Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power

11 Feeding the Squirrels

William Russell had announced his plans to leave Berlin during that first winter of the war. His supervisors in the consular section offered to try to get him a raise and a new title, but he knew that he was at a disadvantage because he had been hired directly by the embassy after he had studied German at the University of Berlin. The foreign service liked to reward those who rose through the normal channels, starting in Washington and then going to their first assignments abroad. Besides, he wanted to try his luck as a writer, and he already had penned much of the manuscript of the book that he would publish in 1941 with the title Berlin Embassy. It was a vivid account of his experiences there, providing Americans with the kind of personal insights that were often missing from news reports.

On April 10, 1940, three days before his scheduled departure, Russell was sitting in his parked car in the back of the embassy with a German girlfriend. “We had not gone there to spoon, but to listen to the automobile radio,” the young clerk recalled somewhat defensively. The morning newspapers had been filled with what he called the “sickening news” that German troops had moved into Denmark and Norway. On the radio, Goebbels was reading the ultimatums that were delivered to the Nazis’ next victims, claiming that Germany had “no territorial ambitions” against them and that “neither of these two countries will be used as a base for operations against the enemy.”

Russell started to make a sarcastic comment, but then he saw that his girlfriend had tears in her eyes. “That hateful damn liar!” she exclaimed. “That hateful damn liar!”

For Russell, this was one of the final reminders that not all Germans were marching in lockstep behind Hitler. Before driving off three days later, he said good-bye to a long list of acquaintances from his three-year sojourn in Berlin—“Americans, Germans, Nazis, anti-Nazis, rich, poor, intellectuals, bums,” as he put it. Reaching Innsbruck, he was summoned to Gestapo headquarters ostensibly for questioning about his car’s papers. They also searched his car, leaving his manuscript strewn about—but still intact.

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 June 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.”

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.

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.

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.

But Brysac documented how a Soviet agent, Alexander Korotkov, visited the Harnacks on September 17, 1940. He thus reestablished a Moscow connection that had been broken when the Harnacks had decided it was too dangerous to maintain their earlier Soviet ties in Berlin. Korotkov wrote to Moscow that Arvid had agreed to send reports, not because he considered himself an agent but because the Soviet Union was “a country with whose ideals he feels connected and from which he awaits support.” On September 26, 1940, as Germany’s fighters and bombers were fighting and losing the Battle of Britain, Harnack sent his first intelligence report, warning Moscow that by the beginning of the following year Hitler was planning to launch an attack on the Soviet Union.

It was a warning that Harnack and other members of the Red Orchestra, which included Luftwaffe intelligence officer Harro Schulze-Boysen, repeated on several occasions—and Stalin refused to believe. The resisters kept taking huge risks in gathering and sending more information as the Gestapo closed in on them. They also weren’t helped by their Soviet handlers, who were guilty of major security lapses in their own radio transmissions. In late August and early September 1942, the German authorities rounded up the Red Orchestra members and anyone suspected of ties to them, arresting an estimated 139 people, including the Harnacks.

All the chief participants in the group were tried for treason. Arvid was among those immediately sentenced to death. Mildred was initially treated with more sympathy by the judges, who chose to view her as a woman who had been led astray by her German husband. She was sentenced to six years in prison and six years’ “loss of honor.” The first round of executions took place on December 22, 1942, with hanging as the chosen instrument of death for Arvid, Schulze-Boysen and two others. Afterward, the guillotine was used on four more members of the group.

In the end, Mildred wasn’t spared either. She was put on trial again. The new charge was that she had seduced an Abwehr lieutenant to steal state secrets, which offered a lurid justification for the death sentence that promptly followed. The only American woman executed by the Gestapo, Mildred Harnack uttered these final words before she was guillotined in Berlin’s Plötzensee Prison on February 16, 1943: “And I have loved Germany so much.”

