Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power

12 The Last Act

During the late months of 1941, George Kennan monitored the progress of Hitler’s armies in the Soviet Union on a large map of that country in his office, comparing what was happening then to Napoleon’s Russian campaign in 1812. “The similarities in timing and geography were often striking,” he observed. Despite the signs that the German drive to take Moscow was faltering, he wasn’t yet sure about the outcome. But he noted the parallel steady deterioration of relations between Germany and the United States, and his sense “that things were now out of control—not only out of our control (we, after all, in our poor overworked embassy, had never at any time had any influence on the course of events) but out of everyone’s control.”

Kennan and other Westerners did not know yet that the battle for Moscow would result in the first defeat of Hitler’s army. It was a titanic struggle, the biggest battle of World War II and of all time, involving 7 million troops. The combined losses of both sides—those killed, taken prisoner or severely wounded—were 2.5 million, of which nearly 2 million were on the Soviet side. German troops had reached the outskirts of Moscow, a direct result of Stalin’s grievous miscalculations, starting with his refusal to believe that Germany would invade his country.

But the Soviet capital was ultimately saved because Hitler committed even bigger mistakes, refusing to listen to his generals who wanted him to push directly to the Soviet capital. He ordered a diversion south to take Kiev, insisting that it was vital to seize control of the agricultural riches and raw materials of the Ukraine first. By the time his troops resumed their drive on Moscow, they were caught in heavy autumn rains that turned Russian dirt roads into swamps, and then by swiftly plummeting temperatures. Since Hitler had firmly believed that Moscow would be quickly overrun, most of the German troops had not even been issued winter uniforms. All of which meant that, as the Soviet writer Vasily Grossman wrote, “General Mud and General Cold” dramatically slowed and weakened the invaders.

Taking full advantage of his good fortune, Stalin rushed in troop reinforcements from the Soviet Far East. On December 6, the day before Pearl Harbor, his forces launched their first major counteroffensive, pushing back those German troops who had made it closest to the capital.

Like other foreigners, American diplomats and journalists based in Moscow had been evacuated to the Volga city of Kuibyshev back in October when it looked like the city would fall to the Germans. Without direct reporting from those observers, most of the world was slow to recognize that the Soviet counteroffensive was the beginning of a huge turnabout on the Eastern Front. But Hitler—who had only recently been confidently expounding on his vision of how the conquered Soviet territories would make Germany an economic powerhouse—had come to recognize that his troops would not be able to take the Soviet capital that winter. Still, he continued to hope that they would do so later, and his propagandists insisted that this change of plans only reflected a temporary setback.

On Sunday evening, December 7, Kennan picked up a weak but audible shortwave news broadcast from the United States about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He called Leland Morris, the chargé d’affaires, who was already asleep, and several other embassy officers, and arranged to meet them for a late night meeting at the embassy. While Pearl Harbor did not automatically trigger a state of war with the United States, and Hitler would in fact wait until he addressed the Reichstag four days later to issue his declaration of war, the American diplomats in Berlin had to assume their mission was coming to an end.

There was no evidence that Hitler remembered Putzi Hanfstaengl’s warnings that it would be fatal to end up on the opposing side of the Americans in another global conflict. Instead, the Nazi leader immediately convinced himself that Japan’s attack was the best news possible since it would mean that the United States would be completely preoccupied by the war in the Pacific, with little energy or resources left to aid Britain and the Soviet Union. The day after Pearl Harbor, he declared: “We can’t lose the war at all. We now have an ally which has never been conquered in 3,000 years.”

The leader who was most genuinely pleased by the consequences of Pearl Harbor was Churchill. In a transatlantic phone call on that fateful day, Roosevelt uttered the words that the British prime minister had wanted to hear: “We are all in the same boat now.” As Churchill would tell Congress on December 26, “To me the best tidings of all is that the United States, united as never before, have drawn the sword for freedom and cast away the scabbard.”

