Hitlerland

9 “Uniforms and Guns”

In the summer of 1936, just after graduating from Tulane University in New Orleans, Howard K. Smith was working at a local newspaper, earning $15 a week, when lightning struck: he won $100 for a short story he had written. Feeling flush but still savvy enough to calculate where his windfall would support him the longest, he decided to go to Germany. At that moment, Germany was the cheapest country in Europe for an American, he noted. His young friends in New Orleans, none of whom could afford such a voyage, had often discussed what the new regime in Germany represented, “whether it was workable, if it afforded solutions to problems we had in America,” as Smith recalled. In essence, he explained, they were asking: “Was Nazi Germany a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?”

While their liberal arts education made Smith and his friends inclined to disapprove of dictatorships, the Great Depression had shaken many core beliefs, and they felt that everything was debatable. Thus, Smith embarked on what he dubbed his “fact-finding” journey with an open mind. “Like a political Descartes, I tried to wash all preconceptions and prejudices out of my mind,” he declared. Hiring himself out as a deckhand on a cargo ship crossing the Atlantic, he experienced a common reaction to his first glimpses of the country he had set out to examine. “Germany captivated me before I set foot inside it,” he wrote. “Crawling up the Weser from Bremerhaven, we passed one fancy-tickling miniature town after another, all spotless with rows of toy houses and big, sunny beer gardens along the river bank.”

Looking back at his first exposure to Nazi Germany, Smith, who would much later become a famed TV anchor back home, reported not just on the country but on how his reactions to it changed over time. Based on the evolution of his thinking during what turned into a nearly six-year sojourn in Germany, most of it as a junior reporter for United Press, Smith developed a theory about how Americans and other foreigners tended to evolve in their thinking about that country. He broke the process down into four stages:

“On first glance, Germany was overwhelmingly attractive, and first impressions disarmed many a hardy anti-Nazi before he could lift his lance for attack,” he wrote. “Germany was clean, it was neat, a truly handsome land. Its big cities were cleaner than big cities ought, by custom, to be… The impression was one of order, cleanliness and prosperity—and this has been of immense propaganda value to the Nazis.” On what he called “my first magic day in Bremen,” a dockworker pointed out to him that Germans were “neat, clean and able to do an amazing lot with amazingly little long before Hitler came to power.” The clear message was that visitors were wrong to credit all of what they saw to the new regime.

But, in most cases, they did exactly that. Some visitors never got beyond this stage, which, according to Smith, “bespeaks the sensitivity of a rhinoceros’s hide and the profundity of a tea-saucer.” He mentioned a group of American schoolgirls he saw in Heidelberg as perfect examples. “The principal obstacle in the way of their further progress was, I think, the fact that German men are handsome and wear uniforms.”

During stage two, the most noticeable characteristic of Nazi Germany was “uniforms and guns; the amazing extent to which Germany, even then, was prepared for war. It took my breath away.” The proliferation of men in uniforms—homo militaris, as Smith put it—suddenly transformed Nazi rearmament into a concrete reality. But visitors at stage two were titillated by what they observed. “Or, more than that, it was downright exciting,” Smith admitted. He watched from a window in Nuremberg “a broad undulating river of ten, twenty thousand men in uniform, stamping in unison down the cobble-stone streets below, flooding the valley between the houses with a marching song so loud the windows rattled, and so compelling your very heart adopted its military rhythm.”

As the mesmerizing spectacles of militarism began to loosen their hold, Smith continued, many visitors would progress to stage three, which was less passive and involved coming to some unnerving conclusions. “You began to grasp that what was happening was that young humans, millions of them, were being trained to act merely upon reflexes,” he wrote. All this drilling was aimed at teaching them “to kill, as a reflex… On terse commands which altered their personalities more neatly than Doctor Jekyll became Mr. Hyde, they were learning to smash, crush, destroy, wreck.”

The next level was characterized by “a strange, stark terror.” Those who reached stage four were often overcome with alarm that the rest of the world had no idea what was rising to confront them; they also feared that the unsuspecting outsiders would be no match for the dark forces unleashed in Germany. Once he reached that stage, Smith fretted that the Nazis were “a real, direct and imminent threat to the existence of a civilization which gathers facts and discusses.” The democratic world, for all its admirable qualities, was weak, while Hitler’s world was “mighty, powerful, reckless. It screamed defiance at my world from the housetops. One had to be deaf not to hear it.”

Smith pointed out that some people made the journey from stage one to stage four in as little as a week. Others remained stuck at stage one or two. And still others got to stage three but didn’t necessarily make it to stage four.

Of course, Americans who made only short visits to Germany often failed to get beyond stage one or two—at least, during their actual journeys. Like many wealthy undergraduates, John F. Kennedy took off for Europe in the summer of 1937 after his freshman year at Harvard. Traveling with his friend LeMoyne Billings, he drove around France and Italy before spending five days in Germany, accompanied by a young German woman—“a bundle of fun,” as Kennedy put it—whom they had apparently picked up at the border.

Kennedy’s cryptic diary entries suggest the American visitors came across as somewhat rowdy. The morning after they went to a Munich nightclub “which was a bit different,” he noted that at the Pension Bristol where they stayed there was “the usual amount of cursing and being told we were not gentlemen.” In an entry marked Nuremberg-Württemberg, he wrote: “Started out as usual except this time we had the added attraction of being spitten [sic] on.”

Still, he did make a couple of political observations. “Hitler seems so popular here, as Mussolini was in Italy, although propaganda seems to be his strongest weapon,” he wrote in Munich. Following the Rhine to Cologne, he added: “Very beautiful as there are many castles along the way. All the towns are very attractive, showing the Nordic races certainly seem superior to the Latins. The Germans are really too good—it makes people gang against them for protection…” A year later, his father, Joseph Kennedy, was appointed ambassador to Great Britain, where he quickly gained a reputation as an envoy with pro-German leanings.

Because of his father’s views, it’s easy to read more into John Kennedy’s brief diary entries than they merit. At a minimum, however, they demonstrate the sense of innocence—and ignorance—of many young Americans who visited Nazi Germany in this period.

A year later, in 1938, John Randolph and his wife, Margaret, spent the summer traveling through Europe before returning to his job as an assistant professor of mathematics at Cornell. Unlike Kennedy, they pinched their pennies, staying at youth hostels and biking whenever they could. Randolph’s observations from Germany, where they spent almost all of June, are filled with minute details: the cost of their lodgings, meals and bike rentals, the exact times of the trains they caught, their panic when a suitcase went astray. Also, there are the standard exclamations about the tourist attractions. “The trip up the Rhine from Koblenz to Bingen was wonderful,” he wrote. But there are only a couple of the most tangential allusions to politics, and it’s clear that the Randolphs were oblivious to most of what was happening.

“The morning was nice and bright,” he noted on June 6 in Heidelberg. “All the people and all the swastikas were out in full color.” After arriving on their bikes in Tübingen, he wrote:

“Of all things, we had a private room in a house of the Hitlerjugend and even so paid only one RM [Reichsmark] for two of us. The room had two very nice cots, two little stands, a table, a chair, a large clothes chest, and a telephone. Very nicely furnished with painted walls and ceilings (white) hard wood floors, and large window. The whole hostel was especially built in 1935 and is modern and nice in every way.”

Randolph appeared to believe that the country they were visiting, like their room in the Hitlerjugend house, was nice in every way. When they happened to be caught in an air raid drill in Munich, he dismissed it as “not very interesting.” A German engineer Randolph met on their trip wrote to him in December 1938, angered by what he construed to be anti-German propaganda in the United States. “You realize don’t you that in Germany there is not a single unemployed, and no man that goes hungry in winter or freezes, and this is not so for any other country except Italy which is also under state’s direction. In Germany order and discipline rule. You were here yourself and saw it.” Nothing in Randolph’s diary or papers suggests that he paused to question those claims. He had simply skimmed the surface of Germany and returned as uninformed as when he arrived.

