Hitlerland

by Nagorski, Andrew

  As Knickerbocker explained, the Nazis won the city elections on May 28, 1933, sweeping into power “a tornado of Brownshirts that drove fear through the heart of every Pole and Jew in the city and made Europe hold its breath.” But while the Nazis quickly consolidated their hold on the city, Hermann Rauschning, the president of the Danzig Senate and Hitler’s lieutenant, immediately went to Warsaw and signed agreements on trade and rights for Polish citizens in the Baltic city. “The Poles were amazed, suspicious, but pleased,” Knickerbocker reported. Danzig and Warsaw played a friendly soccer match, and suddenly tensions eased all around. Hitler had ordered a truce for Danzig, he added, and it was working—at least so far.

  What should readers make of this? “Its lesson for Europe is that Hitler can keep the peace if he wants to,” Knickerbocker wrote. But he warned that this could be merely a tactical truce to buy time for Hitler to rearm. Still, “it means peace in this corner of the European cockpit at least for years to come.”

  But as Knickerbocker chronicled the other parts of his journey—through Central Europe, the Balkans and Western Europe—he emphasized the caveats as well as the cold calculations. Hitler doesn’t want war because his country wasn’t prepared for a new conflict, he maintained. “The odds are too great against Germany for anyone but a mad German to consider making war now against France and her allies,” he wrote. “Contrary to a considerable body of opinion abroad, it may be positively asserted that there are no madmen running Germany today.”

  While he deplored the racial doctrines and terror tactics of the Nazis, he called them “masters of power politics.” Which meant that they were trying to change the balance of power before they would consider triggering a new war. The key, he warned, would be how soon Hitler would feel confident about winning an eventual conflict. Among the experts he consulted, the consensus was that the answer was five to ten years. Knickerbocker ascribed Europe’s pessimistic mood to the fact that the new arms race was already under way. Hitler was insisting over and over again that he wanted only peace. “It is the peace to make the world safe for armaments,” Knickerbocker wrote, ending on a far more ominous note than in his opening section. “Armaments have never kept the world safe from war.”

  Hitler launched World War II by attacking Danzig only five years later, and Knickerbocker would certainly have liked the chance to pull back that opening chapter. Still, his book is instructive, including in that section. It demonstrates how much a highly critical journalist felt compelled to hedge his bets—even when, as the final chapters indicate, he shared much of the pessimism about where Hitler’s policies would ultimately lead.

  Knickerbocker’s critical faculties were certainly still intact, which is much more than could be said about some other Americans living in Berlin. At about the same time that The Boiling Point appeared in print in early 1934, Sir Philip Gibbs, a famed British correspondent during World War I and later a novelist, visited the German capital. He, too, was asking the question whether Europe would go to war. Observing marches of the SA and the Hitlerjugend, along with the shouts of Heil Hitler, he admitted: “It was impossible not to be impressed by the splendour of that German youth . . . There was something stirring in the sight of this army of young men.” But he also felt a sense of apprehension. “This pride and discipline of youth could be so easily used by evil minds for sinister purpose, later on.”

  There was little doubt in his mind that Hitler could be the one to push the country to disaster again. “He was the mesmerist who had put a spell on the German people so that they followed him blindly,” he noted. The German leader kept insisting he wanted peace, but this veteran journalist observed that every German magazine he picked up was full of pictures of soldiers in steel helmets and scenes from the last world conflagration.

  Among the most notable meetings he had on his visit to Berlin was with an American woman who had been married to a German for a long time. At tea with her in the Fürstenhof Hotel, where he was staying, Gibbs came straight to the point. “Most people in England and everybody in France believe Germany is preparing for a new war,” he told her.

  “But that is impossible! It’s ridiculous!” she replied with genuine astonishment. “Why should they believe such an absurdity?”

  He recounted his observations about the militarism of the Nazis, their belief in racial dogmas and persecution of Jews, their crude anti-intellectual theories and all the talk in Mein Kampf and elsewhere about Germany’s expansive dreams. Men like Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg were preaching barbarism and the reign of instinct and biological force, he added.

