Hitlerland

3 Whale or Minnow?

Like so many Germans, Bella Fromm discovered that her life was turned upside down by World War I and its aftermath. Born into a well-to-do Bavarian Jewish family in 1890, she had worked for the Red Cross during the war. Her parents died early, leaving her with what looked like a healthy inheritance once the fighting stopped—certainly enough for her to live on after a brief unhappy marriage and continue doing volunteer social work. But then the hyperinflation of the early 1920s wiped out that cushion and she had to look for a paid job. “I’m going to have to start a new life,” she wrote in her diary on October 1, 1928. From age ten, she had kept a diary and now she decided to write for others, not just herself. She became a journalist for the Ullstein publishing house, covering the social and diplomatic scene in Berlin.

The cub reporter quickly proposed a novel approach to her job. “Let’s have society reports in the American manner,” she told her editor at the Vossische Zeitung, a Berlin-based liberal newspaper with two issues a day. “Lively, with plenty of pictures.” Her editor agreed to give this a try, and soon she wasn’t only reporting in what she dubbed the American manner but mingling frequently with Americans as well, scrupulously noting her encounters in her private diary that she continued to keep.

In her diary entry of July 16, 1929, she described her experience at a Davis Cup match between Germany and Britain in Berlin’s Grunewald district, famous for its lush forest. William “Big Bill” Tilden, the American tennis champion, was there to watch Daniel Prenn, Germany’s top player, who was Jewish. He was playing the English star Bunny Austin. When Prenn won, Fromm noted, “‘Big Bill’ beamed, for Danny had gained his victory with a racket Tilden had brought him as a present from America.”

But Fromm heard a very different reaction from Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, who was a member of the Tennis Guild and would later serve as Germany’s last ambassador to Moscow before Hitler’s armies invaded the Soviet Union. “Of course, always those Jews!” he remarked.

“What do you mean?” Fromm asked angrily.

“The Jew would win of course,” he responded. But as Fromm recorded, at least “he had the grace to blush.”

Fromm had the last word. “He won for Germany. Would you have preferred to have the Englishman win?”

Perhaps precisely because of such contrasts between the Americans she met and her own countrymen, Fromm’s diary entries about Americans in Germany were almost always positive. On February 2, 1930, she went to the train station to observe the arrival of the new American ambassador to Germany, former Kentucky Senator Frederic M. Sackett. In her diary, Fromm wrote that he was “a gentle-looking man with, obviously, very good background.” As for his wife, she was “an attractive woman of great distinction.”

In a later entry that year, she marveled at how the Sacketts were showing what entertaining American-style was all about. “Even the international diplomats are stunned,” she wrote. “The Sacketts serve lobster at tea, an unheard-of luxury in Berlin.”

But Fromm also observed that the new ambassador was acutely aware of the economic crisis that Germany and other countries now faced following the Wall Street crash. She sat next to him at a dinner and opera recital hosted by the Czech legation, giving her the first opportunity to speak with him. “I like Berlin. It is inspiring,” he told her. “We are anxious in America to help Europe get out of the present crisis. We’d like to settle national differences at the green table instead of on the battlefield.”

It wasn’t just a newcomer like Sackett who liked Berlin and felt welcomed not only by Fromm but also by much of German officialdom, despite the renewed sense of crisis. On a visit to his Philadelphia home office in 1930, Knickerbocker was asked about the attitude of Germans toward American correspondents.

“Fortunately for us, we enjoy splendid prestige in Berlin,” he replied. “We are treated courteously and our questions are answered intelligently. Tea is served at the Foreign Office every Friday afternoon at 3 o’clock, being attended by correspondents from every important country in the world.” There, he continued, senior officials provided briefings and the newsmen made valuable contacts. He added, “Germany is the only European country, so far as I know, that has not expelled a correspondent since the World War.”

Asked which country was the most interesting in Europe for a correspondent, he replied: “Germany for the moment. I consider Berlin the most important capital in Europe. For the moment (please note that I emphasize the phrase) Germany and the Soviet Union are the most pacific countries in Europe. The Soviet can’t afford a war and Germany is sick of war. Yet we never know what may happen.”

As Germany’s economy began to unravel again, triggering new angst and unrest among a population that still had raw memories of the last crisis when so many lives and livelihoods were ruined, the Nazi movement began to gain traction. By the end of 1928, with its early signs of trouble ahead, the party boasted 108,000 dues-paying members; by the end of 1929, that number had jumped to 178,000. While Hitler was still considered a marginal political figure, he was drawing larger, more enthusiastic crowds and the party was making gains in local elections.

Not surprisingly, Wiegand was the first American correspondent to decide that it was worth interviewing the rabble rouser whom he and his colleagues had largely ignored for the past several years. After all, Wiegand had been the first American reporter to write about Hitler in the early 1920s, and he remembered well his rapid rise and apparent fall then. He also remembered his ability to play upon popular discontent—and, with that discontent growing, it was only logical to see whether Hitler could ride its wave again.

Wiegand hadn’t bothered to check on Hitler since his imprisonment following the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. But in December 1929, he traveled to Munich to meet him. “Now he is again active, and with a much larger following,” he reported in his article in the New York American that ran on January 5, 1930. Most of his dispatch consisted of lengthy quotes from his interview with Hitler, which were delivered “with that vigor of expression that is characteristic of him.”