Kennan noted that during the four days of “excruciating uncertainty” as he and his colleagues waited for Hitler to address the Reichstag, the embassy was methodically cut off from the outside world. The telegraph office no longer accepted its telegrams, and, by Tuesday, the embassy’s phones stopped functioning. “We were now on our own,” he pointed out. Figuring they had to prepare for the worst, the diplomats began burning their codes and classified correspondence on Tuesday night. The sudden rash of small fires, which spewed ashes over nearby buildings, prompted a German building inspector to warn the embassy that it was endangering the neighborhood.

Of course, the neighborhood—in both the narrow and broader sense—was endangered by much more than swirling ashes. Kennan clearly understood that much better than Hitler did.

The remaining American journalists in Berlin—only fifteen, less than a third of their earlier number—realized that their assignments were likely to be ending as well. On the night that the diplomats were burning their documents, word spread among the correspondents that the FBI had arrested German newsmen in the United States. They knew no details of those arrests, which were carried out as part of a sweep against “enemy aliens,” but they had little doubt what would happen next. Louis Lochner of the AP met with a German Foreign Ministry official early on Wednesday, December 10, who assured him any reprisals “will be done in the noblest manner.” If any confirmation was needed, this was it: the reprisals were coming.

Along with his young reporter Angus Thuermer, Lochner went next to the daily news conference, conducted by Paul Schmidt, the chief of the Foreign Ministry’s press department. By then, most of the press corps knew what was happening. “Many a European correspondent with whom I had worked shoulder to shoulder for years, came to say goodbye and to express the hope that America would bring freedom to a sorely tried European continent,” Lochner recalled. Schmidt arrived and announced the arrest of the German newsmen in the United States. “I must therefore ask the American correspondents here present to leave the conference and proceed forthwith to their homes,” he added.

Everyone knew this meant house arrest until the next orders, and the Americans began walking out. As they did so, the others—“from Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Argentina, even Japan, and from virtually all the subjugated countries of Europe,” as Lochner wrote—lined up to shake their hands. Schmidt stood at the door and shook each correspondent’s hand as well.

As they exited, Lochner turned to Thuermer and told him to drive quickly back to the office so that he could file a final story and say goodbye to the German staffers, defying the order to return straight to their homes. Lochner sent a brief dispatch about their impending house arrest, and Thuermer was at the telex machine when he received an informal query from the Berne bureau about what was really happening. BYE-BYE. WE JUGWARDING NOW, he replied in what he thought was lighthearted cable shorthand. Over breakfast in Chicago the next morning, his father read the AP story quoting his son as saying that he and the other Americans were heading to jail.

Returning to their homes, the American reporters packed up their belongings, fully expecting a knock on the door from the Gestapo. But the afternoon and evening dragged on and no one came. Friends kept dropping by to visit Lochner and his German wife, Hilde, and they fielded constant phone calls as well. Finally, when the last visitor was gone, the couple decided to prepare for bed since nothing more appeared to be happening. But just before 1 a.m., the doorbell rang. Hilde opened the door, and two men stepped in asking for Lochner.

“Here I am,” Lochner called out from the corridor, which was dimly lit because of blackout regulations. The men pointed their flashlights at him and showed their Gestapo badges, ordering him to come with them. Lochner picked up his packed bag. “But how did you know that we were coming?” one of the men asked. Lochner shot back: “Why do you think I’m a newsman?”

Thuermer was even more determined to show he wasn’t surprised when the same two officers knocked sharply on his door and announced: “Geheime Staatspolizei! Come with us.” Already in his pajamas, the young American responded: “Where have you been?” When that made the two visitors pause, he added: “I got so fed up I got undressed, got in these pajamas, and was about to go to bed.” Thuermer pulled out a pack of Chesterfields, offering it to the grateful officers, who abruptly abandoned their air of brisk efficiency and sat down to smoke them as he changed into regular clothes. Everyone was taking their time. But then one of the officers casually mentioned that they had someone waiting in the car downstairs and it was very cold outside. “It was my chief,” Thuermer recalled, half-amused and still half-alarmed by the memory of keeping Lochner in that uncomfortable position. “I was freezing his buns off.”

