Instead of rushing to pass judgment on the Americans who found themselves in Hitler’s Germany, I have focused on telling their stories—and, wherever possible, letting those stories speak for themselves. The assessments of the Americans, where they were right or wrong, and where their moral compasses were on target or completely missing, should flow from their experiences, not from our knowledge based on the luxury of hindsight.
1
“Nervous Breakdown”
Even today, people treat Berlin in the 1920s like a Rorschach test. There are those who immediately think of political paralysis and chaos, with revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries battling each other in the streets. Others talk about hyperinflation wiping out lifetime savings, plunging millions of once solidly middle-class families into abject poverty. There are those who see an era of dizzying sexual free-doms—or, depending on who is doing the talking, a period of shameful degeneracy and perversion. And, finally, there are those who remember this era for its astonishing cultural renaissance, marked by an explosion of creativity in the arts and sciences, all made possible by a genuinely democratic system.
Oddly enough, all of those associations are right—all reflect a fairly accurate version of reality.
In the aftermath of World War I, Berlin was the primary political battlefield in the country—all too often, in the literal sense of that term. While unrest swept across other German cities, nowhere were the battles more intense than in Berlin. In February 1919, the newly elected National Assembly convened in Weimar to draft a new constitution precisely because they needed a less violent setting than Berlin. But the birth of the Weimar Republic quickly spawned violent revolts by both rightists and leftists, who shared a death wish for the country’s new rulers and their experiment in parliamentary democracy. Demagogues of every stripe found willing recruits among a people who were still reeling from their humiliating defeat, the staggering human toll of the war, and the punitive peace terms of the Versailles Treaty.
The political chaos fed off the mounting economic desperation. As the German mark plunged in value, living standards for those on fixed incomes plunged with it. Routine purchases—a loaf of bread, for example—required thousands, then millions, then billions and, finally, trillions of marks. The worthlessness of the currency was vividly captured by a sign at the box office of one of the city’s theaters: “Orchestra stalls: the same price as half a pound of butter. Rear stalls: two eggs.” Amid the general poverty, there were also, as always, those who made their fortunes and lived extravagantly.
The extravagance was particularly evident when it came to sexual mores. At one of the myriad parties in the city playwright Carl Zuckmayer attended, he reported that the young women serving drinks were dressed only in “transparent panties embroidered with a silver fig leaf”—and, unlike “bunnies” in American clubs, they “could be freely handled”; their pay for the evening covered those amusements as well. A sign on the wall proclaimed: “Love is the foolish overestimation of the minimal difference between one sexual object and another.”
Such sexual free-for-alls were one reason why curious foreigners were drawn to the German capital, but the biggest draw was Berlin’s reputation as the most vibrant cultural hub. A city that boasted the likes of Bertolt Brecht, Albert Einstein, Marlene Dietrich and George Grosz quickly became a magnet for those who were talented and creative, adventurous and opportunistic, including a growing number of Americans.
“People have forgotten that, after World War One, the greatest concentration of intellectuals and cultural innovators was not in Paris, and certainly not in London or New York—but in Berlin,” recalled Michael Danzi, a versatile American musician who played the banjo, every kind of guitar and the mandolin, and who spent most of the interwar years in the German capital. “Berlin was truly the capital of Europe—all the railroad tracks from any European city ended up in Berlin.”
From the beginning, many of the Americans were also drawn to the political and economic chaos, trying to understand the forces unleashed all over postwar Germany, particularly in Berlin, as they pondered the future of the new Weimar Republic. But just as in Christopher Isherwood’s stories and the resulting musical and film Cabaret, the recollections of Americans about this extraordinary era are often freighted with premonitions about the sinister forces that would eventually engulf Germany and almost all of Europe.
From their earliest days as a small radical movement based in Munich, the Nazis viewed Berlin as an evil, decadent city, especially as compared to the Bavarian capital, where they enjoyed far more support. “The contrast [of Munich] with Berlin was marked,” noted Kurt Ludecke, who joined the party in the 1920s and became an ardent fund-raiser and activist, including on trips to the United States. “One was the Mecca of Marxists and Jews, the other the citadel of their enemies.” Even after Hitler took power and ruled from Berlin, he remained distrustful of the German capital and its inhabitants.