Hitler focused his remarks on the threat of Bolshevism—and on his claim that his party was the only force capable of stopping it. “Germany is steadily, slowly, but surely slipping more and more into conditions of Communism,” he declared. Pointing to the litany of economic woes—particularly the growing number of bankruptcies and rising unemployment—and “disgust with the present party system in Germany and distrust of public officials,” Hitler warned that “all this tends to smooth the way to national destruction.”

“The public mind of the German people is in utter confusion,” he continued. “It is in this state of affairs that the National Socialists are raising the cry of home, country and nation against the slogan of internationalism of the Marxian Socialists.” The goal, as he explained it, was “to save Germany from being economically enslaved to foreign powers on the one hand and on the other hand from being utterly bolshevized and falling into disorganization and demoralization.”

Wiegand reminded Hitler of his earlier failed putsch and asked if he intended to try to depose the government by force again. “No, we have no thought of revolution,” he replied, insisting that support for his movement was growing so rapidly that “we have no need of other than legal methods.” He claimed that the party was supported at that moment by about 2.5 million Germans, and that this number would grow to about 4 million in another year.

When pressed on what kind of system of government he favored, Hitler was evasive. He called Germany’s parliamentary system with its multiplicity of feuding parties “an utter farce.” He indicated he saw some pluses in the American form of government, “where the president is something more than a rubber stamp and the cabinet cannot be overthrown from day to day.” That kind of system, he added, has “elements of stability” that Germany was sorely lacking. But his language suggested that this was hardly the ideal solution.

Instead of clarifying what he was for, Hitler dwelled on what he was against, including the Jews who had attained, as he put it, wildly disproportionate power and influence. “I am not for curtailing the rights of the Jews in Germany, but I insist that we others who are not Jews shall not have less rights than they,” he said. Any regulations about Jews, he claimed, would be no different from America’s immigration laws that required immigrants to submit to medical examinations to prove they were healthy before they would be admitted. “Germany has no such protective measures,” he complained. “Jewish influence expressed politically has prevented such measures being enacted. We are overrun by the elements that you reject in advance.”

Finally, Hitler told Wiegand he was open to “an entente or understanding” between Germany and England and the United States. But he saw “no hope” that France would change its hostile approach to Germany, allowing for a lessening of tensions between the two.

Although Hitler attempted to sound less strident than he did at his rallies, the message he delivered left little doubt that he remained a committed foe of Germany’s current system of government. Even if he no longer planned to march on Berlin, he wanted to see it come crashing down.

In the conclusion to his article, Wiegand noted that many people in Germany were surprised that Hitler was staging a political comeback. “Just how much of a factor he will be in coming difficulties in Germany, none seems to care to predict,” he wrote. But by giving Hitler and his views so much play, Wiegand was signaling that the Nazi leader should once again be taken seriously.

On one point, Hitler was right on target: many Germans were experiencing “utter confusion,” triggered both by the deteriorating economic situation and their growing anger at the squabbling among the politicians in Berlin as successive governments came and went. “The German people were sick of everything,” Edgar Mowrer wrote. “Treaty fulfillment had not led to national recovery. Russian Bolshevism was not attractive. War was still impossible. Yet the miserable present simply could not go on.”

Contempt for the current rulers cut across all social classes. Charles Thayer, who served in the U.S. Embassy in Berlin both before and after World War II, pointed out that it wasn’t just the far right, big businessmen and former military brass that had failed to support the Weimar Republic. “So had a majority of the professors—a most influential set in Germany, where academic degrees rank second only to military titles in establishing a person’s social position,” he wrote. “Most of them had openly sneered at the little Socialists of Weimar who seldom had a single ‘Dr.’ to put in front of their names.” Their students, he added, shared that contempt for a government that they held responsible for Germany’s humiliating losses of territory after World War I. And when their job prospects began to evaporate as the Depression settled in, “they flocked to the Nazis in droves.”

Mowrer insisted that the lack of faith in liberal democracy extended even to those who were ostensibly its guardians. “The most remarkable feature of the Liberal German Republicans was the scarcity of Liberal republicans,” he wrote. The Weimar governments had not only tolerated numerous “patriotic” private armies but also used them to suppress left-wing revolts. Hitler’s Sturmabteilung, or SA, the Brownshirts, and his elite Schutzstaffel, or SS units, the Blackshirts, were hardly unique when they were formed in 1921.

Early during their stay in Germany, the Mowrers were returning by a night train from a weekend in East Prussia when they were suddenly awakened by loud shouting. The train had stopped at a small station, and two young men had boarded, turned on the light in the carriage where the Mowrers and other passengers were trying to sleep, and opened the window. From the platform, a middle-aged man wearing a trench coat and narrow leather belt was shouting at them “with the raucous voice of a drill sergeant,” Lilian Mowrer recalled. She got up and turned out the light, but one of the young men brusquely switched it back on, clicked his heels and returned to the window. Edgar put a warning finger to his lips, signaling that it was better not to confront them. He explained to her afterward that the men belonged to “a secret army which the government tolerates but does not recognize.”

But by the end of the 1920s, it was Hitler’s political power—admittedly, backed by his not-so-secret armies—that was on the rise. When the economic crisis started to hit hard, the Nazis benefited immediately. In the September 1930 parliamentary elections, they won 107 of 577 seats, a spectacular jump from the 12 seats they had won two years earlier. Of the 35 million Germans who had gone to the polls, nearly 6.5 million had voted for Hitler’s party, making it suddenly the second-largest party in the Reichstag after the Social Democrats. In 1928, only 800,000 Germans had cast their ballots for the Nazis. Hitler, it appeared, had good reason to put his faith in “legal methods” of seizing power, as he had indicated to Wiegand. The Hearst correspondent’s nose for news was working well when he had decided it was time to interview him again.

