Hitlerland

by Nagorski, Andrew

  He drove on to Italy. At the border, a fat customs official couldn’t have been friendlier as he stamped his passport. “Now, why do you want to leave Germany, young man? You liked our country, didn’t you?” When Russell reflexively assented, he added: “You come back when we have peace, eh?”

  Germany had been exciting, even pleasant at times, for the young man from Mississippi, but Russell found it hard to imagine a peaceful continent anytime soon. When he was sitting in his car with his girlfriend in Berlin, he had concluded that Hitler “had embarked on a course from which there could be no turning back.” Looking back at the steep hills behind him as he crossed into Italy, he was stripped of all illusions. “Not a gun to be seen, not a building, not a soldier,” he wrote. “Yet I knew those woods were teeming with soldiers, bristling with guns.”

  Many American officials had come to much the same conclusion even before the Germans occupied Denmark and Norway. But there was still often far too much wishful thinking about Germany in the United States, particularly when it came to imagining that internal discontent spurred by shortages might topple Hitler’s regime and limit its military reach. Jacob Beam visited Washington during that first winter of the war and indicated that he had been treated like a social pariah for warning about how powerful Germany had become. “The last thing Washington upper circles wanted to be told was the truth, that Hitler controlled the world’s most efficient war machine,” his friend Joseph Harsch concluded.

  The young diplomat told Harsch and other American reporters that they hadn’t succeeded in conveying to their readers the extent of Germany’s frightening might. “Jake Beam found himself being accused of being pro-Nazi when he tried to tell people in Washington that the German tanks were not immobilized from lack of oil and grease,” Harsch added. Like Truman Smith, the military attaché who had concluded his final tour in Berlin in April 1939 after providing a steady stream of incisive intelligence reports about Germany’s rapid militarization, Beam learned that bad news was often greeted with suspicion about the motives of the person who delivered it.

  Smith, of course, had been the first American diplomat to meet Hitler, back in 1922. At the beginning of March 1940, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles was the last one to do so. He went to Europe on what he described as a fact-finding mission, without the power to negotiate—or, more important, to threaten the use of force if Hitler didn’t back down. “Only one thing could have deflected Hitler from his purpose: the sure knowledge that the power of the United States would be directed against him if he attempted to carry out his intention of conquering the world by force,” Welles wrote in his memoir. Facing strong pressure from isolationists to stay out of the war in Europe, the Roosevelt Administration wasn’t about to let its envoy suggest anything like that.

  Welles knew Berlin from an earlier era. Arriving on the morning of March 1, he got an immediate introduction to the new Berlin as he was driven from the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof to the Adlon Hotel. Along Unter den Linden, the city’s premier boulevard, armed guards stood watch as Polish prisoners shoveled snow from the streets. On the same day, he met with Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, accompanied by Alexander Kirk. The chargé d’affaires had been cut off from direct contacts at that level because of the Nazi regime’s irritation that Roosevelt had ordered Ambassador Wilson back to Washington after Kristallnacht, so Kirk was pleased to get in the door. But the meeting was a complete disappointment.

  Welles suffered through three hours of “pomposity and absurdity” and “an amazing conglomeration of misinformation and deliberate lies,” he recalled. The foreign minister, he wrote, had “a very stupid mind.” Because he didn’t want to do anything that might jeopardize his appointment with Hitler the next day, the envoy from Washington offered only the most cautious responses to Ribbentrop’s propagandistic monologue.

  At eleven the next morning, Welles was escorted into Hitler’s new Chancellery, which he considered “a monstrous edifice” with the feel of a modern factory. Hitler was cordial but formal as he met him, and he struck Welles as taller than he expected. “He had in real life none of the ludicrous features so often shown in his photographs,” Welles noted. “He seemed in excellent physical condition and in good training . . . He was dignified, both in speech and in movement.”