One factor that encouraged such blindness was how, when it came to people-to-people contact, young Americans found Germans friendly and welcoming. After his first summer in Germany in 1936, Howard K. Smith had returned to a job as a reporter for the New Orleans Item, but then felt the lure of Germany again the following summer. Eager to continue his investigation of that country’s political system, he hitchhiked to save money and was surprised to find how easy it was to get around that way. “I simply draped a small American flag over my single bag and those simple, friendly people stopped every time,” he recalled. “The friendliness, the overwhelming hospitality of Germans to foreigners—and especially to Americans—was phenomenal.” Smith believed the impressive performance of the American athletes in the Olympics a year earlier was one reason why “Americans appeared to be the German people’s favorite foreigner.” With that kind of a welcome, many visitors comfortably remained innocents abroad, missing most of what was happening around them.

Yet there was nothing innocent about Nazi Germany by then, especially in 1938. It was a year punctuated by three major events: the Anschluss, Munich and Kristallnacht. The first and second of those events—the annexation and occupation of Austria in March, and then British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s and French Premier Edouard Daladier’s agreement to allow Germany to seize the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia—represented major triumphs for Hitler, transforming his Greater Germany rhetoric into reality and setting the stage for the Drang nach Osten (“Drive to the East”). The third, the attacks on Jewish businesses and homes all over Germany on November 9 and 10, marked a dramatic escalation of Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies.

Those American reporters who had already spent considerable time in Berlin were, as a rule, stripped of most illusions about the new Germany—and some had been sounding the alarm about the country, its rulers and their intentions for quite some time. William Shirer was certainly in that category. But as he marked his third anniversary in Hitler’s Germany in August 1937, he found himself without a job, the victim of his news agency’s cutbacks. He then received a telegram from Salzburg asking if he’d come for dinner at the Adlon Hotel. It was signed “Murrow, Columbia Broadcasting.”

Shirer had only a vague recollection of the name, but he certainly knew the company and its radio broadcasts. When he met Edward R. Murrow, the European manager of CBS, and they had ordered their martinis at the Adlon’s bar, Shirer was struck by Murrow’s handsome face. “Just what you would expect from radio,” he noted in his diary. But he also found him disarmingly sincere: “Something in his eyes that was not Hollywood.” As soon as Shirer passed a voice test, Murrow called to say he was hired.

As the new CBS correspondent, Shirer was supposed to make Vienna his base instead of Berlin. Although his Berlin days were far from really over—he would return there soon enough—Shirer and his Austrian wife, Tess, were relieved to be leaving the German capital in the fall of 1937. Summing up their three years there, he wrote in his diary on September 27: “Personally, they have not been unhappy ones, though the shadow of Nazi fanaticism, sadism, persecution, regimentation, terror, brutality, suppression, militarism, and preparations for war has hung over all our lives, like a dark, brooding cloud that never clears.”

And exactly as Howard K. Smith had described those foreigners who had acquired a real understanding—and sense of horror—about what they were witnessing, Shirer was increasingly alarmed by how oblivious most of the outside world still was about Hitler’s Germany. “Somehow I feel that, despite our work as reporters, there is little understanding of the Third Reich, what it is, what it is up to, where it is going, either at home or elsewhere abroad… Perhaps, as the Nazis say, the Western democracies have become sick, decadent, and have reached that stage of decline which Spengler predicted… Germany is stronger than her enemies realize.” Exasperated, he recalled his futile attempts to convince visitors of those dangers. “How many visiting butter-and-egg men have I told that the Nazi goal is domination!” he wrote. “They laughed.”

Shirer reserved special scorn for the drop-in journalists who took Nazi protestations about their peaceful intentions seriously. “When the visiting firemen from London, Paris, and New York come, Hitler babbles only of peace,” he wrote. “Peace? Read Mein Kampf, brothers.” And he concluded what he thought was his farewell diary entry from Berlin “with the words of a Nazi marching song still dinning in my ears: Today we own Germany, Tomorrow the whole world.”

Stationed in Vienna as Hitler ratcheted up the threats and pressures aimed at forcing the Anschluss with Austria in March 1938, Shirer watched the takeover unfold with sorrow and frustration. At 4 a.m. on March 12, he wrote in his diary: “The worst has happened… The Nazis are in. The Reichswehr is invading Austria. Hitler has broken a dozen solemn promises, pledges, treaties. And Austria is finished. Beautiful, tragic, civilized Austria! Gone.” But his frustration also stemmed from his inability to report the story on CBS; the Nazis would not permit him to broadcast. And his mood wasn’t improved by his family situation: he was worried about Tess, who was still in the hospital recovering from a difficult Caesarean birth of their daughter two weeks earlier.

Although Shirer knew Austria well enough not to romanticize it—he observed how Austrian anti-Semitism “plays nicely in the hands of the Nazis”—he was still startled by how quickly many Austrians not only accepted but embraced their new rulers. After his daily visit to the hospital to check on Tess and the baby, he emerged from the subway at Karlsplatz to find himself swept up in “a shouting, hysterical Nazi mob” marching through the city. “The faces!” he wrote. “I had seen these before at Nuremberg—the fanatical eyes, the gaping mouths, the hysteria.”

As the crowds sang Nazi songs, he spotted a group of policemen looking on in evident good humor. “What’s that on their arm? A red-black-white Swastika arm-band! So they’ve gone over too!” And then there were the immediate attacks on Jews. “Young toughs were heaving paving blocks into windows of the Jewish shops,” he wrote. “The crowd roared with delight.”

Dropping in at the Café Louvre, the hangout of the foreign correspondents, he found his colleagues in a state of high excitement, rushing back and forth to the phone to call in the latest reports and rumors, while other regulars were saddened, even close to tears. Emil Maass, an Austrian-American who had worked earlier as Shirer’s assistant, stopped by his table. He had posed as an anti-Nazi before, but now he didn’t just walk in—he strutted in, as Shirer noted. “Well, meine Damen und Herren, it was about time,” Maass announced with a smirk. Then he ostentatiously turned over his coat lapel, revealing a hidden swastika button, unpinning it and repinning it on the outside of his coat. Two or three women shouted, “Shame!” And a Major Goldschmidt, whom Shirer described as a Catholic who was also half-Jewish, got up from his table. “I will go home and get my revolver,” he declared.

After another futile attempt to arrange a broadcast from Vienna, Shirer took Murrow’s advice to fly to London. It wasn’t that simple, though. As night turned into morning and he set out for the airport, he observed the proliferation of Nazi flags flying from houses. “Where did they get them so fast?” he wondered. At the airport, all the seats on the London flight were taken. “I offered fantastic sums to several passengers for their places. Most of them were Jews and I could not blame them for turning me down,” Shirer wrote. But he succeeded in getting on the flight to Berlin. From there, he found a prompt connection to London, where he could finally make his broadcast.

“This morning when I flew from Vienna at 9 A.M. it looked like any German city in the Reich,” he told his listeners, describing the Nazi flags hanging from most of the balconies and people in the streets greeting each other with Nazi salutes and shouts of “Heil Hitler!” “Arriving in Berlin three hours later I hardly realized I was in another country,” he added. The transformation of Austria was already complete. As for Shirer, he was more than ever convinced that Hitler was only beginning his march of conquest—and that the outside world urgently needed to wake up to the danger.

But that was hardly the prevailing view at the time. Other Americans came to radically different conclusions. Former President Herbert Hoover embarked on a trip to Europe in February 1938. After visiting several other countries—France, Belgium, Switzerland and Czechoslovakia—he went to Germany. His aim was to bolster his credentials when he held forth on key international issues. In particular, he wanted to strengthen his case that the United States needed to stay clear of “entanglements” abroad.

In Berlin, U.S. Ambassador Hugh Wilson told him that Hitler wanted to meet him. Initially, Hoover balked, explaining that he was traveling as a private citizen. Besides, according to his friend Samuel Arentz, Hoover told Wilson that he had been inclined to believe “that Hitler was actually a front man for a group of the brains who were actually running the Nazi party and everything it was doing.” But Wilson pressed him to reconsider, especially in light of his own inability to get to see Hitler. Hoover finally gave in.

Wearing a khaki jacket with a swastika, Hitler greeted the American visitor at the Chancellery on March 8. As they talked, Hoover concluded that Hitler was well informed on issues such as housing, foreign exchange rates and international trade. But according to Arentz, a few key words would set Hitler off and “all of a sudden [he] would jump to his feet and just went to raving talk—tantrums—that showed he was crazy.” Those words were “Jew,” “Communist” and “democracy.”

