Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (38 page)

Like many of the veteran journalists, Beam had little patience for the likes of Dilling: Americans who came to Germany and admired the Nazis. Early in his tour, however, he did offer a positive assessment of the Arbeitsdienst, the Nazi-organized compulsory six months of labor service for males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. Henry Leverich, an embassy colleague, had been allowed to spend time at three
of the Arbeitsdienst camps and was impressed, as Beam recalled, by “the magnificent physical condition of the camp inmates; their pride in their camp and their work . . .” He noted later that this would prove good training for military service when many of these men would be called up during the war.

Beam was also given his chance to view a Nazi program firsthand—Kraft durch Freude, Strength Through Joy, that offered cheap cruises for workers to boost their morale. Permitted to travel on a one-week cruise of the North Sea, he concluded, “The tours were well-organized, without undue overcrowding, and the satisfaction of the group appeared to be genuine.” As Beam later pointed out, his and Leverich’s positive reporting on those programs contributed to the judgment of some of their superiors back in Washington that they were soft on the Nazis.

But Beam quickly became a perceptive observer of his surroundings, coming to share the far more critical views of many of the other Americans who knew Germany well. He noticed both the pageantry and propaganda, and the bizarre and the brutal.

To mark the anniversary of Hitler’s coming to power in 1933, every January 30 the Nazis would hold a torchlight parade, and the Foreign Ministry would invite diplomats from various embassies to witness the procession. In 1937, the Americans and the Brazilians were invited. Beam and his colleague James Riddleberger came from the U.S. Embassy, and they were positioned at a window next to the balcony from where Hitler reviewed the SS troops carrying the torches.

After the parade, the American and Brazilian diplomats thought they would be escorted out. Instead, an excited Hitler came up to them, asking for their reactions. When they obliged by saying they were impressed, he invited them next door to the president’s palace, which earlier had been occupied by Hindenburg and was now the scene of a party. As they entered a room that was full of Nazis in uniform, Hitler called over the waiters to make sure each of the diplomats was offered a beer. Then, he clapped his hands and shouted the first words of the “Horst Wessel Song,” the Nazi anthem, as he ordered the crowd to make a path for him. This was the prelude to one of his stranger performances, a rare attempt at humor on his part.

As Beam recalled, Hitler goose-stepped across the room “ostensibly imitating a somewhat slovenly stormtrooper with a protruding stomach.” Reaching a bust of himself, he saluted, turned around and marched back, this time adopting “the style of the SS, with stomach tucked in and lips tightly buttoned.” The assembled Nazi brass didn’t know how to react. After they awkwardly applauded, one of Hitler’s aides nudged the Americans and Brazilians out the door.

There was nothing even vaguely amusing about the Nazis’ ferocious enforcement methods. Beam concluded that they blotted out their “most vaunted domestic achievements.” One bit of evidence that impressed upon him their “blood-lust and brutality” was provided by his colleague, Marselis Parsons. The American vice-consul was sent to witness the cremation of the body of a man who was executed for allegedly trying to assassinate Julius Streicher, the rabidly anti-Semitic founder of the Nazi newspaper
Der Stürmer.
The victim had claimed American citizenship, which was why a representative of the embassy was present to collect his remains. But before the coffin was pushed into the fire, Parsons noticed how short it was. The reason: the victim had been beheaded, and his head was placed “in the crook of his elbow.”

Like many of the career foreign service officers at the American Embassy, Beam was pleased to see Ambassador Dodd depart at the end of 1937. He considered him to be “dignified, considerate, sound in his judgment of the Nazis, but very inarticulate.” And he shared the view that the historian had “embarrassed the U.S. government” with his undiplomatic statements—although Beam stressed that this was “not because of their anti-Nazi content but because they had set off press speculation that the German Government would soon feel compelled to demand his removal.” He also faulted Dodd for “antagonizing most of the State Department’s high command.”

For all those reasons, Beam welcomed the appointment in early 1938 of foreign service veteran Hugh Wilson, who had first served in Berlin for a few months back in 1916 and then from 1920 to 1923. His track record as a diplomat and in Washington, where he served as assistant secretary of state before he was sent to Berlin again, convinced Beam that their new boss was a seasoned professional. “We respected Mr. Wilson’s
competence,” he noted. The new envoy was, in Beam’s words, “a veteran, ‘you have to show me’ type diplomat who disapproved of his predecessor’s disorderly performance.”

