Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (41 page)

By the end of 1938 and early 1939, the calendar was much fuller and the hymn soaring to new heights, extolling triumph after triumph. Austria had been annexed and Czechoslovakia carved up. To support the Nationalists against the Republicans in Spain’s civil war, Hitler had dispatched troops and his newest fighter planes to that country, using the conflict there as a testing ground for his latest weaponry and offsetting Stalin’s support for the Republican side. In March 1939, Hitler had demanded the Baltic port of Memel—or, as it is called today, Klaipeda—from Lithuania, and that tiny country quickly capitulated. Nothing, it seemed, stood in the way of more German victories. When the Spanish Civil War ended with the Nationalists triumphant, Beam watched from the windows of the U.S. Embassy the April victory parade of the German troops returning from there. He admitted it was “
an awesome sight
.”

While Roosevelt still insisted he wanted to do everything to ensure the peace, by early 1939 he was beginning to make preparations for an alternative scenario. In his State of the Union address on January 4, he stressed that there were “
many methods
short of war, but stronger and more effective than mere words, of bringing home to aggressor governments the aggregate sentiments of our own people.” Specifically, that meant upping military expenditures, which he promptly did by submitting a budget request with a 30 percent overall increase to $1.3 billion, not including an additional $500 million for acquiring new military aircraft.

For a while, the administration had considered sending Wilson back to his post in Berlin, but that idea was scuttled when Hitler took over what was left of Czechoslovakia in March. In the internal discussions in the State Department, Messersmith—the former consul general in Berlin—“
his eyes aglow
, favored any move directed against the Nazis,” Moffat recorded in his diary. The two men were friends, but they frequently engaged in verbal jousts. “
George, I wonder
if you know what you are
doing,” Moffat told him on one occasion. “You are helping us into this war which is coming on.” Messersmith replied by insisting that it was impossible for Hitler and the Western democracies to coexist.

Many of his colleagues were more cautious, and Roosevelt was still inclined to offer what he hoped would be seen as an olive branch.
On April 14
, he sent an appeal to Hitler and Mussolini that they pledge not to attack thirty-one countries in Europe and the Middle East—including the most likely next target, Poland—for at least ten years.

The president wasn’t optimistic about the chances for success, but he was still stung by the mocking response from Berlin. On April 28, Hitler addressed the Reichstag, but he was focused on his audience abroad. Representing the U.S. Embassy, Beam witnessed his delivery, which the German leader had prepared for by first asking several of the thirty-one states whether they feared a German attack. “The great majority had replied in the negative which enabled Hitler to read out their names slowly, with an air of false drama,” the young diplomat recalled. “It was a beautifully-acted farce which provoked loud laughter.”

Beam didn’t overlook the “particularly chilling nature” of the speech, despite that bit of theater. Poland wasn’t one of the countries that Hitler had asked for its opinion, and he proceeded to denounce that country’s refusal to accede to his demands for Danzig. He also castigated the British for taking Poland’s side in this dispute. He renounced both the 1934 German-Polish nonaggression pact, which was supposed to ensure peace between those neighbors for ten years, and the 1935 Naval Agreement with Britain, which limited the German Navy to 35 percent of the tonnage of the British fleet. As Beam put it, Hitler was performing “as the world’s then most powerful head of state”—and he clearly meant for everyone to understand that.

Despite Hitler’s increasingly belligerent tone, there were still plenty of Americans who wanted to believe he was no threat to them. It was hardly surprising that those who desperately wanted to keep their country out of another global conflagration should feel that way, and some American envoys could be counted among them. Shortly after the Munich Pact, Joseph Kennedy, the American ambassador in London, had floated the idea that democracies and dictatorships “
could advantageously bend
their
energies toward solving common problems by an attempt to re-establish good relations on a world basis.” But it was surprising when Wiegand, Hearst’s veteran correspondent who had covered Germany since World War I, produced a major two-part article that encouraged exactly those kinds of illusions.

Writing in the April and May 1939 editions of
Cosmopolitan
, Wiegand offered a lengthy profile of Hitler, examining his personality and politics. The magazine claimed the author was “
the undisputed dean
of American foreign correspondents and one of the greatest reporters of our time,” citing as evidence Wiegand’s early contacts with Hitler, dating back to 1921. In particular, it explained how the correspondent was “more than a little psychic himself” to recognize so early that Hitler had to be taken seriously. “It takes genius to know genius,” it declared, with no trace of irony. “And a genius indeed is Karl von Wiegand.”

Wiegand’s first installment in the April issue described how Hitler had become “a veritable human meteor streaking the dark political skies of Europe—an ill omen to millions, a sign to other millions.” Like a meteor, Hitler “is being consumed by fires of his own being,” including “his unbelievably deep hatred for the Jews” and “his insatiable greed for ruthless power.” But Wiegand was also clearly in awe of what this strange figure he had first met in Munich had achieved. “Measuring his personal achievements, future historians may record Adolf Hitler as the political genius of this era, perhaps of this century,” he wrote. Nonetheless, he indicated that Hitler was acutely conscious that a climax was coming soon and his own life could be cut short. As a result, his actions were marked by “a fever of impatience, haste, hurry, drive,” which is “a state of mind in which any man may stumble.”

In his second installment in the May issue, however, Wiegand delivered an oddly reassuring message to his American readers: “Adolf Hitler is no physical menace to the United States except (1) in an agreement or alliance with Great Britain; (2) in the event that England should turn Fascist, or (3) if Nazi Germany should conquer England. The probability of any of these eventualities is remote.”

