Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (49 page)

“My callousness on this occasion can hardly be justified,” Smith wrote later, recalling that he forgot about Heppler the next day and didn’t even attempt to bring his case to the embassy’s attention. “Not that it would have helped him; but it would have helped soothe my own conscience,” he added. Smith never saw Heppler again.

At the American Embassy, Kennan and other diplomats often felt
overworked and besieged. Since the German government had ordered the closure of ten U.S. consulates in other cities in 1940, everyone came to the Berlin embassy for help. “
The increasingly desperate
situation of the German Jews, and Jews from the German-occupied areas, and the heavy attendant pressures brought to bear upon us to effect their release and removal to the United States, added to the burden,” he wrote. He bitterly noted that he and his colleagues had been put in an impossible position. “These pressures tended often to be generated in powerful congressional circles at home and to be passed on, unmitigated, to us by the Department of State anxious to get itself out of the firing line and too timid to point out to the Congressmen what could and could not (sometimes in light of the laws they themselves had created) be done to aid such people.”

When Alexander Kirk left Berlin in October 1940, Kennan’s personal workload increased further. Leland Morris replaced Kirk as chargé d’affaires, but was a far weaker figure. As a result, Kennan was often the de facto man in charge. Jacob Beam, by then the longest-serving embassy staffer despite his young age, would write later: “
Time proved him
[Kennan] to be a better historian than executive.” Still, Kennan and the rest of the embassy staff deserved credit for continuing to keep their country’s outpost in Berlin functioning as best they could.
Aside from taking on
the interests of Britain and France, the embassy assumed responsibility for successive countries that came under Nazi rule. This meant more and more work; it also meant that the American diplomats were feeling more and more alone.

The American journalists felt lonelier as well. Some of the best known of their colleagues had already pulled out. Shirer departed in December 1940, and Harsch and Schultz left in January 1941. Unlike many of their countrymen back home who still were hoping the United States could stay out of the war, those correspondents were convinced that it would prove impossible to stay on the sidelines. Harsch was planning on writing a book in the hopes of enlightening his countrymen, and, to do so, he needed to return. “
I felt that
perhaps the time had come to get
home and write down all the things I had not felt free to say when writing from Berlin itself,” he recalled.

The print journalists didn’t labor under the same heavy censorship as their radio colleagues, but there were always unspoken rules. Foremost among them, as Pierre Huss put it, was that “
you must never
, either by act or word of mouth or in a dispatch, say or suggest anything which might be a slur or a reflection on the office and the person of the Fuehrer.” Although the International News Service correspondent also pointed out that he and his American colleagues were “
the hottest game
of the Nazis” right up till mid-1941, since the Germans still hoped to keep the United States out of the war, he complained that afterward the de facto censorship meant that reporters were expected to rely mainly on official information—and disinformation. “Everything else was taboo,” he wrote.

Harsch traced the more hostile attitude toward the American correspondents further back—in particular to Roosevelt’s victory in the November 1940 elections over Wendell Willkie. Although Willkie was a liberal Republican who would later support Roosevelt and do battle with the isolationists, he sent mixed signals during the campaign on what course he would steer if he were elected. His sister Charlotte was married to Commander Paul Pihl, the U.S. naval attaché for air in Berlin, and they would hold frequent Sunday salons attended by officials from the Foreign Ministry and the Luftwaffe. “
Many times I heard her say
that if her brother were to win the 1940 election he would keep the United States out of the war,” Harsch wrote.

As American support for the British war effort was ramped up in early 1941, the pressures on the foreign correspondents increased as well. Ostensibly, they were given special treatment. Two press clubs were set up to attend to their needs, with plenty of wining and dining included, but the clubs’ primary purpose was to disseminate propaganda and keep tabs on what the reporters were doing. The Gestapo “
knew everything
about each of us,” Howard K. Smith wrote. “They maintained agents in the two press clubs, vile little fellows who tried to appear chummy.” They also kept agents at other popular hangouts, such as the Adlon Hotel and Die Taverne.