For Americans living in Germany, the growing strength of the Nazis was hard to miss. Berkeley exchange student Enid Keyes arrived in Berlin in the fall of 1931, with a fellowship to study at the University of Berlin. On October 30, she accompanied Lars Mehnert, the younger son of her German hosts, to a Nazi rally in a big indoor sport stadium. She was fascinated by the policemen lined up outside in case trouble erupted, and by the scene she encountered inside. “The seats swarmed with people, old and young, all loyal to Hitler and the National Socialist program,” she wrote her mother back in California. Noting how quickly the Nazis had risen from obscurity to become the largest opposition group, she added that girls passed around red cans “to collect money for the poor, or the imprisoned Nazi people. And people were generous with their pennies.”

What impressed Keyes the most was the atmosphere of the rally. “The noise, the spontaneous cheers, the band, reminded me of a football game crowd,” she wrote. “But the feeling here was deeper, more firmly rooted, and much more significant than a Saturday afternoon football throng. Heart and soul, Germans are concerned with the political destiny of their country. It was stirring to see the vast crowd rise as one man, when the trumpets announced the entrance of the Hitler flags, and the various divisions marched to their place on the platform.” The crowd greeted the Brownshirts with the Nazi salute and “the roof was nearly raised by the Nazi song, a hymn with a catchy tune.” While Keyes didn’t understand much of the speeches, she needed no translation to feel the fervor of the crowd. She wrote her mother that “young Lars” came home decked out with Nazi pins and flags. “Like all the youth of Germany, he is an ardent party member,” she concluded.

The rise of the Nazis wasn’t simply something Americans observed; it also began having a direct impact on their lives. Edgar Mowrer recounted the story of a thirteen-year-old American boy, whom he only identified as Arthur. The boy was attending a Jesuit school in Berlin, and one day in the winter of 1931 he posed a question to his father: “Dad, what do you think of National-Socialism?”

“I don’t think about it,” the father replied evasively, since he knew he was treading on dangerous ground. “National-Socialism is purely a German matter which does not concern you or me.”

But Arthur didn’t give up. A few days later, he asked his question a different way. “Dad, if you were a German, would you be a National-Socialist?”

The father asked what was prompting his questions. “You see, nearly all my friends are National-Socialists,” Arthur explained. “I like to be with them, and if you aren’t one, there are so many interesting things you are shut out of.”

Worried, the father told Arthur that the Catholic bishops had condemned the Nazis. “How can Catholic boys be members of a forbidden organization?”

“I don’t know, Dad,” Arthur continued. “But they are, and if you aren’t a National-Socialist in this school, you aren’t anybody. Do you think as a foreigner I could become one?”

Mowrer reported that Arthur never followed through on that wish. But by 1932, about half of the students in his class openly supported Hitler’s party. Despite efforts by the Jesuits to stop the politicization of their classrooms, even the boys’ rough games reflected the larger battles swirling around them. One of the most popular was “chariot bumping.” Pretending to ride chariots like in the 1925 silent movie Ben-Hur, the boys crashed into each other. At first, the opposing forces in those contests were labeled “Romans” and “Jews.” Then, the labels switched to “Centrists” and “Nazis” and the confrontations became nastier, with boys clearly seeking to hurt their opponents.

In their dispatches, American correspondents were often reluctant to make outright predictions on how far the growing backing for the Nazis could carry Hitler. But in their private exchanges with their editors, they were more willing to be blunt about the connection between the deteriorating economic conditions and its impact on politics. Writing on December 28, 1931, to C. M. Morrison, the editor of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, Knickerbocker painted a bleak picture of the country he was covering. He had just traveled all over Germany for a series of articles he was writing. “I never saw before with my own eyes the degree and extent of real poverty now prevalent here,” he reported. Those conditions, he warned, could lead to another disaster.

Correspondents like Knickerbocker and Mowrer also enjoyed occasional lighter moments even during economically desperate times. The two American reporters were walking down Friedrichstrasse one day when they stopped two streetwalkers. Knickerbocker introduced himself and asked what the women thought of the latest government changes that represented a major setback for the Social Democrats as more conservative politicians took power.

“We are for the new gentlemen,” one of the women responded.

Taken aback, Knickerbocker and Mowrer asked why.

“These damn socialists with their free love have made it almost impossible for an honest whore to earn a decent living,” she said. “The gentlemen will change all that and give us a chance!”

As Mowrer sardonically noted, he and Knickerbocker filed stories on this revealing conversation, but his editors at the Chicago Daily News found it “too hot to publish.”

For the most part, though, what Americans in Germany saw of the lives of ordinary Germans was far from amusing. Enid Keyes, the Berkeley exchange student, wrote home on November 17, 1931, about the “sad side” of life in Berlin: “I can’t ever walk a block without seeing blind men, old women with galoshes stuffed with newspapers for shoes, cripples, white-haired ex-soldiers who are begging or selling matches or shoe strings. Old people with gnarled hands and round shoulders, faces blue with the cold, creep along looking for work, picking up twigs in the threadbare park, or searching the gutters for paper.” The following month she noted that people were looking even more discouraged, and beggars “have increased on the streets in terrible numbers.” Women approached passersby pleading that they were hungry and had children “who are crying for food,” she added.

In his letter to Morrison, Knickerbocker concluded from all this that Germany not only couldn’t pay reparations in the current crisis, “but will not pay reparations ever again.” Any attempt by France to force the issue would backfire, he added. “Germany is like Sampson [sic]. She is prepared to pull the building down about her ears rather than continue paying ‘tribute’ which she, the whole nation from Communists to National Socialists, considers she does not owe.”

