Hitlerland

1 “Nervous Breakdown”

Even today, people treat Berlin in the 1920s like a Rorschach test. There are those who immediately think of political paralysis and chaos, with revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries battling each other in the streets. Others talk about hyperinflation wiping out lifetime savings, plunging millions of once solidly middle-class families into abject poverty. There are those who see an era of dizzying sexual free-doms—or, depending on who is doing the talking, a period of shameful degeneracy and perversion. And, finally, there are those who remember this era for its astonishing cultural renaissance, marked by an explosion of creativity in the arts and sciences, all made possible by a genuinely democratic system.

Oddly enough, all of those associations are right—all reflect a fairly accurate version of reality.

In the aftermath of World War I, Berlin was the primary political battlefield in the country—all too often, in the literal sense of that term. While unrest swept across other German cities, nowhere were the battles more intense than in Berlin. In February 1919, the newly elected National Assembly convened in Weimar to draft a new constitution precisely because they needed a less violent setting than Berlin. But the birth of the Weimar Republic quickly spawned violent revolts by both rightists and leftists, who shared a death wish for the country’s new rulers and their experiment in parliamentary democracy. Demagogues of every stripe found willing recruits among a people who were still reeling from their humiliating defeat, the staggering human toll of the war, and the punitive peace terms of the Versailles Treaty.

The political chaos fed off the mounting economic desperation. As the German mark plunged in value, living standards for those on fixed incomes plunged with it. Routine purchases—a loaf of bread, for example—required thousands, then millions, then billions and, finally, trillions of marks. The worthlessness of the currency was vividly captured by a sign at the box office of one of the city’s theaters: “Orchestra stalls: the same price as half a pound of butter. Rear stalls: two eggs.” Amid the general poverty, there were also, as always, those who made their fortunes and lived extravagantly.

The extravagance was particularly evident when it came to sexual mores. At one of the myriad parties in the city playwright Carl Zuckmayer attended, he reported that the young women serving drinks were dressed only in “transparent panties embroidered with a silver fig leaf”—and, unlike “bunnies” in American clubs, they “could be freely handled”; their pay for the evening covered those amusements as well. A sign on the wall proclaimed: “Love is the foolish overestimation of the minimal difference between one sexual object and another.”

Such sexual free-for-alls were one reason why curious foreigners were drawn to the German capital, but the biggest draw was Berlin’s reputation as the most vibrant cultural hub. A city that boasted the likes of Bertolt Brecht, Albert Einstein, Marlene Dietrich and George Grosz quickly became a magnet for those who were talented and creative, adventurous and opportunistic, including a growing number of Americans.

“People have forgotten that, after World War One, the greatest concentration of intellectuals and cultural innovators was not in Paris, and certainly not in London or New York—but in Berlin,” recalled Michael Danzi, a versatile American musician who played the banjo, every kind of guitar and the mandolin, and who spent most of the interwar years in the German capital. “Berlin was truly the capital of Europe—all the railroad tracks from any European city ended up in Berlin.”

From the beginning, many of the Americans were also drawn to the political and economic chaos, trying to understand the forces unleashed all over postwar Germany, particularly in Berlin, as they pondered the future of the new Weimar Republic. But just as in Christopher Isherwood’s stories and the resulting musical and film Cabaret, the recollections of Americans about this extraordinary era are often freighted with premonitions about the sinister forces that would eventually engulf Germany and almost all of Europe.

From their earliest days as a small radical movement based in Munich, the Nazis viewed Berlin as an evil, decadent city, especially as compared to the Bavarian capital, where they enjoyed far more support. “The contrast [of Munich] with Berlin was marked,” noted Kurt Ludecke, who joined the party in the 1920s and became an ardent fund-raiser and activist, including on trips to the United States. “One was the Mecca of Marxists and Jews, the other the citadel of their enemies.” Even after Hitler took power and ruled from Berlin, he remained distrustful of the German capital and its inhabitants.

As far as the earliest American arrivals in postwar Germany were concerned, much of what was happening was endlessly intriguing—and totally mystifying. Ben Hecht, the future Broadway and Hollywood star writer, director and producer, came to Germany in 1918 as a twenty-four-year-old reporter for the Chicago Daily News. During his two years in the German capital, he described “political zanies, quibblers and adventurers—mindless and paranoid” performing as if in street theaters, and how “all was politics, revolution, antirevolution.” In a letter to his managing editor Henry Justin Smith back in Chicago, he concluded: “Germany is having a nervous breakdown. There is nothing sane to report.”

While most of their countrymen back home were only too happy to put World War I behind them and return to their domestic preoccupations, a new crop of American diplomats and military attachés were deploying to Germany to resume the official ties between the two countries. They were anxious to assess the mood of the German people and to see whether their new rulers had a chance of riding out the chronic political unrest and the deepening economic crisis, allowing their democratic experiment to succeed.

For a young diplomat like Hugh Wilson, Berlin during and after the war provided confirmation that his future should be in the foreign service, not in a return to the family business he had left behind in Chicago. Shortly before the war, he had decided to try to see what “a few years of experience and diversion” as a diplomat would be like. He had taken the foreign service exam, assuming that he could always return to his old life whenever he tired of his new one. But then the whole world changed.

