Hitlerland

6 “Like Football and Cricket”

Martha Dodd was twenty-four when she arrived in Berlin in the summer of 1933 with her father, the new American ambassador, her mother and brother. Recalling her state of mind later, she stressed how naïve and uninformed she was about politics, with almost no idea about what Germany would be like—or what its new Nazi rulers represented. While her father had evident misgivings and mentioned several times that he wasn’t sure how long their Berlin assignment would last, Martha seemed largely oblivious to them. “I do not remember any of us being especially disturbed by the thought of living under a dictatorship,” she wrote in her Berlin memoir Through Embassy Eyes.

She was hardly alone in that respect. Many Americans were still agnostic about Hitler and his movement, including some of the country’s leading literary figures. At a farewell dinner for the Dodds hosted by the German-American societies in Chicago, Martha sat between Thornton Wilder and Carl Sandburg. Wilder urged Martha to learn German quickly and spend her time with Germans instead of the foreign community in Berlin, while Sandburg offered this bit of advice: “Find out what this man Hitler is made of, what makes his brain go round, what his bones and blood are made of. Before your eyes will pass the greatest pageant of crooks and gangsters, idealists, statesmen, criminals, diplomats, and geniuses. You will see every nationality in the world. Watch them, study them, dissect them. Don’t be frightened or diffident, don’t let them or your experiences spoil you or your eagerness for life. Be brave and truthful, keep your poetry and integrity.”

All of which inspired Martha to view this journey into the unknown as a great adventure, which she planned to experience with the “eagerness for life” that Sandburg commended to her. As for the other qualities—bravery, truthfulness, integrity—there would be plenty of disagreement among those who met Martha in Germany whether she lived up to them, along with endless gossip about her behavior, particularly with a procession of men of various ages and nationalities. If her father often appeared to be stumbling through his time in Berlin, not quite sure what he should or could be doing, Martha was anything but “frightened or diffident.” In that sense, she took Sandburg’s words very much to heart.

Growing up in Chicago, Martha had gone to University High School, which was labeled by students from rival schools as “Jew High.” By her own admission, Martha was also “slightly anti-Semitic.” As she put it, “I accepted the attitude that Jews were not as attractive physically as Gentiles and were less socially presentable.” She recalled that when she went to the University of Chicago, even some of her professors “resented the brilliance of Jewish colleagues and students.”

After college, Martha got a job as the assistant literary editor of the Chicago Tribune. She also married “for a short period unhappily.” But in matters of the heart, she wasn’t quite the naïve young woman that she appeared to be politically. She didn’t bother to inform most of her new acquaintances in Berlin that she was married—and not yet divorced. “I suppose I practiced a great deception on the diplomatic corps by not indicating that I was a married woman at that time,” she noted with evident amusement. “But I must admit I rather enjoyed being treated like a maiden of eighteen knowing all the while my dark secret.”

While no maiden, Martha succeeded in charming many of those who met her for the first time. Upon seeing her arrive with her parents in Berlin on July 12, 1933, Bella Fromm described the daughter of the new ambassador as “a perfect example of the intelligent young American female.” When William Shirer, the new bureau chief of the Universal News Service and soon-to-be-famous CBS broadcaster, arrived in Berlin the following year, he noted in his diary that Martha spent many evenings at Die Taverne, the restaurant where American correspondents gathered almost every evening after filing their stories. Shirer described her as “pretty, vivacious, a mighty arguer.”

But Martha also triggered other feelings, particularly among the embassy wives. Kay Smith returned with her husband, Truman Smith, the military attaché who had been the first American official to meet Hitler in 1922, for a second tour at the Berlin embassy in 1935. “Martha had an apartment of her own on the top floor of the Embassy,” she wrote in her unpublished memoir. “She was small, delicate looking, blue eyed, pink and white complexion, a little Dresden figurine. Appearances are deceiving. Martha had a way with the gentlemen and it was said no scruples. As time went on I heard rumors that she entertained men at all hours in her apartment.”

Martha certainly had a predilection for romance, both political and personal. When it came to politics, her first judgment as a new arrival was that Germany and its new rulers had been unfairly condemned by world opinion—and she needed to help set the record straight. “We liked Germany, and I was enchanted by the kindness and simplicity of the people… everything was peaceful, romantic, strange, nostalgic,” she recalled. “I felt that the press had badly maligned the country and I wanted to proclaim the warmth and friendliness of the people, the soft summer night with its fragrance of trees and flowers, the serenity of the streets.” When she made the rounds of reasonably priced restaurants, she found herself comparing her experiences to what she knew of France: “The Germans seemed much more genuine and honest, even in the merchant class.”

Soon after her arrival, Martha met fellow countryman Quentin Reynolds, who was also a newcomer to Germany. Reynolds had been sent to Berlin in early 1933 by the International News Service to fill in for the regular correspondent, who had run afoul of the new Nazi rulers. He went straight from writing baseball stories about the superstar Ty Cobb to covering the biggest foreign story of the era. By his own admission, he had only “saloon German” and “no special grasp of current events.” But he credited fellow correspondents with giving him a crash course in local politics. Knickerbocker urged him to read Mein Kampf right away. “No American I know of has taken the trouble to read it seriously, but it’s all there: his plan for the conquest of Europe,” he told him.

By the time he met Martha Dodd, Reynolds was also friendly with Putzi Hanfstaengl, who regularly dropped by Die Taverne. “I regret to say that on first acquaintance he struck me as a likeable fellow,” Reynolds recalled later. “He was a tremendous man physically, with heavy features, dark eyes, and a mane of coal-black hair that he kept tossing back. With an ingratiating manner, he was a compulsive and amusing talker and, unlike other Nazis I later had to do business with, he went out of his way to be cordial to Americans. You had to know Putzi to really dislike him.”

