Hitlerland

by Nagorski, Andrew

  If his listeners had any doubts about who he was really talking about, he quickly dispelled them. “I shall never make such a mistake,” he declared. “I know how to keep my hold on people after I have passed on. I shall be the Führer they look up at and go home to talk of and remember. My life shall not end in the mere form of death. It will, on the contrary, begin then.”

  Standing at the rostrum of the Reichstag on July 19, Hitler was practically preening—not just for his Nazi followers but also for the diplomatic corps and foreign press in attendance. “It was Hitler triumphant, at the peak of his career, savoring to the full his victories,” Harsch wrote, calling it a scene that “no one present could ever forget.” The Nazi leader dispensed promotions and decorations for his generals, and theatrically picked up a small box he had placed on the corner of the Speaker’s desk occupied by Goering as the president of the Reichstag. Opening it to display a diamond-studded Grand Cross of the Order of the Iron Cross, he awarded it to his loyal follower, whom he also elevated to the rank of Reich marshal, a special rank above all field marshals.

  Hitler then directed his words across the English Channel. He denounced Winston Churchill, who had replaced Chamberlain as prime minister at the same time as the Germans launched their invasion of the Low Countries, as a warmonger. But he also claimed that a peace deal was still possible. “I consider myself in a position to make this appeal since I am not the vanquished begging favors, but the victor speaking in the name of reason,” he declared. “I see no reason why this war must go on.”

  The Reichstag erupted with applause. Harsch was standing beside Alexander Kirk, who, the reporter noted, displayed “a languid air.” A German Foreign Ministry official rushed up to the American chargé d’affaires. “Oh, Mr. Ambassador, isn’t it wonderful, now we can have peace,” he proclaimed. Kirk had no intention of falling into a diplomatic trap. He ostentatiously stifled a yawn with his hand, offering a nonreply. “I am hungry,” he said. “Where might I find food?”

  By most accounts of the Americans in Berlin, ordinary Germans weren’t nearly as exultant as their leaders might have expected. On the day Paris fell, loudspeakers on Wilhelmplatz, flanked by Hitler’s Chancellery, the Propaganda Ministry and, close by, Goering’s Air Ministry, blared party songs. Harsch, who watched the scene, counted no more than a hundred or so people on the big square. An excited announcer declared that German troops were marching on the Place de la Concorde, followed by the playing of “Deutschland über Alles.” “The little groups of people put up their right arms in perfunctory Nazi salutes,” Harsch recalled. “The loud-speakers went silent. And everyone walked away. Not a sound of cheering. Not an exclamation of pleasure.”

  But Harsch understood that the lack of jubilation didn’t signal the kind of breakdown in morale that many in the West had hoped for. “The loot of war of every description which poured into Germany from midsummer 1940 through the autumn months seemed a convincing argument to many Germans that war can be profitable and that a final victory would burden their bare tables and empty cupboards with the good things of the earth,” he wrote. This made the Nazis’ case better than the official propaganda. “Dr. Goebbels let Dutch cheese, Belgian laces and Parisian silks do his talking for him.”

  To be sure, the sudden appearance of women in stockings in Berlin without multiple runs, along with the infusion of new supplies of food and clothing, didn’t last long. Rationing remained in place, and so did a stricter work regimen. Still, Harsch, Shirer and others pointed out that most ordinary Germans wanted peace—but, in the sense that their leaders did, which meant on Hitler’s terms. They wanted to avoid more fighting if possible, but they wanted victory in any case. Many Germans were elevated to much more senior positions in the occupied lands than they could have ever aspired to hold at home—and quickly became accustomed to their new status. “These Germans have not only acquired the actual means to wealth beyond their wildest dreams but have established themselves as privileged permanent residents in every sense,” Harsch explained.