  “My German friends laugh at Rosenberg’s nonsense,” the American woman said. “As for all this marching and drilling, it means nothing as far as war is concerned. Germans like it, just like the English like football and cricket.”

  She assured him she knew plenty of young Nazis. “They talk very freely to me, because I am the wife of a German and therefore, in their minds, German. They never talk of wanting war. On the contrary, they hate the idea of it.” They only talk about war, she continued, when discussing the possibility that they might be attacked by France and her allies. In that case, they would “naturally” defend the fatherland. “Wouldn’t any other nation feel the same?”

  By then, Gibbs was keenly aware of several waiters hovering around their table. He suggested they move to a quiet corner. “We are having an audience,” he pointed out.

  Once they had switched tables, the American woman talked about Hitler, whom she knew and admired. “He is all for peace,” she declared. “Foreigners don’t believe in his sincerity. But I’m certain he wants to make a friendship with France. It is his strongest wish . . . Why doesn’t France accept the offer?”

  Gibbs was hardly reassured, but he was convinced that the American woman was utterly sincere in her belief that Hitler and his followers wanted nothing but peace. Like Martha Dodd, she felt the new Germany and its leaders were misunderstood and unfairly maligned—and no one more so than Adolf Hitler.

  7

  Dancing with Nazis

  On Saturday, June 30, 1934, Martha Dodd drove off early with her date, someone she identified as “a young secretary in a foreign embassy,” in a Ford roadster, with the top down, to a private lake in Gross Glienicke on the outskirts of Berlin. It was a beautiful, warm, sunny day, and she and her companion spent it on the lakeside beach, working on getting as much of a suntan as possible, knowing that summer doesn’t normally last long in northern Europe. In the late afternoon, the couple began slowly driving back to the city, “our heads giddy and our bodies burning from the sun,” as Martha recalled, perfectly content. “We were not thinking of yesterday or tomorrow, of the Nazis or of politics.”

  They drove into the city at six. “I pulled down my skirt and sat up straight and proper as befits a diplomat’s daughter,” she wrote. But something looked and felt different in the German capital; the atmosphere had changed since their departure that morning. There were fewer people on the streets, mostly clustered in small groups, and, as they got closer to the center, they saw an unusual number of army trucks and machine guns, along with soldiers, SS men and Nazi police. The normally ubiquitous SA troops—the Brownshirts—were nowhere to be seen. Reaching Tiergartenstrasse, they saw that regular traffic was banned completely, and only their diplomatic plates got them through the thickening military and police checkpoints. The young diplomat dropped Martha off near her father’s ambassadorial residence, and then quickly drove to his embassy to find out what accounted for the tense atmosphere.

  With the sun still beating down hard on her, Martha rushed to her father’s residence, feeling slightly dizzy, her eyes briefly blinded as she entered what looked to her like a dark house. She started up the stairs and saw the murky outline of her brother Bill.

  “Martha, is that you?” he asked. “Where have you been? We were worried about you. Von Schleicher has been shot. We don’t know what is happening. There is martial law in Berlin.”

  Gener
al Kurt von Schleicher had served as defense minister and then briefly as the last chancellor before Hitler came to power. He had pursued a policy of trying to split the Nazis by offering Gregor Strasser, the head of the “socialist” faction and a possible rival to Hitler, the post of vice chancellor. Schleicher was one of the politicians who had assured the AP’s Louis Lochner and other correspondents that his government was succeeding in reestablishing “internal peace.” On that morning of June 30 while Martha Dodd and her date were on their beach outing, SS men had arrived at Schleicher’s villa, rung the bell and shot him dead when he opened the door. They then shot his wife as well. At noon, Gregor Strasser was arrested at his house in Berlin and brought to the Gestapo prison on Prinz Albrechtstrasse, where he was shot a few hours later. Strasser had never accepted Schleicher’s offer to join his government and he had withdrawn from politics altogether, but that wasn’t enough to save him from Hitler’s wrath.

