Hitlerland

7 Dancing with Nazis

On Saturday, June 30, 1934, Martha Dodd drove off early with her date, someone she identified as “a young secretary in a foreign embassy,” in a Ford roadster, with the top down, to a private lake in Gross Glienicke on the outskirts of Berlin. It was a beautiful, warm, sunny day, and she and her companion spent it on the lakeside beach, working on getting as much of a suntan as possible, knowing that summer doesn’t normally last long in northern Europe. In the late afternoon, the couple began slowly driving back to the city, “our heads giddy and our bodies burning from the sun,” as Martha recalled, perfectly content. “We were not thinking of yesterday or tomorrow, of the Nazis or of politics.”

They drove into the city at six. “I pulled down my skirt and sat up straight and proper as befits a diplomat’s daughter,” she wrote. But something looked and felt different in the German capital; the atmosphere had changed since their departure that morning. There were fewer people on the streets, mostly clustered in small groups, and, as they got closer to the center, they saw an unusual number of army trucks and machine guns, along with soldiers, SS men and Nazi police. The normally ubiquitous SA troops—the Brownshirts—were nowhere to be seen. Reaching Tiergartenstrasse, they saw that regular traffic was banned completely, and only their diplomatic plates got them through the thickening military and police checkpoints. The young diplomat dropped Martha off near her father’s ambassadorial residence, and then quickly drove to his embassy to find out what accounted for the tense atmosphere.

With the sun still beating down hard on her, Martha rushed to her father’s residence, feeling slightly dizzy, her eyes briefly blinded as she entered what looked to her like a dark house. She started up the stairs and saw the murky outline of her brother Bill.

“Martha, is that you?” he asked. “Where have you been? We were worried about you. Von Schleicher has been shot. We don’t know what is happening. There is martial law in Berlin.”

General Kurt von Schleicher had served as defense minister and then briefly as the last chancellor before Hitler came to power. He had pursued a policy of trying to split the Nazis by offering Gregor Strasser, the head of the “socialist” faction and a possible rival to Hitler, the post of vice chancellor. Schleicher was one of the politicians who had assured the AP’s Louis Lochner and other correspondents that his government was succeeding in reestablishing “internal peace.” On that morning of June 30 while Martha Dodd and her date were on their beach outing, SS men had arrived at Schleicher’s villa, rung the bell and shot him dead when he opened the door. They then shot his wife as well. At noon, Gregor Strasser was arrested at his house in Berlin and brought to the Gestapo prison on Prinz Albrechtstrasse, where he was shot a few hours later. Strasser had never accepted Schleicher’s offer to join his government and he had withdrawn from politics altogether, but that wasn’t enough to save him from Hitler’s wrath.

Those murders in Berlin were only one part of the bloody score-settling known as the “Night of the Long Knives.” Bullet-ridden bodies were left scattered in houses and prisons across Germany. Henry Mann, the Berlin representative of the National City Bank, found the body of one of his neighbors on his front steps; the victim had been lured out of his house and murdered in front of the American’s house. The body lay there for an entire day before the police came and took it away, instructing Mann’s servants to wash up the blood. Mann had earlier expressed the belief to Ambassador Dodd that he and other American bankers could work with Germany’s new rulers. But as Dodd noted in his diary, Mann “showed no patience with the Hitler regime now.”

The primary targets on June 30 were the leaders of the SA, the Storm Troopers who had provided the muscle for Hitler during his rise to power. In particular, tensions had been growing between the Reichswehr, the regular army, and Ernst Röhm, the flamboyant head of the SA, whose numbers had swelled to 2.5 million after the Nazis came to power. Röhm was a famed veteran of the movement, who had teamed up with Hitler even before the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.

The Brownshirts were responsible for much of the violence that followed Hitler’s rise to power—the attacks on Jews, Socialists and anyone else seen to be an opponent of the regime, along with the random American or other foreigner who failed to greet the Brownshirts with a Nazi salute. While there was no doubt that they saw themselves as carrying out Hitler’s will, the Nazi ruler would later claim that they were threatening to spin out of control. He was receiving constant complaints from the Army, and even from the ailing President Hindenburg, about their lack of discipline. And Röhm was increasingly defiant, portraying his thugs as the vanguard of an ongoing revolution. “The SA and the SS will not allow the German Revolution to fall asleep or be betrayed half-way there by non-fighters,” he proclaimed, vowing to carry on “our struggle.” Hitler responded in blunt terms, although not mentioning Röhm by name. “Only fools thought the revolution was not over,” he declared.

The opulent living of the SA leaders, with widespread stories of heavy drinking and open homosexuality, hardly helped their cause. Röhm occupied a villa on Prinzregentenplatz in Munich, outfitted with centuries-old Florentine mirrors and French armchairs. A truce negotiated between the Reichswehr and the SA in early 1934 did little to lessen the rising tensions. Early in the morning on June 30, Hitler personally led a small armed contingent of police that drove in three cars from Munich to Bad Wiessee, the lakeside resort where Röhm and other SA leaders were sleeping off another night of partying.

Breaking into Röhm’s room, they declared him a traitor; in another room, they found Edmund Heines, the leader of the Breslau SA, in bed with a young male lover. Rounding up Röhm’s contingent, they took them back to a Munich prison in a bus. Several were shot immediately. Hitler initially appeared undecided about his old comrade Röhm, and it was only the next day that the SA leader was offered a pistol so he could shoot himself. He refused, and two SS men dispatched him. The regime issued a terse announcement about the man who was once a key figure in Hitler’s rise to power: “The former Chief of Staff Röhm was given the opportunity to draw the consequences of his treacherous behavior. He did not do so and was thereupon shot.”

Appearing at the Propaganda Ministry on that same day, Hermann Goering told a group of hastily assembled foreign correspondents that the Nazis were forced to act to prevent a planned rebellion against Hitler. As the Chicago Tribune’s Sigrid Schultz recalled, the Luftwaffe (Air Force) commander had arrived “in full regalia, with his officers, strutting as stiffly as he could.” After making his terse declaration, Goering started to march out, but, spotting Schultz, whom he knew from earlier social encounters, he stopped short. “And by the way, General von Schleicher was shot, trying to escape,” he told her loudly. He then looked at her “piercingly,” Schultz recalled. It was his way of saying, she concluded, that the Nazi brass could get away with anything they wanted.

The sweeping nature of the killings and the disparate backgrounds of the victims indicated that Hitler and the SS, whose leaders hated Röhm and the SA, had decided to eliminate anyone they regarded as a past or potential opponent. The body of Gustav von Kahr, the Bavarian leader who had presided over the suppression of the Beer Hall Putsch before retiring from politics, was found hacked to pieces. Other victims included the secretary and several associates of Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen, the scheming former chancellor who had helped undermine Schleicher and give Hitler his shot at total power.

Papen was the politician who had assured the AP’s Lochner that “we have hired Hitler” and that he and other veteran politicians would keep him under control. He was personally spared, although roughed up and briefly placed under house arrest until he was dispatched as Hitler’s envoy to Vienna. On July 25, 1934, less than a month after the Night of the Long Knives, Austrian Nazis assassinated Chancellor Engelbert Doll-fuss, who had amassed dictatorial powers but opposed Hitler’s movement. Still, Papen didn’t hesitate to accept his new assignment, which would involve preparing the way for Austria’s Anschluss (unification) with Germany in 1938.