Martha was impressed that Reynolds, who had only been in the country a few months, already knew “such legendary figures” as Hanfstaengl and arranged for her to be introduced to him. At a party thrown by an English journalist—“a lavish and fairly drunken affair,” as Martha recalled—the Nazi propagandist lived up to her expectations. “Putzi came in late in a sensational manner, a huge man in height and build, towering over everyone present,” she noted. “He had a soft, ingratiating manner, a beautiful voice which he used with conscious artistry, sometimes whispering low and soft, the next minute bellowing and shattering the room. He was supposed to be the artist among the Nazis, erratic and interesting, the personal clown and musician to Hitler himself… Bavarian and American blood produced this strange phenomenon.”

Like other Americans, Martha would find herself frequently in Hanfstaengl’s company, dancing with him at parties and gladly taking advantage of his offers to introduce her to Nazi luminaries. But Reynolds was already developing a healthy sense of skepticism about him while remaining careful not to show it. About a month after Reynolds arrived, he ran into Hanfstaengl at the bar of the Adlon Hotel. “You’ve been here a month now, and you haven’t asked me about our so-called Jewish problem or written anything about it to annoy me,” Putzi told him. “How come, Quent?”

“Give me time, Putzi,” Reynolds replied. “I haven’t been here long enough to know what’s going on.”

By the time he met Martha, Reynolds not only knew more but was eager to explore more for himself. In August, he suggested to Martha and her brother Bill that they take their Chevrolet and travel to southern Germany and Austria together with him—an idea that immediately appealed to Martha. As they drove south, she recognized the word “Jude” in banners strung across the road; they realized this was anti-Semitic propaganda but, as Martha put it, “we didn’t—at least I didn’t—take it too seriously.”

In fact, Martha was so swept up by the sight of marching Brown-shirts and the apparent enthusiasm of the people, she responded equally enthusiastically. When Germans saw their special license plate with a low number, they assumed the trio of Americans were top officials—and welcomed them with “Heil Hitler” greetings. “The excitement of the people was contagious and I ‘Heiled’ as vigorously as any Nazi,” she recalled. Although Reynolds and her brother mocked her behavior, “I felt like a child, ebullient and careless, the intoxication of the new regime working like wine in me,” she admitted.

Around midnight, the Americans stopped for the night in Nuremberg. As they reached their hotel on Königstrasse, they were surprised to find the street filled with an excited crowd and speculated that they may have run into a toymakers’ festival. As he registered, Reynolds asked the hotel clerk if there was going to be a parade. The clerk laughed. “It will be kind of a parade,” he replied. “They are teaching someone a lesson.”

The visitors walked out to join the crowd. Everyone seemed in a good mood, with the sound of a band adding to the festive atmosphere. Then they saw Nazi banners and swastikas, and the source of the music: a marching band of Storm Troopers. Two tall troopers were dragging someone between them. “I could not at first tell if it was a man or a woman,” Reynolds wrote. “Its head had been clipped bald, and face and head had been coated with white powder. Even though the figure wore a skirt, it might have been a man dressed as a clown.” As the Brownshirts straightened out their victim, the Americans spotted the placard around its neck: “I wanted to live with a Jew.”

As the “lesson” continued, the Americans learned from the crowd that this was a woman named Anna Rath. The reason for her harsh punishment: she had tried to marry her Jewish fiancé, defying the ban on mixed marriages. Martha remembered the image of her “tragic and tortured face, the color of diluted absinthe.” She also was startled by Reynolds’s reaction. She had believed him to be a “hard-boiled” journalist, but “he was so shaken by the whole scene that he said the only thing he could do was to get drunk, to forget it.”

The Nazis wound up the evening by playing the “Horst Wessel Song” as about 5,000 people stood singing, their right arms extended—and then everyone disappeared. Although she suddenly felt nervous and cold, with her earlier elation fully gone, Martha still tried to convince Reynolds that he shouldn’t file anything about the incident. She argued that her presence and that of her brother would make this a sensational story, and, after all, who knew what the Nazi side of the story really was. And it had to be an isolated case.

Although Martha claimed that the three of them made good on Reynolds’s vow to get drunk, proceeding to tank up on red champagne, the journalist was sober enough when he went up to his room. He promptly called Hudson Hawley, his bureau chief in Berlin, excited that he had proof of exactly the kind of atrocity story that many journalists had heard about but not witnessed—and the Nazis routinely denied. Hawley cautioned that he might not be allowed to wire it and suggested he send it by mail instead. He also advised him to leave out any mention of the presence of Martha and Bill Dodd to avoid negative repercussions for the new ambassador. “Writing the story, I found myself trembling,” Reynolds recalled. “The grotesque white face of Anna Rath haunted me.” The next morning he mailed it in.

By the time he and the Dodds returned to Berlin a week later, the story had received big play. Hanfstaengl had left a message for him, requesting an urgent meeting. “There isn’t one damn word of truth in your story!” Putzi shouted at Reynolds, dropping all pretense of conviviality. “I’ve talked with our people in Nuremberg and they say nothing of the sort happened there.”

But the veteran British correspondent Norman Ebbutt had followed up on the story, getting one of his reporters to confirm it. He told Reynolds that the reporter had learned that Rath had been locked up in a mental hospital.

