Hitler

by Brendan Simms

  Hitler’s hopes for a rapid understanding with Britain were also quickly dashed. To be sure, there were some–such as the press baron Lord Rothermere–who welcomed Hitler as a bulwark against communism.112 ‘There has been a sudden expansion of their national spirit,’ he wrote in the Daily Mail, ‘like that which took place in England under Queen Elizabeth.’ Rothermere hailed the ‘plain blunt patriotism of Hitler’, who had rescued Germany from ‘its alien elements’, the Jews. ‘The world’s greatest need today is realism,’ he concluded. ‘Hitler is a realist.’ The overwhelming view in the press, parliament and Foreign Office, though, was negative. Hitler’s treatment of the Jews, in particular, caused widespread consternation. The only real disagreement was over the extent to which outside intervention was legitimate or effective.113

  Before he made serious diplomatic moves, Hitler needed to win over, or at least neutralize, public opinion in Britain and the United States. This required the regime to tone down its domestic violence, at least in so far as it affected the outside world and could be monitored by the international press, especially the British and American papers, which Hitler assumed to be controlled by the Jews. It was for this reason also that he instructed the SA, SS and the NSDAP generally in early March to avoid attacks on foreign cars and individuals.114 This made little difference, partly because SA discipline left a lot to be desired, partly because Hitler himself continued to encourage violence with very public nudges and winks, but primarily because the fundamental nature of the Nazi regime outraged world opinion, especially in Britain and America. Almost from the start, therefore, Hitler and the Third Reich were subjected to a barrage of negative publicity in the Anglo-American press.115

  At the heart of this critique were the British and American foreign correspondents in Berlin. Their dean, the Associated Press representative Louis Lochner, was a constant thorn in the side of the Nazi authorities.116 Dealing with them was the task of Hitler’s foreign press chief, Putzi Hanfstaengl. He set up an office opposite the Chancellery headed by the Quaker Agnethe von Hausberger, who had grown up in the United States.117 His monopoly of foreign press contacts was constantly being challenged by Goebbels and by the return of Kurt Lüdecke, who was aligned with Alfred Rosenberg, from the United States. Over the next four years or so, Hanfstaengl sought to maximize favourable press coverage. He gossiped and joshed with foreign correspondents at his favourite cafés; the early Third Reich was an open and leaky system, light years away from the totalitarianism of Soviet Russia.118 That said, foreign journalists were also subjected to a systematic policy of intimidation by the Nazi authorities. Göring warned them that their telephone conversations were being monitored. Goebbels frequently protested against bad coverage, and sometimes managed to have journalists arrested, disciplined or recalled.119 There was nothing, however, that the Nazis could do about poor press coverage from across the Channel or the Atlantic.

  Hitler was extremely sensitive to his negative image in the outside world. In early March 1933, he warned the cabinet that he ‘considered the global press agitation against the German government very dangerous’.120 A week later, he complained to Papen that alleged outrages perpetrated by the SA against foreign diplomats were being used as a pretext to launch a ‘systematic barrage’ with the aim of ‘stopping the national revival’ of Germany.121 Hitler was deeply concerned about this, because he firmly believed that Germany’s isolation and defeat in the war had been the result of an Anglo-American press campaign against the Reich. He was also worried about the way in which he was being portrayed personally. In a candid admission of his concern with his global image, Hitler sponsored the compilation of an entire volume of caricatures by Hanfstaengl–Hitler in der Karikatur der Welt–which appeared in the autumn of 1933 together with detailed rebuttals.122 It was for this reason that Hitler was anxious to establish an effective apparatus for engaging with world opinion, and ‘escaping world political isolation’. Hitler told the cabinet that they would have to establish ‘a new organization’ to ‘influence public opinion abroad’. This necessitated a clear demarcation of competencies between the Foreign Office and the Propaganda Ministry of Goebbels. Hitler added that whereas Germany was pursuing a traditional ‘cabinet policy’, that of other countries was being ‘driven by quite different forces’, a clear reference to the supposed power of the Jewish press.123

