Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (24 page)

Many of the foreigners in the audience applauded him. “The Nazis, pale, with rage, sat immobile, in cold silence,” Fromm recorded. But she wasn’t about to get the chance to write anything about this extraordinary performance by the visiting American missionary in her newspaper. Instead, another reporter plucked out the most innocuous parts of Eddy’s opening remarks and ended with his alleged pledge to urge friendly understanding for the new Germany in his home country. “I gasped when I read the piece,” Fromm wrote in her diary. But there was nothing she could do to set the public record straight.

In his clarity of vision and willingness to deliver his tough message, Eddy was unlike almost any other early American visitor to the “new Germany.” There were others who were troubled by the behavior of the Nazis, but very few who truly understood the sweeping nature of the transformation of the country and its people, and the danger this represented.

Often, American visitors would exhibit no more than a vague uneasiness. Future novelist Wright Morris, then only twenty-three, hopped a freighter from New York to Antwerp in October 1933, setting off to explore Europe. During his sojourn there, he briefly passed through Germany, checking into a youth hostel in Heidelberg. The dormer window of his room looked out on a park where blond children were playing, the weather was beautiful, and, as he walked about the city, he was keenly aware of its romantic tradition. “
On the bridge
over the Neckar I stood long and long, looking at the castle, my fancy on the Rhine maidens and the mists behind it,” he wrote in his travel memoir.

But he also felt his “first presentiments that something was rotten in this picture of perfection. Behind the light and the shadow, the trilling
voices of the children, lurked a danger in which we were all complicit.” When he entered a tobacco shop to look at some pipes, he caught sight of someone spying on him through a curtain. “In the shopwoman’s smiling, unctuous manner there was something both disturbing and false,” he recalled. “I could hear muttered whisperings behind the curtain. My sense of apprehension was unused and rudimentary, since I had felt it so seldom, but in the eyes and furtive manner of this woman I felt, and shared, a nameless disquiet.” Nonetheless, Morris was quick to add, “Back in the sunlight I soon forgot it.”

Others were keen to overlook any disquieting signs, convinced that the key to international harmony was recognition of the notion that every country was free to choose its own path and that people everywhere have more in common than they realize. No one believed that more passionately than Donald B. Watt of Putney, Vermont, who in the summer of 1932 took his first small group of young Americans to Europe, launching the Experiment in International Living. The highly successful exchange program, which includes stays with local families, continues to operate today. As Watt put it, his aim was “
to create a
controlled human situation which would produce understanding and friendliness between people and different cultures in a limited period of time.”

Watt’s enthusiasm for “
making friends
out of ‘foreigners’” made him shrug off—and even mock—all those who warned him against taking his young idealistic travelers to Germany in the summer of 1933 for the second “Experiment” after Hitler had taken power. “
From its war-like
reputation, one would have expected Germany to have been most inhospitable toward a group interested in making peace,” Watt wrote. “Just the opposite materialized: the Nazi organizations made us feel most welcome . . . The picture which the [American] newspapers gave and what we actually saw in our families could scarcely have been more different.” Specifically on the subject of violence, he added, “
The suggestion of
personal danger to foreigners is no less laughable to those who spent the summer in that country than the thought of German courtesy failing.”

Watt did concede after the trip that there was an “
excess of order
” and “hypnosis of the masses” orchestrated by the Nazis. But the only real danger for a visiting foreigner, he felt, was not to be swept up by “the power of
suggestion” of the constant saluting and “to use all his restraint if he does not wish to join the saluting throng.” Despite the widespread reports of beatings of visiting Americans who failed to join in the Nazi salutes, Watt maintained that his charges were free to do whatever they pleased. Living with German families, they began to understand that they had been victims of propaganda back in the United States. “All they had learned of Hitlerism in America was definitely unfavorable, but here they actually saw some good features of it,” Watt wrote.