Most Americans who still remained in Germany in 1940 and 1941, of course, were neither traitors nor resistance fighters. But the diplomats and journalists, like the Roosevelt Administration back home, were increasingly open in choosing sides as well. The success of the Royal Air Force in winning the Battle of Britain, which forced Hitler to abandon Operation Sealion, the planned invasion of England, had cheered the Americans in Berlin who had watched Hitler’s military machine score one victory after another up till then. Although the diplomats and journalists had different roles to play, they often acted on the implicit assumption that they supported a common cause. Colonel John Lovell, a military attaché at the Berlin embassy, easily enlisted some of the American correspondents to monitor the numbers on the collars and shoulders of soldiers they saw coming through Berlin. “When a new number showed up we would report it to John,” recalled Harsch of the Christian Science Monitor.

Since Lovell knew which units had been deployed on the Western Front, he assumed that when their soldiers began appearing in Berlin this was a signal that these units were moving east. Harsch had moved from the Adlon Hotel to a house known as the Cercle Français, which had been taken over by the American Embassy and where Lovell and several other staffers were living. One evening in December, the colonel invited Harsch to a dinner for the military attachés of Germany’s eastern and southeastern neighbors. After a French dinner that included a rare endive salad, Lovell asked his guests to come to the library, where he spread out a map of Eastern Europe. He then offered his estimates on where German troops were deployed and their battle readiness, and invited his guests to do the same. He added that these forces could move either east or south, but he believed they were more likely to move east—against the Soviet Union.

The attachés from Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Greece offered minor modifications in some cases, but largely agreed with Lovell’s assessment. They also agreed that it looked like the German forces were getting ready to move east. The Soviet attaché then went to the map and acknowledged that his estimates on deployments were almost exactly the same. But he claimed that the German military machine would probably turn south next. Still, he warned that if they did turn against his country “it will not be a Sunday promenade.”

In fact, Hitler’s decision to abandon the invasion of England had prompted the Nazi leader to pursue his other dream: a swift victory over the Soviet Union. This was supposed to isolate Britain further and convince it that, in the end, a German victory was inevitable. The Chicago Tribune’s Schultz recalled a conversation with Karl Boehmer of the Propaganda Ministry about this time. He didn’t mention a possible invasion of Russia but suggested the Germans would engineer a takeover from within. “Just imagine what we can do with Russia’s resources,” he declared. “She squanders them as badly as America does hers.” Schultz claimed she then asked if his country planned to control America’s resources as well, and that he replied, “Why, yes.”

That may have been a bit of showboating on Boehmer’s part. In reality, Hitler hadn’t yet abandoned hope of keeping the United States out of the war, despite Roosevelt’s growing support for Britain. On December 7, 1940, the president declared that “the best immediate defense of the United States is the success of Great Britain.” In a fireside chat on December 29, he denounced Nazi plans “to dominate the rest of the world” and famously pledged that his country would be “the great arsenal of democracy.” All of which set the stage for the Lend-Lease Act that was signed into law on March 11, 1941, allowing for the shipment of massive amounts of military equipment and other supplies to Britain. But Hitler still clung to the belief that his planned invasion of the Soviet Union would convince the Americans that they had to abandon Europe, including their British friends, to German might.

On June 22, 1941, Hitler’s armies launched Operation Barbarossa, the attack on Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Soviet dictator had refused to believe all the warnings not just from his spies but also from Britain and the United States. As a result, German forces initially scored easy victories against the unprepared Red Army troops and pushed deep into Soviet territory, making it look like Hitler’s calculations would be proven right again. In the August 4, 1941, issue of Life magazine, Hanson W. Baldwin, America’s most authoritative military writer, argued that the outcome of the war depended on what would happen on the Eastern Front. A successful German campaign would result in the completion of “the conquest of Europe,” he declared, dooming Britain as well. He discussed the possibility that Hitler’s armies could be defeated or at least worn down by a long, costly campaign. “But on the basis of all past experience—on our limited knowledge of the Red Army, on the operations of the first month—the world can anticipate in Russia another quick and decisive German victory,” he concluded.