The Foreign Ministry didn’t bother to deny the story the way Hanfstaengl did. In fact, they dispatched officials to the Dodds’ residence to apologize for what they characterized as an incident of isolated brutality—providing the explanation that Martha had already suggested to Reynolds. They also claimed that the perpetrators would be punished. That, apparently, was enough to allow Martha to continue to nourish her initial illusions that the only problem with the new Germany was that it was misunderstood by the outside world.

As for Reynolds, he was rapidly shedding any illusions he still had not just about the nature of the Nazi regime but also about Hanfstaengl. Because of the Anna Rath incident, he got to see the real Putzi, not just the jocular one who charmed many Americans. When Reynolds’s parents visited Berlin, the correspondent threw a big dinner party for them, inviting Martha and Bill Dodd along with several of his journalistic colleagues and German acquaintances. Showing up late as usual, Putzi sat down at the piano and turned to Reynolds’s mother, announcing that he would sing a song for her that he had written himself. “Putzi serenaded my mother with a foul song in which the Third Reich’s enemies were jingled out as Jews, Catholics, and Negroes,” Reynolds recalled. Putzi had lowered his voice so only the small group at the piano could hear his words, which indicated he knew very well what he was doing. He was paying Reynolds back for the Anna Rath story by targeting his mother as the correspondent looked on.

Reynolds felt like hitting him right there, but another German guest talked him out of making a scene that would only reflect badly on him. Relishing his sense of self-importance, Putzi soon announced that he had to leave early because Hitler wanted him at the Chancellery to play some Liszt. Escorting Putzi to the door, Reynolds summoned enough self-control to look like he was the genial host sending his guest off with a pleasant good-bye. But his final words, delivered so only Putzi could hear, couldn’t have been blunter: “Never come to my house again, you louse.”

Writing to his daughter Betty at the University of Chicago on June 30, 1933, the AP’s Louis Lochner mused about President Roosevelt’s decision to send historian William Dodd to represent the United States in Berlin. “Roosevelt must have a sense of humor to send this exponent of the most liberal Jeffersonian democracy… into this anti-democratic country,” he wrote. “He’ll fit into here about like a square peg into a round hole!”

When Dodd arrived in Germany in July, he began cautiously exploring his new surroundings, gauging the reception he received, and sizing up the political situation. Meeting Konstantin von Neurath, Dodd found the foreign minister “most agreeable.” Hans Luther, Germany’s ambassador to the United States, who was also in Berlin that July, visited his new American counterpart to discuss Hitler’s plans for economic recovery and tariff policy. As for the touchier issues of how the Nazi government would treat its immediate neighbors, Luther sought to be reassuring. “He showed no belligerent spirit toward France and did not mention the Polish corridor,” Dodd wrote in his diary.

Dodd was particularly interested in the views of his fellow academics, and what he heard left him with an uneasy feeling. Professor Otto Hoetzsch of the University of Berlin, a former member of the Reichstag and “well-known internationalist,” as Dodd wrote, expressed “his comparative satisfaction with the Hitler regime.” As the new ambassador observed, “So far nearly all university men seem to acquiesce in their own intimidation, but one sees that it is fear of unemployed status rather than a willing surrender.”

On July 28, Dodd described “the saddest story of Jewish persecution I have yet heard.” Acclaimed chemist Fritz Haber came to ask him whether he could emigrate to the United States. He had been fired from his post and denied a pension by the Nazis, all the while suffering from heart problems. Dodd told him that there were no places left in the immigration quota, and there were no special provisions for scientists of his stature. While Haber did have an alternative plan to try to go to Spain, Dodd reflected: “Such treatment can only bring evil to the government which practices such terrible cruelty.”

Like Consul General Messersmith and other American diplomats, Dodd found himself trying to intervene in the growing number of cases where Americans were beaten by Brownshirts, especially after they failed to give Heil Hitler salutes. Foreign Minister von Neurath assured him that he would do everything possible to prevent such incidents in the future, but he maintained that the Brownshirts “are so uncontrollable that I am afraid we cannot stop them.”

In a Columbus Day speech to the American Chamber of Commerce luncheon at the Adlon Hotel, Dodd decided to make some broader points about the nature of government and the perils of repressive actions. With representatives of the Foreign, Economics and Propaganda ministries present, he warned that new social experiments could easily end in disaster. “It would be no sin if statesmen learned enough of history to realize that no system which implies control of society by privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way than collapse,” he declared. As an alternative, he pointed to Thomas Jefferson’s belief that “to develop the ideal social order was to leave every man the utmost freedom of initiative and action and always to forbid any man or group of men to profiteer at the expense of others.”

Dodd was immensely gratified by the “extraordinary applause” his declaration produced, although he noted the high level of tension in the room. He also recognized that the authorities were showing signs of irritation with his pronouncements and his persistent inquiries about the assaults on Americans. “It is evident some dislike of me is arising here now in official circles,” he wrote. “I believe it is simply Nazi opposition.”

On October 17, the ambassador was able to present his case directly to Hitler. His first impression: “He looks somewhat better than the pictures that appear in papers.” When Dodd raised the issue again of attacks on Americans, Hitler sounded accommodating. As the ambassador wrote in his diary, “The Chancellor assured me personally that he would see that any future attack was punished to the limit and that publicity would be given to decrees warning everyone that foreigners were not to be expected to give the Hitler salute.”

But when Dodd asked Hitler about his recent announcement that Germany was withdrawing from the League of Nations, the chancellor “ranted” about the Treaty of Versailles and the many alleged indignities a victimized Germany had faced at the hands of the victors of World War I. Dodd conceded that the French had been unjust, but he tried to strike a more philosophical note. War is always followed by injustice, he argued, citing the example of how southern states were treated after the U.S. Civil War. But Hitler wasn’t exactly the eager student of history: he remained conspicuously silent as the former professor tried to illustrate his point.

