Hitlerland

by Nagorski, Andrew

  Goering was sitting on a sofa and the lion bounded to him, jumping up into his lap and licking his face. Kay kept a safe distance, with a table between her and this scene, but could clearly see what happened next. One of the German aides laughed. “The startled lion let loose a flood of yellow urine all over the snow white uniform!” Kay recalled. “A wave of red flowed up Goering’s neck.” The host pushed off the lion and jumped up, “his face red with anger, his blue eyes blazing.” Emmy Goering rushed over, putting her arms around him. “Hermann, Hermann, it is like a little baby,” she pleaded. “There are too many people!” Goering calmed down, conceding that the animal was like a little baby.

  Truman had turned away, pretending not to witness all of this, and Anne had the same instinct. “I see and say nothing,” she recorded in her diary. While the guests studiously admired the library’s artwork, Goering rushed off to change. Returning, he was dressed “in a pongee suit, whiffs of eau de Cologne, and a diamond pin,” Anne wrote.

  Although Kay had worried that Goering would hold this incident against Truman and the others in the room, the luncheon started a relationship that allowed the military attaché to maintain contact with the Luftwaffe chief for the rest of his tour in Berlin. When Goering’s lion grew too difficult to handle and was sent back to the Berlin Zoo, Truman arranged for his daughter to see the animal there and even hold it on her lap. In the photo of that scene, Kätchen is looking at the camera, flashing a weak smile while wearing gloves to avoid touching the lion directly. “I was scared to death,” she recalls. “My father loved that picture.”

  The lunch wasn’t the only occasion where Truman didn’t know what to say in Goering’s presence. As he recalled, during a meeting at the Air Club a year later, Goering kept going on about his devotion to Hitler. His eyes were moist when he declared: “Smith, there are only three truly great characters in all history: Buddha, Jesus Christ, and Adolf Hitler.” Referring to himself as usual in the third person in his writing, Truman noted: “This remark reduced the military attaché to speechlessness.”

  But the real payoff of Lindbergh’s visit came in the form of the daily visits to Germany’s air installations. At Rostock, for instance, Lindbergh and Koenig, the assistant attaché, were allowed to inspect the new Heinkel He 111 medium bomber. Lindbergh concluded that it was comparable to British and American bombers, and superior to French ones. They also watched Udet fly the He 112, the prototype of a new fighter—and saw the plane disintegrate during a dive, forcing the famed pilot to parachute to safety. Still, based on what they saw of those and two other Heinkel planes (the He 70 observation plane, and the He 118 dive bomber), along with the company’s modern factory for navy planes at Warnemünde, the Americans were suitably impressed. “I have never seen four planes, each distinct in type and built by one manufacturer, which were so well designed,” Lindbergh told Smith when he returned to Berlin that evening.

  Writing to the banker Harry Davison, Lindbergh pointed out that “we have nothing to compare in size to either the Heinkel or Junkers factories.” In another letter, he professed he was struck by “a spirit in Germany which I have not seen in any other country,” and the fact that the country’s new rulers had already built up “tremendous strength.”

  Captain Koenig continued to be allowed to visit more airfields and factories after Lindbergh’s first visit, which meant that his reports about Germany’s air capabilities were packed with increasingly detailed rundowns. Based on such observations and the second visit by Lindbergh in October 1937, Smith reported to Washington that, if current trends continued, Germany would “obtain technical parity with the USA by 1941 or 1942.” If the United States slowed down its program for any reason, he warned further, “German air superiority will be realized still sooner.”

  Goering may have deliberately exaggerated some of his claims to Lindbergh about Germany’s capabilities, but his guest was inclined to take them all seriously. At a cocktail party hosted by Ambassador Dodd’s wife, the society reporter Bella Fromm overheard Lindbergh telling Udet: “German aviation ranks higher than that in any other country. It is invincible.” And German officials boasted that Lindbergh would prove to be “the best promotion campaign we could possibly invest in.”