At one point, Hoover claimed to have interrupted Hitler, declaring, “That’s enough; I’m not interested in hearing your views.” He told Arentz that if Hitler would face an American jury “there wouldn’t be any question about him being declared insane.” Nonetheless, neither Hoover nor Hitler appeared to take serious offense at anything the other said, and the American emerged with a revised view of the German leader. He no longer believed he was merely someone else’s puppet; he could see that he was a force in his own right.

The next day, Hoover had lunch with Goering at his “hunting lodge” east of Berlin, a lavish complex full of tapestries, painting and sculptures. Greeted by sixteen costumed trumpeters, the American was brought up short by the life-sized bust of a woman placed as a centerpiece on the table where they were having lunch. “Yes, that’s solid gold; that’s my first wife,” Goering told him. Knowing about Hoover’s background as a mining engineer, his host pressed him to tell him his views of Russia’s mineral resources. The American gave an optimistic account, telling Arentz later that he’d prefer to have the Germans go east rather than west if they were planning any action in the future.

After Germany, Hoover continued his European journey, visiting Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Sweden. On a final stopover back in England, he spoke with the press. While he acknowledged “many menaces to peace,” he asserted that he did not “believe that a widespread war is probable in the immediate future.” Back in New York, he summed up his views in a speech to the Foreign Policy Association on March 31. Between his meeting with Hitler and that speech, Hitler had completed the annexation of Austria, but that had not altered Hoover’s opinion about the need for America to avoid getting caught up in any new European war. Such a conflict, he said, would “have all the hideous elements of the old religious wars.” His conclusion: “If the world is to keep the peace, then we must keep peace with dictatorships as well as with popular governments. The forms of governments which other peoples pass through in working out their destinies is not our business.”

Hoover’s message was the direct opposite of Shirer’s. Yes, the situation in Europe was dangerous. And, yes, while Hoover believed Germany was not yet ready for military action, he privately conceded that it could take that step later—in all probability, targeting the East. But for him, this was an argument for leaving Hitler’s Germany to its own devices, not for issuing a wake-up call aimed at mobilizing Western nations, including the United States, to try to stop him. He came to Germany with that conviction, and left Germany with his beliefs not only intact but reinforced. Not even his face-to-face encounter with Hitler, complete with tirades and tantrums, could shake his conviction that the only rational American response to the new Germany was, in effect, a shrug of the shoulders.

Jacob Beam was still short of his twenty-seventh birthday when he arrived in Berlin in February 1935 to take up his assignment as third secretary in the U.S. Embassy, with responsibility for reporting on the country’s internal affairs. He would spend a total of five years working in the German capital—“a longer period than can be claimed by any other American official,” as he wrote in his unpublished manuscript about that period.

Despite his youth, Beam was well prepared for his post. His father was a German professor at Princeton, where the younger Beam studied as an undergraduate before continuing his education at Cambridge. Working in the Geneva consulate when he got word of his pending assignment to Berlin, he made a point of seeking “instruction” from Edgar Mowrer, the Chicago Daily News correspondent who had been forced out of Germany in 1933 and was then based in Geneva. “He gave me introductions to representatives of the old regime as well as anti-Nazi dissidents who were to be approached by a cut-out,” Beam recalled. “He even furnished me with a list of women to be avoided.”

While acknowledging that many of those contacts were not representative of the new Germany, he insisted they were still “the most knowledgeable and influential Germans to whom I could have access.” Among them were ardent German nationalists, often from aristocratic families, who considered themselves far superior to the country’s new rulers. “Although cold and severe in their demeanor, they had a code of justice which abhorred Nazi excesses, particularly the mistreatment of the Jews,” he wrote.

Several of these nationalists had American wives. When IBM’s boss Thomas Watson came to visit the company’s German subsidiaries in the summer of 1937, he hosted a large dinner at the Adlon Hotel. Among the guests was Beam, who found himself seated at a table with Norman Ebbut, the Berlin correspondent of the Times of London, a gauleiter (Nazi district leader), and the Count and Countess Seherr-Thoss from East Prussia. The daughter of the former American ambassador to France Henry White, Muriel White had married Hermann Seherr-Thoss in 1909; she was also the sister of one of the diplomats stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin. Beam and Ebbut witnessed her exchange with the gauleiter as the dinner was ending.

“Is it true that the Party sometimes rewards deserving Jews by making them honorary Aryans?” she asked.

When the gauleiter conceded that this happened on occasion, the countess followed up with a line that she must have been mulling over for quite some time. “Can you tell me then how I could become an honorary Jew?”

That kind of bold behavior was hardly typical by then, either for Germans or their American spouses. And Beam’s implicit message that many American wives of German nationalists were at heart anti-Nazi is contradicted by the account of the Chicago Tribune’s Sigrid Schultz. “Foreign women married to Germans often became fervent Nazis,” she wrote. “One American-born countess refused to be introduced to me because I ‘maligned Nazi Germany.’” Schultz had helped found the American Women’s Club in Berlin, but resigned from it before the outbreak of World War II because, as she explained, it had become “a hot-bed of Nazi propaganda” and “a regular rendezvous for American women married to Germans and for their Nazi intimates.”

Schultz observed the broader phenomenon of how the Nazis “commanded a hysterical fanaticism among some foreign women, Americans included.” Elizabeth Dilling, a shrill anti-Communist crusader from Chicago who saw President Roosevelt as the embodiment of all evil, visited Germany in 1931 and again in 1938. On her second visit, she was delighted by “the great improvement of conditions there.” She added, “Personally I thank God for the opposition Germany is making against communism.” On yet another visit a short time later—this one paid for by her German hosts—she attended the Nuremberg Party rally and proclaimed, “The German people under Hitler are contented and happy… don’t believe the stories you hear that this man has not done a great good for this country.”

Schultz recalled seeing Dilling in the dining room where the foreign press and other visitors ate. Dressed in a bright red hat, Dilling went from table to table, pointing to the journalists and “doing a lot of agitated whispering.” After such exchanges, the people she had been talking to would fall silent whenever one of the journalists was nearby. Her curiosity aroused, Schultz caught up with a young American woman who was accompanying Dilling. She demanded to know just what the older woman was doing.

“You are an enemy of Germany, and we must see that our friends do not speak in front of you,” the young American declared.

“And what makes you think I am an enemy of Germany?” Schultz inquired.

“Because of the reports you write against us.”

Schultz emphasized that the young American used the word “us,” leaving no doubt that she and her mentor identified with the Nazis.

Later, Rolf Hoffmann, a local Nazi propagandist, came up to Schultz and apologized for Dilling’s behavior. He told her that the American visitor had insisted that both she and Wallace Deuel of the Chicago Daily News should be expelled from the country. He explained to Dilling that, even if Schultz was critical in her reporting, she tried to be fair. “These foreign sympathizers are so swept away by their emotions, they don’t know how to express their enthusiasm,” he said, smiling.

Like many of the veteran journalists, Beam had little patience for the likes of Dilling: Americans who came to Germany and admired the Nazis. Early in his tour, however, he did offer a positive assessment of the Arbeitsdienst, the Nazi-organized compulsory six months of labor service for males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. Henry Leverich, an embassy colleague, had been allowed to spend time at three of the Arbeitsdienst camps and was impressed, as Beam recalled, by “the magnificent physical condition of the camp inmates; their pride in their camp and their work…” He noted later that this would prove good training for military service when many of these men would be called up during the war.

Beam was also given his chance to view a Nazi program firsthand—Kraft durch Freude, Strength Through Joy, that offered cheap cruises for workers to boost their morale. Permitted to travel on a one-week cruise of the North Sea, he concluded, “The tours were well-organized, without undue overcrowding, and the satisfaction of the group appeared to be genuine.” As Beam later pointed out, his and Leverich’s positive reporting on those programs contributed to the judgment of some of their superiors back in Washington that they were soft on the Nazis.

But Beam quickly became a perceptive observer of his surroundings, coming to share the far more critical views of many of the other Americans who knew Germany well. He noticed both the pageantry and propaganda, and the bizarre and the brutal.

To mark the anniversary of Hitler’s coming to power in 1933, every January 30 the Nazis would hold a torchlight parade, and the Foreign Ministry would invite diplomats from various embassies to witness the procession. In 1937, the Americans and the Brazilians were invited. Beam and his colleague James Riddleberger came from the U.S. Embassy, and they were positioned at a window next to the balcony from where Hitler reviewed the SS troops carrying the torches.

