Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (4 page)

Deciding to go for a walk, she made sure she was fashionably decked
out first. “I put on a beige and blue figured voile dress, a beige coat with beige fox collar and wore, as had been the custom at home, beige suede pumps, beige stockings and a dark blue hat,” she scrupulously recorded. She left the hotel and walked down Unter den Linden, pausing to admire a china display in a shop window. Suddenly, she heard murmuring behind her and turned around to see a group of shabbily dressed people, two rows deep, staring at her and whispering to each other. “I must have looked to them as if I had come from Mars!” she recalled.

One of the people asked her something she didn’t quite understand, and she replied that she was an American. “Ah!” came the response. When she stepped forward, the crowd quickly made way for her and she rushed back to the hotel, where she changed from her “most inappropriate” outfit into plain dark clothes. “It had been a strange and instructive experience,” she concluded.

So was the experience of moving into an apartment. First, there was the battle with fleas, which were still common all over the city. Then, when she hired a housemaid, she was taken aback by one of their early conversations. The maid was holding a plate with the remains of an egg that Truman had not finished, and she asked Kay whether she could eat it. “Eat that cold smeared egg!” Kay replied in astonishment. “Why?” The maid explained that she hadn’t tasted an egg since the war began. When Kay told her to eat as many eggs as she wanted, it was the maid’s turn to be shocked. In other households, servants weren’t supposed to eat the same food as their employers—and food was often kept under lock and key.

As keen a social observer as Kay quickly proved to be, Truman focused just as intensely in those early days on Germany’s political prospects, not just the military part of his job. That was hardly surprising given his impressive credentials.
He was a 1915 Yale graduate
(two noted classmates were Dean Acheson and Archibald MacLeish), a World War I infantry veteran decorated with a Silver Star for bravery, and an avid student of the German language and German politics and history. Like Wilson, he had served in Germany already—as a political advisor to the U.S. Army in Coblenz from March 1919 until his transfer to Berlin in June 1920—and he would return to Germany in the 1930s when Hitler was
in power. His daughter Kätchen is convinced that he would have become a history professor if his graduate studies at Columbia University hadn’t been cut short by what turned into a thirty-year military career.

For those early postwar arrivals like the Wilsons and the Smiths, the plunging German mark meant that everything was increasingly cheap—as long as the foreigners spent their money quickly right after exchanging it. “
With the end of the war
in victory for them everything was hilarious and life in leisure times was a mad scramble for amusement,” Wilson wrote. And there were plenty of foreigners who could revel in each other’s company, even if the American diplomatic presence was small by today’s standards. “All of the embassies had big staffs, all entertained lavishly, and the Allied Governments maintained commissions of control comprising hundreds of foreign officers and their wives,” Wilson added. “Allied uniforms were common on the streets of Berlin.”

Kay Smith’s letters to her mother and her unpublished memoirs describe an endless whirl of those diplomatic parties and social events. For a masked ball in 1921 hosted by Wilson and his wife Kate along with another American colleague, the invitation read in part:

On the nineteenth of March you are urged
To come to this house fully purged
Of all thoughts of dignity,
Rank or insignity,
But in costume on which you have splurged.

At nine-thirty the jazz will begin,
And when you have danced yourself thin,
There’ll be lots of Schinken
Zu essen, and trinken,
Such as rot wein and also blanc vin.

The Americans weren’t enjoying their special status in Berlin just because they were foreigners with access to what stable currencies could buy. They also recognized quickly that their enemies in the last war were affording them an unexpectedly warm welcome. “
The Germans, then
, in 1920, wanted to be friends with the world, but particularly they wanted
to make friends with the Americans,” Wilson wrote. “Curiously enough, the warrior instinct showed in this respect. One of the sources of this almost pathetic friendship was their desire to express the admiration they felt for the stupendous effort of the United States in 1917 and 1918, for the magnificent spirit and dash of our soldiers . . .”

