Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (13 page)

The rise of the Nazis wasn’t simply something Americans observed; it also began having a direct impact on their lives. Edgar Mowrer recounted the story of a thirteen-year-old American boy, whom he only identified as Arthur. The boy was attending a Jesuit school in Berlin, and one day in the winter of 1931 he posed a question to his father: “
Dad, what do you think
of National-Socialism?”

“I don’t think about it,” the father replied evasively, since he knew he was treading on dangerous ground. “National-Socialism is purely a German matter which does not concern you or me.”

But Arthur didn’t give up. A few days later, he asked his question a different way. “Dad, if you were a German, would you be a National-Socialist?”

The father asked what was prompting his questions. “You see, nearly all my friends are National-Socialists,” Arthur explained. “I like to be with them, and if you aren’t one, there are so many interesting things you are shut out of.”

Worried, the father told Arthur that the Catholic bishops had condemned the Nazis. “How can Catholic boys be members of a forbidden organization?”

“I don’t know, Dad,” Arthur continued. “But they are, and if you aren’t a National-Socialist in this school, you aren’t anybody. Do you think as a foreigner I could become one?”

Mowrer reported that Arthur never followed through on that wish. But by 1932, about half of the students in his class openly supported Hitler’s party. Despite efforts by the Jesuits to stop the politicization of their classrooms, even the boys’ rough games reflected the larger battles swirling around them. One of the most popular was “chariot
bumping.” Pretending to ride chariots like in the 1925 silent movie
Ben-Hur
, the boys crashed into each other. At first, the opposing forces in those contests were labeled “Romans” and “Jews.” Then, the labels switched to “Centrists” and “Nazis” and the confrontations became nastier, with boys clearly seeking to hurt their opponents.

In their dispatches, American correspondents were often reluctant to make outright predictions on how far the growing backing for the Nazis could carry Hitler. But in their private exchanges with their editors, they were more willing to be blunt about the connection between the deteriorating economic conditions and its impact on politics. Writing on December 28, 1931, to C. M. Morrison, the editor of the
Philadelphia Public Ledger,
Knickerbocker painted a bleak picture of the country he was covering. He had just traveled all over Germany for a series of articles he was writing. “
I never saw
before with my own eyes the degree and extent of real poverty now prevalent here,” he reported. Those conditions, he warned, could lead to another disaster.

Correspondents like Knickerbocker and Mowrer also enjoyed occasional lighter moments even during economically desperate times. The two American reporters were walking down Friedrichstrasse one day when they stopped two streetwalkers. Knickerbocker introduced himself and asked what the women thought of the latest government changes that represented a major setback for the Social Democrats as more conservative politicians took power.

“
We are for
the new gentlemen,” one of the women responded.

Taken aback, Knickerbocker and Mowrer asked why.

“These damn socialists with their free love have made it almost impossible for an honest whore to earn a decent living,” she said. “The gentlemen will change all that and give us a chance!”

As Mowrer sardonically noted, he and Knickerbocker filed stories on this revealing conversation, but his editors at the
Chicago Daily News
found it “
too hot to publish
.”

For the most part, though, what Americans in Germany saw of the lives of ordinary Germans was far from amusing. Enid Keyes, the Berkeley exchange student, wrote home on November 17, 1931, about the “sad side” of life in Berlin: “
I can’t ever walk
a block without seeing
blind men, old women with galoshes stuffed with newspapers for shoes, cripples, white-haired ex-soldiers who are begging or selling matches or shoe strings. Old people with gnarled hands and round shoulders, faces blue with the cold, creep along looking for work, picking up twigs in the threadbare park, or searching the gutters for paper.” The following month she noted that people were looking even more discouraged, and beggars “have increased on the streets in terrible numbers.” Women approached passersby pleading that they were hungry and had children “who are crying for food,” she added.

In his letter to Morrison, Knickerbocker concluded from all this that Germany not only couldn’t pay reparations in the current crisis, “but will not pay reparations ever again.” Any attempt by France to force the issue would backfire, he added. “Germany is like Sampson [
sic
]. She is prepared to pull the building down about her ears rather than continue paying ‘tribute’ which she, the whole nation from Communists to National Socialists, considers she does not owe.”