But, as Beam soon realized, Dodd may have been more accurate in his critical assessment of the Nazi regime than his more experienced replacement. Wilson was “somewhat skeptical of the negative views held by some of us on his staff who had spent a couple of years or more in Berlin,” Beam recalled. He also pointed out that this wasn’t an uncommon experience “since we found it took some time to educate official newcomers to the facts of living with the Nazis.”

Wilson knew that other foreign service officers with extensive Berlin experience, especially former Consul General Messersmith, saw the Nazi regime as an extremely dangerous enemy. But if Messersmith and some others held this stage-four view, Wilson arrived with an attitude that wasn’t marked by the naïve admiration characteristic of stage one—but was still far from viewing Hitler’s Germany with alarm. Determined to reach his own judgments, Wilson wanted “to concentrate on the diplomatic aspects of the peace in Europe,” as Beam put it. He didn’t want a confrontation with the Nazis over their internal policies or their broader ambitions; he wanted to use the traditional tools of diplomacy to keep the peace.

For those American diplomats like Beam who were no longer willing to suspend judgment on the Nazi regime, the arrival of Wilson proved to be a classic case of the perils of getting what you wish for. Beam and several of his colleagues also quickly concluded that Wilson “was ‘not on the inside track’ either in Berlin or in Washington when it came to dealing with the affairs of state at the highest level.” Dodd had maintained personal relations with Roosevelt, despite his antagonistic relationship with the president’s appointees at the State Department. And while he was ineffective in his dealings with the Nazis, the former ambassador had quickly shed any illusions that they might moderate their policies.

Wilson, by contrast, believed that there should be no rush to judgment on Hitler’s regime, even in 1938, and that traditional diplomacy could avert a confrontation with it. This was precisely the kind of mind-set that would be eagerly embraced by Britain and France, setting the stage for Munich.

After Wilson presented his credentials to Hitler on March 3, 1938, he promptly wrote to Roosevelt. He found that “
the principal impression
I carried away is the lack of drama in this exceedingly dramatic figure,” he reported. “He was clad as I was in a dress suit, and wore only one order, the Iron Cross. He is more healthy looking than I had anticipated, more solid, more erect. The complexion is pale, but there is more character in his face than I had imagined from the photographs. He speaks with a strong Austrian accent, but was quite easy to follow.”

Wilson added: “He is a man who does not look at you steadily but gives you an occasional glance as he talks. In our conversation at least he was restrained and made no gestures of any kind.” When Wilson politely told his host he was interested in meeting the man who had pulled his country out of such poverty and despair and produced prosperity and pride, Hitler was reluctant “to assume for himself the credit for the work which is being done.” The envoy found that appealing, although he confessed that their talk was “colorless” and “the very negative nature of my impressions was surprising.” When he had met Mussolini earlier, Wilson had the feeling that he could have happily invited him for dinner and further conversation over a beer. “I had no such desire on leaving Hitler,” he declared.

After a subsequent meeting on March 12, he wrote again to Roosevelt, pointing out that the frequent descriptions by Germans of Hitler as an artist were on target—“
in the sense of
a man who arrives at his conclusions and undertakes his actions through instinct rather than ratiocination.” He indicated that Hitler was well informed, “but his reasoning, while making use of this knowledge, tends to justify an emotional concept.” As a result, he concluded, “if we think of Hitler as an artist, it explains a great deal.”

That was the same day as the Anschluss, when “the artist” orchestrated the annexation of Austria. In his diary entry for that day, Wilson assessed that event with cool detachment. “
One may judge
the action from the moral point of view with condemnation,” he wrote. “One may deplore the brutality of it. One must admire the efficiency of the action.”