His willingness to continue serving the regime he had helped maneuver into power earned him broad contempt from those foreigners and Germans who were alarmed by what they saw happening. At the American Embassy’s Fourth of July Party at the Dodds’ residence, the Jewish journalist Bella Fromm noted that everyone was on edge, but there was agreement on one thing: “There was general regret that Schleicher was the one to lose his life while Papen only paid with a couple of teeth.”

On July 1, Dodd and his daughter Martha had made the point of driving by Papen’s residence. Martha spotted the young son of the vice chancellor standing behind the curtains, and he later told the Dodds that his family was grateful for this sign of solidarity at a time when no other diplomats dared to venture near their house. Ambassador Dodd also sent his card with a message: “I hope we may call on you soon.” According to Martha, her father had no sympathy for Papen, whom he viewed as “black with cowardice, devious with espionage and betrayal.” But this was his way of expressing his displeasure with the brutal methods of Germany’s new rulers.

At the Fourth of July party, the Dodd residence was festooned with red, white and blue flowers that artfully decorated the tables, along with small American flags. While the orchestra played American music, the American expats, both diplomats and journalists, mingled with the German guests. Martha and her brother Bill sardonically greeted the German arrivals with what had become the most frequently asked question since the Night of the Long Knives: “Lebst du noch?” Translation: “Are you still alive?” Some of the Nazis were visibly irritated.

At one point, the butler told Martha that Papen’s son, the one they had seen in the window three days earlier, had arrived. Visibly nervous, he talked with Ambassador Dodd, protesting how ludicrous were the charges that his father was somehow involved in a conspiracy with Röhm, Schleicher and the others against Hitler. A few days later, once his father was freed and out of immediate danger, the two Papens openly came to visit Dodd, prompting the American journalists to rush over for information about the politician who was still formally in Hitler’s government but had come so close to becoming one of his early victims. Despite Dodd’s personal misgivings about Papen, it was a way for the vice chancellor to demonstrate that he had American support. As Martha put it, this indicated “that the Germans were still respectful, and a bit awed by American public opinion at this time.”

Her father was reaching a different conclusion, even if he had contributed to Papen’s salvation so that he could go on serving his new masters. That same week a professor from the University of Berlin came to see him, ostensibly to discuss a lecture Dodd was supposed to give to the History Department on July 13. Given the tense situation, they agreed to call off the lecture. The German was despondent about the savagery the Nazis were arousing among his countrymen, stunned that they were capable of such barbaric behavior. He made a point of praising an editorial in London’s Times that described the Night of the Long Knives as a return to medieval practices. “Poor Germany, she cannot recover in decades to come. If I could go to any other of the greater countries, I would leave the university at once,” he declared.

In his diary entry of July 8, Dodd admitted to feeling a similar deepening pessimism. He hosted a visiting American delegation, but they had asked that no press be allowed to cover the event because they didn’t want to be attacked at home for their presence in Germany. Hitler’s killing spree had hardened hostility to the country in the United States and elsewhere. As for Germany itself, Dodd noted, “I can think of no country where the psychology is so abnormal as that which prevails here now.”

The ambassador was increasingly questioning the sense of his own mission. “My task here is to work for peace and better relations,” he wrote. “I do not see how anything can be done so long as Hitler, Goering and Goebbels are the directing heads of the country. Never have I heard or read of three more unfit men in high place.” Reading the diary at this point, you can almost hear Dodd sigh as he concluded, “Ought I to resign?”

On February 23, 1934, William Shirer, who was living with his Austrian wife, Tess, in Paris, turned thirty—but he wasn’t exactly thrilled by his situation. Back in 1925, he had left Cedar Rapids, Iowa, right after college and pursued the adventurous life of a young reporter eager to explore the world. He worked for the Chicago Tribune out of Paris, where he got to meet the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Isadora Duncan; he also snagged assignments that allowed him to wander all around Europe and as far afield as Afghanistan and India, where he befriended Mahatma Gandhi and contracted malaria and dysentery. In 1932, as the Depression worsened, he lost his job and he had a skiing accident that caused him to lose sight in one eye. He and Tess then tried to live off his savings in Spain while he worked on a novel and an early memoir, failing to publish either. When they returned to Paris, he got a job offer from the Paris edition of the New York Herald in January 1934. But as he noted in his diary on his birthday the following month, it was “the worst job I’ve ever had.”

The big stories seemed to be happening elsewhere—in Germany, Russia, Italy, where strong leaders were all in command. France was buffeted by strikes and unrest, but looked rudderless by comparison. “The Paris that I came to in 1925 at the tender age of twenty-one and loved, as you love a woman, is no longer the Paris that I will find day after tomorrow,” he wrote right before his return in January 1934.

On June 30, he excitedly recorded in his diary that the phone lines to Berlin were down for several hours. “And what a story!” he exclaimed. He cited the reports of the arrest of Röhm by Hitler in person, and the shooting of several SA leaders. “The French are pleased. They think this is the beginning of the end of the Nazis,” he continued.

While Shirer didn’t record any judgment of his own, he realized that the biggest story of his life was unfolding nearby. “Wish I could get a post in Berlin,” he concluded. “It’s a story I’d like to cover.” Two weeks later, after more details about the breadth and brutality of the purge had come to light, Shirer added: “One had almost forgotten how strong sadism and masochism are in the German people.”

In his largely forgotten novel The Traitor that he wrote after the war, Shirer expounded on his feelings at the time. His protagonist, the aspiring American journalist Oliver Knight, discusses his plans to go to Europe with his college instructor. The instructor tells him that Paris would be great fun, but he would be just “another young American in Paris,” likely to spend endless hours with wine and women, “babbling about a Europe you were woefully ignorant of.” Besides, France is “too static,” he continued, and “nothing very world-shattering is likely to come out of France in our time.”

Not so with the Germans, the instructor continued. Despite Bach, Beethoven, Schiller and Goethe, their culture was “a mere veneer so thin that their barbarism—the pagan barbarism of the German forests—is continually threatening to break through and engulf them.” The big story was developing in Germany, his instructor insisted, and any young man who wanted to make his mark in journalism should go there, not Paris. To be sure, Shirer wrote his novel with the benefit of hindsight, but it undoubtedly reflected his gut feelings in 1934. He desperately longed to get to Berlin.

On August 2, President von Hindenburg died at the age of eighty-six. Once considered a towering figure, he had looked largely irrelevant and impotent once Hitler had become chancellor. “Who can be president now? What will Hitler do?” Shirer asked in his diary when he heard the news. The next day he knew the answer: Hitler had announced he would take over all presidential powers along with his current ones, and the Army would be required to swear an oath of “unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces.” It wasn’t an oath to serve the country; it was deliberately fashioned as an oath to serve one man whose power was now unquestioned and unlimited.

Shirer was impressed with the sheer audacity of such a move. “The man is resourceful,” he wrote in his diary on August 4. Hitler also announced that a plebiscite would be held on August 19 to approve his seizure of all political and military powers. He justified his actions in large part by the alleged plot against him and the Army that he claimed triggered the June 30 crackdown. After attending a meeting of the American Chamber of Commerce in Berlin, Fromm noted in her diary: “Nobody believes that Hitler’s life was endangered or that a counterrevolution was planned.”

But on August 3, Knickerbocker, the veteran correspondent who had been so perceptive in many of his earlier dispatches, reported that Röhm’s Brownshirts had planned “what would have been the most extraordinary massacre in modern political history.” Its supposed victims: the leaders of the Reichswehr, including the chiefs of the General Staff—which, according to Knickerbocker, was why the generals were willing to accept “a one-time corporal” as their commander-in-chief and swear a personal oath to him. While Knickerbocker indicated he was relaying a version of events from Berlin sources, presumably top Nazi officials, he didn’t include anything to suggest he was skeptical of this interpretation.