Wilson may have overstated the admiration for American troops, but he was right about the overall pro-American mood. As Kay Smith put it, “People are laying themselves out to be nice to Americans.” Truman bought a Borsalino felt hat with a large brim. This made him tower above most people on Unter den Linden and other streets he frequented, where he was instantly recognizable. “He became famous as ‘The American,’” Kay proudly recalled. “Germans greatly admired a tall fine physique.”

Americans, it seemed, were the good victors.

In part, the reason why the Americans emerged as the good victors was because they often reciprocated the Germans’ positive feelings about them. They also shared their exasperation with the French—the bad victors, in their eyes. In the immediate aftermath of World War I, Washington and Paris were frequently at odds over how to handle a defeated Germany. The United States and Britain were inclined to give the new government in Berlin enough leeway in terms of troop deployments to suppress uprisings from the left or the right, and the Americans, in particular, disapproved of what they perceived as France’s insistence on extracting exorbitant reparations. But the French protested any perceived violations of the Versailles Treaty—and quickly used them as an excuse to occupy more German territory, as they did by pushing across the Rhine after the Kapp Putsch, and then by occupying the industrialized Ruhr in 1923 as punishment for Germany’s failure to pay reparations.

“The French are the most militaristic nation in Europe . . . they have learned nothing by this war,” Kay Smith complained in a letter to her mother on March 12, 1920. “The next war Germany will not provoke. She wants England and America especially with her and she is making every effort to remodel herself to do so.” In another letter, she wrote,
“France is terrified of another attack by Germany and her policy has been to crucify Germany as much as possible.”

As Wilson pointed out, the French only made things worse by following up their push across the Rhine that year with the stationing of Senegalese and other black troops in the Rhineland, triggering immediate reports of rapes and other violence. “
A flame of resentment
against France arose throughout Germany,” he wrote.

Those alarming allegations prompted the State Department to ask for an investigation by U.S. military officials. After looking into the charges,
Major General Henry T. Allen
, the commander of American troops in Germany, reported to Washington that the German press had deliberately distorted the record to play to racial prejudices and stir antipathy to France abroad, “especially in America, where the negro question is always capable of arousing feeling.” In his report to the State Department that was then relayed to Congress, he acknowledged that 66 sexual crimes had been reported to the French authorities, but he also pointed out that this had resulted in 28 convictions and 11 acquittals by French military courts—suggesting a serious effort to maintain discipline.

“The wholesale atrocities by French negro Colonial troops alleged in the German press, such as the alleged abductions, followed by rape, mutilation, murder and concealment of the bodies of the victims, are false and intended for political propaganda,” he concluded.

Such exaggerations, Allen added, were in part due to “the attitude of certain classes of German women toward the colored troops.” Noting that the postwar economic crisis had spawned widespread prostitution, he explained that “many German women of loose character have openly made advances to the colored soldiers.” Numerous love letters and photographs attested to that fact, he pointed out. In Ludwigshafen, he reported, patrols had to be sent “to drive away the German women from the barracks, where they were kissing the colored troops through the window gratings.”

Even more tellingly, Allen noted that there were several interracial marriages, including one with the daughter of a prominent Rhineland official. “The color line is not regarded either by the French or the Germans as we regard it in America: to keep the white race pure.” While he wasn’t
denying that there were many documented cases of sexual assaults, Allen was convinced that it was the behavior of German women that had been the spark to “incite trouble.”

But many Americans in Germany had already made up their minds that it was France’s vindictive policies that were to blame for everything, not anything the Germans were doing. They saw Germany as the victimized party, which was in keeping with much of the local political rhetoric. “
I am afraid
that many of us who were on duty in Germany after World War I were taken in,”
Chicago Tribune
correspondent Sigrid Schultz wrote much later. “Inadvertently we supported the Germans in their sympathy drive.”

