Hitlerland

by Andrew Nagorski

  Putzi was stunned. “That is a death sentence,” he protested. “Who gave you such orders?”

  Frodel told him he received them right before he took off, and they were signed by Goering. When Putzi protested further, Frodel added, “I was told that you had volunteered for this mission.”

  As Hanfstaengl described it, the rest of this episode played out like a thriller, without the pyrotechnics. After only about half an hour, one of the engines made a noise and Frodel turned it off. Casting Putzi a meaningful look, the pilot told him that there was something wrong. “I shall have to put down and have it seen to,” he said.

  They landed at a quiet airfield near Leipzig, where the mechanics had already left for the day. Over drinks in the canteen, Frodel announced that a car would be ready soon to take them into town since there was no hope of getting the plane repaired until the next day. After ordering another round of drinks, Putzi said his stomach was bothering him and slipped out. It was dark, and he quickly made his way to the road near the airfield, and, meeting a peasant woman, discovered that there was a train station nearby. From there, he took a train to Leipzig, where he spent the night before hopping a morning train to Munich. He spent only about an hour in his hometown before boarding a third train, this time to Zurich. It was his fiftieth birthday when he arrived there, and he wouldn’t return to Germany until after the war.

  Did the top Nazis really concoct such an elaborate plan to arrange the death of someone who had been so eager to serve Hitler for so long? Goering wrote to Hanfstaengl later that the whole affair was “a harmless joke” aimed at getting him to reconsider “some rather over-audacious utterances you have made,” and he would be perfectly safe if he returned to Germany. David Marwell, currently the director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, extensively researched this incident in Germany and concluded that the entire scheme was indeed “an elaborate hoax”; its purpose, he maintained, was to humiliate Hanfstaengl rather than to kill him. But Putzi always remained convinced that he had narrowly escaped a death plot.

  Back in Berlin, some of the American residents were puzzled by Hanfstaengl’s abrupt disappearance. In previous years, Putzi had hosted a Washington’s Birthday party in his apartment, inviting people like Ambassador Dodd, Truman Smith and Louis Lochner, along with a few Germans. The invitations had already gone out for the party on February 22 before the host’s disappearance, and it was only a day or two before that his secretary called the invited guests to say the party was canceled, without giving any explanation. Lochner suspected Putzi was in trouble and began picking up strands of the story, including reports that he had managed to avoid a plane ride over Spain that probably would have ended badly.

  At a cocktail party hosted by Martha Dodd on March 17, Lochner and other guests speculated about Putzi’s whereabouts. “There’s nothing mysterious about Hanfstaengl,” an assistant naval attaché declared. “Why, I ran into him at the bar of the Hotel Bauer au Lac in Zurich only yesterday.”

  Lochner hastily left the party and placed a call to the Zurich hotel. “How did you find out I was here?” Putzi asked. Lochner replied with the standard line that a newsman never reveals his sources. Since he already had his story, it gave the AP correspondent huge satisfaction that Hanfstaengl refused all calls after that.

  By the time that Putzi made his escape, Ambassador Dodd was nearing the end of a four-year tour in Berlin that had proven more frustrating than productive. His early alienation from Hitler and his regime was fully understandable—and, in many ways, morally commendable. But it didn’t help his effectiveness as an envoy. After the Night of the Long Knives, he wrote in his diary that he would try to avoid meeting Hitler whenever he could. “I certainly would not ask to see any man who has committed a score of murders the last few days,” he wrote on July 4, 1934. And again and again throughout his four years, he ruminated about whether it made sense for him to stay in a post when he could see no hope of more positive developments.

  At the State Department, his superiors were often frustrated as well. “What in the world is the use of having an ambassador who refuses to speak to the government to which he is accredited?” complained Undersecretary of State William Phillips. Since Dodd did maintain some contacts with German officials, this was overstating things—but not by much. And the scholar-turned-envoy didn’t help his case by his open disdain for many of the State Department officials he had to deal with and foreign service officers in general. As he rightly noted, they acted like pampered members of an exclusive fraternity, the products of privilege and Ivy League schools. They were highly critical of an outsider like himself, and he made no effort to temper their feelings.

