Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (34 page)

Lindbergh’s subsequent vocal campaign to keep the United States out of the war in Europe, his involvement in the isolationist America First movement, and his conviction that the Soviet Union represented the real threat to European civilization—and that, in a war between those two powers, “
a victory by
Germany’s European people would be preferable to one by Russia’s semi-Asiatic Soviet Union”—only confirmed how well he had been played by the Nazis. His critics were right that he had become, in effect, an apologist for Hitler. Ironically, though, the flyer’s political blindness also allowed him to help Smith and his team gather more data on the Luftwaffe’s modernization and ambitions than any of their counterparts in other embassies. For his part, Lindbergh was pleased to be part of this effort; as he saw it, this information on Germany’s growing strength only bolstered his argument that the United States should avoid any new conflict with that country.

Not all of the intelligence Smith gathered was on target—and, by his own admission, he overlooked the early signs of German plans for rocketry. He also made some erroneous predictions about the degree of disaffection between the Nazis and the military, and certainly about “
Hitler’s realistic
and reticent foreign policy,” as he put it in 1937. But on balance, the regular air intelligence reports Smith sent to Washington demonstrated his team’s accomplishments. And Smith’s reputation as the best-informed attaché in Berlin on the Luftwaffe was fully merited, something he always stressed was only thanks to the fact that Lindbergh had cooperated with him so extensively and opened so many doors.

At a reception at the British Embassy in 1938, Cardinal Pacelli, the Vatican secretary of state who had served earlier as the papal nuncio in Germany, sent an aide over to Smith asking him to join him. “
I was astonished
when . . . he quizzed me in perfect English as to the state of readiness of the Luftwaffe,” he recalled. “One of his questions that I remember distinctly was, what did we Americans think of Germany’s new two-motored fighter: the Messerschmitt 110.” A year later, Pacelli was elected pope and took the name Pius XII.

Of all the people Hitler surrounded himself with, Putzi Hanfstaengl was a special case—and he liked it that way. It wasn’t just the fact that his mother was an American or that he had gone to Harvard that made him different from most of the Nazi leader’s entourage. He would later explain to everyone and anyone that he had wanted to educate and civilize Hitler, but unfortunately he was thwarted at every turn by the radicals around him. “
I could feel
that the rabid extremists of the Party had got their claws into him again and the arguments of the more reasonable of us were constantly being countered,” he wrote in a typical passage of his memoir.

No
te the wording: “the more reasonable of us.” What he really meant was that he was the only reasonable one. When John Toland, the Hitler biographer, interviewed Hanfstaengl in 1970, he asked him whether there were any intelligent men in Hitler’s circle. “No!” Putzi shouted.

Hanfstaengl would also claim that his misgivings about Hitler’s leadership grew steadily. “
It would be reasonable
to ask why, in view of all my misgivings about the character and intentions of Hitler and his circle, I continued for so long in association with them,” he wrote. His answer: “I was an idealistic National-Socialist, I make no bones about it.”

While many Americans in Berlin, especially the correspondents who relied on him to gain access to Hitler, viewed Hanfstaengl as a highly useful contact—and some, like the AP’s Lochner, considered him to be a friend—others were more suspicious and antagonistic. Even Wiegand, the veteran Hearst correspondent who had often taken advantage of Hanfstaengl’s interventions to get to his boss, found himself in tense exchanges with Putzi after Hitler came to power. In a memo dated October 23, 1933, Wiegand wrote that Hanfstaengl complained to him that Hitler was holding him responsible for the fact that the American correspondent was now “
one of my most bitter
opponents.” There were also tensions over money; from Wiegand’s correspondence, it’s clear Putzi had taken fees for articles he may have either contributed or helped on in the past, although he wanted to return some of the money after Hitler came to power.

William Randolph Hearst took an active interest in Wiegand’s memos and letters about Hanfstaengl. The propagandist “
probably likes to
make a little money occasionally for news features,” he wrote Wiegand on November 20, 1934. “That is not a crime. The thing I think is unfortunate is the fact that he is such an extremist and may not be giving his boss the best advice on these religious situations. First the Jews were alienated, then the Catholics, and finally many Protestant sects.” Still, he urged his correspondent to be patient. “Do not be displeased with Dr. Hanfstaengl and others in the Government who seem antagonistic,” he wrote. “Give them good advice and try to guide them towards a greater liberality which will gain approval both at home and abroad.”