After his first postings in Latin America, Wilson was assigned to the Berlin embassy in 1916. He only served a few months in that city, which appeared “to be in a state of siege with the whole world,” before the United States entered the war and the embassy staff was evacuated by special train to Switzerland. By the time he was reassigned to a defeated Germany, Wilson had made the decision to “call into play every atom of energy and intelligence I might possess” in what he now regarded as his life’s work. It would prove to be the second of three postings for him to Berlin. The third time, in the late 1930s, he would become the last U.S. ambassador to serve in Nazi Germany.

Wilson and his wife Kate arrived in Berlin in March 1920, just as the right-wing Kapp Putsch was taking place in full view of the small contingent of Americans at what was then the U.S. Embassy building at 7 Wilhelmplatz. Wolfgang Kapp, the German nationalist who was the nominal leader of the rebel forces, had set up his headquarters at the Leopold Palace on the other side of the square, which was strewn with wire and machine-gun placements. This particular revolt fizzled out quickly, but Wilson had plenty of chances to observe other outbreaks of violence that had peculiarly German attributes. “Rioting seemed to be strictly circumscribed and there appeared to be rules of the game which the rioters themselves respected,” he noted.

Wilson added: “I myself have seen fighting on one street with machine guns and rifles blazing at the other” while a few hundred yards away crowds went about their business in orderly fashion. On another occasion, he watched from his embassy window as thousands of Spartacists, as the Communists were then called, staged a protest in Wilhelmplatz in front of the Chancellery building. Although the demonstrators were “vituperative and angry,” he noted, no one stepped over the low railings marking off plots of grass and flowers. That would have violated their sense of order.

For Wilson and other Americans who had been to Germany before, the most striking feature of Berlin was how dilapidated and impoverished it looked. “The shabbiness of Berlin in that period had to be seen to be believed… Everything needed a coat of paint, everything needed to be cleaned out,” he recalled. “It was the only time that I ever saw this capital of a scrupulously clean people littered with newspapers and dirt.” Even the embassy building, where many staffers lived, was in dismal shape: the roof leaked profusely whenever there was heavy rain or melting snow. Because Washington had routinely denied requests for funds to make the necessary repairs, Wilson and his colleagues used to pray for rain when senators or congressmen arrived on visits so that they would see how bad things were.

This was nothing compared to the desperate plight of the local residents, including the wounded veterans begging in the streets. The wartime blockade of Germany had continued for several months after the end of the fighting, only making things worse. Wilson pointed out that “traces of undernourishment and children’s diseases, especially rickets, were found on every hand.”

Katharine Smith, or Kay as she was generally known, took notice of the poverty all around her right from the moment she and her husband, Captain Truman Smith, arrived in Berlin in June 1920 to take up his post as an assistant military attaché. Like many Americans, the young, physically incongruous couple—she was twenty and only 5 feet tall, while he was twenty-six and an imposing 6 feet 4 inches—first moved into the famed Adlon Hotel. The hotel’s façade was pockmarked by bullets, and even the lobby bore a few similar telling holes, but overall, Kay reported, “the interior was quite luxurious, the desk clerks very polite, the crowded lobby full of foreigners.” Nonetheless, Kay only had to step outside on her first day there to see how insulated that world was.

Deciding to go for a walk, she made sure she was fashionably decked out first. “I put on a beige and blue figured voile dress, a beige coat with beige fox collar and wore, as had been the custom at home, beige suede pumps, beige stockings and a dark blue hat,” she scrupulously recorded. She left the hotel and walked down Unter den Linden, pausing to admire a china display in a shop window. Suddenly, she heard murmuring behind her and turned around to see a group of shabbily dressed people, two rows deep, staring at her and whispering to each other. “I must have looked to them as if I had come from Mars!” she recalled.

One of the people asked her something she didn’t quite understand, and she replied that she was an American. “Ah!” came the response. When she stepped forward, the crowd quickly made way for her and she rushed back to the hotel, where she changed from her “most inappropriate” outfit into plain dark clothes. “It had been a strange and instructive experience,” she concluded.

So was the experience of moving into an apartment. First, there was the battle with fleas, which were still common all over the city. Then, when she hired a housemaid, she was taken aback by one of their early conversations. The maid was holding a plate with the remains of an egg that Truman had not finished, and she asked Kay whether she could eat it. “Eat that cold smeared egg!” Kay replied in astonishment. “Why?” The maid explained that she hadn’t tasted an egg since the war began. When Kay told her to eat as many eggs as she wanted, it was the maid’s turn to be shocked. In other households, servants weren’t supposed to eat the same food as their employers—and food was often kept under lock and key.

As keen a social observer as Kay quickly proved to be, Truman focused just as intensely in those early days on Germany’s political prospects, not just the military part of his job. That was hardly surprising given his impressive credentials. He was a 1915 Yale graduate (two noted classmates were Dean Acheson and Archibald MacLeish), a World War I infantry veteran decorated with a Silver Star for bravery, and an avid student of the German language and German politics and history. Like Wilson, he had served in Germany already—as a political advisor to the U.S. Army in Coblenz from March 1919 until his transfer to Berlin in June 1920—and he would return to Germany in the 1930s when Hitler was in power. His daughter Kätchen is convinced that he would have become a history professor if his graduate studies at Columbia University hadn’t been cut short by what turned into a thirty-year military career.

For those early postwar arrivals like the Wilsons and the Smiths, the plunging German mark meant that everything was increasingly cheap—as long as the foreigners spent their money quickly right after exchanging it. “With the end of the war in victory for them everything was hilarious and life in leisure times was a mad scramble for amusement,” Wilson wrote. And there were plenty of foreigners who could revel in each other’s company, even if the American diplomatic presence was small by today’s standards. “All of the embassies had big staffs, all entertained lavishly, and the Allied Governments maintained commissions of control comprising hundreds of foreign officers and their wives,” Wilson added. “Allied uniforms were common on the streets of Berlin.”

