Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (50 page)

While Hitler boasted to Huss that he would outlast “your President Roosevelt” and “this crazy man Churchill,” and that Stalin’s Red Army was already “practically smashed,” Huss detected more than contempt in Hitler’s repeated mentions of “Herr Roosevelt—and his Jews.” He complained bitterly that the American president “wants to run the world and rob us all of a place in the sun . . . Every time I reached forth my hand he slapped it down.” He blamed Roosevelt for conspiring to keep Britain in the war and, as he became more incensed about his alleged misdeeds, Huss felt “that just for that second an icy chill had crept between us.”

It was then that Huss claimed he understood what triggered Hitler’s denunciations. “Mighty Hitler of the Nazi Reich and the New Order Europe basically and by instinct
fears
President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States of America,” he wrote. Which was why, Huss added, “like a tiger at bay, he wants to spring and land the knockout blow to paralyze the power of the man and the land he fears more than anything else in the world.”

While Huss’s account may have been colored by his desire to bolster the morale of his countrymen at this early stage of their involvement in the war, he was correct in his analysis about Hitler’s primary motive. As he did when he invaded the Soviet Union, Hitler was gambling that another escalation was the only path left to victory.

12

The Last Act

D
uring the late months of 1941, George Kennan monitored the progress of Hitler’s armies in the Soviet Union on a large map of that country in his office, comparing what was happening then to Napoleon’s Russian campaign in 1812. “
The similarities
in timing and geography were often striking,” he observed. Despite the signs that the German drive to take Moscow was faltering, he wasn’t yet sure about the outcome. But he noted the parallel steady deterioration of relations between Germany and the United States, and his sense “that things were now out of control—not only out of
our
control (we, after all, in our poor overworked embassy, had never at any time had any influence on the course of events) but out of everyone’s control.”

Kennan and other Westerners did not know yet that the battle for Moscow would result in the first defeat of Hitler’s army.
It was a titanic struggle
, the biggest battle of World War II and of all time, involving 7 million troops. The combined losses of both sides—those killed, taken prisoner or severely wounded—were 2.5 million, of which nearly 2 million were on the Soviet side. German troops had reached the outskirts of Moscow, a direct result of Stalin’s grievous miscalculations, starting with his refusal to believe that Germany would invade his country.

But the Soviet capital was ultimately saved because Hitler committed even bigger mistakes, refusing to listen to his generals who wanted him to push directly to the Soviet capital. He ordered a diversion south to take Kiev, insisting that it was vital to seize control of the agricultural riches and raw materials of the Ukraine first. By the time his troops resumed their drive on Moscow, they were caught in heavy autumn rains that turned Russian dirt roads into swamps, and then by swiftly plummeting temperatures. Since Hitler had firmly believed that Moscow would be quickly overrun, most of the German troops had not even been issued winter uniforms. All of which meant that, as the Soviet writer Vasily Grossman wrote, “
General Mud and General Cold
” dramatically slowed and weakened the invaders.

Taking full advantage of his good fortune, Stalin rushed in troop reinforcements from the Soviet Far East. On December 6, the day before Pearl Harbor, his forces launched their first major counteroffensive, pushing back those German troops who had made it closest to the capital.

Like other foreigners, American diplomats and journalists based in Moscow had been evacuated to the Volga city of Kuibyshev back in October when it looked like the city would fall to the Germans. Without direct reporting from those observers, most of the world was slow to recognize that the Soviet counteroffensive was the beginning of a huge turnabout on the Eastern Front. But Hitler—who had only recently been confidently expounding on his vision of how the conquered Soviet territories would make
Germany an economic powerhouse
—had come to recognize that his troops would not be able to take the Soviet capital that winter. Still, he continued to hope that they would do so later, and his propagandists insisted that this change of plans only reflected a temporary setback.

On Sunday evening, December 7, Kennan picked up a weak but audible shortwave news broadcast from the United States about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He called Leland Morris, the chargé d’affaires, who was already asleep, and several other embassy officers, and arranged to meet them for a late night meeting at the embassy. While Pearl Harbor did not automatically trigger a state of war with the United States, and Hitler would in fact wait until he addressed the Reichstag four days
later to issue his declaration of war, the American diplomats in Berlin had to assume their mission was coming to an end.

There was no evidence that Hitler remembered Putzi Hanfstaengl’s warnings that it would be fatal to end up on the opposing side of the Americans in another global conflict. Instead, the Nazi leader immediately convinced himself that Japan’s attack was the best news possible since it would mean that the United States would be completely preoccupied by the war in the Pacific, with little energy or resources left to aid Britain and the Soviet Union. The day after Pearl Harbor, he declared: “
We can’t lose
the war at all. We now have an ally which has never been conquered in 3,000 years.”

The leader who was most genuinely pleased by the consequences of Pearl Harbor was Churchill. In a transatlantic phone call on that fateful day, Roosevelt uttered the words that the British prime minister had wanted to hear: “
We are all
in the same boat now.” As Churchill would tell Congress on December 26, “
To me the best tidings
of all is that the United States, united as never before, have drawn the sword for freedom and cast away the scabbard.”

Kennan noted that during the four days of “excruciating uncertainty” as he and his colleagues waited for Hitler to address the Reichstag, the embassy was methodically cut off from the outside world. The telegraph office no longer accepted its telegrams, and, by Tuesday, the embassy’s phones stopped functioning. “We were now on our own,” he pointed out. Figuring they had to prepare for the worst, the diplomats began burning their codes and classified correspondence on Tuesday night.
The sudden rash of
small fires, which spewed ashes over nearby buildings, prompted a German building inspector to warn the embassy that it was endangering the neighborhood.

