Hitlerland

by Nagorski, Andrew

  Wilson was intrigued by what he was observing, but nowhere near as alarmed as Beam and others felt he should be. “This place is all so darned absorbing and interesting,” he added in his letter to Welles. His real feelings came out most strongly in reply to a letter from Hoover, which the former president wrote to him after returning to the United States and delivering his March 31 speech urging Americans to steer clear of any involvement in Europe’s conflicts or domestic affairs. Enclosing a copy of his speech, Hoover argued that it had served its purpose “of bringing our people to a realization we must live with other nations.” Wilson responded that he had read the speech “with a lot of satisfaction.” And he echoed its sentiments: “I wish our people in general could understand how little is gained by scolding other people, and how much is gained by trying to work with them.”

  Wilson wasn’t blind to the persecution of the Jews, although he did hold out hope in a letter to Roosevelt on June 2 that there could be “an attempt to work out some kind of acceptable solution” to the continued Nazi confiscations of Jewish property. And he worried about the dangers of another major war, mentioning the parallels to 1914 in a letter to William Bullitt, the American ambassador in Paris. But his conclusion was always the same. Writing again to Welles on June 20, he declared: “Twenty years ago we tried to save the world and now look at it. If we tried to save the world again, it would be just as bad at the end of the conflict. The older I grow the deeper is my conviction that we have nothing to gain by entering a European conflict, and indeed everything to lose.”

  In his letters and reports, Wilson repeatedly emphasized that Hitler enjoyed the active or passive support of most Germans and that it was wishful thinking to believe that his regime could collapse—or that the minority who opposed it could do anything to make that happen. But as Hitler increased the pressure on Czechoslovakia at the end of the summer, Beam, who had nurtured his contacts with conservative opponents of the Nazis, returned to the embassy with a report that raised the possibility that Wilson was wrong on that score. He had stumbled on what looked like nothing less than a plot to assassinate Hitler.

  Among Beam’s acquaintances was Erwin Respondek, whom he described as “a valuable informant” passed along to him by Douglas Miller, the embassy’s commercial attaché, who had left Berlin in 1937. A Catholic economist who despised Hitler and his movement, Respondek had served in the Reichstag in the early 1930s, when the Center Party’s Heinrich Brüning was chancellor. Brüning’s attempts to ban the SA and the SS won him the enmity of the Nazis, and he fled the country in 1934. But Respondek could afford to stay in Berlin, since he was hardly a famous figure. While he was banned from politics, he continued to monitor information on the country’s economy and finances, passing reports along to both the American Embassy, through Miller, and Brüning. In the second week of September, when the crisis of Czechoslovakia was building to its climax, Beam was invited to a Herrenabend, a men’s evening, at Respondek’s house on the outskirts of Berlin.

  It was a small gathering. Aside from Beam and his host, there was Professor Hermann Muckermann, a former Jesuit priest who wrote about science and Christian ethics, and ventured into the discussions about racial theories and eugenics. The other guest was a Luftwaffe colonel. Once Respondek’s wife served dinner and left the men alone, Respondek declared, “Let’s get down to business and talk about the matter we came here to discuss.” As Beam recalled, the talk then turned to Hitler’s apparent determination to seize the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. From the comments of both Respondek and the colonel, it appeared that they were part of a conspiracy against Hitler that included General Franz Halder, who had recently replaced General Ludwig Beck as the army’s chief of staff. Beck had sought assurances from Hitler that his plans for Czechoslovakia wouldn’t lead to a war, only to be dismissed. Now, if Respondek and the Luftwaffe colonel’s information was accurate, his successor and several other senior officers appeared to be contemplating a stunning act of resistance.

  As Beam wrote, “The plan was to assassinate Hitler if he moved to the point of making war.” Muckermann was visibly nervous about that kind of talk, and around midnight he whispered to the young American: “Let’s get out of here fast.” Making their excuses, Beam drove Mucker-mann back to the city center, both of them breathing a sigh of relief as he did so.