Kay Smith’s letters to her mother and her unpublished memoirs describe an endless whirl of those diplomatic parties and social events. For a masked ball in 1921 hosted by Wilson and his wife Kate along with another American colleague, the invitation read in part:

The Americans weren’t enjoying their special status in Berlin just because they were foreigners with access to what stable currencies could buy. They also recognized quickly that their enemies in the last war were affording them an unexpectedly warm welcome. “The Germans, then, in 1920, wanted to be friends with the world, but particularly they wanted to make friends with the Americans,” Wilson wrote. “Curiously enough, the warrior instinct showed in this respect. One of the sources of this almost pathetic friendship was their desire to express the admiration they felt for the stupendous effort of the United States in 1917 and 1918, for the magnificent spirit and dash of our soldiers…”

Wilson may have overstated the admiration for American troops, but he was right about the overall pro-American mood. As Kay Smith put it, “People are laying themselves out to be nice to Americans.” Truman bought a Borsalino felt hat with a large brim. This made him tower above most people on Unter den Linden and other streets he frequented, where he was instantly recognizable. “He became famous as ‘The American,’” Kay proudly recalled. “Germans greatly admired a tall fine physique.”

Americans, it seemed, were the good victors.

In part, the reason why the Americans emerged as the good victors was because they often reciprocated the Germans’ positive feelings about them. They also shared their exasperation with the French—the bad victors, in their eyes. In the immediate aftermath of World War I, Washington and Paris were frequently at odds over how to handle a defeated Germany. The United States and Britain were inclined to give the new government in Berlin enough leeway in terms of troop deployments to suppress uprisings from the left or the right, and the Americans, in particular, disapproved of what they perceived as France’s insistence on extracting exorbitant reparations. But the French protested any perceived violations of the Versailles Treaty—and quickly used them as an excuse to occupy more German territory, as they did by pushing across the Rhine after the Kapp Putsch, and then by occupying the industrialized Ruhr in 1923 as punishment for Germany’s failure to pay reparations.

“The French are the most militaristic nation in Europe… they have learned nothing by this war,” Kay Smith complained in a letter to her mother on March 12, 1920. “The next war Germany will not provoke. She wants England and America especially with her and she is making every effort to remodel herself to do so.” In another letter, she wrote, “France is terrified of another attack by Germany and her policy has been to crucify Germany as much as possible.”

As Wilson pointed out, the French only made things worse by following up their push across the Rhine that year with the stationing of Senegalese and other black troops in the Rhineland, triggering immediate reports of rapes and other violence. “A flame of resentment against France arose throughout Germany,” he wrote.

Those alarming allegations prompted the State Department to ask for an investigation by U.S. military officials. After looking into the charges, Major General Henry T. Allen, the commander of American troops in Germany, reported to Washington that the German press had deliberately distorted the record to play to racial prejudices and stir antipathy to France abroad, “especially in America, where the negro question is always capable of arousing feeling.” In his report to the State Department that was then relayed to Congress, he acknowledged that 66 sexual crimes had been reported to the French authorities, but he also pointed out that this had resulted in 28 convictions and 11 acquittals by French military courts—suggesting a serious effort to maintain discipline.

“The wholesale atrocities by French negro Colonial troops alleged in the German press, such as the alleged abductions, followed by rape, mutilation, murder and concealment of the bodies of the victims, are false and intended for political propaganda,” he concluded.

Such exaggerations, Allen added, were in part due to “the attitude of certain classes of German women toward the colored troops.” Noting that the postwar economic crisis had spawned widespread prostitution, he explained that “many German women of loose character have openly made advances to the colored soldiers.” Numerous love letters and photographs attested to that fact, he pointed out. In Ludwigshafen, he reported, patrols had to be sent “to drive away the German women from the barracks, where they were kissing the colored troops through the window gratings.”

Even more tellingly, Allen noted that there were several interracial marriages, including one with the daughter of a prominent Rhineland official. “The color line is not regarded either by the French or the Germans as we regard it in America: to keep the white race pure.” While he wasn’t denying that there were many documented cases of sexual assaults, Allen was convinced that it was the behavior of German women that had been the spark to “incite trouble.”

But many Americans in Germany had already made up their minds that it was France’s vindictive policies that were to blame for everything, not anything the Germans were doing. They saw Germany as the victimized party, which was in keeping with much of the local political rhetoric. “I am afraid that many of us who were on duty in Germany after World War I were taken in,” Chicago Tribune correspondent Sigrid Schultz wrote much later. “Inadvertently we supported the Germans in their sympathy drive.”

On January 29, 1921, Karl Henry von Wiegand, a star reporter for the Hearst publications, wrote to C. F. Bertelli, his Hearst colleague in Paris, venting his exasperation with the French. “Your French friends appear to be as insane as they have ever been since the close of the war.” Mentioning new demands by the French for reparations, he added, “Are the French never going to come to their senses, and see Europe as it actually is?” He concluded that many Americans and other Europeans “are getting rather weary of hearing France’s yowl about what France suffered in the war.”

Wiegand was a correspondent who already felt very much at home in Germany and the rest of Europe. Born in 1874 in Hesse, he came to the United States as a young boy, growing up on farms in Iowa where his German immigrant father struggled to make ends meet, losing two farms in the process. When his father was “a fair way to losing a third,” Karl, barely fourteen at the time, decided to make his own way in the world, never telling his siblings or his parents that he wasn’t coming back. “A cruel thing to do to a good father and the kindest of mothers,” he would write much later in notes for an autobiography that he never completed.