He offered this forecast: “If Germany does get rid of reparations, does take up the Hitler banner as it seems likely she will do, and does recover with the general recovery of world business that must sooner or later come, then Germany under Hitler will sooner or later re-arm. The money we remit to Europe, one way or another, goes to increase armaments. But this is only another way of saying that this continent is going to war again.”

Replying to Knickerbocker on January 8, 1932, Morrison thanked his correspondent for his impressions, particularly about German attitudes toward the reparations question. He predicted this would lead the United States to become less sympathetic to their plight. “You see defiance in Germany begets defiance on this side of the Atlantic,” he wrote. But he ignored Knickerbocker’s warnings about a new major conflict, focusing instead on the economic fallout of the rapid rise of Hitler. “This country has grown to expect Hitler to take over power in Germany next month. It will not come as any shock although the effects may be rather disastrous in the financial and economic situation when it does come,” he added. Given Knickerbocker’s far more alarming predictions, Morrison’s worries looked almost sanguine by comparison.

But as the Nazis continued to gain momentum in the early 1930s, even Knickerbocker vacillated in his judgment about how much of a threat Hitler really represented. In a letter to Percy Winner, the editor of the New York Evening Post, on June 18, 1932, he wrote about the increasing speculation that new parliamentary elections the following month would give Hitler the opportunity to become part of a ruling coalition. Knickerbocker still considered him to be a far less powerful figure than Mussolini, in part because of his “feminine” side. And he predicted that President Hindenburg would have no problem keeping him in check.

“Hitler is a homo-sexual, effeminate corporal with a hyper-sensitive political olfactory nerve,” he wrote. “Hindenburg is a granite-faced, bass-voiced Field Marshal with a commanding manner that makes little corporals tremble.”

Then he offered this prediction: “If Hitler came to Hindenburg and said ‘Now is the time to do away with the Republic,’ Hindenburg would cry out ‘Was!’ and the little corporal would wilt like a lettuce leaf in hot water.”

And that wasn’t the end of it. He gave Hitler high marks for his ability to exploit discontent. “Hitler is a cork,” he wrote. “He floats on the crest of every wave of popular sentiment. No man in Germany can smell the trend of mass feeling and respond to it as Hitler can.” This ability, he continued, made Hitler indispensable to the party. But within that same party “he is pulled from pillar to post by his lieutenants in the most astonishing way.”

Finally, Knickerbocker pointed out that all the indications in Germany were pointing toward “militarism.” The inclusion of the National Socialists in a coalition government, he added, would lead to “the disappearance of their ‘socialist’ character,” leaving only the nationalist part. Still, Hitler’s role would be important but limited, he insisted. He’d continue to be “the olfactory sense of the party, but I cannot see him as Germany’s Mussolini, even though he may remain the official head.”

The man Knickerbocker couldn’t imagine as Germany’s Mussolini had challenged the country’s aging President Paul von Hindenburg when he ran for a second term in the spring of 1932. Hitler came up short, but placed a strong second in the first round, forcing a runoff the following month. In that round, Hindenburg won the support of more than 19 million Germans, while Hitler won more than 13 million votes. Hindenburg tried to curb the violence of the Nazis by agreeing to dissolve the SA and the SS, but his efforts to check the broader unrest failed. Triggered by the worsening economic conditions, strikes and other protests multiplied. Soon the president decided to dismiss Heinrich Brüning’s government, name Baron Franz von Papen as his successor as chancellor, and call new elections. A member of the Catholic Center Party who believed he could control the Nazis, Papen convinced Hindenburg to agree to the lifting of the ban on the SA and the SS, which only intensified the bloody clashes between them and the Communists.

In the elections on July 31, 1932, the Nazis emerged victorious, winning 230 seats, more than doubling their total from two years earlier. This made them the largest party in the Reichstag, leaving the Social Democrats in second place with 133 seats. They were followed by the Center Party with 97 seats and the Communists with 89. Chancellor von Papen—whom correspondents like Mowrer labeled as dictatorial and reactionary—simultaneously weakened the left by dismissing Social Democrats from top positions and dispatching Defense Minister Kurt von Schleicher to negotiate a deal with Hitler. But emboldened by his party’s stunning results, the Nazi leader wasn’t ready to settle for anything less than Papen’s job. Their talks ended in failure, and new elections were called on November 6, 1932. This time, the Nazis came in first once again, but lost 34 seats and 2 million votes. They won 196 seats, with the Social Democrats still in second place with 121, and the Communists gaining ground by winning 100.

As late as it was in the endgame of the Weimar Republic, many observers saw the drop in support for the Nazis as a sign that the movement was losing momentum. Their violent rhetoric and actions were backfiring with some of the electorate, and there were also new signs of splits within the party’s top ranks. Schleicher, who took over the job of chancellor from Papen in early December, wanted to take advantage of those divisions by trying to lure Gregor Strasser, a popular Nazi who was considered the leader of the party’s relatively moderate “socialist” wing, into his government as vice chancellor. That proved to be fatal to Strasser, whom Hitler had always viewed as a possible rival. Instead of joining the government, Strasser ended up resigning his party posts.

Americans trying to sort out the meaning of the swirl of elections and political maneuvering were often understandably uncertain what to make of all this. Abraham Plotkin was a Jewish-American labor organizer who arrived in Berlin in November 1932, with the avowed goal of studying workers’ conditions and the German labor movement. He would end up spending six months in Germany, witnessing the demise of the Weimar Republic and the first months of Nazi rule. But during his early days in Berlin, he was far from convinced that Hitler would prevail.

