On February 23, 1934, William Shirer, who was living with his Austrian wife, Tess, in Paris, turned thirty—but he wasn’t exactly thrilled by his situation. Back in 1925, he had left Cedar Rapids, Iowa, right after college and pursued the adventurous life of a young reporter eager to explore the world. He worked for the Chicago Tribune out of Paris, where he got to meet the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Isadora Duncan; he also snagged assignments that allowed him to wander all around Europe and as far afield as Afghanistan and India, where he befriended Mahatma Gandhi and contracted malaria and dysentery. In 1932, as the Depression worsened, he lost his job and he had a skiing accident that caused him to lose sight in one eye. He and Tess then tried to live off his savings in Spain while he worked on a novel and an early memoir, failing to publish either. When they returned to Paris, he got a job offer from the Paris edition of the New York Herald in January 1934. But as he noted in his diary on his birthday the following month, it was “the worst job I’ve ever had.”
The big stories seemed to be happening elsewhere—in Germany, Russia, Italy, where strong leaders were all in command. France was buffeted by strikes and unrest, but looked rudderless by comparison. “The Paris that I came to in 1925 at the tender age of twenty-one and loved, as you love a woman, is no longer the Paris that I will find day after tomorrow,” he wrote right before his return in January 1934.
On June 30, he excitedly recorded in his diary that the phone lines to Berlin were down for several hours. “And what a story!” he exclaimed. He cited the reports of the arrest of Röhm by Hitler in person, and the shooting of several SA leaders. “The French are pleased. They think this is the beginning of the end of the Nazis,” he continued.
While Shirer didn’t record any judgment of his own, he realized that the biggest story of his life was unfolding nearby. “Wish I could get a post in Berlin,” he concluded. “It’s a story I’d like to cover.” Two weeks later, after more details about the breadth and brutality of the purge had come to light, Shirer added: “One had almost forgotten how strong sadism and masochism are in the German people.”
In his largely forgotten novel The Traitor that he wrote after the war, Shirer expounded on his feelings at the time. His protagonist, the aspiring American journalist Oliver Knight, discusses his plans to go to Europe with his college instructor. The instructor tells him that Paris would be great fun, but he would be just “another young American in Paris,” likely to spend endless hours with wine and women, “babbling about a Europe you were woefully ignorant of.” Besides, France is “too static,” he continued, and “nothing very world-shattering is likely to come out of France in our time.”
Not so with the Germans, the instructor continued. Despite Bach, Beethoven, Schiller and Goethe, their culture was “a mere veneer so thin that their barbarism—the pagan barbarism of the German forests—is continually threatening to break through and engulf them.” The big story was developing in Germany, his instructor insisted, and any young man who wanted to make his mark in journalism should go there, not Paris. To be sure, Shirer wrote his novel with the benefit of hindsight, but it undoubtedly reflected his gut feelings in 1934. He desperately longed to get to Berlin.
On August 2, President von Hindenburg died at the age of eighty-six. Once considered a towering figure, he had looked largely irrelevant and impotent once Hitler had become chancellor. “Who can be president now? What will Hitler do?” Shirer asked in his diary when he heard the news. The next day he knew the answer: Hitler had announced he would take over all presidential powers along with his current ones, and the Army would be required to swear an oath of “unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces.” It wasn’t an oath to serve the country; it was deliberately fashioned as an oath to serve one man whose power was now unquestioned and unlimited.
Shirer was impressed with the sheer audacity of such a move. “The man is resourceful,” he wrote in his diary on August 4. Hitler also announced that a plebiscite would be held on August 19 to approve his seizure of all political and military powers. He justified his actions in large part by the alleged plot against him and the Army that he claimed triggered the June 30 crackdown. After attending a meeting of the American Chamber of Commerce in Berlin, Fromm noted in her diary: “Nobody believes that Hitler’s life was endangered or that a counterrevolution was planned.”