Even when it came to Jews, he reported that everyone in his group concluded that “relatively few [were] roughly handled.” The main cause of anti-Semitism in Germany, he added, was the fact that “a large proportion of all business was in Jewish hands.” The young Americans were also impressed how Germans “are surmounting their relative poverty by a return to simple folk ways.” But the key takeaway, as Watt put it, was the one he had come searching for—and was determined to find no matter what happened. “Perhaps most important of all, we realized that the people whom we met were very much like us,” he concluded. “The Second Experiment in International Living was an interesting and successful demonstration of tolerance.”

The American social scientists who studied the new Germany were distinctly less Pollyannaish, but they were far from uniform in their judgments of the country’s New Order. Political scientist Frederick Schuman—who, like Dodd, taught at the University of Chicago—spent eight months in Germany in 1933. He had arranged his research trip before Hitler had come to power, but that event now changed both the nature of his stay and its purpose. “
I journeyed toward
a land I had already known and enjoyed as the home of music, philosophy, and
Gemütlichkeit
and as the birthplace of my Prussian and Hanoverian ancestors, now strangely transmuted into ‘Aryans’ and ‘Nordics,’” he wrote. “Upon my arrival in April of the year of the Nazi seizure of power I found the Reich in process of violent, if orderly, transition from parliamentary democracy to Fascism.”

Schuman made the focus of his research the newly triumphant Nazi
movement, gathering materials for his 1935 book
The Nazi Dictatorship: A Study in Social Pathology and the Politics of Fascism.
Given the nature of his encounters, its analytical but highly critical tone was hardly surprising. “By the older German officials I was invariably received with courtesy and granted as much co-operation as was consistent with considerations of political and personal safety,” he recalled. “By the newer Nazi administrators I was invariably received with evasions and complex circumlocutions or, as in the case of Hanfstaengl, with gross and clownish discourtesy bred of psychic insecurity and conceit.”

While Schuman insisted he was interested in “explanation, not condemnation,” he left no doubt that any accurate picture of the new movement would inevitably be seen as partisan. “Like every form of highly emotionalized and subjectivized mass mysticism, National-socialism demands acceptance or rejection,” he wrote. “Objectivity is equivalent to rejection.” By the time he produced his book, he would offer a dire—and accurate—prediction about the likelihood of a new war inspired by “
pathological hatreds
, lusts, and longings for extinction.” His conclusion: “Fascism itself will be consumed by its war-mad sons. With it will perish the remnants of an age that has outlived its time.”

Columbia University sociologist Theodore Abel was also fascinated by events in Germany. When Hitler was appointed chancellor on January 30, Abel wrote in the private notebook where he regularly recorded his observations: “
Germany wants to become
a world power again, it wants to conquer[,] it wants an emperor. The danger of communism is great and it might come to civil war in Germany. All peace measures will go into the discard meanwhile . . .”

But Abel was far more restrained—even at times, complimentary—about Germany’s new rulers than Schuman; he also would later question some of Schuman’s findings. On February 2, he wrote: “Struck by Hitler’s manifesto appealing in noble terms to patriotism and setting forth as its goal reestablishment of unity of Germans who he claims are on the brink of dissolution.” He approvingly noted that Hitler had vowed to fight unemployment and boost agriculture, while at the same time emphasizing his commitment to peace and disarmament. “I consider it a noble document and while it sounds genuine I hope it is meant,” he wrote.

As for the means Hitler was using, Abel seemed willing to give him every benefit of the doubt. “Parliamentarianism and dictatorship are not, therefore, antithetical but means of solving problems, adequate for specific conditions,” he wrote on March 7. Even when the Nazis staged their burning of the books in May, Abel was intrigued rather than outraged. Calling the book-burning “a futile but a symbolic gesture,” he asserted: “I am impressed by the vitality and sweeping enthusiasm of the Hitler movement, its idealizations[,] its emotional fervor, its revolutionary aspects. They certainly are swayed by an idea, no matter how ludicrous it may seem to us who have no idea to live for. I envy the fascists, the nationalists, the communists, all those who are working for something to be realized.” This was a stunning admission about what could attract an American intellectual to the most radical movements of the time.