  Those murders in Berlin were only one part of the bloody score-settling known as the “Night of the Long Knives.” Bullet-ridden bodies were left scattered in houses and prisons across Germany. Henry Mann, the Berlin representative of the National City Bank, found the body of one of his neighbors on his front steps; the victim had been lured out of his house and murdered in front of the American’s house. The body lay there for an entire day before the police came and took it away, instructing Mann’s servants to wash up the blood. Mann had earlier expressed the belief to Ambassador Dodd that he and other American bankers could work with Germany’s new rulers. But as Dodd noted in his diary, Mann “showed no patience with the Hitler regime now.”

  The primary targets on June 30 were the leaders of the SA, the Storm Troopers who had provided the muscle for Hitler during his rise to power. In particular, tensions had been growing between the Reichswehr, the regular army, and Ernst Röhm, the flamboyant head of the SA, whose numbers had swelled to 2.5 million after the Nazis came to power. Röhm was a famed veteran of the movement, who had teamed up with Hitler even before the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.

  The Brownshirts were responsible for much of the violence that followed Hitler’s rise to power—the attacks on Jews, Socialists and anyone else seen to be an opponent of the regime, along with the random American or other foreigner who failed to greet the Brownshirts with a Nazi salute. While there was no doubt that they saw themselves as carrying out Hitler’s will, the Nazi ruler would later claim that they were threatening to spin out of control. He was receiving constant complaints from the Army, and even from the ailing President Hindenburg, about their lack of discipline. And Röhm was increasingly defiant, portraying his thugs as the vanguard of an ongoing revolution. “The SA and the SS will not allow the German Revolution to fall asleep or be betrayed half-way there by non-fighters,” he proclaimed, vowing to carry on “our struggle.” Hitler responded in blunt terms, although not mentioning Röhm by name. “Only fools thought the revolution was not over,” he declared.

  The opulent living of the SA leaders, with widespread stories of heavy drinking and open homosexuality, hardly helped their cause. Röhm occupied a villa on Prinzregentenplatz in Munich, outfitted with centuries-old Florentine mirrors and French armchairs. A truce negotiated between the Reichswehr and the SA in early 1934 did little to lessen the rising tensions. Early in the morning on June 30, Hitler personally led a small armed contingent of police that drove in three cars from Munich to Bad Wiessee, the lakeside resort where Röhm and other SA leaders were sleeping off another night of partying.

  Breaking into Röhm’s room, they declared him a traitor; in another room, they found Edmund Heines, the leader of the Breslau SA, in bed with a young male lover. Rounding up Röhm’s contingent, they took them back to a Munich prison in a bus. Several were shot immediately. Hitler initially appeared undecided about his old comrade Röhm, and it was only the next day that the SA leader was offered a pistol so he could shoot himself. He refused, and two SS men dispatched him. The regime issued a terse announcement about the man who was once a key figure in Hitler’s rise to power: “The former Chief of Staff Röhm was given the opportunity to draw the consequences of his treacherous behavior. He did not do so and was thereupon shot.”

  Appearing at the Propaganda Ministry on that same day, Hermann Goering told a group of hastily assembled foreign correspondents that the Nazis were forced to act to prevent a planned rebellion against Hitler. As the Chicago Tribune’s Sigrid Schultz recalled, the Luftwaffe (Air Force) commander had arrived “in full regalia, with his officers, strutting as stiffly as he could.” After making his terse declaration, Goering started to march out, but, spotting Schultz, whom he knew from earlier social encounters, he stopped short. “And by the way, General von Schleicher was shot, trying to escape,” he told her loudly. He then looked at her “piercingly,” Schultz recalled. It was his way of saying, she concluded, that the Nazi brass could get away with anything they wanted.

  The sweeping nature of the killings and the disparate backgrounds of the victims indicated that Hitler and the SS, whose leaders hated Röhm and the SA, had decided to eliminate anyone they regarded as a past or potential opponent. The body of Gustav von Kahr, the Bavarian leader who had presided over the suppression of the Beer Hall Putsch before retiring from politics, was found hacked to pieces. Other victims included the secretary and several associates of Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen, the scheming former chancellor who had helped undermine Schleicher and give Hitler his shot at total power.

