Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (16 page)

The following day, Plotkin returned to the same theme. “The Nazi meetings are dispirited, as if beaten and know it,” he noted. But he added a cautionary note: “The only disquieting factor is the number of killings that are political in their origin.” Three days later, he attended another Nazi rally, where Goebbels once again denounced “
the bloody Jews
,” whipping up the crowd to such frenzy that Plotkin thought for a moment that it would “run out of his control.” But when the rally was over, the American was struck by the sight of the young Nazi troops in uniform waiting for their orders “like a bunch of schoolboys, and like a bunch of schoolboys bought hot dogs when the hot-dog men started to circulate among them.” The wording of this diary entry suggests he found it hard to believe that these young men eating hot dogs could be truly dangerous.

Even with the mounting reports of violence by just such young men, some wealthy German Jews didn’t seem all that disturbed by the Nazis either. Edgar Mowrer recalled a dinner at the end of 1932 in the home of “
a banker named Arnholt
.” Mowrer probably misspelled his host’s name; if so, the banker in question may have been Hans Arnhold, who was forced to flee Germany after Hitler’s takeover (his villa now serves as the home of the American Academy in Berlin). In any case, all the men around the dinner table except Mowrer were Jews.

Over coffee, several of them boasted that they had given money to the Nazis at the urging of non-Jews like Hjalmar Schacht and Fritz Thyssen. Although Schacht had served as the currency commissioner in the critical year 1923, when he was credited with ending hyperinflation, and then as president of the Reichsbank until 1930, he had become an increasingly vocal supporter of the Nazis; so had industrialist Thyssen.

Mowrer didn’t hide his surprise, prompting his host to ask what he was thinking. “Merely wondering how the People of Israel have managed to survive so many thousands of years when they obviously have a strong suicidal urge,” the American responded.

“But you don’t take this fellow seriously,” his host inquired.

“Unfortunately I do—and so should you.”

“Just talk,” the banker declared, and all the others nodded in agreement. As Mowrer noted, they “thought me incapable of understanding the German soul.”

Schacht, who had once aligned himself with the democratic forces of the Weimar Republic, wasn’t about “just talk.” Shortly before Christmas, Mowrer ran into him and asked politely about his plans for the holidays. “
I am going to Munich
to talk with Adolf Hitler,” he declared.

“You too, my fine Democrat!” Mowrer responded, abandoning any pretense of politeness.

“
Ach
, you understand nothing. You are a stupid American,” Schacht shot back.

“Granted. But tell me what you expect from Hitler in words of one syllable and I’ll try to understand.”

“Germany will have no peace until we bring Hitler to power.”

Three weeks later, Mowrer met Schacht again, and asked him how his conversation went with the Nazi leader. “Brilliantly,” the German banker replied. “I’ve got that man right in my pocket.”

As Mowrer recalled in his memoirs, “From that moment I expected the worst.”

He wasn’t the only one. Bella Fromm, the Jewish social reporter, found herself seated next to Wiegand at a dinner party in Berlin on December 8. The Hearst correspondent wasn’t living full-time in Berlin then, but had a knack for appearing on scene “
whenever a political melodrama
is about to sweep the stage,” Fromm noted in her diary.

“When are the National Socialists going to seize the government?” she asked him bluntly, using the old journalistic ploy of asking a question in a way that implied she knew the score already.

Wiegand looked taken aback but offered a crisp response: “It won’t be long now.”

And what would that mean? “Hitler intends to abolish the treaty of Versailles,” the American correspondent continued, drawing upon his past meetings with Hitler. “He wants to unite all Germans. He has no desire for the return of colonies if he finds a way for new
Lebensraum
[living space] within Central Europe, to install all the regained German subjects. One of Hitler’s early associates, Professor Karl von Haushofer, has been studying the
Lebensraum
problem for years. He has persuaded Hitler that an expansion to the east, peaceful or by force, is an inevitable necessity.”