  But if Welles may have been unduly impressed by the contrast between Hitler in real life and the numerous caricatures of him in the West—certainly “excellent physical condition” wasn’t a term even his aides employed—the American diplomat was coolly analytical about his message. The German leader claimed to want peace with England and to have spread German rule only where it was absolutely necessary. “I did not want this war,” he insisted. “It has been forced upon me against my will. It is a waste of my time. My life should have been spent in constructing and not in destroying.”

  Predictably, those protestations were accompanied by new threats. Hitler warned against trying to make a distinction between the Nazis and the German people, insisting that he had “the support of every German.” Then he added: “I can see no hope for the establishment of any lasting peace until the will of England and France to destroy Germany is itself destroyed. I feel that there is no way by which the will to destroy Germany can itself be destroyed except through a complete German victory.”

  Winding up, Hitler once again claimed that he only wanted “lasting peace.” But if anything, his entire performance had the opposite effect upon his guest. “I remember thinking to myself as I got into the car that it was only too tragically plain that all decisions had already been made,” Welles recalled. “The best that could be hoped for was delay, for what little that might be worth.”

  Some Americans still refused to accept that verdict. In particular, James D. Mooney, the president of the General Motors Overseas Corporation, had hopes that a wider war could be averted. In October 1939, Otto Dietrich, Hitler’s press chief, asked AP bureau chief Lochner to help set up a meeting with Mooney, who oversaw GM’s plants in Germany and all around the globe. The purpose, he said, was to see if the United States could help defuse the conflict between Germany and England and France. Clearly, the other aim was to keep the Americans out of the war. Lochner, who had been a peace activist during World War I, agreed to do so—although he expressed surprise that Dietrich had turned to him since he was familiar with “my uncompromising anti-Nazi views.”

  On October 19, Mooney met with Goering, who dangled the vision of an accord between his country and the United States, Britain and France. In Paris, Mooney reported his conversation to American Ambassador William Bullitt, who was dismissive of the whole idea that Mooney should be involved in any search for a negotiated solution. Roosevelt met Mooney in the White House on December 22 and the businessman took his willingness to hear him out as a signal that he could continue his quest on an unofficial basis.

  On March 4, 1940, two days after Hitler met Welles, Mooney was ushered into the Chancellery for his own face-to-face meeting with Hitler. Evidently, the Nazis still believed that he might play the mediation role they had suggested to him. Treating him with the utmost seriousness, Hitler told Mooney that Germany was willing to respect England’s world power status so long as Germany was respected in a similar way. He claimed that this could be the basis for a peace agreement with Roosevelt, which could then lead to arms reductions and new international trade. After more meetings with German officials, Mooney sent five messages to Roosevelt about his talks. In a letter dated April 2, the president thanked him for them, writing that they had been of “real value” to him.

  But Mooney failed to get in to see Roosevelt personally to follow up. He was convinced that presidential aide Harry Hopkins and others, who saw him as trying to push a policy of appeasement, blocked him at every turn. Recognizing that he wasn’t going to influence the course of events, Mooney wrote Roosevelt a letter tinged with frustration, expressing his regret that he hadn’t had “the opportunity to present to you some of the arguments for getting back on
the course that you and I believed in last winter.” He added, “I still hope before general hostilities break out again against England—and it is beginning to look as though this may happen very soon . . . that I may be able to interest you in taking a position for peace.”

  Interestingly, Lochner, who had tried to help Mooney at every turn, apparently had hoped the same thing. The AP bureau chief was indeed anti-Nazi, but he remained a peace activist at heart—even after the invasion of Poland.

  Welles had been exactly right: the decisions were already made. Hitler’s armies attacked Denmark and Norway in April and then invaded Holland, Belgium and France in May, rolling up victories at a pace that startled even the American correspondents and diplomats in Berlin who had been the most prescient about Germany’s intentions. After listening to Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop proclaim on April 9 that it was Britain that was guilty of “the most flagrant violation of a neutral country” and Germany’s forces were merely protecting their latest victims, Shirer confessed: “I was stunned. I shouldn’t have been—after so many years in Hitlerland—but I was.”