After the parade, the American and Brazilian diplomats thought they would be escorted out. Instead, an excited Hitler came up to them, asking for their reactions. When they obliged by saying they were impressed, he invited them next door to the president’s palace, which earlier had been occupied by Hindenburg and was now the scene of a party. As they entered a room that was full of Nazis in uniform, Hitler called over the waiters to make sure each of the diplomats was offered a beer. Then, he clapped his hands and shouted the first words of the “Horst Wessel Song,” the Nazi anthem, as he ordered the crowd to make a path for him. This was the prelude to one of his stranger performances, a rare attempt at humor on his part.

As Beam recalled, Hitler goose-stepped across the room “ostensibly imitating a somewhat slovenly stormtrooper with a protruding stomach.” Reaching a bust of himself, he saluted, turned around and marched back, this time adopting “the style of the SS, with stomach tucked in and lips tightly buttoned.” The assembled Nazi brass didn’t know how to react. After they awkwardly applauded, one of Hitler’s aides nudged the Americans and Brazilians out the door.

There was nothing even vaguely amusing about the Nazis’ ferocious enforcement methods. Beam concluded that they blotted out their “most vaunted domestic achievements.” One bit of evidence that impressed upon him their “blood-lust and brutality” was provided by his colleague, Marselis Parsons. The American vice-consul was sent to witness the cremation of the body of a man who was executed for allegedly trying to assassinate Julius Streicher, the rabidly anti-Semitic founder of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer. The victim had claimed American citizenship, which was why a representative of the embassy was present to collect his remains. But before the coffin was pushed into the fire, Parsons noticed how short it was. The reason: the victim had been beheaded, and his head was placed “in the crook of his elbow.”

Like many of the career foreign service officers at the American Embassy, Beam was pleased to see Ambassador Dodd depart at the end of 1937. He considered him to be “dignified, considerate, sound in his judgment of the Nazis, but very inarticulate.” And he shared the view that the historian had “embarrassed the U.S. government” with his undiplomatic statements—although Beam stressed that this was “not because of their anti-Nazi content but because they had set off press speculation that the German Government would soon feel compelled to demand his removal.” He also faulted Dodd for “antagonizing most of the State Department’s high command.”

For all those reasons, Beam welcomed the appointment in early 1938 of foreign service veteran Hugh Wilson, who had first served in Berlin for a few months back in 1916 and then from 1920 to 1923. His track record as a diplomat and in Washington, where he served as assistant secretary of state before he was sent to Berlin again, convinced Beam that their new boss was a seasoned professional. “We respected Mr. Wilson’s competence,” he noted. The new envoy was, in Beam’s words, “a veteran, ‘you have to show me’ type diplomat who disapproved of his predecessor’s disorderly performance.”

But, as Beam soon realized, Dodd may have been more accurate in his critical assessment of the Nazi regime than his more experienced replacement. Wilson was “somewhat skeptical of the negative views held by some of us on his staff who had spent a couple of years or more in Berlin,” Beam recalled. He also pointed out that this wasn’t an uncommon experience “since we found it took some time to educate official newcomers to the facts of living with the Nazis.”

Wilson knew that other foreign service officers with extensive Berlin experience, especially former Consul General Messersmith, saw the Nazi regime as an extremely dangerous enemy. But if Messersmith and some others held this stage-four view, Wilson arrived with an attitude that wasn’t marked by the naïve admiration characteristic of stage one—but was still far from viewing Hitler’s Germany with alarm. Determined to reach his own judgments, Wilson wanted “to concentrate on the diplomatic aspects of the peace in Europe,” as Beam put it. He didn’t want a confrontation with the Nazis over their internal policies or their broader ambitions; he wanted to use the traditional tools of diplomacy to keep the peace.

For those American diplomats like Beam who were no longer willing to suspend judgment on the Nazi regime, the arrival of Wilson proved to be a classic case of the perils of getting what you wish for. Beam and several of his colleagues also quickly concluded that Wilson “was ‘not on the inside track’ either in Berlin or in Washington when it came to dealing with the affairs of state at the highest level.” Dodd had maintained personal relations with Roosevelt, despite his antagonistic relationship with the president’s appointees at the State Department. And while he was ineffective in his dealings with the Nazis, the former ambassador had quickly shed any illusions that they might moderate their policies.

Wilson, by contrast, believed that there should be no rush to judgment on Hitler’s regime, even in 1938, and that traditional diplomacy could avert a confrontation with it. This was precisely the kind of mind-set that would be eagerly embraced by Britain and France, setting the stage for Munich.

After Wilson presented his credentials to Hitler on March 3, 1938, he promptly wrote to Roosevelt. He found that “the principal impression I carried away is the lack of drama in this exceedingly dramatic figure,” he reported. “He was clad as I was in a dress suit, and wore only one order, the Iron Cross. He is more healthy looking than I had anticipated, more solid, more erect. The complexion is pale, but there is more character in his face than I had imagined from the photographs. He speaks with a strong Austrian accent, but was quite easy to follow.”

Wilson added: “He is a man who does not look at you steadily but gives you an occasional glance as he talks. In our conversation at least he was restrained and made no gestures of any kind.” When Wilson politely told his host he was interested in meeting the man who had pulled his country out of such poverty and despair and produced prosperity and pride, Hitler was reluctant “to assume for himself the credit for the work which is being done.” The envoy found that appealing, although he confessed that their talk was “colorless” and “the very negative nature of my impressions was surprising.” When he had met Mussolini earlier, Wilson had the feeling that he could have happily invited him for dinner and further conversation over a beer. “I had no such desire on leaving Hitler,” he declared.

After a subsequent meeting on March 12, he wrote again to Roosevelt, pointing out that the frequent descriptions by Germans of Hitler as an artist were on target—“in the sense of a man who arrives at his conclusions and undertakes his actions through instinct rather than ratiocination.” He indicated that Hitler was well informed, “but his reasoning, while making use of this knowledge, tends to justify an emotional concept.” As a result, he concluded, “if we think of Hitler as an artist, it explains a great deal.”

That was the same day as the Anschluss, when “the artist” orchestrated the annexation of Austria. In his diary entry for that day, Wilson assessed that event with cool detachment. “One may judge the action from the moral point of view with condemnation,” he wrote. “One may deplore the brutality of it. One must admire the efficiency of the action.”

In a letter to Secretary of State Hull on March 24, Wilson argued that since “the smoke and dust of the Austrian Anschluss have begun to settle,” it was time to view what had happened with just that kind of dispassionate judgment. “Whether we like it or not, the Germans’ economic predominance through this region is now, I believe, a fact,” he wrote. By seizing Austria, he continued, Hitler had completed two parts of his original Nazi program—“the union of all Germans on the basis of self determination” and “the equality of rights of the German people vis-à-vis other nations and the cancellation of the peace treaties of Versailles and St. Germain.” Only the third part—the push for Lebensraum, German territorial expansion into Russia—remained unfulfilled. In a subsequent letter to Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, he pointed out that even Germans who were secretly opposed to Hitler “confess that their hearts swelled with pride when Austria was annexed.”

Wilson was intrigued by what he was observing, but nowhere near as alarmed as Beam and others felt he should be. “This place is all so darned absorbing and interesting,” he added in his letter to Welles. His real feelings came out most strongly in reply to a letter from Hoover, which the former president wrote to him after returning to the United States and delivering his March 31 speech urging Americans to steer clear of any involvement in Europe’s conflicts or domestic affairs. Enclosing a copy of his speech, Hoover argued that it had served its purpose “of bringing our people to a realization we must live with other nations.” Wilson responded that he had read the speech “with a lot of satisfaction.” And he echoed its sentiments: “I wish our people in general could understand how little is gained by scolding other people, and how much is gained by trying to work with them.”

