Hitlerland

by Nagorski, Andrew

  As new American correspondents came on the scene, they were prone to start from the premise that they were going to report from a bizarre, increasingly sinister but always intriguing place. Pierre Huss of the International News Service, whom Shirer characterized as “slick, debonair, ambitious, and on better terms with Nazi officials than almost any other,” came to call it both “Hitlerland” and “Naziland.” And, of course, no one was a more intriguing figure in that land than Adolf Hitler. Both the veteran Berlin correspondents and the new arrivals were always looking for opportunities to see him in person, trying to take the measure of the man and his movement. Reflecting on the eight years that he would spend in Berlin, right up until a month before the United States and Germany went to war in December 1941, Huss wrote: “You had to work hard and long, frequently taking your food and sleep on the wing to keep up with Hitler.”

  In January 1935, Huss’s efforts to get an interview with Hitler paid off at just the right moment. The Nazi leader was in his Alpine chalet in Obersalzberg, waiting for the results of the plebiscite in the Saar, the territory that had been administered during the previous fifteen years by Britain and France under a League of Nations mandate. There was little doubt that the Saar’s inhabitants would vote as Hitler wanted them to, ensuring the return of the territory to Germany. Huss calculated he would find Der Führer in good spirits, which would make this an opportune time to meet him.

  He wasn’t mistaken. Arriving at the chalet, he saw Hitler examining the returns, his eyes “alight with joy.” He was dressed in what Huss characterized as “his golf suit,” while Goering stood nearby in a huge white sweater, joining his boss in celebrating the outcome of the voting. Hitler promptly greeted his American guest by insisting that he join him on his regular walk in the mountains before lunch. As usual, he didn’t allow his bodyguards to accompany him, instead only taking along his white Hungarian shepherd dog, his walking stick made of knotted wood, and a Luger automatic pistol in his pocket.

  With the dog leading the way through the snow, Hitler kept up a brisk pace that left Huss nearly out of breath as they reached the crest of a hill. Hitler told him it was good exercise, enjoying the fact that his guest was struggling a bit. Then he pointed down to the chalet that they had just left, which was surrounded by hills like the one they had just climbed. “A good rifle shot, aiming through telescopic sights, could easily pick me off from here while I am sitting on the porch or in that back room there,” he told Huss. He added that he was buying all the land in the area, closing it to outsiders “so [SS leader Heinrich] Himmler can quit worrying.” The road that Huss had traveled up the mountain would also be closed to all but authorized traffic.

  Hitler next pointed in the direction of Salzburg, saying that Himmler and some army officers had claimed that “a few well-directed cannon shots from there some dark night could blow us out of bed.” With a forced laugh, he explained that he had told Himmler that he’d have to be patient since “I cannot just walk over the border and take a piece out of Austria.” He added, “I am a fatalist and all those things take care of themselves.”

  Huss felt Hitler was taking a risk by walking in the hills alone, whatever measures were used to secure the area. He pointed to two woodcutters a couple of hundred yards ahead, indicating that they or someone else could attack him while he was out on one of his walks. At that point, Hitler told Huss to pack a hard snowball and throw it far. When Huss did so, Hitler pulled out his pistol and fired off a dead-on shot: the snowball burst apart in the air. Seeing Huss’s skeptical expression, he told him to throw a second snowball. Once again, his aim was perfect. “You see, I am not entirely defenseless,” he said—and went on to boast that the SS and Army brass considered him better than many of their best marksmen.

  The amiable mood of their walk was broken when Huss ventured to suggest that Hitler would be courting a major conflict if he insisted on carrying out every part of his party’s 25-point program first proclaimed in 1920, including its call for a Greater Germany with new territory and colonies. Hitler abruptly stopped, and “like a flash he changed from the Bavarian alpine rambler to Adolf Hitler,” Huss recalled. Hitler shot back, “Sooner than give up one little point of my program, I’d go over to that tree and hang myself.” Although the Nazis had departed from several parts of their original program already, he insisted “it can only be fulfilled to the letter because it expresses the will of Germany.”