On December 22, Fromm attended a reception hosted by American Consul General George Messersmith, who had been stationed in the German capital for the past two years and monitored the Nazi movement.
While Ambassador Sackett
was increasingly convinced that the Schleicher government had successfully contained the Nazi threat, Messersmith took a different view. “
The German government
had better act quickly, and strongly,” he said at the reception. “It’s really upsetting to find so many people of importance in the National Socialist party. There are going to be fireworks here pretty soon, unless I’m badly mistaken.”

Fromm added this final line to her diary entry that night: “I do not think that my friend Messersmith is mistaken.”

At an “intimate” dinner
for twelve guests hosted by Chancellor von Schleicher and his wife six days later, on December 28, Fromm was able to relay Wiegand’s prediction of a Nazi takeover directly to the man currently in charge. Schleicher laughed it off. “You journalists are all alike,” he told her. “You make a living out of professional pessimism.”

Fromm pointed out that these views were widely held, not just by her and Wiegand. And that everyone knew that Papen and others were “trying to bring the National Socialists to power.”

“I think I can hold them off,” Schleicher insisted.

Referring to the aging President von Hindenburg, Fromm cautioned, “As long as the Old Gentleman sticks to you.”

Later the two of them were briefly alone in Schleicher’s study. The chancellor once again talked about bringing Gregor Strasser into his government. Fromm was hardly reassured. While Strasser represented the
left wing of the Nazi Party, he shared the anti-Semitic views of the rest of the leadership. “What about the church and Jew-phobia of the party?” she asked.

“You ought to know me better than that, Bella,” Schleicher replied. “All that will be dropped entirely.”

Once again, Fromm added a line of commentary to her diary entry of that night. “The National Socialist Party is not in the habit of dropping anything that suits its purposes,” she wrote. “They scuttle men quicker than they scuttle doctrines.”

But even during the fateful month of January 1933, Americans in Berlin were hearing constant reassurances that Hitler and his movement were fading as a threat. Chancellor von Schleicher, they believed, really knew both what he was up against and how to outplay his opponents. On January 22, Abraham Plotkin met with Martin Plettl, the president of the German Clothing Workers’ Union, in a packed Berlin restaurant. Plettl explained to the American labor organizer that Hitler was “
dancing between four masters
and any one of the four of them may break him.” The four: two camps of industrialists, and two camps within the Nazi Party. As a result, Plettl maintained, Hitler was facing a choice of either accepting a position within the current government or allowing his party rival Strasser to do so. “Hitler will lose either way,” he insisted.

Plettl’s reasoning was that Schleicher was probably using Hitler “as a cat’s paw.” And “Hitler on the downgrade, supplying Schleicher with provocative means for eliminating the Communists, will clear the roads for Schleicher in the coming elections.” When Plotkin indicated he was skeptical, Plettl argued that it was a strategy that could easily work, allowing Schleicher to use the Nazis to destroy the Communists but prompting deeper fissures within the party itself as some leaders would be compromised by joining a coalition government. Hitler’s party would no longer be a pure opposition force, and its base of support would weaken.

But the previous chancellor, Papen, had by that time already effectively undercut his successor. On January 4, he met with Hitler in Cologne at the home of banker Kurt von Schröder. The two politicians worked out a deal to oust Schleicher, with Papen assigned the task of winning the
support of President von Hindenburg. Even when word of their meeting leaked out, Schleicher professed himself “
in no way alarmed
by the alleged plot against him.” Neither were the top diplomats at the American Embassy, who believed that the meeting was mostly focused on dealing with the Nazis’ ailing finances. The “rapidly increasing” party debt, chargé d’affaires George Gordon reported, was threatening to undermine the movement. Its financial backers, he added, were both trying to solve that problem and encouraging Hitler to participate in the government, not topple it.

