Hitlerland

by Andrew Nagorski

  Once the German leader successfully pulled off the Munich Pact, however, the situation changed radically. France and Britain had caved to Hitler’s demands for the Sudetenland, marking the apogee of the policy of appeasement and setting the stage for the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia that would culminate in the German takeover of what was left of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939. As Field Marshal Erich von Manstein explained after the war: “We had watched Germany’s precarious course along the razor’s edge to date with close attention and were increasingly amazed at Hitler’s luck in attaining—hitherto without recourse to arms—all his overt and covert political aims. The man seemed to have an infallible instinct.”

  But if Munich eliminated any chance of a revolt of Hitler’s military brass prior to World War II, Ambassador Wilson—like Britain’s Chamberlain and France’s Daladier, who had signed onto the ignominious pact—viewed the outcome there as a step toward sanity. In a letter that he wrote to Secretary Hull soon after, which for an unexplained reason he never mailed, Wilson drew a contrast between “the spontaneous outburst of joy, relief and hope for the future” that greeted news of the Munich Pact in Western Europe with the “rather reluctant appreciation given in the press of our country.”

  His judgment on which reaction was more justified came through loud and clear. The British and the French, he wrote, “have perhaps a deeper knowledge and appreciation of the problems of Europe than the American people, remote from Europe, can have… it is far easier to be dogmatic in one’s judgments with a wide stretch of sea between our country and a possible enemy.” According to Beam, Wilson wrote to “his British colleague”—presumably that country’s ambassador in Berlin—about the “stout piece of work” he had done to help produce the Munich Pact.

  Roosevelt had sounded a similar note when he had congratulated Chamberlain on the “peace” deal. But at the very least, there was a growing awareness in Washington that the pact had come at a very high price. Writing in his diary on September 28, Jay Pierrepont Moffat, the State Department’s chief of the Division of European Affairs, noted: “I do think the chances of preserving the peace have immeasurably improved but it likewise is difficult for me to see how this can be done except at the expense of Czechoslovakia.”

  Beam, who returned to the United States on home leave in October, found Washington’s mood to be “completely different” from the one that was predominating in diplomatic circles in Berlin. “There was a general sense of outrage over the Austrian take-over, as high-lighted by the plight of resident Jews, as well as over the Nazis’ unopposed and clearly predestined subjugation of Czechoslovakia,” he recalled. At a meeting he attended with Hull, the secretary of state “vented his frustration in Biblical predictions of impending European disaster.”

  It wasn’t just many Americans back home who took a different view. So did some of the Americans reporting from Germany, most notably Shirer, who was back in Berlin as Hitler pushed Europe to the brink. Sitting in the balcony just above Hitler as the dictator issued his demands in a speech on September 26, Shirer recorded in his diary: “He’s still got that nervous tic. All during his speech he kept cocking his shoulder, and the opposite leg from the knee down would bounce up. Audience couldn’t see it, but I could.” Shirer added that “for the first time in all the years I’ve observed him he seemed tonight to have completely lost control of himself.”

  Shirer had been hoping all along that the Czechs would fight, even if the British and the French wanted to convince them otherwise. “For if they do, then there’s a European war, and Hitler can’t win it,” he wrote in his diary on September 19. When the appeasement deal was struck, Shirer was practically sickened by the cheers for peace—“a curious commentary on this sick, decadent continent,” he wrote. And he observed the physical change in the German leader. “How different Hitler at two this morning… I noticed his swagger. The tic was gone!”

  Shirer understood that Hitler had been allowed to score a victory that, far from ensuring “peace for our time” as Chamberlain famously claimed, would have disastrous consequences. His gloom only deepened for another reason: Max Jordan of NBC managed to air the text of the Munich Pact an hour before Shirer did. For the CBS man, this amounted, in his own words, to “one of the worst beatings I’ve ever taken.”

  Angus Thuermer was another young American who was eager to explore Hitler’s Germany, arriving there in 1938. After he graduated from the University of Illinois, his father had suggested that he should spend six months studying German in Berlin, and then six months studying French in Paris. “He was giving me an extra year of college,” Thuermer recalled, looking back at that life-changing experience more than seven decades later. But instead of going on to France, he stayed in Germany, not only studying the language but also picking up work from American correspondents there. Soon, he was offered a full-time job for the Associated Press, working under bureau chief Louis Lochner right up until the United States entered World War II in December 1941.

  While he was still living in Hegel Haus, a dormitory for foreign students in Berlin, in late 1938, Thuermer took a trip to Munich, eager to see the Nazis’ annual observance of “The Ninth of November”—the anniversary of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch when sixteen members of the movement were killed. Arriving in that city, Thuermer met a young American missionary who spoke fluent German and managed to convince an SS man to admit the two of them to the VIP grandstand so that they could see how the “martyrs” were honored. (The SS man didn’t know the American was a missionary.) As a result, Thuermer had a clear view of the procession of Nazi luminaries, which included Goebbels, Hess, Himmler, Goering and Hitler.

  “Loose as the formation was, in the midst of his Brownshirt chums, Hitler, the Leader, walked just slightly apart,” Thuermer wrote in his unpublished memoir. “By his stature, his gait, the cut of his jib, a sailor would say, he was not impressive. If I had not known for whom to look, I might have passed him by in a general glance over the group.”

  But the ceremony itself was solemn and, for the party faithful, moving. A man carried “the Blood Banner” in front of the leaders. “The configuration was reminiscent of the acolyte carrying the cross up the nave of the church,” Thuermer noted. Every 50 yards or so, there was a 20-foot-high bright red temporary obelisk bearing the name of one of “the fallen.” When they reached Königsplatz, two white stone mausoleums, each containing eight bronze coffins, were flanked by hundreds of motionless SS men. As a speaker called out the names on the coffins, the SS men answered in unison “Hier!” The ceremony ended with the “Horst Wessel Song,” the Nazi anthem that, as Thuermer put it, was “a genuine rouser.”