Lochner and Thuermer were taken to the third floor of the Alexanderplatz police station, which was the Gestapo’s section. After they entered through a door with steel bars and a huge lock, they were put into a large room that was adorned with stern portraits of Hitler and SS chief Heinrich Himmler. They then waited as more American reporters were brought in, until they numbered fifteen in all. Ed Shanke, another AP correspondent, arrived feeling particularly stiff after his long wait in a small car. Carefully spreading out a newspaper on a table, he stretched out his legs and put them on it. A guard immediately jumped up. “We still have Kultur in Germany,” he snapped. “Take down your feet. You can do that when you get to America, but such manners aren’t tolerated in a civilized country like ours. Here we are still human.”

The guards didn’t seem to know what to do with their captives. In fact, the journalists learned later that the Gestapo hadn’t received the instructions from the Foreign Ministry to wait until the following day—Thursday, December 11—to round them up. “The Gestapo had decided to grab us in the middle of the night, as they were wont to grab Jews, republicans, and nonconformist clergymen,” Lochner wrote later. “So here we were, fifteen marooned and forgotten newsmen.” But any doubts that the Americans were in a very different situation than the Nazis’ other prisoners were erased the next day when they started complaining they were hungry. The Gestapo hadn’t made any arrangements to feed them, but a guard offered to get them food if they would pay for it. The result was a meal of meatballs and boiled potatoes, along with a salami “wurst.” As Lochner noted, the total cost for everyone was 60 cents.

At the embassy that Thursday, the diplomats watched the preparations for Hitler’s Reichstag speech, which included the arrival of sound trucks and large groups of people right outside the embassy building. The diplomats nervously closed the metal blinds, but, as Kennan recorded, no action was taken against them. Instead, while Hitler was announcing his declaration of war on the United States, denouncing Roosevelt and the “entire satanic insidiousness” of the Jews who were backing him, the phone suddenly rang in the embassy for the first time since service had been cut off. It was a summons for Morris to the Foreign Ministry. There, Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop kept him standing as he read out the declaration of war and screamed, “Your President has wanted this war; now he has it.”

At about the same time, the American correspondents were transferred to an unheated summer hotel annex in Gruenau, a Berlin suburb. But they soon received cheering news: the State Department had declared it would consider the arrested German newsmen to have diplomatic standing, which meant that would be the case for the arrested American journalists as well. The next day, a surprise visitor showed up.

An anonymous caller had tipped off Hilde Lochner about where her husband and the others were taken, and she had managed to talk her way past the guards to deliver apples, cigarettes, canned food and American magazines. The spirits of the journalists soared.

Hitler had ordered that the Americans had to be out of Berlin by the end of the week. On Saturday, Kennan was the one who was summoned to the Foreign Ministry, where he was instructed that all the American staffers had to vacate their apartments and report to the embassy with their luggage the following morning. That same day the American journalists were released with the same orders. Returning to their homes to gather up their belongings, several journalists discovered that intruders had already helped themselves to their possessions during their time in detention—everything from canned meat and cigarettes to clothing and silverware.

When everyone dutifully showed up on Sunday morning, they found the embassy surrounded by troops and occupied by the Gestapo. The Americans were then bussed to the Potsdamer train station, where they boarded a special train. Their destination: Bad Nauheim, a spa town near Frankfurt. They were told they would be held there until an exchange could be arranged for the German diplomats and journalists who were being held in the United States. So began the last act for the Americans in Germany, which, in keeping with many of their earlier experiences, demonstrated that they still maintained a privileged status.

The detained Germans in the United States fared very well. They did their time, as it were, at the Greenbrier, the plush spa hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, which had no problem accommodating them. By contrast, Jeschke’s Grand Hotel in Bad Nauheim, which eventually accommodated a total of 132 Americans after a few more were added from occupied Europe, was hardly prepared for the sudden influx of boarders. It had been closed at the start of the war in September 1939, and basic services like heat, water and electricity had been cut off. In the interim, heating pipes had burst during the winter months. In January and February 1942, as temperatures dropped, the Americans would keep their overcoats on when they went to the dining room and then rush back to their beds to keep warm. Of course, these were hardly hardships compared to what was happening elsewhere in occupied Europe. Nonetheless, the Americans had been promised special treatment, and they were quick to complain whenever they felt it came up short.