Wilson wasn’t blind to the persecution of the Jews, although he did hold out hope in a letter to Roosevelt on June 2 that there could be “an attempt to work out some kind of acceptable solution” to the continued Nazi confiscations of Jewish property. And he worried about the dangers of another major war, mentioning the parallels to 1914 in a letter to William Bullitt, the American ambassador in Paris. But his conclusion was always the same. Writing again to Welles on June 20, he declared: “Twenty years ago we tried to save the world and now look at it. If we tried to save the world again, it would be just as bad at the end of the conflict. The older I grow the deeper is my conviction that we have nothing to gain by entering a European conflict, and indeed everything to lose.”

In his letters and reports, Wilson repeatedly emphasized that Hitler enjoyed the active or passive support of most Germans and that it was wishful thinking to believe that his regime could collapse—or that the minority who opposed it could do anything to make that happen. But as Hitler increased the pressure on Czechoslovakia at the end of the summer, Beam, who had nurtured his contacts with conservative opponents of the Nazis, returned to the embassy with a report that raised the possibility that Wilson was wrong on that score. He had stumbled on what looked like nothing less than a plot to assassinate Hitler.

Among Beam’s acquaintances was Erwin Respondek, whom he described as “a valuable informant” passed along to him by Douglas Miller, the embassy’s commercial attaché, who had left Berlin in 1937. A Catholic economist who despised Hitler and his movement, Respondek had served in the Reichstag in the early 1930s, when the Center Party’s Heinrich Brüning was chancellor. Brüning’s attempts to ban the SA and the SS won him the enmity of the Nazis, and he fled the country in 1934. But Respondek could afford to stay in Berlin, since he was hardly a famous figure. While he was banned from politics, he continued to monitor information on the country’s economy and finances, passing reports along to both the American Embassy, through Miller, and Brüning. In the second week of September, when the crisis of Czechoslovakia was building to its climax, Beam was invited to a Herrenabend, a men’s evening, at Respondek’s house on the outskirts of Berlin.

It was a small gathering. Aside from Beam and his host, there was Professor Hermann Muckermann, a former Jesuit priest who wrote about science and Christian ethics, and ventured into the discussions about racial theories and eugenics. The other guest was a Luftwaffe colonel. Once Respondek’s wife served dinner and left the men alone, Respondek declared, “Let’s get down to business and talk about the matter we came here to discuss.” As Beam recalled, the talk then turned to Hitler’s apparent determination to seize the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. From the comments of both Respondek and the colonel, it appeared that they were part of a conspiracy against Hitler that included General Franz Halder, who had recently replaced General Ludwig Beck as the army’s chief of staff. Beck had sought assurances from Hitler that his plans for Czechoslovakia wouldn’t lead to a war, only to be dismissed. Now, if Respondek and the Luftwaffe colonel’s information was accurate, his successor and several other senior officers appeared to be contemplating a stunning act of resistance.

As Beam wrote, “The plan was to assassinate Hitler if he moved to the point of making war.” Muckermann was visibly nervous about that kind of talk, and around midnight he whispered to the young American: “Let’s get out of here fast.” Making their excuses, Beam drove Mucker-mann back to the city center, both of them breathing a sigh of relief as he did so.

Back at the embassy, Beam wrote a report for Wilson on what had transpired, showing it first to Truman Smith. The military attaché made light of Beam’s account, claiming that no such plot was conceivable in Hitler’s highly disciplined army. Beam submitted his report to Wilson anyway, and he believed that the ambassador passed it along to one of Hull’s advisors. But he never heard anything back either from Wilson or Washington.

After Britain’s Chamberlain and France’s Daladier acceded to Hitler’s demands for the Sudetenland later that month, Beam encountered Respondek again and inquired what had happened with the alleged Halder plot against the German leader. “He said that since Hitler had not gone to war, the coup had been abandoned,” Beam wrote later. This was consistent with what Halder and several other Wehrmacht (Army) officers claimed at the end of World War II. They were undoubtedly eager to play up their purported opposition to Hitler, and much of what they had to say was greeted with understandable skepticism by the victors, especially at the Nuremberg Trials. But Beam’s account indicates that they had at least seriously discussed the option of striking at Hitler then.

Once the German leader successfully pulled off the Munich Pact, however, the situation changed radically. France and Britain had caved to Hitler’s demands for the Sudetenland, marking the apogee of the policy of appeasement and setting the stage for the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia that would culminate in the German takeover of what was left of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939. As Field Marshal Erich von Manstein explained after the war: “We had watched Germany’s precarious course along the razor’s edge to date with close attention and were increasingly amazed at Hitler’s luck in attaining—hitherto without recourse to arms—all his overt and covert political aims. The man seemed to have an infallible instinct.”

But if Munich eliminated any chance of a revolt of Hitler’s military brass prior to World War II, Ambassador Wilson—like Britain’s Chamberlain and France’s Daladier, who had signed onto the ignominious pact—viewed the outcome there as a step toward sanity. In a letter that he wrote to Secretary Hull soon after, which for an unexplained reason he never mailed, Wilson drew a contrast between “the spontaneous outburst of joy, relief and hope for the future” that greeted news of the Munich Pact in Western Europe with the “rather reluctant appreciation given in the press of our country.”

His judgment on which reaction was more justified came through loud and clear. The British and the French, he wrote, “have perhaps a deeper knowledge and appreciation of the problems of Europe than the American people, remote from Europe, can have… it is far easier to be dogmatic in one’s judgments with a wide stretch of sea between our country and a possible enemy.” According to Beam, Wilson wrote to “his British colleague”—presumably that country’s ambassador in Berlin—about the “stout piece of work” he had done to help produce the Munich Pact.

Roosevelt had sounded a similar note when he had congratulated Chamberlain on the “peace” deal. But at the very least, there was a growing awareness in Washington that the pact had come at a very high price. Writing in his diary on September 28, Jay Pierrepont Moffat, the State Department’s chief of the Division of European Affairs, noted: “I do think the chances of preserving the peace have immeasurably improved but it likewise is difficult for me to see how this can be done except at the expense of Czechoslovakia.”

Beam, who returned to the United States on home leave in October, found Washington’s mood to be “completely different” from the one that was predominating in diplomatic circles in Berlin. “There was a general sense of outrage over the Austrian take-over, as high-lighted by the plight of resident Jews, as well as over the Nazis’ unopposed and clearly predestined subjugation of Czechoslovakia,” he recalled. At a meeting he attended with Hull, the secretary of state “vented his frustration in Biblical predictions of impending European disaster.”

It wasn’t just many Americans back home who took a different view. So did some of the Americans reporting from Germany, most notably Shirer, who was back in Berlin as Hitler pushed Europe to the brink. Sitting in the balcony just above Hitler as the dictator issued his demands in a speech on September 26, Shirer recorded in his diary: “He’s still got that nervous tic. All during his speech he kept cocking his shoulder, and the opposite leg from the knee down would bounce up. Audience couldn’t see it, but I could.” Shirer added that “for the first time in all the years I’ve observed him he seemed tonight to have completely lost control of himself.”

Shirer had been hoping all along that the Czechs would fight, even if the British and the French wanted to convince them otherwise. “For if they do, then there’s a European war, and Hitler can’t win it,” he wrote in his diary on September 19. When the appeasement deal was struck, Shirer was practically sickened by the cheers for peace—“a curious commentary on this sick, decadent continent,” he wrote. And he observed the physical change in the German leader. “How different Hitler at two this morning… I noticed his swagger. The tic was gone!”

Shirer understood that Hitler had been allowed to score a victory that, far from ensuring “peace for our time” as Chamberlain famously claimed, would have disastrous consequences. His gloom only deepened for another reason: Max Jordan of NBC managed to air the text of the Munich Pact an hour before Shirer did. For the CBS man, this amounted, in his own words, to “one of the worst beatings I’ve ever taken.”

Angus Thuermer was another young American who was eager to explore Hitler’s Germany, arriving there in 1938. After he graduated from the University of Illinois, his father had suggested that he should spend six months studying German in Berlin, and then six months studying French in Paris. “He was giving me an extra year of college,” Thuermer recalled, looking back at that life-changing experience more than seven decades later. But instead of going on to France, he stayed in Germany, not only studying the language but also picking up work from American correspondents there. Soon, he was offered a full-time job for the Associated Press, working under bureau chief Louis Lochner right up until the United States entered World War II in December 1941.

