Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (36 page)

“Uniforms and Guns”

I
n the summer of 1936, just after graduating from Tulane University in New Orleans, Howard K. Smith was working at a local newspaper, earning $15 a week, when lightning struck: he won $100 for a short story he had written. Feeling flush but still savvy enough to calculate where his windfall would support him the longest, he decided to go to Germany. At that moment, Germany was the cheapest country in Europe for an American, he noted. His young friends in New Orleans, none of whom could afford such a voyage, had often discussed what the new regime in Germany represented, “
whether it was
workable, if it afforded solutions to problems we had in America,” as Smith recalled. In essence, he explained, they were asking: “Was Nazi Germany a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?”

While their liberal arts education made Smith and his friends inclined to disapprove of dictatorships, the Great Depression had shaken many core beliefs, and they felt that everything was debatable. Thus, Smith embarked on what he dubbed his “fact-finding” journey with an open mind. “Like a political Descartes, I tried to wash all preconceptions and prejudices out of my mind,” he declared. Hiring himself out as a deckhand on a cargo ship crossing the Atlantic, he experienced a common reaction to
his first glimpses of the country he had set out to examine. “Germany captivated me before I set foot inside it,” he wrote. “Crawling up the Weser from Bremerhaven, we passed one fancy-tickling miniature town after another, all spotless with rows of toy houses and big, sunny beer gardens along the river bank.”

Looking back at his first exposure to Nazi Germany, Smith, who would much later become a famed TV anchor back home, reported not just on the country but on how his reactions to it changed over time. Based on the evolution of his thinking during what turned into a nearly six-year sojourn in Germany, most of it as a junior reporter for United Press, Smith developed a theory about how Americans and other foreigners tended to evolve in their thinking about that country. He broke the process down into four stages:

“On first glance, Germany was overwhelmingly attractive, and first impressions disarmed many a hardy anti-Nazi before he could lift his lance for attack,” he wrote. “Germany was clean, it was neat, a truly handsome land. Its big cities were cleaner than big cities ought, by custom, to be . . . The impression was one of order, cleanliness and prosperity—and this has been of immense propaganda value to the Nazis.” On what he called “my first magic day in Bremen,” a dockworker pointed out to him that Germans were “neat, clean and able to do an amazing lot with amazingly little long before Hitler came to power.” The clear message was that visitors were wrong to credit all of what they saw to the new regime.

But, in most cases, they did exactly that. Some visitors never got beyond this stage, which, according to Smith, “bespeaks the sensitivity of a rhinoceros’s hide and the profundity of a tea-saucer.” He mentioned a group of American schoolgirls he saw in Heidelberg as perfect examples. “The principal obstacle in the way of their further progress was, I think, the fact that German men are handsome and wear uniforms.”

During stage two, the most noticeable characteristic of Nazi Germany was “uniforms and guns; the amazing extent to which Germany, even then, was prepared for war. It took my breath away.” The proliferation of men in uniforms—
homo militaris
, as Smith put it—suddenly transformed Nazi rearmament into a concrete reality. But visitors at
stage two were titillated by what they observed. “Or, more than that, it was downright exciting,” Smith admitted. He watched from a window in Nuremberg “a broad undulating river of ten, twenty thousand men in uniform, stamping in unison down the cobble-stone streets below, flooding the valley between the houses with a marching song so loud the windows rattled, and so compelling your very heart adopted its military rhythm.”

As the mesmerizing spectacles of militarism began to loosen their hold, Smith continued, many visitors would progress to stage three, which was less passive and involved coming to some unnerving conclusions. “You began to grasp that what was happening was that young humans, millions of them, were being trained to act merely upon reflexes,” he wrote. All this drilling was aimed at teaching them “to kill, as a reflex . . . On terse commands which altered their personalities more neatly than Doctor Jekyll became Mr. Hyde, they were learning to smash, crush, destroy, wreck.”

