Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (25 page)

The American journalists who had witnessed the rise of Hitler firsthand were more interested in his drive for total control at this point than in debating what attracted so many Germans to his movement in the first place. The hardworking Knickerbocker filed a slew of pieces during the spring and summer of 1933 that left no doubt about the extent of
Der Führer
’s power grab. “
Adolf Hitler has become
the Aryan Messiah,” he wrote, explaining that he had committed everything to his campaign for “racial purity.” Reporting on the latest anti-Semitic booklet, he noted that it listed six types of Jews: “
Bloody Jews
; Lying Jews; Swindling Jews; Rotten Jews; Art Jews and Money Jews.” He added: “The fact that such a publication could appear is best proof of the good judgment of the refugees
abroad.” Hitler had emerged as “
the supreme boss
,” he wrote in another article, and his authority “transcends . . . that of any political boss known to democratic regimes.”

Drawing on his prior reporting experience in Moscow, Knickerbocker also pointed out how the Nazis were following the Bolshevik lead when it came to new forms of terror. “
The latest Soviet method
to be taken over by the Nazis is the taking of political hostages,” he wrote. Aside from effectively holding “all the Jews of Germany hostage for the good behavior of their racial compatriots abroad,” he explained that the Nazis now were targeting relatives of any anti-Nazi Germans who fled abroad. As in the Soviet Union, he wrote, this “distasteful” practice was proving highly effective. “The bravest man, willing to risk his own life, will shrink at risking the lives or liberty of his loved ones,” he reported.

Knickerbocker found one exception to all this forced subservience. “
German nudists
are the only successful rebels against Nazi control,” he wrote. While Hermann Goering and other top Nazis decreed that the nudists put their clothes on, the journalist reported that this was the one area where the authorities appeared to be willing to turn a blind eye at times, inspiring a degree of defiance. “The nude cult has gone the way of all popular movements suppressed by an unpopular law. It has gone bootleg.” But this was hardly total defiance. The committed nudists were joining the Nazi movement, he added, working from the inside for their cause. “They intend to appeal to Adolf Hitler, who, like the nude culturalists, does not drink, smoke or eat meat.” Although Hitler had given no indication he would accept the centerpiece of their agenda—stripping naked—the nudists weren’t giving up hope. “Hitler must understand us,” Knickerbocker quoted them as saying.

The nudists provided a rare lighter subject in an otherwise alarming drumbeat of stories. And nothing was more alarming than the question that Knickerbocker posed in the opening to his book
The Boiling Point
, based on his crisscrossing of the continent during the year after Hitler’s ascension and published in early 1934. “
Europe is in uniform
,” he wrote. “Will she go to war?”

Knickerbocker was one of the most astute young journalists of his time, someone whose reputation had already spread far beyond his readers
in New York and Philadelphia. Running an interview with him on November 12, 1932, the Polish newspaper
Express Poranny
called him “
the most talked about
reporter in the world.” He didn’t pull his punches when reporting on Hitler’s brutal tactics at home, prompting angry protests from the Nazis who claimed he was spreading anti-German slanders.
They pressured
his editors to send him home early, but initially to no avail. There was little reason to think that Knickerbocker would be any less straightforward in trying to answer the question he was asking about the risk of war—a question that was on the minds of so many people on both sides of the Atlantic.

Yet his book opened with a stunning first chapter devoted to Danzig, the Baltic port with an overwhelmingly German population that had been designated a “Free City” by the League of Nations after World War I. Polish-German tensions over the status of the city, which was surrounded by Polish territory, looked like they could easily spark the next major conflict. Knickerbocker stated a contrary view right from the start:

DANZIG . . . Ten million lives
of Europeans and Americans have been saved in this city of Danzig. That many lives were lost on the battlefields of 1914–1918. At least that many would be lost in the next war. That war was scheduled to begin in Danzig. Today it is evident that war is not going to begin here, and Hitler the Warmaker has become Hitler the Peacemaker as the Lord of Danzig.

For today Danzig is Nazi, and for the first time in thirteen years Danzig is at peace with the Poles. For the first time since the war Danzig has been eliminated from its number one place in the list of the probable seats of war.

As Knickerbocker explained, the Nazis won the city elections on May 28, 1933, sweeping into power “
a tornado of
Brownshirts that drove fear through the heart of every Pole and Jew in the city and made Europe hold its breath.” But while the Nazis quickly consolidated their hold on the city, Hermann Rauschning, the president of the Danzig Senate and Hitler’s lieutenant, immediately went to Warsaw and signed agreements on trade and rights for Polish citizens in the Baltic city. “
The Poles were
amazed, suspicious, but pleased,” Knickerbocker reported. Danzig and Warsaw played a friendly soccer match, and suddenly tensions eased all around. Hitler had ordered a truce for Danzig, he added, and it was working—at least so far.

What should readers make of this? “
Its lesson
for Europe is that Hitler can keep the peace if he wants to,” Knickerbocker wrote. But he warned that this could be merely a tactical truce to buy time for Hitler to rearm. Still, “it means peace in this corner of the European cockpit at least for years to come.”

But as Knickerbocker chronicled the other parts of his journey—through Central Europe, the Balkans and Western Europe—he emphasized the caveats as well as the cold calculations. Hitler doesn’t want war because his country wasn’t prepared for a new conflict, he maintained. “
The odds are
too great against Germany for anyone but a mad German to consider making war now against France and her allies,” he wrote. “Contrary to a considerable body of opinion abroad, it may be positively asserted that there are no madmen running Germany today.”