He claimed to have then worked on a ranch for Buffalo Bill—who at close range was less than the romantic hero of the frontier that he had imagined from reading dime novels. He made his way further west, eventually finding work at the Associated Press in San Francisco. There, he seized the opportunity to use his German and cover World War I for the rival United Press, happily leaving behind his desk job. Three months into that conflict, he scored an exclusive interview with Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, the son of the Kaiser, who famously told the American that he had warned his father the war was already lost. The subsequent headlines offered a huge boost to Wiegand’s early career. He ended up jumping again—this time to Hearst.

Like any good reporter, Wiegand recognized he had to offer his editors and readers a broad range of stories about the new Germany. While dutifully reporting on every political crisis, the continuing street battles and the economic shortages (“Food Shortage Alarms All Germany,” warned the headline of his May 23, 1922, story), he was also alert to other subjects that would titillate his readers—or, when it came to the racier ones that his editors might not allow, at least his colleagues.

That was particularly true when it came to postwar Germany’s growing reputation for sexual licentiousness. Wiegand kept up a running private correspondence with Bertelli in Paris on the subject. In one letter from 1921, Bertelli urged Wiegand to write more about cocaine and “the alleged degeneracy of the old burg.” Good stories on that subject, he added, will “get the whole of the American continent afire with indignation… and greedy longing!” Then, there was the usual banter about how Wiegand should research this story. “Incidentally you might discover in your night investigations (all for the good of the future generation, of course) some novel Venus… Be careful about taking the necessary measurements…”

Back home, one of Wiegand’s readers concluded that the correspondent might be able to help him with a personal matter. “I am looking for a wife,” R. C. Bruchman wrote him on January 14, 1921, from Danville, Illinois. “I imagine there must be an awful lot of handsome good girls in Berlin who would make a fellow a mighty fine wife.” He enclosed $1.50, asking Wiegand to place an ad in a Berlin newspaper, saying that a thirty-five-year-old German-American gentleman “wants to marry girl 18 to 25 yrs. old.”

An amused Wiegand agreed to the request, noting this was the first time he had been asked to act as a matrimonial agent. “As there are at least a million more women in Germany than men, you ought to have quite a lot to pick from, and I have no doubt you will get many answers,” he wrote back. “It is indeed all too true that many refined and educated German girls of formerly well to do families are today facing want.”

Wiegand also participated in the diplomatic party scene in Berlin, occasionally writing features about it, especially when Americans played starring roles. “Houghton Girls Make Berlin Debut” proclaimed his Washington Times story datelined December 30, 1922. The subheadline explained: “Brilliant Assemblage Gives Daughters of U.S. Envoy Welcome to Society.” Alanson B. Houghton, an industrialist-turned-Republican-congressman-turned-diplomat, was Washington’s first postwar envoy to Berlin. He was deeply troubled by the overall situation he found there, repeatedly warning Washington that Germany’s economic plight and political unrest could prove to be highly dangerous for the whole continent. But this didn’t prevent him from putting on some of Berlin’s most lavish parties, which Wiegand wrote up enthusiastically.

At a ball in honor of their daughter and a niece, the Houghtons welcomed “four hundred members of the diplomatic set and high German officialdom, and many representative Americans,” Wiegand reported. This “brilliant fete,” he added, was a huge boost to American prestige. Presumably, the outfits of the daughter (“a gown of silver brocade cloth”) and niece (“a gold-banded net over a novel gold cloth”) all contributed to the success of the evening—as did the fact that the two young women also carried “enormous rose-colored feather fans.” So, too, did an American jazz band that supplied the music, while “a moving picture machine added color by flashing alternate shades on the dancing throng.” All this a half a century before the disco era.

While Wiegand enjoyed such stories, he knew that his editors wanted him to keep explaining Germany’s turbulent political scene as well—a charge he took very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that he became the first American correspondent to interview a local agitator in Munich who was beginning to make his name as a fiery orator. That agitator’s name was Adolf Hitler.

Wiegand declared that he had first met Hitler in 1921, but he only began taking him seriously enough to feature him prominently in his reports a year later. Given the proliferation of extremists in Bavaria at the time, that was hardly surprising. Every encounter with a radical of the right or the left hardly merited a separate story or even a mention in print. But by November 1922, following Benito Mussolini’s power grab in Italy, there was a growing sense that the right was on the rise throughout Europe, providing the perfect peg for a feature about the leader of the German “Fascisti.”

“Hitler Styled Mussolini of Teuton Crisis,” proclaimed the headline of Wiegand’s story datelined November 12, 1922, in the New York American, one of the Hearst papers. “The shadow of the Fascisti is arising in Germany,” Wiegand wrote. Explaining that Hitler—“leader of the movement which is causing no less uneasiness in Communist and Socialist circles than in Government quarters in Berlin and Munich”—had spelled out his program to him that day, the writer offered a summary that would leave the average reader confused about the true nature of this new political movement.

While denouncing the terms of the Versailles Treaty, Hitler insisted that he wanted reconciliation with France. The idea of war, he told Wiegand, “would be suicidal, if it were not idiocy.” As for domestic policy, he called on Germans to work two extra hours a day to pay off reparations and free them of their debts. He denied any intention to restore the monarchy or push separatism for Bavaria, and he attacked the Marxists head-on. “True socialism is the welfare of all the people, and not of one class at the expense of others. Therefore we oppose class warfare,” he declared.