For the Americans who lived and worked in Germany, however, Hitler’s optimistic predictions looked more and more unrealistic. The further his armies marched, the more strains they noticed on the home front. Life was changing in Hitlerland—for the Americans, but also for the Germans. And it wasn’t for the better.

During the Battle of Britain in August and September 1940, RAF bombers rarely made it to Berlin, but their initial forays were enough to shake the confidence of the inhabitants of the German capital who had been assured that it was invulnerable. On September 10, Berlin endured what Shirer described as “the severest bombing yet,” as firebombs hit the Ministry of Munitions right between the Adlon Hotel and the U.S. Embassy. Although the incendiaries were put out before they did much damage, they were scattered in various places, including the yard of the Adlon and the garden of the embassy. That evening after he had completed his broadcast, Shirer was rushing back to the Adlon in the dark when his car hit some debris, skidded and came to a stop about 20 feet from a fresh bomb crater. “I almost met a quick end last night,” he wrote in his diary the next day.

Shirer recorded that Donald Heath had an even closer call at the embassy. A splinter from the same bomb that made the crater had flown through Heath’s office double window 200 yards away, passing directly over his desk and embedding itself in the wall on the opposite side. Heath had been scheduled for night duty, but chargé d’affaires Kirk had relieved him.

The German press trumpeted headlines vowing revenge for such bombings, which it claimed were targeting children, hospitals and other civilian targets. While London was living under the genuine terror of the Blitz, Berliners could be excused for believing that their country was suffering almost as much. “Night Crime of British Against 21 German Children—This Bloody Crime Cries Out for Revenge,” one newspaper proclaimed. Another warned, “‘Assassins’ Murder Is No Longer War, Herr Winston Churchill!—The British Island of Murderers Will Have to Take the Consequences of Its Malicious Bombings.”

For some time after the Battle of Britain, the Americans in Berlin felt almost eerily detached from the actual fighting. “Except for the outbursts from the Nazi orators… and except for the reports of feverish diplomatic activity and rumours of troop movements, we in Berlin hardly knew a war was on during the early part of 1941,” Flannery recalled. In that period, Americans still noticed relatively few wounded soldiers on the streets of Berlin. “But after the Russian campaign began, I saw them in every block along the principal streets—young men with their arms in slings, with an arm gone, walking with crutches or canes, or without one of their legs,” Flannery added.

When the CBS reporter approached a newsstand one day, he overheard the newsdealer ask a woman if she was all right. In a hollow voice, she replied: “No, I just had bad news, and must phone my husband at work. You know we lost a son in Poland, and another in France. Now I have word that Johann is gone, too, our last son. He has been killed in Russia.”

Even during Germany’s early victories in the Soviet Union, the newspapers left no doubt that the cost was high. Flannery estimated that almost half of German families had suffered a loss—and he saw that people were increasingly depressed. As the RAF bombings intensified, this, too, contributed to the drop in morale. Flannery, who was doing full-time duty in Berlin since Shirer’s departure in November 1940, was leaving his dentist one day when the woman elevator operator began complaining about the war’s hardships. “Mein Gott, mein Gott,” she told him, “warum? Why? It’s all caused by a mere handful of men.”

Flannery found himself within a block of falling bombs on more than one occasion. On a night when Colonel Lovell was watching a raid from the roof of an embassy house near the zoo, the bombs hit so close that the attaché threw himself flat. “I thought I was gone,” he said.

Sigrid Schultz observed another more subtle side of the war that was taking its toll as well. On the train from Berlin to Basel, she shared a compartment with a Luftwaffe colonel who freely discussed how the war was changing family relationships. “I love my wife and my children,” he said, “but when we soldiers get home, all our families can talk about is how many potatoes they get and what kinds of sandwiches other people have in their air-raid shelters.” The implicit message: Germany’s fighting men were impatient with what they often saw as the petty concerns of their families back home.