The next level was characterized by “a strange, stark terror.” Those who reached stage four were often overcome with alarm that the rest of the world had no idea what was rising to confront them; they also feared that the unsuspecting outsiders would be no match for the dark forces unleashed in Germany. Once he reached that stage, Smith fretted that the Nazis were “a real, direct and imminent threat to the existence of a civilization which gathers facts and discusses.” The democratic world, for all its admirable qualities, was weak, while Hitler’s world was “mighty, powerful, reckless. It screamed defiance at my world from the housetops. One had to be deaf not to hear it.”

Smith pointed out that some people made the journey from stage one to stage four in as little as a week. Others remained stuck at stage one or two. And still others got to stage three but didn’t necessarily make it to stage four.

Of course, Americans who made only short visits to Germany often failed to get beyond stage one or two—at least, during their actual journeys.
Like many wealthy undergraduates
, John F. Kennedy took off for Europe in the summer of 1937 after his freshman year at Harvard. Traveling with his friend LeMoyne Billings, he drove around France
and Italy before spending five days in Germany, accompanied by a young German woman—“a bundle of fun,” as Kennedy put it—whom they had apparently picked up at the border.

Kennedy’s cryptic diary entries suggest the American visitors came across as somewhat rowdy. The morning after they went to a Munich nightclub “which was a bit different,” he noted that at the Pension Bristol where they stayed there was “the usual amount of cursing and being told we were not gentlemen.” In an entry marked Nuremberg-Württemberg, he wrote: “Started out as usual except this time we had the added attraction of being spitten [
sic
] on.”

Still, he did make a couple of political observations. “Hitler seems so popular here, as Mussolini was in Italy, although propaganda seems to be his strongest weapon,” he wrote in Munich. Following the Rhine to Cologne, he added: “Very beautiful as there are many castles along the way. All the towns are very attractive, showing the Nordic races certainly seem superior to the Latins. The Germans are really too good—it makes people gang against them for protection . . .” A year later, his father, Joseph Kennedy, was appointed ambassador to Great Britain, where he quickly gained a reputation as an envoy with pro-German leanings.

Because of his father’s views, it’s easy to read more into John Kennedy’s brief diary entries than they merit. At a minimum, however, they demonstrate the sense of innocence—and ignorance—of many young Americans who visited Nazi Germany in this period.

A year later, in 1938, John Randolph and his wife, Margaret, spent the summer traveling through Europe before returning to his job as an assistant professor of mathematics at Cornell. Unlike Kennedy, they pinched their pennies, staying at youth hostels and biking whenever they could. Randolph’s observations from Germany, where they spent almost all of June, are filled with minute details: the cost of their lodgings, meals and bike rentals, the exact times of the trains they caught, their panic when a suitcase went astray. Also, there are the standard exclamations about the tourist attractions. “
The trip up the Rhine
from Koblenz to Bingen was wonderful,” he wrote. But there are only a couple of the most tangential allusions to politics, and it’s clear that the Randolphs were oblivious to most of what was happening.

“The morning was nice and bright,” he noted on June 6 in Heidelberg. “All the people and all the swastikas were out in full color.” After arriving on their bikes in Tübingen, he wrote:

“Of all things, we had a private room in a house of the Hitlerjugend and even so paid only one RM [Reichsmark] for two of us. The room had two very nice cots, two little stands, a table, a chair, a large clothes chest, and a telephone. Very nicely furnished with painted walls and ceilings (white) hard wood floors, and large window. The whole hostel was especially built in 1935 and is modern and nice in every way.”

Randolph appeared to believe that the country they were visiting, like their room in the Hitlerjugend house, was nice in every way. When they happened to be caught in an air raid drill in Munich, he dismissed it as “not very interesting.” A German engineer Randolph met on their trip wrote to him in December 1938, angered by what he construed to be anti-German propaganda in the United States. “You realize don’t you that in Germany there is not a single unemployed, and no man that goes hungry in winter or freezes, and this is not so for any other country except Italy which is also under state’s direction. In Germany order and discipline rule. You were here yourself and saw it.” Nothing in Randolph’s diary or papers suggests that he paused to question those claims. He had simply skimmed the surface of Germany and returned as uninformed as when he arrived.

