Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (7 page)

Realizing Putzi had never heard of Hitler, Smith set him straight. “There are quite a lot of placards up announcing a meeting this evening,” he pointed out. “They say he puts up signs saying ‘No entry for Jews,’ but he has a most persuasive line about German honor and rights for the workers and a new society . . . I have the impression he’s going to play a big part, and whether you like him or not he certainly knows what he wants.”

Smith had been given a press pass for Hitler’s appearance that evening in the Kindlkeller, a popular Munich beer hall. Since he had to take the night train back to Berlin, he asked Putzi if he could attend for him. “Could you possibly have a look at him and let me know your impressions?” he added.

Not knowing what to expect but his curiosity aroused, Hanfstaengl agreed to do so. “It is a far cry from Harvard to Hitler, but in my case the connexion is direct,” he would write years later. Or as he put it to one interviewer in recalling the chain of events that would lead him to Hitler: “
All that is
just by some artistry of fate.”

2

Up in the Air

W
hen Putzi Hanfstaengl arrived at the
Kindlkeller
on the evening of November 22, 1922, the hall was already packed with people who looked like shopkeepers, civil servants, young people and artisans, many dressed in traditional Bavarian costume. Once he worked his way through the crowd to the press table, Putzi asked a reporter to point Hitler out. Looking at the future leader of Germany, Hanfstaengl was distinctly underwhelmed. “In his heavy boots, dark suit and leather waistcoat, semi-stiff white collar and odd little mustache, he really did not look very impressive—like a waiter in a railway-station restaurant,” he recalled.

But after he was introduced to loud applause, Hitler straightened up and walked past the press table “with a swift, controlled step, the unmistakable soldier in mufti,” noted Putzi, who was seated only about 8 feet away from the platform that Hitler now occupied. Since Hitler had recently spent a short stint in prison for incitement and he knew
police agents
were in the crowd, he had to be careful in choosing his words. Still, the atmosphere was “
electric
,” as Putzi described it, and he found the orator a master of “innuendo and irony.” Looking back at the first performance that he witnessed, Putzi reflected: “In his early years he had
a command of voice, phrase and effect which has never been equaled, and on that evening he was at his best.”

After starting in an almost light conversational tone, Hitler warmed to his subject and sharpened his rhetoric. He attacked the Jews for profiteering and contributing to the misery all around them—“
a charge which
it was only too easy to make stick,” Hanfstaengl claimed. He denounced the Communists and Socialists, whom he accused of undermining German traditions. And he warned that anyone who was an enemy of the people would be eliminated.

Putzi saw that the audience was enjoying his speech immensely—“
especially the ladies
.” As Hitler talked about everyday life, Putzi observed a young woman who could not tear her eyes away from the speaker. “
Transfixed
as if in some devotional ecstasy, she had ceased to be herself and was completely under the spell of Hitler’s despotic faith in Germany’s future greatness.” When Hitler took a swig from a mug of beer that was passed up to him, the crowd burst into new applause and it was clear he had mesmerized them.

“Impressed beyond measure,” Putzi later claimed he was already calculating how best he could guide and educate this skillful orator who “was clearly going to go far.” Observing Hitler’s entourage, Putzi saw no one who could “bring home to him the picture of the outside world he manifestly lacked, and in this I felt I might be able to help.” In particular, he saw that Hitler had no idea how critical America’s entry into World War I had been and how Europeans had to take into account the United States as a rising power. As a “half American,” he viewed this as his mission.

Putzi made his way to the platform, where Hitler stood, drenched with sweat but relishing his triumph. The newcomer introduced himself and conveyed Smith’s best wishes. “
Ah, you are
the friend of that big captain who called this morning,” Hitler replied, dabbing his wet forehead with a handkerchief.

Declaring his admiration, Putzi added: “I agree with 95 per cent of what you said and would very much like to talk to you about the rest some time.” In an interview long after the war, he would claim that the 5 percent he was referring to was “of course the Jews and all that,” but he wanted to be careful not to hurt Hitler’s feelings by spelling that out.

