Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (6 page)

Long after World War II, Smith would write
The Facts of Life
, an autobiographical manuscript that he tried but failed to publish. There, he recalled his meeting with Hitler in 1922. “
The diary I kept
in Munich indicates that I was deeply impressed with his personality and thought it likely he would play an important role in German politics,” he wrote. “I must confess, however, that I did not see him as the future ruler of most of Europe.”

On November 17, just as Smith was making his rounds in Munich, Wiegand came to see Ambassador Houghton in the Berlin embassy again. He told the envoy about his meeting with Hitler, how the Nazi leader claimed to be seeking “
some arrangement
” with France, and indicated that he might try to stage a coup and install a dictatorship.

Finding this report about Hitler “disquieting,” Houghton decided to write a confidential letter to Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes on November 21, not waiting for Smith’s report from his meeting with Hitler that was taking place on the same day. While Houghton mistakenly lumped Hitler together with the monarchists, much of his letter would prove to be surprisingly accurate.

“
The most active
of the Monarchist groups is headed by a young Austrian named Hitler who is in control, it is estimated, of thirty thousand armed men, and, who, by his vehemence and fanaticism and by his dominating and attractive personality, is rapidly becoming the leader of the whole movement,” Houghton reported, mentioning that he had dispatched a military attaché to learn more about him.

Modeled after its Italian counterparts, the ambassador continued, “This Fascisti movement is unquestionably spreading throughout Germany . . . It offers a method and means by which conservative people of all shades of political opinion can get together and organize to meet and repel Socialist aggression . . . it is not unlikely to bring within its ranks a large share of the population.”

Murphy, the acting consul in Munich, wasn’t nearly as early in spotting the danger Hitler represented. He would admit later that he was initially misled about the Nazi leader by Paul Drey, a German employee of the consulate who was a member of a distinguished Jewish family with deep Bavarian roots. The two men attended some of Hitler’s early meetings, and, at the end of the first one, Drey indignantly told Murphy: “
How does this
Austrian upstart dare to tell us Germans what to do?”

After witnessing some other appearances by Hitler, Murphy asked Drey, “Do you think these agitators will ever get far?”

“Of course not!” Drey replied. “The German people are too intelligent to be taken in by such scamps.”

The German staffer was very much old-school—and he responded to the growing Nazi presence in an old-school way. Once when he and Murphy stopped at a tailor shop to order a suit, the tailor was openly rude. Guessing what was going on, Murphy asked if the man was a member of the Nazi Party. “Yes, I am a follower of Herr Hitler,” he responded proudly. When they were out of the shop, Drey asked Murphy if he had noticed what he had done to show his contempt for the Nazi tailor. The American confessed he hadn’t. “I did not tip my hat to him when we left!” Drey explained, as if that nongesture must have devastated its target.

Murphy only met Hitler for a direct conversation once, in early 1923. He was probably still influenced by Drey at that point, since he clearly did not attach much importance to it at the time. In a report back to Washington titled “Bavaria’s Political Situation,” dated March 17, 1923, Murphy wrote at length about a monarchist conspiracy there, adding a short section at the very end labeled “
Interview with Adolf Hitler
.” The American’s reason for requesting the meeting with Hitler was to see whether there was any truth to the rumors that Henry Ford, who was well known for his anti-Semitic views, had provided support to his movement.

“Mr. Hitler was cordial and stated to the main inquiry that unfortunately Mr. Ford’s organization has so far made no money contributions to the party,” Murphy reported. “He stated that his funds were principally contributed by patriotic Germans living abroad.”

The two men then discussed the tensions surrounding the decision by France and Belgium to occupy the industrial Ruhr Valley in January of that year as punishment for Germany’s failure to pay reparations. Murphy reported that Hitler considered this occupation “a question involving the economic and political life or death of Germany and cannot be compromised.” The Nazi leader clearly backed the campaign of passive resistance that had already started, and suggested that if the French military pushed across the Rhine into Bavaria “an active campaign would certainly ensue.” Murphy related those sentiments without comment, suggesting that he wasn’t particularly worried by them.

