Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (37 page)

Shirer reserved special scorn for the drop-in journalists who took Nazi protestations about their peaceful intentions seriously. “When the visiting firemen from London, Paris, and New York come, Hitler babbles only of peace,” he wrote. “Peace? Read
Mein Kampf
, brothers.” And he concluded what he thought was his farewell diary entry from Berlin “with the words of a Nazi marching song still dinning in my ears:
Today we own Germany, Tomorrow the whole world.”

Stationed in Vienna as Hitler ratcheted up the threats and pressures aimed at forcing the Anschluss with Austria in March 1938, Shirer watched the takeover unfold with sorrow and frustration. At 4
a.m
. on March 12, he wrote in his diary: “
The worst has happened
. . . The Nazis are in. The Reichswehr is invading Austria. Hitler has broken a dozen solemn promises, pledges, treaties. And Austria is finished. Beautiful, tragic, civilized Austria! Gone.” But his frustration also stemmed from his inability to report the story on CBS; the Nazis would not permit him to broadcast. And his mood wasn’t improved by
his family situation: he was worried about Tess, who was still in the hospital recovering from a difficult Caesarean birth of their daughter two weeks earlier.

Although Shirer knew Austria well enough not to romanticize it—he observed how Austrian anti-Semitism “
plays nicely
in the hands of the Nazis”—he was still startled by how quickly many Austrians not only accepted but embraced their new rulers. After his daily visit to the hospital to check on Tess and the baby, he emerged from the subway at Karlsplatz to find himself swept up in “
a shouting, hysterical
Nazi mob” marching through the city. “The faces!” he wrote. “I had seen these before at Nuremberg—the fanatical eyes, the gaping mouths, the hysteria.”

As the crowds sang Nazi songs, he spotted a group of policemen looking on in evident good humor. “
What’s that
on their arm? A red-black-white Swastika arm-band! So they’ve gone over too!” And then there were the immediate attacks on Jews. “Young toughs were heaving paving blocks into windows of the Jewish shops,” he wrote. “The crowd roared with delight.”

Dropping in at the Café Louvre, the hangout of the foreign correspondents, he found his colleagues in a state of high excitement, rushing back and forth to the phone to call in the latest reports and rumors, while other regulars were saddened, even close to tears. Emil Maass, an Austrian-American who had worked earlier as Shirer’s assistant, stopped by his table. He had posed as an anti-Nazi before, but now he didn’t just walk in—he strutted in, as Shirer noted. “
Well
,
meine Damen und Herren,
it was about time,” Maass announced with a smirk. Then he ostentatiously turned over his coat lapel, revealing a hidden swastika button, unpinning it and repinning it on the outside of his coat. Two or three women shouted, “Shame!” And a Major Goldschmidt, whom Shirer described as a Catholic who was also half-Jewish, got up from his table. “I will go home and get my revolver,” he declared.

After another futile attempt to arrange a broadcast from Vienna, Shirer took Murrow’s advice to fly to London. It wasn’t that simple, though. As night turned into morning and he set out for the airport, he observed the proliferation of Nazi flags flying from houses. “
Where did
they get them so fast?” he wondered. At the airport, all the seats on the
London flight were taken. “I offered fantastic sums to several passengers for their places. Most of them were Jews and I could not blame them for turning me down,” Shirer wrote. But he succeeded in getting on the flight to Berlin. From there, he found a prompt connection to London, where he could finally make his broadcast.

“
This morning when
I flew from Vienna at 9
A.M
. it looked like any German city in the Reich,” he told his listeners, describing the Nazi flags hanging from most of the balconies and people in the streets greeting each other with Nazi salutes and shouts of
“Heil Hitler!”
“Arriving in Berlin three hours later I hardly realized I was in another country,” he added. The transformation of Austria was already complete. As for Shirer, he was more than ever convinced that Hitler was only beginning his march of conquest—and that the outside world urgently needed to wake up to the danger.