Earlier, Schultz had talked with a woman who appeared to have none of the material worries of so many of the other civilians; she exuded self-confidence. “I do war work. I am a plastic surgeon,” she said. “I ought to be prosperous; I’m working hard enough beautifying bustlines.”

When Schultz asked her what this had to do with the war, she replied: “Why, when the German men come home from France and the Balkans, they criticize the figures of their wives. All the Nazis have money, you know, so I operate.”

For most Germans who were losing hope of a quick victory, there were far more serious worries—keeping themselves adequately fed and clothed, especially during the winter. And for Jews, there was genuine terror, which had begun long before the war and the bombings, as the remaining Americans knew well.

Angus Thuermer, the young AP correspondent, had first rented a room in a fourth-floor Berlin apartment; one floor below, there was a Jewish family. He recalled that a woman had come out of the third-floor apartment one day and tried to throw herself down the stairwell, but she was stopped from committing suicide. A day later, Thuermer saw that the apartment’s door had its lock removed and a Gestapo seal placed over the empty hole. But another day or so later, he found the door open. Walking in, he saw an “Aryan” family looking around. On the dresser, they spotted several cans of food. “Oh, look at that: see what fancy food they were eating,” one of the Germans said.

Some of the Americans still lived with a lingering sense of guilt decades later about how they failed to respond to appeals for help from Jews. Thuermer recalled a knock on his door very late one night. When the American opened it, he saw a thin man wearing a coat with a yellow star on it; around his neck, he wore the Medal of Honor from the previous war. “I wonder if I could pay you marks here in Germany and you pay me in an account in dollars,” he said. Thuermer tried to explain that, although he was working for the AP and no longer a student, he was still getting a preferential exchange rate provided to foreign students in violation of the rules. This meant he was “a little crooked” already and felt he couldn’t take another risk. His visitor left disappointed.

One night in October 1941, Howard K. Smith, who had just quit the United Press and jumped to CBS to replace Flannery, received a similar knock on the door at around 2 A.M. His visitor was Fritz Heppler, a Jew of about the same age as the young American reporter; they had met during an air raid about a year earlier. Heppler told him that the Gestapo was conducting raids of Jewish apartments all over town, ostensibly looking for hoarded foodstuffs. They had raided his apartment, too, but not finding anything, they released him. Heppler had been defiant the previous time he met Smith, but now his fear was palpable. “It’s come,” he said, alluding to the roundups of Jews, who were then deported to the east. “I knew it would come, as soon as they started losing.” He pleaded for Smith to help him get out of the country. The reporter offered him a cigarette and said he would see if he could help him get an American visa, but claimed that he was exaggerating the danger. Then he shoved him out the door.

“My callousness on this occasion can hardly be justified,” Smith wrote later, recalling that he forgot about Heppler the next day and didn’t even attempt to bring his case to the embassy’s attention. “Not that it would have helped him; but it would have helped soothe my own conscience,” he added. Smith never saw Heppler again.

At the American Embassy, Kennan and other diplomats often felt overworked and besieged. Since the German government had ordered the closure of ten U.S. consulates in other cities in 1940, everyone came to the Berlin embassy for help. “The increasingly desperate situation of the German Jews, and Jews from the German-occupied areas, and the heavy attendant pressures brought to bear upon us to effect their release and removal to the United States, added to the burden,” he wrote. He bitterly noted that he and his colleagues had been put in an impossible position. “These pressures tended often to be generated in powerful congressional circles at home and to be passed on, unmitigated, to us by the Department of State anxious to get itself out of the firing line and too timid to point out to the Congressmen what could and could not (sometimes in light of the laws they themselves had created) be done to aid such people.”

When Alexander Kirk left Berlin in October 1940, Kennan’s personal workload increased further. Leland Morris replaced Kirk as chargé d’affaires, but was a far weaker figure. As a result, Kennan was often the de facto man in charge. Jacob Beam, by then the longest-serving embassy staffer despite his young age, would write later: “Time proved him [Kennan] to be a better historian than executive.” Still, Kennan and the rest of the embassy staff deserved credit for continuing to keep their country’s outpost in Berlin functioning as best they could. Aside from taking on the interests of Britain and France, the embassy assumed responsibility for successive countries that came under Nazi rule. This meant more and more work; it also meant that the American diplomats were feeling more and more alone.

