Hitlerland

by Nagorski, Andrew

  By contrast, Putzi Hanfstaengl was in full agreement with his wife about Hitler’s appeal, taking him very seriously. He quickly joined Hitler’s entourage and began regularly playing the piano for him, especially after the Nazi leader’s frequent run-ins with the police, who were increasingly monitoring his activities. The first time Putzi played, he tried out a Bach fugue, but Hitler didn’t show any interest. Then, he launched into the prelude of Richard Wagner’s Meistersinger and he suddenly had Hitler’s full attention. “He knew the thing absolutely by heart and could whistle every note of it in a curious penetrating vibrato, but completely in tune,” Putzi recalled. Hitler started marching up and down, waving his arms as if he were conducting. “This music affected him physically and by the time I had crashed through the finale he was in splendid spirits, all his worries gone, and raring to get to grips with the public prosecutor.”

  Hanfstaengl also introduced Hitler to Harvard marching songs, explaining how the music and the cheerleaders were used to whip up the crowds to the point of “hysterical enthusiasm.” He played Sousa marches, and then some of his own improvisations that added the marching beat of American tunes to German ones. “That is it, Hanfstaengl, that is what we need for the movement, marvelous,” Hitler exclaimed, prancing about the room like a drum majorette. Putzi would later write several marches that were used by the Brownshirts, including the one they played when they marched through the Brandenburg Gate on the day Hitler took power in 1933. “Rah, rah, rah! became Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil! but that is the origin of it and I suppose I must take my share of the blame,” Putzi wrote in his autobiography. In fact, this sounded like a case of scarcely concealed pride of authorship.

  Putzi contributed to Hitler’s movement in other ways, too. After selling his share of the family art gallery in New York to a partner, he put up $1,000 to turn the four-page Nazi propaganda weekly Völkischer Beobachter into a daily. Hitler complained that regular newspapers ignored him and believed that such a transformation could help overcome that problem. Aside from providing the funding, Putzi hired a cartoonist to design a new masthead. He also claimed credit for thinking up its slogan Arbeit und Brot, work and bread. Although Putzi told Hitler that the $1,000 was a no-interest loan, he would never get it back.

  As part of Hitler’s circle of advisors, Putzi tried to act on his initial impulse to explain more of the world to this young firebrand—particularly the growing importance of the United States. Pointing out that it was America’s entry into World War I that determined the final outcome, he told Hitler, “If there is another war it must be inevitably won by the side which America joins.” All this, he continued, made it vital for Hitler to advocate a policy of friendship with the United States. While Hitler conceded his point, he didn’t really seem to register it. Putzi concluded that his ideas about America were “wildly superficial.” The only American who interested him then was Henry Ford, since he saw him as a fellow anti-Semite who might be tapped for funds. He was equally interested in the Ku Klux Klan. “He seemed to think it was a political movement similar to his own,” Putzi noted.

  By the fall of 1923, Hitler was openly calling for a revolt against the government. Inflation had turned into hyperinflation, and Putzi recalled that when he pushed his way into the Bürgerbräukeller on November 8, the night of what would go down in history as the beginning of the Beer Hall Putsch, the price for the three beers he ordered was 3 billion marks. He handed one to Hitler, who took a sip even though he already considered himself a nondrinker. With three top Bavarian officials sitting at the speaker’s platform, Hitler—wearing his Iron Cross over his trench coat and grasping a whip—ordered his Brownshirts to seize control of the hall. “Quiet!” he shouted. When the crowd continued to talk in the general confusion that followed, he jumped on a chair and fired a shot into the air. “The national revolution has broken out. The hall is surrounded!” he proclaimed.

  Even greater confusion followed. Hitler marched the Bavarian officials out to a side room, telling them he wouldn’t accept anything but their support for his putsch. He would reward them with top positions, he vowed; if they refused, the alternative would be grim, he warned. “Gentlemen, not one of us shall leave this hall alive! There are three of you, and I have four bullets. That will be enough for all of us if I fail.” By some accounts, he held a pistol to his head as he said so. No one seemed impressed, and General Ludendorff, who had arrived late but dressed in his full Imperial Army uniform, allowed the Bavarian officials to slip away after supposedly securing their assurances that they were on the plotters’ side.

