Beyond Belief
Page 34
4. Pittsburgh Sun, March 24, 1933; Poughkeepsie News, March 11, 1933; Toledo Times, March 23, 1933—all cited in The Jews in Nazi Germany, pp. 71-79.
5. St. Louis “Times-Dispatch” (sic), March 24, 1933, as cited in The Jews in Nazi Germany, p. 81; Nashville Banner, as cited in Literary Digest, April 8, 1933, p. 3; New York Times, April 2, 1933.
6. Chicago Tribune, March 1, 1933, p. 1, March 3, 1933, p. 4; New York Times, March 5, 1933, p. 20.
7. New York Herald Tribune, March 8, 1933, p. 22; New York Times, March 10, 1933, p. 1, March 15, 1933, p. 10, March 20, 1933, p. 1; Los Angeles Times, March 16, 1933, p. 10, March 20, 1933, p. 1; Chicago Tribune, March 20, 1933, p. 1.
8. Toledo Times, March 23, 1933, as cited in The Jews in Nazi Germany, p. 77.
9. Los Angeles Times, March 16, 1933, p. 10, March 26, 1933, p. 2, March 27, 1933, p. 1.
10. New York Herald Tribune, March 25, 1933, p. 1.
11. New York Times, March 13, 1933, p. 1. On March 9 in a page 1 story Birchall portrayed the situation in Germany as one in which Nazi extremists were committing a variety of actions against Jews, including the “boyish trick” of flying a swastika over a synagogue. In one portion of the article he noted that the police had been ordered to investigate, and in another section he admitted that the police were under Nazi control. New York Times, March 9, 1933, pp. 1, 10.
12. Los Angeles Times, March 27, 1933, p. 1; Christian Century, April 5, 1933, p. 443.
13. Augusta (Maine) Journal, March 25, 1933.
14. Columbus (Ohio) Journal, March 24, 1933; Vernon McKenzie, “Atrocities in World War II: What We Can Believe,” Journalism Quarterly, vol. XIX, (September 1942), pp. 268-276.
15. Christian Science Monitor, February 18, 1933, p. 3, March 16, 1933, p. 12, March 22, 1933, p. 5; Moshe Gottlieb, “The First of April Boycott and the Reaction of the American Jewish Community,” American Jewish Historical Society Quarterly, vol. LVII (June 1968), p. 519.
16. Christian Science Monitor, March 24, 1933, p. 1; New York Herald Tribune, March 24, 1933, p. 2, March 25, 1933, p. 1; William L. Shirer, 20th Century Journey: A Memoir of a Life and the Times, vol. II, The Nightmare Years, 1930-1940 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), p. 187.
17. Literary Digest, April 8, 1933, p. 3.
18. Marion K. Sanders, Dorothy Thompson: A Legend in Her Time (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), p. 185; New York Times, May 12, 1933, p. 12.
19. The Yellow Spot (New York: Knight Publications, 1933), p. 33. Ernst Hanfstaengl, a graduate of Harvard, was appointed to head a press bureau which was designed to influence foreign correspondents in general and those from America in particular. His mother was a member of a prominent Back Bay Boston family, the Sedgwicks. Ernst Hanfstaengl, Unheard Witness (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1957); Christian Science Monitor, March 24, 1933, p. 8; Gottlieb, “The First of April Boycott,” p. 519.
20. Sigrid Schultz, Germany Will Try It Again (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1944), p. 117.
21. New York Times, March 26, 1933, sec. IV, p. 1; Time, April 3, 1933, pp. 16-17; Los Angeles Times, March 11, 1933, sec. II, p. 9; Nation, December 27, 1933, p. 728.
22. Louis Lochner, What About Germany? (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1942), p. 286.
23. New York Times, June 24, 1933, p. 12.
24. Memo, Hull to Sackett, March 21, 1933, FRUS, 1933, vol. II; memorandum of press conference of Secretary of State, March 22, 1933, FRUS, 1933, vol. II, p. 328.