But on August 3, Knickerbocker, the veteran correspondent who had been so perceptive in many of his earlier dispatches, reported that Röhm’s Brownshirts had planned “what would have been the most extraordinary massacre in modern political history.” Its supposed victims: the leaders of the Reichswehr, including the chiefs of the General Staff—which, according to Knickerbocker, was why the generals were willing to accept “a one-time corporal” as their commander-in-chief and swear a personal oath to him. While Knickerbocker indicated he was relaying a version of events from Berlin sources, presumably top Nazi officials, he didn’t include anything to suggest he was skeptical of this interpretation.
Wiegand, the Hearst correspondent, didn’t comment on Hitler’s claims but offered a more critical view of his power grab on the same day. Noting that “Hitler has attained a position quite without parallel in any country in the world,” he added: “Until yesterday it was possible to say he was the instrument of the Reichswehr. Today the army is his weapon. Fear, not freedom, promises to rule the voters Aug. 19.”
Within days of Hindenburg’s death and Hitler’s quick moves to consolidate all power in his hands, Shirer got his wish: he received a call from one of the bosses at Hearst’s Universal News Service, who offered him a job as its correspondent in Berlin. Elated, Shirer immediately agreed. “Must brush up my German,” he wrote in his diary. On August 25, he and Tess took a train from Paris, arriving at Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof at about ten in the evening. As soon as Shirer stepped off the train, two plainclothesmen grabbed him and demanded to know if he was “Herr So-and-So,” as Shirer recalled, since he didn’t catch the name they kept repeating. “I had expected to meet the secret police sooner or later, but not quite so soon,” he wrote. After examining his passport, the plainclothesmen finally let him go. As he thought of the new chapter that was about to begin for him, Shirer ended his first Berlin diary entry that evening with what he admitted was a bad pun: “I’m going from bad to Hearst.”
That same morning, another foreign correspondent, far more famous at the time than Shirer, had boarded a train to go in the opposite direction, from Berlin to Paris. Dorothy Thompson had the distinction of exiting Nazi Germany for the last time because she had been presented with an expulsion order. Thompson, or Mrs. Sinclair Lewis as she was known because of her novelist husband, had gone to Austria after the murder of Chancellor Dollfuss on July 25, eager to cover what the Nazis were up to there. In early August, she decided to drive from Austria through Munich up to Berlin, reacquainting herself with her old stomping grounds, stopping in towns and villages along the way to get a sense of the popular mood. She may have badly misjudged Hitler when she interviewed him in late 1931, but she was now intent on discovering what he was doing to Germany.
Thompson wasn’t exactly sure when she crossed into Germany since no border guard stopped her, but then she noted the sudden appearance of houses decked out in Nazi flags. Along the road, she saw a Storm Trooper wearing a black armband, which she assumed was in honor of Hindenburg. But when she asked him, the SA man said it was “for Röhm.” Thompson also noticed the election banners everywhere in preparation for the plebiscite that coming Sunday to affirm Hitler’s power grab following Hindenburg’s death. Compared to other countries where voters chose between competing candidates, “in Germany Hitler made himself President and it was a law, and then people voted, whether they liked the law or not,” she wrote later. “If they liked it, that meant he was President; and if they didn’t, that meant he was President anyhow.”
Thompson found the
roads in Germany clogged with cars, motorcycles and bicycles, almost all driven by young men. “I was in a procession of young men,” she recalled. “I had the feeling that there were only young men in Germany, thousands and thousands of young men, all very strong and healthy, and all working furiously to get somewhere.” Then there were the election posters that Thompson described as “sentimental, evangelical,” proclaiming “We are with thee, dear leader.”
In Garmisch, an American visitor from Chicago told Thompson that he had been in Oberammergau, the Bavarian village famed for its Passion Plays. “These people are all crazy,” he said. “This is not a revolution, it’s a revival. They think Hitler is God.” During the scene in the Passion Play when Judas received his thirty pieces of silver, a woman sitting next to him declared: “That is Röhm, who betrayed the Leader.”
