In the summer of 1936, just after graduating from Tulane University in New Orleans, Howard K. Smith was working at a local newspaper, earning $15 a week, when lightning struck: he won $100 for a short story he had written. Feeling flush but still savvy enough to calculate where his windfall would support him the longest, he decided to go to Germany. At that moment, Germany was the cheapest country in Europe for an American, he noted. His young friends in New Orleans, none of whom could afford such a voyage, had often discussed what the new regime in Germany represented, “whether it was workable, if it afforded solutions to problems we had in America,” as Smith recalled. In essence, he explained, they were asking: “Was Nazi Germany a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?”
While their liberal arts education made Smith and his friends inclined to disapprove of dictatorships, the Great Depression had shaken many core beliefs, and they felt that everything was debatable. Thus, Smith embarked on what he dubbed his “fact-finding” journey with an open mind. “Like a political Descartes, I tried to wash all preconceptions and prejudices out of my mind,” he declared. Hiring himself out as a deckhand on a cargo ship crossing the Atlantic, he experienced a common reaction to his first glimpses of the country he had set out to examine. “Germany captivated me before I set foot inside it,” he wrote. “Crawling up the Weser from Bremerhaven, we passed one fancy-tickling miniature town after another, all spotless with rows of toy houses and big, sunny beer gardens along the river bank.”
Looking back at his first exposure to Nazi Germany, Smith, who would much later become a famed TV anchor back home, reported not just on the country but on how his reactions to it changed over time. Based on the evolution of his thinking during what turned into a nearly six-year sojourn in Germany, most of it as a junior reporter for United Press, Smith developed a theory about how Americans and other foreigners tended to evolve in their thinking about that country. He broke the process down into four stages:
“On first glance, Germany was overwhelmingly attractive, and first impressions disarmed many a hardy anti-Nazi before he could lift his lance for attack,” he wrote. “Germany was clean, it was neat, a truly handsome land. Its big cities were cleaner than big cities ought, by custom, to be . . . The impression was one of order, cleanliness and prosperity—and this has been of immense propaganda value to the Nazis.” On what he called “my first magic day in Bremen,” a dockworker pointed out to him that Germans were “neat, clean and able to do an amazing lot with amazingly little long before Hitler came to power.” The clear message was that visitors were wrong to credit all of what they saw to the new regime.
But, in most cases, they did exactly that. Some visitors never got beyond this stage, which, according to Smith, “bespeaks the sensitivity of a rhinoceros’s hide and the profundity of a tea-saucer.” He mentioned a group of American schoolgirls he saw in Heidelberg as perfect examples. “The principal obstacle in the way of their further progress was, I think, the fact that German men are handsome and wear uniforms.”
During stage two, the most noticeable characteristic of Nazi Germany was “uniforms and guns; the amazing extent to which Germany, even then, was prepared for war. It took my breath away.” The proliferation of men in uniforms—homo militaris, as Smith put it—suddenly transformed Nazi rearmament into a concrete reality. But visitors at stage two were titillated by what they observed. “Or, more than that, it was downright exciting,” Smith admitted. He watched from a window in Nuremberg “a broad undulating river of ten, twenty thousand men in uniform, stamping in unison down the cobble-stone streets below, flooding the valley between the houses with a marching song so loud the windows rattled, and so compelling your very heart adopted its military rhythm.”
As the mesmerizing spectacles of militarism began to loosen their hold, Smith continued, many visitors would progress to stage three, which was less passive and involved coming to some unnerving conclusions. “You began to grasp that what was happening was that young humans, millions of them, were being trained to act merely upon reflexes,” he wrote. All this drilling was aimed at teaching them “to kill, as a reflex . . . On terse commands which altered their personalities more neatly than Doctor Jekyll became Mr. Hyde, they were learning to smash, crush, destroy, wreck.”