In the summer of 1933, Abel visited Germany and was struck by the willingness of many people, especially Hitler’s followers, to discuss their political experiences. This gave birth to his idea, nurtured during a period when he found it impossible to find a full-time job, to do a major research project on the Nazis. By June 1934, with the backing of Columbia and the agreement of the German authorities, he announced a contest “
For the Best Personal
Life History of an Adherent of the Hitler Movement.” Only those who had joined the party before January 1, 1933—prior to Hitler’s coming to power—were eligible to submit the autobiographical essays. Prizes ranging from 10 to 125 marks were to be awarded to the best entries. “Completeness and frankness are the sole criteria,” he explained in the announcement.

It was an inspired initiative, attracting 683 submissions before the deadline in the fall of 1934. A series of mishaps delayed shipment of the essays to Abel in New York for two years, and his final product based on his analysis of those submissions—a book entitled
Why Hitler Came into Power
—wasn’t published until 1938.

Abel was intent on showing what prompted so many Germans to follow Hitler. He took careful note of the disillusionment spawned by defeat in World War I, the Treaty of Versailles and the revolutionary uprisings in Germany that followed. A young soldier wrote: “
Heroism had become
cowardice, truth a lie, loyalty was rewarded by dastardliness.”
Eighteen percent
of those who submitted autobiographies had participated in some type of postwar military activities, whether to fight against the rebels of the left or the right or in fighting in Upper Silesia or the Ruhr Valley. Some professed to be shocked by “
the spirit of Jewish materialism
” and motivated by their nationalist upbringing. “We knew nothing of politics, yet we felt that therein lay the destiny of Germany,” one of them declared.

Then came Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 and his treason trial that only built up his reputation. “
From that time
on I had no thought for anyone but Hitler,” another essayist wrote. While many of the contributors also mentioned the harsh economic conditions in Germany, Abel offered a somewhat different picture of Hitler’s followers than scholars like Schuman did. “
Schuman concludes
that at the bottom of the Hitler movement was a collective neurosis, a psychological malady of the
Kleinbürgertum
[lower middle class] . . . the disorganized and pathological personality of a whole class of the German population.”

Dismissing this approach as too reliant on group psychoanalysis, Abel maintained that Schuman and other scholars had painted a misleading portrait of Hitler’s core supporters. Based on those who submitted essays, he offered his description of a fictional average Hitler supporter:

He is male
, in his early thirties, a town resident of lower middle-class origin, without high school education; married and Protestant; participated in the World War, but not in the revolutionary activities during the revolution of 1918 or later outbreaks; had no political affiliations before joining the National Socialist party and belonged to no veteran or semi-military organizations. He joined the party between 1930 and 1931, and had his first contacts with the movement through reading about it and attending a meeting. He was strongly dissatisfied with the republican regime in Germany, but had no specific anti-Semitic bias. His economic status was secure, for not once did he have to change his occupation, job, or residence, nor was he ever unemployed.

Abel played up the differences between his portrayal of Hitler’s supporters and the characterizations of Schuman and others, although
there was overlap in many areas. The key difference was that Abel’s average Nazi supporter comes across as more balanced emotionally, and somehow less sinister, than those portrayed by others. In his introduction, he pointed out that many of the contributors “
frankly state their
disagreement with certain policies, as, for example, anti-Semitism.” But he is conscious of the danger of appearing to accept the declarations of the Nazi contributors at face value. “
In presenting these facts
and opinions without comment, I do not intend to convey the impression that I agree with them,” he insisted.

The essays Abel collected point to a broad array of factors that contributed to Hitler’s appeal. By giving his followers a chance to present their own narratives, Abel produced a significant addition to the growing body of literature in the United States about the Nazi movement, a resource that would prove to be highly valuable to future researchers. But it isn’t hard to understand why
several American publishers rejected
his manuscript before Prentice Hall finally agreed to take it on. Abel’s attempt to maintain a nonjudgmental, academic detachment while studying the Nazis felt like an artificial exercise—and he often slipped in judgments anyway. As Schuman had pointed out, Hitler’s movement demanded acceptance or rejection. The problem with Abel was that, just as he had when Hitler first came to power, he still seemed to want to give the Nazis the benefit of the doubt whenever possible.