Hitler had demonstrated his own near psychic qualities by predicting that neither Britain nor France would fight to save Czechoslovakia, he
added. When it came to what the German leader would do next, Wiegand declared that he was no prophet—but that didn’t prevent him from making a sweeping prediction. “Hitler has achieved without war what no other man has accomplished for centuries,” he wrote. “As I know Der Führer, he will not in his senses stake those achievements and his unique place in history on the uncertain gamble of a deliberately planned aggressive war.”

Suddenly, just as war was looming, Wiegand was sounding less like a seasoned correspondent and more like one of those naïve American visitors to Germany that Howard K. Smith had written about—stuck in stage-one or stage-two thinking about what Hitler and his movement truly represented.

10

“On Our Island”

O
n April 20, 1939, AP bureau chief Lochner dutifully set out to observe the lavish celebration of Hitler’s fiftieth birthday. “
I sat for four hours
in the reviewing stand watching the biggest military display in German history,” he wrote his daughter and son back in Chicago on April 26. “You can imagine how a pacifist like myself falls for that stuff!” Among the troops on parade was Wolfgang Wosseng, who had worked as an “office boy” for Lochner and was then called up as a Potsdam grenadier. While everyone else was wildly cheering, Lochner couldn’t help thinking that Wosseng could be forced to shoot at similar young men in different uniforms very soon. “If that parade is a sample, I tell you the next war will be more terrible than anything the world has known,” he continued in his letter. “The war of 1914 will have been child’s play compared to this.”

Unlike Wiegand, Lochner was far from convinced that Hitler would stop with the easy conquests, avoiding the fatal step that would trigger a new conflagration. “I fear the Germans make one big mistake: they completely underestimate the potential forces arrayed against them,” he explained to his children. Warning that it is always dangerous to underestimate one’s opponents, he added: “Queer that the top leaders in Germany
should repeat that mistake of 1914–1918! Remember how they used to scoff at the possibility that America could ship troops across the ocean? Now they drill into the German people that England is decrepit and won’t fight; that France is torn with domestic strife; that the U.S.A. is a big bag of wind, etc., etc. A great pity!”

But Hitler and his entourage weren’t the only ones to indulge in wishful thinking.
The reports by Truman Smith
and others in the U.S. Embassy in Berlin about the rapidly growing strength of the German military were often greeted with skepticism in Washington, and the authors viewed as alarmists. Still, there was a realization that war was a growing possibility.
By early summer
, Moffat, the State Department’s Chief of the Division of European Affairs, put the chances of a new conflict at 50-50.

For American correspondents and officials, the key question was how well prepared were the countries Germany was most likely to attack—first of all, Poland. Knickerbocker, the former Berlin correspondent who was still traveling around Europe, recalled that everyone wanted to know whether the Poles could hold out long enough for the French to mobilize an offensive and come to their rescue. “
Optimistic Poles
said they could hold out for three years; pessimistic Poles said one year,” he wrote. “The French thought the Poles could hold out for six months.”

On August 18, Moffat noted in his diary: “
The Polish ambassador
called. He had little to offer other than to reiterate the belief of his Government that German strength was overrated . . . He said that the German army was not the army of 1914. The officers had insufficient training and had not been allowed to remain long enough with the same units of troops. The best generals had been liquidated, and the remaining generals were merely ‘Party hacks.’ !! The German people did not want to fight, and it would be suicidal to start a war when conditions were already so bad that people were being rationed as to foodstuffs.”

Moffat concluded, “The whole conversation represented a point of view of unreasonable optimism and still more unreasoning underrating of one’s opponent, that, if typical of Polish mentality in general, causes me to feel considerable foreboding.”

As he continued to cover the unfolding drama in Europe for CBS, Shirer was beyond foreboding. He was deeply pessimistic. Even his good
friend John Gunther, the former
Chicago Daily News
reporter who had launched what would prove to be a highly successful career as an author with his 1936 bestseller
Inside Europe
, was more reserved in his judgments after the sellout of Czechoslovakia. In the introduction to the new edition of the book that was published near the end of 1938, he noted “
the death of
the Czechoslovak nation in its present form,” but declared, “
There is a chance
—just a chance but a chance—that the Munich Agreement may bring a European settlement.” As late as July 28, 1939, when Shirer met Gunther in Geneva, the CBS man wrote in his diary, “
John fairly optimistic
about peace.”

Returning to Berlin in early August, Shirer found his darkening mood turning into open anger. On the train from Basel, he observed that the passengers “
looked clean
and decent, the kind that made us like Germans, as people, before the Nazis.” In a discussion with someone he identified as Captain D—“a World War officer of proved patriotism”—Shirer recorded that the German, who had earlier professed to be against a new war, “became violent today at the very mention of the Poles and the British,” taking his cue from Hitler’s attacks on both. His diary entry on August 9 chronicles their heated exchange:

He thundered: “Why do the English butt in on Danzig and threaten war over the return of a German city? Why do the Poles [sic] provoke us? Haven’t we the right to a German city like Danzig?”

“
Have you the right to a Czech city like Prague?” I asked. Silence. No answer. That vacant stare you get on Germans.

“
Why didn’t the Poles accept the generous offer of the Führer?” he began again.

“
Because they feared another Sudetenland, Captain.”

“
You mean they don’t trust the Führer?”

“
Not much since March 15,” I said, looking carefully around before I spoke such blasphemy to see I was not being overheard. Again the vacant German stare.