As for Murphy’s superiors in the State Department, they weren’t necessarily
appreciative of his efforts to learn more about the volatile politics of the region.
In a letter to Murphy
dated April 8, 1924, Wilbur J. Carr, writing on behalf of the secretary of state, complained that “a large proportion of the reports received from Munich dealt with political and politico-economic subjects” during the previous year. While acknowledging that “the disturbed political conditions have perhaps over-shadowed commercial development,” he urged the consular officials to focus more on “the promotion of American commerce.”

Murphy took the message to heart, at least to the extent that he worked harder on his reporting on commercial issues. But he also began taking Hitler seriously, while Drey persisted in dismissing him and the Nazis as aberrations—even after they took power. As late as 1938, Murphy—alarmed by the news that a Munich synagogue had been burned—flew back to that city to persuade his former employee to flee the country. He also assured him that he would arrange for him to find a job with the State Department elsewhere. Drey said he appreciated his concern, but he wasn’t going. “
No, this is
a temporary madness. Self-respecting Germans will not tolerate these louts much longer,” he insisted.

Paul Drey would die in Dachau.

When Captain Smith was preparing for his trip to Munich, Warren Robbins, a colleague at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, placed a phone call to Ernst Hanfstaengl in the Bavarian capital. Explaining that Smith would be going south, he asked a favor: “
Look after him and
introduce him to a few people, will you?” It was a minor request that would prove to have major consequences.

Robbins knew that Hanfstaengl would be happy to oblige. He and Hanfstaengl had been classmates at Harvard and performed in a production of the Hasty Pudding Club together. The show was called
Fate Fakirs,
and Hanfstaengl—who, just like Smith, was 6 feet 4 inches tall—played the role of a Dutch girl called Gretchen Spootsfeiffer, decked out in feminine garb. “
I was the leading
soprano there—the falsetto voice,” he recalled. This was a towering, husky young man who always loved an audience.

Born in Bavaria in 1887, Hanfstaengl was “half American,” as he put it, the son of a German father and American mother with equally impressive lineage. “Putzi,” which means “little fellow” in Bavarian and stuck as his nickname from an early age, proudly offered this description of the paternal side of his family: “
The Hanfstaengls were
substantial folk. For three generations they were privy councillors to the Dukes of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and well-known as connoisseurs and patrons of the arts.”
Putzi’s grandfather
had been famous for his art reproduction work, and then his early use of photography. His father kept the family arts business going and expanded it by opening galleries in London and New York.

Putzi’s mother Katharine, whose maiden name was Sedgwick, came from one of New England’s truly eminent families. Her maternal uncle was General John Sedgwick, a Civil War hero. Her father was William Heine, an architect by training who had fled Dresden after the revolution of 1848, worked on the decorations of the Paris Opera, and then emigrated to the United States. There, he joined Admiral Perry as his official illustrator on his expedition to Japan. He, too, became a Civil War general, and he helped carry Abraham Lincoln’s coffin at his funeral. Thus, it was hardly surprising that Putzi was dispatched to Harvard in 1905, both to learn more about his American heritage and to prepare him to take over the family art gallery on New York’s Fifth Avenue.

When discussing his
Harvard days
, Putzi always dwelled on his prominence and connections there. “
I hate to say
it myself: I was popular in my class,” he eagerly pointed out. Monumentally vain, Hanfstaengl was right on that score: whether he was playing Wagner or banging out marching songs on the piano for the football team, he ingratiated himself with the Harvard crowd, mingling easily with the likes of T. S. Eliot, Walter Lippmann, Robert Benchley and John Reed.

But it was an off-campus exploit that catapulted him to wider fame. On a cold morning in the spring of 1906, he was waiting for practice tryouts for the crew team on the Charles River. As Putzi recalled, “
Some fool
of a canoeist got into difficulties in the swift current and tipped himself out.” Without hesitating, Putzi grabbed a boat and rowed out to the canoeist who was floundering badly. Fully clothed, he jumped into the cold
water and managed to push the man up into the boat. The next day, the headline in the
Boston Herald
proclaimed, “Hanfstaengl, Harvard’s Hero.”