But for American readers who hadn’t heard of this new politician, what probably registered the most in Wiegand’s article was his personal description of Hitler. Calling him “a man of the people” who had served in the trenches of World War I and afterward worked as a carpenter-turned-master builder (almost certainly an exaggerated description of Hitler’s early days as a handyman), Wiegand described him as “a magnetic speaker having also exceptional organizing genius.” He then spelled out the key characteristics of “the German Mussolini,” as he promptly dubbed him:

“Aged thirty-four, medium tall, wiry, slender, dark hair, cropped toothbrush mustache, eyes that seem at times to spurt fire, straight nose, finely chiseled features with a complexion so remarkably delicate that many a woman would be proud to possess it, and possessing a bearing that creates an impression of dynamic energy well under control…

“That is Hitler—one of the most interesting characters I have met in many months.

“With apostolic fervor and gifted with convincing oratory and a magnetism which is drawing him followers even out of the inner communistic and socialistic circles, Hitler has the earmarks of a leader. Whether it be merely a band or a great movement, only the future will tell.

“He believes firmly that his mission is to arouse and save Germany from its internal foes…”

Wiegand concluded his article by reporting: “The Bavarian Fascisti, like the Italians, are working secretly in the Reichswehr and the police, and there is fear that Hitler may one day proclaim himself dictator of Bavaria.”

Even before he filed that story, Wiegand had been telling Ambassador Houghton in Berlin about the disarray in the southern part of the country, and warning that General Erich Ludendorff might be planning to topple the government and impose a right-wing dictatorship. Ludendorff had led the German war effort in its latter stages and, after a brief exile, had returned to Germany and taken up with Hitler and other agitators in Munich. Instead of accepting responsibility for Germany’s military defeat, he blamed Socialists, leftists and Jews, laying the groundwork for what would become known as the “stab-in-the-back” theory.

Houghton decided that he needed more information about what was happening in the south. “Something is brewing in Bavaria and no one seems to know exactly what it is,” he wrote in his diary. “Probably it will result in nothing definite, but too much is at stake to permit us to run any danger.” To check out the situation, he turned to his young assistant military attaché, Captain Smith. At the same time that Wiegand was filing his first story about Hitler, Smith was preparing to follow in his footsteps—and to become the first American official to meet the future leader of Nazi Germany.

Smith would later point out that most foreign diplomats in Berlin at the time had written off the National Socialists as “being without significance and its leader, Adolf Hitler, as an uneducated madman.” Houghton, by contrast, “seems to have had, even at this early date, a premonition that the movement and its leader might play an important role in the disturbed Germany of the early twenties.” The ambassador and the embassy’s military attaché Lieutenant Colonel Edward Davis, Smith’s immediate superior, urged the captain to “try to make personal contact with Hitler himself and form an estimate of his character, personality, abilities, and weaknesses.”

Arriving in Munich on November 15, Smith had a clear-cut set of questions to address based on the hot topics of conversation among diplomats in Berlin. First, in light of the open hostility of “the reactionary government in Munich” to “the moderately leftist Reich government in Berlin,” was there a danger that Bavaria would declare itself independent? Second, was there a danger of another Communist revolt in Bavaria (a “Bavarian Soviet Republic” was briefly proclaimed in 1919)? And, third, “Did the possibility exist that Hitler’s National Socialists were strong enough to seize power in Bavaria?” He was also supposed to check on the loyalty of the 7th Division of the Reichswehr, as the Army was called, and on the significance of the sporadic incidents between the Bavarians and the Allied Military Control commissions, which were still operating in Germany following that country’s defeat.

Smith set out to fulfill his assignment by meeting as many people as possible, recording his discussions and impressions in his notebooks. In typical military style, he referred to himself in the third person in these notes.

Upon his arrival, he first went to the U.S. Consulate, where he met with Robert Murphy, the acting consul. Since the consulate had reopened in 1921, the four consular officers assigned there had been overwhelmed with paperwork, issuing on average about four hundred visas a day. “It seemed to us that the whole of Bavaria wanted to emigrate,” Murphy recalled. But the consular officers also attempted to monitor the turbulent local politics, trying to get a fix on Hitler and other radicals. “It was a welcome relief from those chores to transform ourselves into political reporters for the benefit of the State Department,” Murphy noted.

Murphy told Smith that the new Bavarian Minister President Eugen von Knilling was weak and easily manipulated by right-wing politicians. Then their conversation turned to Hitler and the Nazis. Smith summarized Murphy’s views: “The National Socialists are increasing their strength rapidly. Hitler, their leader, is of Austrian origin and a pure and simple adventurer. Nevertheless, he is a real character and is exploiting all latent discontent to increase his party’s strength.”

Murphy also passed along a rumor that Hitler had “a shady past” and may have misappropriated government funds in Austria. In Germany, he now commanded 40,000 men—“largely roughnecks but devoted to their leader.” While some reports had suggested he might have up to 200,000 men, Murphy pointed out that even his smaller force could prove effective if well led. “Hitler thoroughly understands the Bavarian psychology. Whether he is big enough to take the lead in a German national movement is another question; probably not.” Noting that the National Socialists were not working together with “the other monarchist groups,” he added that the Bavarian government was permitting the Nazis “to do what they want.” Still, Murphy confessed that it was difficult to assess all the competing groups. “All these nationalist societies are so mixed up among themselves that it is hard to keep them distinct.”

