Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power

4 “I Will Show Them”

There were those who saw what was coming, those who were blind to it until the very last moment and those who continued to insist that the fears about Hitler and the Nazis had been blown out of all proportion, dismissing all the evidence to the contrary. That was true of Germans; it was also true for Americans who lived and worked in their midst.

There was also a special category of German politicians: those who believed that they could outmaneuver and outsmart Hitler. On June 1, 1932, Franz von Papen, the newly appointed chancellor, took the AP’s Louis Lochner aside at a lunch in the Reich Chancellery, assuring him that he knew how to more effectively contain the Nazis than his predecessor had. His strategy, he explained, would be to loosen rather than tighten the restrictions on them. “I’ll give the Hitlerites enough freedom to show them up in all their absurdity,” he told the American reporter.

After he was replaced as chancellor by General Kurt von Schleicher, who had served as his defense minister, Papen began promoting a new approach. In his dealings with the octogenarian President von Hindenburg—who according to Lochner and others was increasingly “senile”—he argued that the best way to keep Hitler under control would be to appoint him chancellor.

Schleicher was pursuing a different policy toward the Nazis, trying to split them by luring Gregor Strasser, the head of the “socialist” faction within the party, into his government as vice-chancellor. Although that maneuver failed, the chancellor would prove to be as naïve in his own way as Papen. After taking power in early December, he quickly convinced himself that he had managed to usher in a new era of “Ruhe, Ruhe, Ruhe [Quiet, Quiet, Quiet],” as he told Lochner during the Christmas holiday.

“As you see, I have succeeded,” he declared. “Germany has for a long time not been as quiet as now. Even the Communists and the Nazis are behaving. The longer this quiet continues, the more certain is the present government to reestablish internal peace.” Lochner later observed that it was “sophomoric” for Schleicher to mistake the normal Christmas lull in Germany as a sign of better times.

New reports of fissures in the Nazi movement, combined with the dip in their support in the November 6 elections, had led others to nurture such illusions as well. American Ambassador Sackett was more worried about the fact that the third-place Communists had increased their number of seats in the Reichstag, since he viewed the left as more dangerous than the far right. To counter the Communist threat, he argued, “it was obviously important at the moment to have a strongly centralized more or less military Government.” While Sackett had warned Washington that Hitler appeared determined to “rule alone” and that he and Goebbels “are past adepts at twisting events to suit their fancies and purposes, and indefatigable spellbinders,” he still sounded somewhat dismissive of the Nazi leader, calling him “one of the biggest show-men since P. T. Barnum.”

Abraham Plotkin, the Jewish-American labor organizer who had arrived in Berlin in November, continued going to political rallies to figure out for himself what the Nazis represented. He saw Goebbels perform for the second time in early January. The Nazi propagandist stirred little emotion at first but then fired up the crowd by blaming Jews for the murder of a young Nazi. This prompted Plotkin to reflect in his diary that day about the possible parallels to the Ku Klux Klan back in his home country. The Klan had looked to be ascendant in the mid-1920s, controlling several governorships, he wrote, but then abruptly the movement had collapsed politically. “I am told that in Germany it will not be so easy for the Hitlerites to collapse, but it strikes me that any movement that depends on the intensity of emotion such as I saw tonight must either win power quickly or its foundations of hatred and feeling will collapse,” he wrote.

The following day, Plotkin returned to the same theme. “The Nazi meetings are dispirited, as if beaten and know it,” he noted. But he added a cautionary note: “The only disquieting factor is the number of killings that are political in their origin.” Three days later, he attended another Nazi rally, where Goebbels once again denounced “the bloody Jews,” whipping up the crowd to such frenzy that Plotkin thought for a moment that it would “run out of his control.” But when the rally was over, the American was struck by the sight of the young Nazi troops in uniform waiting for their orders “like a bunch of schoolboys, and like a bunch of schoolboys bought hot dogs when the hot-dog men started to circulate among them.” The wording of this diary entry suggests he found it hard to believe that these young men eating hot dogs could be truly dangerous.

Even with the mounting reports of violence by just such young men, some wealthy German Jews didn’t seem all that disturbed by the Nazis either. Edgar Mowrer recalled a dinner at the end of 1932 in the home of “a banker named Arnholt.” Mowrer probably misspelled his host’s name; if so, the banker in question may have been Hans Arnhold, who was forced to flee Germany after Hitler’s takeover (his villa now serves as the home of the American Academy in Berlin). In any case, all the men around the dinner table except Mowrer were Jews.

Over coffee, several of them boasted that they had given money to the Nazis at the urging of non-Jews like Hjalmar Schacht and Fritz Thyssen. Although Schacht had served as the currency commissioner in the critical year 1923, when he was credited with ending hyperinflation, and then as president of the Reichsbank until 1930, he had become an increasingly vocal supporter of the Nazis; so had industrialist Thyssen.

Mowrer didn’t hide his surprise, prompting his host to ask what he was thinking. “Merely wondering how the People of Israel have managed to survive so many thousands of years when they obviously have a strong suicidal urge,” the American responded.

“But you don’t take this fellow seriously,” his host inquired.

“Unfortunately I do—and so should you.”

“Just talk,” the banker declared, and all the others nodded in agreement. As Mowrer noted, they “thought me incapable of understanding the German soul.”