  Back at the embassy, Beam wrote a report for Wilson on what had transpired, showing it first to Truman Smith. The military attaché made light of Beam’s account, claiming that no such plot was conceivable in Hitler’s highly disciplined army. Beam submitted his report to Wilson anyway, and he believed that the ambassador passed it along to one of Hull’s advisors. But he never heard anything back either from Wilson or Washington.

  After Britain’s Chamberlain and France’s Daladier acceded to Hitler’s demands for the Sudetenland later that month, Beam encountered Respondek again and inquired what had happened with the alleged Halder plot against the German leader. “He said that since Hitler had not gone to war, the coup had been abandoned,” Beam wrote later. This was consistent with what Halder and several other Wehrmacht (Army) officers claimed at the end of World War II. They were undoubtedly eager to play up their purported opposition to Hitler, and much of what they had to say was greeted with understandable skepticism by the victors, especially at the Nuremberg Trials. But Beam’s account indicates that they had at least seriously discussed the option of striking at Hitler then.

  Once the German leader successfully pulled off the Munich Pact, however, the situation changed radically. France and Britain had caved to Hitler’s demands for the Sudetenland, marking the apogee of the policy of appeasement and setting the stage for the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia that would culminate in the German takeover of what was left of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939. As Field Marshal Erich von Manstein explained after the war: “We had watched Germany’s precarious course along the razor’s edge to date with close attention and were increasingly amazed at Hitler’s luck in attaining—hitherto without recourse to arms—all his overt and covert political aims. The man seemed to have an infallible instinct.”

  But if Munich eliminated any chance of a revolt of Hitler’s military brass prior to World War II, Ambassador Wilson—like Britain’s Chamberlain and France’s Daladier, who had signed onto the ignominious pact—viewed the outcome there as a step toward sanity. In a letter that he wrote to Secretary Hull soon after, which for an unexplained reason he never mailed, Wilson drew a contrast between “the spontaneous outburst of joy, relief and hope for the future” that greeted news of the Munich Pact in Western Europe with the “rather reluctant appreciation given in the press of our country.”

  His judgment on which reaction was more justified came through loud and clear. The British and the French, he wrote, “have perhaps a deeper knowledge and appreciation of the problems of Europe than the American people, remote from Europe, can have . . . it is far easier to be dogmatic in one’s judgments with a wide stretch of sea between our country and a possible enemy.” According to Beam, Wilson wrote to “his British colleague”—presumably that country’s ambassador in Berlin—about the “stout piece of work” he had done to help produce the Munich Pact.

  Roosevelt had sounded a similar note when he had congratulated Chamberlain on the “peace” deal. But at the very least, there was a growing awareness in Washington that the pact had come at a very high price. Writing in his diary on September 28, Jay Pierrepont Moffat, the State Department’s chief of the Division of European Affairs, noted: “I do think the chances of preserving the peace have immeasurably improved but it likewise is difficult for me to see how this can be done except at the expense of Czechoslovakia.”

  Beam, who returned to the United States on home leave in October, found Washington’s mood to be “completely different” from the one that was predominating in diplomatic circles in Berlin. “There was a general sense of outrage over the Austrian take-over, as high-lighted by the plight of resident Jews, as wel
l as over the Nazis’ unopposed and clearly predestined subjugation of Czechoslovakia,” he recalled. At a meeting he attended with Hull, the secretary of state “vented his frustration in Biblical predictions of impending European disaster.”

  It wasn’t just many Americans back home who took a different view. So did some of the Americans reporting from Germany, most notably Shirer, who was back in Berlin as Hitler pushed Europe to the brink. Sitting in the balcony just above Hitler as the dictator issued his demands in a speech on September 26, Shirer recorded in his diary: “He’s still got that nervous tic. All during his speech he kept cocking his shoulder, and the opposite leg from the knee down would bounce up. Audience couldn’t see it, but I could.” Shirer added that “for the first time in all the years I’ve observed him he seemed tonight to have completely lost control of himself.”