  One way of getting the Führer’s message across was through the dissemination of Mein Kampf abroad. Here Hitler was conflicted. On the one hand, he went to considerable lengths to restrict the publication of some foreign-language editions, even going to court in France. On the other hand, he endorsed or at least tolerated other versions. An Italian edition was honoured with a new preface by Hitler.124 An abridged English version was published in the autumn of 1933 by Hurst and Blackett in London and Houghton Mifflin in New York. Despite subsequent claims, for example by the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, that these editions tended to play down Hitler’s racism and territorial ambitions, they were in fact not bowdlerized in any meaningful sense of the word.125 The emphasis on Lebensraum and the alleged malevolent power of world Jewry was as strong in these editions as it was in the original.126 The Führer also openly signalled his plans in an interview with the Daily Telegraph in May 1933, when he stated that he did not want naval or colonial competition with Britain, but eastern enlargement.127 None of this is surprising, because although Hitler always sought to conceal his immediate diplomatic and military moves, it was very much in his strategic long-term interest to win over Anglo-American audiences to his way or thinking on race and space.

  Significantly, while Hitler devoted considerable effort to converting Anglo-America, he was reluctant to pursue a more broadly-based international coalition against world Jewry and the other pillars of the global order. His interpretation of the institutions of global governance and the workings of the world economy was likely to appeal to those have-nots of the international system, and that was a very large proportion of the literate non-Anglo-world population, who felt short-changed by the power of Anglo-America and ‘the Jews’, and who did not think that history had ended with the advent of liberalism.128 There were many senior Nazis, Rosenberg and Goebbels among them, who wished to pick up where Strasser had left off and forge global alliances, if not with the wretched of the earth on the Indian continent, then at least with the many others who had got the rough end of the stick from global capitalism or British imperialism, or believed themselves to have done so. They created a lively fascist and anti-Semitic ‘international’ in the 1930s.129 Hitler himself had no interest in any of these transnational entanglements, at least for the moment. He planned to export Nazis to the east in large numbers when the time was right, but–with the exception two small nearby markets in Austria and Czechoslovakia–he had no intention of exporting Nazism itself to the world at large.

  At the heart of the negative foreign press campaign, Hitler believed, lay a Jewish conspiracy. The need for ‘defensive measures’ against the ‘atrocity propaganda’ preoccupied him throughout the second half of March 1933.130 He decided to launch a time-limited boycott of Jewish businesses.131 Julius Streicher, a fanatical anti-Semite and editor of Der Stürmer, was put in charge of the ‘Central Committee for Defence against Jewish Atrocity and Boycott Agitation’.132 Its main addressee was Anglo-America. Hitler told the cabinet that he would be prepared ‘to delay the start of the boycott, if the governments of Britain and the United States immediately made satisfactory declarations against the atrocity propaganda’.133 ‘What would America do,’ he asked, ‘if the Germans in America behaved as badly towards America’ as the German Jews did against Germany? This was a particularly bitter issue for Hitler, because of his beliefs about the role of German emigrants fighting against their Fatherland in the American army in the World War. Moreover, Hitler argued, alluding to the immigration of Ostjuden from the late nineteenth century, Germany had ‘let in every foreigner for hundreds of years’ without restriction, so that she had a huge
population density. In America, he continued, the figure was much lower, and yet ‘America had introduced quotas and simply excluded certain peoples’ from immigrating.134 There it was again, the old preoccupation with Jewish interference from America, coupled with the spatial superiority and racial exclusivity of the United States. It had changed very little since Hitler’s first articulations in the 1920s.

