Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (54 page)

Thomas Wolfe in Berlin in 1935. The writer was treated like a literary superhero, and initially he reciprocated the warm feelings of the Germans. But by his next visit in 1936, he became much more aware of the horrors of the Nazi regime, vividly describing them in his novella
I Have a Thing to Tell You.

At the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, track star Jesse Owens was the most popular athlete, despite the Nazis’ racist ideology.

After the
Anschluss,
the annexation and occupation of Austria in March 1938, a triumphant Hitler received a hero’s welcome in Vienna on April 9. Here he is led by the Lord Mayor; Rudolf Hess and Joseph Goebbels are walking behind Hitler. American journalists like William Shirer were stunned by how quickly Vienna was decked out in Nazi flags and took on the look of “any German city in the Reich.”

In March 1938, former President Herbert Hoover visited Berlin (top, with Reichsbank President Hjalmer Schacht and U.S. Ambassador Hugh Wilson on right). Meeting Hitler, he was subjected to Hitler’s usual tirades. Nonetheless, Hoover continued to argue that “we must live with other nations.” Wilson, the last American ambassador to Nazi Germany, agreed with those sentiments.

Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain is greeted by Hitler on September 15, 1938.

His visit produced the infamous Munich agreement that doomed Czechoslovakia.

On November 9, 1938, Germany erupted in the frenzy of anti-Semitic violence known as Kristallnacht. Jews flocked to the U.S. Embassy, begging for visas, as consular official Charles Thayer recalled, in the hopes that they could be saved “from the madness that had seized the city.” Above, smashed windows of Jewish shops in Magdeburg.

German troops search the rubble in Danzig after Hitler launched World War II by invading Poland on September 1, 1939.

On September 16, 1940, while Hitler’s armies were on the march in Europe, President Roosevelt signed America’s first peacetime draft legislation (with Secretary of War Henry Stimson on left and Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall second from right).

American correspondents in Germany were already covering the war. From right, the AP’s Louis Lochner, the Propaganda Ministry’s Karl Boehmer and the International News Service’s Pierre Huss.

William Shirer (broadcasting for CBS in 1940) was one of the most discerning American correspondents, anti-Nazi from the beginning.