Hitlerland

by Andrew Nagorski

  From its early days, the Nazi Party made a show of raw virility. “I have seen the sex instinct deliberately aroused in many ways,” Schultz wrote. “At mass meetings, speeches dwelling on the copulative process of the Nazi male would send the Storm Troopers marching out of the hall all set for a demonstration. They never had to wait long for a partner. German women would wait outside the meeting places.” With Hitler intent on boosting the birth rate, newsstands displayed “books and magazines filled with nude men and women,” as the CBS newcomer Flannery observed. “It was plain that Nazi Germany planned all this to but one end.”

  With more and more men serving far from home and, especially after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, dying there, the authorities stepped up their campaign for more births, whatever a woman’s marital status. “The word illegitimate must be blotted out of the German language,” Minister of Labor Robert Ley declared. Flannery reported that women who felt they needed more social respectability could legally take the name of a soldier who had died in battle. While Nazi propagandists claimed that unwed mothers were giving birth to children of “young German heroes,” Schultz pointed out that the real fathers were often “the married bosses of little secretaries, filing clerks and saleswomen.” This created a class of women “who clung to Nazism because the Nazi Party would protect their illegitimate children,” she added.

  The American reporters began to notice a parallel trend: the disappearance of those who were deemed physically or mentally unfit. In a broadcast on December 11, 1940, Flannery mentioned a German claim that British bombers had hit a nursing home in southwestern Germany. When Hitler added in a speech that the British were targeting German hospitals, he concluded that all of this was a cover-up for “their murder of the insane, crippled, hopelessly ill, even aged.”

  Flannery learned of a young man in Leipzig who had become suspicious of a proliferation of death notices that contained the phrase “After weeks of uncertainty we received the unbelievable news of his death and cremation.” The young man called on some of the families, discovering that in each case the dead person had been confined to an institution. Flannery inquired about all those death notices with identical wording, but Nazi officials denied that any murders were taking place. Indirect confirmation came in another form: subsequent death notices avoided such telltale phrases.

  When Flannery was first assigned to Berlin in October 1940, he was hardly a fervent anti-Nazi. “I was one of those people who were known as ‘open-minded,’ who did not believe that Nazi Germany was necessarily a threat to the United States, who believed it was at least possible that we might do business with Hitler,” he recalled. After his first couple of months in Hitlerland, he was becoming far less “open-minded.”

  While Flannery and many of his colleagues found it increasingly difficult to hide their growing abhorrence of Nazi practices, a few Americans lived in Berlin apart from their fellow countrymen for the opposite reason: they had signed up to work for German radio’s English-language broadcasts. They served as the Nazis’ American propagandists.

  In some cases, they appeared to be motivated by little more than opportunism. Edward Delaney was a failed actor who had bounced around various stage- and film-related jobs in Australia and South Africa, and also done a public relations stint for MGM based in Chicago. Casting about for something new, he went to Berlin in the summer of 1939 and met with Hans Schirmer of the Foreign Ministry. According to Delaney, Schirmer explained he was looking for someone who could broadcast “human interest” material about Germany “to counteract much adverse criticism by those who, for the most part, knew little or nothing about conditions in that part of Europe.”

  Delaney claimed that he was assured his job would not be connected to Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, but it was a flimsy distinction. The American left little doubt why he jumped at the opportunity. “The remuneration he [Schirmer] mentioned was acceptable,” he recalled. Soon he was denouncing the British for “wanton, premeditated murder” and Roosevelt for pushing the United States toward war. Later, he would justify his actions on the grounds that he was a de facto spokesman for America’s isolationist movement and a pioneer in warning about the dangers of Communism as opposed to Nazism. Shirer delivered his verdict on Delaney in his diary on September 26, 1940: “He has a diseased hatred for Jews, but otherwise is a mild fellow and broadcasts the cruder type of Nazi propaganda without questioning.”