Schacht, who had once aligned himself with the democratic forces of the Weimar Republic, wasn’t about “just talk.” Shortly before Christmas, Mowrer ran into him and asked politely about his plans for the holidays. “I am going to Munich to talk with Adolf Hitler,” he declared.

“You too, my fine Democrat!” Mowrer responded, abandoning any pretense of politeness.

“Ach, you understand nothing. You are a stupid American,” Schacht shot back.

“Granted. But tell me what you expect from Hitler in words of one syllable and I’ll try to understand.”

“Germany will have no peace until we bring Hitler to power.”

Three weeks later, Mowrer met Schacht again, and asked him how his conversation went with the Nazi leader. “Brilliantly,” the German banker replied. “I’ve got that man right in my pocket.”

As Mowrer recalled in his memoirs, “From that moment I expected the worst.”

He wasn’t the only one. Bella Fromm, the Jewish social reporter, found herself seated next to Wiegand at a dinner party in Berlin on December 8. The Hearst correspondent wasn’t living full-time in Berlin then, but had a knack for appearing on scene “whenever a political melodrama is about to sweep the stage,” Fromm noted in her diary.

“When are the National Socialists going to seize the government?” she asked him bluntly, using the old journalistic ploy of asking a question in a way that implied she knew the score already.

Wiegand looked taken aback but offered a crisp response: “It won’t be long now.”

And what would that mean? “Hitler intends to abolish the treaty of Versailles,” the American correspondent continued, drawing upon his past meetings with Hitler. “He wants to unite all Germans. He has no desire for the return of colonies if he finds a way for new Lebensraum [living space] within Central Europe, to install all the regained German subjects. One of Hitler’s early associates, Professor Karl von Haushofer, has been studying the Lebensraum problem for years. He has persuaded Hitler that an expansion to the east, peaceful or by force, is an inevitable necessity.”

On December 22, Fromm attended a reception hosted by American Consul General George Messersmith, who had been stationed in the German capital for the past two years and monitored the Nazi movement. While Ambassador Sackett was increasingly convinced that the Schleicher government had successfully contained the Nazi threat, Messersmith took a different view. “The German government had better act quickly, and strongly,” he said at the reception. “It’s really upsetting to find so many people of importance in the National Socialist party. There are going to be fireworks here pretty soon, unless I’m badly mistaken.”

Fromm added this final line to her diary entry that night: “I do not think that my friend Messersmith is mistaken.”

At an “intimate” dinner for twelve guests hosted by Chancellor von Schleicher and his wife six days later, on December 28, Fromm was able to relay Wiegand’s prediction of a Nazi takeover directly to the man currently in charge. Schleicher laughed it off. “You journalists are all alike,” he told her. “You make a living out of professional pessimism.”

Fromm pointed out that these views were widely held, not just by her and Wiegand. And that everyone knew that Papen and others were “trying to bring the National Socialists to power.”

“I think I can hold them off,” Schleicher insisted.

Referring to the aging President von Hindenburg, Fromm cautioned, “As long as the Old Gentleman sticks to you.”

Later the two of them were briefly alone in Schleicher’s study. The chancellor once again talked about bringing Gregor Strasser into his government. Fromm was hardly reassured. While Strasser represented the left wing of the Nazi Party, he shared the anti-Semitic views of the rest of the leadership. “What about the church and Jew-phobia of the party?” she asked.

“You ought to know me better than that, Bella,” Schleicher replied. “All that will be dropped entirely.”

Once again, Fromm added a line of commentary to her diary entry of that night. “The National Socialist Party is not in the habit of dropping anything that suits its purposes,” she wrote. “They scuttle men quicker than they scuttle doctrines.”

But even during the fateful month of January 1933, Americans in Berlin were hearing constant reassurances that Hitler and his movement were fading as a threat. Chancellor von Schleicher, they believed, really knew both what he was up against and how to outplay his opponents. On January 22, Abraham Plotkin met with Martin Plettl, the president of the German Clothing Workers’ Union, in a packed Berlin restaurant. Plettl explained to the American labor organizer that Hitler was “dancing between four masters and any one of the four of them may break him.” The four: two camps of industrialists, and two camps within the Nazi Party. As a result, Plettl maintained, Hitler was facing a choice of either accepting a position within the current government or allowing his party rival Strasser to do so. “Hitler will lose either way,” he insisted.

Plettl’s reasoning was that Schleicher was probably using Hitler “as a cat’s paw.” And “Hitler on the downgrade, supplying Schleicher with provocative means for eliminating the Communists, will clear the roads for Schleicher in the coming elections.” When Plotkin indicated he was skeptical, Plettl argued that it was a strategy that could easily work, allowing Schleicher to use the Nazis to destroy the Communists but prompting deeper fissures within the party itself as some leaders would be compromised by joining a coalition government. Hitler’s party would no longer be a pure opposition force, and its base of support would weaken.

But the previous chancellor, Papen, had by that time already effectively undercut his successor. On January 4, he met with Hitler in Cologne at the home of banker Kurt von Schröder. The two politicians worked out a deal to oust Schleicher, with Papen assigned the task of winning the support of President von Hindenburg. Even when word of their meeting leaked out, Schleicher professed himself “in no way alarmed by the alleged plot against him.” Neither were the top diplomats at the American Embassy, who believed that the meeting was mostly focused on dealing with the Nazis’ ailing finances. The “rapidly increasing” party debt, chargé d’affaires George Gordon reported, was threatening to undermine the movement. Its financial backers, he added, were both trying to solve that problem and encouraging Hitler to participate in the government, not topple it.