A few days earlier, Dodd had tried to take a similarly philosophical tack with Roosevelt in discussing the nature of what was happening in Germany. In an October 12 letter to the president, he wrote about the need for reserving judgment on that country’s new rulers, implying that there was still reason for hope. “Fundamentally, I believe a people has a right to govern itself and that other peoples must exercise patience even when crudities and injustices are done. Give men a chance to try their schemes.”

Dodd tried to draw Hitler out on what his schemes might be—specifically, whether a border incident with any of Germany’s neighbors could trigger a new war. “No, no,” Hitler protested. But when Dodd asked whether he would try to call a European conference if there were any flare-up in the Ruhr Valley, he replied: “That would be my purpose, but we might not be able to restrain the German people.” Dodd noted in his diary, “I saw that meant the violent Nazis whom he has trained to violence.” The ambassador’s conclusion: “My first impression was of his belligerence and self-confidence.”

Still, Dodd wasn’t convinced that Hitler had the full support of the German people and questioned how strong his grip on power really was. Two days before he met the chancellor, he had gone to the movies and observed that Hitler’s appearance in a newsreel only triggered tepid applause. “Hitler is surely not so powerful with the people as Mussolini, the Italian despot, has been,” he observed. But Dodd certainly understood the physical danger represented by his movement. On the last Sunday in October, he was walking along the Tiergartenstrasse at noon and spotted a procession of Storm Troopers approaching. “I walked into the park to avoid embarrassment,” he recorded in his diary. Understandably, he did not want to become a cause célèbre by not giving the Hitler salute and possibly paying the price as other Americans already had.

Nonetheless, Dodd was intent on continuing to do what he could to make the case that Germany should put some brakes on repression, preserving a modicum of liberty and decency. Asked to speak at the German-American Church Forum on November 19, which was designated as Martin Luther Day, the ambassador lectured about Luther’s life “just as I would have done before an American audience,” he noted with visible pride. The audience was about two-thirds German and one-third American, and both groups applauded him enthusiastically. “It was clear to me that Germans wished me to say in public what they are not allowed to say in private, especially about religious and personal freedom,” he concluded.

Dodd had by no means shed all illusions about Hitler’s intentions. In early December, Sir Eric Phipps, his British counterpart in Berlin, dropped by his house to brief him on Hitler’s renewal of an earlier proposal to discuss a disarmament deal with France. Under its provisions, Germany would be able to maintain a 300,000-man army along with guns and “defensive airplanes.” Now, Hitler was adding that he would include a ten-year pledge not to go to war, and accept international supervision of German armaments and of its 2.5 million SA and SS troops. Dodd promised to cable a report summarizing this offer to Washington, and noted optimistically in his diary, “It looked to me like a real move towards disarmament…”

But if the ambassador continued to hold out hope that Hitler might prove to be more reasonable than his rhetoric and program indicated, he was hardly at ease in his company—and sensed that the German leader was equally ill at ease with him. On January 1, 1934, Berlin’s diplomatic corps gathered in the Presidential Palace to pay their respects to eighty-six-year-old President von Hindenburg. When Hitler showed up, he and Dodd exchanged New Year’s greetings. Then, seeking to find a seemingly neutral subject of conversation, the American told him that he had recently spent a few very pleasant days in Munich, where Hitler had spent part of the holidays. Dodd mentioned that he had met “a fine German historian”—a Professor Meyer who had studied with him in Leipzig. When Hitler indicated he had no idea who Meyer was, Dodd mentioned some other academics at Munich University. But, once again, Hitler didn’t display any signs of recognition, “leaving the impression that he had never had contacts with the people I knew and respected.”

“I was afraid he thought I was trying to embarrass him a little,” Dodd wrote in his diary. “I was not. There was, however, no diplomatic or political subject we could mention these touchy times.” Hanfstaengl, who had made a point of cultivating his ties with both the ambassador and his daughter Martha, would later claim that there was another reason for the awkwardness between the chancellor and the American envoy. “Der gute Dodd, he can hardly speak German and made no sense at all,” Hitler told Putzi. In the eyes of Der Führer, Dodd’s earnestness left almost no impression. The German leader was only too happy to dismiss him as an inconsequential figure representing a country that was “hopelessly weak and could not interfere in any way with the realization of… [his] plans.”

Hanfstaengl shared his leader’s scorn for Dodd. “He was a modest little Southern history professor, who ran his embassy on a shoe-string and was probably trying to save money out of his pay,” he wrote in his postwar memoir. “At a time when it needed a robust millionaire to compete with the flamboyance of the Nazis, he teetered round self-effacingly as if he was still on a college campus.”

The notion that a flashier, wealthier envoy could have “competed” with the Nazis is, to put it mildly, a bizarre argument that says more about Hanfstaengl than it does about Dodd. Putzi still proudly strutted about town as Hitler’s propagandist, while Dodd was at least trying to push back against the Nazi tide—even if it was proving to be a futile effort.

In the first year of Hitler’s rule, there was at least one American visitor who had come to a quick judgment about what was happening and decided to issue a blunt warning to the Nazis. He was Sherwood Eddy, a Protestant missionary and YMCA national secretary who had traveled and taught in Asia, Russia and Germany, writing several books about his experiences and views. The Carl Schurz Society, named after a German-American politician and journalist who had served as a general in the Union Army during the Civil War and then become the first German-American elected to the U.S. Senate, was hosting a reception for the annual American Seminar in July 1933, and Eddy was the leader of the visiting delegation. In fact, as he pointed out to his hosts, this was his twelfth visit to Germany.

