Hitlerland

by Andrew Nagorski

  Like the journalist Knickerbocker, the exchange student Keyes and others, he was struck by the destitution of working-class Germans. In the United States, he had worked as a West Coast organizer for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, the ILGWU, losing his job in late 1931 when the union had to trim its payroll. He knew firsthand about the toll that the Depression was taking in his own country. But he found that living conditions in Germany were often worse.

  Initial impressions could be misleading, he noted on November 22, 1932, in the diary he kept throughout his stay. On the streets of Cologne and Berlin, he pointed out, people “hide their poverty very well,” looking reasonably dressed. “From their appearances it would be hard to believe that the last unemployment figures show that 44 out of every hundred Germans are out of employment, and some of them for the last three years.”

  Soon he was making the rounds with local trade union organizers, seeing what life was like in reality. While the jobless received unemployment and welfare benefits, they were hardly enough to relieve the misery. “You Americans have a bathroom in every apartment—is it not so?” one of his escorts named Hans asked him. He was showing Plotkin a building with 120 inhabitants and not a single bath. “They tell me that in New York every apartment has a toilet,” Hans added. “Come. I’ll show you what we have.” Leading Plotkin to the basement, he pushed open a door and lit a match so he could see a crude toilet made of wooden boards. “Do you know how many families use this toilet?” he asked. “Nine families. The pots in the rooms would choke you. Go to America and tell them you saw this.”

  Visiting another tenement house with Hans, he observed one family’s diet: potatoes and herring or potatoes and margarine for the main meal, never any butter, and one pound of meat on Sundays for the four of them. The head of a district health department told Plotkin about the rapid spread of infectious diseases because of deteriorating sanitary conditions. Berlin’s bathhouses had lost two-thirds of their customers, he explained, since they could no longer afford their small fees; and even families with tubs were bathing in the same water to save heating costs.

  Plotkin was also “fascinated by the ladies of the streets and their easy ways.” While he was drinking a beer at Alexanderplatz, a young woman approached him, asking whether he’d consider her for two marks—the equivalent of 50 cents. When he declined, she asked if he’d like one of her four friends at the next table. He turned her down again, but offered to buy her a beer and sausage. She eagerly agreed, but scoffed when he asked her about Wedding, a district known for its poverty. She complained that the women there weren’t professional because they would sell themselves “for a piece of bread.”

  As they talked, the woman was startled to learn Plotkin had read Alfred Döblin’s recently published novel Berlin Alexanderplatz about the down-and-out life in the city. “Do you remember that Döblin said that time is a butcher and that all of us are running away from the butcher’s knife?” she asked. “Well, that’s me, and that’s all of us.”

  Meeting German Jews, Plotkin found himself besieged by questions about how conditions were for Jews in America. “Do you have a fascist party in America?” someone asked. “No, not yet—we had the Ku Klux Klan for a while, but that’s over with for the present,” he replied, alluding to signs that its membership had peaked earlier.

  “Then the Jews of America are fortunate,” one of the German Jews declared. “Here we are cursed with anti-Semitism, the most bitter anti-Semitism we have ever known.” When Plotkin declared that there was anti-Semitism in the United States, too, they scoffed at the notion that it could be at all comparable. “Do they ever throw Jews out of subway cars in New York?” they asked. “Do they ever come into stores belonging to Jews and tear up all the stock and break up all the fixtures?” They pointed out that boycotts and threats were a daily fact of life. “The majority of the Jews in Germany are being driven into no one knows what,” he quoted them as saying. “There is hardly a Friday night that we pray without trembling.”

  Yet despite all the poverty and anti-Semitism he witnessed or heard about, Plotkin was dubious about Hitler’s chances of seizing power—or, if he did, how long he would be able to keep it. Many of the trade union leaders he met were convinced that his movement had already peaked. “Hitlerism is rapidly going to pieces,” one of them insisted to Plotkin, adding that the Communists were on the rise. “Whenever a Hitlerite leaves the Nazis, he goes straight to the Communists, they are growing in strength.”

