Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (17 page)

“I am pretty sure that these confident critics are wrong,” he wrote. “There are probably few if any Americans in Germany who have as wide a circle of German friends and acquaintances as I have.” Those acquaintances, he added, were highly educated—“for the greater part academicians, professional men of high standing, high government officials, etc.” At least 80 percent of them had voted for Hitler, he claimed. Of the others, 10 percent refused to vote for Hindenburg, and the remaining 10 percent were Jews. “Even some of them would have voted for Hitler had it not been for the anti-Semitic plank in his platform.”

At the end of his long article, he tossed in what he called “one more significant fact.” Many of his German friends had American wives who “without any exception are more ardent Hitlerites than their German husbands.” His interpretation of this phenomenon: “Theirs is the
American brand of patriotism, the brand which has happily made Marxism and internationalism unthinkable in our country.” His message: Germans supported Hitler for the same “patriotic” reasons, and American readers shouldn’t be swayed by the anti-Nazi accounts of his colleagues in the American press corps.

Some of those colleagues had come to their own conclusions about why Bouton was offering such contrarian views. Writing on December 11, 1932, to his daughter Betty, who was a student at the University of Chicago, the AP’s Lochner recounted an incident triggered by a photograph of Chancellor von Papen and a few journalists, including Lochner and Bouton, that ran in the Nazi weekly
Illustrierter Beobachter.
The caption read:
“Von Papen und die jüdische Weltpresse”
(Von Papen and the Jewish world press). “
That they put me down
as one of the Chosen People doesn’t matter much, but the unkindest cut was that Miles Bouton, of all people—he who himself is an ardent Nazi—should have been put down as ‘Sally Bouton-Knopf.’ The whole American colony is laughing about it,” Lochner wrote.

Lochner explained that the Nazi publication listed Bouton’s first name as Sally “as that is a favorite Jewish name” and that they had translated Bouton as
Knopf
(German for “button”) and hyphenated his last name. “Miles nearly hit the roof,” Lochner added with evident glee. “He was furious—all the more so as he had travelled around with Hitler in an airplane. We both protested not because we were called Jews—we both have very dear friends among the Jews and neither of us are anti-Semitic—but because from the whole ideology of the Nazis it is evident they meant to insult us by calling us Jews.”

Lochner reported that he heard Hitler was furious about this “boner” by the Nazi weekly, and several Nazi leaders called him to say they were “ashamed” that someone from their camp had played such a dirty trick on them. Lochner wrote to the editor of the weekly demanding he print a retraction. “He did—but in a way that makes the readers think we objected to being called Jews, when our point was that we objected to being insulted by the Nazis,” he reported to his daughter. Nonetheless, Lochner was pleased that the Nazis had made Bouton squirm. “We’ve had lots of fun,” he concluded.

No issue crystallized the question of Hitler’s intentions more than what Nazi rule would mean for the Jews. A correspondent like Edgar Mowrer, who was Bouton’s polar opposite when it came to his assumptions about the party and what it represented, had covered the attacks of Brownshirts on “
foreigners and Jews
,” in some cases going out in armored police cars. His wife Lilian recalled anxiously waiting for hours until he returned from “the front.” The young thugs wearing heavy leather boots and carrying revolvers were “always insolent and swaggering,” she added, and they would gather at a number of cafés and beer houses, hanging huge swastika flags outside. The owners of these establishments had no choice but to tolerate “these invasions.”

Before the Nazis came to power, Edgar made a habit of going into such hangouts to buy the brawlers beers and try to learn more about their views. As Lilian described it, these young toughs rallied to slogans like “We spit on freedom” and “Beat the Red Front to pulp.” Their favorite toast: “Germany awake, perish the Jew!”

“But just where did you learn all this interesting stuff about the Jew?” Edgar asked on one occasion.

“
Aber Herr
, everybody in Germany knows that the Jews are our misfortune,” one of the Nazis replied.

“But just how? Why?” Edgar persisted.

“There are too many of them. And then, Jews are not people like the rest of us.”

“But in my country the proportion of Jews is much higher than in Germany. But we lost no war, have not starved, not been betrayed to foreigners; in short, have suffered none of the evils you attribute to the presence of the Jews in Germany. How do you account for this?”