That was only the beginning of Smith’s rounds, where he asked everyone he met about Hitler. General Kress von Kressenstein, the artillery commander of the 7th Division, hadn’t met Hitler, but he called his nationalist movement a “healthy drift away from socialism.” The general had the impression that the man was “an oratorical genius,” but he felt that “Hitler was not as radical as his speeches made him out.” He was anti-Semitic in “a healthy sense,” Kressenstein continued, since he wanted to keep Jews out of government positions. Barring some mistake, he predicted to Smith, his movement had “a great future before it.” He added that the National Socialists favored “an evolutionary development, not a revolutionary one.”

Friedrich Trefz, the chief editor of the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, concurred that the National Socialists were a growing force. “Hitler was a marvelous speaker. None better,” Smith recorded him as saying. Trefz told Smith he had gone to a Nazi meeting and sat between a general and a Communist; both had come out of simple curiosity—and, afterward, both signed up as party members. Trefz’s conclusion: “The National Socialists present no immediate danger to the government. The ground is fertile, however, and the party will grow.”

Finally, Smith made it to the informal headquarters of the Nazis at Georgenstrasse 42. There, he first met with Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, an early confidant of Hitler. He claimed that the party had 35,000 members in Munich, 200,000 sympathizers and a “militarily organized” underground, armed with clubs and pistols. As for the party’s anti-Semitism, he assured his American visitor that it was “purely for propaganda.”

In the midst of the conversation, there was a sudden flurry of activity. The National Socialists had been planning to hold a meeting in Regensburg that evening, but the Reich Ministry of Railroads had just denied them permission for a special train to transport Hitler’s men. Scheubner-Richter explained that the Regensburg event had been postponed but that Hitler would be reviewing his troops, the Brownshirts, nearby. Smith was invited to watch this in the company of party ideologist Alfred Rosenberg.

“A remarkable sight indeed,” Smith noted. “Twelve hundred of the toughest roughnecks I have ever seen in my life pass in review before Hitler at the goosestep under the old Reichflag wearing red armbands with Hakenkreuzen (swastikas).”

Addressing his followers, Hitler explained that while the German government had stopped them from getting to Regensburg that day, the National Socialists would “clean up the town” the following week. In his notebook, Smith added: “He then shouts, ‘Death to the Jews’ etc. and etc. There was frantic cheering. I never saw such a sight in my life.” Afterward, Smith was briefly introduced to Hitler, who promised to talk with him two days later.

While waiting, Smith visited General Ludendorff at home. The famed commander had a blunt message: “The Allies must support a strong German government capable of combating Marxism,” he insisted. As for the Fascist movement, he described it approvingly as “the beginning of a reactionary awakening in Europe.” His conclusion: “America must understand that only a strong nationalist government can preserve the country from chaos and insure reparations being paid to the Allies.”

Returning to the Nazi headquarters on Monday, November 21, Smith met Hitler at 4 P.M. The American was startled by his quarters, which reminded him of a dreary back room of a New York tenement house. Later, Smith would express regret that he focused so much on the substance of Hitler’s political message rather than on more observations about his personality. But his impressions that day, which he recorded in his notebook once he had returned to his room in the Hotel Marienbad, were right to the point. “A marvelous demagogue,” he wrote. “I have rarely listened to such a logical and fanatical man. His power over the mob must be immense.” Hitler’s message was unequivocal: “Parliament and parliamentarianism must go. No one can govern with it in Germany today. Only a dictatorship can bring Germany to its feet.”

In a report he filed after returning to Berlin, Smith echoed those points and added this assessment:

Long after World War II, Smith would write The Facts of Life, an autobiographical manuscript that he tried but failed to publish. There, he recalled his meeting with Hitler in 1922. “The diary I kept in Munich indicates that I was deeply impressed with his personality and thought it likely he would play an important role in German politics,” he wrote. “I must confess, however, that I did not see him as the future ruler of most of Europe.”

On November 17, just as Smith was making his rounds in Munich, Wiegand came to see Ambassador Houghton in the Berlin embassy again. He told the envoy about his meeting with Hitler, how the Nazi leader claimed to be seeking “some arrangement” with France, and indicated that he might try to stage a coup and install a dictatorship.

Finding this report about Hitler “disquieting,” Houghton decided to write a confidential letter to Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes on November 21, not waiting for Smith’s report from his meeting with Hitler that was taking place on the same day. While Houghton mistakenly lumped Hitler together with the monarchists, much of his letter would prove to be surprisingly accurate.

“The most active of the Monarchist groups is headed by a young Austrian named Hitler who is in control, it is estimated, of thirty thousand armed men, and, who, by his vehemence and fanaticism and by his dominating and attractive personality, is rapidly becoming the leader of the whole movement,” Houghton reported, mentioning that he had dispatched a military attaché to learn more about him.

Modeled after its Italian counterparts, the ambassador continued, “This Fascisti movement is unquestionably spreading throughout Germany… It offers a method and means by which conservative people of all shades of political opinion can get together and organize to meet and repel Socialist aggression… it is not unlikely to bring within its ranks a large share of the population.”

Murphy, the acting consul in Munich, wasn’t nearly as early in spotting the danger Hitler represented. He would admit later that he was initially misled about the Nazi leader by Paul Drey, a German employee of the consulate who was a member of a distinguished Jewish family with deep Bavarian roots. The two men attended some of Hitler’s early meetings, and, at the end of the first one, Drey indignantly told Murphy: “How does this Austrian upstart dare to tell us Germans what to do?”