25. Memo, Gordon to Hull, March 30, 1933, FRUS, 1933, vol. II, p. 335.
26. New York Times, March 27, 1933, p. 1; New York Herald Tribune, March 27, 1933, p. 1; Newsweek, April 1, 1933, p. 5.
27. Telephone call between Gordon and Phillips, March 31, 1933, FRUS, 1933, vol. II, p. 342; Gordon to Hull, March 23, 1933, FRUS, 1933, vol. II, pp. 328-331; Gordon to Hull, March 26, 1933, DS 862.4016/ 116, as cited in Shlomo Shafir, “The Impact of the Jewish Crisis on American German Relations, 1933-1939, Ph.D. diss. (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1971), p. 54.
28. Shafir, p. 77; New York Times, March 27, 1933, p. 1.
29. Louis Lochner to Betty Lochner, November 12, 1933, Lochner Papers, Mass Communications History Center, State Historical Society of Wisconsin. A portion of Lochner’s letters to his children who were students in the United States have been reprinted in “Round Robins from Berlin: Louis P. Lochner’s Letters to His Children, 1932-1941,” Wisconsin Magazine of History, vol. 50, no. 4 (Summer 1967), pp. 291-336; Chicago Tribune, January 28, 1936, p. 3.
30. FRUS, May 12, 1933, vol. II, p. 398.
31. Interview with C. Brooks Peters, February 12, 1985.
32. New York Herald Tribune, March 24, 1933, p. 2; Chicago Tribune, April 9, 1933, p. 4; Schultz, p. 187; Edgar Ansel Mowrer, Triumph and Turmoil: A Personal History of Our Times (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1968), p. 225.
33. FRUS, 1933, vol. II, pp. 403-406; Lilian Mowrer, Journalist’s Wife (New York: Morrow, 1937), p. 307. For bungled attempts to get the New York Evening Post and Philadelphia Public Ledger to recall Knickerbocker, see FRUS, May 12, 1933, vol. II, pp. 400-401.
34. Shirer, p. 138; S. Miles Bouton, “A Peculiar People,” in Robert Benjamin, ed., The Inside Story by Members of the Overseas Press Club of America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1940), p. 116; interview with Howard K. Smith, February 27, 1985; Saturday Evening Post, June 2, 1934, p. 34; interview with Richard C. Hottelot, December 21, 1984.
35. Shirer, p. 551.
36. G. E. R. Gedye, “Vienna Waltz,” in Hanson Baldwin and Shepard Stone, eds., We Saw It Happen: The News Behind the News That’s Fit to Print (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1938), p. 68.
37. Louis Lochner, Always the Unexpected: A Book of Reminiscences (New York: Macmillan, 1956), p. 252; Lochner, What About Germany? p. 307.
38. Sigrid Schultz, “Hermann Goering’s ‘Dragon from Chicago,’” in David Brown and W. Richard Bruner, eds., How I Got That Story (New York: Dutton, 1967), p. 76.
39. Lochner, What About Germany? p. 303; Howard K. Smith, Last Train from Berlin (New York: Knopf, 1942), p. 48; interview with Percy Knauth, February 18, 1985; interview with C. Brooks Peters, February 12, 1985; transcript of recollections of Sigrid Schultz, Tribune Company Archives, tape 52A/000-745, part II, pp. 3-4, 14, Sigrid Schultz Collection, Mass Communications History Center of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
40. Shirer, p. 229; Edgar Mowrer, pp. 225-226; H. R. Knickerbocker, Is Tomorrow Hitler’s? 200 Questions on the Battle of Mankind (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941), pp. 213-214.
41. Edgar Mowrer, pp. 216-217, 224; Lilian Mowrer, p. 275, 287.
42. FRUS, May 12, 1933, vol. II, p. 399; Shafir, p. 43.
43. Manchester Guardian, April 9, 1933 (reprinted in New York Times, April 9, 1933); New York Times, December 24, 1933, p. 1.