  In fact, Dodd reinforced them by almost obsessively pushing for budget cuts, including shorter cables. His embassy did produce numerous well-done reports during his tenure, including some lengthy ones; they demonstrated a deeper understanding of the Nazi regime than the reports of many other missions, including those of France and Britain. But by penny-pinching, he contributed to the impression that there was a “telegram deficiency,” as he acknowledged. He argued that he was only trying to eliminate three- or four-page telegrams when “one or two hundred words” would do, adding defensively: “I do not send what I think I should have to contradict in a week. This is my explanation. It may not be what the Department likes.”

  Dodd wasn’t popular with his military attachés either. Truman Smith described him as “a historian of repute, and a pacifist.” According to Smith, he showed “a marked distaste for military matters” and a lack of interest in the work of the military attachés or in the rapid expansion of the German Army and Air Force. “The question perforce arises with respect to Dr. Dodd’s fitness for the ambassadorial post in Germany at this particular period in history,” Smith wrote later. In her unpublished memoir, Kay dispensed with any diplomatic wording. Claiming that Dodd’s pacifist beliefs prompted him to forbid Smith or other attachés to appear in uniform when they attended official ceremonies together, she declared: “I have seldom met a man for whom I developed so much contempt.”

  Dodd hardly deserved that level of opprobrium. And as his biographer Robert Dallek and others have pointed out, it would be impossible to argue convincingly that a different ambassador, no matter how skillful, could have produced better results. But Dodd’s final period in Berlin was marked by his acute sense of disappointment—and the knowledge that many of the people he worked with were disappointed in him. By the end of 1936, he was considering resigning again—and openly saying that “four years’ service is enough.” After a two-and-a-half-month visit to the United States to deal with his deteriorating health, he returned to Germany in late October 1937. “In Berlin once more,” he wrote in his diary on October 29. “What can I do?”

  But when it really came time to leave, Dodd changed his mind, arguing that his term should be extended. By then, Roosevelt was no longer in sympathy with the envoy he had dispatched to Berlin in 1933, still hoping the new regime might be influenced by a convinced democrat like the historian from the University of Chicago. On one initiative of his envoy, the president was even in basic agreement with Hitler: neither leader had the least patience for Dodd’s push for a new world peace conference.

  Dodd left Berlin for the last time on December 29, 1937, nurturing a sense of grievance that, in the end, he was forced to resign sooner than he wanted to. “There were and are still officials in the State Department who do not like me or the things I stand for,” he wrote. After retiring to his farm in Virginia, his physical condition kept declining. When World War II broke out, the man who was often labeled a pacifist wrote to Roosevelt: “Hitler intends to conquer the whole world. If we do not join England and France, we shall have a hard time.” He died on February 9, 1940, at the age of seventy, long before his country joined the fight.

  Dodd hadn’t left Berlin alone; his family went with him. That, of course, included his daughter Martha, whose conversion to a new cause had prompted her to take some
extraordinary actions during the latter part of her stay in Berlin. Although Boris Vinogradov, her lover, was recalled to Moscow, she arranged to meet him there and in Paris—and, when he was transferred to the Soviet Embassy in Warsaw, she visited him there as well. But it wasn’t only romance that kept her connected to the Soviet regime. In the memoir she wrote of her Berlin days, she discreetly commented: “The Russians of the Embassy in Berlin were, on the whole, charming people—natural, informal, sprightly and clever.”

  One of the charming people was an agent named Bukhartsev, the Berlin correspondent for the Soviet daily Izvestia. By most accounts, he took over from Vinogradov as her handler for the NKVD, the Soviet secret police and spy agency. According to a NKVD memo, “Martha argues that she is a convinced partisan of the Communist Party and the USSR.” In January 1936, Bukhartsev reported that he had met with Martha several times and that she “frankly expressed her willingness to help the Soviet Embassy with her information. Now she is studying hard the theory of communism [and] ‘Matters of Leninism’ by Stalin. Her teacher is [Arvid] Harnack to whom she goes often.”