In the last few days of January, those interpretations were proven grievously wrong. Facing a growing political revolt fanned by Papen, Schleicher asked Hindenburg for his support so that he could dissolve the Reichstag. The president refused, triggering the resignation of the Schleicher government. Next, he turned to Papen to negotiate a new arrangement with the political parties. This gave Papen the green light to do what he had been advocating all along. On January 30, Hindenburg formally asked Hitler to form a new government, appointing him chancellor and Papen as vice chancellor. While Ambassador Sackett reported this “sudden and unexpected triumph” for the Nazis, the AP’s Louis Lochner indicated that Papen remained convinced that he had truly outsmarted the new chancellor. “We have hired Hitler,” he told his friends. In other words, Lochner concluded, Papen was still convinced that he would be “in the driver’s seat.”

Even before the debate about whether Hitler could truly take power was settled by his dramatic ascension, Americans in Germany were split about what such a development would mean. Were Hitler’s speeches and Mein Kampf a true indication of what Nazi rule would look like, or were they merely tools for his emotional campaign? If the latter, it would be logical to believe that, once in power, Hitler would tone down his rhetoric, moderate his program and seek accommodation with many of those he had been denouncing at home and abroad.

Among the correspondents covering Germany, no one had a longer track record than S. Miles Bouton of the Baltimore Sun. He had arrived in Germany in 1911, working at first for the Associated Press. He had covered World War I, written the book And the Kaiser Abdicates, married a German woman and left no doubt that he considered himself the preeminent authority on the country. “It requires no great skill at reading between the lines to discover that I have no very high opinion of the quality of the reporting done from Germany for the American press,” he declared in an interview for his own newspaper on a visit to the United States in 1925. He claimed he wasn’t blaming his fellow correspondents but only their editors, who were guided by their prejudices. Nonetheless, he was scathing about those colleagues. “Some of them are, it is true, much less well informed about the situation there than they might be.”

A well-informed correspondent, he emphasized both before the Nazis took power and after, would have no doubt who was to blame for what went wrong in Germany. Speaking to the Rockford, Illinois, Women’s Club in March 1935, he pointed out that he had denounced the Versailles Treaty from the beginning. “Read that treaty and understand the things that are happening today,” he said. “The allies heaped oppressions, humiliations, and exactions upon Germany.”

Bouton had first encountered Hitler in September 1923 before the Beer Hall Putsch that made the Nazi leader famous. At the party headquarters, he was met by a young man who began explaining how Hitler would restore Germany’s honor, saving it from the Communists and the Jews. “It was several minutes before it occurred to me that this was Hitler, talking about himself in the third person,” Bouton recalled in an unpublished manuscript. “I had never before met and have never since met a man who so completely identified himself with his supposed mission.”

When Hitler’s party regained momentum once the Depression hit, Bouton was at first skeptical of its chances, reporting in 1930 that it “does not come into consideration at all as a government party.” (In 1935, he would claim to have been much more prescient, telling his audience at the University of Georgia: “For the last five years of the Republic I prophesied time and again that Hitler and the National Socialists would come to power.”) But in March 1932, he reported that the strong second-place finish by Hitler in the presidential election “represents a remarkable personal triumph, and it becomes the more astounding when one considers the circumstances in which it was gained.” From there, he launched into an account of what he characterized as the story that his American colleagues had routinely failed to report: it was about “the methods used by both the Reich and the state governments against Hitler, since these methods make a mockery of all protestations by the men in power that they believe in democracy.”

In other words, the real story that needed to be reported from Germany was not about the brutal methods and ideology of the Nazis but the attempts by the Weimar government to muzzle them, forbidding them to broadcast their message on the radio, suppressing their party newspapers, and banning some of their leaders from speaking in public, as happened to Hitler after he emerged from prison. He scornfully referred to all the talk of the “menace of Hitlerism” that was “disturbing the peace of mind of the outside world in general and of America in particular.” Americans, he added, saw Hitler as “a mere rabble-rouser and shallow demagogue.” Quoting Dorothy Thompson’s description of Hitler as “the very prototype of the Little Man,” he declared that his extensive experience in Germany had taught him to be hesitant about making such judgments about both Hitler and his followers, who were dismissed as “a strange collection of heavy doctrinaires and helpless neurotics.”

“I am pretty sure that these confident critics are wrong,” he wrote. “There are probably few if any Americans in Germany who have as wide a circle of German friends and acquaintances as I have.” Those acquaintances, he added, were highly educated—“for the greater part academicians, professional men of high standing, high government officials, etc.” At least 80 percent of them had voted for Hitler, he claimed. Of the others, 10 percent refused to vote for Hindenburg, and the remaining 10 percent were Jews. “Even some of them would have voted for Hitler had it not been for the anti-Semitic plank in his platform.”

At the end of his long article, he tossed in what he called “one more significant fact.” Many of his German friends had American wives who “without any exception are more ardent Hitlerites than their German husbands.” His interpretation of this phenomenon: “Theirs is the American brand of patriotism, the brand which has happily made Marxism and internationalism unthinkable in our country.” His message: Germans supported Hitler for the same “patriotic” reasons, and American readers shouldn’t be swayed by the anti-Nazi accounts of his colleagues in the American press corps.

