Hitlerland

by Nagorski, Andrew

  Wearing a khaki jacket with a swastika, Hitler greeted the American visitor at the Chancellery on March 8. As they talked, Hoover concluded that Hitler was well informed on issues such as housing, foreign exchange rates and international trade. But according to Arentz, a few key words would set Hitler off and “all of a sudden [he] would jump to his feet and just went to raving talk—tantrums—that showed he was crazy.” Those words were “Jew,” “Communist” and “democracy.”

  At one point, Hoover claimed to have interrupted Hitler, declaring, “That’s enough; I’m not interested in hearing your views.” He told Arentz that if Hitler would face an American jury “there wouldn’t be any question about him being declared insane.” Nonetheless, neither Hoover nor Hitler appeared to take serious offense at anything the other said, and the American emerged with a revised view of the German leader. He no longer believed he was merely someone else’s puppet; he could see that he was a force in his own right.

  The next day, Hoover had lunch with Goering at his “hunting lodge” east of Berlin, a lavish complex full of tapestries, painting and sculptures. Greeted by sixteen costumed trumpeters, the American was brought up short by the life-sized bust of a woman placed as a centerpiece on the table where they were having lunch. “Yes, that’s solid gold; that’s my first wife,” Goering told him. Knowing about Hoover’s background as a mining engineer, his host pressed him to tell him his views of Russia’s mineral resources. The American gave an optimistic account, telling Arentz later that he’d prefer to have the Germans go east rather than west if they were planning any action in the future.

  After Germany, Hoover continued his European journey, visiting Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Sweden. On a final stopover back in England, he spoke with the press. While he acknowledged “many menaces to peace,” he asserted that he did not “believe that a widespread war is probable in the immediate future.” Back in New York, he summed up his views in a speech to the Foreign Policy Association on March 31. Between his meeting with Hitler and that speech, Hitler had completed the annexation of Austria, but that had not altered Hoover’s opinion about the need for America to avoid getting caught up in any new European war. Such a conflict, he said, would “have all the hideous elements of the old religious wars.” His conclusion: “If the world is to keep the peace, then we must keep peace with dictatorships as well as with popular governments. The forms of governments which other peoples pass through in working out their destinies is not our business.”

  Hoover’s message was the direct opposite of Shirer’s. Yes, the situation in Europe was dangerous. And, yes, while Hoover believed Germany was not yet ready for military action, he privately conceded that it could take that step later—in all probability, targeting the East. But for him, this was an argument for leaving Hitler’s Germany to its own devices, not for issuing a wake-up call aimed at mobilizing Western nations, including the United States, to try to stop him. He came to Germany with that conviction, and left Germany with his beliefs not only intact but reinforced. Not even his face-to-face encounter with Hitler, complete with tirades and tantrums, could shake his conviction that the only rational American response to the new Germany was, in effect, a shrug of the shoulders.

  Jacob Beam was still short of his twenty-seventh birthday when he arrived in Berlin in February 1935 to take up his assignment as third secretary in the U.S. Embassy, with responsibility for reporting on the country’s internal affairs. He would spend a total of five years working in the German capital—“a longer period than can be claimed by any other American official,” as he wrote in his unpublished manuscript about that period.

  Despite his youth, Beam was well prepared for his post. His father was a German professor at Princeton, where the younger Beam studied as an undergraduate before continuing his education at Cambridge. Working in the Geneva consulate when he got word of his pending assignment to Berlin, he made a point of seeking “instruction” from Edgar Mowrer, the Chicago Daily News correspondent who had been forced out of Germany in 1933 and was then based in Geneva. “He gave me introductions to representatives of the old regime as well as anti-Nazi dissidents who were to be approached by a cut-out,” Beam recalled. “He even furnished me with a list of women to be avoided.”

  While acknowledging that many of those contacts were not representative of the new Germany, he insisted they were still “the most knowledgeable and influential Germans to whom I could have access.” Among them were ardent German nationalists, often from aristocratic families, who considered themselves far superior to the country’s new rulers. “Although cold and severe in their demeanor, they had a code of justice which abhorred Nazi excesses, particularly the mistreatment of the Jews,” he wrote.