Wiegand, the Hearst correspondent, didn’t comment on Hitler’s claims but offered a more critical view of his power grab on the same day. Noting that “Hitler has attained a position quite without parallel in any country in the world,” he added: “Until yesterday it was possible to say he was the instrument of the Reichswehr. Today the army is his weapon. Fear, not freedom, promises to rule the voters Aug. 19.”

Within days of Hindenburg’s death and Hitler’s quick moves to consolidate all power in his hands, Shirer got his wish: he received a call from one of the bosses at Hearst’s Universal News Service, who offered him a job as its correspondent in Berlin. Elated, Shirer immediately agreed. “Must brush up my German,” he wrote in his diary. On August 25, he and Tess took a train from Paris, arriving at Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof at about ten in the evening. As soon as Shirer stepped off the train, two plainclothesmen grabbed him and demanded to know if he was “Herr So-and-So,” as Shirer recalled, since he didn’t catch the name they kept repeating. “I had expected to meet the secret police sooner or later, but not quite so soon,” he wrote. After examining his passport, the plainclothesmen finally let him go. As he thought of the new chapter that was about to begin for him, Shirer ended his first Berlin diary entry that evening with what he admitted was a bad pun: “I’m going from bad to Hearst.”

That same morning, another foreign correspondent, far more famous at the time than Shirer, had boarded a train to go in the opposite direction, from Berlin to Paris. Dorothy Thompson had the distinction of exiting Nazi Germany for the last time because she had been presented with an expulsion order. Thompson, or Mrs. Sinclair Lewis as she was known because of her novelist husband, had gone to Austria after the murder of Chancellor Dollfuss on July 25, eager to cover what the Nazis were up to there. In early August, she decided to drive from Austria through Munich up to Berlin, reacquainting herself with her old stomping grounds, stopping in towns and villages along the way to get a sense of the popular mood. She may have badly misjudged Hitler when she interviewed him in late 1931, but she was now intent on discovering what he was doing to Germany.

Thompson wasn’t exactly sure when she crossed into Germany since no border guard stopped her, but then she noted the sudden appearance of houses decked out in Nazi flags. Along the road, she saw a Storm Trooper wearing a black armband, which she assumed was in honor of Hindenburg. But when she asked him, the SA man said it was “for Röhm.” Thompson also noticed the election banners everywhere in preparation for the plebiscite that coming Sunday to affirm Hitler’s power grab following Hindenburg’s death. Compared to other countries where voters chose between competing candidates, “in Germany Hitler made himself President and it was a law, and then people voted, whether they liked the law or not,” she wrote later. “If they liked it, that meant he was President; and if they didn’t, that meant he was President anyhow.”

Thompson found the roads in Germany clogged with cars, motorcycles and bicycles, almost all driven by young men. “I was in a procession of young men,” she recalled. “I had the feeling that there were only young men in Germany, thousands and thousands of young men, all very strong and healthy, and all working furiously to get somewhere.” Then there were the election posters that Thompson described as “sentimental, evangelical,” proclaiming “We are with thee, dear leader.”

In Garmisch, an American visitor from Chicago told Thompson that he had been in Oberammergau, the Bavarian village famed for its Passion Plays. “These people are all crazy,” he said. “This is not a revolution, it’s a revival. They think Hitler is God.” During the scene in the Passion Play when Judas received his thirty pieces of silver, a woman sitting next to him declared: “That is Röhm, who betrayed the Leader.”

In the Bavarian town of Murnau, a Hitler Youth camp filled with “beautiful children,” as Thompson put it, sported a huge banner proclaiming WE WERE BORN TO DIE FOR GERMANY. When she arrived in Munich, Thompson had letters of introduction to people she hadn’t met before. “I went to see them but they wouldn’t talk,” she reported. “They were frightened to death; you could see that.”

At another stop, she met a Catholic priest who was willing to talk. “The Nazi Revolution is the greatest blow to Catholicism since Martin Luther,” he told her. “But it is also a blow to all Christianity… In the Nazi outlook nationalism is elevated to a mystic religion, and the state claims not only the bodies of the people but the souls. Force, and not goodness, is the measure of all things.” Who would win in this struggle between Christianity and the Nazis, she inquired. “They are getting the children,” the priest replied. “That is their program—to get the children.” In other words, the Nazis were aiming to replace Christianity with their own “mystic religion,” and they were well on their way to doing so.

When Thompson finally arrived in Berlin, she headed straight to the Adlon Hotel, which felt “like home,” the smiling barman ready with his popular dry martinis. “Oh, I was so glad to be back!” she recalled. Everything was perfect in the hotel. “It was all the courtesy, all the cleanliness, all the exquisite order that was Germany.” But her journalistic colleagues warned her not to use the hotel phones, since they were monitored. So Thompson found a cheap saloon with a phone booth in the back, which she used to place calls to some of her German acquaintances.

The American reporter had lunch with a young woman who worked as a stenographer in a state bank. She had “eyes as candid as water,” Thompson noted. “When you look at her you know she never told a lie in her life.”

“Do you find it’s so bad here as the outside world seems to think?” the woman asked Thompson. When the reporter replied that she had come back to Germany to see the situation for herself, the woman explained that she hadn’t been a Nazi in the beginning, but that even in her bank conditions had changed since Hitler came to power. Overall, wages were lower than before, but the biggest cuts were among the directors and other senior staff. And regular staff felt that they were treated better, with fewer social distinctions. “It’s as though we all belonged to a big family,” she said. While there was talk of food rationing, she claimed everyone was willing to make sacrifices as long as they were employed.

Thompson asked her about the Night of the Long Knives. She professed it was “an awful shock” to learn that some of the Nazi leaders had been “acting dreadful” and were corrupt. “That is why Hitler had to execute them,” she concluded, as if that was a perfectly logical solution.

When Thompson pointed out that in the United States people were tried before they were punished, the German woman didn’t seem to understand her point. “It was funny,” Thompson mused. “I never met anyone in Germany except a few intellectuals, who minded that these people did not have a trial. It was as though they had forgotten that there ever had been such a thing as law.”

Thompson also met a Brownshirt she had known earlier. While admitting there were clashes within the Nazi movement and some of the SA leaders wanted to get rid of Goering or Goebbels, he insisted there was never any talk of undermining Hitler’s regime or of acting in any way against him. “Hitler sold us out,” he said. “There wasn’t any plot. No one was treasonable to Hitler.” He described how Nazi firing squads gunned down far more of his colleagues than reported, with the victims numbering about 300 instead of the 77 mentioned by Hitler.

Thompson also met Otto, a German journalist who had earlier been a staunch defender of free speech but who now “writes articles that free speech isn’t any good,” as she put it. Over coffee and plum cake, he calmly explained that revolutions aren’t made by pleasant people. “Revolutions need terrorists,” he said. “Afterward, when the revolutions succeed, the people who made them are in the way.” The Russians could send those who fell out of favor to Siberia, but in Germany “there was nothing to do but shoot them.” He admitted that shooting former Chancellor von Schleicher’s wife “made a bad impression abroad” and the cleanup was “not pretty.” But the result was a stronger Germany, he insisted. “I doubt if any revolution in history has been made with greater order. It is now consolidated. It will last for years.”

