Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power

Photographs

^{On August 17, 1932, three American correspondents interviewed Hitler at Berchtesgaden. From left on the porch of his Alpine retreat: Hearst’s Karl von Wiegand; famed broadcaster H. V. Kaltenborn; Hitler; AP Berlin bureau chief Louis Lochner.}

^{Wiegand had a separate interview and quickly emerged complaining: “I get nothing out of him.” After the two others had a longer session, Kaltenborn concluded that Hitler “has no capacity for logical consecutive thought.” He added: “I could not see how a man of his type, a plebeian Austrian of limited mentality, could ever gain the allegiance of a majority of Germans.”}

^{Less than six months later, Hitler took power.}

^{At Hoboken’s City Hall in 1912 or 1913, Helen Niemeyer, the daughter of German immigrants, dressed up as “Liberty” holding the American flag. She later married Ernst Hanfstaengl. The couple then moved to Munich, where they befriended Hitler. Hitler developed a particular fascination with Helen. After the Beer Hall putsch of 1923, he took refuge in her home. As the police closed in to arrest him, he despaired that all was lost and picked up a revolver. Helen grabbed it from him, possibly preventing his suicide. He went on trial in early 1924.}

^{General Erich Ludendorff, center, Hitler and the other defendants on April 1, 1924.}

^{Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, who had an American mother and a German father, became Hitler’s propagandist. Hitler and Putzi (right) on a campaign swing during the 1930 elections.}

^{Putzi at his 25th reunion at Harvard in 1934. Those who protested his presence for political reasons, the Crimson wrote, were exhibiting “childish” behavior.}

^{In 1922, Karl von Wiegand was the first American correspondent to interview and write about Hitler, describing him as the leader of a rising “Fascisti” movement and as “a magnetic speaker having also exceptional organizing genius.” But in the mid-1920s when Germany appeared to be recovering and the Nazis faded from prominence, readers were far more interested in stories like the ones Wiegand and fellow Hearst correspondent Lady Drummond-Hay (above) filed about the first trans-Atlantic flight of the Zeppelin, issued in a special booklet by The Chicago Herald and Examiner (below).}

^{Chicago Daily News correspondent Edgar Mowrer sounded the alarm about Hitler and the Nazis early and often.}

^{Correspondent Dorothy Thompson, here with Sinclair Lewis in 1928 after they were married, totally misjudged Hitler during her interview with him in November 1931. She was struck by his “startling insignificance.” Later, she radically revised her views.}

^{The Brownshirts (in 1926) were soon a rising force. After Hitler took power, Mowrer was threatened and driven out of Germany on September 1, 1933.}

^{On July 13, 1933, William Dodd took the train from Hamburg to Berlin to take up his post as U.S. ambassador. President Roosevelt had tapped the University of Chicago history professor for the job, telling him: “I want an American liberal in Germany as a standing example.” Here Dodd is shown arriving in the German capital with his wife and daughter Martha (right). Martha quickly scandalized the embassy with her procession of lovers.}

^{From left, publisher Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt, Martha Dodd, Mildred Harnack and German novelist Hans Fallada at the Fallada farm on May 27, 1934. Initially enchanted by Hitler, Martha would end up spying for Moscow. Her friend Mildred, along with her German husband Arvid Harnack, would become members of the “Red Orchestra” spy ring. Harnack was the only American woman executed by the Gestapo.}

^{George Messersmith, U.S. Consul General in Berlin from 1930 to 1934, went on to become the ambassador to Austria (left, with Austrian State Secretary General Wilhelm Zehner in Vienna). Messersmith was a fervent opponent of the Nazis, issuing increasingly dire warnings about their intentions.}

^{Truman Smith served twice as a military attaché in the U.S. Embassy in Berlin. In 1922, he became the first American diplomat to meet Hitler, recording his astute impressions in a notebook.}

^{On his second tour, he came up with the plan to have Hermann Goering’s Air Ministry invite Charles Lindbergh (above, with General Erhard Milch) to Germany. As Smith hoped, Lindbergh was granted access to the Luftwaffe’s airfields and factories, providing valuable intelligence that he freely shared with the military attaché. This part of the Lindbergh story was soon overshadowed by the aviator’s pro-German leanings and his campaign to keep the U.S. out of the war.}

^{Kätchen, the daughter of Truman and Kay Smith, with Hermann Goering’s lion after the Luftwaffe commander dispatched the animal to the Berlin Zoo. Its offense, as witnessed by both the Lindberghs and the Smiths: urinating on Goering’s white uniform when he was showing his pet off to his guests. Kätchen recalls that she was “scared to death” while holding the lion, and wore gloves so she wouldn’t touch it. Today, the photo still hangs on her refrigerator door in Connecticut.}

^{Thomas Wolfe in Berlin in 1935. The writer was treated like a literary superhero, and initially he reciprocated the warm feelings of the Germans. But by his next visit in 1936, he became much more aware of the horrors of the Nazi regime, vividly describing them in his novella I Have a Thing to Tell You.}

^{At the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, track star Jesse Owens was the most popular athlete, despite the Nazis’ racist ideology.}

^{After the Anschluss, the annexation and occupation of Austria in March 1938, a triumphant Hitler received a hero’s welcome in Vienna on April 9. Here he is led by the Lord Mayor; Rudolf Hess and Joseph Goebbels are walking behind Hitler. American journalists like William Shirer were stunned by how quickly Vienna was decked out in Nazi flags and took on the look of “any German city in the Reich.”}

^{In March 1938, former President Herbert Hoover visited Berlin (top, with Reichsbank President Hjalmer Schacht and U.S. Ambassador Hugh Wilson on right). Meeting Hitler, he was subjected to Hitler’s usual tirades. Nonetheless, Hoover continued to argue that “we must live with other nations.” Wilson, the last American ambassador to Nazi Germany, agreed with those sentiments.}

^{Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain is greeted by Hitler on September 15, 1938.}

^{His visit produced the infamous Munich agreement that doomed Czechoslovakia.}

^{On November 9, 1938, Germany erupted in the frenzy of anti-Semitic violence known as Kristallnacht. Jews flocked to the U.S. Embassy, begging for visas, as consular official Charles Thayer recalled, in the hopes that they could be saved “from the madness that had seized the city.” Above, smashed windows of Jewish shops in Magdeburg.}

^{German troops search the rubble in Danzig after Hitler launched World War II by invading Poland on September 1, 1939.}

^{On September 16, 1940, while Hitler’s armies were on the march in Europe, President Roosevelt signed America’s first peacetime draft legislation (with Secretary of War Henry Stimson on left and Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall second from right).}

^{American correspondents in Germany were already covering the war. From right, the AP’s Louis Lochner, the Propaganda Ministry’s Karl Boehmer and the International News Service’s Pierre Huss.}

^{William Shirer (broadcasting for CBS in 1940) was one of the most discerning American correspondents, anti-Nazi from the beginning.}

^{After Germany declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941, U.S. diplomats and reporters based in Berlin were interned in a deserted spa hotel in Bad Nauheim, outside of Frankfurt. The AP’s Angus Thuermer reads in his room, while other Americans pass the time in the main lobby.}

^{On May 12, 1942, the Americans were released from Bad Nauheim in exchange for the release of the German diplomats and journalists who had been interned in far more luxurious conditions at the Greenbrier, the plush resort hotel in West Virginia. Here, the Americans are arriving at the Bad Nauheim train station where they would begin their journey to Lisbon—and freedom.}