  Plotkin decided to see for himself what the Nazis represented. On December 16, 1932, he noticed posters advertising one of their rallies at the Sportpalast, with propagandist Joseph Goebbels as the featured speaker. He showed up an hour early, finding only a couple of thousand people in the hall which he estimated could hold 15,000. The young Nazis in uniforms looked disheartened. By the time the rally started, the hall contained more people, but there were still plenty of empty seats. The opening round of martial music was met with weak applause. “One felt as if the spirit had taken flight,” Plotkin noted in his diary. While he gave Goebbels high marks for “showmanship,” the evening proved anticlimactic. “So this was the famous menace to Germany and to the world,” he wrote. “I confess my disappointment… I had come to see a whale and found a minnow.”

  Other American Jews who visited Germany in this period also weren’t sure how dangerous the Nazis, with their anti-Semitic tirades, really were. Norman Corwin, a young reporter from Massachusetts who would go on to become a highly successful writer, director and producer in radio’s golden age, took a European journey in 1931. In Heidelberg, he stayed at a pension where the owners were apolitical but their blond seventeen-year-old son was a committed Nazi. The boy was intrigued by Corwin, who was only four years older and probably the first American he’d met. He followed the visitor everywhere, in Corwin’s words, “like a faithful dog.”

  As they walked around the city taking in the sights, Corwin told his companion about life in the United States, and the German teenager expounded on his views of his country’s future. The Nazis, he insisted, would restore Germany to its proper place in the world and rid it of “the pollution of the race.” Corwin listened, but it wasn’t until his last day, while they were up at the Heidelberg Castle, that he told the boy that he was Jewish. This was met with silence that neither of them broke during their walk back to the pension.

  Corwin left Germany not nearly as troubled as he should have been by that encounter. Traveling in northern France, he tried to convince a young woman he met that her fears about a new war were unfounded. “We are beyond thinking of war as an instrument of political expediency,” he told her.

  The American diplomats and journalists who were based in Berlin were increasingly curious about the man who led the movement that everyone was talking about. On Saturday, December 5, 1931, Ambassador Sack-ett met Hitler for the first and only time during his three-year posting. Carefully prearranged to avoid the appearance of an official meeting with an opposition figure, this first-ever encounter between a U.S. envoy and Hitler took place over tea in the home of Emil Georg von Stauss, a pro-Nazi director of the Deutsche Diskonto Bank. Sackett, who had only limited German, was accompanied by Alfred Klieforth, the embassy’s first secretary. Hitler was accompanied by Rudolf Hess, Hermann Goering and Putzi Hanfstaengl.

  As the host, von Stauss introduced the topic of Germany’s “distressing” economic situation—and Hitler promptly took over by embarking on one of his trademark monologues. Sackett would note later that he spoke “as if he were addressing a large audience.” The Nazi leader claimed the country’s plight was caused by its loss of colonies and territory, and argued for a revision of the terms of the Versailles Treaty, including the return of the Polish Corridor. He denounced what he characterized as a vastly overarmed France and warned that its aggressive actions could prevent Germany from repaying its private debts, which he claimed it otherwise would do. And he insisted that the Nazis’ paramilitary units were
only “for the purpose of keeping order within Germany and suppressing Communism.”

  Writing to Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, Sackett indicated that the meeting had left him with distinctly cool feelings. “The impression I gained of Hitler is that of a fanatical crusader,” he reported. “He has a certain forcefulness and intensity which gives him a power of leadership among those classes that do not weigh his outpourings. His methods are those of an opportunist. While he talked vigorously, he never looked me in the eye.” Many Germans were turning to the Nazis “in despair that former political allegiances provide no relief from present intolerable conditions,” Sackett acknowledged. But he predicted that “if this man comes into power he must find himself shortly on the rocks, both of international and internal difficulties. He is certainly not the type from which statesmen evolve.”