While listening to Otto, Thompson was thinking of some of the other murders on June 30. A music critic in Munich by the name of Willi Schmidt was shot because he was mistaken for a storm trooper with the same name who had already been shot earlier that same day. Dr. Erich Klausener, a Catholic leader, was killed for no reason that she could ascertain. He was cremated and his ashes were sent to his wife by registered post, according to an account she had read in a British newspaper. “I kept thinking how it must have been when the postman rang the bell,” she recalled, imagining a scene of the postman asking the unsuspecting widow to sign for the package and then tipping his hat. “They are awfully polite in Germany,” she observed. To Otto, she said aloud: “Yes, Germany is an orderly country.”

Thompson spent only ten days in Berlin. One day the porter called. “Good morning, madam, there is a gentleman here from the secret state police,” he announced. A young man in a trench coat that looked like the one Hitler wore came up with an order for her to leave the country within forty-eight hours. “In view of your numerous anti-German publications in the American press, the German authorities, for reasons of national self-respect, are unable to extend to you a further right of hospitality,” it read.

While other reporters had been pressured to leave, this was the first outright expulsion and it generated front-page stories back in the United States. “The general feeling of the foreign colony here over the incident is that Nazism has once again demonstrated its utter inability to understand any mentality but its own,” wrote Frederick Birchall, the New York Times’s Berlin correspondent.

Several American and British correspondents came to see Thompson off to Paris, giving her American Beauty roses for her journey. As the train pulled out of the station, she leaned out of the window, clutching the roses, “a little tearful about such a demonstration of comradeship,” Birchall added.

In her own account, Thompson identified the real reason for her expulsion as “blasphemy.” As she explained, “My offense was to think that Hitler is just an ordinary man, after all. That is a crime against the reigning cult in Germany, which says Mr. Hitler is a Messiah sent by God to save the German people—an old Jewish idea.” Returning to New York in September, she had attained new supercelebrity status, with reporters rushing to get her views on the country that had given her the boot. “Germany has gone to war already and the rest of the world does not believe it,” she declared.

At about the same time, Shirer, the new arrival, was contrasting his new home with the city he had first visited in the 1920s. “I miss the old Berlin of the Republic, the care-free, emancipated, civilized air, the snubnosed young women with short-bobbed hair and the young men with either cropped or long hair—it made no difference—who sat up all night with you and discussed anything with intelligence and passion.” Instead, Shirer found a city where there were the constant shouts of “Heil Hitler,” Brownshirts and SS guards marching everywhere, and the endless clicking of heels, all of which grated on his nerves. Barely a week into the new assignment that he had been so anxious to get, Shirer admitted he was already “in the throes of a severe case of depression.”

Whether the correspondents were coming or going, they recognized that Germany had undergone a remarkably swift and chilling transformation. No one was casually writing off Hitler anymore.

Back in the United States, Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Thompson’s husband, drew heavily on his observations of Germany as he dashed off his new novel It Can’t Happen Here in two frantic months of writing. Published in 1935, it envisaged the coming to power of a fascist dictator in the United States. Like Hitler, Berzelius Windrip, Lewis’s antihero, claims to have all the answers to all the country’s economic problems, while proclaiming his people’s superiority. “My one ambition is to get all Americans to realize that they are, and must continue to be, the greatest Race on the face of this old Earth,” he declares. Once in power, he abolishes Congress and employs the Minute Men, his equivalent of the Brownshirts, to bash anyone who dares to resist.

The book was a huge success, eventually selling more than 300,000 copies, and stirring controversy as the American Communist Party and others on the far left embraced its message with particular enthusiasm. Lewis liked the praise, but was uneasy about the source. “There is no excuse for any one to swallow the Bolshevik claim to be the one defense against Fascism,” he wrote. But he had succeeded in his primary aim: convincing many of his countrymen that fascism was a threat that they should take seriously, wherever it manifested itself.

As new American correspondents came on the scene, they were prone to start from the premise that they were going to report from a bizarre, increasingly sinister but always intriguing place. Pierre Huss of the International News Service, whom Shirer characterized as “slick, debonair, ambitious, and on better terms with Nazi officials than almost any other,” came to call it both “Hitlerland” and “Naziland.” And, of course, no one was a more intriguing figure in that land than Adolf Hitler. Both the veteran Berlin correspondents and the new arrivals were always looking for opportunities to see him in person, trying to take the measure of the man and his movement. Reflecting on the eight years that he would spend in Berlin, right up until a month before the United States and Germany went to war in December 1941, Huss wrote: “You had to work hard and long, frequently taking your food and sleep on the wing to keep up with Hitler.”

In January 1935, Huss’s efforts to get an interview with Hitler paid off at just the right moment. The Nazi leader was in his Alpine chalet in Obersalzberg, waiting for the results of the plebiscite in the Saar, the territory that had been administered during the previous fifteen years by Britain and France under a League of Nations mandate. There was little doubt that the Saar’s inhabitants would vote as Hitler wanted them to, ensuring the return of the territory to Germany. Huss calculated he would find Der Führer in good spirits, which would make this an opportune time to meet him.

He wasn’t mistaken. Arriving at the chalet, he saw Hitler examining the returns, his eyes “alight with joy.” He was dressed in what Huss characterized as “his golf suit,” while Goering stood nearby in a huge white sweater, joining his boss in celebrating the outcome of the voting. Hitler promptly greeted his American guest by insisting that he join him on his regular walk in the mountains before lunch. As usual, he didn’t allow his bodyguards to accompany him, instead only taking along his white Hungarian shepherd dog, his walking stick made of knotted wood, and a Luger automatic pistol in his pocket.

With the dog leading the way through the snow, Hitler kept up a brisk pace that left Huss nearly out of breath as they reached the crest of a hill. Hitler told him it was good exercise, enjoying the fact that his guest was struggling a bit. Then he pointed down to the chalet that they had just left, which was surrounded by hills like the one they had just climbed. “A good rifle shot, aiming through telescopic sights, could easily pick me off from here while I am sitting on the porch or in that back room there,” he told Huss. He added that he was buying all the land in the area, closing it to outsiders “so [SS leader Heinrich] Himmler can quit worrying.” The road that Huss had traveled up the mountain would also be closed to all but authorized traffic.

Hitler next pointed in the direction of Salzburg, saying that Himmler and some army officers had claimed that “a few well-directed cannon shots from there some dark night could blow us out of bed.” With a forced laugh, he explained that he had told Himmler that he’d have to be patient since “I cannot just walk over the border and take a piece out of Austria.” He added, “I am a fatalist and all those things take care of themselves.”

Huss felt Hitler was taking a risk by walking in the hills alone, whatever measures were used to secure the area. He pointed to two woodcutters a couple of hundred yards ahead, indicating that they or someone else could attack him while he was out on one of his walks. At that point, Hitler told Huss to pack a hard snowball and throw it far. When Huss did so, Hitler pulled out his pistol and fired off a dead-on shot: the snowball burst apart in the air. Seeing Huss’s skeptical expression, he told him to throw a second snowball. Once again, his aim was perfect. “You see, I am not entirely defenseless,” he said—and went on to boast that the SS and Army brass considered him better than many of their best marksmen.

The amiable mood of their walk was broken when Huss ventured to suggest that Hitler would be courting a major conflict if he insisted on carrying out every part of his party’s 25-point program first proclaimed in 1920, including its call for a Greater Germany with new territory and colonies. Hitler abruptly stopped, and “like a flash he changed from the Bavarian alpine rambler to Adolf Hitler,” Huss recalled. Hitler shot back, “Sooner than give up one little point of my program, I’d go over to that tree and hang myself.” Although the Nazis had departed from several parts of their original program already, he insisted “it can only be fulfilled to the letter because it expresses the will of Germany.”