  Huss’s conclusion about Hitler after his walk in the hills: “He is a fanatic, every inch of him, going into a passion or fury when the occasion demands.”

  Veteran correspondents like Lochner and Wiegand worried that the fanaticism of Germany’s new rulers was impacting their ability to do their jobs. “Reporting from Germany ceased to be a pleasure when the Nazis seized power in 1933,” the AP bureau chief noted with typical under-statement. In a letter to William Randolph Hearst dated August 5, 1933, Wiegand told his boss that he had been warned “that in one way or another every effort allegedly will be made to persuade you to transfer me from Germany.” Mentioning the increased monitoring of cables, phones and mail, along with the sweeping crackdown on any freedom of expression inside Germany, he wrote: “It is no pleasure to a freedom-loving man to work in Germany these days . . . Hitler’s proud claim is that there is order and discipline in his Germany. So there also is in St. Quentin and Sing Sing.”

  The Nazis realized that they often lost the propaganda war if they forced correspondents out, since those reporters then enjoyed the spotlight when they returned home. But that only prompted them to try new methods to compromise those they disliked. Supposedly anti-Nazi Germans started approaching correspondents with offers to provide secret military information. On more than one occasion, Sigrid Schultz threw men out of her Chicago Tribune office when they made such an offer and warned her colleagues to stay clear of them. In April 1935, she returned home one day to discover that an envelope with “important information” had been delivered in her absence by what sounded like one of the same men. Opening it, she saw the design for an airplane engine, which she promptly burned in her fireplace; she knew that, if found on her premises, this would be perfect incriminating evidence in a spy trial.

  On her way back to the office, Schultz spotted three men, who looked familiar from her earlier encounters with the secret police, heading toward her home. Stepping in front of them, she told them not to bother going there since she had burned the envelope. As they stood speechless, she hailed a cab and loudly instructed the driver to take her to the American Embassy.

  Schultz was convinced that Goering was behind that effort to set her up because they had had several tense exchanges earlier about the country’s expanding concentration camps. At a lavish lunch in the Adlon Hotel for him and his new bride, Emmy Sonnemann, on May 2, the feisty reporter told him quietly but firmly what happened, blaming his agents provocateurs. Startled, Goering kept saying, “You are imagining things.” When Schultz stuck to her story and added that she had informed the embassy of the details, he snapped angrily: “Schultz, I’ve always suspected it: you’ll never learn to show proper respect for state authorities. I suppose that is one of the characteristics of people from that crime-ridden city of Chicago.” An amused acquaintance in Goering’s Air Ministry later told her that around his offices she became known as “that dragon from Chicago.” But no more attempts were made to set her up.

  Despite such incidents, the Nazis still sought to impress as much as to intimidate, particularly with the displays of adulation of their leader. For most correspondents, the best chance to observe Hitler and his followers up close came during the annual Parteitag, the weeklong Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg. The party leaders, from Hitler on down, were only too happy to have the foreign press observe these lavishly orchestrated demonstrations of their popularity and power.

  “Like a Roman Emperor Hitler rode into this medieval town at sundown today past solid phalanxes of wildly cheering Nazis who packed the narrow streets . . . T
he streets, hardly wider than alleys, are a sea of brown and black uniforms,” Shirer wrote in his diary on September 4, 1934. The new correspondent got his first glimpse of Hitler as he drove past the Württemberger Hof, where the reporters were staying. Der Führer stood up in his open car, wearing a worn trench coat, fumbling with his cap and “acknowledging the delirious welcome with somewhat feeble Nazi salutes from his right arm.”

  Shirer was struck by Hitler’s lack of expression—“though there is something glassy in his eyes, the strongest thing in his face.” But he had expected something more powerful and theatrical, prompting him to observe that “for the life of me I could not quite comprehend what hidden springs he undoubtedly unloosed in the hysterical mob which was greeting him so wildly.” And hysterical they were. That evening, Shirer found himself “caught in a mob of ten thousand hysterics” in front of the Deutscher Hof, Hitler’s hotel, shouting: “We want our Führer.” He wasn’t prepared for the faces he saw in the crowd, especially those of the women when they caught sight of Hitler as he stepped out briefly on the balcony.