  Several of these nationalists had American wives. When IBM’s boss Thomas Watson came to visit the company’s German subsidiaries in the summer of 1937, he hosted a large dinner at the Adlon Hotel. Among the guests was Beam, who found himself seated at a table with Norman Ebbut, the Berlin correspondent of the Times of London, a gauleiter (Nazi district leader), and the Count and Countess Seherr-Thoss from East Prussia. The daughter of the former American ambassador to France Henry White, Muriel White had married Hermann Seherr-Thoss in 1909; she was also the sister of one of the diplomats stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin. Beam and Ebbut witnessed her exchange with the gauleiter as the dinner was ending.

  “Is it true that the Party sometimes rewards deserving Jews by making them honorary Aryans?” she asked.

  When the gauleiter conceded that this happened on occasion, the countess followed up with a line that she must have been mulling over for quite some time. “Can you tell me then how I could become an honorary Jew?”

  That kind of bold behavior was hardly typical by then, either for Germans or their American spouses. And Beam’s implicit message that many American wives of German nationalists were at heart anti-Nazi is contradicted by the account of the Chicago Tribune’s Sigrid Schultz. “Foreign women married to Germans often became fervent Nazis,” she wrote. “One American-born countess refused to be introduced to me because I ‘maligned Nazi Germany.’” Schultz had helped found the American Women’s Club in Berlin, but resigned from it before the outbreak of World War II because, as she explained, it had become “a hot-bed of Nazi propaganda” and “a regular rendezvous for American women married to Germans and for their Nazi intimates.”

  Schultz observed the broader phenomenon of how the Nazis “commanded a hysterical fanaticism among some foreign women, Americans included.” Elizabeth Dilling, a shrill anti-Communist crusader from Chicago who saw President Roosevelt as the embodiment of all evil, visited Germany in 1931 and again in 1938. On her second visit, she was delighted by “the great improvement of conditions there.” She added, “Personally I thank God for the opposition Germany is making against communism.” On yet another visit a short time later—this one paid for by her German hosts—she attended the Nuremberg Party rally and proclaimed, “The German people under Hitler are contented and happy . . . don’t believe the stories you hear that this man has not done a great good for this country.”

  Schultz recalled seeing Dilling in the dining room where the foreign press and other visitors ate. Dressed in a bright red hat, Dilling went from table to table, pointing to the journalists and “doing a lot of agitated whispering.” After such exchanges, the people she had been talking to would fall silent whenever one of the journalists was nearby. Her curiosity aroused, Schultz caught up with a young American woman who was accompanying Dilling. She demanded to know just what the older woman was doing.

  “You are an enemy of Germany, and we must see that our friends do not speak in front of you,” the young American declared.

  “And what makes you think I am an enemy of Germany?” Schultz inquired.

  “Because of the reports you write against us.”

  Schultz emphasized that the young American used the word “us,” leaving no doubt that she and her mentor identified with the Naz
is.

  Later, Rolf Hoffmann, a local Nazi propagandist, came up to Schultz and apologized for Dilling’s behavior. He told her that the American visitor had insisted that both she and Wallace Deuel of the Chicago Daily News should be expelled from the country. He explained to Dilling that, even if Schultz was critical in her reporting, she tried to be fair. “These foreign sympathizers are so swept away by their emotions, they don’t know how to express their enthusiasm,” he said, smiling.

  Like many of the veteran journalists, Beam had little patience for the likes of Dilling: Americans who came to Germany and admired the Nazis. Early in his tour, however, he did offer a positive assessment of the Arbeitsdienst, the Nazi-organized compulsory six months of labor service for males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. Henry Leverich, an embassy colleague, had been allowed to spend time at three of the Arbeitsdienst camps and was impressed, as Beam recalled, by “the magnificent physical condition of the camp inmates; their pride in their camp and their work . . .” He noted later that this would prove good training for military service when many of these men would be called up during the war.