  Denmark surrendered on the same day as the German troops appeared. Harsch flew to Copenhagen in a German transport plane and reported at the end of the day: “I never dreamed that I should ever see such heartache in a people.” He found the Danes “crushed, physically and mentally.” Broadcasting from Berlin, Shirer reported that the Germans had expected the Norwegians to fold just as quickly—but they were wrong on that count. The Norwegians fought back on land and sea, aided by Britain’s Royal Navy and troops from both Britain and France. On April 14, Shirer wrote a thought in his diary that he could never get past the censor for his broadcast: “Hitler is sowing something in Europe that one day will destroy not only him but his nation.”

  After Hitler launched the invasion of the Low Countries on May 10, not waiting for an end to the fighting in Norway, “the German steamroller,” as Shirer called it, looked to be unstoppable. And the German authorities were confident enough to permit American correspondents to join German troops on the march in Belgium on May 20. “It’s been dream of every newsman in Berlin ever since 5/10 when Reich’s gigantic offensive via Holland, Belgium began to see Hitler’s amazing, awe inspiring armed forces in action,” Lochner, one of the first three correspondents to do so, reported to New York that day.

  Excited by his access, Lochner marveled how German air power had “revolutionized” the way wars were fought. Luftwaffe scouter planes first assessed the strength of enemy forces, he explained to his readers, then unleashed their “terrorizing” Stukas and bombers, which “dash madly down upon enemy.” Once the planes had done their damage, the infantry followed up with “death disdaining courage,” leaving the enemy in complete confusion.

  As for the human toll, Lochner was inclined to take much of what he saw at face value. While he informed his readers that he saw “human drama of misery, terrifying first glimpse of horrors wrought by modernist warfare, and strange contrasts of German kindness and German inexorability,” he emphasized the former. There were “dejected civilians” on the road, he reported, but German soldiers “seemed anxiousest [sic] to be nice to children, to deal courteously with grownups.” The average German soldier, he continued, “is bitter, unyielding, determined even terrible fighter but he also has [a] vast sentimental strain in him.”

  If Lochner appeared to be unduly credulous about what he was seeing in the presence of his German minders, Shirer—who entered Belgium at the same time—was more cautious. In his radio broadcast, he reported that Belgians he encountered in Brussels, the capital that emerged unscathed, said that “the behavior of German troops had been correct.” But he stressed that the Belgians he saw on the roads looked “dazed and bitter and sad.” And the housing blocks in the university city of Louvain, where British troops had set up a headquarters, were “a terrible sight to behold” after the battles there. As he waded through the debris in the streets of Saint-Trond, another Belgian town, he jotted quick notes: “houses smashed . . . shambles . . . bitter Belgium civilians . . . women sobbing . . . their menfolk? . . . where? . . . here houses destroyed at random . . . Stukas careless? . . . on purpose?”

  In his diary, Shirer also noted that he and his colleagues had expected the inhabitants of Louvain to tell them about German responsibility for the destruction. “But eyeing the German officers with us, they grow sly, act shy, and tell us nothing,” he wrote. A German nun recounted how she huddled with fifty-six children in the cellar of a convent after the bombs started falling without warning on May 10. She emphasized that Belgium had not been at war and not done anything to provoke such an attack. Then, she noticed the German officers watching her speak to the Americans.

  “You’re German, aren’t you?” one of them asked her.

  She confirmed her nationality and hastened to add in a frightened voice: “Of course, as a German, I was glad when it was all over and the German troops arrived.”

  Lochner never alluded to the intimidating effect of the German officers who served as their escorts and how this may have colored what he heard. He and two other reporters—Guido Enderis of the New York Times and Pierre Huss of the International News Service—were given special treatment by Karl Boehmer, a German army officer assigned to the Propaganda Ministry. During their tours of newly conquered territory, Boehmer often took them in his own car, which was inevitably first to arrive in most places, while other American reporters followed in cars that were ordered to observe an official speed limit of about 25 miles per hour. The latter reporters complained that the privileged threesome was too chummy with Boehmer and the Nazis in general, although the three responded that they were simply doing their jobs. “Some of the correspondents accused Lochner and Huss of being pro-Nazi because they gained more privileges in trips and tips than some of the other men,” wrote Henry Flannery of CBS, who arrived in Berlin that fall to prepare to succeed Shirer, “but I had no reason to feel that this was true.”

