a danger in which we were all complicit.” When he entered a tobacco shop to look at some pipes, he caught sight of someone spying on him through a curtain. “In the shopwoman’s smiling, unctuous manner there was something both disturbing and false,” he recalled. “I could hear muttered whisperings behind the curtain. My sense of apprehension was unused and rudimentary, since I had felt it so seldom, but in the eyes and furtive manner of this woman I felt, and shared, a nameless disquiet.” Nonetheless, Morris was quick to add, “Back in the sunlight I soon forgot it.”
Others were keen to overlook any disquieting signs, convinced that the key to international harmony was recognition of the notion that every country was free to choose its own path and that people everywhere have more in common than they realize. No one believed that more passionately than Donald B. Watt of Putney, Vermont, who in the summer of 1932 took his first small group of young Americans to Europe, launching the Experiment in International Living. The highly successful exchange program, which includes stays with local families, continues to operate today. As Watt put it, his aim was “to create a controlled human situation which would produce understanding and friendliness between people and different cultures in a limited period of time.”
Watt’s enthusiasm for “making friends out of ‘foreigners’” made him shrug off—and even mock—all those who warned him against taking his young idealistic travelers to Germany in the summer of 1933 for the second “Experiment” after Hitler had taken power. “From its war-like reputation, one would have expected Germany to have been most inhospitable toward a group interested in making peace,” Watt wrote. “Just the opposite materialized: the Nazi organizations made us feel most welcome . . . The picture which the [American] newspapers gave and what we actually saw in our families could scarcely have been more different.” Specifically on the subject of violence, he added, “The suggestion of personal danger to foreigners is no less laughable to those who spent the summer in that country than the thought of German courtesy failing.”
Watt did concede after the trip that there was an “excess of order” and “hypnosis of the masses” orchestrated by the Nazis. But the only real danger for a visiting foreigner, he felt, was not to be swept up by “the power of suggestion” of the constant saluting and “to use all his restraint if he does not wish to join the saluting throng.” Despite the widespread reports of beatings of visiting Americans who failed to join in the Nazi salutes, Watt maintained that his charges were free to do whatever they pleased. Living with German families, they began to understand that they had been victims of propaganda back in the United States. “All they had learned of Hitlerism in America was definitely unfavorable, but here they actually saw some good features of it,” Watt wrote.
Even when it came to Jews, he reported that everyone in his group concluded that “relatively few [were] roughly handled.” The main cause of anti-Semitism in Germany, he added, was the fact that “a large proportion of all business was in Jewish hands.” The young Americans were also impressed how Germans “are surmounting their relative poverty by a return to simple folk ways.” But the key takeaway, as Watt put it, was the one he had come searching for—and was determined to find no matter what happened. “Perhaps most important of all, we realized that the people whom we met were very much like us,” he concluded. “The Second Experiment in International Living was an interesting and successful demonstration of tolerance.”
The American social scientists who studied the new Germany were distinctly less Pollyannaish, but they were far from uniform in their judgments of the country’s New Order. Political scientist Frederick Schuman—who, like Dodd, taught at the University of Chicago—spent eight months in Germany in 1933. He had arranged his research trip before Hitler had come to power, but that event now changed both the nature of his stay and its purpose. “I journeyed toward a land I had already known and enjoyed as the home of music, philosophy, and Gemütlichkeit and as the birthplace of my Prussian and Hanoverian ancestors, now strangely transmuted into ‘Aryans’ and ‘Nordics,’” he wrote. “Upon my arrival in April of the year of the Nazi seizure of power I found the Reich in process of violent, if orderly, transition from parliamentary democracy to Fascism.”
Schuman made the focus of his research the newly triumphant Nazi movement, gathering materials for his 1935 book The Nazi Dictatorship: A Study in Social Pathology and the Politics of Fascism. Given the nature of his encounters, its analytical but highly critical tone was hardly surprising. “By the older German officials I was invariably received with courtesy and granted as much co-operation as was consistent with considerations of political and personal safety,” he recalled. “By the newer Nazi administrators I was invariably received with evasions and complex circumlocutions or, as in the case of Hanfstaengl, with gross and clownish discourtesy bred of psychic insecurity and conceit.”
While Schuman insisted he was interested in “explanation, not condemnation,” he left no doubt that any accurate picture of the new movement would inevitably be seen as partisan. “Like every form of highly emotionalized and subjectivized mass mysticism, National-socialism demands acceptance or rejection,” he wrote. “Objectivity is equivalent to rejection.” By the time he produced his book, he would offer a dire—and accurate—prediction about the likelihood of a new war inspired by “pathological hatreds, lusts, and longings for extinction.” His conclusion: “Fascism itself will be consumed by its war-mad sons. With it will perish the remnants of an age that has outlived its time.”