Huss’s conclusion about Hitler after his walk in the hills: “He is a fanatic, every inch of him, going into a passion or fury when the occasion demands.”

Veteran correspondents like Lochner and Wiegand worried that the fanaticism of Germany’s new rulers was impacting their ability to do their jobs. “Reporting from Germany ceased to be a pleasure when the Nazis seized power in 1933,” the AP bureau chief noted with typical under-statement. In a letter to William Randolph Hearst dated August 5, 1933, Wiegand told his boss that he had been warned “that in one way or another every effort allegedly will be made to persuade you to transfer me from Germany.” Mentioning the increased monitoring of cables, phones and mail, along with the sweeping crackdown on any freedom of expression inside Germany, he wrote: “It is no pleasure to a freedom-loving man to work in Germany these days… Hitler’s proud claim is that there is order and discipline in his Germany. So there also is in St. Quentin and Sing Sing.”

The Nazis realized that they often lost the propaganda war if they forced correspondents out, since those reporters then enjoyed the spotlight when they returned home. But that only prompted them to try new methods to compromise those they disliked. Supposedly anti-Nazi Germans started approaching correspondents with offers to provide secret military information. On more than one occasion, Sigrid Schultz threw men out of her Chicago Tribune office when they made such an offer and warned her colleagues to stay clear of them. In April 1935, she returned home one day to discover that an envelope with “important information” had been delivered in her absence by what sounded like one of the same men. Opening it, she saw the design for an airplane engine, which she promptly burned in her fireplace; she knew that, if found on her premises, this would be perfect incriminating evidence in a spy trial.

On her way back to the office, Schultz spotted three men, who looked familiar from her earlier encounters with the secret police, heading toward her home. Stepping in front of them, she told them not to bother going there since she had burned the envelope. As they stood speechless, she hailed a cab and loudly instructed the driver to take her to the American Embassy.

Schultz was convinced that Goering was behind that effort to set her up because they had had several tense exchanges earlier about the country’s expanding concentration camps. At a lavish lunch in the Adlon Hotel for him and his new bride, Emmy Sonnemann, on May 2, the feisty reporter told him quietly but firmly what happened, blaming his agents provocateurs. Startled, Goering kept saying, “You are imagining things.” When Schultz stuck to her story and added that she had informed the embassy of the details, he snapped angrily: “Schultz, I’ve always suspected it: you’ll never learn to show proper respect for state authorities. I suppose that is one of the characteristics of people from that crime-ridden city of Chicago.” An amused acquaintance in Goering’s Air Ministry later told her that around his offices she became known as “that dragon from Chicago.” But no more attempts were made to set her up.

Despite such incidents, the Nazis still sought to impress as much as to intimidate, particularly with the displays of adulation of their leader. For most correspondents, the best chance to observe Hitler and his followers up close came during the annual Parteitag, the weeklong Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg. The party leaders, from Hitler on down, were only too happy to have the foreign press observe these lavishly orchestrated demonstrations of their popularity and power.

“Like a Roman Emperor Hitler rode into this medieval town at sundown today past solid phalanxes of wildly cheering Nazis who packed the narrow streets… The streets, hardly wider than alleys, are a sea of brown and black uniforms,” Shirer wrote in his diary on September 4, 1934. The new correspondent got his first glimpse of Hitler as he drove past the Württemberger Hof, where the reporters were staying. Der Führer stood up in his open car, wearing a worn trench coat, fumbling with his cap and “acknowledging the delirious welcome with somewhat feeble Nazi salutes from his right arm.”

Shirer was struck by Hitler’s lack of expression—“though there is something glassy in his eyes, the strongest thing in his face.” But he had expected something more powerful and theatrical, prompting him to observe that “for the life of me I could not quite comprehend what hidden springs he undoubtedly unloosed in the hysterical mob which was greeting him so wildly.” And hysterical they were. That evening, Shirer found himself “caught in a mob of ten thousand hysterics” in front of the Deutscher Hof, Hitler’s hotel, shouting: “We want our Führer.” He wasn’t prepared for the faces he saw in the crowd, especially those of the women when they caught sight of Hitler as he stepped out briefly on the balcony.

“They reminded me of the crazed expressions I saw once in the back country of Louisiana on the faces of some Holy Rollers who were about to hit the trail,” he wrote. “They looked up at him as if he were a Messiah, their faces transformed into something positively inhuman. If he had remained in sight for more than a few moments, I think many of the women would have swooned from excitement.”

The next day, Shirer began to understand how Hitler was generating such fanatical admiration. At the opening meeting of the Party Congress in Luitpold Hall, he noted that the Nazis were putting on “more than a gorgeous show; it also had something of the mysticism and religious fervour of an Easter or Christmas Mass in a great Gothic cathedral.” There were brightly colored flags, a band that fell silent when Hitler made his dramatic entrance and then struck up a catchy marching tune, and the roll call of the “martyrs”—the Nazis who had died in the failed Beer Hall Putsch. “In such an atmosphere no wonder, then, that every word dropped by Hitler seemed like an inspired Word from on high,” Shirer recorded. “Man’s—or at least the German’s—critical faculty is swept away at such moments.”

By the end of the Nuremberg festivities, Shirer confessed he was “dead tired and rapidly developing a bad case of crowd-phobia.” But he was pleased that he had come. “You have to go through one of these to understand Hitler’s hold on the people, to feel the dynamic of the movement he’s unleashed and the sheer, disciplined strength the Germans possess,” he noted.

To be sure, the foreign correspondents took a more jaundiced view of the proceedings than the Germans in attendance. Shirer, Knickerbocker and a couple of British reporters were in a room overlooking the moat of Nuremberg’s castle when they saw Hitler driving by again. “Though Hitler is certainly closely guarded by the S.S., it is nonsense to hold that he cannot be killed,” Shirer wrote. He and the other correspondents in the room agreed that it would be simple to throw a bomb from the room onto Hitler’s car, and then escape by running into the crowd.

Along with four other reporters, the AP’s Lochner was invited to join Hitler’s motorcade as it made a triumphal tour of the city before going up to the Burg, Nuremberg’s medieval castle. The reporters were put in the car directly behind Hitler’s so that they could see the reaction of the crowds. “His followers were simply beside themselves with hysteric joy when they see him, and they actually think of him as a God-sent superman whom they do not hesitate to liken to Christ,” Lochner explained in a letter to his daughter Betty back in Chicago, echoing Shirer’s observations.

When the motorcade reached the castle courtyard, Hitler got out of his car and approached the reporters to greet them. But before he could reach out his hand to Lochner, the AP correspondent declared: “Mr. Chancellor, I welcome you here in the city of my forebears.”

Hitler was startled. “How come?” he asked. “You’re an American, aren’t you?”

“Yes, indeed,” Lochner replied. “I am an American, but my family for centuries lived continuously in this city until my grandfather and father emigrated to the United States. I think therefore I have the right to greet you here.”

Lochner hadn’t considered how this declaration would be received. As the reporter recalled, “Hitler blushed in anger, turned on his heel, and stalked into the castle.” It was then that Lochner realized that he had inadvertently reminded Der Führer that he wasn’t a born German. “I had struck an exceedingly sensitive nerve,” he concluded. And he blamed this incident for the fact that Hitler never invited him for a personal meeting again, although he would remain in Germany until their two countries went to war with each other seven years later.