  Smith and Koenig remained convinced that Lindbergh’s visits provided them with crucial information about Hitler’s aviation buildup, which they regularly conveyed to Washington. At the end of World War II when some columnists attacked Smith for his close ties to Lindbergh, FDR advisor Bernard Baruch wrote to then Chief of Staff General George Marshall on June 13, 1945: “How well and how timely were his [Smith’s] warnings about German preparations! And what little attention we paid to them!”

  Of course, the reason why the Smith-Lindbergh relationship became controversial in the first place was the political trajectory of the aviator and his wife that can be traced to that first visit to Germany, which ended with his brief appearance at the opening ceremony of the Olympics in a VIP seat. By inviting Lindbergh and rolling out the red carpet for him everywhere, the Nazis hoped to demonstrate the strengths of the new Germany—both political and military. They would continue to do so during his subsequent four visits before the outbreak of the war in 1939.

  Right after their first visit to Germany in 1936, both Charles and Anne were full of the kind of impressions that their hosts had tried so hard to convey. In a letter to her mother from Copenhagen on August 5, Anne wrote: “I have had ten days in Berlin—bursting to talk about it . . . The feeling that one was right in the center of the volcano of Europe . . .” She described the shock of seeing in person what she had been viewing through “the strictly puritanical view at home that dictatorships are of necessity wrong, evil, unstable, and no good can come of them, combined with the funny-paper view of Hitler as a clown.”

  As for the real picture, as Anne saw it, “there is no question of the power, unity, and purposefulness of Germany. It is terrific. I have never in my life been so conscious of such a directed force. It is thrilling when seen manifested in the energy, pride, and morale of the people—especially the young people.” But Anne admitted this unity could also be terrifying as “a weapon made by one man but also to be used by one man.” Hitler, she added, “is like an inspired religious leader, and as such fanatical—a visionary who really wants the best for his country.” She pointed out many things she disliked about the new Germany: “their treatment of the Jews, their brute-force manner, their stupidity, their rudeness . . .” But she concluded “it could be a force for good in the world” if only the world would seek to acknowledge Germany’s new rulers, turning them “in the right direction” rather than ignoring or insulting them.

  Also from Denmark, Charles wrote to Truman: “While I still have many reservations, I have come away with a feeling of great admiration for the German people.” As for Hitler, Lindbergh wrote in a letter to the banker Harry Davison, “he is undoubtedly a great man, and I believe he has done much for the German people.” While conceding that Hitler and the German people exhibited fanaticism, he added: “It is less than I expected . . .” And many of Hitler’s accomplishments would have been impossible “without some fanaticism.”

  The event that would cement Lindbergh’s reputation as pro-Nazi took place on October 18, 1938, during the flyer’s third visit. Hugh Wilson, who had recently returned to Germany to take up the post of ambassador, hosted a stag dinner that included Goering and other German aviation officials and experts. When Goering arrived with his aides, he greeted Wilson and then, with the ambassador at his side, made straight for Lindbergh. Holding a small red box in his hand, the Luftwaffe chief made a short speech in German and awarded Lindbergh the Service Cross of the German Eagle, one of the highest decorations for civilians. As Wilson confirmed later in a letter to Lindbergh, both of them were caught by surprise by this award, which was given for his services to aviation. Truman Smith, who was also present, noted there was “no possibility” for Lindbergh to have turned down the decoration. “To
have done so would have been a personal affront to Ambassador Wilson, his host for the evening, and to Minister Goering, who in a sense was a host in Germany,” he wrote.

  Lindbergh’s subsequent vocal campaign to keep the United States out of the war in Europe, his involvement in the isolationist America First movement, and his conviction that the Soviet Union represented the real threat to European civilization—and that, in a war between those two powers, “a victory by Germany’s European people would be preferable to one by Russia’s semi-Asiatic Soviet Union”—only confirmed how well he had been played by the Nazis. His critics were right that he had become, in effect, an apologist for Hitler. Ironically, though, the flyer’s political blindness also allowed him to help Smith and his team gather more data on the Luftwaffe’s modernization and ambitions than any of their counterparts in other embassies. For his part, Lindbergh was pleased to be part of this effort; as he saw it, this information on Germany’s growing strength only bolstered his argument that the United States should avoid any new conflict with that country.