In the last few days of January, those interpretations were proven grievously wrong. Facing a growing political revolt fanned by Papen, Schleicher asked Hindenburg for his support so that he could dissolve the Reichstag. The president refused, triggering the resignation of the Schleicher government. Next, he turned to Papen to negotiate a new arrangement with the political parties. This gave Papen the green light to do what he had been advocating all along. On January 30, Hindenburg formally asked Hitler to form a new government, appointing him chancellor and Papen as vice chancellor. While Ambassador Sackett reported this “
sudden and unexpected
triumph” for the Nazis, the AP’s Louis Lochner indicated that Papen remained convinced that he had truly outsmarted the new chancellor. “
We have hired Hitler
,” he told his friends. In other words, Lochner concluded, Papen was still convinced that he would be “in the driver’s seat.”

Even before the debate about whether Hitler could truly take power was settled by his dramatic ascension, Americans in Germany were split about what such a development would mean. Were Hitler’s speeches and
Mein Kampf
a true indication of what Nazi rule would look like, or were they merely tools for his emotional campaign? If the latter, it would be logical to believe that, once in power, Hitler would tone down his rhetoric, moderate his program and seek accommodation with many of those he had been denouncing at home and abroad.

Among the correspondents covering Germany, no one had a longer track record than S. Miles Bouton of the
Baltimore Sun.
He had arrived
in Germany in 1911, working at first for the Associated Press. He had covered World War I, written the book
And the Kaiser Abdicates
, married a German woman and left no doubt that he considered himself the preeminent authority on the country. “
It requires no great skill
at reading between the lines to discover that I have no very high opinion of the quality of the reporting done from Germany for the American press,” he declared in an interview for his own newspaper on a visit to the United States in 1925. He claimed he wasn’t blaming his fellow correspondents but only their editors, who were guided by their prejudices. Nonetheless, he was scathing about those colleagues. “Some of them are, it is true, much less well informed about the situation there than they might be.”

A well-informed correspondent, he emphasized both before the Nazis took power and after, would have no doubt who was to blame for what went wrong in Germany. Speaking to the Rockford, Illinois, Women’s Club in March 1935, he pointed out that he had denounced the Versailles Treaty from the beginning. “
Read that treaty
and understand the things that are happening today,” he said. “The allies heaped oppressions, humiliations, and exactions upon Germany.”

Bouton had first encountered Hitler in September 1923 before the Beer Hall Putsch that made the Nazi leader famous. At the party headquarters, he was met by a young man who began explaining how Hitler would restore Germany’s honor, saving it from the Communists and the Jews. “
It was several minutes
before it occurred to me that this was Hitler, talking about himself in the third person,” Bouton recalled in an unpublished manuscript. “I had never before met and have never since met a man who so completely identified himself with his supposed mission.”

When Hitler’s party regained momentum once the Depression hit, Bouton was at first skeptical of its chances, reporting in 1930 that it “
does not
come into consideration at all as a government party.” (In 1935, he would claim to have been much more prescient, telling his audience at the University of Georgia: “
For the last five years
of the Republic I prophesied time and again that Hitler and the National Socialists would come to power.”) But in March 1932, he reported that the strong second-place
finish by Hitler in the presidential election “
represents a remarkable
personal triumph, and it becomes the more astounding when one considers the circumstances in which it was gained.” From there, he launched into an account of what he characterized as the story that his American colleagues had routinely failed to report: it was about “the methods used by both the Reich and the state governments against Hitler, since these methods make a mockery of all protestations by the men in power that they believe in democracy.”

In other words, the real story that needed to be reported from Germany was not about the brutal methods and ideology of the Nazis but the attempts by the Weimar government to muzzle them, forbidding them to broadcast their message on the radio, suppressing their party newspapers, and banning some of their leaders from speaking in public, as happened to Hitler after he emerged from prison. He scornfully referred to all the talk of the “menace of Hitlerism” that was “disturbing the peace of mind of the outside world in general and of America in particular.” Americans, he added, saw Hitler as “a mere rabble-rouser and shallow demagogue.” Quoting Dorothy Thompson’s description of Hitler as “the very prototype of the Little Man,” he declared that his extensive experience in Germany had taught him to be hesitant about making such judgments about both Hitler and his followers, who were dismissed as “a strange collection of heavy doctrinaires and helpless neurotics.”