All of which made Smith and others completely disbelieve the official
reason why seven Gestapo agents showed up at Richard Hottelet’s door at 7
A.M
. on Saturday, March 15, 1941. Taken to the Alexanderplatz Prison, Hottelet, Smith’s colleague in the United Press’s Berlin bureau, was told he had been arrested “
on suspicion of espionage
.” As Smith curtly put it, “
Had he been
a spy, the Gestapo would have known it.”

Beam, who
was transferred back to the State Department by this time, believed that Hottelet was picked up in retaliation for the arrest of a German journalist in Washington on spying charges. But Smith was convinced that the real reason was both more personal and more general. He pointed out that Hottelet had been bursting with anger at the Nazis—a result of the fact that he had lived in Berlin “too long for his own safety.” Hottelet could “no longer hide his nausea and bob his head stupidly at the inane dinner-table propaganda essays of the little Propaganda Ministry bureaucrats in the Press Club restaurants,” Smith wrote. “To use Dick’s own expressive language: he hated their goddam guts.” Since the Nazis were looking for someone to arrest so that they could intimidate the other American reporters in Berlin, he continued, Hottelet was the obvious target.

Hottelet found himself in a solitary cell with a stool, a cot and a toilet in the corner. From six-thirty in the morning till four-thirty in the afternoon, he wasn’t allowed to sit or lie on the cot. He wasn’t allowed any reading matter initially either, and his glasses were taken away “to prevent suicide.” That meant he spent long hours sitting on the stool and reading what other prisoners had written on the wall. It appeared to be a cell used often for foreigners. Someone had written in English
HOME
,
SWEET HOME
,
DEAR MOTHER WHERE ARE YOU
? Another inscription was
VIVE L
’
INTERNATIONALE
. There was writing in Russian, too, but Hottelet couldn’t read it.

His diet consisted mostly of dry black bread, ersatz coffee and bean, noodle or barley soup. He realized that the prison was very international: the inmates were Russian, Polish, Czech, Japanese and Italian. They also included several Catholic priests.

At first, the Gestapo interrogated him often, sometimes twice a day. When he denied the accusation that he was a spy, his interrogators tried to scare him. “You won’t feel quite so confident when you are sweating
under the lights and we throw questions at you,” they told him. Or: “You will sit until you confess. You will soften up. You’ll be soft as butter. We’ve got plenty of time.”

But Hottelet’s treatment was radically different than that accorded most prisoners. His nationality and profession still offered him a degree of protection. An official from the American consulate was allowed to visit him, bringing fresh clothes—although the prisoner was denied the soap, toothbrush and toothpaste he also brought. On May 3, Hottelet was transferred to the Moabit Prison in another part of the city, where the food was better. When word got around that he was American, trusties began slipping him extra potatoes, which helped him fend off hunger. Soon he was allowed to receive a daily newspaper and two books a week from the prison library. The most interesting book he found was
De Profundis
, Oscar Wilde’s meditative essay that he wrote during his imprisonment in England.

On July 8, to his complete surprise, Hottelet was released and delivered to a representative from the U.S. Embassy. He had lost fifteen pounds during his incarceration, but this, again, was nothing compared to what routinely happened to other prisoners. Still, Smith and other colleagues understood the message from the Nazis: American reporters were no longer untouchable—and they had better be extra careful. On July 17, Hottelet quietly left Berlin. Describing his sense of freedom as he saw the New York skyline later that month, he wrote, “Now I know doors which I can open myself are something to be thankful for and not to be taken for granted.”

The German press minders abandoned any pretense of friendliness in dealing with the remaining, shrinking contingent of American reporters in Berlin. “
Your situation is
anomalous,” a Propaganda Ministry official told Smith after he switched to CBS in October 1941. “We do not want you here and you do not want to stay. Why don’t you leave?” For the radio broadcasters, overt censorship was increasingly heavy-handed, disallowing mentioning, as Smith recalled, anti-Jewish measures or the executions of “
Czech patriots
or of French ‘communists’ and hostages.” His texts were “
utterly vapid
,” Smith despaired.
Like other American reporters
, he began methodically destroying all his notes as soon as he had used them, leaving
his desk almost empty, except for pencils, pens and ink. The assumption was that anything could prove to be incriminating for the reporters and their sources.