  “They reminded me of the crazed expressions I saw once in the back country of Louisiana on the faces of some Holy Rollers who were about to hit the trail,” he wrote. “They looked up at him as if he were a Messiah, their faces transformed into something positively inhuman. If he had remained in sight for more than a few moments, I think many of the women would have swooned from excitement.”

  The next day, Shirer began to understand how Hitler was generating such fanatical admiration. At the opening meeting of the Party Congress in Luitpold Hall, he noted that the Nazis were putting on “more than a gorgeous show; it also had something of the mysticism and religious fervour of an Easter or Christmas Mass in a great Gothic cathedral.” There were brightly colored flags, a band that fell silent when Hitler made his dramatic entrance and then struck up a catchy marching tune, and the roll call of the “martyrs”—the Nazis who had died in the failed Beer Hall Putsch. “In such an atmosphere no wonder, then, that every word dropped by Hitler seemed like an inspired Word from on high,” Shirer recorded. “Man’s—or at least the German’s—critical faculty is swept away at such moments.”

  By the end of the Nuremberg festivities, Shirer confessed he was “dead tired and rapidly developing a bad case of crowd-phobia.” But he was pleased that he had come. “You have to go through one of these to understand Hitler’s hold on the people, to feel the dynamic of the movement he’s unleashed and the sheer, disciplined strength the Germans possess,” he noted.

  To be sure, the foreign correspondents took a more jaundiced view of the proceedings than the Germans in attendance. Shirer, Knickerbocker and a couple of British reporters were in a room overlooking the moat of Nuremberg’s castle when they saw Hitler driving by again. “Though Hitler is certainly closely guarded by the S.S., it is nonsense to hold that he cannot be killed,” Shirer wrote. He and the other correspondents in the room agreed that it would be simple to throw a bomb from the room onto Hitler’s car, and then escape by running into the crowd.

  Along with four other reporters, the AP’s Lochner was invited to join Hitler’s motorcade as it made a triumphal tour of the city before going up to the Burg, Nuremberg’s medieval castle. The reporters were put in the car directly behind Hitler’s so that they could see the reaction of the crowds. “His followers were simply beside themselves with hysteric joy when they see him, and they actually think of him as a God-sent superman whom they do not hesitate to liken to Christ,” Lochner explained in a letter to his daughter Betty back in Chicago, echoing Shirer’s observations.

  When the motorcade reached the castle courtyard, Hitler got out of his car and approached the reporters to greet them. But before he could reach out his hand to Lochner, the AP correspondent declared: “Mr. Chancellor, I welcome you here in the city of my forebears.”

  Hitler was startled. “How come?” he asked. “You’re an American, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, indeed,” Lochner replied. “I am an American, but my family for centuries lived continuously in this city until my grandfather and father emigrated to the United States. I think therefore I have the right to greet you here.”

  Lochner hadn’t considered how this declaration would be received. As the reporter recalled, “Hitler blushed in anger, turned on his heel, and stalked into the castle.” It was then that Lochner realized that he had inadvertently reminded Der Führer that he wasn’t a born German. “I had struck an exceedingly sensitive nerve,” he concluded. And he blamed this incident for the fact that Hitler never invited him for a personal meeting again, although he would remain in Germany until their two countries went to war with each other seven years later.

  The Nuremberg rallies became a standard event for reporters from many countries, often with special seats in the motorcade that were meant to ensure that they reached the right conclusions. Two years later, in 1936, a young United Press correspondent, Richard Helms—the future director of the Central Intelligence Agency—was one of the chosen ones. After sitting in the back seat of a car alongside Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg and a Polish reporter, Helms offered this evocative description of his experience as they followed right behind Hitler’s car:

  There was, I must admit, something mesmerizing about this ride. Only a seasoned movie star might have resisted the weird, vicarious sense that somehow some of the blind adulation of the crowds, who could have had no idea who was riding in the limousine directly behind Hitler, was meant for oneself. It was not difficult to imagine the feelings of the provincial Nazi Party functionaries in the cars that followed.