Columbia University sociologist Theodore Abel was also fascinated by events in Germany. When Hitler was appointed chancellor on January 30, Abel wrote in the private notebook where he regularly recorded his observations: “Germany wants to become a world power again, it wants to conquer[,] it wants an emperor. The danger of communism is great and it might come to civil war in Germany. All peace measures will go into the discard meanwhile . . .”
But Abel was far more restrained—even at times, complimentary—about Germany’s new rulers than Schuman; he also would later question some of Schuman’s findings. On February 2, he wrote: “Struck by Hitler’s manifesto appealing in noble terms to patriotism and setting forth as its goal reestablishment of unity of Germans who he claims are on the brink of dissolution.” He approvingly noted that Hitler had vowed to fight unemployment and boost agriculture, while at the same time emphasizing his commitment to peace and disarmament. “I consider it a noble document and while it sounds genuine I hope it is meant,” he wrote.
As for the means Hitler was using, Abel seemed willing to give him every benefit of the doubt. “Parliamentarianism and dictatorship are not, therefore, antithetical but means of solving problems, adequate for specific conditions,” he wrote on March 7. Even when the Nazis staged their burning of the books in May, Abel was intrigued rather than outraged. Calling the book-burning “a futile but a symbolic gesture,” he asserted: “I am impressed by the vitality and sweeping enthusiasm of the Hitler movement, its idealizations[,] its emotional fervor, its revolutionary aspects. They certainly are swayed by an idea, no matter how ludicrous it may seem to us who have no idea to live for. I envy the fascists, the nationalists, the communists, all those
who are working for something to be realized.” This was a stunning admission about what could attract an American intellectual to the most radical movements of the time.
In the summer of 1933, Abel visited Germany and was struck by the willingness of many people, especially Hitler’s followers, to discuss their political experiences. This gave birth to his idea, nurtured during a period when he found it impossible to find a full-time job, to do a major research project on the Nazis. By June 1934, with the backing of Columbia and the agreement of the German authorities, he announced a contest “For the Best Personal Life History of an Adherent of the Hitler Movement.” Only those who had joined the party before January 1, 1933—prior to Hitler’s coming to power—were eligible to submit the autobiographical essays. Prizes ranging from 10 to 125 marks were to be awarded to the best entries. “Completeness and frankness are the sole criteria,” he explained in the announcement.
It was an inspired initiative, attracting 683 submissions before the deadline in the fall of 1934. A series of mishaps delayed shipment of the essays to Abel in New York for two years, and his final product based on his analysis of those submissions—a book entitled Why Hitler Came into Power—wasn’t published until 1938.
Abel was intent on showing what prompted so many Germans to follow Hitler. He took careful note of the disillusionment spawned by defeat in World War I, the Treaty of Versailles and the revolutionary uprisings in Germany that followed. A young soldier wrote: “Heroism had become cowardice, truth a lie, loyalty was rewarded by dastardliness.” Eighteen percent of those who submitted autobiographies had participated in some type of postwar military activities, whether to fight against the rebels of the left or the right or in fighting in Upper Silesia or the Ruhr Valley. Some professed to be shocked by “the spirit of Jewish materialism” and motivated by their nationalist upbringing. “We knew nothing of politics, yet we felt that therein lay the destiny of Germany,” one of them declared.
Then came Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 and his treason trial that only built up his reputation. “From that time on I had no thought for anyone but Hitler,” another essayist wrote. While many of the contributors also mentioned the harsh economic conditions in Germany, Abel offered a somewhat different picture of Hitler’s followers than scholars like Schuman did. “Schuman concludes that at the bottom of the Hitler movement was a collective neurosis, a psychological malady of the Kleinbürgertum [lower middle class] . . . the disorganized and pathological personality of a whole class of the German population.”
Dismissing this approach as too reliant on group psychoanalysis, Abel maintained that Schuman and other scholars had painted a misleading portrait of Hitler’s core supporters. Based on those who submitted essays, he offered his description of a fictional average Hitler supporter:
He is male, in his early thirties, a town resident of lower middle-class origin, without high school education; married and Protestant; participated in the World War, but not in the revolutionary activities during the revolution of 1918 or later outbreaks; had no political affiliations before joining the National Socialist party and belonged to no veteran or semi-military organizations. He joined the party between 1930 and 1931, and had his first contacts with the movement through reading about it and attending a meeting. He was strongly dissatisfied with the republican regime in Germany, but had no specific anti-Semitic bias. His economic status was secure, for not once did he have to change his occupation, job, or residence, nor was he ever unemployed.
Abel played up the differences between his portrayal of Hitler’s supporters and the characterizations of Schuman and others, although there was overlap in many areas. The key difference was that Abel’s average Nazi supporter comes across as more balanced emotionally, and somehow less sinister, than those portrayed by others. In his introduction, he pointed out that many of the contributors “frankly state their disagreement with certain policies, as, for example, anti-Semitism.” But he is conscious of the danger of appearing to accept the declarations of the Nazi contributors at face value. “In presenting these facts and opinions without comment, I do not intend to convey the impression that I agree with them,” he insisted.