While he was still living in Hegel Haus, a dormitory for foreign students in Berlin, in late 1938, Thuermer took a trip to Munich, eager to see the Nazis’ annual observance of “The Ninth of November”—the anniversary of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch when sixteen members of the movement were killed. Arriving in that city, Thuermer met a young American missionary who spoke fluent German and managed to convince an SS man to admit the two of them to the VIP grandstand so that they could see how the “martyrs” were honored. (The SS man didn’t know the American was a missionary.) As a result, Thuermer had a clear view of the procession of Nazi luminaries, which included Goebbels, Hess, Himmler, Goering and Hitler.

“Loose as the formation was, in the midst of his Brownshirt chums, Hitler, the Leader, walked just slightly apart,” Thuermer wrote in his unpublished memoir. “By his stature, his gait, the cut of his jib, a sailor would say, he was not impressive. If I had not known for whom to look, I might have passed him by in a general glance over the group.”

But the ceremony itself was solemn and, for the party faithful, moving. A man carried “the Blood Banner” in front of the leaders. “The configuration was reminiscent of the acolyte carrying the cross up the nave of the church,” Thuermer noted. Every 50 yards or so, there was a 20-foot-high bright red temporary obelisk bearing the name of one of “the fallen.” When they reached Königsplatz, two white stone mausoleums, each containing eight bronze coffins, were flanked by hundreds of motionless SS men. As a speaker called out the names on the coffins, the SS men answered in unison “Hier!” The ceremony ended with the “Horst Wessel Song,” the Nazi anthem that, as Thuermer put it, was “a genuine rouser.”

It included the words: “Comrades shot by the red front and reactionaries march in spirit in our ranks.”

Once the ceremony was over, Thuermer bought himself a third-class ticket and boarded the overnight train to Berlin, stowing his bicycle in the baggage car. Lulled to sleep in the train, he had no idea what was happening that night around the country. Arriving in the capital, he retrieved his bike and rode from the station to Hegel Haus, hoping to make it in time to get a cheap breakfast there. Suddenly, he heard “the smash and tinkle of breaking glass.” Applying his hand brake, he saw a shattered show window just ahead of him. Unbeknownst to him, he was witnessing part of what would be called Kristallnacht. Although most of the violence had taken place during the early morning hours, he saw thugs with Nazi armbands still smashing shop windows, and someone inside the store breaking a grand piano to pieces. He saw a typewriter come flying out of another window and land on Unter den Linden—“one of the great avenues of Western Europe.”

After a brief stop at Hegel Haus, Thuermer and a Dutch student rode their bicycles around the city to see more. Down one street, they saw smoke from a burning synagogue, but they decided not to risk getting closer, fearing they would be arrested. “I was seeing, eye-witnessing an unreal frenzy… it was the n-th power of what I had seen at Nazi rallies,” he recalled. “That was sound. This was fury.” Since Jewish shops had the names of their owners written in white paint on the front window, they were easy to spot. Thuermer saw one shop with a new sign announcing THIS SHOP IS BEING PURCHASED BY AN ARYAN. Later that same day, the sign was changed to this HAS BEEN PURCHASED BY AN ARYAN. The unmistakable message: it should no longer be targeted.

Eager to see as much as possible, Thuermer and an English student took buses to other parts of the city. While they stopped to observe the spectacle, the locals were doing just the opposite at first. “The citizens were just walking along staring straight ahead, pretending they didn’t know what was happening,” he said. By the afternoon, though, crowds were no longer pretending; they watched the destruction in the areas with the most Jewish shops. Some of those who were continuing to smash at will were boys in their teens; others were grown men. Very few police were in sight. As Thuermer observed, “Those who were there were uncharacteristically unobtrusive, obviously following orders not to interfere with the rowdy Brownshirts.”

Thuermer offered two possible explanations for the lack of any opposition to this orgy of anti-Semitic violence: most Germans, by this time, “believed in it all” when it came to Nazi ideology; or they were too frightened to say anything. “By the autumn of 1938 everyone knew what happened to opponents of the regime,” he wrote.

Other Americans also witnessed Kristallnacht and felt its consequences. Charles Thayer, a diplomat assigned to the Berlin consulate, heard horror stories from all around the city. One of his friends witnessed how Nazis threw a small boy from a second-floor window into a mob below. “His leg broken, the boy tried to crawl on hands and knees through the forest of kicking black boots until my friend plunged into the mob and rescued him,” he recounted. While synagogues burned, the thugs ransacked Jewish-owned department stores. At Wertheim, they pushed grand pianos off the gallery level so that they would smash to pieces on the main floor six floors down.

As the violence continued for two days, the American consulate’s staff had to duck in and out of the building through the fire escape in the back because, in the front, panicked Jews blocked the entrance as they tried to get in. “All day long Kempinskis, Wertheims, Rosenthals, some of the oldest and most famous names in Berlin, trembled in front of our desks, pleading for visas or passports—anything to save them from the madness that had seized the city,” Thayer recalled. His small apartment, he added, “was crammed with Jewish families seeking refuge until the storm subsided.”

Thayer appeared to be more generous than Thuermer in his assessment of the reaction of ordinary Berliners to those events, explaining that “the many Berliners who were neither Nazis nor Jews stood by looking aghast and ashamed but helpless at the sordid spectacle.” Still, after the war he confessed that he had a less forgiving attitude than that. During the heavy Allied bombing raids on German cities, especially those with historic Old Towns like Hamburg, he wondered whether the destruction was really necessary. “But for Berlin I seldom felt a qualm,” he wrote.

“That ugly old city, it seemed to me, had been the seat of too much evil to deserve either remorse or sorrow when it was smashed to pieces like the pianos at Wertheims.”

For all the shattered glass, however, it still remained possible for American visitors to come to Germany and miss much of what was happening around them. Phillips Talbot, who had studied along with Thuermer at the University of Illinois and would become a well-known Asian specialist and diplomat, visited Berlin soon after Kristallnacht. He had been a cub reporter for the Chicago Daily News and was invited by Wallace Deuel, its Berlin correspondent, to stay in his apartment. Talbot met up with Thuermer, who pointed out the evidence of what had just transpired. “Do you see that?” he asked, pointing to a second-story shattered window on the Kurfürstendamm. “I watched them break that one on the big night.”

Speaking about his brief experience in Germany long afterward, Talbot admitted that if it hadn’t been for what he learned from Thuermer and Deuel, he could have easily missed much of what was happening. And he still came away with, at the very least, mixed impressions. “Measured by efficiency, it [Germany] didn’t look bad,” he recalled. In a letter dated December 27, 1938, written shortly after his German visit, he wrote: “But it would be unfair to mention the evidences of the anti-Jewish campaign without some of the other things I saw.” He listed “the physical results of Nazism… the super-roads, the busy slum clearance and new housing, the bridges and public buildings,” which “all give the country a flavor of newness.” He did add, though, that “some of the stories of methods told by people who should have no ax to grind are chilling.”

For many of those Americans who had been monitoring these chilling developments, it was no longer possible to pretend that the new Germany represented anything like a normal mixture of good and bad, and should still be treated like a normal country. In a letter to Assistant Secretary of State Francis B. Sayre on November 14, Wilson finally admitted that it was futile to keep hoping that reasonable officials within the German government would succeed in producing “some moderation of the National Socialist racial policy, at least to the extent of permitting orderly emigration of Jews with a fairly substantial portion of their property.” He concluded, “The events of the last few days apparently dispel such hopes.”

Facing growing outrage against the Nazi regime, the Roosevelt Administration recalled Wilson to Washington for consultations the next day. He would formally remain ambassador to Germany until August 31, 1939, the eve of Germany’s invasion of Poland, but he never returned to Berlin during that period. After Wilson’s departure, the embassy was run by lower-level diplomats. Although he had been disappointed by Wilson’s performance, Jacob Beam noted that the decision not to replace him “dealt our Embassy a sad blow.” Without an ambassador to maintain ties at the senior level with Nazi officials, he wrote, “a bizarre state of non-communication was allowed to develop to our overall disadvantage.”

Many of the embassy staffers were focused increasingly on determining Germany’s war capabilities and intentions, and no one was more experienced in that department than Truman Smith. The veteran military attaché was constantly on the lookout for new opportunities to gather more intelligence. He had engineered Lindbergh’s visits to Germany that had provided an inside look at many of the Luftwaffe’s factories and airfields. At the same time, he took advantage of the arrival of two other U.S. Army officers who were provided with a different kind of inside look at another aspect of the German military—in this case, its officer training program and its engineering capabilities.