  It was no accident that Hanfstaengl had accompanied Hitler to his meeting with the American ambassador. This “half American” Harvard graduate, as he liked to characterize himself, was once again seen frequently in the Nazi leader’s entourage, particularly during his meetings with American journalists. After Hitler was released from prison in late 1924, Putzi and Helen had continued to see him fairly regularly for the next couple of years, but then their contacts tapered off during the period when his political appeal was waning.

  Hitler was still clearly attracted to Helen. On one occasion when he was visiting the Hanfstaengls’ home and Putzi had gone out, Hitler sank down on his knees in front of her and began: “If only I had someone to look after me…” Helen was sitting on the sofa, she recalled later, and “here he was on his knees, with his head in your lap, he was almost like a little boy.” Was this a declaration of love, as Putzi would later write in his memoirs? Was he really in love with her? “I should say in a way he was,” Helen explained. “As far as he was in love with anyone, maybe I was one of the ones that perhaps he was in love with.”

  All of Helen’s qualifiers were understandable. After all, she and her husband speculated, as American correspondents and others did, about Hitler’s sexuality. In his memoir, Putzi wrote: “I felt Hitler was a case of a man who was neither fish, flesh [he clearly meant “meat” here] nor fowl, neither fully homosexual nor fully heterosexual… I had formed the firm conviction that he was impotent, the repressed, masturbating type.”

  Helen had asked Hitler once, “Why don’t you find a lovely wife and marry?” He replied that he could never marry because his life was dedicated to his country. But the evidence suggests that, whatever his sexual capabilities or proclivities, Hitler was at the very least attracted to several women during his life, with Helen perhaps the only one who was close to him in age. He routinely charmed older women, but whatever sexual longings he possessed seemed mostly focused on much younger ones.

  As Putzi began to reengage with Hitler when the Nazis’ political fortunes rose in direct response to the economic crisis, he found that suppressing information was a big part of his role. And one of the biggest near scandals that needed to be contained surrounded the nature of Hitler’s relationship with his half-sister’s daughter Geli Raubal. By all accounts vivacious and flirtatious, Geli had come to Munich from Vienna as a teenager ostensibly to study. But soon she seemed fully preoccupied with her uncle, who was nearly twenty years her senior. She appeared at his side at cafés, restaurants, the opera and other public places. Then she moved into his spacious new apartment on Prinzregentenplatz, which was funded by his supporters. Although she had her own room there, rumors about the couple were rife in party circles.

  Putzi dismissed Geli as “an empty-headed little slut” who basked in her uncle’s fame. Helen took a more charitable view. “I always had the feeling he was trying to run her life, tyrannizing her, that she was more or less oppressed,” she said, looking back at that period. Others—particularly Otto Strasser, the brother of Hitler’s main rival in the party—would later claim that Hitler forced Geli to arouse him by humiliating sexual practices since he was incapable of normal sex. Whatever transpired between them, Geli was found in her room, shot in the heart, on September 18, 1931, dead at age twenty-three; earlier, she and Hitler had been overheard having a loud argument. Officially, her death was ruled a suicide, but Putzi and other propagandists had to work hard to quell reports in leftist local papers that this was a possible cover-up. “The whole affair was hushed up and glossed over as much as possible,” he noted.

  While Putzi was busy cultivating his ties to American correspondents, he certainly didn’t let them in on this story, whether it was the early party gossip and whispers about Hitler and Geli when they were parading around together or her suspicious death. Instead, he was eager to serve as the go-between for American reporters who wanted to interview Hitler, usually for the first time. Even as Hitler’s domestic drama was playing itself out behind the scenes, the Nazi leader was capitalizing on the growing popular discontent that was attracting new converts to his cause. To boost Hitler’s international stature, Putzi urged him to meet American reporters, particularly the most famous ones.