“We don’t account for it. We simply know it is true,” the Nazi replied, complaining that the Jews were getting the best jobs for themselves by “stealth and fraud.” Germans were waking up to that, he added, “and no matter how hard the Jew works, he won’t be on top long.”

“Then you admit the Jew works harder?” Edgar asked.

“Of course.”

“But doesn’t the hardest worker deserve the best jobs?”

His interlocutor suddenly sounded uncertain. “Yes—that is, no; not if he is a Jew.”

“Is that logical, is that clear thinking?”

“
Ach
, thinking!” the exasperated Nazi replied. “We are sick of thinking. Thinking gets you nowhere. The
Führer
himself says true Nazis think with their blood.”

And this kind of lack of thinking was everywhere. The Mowrers’ young daughter, Diana Jane, came home from school one day and said, in German, that she had to ask her mother a question. Lilian insisted, as always, that she speak English at home. “
But I have only heard
about these things in German and I must know if I am saying the right words,” she replied.

Lilian assented.

“Mutti, am I a Jew or a Christian?”

“You are not a Jew, my dear. What makes you ask?”

The girl said that all the talk at school about who was or wasn’t Jewish had made her wonder about her own identity. “It isn’t good to be a Jew,” she concluded.

Nineteen thirty-two was a big year for Edgar Mowrer. He would win the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting then, and his deepening fears about where Germany was heading prompted him to write his book
Germany Puts the Clock Back
, which he finished in November and was quickly published in the United States at the beginning of 1933 just as Hitler was taking power. His book chronicled the disintegration of the Weimar Republic, how Germans had grown “
sick of everything
” and how “the depression brought voters by the carloads to Hitler.” By way of explanation of the Nazi leader’s appeal, he wrote, “A little man has taken the measure of still smaller men.”

Yet even Mowrer wasn’t quite sure what Hitler represented—and what to expect if he took power. “
Did he believe
all that he said?” he asked. “The question is inapplicable to this sort of personality. Subjectively Adolf Hitler was, in my opinion, entirely sincere even in his self-contradictions. For his is a humorless mind that simply excludes the need for consistency that might distress more intellectual types. To an
actor the truth is anything that lies in its effect: if it makes the right impression it is true.”

Sigrid Schultz of the rival
Chicago Tribune
recalled one incident that proved Mowrer’s point about Hitler’s acting ability, which allowed him to ingratiate himself with those who were normally skeptical. After the Nazis’ string of electoral wins in 1932, Hanfstaengl invited a dozen American and British correspondents to meet Hitler at the Kaiserhof Hotel. Schultz was among them, and she watched with fascination as Hitler greeted the first correspondent in line by clutching his hands and staring into his eyes. Encountering Schultz, he merely shook her hand. When he reached a correspondent who was normally known for his irreverent style, Schultz expected some fireworks. Instead, she recalled, “
I could see the man’s face
as Hitler went into his routine and, to my horror, those usually cynical eyes responded adoringly to whatever message Hitler was giving out.”

Mowrer credited Hitler and the Nazis with doing everything possible to achieve the maximum effect at every such opportunity. “
While others slept
, they had labored. While opponents talked once, they talked ten times,” he wrote. “Hitler believes chiefly in the personal contact, the spoken word, personality.” He added ominously, “In the great game of fooling the public he is an incomparable master.”

As for the true intentions of his anti-Semitic campaign, Mowrer sounded alarmed in some moments but uncertain in others. “A suspicion arises that Adolf Hitler himself accepted anti-Semitism with his characteristic mixture of emotionalism and political cunning,” he wrote. “Many doubted if he really desired pogroms.”

In January 1933 after Mowrer had completed his book and Hitler was coming to power, the
Chicago Daily News
reporter won an election, too. He was elected president of the Foreign Press Association. It was a confluence of events that would ultimately lead to a dramatic ending of the Mowrers’ stay in Germany.

Putzi Hanfstaengl would claim in his postwar memoir that he had felt “
singularly unmoved
by that clamour and hysteria of that January 30 in
1933 when the Nazi Party came to power.” He added, “Certainly it was an exciting moment, but I had too many reservations concerning the dangerous turbulence of the radicals to feel unduly confident about the possible march of events.”