  Not all of the intelligence Smith gathered was on target—and, by his own admission, he overlooked the early signs of German plans for rocketry. He also made some erroneous predictions about the degree of disaffection between the Nazis and the military, and certainly about “Hitler’s realistic and reticent foreign policy,” as he put it in 1937. But on balance, the regular air intelligence reports Smith sent to Washington demonstrated his team’s accomplishments. And Smith’s reputation as the best-informed attaché in Berlin on the Luftwaffe was fully merited, something he always stressed was only thanks to the fact that Lindbergh had cooperated with him so extensively and opened so many doors.

  At a reception at the British Embassy in 1938, Cardinal Pacelli, the Vatican secretary of state who had served earlier as the papal nuncio in Germany, sent an aide over to Smith asking him to join him. “I was astonished when . . . he quizzed me in perfect English as to the state of readiness of the Luftwaffe,” he recalled. “One of his questions that I remember distinctly was, what did we Americans think of Germany’s new two-motored fighter: the Messerschmitt 110.” A year later, Pacelli was elected pope and took the name Pius XII.

  Of all the people Hitler surrounded himself with, Putzi Hanfstaengl was a special case—and he liked it that way. It wasn’t just the fact that his mother was an American or that he had gone to Harvard that made him different from most of the Nazi leader’s entourage. He would later explain to everyone and anyone that he had wanted to educate and civilize Hitler, but unfortunately he was thwarted at every turn by the radicals around him. “I could feel that the rabid extremists of the Party had got their claws into him again and the arguments of the more reasonable of us were constantly being countered,” he wrote in a typical passage of his memoir.

  Note the wording: “the more reasonable of us.” What he really meant was that he was the only reasonable one. When John Toland, the Hitler biographer, interviewed Hanfstaengl in 1970, he asked him whether there were any intelligent men in Hitler’s circle. “No!” Putzi shouted.

  Hanfstaengl would also claim that his misgivings about Hitler’s leadership grew steadily. “It would be reasonable to ask why, in view of all my misgivings about the character and intentions of Hitler and his circle, I continued for so long in association with them,” he wrote. His answer: “I was an idealistic National-Socialist, I make no bones about it.”

  While many Americans in Berlin, especially the correspondents who relied on him to gain access to Hitler, viewed Hanfstaengl as a highly useful contact—and some, like the AP’s Lochner, considered him to be a friend—others were more suspicious and antagonistic. Even Wiegand, the veteran Hearst correspondent who had often taken advantage of Hanfstaengl’s interventions to get to his boss, found himself in tense exchanges with Putzi after Hitler came to power. In a memo dated October 23, 1933, Wiegand wrote that Hanfstaengl complained to him that Hitler was holding him responsible for the fact that the American correspondent was now “one of my most bitter opponents.” There were also tensions over money; from Wiegand’s correspondence, it’s clear Putzi had taken fees for articles he may have either contributed or helped on in the past, although he wanted to return some of the money after Hitler came to power.

  William Randolph Hearst took an active interest in Wiegand’s memos and letters about Hanfstaengl. The propagandist “probably likes to make a little money occasionally for news features,” he wrote Wiegand on November 20, 1934. “That is not a crime. The thing I think is unfortunate is the fact that he is such an extremist and may not be giving his boss the best advice on these religious situations. First the Jews were alienated, then the Catholics, and finally many Protestant sects.” Still, he urged his correspondent to be patient. “Do not be displeased with Dr. Hanfstaengl and others in the Government who seem antagonistic,” he wrote. “Give them good advice and try to guide them towards a greater liberality which will gain approval both at home and abroad.”