44. Edgar Mowrer, Triumph, pp. 216-217, 224; Lilian Mowrer, pp. 275, 287.
45. FRUS, March 31, 1933, vol. II, p. 340.
46. Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Hitler’s Reich: The First Phase (New York: Macmillan, 1933), p. 19; Martha Dodd, Through Embassy Eyes (New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1939), p. 99; Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Peace and Counterpeace: From Wilson to Hitler (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 530.
47. Macon (Georgia) Telegraph, May 25, 1933, as quoted in The Jews in Nazi Germany, pp. 20-21; Shafir, pp. 76-77.
48. New York Times, June 14, 1933, p. 4; The Jews in Nazi Germany, p. 16.
49. New York Times, May 29, 1933, p. 5; May 30, 1933, p. 14.
50. Edgar A. Mowrer, Germany Puts the Clock Back (New York: Morrow, 1933), pp. 230, 239; Baltimore Sun, August 1, 1935.
51. Lochner, What About Germany? p. 109; Frederick Oeschner, This Is the Enemy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1942), p. 56.
52. Dodd (White) to Hull, August 20, 1935, DS 862.4016, Decimal Files 1538, Department of State, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (hereafter DS and file numbers only).
53. Chicago Tribune, March 13, September 14, 1932, February 4, 1933, March 13, 1933, March 24, 1933, August 9, 193
3, August 11, 1933, August 12, 1933 (reprinted in Los Angeles Times, August 23, 1933), August 24, 1933, May 14, 1934, July 31, 1934—all as cited in Jerome Edwards, The Foreign Policy of Col. McCormick’s Tribune, 1929-1941 (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1971), pp. 66, 92-94. Joseph Gies, The Colonel of Chicago (New York: Dutton, 1979), pp. 130, 147; Schultz, Germany Will Try It Again, p. x; George Seldes, Tell the Truth and Run, (New York: Greenberg, 1953), p. 114; transcript of recollections of Sigrid Schultz, part II, p. 9.
54. Margaret K. Norden, “American Editorial Response to the Rise of Adolf Hitler: A Preliminary Consideration,” American Jewish Historical Society Quarterly, vol. LVII (October 1968), p. 293.
55. John Evelyn Wrench, Geoffrey Dawson and Our Times, as cited in Shirer, p. 206; Franklin Reid Gannon, The British Press and Germany, 1936-1939 (London: Oxford, 1971), p. 121.
56. New York Times, August 26, 1934, p. 1, August 27, 1934, p. 8. The North American Newspaper Alliance, for which Thompson wrote her column, issued her own report on her expulsion on August 26, 1934. The report was front-page news in many American newspapers. According to Ambassador Dodd, the reasons for her expulsion lay in her interview with Hitler in 1932 and her reports in 1933 condemning Hitler’s antisemitic campaign. Marian K. Sanders, Dorothy Thompson: A Legend in Her Own Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), pp. 167-168, 200; interview with William Shirer, December 19, 1984.
57. Enrique Hank Lopez, Conversations with Katherine Anne Porter (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), pp. 175-176, 178, 180; Joan Givner, Katherine Anne Porter: A Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), pp. 259-263; Mary Anne Dolan, “Almost Since Chaucer with Miss Porter,” Washington Star, May 11, 1975.
58. Shirer, pp. 189, 193; Edgar Mowrer, p. 225; Lochner, What About Germany? p. 100.
59. Philadelphia Record, March 28, 1933.
60. Edgar Mowrer, p. 224; John Gunther, Inside Europe, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937), p. 10.
61. New York Times, August 11, 1935, p. 4.
62. William E. Dodd, Jr., and Martha Dodd, eds., Ambassador Dodd’s Diary, 1933-1938 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941), pp. 157, 248, 288-289.
63. Dodd to Hull, July 30, 1935, August 20, 1935. For a less critical evaluation of the Hitler regime by an American official, see the report of Military Attaché Truman Smith to the War Department, September 24, 1935, Attaché Reports, reprint 2657-B-780/4, as cited in Shafir, p. 506.
