Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (11 page)

Thompson was struck by the German public’s fascination with gruesome crimes, as evidenced by the popularity of a police exhibition chronicling a series of murders that had captured the headlines. It included a
reproduction of the bedroom of a man who had trolled for his twenty-six young male victims in the toilets of the Hannover train station. “
If one wants
a glimpse of the miserable den in which this monster killed his victims, if one longs to see the cot where he strangled them, the table where he carved them, the buckets in which he stored them, one must stand in line for half an hour,” she observed.

Americans were equally intrigued by other forms of extreme behavior. The Mowrers were taken aback by the assistant in the
Daily News
bureau who pursued a “natural” diet with almost no liquids that he claimed would ensure him a much longer than normal life span. He did so with such fervor that he lost forty pounds, his productivity dropped by 50 percent and he looked “
like a death’s head
.” When he broke down and ordered a meal of pork, potato salad and apple pie, along with plenty of beer, his body swelled up enormously and he had to be hospitalized. Still, after a six-week recovery, he declared that he simply hadn’t found the right diet to prolong his life. “If only I could devote all my time to the search . . .” he said.

“
Do you think
Germans are madder than any other peoples?” Lilian asked her husband. “They seem so unbalanced . . . so hysterical.”

“They lack coherence,” Edgar replied. “They are so rich in intellect and poor in common sense. And there is almost nothing they can’t persuade themselves to believe.”

In an era of rampant anti-Semitism, Weimar Germany wasn’t always viewed as a special case. In fact, Hecht, who claimed to be the only Jewish correspondent in the American press corps in Berlin during his stay from 1918 to 1920, offered this somewhat startling reflection about his experiences: “
The strange bit of history
I have to report is that in my two years in Germany, I, a Jew, saw and heard no hint of anti-Semitism. Not once in the time I spent in Germany did I hear the word Jew used as an epithet . . . There was less anti-Semitism to be heard, seen, felt or smelled in that postwar Germany than at any time in the U.S.A.”

Hecht may have had a couple of reasons for deliberately overlooking the anti-Semitic rhetoric that would have been hard to miss. First, he
wanted to make the point that Americans had no cause to feel smugly superior on this score. Second, writing in the immediate aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust, he was setting up his thesis that what led to this disaster was a national characteristic of the average German. No matter how educated or sophisticated the German appeared to be, Hecht claimed, “
In him all morality
was secondary to this morality of obeying a leader.” Or put differently, it wasn’t the doctrine of a leader that made Germans follow him; it was simply the fact that he demanded their allegiance and they blindly complied.

There was no denying how receptive Americans were to anti-Semitism in the aftermath of World War I. Or how energetically some Americans not only embraced anti-Semitic propaganda but promoted it. The most prominent American to do so was Henry Ford. The automaker was also a crusading pacifist who had proclaimed his worldview as early as 1915. “
I know who caused
the war—the German-Jewish bankers,” he told Rosika Schwimmer, a Hungarian Jewish peace activist. “I have the evidence here. Facts!”

In 1919, Ford bought the
Dearborn Independent,
a small weekly that promptly launched a virulently anti-Semitic campaign, championing the
Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
, a fraudulent exposé of the alleged Jewish conspiracy to take over the world that had circulated earlier in Europe but only reached American shores at that time. The series of articles were soon published as a notorious pamphlet called
The International Jew.
When Annetta Antona, a columnist for the
Detroit News
, interviewed Hitler on December 28, 1931, at the Brown House, the Nazi headquarters in Munich, she noticed the large portrait of Ford above his desk. “
I regard Henry Ford
as my inspiration,” Hitler told her.

Too much can be read into that statement of the future leader of Germany. Hitler had lived and breathed anti-Semitism long before he became acquainted with Ford’s views. And his admiration of Ford had at least as much to do with his pioneering work as an automaker as with his prejudices. Once in power, Hitler would transform his idea of the Volkswagen—the “people’s car”—into reality, crediting “
Mr. Ford’s genius
” for demonstrating that the motor car could be an instrument for uniting different classes rather than dividing them.

Still, the Ford record and other manifestations of American anti-Semitism serve as useful reminders that Germany was far from unique in harboring such sentiments in the 1920s. In fact, some Americans in Berlin were just as likely as their German counterparts to let their prejudices show. In a letter dated February 23, 1921, to Vivian Dillon, an aspiring American opera singer, Wiegand expressed shock that she was considering marrying “
a prosperous, energetic
, Jewish manager.” He inquired “why must it be a Jew, or have you come to the conclusion that there are no others, who are prosperous and energetic?”

But anti-Semitism in Germany wasn’t just a matter of all-too-ordinary bias. On June 24, 1922, Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau, the most prominent Jew in high office, was assassinated in Berlin, and other acts of right-wing violence became increasingly commonplace. Diplomat Hugh Wilson blamed a combination of factors: millions of veterans returning to a Germany where jobs were scarce and the rich and powerful included “
a high proportion of
Jews.” Bolshevism was seen as dominated by Jews, he pointed out, as were some of the democratic parties in the Reichstag. “One could sense the spreading resentment and hatred,” he wrote.

Once the country appeared to be getting back on its feet in the mid-1920s, many Americans in Germany were less alarmed by the anti- Semitic diatribes of the Nazis and other extremists. But they hardly could be as oblivious to them as Hecht claimed to be years earlier. Particularly when they were in the presence of German Jews, they were acutely conscious of the growing tensions.