Of course, the neighborhood—in both the narrow and broader sense—was endangered by much more than swirling ashes. Kennan clearly understood that much better than Hitler did.

The remaining American journalists in Berlin—
only fifteen, less than a third
of their earlier number—realized that their assignments were likely
to be ending as well. On the night that the diplomats were burning their documents, word spread among the correspondents that the FBI had arrested German newsmen in the United States. They knew no details of those arrests, which were carried out as part of a sweep against “
enemy aliens
,” but they had little doubt what would happen next. Louis Lochner of the AP met with a German Foreign Ministry official early on Wednesday, December 10, who assured him any reprisals “
will be done
in the noblest manner.” If any confirmation was needed, this was it: the reprisals were coming.

Along with his young reporter Angus Thuermer, Lochner went next to the daily news conference, conducted by Paul Schmidt, the chief of the Foreign Ministry’s press department. By then, most of the press corps knew what was happening. “Many a European correspondent with whom I had worked shoulder to shoulder for years, came to say goodbye and to express the hope that America would bring freedom to a sorely tried European continent,” Lochner recalled. Schmidt arrived and announced the arrest of the German newsmen in the United States. “I must therefore ask the American correspondents here present to leave the conference and proceed forthwith to their homes,” he added.

Everyone knew this meant house arrest until the next orders, and the Americans began walking out. As they did so, the others—“from Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Argentina, even Japan, and from virtually all the subjugated countries of Europe,” as Lochner wrote—lined up to shake their hands. Schmidt stood at the door and shook each correspondent’s hand as well.

As they exited, Lochner turned to Thuermer and told him to drive quickly back to the office so that he could file a final story and say goodbye to the German staffers, defying the order to return straight to their homes. Lochner sent a brief dispatch about their impending house arrest, and Thuermer was at the telex machine when he received an informal query from the Berne bureau about what was really happening.
BYE-BYE
.
WE JUGWARDING NOW
, he replied in what he thought was lighthearted cable shorthand. Over breakfast in Chicago the next morning, his father read the AP story quoting his son as saying that he and the other Americans were heading to jail.

Returning to their homes, the American reporters packed up their belongings, fully expecting a knock on the door from the Gestapo. But the afternoon and evening dragged on and no one came.
Friends kept dropping by
to visit Lochner and his German wife, Hilde, and they fielded constant phone calls as well. Finally, when the last visitor was gone, the couple decided to prepare for bed since nothing more appeared to be happening. But just before 1
a.m
., the doorbell rang. Hilde opened the door, and two men stepped in asking for Lochner.

“Here I am,” Lochner called out from the corridor, which was dimly lit because of blackout regulations. The men pointed their flashlights at him and showed their Gestapo badges, ordering him to come with them. Lochner picked up his packed bag. “But how did you know that we were coming?” one of the men asked. Lochner shot back: “Why do you think I’m a newsman?”

Thuermer was even more determined to show he wasn’t surprised when the same two officers knocked sharply on his door and announced: “
Geheime Staatspolizei!
Come with us.” Already in his pajamas, the young American responded: “Where have you been?” When that made the two visitors pause, he added: “I got so fed up I got undressed, got in these pajamas, and was about to go to bed.” Thuermer pulled out a pack of Chesterfields, offering it to the grateful officers, who abruptly abandoned their air of brisk efficiency and sat down to smoke them as he changed into regular clothes. Everyone was taking their time. But then one of the officers casually mentioned that they had someone waiting in the car downstairs and it was very cold outside. “It was my chief,” Thuermer recalled, half-amused and still half-alarmed by the memory of keeping Lochner in that uncomfortable position. “I was freezing his buns off.”

Lochner and Thuermer were taken to the third floor of the Alexanderplatz police station, which was the Gestapo’s section. After they entered through a door with steel bars and a huge lock, they were put into a large room that was adorned with stern portraits of Hitler and SS chief Heinrich Himmler. They then waited as more American reporters were brought in, until they numbered fifteen in all. Ed Shanke, another AP correspondent, arrived feeling particularly stiff after his long wait in a small car. Carefully spreading out a newspaper on a table, he stretched
out his legs and put them on it. A guard immediately jumped up. “
We still have
Kultur
in Germany,” he snapped. “Take down your feet. You can do that when you get to America, but such manners aren’t tolerated in a civilized country like ours. Here we are still human.”

The guards didn’t seem to know what to do with their captives. In fact, the journalists learned later that the Gestapo hadn’t received the instructions from the Foreign Ministry to wait until the following day—Thursday, December 11—to round them up. “The Gestapo had decided to grab us in the middle of the night, as they were wont to grab Jews, republicans, and nonconformist clergymen,” Lochner wrote later. “So here we were, fifteen marooned and forgotten newsmen.” But any doubts that the Americans were in a very different situation than the Nazis’ other prisoners were erased the next day when they started complaining they were hungry. The Gestapo hadn’t made any arrangements to feed them, but a guard offered to get them food if they would pay for it. The result was a meal of meatballs and boiled potatoes, along with a salami “wurst.” As Lochner noted, the total cost for everyone was 60 cents.

At the embassy
that Thursday, the diplomats watched the preparations for Hitler’s Reichstag speech, which included the arrival of sound trucks and large groups of people right outside the embassy building. The diplomats nervously closed the metal blinds, but, as Kennan recorded, no action was taken against them. Instead, while Hitler was announcing his declaration of war on the United States, denouncing Roosevelt and the “
entire satanic insidiousness
” of the Jews who were backing him, the phone suddenly rang in the embassy for the first time since service had been cut off. It was a summons for Morris to the Foreign Ministry. There, Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop kept him standing as he read out the declaration of war and screamed, “Your President has wanted this war; now he has it.”