  Harnack was the German husband of Mildred Harnack, Martha’s American friend, a teacher who had also enlisted in the Communist cause. Like Martha, Mildred had to be careful to hide her allegiances in Germany—but, unlike the daughter of the ambassador, she would remain in Berlin, with fateful consequences.

  Although Martha was hardly a patient, faithful lover, she still had her heart set on Vinogradov. On March 14, 1937, she petitioned the Soviet government, saying “we have agreed to ask official permission to marry.” Two weeks later in Moscow, she met with the head of the NKVD’s Foreign Department, Abram Slutsky. At his request, she prepared a statement elaborating on her willingness to serve the Kremlin: “It goes without saying that my services of any kind and at any time are proposed to the party for use at its discretion. Currently, I have access mainly to the personal, confidential correspondence of my father with the U.S. State Department and the U.S. President.” It was clear her father had no idea what she was doing.

  Then she switched course in her statement, pointing out that she had lost almost all personal connections with German society, and that her extensive diplomatic contacts yielded meager results. In other words, her usefulness was ending in Berlin. “Is the information which I get from my father, who is hated in Germany and who occupies an isolated position among foreign diplomats and therefore has no access to any secret information, important enough for me to remain in Germany?” she asked rhetorically. “Couldn’t I conduct more valuable work in America or in some European organization such as the International Conference for Peace… ?”

  She also noted that, while she was trying to get her father’s tour in Berlin extended, it was likely to end soon. With that in mind, she was positioning herself to help Moscow elsewhere. And, at the same time, she clearly hoped that might still bring her and Vinogradov back together.

  But after the Dodds returned to the United States, Vinogradov was recalled to Moscow from Warsaw. It was 1938, and Stalin’s purges were at their height. Among the prime targets: anyone who had contacts with foreigners. It made no difference if that person was carrying out direct orders from Moscow. Martha’s lover was arrested. Not knowing his fate, Martha responded to a letter he wrote to her at the NKVD’s behest. She wrote back in a jaunty tone on July 9. “Boris, dear! Finally I got your letter… Are you happy? Did you find a girl you can love instead of me?” she asked. Then she added: “You haven’t had time yet to know that I really got married. On June 16, I married an American whom I love very much.”

  Vinogradov never read that letter. Before it arrived, he was executed.

  9

  “Uniforms and Guns”

  In the summer of 1936, just after graduating from Tulane University in New Orleans, Howard K. Smith was working at a local newspaper, earning $15 a week, when lightning struck: he won $100 for a short story he had written. Feeling flush but still savvy enough to calculate where his windfall would support him the longest, he decided to go to Germany. At that moment, Germany was the cheapest country in Europe for an American, he noted. His young friends in New Orleans, none of whom could afford such a voyage, had often discussed what the new regime in Germany represented, “whether it was workable, if it afforded solutions to problems we had in America,” as Smith recalled. In essence, he explained, they were asking: “Was Nazi Germany a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?”

  While their liberal arts education made Smith and his friends inclined to disapprove of dictatorships, the Great Depression had shaken many core beliefs, and they felt that everything was debatable. Thus, Smith embarked on what he dubbed his “fact-finding” journey with an open mind. “Like a political Descartes, I tried to wash all preconceptions and prejudices out of my mind,” he declared. Hiring himself out as a deckhand on a cargo ship crossing the Atlantic, he experienced a common reaction to his first glimpses of the country he had set out to examine. “Germany captivated me before I set foot inside it,” he wrote. “Crawling up the Weser from Bremerhaven, we passed one fancy-tickling miniature town after another, all spotless with rows of toy houses and big, sunny beer gardens along the river bank.”