The continuation of such meetings was supposed to send a signal of reassurance that the new regime was committed to peace. At the reception, the German speakers praised Hitler’s recent Reichstag speech on international relations. According to reporter Bella Fromm, who as usual was present at such social events, they delivered a double-edged message: “Any possible concern in foreign countries as to the aggressive intentions of Germany should disappear. After all, the Führer principle is also represented in America under Roosevelt.”

Eddy responded with a polite profession of his love for Germany and delicately edged into the subject of the new regime. “I noted the unity of enthusiasm and zeal in what you call the ‘New Germany.’ I have always approved of enthusiasm and zeal.” But then he quickly made his point. “Besides my love for Germany, I have another, even stronger love in my heart: the love for humanity.” And that love, he continued, made him into a firm proponent of “impartial justice; freedom of speech, press, and assembly; fundamental moral and economic principles.” In case anyone didn’t get the point, he added, “These freedoms have to be accepted by all nations who claim cultural integrity.”

Eddy mentioned that he had upheld the same principles in Russia and refused to remain silent about the blatant violations of them there. “As a friend of Germany, I state that you are acting against the principles of justice,” he continued, making the Nazis in the audience “gasp in consternation,” as Fromm noted. “There is no room for a twofold justice, one for ‘Aryans’ and ‘Nordics,’ and another one for Social Democrats, Communists, Liberals, Jews, and Pacifists. Don’t say it’s your affair. It concerns the whole world when we in the United States conduct a lynching… The world is also concerned when you commit similar injustice.”

As he warmed to his topic, Eddy addressed the Germans even more bluntly: “In your country, injustice is committed every day, every hour. What are you doing to Catholics, Communists, Social Democrats, Jews? What atrocities are committed behind the wall of your horrible concentration camps? I see your papers.”

With that, Eddy held up that day’s edition of the Nazi daily Völkischer Beobachter with the headline “70,000 Jews Immigrated into Germany Within the Last 15 Years.” He called the statement not only wrong but “an instigation of youth, a kindling of race-hatred, a signal for cruel and wanton destruction.” Mentioning that he had heard the “Jew baiting” at meetings in Germany, he warned: “This must lead to a massacre… I am deeply worried about this country, which I love.”

Many of the foreigners in the audience applauded him. “The Nazis, pale, with rage, sat immobile, in cold silence,” Fromm recorded. But she wasn’t about to get the chance to write anything about this extraordinary performance by the visiting American missionary in her newspaper. Instead, another reporter plucked out the most innocuous parts of Eddy’s opening remarks and ended with his alleged pledge to urge friendly understanding for the new Germany in his home country. “I gasped when I read the piece,” Fromm wrote in her diary. But there was nothing she could do to set the public record straight.

In his clarity of vision and willingness to deliver his tough message, Eddy was unlike almost any other early American visitor to the “new Germany.” There were others who were troubled by the behavior of the Nazis, but very few who truly understood the sweeping nature of the transformation of the country and its people, and the danger this represented.

Often, American visitors would exhibit no more than a vague uneasiness. Future novelist Wright Morris, then only twenty-three, hopped a freighter from New York to Antwerp in October 1933, setting off to explore Europe. During his sojourn there, he briefly passed through Germany, checking into a youth hostel in Heidelberg. The dormer window of his room looked out on a park where blond children were playing, the weather was beautiful, and, as he walked about the city, he was keenly aware of its romantic tradition. “On the bridge over the Neckar I stood long and long, looking at the castle, my fancy on the Rhine maidens and the mists behind it,” he wrote in his travel memoir.

But he also felt his “first presentiments that something was rotten in this picture of perfection. Behind the light and the shadow, the trilling voices of the children, lurked a danger in which we were all complicit.” When he entered a tobacco shop to look at some pipes, he caught sight of someone spying on him through a curtain. “In the shopwoman’s smiling, unctuous manner there was something both disturbing and false,” he recalled. “I could hear muttered whisperings behind the curtain. My sense of apprehension was unused and rudimentary, since I had felt it so seldom, but in the eyes and furtive manner of this woman I felt, and shared, a nameless disquiet.” Nonetheless, Morris was quick to add, “Back in the sunlight I soon forgot it.”

Others were keen to overlook any disquieting signs, convinced that the key to international harmony was recognition of the notion that every country was free to choose its own path and that people everywhere have more in common than they realize. No one believed that more passionately than Donald B. Watt of Putney, Vermont, who in the summer of 1932 took his first small group of young Americans to Europe, launching the Experiment in International Living. The highly successful exchange program, which includes stays with local families, continues to operate today. As Watt put it, his aim was “to create a controlled human situation which would produce understanding and friendliness between people and different cultures in a limited period of time.”

Watt’s enthusiasm for “making friends out of ‘foreigners’” made him shrug off—and even mock—all those who warned him against taking his young idealistic travelers to Germany in the summer of 1933 for the second “Experiment” after Hitler had taken power. “From its war-like reputation, one would have expected Germany to have been most inhospitable toward a group interested in making peace,” Watt wrote. “Just the opposite materialized: the Nazi organizations made us feel most welcome… The picture which the [American] newspapers gave and what we actually saw in our families could scarcely have been more different.” Specifically on the subject of violence, he added, “The suggestion of personal danger to foreigners is no less laughable to those who spent the summer in that country than the thought of German courtesy failing.”