In a letter to Secretary of State Hull on March 24, Wilson argued that since “
the smoke and dust
of the Austrian Anschluss have begun to settle,” it was time to view what had happened with just that kind of dispassionate judgment. “Whether we like it or not, the Germans’ economic predominance through this region is now, I believe, a fact,” he wrote. By seizing Austria, he continued, Hitler had completed two parts of his original Nazi program—“the union of all Germans on the basis of self determination” and “the equality of rights of the German people vis-à-vis other nations and the cancellation of the peace treaties of Versailles and St. Germain.” Only the third part—the push for
Lebensraum,
German territorial expansion into Russia—remained unfulfilled. In a subsequent letter to Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, he pointed out that even Germans who were secretly opposed to Hitler “
confess that their hearts
swelled with pride when Austria was annexed.”

Wilson was intrigued by what he was observing, but nowhere near as alarmed as Beam and others felt he should be. “This place is all so darned absorbing and interesting,” he added in his letter to Welles. His real feelings came out most strongly in reply to a letter from Hoover, which the former president wrote to him after returning to the United States and delivering his March 31 speech urging Americans to steer clear of any involvement in Europe’s conflicts or domestic affairs. Enclosing a copy of his speech, Hoover argued that it had served its purpose “
of bringing our people
to a realization we must live with other nations.” Wilson responded that he had read the speech “with a lot of satisfaction.” And he echoed its sentiments: “I wish our people in general could understand how little is gained by scolding other people, and how much is gained by trying to work with them.”

Wilson wasn’t blind to the persecution of the Jews, although he did hold out hope in a letter to Roosevelt on June 2 that there could be “
an attempt to work out
some kind of acceptable solution” to the continued Nazi confiscations of Jewish property.
And he worried
about the dangers of another major war, mentioning the parallels to 1914 in a letter to William Bullitt, the American ambassador in Paris. But his conclusion was always the same. Writing again to Welles on June 20, he declared: “
Twenty years ago
we tried to save the world and now look
at it. If we tried to save the world again, it would be just as bad at the end of the conflict. The older I grow the deeper is my conviction that we have nothing to gain by entering a European conflict, and indeed everything to lose.”

In his letters and reports, Wilson repeatedly emphasized that Hitler enjoyed the active or passive support of most Germans and that it was wishful thinking to believe that his regime could collapse—or that the minority who opposed it could do anything to make that happen. But as Hitler increased the pressure on Czechoslovakia at the end of the summer, Beam, who had nurtured his contacts with conservative opponents of the Nazis, returned to the embassy with a report that raised the possibility that Wilson was wrong on that score. He had stumbled on what looked like nothing less than a plot to assassinate Hitler.

Among Beam’s acquaintances
was Erwin Respondek, whom he described as “a valuable informant” passed along to him by Douglas Miller, the embassy’s commercial attaché, who had left Berlin in 1937. A Catholic economist who despised Hitler and his movement, Respondek had served in the Reichstag in the early 1930s, when the Center Party’s Heinrich Brüning was chancellor. Brüning’s attempts to ban the SA and the SS won him the enmity of the Nazis, and he fled the country in 1934. But Respondek could afford to stay in Berlin, since he was hardly a famous figure. While he was banned from politics, he continued to monitor information on the country’s economy and finances, passing reports along to both the American Embassy, through Miller, and Brüning. In the second week of September, when the crisis of Czechoslovakia was building to its climax, Beam was invited to a
Herrenabend
, a men’s evening, at Respondek’s house on the outskirts of Berlin.

It was a small gathering. Aside from Beam and his host, there was Professor Hermann Muckermann, a former Jesuit priest who wrote about science and Christian ethics, and ventured into the discussions about racial theories and eugenics. The other guest was a Luftwaffe colonel. Once Respondek’s wife served dinner and left the men alone, Respondek declared, “Let’s get down to business and talk about the matter we came here to discuss.” As Beam recalled, the talk then turned to Hitler’s apparent determination to seize the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia.
From the comments of both Respondek and the colonel, it appeared that they were part of a conspiracy against Hitler that included General Franz Halder, who had recently replaced General Ludwig Beck as the army’s chief of staff. Beck had sought assurances from Hitler that his plans for Czechoslovakia wouldn’t lead to a war, only to be dismissed. Now, if Respondek and the Luftwaffe colonel’s information was accurate, his successor and several other senior officers appeared to be contemplating a stunning act of resistance.