Like the journalist Knickerbocker, the exchange student Keyes and others, he was struck by the destitution of working-class Germans. In the United States, he had worked as a West Coast organizer for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, the ILGWU, losing his job in late 1931 when the union had to trim its payroll. He knew firsthand about the toll that the Depression was taking in his own country. But he found that living conditions in Germany were often worse.

Initial impressions could be misleading, he noted on November 22, 1932, in the diary he kept throughout his stay. On the streets of Cologne and Berlin, he pointed out, people “hide their poverty very well,” looking reasonably dressed. “From their appearances it would be hard to believe that the last unemployment figures show that 44 out of every hundred Germans are out of employment, and some of them for the last three years.”

Soon he was making the rounds with local trade union organizers, seeing what life was like in reality. While the jobless received unemployment and welfare benefits, they were hardly enough to relieve the misery. “You Americans have a bathroom in every apartment—is it not so?” one of his escorts named Hans asked him. He was showing Plotkin a building with 120 inhabitants and not a single bath. “They tell me that in New York every apartment has a toilet,” Hans added. “Come. I’ll show you what we have.” Leading Plotkin to the basement, he pushed open a door and lit a match so he could see a crude toilet made of wooden boards. “Do you know how many families use this toilet?” he asked. “Nine families. The pots in the rooms would choke you. Go to America and tell them you saw this.”

Visiting another tenement house with Hans, he observed one family’s diet: potatoes and herring or potatoes and margarine for the main meal, never any butter, and one pound of meat on Sundays for the four of them. The head of a district health department told Plotkin about the rapid spread of infectious diseases because of deteriorating sanitary conditions. Berlin’s bathhouses had lost two-thirds of their customers, he explained, since they could no longer afford their small fees; and even families with tubs were bathing in the same water to save heating costs.

Plotkin was also “fascinated by the ladies of the streets and their easy ways.” While he was drinking a beer at Alexanderplatz, a young woman approached him, asking whether he’d consider her for two marks—the equivalent of 50 cents. When he declined, she asked if he’d like one of her four friends at the next table. He turned her down again, but offered to buy her a beer and sausage. She eagerly agreed, but scoffed when he asked her about Wedding, a district known for its poverty. She complained that the women there weren’t professional because they would sell themselves “for a piece of bread.”

As they talked, the woman was startled to learn Plotkin had read Alfred Döblin’s recently published novel Berlin Alexanderplatz about the down-and-out life in the city. “Do you remember that Döblin said that time is a butcher and that all of us are running away from the butcher’s knife?” she asked. “Well, that’s me, and that’s all of us.”

Meeting German Jews, Plotkin found himself besieged by questions about how conditions were for Jews in America. “Do you have a fascist party in America?” someone asked. “No, not yet—we had the Ku Klux Klan for a while, but that’s over with for the present,” he replied, alluding to signs that its membership had peaked earlier.

“Then the Jews of America are fortunate,” one of the German Jews declared. “Here we are cursed with anti-Semitism, the most bitter anti-Semitism we have ever known.” When Plotkin declared that there was anti-Semitism in the United States, too, they scoffed at the notion that it could be at all comparable. “Do they ever throw Jews out of subway cars in New York?” they asked. “Do they ever come into stores belonging to Jews and tear up all the stock and break up all the fixtures?” They pointed out that boycotts and threats were a daily fact of life. “The majority of the Jews in Germany are being driven into no one knows what,” he quoted them as saying. “There is hardly a Friday night that we pray without trembling.”

Yet despite all the poverty and anti-Semitism he witnessed or heard about, Plotkin was dubious about Hitler’s chances of seizing power—or, if he did, how long he would be able to keep it. Many of the trade union leaders he met were convinced that his movement had already peaked. “Hitlerism is rapidly going to pieces,” one of them insisted to Plotkin, adding that the Communists were on the rise. “Whenever a Hitlerite leaves the Nazis, he goes straight to the Communists, they are growing in strength.”

Plotkin decided to see for himself what the Nazis represented. On December 16, 1932, he noticed posters advertising one of their rallies at the Sportpalast, with propagandist Joseph Goebbels as the featured speaker. He showed up an hour early, finding only a couple of thousand people in the hall which he estimated could hold 15,000. The young Nazis in uniforms looked disheartened. By the time the rally started, the hall contained more people, but there were still plenty of empty seats. The opening round of martial music was met with weak applause. “One felt as if the spirit had taken flight,” Plotkin noted in his diary. While he gave Goebbels high marks for “showmanship,” the evening proved anticlimactic. “So this was the famous menace to Germany and to the world,” he wrote. “I confess my disappointment… I had come to see a whale and found a minnow.”

Other American Jews who visited Germany in this period also weren’t sure how dangerous the Nazis, with their anti-Semitic tirades, really were. Norman Corwin, a young reporter from Massachusetts who would go on to become a highly successful writer, director and producer in radio’s golden age, took a European journey in 1931. In Heidelberg, he stayed at a pension where the owners were apolitical but their blond seventeen-year-old son was a committed Nazi. The boy was intrigued by Corwin, who was only four years older and probably the first American he’d met. He followed the visitor everywhere, in Corwin’s words, “like a faithful dog.”