By then, many of the Berlin correspondents no longer nurtured those kinds of illusions. As for Putzi, the reporters who were new to Berlin were particularly scathing in their evaluation. Observing him at the Nuremberg party rally in September 1934, Shirer described him as “
an immense, high-strung
, incoherent clown who does not often fail to remind us that he is part American and graduated from Harvard.” But he admitted that many of the American and British correspondents “rather like him despite his clownish stupidity.”

When it came to Hanfstaengl’s postwar assertions that he had disagreed with the Nazis’ anti-Semitism, they were flatly contradicted by his behavior. On numerous occasions, he had lashed out at outspoken American diplomats and correspondents, like George Messersmith and Edgar Mowrer, by labeling them as Jews. Bella Fromm ran into Putzi at the entrance at the Dodds’ farewell party for Messersmith on May 12, 1934.

“
I wonder why
we were asked today,” Hanfstaengl told her. “All this excitement about Jews. Messersmith is one. So is Roosevelt. The party detests them.”

“Dr. Hanfstaengl, we’ve discussed this before,” the Jewish reporter replied. “You don’t have to put on that kind of an act with me.”

“All right,” he said. “Even if they are Aryan, you’d never know it from their actions.”

Putzi ended their exchange by offering her a fruit drop. “Have one. They are made especially for the
Führer.
”

Fromm had enjoyed eating similar fruit drops as a child and she politely took one. Then, as she was about to put it in her mouth, she noticed the swastika on it. “Try as I would to make the hideous mark disappear, it remained leering at me until I had finished the drop,” she noted.

A month later, Hanfstaengl made a much-publicized visit to the United States to attend his twenty-fifth class reunion at Harvard. The news sparked heated controversy on and off campus. A committee of Jewish organizations argued that Americans should show “
no discourtesy of any kind
” toward him, but columnist Heywood Broun warned of “bloody riots” during his visit and called for his deportation as an undesirable alien. Noting that Broun was a class ahead of him at Harvard, Putzi dismissed his attacks as “class jealousy.” Talking to reporters who met him as he disembarked in New York, he was equally dismissive of questions about German Jews. “The situation of the Jew in Germany is fairly normal,” he said. When some Jewish reporters asked for five minutes to discuss the issue further, he brushed them off.

While protesters gathered a short distance from his ship and shouted “Down with Hitler,” the on-campus debate was conducted in more muted tones.
Benjamin Halpern
, a Jewish student, wrote a letter to the
Harvard Crimson
titled “Heil Hitler” questioning the initial decision by Elliott Carr Cutler, the chief marshal at the reunion, to ask Hanfstaengl to serve as his aide during the ceremonies. Seeing the backlash, Cutler backed off that idea and asked Hanfstaengl to come as an ordinary alumnus. Still, the
Crimson
appeared to reflect the prevailing view on campus about the whole affair. “To object to the presence of a Harvard man among other Harvard men in any capacity, on purely political grounds, is an extremely childish thing to do,” it editorialized.

While Putzi would find it increasingly difficult in the next couple of years to convince Americans in Berlin that he was the reasonable face of the regime, he also was encountering problems with Hitler and his inner circle. The Nazi leader was contemptuous of Putzi’s assertions that he knew how to handle relations with the United States in order to prevent it from opposing Germany. When the Roosevelt Administration established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in November 1933, Hitler told him: “
There you are
, Hanfstaengl, your friends the Americans have
teamed up with the Bolsheviks.” Earlier, Hitler had told him bluntly: “
I see America
from where I sit much more clearly than you have ever known it.”

