Hitlerland

by Andrew Nagorski

  Despite all those daily inconveniences, it was still relatively easy to overlook the fact that the war was on since the fighting was taking place elsewhere. On a visit to Hamburg about a month into the war, Kennan was making his way back to his lodgings one evening when a woman emerged from a street corner and said cheerfully: “Shan’t we go somewhere?” Kennan indicated he wasn’t interested in her services but he’d buy her a drink—and pay her what she normally charged for more than that. At her favorite bar, she told him her story: that she had a daytime job packing parcels, where the pay was bad but it was her way of avoiding the roundups of street girls who were sent to labor camps; that she was engaged to an army flyer who was on duty in Poland, “a complete egoist” who treated her badly; and that she made her real money on the streets at night—of course, unbeknownst to him.

  There was nothing all that extraordinary in her story, and nothing all that unusual that Kennan would find it intriguing to talk to a fairly sophisticated streetwalker. He may have been destined for a distinguished career as a diplomat and scholar, but he was still a young man at the time. The most memorable part of his encounter, though, was what was left unsaid. “It was only after I got home it occurred to me that neither of us had mentioned the war,” he wrote.

  Among top Nazi leaders, the mood was one of growing confidence that events were moving their way. At the Soviet Embassy’s November 7 reception to celebrate the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, a group of American correspondents chatted with Goering as he stood at the buffet drinking a beer and smoking a cigar. Shirer, who was part of this group, had thought the Luftwaffe commander might be upset with America’s increasingly open support for Britain and growing talk of supplying that country with large numbers of airplanes.

  But Goering was in an expansive, jovial mood. “If we could only make planes at your rate of production we should be very weak,” he declared. “I mean that seriously. Your planes are good, but you don’t make enough of them fast enough.” He added that “one day you’ll see who has been building the best and the most planes.”

  When the Americans asked why German planes had only attacked British warships, he replied that they were important targets and “give us good practice.”

  “Are you going to begin bombing enemy ports?” the Americans persisted.

  “We’re humane,” Goering responded. Shirer and the others couldn’t help laughing. “You shouldn’t laugh,” he admonished them. “I’m serious. I am humane.”

  In less official settings, Americans in Berlin were surprised to discover occasional flashes of genuine wartime humor. Harsch, the newcomer from the Christian Science Monitor, heard one story that was making the rounds of a working-class neighborhood. According to the joke, a disguised Hitler goes to a beer hall and asks the proprietor what people really think of Der Führer. The proprietor leans forward and whispers to him: “I couldn’t afford to have any of my customers hear me say it, but I, personally, don’t think he’s so bad.”

  As the American reporters and diplomats learned, many Germans were also listening to foreign radio stations, despite the fact that this was strictly forbidden. Russell estimated that 60 to 70 percent did so in secret, and he noticed that the stores sold out all their old-fashioned radio headphones during the first week of the war. While his estimate was probably high, he encountered enough Germans who signaled their reservations about Hitler and the war, however obliquely, that he was hesitant to make sweeping judgments about the national mood.

  “If the United States goes into this war, there is one thing I do not want to forget,” he wrote. “There are millions of people in Germany who do not agree with the policies of their leaders. And there are other millions, simple people, who believe exactly what their leaders tell them—especially when they tell them the same thing day after day. I do not want to go blind with hatred and forget that.” Kennan echoed those sentiments. “It was hard to associate oneself with much of the American press and of Washington officialdom in picturing the German people as a mass of inhuman monsters, solidly behind Hitler and consumed with a demonic enthusiasm for the ruin and enslavement of the rest of Europe,” he wrote in his memoirs.

  Even Shirer, who was far less forgiving, was encouraged by the occasional encounter with a German who represented the kind of free thinking that had until recently flourished in that country. In January 1940, he met with a woman in Berlin to give her some provisions he had brought for her from her relatives abroad. He described her as “the most intelligent German female I have met in ages.” She bemoaned her countrymen’s slavish obedience to authority, and their willingness to follow its Nazi leaders, who represented the barbarian impulses that always lurked below the surface. She saw those rulers as intent on destroying Western civilization and its values, despite the contribution of so many Germans to the development of that civilization.

  It was a recipe for self-destruction, she explained to Shirer, the result of an unwillingness or inability of her countrymen to think and act for themselves. “A German will think he has died a good German if he waits at a curb at a red light, and then crosses on a green one though he knows perfectly well that a truck, against the law though it may be, is bearing down upon him to crush him to death.”

  The American diplomats and correspondents continued to live, as the consular clerk Russell put it, “isolated on our island in the middle of Berlin.” He attributed the gas rationing for embassy employees less to wartime shortages than to the desire of the Nazis to limit the mobility of the Americans in their midst. The authorities also tapped their phones and didn’t mind that the Americans realized it, since this was meant to make them cautious in contacts with Germans.