Some of those colleagues had come to their own conclusions about why Bouton was offering such contrarian views. Writing on December 11, 1932, to his daughter Betty, who was a student at the University of Chicago, the AP’s Lochner recounted an incident triggered by a photograph of Chancellor von Papen and a few journalists, including Lochner and Bouton, that ran in the Nazi weekly Illustrierter Beobachter. The caption read: “Von Papen und die jüdische Weltpresse” (Von Papen and the Jewish world press). “That they put me down as one of the Chosen People doesn’t matter much, but the unkindest cut was that Miles Bouton, of all people—he who himself is an ardent Nazi—should have been put down as ‘Sally Bouton-Knopf.’ The whole American colony is laughing about it,” Lochner wrote.

Lochner explained that the Nazi publication listed Bouton’s first name as Sally “as that is a favorite Jewish name” and that they had translated Bouton as Knopf (German for “button”) and hyphenated his last name. “Miles nearly hit the roof,” Lochner added with evident glee. “He was furious—all the more so as he had travelled around with Hitler in an airplane. We both protested not because we were called Jews—we both have very dear friends among the Jews and neither of us are anti-Semitic—but because from the whole ideology of the Nazis it is evident they meant to insult us by calling us Jews.”

Lochner reported that he heard Hitler was furious about this “boner” by the Nazi weekly, and several Nazi leaders called him to say they were “ashamed” that someone from their camp had played such a dirty trick on them. Lochner wrote to the editor of the weekly demanding he print a retraction. “He did—but in a way that makes the readers think we objected to being called Jews, when our point was that we objected to being insulted by the Nazis,” he reported to his daughter. Nonetheless, Lochner was pleased that the Nazis had made Bouton squirm. “We’ve had lots of fun,” he concluded.

No issue crystallized the question of Hitler’s intentions more than what Nazi rule would mean for the Jews. A correspondent like Edgar Mowrer, who was Bouton’s polar opposite when it came to his assumptions about the party and what it represented, had covered the attacks of Brownshirts on “foreigners and Jews,” in some cases going out in armored police cars. His wife Lilian recalled anxiously waiting for hours until he returned from “the front.” The young thugs wearing heavy leather boots and carrying revolvers were “always insolent and swaggering,” she added, and they would gather at a number of cafés and beer houses, hanging huge swastika flags outside. The owners of these establishments had no choice but to tolerate “these invasions.”

Before the Nazis came to power, Edgar made a habit of going into such hangouts to buy the brawlers beers and try to learn more about their views. As Lilian described it, these young toughs rallied to slogans like “We spit on freedom” and “Beat the Red Front to pulp.” Their favorite toast: “Germany awake, perish the Jew!”

“But just where did you learn all this interesting stuff about the Jew?” Edgar asked on one occasion.

“Aber Herr, everybody in Germany knows that the Jews are our misfortune,” one of the Nazis replied.

“But just how? Why?” Edgar persisted.

“There are too many of them. And then, Jews are not people like the rest of us.”

“But in my country the proportion of Jews is much higher than in Germany. But we lost no war, have not starved, not been betrayed to foreigners; in short, have suffered none of the evils you attribute to the presence of the Jews in Germany. How do you account for this?”

“We don’t account for it. We simply know it is true,” the Nazi replied, complaining that the Jews were getting the best jobs for themselves by “stealth and fraud.” Germans were waking up to that, he added, “and no matter how hard the Jew works, he won’t be on top long.”

“Then you admit the Jew works harder?” Edgar asked.

“Of course.”

“But doesn’t the hardest worker deserve the best jobs?”

His interlocutor suddenly sounded uncertain. “Yes—that is, no; not if he is a Jew.”

“Is that logical, is that clear thinking?”

“Ach, thinking!” the exasperated Nazi replied. “We are sick of thinking. Thinking gets you nowhere. The Führer himself says true Nazis think with their blood.”

And this kind of lack of thinking was everywhere. The Mowrers’ young daughter, Diana Jane, came home from school one day and said, in German, that she had to ask her mother a question. Lilian insisted, as always, that she speak English at home. “But I have only heard about these things in German and I must know if I am saying the right words,” she replied.

Lilian assented.

“Mutti, am I a Jew or a Christian?”

“You are not a Jew, my dear. What makes you ask?”

The girl said that all the talk at school about who was or wasn’t Jewish had made her wonder about her own identity. “It isn’t good to be a Jew,” she concluded.

Nineteen thirty-two was a big year for Edgar Mowrer. He would win the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting then, and his deepening fears about where Germany was heading prompted him to write his book Germany Puts the Clock Back, which he finished in November and was quickly published in the United States at the beginning of 1933 just as Hitler was taking power. His book chronicled the disintegration of the Weimar Republic, how Germans had grown “sick of everything” and how “the depression brought voters by the carloads to Hitler.” By way of explanation of the Nazi leader’s appeal, he wrote, “A little man has taken the measure of still smaller men.”

Yet even Mowrer wasn’t quite sure what Hitler represented—and what to expect if he took power. “Did he believe all that he said?” he asked. “The question is inapplicable to this sort of personality. Subjectively Adolf Hitler was, in my opinion, entirely sincere even in his self-contradictions. For his is a humorless mind that simply excludes the need for consistency that might distress more intellectual types. To an actor the truth is anything that lies in its effect: if it makes the right impression it is true.”