  Beam was also given his chance to view a Nazi program firsthand—Kraft durch Freude, Strength Through Joy, that offered cheap cruises for workers to boost their morale. Permitted to travel on a one-week cruise of the North Sea, he concluded, “The tours were well-organized, without undue overcrowding, and the satisfaction of the group appeared to be genuine.” As Beam later pointed out, his and Leverich’s positive reporting on those programs contributed to the judgment of some of their superiors back in Washington that they were soft on the Nazis.

  But Beam quickly became a perceptive observer of his surroundings, coming to share the far more critical views of many of the other Americans who knew Germany well. He noticed both the pageantry and propaganda, and the bizarre and the brutal.

  To mark the anniversary of Hitler’s coming to power in 1933, every January 30 the Nazis would hold a torchlight parade, and the Foreign Ministry would invite diplomats from various embassies to witness the procession. In 1937, the Americans and the Brazilians were invited. Beam and his colleague James Riddleberger came from the U.S. Embassy, and they were positioned at a window next to the balcony from where Hitler reviewed the SS troops carrying the torches.

  After the parade, the American and Brazilian diplomats thought they would be escorted out. Instead, an excited Hitler came up to them, asking for their reactions. When they obliged by saying they were impressed, he invited them next door to the president’s palace, which earlier had been occupied by Hindenburg and was now the scene of a party. As they entered a room that was full of Nazis in uniform, Hitler called over the waiters to make sure each of the diplomats was offered a beer. Then, he clapped his hands and shouted the first words of the “Horst Wessel Song,” the Nazi anthem, as he ordered the crowd to make a path for him. This was the prelude to one of his stranger performances, a rare attempt at humor on his part.

  As Beam recalled, Hitler goose-stepped across the room “ostensibly imitating a somewhat slovenly stormtrooper with a protruding stomach.” Reaching a bust of himself, he saluted, turned around and marched back, this time adopting “the style of the SS, with stomach tucked in and lips tightly buttoned.” The assembled Nazi brass didn’t know how to react. After they awkwardly applauded, one of Hitler’s aides nudged the Americans and Brazilians out the door.

  There was nothing even vaguely amusing about the Nazis’ ferocious enforcement methods. Beam concluded that they blotted out their “most vaunted domestic achievements.” One bit of evidence that impressed upon him their “blood-lust and brutality” was provided by his colleague, Marselis Parsons. The American vice-consul was sent to witness the cremation of the body of a man who was executed for allegedly trying to assassinate Julius Streicher, the rabidly anti-Semitic founder of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer. The victim had claimed American citizenship, which was why a representative of the embassy was present to collect his remains. But before the coffin was pushed into the fire, Parsons noticed how short it was. The reason: the victim had been beheaded, and his head was placed “in the crook of his elbow.”

  Like many of the career foreign service officers at the American Embassy, Beam was pleased to see Ambassador Dodd depart at the end of 1937. He considered him to be “dignified, considerate, sound in his judgment of the Nazis, but very inarticulate.” And he shared the view that the historian had “embarrassed the U.S. government” with his undiplomatic statements—although Beam stressed that this was “not because of their anti-Nazi content but because they had set off press speculation that the German Government would soon feel compelled to demand his removal.” He also faulted Dodd for “antagonizing most of the State Department’s high command.”

  For all those reasons, Beam welcomed the appointment in early 1938 of foreign service veteran Hugh Wilson, who had first served in Berlin for a few months back in 1916 and then from 1920 to 1923. His track record as a diplomat and in Washington, where he served as assistant secretary of state before he was sent to Berlin again, convinced Beam that their new boss was a seasoned professional. “We respected Mr. Wilson’s competence,” he noted. The new envoy was, in Beam’s words, “a veteran, ‘you have to show me’ type diplomat who disapproved of his predecessor’s disorderly performance.”

  But, as Beam soon realized, Dodd may have been more accurate in his critical assessment of the Nazi regime than his more experienced replacement. Wilson was “somewhat skeptical of the negative views held by some of us on his staff who had spent a couple of years or more in Berlin,” Beam recalled. He also pointed out that this wasn’t an uncommon experience “since we found it took some time to educate official newcomers to the facts of living with the Nazis.”