“Why, yes, of course,” Hitler replied. “I am sure we shall not have to quarrel about the odd five per cent.”

Putzi shook hands with him, feeling that here was someone who was “modest and friendly.” After he went home, he couldn’t fall asleep for a long time as he kept thinking about the evening and what it represented. He saw Hitler as a self-made man who could reach ordinary Germans with a non-communist program. But he hadn’t liked the look of some of his followers, including “dubious types” like party ideologist Alfred Rosenberg—“
a sallow, untidy
fellow, who looked half-Jewish in an unpleasant sort of way.”

Nonetheless, Putzi found reassurance in a quote from Nietzsche that he remembered: “
The first followers
of a movement do not prove anything against it.”

Putzi’s wife, Helen, or Helene as she was known in Germany, would play a role unlike any other in Hitler’s rise to power. In her fragmentary, unpublished notes about her dealings with the Nazi leader, she wrote that her husband had returned that evening from his first encounter with him full of enthusiasm, talking about “
the earnest, magnetic
young man.” While Putzi maintained that the second time he heard Hitler speak he was “less impressed,” he quickly threw his lot in with this agitator who he felt could go very far. He started to play the role of his propagandist and press advisor, but his initial involvement was as much social as it was political. And it was very much tied to Hitler’s evident attraction to Helen—an attraction that would not be hurt in the least by the fact that she was an American.

Putzi claimed that he first introduced Helen to Hitler when he took her to see him speak, striking up a conversation afterward. The future dictator, according to Putzi, “was delighted with my wife, who was blonde and beautiful and American.” In her notes, Helen offered a different recollection, asserting that she met Hitler on a tram. She and Putzi were going downtown when Hitler got on and her husband introduced them. After a brief conversation, she invited him for lunch or dinner whenever he had the time. Whichever version is correct, both Putzi and Helen’s stories
agree that the first encounter ended with Helen extending an open invitation for him to come to their home. Hitler soon became a frequent guest in their apartment in Gentzstrasse, where they lived with their young son Egon; the Hanfstaengls jokingly referred to it as the Café Gentz.

“From that day he was a constant visitor, enjoying the quiet, cozy home atmosphere, playing with my son at intervals, and talking over for hours his plans and hopes for the renaissance of the German Reich,” Helen recalled. With more than a trace of pride, she added in her postwar notes, “It seems he enjoyed our home above all others to which he was invited.”

According to Helen, Hitler was dressed in a cheap white shirt, black tie, a worn dark blue suit and an “incongruous” brown leather vest, topped off by a beige trench coat “much the worse for wear,” cheap shoes and an old, soft grey hat. “His appearance was really quite pathetic,” she wrote. But she found the person in those clothes to be quite appealing: “He was at that time, a slim, shy young man, with a far-away look in his very blue eyes.”

She maintained that she was able to see Hitler from an “absolutely different” side than others would in later years. “He was a warm person,” she insisted in an interview in 1971. “One thing was really quite touching: he evidently liked children or he made a good act of it. He was wonderful with Egon.” One afternoon as the little boy ran to meet Hitler, he slipped and bumped his head against a chair. With a dramatic gesture, Hitler then beat the chair, berating it for hurting “good little Egon.” Helen remembered this as “a surprise and a delight,” which prompted the boy to ask the visitor to go through the same act each time he came over. “Please, Uncle Dolf, spank the naughty chair,” Egon would plead.

Helen was fascinated by Hitler’s inclination “to talk and talk and talk,” as she put it. “Nobody else had the chance to say anything. I remember, too, that he couldn’t stand anyone who wanted to talk. He was the one who talked; the others listened. That was why he couldn’t stand some people: because he talked too much.” Whether it was in her home or at rallies in this early period, she continued, “his voice had an unusually vibrant, expressive quality, which it later lost, probably through over-exertion . . . It has often been said that his voice had a mesmeric quality, and this I can verify, from my own observation.”