One evening in 1928, S. Miles Bouton, the
Baltimore Sun
’s Berlin correspondent, ran into Thompson and Lewis at the Berlin Municipal Opera. Bouton was there with a daughter of a Jewish family that lived in his apartment building. He had not met Lewis before, and Thompson introduced them during the intermission. Since the young woman spoke no English, Lewis used only his fluent German, and at one point made a reference to Jews. He hadn’t said anything critical, but Bouton was worried enough to caution him quietly in English: “
Look out
. The girl with me is a Jewess.”

Lewis gave no indication he had heard him, but then casually remarked: “You know, lots of people won’t believe that my father was a rabbi.” The young woman was suddenly all aglow. “Your father was a rabbi?” she asked.

Writing about this encounter a few years afterward, Bouton recalled: “There was still no indication in 1928 of the coming pogroms that were to sully Germany’s repute five years later, but songs about spilling Jewish blood were being sung by uniformed marchers, and the swastika, emblem in Germany for hatred of the race, was ever more in evidence.” For this young woman, the highlight of the evening was not only meeting the famous American writer, who in reality was the son of a Wisconsin country doctor, but hearing the white lie that he was Jewish. “I hope she has never been undeceived,” Bouton concluded, “but be that as it may, Lewis’s alertness and kindness of heart brought more cheer to one unfortunate than he will ever know.”

In 1925, Jacob Gould Schurman
succeeded Houghton as ambassador. A former New York politician, Schurman had studied in Germany, spoke excellent German and worked hard to maintain the good will that his predecessor had earned. One of his initiatives was to raise money from wealthy Americans for a building fund for Heidelberg University; among the contributors was John D. Rockefeller, who donated $200,000 of the total gift of $500,000. Such activism made Schurman a very popular envoy.

So did his pronouncements praising the German government’s commitment to peace and democracy. Early in his tenure, he argued that “
the will to war
was dead in Germany” and he later touted Germany’s signing on to the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war. On a visit to New York that same year, he declared, “
The Republic
has in general commended itself to the people and grows with such strength and vitality that its permanency may now be taken for granted.”

Schurman wasn’t as blind to the dangers of more turmoil as his public pronouncements suggested. He noted during his first year in Berlin that American financial institutions were aggressively pushing their
highinterest loans, disregarding the risks involved. His embassy reported that the “
itch to pour
unproductive millions into German municipal coffers is rapidly becoming pathological.”

American correspondents like Mowrer also began to question what was happening. Economist David Friday, who had been one of Mowrer’s instructors at the University of Michigan, came to Berlin representing an investment firm eager to pump funds into Germany. Puffing on a cigar after a dinner with the Mowrers, he explained his mission: “
You see we
consider these people a sound proposition: hard-working, solid . . . we’re going to put them on their feet again.”

“At nine per cent?” asked Mowrer.

“Well, of course, we are no philanthropists,” Friday replied.

As Lilian Mowrer pointed out, the influx of what appeared to be easy money from the United States and other countries led to “
an orgy of spending
.” Traveling frequently around the country for her
Town and Country
pieces, she mentioned one example: “the stunning new railway cars and streamlined monsters on the Reichsbahn track.” She also realized that “the entire rolling stock of the country had just been equipped with the new Kunze-Knorr air brakes, a little luxury that had cost close to one hundred million dollars.” Britain, she added, had considered equipping its railroads with those new brakes, but had concluded it couldn’t afford to.

Germany was also using loans to make reparation payments, and Schurman openly sympathized with German complaints that the financial burden was unsustainable. Even before the Wall Street crash, there were plenty of ominous signs of the shakiness of the German economy. In March 1929,
Schurman received a warning
from the chairman of the Reichstag Budget Committee that the country’s finances were in the worst shape since the near meltdown in 1923.

Soon the Dawes Plan was replaced by the Young Plan, named after American banker Owen D. Young, the chairman of another group of experts. They produced a plan in 1929 to further reduce reparation payments but stretch them out all the way until 1988. Ferdinand Eberstadt, the most knowledgeable of the American experts about Germany’s finances, bluntly told Young right at the beginning of their deliberations with the French and others: “
Hey, this thing’s a fake
—it will bust up
because they are playing politics and have no concern for economics.” German officials complained the payments were still too high, and Hitler and other opposition figures denounced the whole scheme.

The Wall Street crash of October 1929 changed everything. Although the German government formally approved the Young Plan in March 1930, allowing it to receive about
$300 million in new American loans
, the plan was effectively stillborn. Faced with the sudden drying up of foreign loans and the domestic credit market followed by mounting unemployment, the Socialist government collapsed that same month. A new minority coalition led by the Center Party’s Heinrich Brüning failed to win support for its economic program. Frustrated by the gridlock in the Reichstag, he called for new elections in September.

The stage was set for the return of the agitator from Munich.

3

Whale or Minnow?

L
ike so many Germans, Bella Fromm discovered that her life was turned upside down by World War I and its aftermath. Born into a well-to-do Bavarian Jewish family in 1890, she had worked for the Red Cross during the war. Her parents died early, leaving her with what looked like a healthy inheritance once the fighting stopped—certainly enough for her to live on after a brief unhappy marriage and continue doing volunteer social work. But then the hyperinflation of the early 1920s wiped out that cushion and she had to look for a paid job. “
I’m going to have to start
a new life,” she wrote in her diary on October 1, 1928. From age ten, she had kept a diary and now she decided to write for others, not just herself. She became a journalist for the Ullstein publishing house, covering the social and diplomatic scene in Berlin.