Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (32 page)

Reflecting on his stay, DuBois elaborated on the reasons why black Americans would have mixed feelings about their experiences in Hitler’s Germany. “
I have been treated
with uniform courtesy and consideration,” he reported. “It would have been impossible for me to have spent a similarly long time in any part of the United States, without some, if not frequent cases of personal insult or discrimination. I cannot record a single instance here.”

He observed that Germany felt “contented and prosperous” under its new rulers, but also that it was “silent, nervous, suppressed” and all opposition was banned. He certainly noticed the “campaign of race prejudice carried on openly, continuously and determinedly against all non-Nordic races, but specifically against the Jews, which surpasses in vindictive cruelty and public insult anything I have ever seen.” The situation, he added, was “so complicated that one cannot express it without seeming to convict one’s self of deliberate misstatement.” All of which got him back to the Olympics, concluding that “the testimony of the casual, non-German-speaking visitor to the Olympic Games is worse than valueless in any direction.”

Many of the American athletes, black or white, gave little or no thought to such considerations. They were there for the competition—and, just like the spectators, out for a good time. In at least one case, this led to a German-American personal drama that played itself out almost as publicly as the races on the field.

Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s favorite film director, who had already immortalized the Nuremberg Nazi rallies in
Triumph of the Will
, was busy filming the games for what would become her second major work,
Olympia.
Fromm clearly detested the glamorous young director and former actress. “
Wearing gray flannel
slacks and a kind of jockey cap, [she] is obtrusively in evidence everywhere,” the Jewish reporter wrote in her diary. “On and off she sits down beside her
Führer
, a magazine-cover grin on her face and a halo of importance fixed firmly above her head.” It wasn’t the Nazi leader, however, who made Riefenstahl lose control of her emotions; it was the American decathlon winner Glenn Morris.

On the second day of the decathlon, the German champion Erwin Huber introduced Riefenstahl to Morris, who was lying on the grass resting with a towel over his head. “
When Huber presented
Morris to me, and we looked at one another, we both seemed transfixed,” the film director wrote in her autobiography, slipping into the tone of a sappy romance novel. “It was an incredible moment and I had never experienced anything like it. I tried to choke back the feelings surging up inside me . . .”

After Morris won the competition, breaking a world record, he stood with two other Americans on the podium for the medals ceremony. Riefenstahl watched, but was unable to film the ceremony because it was getting dark. As Morris came off the podium, he headed straight toward the film director. Here, her memoir goes from romance novel to bodice-ripper mode. “I held out my hand and congratulated him, but he grabbed me in his arms, tore off my blouse, and kissed my breasts, right in the middle of the stadium, in front of a hundred thousand spectators. A lunatic, I thought,” she wrote. “But I could not forget the wild look in his eyes . . .”

Riefenstahl claimed she tried to avoid Morris after that, but ended up encountering him again at the pole vault. “We couldn’t control our feelings,” she wrote, describing how they immediately became lovers in the midst of the Olympic events and her film shoots. “I had lost my head completely,” she confessed, and imagined he was the man she would marry. When Morris left to be feted for his triumphs in a New York ticker-tape parade, she was despondent. Then she read that he was engaged to an American teacher. He still wrote to Riefenstahl, and she still believed she
loved him. Although she finally decided to break off their affair, she sent him her stills of him in action in Berlin, which helped him get the part of Tarzan in a Hollywood movie. Later, she learned he divorced in 1940 and died of alcohol and drug abuse in 1974.

By pointing out “
his sad fate
” in her memoir, Riefenstahl implied that Morris would have done better if he had stayed with her. In the midst of the pageantry of the Olympics, Hitler’s favorite film director had fanta-sized about a whole other life with the American who couldn’t have cared less what movement she was working for.

Truman Smith, who had been the first American official to meet Hitler, returned to Berlin in 1935 for a second tour, this time as the senior military attaché. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that he met the Nazi leader again, although he had observed him from afar on several occasions, including at the Olympics.
At an official function
at the Chancellery, Smith worked his way through the reception line and shook Hitler’s hand. Preparing to move on, he felt Hitler’s hand on his sleeve.