After witnessing some other appearances by Hitler, Murphy asked Drey, “Do you think these agitators will ever get far?”

“Of course not!” Drey replied. “The German people are too intelligent to be taken in by such scamps.”

The German staffer was very much old-school—and he responded to the growing Nazi presence in an old-school way. Once when he and Murphy stopped at a tailor shop to order a suit, the tailor was openly rude. Guessing what was going on, Murphy asked if the man was a member of the Nazi Party. “Yes, I am a follower of Herr Hitler,” he responded proudly. When they were out of the shop, Drey asked Murphy if he had noticed what he had done to show his contempt for the Nazi tailor. The American confessed he hadn’t. “I did not tip my hat to him when we left!” Drey explained, as if that nongesture must have devastated its target.

Murphy only met Hitler for a direct conversation once, in early 1923. He was probably still influenced by Drey at that point, since he clearly did not attach much importance to it at the time. In a report back to Washington titled “Bavaria’s Political Situation,” dated March 17, 1923, Murphy wrote at length about a monarchist conspiracy there, adding a short section at the very end labeled “Interview with Adolf Hitler.” The American’s reason for requesting the meeting with Hitler was to see whether there was any truth to the rumors that Henry Ford, who was well known for his anti-Semitic views, had provided support to his movement.

“Mr. Hitler was cordial and stated to the main inquiry that unfortunately Mr. Ford’s organization has so far made no money contributions to the party,” Murphy reported. “He stated that his funds were principally contributed by patriotic Germans living abroad.”

The two men then discussed the tensions surrounding the decision by France and Belgium to occupy the industrial Ruhr Valley in January of that year as punishment for Germany’s failure to pay reparations. Murphy reported that Hitler considered this occupation “a question involving the economic and political life or death of Germany and cannot be compromised.” The Nazi leader clearly backed the campaign of passive resistance that had already started, and suggested that if the French military pushed across the Rhine into Bavaria “an active campaign would certainly ensue.” Murphy related those sentiments without comment, suggesting that he wasn’t particularly worried by them.

As for Murphy’s superiors in the State Department, they weren’t necessarily appreciative of his efforts to learn more about the volatile politics of the region. In a letter to Murphy dated April 8, 1924, Wilbur J. Carr, writing on behalf of the secretary of state, complained that “a large proportion of the reports received from Munich dealt with political and politico-economic subjects” during the previous year. While acknowledging that “the disturbed political conditions have perhaps over-shadowed commercial development,” he urged the consular officials to focus more on “the promotion of American commerce.”

Murphy took the message to heart, at least to the extent that he worked harder on his reporting on commercial issues. But he also began taking Hitler seriously, while Drey persisted in dismissing him and the Nazis as aberrations—even after they took power. As late as 1938, Murphy—alarmed by the news that a Munich synagogue had been burned—flew back to that city to persuade his former employee to flee the country. He also assured him that he would arrange for him to find a job with the State Department elsewhere. Drey said he appreciated his concern, but he wasn’t going. “No, this is a temporary madness. Self-respecting Germans will not tolerate these louts much longer,” he insisted.

Paul Drey would die in Dachau.

When Captain Smith was preparing for his trip to Munich, Warren Robbins, a colleague at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, placed a phone call to Ernst Hanfstaengl in the Bavarian capital. Explaining that Smith would be going south, he asked a favor: “Look after him and introduce him to a few people, will you?” It was a minor request that would prove to have major consequences.

Robbins knew that Hanfstaengl would be happy to oblige. He and Hanfstaengl had been classmates at Harvard and performed in a production of the Hasty Pudding Club together. The show was called Fate Fakirs, and Hanfstaengl—who, just like Smith, was 6 feet 4 inches tall—played the role of a Dutch girl called Gretchen Spootsfeiffer, decked out in feminine garb. “I was the leading soprano there—the falsetto voice,” he recalled. This was a towering, husky young man who always loved an audience.

Born in Bavaria in 1887, Hanfstaengl was “half American,” as he put it, the son of a German father and American mother with equally impressive lineage. “Putzi,” which means “little fellow” in Bavarian and stuck as his nickname from an early age, proudly offered this description of the paternal side of his family: “The Hanfstaengls were substantial folk. For three generations they were privy councillors to the Dukes of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and well-known as connoisseurs and patrons of the arts.” Putzi’s grandfather had been famous for his art reproduction work, and then his early use of photography. His father kept the family arts business going and expanded it by opening galleries in London and New York.

Putzi’s mother Katharine, whose maiden name was Sedgwick, came from one of New England’s truly eminent families. Her maternal uncle was General John Sedgwick, a Civil War hero. Her father was William Heine, an architect by training who had fled Dresden after the revolution of 1848, worked on the decorations of the Paris Opera, and then emigrated to the United States. There, he joined Admiral Perry as his official illustrator on his expedition to Japan. He, too, became a Civil War general, and he helped carry Abraham Lincoln’s coffin at his funeral. Thus, it was hardly surprising that Putzi was dispatched to Harvard in 1905, both to learn more about his American heritage and to prepare him to take over the family art gallery on New York’s Fifth Avenue.

When discussing his Harvard days, Putzi always dwelled on his prominence and connections there. “I hate to say it myself: I was popular in my class,” he eagerly pointed out. Monumentally vain, Hanfstaengl was right on that score: whether he was playing Wagner or banging out marching songs on the piano for the football team, he ingratiated himself with the Harvard crowd, mingling easily with the likes of T. S. Eliot, Walter Lippmann, Robert Benchley and John Reed.

