Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (21 page)

“Certainly,” Ossietzky replied to the satisfaction of the guards.

Knickerbocker asked what kind of books he liked to read, and Ossietzky said: “Whatever you have . . . history perhaps.”

Mowrer jumped in, asking what period interested him the most. “Ancient, medieval, modern—which do you prefer?”

Ossietzky was silent, then briefly looked him in the eyes as he replied in a monotone voice, “Send me a description of the Middle Ages in Europe.”

As Mowrer recalled later, the two American journalists understood his message all too well, and they watched silently as the prisoner was led “back into Europe’s New Dark Age.”

The AP’s Lochner was also part of the group, but he came to a somewhat different conclusion. After questioning the prisoners, he was convinced that some of them “
were indeed badly beaten
up, but that apparently all cruel treatment has now stopped,” he wrote in the same letter to his daughter Betty where he had described Hitler’s “Peace Speech.” He was troubled, though, by the lack of charges against the prisoners, and the uncertainty they faced about their fate. “Hence, if the purpose of our visit to Sonnenburg was to convince us that no bodily harm was being done to the prisoners, the purpose was served,” he concluded. “But if the Nazis think that any of us came away enthusiastic over Sonnenburg, they are far mistaken.”

During the visit to the camp, the Nazi officer in charge put on a show of friendliness for the visiting correspondents—and made a special point of singling out Mowrer. “
You know, Herr Mowrer
, we were very angry at you at one moment,” he said, implying that this was no longer the case. “We even thought of sending a detachment of SA lads to beat you into reason. What would you have done about that?”

“If there had been anything left of me, I suppose I should have staggered to a typewriter and written what I thought about it,” the American replied.

The Nazi wanted to know what he would have thought exactly. Mowrer promptly told him: “That it was a typical Nazi victory.”

“And what do you imply by that?” the Nazi persisted.

“Fifteen armed men against one unarmed man,” Mowrer noted, bringing their exchange to an end.

The “sugar period” in relations between the correspondents and the Nazis, as his wife, Lilian, called it, didn’t last long. Certainly not for her husband, who continued to pursue the stories that only deepened his gloom about where Germany was headed. He wasn’t just saddened—he was angry and increasingly impatient with those who refused to see the danger signals the way he did. When two prominent American editors visited him in Berlin—Oswald Garrison Villard of the
Nation
, and George Shuster of
Commonweal
—he tried to convince them that Hitler was really intent on war, but only antagonized them instead. “
If such intelligent
Americans refused to face the facts, how be confident that the West would react in time to prevent the worst?” he wrote.

One of Mowrer’s sources
was a doctor who was the son of the Grand Rabbi in Berlin. Every couple of weeks, the American would phone and complain of a pain in his throat, asking for an appointment. When the doctor would start to examine his “patient,” he would find an excuse to send his assistant out of the room. As soon as she stepped away, he would quickly push a rolled-up piece of paper into Mowrer’s breast pocket, chronicling the latest assaults and arrests. On one such visit, the doctor told him: “You are a marked man and were followed here. I can’t afford to see you any more.”

But see each other they did. Mowrer suggested an alternative scheme, whereby each Wednesday at 11:45
A.M
. they stood at adjoining urinals in the public restroom under Potsdamer Platz. The two men never spoke, and they left by separate entrances so no one trailing them would suspect anything. But the doctor would drop messages on the floor that Mowrer picked up as he continued to gather information on the plight of the persecuted. When Jews asked him for advice, he was unhesitating in his answer: “Get out, and fast,” he’d say—even providing those who listened with a map of the border between Germany and Czechoslovakia.

Despite all the rising tensions, Mowrer didn’t completely lose his
sense of humor. It was a tradition of the Foreign Press Association to hold a dinner for the German foreign minister each June where the minister would expound on his policies. Since the Nazi government was still boycotting the association in June 1933 because of its anger at Mowrer, the association decided instead to hold a lunch for the diplomatic corps. To the surprise of the correspondents, along with almost all the foreign ambassadors, two German officials they had invited showed up: Reichs-bank president Schacht and Heinrich Sahm, Berlin’s famously tall (6 feet 6) mayor.