  Rationing for the general population kept getting stricter, with everything from toilet paper to shoelaces disappearing, and stores began putting up small signs proclaiming GOODS DISPLAYED IN THE WINDOWS ARE NOT FOR SALE. But most Americans lived in a parallel universe. On Thanksgiving Day 1939, when the war was into its third month, Kirk, the embassy’s senior diplomat, invited a contingent of his countrymen in Berlin for the customary afternoon meal. “A hundred or so hungry Americans charged into several turkeys assembled on the buffet table,” Shirer noted in his diary.

  The CBS correspondent then went on to a dinner at the home of Dorothy and Fred Oechsner, the United Press manager in Berlin, where Shirer tucked into another turkey. He was so thrilled by the whipped cream on the pumpkin pie that he talked Dorothy into going to the broadcast studio at midnight to explain to listeners back home how she had used “a new-fangled machine” to extract the cream from butter.

  Despite their unique circumstances, the Americans did get around, and the diplomats in particular were constantly contacted by those seeking their help. As Christmas approached, Russell reported, “embarrassingly large baskets of food, wine, champagne and delicacies of all sorts in Berlin were delivered to our residences.” Those who still had the means to put together those kinds of packages never included a card identifying themselves, but usually in a short time they would send a letter to the recipient asking for help. At the end of the letter, the supplicant would inquire whether the Christmas present had arrived safely—and then would sign with his or her full name and address. Other visa applicants offered bribes of money to the Americans right in the consulate, although trying to do so secretly and using “veiled language.”

  In January 1940, as a bitter cold winter set in, the Americans flooded the tennis court in the back of the embassy, turning it into an ice-skating rink. But for all their amenities, including shipments of warm winter clothes from Denmark, they were in close enough contact with life around them to dismiss reports back home about the desperate conditions of most Germans and the possibility that this could bring down the Nazi regime.

  To be sure, the privations of the war were making themselves felt, and Kennan was struck by the “unmistakable inner detachment of the people from the pretentious purposes of the regime.” But he also remarked on “the way life wen
t on, as best it could, under the growing difficulties of wartime discipline.” Russell reported a similar lack of enthusiasm for the war, adding: “But here Germany was, right before my eyes, working and living and going strong.” In other words, the speculation back in the United States that the Germans were prepared to rise up in revolt was nothing more than wishful thinking.

  As the embassy staffers arranged the paperwork for numerous Americans who had surfaced to make arrangements to return home in those first months of the war, their island felt lonelier than before. And they weren’t completely immune to the deteriorating living conditions. By January, hot water was usually no longer available in their apartments, prompting the embassy to put in two tin bathtubs on the building’s upper floor, one for women and one for men.

  Late in January, Russell was invited to lunch at the apartment of Consul Richard Stratton, where he met Jane Dyer, whose brother was also working at the embassy. She was up for a visit from Rome, where she was studying music, but her real home was Alabama. “I never expected to be so far away from home in my life,” she proclaimed in a husky voice with a thick southern accent that instantly charmed Russell, who had grown up in neighboring Mississippi. After lunch, they played records, and Russell danced with her. All of which made for a lovely afternoon. Toward the end of it, Dyer asked: “Is Germany really at war? I mean, I haven’t seen anything to remind me of war. Everything is the same as it always was.”

  It was Stratton who replied. “You don’t feel anything yet. Just like those children playing out in the street. They don’t feel the war either—yet. But the time will come when war will come home to all of us—to Americans, Russians, Africans, children and unborn babies. I think so, anyway.”

  The party was over, and Dyer and Russell pondered his words in silence.

  11

  Feeding the Squirrels

  William Russell had announced his plans to leave Berlin during that first winter of the war. His supervisors in the consular section offered to try to get him a raise and a new title, but he knew that he was at a disadvantage because he had been hired directly by the embassy after he had studied German at the University of Berlin. The foreign service liked to reward those who rose through the normal channels, starting in Washington and then going to their first assignments abroad. Besides, he wanted to try his luck as a writer, and he already had penned much of the manuscript of the book that he would publish in 1941 with the title Berlin Embassy. It was a vivid account of his experiences there, providing Americans with the kind of personal insights that were often missing from news reports.

  On April 10, 1940, three days before his scheduled departure, Russell was sitting in his parked car in the back of the embassy with a German girlfriend. “We had not gone there to spoon, but to listen to the automobile radio,” the young clerk recalled somewhat defensively. The morning newspapers had been filled with what he called the “sickening news” that German troops had moved into Denmark and Norway. On the radio, Goebbels was reading the ultimatums that were delivered to the Nazis’ next victims, claiming that Germany had “no territorial ambitions” against them and that “neither of these two countries will be used as a base for operations against the enemy.”

  Russell started to make a sarcastic comment, but then he saw that his girlfriend had tears in her eyes. “That hateful damn liar!” she exclaimed. “That hateful damn liar!”

  For Russell, this was one of the final reminders that not all Germans were marching in lockstep behind Hitler. Before driving off three days later, he said good-bye to a long list of acquaintances from his three-year sojourn in Berlin—“Americans, Germans, Nazis, anti-Nazis, rich, poor, intellectuals, bums,” as he put it. Reaching Innsbruck, he was summoned to Gestapo headquarters ostensibly for questioning about his car’s papers. They also searched his car, leaving his manuscript strewn about—but still intact.