  Shirer had been hoping all along that the Czechs would fight, even if the British and the French wanted to convince them otherwise. “For if they do, then there’s a European war, and Hitler can’t win it,” he wrote in his diary on September 19. When the appeasement deal was struck, Shirer was practically sickened by the cheers for peace—“a curious commentary on this sick, decadent continent,” he wrote. And he observed the physical change in the German leader. “How different Hitler at two this morning . . . I noticed his swagger. The tic was gone!”

  Shirer understood that Hitler had been allowed to score a victory that, far from ensuring “peace for our time” as Chamberlain famously claimed, would have disastrous consequences. His gloom only deepened for another reason: Max Jordan of NBC managed to air the text of the Munich Pact an hour before Shirer did. For the CBS man, this amounted, in his own words, to “one of the worst beatings I’ve ever taken.”

  Angus Thuermer was another young American who was eager to explore Hitler’s Germany, arriving there in 1938. After he graduated from the University of Illinois, his father had suggested that he should spend six months studying German in Berlin, and then six months studying French in Paris. “He was giving me an extra year of college,” Thuermer recalled, looking back at that life-changing experience more than seven decades later. But instead of going on to France, he stayed in Germany, not only studying the language but also picking up work from American correspondents there. Soon, he was offered a full-time job for the Associated Press, working under bureau chief Louis Lochner right up until the United States entered World War II in December 1941.

  While he was still living in Hegel Haus, a dormitory for foreign students in Berlin, in late 1938, Thuermer took a trip to Munich, eager to see the Nazis’ annual observance of “The Ninth of November”—the anniversary of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch when sixteen members of the movement were killed. Arriving in that city, Thuermer met a young American missionary who spoke fluent German and managed to convince an SS man to admit the two of them to the VIP grandstand so that they could see how the “martyrs” were honored. (The SS man didn’t know the American was a missionary.) As a result, Thuermer had a clear view of the procession of Nazi luminaries, which included Goebbels, Hess, Himmler, Goering and Hitler.

  “Loose as the formation was, in the midst of his Brownshirt chums, Hitler, the Leader, walked just slightly apart,” Thuermer wrote in his unpublished memoir. “By his stature, his gait, the cut of his jib, a sailor would say, he was not impressive. If I had not known for whom to look, I might have passed him by in a general glance over the group.”

  But the ceremony itself was solemn and, for the party faithful, moving. A man carried “the Blood Banner” in front of the leaders. “The configuration was reminiscent of the acolyte carrying the cross up the nave of the church,” Thuermer noted. Every 50 yards or so, there was a 20-foot-high bright red temporary obelisk bearing the name of one of “the fallen.” When they reached Königsplatz, two white stone mausoleums, each containing eight bronze coffins, were flanked by hundreds of motionless SS men. As a speaker called out the names on the coffins, the SS men answered in unison “Hier!” The ceremony ended with the “Horst Wessel Song,” the Nazi anthem that, as Thuermer put it, was “a genuine rouser.”

  It included the words: “Comrades shot by the red front and reactionaries march in spirit in our ranks.”

  Once the ceremony was over, Thuermer bought himself a third-class ticket and boarded the overnight train to Berlin, stowing his bicycle in the baggage car. Lulled to sleep in the train, he had no idea what was happening that night around the country. Arriving in the capital, he retrieved his bike and rode from the station to Hegel Haus, hoping to make it in time to get a cheap breakfast there. Suddenly, he heard “the smash and tinkle of breaking glass.” Applying his hand brake, he saw a shattered show window just ahead of him. Unbeknownst to him, he was witnessing part of what would be called Kristallnacht. Although most of the violence had taken place during the early morning hours, he saw thugs with Nazi armbands still smashing shop windows, and someone inside the store breaking a grand piano to pieces. He saw a typewriter come flying out of another window and land on Unter den Linden—“one of the great avenues of Western Europe.”