  By then, many of the Berlin correspondents no longer nurtured those kinds of illusions. As for Putzi, the reporters who were new to Berlin were particularly scathing in their evaluation. Observing him at the Nuremberg party rally in September 1934, Shirer described him as “an immense, high-strung, incoherent clown who does not often fail to remind us that he is part American and graduated from Harvard.” But he admitted that many of the American and British correspondents “rather like him despite his clownish stupidity.”

  When it came to Hanfstaengl’s postwar assertions that he had disagreed with the Nazis’ anti-Semitism, they were flatly contradicted by his behavior. On numerous occasions, he had lashed out at outspoken American diplomats and correspondents, like George Messersmith and Edgar Mowrer, by labeling them as Jews. Bella Fromm ran into Putzi at the entrance at the Dodds’ farewell party for Messersmith on May 12, 1934.

  “I wonder why we were asked today,” Hanfstaengl told her. “All this excitement about Jews. Messersmith is one. So is Roosevelt. The party detests them.”

  “Dr. Hanfstaengl, we’ve discussed this before,” the Jewish reporter replied. “You don’t have to put on that kind of an act with me.”

  “All right,” he said. “Even if they are Aryan, you’d never know it from their actions.”

  Putzi ended their exchange by offering her a fruit drop. “Have one. They are made especially for the Führer.”

  Fromm had enjoyed eating similar fruit drops as a child and she politely took one. Then, as she was about to put it in her mouth, she noticed the swastika on it. “Try as I would to make the hideous mark disappear, it remained leering at me until I had finished the drop,” she noted.

  A month later, Hanfstaengl made a much-publicized visit to the United States to attend his twenty-fifth class reunion at Harvard. The news sparked heated controversy on and off campus. A committee of Jewish organizations argued that Americans should show “no discourtesy of any kind” toward him, but columnist Heywood Broun warned of “bloody riots” during his visit and called for his deportation as an undesirable alien. Noting that Broun was a class ahead of him at Harvard, Putzi dismissed his attacks as “class jealousy.” Talking to reporters who met him as he disembarked in New York, he was equally dismissive of questions about German Jews. “The situation of the Jew in Germany is fairly normal,” he said. When some Jewish reporters asked for five minutes to discuss the issue further, he brushed them off.

  While protesters gathered a short distance from his ship and shouted “Down with Hitler,” the on-campus debate was conducted in more muted tones. Benjamin Halpern, a Jewish student, wrote a letter to the Harvard Crimson titled “Heil Hitler” questioning the initial decision by Elliott Carr Cutler, the chief marshal at the reunion, to ask Hanfstaengl to serve as his aide during the ceremonies. Seeing the backlash, Cutler backed off that idea and asked Hanfstaengl to come as an ordinary alumnus. Still, the Crimson appeared to reflect the prevailing view on campus about the whole affair. “To object to the presence of a Har
vard man among other Harvard men in any capacity, on purely political grounds, is an extremely childish thing to do,” it editorialized.

  While Putzi would find it increasingly difficult in the next couple of years to convince Americans in Berlin that he was the reasonable face of the regime, he also was encountering problems with Hitler and his inner circle. The Nazi leader was contemptuous of Putzi’s assertions that he knew how to handle relations with the United States in order to prevent it from opposing Germany. When the Roosevelt Administration established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in November 1933, Hitler told him: “There you are, Hanfstaengl, your friends the Americans have teamed up with the Bolsheviks.” Earlier, Hitler had told him bluntly: “I see America from where I sit much more clearly than you have ever known it.”

  Putzi would later claim that, in the first period of Hitler’s reign, he began to notice its absurdities and how detached from reality his entourage was. Returning from his Harvard reunion to the aftermath of the Night of the Long Knives, the bloody purge of the SA leaders and assorted other targets of the Nazis, he was summoned to Heiligendamm, the Baltic Sea resort where Hitler, Goebbels and others were vacationing. “It was really like something out of Lewis Carroll, a mad hatter’s luncheon party,” he wrote. “With the whole of Germany groaning under this atmosphere of murder, fear and suspicion, there was Magda Goebbels doing the honors in an airy summer dress, with several other young women at the table, even one or two from the aristocratic families . . .”