Sigrid Schultz of the rival Chicago Tribune recalled one incident that proved Mowrer’s point about Hitler’s acting ability, which allowed him to ingratiate himself with those who were normally skeptical. After the Nazis’ string of electoral wins in 1932, Hanfstaengl invited a dozen American and British correspondents to meet Hitler at the Kaiserhof Hotel. Schultz was among them, and she watched with fascination as Hitler greeted the first correspondent in line by clutching his hands and staring into his eyes. Encountering Schultz, he merely shook her hand. When he reached a correspondent who was normally known for his irreverent style, Schultz expected some fireworks. Instead, she recalled, “I could see the man’s face as Hitler went into his routine and, to my horror, those usually cynical eyes responded adoringly to whatever message Hitler was giving out.”

Mowrer credited Hitler and the Nazis with doing everything possible to achieve the maximum effect at every such opportunity. “While others slept, they had labored. While opponents talked once, they talked ten times,” he wrote. “Hitler believes chiefly in the personal contact, the spoken word, personality.” He added ominously, “In the great game of fooling the public he is an incomparable master.”

As for the true intentions of his anti-Semitic campaign, Mowrer sounded alarmed in some moments but uncertain in others. “A suspicion arises that Adolf Hitler himself accepted anti-Semitism with his characteristic mixture of emotionalism and political cunning,” he wrote. “Many doubted if he really desired pogroms.”

In January 1933 after Mowrer had completed his book and Hitler was coming to power, the Chicago Daily News reporter won an election, too. He was elected president of the Foreign Press Association. It was a confluence of events that would ultimately lead to a dramatic ending of the Mowrers’ stay in Germany.

Putzi Hanfstaengl would claim in his postwar memoir that he had felt “singularly unmoved by that clamour and hysteria of that January 30 in 1933 when the Nazi Party came to power.” He added, “Certainly it was an exciting moment, but I had too many reservations concerning the dangerous turbulence of the radicals to feel unduly confident about the possible march of events.”

If he really had any reservations then, Putzi disguised them well. He congratulated Hitler when he returned to the Kaiserhof Hotel after his meeting with President von Hindenburg and immediately talked with a steady stream of foreign journalists coming to see him. And soon he was directing propaganda films, publishing a book of “caricatures”—or sketches—of Hitler, and designing his own personalized Nazi Party uniform. Putzi didn’t want to don the standard shirt and trousers that Hitler offered him from the party’s clothing store. Instead, he noted, “I sent for a superb length of chocolate-brown gabardine from a London tailor and had it made up with a delicate little gold epaulette.”

Hanfstaengl boasted that his first appearance in his new uniform, at a dinner party hosted by the AP’s Lochner and his German wife, Hilde, “was, needless to state, the talk of the town.” Lochner remembered the evening well. It was April 27, 1933, and his guests included U.S. Consul General George Messersmith, Sigrid Schultz, some former German officials and banker Curt Sobernheim and his wife, Lilli, who were Jewish. In typical German fashion, all the guests had arrived promptly at eight, except for Putzi. Hilde was ready to seat them at eight-fifteen when the Nazi press officer suddenly appeared. “In strode an enormous bulk of masculinity in a brand-new Nazi brown uniform,” Lochner recalled. “It was Putzi, who had hitherto made sarcastic remarks about the official Nazi garb and had never dressed in one.”

Lochner added that Lilli Sobernheim—“a short stubby person who was nearly as round as she was small”—nearly fainted. Trembling, she whispered, “The Gestapo.” Putzi bowed to Hilde and apologized for his tardiness, explaining that his butler hadn’t properly prepared his evening dress suit, which was why he had to wear his party uniform. As Louis noted, nobody believed him; Putzi’s own account of that evening makes clear that his appearance in uniform was fully planned, although he never mentioned his lie. Nor did he mention what happened next. According to Lochner, he politely bowed and kissed the hand of Lilli Sobernheim. Her husband, Curt, then stated, with a look of professed innocence: “I believe, Dr. Hanfstaengl, we are somewhat related.”

Putzi was visibly startled. After all, a Jew was telling him that he was related to him. “How interesting! What do you mean?” he asked.

Sobernheim began explaining that a relative had married someone in Hanfstaengl’s family, and the two men retreated to a corner where they talked further. Lochner recalled that this had everyone chuckling since “it seemed like accusing someone of treason to tell a Nazi he was related to a Jew.”

As the evening progressed, the tension appeared to dissipate. Hanfstaengl even spent time chatting amicably with former Minister of Defense Wilhelm Groener, who had supported a ban on the SA during his term in office. “Only you unofficial people can stage a dinner like this,” Messersmith, the U.S. consul general, told Lochner. “There ought to be more like it. Maybe they would exert a good influence upon the Nazis.”

But as Hanfstaengl made the rounds of the parties hosted by diplomats and journalists during those early days of the new government, he charmed some of his hosts and alienated others. Messersmith soon concluded that he was “a court jester,” but one who “thought that his position as Hitler’s favorite and his uniform permitted him to do anything.” Since the consul general had become increasingly critical of the new regime, Hanfstaengl registered his displeasure by what was meant as a pointed put-down at an American Embassy dinner party. “Oh, so this is the famous Messersmith who knows everything that is going on and doesn’t like it,” he told him.