As they walked around the city taking in the sights, Corwin told his companion about life in the United States, and the German teenager expounded on his views of his country’s future. The Nazis, he insisted, would restore Germany to its proper place in the world and rid it of “the pollution of the race.” Corwin listened, but it wasn’t until his last day, while they were up at the Heidelberg Castle, that he told the boy that he was Jewish. This was met with silence that neither of them broke during their walk back to the pension.

Corwin left Germany not nearly as troubled as he should have been by that encounter. Traveling in northern France, he tried to convince a young woman he met that her fears about a new war were unfounded. “We are beyond thinking of war as an instrument of political expediency,” he told her.

The American diplomats and journalists who were based in Berlin were increasingly curious about the man who led the movement that everyone was talking about. On Saturday, December 5, 1931, Ambassador Sack-ett met Hitler for the first and only time during his three-year posting. Carefully prearranged to avoid the appearance of an official meeting with an opposition figure, this first-ever encounter between a U.S. envoy and Hitler took place over tea in the home of Emil Georg von Stauss, a pro-Nazi director of the Deutsche Diskonto Bank. Sackett, who had only limited German, was accompanied by Alfred Klieforth, the embassy’s first secretary. Hitler was accompanied by Rudolf Hess, Hermann Goering and Putzi Hanfstaengl.

As the host, von Stauss introduced the topic of Germany’s “distressing” economic situation—and Hitler promptly took over by embarking on one of his trademark monologues. Sackett would note later that he spoke “as if he were addressing a large audience.” The Nazi leader claimed the country’s plight was caused by its loss of colonies and territory, and argued for a revision of the terms of the Versailles Treaty, including the return of the Polish Corridor. He denounced what he characterized as a vastly overarmed France and warned that its aggressive actions could prevent Germany from repaying its private debts, which he claimed it otherwise would do. And he insisted that the Nazis’ paramilitary units were only “for the purpose of keeping order within Germany and suppressing Communism.”

Writing to Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, Sackett indicated that the meeting had left him with distinctly cool feelings. “The impression I gained of Hitler is that of a fanatical crusader,” he reported. “He has a certain forcefulness and intensity which gives him a power of leadership among those classes that do not weigh his outpourings. His methods are those of an opportunist. While he talked vigorously, he never looked me in the eye.” Many Germans were turning to the Nazis “in despair that former political allegiances provide no relief from present intolerable conditions,” Sackett acknowledged. But he predicted that “if this man comes into power he must find himself shortly on the rocks, both of international and internal difficulties. He is certainly not the type from which statesmen evolve.”

It was no accident that Hanfstaengl had accompanied Hitler to his meeting with the American ambassador. This “half American” Harvard graduate, as he liked to characterize himself, was once again seen frequently in the Nazi leader’s entourage, particularly during his meetings with American journalists. After Hitler was released from prison in late 1924, Putzi and Helen had continued to see him fairly regularly for the next couple of years, but then their contacts tapered off during the period when his political appeal was waning.

Hitler was still clearly attracted to Helen. On one occasion when he was visiting the Hanfstaengls’ home and Putzi had gone out, Hitler sank down on his knees in front of her and began: “If only I had someone to look after me…” Helen was sitting on the sofa, she recalled later, and “here he was on his knees, with his head in your lap, he was almost like a little boy.” Was this a declaration of love, as Putzi would later write in his memoirs? Was he really in love with her? “I should say in a way he was,” Helen explained. “As far as he was in love with anyone, maybe I was one of the ones that perhaps he was in love with.”

All of Helen’s qualifiers were understandable. After all, she and her husband speculated, as American correspondents and others did, about Hitler’s sexuality. In his memoir, Putzi wrote: “I felt Hitler was a case of a man who was neither fish, flesh [he clearly meant “meat” here] nor fowl, neither fully homosexual nor fully heterosexual… I had formed the firm conviction that he was impotent, the repressed, masturbating type.”

Helen had asked Hitler once, “Why don’t you find a lovely wife and marry?” He replied that he could never marry because his life was dedicated to his country. But the evidence suggests that, whatever his sexual capabilities or proclivities, Hitler was at the very least attracted to several women during his life, with Helen perhaps the only one who was close to him in age. He routinely charmed older women, but whatever sexual longings he possessed seemed mostly focused on much younger ones.

As Putzi began to reengage with Hitler when the Nazis’ political fortunes rose in direct response to the economic crisis, he found that suppressing information was a big part of his role. And one of the biggest near scandals that needed to be contained surrounded the nature of Hitler’s relationship with his half-sister’s daughter Geli Raubal. By all accounts vivacious and flirtatious, Geli had come to Munich from Vienna as a teenager ostensibly to study. But soon she seemed fully preoccupied with her uncle, who was nearly twenty years her senior. She appeared at his side at cafés, restaurants, the opera and other public places. Then she moved into his spacious new apartment on Prinzregentenplatz, which was funded by his supporters. Although she had her own room there, rumors about the couple were rife in party circles.

Putzi dismissed Geli as “an empty-headed little slut” who basked in her uncle’s fame. Helen took a more charitable view. “I always had the feeling he was trying to run her life, tyrannizing her, that she was more or less oppressed,” she said, looking back at that period. Others—particularly Otto Strasser, the brother of Hitler’s main rival in the party—would later claim that Hitler forced Geli to arouse him by humiliating sexual practices since he was incapable of normal sex. Whatever transpired between them, Geli was found in her room, shot in the heart, on September 18, 1931, dead at age twenty-three; earlier, she and Hitler had been overheard having a loud argument. Officially, her death was ruled a suicide, but Putzi and other propagandists had to work hard to quell reports in leftist local papers that this was a possible cover-up. “The whole affair was hushed up and glossed over as much as possible,” he noted.