The most constant complaints were about food. German officials maintained that the detainees were receiving 150 percent of the normal German civilian rations, and the Americans didn’t doubt it. But even that preferential diet was a far cry from what most of the detainees had been used to in Berlin. “This showed us how tightly the Germans had pulled in their belts,” Lochner wrote in an AP dispatch after he returned home. He added that, during the five months they ended up spending in Bad Nauheim, American men on average lost 10 pounds and women 6.7 pounds; in extreme cases, he added, there were losses of 35 pounds. All of which hardly constituted evidence of genuine hardship.

After they returned home, many of the Americans were reluctant to talk too much about their complaints at the time, recognizing how petty they sounded—particularly as they learned more about how Germans were treating most of their captives. SS Captain Valentin Patzak, who was in charge from the German side, worked closely with Kennan, who became the real leader of the Americans on a day-to-day basis, while Morris took a more passive role. To deal with the constant problems in the accommodations, the Germans simply went out and arrested whoever they needed—an electrician or plumber—assigning them to make repairs at the hotel before releasing them. Occasionally, food supplies from the abandoned U.S. Embassy in Berlin were delivered to the hotel.

Patzak also allowed the Americans to write letters, although they were subject to censorship. The detainees could not send telegrams, but they could receive them. Kennan and Morris were allowed to call the Swiss officials who represented U.S. interests in Berlin, which was the only permitted use of the phone. Much of the day-to-day handling of the Americans and their complaints was left to the two senior Americans, which minimized direct interactions between the Germans and most of their detainees. Kennan promptly organized a secretariat, which issued a variety of regulations. Morris insisted, for instance, that men had to wear coats and ties in the public rooms of the hotel, and that everyone had to assume responsibility for keeping their rooms clean. Another order read: “It is in the general interest not to listen to or pass on rumors.”

Rumors flew all the time, of course, especially about how long the detention would drag on. As weeks turned into months, the real challenge was in dealing with what Lochner called “a rather unique American experience in the art of fighting boredom.” But the detainees did pretty well in that department. The AP’s Ed Shanke had smuggled in a small RCA battery-operated shortwave radio, and he invited his friends to “choir practice” in his room at nine in the evenings to listen to the BBC news from London.

Alvin Steinkopf, another AP reporter, was a source of entertainment one day when he received a surprise visit from Otty Wendell, a waitress at Die Taverne, the journalists’ popular Berlin hangout. She had arranged for her family in Frankfurt to send her a telegram asking her to visit because someone was ill, and she went from there to Bad Nauheim, where she joined the Americans as they were taking a walk around the grounds. She brought liquor that Steinkopf shared with his colleagues, and then spent the night with him. The next morning as she tried to leave, the Gestapo arrested her. But, incredibly, Steinkopf managed to convince them to let her go and to cover up the incident, since the ease with which she had slipped into the hotel would reflect badly upon their guard duties.

But what really kept morale up was an expanding program of activities that the Americans organized. Two of the military attachés started a gymnastics class, and soon this was followed by the founding of “Badheim University,” with the motto “Education of the ignorant, for the ignorant, by the ignorant, shall not perish from the face of the earth.” For all the self-mockery, many of the classes were quite serious. Kennan taught a Russian history course that attracted a record 60 students, while other detainees taught classes in foreign languages, civics, philosophy and “Plains Indian Dancing.” A chorus attracted 24 members, and the internees also staged occasionally raucous skits, including some in drag.

The journalists put out several issues of the Bad Nauheim Pudding, which qualified as the only American newspaper left in occupied Europe. But they promptly got into arguments with Kennan about what could or couldn’t be published. The diplomat was intent on not doing anything to offend the German authorities, and he viewed the reporters as the rowdiest and least controllable members of the group.

The Americans were always looking for new physical activities as well. As the weather improved, they were allowed to take walks along a stream called the Usa—whose name provided fodder for endless jokes. But the real breakthrough came when Kennan won permission for the group to use a municipal athletic field for baseball games. One of the military attachés had brought some basic equipment, but most of the gear was homemade.