He offered this forecast: “If Germany does get rid of reparations, does take up the Hitler banner as it seems likely she will do, and does recover with the general recovery of world business that must sooner or later come, then Germany under Hitler will sooner or later re-arm. The money we remit to Europe, one way or another, goes to increase armaments. But this is only another way of saying that this continent is going to war again.”

Replying to Knickerbocker on January 8, 1932, Morrison thanked his correspondent for his impressions, particularly about German attitudes toward the reparations question. He predicted this would lead the United States to become less sympathetic to their plight. “
You see defiance
in Germany begets defiance on this side of the Atlantic,” he wrote. But he ignored Knickerbocker’s warnings about a new major conflict, focusing instead on the economic fallout of the rapid rise of Hitler. “This country has grown to expect Hitler to take over power in Germany next month. It will not come as any shock although the effects may be rather disastrous in the financial and economic situation when it does come,” he added. Given Knickerbocker’s far more alarming predictions, Morrison’s worries looked almost sanguine by comparison.

But as the Nazis continued to gain momentum in the early 1930s, even Knickerbocker vacillated in his judgment about how much of a threat Hitler really represented. In a letter to Percy Winner, the editor of the
New York Evening Post
, on June 18, 1932, he wrote about the increasing speculation that new parliamentary elections the following month would give Hitler the opportunity to become part of a ruling coalition. Knickerbocker still considered him to be a far less powerful figure than Mussolini, in part because of his “feminine” side. And he predicted that President Hindenburg would have no problem keeping him in check.

“
Hitler is a homo-sexual
, effeminate corporal with a hyper-sensitive political olfactory nerve,” he wrote. “Hindenburg is a granite-faced, bass-voiced Field Marshal with a commanding manner that makes little corporals tremble.”

Then he offered this prediction: “If Hitler came to Hindenburg and said ‘Now is the time to do away with the Republic,’ Hindenburg would cry out ‘
Was!
’ and the little corporal would wilt like a lettuce leaf in hot water.”

And that wasn’t the end of it. He gave Hitler high marks for his ability to exploit discontent. “Hitler is a cork,” he wrote. “He floats on the crest of every wave of popular sentiment. No man in Germany can smell the trend of mass feeling and respond to it as Hitler can.” This ability, he continued, made Hitler indispensable to the party. But within that same party “he is pulled from pillar to post by his lieutenants in the most astonishing way.”

Finally, Knickerbocker pointed out that all the indications in Germany were pointing toward “militarism.” The inclusion of the National Socialists in a coalition government, he added, would lead to “the disappearance of their ‘socialist’ character,” leaving only the nationalist part. Still, Hitler’s role would be important but limited, he insisted. He’d continue to be “the olfactory sense of the party, but I cannot see him as Germany’s Mussolini, even though he may remain the official head.”

The man Knickerbocker couldn’t imagine as Germany’s Mussolini had challenged the country’s aging President Paul von Hindenburg when he
ran for a second term in the spring of 1932. Hitler came up short, but placed a strong second in the first round, forcing a runoff the following month. In that round, Hindenburg won the support of more than 19 million Germans, while Hitler won more than 13 million votes. Hindenburg tried to curb the violence of the Nazis by agreeing to dissolve the SA and the SS, but his efforts to check the broader unrest failed. Triggered by the worsening economic conditions, strikes and other protests multiplied. Soon the president decided to dismiss Heinrich Brüning’s government, name Baron Franz von Papen as his successor as chancellor, and call new elections. A member of the Catholic Center Party who believed he could control the Nazis, Papen convinced Hindenburg to agree to the lifting of the ban on the SA and the SS, which only intensified the bloody clashes between them and the Communists.