  Papen was the politician who had assured the AP’s Lochner that “we have hired Hitler” and that he and other veteran politicians would keep him under control. He was personally spared, although roughed up and briefly placed under house arrest until he was dispatched as Hitler’s envoy to Vienna. On July 25, 1934, less than a month after the Night of the Long Knives, Austrian Nazis assassinated Chancellor Engelbert Doll-fuss, who had amassed dictatorial powers but opposed Hitler’s movement. Still, Papen didn’t hesitate to accept his new assignment, which would involve preparing the way for Austria’s Anschluss (unification) with Germany in 1938.

  His willingness to continue serving the regime he had helped maneuver into power earned him broad contempt from those foreigners and Germans who were alarmed by what they saw happening. At the American Embassy’s Fourth of July Party at the Dodds’ residence, the Jewish journalist Bella Fromm noted that everyone was on edge, but there was agreement on one thing: “There was general regret that Schleicher was the one to lose his life while Papen only paid with a couple of teeth.”

  On July 1, Dodd and his daughter Martha had made the point of driving by Papen’s residence. Martha spotted the young son of the vice chancellor standing behind the curtains, and he later told the Dodds that his family was grateful for this sign of solidarity at a time when no other diplomats dared to venture near their house. Ambassador Dodd also sent his card with a message: “I hope we may call on you soon.” According to Martha, her father had no sympathy for Papen, whom he viewed as “black with cowardice, devious with espionage and betrayal.” But this was his way of expressing his displeasure with the brutal methods of Germany’s new rulers.

  At the Fourth of July party, the Dodd residence was festooned with red, white and blue flowers that artfully decorated the tables, along with small American flags. While the orchestra played American music, the American expats, both diplomats and journalists, mingled with the German guests. Martha and her brother Bill sardonically greeted the German arrivals with what had become the most frequently asked question since the Night of the Long Knives: “Lebst du noch?” Translation: “Are you still alive?” Some of the Nazis were visibly irritated.

  At one point, the butler told Martha that Papen’s son, the one they had seen in the window three days earlier, had arrived. Visibly nervous, he talked with Ambassador Dodd, protesting how ludicrous were the charges that his father was somehow involved in a conspiracy with Röhm, Schleicher and the others against Hitler. A few days later, once his father was freed and out of
immediate danger, the two Papens openly came to visit Dodd, prompting the American journalists to rush over for information about the politician who was still formally in Hitler’s government but had come so close to becoming one of his early victims. Despite Dodd’s personal misgivings about Papen, it was a way for the vice chancellor to demonstrate that he had American support. As Martha put it, this indicated “that the Germans were still respectful, and a bit awed by American public opinion at this time.”

  Her father was reaching a different conclusion, even if he had contributed to Papen’s salvation so that he could go on serving his new masters. That same week a professor from the University of Berlin came to see him, ostensibly to discuss a lecture Dodd was supposed to give to the History Department on July 13. Given the tense situation, they agreed to call off the lecture. The German was despondent about the savagery the Nazis were arousing among his countrymen, stunned that they were capable of such barbaric behavior. He made a point of praising an editorial in London’s Times that described the Night of the Long Knives as a return to medieval practices. “Poor Germany, she cannot recover in decades to come. If I could go to any other of the greater countries, I would leave the university at once,” he declared.

  In his diary entry of July 8, Dodd admitted to feeling a similar deepening pessimism. He hosted a visiting American delegation, but they had asked that no press be allowed to cover the event because they didn’t want to be attacked at home for their presence in Germany. Hitler’s killing spree had hardened hostility to the country in the United States and elsewhere. As for Germany itself, Dodd noted, “I can think of no country where the psychology is so abnormal as that which prevails here now.”

  The ambassador was increasingly questioning the sense of his own mission. “My task here is to work for peace and better relations,” he wrote. “I do not see how anything can be done so long as Hitler, Goering and Goebbels are the directing heads of the country. Never have I heard or read of three more unfit men in high place.” Reading the diary at this point, you can almost hear Dodd sigh as he concluded, “Ought I to resign?”