Putzi’s rudeness didn’t stop there. He began rubbing the leg of the woman seated next to him at the dinner table. As Lilian Mowrer pointed out later, “I knew he was crazy about women and could not keep his hands off them.” Most guests pretended not to notice Putzi’s antics, but Messer-smith bluntly and openly reprimanded him. The consul general reported with evident satisfaction that Putzi acted like “an exemplary guest” from that point on.

Later, Hanfstaengl would seek to take revenge by spreading rumors that Messersmith was Jewish. He had used the same tactics against Edgar Mowrer when the correspondent began reporting on attacks against Jews during those first months of the new regime, claiming that Mowrer was a “secret” Jew. Meeting with James G. McDonald, the visiting head of the New York–based Foreign Policy Association, Putzi declared: “Of course, he is a Jew and so is his wife”—and then proceeded to name other reporters who he claimed were Jews or served Jewish interests.

Mowrer’s friend Knickerbocker heard a group of Nazi leaders repeating this story. “Edgar a Jew? Of course!” he replied. Then referring to the revered general from World War I who had marched with Hitler in the Beer Hall Putsch, he added, “As Jewish as Ludendorff!”

Those kinds of personal battles were hardly surprising given the escalating political tensions from the moment that Hitler took power. According to Putzi, Hitler initially liked Knickerbocker, not for his reporting but for his excellent German, lively personality and red hair—although, of course, none of that would matter later when his dispatches became increasingly irritating to the Nazis. Knickerbocker was on hand for all the major events in early 1933, including “the greatest torchlight procession in its history” on January 30, when Hitler became chancellor.

“Hitler stationed himself at the window of the Chancellor’s palace and Hindenburg at another window,” Knickerbocker wrote. “From eight o’clock in the evening until midnight the thirty-five thousand Brownshirts of Berlin marched past and their flaming torches turned the streets into rivers of fire. The aged president stood in a bath of searchlights, the young Chancellor in another. All Berlin tried to reach them to cheer them and the music and the shouting brought many stout Teutons to tears.”

At first, the representatives of the new regime reached out to Americans to deliver messages of reassurance. “The Nazis will make no attempt to carry out any of their well-known demagogic reforms,” Hjalmar Schacht, the former president of the Reichsbank who would soon regain his old post, told Alfred Klieforth, the embassy’s first secretary, over dinner. Sackett, who would end his posting in Berlin in March, initially believed that the government was genuinely divided in its responsibilities, with the Nazis taking charge only of “the purely political and administrative departments” while others would continue to deal with the economy, finance and the remaining daily chores of government. He believed Papen, the vice-chancellor, was continuing to play a major role, along with Nationalist Party leader Alfred Hugenberg, who had been appointed minister of agriculture and economics. The ambassador described him as “practically economic dictator.”

But the next rapid sequence of events would dispel all such illusions about competing power brokers. On February 27, the Reichstag was set ablaze by Marinus van der Lubbe, a twenty-four-year-old Dutchman who had been a member of a Communist youth group. Suspicions were immediately aroused that the arsonist was “a dupe of the Nazis” and that he had been set up to provide them with an excuse for a massive crack-down. Subsequently, many historians have concluded that the Dutchman may have indeed acted alone. But whatever the case, Hitler seized on the opportunity to lash out against the Communists and other alleged conspirators, and to transform Germany into an absolute dictatorship.

Based on a hastily prepared emergency decree “For the Protection of People and State,” Hitler banned opposition publications and rallies, and ordered the arrests of thousands of Communists and Social Democrats, claiming they were plotting more attacks. SA troops wreaked havoc, breaking into homes, beating and torturing the victims they dragged out. With new elections scheduled for March 5, everything happened so fast that it ensured that opposition parties wouldn’t have a chance to mount effective campaigns.

On February 28, the day when Hitler had convinced the increasingly feeble President von Hindenburg to sign the emergency decree that suspended the key civil liberty sections of the Weimar constitution, Fromm attended a reception at Sackett’s residence. Everyone was abuzz with the latest speculation about how far the crackdown would go. It was then, according to Fromm, that Sackett revealed he had asked Washington to send him home. He was disappointed by the failure of American efforts to stabilize the German economy, the Jewish reporter wrote in her diary, and “deeply displeased with German domestic politics.”

Despite the Nazis’ rampage against their opponents, the party garnered only 43.9 percent of the votes in the March 5 elections. That made them the strongest party in the Reichstag but still not the majority party. They had to include Hugenberg’s Nationalists in the government to give them the majority they needed. But Hitler had no intention of allowing anything to slow him down. On March 23, he had the Reichstag approve the “enabling act,” effectively shifting all key powers from the legislative body to him. As chancellor, he would draft the laws that would be enacted by the cabinet—even, as the act specified, when they “might deviate from the constitution.” There would be no more restraints on his power.

Or on the attacks on anyone deemed a political opponent and on Jews. April 1 marked the official start of a boycott against Jewish businesses, allegedly as a response to slanderous campaigns against Germany by Jews abroad. Calling what happened next “a tragedy,” Knickerbocker reported: “The nation turned into a huge hunting party and for another fortnight all attention was absorbed in chasing the Jews.”