  In his brief remarks about the American propagandists, Shirer called Frederick Kaltenbach “probably the best of the lot, actually believing in National Socialism with a sincere fanaticism and continually fighting the Nazi Party hacks when they don’t agree with him.” (Kaltenbach should not be confused with Hans V. Kaltenborn, the famous American radio broadcaster who had often visited Germany and interviewed Hitler.) In part, Shirer’s postwar novel The Traitor is based on Kaltenbach’s story, although his main character also shares the traits of some of the other American propagandists. The novel is much less compelling than Shirer’s nonfiction, particularly The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, but it provides intriguing testimony to his grim fascination with those Americans who had gone to the other side.

  Born in Dubuque, Iowa, in 1895, Kaltenbach was the son of a German butcher who had immigrated to the United States. As a teenager, he felt the pull of his father’s country of origin—and, along with his brother Adolph, he traveled around Germany just as World War I broke out in 1914. Although the German police arrested them on suspicion of spying on more than one occasion, Kaltenbach titled his diary chronicling their adventures Through the Fatherland on Bycycles. He would tell his Nazi employers later that this trip made him feel “swept by a powerful emotion” that led him to love both Germany and America, prompting him to want to promote good relations between the two.

  Back in Iowa, he became a teacher at Dubuque High School, but he was fired in 1933 after he set up a “hiking club” that was almost a straight copy of the Hitlerjugend, complete with brown shirts for uniforms. Following that episode, Kaltenbach returned to Germany, where he immediately became entranced by the country’s new rulers. On June 25, 1933, he sent a postcard to his family back home showing Hitler in uniform, his swastika armband prominently displayed, looking into the distance in what is meant to be a commanding pose. The caption read: “Reichskanzler ADOLF HITLER.” Kaltenbach’s handwriting was scrunched to squeeze into the small space, but his terse phrases conveyed his growing infatuation.

  Dear Folks:

  Here I am in the midst of things—Hot stuff, see all, hear all. About to view the Changing of the Guard. You should see the uniformed Nazi soldiers. Enjoying the night life too. Hotel costs me 65 cents per. Can get meals for 1 Mark. Sandwiches and drinks at automat for 2.5 cents. Shall see palaces, museums-zoo-movies-attend Nazi celebrations Spreewald-Potsdam-May go to Danzig-

  Love, Fritz

  Kaltenbach was one of the first Americans to work for German radio during the Third Reich. In his broadcasts addressed to “Dear Harry,” which stood for his supposed friends in Iowa, he urged his countrymen to open their eyes to the virtues of Hitler’s Germany.

  By contrast, Douglas Chandler was a latecomer among the Americans working for German radio, starting his broadcasts as “Paul Revere” in the spring of 1941. But he more than made up for that with his vitriol. “Roosevelt, himself an off-spring of Spanish Jews, is a mere tool of the Jewish conspiracy against all Nordic Aryans,” he declared. As a freelance journalist who had bounced around the continent with his wife, Laura, and two daughters, he had met up with Hanfstaengl and other Nazi propagandists in the early days of the new regime. In Berlin, he also visited U.S. military attaché Truman Smith and his wife, Kay, since they had known each other in New York in the mid-1920s. Kay claimed that Chandler had suffered a “nervous breakdown” after his initial career in finance collapsed along with the stock market in 1929.

  Kätchen, the Smiths’ daughter, still remembers a lunchtime visit of the Chandlers. She was struc
k by the appearances of their two young girls with “ponytails and dirndls, looking more German than the Germans.” Chandler told Kay he was thinking of getting German citizenship for himself and his family since he felt the United States was turning socialist. “I told him he was a great fool,” Kay recalled. It was a tense encounter, and later, when the Smiths were back in Washington, she heard “Paul Revere” on the radio and instantly recognized the voice of Douglas Chandler.

  Delaney, Kaltenbach and Chandler were three of the six Americans indicted in absentia for treason by a Washington, D.C., grand jury on July 26, 1943. A few months earlier, Delaney had left Berlin and his propaganda work behind, and moved to Slovakia, then Prague. At the end of the war, he was detained by the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps, released, detained and then released again. When he finally returned to the United States, he was arrested again but his indictment was dismissed, and for the rest of his life he claimed he had been persecuted because of his anti-Communist views. Kaltenbach wasn’t so lucky. Captured by the Red Army on July 14, 1945, he died in a Soviet camp in eastern Germany in October.