  Then, too, the successive German victories turned even some early skeptics into true believers. Schultz, the Chicago Tribune correspondent, told the story of the wife of a professor she knew who had been “a violent anti-Nazi.” After her son became a member of the Hitlerjugend, the Gestapo arrested him for homosexuality. The parents frantically appealed to Schultz for help, and the American suggested they get a good Nazi lawyer and prepare to offer big donations to the party. Schultz also arranged for one of her Nazi contacts to take a high party official to a lavish dinner to soften him up. Eventually, “by dint of perjury and bribes,” Schultz wrote, the boy was released, avoiding what the high party official described as the “inferno” of a concentration camp. The father also had to join the party to demonstrate his loyalty.

  Nonetheless, when Germany invaded Norway, the mother came to Schultz all excited. “Maybe it was meant for us to go through Nazism—it has made us strong,” she told the American, who was startled by her transformation. “It has brought us great military victories, and it will bring us more.” Based on such experiences, Schultz concluded, “The lust for conquest is there, deep in the heart of the German woman.” In her 1944 book Germany Will Try It Again, she predicted that, once Germany lost the war, many of those women would be disillusioned “but not with Nazism—only with its failure.”

  As one of the few women correspondents in Berlin, Schultz was particularly interested in Nazi policies about women and the family. While Nazis were undermining the security of the country and its people, she pointed out, they shrewdly won many women over by appealing to their emotions and insecurities.

  From its early days, the Nazi Party made a show of raw virility. “I have seen the sex instinct deliberately aroused in many ways,” Schultz wrote. “At mass meetings, speeches dwelling on the copulative process of the Nazi male would send the Storm Troopers marching out of the hall all set for a demonstration. They never had to wait long for a partner. German women would wait outside the meeting places.” With Hitler intent on boosting the birth rate, newsstands displayed “books and magazines filled with nude men and women,” as the CBS newcomer Flannery observed. “It was plain that Nazi Germany planned all this to but one end.”

  With more and more men serving far from home and, especially after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, dying there, the authorities stepped up their campaign for more births, whatever a woman’s marital status. “The word illegitimate must be blotted out of the German language,” Minister of Labor Robert Ley declared. Flannery reported that women who felt they needed more social respectability could legally take the name of a soldier who had died in battle. While Nazi propagandists claimed that unwed mothers were giving birth to children of “young German heroes,” Schultz pointed out that the real fathers were often “the married bosses of little secretaries, filing clerks and saleswomen.” This created a class of women “who clung to Nazism because the Nazi Party would protect their illegitimate children,” she added.

  The American reporters began to notice a parallel trend: the disappearance of those who were deemed physically or mentally unfit. In a broadcast on December 11, 1940, Flannery mentioned a German claim that British bombers had hit a nursing home in southwestern Germany. When Hitler added in a speech that the British were targeting German hospitals, he concluded that all of this was a cover-up for “their murder of the insane, crippled, hopelessly ill, even aged.”

  Flannery learned of a young man in Leipzig who had become suspicious of a proliferation of death notices that contained the phrase “After weeks of uncertainty we received the unbelievable news of his death and cremation.” The young man called on some of the families, discovering that in each case the dead person had been confined to an institution. Flannery inquired about all those death notices with identical wording, but Nazi officials denied that any murders were taking place. Indirect confirmation came in another form: subsequent death notices avoided such telltale phrases.

&nb
sp; When Flannery was first assigned to Berlin in October 1940, he was hardly a fervent anti-Nazi. “I was one of those people who were known as ‘open-minded,’ who did not believe that Nazi Germany was necessarily a threat to the United States, who believed it was at least possible that we might do business with Hitler,” he recalled. After his first couple of months in Hitlerland, he was becoming far less “open-minded.”

  While Flannery and many of his colleagues found it increasingly difficult to hide their growing abhorrence of Nazi practices, a few Americans lived in Berlin apart from their fellow countrymen for the opposite reason: they had signed up to work for German radio’s English-language broadcasts. They served as the Nazis’ American propagandists.