Watt did concede after the trip that there was an “excess of order” and “hypnosis of the masses” orchestrated by the Nazis. But the only real danger for a visiting foreigner, he felt, was not to be swept up by “the power of suggestion” of the constant saluting and “to use all his restraint if he does not wish to join the saluting throng.” Despite the widespread reports of beatings of visiting Americans who failed to join in the Nazi salutes, Watt maintained that his charges were free to do whatever they pleased. Living with German families, they began to understand that they had been victims of propaganda back in the United States. “All they had learned of Hitlerism in America was definitely unfavorable, but here they actually saw some good features of it,” Watt wrote.

Even when it came to Jews, he reported that everyone in his group concluded that “relatively few [were] roughly handled.” The main cause of anti-Semitism in Germany, he added, was the fact that “a large proportion of all business was in Jewish hands.” The young Americans were also impressed how Germans “are surmounting their relative poverty by a return to simple folk ways.” But the key takeaway, as Watt put it, was the one he had come searching for—and was determined to find no matter what happened. “Perhaps most important of all, we realized that the people whom we met were very much like us,” he concluded. “The Second Experiment in International Living was an interesting and successful demonstration of tolerance.”

The American social scientists who studied the new Germany were distinctly less Pollyannaish, but they were far from uniform in their judgments of the country’s New Order. Political scientist Frederick Schuman—who, like Dodd, taught at the University of Chicago—spent eight months in Germany in 1933. He had arranged his research trip before Hitler had come to power, but that event now changed both the nature of his stay and its purpose. “I journeyed toward a land I had already known and enjoyed as the home of music, philosophy, and Gemütlichkeit and as the birthplace of my Prussian and Hanoverian ancestors, now strangely transmuted into ‘Aryans’ and ‘Nordics,’” he wrote. “Upon my arrival in April of the year of the Nazi seizure of power I found the Reich in process of violent, if orderly, transition from parliamentary democracy to Fascism.”

Schuman made the focus of his research the newly triumphant Nazi movement, gathering materials for his 1935 book The Nazi Dictatorship: A Study in Social Pathology and the Politics of Fascism. Given the nature of his encounters, its analytical but highly critical tone was hardly surprising. “By the older German officials I was invariably received with courtesy and granted as much co-operation as was consistent with considerations of political and personal safety,” he recalled. “By the newer Nazi administrators I was invariably received with evasions and complex circumlocutions or, as in the case of Hanfstaengl, with gross and clownish discourtesy bred of psychic insecurity and conceit.”

While Schuman insisted he was interested in “explanation, not condemnation,” he left no doubt that any accurate picture of the new movement would inevitably be seen as partisan. “Like every form of highly emotionalized and subjectivized mass mysticism, National-socialism demands acceptance or rejection,” he wrote. “Objectivity is equivalent to rejection.” By the time he produced his book, he would offer a dire—and accurate—prediction about the likelihood of a new war inspired by “pathological hatreds, lusts, and longings for extinction.” His conclusion: “Fascism itself will be consumed by its war-mad sons. With it will perish the remnants of an age that has outlived its time.”

Columbia University sociologist Theodore Abel was also fascinated by events in Germany. When Hitler was appointed chancellor on January 30, Abel wrote in the private notebook where he regularly recorded his observations: “Germany wants to become a world power again, it wants to conquer[,] it wants an emperor. The danger of communism is great and it might come to civil war in Germany. All peace measures will go into the discard meanwhile…”

But Abel was far more restrained—even at times, complimentary—about Germany’s new rulers than Schuman; he also would later question some of Schuman’s findings. On February 2, he wrote: “Struck by Hitler’s manifesto appealing in noble terms to patriotism and setting forth as its goal reestablishment of unity of Germans who he claims are on the brink of dissolution.” He approvingly noted that Hitler had vowed to fight unemployment and boost agriculture, while at the same time emphasizing his commitment to peace and disarmament. “I consider it a noble document and while it sounds genuine I hope it is meant,” he wrote.

As for the means Hitler was using, Abel seemed willing to give him every benefit of the doubt. “Parliamentarianism and dictatorship are not, therefore, antithetical but means of solving problems, adequate for specific conditions,” he wrote on March 7. Even when the Nazis staged their burning of the books in May, Abel was intrigued rather than outraged. Calling the book-burning “a futile but a symbolic gesture,” he asserted: “I am impressed by the vitality and sweeping enthusiasm of the Hitler movement, its idealizations[,] its emotional fervor, its revolutionary aspects. They certainly are swayed by an idea, no matter how ludicrous it may seem to us who have no idea to live for. I envy the fascists, the nationalists, the communists, all those who are working for something to be realized.” This was a stunning admission about what could attract an American intellectual to the most radical movements of the time.

In the summer of 1933, Abel visited Germany and was struck by the willingness of many people, especially Hitler’s followers, to discuss their political experiences. This gave birth to his idea, nurtured during a period when he found it impossible to find a full-time job, to do a major research project on the Nazis. By June 1934, with the backing of Columbia and the agreement of the German authorities, he announced a contest “For the Best Personal Life History of an Adherent of the Hitler Movement.” Only those who had joined the party before January 1, 1933—prior to Hitler’s coming to power—were eligible to submit the autobiographical essays. Prizes ranging from 10 to 125 marks were to be awarded to the best entries. “Completeness and frankness are the sole criteria,” he explained in the announcement.

It was an inspired initiative, attracting 683 submissions before the deadline in the fall of 1934. A series of mishaps delayed shipment of the essays to Abel in New York for two years, and his final product based on his analysis of those submissions—a book entitled Why Hitler Came into Power—wasn’t published until 1938.