Putzi would later claim that, in the first period of Hitler’s reign, he began to notice its absurdities and how detached from reality his entou rage was. Returning from his Harvard reunion to the aftermath of the Night of the Long Knives, the bloody purge of the SA leaders and assorted other targets of the Nazis, he was summoned to Heiligendamm, the Baltic Sea resort where Hitler, Goebbels and others were vacationing. “
It was really like
something out of Lewis Carroll, a mad hatter’s luncheon party,” he wrote. “With the whole of Germany groaning under this atmosphere of murder, fear and suspicion, there was Magda Goebbels doing the honors in an airy summer dress, with several other young women at the table, even one or two from the aristocratic families . . .”

It was around this time, Putzi added, that he came to realize that, once Hitler was ensconced in power, “
the demon
had entered into him.” But even with the benefit of hindsight, he blamed Goebbels and others for pushing Hitler to the point of no return, and admitted he continued to nurture the hope that he could moderate his excesses. Amid all the self-justification, Hanfstaengl’s real concern was much less policy than his own position. Putzi could see it was weakening rapidly. Others were openly criticizing and mocking him, and Hitler didn’t seem interested in doing anything about it. The invitations to play the piano for the Nazi leader were becoming less frequent.

When Truman and Kay Smith returned to Berlin in 1935, they visited Putzi in his small apartment, which was in back of the Chancellery. The living room was dominated by a large bust of Hitler and a grand piano, and Truman casually hung his hat on Hitler’s head as he walked in. “
Putz hastily
snatched it off,” Kay recalled, pointing out that he treated this as bad manners on Truman’s part, not something to joke about. Over coffee and cake, the old acquaintances caught up on their news. “It was plain that all was not rosy between Putz and Goebbels,” Kay continued. “Putz intimated that Goebbels was jealous of his . . . influence over Hitler and was keeping him away from Hitler.”

The jealousy factor was almost certainly overblown, since Hanfstaengl’s influence had been on the wane for some time. That was
typical Putzi talk—making himself out to be more important than he was. But there was certainly truth in his assertion that Goebbels had no use for a competing propagandist, and there was increasing evidence that he wanted to cut him out of the inner circle completely.

Hanfstaengl claimed that he considered resigning, but that others talked him out of it. More likely, he clung to every shred of power and influence as long as possible, even when his foreign press office was unceremoniously moved further away from the Chancellery. For nearly two years, he wasn’t invited to any events with Hitler at all. At the end of the last luncheon he ever attended with him, Hitler asked him to go to the piano “
to play that
thing of yours.” When Putzi asked him what piece he meant, he said, “Your funeral march.” Hanfstaengl played it with, as he recalled, “a sense of foreboding.”

In 1936, Putzi felt that he lost another connection to Hitler when his wife, Helen, divorced him. She was the American woman who had possibly prevented Hitler from committing suicide after the Beer Hall Putsch, and who had been the object of his clumsy affection in those Munich days. Helen had long put up with her philandering husband but refused to join him in Berlin—and eventually decided to make their de facto separation permanent. Like Putzi, Helen would later claim that she had grown disaffected with Hitler and the Nazis, especially after the Night of the Long Knives. But even when discussing her feelings with John Toland in 1971, she never mentioned anything else she objected to, not even the Holocaust, and remained fascinated by her association with this historic figure. “
Yes, he was extraordinary
,” she declared. “After all, when you think of a man from very modest background, to put himself on the map so to speak, he was an extraordinary man. Yes, he was.”

After not seeing Helen for a long time, Hitler once asked an acquaintance of hers what had happened to her. When he learned she had divorced Putzi, he declared, “Oh, fine, fine. I’ll send a telegram congratulating her.” Then, he added, “Oh no, that won’t do.” Helen, who provided this account, was visibly pleased that Germany’s leader was still thinking about her even after he had attained absolute power. She returned to the United States in 1938, where she spent the war years; still, Hitler appeared to hold a special place in her memory until the end of her life.

Seeing how tenuous his position had become,
Putzi began smuggling
out gold and platinum objects to London. He claimed he also helped some of the victims of the Nazis, winning the release of the daughter of a German-American couple who had been put in a concentration camp in Saxony for criticizing the regime. Above all, though, he kept looking nervously over his shoulder, often sleeping at friends’ apartments and keeping a valid passport with visas to several countries in his pocket.