The essays Abel collected point to a broad array of factors that contributed to Hitler’s appeal. By giving his followers a chance to present their own narratives, Abel produced a significant addition to the growing body of literature in the United States about the Nazi movement, a resource that would prove to be highly valuable to future researchers. But it isn’t hard to understand why several American publishers rejected his manuscript before Prentice Hall finally agreed to take it on. Abel’s attempt to maintain a nonjudgmental, academic detachment while studying the Nazis felt like an artificial exercise—and he often slipped in judgments anyway. As Schuman had pointed out, Hitler’s movement demanded acceptance or rejection. The problem with Abel was that, just as he had when Hitler first came to power, he still seemed to want to give the Nazis the benefit of the doubt whenever possible.
The American journalists who had witnessed the rise of Hitler firsthand were more interested in his drive for total control at this point than in debating what attracted so many Germans to his movement in the first place. The hardworking Knickerbocker filed a slew of pieces during the spring and summer of 1933 that left no doubt about the extent of Der Führer’s power grab. “Adolf Hitler has become the Aryan Messiah,” he wrote, explaining that he had committed everything to his campaign for “racial purity.” Reporting on the latest anti-Semitic booklet, he noted that it listed six types of Jews: “Bloody Jews; Lying Jews; Swindling Jews; Rotten Jews; Art Jews and Money Jews.” He added: “The fact that such a publication could appear is best proof of the good judgment of the refugees abroad.” Hitler had emerged as “the supreme boss,” he wrote in another article, and his authority “transcends . . . that of any political boss known to democratic regimes.”
Drawing on his prior reporting experience in Moscow, Knickerbocker also pointed out how the Nazis were following the Bolshevik lead when it came to new forms of terror. “The latest Soviet method to be taken over by the Nazis is the taking of political hostages,” he wrote. Aside from effectively holding “all the Jews of Germany hostage for the good behavior of their racial compatriots abroad,” he explained that the Nazis now were targeting relatives of any anti-Nazi Germans who fled abroad. As in the Soviet Union, he wrote, this “distasteful” practice was proving highly effective. “The bravest man, willing to risk his own life, will shrink at risking the lives or liberty of his loved ones,” he reported.
Knickerbocker found one exception to all this forced subservience. “German nudists are the only successful rebels against Nazi control,” he wrote. While Hermann Goering and other top Nazis decreed that the nudists put their clothes on, the journalist reported that this was the one area where the authorities appeared to be willing to turn a blind eye at times, inspiring a degree of defiance. “The nude cult has gone the way of all popular movements suppressed by an unpopular law. It has gone bootleg.” But this was hardly total defiance. The committed nudists were joining the Nazi movement, he added, working from the inside for their cause. “They intend to appeal to Adolf Hitler, who, like the nude culturalists, does not drink, smoke or eat meat.” Although Hitler had given no indication he would accept the centerpiece of their agenda—stripping naked—the nudists weren’t giving up hope. “Hitler must understand us,” Knickerbocker quoted them as saying.
The nudists provided a rare lighter subject in an otherwise alarming drumbeat of stories. And nothing was more alarming than the question that Knickerbocker posed in the opening to his book The Boiling Point, based on his crisscrossing of the continent during the year after Hitler’s ascension and published in early 1934. “Europe is in uniform,” he wrote. “Will she go to war?”
Knickerbocker was one of the most astute young journalists of his time, someone whose reputation had already spread far beyond his readers in New York and Philadelphia. Running an inte
rview with him on November 12, 1932, the Polish newspaper Express Poranny called him “the most talked about reporter in the world.” He didn’t pull his punches when reporting on Hitler’s brutal tactics at home, prompting angry protests from the Nazis who claimed he was spreading anti-German slanders. They pressured his editors to send him home early, but initially to no avail. There was little reason to think that Knickerbocker would be any less straightforward in trying to answer the question he was asking about the risk of war—a question that was on the minds of so many people on both sides of the Atlantic.
Yet his book opened with a stunning first chapter devoted to Danzig, the Baltic port with an overwhelmingly German population that had been designated a “Free City” by the League of Nations after World War I. Polish-German tensions over the status of the city, which was surrounded by Polish territory, looked like they could easily spark the next major conflict. Knickerbocker stated a contrary view right from the start:
DANZIG . . . Ten million lives of Europeans and Americans have been saved in this city of Danzig. That many lives were lost on the battlefields of 1914–1918. At least that many would be lost in the next war. That war was scheduled to begin in Danzig. Today it is evident that war is not going to begin here, and Hitler the Warmaker has become Hitler the Peacemaker as the Lord of Danzig.
For today Danzig is Nazi, and for the first time in thirteen years Danzig is at peace with the Poles. For the first time since the war Danzig has been eliminated from its number one place in the list of the probable seats of war.
Hitlerland Page 18