The next level was characterized by “a strange, stark terror.” Those who reached stage four were often overcome with alarm that the rest of the world had no idea what was rising to confront them; they also feared that the unsuspecting outsiders would be no match for the dark forces unleashed in Germany. Once he reached that stage, Smith fretted that the Nazis were “a real, direct and imminent threat to the existence of a civilization which gathers facts and discusses.” The democratic world, for all its admirable qualities, was weak, while Hitler’s world was “mighty, powerful, reckless. It screamed defiance at my world from the housetops. One had to be deaf not to hear it.”
Smith pointed out that some people made the journey from stage one to stage four in as little as a week. Others remained stuck at stage one or two. And still others got to stage three but didn’t necessarily make it to stage four.
Of course, Americans who made only short visits to Germany often failed to get beyond stage one or two—at least, during their actual journeys. Like many wealthy undergraduates, John F. Kennedy took off for Europe in the summer of 1937 after his freshman year at Harvard. Traveling with his friend LeMoyne Billings, he drove around France and Italy before spending five days in Germany, accompanied by a young German woman—“a bundle of fun,” as Kennedy put it—whom they had apparently picked up at the border.
Kennedy’s cryptic diary entries suggest the American visitors came across as somewhat rowdy. The morning after they went to a Munich nightclub “which was a bit different,” he noted that at the Pension Bristol where they stayed there was “the usual amount of cursing and being told we were not gentlemen.” In an entry marked Nuremberg-Württemberg, he wrote: “Started out as usual except this time we had the added attraction of being spitten [sic] on.”
Still, he did make a couple of political observations. “Hitler seems so popular here, as Mussolini was in Italy, although propaganda seems to be his strongest weapon,” he wrote in Munich. Following the Rhine to Cologne, he added: “Very beautiful as there are many castles along the way. All the towns are very attractive, showing the Nordic races certainly seem superior to the Latins. The Germans are really too good—it makes people gang against them for protection . . .” A year later, his father, Joseph Kennedy, was appointed ambassador to Great Britain, where he quickly gained a reputation as an envoy with pro-German leanings.
Because of his father’s views, it’s easy to read more into John Kennedy’s brief diary entries than they merit. At a minimum, however, they demonstrate the sense of innocence—and ignorance—of many young Americans who visited Nazi Germany in this period.
A year later, in 1938, John Randolph and his wife, Margaret, spent the summer traveling through Europe before returning to his job as an assistant professor of mathematics at Cornell. Unlike Kennedy, they pinched their pennies, staying at youth hostels and biking whenever they could. Randolph’s observations from Germany, where they spent almost all of June, are filled with minute details: the cost of their lodgings, meals and bike rentals, the exact times of the trains they caught, their panic when a suitcase went astray. Also, there are the standard exclamations about the tourist attractions. “The trip up the Rhine from Koblenz to Bingen was wonderful,” he wrote. But there are only a couple of the most tangential allusions to politics, and it’s clear that the Randolphs were oblivious to most of what was happening.
“The morning was nice and bright,” he noted on June 6 in Heidelberg. “All the people and all the swastikas were out in full color.” After arriving on their bikes in Tübingen, he wrote:
“Of all things, we had a private room in a house of the Hitlerjugend and even so paid only one RM [Reichsmark] for two of us. The room had two very nice cots, two little stands, a table, a chair,
a large clothes chest, and a telephone. Very nicely furnished with painted walls and ceilings (white) hard wood floors, and large window. The whole hostel was especially built in 1935 and is modern and nice in every way.”
Randolph appeared to believe that the country they were visiting, like their room in the Hitlerjugend house, was nice in every way. When they happened to be caught in an air raid drill in Munich, he dismissed it as “not very interesting.” A German engineer Randolph met on their trip wrote to him in December 1938, angered by what he construed to be anti-German propaganda in the United States. “You realize don’t you that in Germany there is not a single unemployed, and no man that goes hungry in winter or freezes, and this is not so for any other country except Italy which is also under state’s direction. In Germany order and discipline rule. You were here yourself and saw it.” Nothing in Randolph’s diary or papers suggests that he paused to question those claims. He had simply skimmed the surface of Germany and returned as uninformed as when he arrived.