Dorothy Thompson, who was back on the continent but no longer living in Berlin, had arrived in the German capital on the night of the Reichstag fire and stayed long enough to witness some of the rampages that followed. When the Jewish boycott started on April 1, she wrote from Vienna to her husband Sinclair Lewis, who was back in New York: “It is really as bad as the most sensational papers report… the S.A. boys have simply turned into gangs and beat up people on the streets… and take socialists and communists & Jews into so-called ‘Braune Etagen’ [brown floors] where they are tortured. Italian fascism was a kindergarten compared to it.” She also despaired of “incredible (to me) docility” of the liberals and confessed she felt the urge to go around Berlin reciting the Gettysburg Address. And she was worried about her colleagues who were still stationed there, particularly Mowrer. “Edgar is constantly threatened, but has no intention of leaving Berlin & doesn’t think he is in actual danger.”

Thompson sent another letter to a friend in London, the pianist Harriet Cohen, who knew British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. She explained that she had seen many victims of Nazi violence with her own eyes. The SA thugs had gone “perfectly mad” as they hunted down new victims, she wrote. “They beat them with steel rods, knock their teeth out with revolver butts, break their arms… urinate on them, make them kneel and kiss the Hakenkreuz [the swastika].” Noting the silence of the German press and the exodus of such writers as Thomas Mann, Erich Maria Remarque and Bertolt Brecht, she let loose with her frustration. “I keep thinking what could be done… I feel myself starting to hate Germany. And already the world is rotten with hatred. If only someone would speak…” Cohen understood this to be an appeal for her to show the letter to MacDonald, which she did.

Not that such messages had any impact. The Nazis continued to usher in their new order with new drama. On the evening of May 10, propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels presided over the infamous “burning of the books”—“the auto da fé of ‘un-German literature,’” as Knickerbocker described it, “when throughout the Reich 100,000 students gathered to destroy ‘Jewish, Marxist, anti-German, immoral’ publications of 280 authors, many of them bearing world-famous names.” It was “a circus of historical significance but one that furnished immense entertainment for the participants.”

Addressing the crowd, Goebbels declared: “These flames do not only illuminate the final act of the old era, they also light up the new. Never before have the young men had so good a right to clean up the debris of the past… Oh, my century, it is a joy to be alive.” Along with the predictable volumes of Marx, Engels and Lenin, books by Remarque, Brecht, Hemingway and even Helen Keller (How I Became a Socialist) went up in flames, all part of an estimated total of 20,000 copies incinerated that night while the crowd cheered and sang.

Several correspondents witnessed the spectacle, and the cumulative effect of the Nazi actions was a growing sense of repulsion among many of them. Even the Baltimore Sun’s Bouton, whom Lochner had scornfully referred to as “an ardent Nazi” earlier, underwent a fundamental transformation and started filing increasingly hard-hitting stories, warning “that the truth [about the Nazis’ tactics] is ten times worse than the reports.” Just over a year after Hitler took power, the German Foreign Ministry ordered Bouton to “change his style of reporting or leave the country.” Within a short time, he was gone.

Most of Bouton’s colleagues, including Lochner, very much wanted to keep covering what was the most exciting story of the moment. Besides, their home offices didn’t want dramatic exits—they wanted to keep their reporters in Berlin. “Our orders from our bosses were to tell no untruth, but to report only as much of the truth, without distorting the picture, as would enable us to remain at our posts,” Lochner wrote in his memoirs. Cautious by nature, the AP veteran would follow those instructions.

Other Americans exhibited even greater caution, but sometimes for other reasons. Despite all the violence and intimidation—in fact, directly because of the seemingly unbridled nature of the almost daily attacks on anyone deemed a political opponent—the outsiders were often puzzled and still suspended judgment on what exactly was driving this fury.

Writing in the American Federationist, the house organ of the American Federation of Labor, Abraham Plotkin summed up the desperate situation of his German counterparts in an article that he published shortly after his return to the United States in May 1933. “The Nazis have turned loose forces that they themselves do not understand,” the Jewish-American labor organizer insisted. “It may surprise many to learn that the most exciting things that have happened in Germany have come as an upsurge from below, and not from the government itself.” Citing as an example the anti-Jewish boycott in Munich, which was formally disavowed by Hitler’s government, he claimed it had been started by SA troops and “it gained such momentum within a few hours that not one among the Nazi leaders dared to make an effort to head it off.”

Plotkin was far from the only American subscriber to the notion that Hitler and other top Nazis were seeking to restrain their supporters rather than incite them to ever greater violence. Consul General Messersmith initially believed that Hitler had to ride the violent wave of his followers since otherwise he might be replaced by “real radicals.” Growing protests back in the United States, such as the one held in Madison Square Garden on March 27, were only whipping up “what was almost hysteria” among those German leaders who wanted to pursue a moderate course, he warned. Unlike Plotkin, he believed that the subsequent boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany had been ordered from the top, but to contain the popular resentment and control it. When the government officially abandoned the boycott on April 4, he was pleased to report that the number of anti-Semitic incidents dropped quickly.

Not even the fact that a growing number of Americans were caught up in the violence could shake Messersmith’s belief that the reality of what was happening was far more complicated than it appeared—and that it would be counterproductive to pin all the blame on Hitler. In early March, Nathaniel Wolff, a painter from Rochester, New York, was nabbed by the SA when he was overheard denouncing both Communists and Nazis. Before he was allowed to leave the country, he had to sign a statement promising that he would never return. “I am a Jew,” it read. “I certify that no physical violence has been done to me and none of my property has been stolen.”