Wrapping champagne corks or golf balls with socks, cotton and other makeshift fillers, the medical staffers used adhesive tape and stitched together balls. Thuermer picked up a bough during one of the walks along the Usa, bringing it back to the hotel. There, United Press correspondent Glen Stadler used his sharp Finnish knife to carve it into a 33-inch bat, complete with a grip. Thuermer insisted on penciling in a “trademark” as well. (After leaving the bat for many years in his garage in Middleburg, Virginia, after the war, Thuermer donated it to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.) Otherwise useless diplomatic pouches served as bases.

The games became very popular. About 50 men played on four teams—two for the diplomats, one for the military attachés and one for the journalists—and some of the women came to watch and cheer. Kennan, who played catcher for the Embassy Reds, was especially pleased that this activity provided a distraction from the daily carping about conditions in Bad Nauheim. The diplomat wrote later that he had responsibility “for disciplinary control of this motley group of hungry, cold, and worried prisoners” and “their cares, their quarrels, their jealousies, their complaints filled every moment of my waking day.”

One reason for those complaints may have been that the war often seemed to be a distant abstraction, despite the sightings of British bombers targeting nearby Frankfurt or Stuttgart. In Berlin, the war and Nazi terror had been a daily reality; in Bad Nauheim, the Americans were largely cut off from the outside world and left to focus only on themselves.

By the time the arrangements were made for the release of the Germans at the Greenbrier and the Americans in Bad Nauheim, Kennan’s irritation with the countrymen under his charge had reached its peak. The Americans were taken to Frankfurt, and from there boarded two special trains for Lisbon. As they chugged through Spain, Kennan noted that they had to lock the compartments “to keep the more exuberant members of our party (primarily the journalists) from disappearing into the crowded, chaotic stations in search of liquor and then getting left behind.”

When they reached a small Portuguese border station, Kennan got off the train to meet Ted Rousseau, the assistant naval attaché from the U.S. Embassy in Lisbon, leaving everyone else locked up in the train. Upon hearing that breakfast was available at the station, he exacted payback for the months of complaints he had endured about the food in Bad Nauheim. At the breakfast buffet, he ate alone, stuffing himself with eggs. As he confessed in his memoir, this was especially satisfying because he was “leaving the rest of them to nurse their empty bellies over the remaining six or seven hours of rail journey.”

Kennan had another reason to be bitter. The State Department had informed the Americans who had spent five months in Bad Nauheim that they would not be paid for that period. “We had not, you see, been working,” as Kennan acidly observed. Then there was the initial news that many of the Americans would not be boarding the ship from Lisbon since those spaces would be given to Jewish refugees. Kennan blamed congressmen who were anxious to please their constituents by bringing over the refugees, considering the fates of these noncitizens “more important than what happened to us.” In this respect, he, too, appeared to have little concern for the broader context of the times—especially for the plight of European Jews.

Kennan and Morris managed to get the State Department to reconsider both of those directives. But their anger only grew when, upon arriving in Lisbon, a new telegram ordered several of the diplomats to report for duty the very next day in Portugal instead of going home. “The department obviously had not the faintest idea of the condition, nervous and physical, in which these people found themselves, and had not bothered to use its imagination,” Kennan wrote. At that moment, he found himself defending the same people who had tested his patience in Bad Nauheim.

Whether the Americans who reached Lisbon stayed on for new assignments in Europe or, as most did on May 22, boarded the Drottningholm, a white Swedish ship that had the word diplomat painted in large dark letters on both of its sides to assure safe passage to New York, they knew that fortune had smiled upon them. As they reemerged into the larger world—a world at war because of the course of events in Nazi Germany, the country they had called their temporary home—they began to put their personal experiences in perspective again. “Yes, for us there was an end to the pall of the Geheime Staatspolizei [Gestapo],” Thuermer recalled. “We were lucky. We happened to be foreigners, American foreigners.”

That is a fitting epithet for most of the Americans who lived in Germany during this period. They were lucky to be able to observe firsthand the unfolding of a terrifying chapter of the modern era; they were even luckier to be Americans, which meant they could do so from a protected vantage point. They were truly privileged eyewitnesses to history.