The Nuremberg rallies became a standard event for reporters from many countries, often with special seats in the motorcade that were meant to ensure that they reached the right conclusions. Two years later, in 1936, a young United Press correspondent, Richard Helms—the future director of the Central Intelligence Agency—was one of the chosen ones. After sitting in the back seat of a car alongside Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg and a Polish reporter, Helms offered this evocative description of his experience as they followed right behind Hitler’s car:

While many of the regular American correspondents in Berlin failed to get personal meetings with Hitler, Putzi Hanfstaengl was still in the business of trying to connect influential Americans with Der Führer. One person he targeted was Hearst, the powerful publisher, who traveled frequently to Europe and made a special point of declaring how much he liked Germany. He was particularly enchanted with Munich—“the city, the surroundings, the climate, the bright and happy Bavarian people, the shops, the theaters, the museums—and the beer,” he told a reporter. “In fact, it is such a delightful place that one has to be careful not to want to live here instead of going home and attending to business.”

Catching up with Hearst, who was on another European trip during the summer of 1934, Hanfstaengl tried to convince him to come to Nuremberg to attend the Nazi Party rally. After the two men met in Munich, Putzi published an article in Germany that was cited in the New York Times on August 23. Putzi quoted the publisher as saying that the results of the plebiscite backing Hitler were “a unanimous expression of the popular will.” Hearst added: “Germany is battling for her liberation from the mischievous provisions of the Treaty of Versailles… This battle, in fact, can only be viewed as a struggle which all liberty-loving peoples are bound to follow with understanding and sympathy.” In his account, Putzi also reported that Hearst would attend the Nuremberg rally the following month.

Hanfstaengl had spoken too soon. Worried that his presence in Nuremberg could be viewed as an even stronger endorsement of Hitler’s movement, Hearst declined. Nonetheless, after some initial hesitation, he accepted Putzi’s invitation to meet the Nazi leader in Berlin on September 16, once the Nuremberg spectacle was over.

When they met in the Chancellery, Hitler—speaking through Hanfstaengl, who served as the translator—immediately asked: “Why am I so misrepresented, so misunderstood in America? Why are the people of America so antagonistic to my regime?”

Hearst reportedly explained that Americans “believe in democracy and are averse to dictatorship.”

Hitler replied that he had been elected by the German people, who had reaffirmed their support for his policies. “That is democracy, is it not?”

“That might be democracy, but it is also dictatorship in view of what those policies are,” Hearst said.

If accurate, that account, which was provided by his traveling secretary Harry Crocker, would indicate that Hearst wasn’t a completely uncritical admirer of Hitler as his critics back home were charging. But there’s no doubt that Hanfstaengl had achieved his goal of making Hearst see Hitler in a more positive light. Fromm noted in her diary that Putzi had been “bragging about what he considers his latest achievements”—namely, orchestrating the Hearst-Hitler session at which the German leader “turned on all his charm to impress the great man.”

“Hitler is certainly an extraordinary man,” Hearst wrote to his friend and secretary Colonel Joseph Willicombe after their meeting. “We estimate him too lightly in America. He has enormous energy, intense enthusiasm, a marvelous facility for dramatic oratory, and great organizing ability.” He did throw in a note of caution, however: “Of course, all these qualities can be misdirected.”

“Hitler needs a woman,” Hanfstaengl declared to Martha Dodd during her early days in Berlin. “Hitler should have an American woman—a lovely woman could change the whole destiny of Europe.” Then, with his typical dramatic flourish, he proclaimed, “Martha, you are the woman!”

Martha recognized that “this sounded like inflated horse play as did most of Putzi’s schemes,” but she wasn’t sure he wasn’t serious. “I was quite satisfied by the role so generously passed on to me and rather excited by the opportunity that presented itself, to meet this strange leader of men,” she wrote. She was still convinced that Hitler was “a glamorous and brilliant personality who must have great power and charm.”

In her recollection of the day of her encounter, Martha added a somewhat sardonic note, which nonetheless reveals her state of mind: “Since I was appointed to change the history of Europe, I decided to dress in my most demure and intriguing best—which always appeals to the Germans: they want their women to be seen and not heard, and then only as appendages of the splendid male they accompany.”

Putzi and Martha went to the Kaiserhof, Hitler’s favorite hotel, where they met Jan Kiepura, a Polish singer. They drank tea and chatted until Hitler, accompanied by his bodyguards and driver, sat down at a table nearby. Kiepura was called over to Hitler’s table and the two men talked for a few minutes. Then, Putzi walked over to Der Führer, bending his tall frame down to whisper something to him. Visibly excited, he returned to Martha, telling her that he had agreed to meet her. When Martha walked over to his table, Hitler stood up and kissed her hand, murmuring something that she didn’t catch since her German was still rudimentary then. Their encounter was very short, with Hitler kissing her hand once again as she went back to her table. From time to time, she recalled, he cast “curious, embarrassed stares” her way.

That meeting left her “with a picture of a weak, soft face, with pouches under the eyes, full lips and very little bony facial structure.” She barely noticed his famous mustache, but she observed that his eyes were “startling and unforgettable—they seemed pale blue in color, were intense, unwavering, hypnotic.” Overall, she found the Hitler she met that afternoon to be “excessively gentle and modest” and “unobtrusive, communicative, informal.” She was struck by “a certain, quiet charm, almost a tenderness of speech and glance.”

When Martha returned home that evening and told her father about her meeting with Hitler, the ambassador didn’t hide his amusement at how easily she was impressed by him. He did admit that Hitler could turn on personal charm, and, teasingly, told her not to wash her hands for a long time since she should preserve the extraordinary blessing of Hitler’s kiss. If anything, he persisted, she should wash carefully around the spot where his lips had blessed her. Martha was irritated by this ribbing, but she tried not to show it.

Nothing more clearly demonstrated the difference in perceptions of Hitler up close than another even more fleeting encounter, this one with Robert Lochner, the teenage son of the AP bureau chief. Robert and his stepmother were at the opera in Berlin one evening, waiting for his father to arrive, when suddenly a phalanx of SS men burst in, clearing a path for Hitler. As the leader followed in their wake, there were shouts of “Heil Hitler,” and the Germans shot their right arms out in the obligatory right-handed salute. Instead of following suit, Robert lapsed into the pose of a surly American teenager. “I ostentatiously kept both of my hands in my pockets and demonstratively chewed gum, which the Nazis disapproved of,” he recalled. For a split second, this prompted Hitler to focus his attention on him, and the teenager was startled by the menacing intensity of his “piercing look.”

Angus Thuermer, a cub reporter who worked in the AP bureau where Robert’s father was the boss, recalled how the younger Lochner explained his feelings after that short incident. “Ever afterwards, I could understand how young officers, or anyone else, for that matter, would be terrorized by Hitler’s eyes,” he said.

Young as he was, Robert Lochner certainly understood Germany better than Martha Dodd—and was more attuned to the atmosphere of fear and intimidation that accompanied Hitler and the Nazis. But this wasn’t only a difference in the views of two young Americans. It also underscored how Hitler succeeded in favorably impressing women on so many occasions, particularly when in their company for the first time. Louis Lochner recalled attending a reception hosted by Joseph and Magda Goebbels in 1935, with many theater and movie people in attendance. Hitler appeared to love the company, pressing the hand of famed actress Dorothea Wieck, who blushed as he greeted her. Inviting her over to his table, he laughed and told stories, even slapping his thigh as he did so. And there was one thing that Lochner heard women saying over and over: “Once you look into Hitler’s eyes, you are his devoted follower forever.”

