Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (40 page)

For many of those Americans who had been monitoring these chilling developments, it was no longer possible to pretend that the new Germany represented anything like a normal mixture of good and bad, and should still be treated like a normal country.
In a letter to
Assistant Secretary of State Francis B. Sayre on November 14, Wilson finally admitted that it was futile to keep hoping that reasonable officials within the German government would succeed in producing “some moderation of the National Socialist racial policy, at least to the extent of permitting orderly
emigration of Jews with a fairly substantial portion of their property.” He concluded, “The events of the last few days apparently dispel such hopes.”

Facing growing outrage against the Nazi regime, the Roosevelt Administration recalled Wilson to Washington for consultations the next day. He would formally remain ambassador to Germany until August 31, 1939, the eve of Germany’s invasion of Poland, but he never returned to Berlin during that period. After Wilson’s departure, the embassy was run by lower-level diplomats. Although he had been disappointed by Wilson’s performance, Jacob Beam noted that the decision not to replace him “dealt our Embassy a sad blow.” Without an ambassador to maintain ties at the senior level with Nazi officials, he wrote, “a bizarre state of non-communication was allowed to develop to our overall disadvantage.”

Many of the embassy staffers were focused increasingly on determining Germany’s war capabilities and intentions, and no one was more experienced in that department than Truman Smith. The veteran military attaché was constantly on the lookout for new opportunities to gather more intelligence. He had engineered Lindbergh’s visits to Germany that had provided an inside look at many of the Luftwaffe’s factories and airfields. At the same time, he took advantage of the arrival of two other U.S. Army officers who were provided with a different kind of inside look at another aspect of the German military—in this case, its officer training program and its engineering capabilities.

Remarkably and inconspicuously, the United States and Germany had agreed in 1935 on an exchange of students in its officer training schools—the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and the German War College, or Kriegsakademie, in Berlin. The program was to start the following year, but the Germans failed to avail themselves of this opportunity, probably because of their belief that their officers could get better training at home. “
It was suggested
tactfully that the Germans did not think very highly of the U.S. course of instruction at Leavenworth,” wrote Albert C. Wedemeyer, the American officer who enrolled in the German War College, staying for the full two-year course from 1936 to 1938.

At the time a young captain from Nebraska, the “
tall and handsome
” Wedemeyer, as Kay Smith noted, immediately hit it off with her husband.
Kätchen Smith
, their daughter, recalled that Wedemeyer and Paul Thompson, another young officer from the Midwest who was also studying in Germany, would often come over for Sunday brunch. Thompson was an army engineer and he was enrolled at the Technical University in Berlin.

According to Kay, Thompson was “
out-going, hard-working
, modest, handsome with rosy cheeks, brown eyes and dark hair and a winning personality. He was very young and naïve socially but not professionally.” Or, as Kätchen recalls, “Paul was wet behind the ears—truly innocent.” Her parents worried about his relationship with a German woman named Friedl, fearing that she could be taking advantage of him. When he announced to the Smiths that he was going to marry her right before he was due to sail back home, Truman told Kay: “I hope she is not just getting a trip to the United States as so many have.” But the Smiths attended their civil wedding and saw them off.

Since Thompson had already acquired considerable experience dealing with flood control on the Mississippi River, he didn’t feel he was learning much in his courses in Berlin. Truman managed to get him assigned to a German Army engineer battalion instead, where he closely observed the Germans’ methods and equipment. His subsequent report, according to Kay, “brought Thompson to the attention of his superiors in his branch and from then on . . . his rise was spectacular.” He later trained U.S. Army engineers for the D-Day invasion and landed on Omaha Beach, where he was shot through the jaw. He survived and was decorated for bravery. After the war, he retired from the Army and started a second career as a senior executive at
Reader’s Digest.

But of the two young American officers who studied in Germany in this period, it was Wedemeyer—who would later rise much higher in the military hierarchy, succeeding General Joseph Stillwell as commander of U.S. forces in China—who gathered the most valuable information. The young captain took his duties as an exchange student at the German War College extremely seriously, keeping a meticulous record of everything he learned and observed over two years, which he summarized in a
147-page
report for his military superiors. It offered the military brass valuable insights into the training provided to many of the best German officers who were destined to fight in World War II.