One factor that encouraged such blindness was how, when it came to people-to-people contact, young Americans found Germans friendly and welcoming. After his first summer in Germany in 1936, Howard K. Smith had returned to a job as a reporter for the New Orleans Item, but then felt the lure of Germany again the following summer. Eager to continue his investigation of that country’s political system, he hitchhiked to save money and was surprised to find how easy it was to get around that way. “I simply draped a small American flag over my single bag and those simple, friendly people stopped every time,” he recalled. “The friendliness, the overwhelming hospitality of Germans to foreigners—and especially to Americans—was phenomenal.” Smith believed the impressive performance of the American athletes in the Olympics a year earlier was one reason why “Americans appeared to be the German people’s favorite foreigner.” With that kind of a welcome, many visitors comfortably remained innocents abroad, missing most of what was happening around them.
Yet there was nothing innocent about Nazi Germany by then, especially in 1938. It was a year punctuated by three major events: the Anschluss, Munich and Kristallnacht. The first and second of those events—the annexation and occupation of Austria in March, and then British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s and French Premier Edouard Daladier’s agreement to allow Germany to seize the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia—represented major triumphs for Hitler, transforming his Greater Germany rhetoric into reality and setting the stage for the Drang nach Osten (“Drive to the East”). The third, the attacks on Jewish businesses and homes all over Germany on November 9 and 10, marked a dramatic escalation of Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies.
Those American reporters who had already spent considerable time in Berlin were, as a rule, stripped of most illusions about the new Germany—and some had been sounding the alarm about the country, its rulers and their intentions for quite some time. William Shirer was certainly in that category. But as he marked his third anniversary in Hitler’s Germany in August 1937, he found himself without a job, the victim of his news agency’s cutbacks. He then received a telegram from Salzburg asking if he’d come for dinner at the Adlon Hotel. It was signed “Murrow, Columbia Broadcasting.”
Shirer had only a vague recollection of the name, but he certainly knew the company and its radio broadcasts. When he met Edward R. Murrow, the European manager of CBS, and they had ordered their martinis at the Adlon’s bar, Shirer was struck by Murrow’s handsome face. “Just what you would expect from radio,” he noted in his diary. But he also found him disarmingly sincere: “Something in his eyes that was not Hollywood.” As soon as Shirer passed a voice test, Murrow called to say he was hired.
As the new CBS correspondent, Shirer was supposed to make Vienna his base instead of Berlin. Although his Berlin days were far from really over—he would return there soon enough—Shirer and his Austrian wife, Tess, were relieved to be leaving the German capital in the fall of 1937. Summing up their three years there, he wrote in his diary on September 27: “Personally, they have not been unhappy ones, though the shadow of Nazi fanaticism, sadism, persecution, regimentation, terror, brutality, suppression, militarism, and preparations for war has hung over all our lives, like a dark, brooding cloud that never clears.”
And exactly as Howard K. Smith had described those foreigners who had acquired a real understanding—and sense of horror—about what they were witnessing, Shirer was increasingly alarmed by how oblivious most of the outside world still was about Hitler’s Germany. “Somehow I feel that, despite our work as reporters, there is little understanding of the Third Reich, what it is, what it is up to, where it is going, either at home or elsewhere abroad . . . Perhaps, as the Nazis say, the Western democracies have become sick, decadent, and have reached that stage of decline which Spengler predicted . . . Germany is stronger than her enemies realize.” Exasperated, he recalled his futile attempts to convince visitors of those dangers. “How many visiting butter-and-egg men have I told that the Nazi goal is domination!” he wrote. “They laughed.”
Shirer reserved special scorn for the drop-in journalists who took Nazi protestations about their peaceful intentions seriously. “When the visiting firemen from London, Paris, and New York come, Hitler babbles only of peace,” he wrote. “Peace? Read Mein Kampf, brothers.” And he concluded what he thought was his farewell diary entry from Berlin “with the words of a Nazi marching song still dinning in my ears: Today we own Germany, Tomorrow the whole world.”