While he deplored the racial doctrines and terror tactics of the Nazis, he called them “masters of power politics.” Which meant that they were trying to change the balance of power before they would consider triggering a new war. The key, he warned, would be how soon Hitler would feel confident about winning an eventual conflict. Among the experts he consulted, the consensus was that the answer was five to ten years. Knickerbocker ascribed Europe’s pessimistic mood to the fact that the new arms race was already under way. Hitler was insisting over and over again that he wanted only peace. “
It is the peace
to make the world safe for armaments,” Knickerbocker wrote, ending on a far more ominous note than in his opening section. “Armaments have never kept the world safe from war.”

Hitler launched World War II by attacking Danzig only five years later, and Knickerbocker would certainly have liked the chance to pull back that opening chapter. Still, his book is instructive, including in that section. It demonstrates how much a highly critical journalist felt compelled to hedge his bets—even when, as the final chapters indicate, he shared much of the pessimism about where Hitler’s policies would ultimately lead.

Knickerbocker’s critical faculties were certainly still intact, which is much more than could be said about some other Americans living in Berlin. At about the same time that
The Boiling Point
appeared in print in early 1934, Sir Philip Gibbs, a famed British correspondent during World War I and later a novelist, visited the German capital. He, too, was asking the question whether Europe would go to war. Observing marches of the SA and the Hitlerjugend, along with the shouts of
Heil Hitler
, he admitted: “
It was impossible
not to be impressed by the splendour of that German youth . . . There was something stirring in the sight of this army of young men.” But he also felt a sense of apprehension. “This pride and discipline of youth could be so easily used by evil minds for sinister purpose, later on.”

There was little doubt in his mind that Hitler could be the one to push the country to disaster again. “
He was the mesmerist
who had put a spell on the German people so that they followed him blindly,” he noted. The German leader kept insisting he wanted peace, but this veteran journalist observed that every German magazine he picked up was full of pictures of soldiers in steel helmets and scenes from the last world conflagration.

Among the most notable meetings he had on his visit to Berlin was with an American woman who had been married to a German for a long time. At tea with her in the Fürstenhof Hotel, where he was staying, Gibbs came straight to the point. “
Most people in
England and everybody in France believe Germany is preparing for a new war,” he told her.

“But that is impossible! It’s ridiculous!” she replied with genuine astonishment. “Why should they believe such an absurdity?”

He recounted his observations about the militarism of the Nazis, their belief in racial dogmas and persecution of Jews, their crude anti-intellectual theories and all the talk in
Mein Kampf
and elsewhere about Germany’s expansive dreams. Men like Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg were preaching barbarism and the reign of instinct and biological force, he added.

“My German friends laugh at Rosenberg’s nonsense,” the American woman said. “As for all this marching and drilling, it means nothing as far as war is concerned. Germans like it, just like the English like football and cricket.”

She assured him she knew plenty of young Nazis. “They talk very freely to me, because I am the wife of a German and therefore, in their minds, German. They never talk of wanting war. On the contrary, they hate the idea of it.” They only talk about war, she continued, when discussing the possibility that they might be attacked by France and her allies. In that case, they would “naturally” defend the fatherland. “Wouldn’t any other nation feel the same?”

By then, Gibbs was keenly aware of several waiters hovering around their table. He suggested they move to a quiet corner. “We are having an audience,” he pointed out.

Once they had switched tables, the American woman talked about Hitler, whom she knew and admired. “He is all for peace,” she declared. “Foreigners don’t believe in his sincerity. But I’m certain he wants to make a friendship with France. It is his strongest wish . . . Why doesn’t France accept the offer?”

Gibbs was hardly reassured, but he was convinced that the American woman was utterly sincere in her belief that Hitler and his followers wanted nothing but peace. Like Martha Dodd, she felt the new Germany and its leaders were misunderstood and unfairly maligned—and no one more so than Adolf Hitler.

7

Dancing with Nazis

O
n Saturday, June 30, 1934, Martha Dodd drove off early with her date, someone she identified as “
a young secretary
in a foreign embassy,” in a Ford roadster, with the top down, to a private lake in Gross Glienicke on the outskirts of Berlin. It was a beautiful, warm, sunny day, and she and her companion spent it on the lakeside beach, working on getting as much of a suntan as possible, knowing that summer doesn’t normally last long in northern Europe. In the late afternoon, the couple began slowly driving back to the city, “our heads giddy and our bodies burning from the sun,” as Martha recalled, perfectly content. “We were not thinking of yesterday or tomorrow, of the Nazis or of politics.”

They drove into the city at six. “I pulled down my skirt and sat up straight and proper as befits a diplomat’s daughter,” she wrote. But something looked and felt different in the German capital; the atmosphere had changed since their departure that morning. There were fewer people on the streets, mostly clustered in small groups, and, as they got closer to the center, they saw an unusual number of army trucks and machine guns, along with soldiers, SS men and Nazi police. The normally ubiquitous SA troops—the Brownshirts—were nowhere
to be seen. Reaching Tiergartenstrasse, they saw that regular traffic was banned completely, and only their diplomatic plates got them through the thickening military and police checkpoints. The young diplomat dropped Martha off near her father’s ambassadorial residence, and then quickly drove to his embassy to find out what accounted for the tense atmosphere.

With the sun still beating down hard on her, Martha rushed to her father’s residence, feeling slightly dizzy, her eyes briefly blinded as she entered what looked to her like a dark house. She started up the stairs and saw the murky outline of her brother Bill.