In his report, Wedemeyer left no doubt how much he admired the German training program and its mix of in-depth military history and practical exercises of “Troop Leading,” allowing the officers to simulate battlefield conditions they were likely to face so that they could apply new tactics. “The situations presented at the Kriegsakademie involve War of Movement, special emphasis being placed upon speed, in anticipation of the employment of mechanized and motorized forces,” he wrote. Officers were taught to make quick decisions, recognizing “that a fair decision given in time for aggressive execution is much better than one wholly right but too late.”

All of which indicated that the Germans were preparing for new forms of combat. “They visualize rapidly changing situations in modern warfare and gearing their command and staff operations accordingly,” he wrote. In essence, he was previewing the blitzkrieg tactics that Hitler would first unleash on Poland the following year.

In his postwar memoir, Wedemeyer openly stated what he had clearly implied. Deeply impressed by “
German methods
and quality of the instruction,” he concluded: “The German pedagogy and curriculum were, in my judgment, superior to our own.” By comparison, he felt that the instruction he had received at Fort Leavenworth was “much more theoretical” and the instructors mostly “mediocre.” In Berlin, his chief instructor was Major Ferdinand Jodl, the brother of Alfred Jodl, who would become a top commander in World War II and was convicted and hanged as a war criminal at Nuremberg. The lesser-known brother was “
outstanding as
a teacher,” Wedemeyer recalled, and overall he found the lectures at the German War College to be “thought-provoking” and comprehensive.

It was the practical training that left a particularly strong impression. “
One of the
map problems given while I was a student in Berlin involved a hypothetical attack against Czechoslovakia,” he wrote. “Later, it developed that the problem was not so hypothetical.” In his 1938 report, Wedemeyer included a broad array of details on everything from German weaponry to courier pigeons, but he didn’t spell out the obvious
key conclusion. In his memoir, he made up for that omission. Pointing out that he could not have predicted the mistakes that would lead Hitler to disaster, he declared: “
But assuredly
I recognized that the Nazi leaders were preparing for war.”

During his studies in Berlin, Wedemeyer was careful not to discuss politics with his German counterparts. But he did write later that they sometimes “
subtly revealed
” their disapproval of their rulers. “There would be veiled statements, sometimes hints which would indicate shame, disgust, or displeasure with the Nazis.” He met General Ludwig Beck, who was ousted as the army’s chief of staff in 1938 and would later be executed for his role in the July 20, 1944, plot against Hitler. And among Wedemeyer’s classmates was Captain Claus von Stauffenberg, who carried the briefcase with the bomb that failed to kill the German leader; he was promptly executed as well. During his time at the German War College, Wedemeyer recalled, Stauffenberg recited poetry at parties and was “not always discreet in expressing his contempt for the Nazis or for Hitler.” But he was hugely popular, and he was never denounced for his views. Nonetheless, Wedemeyer felt that such anti-Nazi sentiment wasn’t all that widespread within the military in that period.

Wedemeyer also had the opportunity to observe Nazi bigwigs up close. Invited to a party where several of them were present, he wrote off Hess as “
stolid, not overly
intelligent,” but Goebbels was “a dynamo with a brain” and Goering “gave the impression of being jovial and an ebullient extrovert.”

As such descriptions imply, Wedemeyer genuinely enjoyed his two years in Berlin. He found both his classmates and instructors, whatever their views, to be “at all times friendly.” And soon he felt comfortable enough to engage in a bit of humor. When he first started arriving for classes, he didn’t know what to say when the cleaning women working on their hands and knees in the hallway would shoot out their right arms and greet him with “
Heil Hitler
.” Then, he started replying with “Heil Roosevelt.” By his second year, those exchanges had become legendary in the school, and the charwomen would greet him with the Nazi salute but say “Heil Roosevelt.” He then replied, “Heil Hitler.”