  Looking back at his first exposure to Nazi Germany, Smith, who would much later become a famed TV anchor back home, reported not just on the country but on how his reactions to it changed over time. Based on the evolution of his thinking during what turned into a nearly six-year sojourn in Germany, most of it as a junior reporter for United Press, Smith developed a theory about how Americans and other foreigners tended to evolve in their thinking about that country. He broke the process down into four stages:

  “On first glance, Germany was overwhelmingly attractive, and first impressions disarmed many a hardy anti-Nazi before he could lift his lance for attack,” he wrote. “Germany was clean, it was neat, a truly handsome land. Its big cities were cleaner than big cities ought, by custom, to be… The impression was one of order, cleanliness and prosperity—and this has been of immense propaganda value to the Nazis.” On what he called “my first magic day in Bremen,” a dockworker pointed out to him that Germans were “neat, clean and able to do an amazing lot with amazingly little long before Hitler came to power.” The clear message was that visitors were wrong to credit all of what they saw to the new regime.

  But, in most cases, they did exactly that. Some visitors never got beyond this stage, which, according to Smith, “bespeaks the sensitivity of a rhinoceros’s hide and the profundity of a tea-saucer.” He mentioned a group of American schoolgirls he saw in Heidelberg as perfect examples. “The principal obstacle in the way of their further progress was, I think, the fact that German men are handsome and wear uniforms.”

  During stage two, the most noticeable characteristic of Nazi Germany was “uniforms and guns; the amazing extent to which Germany, even then, was prepared for war. It took my breath away.” The proliferation of men in uniforms—homo militaris, as Smith put it—suddenly transformed Nazi rearmament into a concrete reality. But visitors at stage two were titillated by what they observed. “Or, more than that, it was downright exciting,” Smith admitted. He watched from a window in Nuremberg “a broad undulating river of ten, twenty thousand men in uniform, stamping in unison down the cobble-stone streets below, flooding the valley between the houses with a marching song so loud the windows rattled, and so compelling your very heart adopted its military rhythm.”

  As the mesmerizing spectacles of militarism began to loosen their hold, Smith continued, many visitors would progress to stage three, which was less passive and involved coming to some unnerving conclusions. “You began to grasp that what was happening was that young humans, millions of them, were being trained to act merely upon reflexes,” he wrote. All this drilling was aimed at teaching them “to kill, as a reflex… On terse commands which altered their personalities more neatly than Doctor Jekyll became Mr. Hyde, they were learning to smash, crush, destroy, wreck.”

  The ne
xt level was characterized by “a strange, stark terror.” Those who reached stage four were often overcome with alarm that the rest of the world had no idea what was rising to confront them; they also feared that the unsuspecting outsiders would be no match for the dark forces unleashed in Germany. Once he reached that stage, Smith fretted that the Nazis were “a real, direct and imminent threat to the existence of a civilization which gathers facts and discusses.” The democratic world, for all its admirable qualities, was weak, while Hitler’s world was “mighty, powerful, reckless. It screamed defiance at my world from the housetops. One had to be deaf not to hear it.”

  Smith pointed out that some people made the journey from stage one to stage four in as little as a week. Others remained stuck at stage one or two. And still others got to stage three but didn’t necessarily make it to stage four.

  Of course, Americans who made only short visits to Germany often failed to get beyond stage one or two—at least, during their actual journeys. Like many wealthy undergraduates, John F. Kennedy took off for Europe in the summer of 1937 after his freshman year at Harvard. Traveling with his friend LeMoyne Billings, he drove around France and Italy before spending five days in Germany, accompanied by a young German woman—“a bundle of fun,” as Kennedy put it—whom they had apparently picked up at the border.

  Kennedy’s cryptic diary entries suggest the American visitors came across as somewhat rowdy. The morning after they went to a Munich nightclub “which was a bit different,” he noted that at the Pension Bristol where they stayed there was “the usual amount of cursing and being told we were not gentlemen.” In an entry marked Nuremberg-Württemberg, he wrote: “Started out as usual except this time we had the added attraction of being spitten [sic] on.”