In the elections on July 31, 1932, the Nazis emerged victorious, winning 230 seats, more than doubling their total from two years earlier. This made them the largest party in the Reichstag, leaving the Social Democrats in second place with 133 seats. They were followed by the Center Party with 97 seats and the Communists with 89. Chancellor von Papen—whom correspondents like Mowrer labeled as dictatorial and reactionary—simultaneously weakened the left by dismissing Social Democrats from top positions and dispatching Defense Minister Kurt von Schleicher to negotiate a deal with Hitler. But emboldened by his party’s stunning results, the Nazi leader wasn’t ready to settle for anything less than Papen’s job. Their talks ended in failure, and new elections were called on November 6, 1932. This time, the Nazis came in first once again, but lost 34 seats and 2 million votes. They won 196 seats, with the Social Democrats still in second place with 121, and the Communists gaining ground by winning 100.

As late as it was in the endgame of the Weimar Republic, many observers saw the drop in support for the Nazis as a sign that the movement was losing momentum. Their violent rhetoric and actions were backfiring with some of the electorate, and there were also new signs of splits within the party’s top ranks. Schleicher, who took over the job of chancellor from Papen in early December, wanted to take advantage of those divisions by trying to lure Gregor Strasser, a popular Nazi who was considered the
leader of the party’s relatively moderate “socialist” wing, into his government as vice chancellor. That proved to be fatal to Strasser, whom Hitler had always viewed as a possible rival. Instead of joining the government, Strasser ended up resigning his party posts.

Americans trying to sort out the meaning of the swirl of elections and political maneuvering were often understandably uncertain what to make of all this.
Abraham Plotkin was
a Jewish-American labor organizer who arrived in Berlin in November 1932, with the avowed goal of studying workers’ conditions and the German labor movement. He would end up spending six months in Germany, witnessing the demise of the Weimar Republic and the first months of Nazi rule. But during his early days in Berlin, he was far from convinced that Hitler would prevail.

Like the journalist Knickerbocker, the exchange student Keyes and others, he was struck by the destitution of working-class Germans. In the United States, he had worked as a West Coast organizer for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, the ILGWU, losing his job in late 1931 when the union had to trim its payroll. He knew firsthand about the toll that the Depression was taking in his own country. But he found that living conditions in Germany were often worse.

Initial impressions could be misleading, he noted on November 22, 1932, in the diary he kept throughout his stay. On the streets of Cologne and Berlin, he pointed out, people “
hide their poverty very well
,” looking reasonably dressed. “From their appearances it would be hard to believe that the last unemployment figures show that 44 out of every hundred Germans are out of employment, and some of them for the last three years.”

Soon he was making the rounds with local trade union organizers, seeing what life was like in reality. While the jobless received unemployment and welfare benefits, they were hardly enough to relieve the misery. “
You Americans
have a bathroom in every apartment—is it not so?” one of his escorts named Hans asked him. He was showing Plotkin a building with 120 inhabitants and not a single bath. “They tell me that in New York every apartment has a toilet,” Hans added. “Come. I’ll show you what we have.” Leading Plotkin to the basement, he pushed open a door and lit a match so he could see a crude toilet made of wooden boards. “Do
you know how many families use this toilet?” he asked. “Nine families. The pots in the rooms would choke you. Go to America and tell them you saw this.”

Visiting another tenement house with Hans, he observed
one family’s diet
: potatoes and herring or potatoes and margarine for the main meal, never any butter, and one pound of meat on Sundays for the four of them.
The head of a district health department
told Plotkin about the rapid spread of infectious diseases because of deteriorating sanitary conditions. Berlin’s bathhouses had lost two-thirds of their customers, he explained, since they could no longer afford their small fees; and even families with tubs were bathing in the same water to save heating costs.

Plotkin was also “
fascinated by
the ladies of the streets and their easy ways.” While he was drinking a beer at Alexanderplatz, a young woman approached him, asking whether he’d consider her for two marks—the equivalent of 50 cents. When he declined, she asked if he’d like one of her four friends at the next table. He turned her down again, but offered to buy her a beer and sausage. She eagerly agreed, but scoffed when he asked her about Wedding, a district known for its poverty. She complained that the women there weren’t professional because they would sell themselves “for a piece of bread.”