  Hanfstaengl held an impromptu press conference, telling foreign correspondents that a new government had been formed. Cabling from Berlin, Wiegand accepted that version of events as fact and ran with it. “REBELS IN COUP SEIZE BAVARIAN RULE, BEGIN ARMED MARCH AGAINST BERLIN” proclaimed the giant two-line headline across the front page of the San Francisco Examiner in its November 9, 1923, edition over his story. He reported that after “the long expected coup,” Hitler’s storm troopers were in control of key communications in Munich and had cut off contact with Berlin, Ludendorff had taken charge of the army, and Hitler had proclaimed the end of the republic.

  In reality, Hitler and Ludendorff had lost control of events as soon as the Bavarian officials had left the beer hall. Overnight, the officials made arrangements to put down the rebellion. Although they had largely tolerated Hitler’s movement up till then and sympathized with some of its aims, they weren’t about to let him dictate to them. By the time Hitler and Ludendorff had ordered their troops to march from the Bürgerbräukeller to the center of the city around noon on November 9, the state police was lined up to stop them, with two machine guns at the ready. Confident that they wouldn’t open fire on a war hero like Ludendorff, both the general and the ex-corporal proceeded with their plan, leading the march. They were met with machine-gun fire. Fourteen Nazis died on the spot, along with four policemen.

  The American consul Robert Murphy and his German colleague Paul Drey had rushed to the scene to see what was happening. “I can testify that both Hitler and Ludendorff behaved in an identical manner, like the battle-hardened soldiers they were. Both fell flat to escape the hail of bullets,” Murphy recalled. In the brief pandemonium, it was hard to see what actually transpired—and Hitler may have dropped to the ground for another reason. One of those struck by the hail of bullets was Scheubner-Richter, Hitler’s close aide, who was marching with him arm-in-arm. Killed instantly, he may have jerked Hitler to the ground. In any case, the Nazi leader fled the scene with a dislocated shoulder.

  Several top Nazis were immediately arrested and Ludendorff surrendered to the authorities, but he was set free after giving his officer’s word that he wouldn’t evade trial. Putzi, who had missed the shooting, rushed to see the outcome, and a Brownshirt medic he encountered told him that Hitler, Ludendorff and Goering were all dead. “My God, Herr Hanfstaengl, it’s too terrible,” he said. “It is the end of Germany.” Believing all was lost, Putzi advised other Nazis he met to get out of Munich immediately, crossing the border into Austria. And he promptly followed his own advice.

  In fact, Hitler had managed to escape to his waiting car, along with Walter Schultze, the chief doctor for the storm troopers and others. And, unlike Putzi, he sought refuge in the Hanfstaengls’ country house in Uffing, about an hour from Munich. “The last place it would have occurred to me to go was my own home in Uffing, where I surely would be caught and arrested,” Putzi noted later.

  In Hitler’s case, that’s exactly where he ended up, although apparently not by initial design. Still, he probably went there in part because, as Putzi put it, Hitler had developed “one of his theoretical passions” for Helen. Putzi was quick to suggest that Hitler was impotent, and that Hitler’s infatuation with his wife never went beyond hand-kissing and bringing her flowers. “He had no normal sex life . . . somehow one never felt with him that the attraction was physical,” he declared. Helen agreed that her admirer was pr
obably “a neuter,” but she had no doubt that he was strongly attracted to her.

  Whatever the reason, Helen suddenly found herself with an unexpected house guest on the evening of November 9. She had been hearing reports about the putsch and the rumors that Hitler and Ludendorff were dead, but she didn’t know what to believe. While she and Egon were having supper in the upstairs living room, a maid reported that someone was knocking softly on the door. Helen went downstairs and, without opening the door, asked who was there. “To my utter amazement, I recognized the weak but unmistakable voice of Hitler,” she recalled.

  Helen quickly opened the door and found herself facing a very different Hitler than the one who normally showed up: “There he stood, ghastly pale, hatless, his face and clothing covered with mud, the left arm hanging down from a strangely slanting shoulder.” The doctor and a medic were holding him up from both sides, but they, too, looked “pathetically rampaged.” Once inside, Helen asked Hitler about Putzi. He told her he wasn’t in the confrontation because he was working on putting out the party newspaper and that he’d probably show up soon. Hitler kept talking, despondent about the deaths of his aides and possibly of Ludendorff, and furious about what he called the treachery of the Bavarian officials. He also swore to her that “he would go on fighting for his ideals as long as breath was in him.”