  After a brief stop at Hegel Haus, Thuermer and a Dutch student rode their bicycles around the city to see more. Down one street, they saw smoke from a burning synagogue, but they decided not to risk getting closer, fearing they would be arrested. “I was seeing, eye-witnessing an unreal frenzy . . . it was the n-th power of what I had seen at Nazi rallies,” he recalled. “That was sound. This was fury.” Since Jewish shops had the names of their owners written in white paint on the front window, they were easy to spot. Thuermer saw one shop with a new sign announcing THIS SHOP IS BEING PURCHASED BY AN ARYAN. Later that same day, the sign was changed to this HAS BEEN PURCHASED BY AN ARYAN. The unmistakable message: it should no longer be targeted.

  Eager to see as much as possible, Thuermer and an English student took buses to other parts of the city. While they stopped to observe the spectacle, the locals were doing just the opposite at first. “The citizens were just walking along staring straight ahead, pretending they didn’t know what was happening,” he said. By the afternoon, though, crowds were no longer pretending; they watched the destruction in the areas with the most Jewish shops. Some of those who were continuing to smash at will were boys in their teens; others were grown men. Very few police were in sight. As Thuermer observed, “Those who were there were uncharacteristically unobtrusive, obviously following orders not to interfere with the rowdy Brownshirts.”

  Thuermer offered two possible explanations for the lack of any opposition to this orgy of anti-Semitic violence: most Germans, by this time, “believed in it all” when it came to Nazi ideology; or they were too frightened to say anything. “By the autumn of 1938 everyone knew what happened to opponents of the regime,” he wrote.

  Other Americans also witnessed Kristallnacht and felt its consequences. Charles Thayer, a diplomat assigned to the Berlin consulate, heard horror stories from all around the city. One of his friends witnessed how Nazis threw a small boy from a second-floor window into a mob below. “His leg broken, the boy tried to crawl on hands and knees through the forest of kicking black boots until my friend plunged into the mob and rescued him,” he recounted. While synagogues burned, the thugs ransacked Jewish-owned department stores. At Wertheim, they pushed grand pianos off the gallery level so that they would smash to pieces on the main floor six floors down.

  As the violence continued for two days, the American consulate’s staff had to duck in and out of the building through the fire escape in the back because, in the front, panicked Jews blocked the entrance as they tried to get in. “All day long Kempinskis, Wertheims, Rosenthals, some of the oldest and most famous names in Berlin, trembled in front of our desks, pleading for visas or passports—anything to save them from the madness that had seized the city,” Thayer recalled. His small apartment, he added, “was crammed with Jewish families seeking refuge until the storm subsided.”

  Thayer appeared to be more generous than Thuermer in his as
sessment of the reaction of ordinary Berliners to those events, explaining that “the many Berliners who were neither Nazis nor Jews stood by looking aghast and ashamed but helpless at the sordid spectacle.” Still, after the war he confessed that he had a less forgiving attitude than that. During the heavy Allied bombing raids on German cities, especially those with historic Old Towns like Hamburg, he wondered whether the destruction was really necessary. “But for Berlin I seldom felt a qualm,” he wrote.

  “That ugly old city, it seemed to me, had been the seat of too much evil to deserve either remorse or sorrow when it was smashed to pieces like the pianos at Wertheims.”

  For all the shattered glass, however, it still remained possible for American visitors to come to Germany and miss much of what was happening around them. Phillips Talbot, who had studied along with Thuermer at the University of Illinois and would become a well-known Asian specialist and diplomat, visited Berlin soon after Kristallnacht. He had been a cub reporter for the Chicago Daily News and was invited by Wallace Deuel, its Berlin correspondent, to stay in his apartment. Talbot met up with Thuermer, who pointed out the evidence of what had just transpired. “Do you see that?” he asked, pointing to a second-story shattered window on the Kurfürstendamm. “I watched them break that one on the big night.”