The American journalists felt lonelier as well. Some of the best known of their colleagues had already pulled out. Shirer departed in December 1940, and Harsch and Schultz left in January 1941. Unlike many of their countrymen back home who still were hoping the United States could stay out of the war, those correspondents were convinced that it would prove impossible to stay on the sidelines. Harsch was planning on writing a book in the hopes of enlightening his countrymen, and, to do so, he needed to return. “I felt that perhaps the time had come to get home and write down all the things I had not felt free to say when writing from Berlin itself,” he recalled.

The print journalists didn’t labor under the same heavy censorship as their radio colleagues, but there were always unspoken rules. Foremost among them, as Pierre Huss put it, was that “you must never, either by act or word of mouth or in a dispatch, say or suggest anything which might be a slur or a reflection on the office and the person of the Fuehrer.” Although the International News Service correspondent also pointed out that he and his American colleagues were “the hottest game of the Nazis” right up till mid-1941, since the Germans still hoped to keep the United States out of the war, he complained that afterward the de facto censorship meant that reporters were expected to rely mainly on official information—and disinformation. “Everything else was taboo,” he wrote.

Harsch traced the more hostile attitude toward the American correspondents further back—in particular to Roosevelt’s victory in the November 1940 elections over Wendell Willkie. Although Willkie was a liberal Republican who would later support Roosevelt and do battle with the isolationists, he sent mixed signals during the campaign on what course he would steer if he were elected. His sister Charlotte was married to Commander Paul Pihl, the U.S. naval attaché for air in Berlin, and they would hold frequent Sunday salons attended by officials from the Foreign Ministry and the Luftwaffe. “Many times I heard her say that if her brother were to win the 1940 election he would keep the United States out of the war,” Harsch wrote.

As American support for the British war effort was ramped up in early 1941, the pressures on the foreign correspondents increased as well. Ostensibly, they were given special treatment. Two press clubs were set up to attend to their needs, with plenty of wining and dining included, but the clubs’ primary purpose was to disseminate propaganda and keep tabs on what the reporters were doing. The Gestapo “knew everything about each of us,” Howard K. Smith wrote. “They maintained agents in the two press clubs, vile little fellows who tried to appear chummy.” They also kept agents at other popular hangouts, such as the Adlon Hotel and Die Taverne.

All of which made Smith and others completely disbelieve the official reason why seven Gestapo agents showed up at Richard Hottelet’s door at 7 A.M. on Saturday, March 15, 1941. Taken to the Alexanderplatz Prison, Hottelet, Smith’s colleague in the United Press’s Berlin bureau, was told he had been arrested “on suspicion of espionage.” As Smith curtly put it, “Had he been a spy, the Gestapo would have known it.”

Beam, who was transferred back to the State Department by this time, believed that Hottelet was picked up in retaliation for the arrest of a German journalist in Washington on spying charges. But Smith was convinced that the real reason was both more personal and more general. He pointed out that Hottelet had been bursting with anger at the Nazis—a result of the fact that he had lived in Berlin “too long for his own safety.” Hottelet could “no longer hide his nausea and bob his head stupidly at the inane dinner-table propaganda essays of the little Propaganda Ministry bureaucrats in the Press Club restaurants,” Smith wrote. “To use Dick’s own expressive language: he hated their goddam guts.” Since the Nazis were looking for someone to arrest so that they could intimidate the other American reporters in Berlin, he continued, Hottelet was the obvious target.