  When it came to describing Hitler’s aims, Lochner didn’t hesitate to be blunt. After driving through Muenster, the town where the Treaty of Westphalia was signed in 1648, he reported that the German leader planned, “when he has forced England, France on knees,” to make their representatives submit to his dictates there. “In other words, Hitler isn’t content now with wiping out last vestiges Versailles Treaty,” he transmitted to New York. “His mind goes back to 1648 when Holy Roman Empire of German nation was broken up into principalities and powerless miniature states.” His intent was “to rectify that mistake.”

  General Walther von Reichenau, the commander of the 6th Army, which had rapidly subdued Belgium and would continue to another victory in France, exuded confidence when he met with Lochner and the other correspondents following his forces. “Every German soldier knows why he is fighting,” he declared. “It’s to be or not to be for Germany. I have talked to many French, English prisoners in their own language. They don’t know what it is all about. Our men have supreme confidence in our military leadership. Others don’t in theirs. There can be no doubt about the outcome.”

  Since the U.S. Embassy in Berlin had taken over the interests of France and Britain once the war broke out, its diplomats were able, under the terms of the Hague Convention, to inspect camps with prisoners from those countries. Some British flyers had been shot down even before the German military machine turned west, and the Germans had also seized some early French prisoners in raids across the border. Of course, the number of prisoners grew rapidly as soon as the fighting started in earnest. All of which meant that Americans from the Berlin embassy were able to take their own measure of the morale of the captured pilots and soldiers.

  “A most discouraging difference between the French and the British became manifest,” Jacob Beam wrote. “The French officers for instance cared very little for their men, and a spirit of defeatism was universal . . . Among the British on the other hand, discipline and high morale prevailed.”

  By Jun
e 14, the German Army had entered Paris, and, on June 22, a French delegation signed the armistice in the same railway carriage in Compiègne that had been used for the signing of the armistice of 1918. The spirit of defeatism was such that, as Shirer recorded in his diary after returning from newly occupied Paris, with few exceptions “France did not fight. If she did, there is little evidence of it.” Although Hitler had decided to hold the ceremony in Compiègne, not Muenster as Lochner had predicted, the AP reporter had been right that he was intent on demonstrating that Germany was settling its historical scores.

  As other Americans living in Germany could attest from personal observation, no vision was too grandiose for Hitler at that moment of his successive military victories. Pierre Huss was one of a small group of Berlin correspondents who were invited to Les Invalides in Paris when Hitler paid a visit to Napoleon’s tomb soon after the French surrender. As the reporters watched, the Nazi leader was lost in his thoughts. “He folded his arms and murmured something we could not hear; his lips moved, as if he were talking to himself, and once or twice he shook his head,” Huss recalled.

  Hitler snapped back into focus as he leaned forward on the balustrade to stare down at Napoleon’s tomb. “Napoleon, mein lieber, they have made a bad mistake,” he said in a suddenly audible voice. Huss confessed, “It startled me, standing there across from a live war lord and above a dead emperor.” The correspondent also couldn’t figure out what Hitler meant.

  The German ruler pointed down and repeated that this was “a big mistake,” explaining to everyone around him: “They have put him down into a hole. People must look down at a coffin far below them . . . They should look up at Napoleon, feeling small by the very size of the monument or sarcophagus above their heads.” Then, exhibiting the kind of understanding of basic psychology that had helped him orchestrate his rallies for maximum impact, he added: “You do not impress people if you walk in a street and they are on top of a building. They must look at something above them; you must be the stage and the center of attraction above the level of all eyes.”