  In these early days, the Third Reich encouraged Jewish emigration, especially to Palestine. This was the policy of the Foreign Office, the Economics Ministry and particularly of the SS, subject to confiscating most of the Jews’ property.135 They looked for help to German and World Zionism, which was interested in increasing the number of immigrants to the Yeshuv. The apotheosis of this cooperation was the Haavara Agreement between the German Zionist Federation, the Jewish Agency and the Nazi Ministry of Finance in August 1933 to facilitate the passage of German Jews to Palestine. This was a Zionist rather than a Nazi initiative, designed to enable Jews who wished to flee the discriminatory policies of the Third Reich to move at least some of their assets to Palestine. With the benefit of hindsight, the Haavara Agreement saved many lives, as it permitted the departure of Jews who would otherwise almost certainly have been killed later. There is no evidence that it was encouraged or sanctioned by the ‘Führer’, though he made no attempt to reverse it either.136

  Hitler, in fact, was at best ambivalent about the emigration of German Jews. He used the reluctance of other powers to accept Jewish refugees, and that of Britain to admit them to Palestine, in order to lambast them for hypocrisy,137 but he did not favour their large-scale systematic removal there or anywhere else. This was partly because Hitler remained completely hostile to the idea of a Jewish state as such, which would on his reading simply serve as the headquarters of an international conspiracy. The main reason, however, was that he sought to hold German Jews to ransom for the good behaviour of world Jewry. This became clear when a leading New York Jewish lawyer, Maxie Steuer, visited Berlin in the spring or early summer of 1933 bringing an offer from major figures of the American Jewish community, including Warburgs, Speyers and Guggenheims, to finance the departure of all German Jews, not excepting those who had recently immigrated from eastern Europe. Both Neurath and Schacht were enthusiastic. To Hanfstaengl’s astonishment, Hitler rejected the proposal, reminding him that he wanted to keep the Jews as hostages.138

  From the start, therefore, there was a tension running through Hitler’s policy towards the Jews after 1933. On the one hand, he wanted to make life as difficult for them as possible so that they would leave and enable an evolutionary solution to the ‘problem’. On the other hand, he wanted to keep at least some of them in the country as hostages for the good behaviour of the Anglo-American Jews in the western ‘plutocracies’. This tension partly reflected differing pressures within the regime, but mainly one in Hitler’s own mind, which was to resolve itself over time.

  The confrontation between Hitler and what he regarded as world Jewry in the spring of 1933 nearly derailed his grandiose plans for the Olympic Games. In late May of that year, the American Jewish Congress under its president, Bernard S. Deutsch, spoke out against holding the games in Germany. There were also deep divisions within the American Olympic establishment. The US representative on the International Olympic Committee was the Louisiana Republican Ernest Lee Jahncke, who had just finished a term as secretary of the navy. Jahncke was a non-Jewish German-American, whose father had been born in Hamburg, who hated Hitler and who was strongly against the Nazi ‘sordid exploitation of the Games’. It was thanks largely to the enthusiastic support of the president of the US Olympic Committee, and strong anti-Semite, Avery Brundage, that the threat of an American-led international boycott of the Berlin Olympic Games never materialized.

  Another minefield that Hitler had to negotiate with the United States was the role of German-Americans, who constituted by far the largest group of Auslandsdeutschen. As we have seen, this group lay at the heart of his whole world view, and he had milked the two high-profile returns for all they were worth. That said, Hitler was anxious not to alienate Washington by interfering in its internal affairs. For this reason, the American NSDAP-Ortsgruppen were disbanded in spring 1933, not long after Hitler came to power. Their place was taken by a new organization, ‘League of the Friends of the New Germany’, generally known as the Bund. The Bund was a very two-edged weapon, however. To be sure, it garnered support on the racist and isolationist right, but it was fundamentally anathema to the American mainstream. The Bund was subjected to severe criticism from the very beginning not only by Jewish groups but by many other Americans, including the majority of German-Americans, for whom any form of external interference was unacceptable. The Third Reich reacted by banning German citizens from involvement in the Bund, and towards the end of the year Hitler assured an interviewer from Hearst Press, the German-American Karl von Wiegand, that he had ‘forbidden party members abroad from making National Socialist propaganda in order not to endanger the diplomatic relations with those countries’.139