On January 29, 1921, Karl Henry von Wiegand, a star reporter for the Hearst publications, wrote to C. F. Bertelli, his Hearst colleague in Paris, venting his exasperation with the French. “
Your French friends
appear to be as insane as they have ever been since the close of the war.” Mentioning new demands by the French for reparations, he added, “Are the French never going to come to their senses, and see Europe as it actually is?” He concluded that many Americans and other Europeans “are getting rather weary of hearing France’s yowl about what France suffered in the war.”

Wiegand was a correspondent who already felt very much at home in Germany and the rest of Europe. Born in 1874 in Hesse, he came to the United States as a young boy, growing up on farms in Iowa where his German immigrant father struggled to make ends meet, losing two farms in the process. When his father was “
a fair way
to losing a third,” Karl, barely fourteen at the time, decided to make his own way in the world, never telling his siblings or his parents that he wasn’t coming back. “A cruel thing to do to a good father and the kindest of mothers,” he would write much later in notes for an autobiography that he never completed.

He claimed to have then worked on a ranch for Buffalo Bill—who at close range was less than the romantic hero of the frontier that he had imagined from reading dime novels. He made his way further west, eventually
finding work at the Associated Press
in San Francisco. There, he seized the opportunity to use his German and cover World War I for the rival United Press, happily leaving behind his desk job. Three months
into that conflict, he scored an exclusive interview with Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, the son of the Kaiser, who famously told the American that he had warned his father the war was already lost. The subsequent headlines offered a huge boost to Wiegand’s early career. He ended up jumping again—this time to Hearst.

Like any good reporter, Wiegand recognized he had to offer his editors and readers a broad range of stories about the new Germany. While dutifully reporting on every political crisis, the continuing street battles and the economic shortages (“
Food Shortage Alarms All Germany
,” warned the headline of his May 23, 1922, story), he was also alert to other subjects that would titillate his readers—or, when it came to the racier ones that his editors might not allow, at least his colleagues.

That was particularly true when it came to postwar Germany’s growing reputation for sexual licentiousness. Wiegand kept up a running private correspondence with Bertelli in Paris on the subject.
In one letter from 1921
, Bertelli urged Wiegand to write more about cocaine and “the alleged degeneracy of the old burg.” Good stories on that subject, he added, will “get the whole of the American continent afire with indignation . . . and greedy longing!” Then, there was the usual banter about how Wiegand should research this story. “Incidentally you might discover in your night investigations (all for the good of the future generation, of course) some novel Venus . . . Be careful about taking the necessary measurements . . .”

Back home, one of Wiegand’s readers concluded that the correspondent might be able to help him with a personal matter. “I am looking for a wife,” R. C. Bruchman wrote him on January 14, 1921, from Danville, Illinois. “I imagine there must be an awful lot of handsome good girls in Berlin who would make a fellow a mighty fine wife.” He enclosed $1.50, asking
Wiegand
to place an ad in a Berlin newspaper, saying that a thirty-five-year-old German-American gentleman “wants to marry girl 18 to 25 yrs. old.”

An amused Wiegand agreed to the request, noting this was the first time he had been asked to act as a matrimonial agent. “As there are at least a million more women in Germany than men, you ought to have quite a lot to pick from, and I have no doubt you will get many answers,” he wrote back. “It is indeed all too true that many refined and educated German girls of formerly well to do families are today facing want.”

Wiegand also participated in the diplomatic party scene in Berlin, occasionally writing features about it, especially when Americans played starring roles. “
Houghton Girls Make Berlin Debut
” proclaimed his
Washington Times
story datelined December 30, 1922. The subheadline explained: “Brilliant Assemblage Gives Daughters of U.S. Envoy Welcome to Society.” Alanson B. Houghton, an industrialist-turned-Republican-congressman-turned-diplomat, was Washington’s first postwar envoy to Berlin. He was deeply troubled by the overall situation he found there, repeatedly warning Washington that Germany’s economic plight and political unrest could prove to be highly dangerous for the whole continent. But this didn’t prevent him from putting on some of Berlin’s most lavish parties, which Wiegand wrote up enthusiastically.