  Chandler’s wife, Laura, died in Berlin in 1942, and Douglas was captured by the Americans in Bavaria in May 1945. Sent back to the United States the following year, he was tried, convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. His daughter later wrote to Truman Smith asking him if he would testify on his behalf. “Truman wrote her he was sorry for her but that he could not testify on behalf of anyone who had betrayed his country,” Kay Smith recalled. But the loyal daughter kept lobbying for her father, appealing to President Kennedy in July 1963. On August 5, Kennedy commuted Chandler’s sentence. After his release, Chandler spent the final period of his life on Tenerife in the Canary Islands, leaving the country he had betrayed behind.

  It wasn’t just the American propagandists who were choosing sides in the rapidly escalating war. Mildred Harnack, who had grown up in Wisconsin and then met and married the German exchange student Arvid Harnack, had remained one of the closest American friends of Martha Dodd during her time in Berlin. Like Martha, she had become fascinated by the Soviet Union, seeing it as an alternative to the Nazi dictatorship she lived in. Even the Nazi-Soviet Pact didn’t seem to undermine her faith that Stalin’s system was a genuine alternative to Hitler’s. By the late 1930s, she and her husband were part of a loose network of resisters intent on doing what they could to undermine the Nazi regime. Later, the Gestapo would dub this network the Rote Kapelle, the Red Orchestra.

  Understandably, the growing dangers for anyone pursuing such a course may have prompted Mildred to submit applications in October 1939 to both the Rockefeller and Guggenheim fellowship programs. If she had been accepted by either, she presumably would have returned to the United States to work on a book about American literature, her field of study. But the Guggenheim committee considered her “a beginner,” and she failed to get either fellowship.

  One of Mildred’s jobs before the war was to hunt up English-language books for a German publisher, which allowed her to travel around Europe. During those trips, she may have helped Jews and others to escape from Germany, although the evidence is patchy. Her husband Arvid worked in the Economics Ministry, which also allowed him to travel and contact foreigners. He became particularly friendly with Donald Heath, a first secretary at the U.S. Embassy, and Mildred tutored his son. Heath began sending reports to Washington about how the Germans assessed their economic capabilities based on someone he identified as a “confidential” or “well-placed” source. After the war, Heath told his family that Arvid was that source.

  Shareen Blair Brysac, Mildred Harnack’s biographer, points to Arvid’s ties with Heath as evidence that he thought of himself as “a German patriot” who was willing to work with the United States as well as the Soviet Union—in other words, anyone who would help topple Hitler’s regime. “Harnack never regarded himself as an agent of a foreign power, nor did he follow Soviet orders,” she wrote.

  But Brysac documented how a Soviet agent, Alexander Korotkov, visited the Harnacks on September 17, 1940. He thus reestablished a Moscow connection that had been broken when the Harnacks had decided it was too dangerous to maintain their earlier Soviet ties in Berlin. Korotkov wrote to Moscow that Arvid had agreed to send reports, not because he considered himself an agent but because the Soviet Union was “a country with whose ideals he feels connected and from which he awaits support.” On September 26, 1940, as Germany’s fighters and bombers were fighting and losing the Battle of Britain, Harnack sent his first intelligence report, warning Moscow that by the beginning of the following year Hitler was planning to launch an attack on the Soviet Union.

  It was a warning that Harnack and other members of the Red Orchestra, which included Luftwaffe intelligence officer Harro Schulze-Boysen, repeated on several occasions—and Stalin refused to believe. The resisters kept taking huge risks in gathering and sending more information as the Gestapo closed in on them. They also weren’t helped by their Soviet handlers, who were guilty of major security lapses in their own radio transmissions. In late August and early September 1942, the German authorities rounded up the Red Orchestra members and anyone suspected of ties to them, arresting an estimated 139 people, including the Harnacks.