Aside from Hitler, Martha Dodd was initially attracted to many German men who showed up on the endless diplomatic social circuit. She wasn’t that taken with the young Reichswehr officers she met, whom she dismissed as “extremely pleasant, handsome, courteous, and uninteresting.” But aside from Putzi, she was happy to be in the company of the likes of Ernst Udet, the World War I flying ace who took her up in his plane (Martha later wrote Sowing the Wind, a mediocre novel about an Udet-like character); Prince Louis Ferdinand, the grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm II and a frequent guest of the Dodds and the Lochners; and numerous young Foreign Ministry and SS men. One of these young men she dated, whom she at first considered to be part of the “blond Aryan wholesome-looking talent,” pressed her repeatedly for information about her father’s views on events in Germany. Finally recognizing what he was doing, she confessed that he was “one of the first disillusions I had in German official life.”

While she was still in what she characterized as her “most violent pro-Nazi period,” Martha met a young French diplomat, who began taking her out with her parents’ permission. Not that Martha cared much about such formalities. Although her German male friends warned her that he was a French spy and she considered herself anti-French and pro-German, she was drawn to “the tall boy, romantic and perfect of feature.” When he denounced the militarism of the Nazis, she argued with him—but later she conceded that some of his arguments made her begin “to think a little.” Sylvia Crane, one of Martha’s friends, maintained that her political thinking was always guided by her love life. “She just liked sleeping with attractive men, and that’s how she learned about politics and history,” she said.

Martha was certainly eclectic in her tastes. Early in her stay, she met the Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels. He was a frequent visitor to the Dodds’ residence, often to assure the ambassador that he was doing what he could to prevent violence against Americans. Martha’s father and other diplomats viewed him as more sympathetic to their grievances than other German officials. Nonetheless, he was also presiding over the early concentration camps, and Martha admitted she heard from several people that “at least twelve people a day” were killed during that period. But none of that prevented Martha from going out with him, dancing in nightclubs and taking long drives in the country together. “I was intrigued and fascinated by this human monster of sensitive face and cruel, broken beauty,” she declared. Nor, of course, did it matter that Diels was married; Martha dismissed his wife as “a pathetic passive-looking creature.”

A young Jew who met Martha at several cocktail parties warned her that Diels was using her as protection, probably in some internal Nazi battles. “Martha, you are very silly, and you are playing with fire,” he said. But she wasn’t about to be dissuaded and kept seeing the Gestapo chief. “I was extremely interested in his type and his conversation,” she wrote. “He gave me, consciously and unconsciously, a picture of the backstage workings of espionage that I could have not got anywhere else.” It was a revealing comment that later could be read as an indirect admission about her own spying for a different regime.

Martha was soon infected by Diels’s evident nervousness about his rivals within the party, and in December 1933 even told Messersmith, the U.S. consul general, that he feared for his life. He wanted Messersmith to write a letter to the Nazi authorities praising him, suggesting that he was doing a lot to keep U.S.-German relations on an even keel. Messersmith and Ambassador Dodd sympathized with him but didn’t feel they could write such a letter.

Martha worried both about inadvertently saying something to Diels about her German friends that might lead to their deaths, and about Diels himself. After one late night of dancing, Diels came into the Dodds’ residence for a drink in the library before going home. It was evident he wanted to talk about whatever latest intrigues he had on his mind. Martha grabbed a pillow from the sofa. When Diels asked her what she was doing, she indicated she was going to cover the phone. That prompted a fleeting sinister smile, as Martha recalled, and a nod of approval.

While Martha continued to take such measures, she admitted she got herself into “a nervous state that almost bordered on the hysterical.” She began replaying conversations in her head with various Germans, wondering if they were recorded or overheard. From her second-floor bedroom, she was suddenly prone to hear ominous footsteps on the gravel driveway, see moving shadows, and to assume any popping sound was a gunshot. As for Diels, in the period leading up to the Night of the Long Knives, he was like “a frightened rabbit,” Martha recalled, clinging to her. Diels survived the bloodletting of June 30, 1934, but earlier he lost his post of Gestapo chief, never attaining that prominent a position in the Nazi hierarchy again.

Martha Dodd claimed that a variety of factors—everything from the crudeness of German propaganda to her exposure to a widening circle of friends—transformed her from an apologist for the Nazis into a fervent opponent in the spring of 1934. Not coincidentally, this was also the period when Martha began what was probably her most passionate affair. Her new lover was Boris Vinogradov. In her 1939 memoir Through Embassy Eyes, she never mentioned him by name, but he was “the young secretary in a foreign embassy” who took her to the lakeside beach on June 30. He was a tall, blond, handsome first secretary in the Soviet Embassy, and, because he had served earlier as the press secretary, was well known to American correspondents in Berlin. They found him to be good company when Martha would bring him by Die Taverne, the Italian restaurant where they gathered in the evenings.

The other important new person in Martha’s life was Mildred Harnack, a fellow midwesterner who found herself in Germany. She had met Arvid Harnack, a German exchange student, at the University of Wisconsin and soon married into his distinguished, scholarly Prussian family. In 1929, the couple moved to Germany, and Mildred at first taught classes on American and British literature at the University of Berlin and later at a night school for adults. Watching the impact of the Depression on her students, she noted their sense of weariness since they knew “they had no future.” Like her German husband, she was troubled by the rise of the Nazis, but she was confident that they would fail to seize power. “It is said by people who are capable of estimating the present situation that no such dictatorship as is in Italy can be erected in Germany,” she wrote on July 24, 1932.

Mildred’s confidence flowed from her faith that there was already an alternative model that would serve as the solution to the crisis of the capitalist system. She and Arvid had visited Russia, where she was awed by the atmosphere of “hopefulness and achievement.” She enthusiastically explained in a letter to her mother that the country was “the scene of an enormously important experiment in loving your neighbor as yourself.” Back in Berlin, the Harnacks became regular guests at Soviet Embassy receptions.

Once the Nazis came to power, the Harnacks had to be careful to hide their political views, and Mildred avoided any more pro-Russian commentaries in her letters home. But when she met Martha, the two instantly hit it off. Mildred and Martha, with her new political outlook and Soviet lover, felt free to share their private thoughts with each other. And they were both quick to pass judgment on those who they felt hadn’t seen the light the way they had. Martha professed herself “amazed at the naïveté” of any Americans who still could have profascist leanings, seemingly oblivious to the irony that she would make such a statement so soon after her own conversion.

On May 27, 1934, Mildred, Martha and Boris—along with Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt, the son of the publisher Ernst Rowohlt—drove to the farm of writer Hans Fallada, whose 1932 novel Little Man, What Now? was a huge bestseller in Germany and a major hit abroad. While the Nazis liked his grim portrayal of life in Weimar Germany, they were highly suspicious of him. Fallada tried to skirt current politics and even sought to ingratiate himself with the Nazis on occasion. Nonetheless, as numerous press attacks on him indicated, the lack of ideology in his books was enough to make the authorities discern an undercurrent of dangerously independent thinking.

But Martha was irritated by Fallada’s decision to concentrate on his life on the farm with his wife and children, and his ostensibly apolitical writing. “He was isolated from life and happy in his isolation,” she wrote reproachfully. From their conversation, she continued, “though I got the impression that he was not and could not be a Nazi—what artist is?—I felt a certain resignation in his attitude.” Mildred was less judgmental, telling her companions that Fallada was a man with a conscience. “He is not happy, he is not a Nazi, he is not hopeless,” she said. In fact, Fallada’s last novel, Every Man Dies Alone, which he wrote right after World War II, would prove to be one of the most powerful fictional portrayals of the horrors of life in Germany under Hitler—and of the terrifying price that anyone paid who dared to resist the Nazis.

