Hitlerland

by Nagorski, Andrew

  It was around this time, Putzi added, that he came to realize that, once Hitler was ensconced in power, “the demon had entered into him.” But even with the benefit of hindsight, he blamed Goebbels and others for pushing Hitler to the point of no return, and admitted he continued to nurture the hope that he could moderate his excesses. Amid all the self-justification, Hanfstaengl’s real concern was much less policy than his own position. Putzi could see it was weakening rapidly. Others were openly criticizing and mocking him, and Hitler didn’t seem interested in doing anything about it. The invitations to play the piano for the Nazi leader were becoming less frequent.

  When Truman and Kay Smith returned to Berlin in 1935, they visited Putzi in his small apartment, which was in back of the Chancellery. The living room was dominated by a large bust of Hitler and a grand piano, and Truman casually hung his hat on Hitler’s head as he walked in. “Putz hastily snatched it off,” Kay recalled, pointing out that he treated this as bad manners on Truman’s part, not something to joke about. Over coffee and cake, the old acquaintances caught up on their news. “It was plain that all was not rosy between Putz and Goebbels,” Kay continued. “Putz intimated that Goebbels was jealous of his . . . influence over Hitler and was keeping him away from Hitler.”

  The jealousy factor was almost certainly overblown, since Hanfstaengl’s influence had been on the wane for some time. That was typical Putzi talk—making himself out to be more important than he was. But there was certainly truth in his assertion that Goebbels had no use for a competing propagandist, and there was increasing evidence that he wanted to cut him out of the inner circle completely.

  Hanfstaengl claimed that he considered resigning, but that others talked him out of it. More likely, he clung to every shred of power and influence as long as possible, even when his foreign press office was unceremoniously moved further away from the Chancellery. For nearly two years, he wasn’t invited to any events with Hitler at all. At the end of the last luncheon he ever attended with him, Hitler asked him to go to the piano “to play that thing of yours.” When Putzi asked him what piece he meant, he said, “Your funeral march.” Hanfstaengl played it with, as he recalled, “a sense of foreboding.”

  In 1936, Putzi felt that he lost another connection to Hitler when his wife, Helen, divorced him. She was the American woman who had possibly prevented Hitler from committing suicide after the Beer Hall Putsch, and who had been the object of his clumsy affection in those Munich days. Helen had long put up with her philandering husband but refused to join him in Berlin—and eventually decided to make their de facto separation permanent. Like Putzi, Helen would later claim that she had grown disaffected with Hitler and the Nazis, especially after the Night of the Long Knives. But even when discussing her feelings with John Toland in 1971, she never mentioned anything else she objected to, not even the Holocaust, and remained fascinated by her association with this historic figure. “Yes, he was extraordinary,” she declared. “After all, when you think of a man from very modest background, to put himself on the map so to speak, he was an extraordinary man. Yes, he was.”

  After not seeing Helen for a long time, Hitler once asked an acquaintance of hers what had happened to her. When he learned she had divorced Putzi, he declared, “Oh, fine, fine. I’ll send a telegram congratulating her.” Then, he added, “Oh no, that won’t do.” Helen, who provided this account, was visibly pleased that Germany’s leader was still thinking about her even after he had attained absolute power. She returned to the United States in 1938, where she spent the war years; still, Hitler appeared to hold a special place in her memory until the end of her life.

  Seeing how tenuous his position had become, Putzi began smuggling out gold and platinum objects to London. He claimed he also helped some of the victims of the Nazis, winning the release of the daughter of a German-American couple who had been put in a concentration camp in Saxony for criticizing the regime. Above all, though, he kept looking nervously over his shoulder, often sleeping at friends’ apartments and keeping a valid passport with visas to several countries in his pocket.