When Mowrer rose to greet everyone, he pretended to encounter difficulties with German grammar. “
In this country where
we are—I mean
have
been—so happy . . . that some of us have sought relief—I mean recreation—abroad . . .” he said, reeling off a string of such “corrections” of his wording that soon had all the ambassadors laughing uproariously.

An angry Schacht demanded the right to reply. He charged that the foreign press should report facts, not opinions, implying that the latter was the reason why Germany’s image was tainted in the world. Mowrer thanked him with the same kind of ironical humor he had used before, saying that he was pleased that Schacht so valued American journalism, which was justifiably famous for its factual reporting. Once again, he left the diplomats chuckling while Schacht fumed.

The Nazis certainly weren’t laughing, and Mowrer could feel their mounting displeasure.
In July, Colonel Frank Knox
, the publisher of the
Chicago Daily News
, arrived in Berlin, still skeptical about some of the stories that his correspondent was filing from there. But by the time he left, he concluded two things: Mowrer was right about the rising terror, and it was time for his correspondent to leave. He informed Mowrer that he wanted to transfer him to Tokyo, since he was convinced that the Nazis could do him physical harm otherwise.

Mowrer didn’t want to go but recognized that at some point he would almost certainly be expelled if he didn’t go voluntarily. He was also more outspoken than ever, not hiding his antipathy to Germany’s new masters. When he had the chance to talk to Dodd at social occasions, Mowrer expounded on the brutality of the regime but found the new ambassador cautious to the extreme, considering the correspondent too emotional on
the subject. After a dinner party at the Dodds’, the ambassador noted in his diary: “
I felt at the end
that Mowrer was almost as vehement, in his way, as the Nazis, but I could understand his point of view.”

Dodd’s reluctance to accept Mowrer’s dark vision of what was happening in Germany led the American correspondent to write off the ambassador’s appointment as “
a blow to freedom
.” It was a harsh judgment, but understandable given the contrast to the increasingly bold behavior of the far more experienced George Messersmith. The consul general vigorously protested the mistreatment of any Americans, including the correspondents, and, as a result, had developed close ties with them.
In the Mowrer household
, Messersmith’s number was written on three stands, since he would be the first person to call if anything happened to Edgar. “At this point, when even foreigners were dividing into sheep and goats, this American not only ‘stood up’ to the country to which he was accredited—a rare phenomenon!—but came out in the open in defense of everything finest in the American tradition,” Lilian Mowrer wrote. Messersmith’s earlier doubts had largely evaporated about the extent to which Nazi terror reflected Hitler’s will.

Late one night in August, Edgar received a frantic phone call from the wife of Paul Goldmann, the Berlin correspondent for the Vienna
Neue Freie Presse.
“
Oh, Mr. Mowrer
, they have just arrested my husband!” she declared. Goldmann was sixty-eight, ailing, a Prussian Jew and one of the founders of the Foreign Press Association. He had been picked up in retaliation for the arrest and deportation of the German press officer in Vienna, and his wife was understandably terrified that he wouldn’t last long in a Nazi prison.

When he hung up, Edgar let loose with his feelings. “The sons of bitches! Why don’t they pick on someone their own size?” Lilian recalled that she had never seen him so angry.

Once he had calmed down, Edgar and Knickerbocker concocted a scheme to spring Goldmann. Knickerbocker told Goebbels that Mowrer would resign as president of the Foreign Press Association if they let Goldmann go. What he didn’t tell him was that Edgar knew already that he was going to be transferred to Tokyo soon. Learning about this, some other American correspondents told Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels that
they were willing to spend a day each in jail in exchange for Goldmann’s freedom. The Nazis happily took Mowrer up on his offer, promptly releasing their prisoner.