Stationed in Vienna as Hitler ratcheted up the threats and pressures aimed at forcing the Anschluss with Austria in March 1938, Shirer watched the takeover unfold with sorrow and frustration. At 4 a.m. on March 12, he wrote in his diary: “The worst has happened . . . The Nazis are in. The Reichswehr is invading Austria. Hitler has broken a dozen solemn promises, pledges, treaties. And Austria is finished. Beautiful, tragic, civilized Austria! Gone.” But his frustration also stemmed from his inability to report the story on CBS; the Nazis would not permit him to broadcast. And his mood wasn’t improved by his family situation: he was worried about Tess, who was still in the hospital recovering from a difficult Caesarean birth of their daughter two weeks earlier.
Although Shirer knew Austria well enough not to romanticize it—he observed how Austrian anti-Semitism “plays nicely in the hands of the Nazis”—he was still startled by how quickly many Austrians not only accepted but embraced their new rulers. After his daily visit to the hospital to check on Tess and the baby, he emerged from the subway at Karlsplatz to find himself swept up in “a shouting, hysterical Nazi mob” marching through the city. “The faces!” he wrote. “I had seen these before at Nuremberg—the fanatical eyes, the gaping mouths, the hysteria.”
As the crowds sang Nazi songs, he spotted a group of policemen looking on in evident good humor. “What’s that on their arm? A red-black-white Swastika arm-band! So they’ve gone over too!” And then there were the immediate attacks on Jews. “Young toughs were heaving paving blocks into windows of the Jewish shops,” he wrote. “The crowd roared with delight.”
Dropping in at the Café Louvre, the hangout of the foreign correspondents, he found his colleagues in a state of high excitement, rushing back and forth to the phone to call in the latest reports and rumors, while other regulars were saddened, even close to tears. Emil Maass, an Austrian-American who had worked earlier as Shirer’s assistant, stopped by his table. He had posed as an anti-Nazi before, but now he didn’t just walk in—he strutted in, as Shirer noted. “Well, meine Damen und Herren, it was about time,” Maass announced with a smirk. Then he ostentatiously turned over his coat lapel, revealing a hidden swastika button, unpinning it and repinning it on the outside of his coat. Two or three women shouted, “Shame!” And a Major Goldschmidt, whom Shirer described as a Catholic who was also half-Jewish, got up from his table. “I will go home and get my revolver,” he declared.
After another futile attempt to arrange a broadcast from Vienna, Shirer took Murrow’s advice to fly t
o London. It wasn’t that simple, though. As night turned into morning and he set out for the airport, he observed the proliferation of Nazi flags flying from houses. “Where did they get them so fast?” he wondered. At the airport, all the seats on the London flight were taken. “I offered fantastic sums to several passengers for their places. Most of them were Jews and I could not blame them for turning me down,” Shirer wrote. But he succeeded in getting on the flight to Berlin. From there, he found a prompt connection to London, where he could finally make his broadcast.
“This morning when I flew from Vienna at 9 A.M. it looked like any German city in the Reich,” he told his listeners, describing the Nazi flags hanging from most of the balconies and people in the streets greeting each other with Nazi salutes and shouts of “Heil Hitler!” “Arriving in Berlin three hours later I hardly realized I was in another country,” he added. The transformation of Austria was already complete. As for Shirer, he was more than ever convinced that Hitler was only beginning his march of conquest—and that the outside world urgently needed to wake up to the danger.
But that was hardly the prevailing view at the time. Other Americans came to radically different conclusions. Former President Herbert Hoover embarked on a trip to Europe in February 1938. After visiting several other countries—France, Belgium, Switzerland and Czechoslovakia—he went to Germany. His aim was to bolster his credentials when he held forth on key international issues. In particular, he wanted to strengthen his case that the United States needed to stay clear of “entanglements” abroad.
In Berlin, U.S. Ambassador Hugh Wilson told him that Hitler wanted to meet him. Initially, Hoover balked, explaining that he was traveling as a private citizen. Besides, according to his friend Samuel Arentz, Hoover told Wilson that he had been inclined to believe “that Hitler was actually a front man for a group of the brains who were actually running the Nazi party and everything it was doing.” But Wilson pressed him to reconsider, especially in light of his own inability to get to see Hitler. Hoover finally gave in.
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