Hottelet found himself in a solitary cell with a stool, a cot and a toilet in the corner. From six-thirty in the morning till four-thirty in the afternoon, he wasn’t allowed to sit or lie on the cot. He wasn’t allowed any reading matter initially either, and his glasses were taken away “to prevent suicide.” That meant he spent long hours sitting on the stool and reading what other prisoners had written on the wall. It appeared to be a cell used often for foreigners. Someone had written in English HOME, SWEET HOME, DEAR MOTHER WHERE ARE YOU? Another inscription was VIVE L’INTERNATIONALE. There was writing in Russian, too, but Hottelet couldn’t read it.

His diet consisted mostly of dry black bread, ersatz coffee and bean, noodle or barley soup. He realized that the prison was very international: the inmates were Russian, Polish, Czech, Japanese and Italian. They also included several Catholic priests.

At first, the Gestapo interrogated him often, sometimes twice a day. When he denied the accusation that he was a spy, his interrogators tried to scare him. “You won’t feel quite so confident when you are sweating under the lights and we throw questions at you,” they told him. Or: “You will sit until you confess. You will soften up. You’ll be soft as butter. We’ve got plenty of time.”

But Hottelet’s treatment was radically different than that accorded most prisoners. His nationality and profession still offered him a degree of protection. An official from the American consulate was allowed to visit him, bringing fresh clothes—although the prisoner was denied the soap, toothbrush and toothpaste he also brought. On May 3, Hottelet was transferred to the Moabit Prison in another part of the city, where the food was better. When word got around that he was American, trusties began slipping him extra potatoes, which helped him fend off hunger. Soon he was allowed to receive a daily newspaper and two books a week from the prison library. The most interesting book he found was De Profundis, Oscar Wilde’s meditative essay that he wrote during his imprisonment in England.

On July 8, to his complete surprise, Hottelet was released and delivered to a representative from the U.S. Embassy. He had lost fifteen pounds during his incarceration, but this, again, was nothing compared to what routinely happened to other prisoners. Still, Smith and other colleagues understood the message from the Nazis: American reporters were no longer untouchable—and they had better be extra careful. On July 17, Hottelet quietly left Berlin. Describing his sense of freedom as he saw the New York skyline later that month, he wrote, “Now I know doors which I can open myself are something to be thankful for and not to be taken for granted.”

The German press minders abandoned any pretense of friendliness in dealing with the remaining, shrinking contingent of American reporters in Berlin. “Your situation is anomalous,” a Propaganda Ministry official told Smith after he switched to CBS in October 1941. “We do not want you here and you do not want to stay. Why don’t you leave?” For the radio broadcasters, overt censorship was increasingly heavy-handed, disallowing mentioning, as Smith recalled, anti-Jewish measures or the executions of “Czech patriots or of French ‘communists’ and hostages.” His texts were “utterly vapid,” Smith despaired. Like other American reporters, he began methodically destroying all his notes as soon as he had used them, leaving his desk almost empty, except for pencils, pens and ink. The assumption was that anything could prove to be incriminating for the reporters and their sources.

Two of the correspondents who had returned to the United States a few months earlier were already getting their books rushed into print. In June 1941, Shirer’s Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941 hit the bookstores. In one of his final diary entries from Berlin, he conceded that his observations were hardly dispassionate. “We who have been so close to the German scene, who have seen with our own eyes the tramping Nazi boots over Europe and heard with our own ears Hitler’s hysterical tirades of hate, have found it difficult to keep a sense of historical perspective,” he wrote. And like almost all the reporters who had lived in Berlin in that era, he found himself constantly returning to the question of “the strange contradictory character of the German people”—and how Hitler had managed to take such complete control of them.

Shirer rejected the notion, which he ascribed to many American liberals, “that Nazism is a form of rule and life unnatural to the German people and forced upon them against their wish by a few fanatic derelicts of the last war.” He conceded that the Nazis had never won a majority of the votes in a free election, only a plurality. “But for the last three or four years the Nazi regime has expressed something very deep in the German nature and in that respect it has been representative of the people it rules.” Unlike other nationalities, the Germans lacked “balance,” he maintained, and their inner contradictions and frustrations made them lurch from one extreme to another. The Weimar era was an extreme form of liberal democracy, he argued, “and now they have turned to the extremes of tyranny” because in the chaos of the twentieth century it was too difficult for them “to think and make decisions as free men.”