There was just one catch: the authorities also confiscated the German passport of Goldmann’s wife to make sure he didn’t try to leave the country or do anything “unfriendly.” But she was an Austrian by birth and immediately filed for divorce so that she could reclaim her Austrian citizenship—and an Austrian passport.

Lilian Mowrer asked “the plucky old lady” whether it didn’t hurt her to take such drastic action after so many years of marriage. “No, my dear,” she replied, although the tears in her eyes told a different story. “It is true that I shall divorce him, but that is merely a matter of expediency. I shall continue to live with my husband . . . in sin.”

When some of Mowrer’s American and British colleagues filed stories about how he had outwitted the authorities since he was going to be transferred to Tokyo anyway, the Nazi press proclaimed that they had succeeded in getting rid of a “sworn and proven enemy” from the top job at the Foreign Press Association. Storm troopers showed up outside Mowrer’s office and apartment, followed him around town and often followed his acquaintances as well. Messersmith was so concerned about him that he made a point of always leaving him a phone number where he could be reached when he went out in the evenings. Lilian lived in constant anxiety about her husband. The presence of the Brownshirts was “a horrible menace,” she recalled, “for there was practically nothing they could not have done at that period.”

The climax came quickly. The Mowrers had originally planned to move to Tokyo in October, but the Nazis kept cranking up the pressure that August. The German ambassador in Washington, Hans Dieckhoff, whom Mowrer had once considered a friend, informed the State Department and Colonel Knox that because of “the people’s righteous indignation” his government could no longer guarantee his physical safety. The Nazis were particularly anxious to force his departure before the party’s annual celebration in Nuremberg on September 2, which he was still hoping to cover.

Worried that his reporter was in severe jeopardy, Knox sent a telegram
telling Mowrer to leave right away. Edgar still wanted to resist, at least delaying his departure until after the Nuremberg event to show that he would not be intimidated. But Ambassador Dodd urged him to leave sooner. “
If you were not
being moved by your paper anyway, we would go to the mat on this issue, but it only means hastening your departure by six days,” he told him. “Won’t you do this to avoid complications?” While Mowrer bitterly resented the new ambassador’s reluctance to take a stronger stand against the regime, even Messersmith and Knickerbocker concurred with Dodd’s judgment. They figured that the risks were too high for their friend and it was time for him to get out.

Mowrer finally agreed to leave on September 1, with Lilian and their daughter staying behind for a short while to pack up. Before Edgar’s departure, his British and American fellow correspondents presented him with a silver rose bowl inscribed to a “gallant fighter for the liberty of the Press.” And as he prepared to board a train for Paris from the Bahnhof Zoo, Messersmith rushed over from a dinner party to give him an embrace.

Others were at the train station in a more official capacity, making sure that the correspondent who had been such an irritant really departed. Shortly before his departure, a young German official sardonically asked him: “
And when are you
coming back to Germany, Herr Mowrer?”

“Why, when I can come back with two million of my countrymen,” the correspondent replied.

It took a moment for the official to absorb the import of his statement: Mowrer was envisaging a day when American soldiers would march into a defeated Germany. “
Aber nein.
Impossible,” the official protested loudly.

Mowrer didn’t let that pass; he wasn’t about to leave Germany without having the last word. “Not for the
Führer
,” he said. “The
Führer
can bring anything about . . . even that.”

6

“Like Football and Cricket”

M
artha Dodd was twenty-four when she arrived in Berlin in the summer of 1933 with her father, the new American ambassador, her mother and brother. Recalling her state of mind later, she stressed how naïve and uninformed she was about politics, with almost no idea about what Germany would be like—or what its new Nazi rulers represented. While her father had evident misgivings and mentioned several times that he wasn’t sure how long their Berlin assignment would last, Martha seemed largely oblivious to them. “
I do not remember
any of us being especially disturbed by the thought of living under a dictatorship,” she wrote in her Berlin memoir
Through Embassy Eyes.