While Putzi was busy cultivating his ties to American correspondents, he certainly didn’t let them in on this story, whether it was the early party gossip and whispers about Hitler and Geli when they were parading around together or her suspicious death. Instead, he was eager to serve as the go-between for American reporters who wanted to interview Hitler, usually for the first time. Even as Hitler’s domestic drama was playing itself out behind the scenes, the Nazi leader was capitalizing on the growing popular discontent that was attracting new converts to his cause. To boost Hitler’s international stature, Putzi urged him to meet American reporters, particularly the most famous ones.

One of the most famous, of course, was Dorothy Thompson. While she was no longer living in Berlin, she wasn’t really settled with her husband Sinclair Lewis in New York either. Europe—in particular, Germany—kept pulling her back as she churned out lengthy pieces for the Saturday Evening Post and other publications. She had tried to meet Hitler as far back as the aftermath of the failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. Hearing that he had taken refuge at the Hanfstaengls’ place outside of Munich, she rushed to the house “of an American woman” only to learn from Helen that Hitler was already gone. She recalled meeting Helen in New York during World War I and claimed that even then she was “a German propagandist.” Following Hitler’s release from prison, Thompson made a few attempts to meet him but blamed her failure to do so on the fact that he was “lofty and remote from all foreigners.”

Like many American journalists, Thompson found Putzi Hanfstaengl to be the most colorful member of Hitler’s entourage. “Fussy. Amusing. The oddest imaginable press chief for a dictator,” she wrote. But also like many of her colleagues, she could mock him as “an immense, high-strung, incoherent clown.” To be sure, that didn’t prevent her from enlisting his help when Cosmopolitan gave her the assignment of interviewing Hitler in November 1931. Excited by that prospect, she checked into Berlin’s Adlon Hotel, where she ran into John Farrar of the New York publishing house Farrar & Rinehart. He promptly got her to commit to writing a quickie book about the Nazi leader if her interview went well. After all, it wasn’t just Cosmopolitan that was interested in figuring out whether this bizarre figure could become the leader of Germany and who he really was.

Thompson made full use of this opportunity, speedily turning out her short book, I Saw Hitler!, which made a big splash when it was published in 1932, just as its subject was figuring prominently in all the political stories flowing from Germany. In the foreword, she expressed no reservations about making sweeping judgments that others might consider more appropriate for historians—quite the contrary. “The times in which we live move too fast for the considered historian to record them for us,” she grandly proclaimed. “They move too quickly to permit the writing of long books about momentary phases. Ours is the age of the reporter.”

And Thompson wasn’t shy about revealing her emotions and snap judgments as she set up and conducted the interview. She briefly explained Hitler’s shift in tactics after he emerged from prison, abandoning talk of revolt and replacing it with a new strategy: “Gone ‘legal,’” she wrote. “No longer was there to be a march on Berlin. The people were to ‘awaken’ and Hitler’s movement was going to vote dictatorship in! In itself a fascinating idea. Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights.” This would-be dictator, she added, already had his own army and “terrorizes the streets.”

Little wonder that Thompson was a popular writer: her vivid, succinct prose got right to the heart of the issue. She knew her readers wanted to know about Hitler’s strategy, but, more important, whether it was going to work. And she wasn’t going to disappoint them by equivocating.

Confessing that she was nervous enough about this encounter to consider taking smelling salts, she waited impatiently in the Kaiserhof Hotel for Hitler to arrive. He did so an hour late, and then kept her waiting in Putzi’s room even longer. Thompson related all this, keeping the reader in suspense as well. But not for long. With a dramatic flourish, she allowed the reader to accompany her not just into her meeting but also into her mind. “When finally I walked into Adolph Hitler’s salon in the Kaiserhof Hotel, I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany,” she wrote. “In something less than fifty seconds I was quite sure I was not. It took just that long to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog.

“He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones,” she continued. “He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure.” Then, referring to the title of a bestselling novel of that era by German writer Hans Fallada, she added: “He is the very prototype of the Little Man.”

In quick brush strokes, she completed the physical portrait of Hitler: the lock of hair falling over “an insignificant and slightly retreating forehead,” a large nose “badly shaped and without character,” and his movements “awkward, almost undignified and most un-martial.” But his eyes, she pointed out, were notable, because “they have the peculiar shine which often distinguishes geniuses, alcoholics, and hysterics.” At the same time, she confessed he had “the soft, almost feminine charm of the Austrian!”

She contrasted his “actor’s face… capable of being pushed out or in” to President von Hindenburg’s face “cut out of rock” and Chancellor Brüning’s “head of an eighteenth century cardinal-statesman.” This caused her to involuntarily smile and think, “Oh, Adolph! Adolph! You will be out of luck!”

As Thompson also pointed out, the interview itself was difficult, since Hitler, as usual, spoke as if he were addressing a mass meeting. But it wasn’t the content of her interview that was important; it was her reading of the man and his prospects. While she dutifully marched the reader through his ideas as he spelled them out in the interview and in Mein Kampf (“The Jews are responsible for everything,” as she summed it up—adding “take the Jews out of Hitler’s program, and the whole thing… collapses”), the real message was her conclusion that “Hitler’s tragedy is that he has risen too high.” Her prediction: “If Hitler comes into power, he will smite only the weakest of his enemies.” In that case, she concluded, the key question would be who would come after him.