But that was hardly the prevailing view at the time. Other Americans came to radically different conclusions. Former President Herbert Hoover embarked on a trip to Europe in February 1938. After visiting several other countries—France, Belgium, Switzerland and Czechoslovakia—he went to Germany. His aim was to bolster his credentials when he held forth on key international issues. In particular, he wanted to strengthen his case that the United States needed to stay clear of “
entanglements
” abroad.

In Berlin, U.S. Ambassador Hugh Wilson told him that Hitler wanted to meet him. Initially, Hoover balked, explaining that he was traveling as a private citizen. Besides, according to his friend Samuel Arentz, Hoover told Wilson that he had been inclined to believe “
that Hitler was
actually a front man for a group of the brains who were actually running the Nazi party and everything it was doing.” But Wilson pressed him to reconsider, especially in light of his own inability to get to see Hitler. Hoover finally gave in.

Wearing a khaki jacket with a swastika, Hitler greeted the American visitor at the Chancellery on March 8. As they talked, Hoover concluded that Hitler was well informed on issues such as housing, foreign exchange rates and international trade. But according to Arentz, a few key words would set Hitler off and “all of a sudden [he] would jump to his feet and
just went to raving talk—tantrums—that showed he was crazy.” Those words were “Jew,” “Communist” and “democracy.”

At one point, Hoover claimed to have interrupted Hitler, declaring, “That’s enough; I’m not interested in hearing your views.” He told Arentz that if Hitler would face an American jury “there wouldn’t be any question about him being declared insane.” Nonetheless, neither Hoover nor Hitler appeared to take serious offense at anything the other said, and the American emerged with a revised view of the German leader. He no longer believed he was merely someone else’s puppet; he could see that he was a force in his own right.

The next day, Hoover had lunch with Goering at his “hunting lodge” east of Berlin, a lavish complex full of tapestries, painting and sculptures.
Greeted by
sixteen costumed trumpeters, the American was brought up short by the life-sized bust of a woman placed as a centerpiece on the table where they were having lunch. “
Yes, that’s
solid gold; that’s my first wife,” Goering told him. Knowing about Hoover’s background as a mining engineer, his host pressed him to tell him his views of Russia’s mineral resources. The American gave an optimistic account, telling Arentz later that he’d prefer to have the Germans go east rather than west if they were planning any action in the future.

After Germany, Hoover continued his European journey, visiting Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Sweden. On a final stopover back in England, he spoke with the press. While he acknowledged “
many menaces
to peace,” he asserted that he did not “believe that a widespread war is probable in the immediate future.” Back in New York, he summed up his views in a speech to the Foreign Policy Association on March 31. Between his meeting with Hitler and that speech, Hitler had completed the annexation of Austria, but that had not altered Hoover’s opinion about the need for America to avoid getting caught up in any new European war. Such a conflict, he said, would “
have all the hideous
elements of the old religious wars.” His conclusion: “If the world is to keep the peace, then we must keep peace with dictatorships as well as with popular governments. The forms of governments which other peoples pass through in working out their destinies is not our business.”

Hoover’s message was the direct opposite of Shirer’s. Yes, the situation
in Europe was dangerous. And, yes, while Hoover believed Germany was not yet ready for military action, he privately conceded that it could take that step later—in all probability, targeting the East. But for him, this was an argument for leaving Hitler’s Germany to its own devices, not for issuing a wake-up call aimed at mobilizing Western nations, including the United States, to try to stop him. He came to Germany with that conviction, and left Germany with his beliefs not only intact but reinforced. Not even his face-to-face encounter with Hitler, complete with tirades and tantrums, could shake his conviction that the only rational American response to the new Germany was, in effect, a shrug of the shoulders.

Jacob Beam was still short of his twenty-seventh birthday when he arrived in Berlin in February 1935 to take up his assignment as third secretary in the U.S. Embassy, with responsibility for reporting on the country’s internal affairs. He would spend a total of five years working in the German capital—“
a longer period
than can be claimed by any other American official,” as he wrote in his unpublished manuscript about that period.