64. New York Times, August 4, 1935, p. 19.
65. Edgar Mowrer, Triumph, p. 233; Dodd and Dodd, pp. 99, 298.
66. New York Times, August 4, 1935, p. 19.
67. Smith, Last Train from Berlin, p. 9, Lilian Mowrer, pp. 288, 313; Nation, October 18, 1933, p. 433; Rhea Clyman, “The Story That Stopped Hitler,” in Brown and Bruner, p. 58.
68. Another American Olympics visitor who would eventually become a virtual spokesman for Nazi Germany was Charles Lindbergh. When he met with reporters, he too lectured them on conditions in Germany. Shirer, pp. 232, 237; Martha Dodd, p. 99.
69. Howard K. Smith, who visited Germany when he was a student, was struck by American students’ failure to grasp the true nature of Nazi Germany. Smith, Last Train from Berlin, p. 9.
70. Memo, Messersmith to Hull, March 25, 1935, DS 862.4016/496, as cited in Shafir, p. 76.
71. Schultz, Germany Will Try It Again, p. 97. The American Commercial Attaché in Berlin, Douglas Miller, revealed that the Nazis even insisted that contracts which Americans signed with German firms had to carry a printed clause to the effect that “this contract is made under National Socialist principles.” Though those principles were never explicitly spelled out, American firms in Germany were often blackmailed into appointing Nazis to their boards and inviting Nazi delegations to the United States to “investigate whether the product was, in fact, Jewish.” Douglas Miller, You Can’t Do Business with Hitler (Boston: Little, Brown, 1941), pp. 88, 197-201.
72. During the winter Olympics Shirer, concerned about the way some American businessmen were responding to Nazism, arranged for them to have lunch with Miller. The “tycoons,” Shirer recalled, “told him what the situation was in Nazi Germany . . . . Miller could scarcely get a word in.” Shirer, p. 232.
73. Business Week, May 24, November 11, 1933, December 8, 1934, September 7, 1935, August 15, 1936, January 2, August 21, 1937, all as cited in Daniel Shepherd Day, “American Opinion of National Socialism, 1933-1937,” Ph.D. diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 1958, pp. 112, 124; Harold C. Syrett, “The Business Press and American Neutrality, 1914-1917,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 32 (September 1945), pp. 215-230; Gabriel Kolko, “American Business and Germany, 1930-1941,” Western Political Quarterly, December 1962, pp. 715ff.
74. Miller, p. 194. See Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy (New York: Delacorte Press, 1983), for a discussion of American business connections with Nazi Germany. Higham demonstrates how American businesses continued to trade with Germany long after Pearl Harbor.
75. Christian Science Monitor, April 18, July 6, July 12, August 2, August 3, August 9, August 24, October 5, October 12, October 19, 1933.
76. Newsweek, July 29, 1933.
77. Armstrong, Hitler’s Reich, pp. 11-12; Los Angeles Times, June 2, August 29, August 31, September 3, October 6, October 14, November 11, 1933; Martha Dodd, pp. 27-28.
78. Chicago Tribune, August 9, August 11, August 12, 1933 (reprinted in Los Angeles Times, August 23, August 24, and August 25, 1933); Edwards, pp. 93-94; Shafir, p. 33.
79. Transcript of recollections of Sigrid Schultz, part II, pp. 7-8.
80. Christian Century, August 16, 1933, pp. 1031-1033.
81. Minneapolis Tribune, July 31, 1935; Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, August 31, 1935; Knoxville Journal, August 8, 1935; Grand Junction (Colorado) Sentinel, October 28, 1935; Harper’s, January 1935, p. 125; Armstrong, Hitler’s Reich, p. 19.
82. Philadelphia Record, March 28, 1933; New York Evening Post, March 27, 1933.
83. Philadelphia Ledger, March 28, 1933; Hartford Courant, March 28, 1933.
84. St. Louis Times Dispatch, March 24, 1933, as cited in The Jews in Nazi Germany, pp. 81-82; Columbus Journal, March 24, 1933; Toledo Times, March 23, 1933.