Others were not so lucky. Some, like editor Edward Dahlberg, a visiting Scribner’s Magazine editor, were beaten on the street. The American wife of a German Jew had to watch storm troopers, who had burst into their apartment, beat her husband, ostensibly for having four suits in their closet. “Four suits, while for fourteen years we have been starving,” one of his tormenters shouted. “Jews. We hate you.”

On March 31, the SA snatched three Americans and took them to a makeshift prison, where they were stripped and left to sleep on the cold floor. The next day, their tormentors beat them unconscious before leaving them out on the street. American correspondents knew of this and other incidents, but Messersmith convinced them to hold off any reporting on what happened to the trio of Americans on March 31 for forty-eight hours. He explained this would allow him to press the authorities to take the proper actions first. As Messersmith reported with evident satisfaction, the police took “rapid action” and the guilty Brownshirts were “sharply reproved” and expelled from the ranks.

Messersmith and other embassy officials kept protesting when Americans were assaulted, as they continued to be. But they also looked for signs of hope in any case where the authorities seemed willing to help. During the summer of 1933, America’s famous radio broadcaster H. V. Kaltenborn returned to Berlin for a visit with his son Rolf. He told Messersmith that American reporters like Mowrer were surely exaggerating in their stories about incidents of Nazi brutality. A few days later when his son Rolf failed to salute the Nazi banners carried in one of the frequent parades, a storm trooper hit him. Learning of the incident, the Propaganda Ministry promptly issued his father a written apology “in the hope that I would not feature my son’s misadventure in a broadcast,” Kaltenborn recalled. He added, “I had, of course, no intention of exploiting a personal experience.”

Some Americans, it seemed, didn’t want to see what was really happening, even when it was happening to them.

There were other American visitors during those early days of Hitler’s rule who were keen to understand just how dramatically the situation had changed in Germany—and not to downplay the implications. James G. McDonald, the head of the Foreign Policy Association who would soon become the League of Nations’ high commissioner for refugees, was alarmed by what he heard from the moment he arrived in Berlin on March 29, 1933. That first day, Putzi Hanfstaengl painted “a terrifying account of Nazi plans,” McDonald recorded in his diary, and didn’t conceal what this would mean for Jews. “The Jews are the vampire sucking German blood,” Putzi told his American visitor with a laugh. “We shall not be strong until we have freed ourselves of them.”

Later, McDonald was so disturbed by Hanfstaengl’s vitriol that, unable to sleep, he walked around the Tiergarten. It was a beautiful night, the park was peaceful, with lovers scattered about, “and yet these ghastly hatreds breeding such shocking plans for heartless oppression of a whole section of the people,” he noted.

Making his rounds, McDonald found nothing to lessen his fears. At dinner with the Mowrers, he could see that both of them were “highly overwrought.” He wrote in his diary: “I have never seen them so tense. He could talk of little but terror and atrocities.” Since a waiter was hovering within earshot, they could not talk all that freely. When they met again several days later, Mowrer was even more scathing in his remarks. “To him the leaders are thugs, perverts, and sadists,” McDonald wrote. Separately, Knickerbocker reported to McDonald that he believed that the Nazis were already holding more than 40,000 political prisoners.

During the Jewish boycott, McDonald was chilled by the sight of an old Jew surrounded by a taunting crowd and, on another occasion, “laughing, jeering children making sport of a national shame.” Meeting German officials, he was struck how they refused to acknowledge that there could be anything wrong with what was happening. He was reminded of meetings he had in Moscow with militant Communists. “In each case the discussion was completely dogmatic”—in particular, when it came to their racial theories.

Two months before his visit to Berlin, McDonald had met with Henry Goldman of Goldman Sachs, who also was planning a trip to Germany. McDonald asked him then whether the intense anti-Semitism of Germany’s new government didn’t signal that something was wrong with the German people. Goldman, the son of the German-Jewish immigrant founder of the company, brushed off McDonald’s question. “No, there is no more anti-Semitism in Germany than in the United States,” he declared. McDonald considered Goldman a longtime “apologist for Germany,” but he was startled by how he looked when they met at the Adlon Hotel on April 8. “I saw that he was a broken old man,” McDonald noted.

Based on what he had seen and heard, Goldman had radically revised his views of Germany. “Mr. McDonald, I never would have believed that the worst of the fifteenth and sixteenth century would return in this twentieth century and of all places in Germany,” he said. When McDonald asked him how long he was staying, he replied: “Just as long as I can bear it.”

Later that same day, Hanfstaengl had arranged for McDonald to meet Hitler, giving him the opportunity to ask him directly about “the Jewish question.” As the American visitor entered his office, Hitler “sized me up from head to foot with glances obviously half suspicious,” McDonald recorded. But he appeared almost nonchalant in replying to his queries about his anti-Semitic policies.

“We are not primarily attacking the Jews, rather the Socialists and the Communists,” Hitler declared. “The United States has shut out such people. We did not do so. Therefore, we cannot be blamed if we now take measures against them. Besides, as to Jews, why should there be such a fuss when they are thrown out of places, when hundreds of thousands of Aryan Germans are on the streets? No, the world has no just ground for complaint.”

McDonald observed that Hitler had “the eyes of a fanatic, but he has in addition, I think, much more reserve and control and intelligence than most fanatics.”

That was what McDonald recorded of his encounter in his diary right afterward. Later, when he returned to the United States, he offered an additional description of what Hitler said. “His word to me was, ‘I will do the thing that the rest of the world would like to do. It doesn’t know how to get rid of the Jews. I will show them.’ ”