Remarkably and inconspicuously, the United States and Germany had agreed in 1935 on an exchange of students in its officer training schools—the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and the German War College, or Kriegsakademie, in Berlin. The program was to start the following year, but the Germans failed to avail themselves of this opportunity, probably because of their belief that their officers could get better training at home. “It was suggested tactfully that the Germans did not think very highly of the U.S. course of instruction at Leavenworth,” wrote Albert C. Wedemeyer, the American officer who enrolled in the German War College, staying for the full two-year course from 1936 to 1938.

At the time a young captain from Nebraska, the “tall and handsome” Wedemeyer, as Kay Smith noted, immediately hit it off with her husband. Kätchen Smith, their daughter, recalled that Wedemeyer and Paul Thompson, another young officer from the Midwest who was also studying in Germany, would often come over for Sunday brunch. Thompson was an army engineer and he was enrolled at the Technical University in Berlin.

According to Kay, Thompson was “out-going, hard-working, modest, handsome with rosy cheeks, brown eyes and dark hair and a winning personality. He was very young and naïve socially but not professionally.” Or, as Kätchen recalls, “Paul was wet behind the ears—truly innocent.” Her parents worried about his relationship with a German woman named Friedl, fearing that she could be taking advantage of him. When he announced to the Smiths that he was going to marry her right before he was due to sail back home, Truman told Kay: “I hope she is not just getting a trip to the United States as so many have.” But the Smiths attended their civil wedding and saw them off.

Since Thompson had already acquired considerable experience dealing with flood control on the Mississippi River, he didn’t feel he was learning much in his courses in Berlin. Truman managed to get him assigned to a German Army engineer battalion instead, where he closely observed the Germans’ methods and equipment. His subsequent report, according to Kay, “brought Thompson to the attention of his superiors in his branch and from then on… his rise was spectacular.” He later trained U.S. Army engineers for the D-Day invasion and landed on Omaha Beach, where he was shot through the jaw. He survived and was decorated for bravery. After the war, he retired from the Army and started a second career as a senior executive at Reader’s Digest.

But of the two young American officers who studied in Germany in this period, it was Wedemeyer—who would later rise much higher in the military hierarchy, succeeding General Joseph Stillwell as commander of U.S. forces in China—who gathered the most valuable information. The young captain took his duties as an exchange student at the German War College extremely seriously, keeping a meticulous record of everything he learned and observed over two years, which he summarized in a 147-page report for his military superiors. It offered the military brass valuable insights into the training provided to many of the best German officers who were destined to fight in World War II.

In his report, Wedemeyer left no doubt how much he admired the German training program and its mix of in-depth military history and practical exercises of “Troop Leading,” allowing the officers to simulate battlefield conditions they were likely to face so that they could apply new tactics. “The situations presented at the Kriegsakademie involve War of Movement, special emphasis being placed upon speed, in anticipation of the employment of mechanized and motorized forces,” he wrote. Officers were taught to make quick decisions, recognizing “that a fair decision given in time for aggressive execution is much better than one wholly right but too late.”

All of which indicated that the Germans were preparing for new forms of combat. “They visualize rapidly changing situations in modern warfare and gearing their command and staff operations accordingly,” he wrote. In essence, he was previewing the blitzkrieg tactics that Hitler would first unleash on Poland the following year.

In his postwar memoir, Wedemeyer openly stated what he had clearly implied. Deeply impressed by “German methods and quality of the instruction,” he concluded: “The German pedagogy and curriculum were, in my judgment, superior to our own.” By comparison, he felt that the instruction he had received at Fort Leavenworth was “much more theoretical” and the instructors mostly “mediocre.” In Berlin, his chief instructor was Major Ferdinand Jodl, the brother of Alfred Jodl, who would become a top commander in World War II and was convicted and hanged as a war criminal at Nuremberg. The lesser-known brother was “outstanding as a teacher,” Wedemeyer recalled, and overall he found the lectures at the German War College to be “thought-provoking” and comprehensive.

It was the practical training that left a particularly strong impression. “One of the map problems given while I was a student in Berlin involved a hypothetical attack against Czechoslovakia,” he wrote. “Later, it developed that the problem was not so hypothetical.” In his 1938 report, Wedemeyer included a broad array of details on everything from German weaponry to courier pigeons, but he didn’t spell out the obvious key conclusion. In his memoir, he made up for that omission. Pointing out that he could not have predicted the mistakes that would lead Hitler to disaster, he declared: “But assuredly I recognized that the Nazi leaders were preparing for war.”

During his studies in Berlin, Wedemeyer was careful not to discuss politics with his German counterparts. But he did write later that they sometimes “subtly revealed” their disapproval of their rulers. “There would be veiled statements, sometimes hints which would indicate shame, disgust, or displeasure with the Nazis.” He met General Ludwig Beck, who was ousted as the army’s chief of staff in 1938 and would later be executed for his role in the July 20, 1944, plot against Hitler. And among Wedemeyer’s classmates was Captain Claus von Stauffenberg, who carried the briefcase with the bomb that failed to kill the German leader; he was promptly executed as well. During his time at the German War College, Wedemeyer recalled, Stauffenberg recited poetry at parties and was “not always discreet in expressing his contempt for the Nazis or for Hitler.” But he was hugely popular, and he was never denounced for his views. Nonetheless, Wedemeyer felt that such anti-Nazi sentiment wasn’t all that widespread within the military in that period.

Wedemeyer also had the opportunity to observe Nazi bigwigs up close. Invited to a party where several of them were present, he wrote off Hess as “stolid, not overly intelligent,” but Goebbels was “a dynamo with a brain” and Goering “gave the impression of being jovial and an ebullient extrovert.”

As such descriptions imply, Wedemeyer genuinely enjoyed his two years in Berlin. He found both his classmates and instructors, whatever their views, to be “at all times friendly.” And soon he felt comfortable enough to engage in a bit of humor. When he first started arriving for classes, he didn’t know what to say when the cleaning women working on their hands and knees in the hallway would shoot out their right arms and greet him with “Heil Hitler.” Then, he started replying with “Heil Roosevelt.” By his second year, those exchanges had become legendary in the school, and the charwomen would greet him with the Nazi salute but say “Heil Roosevelt.” He then replied, “Heil Hitler.”

Later, when Wedemeyer was suspected of pro-German sympathies, he explained how easily such banter could be misinterpreted. But there was little doubt that, even after World War II, he felt far more sympathetic to Germany than most of his countrymen. “… however greatly one was revolted by Hitler’s treatment of the Jews and his arrogant bullying of small neighboring nations, one was compelled by knowledge of the record and the facts of Germany’s situation to understand the dynamic of self-preservation which underlay the Nazi revolution,” he wrote. Germans felt that Hitler had raised them from the abyss, he added. “It did not require any prolonged study of history to learn how false was the popular image of Germany as the most aggressive of nations and recurrent disturber of the peace.”

At the German War College, Wedemeyer pointed out that he was exposed to constant lectures about the Bolshevik menace. “Beneath the propaganda I discerned a great deal of truth about Communist aims, practices, methods unknown or ignored in America until recently,” he wrote. In other words, he came to believe that the Roosevelt Administration was wrong to consider Germany to be the main danger in Europe. “I was convinced that the German search for Lebensraum did not menace the Western World to anything like the same degree as the world-wide Communist conspiracy centered in Moscow.”

Like Lindbergh, Wedemeyer gained remarkable insights into the German military buildup but came away convinced that the United States should stay out of the looming conflict in Europe. According to Kay Smith, however, Wedemeyer and her husband also had a significant talk in 1938. “It was Al with whom Truman first discussed plans for an assault of Germany if needed,” she wrote in her unpublished memoir. “That discussion took place in our apartment.”

The two men regularly compared notes on their experiences, and Smith shared his knowledge about Germany’s rapid military buildup, which he was conveying in his regular reports to Washington. “I like to think that some of Truman Smith’s shrewdness and knowledge rubbed off on me during my German War College period,” Wedemeyer wrote. Once he returned to the United States, Wedemeyer had little patience for those who were curious about the political situation in Germany. “I had been disillusioned by the superficiality and nonmilitary type of questions put to me,” he observed. “I had been asked all sorts of questions about Hitler’s peculiarities, the Nazi persecution of Jews, and about Goebbels and Goering’s love life, but almost nothing pertaining to strategy, or German capabilities, military training, and organization.”