American readers probably found Thompson’s descriptions and conclusions reassuring. After all, the message was that, in all likelihood, Hitler would never make it to the top—and, if he did, it would be only for a brief, ineffective moment. When I Saw Hitler! was published, Nazi activist Kurt Ludecke, who shared Putzi’s ambitions to educate Hitler about the United States and saw the press chief as a pompous fool, told the Nazi leader that he was going to quote him something from “Mrs. Lewis, the wife of one of America’s most famous novelists.” He then translated the part about how quickly she had realized that he wasn’t going to take power.

“Who is this Mrs. Lewis anyway?” Hitler asked. Ludecke explained that she was Dorothy Thompson, the correspondent Putzi had brought to him. “Ja, ja, now I remember,” Hitler replied. “Hanfstaengl again! He brought this woman to me…”

But Hitler seemed more amused than irritated by Thompson’s conclusions, much to the disappointment of Ludecke. In fact, he had good reason to welcome and encourage any coverage that downplayed the threat he represented—and he usually did so with Americans when Hanfstaengl was the facilitator, taking advantage of his American and, on occasion, Harvard ties.

One of Putzi’s classmates and best friends at Harvard was Hans V. Kaltenborn, who would become a nationally famous radio broadcaster. The son of German immigrants who had settled in Milwaukee, he learned German at home, and in college he became the vice president of the Deutscher Verein, the German Union, while Putzi served as its president. In the 1920s, Kaltenborn visited Europe often and, in Germany, Hanfstaengl arranged for him to meet various Nazis. But he hadn’t met Hitler, since he was rarely willing to spend much time waiting around for a possible interview. As Kaltenborn recalled, though, Putzi “felt that any newspaper correspondent or radio commentator should be willing to waste at least a week in prayerful hope that the Führer might condescend to receive him.”

But on August 16, 1932, while he was visiting Berlin, Kaltenborn received a telegram from his old classmate, who was in Munich, informing him that an interview was arranged for the next day in Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s Alpine retreat. Louis Lochner, the Associated Press bureau chief in Berlin, called him to let him know he had received a similar telegram so they would be going together. The two took the night train to Munich, and Putzi met them at the station. Both journalists were disappointed to learn from him that Wiegand, the Hearst correspondent, would also be included. The session felt less and less exclusive.

Putzi had arranged for Hitler’s car and driver to take them to Berchtesgaden. Once they arrived, they were treated to lunch on the terrace of a little hotel, while Putzi went over to Hitler’s “Swiss chalet,” as Kalten-born called it. Wiegand had argued that he had to have a separate interview, and the two other journalists were pleased when Putzi managed to arrange this. They were even happier when the Hearst correspondent angrily returned from a mere fifteen minutes with Hitler. “That man is hopeless,” he told them. “He gets worse every time I see him. I get nothing out of him. Ask him a question and he makes a speech. This whole trip has been a waste of time.”

Kaltenborn took that as a lesson and decided that he would confront Hitler immediately about his feelings about the Jews. “Unlike Lochner, I wasn’t stationed in Germany and did not need to be discreet to escape expulsion,” he noted later. They walked over to Hitler’s house, and their host, dressed all in black, including his tie, came out to meet them. Hitler’s laundry, hung out by his half-sister Angela, was fluttering in the breeze, the view of the Bavarian Alps was majestic, and despite a few Nazi guards stationed on the paths outside, “everything suggested peace,” Kaltenborn noted. But he also felt an atmosphere of “latent hostility” when Putzi whispered to Hitler who they were.

As soon as they sat down, Kaltenborn fired off his first question: “Why does your anti-Semitism make no distinction between the Jews that flooded into Germany during the postwar period and the many fine Jewish families that have been German for generations?”

“All Jews are foreigners,” Hitler shouted back. “Who are you to ask me how I deal with foreigners. You Americans admit no foreigner unless he has good money, good physique, and good morals. Who are you to talk about who should be allowed in Germany?”

From then on, Kaltenborn continued tossing in as pointed questions as possible, while Lochner focused on more tactical queries about Hitler’s next political moves. As Kaltenborn noted, Hitler didn’t really answer his questions, no more than the first one, since “he has no capacity for logical consecutive thought.” As usual, he denounced the parliamentary system that, he argued, “has never functioned in Europe,” and called for authoritarian rule. He expected to take power, he maintained, but with the support of the German people. “A dictatorship is justified once the people declare their confidence in one man and ask him to rule,” he insisted.

Kaltenborn was as interested in Hitler’s behavior as in his answers. At one point, Hitler’s wolfhound came to the porch and approached his master. Instead of petting him, Hitler sternly commanded “Platz!”—the standard German order for a dog to back off and lie down. The dog obeyed, and soon took advantage of Hitler’s absorption in his own rhetoric to slink away. “I could understand that a man with Hitler’s temperament, background and experience might not care to make a friendly gesture towards an American correspondent, but it was surprising to see him observe the same stern aloofness towards his own dog,” Kaltenborn wrote.

The interview lasted forty-five minutes, and Kaltenborn emerged distinctly unimpressed with the man everyone was talking about. But the conclusion he drew was startling. “After meeting Hitler I myself felt almost reassured,” he recalled. “I could not see how a man of his type, a plebeian Austrian of limited mentality, could ever gain the allegiance of a majority of Germans.” He arrived at that judgment despite the fact that the Nazis had already garnered more votes and more Reichstag seats than any other party.

Yet Kaltenborn deserves credit for honestly admitting that he was no prophet. Many others would have been tempted to airbrush their memories; he didn’t. “Most people who met Adolf Hitler before he came to power in January, 1933 were apt to underestimate him,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I was no exception.”