Abel was intent on showing what prompted so many Germans to follow Hitler. He took careful note of the disillusionment spawned by defeat in World War I, the Treaty of Versailles and the revolutionary uprisings in Germany that followed. A young soldier wrote: “Heroism had become cowardice, truth a lie, loyalty was rewarded by dastardliness.” Eighteen percent of those who submitted autobiographies had participated in some type of postwar military activities, whether to fight against the rebels of the left or the right or in fighting in Upper Silesia or the Ruhr Valley. Some professed to be shocked by “the spirit of Jewish materialism” and motivated by their nationalist upbringing. “We knew nothing of politics, yet we felt that therein lay the destiny of Germany,” one of them declared.

Then came Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 and his treason trial that only built up his reputation. “From that time on I had no thought for anyone but Hitler,” another essayist wrote. While many of the contributors also mentioned the harsh economic conditions in Germany, Abel offered a somewhat different picture of Hitler’s followers than scholars like Schuman did. “Schuman concludes that at the bottom of the Hitler movement was a collective neurosis, a psychological malady of the Kleinbürgertum [lower middle class]… the disorganized and pathological personality of a whole class of the German population.”

Dismissing this approach as too reliant on group psychoanalysis, Abel maintained that Schuman and other scholars had painted a misleading portrait of Hitler’s core supporters. Based on those who submitted essays, he offered his description of a fictional average Hitler supporter:

Abel played up the differences between his portrayal of Hitler’s supporters and the characterizations of Schuman and others, although there was overlap in many areas. The key difference was that Abel’s average Nazi supporter comes across as more balanced emotionally, and somehow less sinister, than those portrayed by others. In his introduction, he pointed out that many of the contributors “frankly state their disagreement with certain policies, as, for example, anti-Semitism.” But he is conscious of the danger of appearing to accept the declarations of the Nazi contributors at face value. “In presenting these facts and opinions without comment, I do not intend to convey the impression that I agree with them,” he insisted.

The essays Abel collected point to a broad array of factors that contributed to Hitler’s appeal. By giving his followers a chance to present their own narratives, Abel produced a significant addition to the growing body of literature in the United States about the Nazi movement, a resource that would prove to be highly valuable to future researchers. But it isn’t hard to understand why several American publishers rejected his manuscript before Prentice Hall finally agreed to take it on. Abel’s attempt to maintain a nonjudgmental, academic detachment while studying the Nazis felt like an artificial exercise—and he often slipped in judgments anyway. As Schuman had pointed out, Hitler’s movement demanded acceptance or rejection. The problem with Abel was that, just as he had when Hitler first came to power, he still seemed to want to give the Nazis the benefit of the doubt whenever possible.

The American journalists who had witnessed the rise of Hitler firsthand were more interested in his drive for total control at this point than in debating what attracted so many Germans to his movement in the first place. The hardworking Knickerbocker filed a slew of pieces during the spring and summer of 1933 that left no doubt about the extent of Der Führer’s power grab. “Adolf Hitler has become the Aryan Messiah,” he wrote, explaining that he had committed everything to his campaign for “racial purity.” Reporting on the latest anti-Semitic booklet, he noted that it listed six types of Jews: “Bloody Jews; Lying Jews; Swindling Jews; Rotten Jews; Art Jews and Money Jews.” He added: “The fact that such a publication could appear is best proof of the good judgment of the refugees abroad.” Hitler had emerged as “the supreme boss,” he wrote in another article, and his authority “transcends… that of any political boss known to democratic regimes.”

Drawing on his prior reporting experience in Moscow, Knickerbocker also pointed out how the Nazis were following the Bolshevik lead when it came to new forms of terror. “The latest Soviet method to be taken over by the Nazis is the taking of political hostages,” he wrote. Aside from effectively holding “all the Jews of Germany hostage for the good behavior of their racial compatriots abroad,” he explained that the Nazis now were targeting relatives of any anti-Nazi Germans who fled abroad. As in the Soviet Union, he wrote, this “distasteful” practice was proving highly effective. “The bravest man, willing to risk his own life, will shrink at risking the lives or liberty of his loved ones,” he reported.

Knickerbocker found one exception to all this forced subservience. “German nudists are the only successful rebels against Nazi control,” he wrote. While Hermann Goering and other top Nazis decreed that the nudists put their clothes on, the journalist reported that this was the one area where the authorities appeared to be willing to turn a blind eye at times, inspiring a degree of defiance. “The nude cult has gone the way of all popular movements suppressed by an unpopular law. It has gone bootleg.” But this was hardly total defiance. The committed nudists were joining the Nazi movement, he added, working from the inside for their cause. “They intend to appeal to Adolf Hitler, who, like the nude culturalists, does not drink, smoke or eat meat.” Although Hitler had given no indication he would accept the centerpiece of their agenda—stripping naked—the nudists weren’t giving up hope. “Hitler must understand us,” Knickerbocker quoted them as saying.

The nudists provided a rare lighter subject in an otherwise alarming drumbeat of stories. And nothing was more alarming than the question that Knickerbocker posed in the opening to his book The Boiling Point, based on his crisscrossing of the continent during the year after Hitler’s ascension and published in early 1934. “Europe is in uniform,” he wrote. “Will she go to war?”

Knickerbocker was one of the most astute young journalists of his time, someone whose reputation had already spread far beyond his readers in New York and Philadelphia. Running an interview with him on November 12, 1932, the Polish newspaper Express Poranny called him “the most talked about reporter in the world.” He didn’t pull his punches when reporting on Hitler’s brutal tactics at home, prompting angry protests from the Nazis who claimed he was spreading anti-German slanders. They pressured his editors to send him home early, but initially to no avail. There was little reason to think that Knickerbocker would be any less straightforward in trying to answer the question he was asking about the risk of war—a question that was on the minds of so many people on both sides of the Atlantic.