  Here, Hitler was no doubt reacting to the activities of the Jewish Representative Samuel Dickstein of New York, who began to hold informal hearings in 1933 in the House of Representatives on Nazi activities in the United States. This eventually led, a year later (March 1934), to the establishment of ‘The Special Committee on Un-American Activities Authorized to Investigate Nazi Propaganda and Certain other Propaganda Activities’. It was chaired for optical reasons by the non-Jewish Congressman John W. McCormack from Massachusetts, though the German press invariably referred to the ‘Dickstein Committee’. Two months later, President Roosevelt ordered FBI Director Hoover to begin a ‘very careful and searching investigation’ of American fascism, with a particular focus on ‘any possible connection with official representatives of the German government’.140 In fact, the very notion of ‘Un-American’ behaviour was first given institutionalized political expression in the confrontation between the United States and Nazism. Clearly, Hitler was losing the battle for America. The ‘othering’ of US fascists, of German America, of Nazism and of the Führer himself, was well underway.

  Meanwhile, Hitler sought to come to a financial arrangement with Washington. The Third Reich desperately needed to reduce the debt interest payments on loans. At the same time, despite his long-term ambition to achieve autarchy, Hitler’s plans for rearmament required the import of raw materials, which could only be paid for with foreign currency derived from exports. Hitler also wanted to explore the possibilities for deeper forms of economic cooperation in Europe. Picking up a theme he had already ventilated before 1933, Hitler feared the rise of non-European economic actors–here he seems to have been thinking not just of the US but also Japan and possibly China–as these imported western machinery and competed with the established industrial powers.141 He hoped that the old world could be persuaded at the World Economic Conference in Washington to join a boycott of the export of machinery to these rising powers. Failure to do so, he lamented, would destroy European industry. If that were not possible, however, Hitler wanted–as he put it to a delegation from eastern Germany in late April 1933–to compensate for losses in ‘world trade’ through the ‘development of its domestic market’.142

  In May 1933, Schacht was sent to Washington to discuss the interlinked questions of the international economy, Germany’s debts and armaments. He met no fewer than four times privately with President Roosevelt, besides having countless other conversations with his advisers, various senators, ministers, bankers and prominent American Jews. They even issued a joint declaration, which stressed the need for the abolition of international trade constraints and for stable currencies. They also agreed that tackling unemployment was an urgent priority both through domestic credit expansion and, remarkably, the establishment of an international programme to mobilize public and private credit for productive purposes. What was being signalled here, on the face of it, was nothing less than a possible global Keynesian al
liance for global prosperity. Roosevelt’s New Deal, it seemed, was internationally aligned with Hitler’s new order in Germany.143

  In June, Hitler’s first major move in foreign policy was the announcement of an effective debt moratorium. German firms would pay for imports with Reichsmarks which would not be converted until the trade balance had improved. In the meantime, creditors could use their frozen balances to pay for German goods. There was no concerted world reaction, not even from the United States. Hitler had got away with it.

  Otherwise, Hitler continued to go out of his way to avoid difficulties with the United States. He expressly forbade attacks on Roosevelt and his government.144 Hitler also sought to dampen the fire he himself had started with ‘world Jewry’. The time for a direct confrontation was not yet ripe, in his view, and for this reason spontaneous acts of violence from below were strongly discouraged. ‘The front we must watch today,’ he warned the Reichsstaathalter in early July 1933, lay ‘outside of Germany’. ‘This front is dangerous,’ Hitler continued, and ‘we must not provoke it unnecessarily.’ ‘To reopen the Jewish question again today,’ he concluded, ‘means stirring up the entire world again.’145 What Hitler did not yet know was that President Roosevelt was already implacably opposed both to him and to Nazism. In January 1933, between his election and inauguration, Roosevelt remarked privately that Hitler’s rise was ‘a portent of evil’ not merely for Europe but also for the United States. Hitler, he predicted, ‘would in the end challenge us because his black sorcery appealed to the worst in men; it supported their hates and ridiculed their tolerances; and it could not exist permanently in the world with a system whose reliance on reason and justice was fundamental’.146