In the Bavarian town of Murnau, a Hitler Youth camp filled with “beautiful children,” as Thompson put it, sported a huge banner proclaiming WE WERE BORN TO DIE FOR GERMANY. When she arrived in Munich, Thompson had letters of introduction to people she hadn’t met before. “I went to see them but they wouldn’t talk,” she reported. “They were frightened to death; you could see that.”
At another stop, she met a Catholic priest who was willing to talk. “The Nazi Revolution is the greatest blow to Catholicism since Martin Luther,” he told her. “But it is also a blow to all Christianity . . . In the Nazi outlook nationalism is elevated to a mystic religion, and the state claims not only the bodies of the people but the souls. Force, and not goodness, is the measure of all things.” Who would win in this struggle between Christianity and the Nazis, she inquired. “They are getting the children,” the priest replied. “That is their program—to get the children.” In other words, the Nazis were aiming to replace Christianity with their own “mystic religion,” and they were well on their way to doing so.
When Thompson finally arrived in Berlin, she headed straight to the Adlon Hotel, which felt “like home,” the smiling barman ready with his popular dry martinis. “Oh, I was so glad to be back!” she recalled. Everything was perfect in the hotel. “It was all the courtesy, all the cleanliness, all the exquisite order that was Germany.” But her journalistic colleagues warned her not to use the hotel phones, since they were monitored. So Thompson found a cheap saloon with a phone booth in the back, which she used to place calls to some of her German acquaintances.
The American reporter had lunch with a young woman who worked as a stenographer in a state bank. She had “eyes as candid as water,” Thompson noted. “When you look at her you know she never told a lie in her life.”
“Do you find it’s so bad here as the outside world seems to think?” the woman asked Thompson. When the reporter replied that she had come back to Germany to see the situation for herself, the woman explained that she hadn’t been a Nazi in the beginning, but that even in her bank conditions had changed since Hitler came to power. Overall, wages were lower than before, but the biggest cuts were among the directors and other senior staff. And regular staff felt that they were treated better, with fewer social distinctions. “It’s as though we all belonged to a big family,” she said. While there was talk of food rationing, she claimed everyone was willing to make sacrifices as long as they were employed.
Thompson asked her about the Night of the Long Knives. She professed it was “an awful shock” to learn that some of the Nazi leaders had been “acting dreadful” and were corrupt. “That is why Hitler had to execute them,” she concluded, as if that was a perfectly logical solution.
When Thompson pointed out that in the United States people were tried before they were punished, the German woman didn’t seem to understand her point. “It was funny,” Thompson mused. “I never met anyone in Germany except a few intellectuals, who minded that these people did not have a trial. It was as though they had forgotten that there ever had been such a thing as law.”
Thompson also met a Brownshirt she had known earlier. While admitting there were clashes within the Nazi movement and some of the SA leaders wanted to get rid of Goering or Goebbels, he insisted there was never any talk of undermining Hitler’s regime or of acting in any way against him. “Hitler sold us out,” he said. “There wasn’t any plot. No one was treasonable to Hitler.” He described how Nazi firing squads gunned down far more of his colleagues than reported, with the victims numbering about 300 instead of the 77 mentioned by Hitler.
Thompson also met Otto, a German journalist who had earlier been a staunch defender of free speech but who now “writes articles that free speech isn’t any good,” as she put it. Over coffee and plum cake, he calmly explained that revolutions aren’t made by pleasant people. “Revolutions need terrorists,” he said. “Afterward, when the revolutions succeed, the people who made them are in the way.” The Russians could send those who fell out of favor to Siberia, but in Germany “there was nothing to do but shoot them.” He admitted that shooting former Chancellor von Schleicher’s wife “made a bad impression abroad” and the cleanup was “not pretty.” But the result was a stronger Germany, he insisted. “I doubt if any revolution in history has been made with greater order. It is now consolidated. It will last for years.”
