Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power

Afterword

Early in his political career, long before he became the all-powerful ruler of the Third Reich who was the target of assassination plots, Adolf Hitler narrowly escaped death. On November 9, 1923, when he and General Ludendorff led their followers in the final act of the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, they were met by a hail of machine-gun fire from the police. One of the bullets struck down Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, a close confidant of the Nazi leader; the two men had been marching arm-in-arm, and a slight difference in the trajectory of that bullet would have changed the course of history.

That was pure chance, but what happened the next day was something else. It is impossible to know whether Hitler was really about to shoot himself when he picked up his revolver in Helen Hanfstaengl’s house as the police were arriving to arrest him. But by grabbing the gun away from him and berating him for even thinking of such a thing, the American wife of Hitler’s propagandist Putzi Hanfstaengl may have played as pivotal a role as chance had the day before. If so, this was a clear case of the wrong person appearing at the wrong time.

All of which raises the biggest “what if” question of history: without Hitler, what would have happened to Germany after World War I? The Americans who lived through the collapse of the Weimar Republic, Hitler’s rise to power and the Nazi era did not explicitly address that question, which can never have a definitive answer. But the common thread that runs through so many of the Americans’ accounts is their fascination with Hitler. Their experiences and observations strongly suggest that, without Hitler, the Nazis never would have succeeded in their drive for absolute power. The country still might have embarked on an authoritarian course, possibly a military dictatorship. But whatever might have emerged would not have been on the terrifying scale of the Third Reich, with all its terrifying consequences.

Even those Americans who initially dismissed the Nazi leader as a clownish figure came to recognize that he possessed an uncanny ability to mesmerize his followers and attract new ones. He knew how to tap into his countrymen’s worst instincts by playing on their fears, resentments and prejudices more masterfully than anyone else. He possessed a combination of peculiar personal qualities and oratorical skills that fueled his movement’s rise. No other leading Nazi was as effective a mobilizing force as he was. Not Goering, not Goebbels, not his early rival Gregor Strasser. They, too, would have tried to exploit their countrymen’s anger and confusion following their defeat in World War I and the successive economic crises, but without the same results.

As the less than noble ending to their saga makes clear, the Americans in Hitler’s Germany were prone to all the normal human failings, including a certain amount of self-centered pettiness during a time of epic tragedy. Many were superficial in their observations, some were deliberately blind, and a few became Nazi apologists. But most of the Americans came to understand what was happening around them, even if they often found it hard to grasp the full implications. This was hardly surprising. After all, they came from a country that was democratic and pragmatic and were plunged into a society undergoing a horrific transformation in the name of a demented ideology.

Among the journalists, William Shirer stood out in terms of his ability to discern the meaning of events as they happened, avoiding the trap of wishful thinking. Little wonder that his Berlin Diary, published in 1941, propelled him to initial fame, and that he cemented his reputation as a distinguished author with The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. First published in 1960, this masterful account was an immediate bestseller and continues to be essential reading for anyone trying to understand Hitler’s Germany.

Shirer was far from alone, however. Edgar Mowrer and Sigrid Schultz also were journalists who were rarely fooled. Consul General George Messersmith stood out among the American diplomats for the same reason, and for his passion and courage. Truman Smith, the first American official to meet Hitler, proved to be both an astute political observer and a remarkably able military attaché, taking the measure of Germany’s rapidly growing military might. Many others served in the Berlin embassy with distinction, including young staffers like William Russell and Jacob Beam.

Several of the Americans would reach the apogee of their careers long after they left Hitler’s Germany. Beam became a top-level diplomat, serving as U.S. ambassador to Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. George Kennan would not only become famous as the architect of containment and then ambassador to the Soviet Union, but also as a historian and frequent critic of American foreign policy during the later decades of the Cold War. Richard Helms rose to the top of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Howard K. Smith became the coanchor of ABC Evening News when network television reigned supreme.

All of the Americans—whether journalists, diplomats, academics or simply family members—were profoundly affected by their time there, and some far more than others.

After her return to the United States and marriage to the wealthy financier Alfred Stern in 1938, Martha Dodd continued as a Soviet agent, following the path that she had first embarked on in Berlin with her lover Boris Vinogradov, the Soviet diplomat. In 1953, when she heard that she was about to be summoned to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, she and Alfred fled to Mexico. They moved to Prague in 1957, the year they were indicted for espionage back home. The indictment was dismissed upon review in 1979 for lack of sufficient evidence, but the couple never returned to the United States. Long after his tenure as CIA director, Helms concluded from Soviet intelligence cables that came to light in the 1990s that they both were indeed part of a Soviet spy ring. “She continued to serve as a spy throughout her life,” he wrote, pointing out that her work in Berlin “was probably the peak of her spy career.” Alfred died in Prague in 1986, and Martha died there in 1990.

Putzi Hanfstaengl was among the Germans living in Britain who were rounded up as potential security threats at the beginning of World War II. Transferred to an internment camp in Canada, he managed to get a letter smuggled out that reached the desk “of my Harvard Club friend, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” as he grandiosely put it. In the summer of 1942, he was transferred to American custody. Arriving in Washington, he was met by his son Egon, who had been studying at Harvard but then dropped out to join the U.S. Army. Now a sergeant, he greeted his father in uniform.

Putzi provided information on Hitler and other Nazi leaders along with analysis of German radio broadcasts for American intelligence. In 1944, the Americans transferred him back to Britain. After the war ended, he was sent to an internment camp in Germany and finally released on September 3, 1946. He spent the rest of his life in Munich. While Putzi proclaimed his disillusionment with Hitler, he left the impression that the years in his company were the high point of his life. His grandson Eric, who was born in New York in 1954 but grew up in Germany, recalls that Putzi was endlessly telling people about the old days, effectively boasting about how close he was to Hitler. While he could be jovial and entertaining, Eric said, “most of the time he was on the Hitler trip—it was terrible.” In an interview with an American scholar in 1973, a year before his death at age eighty-eight, Putzi declared that Hitler was “still in his bones.”

Helen, who had moved back to the United States in 1938 after their divorce, returned to Munich in the mid-1950s and died there in 1973. She, too, never completely lost her sense of wonderment about Hitler, or about the fact that she had once been so close to the Nazi leader and an object of his awkward affection.

To be sure, most Americans had far less personal involvement with Hitler—and played a far more positive role. Their overall record, not just of the final group that made it to Lisbon but also of many of their predecessors, was impressive. They served as America’s eyes and ears in Germany, and they helped produce the proverbial first draft of history. Like all first drafts, it isn’t always on the mark, but it offers highly unusual, very personal perspectives on Hitler’s rise and Germany’s march to the abyss.

By and large, these Americans helped their countrymen begin to understand the nature of Nazi Germany: how it ruthlessly eliminated its political opponents; how it instilled hatred of Jews and anyone else deemed a member of an inferior race; and how it was preparing its military and its people for a war for global domination. The best of them, listening closely to this drumbeat of German militarism, recognized the looming danger. By so doing, the Americans in Germany gradually eroded isolationist sentiments and prepared their countrymen psychologically for the years of bloodshed and struggle ahead. This was the real contribution of the Americans in Hitler’s Germany.