“Have I not seen you before?” Hitler asked.

“Yes, Mr. Chancellor, in Munich in 1922,” the startled attaché responded.

“Oh, yes, you introduced me to Hanfstaengl,” Hitler recalled.

It was a vivid demonstration that the German leader, like many skilled politicians, possessed an uncanny memory for significant faces and events in his life even after a long interval.

Returning to Berlin, Truman and his wife, Kay, were immediately struck by its transformation since the early 1920s. “
Berlin was so familiar
,” Kay wrote in her unpublished memoirs. “It was the same yet not the same. The streets, the buildings were all as I had known them. But now no more shabby fronts and broken fences. All was clean, freshly painted . . . It was as in a dream; all is familiar but changed . . . The crowds well dressed, the people looking well nourished, energetic.” Without any irony, she also observed: “Berlin was a very safe city at this time, as all the drunks, bums, homosexuals, etc. had been put in concentration camps.”

If such remarks betrayed her own prejudices, Kay wasn’t blind to
what she characterized as “a certain tenseness” in the air, the product of a regime that was ready to target anyone. When she and Truman returned to the house one day, a servant told them that telephone repairmen had visited the house and insisted on “checking” their connections, despite her protestations that the phone was working well. After that, the Smiths made a habit of putting an overcoat over the phone to foil any listening devices, and postponing any sensitive conversations to when they took walks in the Grunewald, the forest on the outskirts of the city. The couple assumed that it wasn’t only the Nazis who could be spying on them. According to Kay, Truman tried to engineer the removal of an American secretary in his office, a longtime Berlin resident with strong leftist views who he suspected was giving information to the Russians.

Kay also pointed out parallels between the Nazis and the Communists. The Nazis, like the Communists, hoped to replace Christianity with another doctrine—what she identified as “the old Germanic religion,” but in reality was the idea that Nazism superseded all previous beliefs. According to one of Kay’s Catholic friends, a Nazi leader had ordered schoolchildren to replace the standard grace at meals with “Dear Jesus, stay away from us. We eat gladly without thee.” When Rochus von Rheinbabin, a German acquaintance from their first tour, arrived decked out in Nazi insignia, proudly boasting about his early membership in the party, Kay questioned him about the party’s beliefs. After he finished, she said, “But Rochus, what is then the difference between National Socialism and Communism?” Her German visitor threw up his hands. “Hush Katie,” he declared. “One may not say that.”

When Colonel Charles Bennett, the chief of the attaché section of the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department, had asked Smith to return to Germany, he was counting on his getting privileged access to the new regime. “
Your past relationship
with Hitler, [Minister of War and Army Commander-in-Chief Werner von] Blomberg, and others who are at the head of affairs in Germany, would enable you to do a service that no one else, however well qualified they might be in other respects, could do,” he wrote. Of course, Smith could no longer drop in on Hitler the way he first had in Munich; in fact, his brief encounter with him on the reception line was the only time he spoke to him directly again. But his extensive
contacts from those earlier days gave him a tremendous advantage over the other military attachés in Berlin, more than justifying Bennett’s faith in him.

Unlike many of his counterparts in other embassies, Smith had no money in his office budget to pay for spies. What he did have was a long list of German officers he knew, some of whom he had met during his first tour in Germany or later when he was an instructor at the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, from 1928 to 1932. The assistant commandant of the Infantry School was George C. Marshall, then a lieutenant colonel, who treated Smith as an aide and translator when it came to dealing with visiting Germans.

After the Nazis took power, they made a rule that a German officer could not visit the house of a foreigner unless he knew the foreigner previously. This meant most military attachés were effectively prevented from inviting German officers to their homes. But Smith was in a different category. When he and Kay held a party upon their return to Berlin, Kay recalled, “The other attachés were dumbfounded to find so many German officers at our reception. They were green with envy and Truman became their prime target in their attempt to get news.”

By comparison, Kay noted, the British and the French, who relied heavily on paid spies, “were remarkably bare of contacts.” That was true for most of the other attachés as well, making Truman a celebrity in their ranks. Only the Poles, she conceded, may have had better contacts than her husband.