While listening to Otto, Thompson was thinking of some of the other murders on June 30. A music critic in Munich by the name of Willi Schmidt was shot because he was mistaken for a storm trooper with the same name who had already been shot earlier that same day. Dr. Erich Klausener, a Catholic leader, was killed for no reason that she could ascertain. He was cremated and his ashes were sent to his wife by registered post, according to an account she had read in a British newspaper. “I kept thinking how it must have been when the postman rang the bell,” she recalled, imagining a scene of the postman asking the unsuspecting widow to sign for the package and then tipping his hat. “They are awfully polite in Germany,” she observed. To Otto, she said aloud: “Yes, Germany is an orderly country.”
Thompson spent only ten days in Berlin. One day the porter called. “Good morning, madam, there is a gentleman here from the secret state police,” he announced. A young man in a trench coat that looked like the one Hitler wore came up with an order for her to leave the country within forty-eight hours. “In view of your numerous anti-German publications in the American press, the German authorities, for reasons of national self-respect, are unable to extend to you a further right of hospitality,” it read.
While other reporters had been pressured to leave, this was the first outright expulsion and it generated front-page stories back in the United States. “The general feeling of the foreign colony here over the incident is that Nazism has once again demonstrated its utter inability to understand any mentality but its own,” wrote Frederick Birchall, the New York Times’s Berlin correspondent.
Several American and British correspondents came to see Thompson off to Paris, giving her American Beauty roses for her journey. As the train pulled out of the station, she leaned out of the window, clutching the roses, “a little tearful about such a demonstration of comradeship,” Birchall added.
In her own account, Thompson identified the real reason for her expulsion as “blasphemy.” As she explained, “My offense was to think that Hitler is just an ordinary man, after all. That is a crime against the reigning cult in Germany, which says Mr. Hitler is a Messiah sent by God to save the German people—an old Jewish idea.” Returning to New York in September, she had attained new supercelebrity status, with reporters rushing to get her views on the country that had given her the boot. “Germany has gone to war already and the rest of the world does not believe it,” she declared.
At about the same time, Shirer, the new arrival, was contrasting his new home with the city he had first visited in the 1920s. “I miss the old Berlin of the Republic, the care-free, emancipated, civilized air, the snubnosed young women with short-bobbed hair and the young men with either cropped or long hair—it made no difference—who sat up all night with you and discussed anything with intellig
ence and passion.” Instead, Shirer found a city where there were the constant shouts of “Heil Hitler,” Brownshirts and SS guards marching everywhere, and the endless clicking of heels, all of which grated on his nerves. Barely a week into the new assignment that he had been so anxious to get, Shirer admitted he was already “in the throes of a severe case of depression.”
Whether the correspondents were coming or going, they recognized that Germany had undergone a remarkably swift and chilling transformation. No one was casually writing off Hitler anymore.
Back in the United States, Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Thompson’s husband, drew heavily on his observations of Germany as he dashed off his new novel It Can’t Happen Here in two frantic months of writing. Published in 1935, it envisaged the coming to power of a fascist dictator in the United States. Like Hitler, Berzelius Windrip, Lewis’s antihero, claims to have all the answers to all the country’s economic problems, while proclaiming his people’s superiority. “My one ambition is to get all Americans to realize that they are, and must continue to be, the greatest Race on the face of this old Earth,” he declares. Once in power, he abolishes Congress and employs the Minute Men, his equivalent of the Brownshirts, to bash anyone who dares to resist.
The book was a huge success, eventually selling more than 300,000 copies, and stirring controversy as the American Communist Party and others on the far left embraced its message with particular enthusiasm. Lewis liked the praise, but was uneasy about the source. “There is no excuse for any one to swallow the Bolshevik claim to be the one defense against Fascism,” he wrote. But he had succeeded in his primary aim: convincing many of his countrymen that fascism was a threat that they should take seriously, wherever it manifested itself.
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