  In some cases, they appeared to be motivated by little more than opportunism. Edward Delaney was a failed actor who had bounced around various stage- and film-related jobs in Australia and South Africa, and also done a public relations stint for MGM based in Chicago. Casting about for something new, he went to Berlin in the summer of 1939 and met with Hans Schirmer of the Foreign Ministry. According to Delaney, Schirmer explained he was looking for someone who could broadcast “human interest” material about Germany “to counteract much adverse criticism by those who, for the most part, knew little or nothing about conditions in that part of Europe.”

  Delaney claimed that he was assured his job would not be connected to Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, but it was a flimsy distinction. The American left little doubt why he jumped at the opportunity. “The remuneration he [Schirmer] mentioned was acceptable,” he recalled. Soon he was denouncing the British for “wanton, premeditated murder” and Roosevelt for pushing the United States toward war. Later, he would justify his actions on the grounds that he was a de facto spokesman for America’s isolationist movement and a pioneer in warning about the dangers of Communism as opposed to Nazism. Shirer delivered his verdict on Delaney in his diary on September 26, 1940: “He has a diseased hatred for Jews, but otherwise is a mild fellow and broadcasts the cruder type of Nazi propaganda without questioning.”

  In his brief remarks about the American propagandists, Shirer called Frederick Kaltenbach “probably the best of the lot, actually believing in National Socialism with a sincere fanaticism and continually fighting the Nazi Party hacks when they don’t agree with him.” (Kaltenbach should not be confused with Hans V. Kaltenborn, the famous American radio broadcaster who had often visited Germany and interviewed Hitler.) In part, Shirer’s postwar novel The Traitor is based on Kaltenbach’s story, although his main character also shares the traits of some of the other American propagandists. The novel is much less compelling than Shirer’s nonfiction, particularly The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, but it provides intriguing testimony to his grim fascination with those Americans who had gone to the other side.

  Born in Dubuque, Iowa, in 1895, Kaltenbach was the son of a German butcher who had immigrated to the United States. As a teenager, he felt the pull of his father’s country of origin—and, along with his brother Adolph, he traveled around Germany just as World War I broke out in 1914. Although the German police arrested them on suspicion of spying on more than one occasion, Kaltenbach titled his diary chronicling their adventures Through the Fatherland on Bycycles. He would tell his Nazi employers later that this trip made him feel “swept by a powerful emotion” that led him to love both Germany and America, prompting him to want to promote good relations between the two.

  Back in Iowa, he became a teacher at Dubuque High School, but he was fired in 1933 after he set up a “hiking club” that was almost a straight copy of the Hitlerjugend, complete with brown shirts for uniforms. Following that episode, Kaltenbach returned to Germany, where he immediately became entranced by the country’s new rulers. On June 25, 1933, he sent a postcard to his family back home showing Hitler in uniform, his swastika armband prominently displayed, looking into the distance in what is meant to be a commanding pose. The caption read: “Reichskanzler ADOLF HITLER.” Kaltenbach’s handwriting was scrunched to squeeze into the small space, but his terse phrases conveyed his growing infatuation.

  Dear Folks:

  Here I am in the midst of things—Hot stuff, see all, hear all. About to view the Changing of the Guard. You should see the uniformed Nazi soldiers. Enjoying the night life too. Hotel costs me 65 cents per. Can get meals for 1 Mark. Sandwiches and drinks at automat for 2.5 cents. Shall see palaces, museums-zoo-movies-attend Nazi celebrations Spreewald-Potsdam-May go to Danzig-

  Love, Fritz

  Kaltenbach was one of the first Americans to work for German radio during the Third Reich. In his broadcasts addressed to “Dear Harry,” which stood for his supposed friends in Iowa, he urged his countrymen to open their eyes to the virtues of Hitler’s Germany.

  By contrast, Douglas Chandler was a latecomer among the Americans working for German radio, starting his broadcasts as “Paul Revere” in the spring of 1941. But he more than made up for that with his vitriol. “Roosevelt, himself an off-spring of Spanish Jews, is a mere tool of the Jewish conspiracy against all Nordic Aryans,” he declared. As a freelance journalist who had bounced around the continent with his wife, Laura, and two daughters, he had met up with Hanfstaengl and other Nazi propagandists in the early days of the new regime. In Berlin, he also visited U.S. military attaché Truman Smith and his wife, Kay, since they had known each other in New York in the mid-1920s. Kay claimed that Chandler had suffered a “nervous breakdown” after his initial career in finance collapsed along with the stock market in 1929.