Despite his youth, Beam was well prepared for his post. His father was a German professor at Princeton, where the younger Beam studied as an undergraduate before continuing his education at Cambridge. Working in the Geneva consulate when he got word of his pending assignment to Berlin, he made a point of seeking “instruction” from Edgar Mowrer, the
Chicago Daily News
correspondent who had been forced out of Germany in 1933 and was then based in Geneva. “He gave me introductions to representatives of the old regime as well as anti-Nazi dissidents who were to be approached by a cut-out,” Beam recalled. “He even furnished me with a list of women to be avoided.”

While acknowledging that many of those contacts were not representative of the new Germany, he insisted they were still “the most knowledgeable and influential Germans to whom I could have access.” Among them were ardent German nationalists, often from aristocratic families, who considered themselves far superior to the country’s new rulers. “Although cold and severe in their demeanor, they had a code of
justice which abhorred Nazi excesses, particularly the mistreatment of the Jews,” he wrote.

Several of these nationalists had American wives. When IBM’s boss Thomas Watson came to visit the company’s German subsidiaries in the summer of 1937, he hosted a large dinner at the Adlon Hotel. Among the guests was Beam, who found himself seated at a table with Norman Ebbut, the Berlin correspondent of the
Times
of London, a gauleiter (Nazi district leader), and the Count and Countess Seherr-Thoss from East Prussia.
The daughter of
the former American ambassador to France Henry White, Muriel White had married Hermann Seherr-Thoss in 1909; she was also the sister of one of the diplomats stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin. Beam and Ebbut witnessed her exchange with the gauleiter as the dinner was ending.

“Is it true that the Party sometimes rewards deserving Jews by making them honorary Aryans?” she asked.

When the gauleiter conceded that this happened on occasion, the countess followed up with a line that she must have been mulling over for quite some time. “Can you tell me then how I could become an honorary Jew?”

That kind of bold behavior was hardly typical by then, either for Germans or their American spouses. And Beam’s implicit message that many American wives of German nationalists were at heart anti-Nazi is contradicted by the account of the
Chicago Tribune
’s Sigrid Schultz. “
Foreign women
married to Germans often became fervent Nazis,” she wrote. “One American-born countess refused to be introduced to me because I ‘maligned Nazi Germany.’” Schultz had helped found the American Women’s Club in Berlin, but resigned from it before the outbreak of World War II because, as she explained, it had become “a hot-bed of Nazi propaganda” and “a regular rendezvous for American women married to Germans and for their Nazi intimates.”

Schultz observed the broader phenomenon of how the Nazis “
commanded a hysterical
fanaticism among some foreign women, Americans included.” Elizabeth Dilling, a shrill anti-Communist crusader from Chicago who saw President Roosevelt as the embodiment of all evil, visited Germany in 1931 and again in 1938. On her second visit, she
was delighted by “
the great improvement
of conditions there.” She added, “Personally I thank God for the opposition Germany is making against communism.” On yet another visit a short time later—this one paid for by her German hosts—she attended the Nuremberg Party rally and proclaimed, “The German people under Hitler are contented and happy . . . don’t believe the stories you hear that this man has not done a great good for this country.”

Schultz recalled seeing Dilling
in the dining room where the foreign press and other visitors ate. Dressed in a bright red hat, Dilling went from table to table, pointing to the journalists and “doing a lot of agitated whispering.” After such exchanges, the people she had been talking to would fall silent whenever one of the journalists was nearby. Her curiosity aroused, Schultz caught up with a young American woman who was accompanying Dilling. She demanded to know just what the older woman was doing.

“You are an enemy of Germany, and we must see that our friends do not speak in front of you,” the young American declared.

“And what makes you think I am an enemy of Germany?” Schultz inquired.

“Because of the reports you write against us.”

Schultz emphasized that the young American used the word “us,” leaving no doubt that she and her mentor identified with the Nazis.

Later, Rolf Hoffmann, a local Nazi propagandist, came up to Schultz and apologized for Dilling’s behavior. He told her that the American visitor had insisted that both she and Wallace Deuel of the
Chicago Daily News
should be expelled from the country. He explained to Dilling that, even if Schultz was critical in her reporting, she tried to be fair. “These foreign sympathizers are so swept away by their emotions, they don’t know how to express their enthusiasm,” he said, smiling.