  Hitler was running a temperature and in pain from the dislocated shoulder, so the doctor and the medic eased him upstairs to a bedroom. From there, Helen heard him moaning as they tried to push his arm back into his shoulder.

  During the night, the doctor explained to Helen that they, too, had tried to flee to Austria, but their car had broken down. When the driver couldn’t fix it, Hitler had suggested going to Hanfstaengl’s house since they could reach it by foot, although it was a long, difficult walk for the three worn-out men. What that story didn’t explain was how Hitler imagined he could stay hidden in the house of one of his well-known followers.

  The next morning, Hitler sent off the doctor to Munich to see if he could arrange for another car to pick him up and still get him to Austria. His arm was in a sling and he appeared to be in less pain than the previous evening, but he was pacing nervously about in a blue bathrobe, asking where the car might be. Helen’s mother-in-law called to say that the police were already in her nearby house. Suddenly, an official cut her off and took the phone himself, telling Helen that he and his men would be arriving at her house next.

  Helen went upstairs to let Hitler know that he was about to be arrested. Standing in the hallway, he looked devastated by the news. “Now all is lost—no use going on!” he exclaimed, throwing up his hands. Then, with a quick motion, he picked up his revolver from the cabinet. “But I was alert, grasped his arm and took the weapon away from him,” Helen recalled.

  Alarmed that he might have shot himself, she shouted: “What do you think you’re doing? After all, are you going to leave all the people that you’ve gotten interested in your idea of saving the country and you take your life . . . They’re looking for you to carry on.”

  Hitler hadn’t resisted when she grabbed the gun, and he sank into a chair, burying his head in his hands. While he was still sitting like that, Helen quickly took the gun away to dispose of it, settling on a large flour bin where it easily vanished from sight as she pushed it down deep inside. Returning to Hitler, she urged him to dictate to her all his instructions for his followers before the police arrived; that way, they would know what to do while he would be in prison. She added that he could then sign each sheet containing instructions and she would make sure they would be delivered to his lawyer. “He thanked me for helping him remember his duty to his men, and then dictated the orders which were to be of such importance in carrying on the work,” she recalled.

  Soon, the police with guard dogs surrounded the house. Helen answered the knock at the door, and a shy young army lieutenant, accompanied by two policemen, apologetically explained that he had to search the house. Helen told them to follow her upstairs and she opened the door to the room where Hitler was standing. Startled, the three men took a step back for a moment. The Nazi leader had regained his confidence and immediately began berating the lieutenant in a loud voice, particularly when he told him he had to arrest him for high treason.

  There was no use arguing, however, and even Hitler realized that. Refusing Helen’s offer of Putzi’s clothes to shield him from the cold, he was still dressed in the blue bathrobe, with his own coat draped over his shoulders, as the men led him down the stairs. At that moment, little Egon ran out, calling, “What are the bad, bad men doing to my Uncle Dolf?” Looking moved, Hitler patted Egon on the cheek. Then he shook hands with Helen and the maids before going out the door. Helen caught a last glance at his face when he was seated in the police car. It was “deathly pale,” she remembered.

  Most of the press coverage that followed, at home and abroad, quickly wrote off Hitler and the Nazis. The Beer Hall Putsch had been laughably amateurish, and now all that awaited the arrested leaders was a trial and certain convictions.

  Few people realized then that the trial and even imprisonment would serve Hitler surprisingly well. And only a few insiders knew then that it was a young American woman, the wife of one of his earliest followers, who may have prevented him from taking his own life—an act that would have delivered humanity from the devastating consequences of his political resurrection later. It was Helen Hanfstaengl, née Niemeyer, who, in the worst possible way, may have changed the course of history.