  However much one loathed Nazis, and I certainly did, this was heady stuff. There could be no question about the German people’s intoxication with their leader. It is easy today to forget that in his prime—the word sticks on one’s tongue—Hitler was a masterful politician.

  While many of the regular American correspondents in Berlin failed to get personal meetings with Hitler, Putzi Hanfstaengl was still in the business of trying to connect influential Americans with Der Führer. One person he targeted was Hearst, the powerful publisher, who traveled frequently to Europe and made a special point of declaring how much he liked Germany. He was particularly enchanted with Munich—“the city, the surroundings, the climate, the bright and happy Bavarian people, the shops, the theaters, the museums—and the beer,” he told a reporter. “In fact, it is such a delightful place that one has to be careful not to want to live here instead of going home and attending to business.”

  Catching up with Hearst, who was on another European trip during the summer of 1934, Hanfstaengl tried to convince him to come to Nuremberg to attend the Nazi Party rally. After the two men met in Munich, Putzi published an article in Germany that was cited in the New York Times on August 23. Putzi quoted the publisher as saying that the results of the plebiscite backing Hitler were “a unanimous expression of the popular will.” Hearst added: “Germany is battling for her liberation from the mischievous provisions of the Treaty of Versailles . . . This battle, in fact, can only be viewed as a struggle which all liberty-loving peoples are bound to follow with understanding and sympathy.” In his account, Putzi also reported that Hearst would attend the Nuremberg rally the following month.

  Hanfstaengl had spoken too soon. Worried that his presence in Nuremberg could be viewed as an even stronger endorsement of Hitler’s movement, Hearst declined. Nonetheless, after some initial hesitation, he accepted Putzi’s invitation to meet the Nazi leader in Berlin on September 16, once the Nuremberg spectacle was over.

  When they met in the Chancellery, Hitler—speaking through Hanfstaengl, who served as the translator—immediately asked: “Why am I so misrepresented, so misunderstood in America? Why are the people of America so antagonistic to my regime?”

  Hearst reportedly explained that Americans “believe in democracy and are averse to dictatorship.”

  Hitler replied that he had been elected by the German people, who had reaffirmed th
eir support for his policies. “That is democracy, is it not?”

  “That might be democracy, but it is also dictatorship in view of what those policies are,” Hearst said.

  If accurate, that account, which was provided by his traveling secretary Harry Crocker, would indicate that Hearst wasn’t a completely uncritical admirer of Hitler as his critics back home were charging. But there’s no doubt that Hanfstaengl had achieved his goal of making Hearst see Hitler in a more positive light. Fromm noted in her diary that Putzi had been “bragging about what he considers his latest achievements”—namely, orchestrating the Hearst-Hitler session at which the German leader “turned on all his charm to impress the great man.”

  “Hitler is certainly an extraordinary man,” Hearst wrote to his friend and secretary Colonel Joseph Willicombe after their meeting. “We estimate him too lightly in America. He has enormous energy, intense enthusiasm, a marvelous facility for dramatic oratory, and great organizing ability.” He did throw in a note of caution, however: “Of course, all these qualities can be misdirected.”

  “Hitler needs a woman,” Hanfstaengl declared to Martha Dodd during her early days in Berlin. “Hitler should have an American woman—a lovely woman could change the whole destiny of Europe.” Then, with his typical dramatic flourish, he proclaimed, “Martha, you are the woman!”

  Martha recognized that “this sounded like inflated horse play as did most of Putzi’s schemes,” but she wasn’t sure he wasn’t serious. “I was quite satisfied by the role so generously passed on to me and rather excited by the opportunity that presented itself, to meet this strange leader of men,” she wrote. She was still convinced that Hitler was “a glamorous and brilliant personality who must have great power and charm.”