Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (18 page)

Mowrer’s friend Knickerbocker heard a group of Nazi leaders repeating this story. “
Edgar a Jew
? Of course!” he replied. Then referring to the revered general from World War I who had marched with Hitler in the Beer Hall Putsch, he added, “As Jewish as Ludendorff!”

Those kinds of personal battles were hardly surprising given the escalating political tensions from the moment that Hitler took power.
According to Putzi
, Hitler initially liked Knickerbocker, not for his reporting but for his excellent German, lively personality and red hair—although, of course, none of that would matter later when his dispatches became increasingly irritating to the Nazis. Knickerbocker was on hand for all the major events in early 1933, including “
the greatest torchlight procession
in its history” on January 30, when Hitler became chancellor.

“Hitler stationed himself at the window of the Chancellor’s palace and Hindenburg at another window,” Knickerbocker wrote. “From eight o’clock in the evening until midnight the thirty-five thousand Brownshirts of Berlin marched past and their flaming torches turned the streets into rivers of fire. The aged president stood in a bath of searchlights, the young Chancellor in another. All Berlin tried to reach them to cheer them and the music and the shouting brought many stout Teutons to tears.”

At first, the representatives of the new regime reached out to Americans to deliver messages of reassurance. “
The Nazis will make
no attempt to carry out any of their well-known demagogic reforms,” Hjalmar Schacht, the former president of the Reichsbank who would soon regain his old post, told Alfred Klieforth, the embassy’s first secretary, over dinner. Sackett, who would end his posting in Berlin in March, initially believed that the government was genuinely divided in its responsibilities, with the Nazis taking charge only of “
the purely political
and administrative departments” while others would continue to deal with the economy, finance and the remaining daily chores of government. He believed Papen, the vice-chancellor, was continuing to play a major role, along with
Nationalist Party leader Alfred Hugenberg, who had been appointed minister of agriculture and economics. The ambassador described him as “practically economic dictator.”

But the next rapid sequence of events would dispel all such illusions about competing power brokers. On February 27, the Reichstag was set ablaze by
Marinus van der Lubbe
, a twenty-four-year-old Dutchman who had been a member of a Communist youth group. Suspicions were immediately aroused that the arsonist was “
a dupe of the Nazis
” and that he had been set up to provide them with an excuse for a massive crack-down. Subsequently, many historians have concluded that the Dutchman may have indeed acted alone. But whatever the case, Hitler seized on the opportunity to lash out against the Communists and other alleged conspirators, and to transform Germany into an absolute dictatorship.

Based on a hastily prepared emergency decree “
For the Protection
of People and State,” Hitler banned opposition publications and rallies, and ordered the arrests of thousands of Communists and Social Democrats, claiming they were plotting more attacks. SA troops wreaked havoc, breaking into homes, beating and torturing the victims they dragged out. With new elections scheduled for March 5, everything happened so fast that it ensured that opposition parties wouldn’t have a chance to mount effective campaigns.

On February 28, the day when Hitler had convinced the increasingly feeble President von Hindenburg to sign the emergency decree that suspended the key civil liberty sections of the Weimar constitution, Fromm attended a reception at Sackett’s residence. Everyone was abuzz with the latest speculation about how far the crackdown would go. It was then, according to Fromm, that Sackett revealed he had asked Washington to send him home. He was disappointed by the failure of American efforts to stabilize the German economy, the Jewish reporter wrote in her diary, and “
deeply displeased
with German domestic politics.”

Despite the Nazis’ rampage against their opponents, the party garnered only 43.9 percent of the votes in the March 5 elections. That made them the strongest party in the Reichstag but still not the majority party. They had to include Hugenberg’s Nationalists in the government to give them the majority they needed. But Hitler had no intention of allowing
anything to slow him down. On March 23, he had the Reichstag approve the “enabling act,” effectively shifting all key powers from the legislative body to him. As chancellor, he would draft the laws that would be enacted by the cabinet—even, as the act specified, when they “
might deviate from
the constitution.” There would be no more restraints on his power.