Later, when Wedemeyer was suspected of pro-German sympathies,
he explained how easily such banter could be misinterpreted. But there was little doubt that, even after World War II, he felt far more sympathetic to Germany than most of his countrymen. “
. . . however greatly
one was revolted by Hitler’s treatment of the Jews and his arrogant bullying of small neighboring nations, one was compelled by knowledge of the record and the facts of Germany’s situation to understand the dynamic of self-preservation which underlay the Nazi revolution,” he wrote. Germans felt that Hitler had raised them from the abyss, he added. “It did not require any prolonged study of history to learn how false was the popular image of Germany as the most aggressive of nations and recurrent disturber of the peace.”

At the German War College, Wedemeyer pointed out that he was exposed to constant lectures about the Bolshevik menace. “
Beneath the propaganda
I discerned a great deal of truth about Communist aims, practices, methods unknown or ignored in America until recently,” he wrote. In other words, he came to believe that the Roosevelt Administration was wrong to consider Germany to be the main danger in Europe. “I was convinced that the German search for
Lebensraum
did not menace the Western World to anything like the same degree as the world-wide Communist conspiracy centered in Moscow.”

Like Lindbergh, Wedemeyer gained remarkable insights into the German military buildup but came away convinced that the United States should stay out of the looming conflict in Europe. According to Kay Smith, however, Wedemeyer and her husband also had a significant talk in 1938. “
It was Al
with whom Truman first discussed plans for an assault of Germany if needed,” she wrote in her unpublished memoir. “That discussion took place in our apartment.”

The two men regularly compared notes on their experiences, and Smith shared his knowledge about Germany’s rapid military buildup, which he was conveying in his regular reports to Washington. “
I like to think
that some of Truman Smith’s shrewdness and knowledge rubbed off on me during my German War College period,” Wedemeyer wrote. Once he returned to the United States, Wedemeyer had little patience for those who were curious about the political situation in Germany. “
I had been disillusioned
by the superficiality and nonmilitary type of questions
put to me,” he observed. “I had been asked all sorts of questions about Hitler’s peculiarities, the Nazi persecution of Jews, and about Goebbels and Goering’s love life, but almost nothing pertaining to strategy, or German capabilities, military training, and organization.”

But there was one man who asked about exactly those subjects based on Wedemeyer’s lengthy report: General George Marshall, who was chief of war plans. “
When I reported
to him, he had a copy on his desk, and had made many notes, indicating that he had read the report carefully,” Wedemeyer recalled. Marshall asked, “What is the most important lesson you brought back from the German experience?” The young officer replied that the Germans would never fight a war again the way they did the last time. Instead of trench warfare, they would use new equipment and tactics based on “high mobility.” As Wedemeyer noted in a memorandum decades later, “I don’t want to sound like I am bragging, however I can assure you that these discussions, especially concerning our strategy and our tactics as the war advanced, were almost daily occurrences in General Marshall’s office—just the two of us.”

Wedemeyer was boasting, of course, but justifiably so. Marshall chose him in the spring of 1941 to help draft the “Victory Program” outlining how the United States needed to mobilize its manpower and resources to prepare for war. By then a major, Wedemeyer worked diligently to prepare this ambitious plan, despite his sympathies for the America First movement that was fervently campaigning against the country’s entry into World War II. And in making those preparations for war, Wede-meyer drew extensively on his firsthand knowledge of Germany, the product of his two years at the German War College. The irony was that while Wedemeyer, like Lindbergh, opposed the Roosevelt Administration’s drift toward direct involvement in World War II, both men provided intelligence that would prove invaluable when their country joined the conflict.

In a 1937 updated edition of his famous book
Germany Puts the Clock Back
, Edgar Mowrer, the
Chicago Daily News
correspondent who had been forced to leave Germany in 1933, chronicled Hitler’s increasingly
aggressive behavior, including moving troops into the demilitarized Rhineland, his repudiation of the Versailles Treaty and all its restrictions on a new military buildup, and Germany and Italy’s direct aid for the fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War. “
A brief calendar
of the first four years of Hitler reads like a hymn of victory from a Prussian historian or war poet,” he wrote.