  All the chief participants in the group were tried for treason. Arvid was among those immediately sentenced to death. Mildred was initially treated with more sympathy by the judges, who chose to view her as a woman who had been led astray by her German husband. She was sentenced to six years in prison and six years’ “loss of honor.” The first round of executions took place on December 22, 1942, with hanging as the chosen instrument of death for Arvid, Schulze-Boysen and two others. Afterward, the guillotine was used on four more members of the group.

  In the end, Mildred wasn’t spared either. She was put on trial again. The new charge was that she had seduced an Abwehr lieutenant to steal state secrets, which offered a lurid justification for the death sentence that promptly followed. The only American woman executed by the Gestapo, Mildred Harnack uttered these final words before she was guillotined in Berlin’s Plötzensee Prison on February 16, 1943: “And I have loved Germany so much.”

  Most Americans who still remained in Germany in 1940 and 1941, of course, were neither traitors nor resistance fighters. But the diplomats and journalists, like the Roosevelt Administration back home, were increasingly open in choosing sides as well. The success of the Royal Air Force in winning the Battle of Britain, which forced Hitler to abandon Operation Sealion, the planned invasion of England, had cheered the Americans in Berlin who had watched Hitler’s military machine score one victory after another up till then. Although the diplomats and journalists had different roles to play, they often acted on the implicit assumption that they supported a common cause. Colonel John Lovell, a military attaché at the Berlin embassy, easily enlisted some of the American correspondents to monitor the numbers on the collars and shoulders of soldiers they saw coming through Berlin. “When a new number showed up we would report it to John,” recalled Harsch of the Christian Science Monitor.

  Since Lovell knew which units had been deployed on the Western Front, he assumed that when their soldiers began appearing in Berlin this was a signal that these units were moving east. Harsch had moved from the Adlon Hotel to a house known as the Cercle Français, which had been taken over by the American Embassy and where Lovell and several other staffers were living. One evening in December, the colonel invited Harsch to a dinner for the military attachés of Germany’s eastern and southeastern neighbors. After a French dinner that included a rare endive salad, Lovell asked his guests to come to the library, where he spread out a map of Eastern Europe. He then offered his estimates on where German troops were deployed and their battle readiness, and invited his guests to do the same. He added that these forces could move either east or south, but he believed they were more likely to move east—against the Soviet Union.

  The attachés from Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavi
a, Bulgaria and Greece offered minor modifications in some cases, but largely agreed with Lovell’s assessment. They also agreed that it looked like the German forces were getting ready to move east. The Soviet attaché then went to the map and acknowledged that his estimates on deployments were almost exactly the same. But he claimed that the German military machine would probably turn south next. Still, he warned that if they did turn against his country “it will not be a Sunday promenade.”

  In fact, Hitler’s decision to abandon the invasion of England had prompted the Nazi leader to pursue his other dream: a swift victory over the Soviet Union. This was supposed to isolate Britain further and convince it that, in the end, a German victory was inevitable. The Chicago Tribune’s Schultz recalled a conversation with Karl Boehmer of the Propaganda Ministry about this time. He didn’t mention a possible invasion of Russia but suggested the Germans would engineer a takeover from within. “Just imagine what we can do with Russia’s resources,” he declared. “She squanders them as badly as America does hers.” Schultz claimed she then asked if his country planned to control America’s resources as well, and that he replied, “Why, yes.”

  That may have been a bit of showboating on Boehmer’s part. In reality, Hitler hadn’t yet abandoned hope of keeping the United States out of the war, despite Roosevelt’s growing support for Britain. On December 7, 1940, the president declared that “the best immediate defense of the United States is the success of Great Britain.” In a fireside chat on December 29, he denounced Nazi plans “to dominate the rest of the world” and famously pledged that his country would be “the great arsenal of democracy.” All of which set the stage for the Lend-Lease Act that was signed into law on March 11, 1941, allowing for the shipment of massive amounts of military equipment and other supplies to Britain. But Hitler still clung to the belief that his planned invasion of the Soviet Union would convince the Americans that they had to abandon Europe, including their British friends, to German might.