This led Shirer to his theory about the “two characters” of Germans. “As an individual he will give his rationed bread to feed the squirrels in the Tiergarten on a Sunday morning. He can be a kind and considerate person. But, as a unit in the Germanic mass he can persecute Jews, torture and murder his fellow men in a concentration camp, massacre women and children by bombing and bombardment, overrun without the slightest justification the lands of other peoples, cut them down if they protest, and enslave them.”

Then, Shirer addressed the burning question of the moment in his country: was Hitler contemplating war with the United States? “I am firmly convinced that he does contemplate it and that if he wins in Europe and Africa he will in the end launch it unless we are prepared to give up our way of life and adapt ourselves to a subservient place in his totalitarian scheme of things.” The contest between tyranny and democracy, he added, “is as inevitable as that of two planets hurtling inexorably through the heavens towards each other.” Addressing the America First movement and other isolationists, he concluded: “The Lindberghs and their friends laugh at the idea of Germany ever being able to attack the United States. The Germans welcome their laughter and hope more Americans will laugh…”

Upon his return to the United States, Harsch had written a twelve-part series for the Christian Science Monitor that he turned into a book, delivering his completed manuscript to the printer on June 22, 1941, the day Hitler’s armies invaded Russia. Called Pattern of Conquest, it echoed many of Shirer’s themes—and specifically its immediate message. “The question before the American people is a clear one,” he wrote. In a world where a titanic struggle for dominance was taking place, “America can either belong to that dominant force or submit to it.” If the United States permitted Germany to win “by default,” it would soon become a satellite of Hitlerland. “The alternative for America is to take its stand with Britain,” he concluded. “The two together can unquestionably defeat Germany.”

Huss stayed in Berlin for the International News Service until November 1941, and he, too, wrote a book about his experiences when he returned home. Entitled The Foe We Face, it was published in 1942 when the United States was already in the war. Shortly before his departure from Berlin—only a month before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that would prompt Hitler to declare war on the United States—Huss interviewed Hitler for the last time.

Their meeting took place at Wolf’s Lair, the headquarters for the Eastern Front. As Huss followed Hitler’s erratic steps on a path in the woods, the Nazi leader eerily enacted the scene that Shirer had conjured up earlier in his characterization of the German people. Spotting a squirrel, Hitler pulled out a bag of hazelnuts from his coat pocket. “Quietly, and with a half-smile on his pinkish face,” Huss wrote, he approached it, holding out some nuts. Unafraid, the squirrel jumped up into his hand—to Hitler’s delight. Once it had gathered the nuts and scampered off, he said: “Ja, if the world would only mind its own business like this little squirrel.”

While Hitler boasted to Huss that he would outlast “your President Roosevelt” and “this crazy man Churchill,” and that Stalin’s Red Army was already “practically smashed,” Huss detected more than contempt in Hitler’s repeated mentions of “Herr Roosevelt—and his Jews.” He complained bitterly that the American president “wants to run the world and rob us all of a place in the sun… Every time I reached forth my hand he slapped it down.” He blamed Roosevelt for conspiring to keep Britain in the war and, as he became more incensed about his alleged misdeeds, Huss felt “that just for that second an icy chill had crept between us.”

It was then that Huss claimed he understood what triggered Hitler’s denunciations. “Mighty Hitler of the Nazi Reich and the New Order Europe basically and by instinct fears President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States of America,” he wrote. Which was why, Huss added, “like a tiger at bay, he wants to spring and land the knockout blow to paralyze the power of the man and the land he fears more than anything else in the world.”

While Huss’s account may have been colored by his desire to bolster the morale of his countrymen at this early stage of their involvement in the war, he was correct in his analysis about Hitler’s primary motive. As he did when he invaded the Soviet Union, Hitler was gambling that another escalation was the only path left to victory.