Yet his book opened with a stunning first chapter devoted to Danzig, the Baltic port with an overwhelmingly German population that had been designated a “Free City” by the League of Nations after World War I. Polish-German tensions over the status of the city, which was surrounded by Polish territory, looked like they could easily spark the next major conflict. Knickerbocker stated a contrary view right from the start:

As Knickerbocker explained, the Nazis won the city elections on May 28, 1933, sweeping into power “a tornado of Brownshirts that drove fear through the heart of every Pole and Jew in the city and made Europe hold its breath.” But while the Nazis quickly consolidated their hold on the city, Hermann Rauschning, the president of the Danzig Senate and Hitler’s lieutenant, immediately went to Warsaw and signed agreements on trade and rights for Polish citizens in the Baltic city. “The Poles were amazed, suspicious, but pleased,” Knickerbocker reported. Danzig and Warsaw played a friendly soccer match, and suddenly tensions eased all around. Hitler had ordered a truce for Danzig, he added, and it was working—at least so far.

What should readers make of this? “Its lesson for Europe is that Hitler can keep the peace if he wants to,” Knickerbocker wrote. But he warned that this could be merely a tactical truce to buy time for Hitler to rearm. Still, “it means peace in this corner of the European cockpit at least for years to come.”

But as Knickerbocker chronicled the other parts of his journey—through Central Europe, the Balkans and Western Europe—he emphasized the caveats as well as the cold calculations. Hitler doesn’t want war because his country wasn’t prepared for a new conflict, he maintained. “The odds are too great against Germany for anyone but a mad German to consider making war now against France and her allies,” he wrote. “Contrary to a considerable body of opinion abroad, it may be positively asserted that there are no madmen running Germany today.”

While he deplored the racial doctrines and terror tactics of the Nazis, he called them “masters of power politics.” Which meant that they were trying to change the balance of power before they would consider triggering a new war. The key, he warned, would be how soon Hitler would feel confident about winning an eventual conflict. Among the experts he consulted, the consensus was that the answer was five to ten years. Knickerbocker ascribed Europe’s pessimistic mood to the fact that the new arms race was already under way. Hitler was insisting over and over again that he wanted only peace. “It is the peace to make the world safe for armaments,” Knickerbocker wrote, ending on a far more ominous note than in his opening section. “Armaments have never kept the world safe from war.”

Hitler launched World War II by attacking Danzig only five years later, and Knickerbocker would certainly have liked the chance to pull back that opening chapter. Still, his book is instructive, including in that section. It demonstrates how much a highly critical journalist felt compelled to hedge his bets—even when, as the final chapters indicate, he shared much of the pessimism about where Hitler’s policies would ultimately lead.

Knickerbocker’s critical faculties were certainly still intact, which is much more than could be said about some other Americans living in Berlin. At about the same time that The Boiling Point appeared in print in early 1934, Sir Philip Gibbs, a famed British correspondent during World War I and later a novelist, visited the German capital. He, too, was asking the question whether Europe would go to war. Observing marches of the SA and the Hitlerjugend, along with the shouts of Heil Hitler, he admitted: “It was impossible not to be impressed by the splendour of that German youth… There was something stirring in the sight of this army of young men.” But he also felt a sense of apprehension. “This pride and discipline of youth could be so easily used by evil minds for sinister purpose, later on.”

There was little doubt in his mind that Hitler could be the one to push the country to disaster again. “He was the mesmerist who had put a spell on the German people so that they followed him blindly,” he noted. The German leader kept insisting he wanted peace, but this veteran journalist observed that every German magazine he picked up was full of pictures of soldiers in steel helmets and scenes from the last world conflagration.

Among the most notable meetings he had on his visit to Berlin was with an American woman who had been married to a German for a long time. At tea with her in the Fürstenhof Hotel, where he was staying, Gibbs came straight to the point. “Most people in England and everybody in France believe Germany is preparing for a new war,” he told her.

“But that is impossible! It’s ridiculous!” she replied with genuine astonishment. “Why should they believe such an absurdity?”

He recounted his observations about the militarism of the Nazis, their belief in racial dogmas and persecution of Jews, their crude anti-intellectual theories and all the talk in Mein Kampf and elsewhere about Germany’s expansive dreams. Men like Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg were preaching barbarism and the reign of instinct and biological force, he added.

“My German friends laugh at Rosenberg’s nonsense,” the American woman said. “As for all this marching and drilling, it means nothing as far as war is concerned. Germans like it, just like the English like football and cricket.”

She assured him she knew plenty of young Nazis. “They talk very freely to me, because I am the wife of a German and therefore, in their minds, German. They never talk of wanting war. On the contrary, they hate the idea of it.” They only talk about war, she continued, when discussing the possibility that they might be attacked by France and her allies. In that case, they would “naturally” defend the fatherland. “Wouldn’t any other nation feel the same?”

By then, Gibbs was keenly aware of several waiters hovering around their table. He suggested they move to a quiet corner. “We are having an audience,” he pointed out.

Once they had switched tables, the American woman talked about Hitler, whom she knew and admired. “He is all for peace,” she declared. “Foreigners don’t believe in his sincerity. But I’m certain he wants to make a friendship with France. It is his strongest wish… Why doesn’t France accept the offer?”

Gibbs was hardly reassured, but he was convinced that the American woman was utterly sincere in her belief that Hitler and his followers wanted nothing but peace. Like Martha Dodd, she felt the new Germany and its leaders were misunderstood and unfairly maligned—and no one more so than Adolf Hitler.