As far as the earliest American arrivals in postwar Germany were concerned, much of what was happening was endlessly intriguing—and totally mystifying. Ben Hecht, the future Broadway and Hollywood star writer, director and producer, came to Germany in 1918 as a twenty-four-year-old reporter for the Chicago Daily News. During his two years in the German capital, he described “political zanies, quibblers and adventurers—mindless and paranoid” performing as if in street theaters, and how “all was politics, revolution, antirevolution.” In a letter to his managing editor Henry Justin Smith back in Chicago, he concluded: “Germany is having a nervous breakdown. There is nothing sane to report.”
While most of their countrymen back home were only too happy to put World War I behind them and return to their domestic preoccupations, a new crop of American diplomats and military attachés were deploying to Germany to resume the official ties between the two countries. They were anxious to assess the mood of the German people and to see whether their new rulers had a chance of riding out the chronic political unrest and the deepening economic crisis, allowing their democratic experiment to succeed.
For a young diplomat like Hugh Wilson, Berlin during and after the war provided confirmation that his future should be in the foreign service, not in a return to the family business he had left behind in Chicago. Shortly before the war, he had decided to try to see what “a few years of experience and diversion” as a diplomat would be like. He had taken the foreign service exam, assuming that he could always return to his old life whenever he tired of his new one. But then the whole world changed.
After his first postings in Latin America, Wilson was assigned to the Berlin embassy in 1916. He only served a few months in that city, which appeared “to be in a state of siege with the whole world,” before the United States entered the war and the embassy staff was evacuated by special train to Switzerland. By the time he was reassigned to a defeated Germany, Wilson had made the decision to “call into play every atom of energy and intelligence I might possess” in what he now regarded as his life’s work. It would prove to be the second of three postings for him to Berlin. The third time, in the late 1930s, he would become the last U.S. ambassador to serve in Nazi Germany.
Wilson and his wife Kate arrived in Berlin in March 1920, just as the right-wing Kapp Putsch was taking place in full view of the small contingent of Americans at what was then the U.S. Embassy building at 7 Wilhelmplatz. Wolfgang Kapp, the German nationalist who was the nominal leader of the rebel forces, had set up his headquarters at the Leopold Palace on the other side of the square, which was strewn with wire and machine-gun placements. This particular revolt fizzled out quickly, but Wilson had plenty of chances to observe other outbreaks of violence that had peculiarly German attributes. “Rioting seemed to be strictly circumscribed and there appeared to be rules of the game which the rioters themselves respected,” he noted.
Wilson added: “I myself have seen fighting on one street with machine guns and rifles blazing at the other” while a few hundred yards away crowds went about their
business in orderly fashion. On another occasion, he watched from his embassy window as thousands of Spartacists, as the Communists were then called, staged a protest in Wilhelmplatz in front of the Chancellery building. Although the demonstrators were “vituperative and angry,” he noted, no one stepped over the low railings marking off plots of grass and flowers. That would have violated their sense of order.
For Wilson and other Americans who had been to Germany before, the most striking feature of Berlin was how dilapidated and impoverished it looked. “The shabbiness of Berlin in that period had to be seen to be believed… Everything needed a coat of paint, everything needed to be cleaned out,” he recalled. “It was the only time that I ever saw this capital of a scrupulously clean people littered with newspapers and dirt.” Even the embassy building, where many staffers lived, was in dismal shape: the roof leaked profusely whenever there was heavy rain or melting snow. Because Washington had routinely denied requests for funds to make the necessary repairs, Wilson and his colleagues used to pray for rain when senators or congressmen arrived on visits so that they would see how bad things were.
This was nothing compared to the desperate plight of the local residents, including the wounded veterans begging in the streets. The wartime blockade of Germany had continued for several months after the end of the fighting, only making things worse. Wilson pointed out that “traces of undernourishment and children’s diseases, especially rickets, were found on every hand.”
Katharine Smith, or Kay as she was generally known, took notice of the poverty all around her right from the moment she and her husband, Captain Truman Smith, arrived in Berlin in June 1920 to take up his post as an assistant military attaché. Like many Americans, the young, physically incongruous couple—she was twenty and only 5 feet tall, while he was twenty-six and an imposing 6 feet 4 inches—first moved into the famed Adlon Hotel. The hotel’s façade was pockmarked by bullets, and even the lobby bore a few similar telling holes, but overall, Kay reported, “the interior was quite luxurious, the desk clerks very polite, the crowded lobby full of foreigners.” Nonetheless, Kay only had to step outside on her first day there to see how insulated that world was.
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.
Hitlerland Page 2