But there was one man who asked about exactly those subjects based on Wedemeyer’s lengthy report: General George Marshall, who was chief of war plans. “When I reported to him, he had a copy on his desk, and had made many notes, indicating that he had read the report carefully,” Wedemeyer recalled. Marshall asked, “What is the most important lesson you brought back from the German experience?” The young officer replied that the Germans would never fight a war again the way they did the last time. Instead of trench warfare, they would use new equipment and tactics based on “high mobility.” As Wedemeyer noted in a memorandum decades later, “I don’t want to sound like I am bragging, however I can assure you that these discussions, especially concerning our strategy and our tactics as the war advanced, were almost daily occurrences in General Marshall’s office—just the two of us.”

Wedemeyer was boasting, of course, but justifiably so. Marshall chose him in the spring of 1941 to help draft the “Victory Program” outlining how the United States needed to mobilize its manpower and resources to prepare for war. By then a major, Wedemeyer worked diligently to prepare this ambitious plan, despite his sympathies for the America First movement that was fervently campaigning against the country’s entry into World War II. And in making those preparations for war, Wede-meyer drew extensively on his firsthand knowledge of Germany, the product of his two years at the German War College. The irony was that while Wedemeyer, like Lindbergh, opposed the Roosevelt Administration’s drift toward direct involvement in World War II, both men provided intelligence that would prove invaluable when their country joined the conflict.

In a 1937 updated edition of his famous book Germany Puts the Clock Back, Edgar Mowrer, the Chicago Daily News correspondent who had been forced to leave Germany in 1933, chronicled Hitler’s increasingly aggressive behavior, including moving troops into the demilitarized Rhineland, his repudiation of the Versailles Treaty and all its restrictions on a new military buildup, and Germany and Italy’s direct aid for the fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War. “A brief calendar of the first four years of Hitler reads like a hymn of victory from a Prussian historian or war poet,” he wrote.

By the end of 1938 and early 1939, the calendar was much fuller and the hymn soaring to new heights, extolling triumph after triumph. Austria had been annexed and Czechoslovakia carved up. To support the Nationalists against the Republicans in Spain’s civil war, Hitler had dispatched troops and his newest fighter planes to that country, using the conflict there as a testing ground for his latest weaponry and offsetting Stalin’s support for the Republican side. In March 1939, Hitler had demanded the Baltic port of Memel—or, as it is called today, Klaipeda—from Lithuania, and that tiny country quickly capitulated. Nothing, it seemed, stood in the way of more German victories. When the Spanish Civil War ended with the Nationalists triumphant, Beam watched from the windows of the U.S. Embassy the April victory parade of the German troops returning from there. He admitted it was “an awesome sight.”

While Roosevelt still insisted he wanted to do everything to ensure the peace, by early 1939 he was beginning to make preparations for an alternative scenario. In his State of the Union address on January 4, he stressed that there were “many methods short of war, but stronger and more effective than mere words, of bringing home to aggressor governments the aggregate sentiments of our own people.” Specifically, that meant upping military expenditures, which he promptly did by submitting a budget request with a 30 percent overall increase to $1.3 billion, not including an additional $500 million for acquiring new military aircraft.

For a while, the administration had considered sending Wilson back to his post in Berlin, but that idea was scuttled when Hitler took over what was left of Czechoslovakia in March. In the internal discussions in the State Department, Messersmith—the former consul general in Berlin—“his eyes aglow, favored any move directed against the Nazis,” Moffat recorded in his diary. The two men were friends, but they frequently engaged in verbal jousts. “George, I wonder if you know what you are doing,” Moffat told him on one occasion. “You are helping us into this war which is coming on.” Messersmith replied by insisting that it was impossible for Hitler and the Western democracies to coexist.

Many of his colleagues were more cautious, and Roosevelt was still inclined to offer what he hoped would be seen as an olive branch. On April 14, he sent an appeal to Hitler and Mussolini that they pledge not to attack thirty-one countries in Europe and the Middle East—including the most likely next target, Poland—for at least ten years.

The president wasn’t optimistic about the chances for success, but he was still stung by the mocking response from Berlin. On April 28, Hitler addressed the Reichstag, but he was focused on his audience abroad. Representing the U.S. Embassy, Beam witnessed his delivery, which the German leader had prepared for by first asking several of the thirty-one states whether they feared a German attack. “The great majority had replied in the negative which enabled Hitler to read out their names slowly, with an air of false drama,” the young diplomat recalled. “It was a beautifully-acted farce which provoked loud laughter.”

Beam didn’t overlook the “particularly chilling nature” of the speech, despite that bit of theater. Poland wasn’t one of the countries that Hitler had asked for its opinion, and he proceeded to denounce that country’s refusal to accede to his demands for Danzig. He also castigated the British for taking Poland’s side in this dispute. He renounced both the 1934 German-Polish nonaggression pact, which was supposed to ensure peace between those neighbors for ten years, and the 1935 Naval Agreement with Britain, which limited the German Navy to 35 percent of the tonnage of the British fleet. As Beam put it, Hitler was performing “as the world’s then most powerful head of state”—and he clearly meant for everyone to understand that.

Despite Hitler’s increasingly belligerent tone, there were still plenty of Americans who wanted to believe he was no threat to them. It was hardly surprising that those who desperately wanted to keep their country out of another global conflagration should feel that way, and some American envoys could be counted among them. Shortly after the Munich Pact, Joseph Kennedy, the American ambassador in London, had floated the idea that democracies and dictatorships “could advantageously bend their energies toward solving common problems by an attempt to re-establish good relations on a world basis.” But it was surprising when Wiegand, Hearst’s veteran correspondent who had covered Germany since World War I, produced a major two-part article that encouraged exactly those kinds of illusions.

Writing in the April and May 1939 editions of Cosmopolitan, Wiegand offered a lengthy profile of Hitler, examining his personality and politics. The magazine claimed the author was “the undisputed dean of American foreign correspondents and one of the greatest reporters of our time,” citing as evidence Wiegand’s early contacts with Hitler, dating back to 1921. In particular, it explained how the correspondent was “more than a little psychic himself” to recognize so early that Hitler had to be taken seriously. “It takes genius to know genius,” it declared, with no trace of irony. “And a genius indeed is Karl von Wiegand.”

Wiegand’s first installment in the April issue described how Hitler had become “a veritable human meteor streaking the dark political skies of Europe—an ill omen to millions, a sign to other millions.” Like a meteor, Hitler “is being consumed by fires of his own being,” including “his unbelievably deep hatred for the Jews” and “his insatiable greed for ruthless power.” But Wiegand was also clearly in awe of what this strange figure he had first met in Munich had achieved. “Measuring his personal achievements, future historians may record Adolf Hitler as the political genius of this era, perhaps of this century,” he wrote. Nonetheless, he indicated that Hitler was acutely conscious that a climax was coming soon and his own life could be cut short. As a result, his actions were marked by “a fever of impatience, haste, hurry, drive,” which is “a state of mind in which any man may stumble.”

In his second installment in the May issue, however, Wiegand delivered an oddly reassuring message to his American readers: “Adolf Hitler is no physical menace to the United States except (1) in an agreement or alliance with Great Britain; (2) in the event that England should turn Fascist, or (3) if Nazi Germany should conquer England. The probability of any of these eventualities is remote.”

Hitler had demonstrated his own near psychic qualities by predicting that neither Britain nor France would fight to save Czechoslovakia, he added. When it came to what the German leader would do next, Wiegand declared that he was no prophet—but that didn’t prevent him from making a sweeping prediction. “Hitler has achieved without war what no other man has accomplished for centuries,” he wrote. “As I know Der Führer, he will not in his senses stake those achievements and his unique place in history on the uncertain gamble of a deliberately planned aggressive war.”

Suddenly, just as war was looming, Wiegand was sounding less like a seasoned correspondent and more like one of those naïve American visitors to Germany that Howard K. Smith had written about—stuck in stage-one or stage-two thinking about what Hitler and his movement truly represented.