  Like Knickerbocker who quickly became a close friend, Edgar Ansel Mowrer of the Chicago Daily News was a new arrival in Berlin in 1923, showing up late that year and staying for a decade, right through Hitler’s rise to power. And, like Knickerbocker, Wiegand and other correspondents, he was as much intrigued by the German capital’s dynamism in the arts as by its chaotic politics. The city was “a cultural riot, the wilder for the lack of such deep traditions as still had held sway in Paris and London,” he recalled. Along with his British-born wife Lilian, he was quickly swept up in that cultural riot.

  At the annual Press Ball in the huge Zoo Restaurant, the Mowrers had the chance to mingle with everyone from top government officials and the high-society crowd to the playwrights Bertolt Brecht and Carl Zuckmayer, composer Richard Strauss when he was visiting from Vienna to conduct an opera, and conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. The event brought together “the leaders of totally different worlds,” Mowrer wrote. “It was as though Paris had merged the Elysée, the Opéra, and the Beaux Arts Ball into one vast get-together that opened with the dignity of a state reception and ended in a bacchanal.”

  Initially, Lilian Mowrer had been distinctly unimpressed with Berlin when she followed her husband after wrapping up the couple’s affairs in Rome, their previous assignment. Arriving in March 1924, she was depressed by the figurative and literal cold and the contrast to Italy, where spring flowers were already in bloom. “In Berlin ice still covered the ponds in the Tiergarten, and the atmosphere was leaden,” she noted. She was depressed, too, by “the ugliness of the city,” the heavy Victorian architecture, the pompousness of public buildings—and by “the unlovely figures of the people!”

  In the apartment they rented, she found canvases painted by their landlord, female nudes “in the violent tones and formless composition of the German Expressionist school” featuring massive torsos and backsides. “As if we don’t see enough horrors in the street,” she complained. Then there was the matter of food. “There is a great deal in the German cuisine that needs getting used to,” she archly noted. Even the fact that the mark had finally stabilized had its downside as far as she was concerned: prices were now much higher for foreigners than a few years earlier.

  Soon, however, Lilian began to see her new home in a different light. German Expressionism was still a puzzle to her, “but something in the passionately contorted figures and faces was beginning to arouse my interest.” She loved Italian art but realized that in Rome she had
been living artistically “entirely in the past.” By contrast, “German modern work, half metaphysical, half barbaric, was a stimulating challenge.” As for German theater, she quickly recognized it as “the most vital in Europe” and Germans as “the greatest theater-goers in Europe.” And she loved the fact that Berlin was full of foreign productions as well, from the classic Comédie Française to the daring new Russian offerings of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, which she found particularly exciting. “Nowhere in the world was there such hospitality to foreign talent as in Germany,” she wrote.

  Lilian’s happiest discovery, though, was how open many Germans were to foreigners in everyday life, not just on the stage. “They were so wonderfully hospitable, those Weimar Republicans, they did not wait to make a bella figura with receptions and parties, they invited us to take potluck with them in the friendliest manner.” She found everyone—bankers, politicians, writers—inquisitive, expansive and often entertaining.

  Another striking aspect of life in Weimar Germany, she observed, was the role of women. At the time of her arrival, the Reichstag boasted 36 women parliamentarians—more than anywhere else. Women were studying a broad array of subjects at the universities—law, economics, history, engineering—and were entering professions once reserved for men. Lilian even met “a full-fledged slaughterer” in Berlin: Margarethe Cohn, who could kill a steer with a single blow of the mallet. “A woman could do what she liked in Weimar Germany,” Lilian concluded.

  Lilian was far more than just an observer of life in Berlin. She wrote articles for Town and Country, and she appeared in the first “super-talkie” German film, Liebeswalzer (The Love Waltz), which had both an English and a French version. The German actress who had been cast for the role didn’t speak English as well as she claimed, and Lilian was asked to try out for it. She passed the screen test easily, but her initial elation faded when she saw how monotonous much of the work of endless reshooting was. Still, there were consolations. At another studio lot, Marlene Dietrich was shooting The Blue Angel, and Lilian saw her often eating lunch at the same restaurant where she took her meals. She recognized Dietrich from the stage, where she played leads in “sophisticated” musical reviews and comedies. When The Blue Angel catapulted her to stardom on the big screen, Lilian wasn’t impressed. “It was the greatest waste of material to condemn her forever to vamp roles,” she wrote.