Or on the attacks on anyone deemed a political opponent and on Jews. April 1 marked the official start of a boycott against Jewish businesses, allegedly as a response to slanderous campaigns against Germany by Jews abroad. Calling what happened next “a tragedy,” Knickerbocker reported: “
The nation turned
into a huge hunting party and for another fortnight all attention was absorbed in chasing the Jews.”

Dorothy Thompson, who was back on the continent but no longer living in Berlin, had arrived in the German capital on the night of the Reichstag fire and stayed long enough to witness some of the rampages that followed. When the Jewish boycott started on April 1, she wrote from Vienna to her husband Sinclair Lewis, who was back in New York: “
It is really as bad
as the most sensational papers report . . . the S.A. boys have simply turned into gangs and beat up people on the streets . . . and take socialists and communists & Jews into so-called ‘Braune Etagen’ [brown floors] where they are tortured. Italian fascism was a kindergarten compared to it.” She also despaired of “incredible (to me) docility” of the liberals and confessed she felt the urge to go around Berlin reciting the Gettysburg Address. And she was worried about her colleagues who were still stationed there, particularly Mowrer. “Edgar is constantly threatened, but has no intention of leaving Berlin & doesn’t think he is in actual danger.”

Thompson sent another letter to a friend in London, the pianist Harriet Cohen, who knew British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. She explained that she had seen many victims of Nazi violence with her own eyes. The SA thugs had gone “
perfectly mad
” as they hunted down new victims, she wrote. “They beat them with steel rods, knock their teeth out with revolver butts, break their arms . . . urinate on them, make them kneel and kiss the
Hakenkreuz
[the swastika].” Noting the silence of the German press and the exodus of such writers as Thomas Mann, Erich Maria Remarque and Bertolt Brecht, she let loose with her frustration.
“I keep thinking what
could
be done . . . I feel myself starting to hate Germany. And already the world is rotten with hatred. If only someone would speak . . .” Cohen understood this to be an appeal for her to show the letter to MacDonald, which she did.

Not that such messages had any impact. The Nazis continued to usher in their new order with new drama. On the evening of May 10, propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels presided over the infamous “burning of the books”—“
the auto da fé
of ‘un-German literature,’” as Knickerbocker described it, “when throughout the Reich 100,000 students gathered to destroy ‘Jewish, Marxist, anti-German, immoral’ publications of 280 authors, many of them bearing world-famous names.” It was “a circus of historical significance but one that furnished immense entertainment for the participants.”

Addressing the crowd, Goebbels declared: “
These flames do not only
illuminate the final act of the old era, they also light up the new. Never before have the young men had so good a right to clean up the debris of the past . . . Oh, my century, it is a joy to be alive.” Along with the predictable volumes of Marx, Engels and Lenin, books by Remarque, Brecht, Hemingway and even Helen Keller (
How I Became a Socialist
) went up in flames, all part of an estimated total of 20,000 copies incinerated that night while the crowd cheered and sang.

Several correspondents witnessed the spectacle, and the cumulative effect of the Nazi actions was a growing sense of repulsion among many of them. Even the
Baltimore Sun
’s Bouton, whom Lochner had scornfully referred to as “an ardent Nazi” earlier, underwent a fundamental transformation and started filing increasingly hard-hitting stories, warning “
that the truth
[about the Nazis’ tactics] is ten times worse than the reports.” Just over a year after Hitler took power, the German Foreign Ministry ordered Bouton to “
change his style of reporting
or leave the country.” Within a short time, he was gone.

Most of Bouton’s colleagues, including Lochner, very much wanted to keep covering what was the most exciting story of the moment. Besides, their home offices didn’t want dramatic exits—they wanted to keep their
reporters in Berlin. “
Our orders from our bosses
were to tell no untruth, but to report only as much of the truth, without distorting the picture, as would enable us to remain at our posts,” Lochner wrote in his memoirs. Cautious by nature, the AP veteran would follow those instructions.

Other Americans exhibited even greater caution, but sometimes for other reasons. Despite all the violence and intimidation—in fact, directly because of the seemingly unbridled nature of the almost daily attacks on anyone deemed a political opponent—the outsiders were often puzzled and still suspended judgment on what exactly was driving this fury.