  He drove on to Italy. At the border, a fat customs official couldn’t have been friendlier as he stamped his passport. “Now, why do you want to leave Germany, young man? You liked our country, didn’t you?” When Russell reflexively assented, he added: “You come back when we have peace, eh?”

  Germany had been exciting, even pleasant at times, for the young man from Mississippi, but Russell found it hard to imagine a peaceful continent anytime soon. When he was sitting in his car with his girlfriend in Berlin, he had concluded that Hitler “had embarked on a course from which there could be no turning back.” Looking back at the steep hills behind him as he crossed into Italy, he was stripped of all illusions. “Not a gun to be seen, not a building, not a soldier,” he wrote. “Yet I knew those woods were teeming with soldiers, bristling with guns.”

  Many American officials had come to much the same conclusion even before the Germans occupied Denmark and Norway. But there was still often far too much wishful thinking about Germany in the United States, particularly when it came to imagining that internal discontent spurred by shortages might topple Hitler’s regime and limit its military reach. Jacob Beam visited Washington during that first winter of the war and indicated that he had been treated like a social pariah for warning about how powerful Germany had become. “The last thing Washington upper circles wanted to be told was the truth, that Hitler controlled the world’s most efficient war machine,” his friend Joseph Harsch concluded.

  The young diplomat told Harsch and other American reporters that they hadn’t succeeded in conveying to their readers the extent of Germany’s frightening might. “Jake Beam found himself being accused of being pro-Nazi when he tried to tell people in Washington that the German tanks were not immobilized from lack of oil and grease,” Harsch added. Like Truman Smith, the military attaché who had concluded his final tour in Berlin in April 1939 after providing a steady stream of incisive intelligence reports about Germany’s rapid militarization, Beam learned that bad news was often greeted with suspicion about the motives of the person who delivered it.

  Smith, of course, had been the first American diplomat to meet Hitler, back in 1922. At the beginning of March 1940, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles was the last one to do so. He went to Europe on what he described as a fact-finding mission, without the power to negotiate—or, more important, to threaten the use of force if Hitler didn’t back down. “Only one thing could have deflected Hitler from his purpose: the sure knowledge that the power of the United States would be directed against him if he attempted to carry out his intention of conquering the world by force,” Welles wrote in his memoir. Facing strong pressure from isolationists to stay out of the war in Europe, the Roosevelt Administration wasn’t about to let its envoy suggest anything like that.

  Welles knew Berlin from an earlier era. Arriving on the morning of March 1, he got an immediate introduction to the new Berlin as he was driven from the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof to the Adlon Hotel. Along Unter den Linden, the city’s premier boulevard, armed guards stood watch as Polish prisoners shoveled snow from the streets. On the same day, he met with Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, accompanied by Alexander Kirk. The chargé d’affaires had been cut off from direct contacts at that level because of the Nazi regime’s irritation that Roosevelt had ordered Ambassador Wilson back to Washington after Kristallnacht, so Kirk was pleased to get in the door. But the meeting was a complete disappointment.

  Welles suffered through three hours of “pomposity and absurdity” and “an amazing conglomeration of misinformation and deliberate lies,” he recalled. The foreign minister, he wrote, had “a very stupid mind.” Because he didn’t want to do anything that might jeopardize his appointment with Hitler the next day, the envoy from Washington offered only the most cautious responses to Ribbentrop’s propagandistic monologue.

  At eleven the next morning, Welles was escorted into Hitler’s new Chancellery, which he considered “a monstrous edifice” with the feel of a modern factory. Hitler was cordial but formal as he met him, and he struck Welles as taller than he expected. “He had in real life none of the ludicrous featur
es so often shown in his photographs,” Welles noted. “He seemed in excellent physical condition and in good training… He was dignified, both in speech and in movement.”

  But if Welles may have been unduly impressed by the contrast between Hitler in real life and the numerous caricatures of him in the West—certainly “excellent physical condition” wasn’t a term even his aides employed—the American diplomat was coolly analytical about his message. The German leader claimed to want peace with England and to have spread German rule only where it was absolutely necessary. “I did not want this war,” he insisted. “It has been forced upon me against my will. It is a waste of my time. My life should have been spent in constructing and not in destroying.”

  Predictably, those protestations were accompanied by new threats. Hitler warned against trying to make a distinction between the Nazis and the German people, insisting that he had “the support of every German.” Then he added: “I can see no hope for the establishment of any lasting peace until the will of England and France to destroy Germany is itself destroyed. I feel that there is no way by which the will to destroy Germany can itself be destroyed except through a complete German victory.”

  Winding up, Hitler once again claimed that he only wanted “lasting peace.” But if anything, his entire performance had the opposite effect upon his guest. “I remember thinking to myself as I got into the car that it was only too tragically plain that all decisions had already been made,” Welles recalled. “The best that could be hoped for was delay, for what little that might be worth.”