Two of the correspondents who had returned to the United States a few months earlier were already getting their books rushed into print. In June 1941, Shirer’s
Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941
hit the bookstores. In one of his final diary entries from Berlin, he conceded that his observations were hardly dispassionate. “
We who have been
so close to the German scene, who have seen with our own eyes the tramping Nazi boots over Europe and heard with our own ears Hitler’s hysterical tirades of hate, have found it difficult to keep a sense of historical perspective,” he wrote. And like almost all the reporters who had lived in Berlin in that era, he found himself constantly returning to the question of “the strange contradictory character of the German people”—and how Hitler had managed to take such complete control of them.

Shirer rejected the notion, which he ascribed to many American liberals, “that Nazism is a form of rule and life unnatural to the German people and forced upon them against their wish by a few fanatic derelicts of the last war.” He conceded that the Nazis had never won a majority of the votes in a free election, only a plurality. “But for the last three or four years the Nazi regime has expressed something very deep in the German nature and in that respect it has been representative of the people it rules.” Unlike other nationalities, the Germans lacked “balance,” he maintained, and their inner contradictions and frustrations made them lurch from one extreme to another. The Weimar era was an extreme form of liberal democracy, he argued, “and now they have turned to the extremes of tyranny” because in the chaos of the twentieth century it was too difficult for them “to think and make decisions as free men.”

This led Shirer to his theory about the “two characters” of Germans. “As an individual he will give his rationed bread to feed the squirrels in the Tiergarten on a Sunday morning. He can be a kind and considerate person. But, as a unit in the Germanic mass he can persecute Jews, torture and murder his fellow men in a concentration camp, massacre women and children by bombing and bombardment, overrun without
the slightest justification the lands of other peoples, cut them down if they protest, and enslave them.”

Then, Shirer addressed the burning question of the moment in his country: was Hitler contemplating war with the United States? “
I am firmly convinced
that he does contemplate it and that if he wins in Europe and Africa he will in the end launch it unless we are prepared to give up our way of life and adapt ourselves to a subservient place in his totalitarian scheme of things.” The contest between tyranny and democracy, he added, “is as inevitable as that of two planets hurtling inexorably through the heavens towards each other.” Addressing the America First movement and other isolationists, he concluded: “The Lindberghs and their friends laugh at the idea of Germany ever being able to attack the United States. The Germans welcome their laughter and hope more Americans will laugh . . .”

Upon his return to the United States, Harsch had written a twelve-part series for the
Christian Science Monitor
that he turned into a book, delivering his completed manuscript to the printer on June 22, 1941, the day Hitler’s armies invaded Russia. Called
Pattern of Conquest
, it echoed many of Shirer’s themes—and specifically its immediate message. “
The question before
the American people is a clear one,” he wrote. In a world where a titanic struggle for dominance was taking place, “America can either belong to that dominant force or submit to it.” If the United States permitted Germany to win “by default,” it would soon become a satellite of Hitlerland. “The alternative for America is to take its stand with Britain,” he concluded. “The two together can unquestionably defeat Germany.”

Huss stayed in Berlin for the International News Service until November 1941, and he, too, wrote a book about his experiences when he returned home. Entitled
The Foe We Face
, it was published in 1942 when the United States was already in the war. Shortly before his departure from Berlin—only a month before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that would prompt Hitler to declare war on the United States—
Huss interviewed Hitler
for the last time.

Their meeting took place at Wolf’s Lair, the headquarters for the Eastern Front. As Huss followed Hitler’s erratic steps on a path in the
woods, the Nazi leader eerily enacted the scene that Shirer had conjured up earlier in his characterization of the German people. Spotting a squirrel, Hitler pulled out a bag of hazelnuts from his coat pocket. “Quietly, and with a half-smile on his pinkish face,” Huss wrote, he approached it, holding out some nuts. Unafraid, the squirrel jumped up into his hand—to Hitler’s delight. Once it had gathered the nuts and scampered off, he said: “
Ja
, if the world would only mind its own business like this little squirrel.”