  According to Putzi’s dramatic account, he was in his Munich apartment on February 8, 1937, when the phone rang. The Chancellery was requesting that he report urgently to Berlin. A special plane was waiting to take him there. Putzi was delighted that he might be returned to favor. Although the special plane never materialized, he caught a Lufthansa flight to Berlin, where he reported to the Chancellery. There, he was told he was to fly immediately to Spain to help German correspondents who were covering the civil war. Putzi couldn’t understand the urgency, and complained that this could at least wait till he celebrated his fiftieth birthday two days later. But the officials insisted he stick with the plan, and one of them assured him that, if he did well in Spain, he would be back in Hitler’s good graces. They knew that this was what Putzi still craved.

  Informed that he was on a secret mission that would last five or six weeks, Putzi was rushed to Staaken Airfield where he was to board a military plane. Along the way, one of his escorts told him that he would use the name of August Lehman and would pose as a painter and interior decorator in Spain. A cameraman recorded their trip to the airport. By this point, Hanfstaengl was deeply suspicious, and he became even more alarmed when Colonel Kastner, the commandant at the airfield, handed him a parachute, ordering him to put it on.

  Once aloft, the pilot, who introduced himself as Captain Frodel, called him up to the copilot’s seat. He had recognized who “August Lehman” really was and asked him what instructions he had. When Putzi told him he was to report to a general in Salamanca, Frodel offered him some chilling news. “Herr Hanfstaengl, I have no orders to take you to Salamanca,” he said. “My instructions are to drop you over the Red lines between Barcelona and Madrid.”

  Putzi was stunned. “That is a death sentence,” he protested. “Who gave you such orders?”

  Frodel told him he received them right before he took off, and they were signed by Goering. When Putzi protested further, Frodel added, “I was told that you had volunteered for this mission.”

  As Hanfstaengl described it, the rest of this episode played out like a thriller, without the pyrotechnics. After only about half an hour, one of the engines made a noise and Frodel turned it off. Casting Putzi a meaningful look, the pilot told him that there was something wrong. “I shall have to put down and have it seen to,” he said.

  They landed at a quiet airfield near Leipzig, where the mechanics had already left for the day. Over drinks in the canteen, Frodel announced that a car would be ready soon to take them into town since there was no hope of getting the plane repaired until the next day. After ordering another round of drinks, Putzi said his stomach was bothering him and slipped out. It was dark, and he quickly made his way to the road near the airfield, and, meeting a peasant woman, discovered that there was a train station nearby. From there, he took a train to Leipzig, where he spent the night before hopping a morning train to Munich. He spent only about an hour in his hometown before boarding a third train, this time to Zurich. It was his fiftieth birthday when he arrived there, and he wouldn’t return to Germany until after the war.

  Did the top Nazis really concoct such an elaborate plan to arrange the death of someone who had been so eager to serve Hitler for so long? Goering wrote to Hanfstaengl later that the whole affair was “a harmless joke” aimed at getting him to reconsider “some rather over-audacious utterances you have made,” and he would be perfectly safe if he returned to Germany. David Marwell, currently the director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, extensively researched this incident in Germany and concluded that the entire scheme was indeed “an elaborate hoax”; its purpose, he maintained, was to humiliate Hanfstaengl rather than to kill him. But Putzi always remained convinced that he had narrowly escaped a death plot.

  Back in Berlin, some of the American residents were puzzled by Hanfstaengl’s abrupt disappearance. In previous years, Putzi had hosted a Washington�
�s Birthday party in his apartment, inviting people like Ambassador Dodd, Truman Smith and Louis Lochner, along with a few Germans. The invitations had already gone out for the party on February 22 before the host’s disappearance, and it was only a day or two before that his secretary called the invited guests to say the party was canceled, without giving any explanation. Lochner suspected Putzi was in trouble and began picking up strands of the story, including reports that he had managed to avoid a plane ride over Spain that probably would have ended badly.

  At a cocktail party hosted by Martha Dodd on March 17, Lochner and other guests speculated about Putzi’s whereabouts. “There’s nothing mysterious about Hanfstaengl,” an assistant naval attaché declared. “Why, I ran into him at the bar of the Hotel Bauer au Lac in Zurich only yesterday.”