Putzi maintained that this episode was responsible for his getting to know another famous Harvard student: Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., the eldest son of the president. In the winter of 1908, the father—“
a fellow extrovert
,” as Putzi described him—invited him to Washington. His strongest recollection of that first of several meetings with TR was a stag party in the White House basement and “of breaking seven bass strings on his magnificent Steinway Grand.”

After Harvard, Hanfstaengl returned to Germany for a year of military service in the Royal Bavarian Foot Guards, standing guard at the royal palace and generally feeling that he was trapped in an anachronistic world. He spent another year studying in Grenoble, Vienna and Rome before returning to the United States and taking charge of the family gallery on Fifth Avenue. Eating often at the Harvard Club, he met another Roosevelt—FDR, who was then a young New York state senator. He also reconnected with the elder Theodore Roosevelt. The former president told him his military service must have been good for him. “I saw something of your army at Doeberitz as the Kaiser’s guest, and discipline like that never hurt anybody,” he said. “No nation can degenerate which maintains those standards.”

Later, their conversation turned to both art and politics. “Hanfstaengl, your business is to pick the best pictures, but remember that in politics the choice is that of the lesser evil,” the former president told him. With no sense of irony, Putzi—who would later work assiduously to help Hitler as he rose to power—noted that it was a phrase “which has stuck with me ever since.”

During World War I, Hanfstaengl felt the pull of allegiance to the country of his birth. Before the United States entered the war, he tried to help the bands on German ships blockaded in New York harbor by inviting them to perform in the family gallery. Once the Americans joined the fighting, Putzi had to get a lawyer, former Senator Elihu Root, who had been TR’s secretary of state, and pledge not to engage in any anti-American activities to avoid internment.

A Department of Justice report
in February 1917 offered this
assessment of Hanfstaengl, whom investigators had been clearly observing: “He is not a man of criminal instinct, but if war was declared between Germany and America it probably would be best that he be interned because he has the ability of an officer to lead men either here or in Mexico.” Nicholas Roosevelt, another member of the famous clan, wrote to the authorities to say that Putzi was “violently anti-American,” that he had been in close touch with the German Embassy until it was closed down and that he was “almost a fanatical supporter of his fatherland” and “a most dangerous man to have about.”

Whatever the accuracy of that reporting, Hanfstaengl—who had recently married and had his first child—decided to return to Germany in 1921. There, he found a country “
riven by faction and
near destitution.” Echoing Ben Hecht’s comment about a country undergoing a nervous breakdown, he added: “It became evident to me that Germany, politically speaking, was a madhouse . . .” It was while he was still trying to get his bearings in his transformed homeland that Putzi took the call from his former Harvard classmate who now worked at the American Embassy in Berlin.

When Smith arrived in Munich, Putzi did what he could for him, providing a few largely social introductions. He wrote in his memoirs that Smith was “
a very pleasant
young officer of about thirty, a Yale man, but in spite of that I was nice to him.” He was also nice to Kay, who accompanied her husband to Munich. Putzi, who would soon become notorious for his womanizing, was the perfect gentleman with her. He showed her the sights as a light snow fell, ducking inside the Frauenkirche, whose medieval art charmed his American visitor. When they stopped at his family’s art store, he gave her an engraving of the interior of the church. “
A lovely way
to be introduced to Munich,” she would write later. “Perhaps this day is the reason why I have always been so fond of this place.”

As it turned out, her husband didn’t need all that much help from Putzi, who was impressed with how Truman “
worked like
a beaver” and met almost everyone who mattered politically. “He soon knew much more about Bavarian politics than I did,” he admitted.

On Smith’s final day in Munich, the two met for lunch. “I met the most remarkable fellow I’ve ever come across this morning,” Smith volunteered.

Putzi asked who he was talking about. “Adolf Hitler,” Smith replied.

“You must have the name wrong,” Putzi said. “Don’t you mean Hilpert, the German nationalist fellow, although I can’t say I see anything particularly remarkable in him.”