85. Collier’s, February 11, 1939, p. 12.
Chapter 2
1. Saturday Evening Post, June 2, 1934, p. 36.
2. Kansas City Journal Post, July 25, 1935; Cleveland Plain Dealer, July 21, 1935; Davenport (Iowa) Times, July 29, 1935; Terre Haute Star, July 22, 1935.
3. Greensboro (North Carolina) News, July 24, 1935; Wilmington (Delaware) Journal, July 24, 1935.
4. Davenport (Iowa) Times, July 29, 1935; Birmingham (Alabama) Age Herald, July 22, 1935; Dallas News, November 18, 1935.
5. Houston Post, as cited in Literary Digest, April 8, 1933; Chicago Tribune, March 13, September 14, 1932, February 4, March 13, March 24, 1933, May 14, July 31, 1934; Cincinnati Enquirer, November 18, 1935; Shlomo Shafir, “The Impact of the Jewish Crisis on American German Relations, 1933-1945,” Ph.D. diss. (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1971), p. 33; Jerome Edwards, The Foreign Policy of Colonel McCormick’s Tribune, 1929-1941 (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1971), pp. 92-94.
6. Christian Science Monitor, March 28, March 30, 1933; New York Herald Tribune, March 27, 1933, pp. 1, 5, April 1, 1933, p. 1; New York Times, March 27, 1933, p. 4, April 1, 1933, p. 1; Literary Digest, April 8, 1933, p. 3.
7. Christian Science Monitor, April 4, 1933. In its editorial comment of April 2, 1933, the New York Times used a tongue-in-cheek manner and diagnosed millions of Germans as “suffering from malign obsessions, painful hallucinations and nervous disorders of an alarming kind . . . . They forget entirely the impressions which their wild conduct may make upon others. If they hear protests and appeals from the outside world [to stop the terror and boycott], these only heighten their persecution mania.” In his report from Germany, Frederick Birchall observed that the boycott had been limited to one day and said that “one would like to b
elieve this to be a lasthour concession to the sober remonstrances of the few thinking Germans there seem to be left in this maelstrom of ultranationalist frenzy.” This, however, Birchall contended, was not the case. “Instead it must be confessed that the [boycott] movement has been revealed . . . as a triumph of propaganda on a scale never before achieved here, even in wartime.” As a result of the boycott and the preboycott propaganda, the German people had been incited to turn against the Jews. Hostility and hatred toward the Jews had increased significantly. Germans blamed Jews for spreading “atrocity” stories which maligned Germany. Furthermore, Birchall argued, by scaling down the boycott to one day and eliminating many of those who were initially to be boycotted, the government had achieved these ends but had avoided many adverse economic effects. In short, the propaganda objectives had been fulfilled at limited cost. New York Times, April 1, 1933. FRUS, 1933, vol. II, p. 333.
8. Christian Science Monitor, April 4, 1933. This was not the only time that the Christian Science Monitor directly accused Jews of bringing about their own misfortune. It also did so in 1939 when the SS St. Louis was meandering off the Cuban coast looking for a place to unload its Jewish refugee passengers (see Chapter 5). For background on the Christian Science movement see Erwin D. Canham, Commitment to Freedom: The Story of the Christian Science Monitor (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), p. 287, and Stephen Gottschalk, The Emergence of Christian Science in American Religious Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 273-274. There were prominent Social Gospel leaders who were extremely critical of Christian Science. Walter Rauschenbush described it as a “form of selfish spirituality which turned its back on the world.” Rauschenbush, A Theology for the Social Gospel, p. 103, as cited in Gottschalk, pp. 260-261.
9. Ismar Schorsch, Jewish Reactions to German Anti-Semitism, 1870-1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), pp. 169-170.
10. Reformed Church Messenger, April 6, 1933, August 24, 1933, pp. 9-11, September 7, 1933, pp. 8-9; Lutheran Companion, September 2, 1933, p. 1105; Moody Bible Institute Monthly, May 1933, p. 392; King’s Business, June 1933, p. 171; Sunday School Times, December 9, 1933, p. 778, all as cited in Robert W. Ross So It Was True (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), pp. 33-36.