  It included the words: “Comrades shot by the red front and reactionaries march in spirit in our ranks.”

  Once the ceremony was over, Thuermer bought himself a third-class ticket and boarded the overnight train to Berlin, stowing his bicycle in the baggage car. Lulled to sleep in the train, he had no idea what was happening that night around the country. Arriving in the capital, he retrieved his bike and rode from the station to Hegel Haus, hoping to make it in time to get a cheap breakfast there. Suddenly, he heard “the smash and tinkle of breaking glass.” Applying his hand brake, he saw a shattered show window just ahead of him. Unbeknownst to him, he was witnessing part of what would be called Kristallnacht. Although most of the violence had taken place during the early morning hours, he saw thugs with Nazi armbands still smashing shop windows, and someone inside the store breaking a grand piano to pieces. He saw a typewriter come flying out of another window and land on Unter den Linden—“one of the great avenues of Western Europe.”

  After a brief stop at Hegel Haus, Thuermer and a Dutch student rode their bicycles around the city to see more. Down one street, they saw smoke from a burning synagogue, but they decided not to risk getting closer, fearing they would be arrested. “I was seeing, eye-witnessing an unreal frenzy… it was the n-th power of what I had seen at Nazi rallies,” he recalled. “That was sound.
This was fury.” Since Jewish shops had the names of their owners written in white paint on the front window, they were easy to spot. Thuermer saw one shop with a new sign announcing THIS SHOP IS BEING PURCHASED BY AN ARYAN. Later that same day, the sign was changed to this HAS BEEN PURCHASED BY AN ARYAN. The unmistakable message: it should no longer be targeted.

  Eager to see as much as possible, Thuermer and an English student took buses to other parts of the city. While they stopped to observe the spectacle, the locals were doing just the opposite at first. “The citizens were just walking along staring straight ahead, pretending they didn’t know what was happening,” he said. By the afternoon, though, crowds were no longer pretending; they watched the destruction in the areas with the most Jewish shops. Some of those who were continuing to smash at will were boys in their teens; others were grown men. Very few police were in sight. As Thuermer observed, “Those who were there were uncharacteristically unobtrusive, obviously following orders not to interfere with the rowdy Brownshirts.”

  Thuermer offered two possible explanations for the lack of any opposition to this orgy of anti-Semitic violence: most Germans, by this time, “believed in it all” when it came to Nazi ideology; or they were too frightened to say anything. “By the autumn of 1938 everyone knew what happened to opponents of the regime,” he wrote.

  Other Americans also witnessed Kristallnacht and felt its consequences. Charles Thayer, a diplomat assigned to the Berlin consulate, heard horror stories from all around the city. One of his friends witnessed how Nazis threw a small boy from a second-floor window into a mob below. “His leg broken, the boy tried to crawl on hands and knees through the forest of kicking black boots until my friend plunged into the mob and rescued him,” he recounted. While synagogues burned, the thugs ransacked Jewish-owned department stores. At Wertheim, they pushed grand pianos off the gallery level so that they would smash to pieces on the main floor six floors down.

  As the violence continued for two days, the American consulate’s staff had to duck in and out of the building through the fire escape in the back because, in the front, panicked Jews blocked the entrance as they tried to get in. “All day long Kempinskis, Wertheims, Rosenthals, some of the oldest and most famous names in Berlin, trembled in front of our desks, pleading for visas or passports—anything to save them from the madness that had seized the city,” Thayer recalled. His small apartment, he added, “was crammed with Jewish families seeking refuge until the storm subsided.”

  Thayer appeared to be more generous than Thuermer in his assessment of the reaction of ordinary Berliners to those events, explaining that “the many Berliners who were neither Nazis nor Jews stood by looking aghast and ashamed but helpless at the sordid spectacle.” Still, after the war he confessed that he had a less forgiving attitude than that. During the heavy Allied bombing raids on German cities, especially those with historic Old Towns like Hamburg, he wondered whether the destruction was really necessary. “But for Berlin I seldom felt a qualm,” he wrote.

  “That ugly old city, it seemed to me, had been the seat of too much evil to deserve either remorse or sorrow when it was smashed to pieces like the pianos at Wertheims.”

  For all the shattered glass, however, it still remained possible for American visitors to come to Germany and miss much of what was happening around them. Phillips Talbot, who had studied along with Thuermer at the University of Illinois and would become a well-known Asian specialist and diplomat, visited Berlin soon after Kristallnacht. He had been a cub reporter for the Chicago Daily News and was invited by Wallace Deuel, its Berlin correspondent, to stay in his apartment. Talbot met up with Thuermer, who pointed out the evidence of what had just transpired. “Do you see that?” he asked, pointing to a second-story shattered window on the Kurfürstendamm. “I watched them break that one on the big night.”

  Speaking about his brief experience in Germany long afterward, Talbot admitted that if it hadn’t been for what he learned from Thuermer and Deuel, he could have easily missed much of what was happening. And he still came away with, at the very least, mixed impressions. “Measured by efficiency, it [Germany] didn’t look bad,” he recalled. In a letter dated December 27, 1938, written shortly after his German visit, he wrote: “But it would be unfair to mention the evidences of the anti-Jewish campaign without some of the other things I saw.” He listed “the physical results of Nazism… the super-roads, the busy slum clearance and new housing, the bridges and public buildings,” which “all give the country a flavor of newness.” He did add, though, that “some of the stories of methods told by people who should have no ax to grind are chilling.”

  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.