But it was an off-campus exploit that catapulted him to wider fame. On a cold morning in the spring of 1906, he was waiting for practice tryouts for the crew team on the Charles River. As Putzi recalled, “Some fool of a canoeist got into difficulties in the swift current and tipped himself out.” Without hesitating, Putzi grabbed a boat and rowed out to the canoeist who was floundering badly. Fully clothed, he jumped into the cold water and managed to push the man up into the boat. The next day, the headline in the Boston Herald proclaimed, “Hanfstaengl, Harvard’s Hero.”

Putzi maintained that this episode was responsible for his getting to know another famous Harvard student: Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., the eldest son of the president. In the winter of 1908, the father—“a fellow extrovert,” as Putzi described him—invited him to Washington. His strongest recollection of that first of several meetings with TR was a stag party in the White House basement and “of breaking seven bass strings on his magnificent Steinway Grand.”

After Harvard, Hanfstaengl returned to Germany for a year of military service in the Royal Bavarian Foot Guards, standing guard at the royal palace and generally feeling that he was trapped in an anachronistic world. He spent another year studying in Grenoble, Vienna and Rome before returning to the United States and taking charge of the family gallery on Fifth Avenue. Eating often at the Harvard Club, he met another Roosevelt—FDR, who was then a young New York state senator. He also reconnected with the elder Theodore Roosevelt. The former president told him his military service must have been good for him. “I saw something of your army at Doeberitz as the Kaiser’s guest, and discipline like that never hurt anybody,” he said. “No nation can degenerate which maintains those standards.”

Later, their conversation turned to both art and politics. “Hanfstaengl, your business is to pick the best pictures, but remember that in politics the choice is that of the lesser evil,” the former president told him. With no sense of irony, Putzi—who would later work assiduously to help Hitler as he rose to power—noted that it was a phrase “which has stuck with me ever since.”

During World War I, Hanfstaengl felt the pull of allegiance to the country of his birth. Before the United States entered the war, he tried to help the bands on German ships blockaded in New York harbor by inviting them to perform in the family gallery. Once the Americans joined the fighting, Putzi had to get a lawyer, former Senator Elihu Root, who had been TR’s secretary of state, and pledge not to engage in any anti-American activities to avoid internment.

A Department of Justice report in February 1917 offered this assessment of Hanfstaengl, whom investigators had been clearly observing: “He is not a man of criminal instinct, but if war was declared between Germany and America it probably would be best that he be interned because he has the ability of an officer to lead men either here or in Mexico.” Nicholas Roosevelt, another member of the famous clan, wrote to the authorities to say that Putzi was “violently anti-American,” that he had been in close touch with the German Embassy until it was closed down and that he was “almost a fanatical supporter of his fatherland” and “a most dangerous man to have about.”

Whatever the accuracy of that reporting, Hanfstaengl—who had recently married and had his first child—decided to return to Germany in 1921. There, he found a country “riven by faction and near destitution.” Echoing Ben Hecht’s comment about a country undergoing a nervous breakdown, he added: “It became evident to me that Germany, politically speaking, was a madhouse…” It was while he was still trying to get his bearings in his transformed homeland that Putzi took the call from his former Harvard classmate who now worked at the American Embassy in Berlin.

When Smith arrived in Munich, Putzi did what he could for him, providing a few largely social introductions. He wrote in his memoirs that Smith was “a very pleasant young officer of about thirty, a Yale man, but in spite of that I was nice to him.” He was also nice to Kay, who accompanied her husband to Munich. Putzi, who would soon become notorious for his womanizing, was the perfect gentleman with her. He showed her the sights as a light snow fell, ducking inside the Frauenkirche, whose medieval art charmed his American visitor. When they stopped at his family’s art store, he gave her an engraving of the interior of the church. “A lovely way to be introduced to Munich,” she would write later. “Perhaps this day is the reason why I have always been so fond of this place.”

As it turned out, her husband didn’t need all that much help from Putzi, who was impressed with how Truman “worked like a beaver” and met almost everyone who mattered politically. “He soon knew much more about Bavarian politics than I did,” he admitted.

On Smith’s final day in Munich, the two met for lunch. “I met the most remarkable fellow I’ve ever come across this morning,” Smith volunteered.

Putzi asked who he was talking about. “Adolf Hitler,” Smith replied.

“You must have the name wrong,” Putzi said. “Don’t you mean Hilpert, the German nationalist fellow, although I can’t say I see anything particularly remarkable in him.”

Realizing Putzi had never heard of Hitler, Smith set him straight. “There are quite a lot of placards up announcing a meeting this evening,” he pointed out. “They say he puts up signs saying ‘No entry for Jews,’ but he has a most persuasive line about German honor and rights for the workers and a new society… I have the impression he’s going to play a big part, and whether you like him or not he certainly knows what he wants.”

Smith had been given a press pass for Hitler’s appearance that evening in the Kindlkeller, a popular Munich beer hall. Since he had to take the night train back to Berlin, he asked Putzi if he could attend for him. “Could you possibly have a look at him and let me know your impressions?” he added.

Not knowing what to expect but his curiosity aroused, Hanfstaengl agreed to do so. “It is a far cry from Harvard to Hitler, but in my case the connexion is direct,” he would write years later. Or as he put it to one interviewer in recalling the chain of events that would lead him to Hitler: “All that is just by some artistry of fate.”