Truman used everything he could to learn about the German military plans and deployments. Early in his second tour, German officers still wore insignia of their regiments on their shoulders. He carefully noted what units were represented, piecing together valuable information, even enlisting Kay and their young daughter Kätchen to help him in this task. “Katchen and I were coached to scrutinize their shoulders well and to describe their marks,” Kay wrote, omitting the umlaut that her daughter has always insisted belongs on her name. “Whenever we drove out in the car together she would take one side and I the other, our faces pressed against the window pane. It made an amusing game for us and we had the feeling of helping solve the riddle.”

Kätchen, who was
born in 1924, still relishes similar memories. Her father suspected that their driver Robert was reporting on them, she recalled, so Truman took them out for drives in the country on Sundays when he had the day off. Kätchen would sit in the back with her dog, a chow called Tauila, and Truman would often ask her to be the lookout. “Don’t be too obvious, but turn your head and see if you can see a big building in there,” he told her on one occasion as they were driving on a road surrounded by woods. He was looking for signs that a new factory had been built to produce engines for the Luftwaffe.

When Kätchen traveled to The Hague by train with her friends the daughters of the Dutch ambassador, she observed the gun emplacements on the German side of the border with Holland—and promptly sent a postcard to her parents describing them. “People thought that he must have had spies in Berlin, but I was the only spy,” Kätchen laughed, thinking of herself at about age twelve taking on that role.

But there was one riddle Truman realized early he would have trouble solving. For all his contacts in the army, he had few contacts with the Luftwaffe—and no more knowledge “
of air corps
organization and tactics than did the average American infantry officer,” as he put it. He also had “negligible” knowledge of the technical side of air power. Captain Theodore Koenig, the assistant attaché who was supposed to monitor Germany’s growing air capabilities, was a capable officer, but Truman was worried that his small team was poorly equipped to do so, forced to rely on “
their wits alone
” to make up for their lack of resources.

The urgency of such tasks was underscored by Hitler’s push to reassert Germany’s power, which Truman took extremely seriously. When German troops reoccupied the Rhineland in March 1936, reversing the demilitarization that had been mandated by the Treaty of Versailles, he rushed home. “
How fast can you
and Katchen get away from here?” he asked Kay. Looking around the apartment, she replied that it would probably take movers three days to pack up their things. “Three days!” Truman replied. “Thirty minutes is all you will have if the French react as they must. The bombers will be here in half an hour. Pack two suitcases. Tell Robert to put enough cans of gas in the car to take you to France.” When Kay asked what he would do in that situation, he declared
he would “stay with the embassy.” Kay did as she was told, but the French failed to respond at all to Hitler’s calculated gamble.

Two months later
, Kay and Truman were having breakfast in their apartment when she pointed out a front-page story in the Paris edition of the
Herald Tribune.
It reported that Charles Lindbergh had visited an airplane factory in France. Over the next few days, Truman began wondering if the famous airman, whose transatlantic voyage had captured the imagination of people everywhere, couldn’t gain the same kind of access to German airplane factories as he did to French ones. He checked with aides to Luftwaffe Commander-in-Chief Goering, and they reacted as he had hoped they would, saying that they would be pleased to show Lindbergh their combat units and factories. Truman then wrote a letter to Lindbergh on May 25, relaying this invitation. Smith had never met Lindbergh before, but he didn’t hesitate to make a forceful case.

“
I need hardly tell you
that the present German air development is very imposing and on a scale which I believe is unmatched in the world,” he wrote. Pointing out that the Luftwaffe’s buildup had been shrouded in secrecy until recently, he added that the Germans had already demonstrated an increasing willingness to show more of what they were doing to Americans than to representatives of other countries. “General Goering has particularly exerted himself for friendly relations with the United States,” he continued, emphasizing that the invitation was extended directly by the Luftwaffe commander and his Air Ministry. “From a purely American point of view, I consider your visit here would be of high patriotic benefit,” Smith concluded. “I am certain they will go out of their way to show you even more than they will show us.”