Writing in the
American Federationist
, the house organ of the American Federation of Labor, Abraham Plotkin summed up the desperate situation of his German counterparts in an article that he published shortly after his return to the United States in May 1933. “
The Nazis have turned loose
forces that they themselves do not understand,” the Jewish-American labor organizer insisted. “It may surprise many to learn that the most exciting things that have happened in Germany have come as an upsurge from below, and not from the government itself.” Citing as an example the anti-Jewish boycott in Munich, which was formally disavowed by Hitler’s government, he claimed it had been started by SA troops and “it gained such momentum within a few hours that not one among the Nazi leaders dared to make an effort to head it off.”

Plotkin was far from the only American subscriber to the notion that Hitler and other top Nazis were seeking to restrain their supporters rather than incite them to ever greater violence. Consul General Messersmith initially believed that Hitler had to ride the violent wave of his followers since otherwise he might be replaced by “
real radicals
.” Growing protests back in the United States, such as the one held in Madison Square Garden on March 27, were only whipping up “what was almost hysteria” among those German leaders who wanted to pursue a moderate course, he warned. Unlike Plotkin, he believed that the subsequent boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany had been ordered from the top, but to contain the popular resentment and control it. When the government officially abandoned the boycott on April 4, he was pleased to report that the number of anti-Semitic incidents dropped quickly.

Not even the fact that a growing number of Americans were caught
up in the violence could shake Messersmith’s belief that the reality of what was happening was far more complicated than it appeared—and that it would be counterproductive to pin all the blame on Hitler. In early March, Nathaniel Wolff, a painter from Rochester, New York, was nabbed by the SA when he was overheard denouncing both Communists and Nazis. Before he was allowed to leave the country, he had to sign a statement promising that he would never return. “
I am a Jew
,” it read. “I certify that no physical violence has been done to me and none of my property has been stolen.”

Others were not so lucky. Some, like editor
Edward Dahlberg
, a visiting
Scribner’s Magazine
editor, were beaten on the street. The American wife of a German Jew had to watch storm troopers, who had burst into their apartment, beat her husband, ostensibly for having four suits in their closet. “Four suits, while for fourteen years we have been starving,” one of his tormenters shouted. “Jews. We hate you.”

On March 31, the SA snatched
three Americans and took them to a makeshift prison, where they were stripped and left to sleep on the cold floor. The next day, their tormentors beat them unconscious before leaving them out on the street. American correspondents knew of this and other incidents, but Messersmith convinced them to hold off any reporting on what happened to the trio of Americans on March 31 for forty-eight hours. He explained this would allow him to press the authorities to take the proper actions first. As Messersmith reported with evident satisfaction, the police took “rapid action” and the guilty Brownshirts were “sharply reproved” and expelled from the ranks.

Messersmith and other embassy officials kept protesting when Americans were assaulted, as they continued to be. But they also looked for signs of hope in any case where the authorities seemed willing to help. During the summer of 1933, America’s famous radio broadcaster H. V. Kaltenborn returned to Berlin for a visit with his son Rolf.
He told Messersmith
that American reporters like Mowrer were surely exaggerating in their stories about incidents of Nazi brutality. A few days later when his son Rolf failed to salute the Nazi banners carried in one of the frequent parades, a storm trooper hit him. Learning of the incident, the Propaganda Ministry promptly issued his father a written apology “in
the hope that
I would not feature my son’s misadventure in a broadcast,” Kaltenborn recalled. He added, “I had, of course, no intention of exploiting a personal experience.”

Some Americans, it seemed, didn’t want to see what was really happening, even when it was happening to them.

There were other American visitors during those early days of Hitler’s rule who were keen to understand just how dramatically the situation had changed in Germany—and not to downplay the implications. James G. McDonald, the head of the Foreign Policy Association who would soon become the League of Nations’ high commissioner for refugees, was alarmed by what he heard from the moment he arrived in Berlin on March 29, 1933. That first day, Putzi Hanfstaengl painted “
a terrifying account
of Nazi plans,” McDonald recorded in his diary, and didn’t conceal what this would mean for Jews. “The Jews are the vampire sucking German blood,” Putzi told his American visitor with a laugh. “We shall not be strong until we have freed ourselves of them.”