One factor that encouraged such blindness was how, when it came to people-to-people contact, young Americans found Germans friendly and welcoming. After his first summer in Germany in 1936, Howard K. Smith had returned to a job as a reporter for the
New Orleans Item
, but then felt the lure of Germany again the following summer. Eager to continue his investigation of that country’s political system, he hitchhiked to save money and was surprised to find how easy it was to get around that way. “
I simply draped
a small American flag over my single bag and those simple, friendly people stopped every time,” he recalled. “The friendliness, the overwhelming hospitality of Germans to foreigners—and especially to Americans—was phenomenal.” Smith believed the impressive performance of the American athletes in the Olympics a year earlier was one reason why “Americans appeared to be
the German people’s favorite foreigner.” With that kind of a welcome, many visitors comfortably remained innocents abroad, missing most of what was happening around them.

Yet there was nothing innocent about Nazi Germany by then, especially in 1938. It was a year punctuated by three major events: the Anschluss, Munich and Kristallnacht. The first and second of those events—the annexation and occupation of Austria in March, and then British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s and French Premier Edouard Daladier’s agreement to allow Germany to seize the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia—represented major triumphs for Hitler, transforming his Greater Germany rhetoric into reality and setting the stage for the
Drang nach Osten
(“Drive to the East”). The third, the attacks on Jewish businesses and homes all over Germany on November 9 and 10, marked a dramatic escalation of Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies.

Those American reporters who had already spent considerable time in Berlin were, as a rule, stripped of most illusions about the new Germany—and some had been sounding the alarm about the country, its rulers and their intentions for quite some time. William Shirer was certainly in that category. But as he marked his third anniversary in Hitler’s Germany in August 1937, he found himself without a job, the victim of his news agency’s cutbacks. He then received a telegram from Salzburg asking if he’d come for dinner at the Adlon Hotel. It was signed “
Murrow, Columbia Broadcasting
.”

Shirer had only a vague recollection of the name, but he certainly knew the company and its radio broadcasts. When he met Edward R. Murrow, the European manager of CBS, and they had ordered their martinis at the Adlon’s bar, Shirer was struck by Murrow’s handsome face. “Just what you would expect from radio,” he noted in his diary. But he also found him disarmingly sincere: “Something in his eyes that was not Hollywood.” As soon as Shirer passed a voice test, Murrow called to say he was hired.

As the new CBS correspondent, Shirer was supposed to make Vienna his base instead of Berlin. Although his Berlin days were far from really
over—he would return there soon enough—Shirer and his Austrian wife, Tess, were relieved to be leaving the German capital in the fall of 1937. Summing up their three years there, he wrote in his diary on September 27: “
Personally, they have not
been unhappy ones, though the shadow of Nazi fanaticism, sadism, persecution, regimentation, terror, brutality, suppression, militarism, and preparations for war has hung over all our lives, like a dark, brooding cloud that never clears.”

And exactly as Howard K. Smith had described those foreigners who had acquired a real understanding—and sense of horror—about what they were witnessing, Shirer was increasingly alarmed by how oblivious most of the outside world still was about Hitler’s Germany. “Somehow I feel that, despite our work as reporters, there is little understanding of the Third Reich, what it
is
, what it is up to, where it is going, either at home or elsewhere abroad . . . Perhaps, as the Nazis say, the Western democracies have become sick, decadent, and have reached that stage of decline which Spengler predicted . . . Germany is stronger than her enemies realize.” Exasperated, he recalled his futile attempts to convince visitors of those dangers. “How many visiting butter-and-egg men have I told that the Nazi goal is domination!” he wrote. “They laughed.”