  Wilson knew that other foreign service officers with extensive Berlin experience, especially former Consul General Messersmith, saw the Nazi regime as an extremely dangerous enemy. But if Messersmith and some others held this stage-four view, Wilson arrived with an attitude that wasn’t marked by the naïve admiration characteristic of stage one—but was still far from viewing Hitler’s Germany with alarm. Determined to reach his own judgments, Wilson wanted “to concentrate on the diplomatic aspects of the peace in Europe,” as Beam put it. He didn’t want a confrontation with the Nazis over their internal policies or their broader ambitions; he wanted to use the traditional tools of diplomacy to keep the peace.

  For those American diplomats like Beam who were no longer willing to suspend judgment on the Nazi regime, the arrival of Wilson proved to be a classic case of the perils of getting what you wish for. Beam and several of his colleagues also quickly concluded that Wilson “was ‘not on the inside track’ either in Berlin or in Washington when it came to dealing with the affairs of state at the highest level.” Dodd had maintained personal relations with Roosevelt, despite his antagonistic relationship with the president’s appointees at the State Department. And while he was ineffective in his dealings with the Nazis, the former ambassador had quickly shed any illusions that they might moderate their policies.

  Wilson, by contrast, believed that there should be no rush to judgment on Hitler’s regime, even in 1938, and that traditional diplomacy could avert a confrontation with it. This was precisely the kind of mind-set that would be eagerly embraced by Britain and France, setting the stage for Munich.

  After Wilson presented his credentials to Hitler on March 3, 1938, he promptly wrote to Roosevelt. He found that “the principal impression I carried away is the lack of drama in this exceedingly dramatic figure,” he reported. “He was clad as I was in a dress suit, and wore only one order, the Iron Cross. He is more healthy looking than I had anticipated, more solid, more erect. The complexion is pale, but there is more character in his face than I had imagined from the photographs. He speaks with a strong Austrian accent, but was quite easy to follow.”

  Wilson added: “He is a man who does not look at you steadily but gives you an occasional glance as
he talks. In our conversation at least he was restrained and made no gestures of any kind.” When Wilson politely told his host he was interested in meeting the man who had pulled his country out of such poverty and despair and produced prosperity and pride, Hitler was reluctant “to assume for himself the credit for the work which is being done.” The envoy found that appealing, although he confessed that their talk was “colorless” and “the very negative nature of my impressions was surprising.” When he had met Mussolini earlier, Wilson had the feeling that he could have happily invited him for dinner and further conversation over a beer. “I had no such desire on leaving Hitler,” he declared.

  After a subsequent meeting on March 12, he wrote again to Roosevelt, pointing out that the frequent descriptions by Germans of Hitler as an artist were on target—“in the sense of a man who arrives at his conclusions and undertakes his actions through instinct rather than ratiocination.” He indicated that Hitler was well informed, “but his reasoning, while making use of this knowledge, tends to justify an emotional concept.” As a result, he concluded, “if we think of Hitler as an artist, it explains a great deal.”

  That was the same day as the Anschluss, when “the artist” orchestrated the annexation of Austria. In his diary entry for that day, Wilson assessed that event with cool detachment. “One may judge the action from the moral point of view with condemnation,” he wrote. “One may deplore the brutality of it. One must admire the efficiency of the action.”

  In a letter to Secretary of State Hull on March 24, Wilson argued that since “the smoke and dust of the Austrian Anschluss have begun to settle,” it was time to view what had happened with just that kind of dispassionate judgment. “Whether we like it or not, the Germans’ economic predominance through this region is now, I believe, a fact,” he wrote. By seizing Austria, he continued, Hitler had completed two parts of his original Nazi program—“the union of all Germans on the basis of self determination” and “the equality of rights of the German people vis-à-vis other nations and the cancellation of the peace treaties of Versailles and St. Germain.” Only the third part—the push for Lebensraum, German territorial expansion into Russia—remained unfulfilled. In a subsequent letter to Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, he pointed out that even Germans who were secretly opposed to Hitler “confess that their hearts swelled with pride when Austria was annexed.”