If he really had any reservations then, Putzi disguised them well. He congratulated Hitler when he returned to the Kaiserhof Hotel after his meeting with President von Hindenburg and immediately talked with a steady stream of foreign journalists coming to see him. And soon he was directing propaganda films, publishing a book of “caricatures”—or sketches—of Hitler, and designing his own personalized Nazi Party uniform. Putzi didn’t want to don the standard shirt and trousers that Hitler offered him from the party’s clothing store. Instead, he noted, “
I sent for
a superb length of chocolate-brown gabardine from a London tailor and had it made up with a delicate little gold epaulette.”

Hanfstaengl boasted that his first appearance in his new uniform, at a dinner party hosted by the AP’s Lochner and his German wife, Hilde, “was, needless to state, the talk of the town.” Lochner remembered the evening well. It was April 27, 1933, and his guests included U.S. Consul General George Messersmith, Sigrid Schultz, some former German officials and banker Curt Sobernheim and his wife, Lilli, who were Jewish. In typical German fashion, all the guests had arrived promptly at eight, except for Putzi. Hilde was ready to seat them at eight-fifteen when the Nazi press officer suddenly appeared. “
In strode
an enormous bulk of masculinity in a brand-new Nazi brown uniform,” Lochner recalled. “It was Putzi, who had hitherto made sarcastic remarks about the official Nazi garb and had never dressed in one.”

Lochner added that Lilli Sobernheim—“a short stubby person who was nearly as round as she was small”—nearly fainted. Trembling, she whispered, “The Gestapo.” Putzi bowed to Hilde and apologized for his tardiness, explaining that his butler hadn’t properly prepared his evening dress suit, which was why he had to wear his party uniform. As Louis noted, nobody believed him; Putzi’s own account of that evening makes clear that his appearance in uniform was fully planned, although he never mentioned his lie. Nor did he mention what happened next. According to Lochner, he politely bowed and kissed the hand of Lilli Sobernheim. Her
husband, Curt, then stated, with a look of professed innocence: “I believe, Dr. Hanfstaengl, we are somewhat related.”

Putzi was visibly startled. After all, a Jew was telling him that he was related to him. “How interesting! What do you mean?” he asked.

Sobernheim began explaining that a relative had married someone in Hanfstaengl’s family, and the two men retreated to a corner where they talked further. Lochner recalled that this had everyone chuckling since “it seemed like accusing someone of treason to tell a Nazi he was related to a Jew.”

As the evening progressed, the tension appeared to dissipate. Hanfstaengl even spent time chatting amicably with former Minister of Defense Wilhelm Groener, who had supported a ban on the SA during his term in office. “Only you unofficial people can stage a dinner like this,” Messersmith, the U.S. consul general, told Lochner. “There ought to be more like it. Maybe they would exert a good influence upon the Nazis.”

But as Hanfstaengl made the rounds of the parties hosted by diplomats and journalists during those early days of the new government, he charmed some of his hosts and alienated others. Messersmith soon concluded that he was “
a court jester
,” but one who “thought that his position as Hitler’s favorite and his uniform permitted him to do anything.” Since the consul general had become increasingly critical of the new regime, Hanfstaengl registered his displeasure by what was meant as a pointed put-down at an American Embassy dinner party. “Oh, so this is the famous Messersmith who knows everything that is going on and doesn’t like it,” he told him.

Putzi’s rudeness didn’t stop there. He began rubbing the leg of the woman seated next to him at the dinner table. As Lilian Mowrer pointed out later, “
I knew he was crazy
about women and could not keep his hands off them.” Most guests pretended not to notice Putzi’s antics, but Messer-smith bluntly and openly reprimanded him. The consul general reported with evident satisfaction that Putzi acted like “an exemplary guest” from that point on.

Later, Hanfstaengl would seek to take revenge by spreading rumors that Messersmith was Jewish. He had used the same tactics against Edgar Mowrer when the correspondent began reporting on attacks against Jews
during those first months of the new regime, claiming that Mowrer was a “
secret” Jew
. Meeting with James G. McDonald, the visiting head of the New York–based Foreign Policy Association, Putzi declared: “
Of course, he is
a Jew and so is his wife”—and then proceeded to name other reporters who he claimed were Jews or served Jewish interests.