That summer, with Vinogradov’s help, Martha made her first pilgrimage to her new ideal state: Russia. “I had had enough of blood and terror to last me for the rest of my life,” she declared by way of explaining why she was eager to take a break from Germany. And, of course, what other country was freer of blood and terror than the Soviet Union? From the moment she set foot in Moscow, and probably even before she made her trip, her blind admiration of Stalin’s Russia knew no bounds, even exceeding her earlier zeal for Hitler’s Germany. There was a complete lack of militarism, arrogance, insolent behavior and regimentation, she giddily reported. The Bolshevik Revolution had been a triumph for humanity. “One felt in Moscow that the struggle was over, that the fruits of victory were being cherished and enjoyed by everyone.”

While she confessed that there was still some startling poverty, everything was being done to eliminate it, she insisted. Stalin was setting an example by living modestly, the workers were living happily in their workers’ state, and “the conscience and idealism that lie latent in most mankind were being stimulated and awakened in me,” she wrote. That didn’t prevent her from boasting that she was served caviar three times a day on a Volga cruise ship, along with “marvelous nourishing Russian soups, excellent meats, butter, ice cream, fish…” Or from “marveling over the fact that everything good in life was being supplied for the vast majority of the population.” Unlike Germany, she added, Russia was “almost like a democratic country,” and threatened no one.

Despite her new anti-Nazi, pro-Soviet orientation, Martha was still the same woman when it came to matters of the heart. When she returned to Germany, she was, as always, more than eager to associate with any man who looked glamorous to her, no matter what his views. This was certainly the case with Thomas Wolfe, whose novel Look Homeward, Angel was a smash hit in Germany as elsewhere. When he visited Berlin in 1935, the young but already widely known writer was treated like a conquering hero. Arriving in Berlin, he was greeted at the American Express office by a huge number of letters, telegrams and phone messages from journalists, diplomats and admirers, all seeking to see him. Describing all this in a letter to his editor Max Perkins, Wolfe marveled that “for the last two weeks at least I have been famous in Berlin.”

As Martha put it, “Tom, a huge man of six foot six, with the face of a great poet, strode the streets, oblivious of the sensation he created… To the desolateness of the intellectual life in Germany, Thomas Wolfe was like a symbol of the past, when great writers were great men.” Wolfe had visited Germany in the mid-1920s, and his fond memories of that era combined with his recent literary successes there prompted him to feel that Berlin was still a magical place. In his letter to Perkins from Berlin, he declared: “I feel myself welling up with energy and life again…” He had finally finished a new novel, Of Time and the River, and he was reveling in the adulation he found in Germany, going from party to party, where he was always the center of attention.

“Part of Tom’s uncritical attitude towards Nazism can be explained by his own state of delirium,” Martha wrote. Her own forgiving attitude was just as easy to explain: she loved escorting a celebrity like Wolfe around town and adding him to her list of conquests. It was a tempestuous affair, with Martha often reprimanding him for his heavy drinking. Decades later, Ledig-Rowohlt, the son of his German publisher, revealed to an interviewer a conversation that he and Wolfe had about Martha. Wolfe told him that Martha was “like a butterfly hovering around my penis.”

Wolfe indicated that he did notice some “disturbing things” during his 1935 visit to Germany, but it wasn’t until he returned in the summer of the following year that his intoxication with his reception there wore off and he began to recognize what Nazi rule meant in practice. In an interview that Ledig-Rowohlt arranged for him with the Berliner Tageblatt, he still waxed poetic about Germany’s virtues. “If there were no Germany, it would be necessary to invent one,” he declared. “It is a magical country. I know Hildesheim, Nuremberg, Munich, the architecture of Germany, the soul of the place, the glory of her history and art.” But, as Martha explained, Wolfe returned to Germany “a much soberer person, this time eager to learn what lay beneath the surface of Nazi success and effectiveness.”

After that visit, Wolfe wrote I Have a Thing to Tell You, a novella that was spread over three issues of the New Republic in March 1937; he later expanded his story and made it part of You Can’t Go Home Again, one of two novels that were published after his death from a brain disease in 1938, before he reached his thirty-eighth birthday. The novella is unabashedly autobiographical in terms of Wolfe’s feelings about Germany. It is the story of an American writer as he leaves Germany, “that great land whose image had been engraved upon my spirit in my childhood and my youth, before I had ever seen it… I had been at home in it and it in me.”

But this Germany is one that the narrator realizes he must leave for the last time. A German friend frets about losing his job, his mistress and possibly even his life because “these stupid people”—the Nazis—are capable of anything. At the same time, he warns the American that he must not write too truthfully about what he observed, since the authorities would then ban his books and destroy his exalted reputation. “A man must write what he must write,” Wolfe’s narrator and alter ego replies. “A man must do what he must do.”

As the narrator’s train leaves Berlin behind, he muses that the people he knew there were “now remote from me as dreams, imprisoned there as in another world.”

Soon, though, the American finds himself cheered by his lively, friendly companions in his compartment. Even “a stuffy-looking little man with a long nose,” who fidgets throughout the trip and initially made the other passengers uncomfortable, gradually loosens up and joins in the convivial conversation. Reaching the frontier at Aachen, they all get out for fifteen minutes while the locomotive is changed. The little man says something about needing to pick up a ticket for the rest of the journey, and slips away. The others walk around before returning to the platform to reboard.

As the returning passengers look from the outside, they see the fidgety man—his face now “white and pasty”—sitting in their compartment facing a group of officials. The leader of his interrogators is “a Germanic type… His head was shaven, and there were thick creases at the base of his skull and across his fleshy neck.” Even before he learns that his fellow passenger was a Jew who was trying to escape and smuggle money out in the process, the American narrator felt “a murderous and incomprehensible anger” welling up in him. “I wanted to smash that fat neck with the creases in it,” he writes. “I wanted to pound that inflamed and blunted face into jelly.” But he admits to his sense of helplessness, which is shared by everyone around him. Feeling nauseated, he watches as the officials escort the man off the train.

As the train pulls out of the station, the narrator and the others look at him for the last time. He looks back. “And in that glance there was all the silence of man’s mortal anguish,” Wolfe writes. “And we were all somehow naked and ashamed, and somehow guilty. We all felt somehow that we were saying farewell, not to a man, but to humanity.”

The American’s sense of remorse and anger is only heightened by the advice of an attractive blond woman in the compartment, whom he had found seductively appealing, with “an almost shameless physical attraction.” She tries to talk the others in the compartment out of their glum mood. “Those Jews!” she says. “These things would never happen if it were not for them! They make all the trouble. Germany has to protect herself.”

As the German friend in his novella had predicted, the publication of I Have a Thing to Tell You led to the banning of Wolfe’s books in Germany, and he never returned to that country. In an interview in the Asheville Daily News, his North Carolina hometown paper, Wolfe talked about his last trip to Germany. “I came away with the profoundest respect and admiration for the German people, but I feel that they are betrayed by false leadership,” he declared. Reflecting more broadly on his European experiences, he added: “I saw a certain perfection and finish in European life that we do not have here. However, there is a poisonous atmosphere of hatred. I finally wanted to come back home.”

Despite the title of his posthumous novel, Wolfe did make it home.