  One of the most famous, of course, was Dorothy Thompson. While she was no longer living in Berlin, she wasn’t really settled with her husband Sinclair Lewis in New York either. Europe—in particular, Germany—kept pulling her back as she churned out lengthy pieces for the Saturday Evening Post and other publications. She had tried to meet Hitler as far back as the aftermath of the failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. Hearing that he had taken refuge at the Hanfstaengls’ place outside of Munich, she rushed to the house “of an American woman” only to learn from Helen that Hitler was already gone. She recalled meeting Helen in New York during World War I and claimed that even then she was “a German propagandist.” Following Hitler’s release from prison, Thompson made a few attempts to meet him but blamed her failure to do so on the fact that he was “lofty and remote from all foreigners.”

  Like many American journalists, Thompson found Putzi Hanfstaengl to be the most colorful member of Hitler’s entourage. “Fussy. Amusing. The oddest imaginable press chief for a dictator,” she wrote. But also like many of her colleagues, she could mock him as “an immense, high-strung, incoherent clown.” To be sure, that didn’t prevent her from enlisting his help when Cosmopolitan gave her the assignment of interviewing Hitler in November 1931. Excited by that prospect, she checked into Berlin’s Adlon Hotel, where she ran into John Farrar of the New York publishing house Farrar & Rinehart. He promptly got her to commit to writing a quickie book about the Nazi leader if her interview went well. After all, it wasn’t just Cosmopolitan that was interested in figuring out whether this bizarre figure could become the leader of Germany and who he really was.

  Thompson made full use of this opportunity, speedily turning out her short book, I Saw Hitler!, which made a big splash when it was published in 1932, just as its subject was figuring prominently in all the political stories flowing from Germany. In the foreword, she expressed no reservations about making sweeping judgments that others might consider more appropriate for historians—quite the contrary. “The times in which we live move too fast for the considered historian to record them for us,” she grandly proclaimed. “They move too quickly to permit the writing of long books about momentary phases. Ours is the age of the reporter.”

  And Thompson wasn’t shy about revealing her emotions and snap judgments as she set up and conducted the interview. She briefly explained Hitler’s shift in tactics after he emerged from prison, abandoning talk of revolt and replacing it with a new strategy: “Gone ‘legal,’” she wrote. “No longer was there to be a march on Berlin. The people were to ‘awaken’ and Hitler’s movement was going to vote dictatorship in! In itself a fascinating idea. Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights.” This would-be dictator, she added, already had his own army and “terrorizes the streets.”

  Little wonder that Thompson was a popular writer: her vivid, succinct prose got right to the heart of the issue.
She knew her readers wanted to know about Hitler’s strategy, but, more important, whether it was going to work. And she wasn’t going to disappoint them by equivocating.

  Confessing that she was nervous enough about this encounter to consider taking smelling salts, she waited impatiently in the Kaiserhof Hotel for Hitler to arrive. He did so an hour late, and then kept her waiting in Putzi’s room even longer. Thompson related all this, keeping the reader in suspense as well. But not for long. With a dramatic flourish, she allowed the reader to accompany her not just into her meeting but also into her mind. “When finally I walked into Adolph Hitler’s salon in the Kaiserhof Hotel, I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany,” she wrote. “In something less than fifty seconds I was quite sure I was not. It took just that long to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog.

  “He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones,” she continued. “He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure.” Then, referring to the title of a bestselling novel of that era by German writer Hans Fallada, she added: “He is the very prototype of the Little Man.”

  In quick brush strokes, she completed the physical portrait of Hitler: the lock of hair falling over “an insignificant and slightly retreating forehead,” a large nose “badly shaped and without character,” and his movements “awkward, almost undignified and most un-martial.” But his eyes, she pointed out, were notable, because “they have the peculiar shine which often distinguishes geniuses, alcoholics, and hysterics.” At the same time, she confessed he had “the soft, almost feminine charm of the Austrian!”

  She contrasted his “actor’s face… capable of being pushed out or in” to President von Hindenburg’s face “cut out of rock” and Chancellor Brüning’s “head of an eighteenth century cardinal-statesman.” This caused her to involuntarily smile and think, “Oh, Adolph! Adolph! You will be out of luck!”