  Lochner hastily left the party and placed a call to the Zurich hotel. “How did you find out I was here?” Putzi asked. Lochner replied with the standard line that a newsman never reveals his sources. Since he already had his story, it gave the AP correspondent huge satisfaction that Hanfstaengl refused all calls after that.

  By the time that Putzi made his escape, Ambassador Dodd was nearing the end of a four-year tour in Berlin that had proven more frustrating than productive. His early alienation from Hitler and his regime was fully understandable—and, in many ways, morally commendable. But it didn’t help his effectiveness as an envoy. After the Night of the Long Knives, he wrote in his diary that he would try to avoid meeting Hitler whenever he could. “I certainly would not ask to see any man who has committed a score of murders the last few days,” he wrote on July 4, 1934. And again and again throughout his four years, he ruminated about whether it made sense for him to stay in a post when he could see no hope of more positive developments.

  At the State Department, his superiors were often frustrated as well. “What in the world is the use of having an ambassador who refuses to speak to the government to which he is accredited?” complained Undersecretary of State William Phillips. Since Dodd did maintain some contacts with German officials, this was overstating things—but not by much. And the scholar-turned-envoy didn’t help his case by his open disdain for many of the State Department officials he had to deal with and foreign service officers in general. As he rightly noted, they acted like pampered members of an exclusive fraternity, the products of privilege and Ivy League schools. They were highly critical of an outsider like himself, and he made no effort to temper their feelings.

  In fact, Dodd reinforced them by almost obsessively pushing for budget cuts, including shorter cables. His embassy did produce numerous well-done reports during his tenure, including some lengthy ones; they demonstrated a deeper understanding of the Nazi regime than the reports of many other missions, including those of France and Britain. But by penny-pinching, he contributed to the impression that there was a “telegram deficiency,” as he acknowledged. He argued that he was only trying to eliminate three- or four-page telegrams when “one or two hundred words” would do, adding defensively: “I do not send what I think I should have to contradict in a week. This is my explanation. It may not be what the Department likes.”

  Dodd wasn’t popular with his military attachés either. Truman Smith described him as “a historian of repute, and a pacifist.” According to Smith, he showed “a marked distaste for military matters” and a lack of interest in the work of the military attachés or in the rapid expansion of the German Army and Air Force. “The question perforce arises with respect to Dr. Dodd’s fitness for the ambassadorial post in Germany at this particular period in history,” Smith wrote later. In her unpublished memoir, Kay dispensed with any diplomatic wording. Claiming that Dodd’s pacifist beliefs prompted him to forbid Smith or other attachés to appear in uniform when they attended official ceremonies together, she declared: “I have seldom met a man for whom I developed so much contempt.”

  Dodd hardly deserved that level of opprobrium. And as his biographer Robert Dallek and others have pointed out, it would be impossible to argue convincingly that a different ambassador, no matter how skillful, could have produced better results. But Dodd’s final period in Berlin was marked by his acute sense of disappointment—and the knowledge that many of the people he worked with were disappointed in him. By the end of 1936, he was considering resigning again—and openly saying that “four years’ service is enough.” After a two-and-a-half-month visit to the United States to deal with his deteriorating health, he returned to Germany in late October 1937. “In Berlin once more,” he wrote in his diary on October 29. “What can I do?”

  But when it really came time to leave, Dodd changed his mind, arguing that his term should be extended. By then, Roosevelt was no longer in sympathy with the envoy he had dispatched to Berlin in 1933, still hoping the new regime might be influenced by a convinced democrat like the historian from the University of Chicago. On one initiative of his envoy, the president was even in basic agreement with Hitler: neither leader had the least patience for Dodd’s push for a new world peace conference.