  Kätchen, the Smiths’ daughter, still remembers a lunchtime visit of the Chandlers. She was struck by the appearances of their two young girls with “ponytails and dirndls, looking more German than the Germans.” Chandler told Kay he was thinking of getting German citizenship for himself and his family since he felt the United States was turning socialist. “I told him he was a great fool,” Kay recalled. It was a tense encounter, and later, when the Smiths were back in Washington, she heard “Paul Revere” on the radio and instantly recognized the voice of Douglas Chandler.

  Delaney, Kaltenbach and Chandler were three of the six Americans indicted in absentia for treason by a Washington, D.C., grand jury on July 26, 1943. A few months earlier, Delaney had left Berlin and his propaganda work behind, and moved to Slovakia, then Prague. At the end of the war, he was detained by the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps, released, detained and then released again. When he finally returned to the United States, he was arrested again but his indictment was dismissed, and for the rest of his life he claimed he had been persecuted because of his anti-Communist views. Kaltenbach wasn’t so lucky. Captured by the Red Army on July 14, 1945, he died in a Soviet camp in eastern Germany in October.

  Chandler’s wife, Laura, died in Berlin in 1942, and Douglas was captured by the Americans in Bavaria in May 1945. Sent back to the United States the following year, he was tried, convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. His daughter later wrote to Truman Smith asking him if he would testify on his behalf. “Truman wrote her he was sorry for her but that he could not testify on behalf of anyone who had betrayed his country,” Kay Smith recalled. But the loyal daughter kept lobbying for her father, appealing to President Kennedy in July 1963. On August 5, Kennedy commuted Chandler’s sentence. After his release, Chandler spent the final period of his life on Tenerife in the Canary Islands, leaving the country he had betrayed behind.

  It wasn’t just the American propagandists who were choosing sides in the rapidly escalating war. Mildred Harnack, who had grown up in Wisconsin and then met and married the German exchange student Arvid Harnack, had remained one of the closest American friends of Martha Dodd during her time in Berlin. Like Martha, she had become fascinated by the Soviet Union, seeing it as an alternative to the Nazi dictatorship she lived in. Even the Nazi-Soviet Pact didn’t seem to undermine her faith that Stalin’s system was a genuine alternative to Hitler’s. By the late 1930s, she and her husband were part of a loose network of
resisters intent on doing what they could to undermine the Nazi regime. Later, the Gestapo would dub this network the Rote Kapelle, the Red Orchestra.

  Understandably, the growing dangers for anyone pursuing such a course may have prompted Mildred to submit applications in October 1939 to both the Rockefeller and Guggenheim fellowship programs. If she had been accepted by either, she presumably would have returned to the United States to work on a book about American literature, her field of study. But the Guggenheim committee considered her “a beginner,” and she failed to get either fellowship.

  One of Mildred’s jobs before the war was to hunt up English-language books for a German publisher, which allowed her to travel around Europe. During those trips, she may have helped Jews and others to escape from Germany, although the evidence is patchy. Her husband Arvid worked in the Economics Ministry, which also allowed him to travel and contact foreigners. He became particularly friendly with Donald Heath, a first secretary at the U.S. Embassy, and Mildred tutored his son. Heath began sending reports to Washington about how the Germans assessed their economic capabilities based on someone he identified as a “confidential” or “well-placed” source. After the war, Heath told his family that Arvid was that source.

  Shareen Blair Brysac, Mildred Harnack’s biographer, points to Arvid’s ties with Heath as evidence that he thought of himself as “a German patriot” who was willing to work with the United States as well as the Soviet Union—in other words, anyone who would help topple Hitler’s regime. “Harnack never regarded himself as an agent of a foreign power, nor did he follow Soviet orders,” she wrote.