  Dodd left Berlin for the last time on December 29, 1937, nurturing a sense of grievance that, in the end, he was forced to resign sooner than he wanted to. “There were and are still officials in the State Department who do not like me or the things I stand for,” he wrote. After retiring to his farm in Virginia, his physical condition kept declining. When World War II broke out, the man who was often labeled a pacifist wrote to Roosevelt: “Hitler intends to conquer the whole world. If we do not join England and France, we shall have a hard time.” He died on February 9, 1940, at the age of seventy, long before his country joined the fight.

  Dodd hadn’t left Berlin alone; his family went with him. That, of course, included his daughter Martha, whose conversion to a new cause had prompted her to take some extraordinary actions during the latter part of her stay in Berlin. Although Boris Vinogradov, her lover, was recalled to Moscow, she arranged to meet him there and in Paris—and, when he was transferred to the Soviet Embassy in Warsaw, she visited him there as well. But it wasn’t only romance that kept her connected to the Soviet regime. In the memoir she wrote of her Berlin days, she discreetly commented: “The Russians of the Embassy in Berlin were, on the whole, charming people—natural, informal, sprightly and clever.”

  One of the charming people was an agent named Bukhartsev, the Berlin correspondent for the Soviet daily Izvestia. By most accounts, he took over from Vinogradov as her handler for the NKVD, the Soviet secret police and spy agency. According to a NKVD memo, “Martha argues that she is a convinced partisan of the Communist Party and the USSR.” In January 1936, Bukhartsev reported that he had met with Martha several times and that she “frankly expressed her willingness to help the Soviet Embassy with her information. Now she is studying hard the theory of communism [and] ‘Matters of Leninism’ by Stalin. Her teacher is [Arvid] Harnack to whom she goes often.”

  Harnack was the German husband of Mildred Harnack, Martha’s American friend, a teacher who had also enlisted in the Communist cause. Like Martha, Mildred had to be careful to hide her allegiances in Germany—but, unlike the daughter of the ambassador, she would remain in Berlin, with fateful consequences.

  Although Martha was hardly a patient, faithful lover, she still had her heart set on Vinogradov. On March 14, 1937, she petitioned the Soviet government, saying “we have agreed to ask official permission to marry.” Two weeks later in Moscow, she met with the head of the NKVD’s Foreign Department, Abram Slutsky. At his request, she prepared a statement elaborating on her willingness to serve the Kremlin: “It goes without saying that my services of any kind and at any time are proposed to the party for use at its discretion. Currently, I have access mainly to the personal, confidential correspondence of my father with the U.S. State Department and the U.S. President.” It was clear her father had no idea what she was doing.

  Then she switched course in her statement, pointing out that she had lost almost all personal connections with German society, and th
at her extensive diplomatic contacts yielded meager results. In other words, her usefulness was ending in Berlin. “Is the information which I get from my father, who is hated in Germany and who occupies an isolated position among foreign diplomats and therefore has no access to any secret information, important enough for me to remain in Germany?” she asked rhetorically. “Couldn’t I conduct more valuable work in America or in some European organization such as the International Conference for Peace . . . ?”

  She also noted that, while she was trying to get her father’s tour in Berlin extended, it was likely to end soon. With that in mind, she was positioning herself to help Moscow elsewhere. And, at the same time, she clearly hoped that might still bring her and Vinogradov back together.

  But after the Dodds returned to the United States, Vinogradov was recalled to Moscow from Warsaw. It was 1938, and Stalin’s purges were at their height. Among the prime targets: anyone who had contacts with foreigners. It made no difference if that person was carrying out direct orders from Moscow. Martha’s lover was arrested. Not knowing his fate, Martha responded to a letter he wrote to her at the NKVD’s behest. She wrote back in a jaunty tone on July 9. “Boris, dear! Finally I got your letter . . . Are you happy? Did you find a girl you can love instead of me?” she asked. Then she added: “You haven’t had time yet to know that I really got married. On June 16, I married an American whom I love very much.”

  Vinogradov never read that letter. Before it arrived, he was executed.

  9

  “Uniforms and Guns”