Her fascination was in no way diminished by the main subject that Hitler focused on. “The one thing he always raved against was the Jews,” she admitted. He went on about how Jews had prevented him from getting jobs when he was living in Vienna. Helen believed these experiences generated his anti-Semitism. “It began as personal but he built it up politically,” she said.

Who was this American who began hosting Hitler in her home on a regular basis, offering him meals or his favorite duo of black coffee and chocolate—seemingly unconcerned about his dark side? Born in 1893 in New York City, Helen Niemeyer was the daughter of German immigrants, who made sure she spoke German and was aware of her German heritage. But her American identity is on full display in
family photos
of her dressed as “Liberty”—decked out like the model for the Statue of Liberty and holding a large American flag on the steps of Hoboken’s City Hall. Dated 1912–1913, the photos show her as a young woman of nearly twenty, accompanied by little girls in white dresses and sashes bearing the names of different states.

Soon after they began to see each other socially, Hitler asked Helen: “How do you manage here as an American?” Helen explained about her family roots, noting that she spoke German as fluently as she did English and that she also considered herself “really half and half” in terms of her nationality, despite her U.S. passport.

Putzi told Kay Smith that Helen had walked into his family’s Fifth Avenue shop one day and he had been immediately smitten. “
He had been so struck
with her beauty he had followed her home,” she recalled. Helen wasn’t film-star beautiful: she was five feet nine inches tall, big-boned, and somewhat matronly looking at an early age. But she had an expressive face with lively blue eyes, kept her hair stylishly back, and wore conservative but chic clothes. Helen and Putzi married on February 11, 1920, their marriage certificate issued by the city clerk in Queens. A year later, after Egon was born, they moved to Munich.

Their marriage wasn’t easy from the beginning. When the Hanfstaengls came to Berlin for a visit and stayed with the Smiths, Kay found Putzi boisterous to the point where she had to keep him in check. At a dinner party the two couples attended, he played the piano
magnificently, she noted. “He might have been a concert pianist had he wished to concentrate on that but . . . he did not work very hard at anything.” When they returned to the Smiths’ apartment on Olivaer Platz, he swung back into action. With a bottle of cognac at his side, he banged out “Harvard, Fair Harvard,” at the same time declaring, “Ah, there’s nothing like Wagner.”

Both Truman and Helen slipped off to their respective bedrooms to go to sleep, but Kay only managed to stop Putzi after four in the morning. Kay recalled that it felt like she had barely fallen asleep when she heard the piano again. Throwing on some clothes, she got him to stop, since Truman and Helen were still sleeping. To keep him from returning to the piano, she convinced Putzi to accompany her on a walk through the nearly empty Tiergarten in the cold early morning hours, telling him that he had to give his wife and her husband some time to rest.

“Ah, the little Helene is always exhausted,” he told her.

“I don’t wonder. You are an exhausting person,” Kay responded. Once Helen finally left Putzi more than a decade later, Kay observed that she had found him “too exhausting.”

But when Helen was new to Germany, she shared many of the same feelings as her husband. She was struck by the economic misery of the postwar period and the political turmoil. “
What wonder
that in all this chaos a man like A.H. should successfully attract the attention of desperate Germany,” she wrote in her precise handwriting. “His plans for the renaissance of the country sounded ideal for most citizens . . .”

Among the new American reporters in Germany at that time, there was far from universal agreement that Hitler was a force to be reckoned with. One of the best known was Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker, a red-haired, hard-charging Texan who had already worked in Moscow before moving to Berlin in 1923, although he was only twenty-five when he arrived in the German capital. During the ten years that he was based there, H. R. Knickerbocker, as his byline usually read, published six books in German, wrote regular columns for German newspapers, while still attending to his primary duties initially as a reporter for the International News Service
and then for the
Philadelphia Public Ledger
and the
New York Evening Post.
As John Gunther, another famous itinerant correspondent and author of that era, recalled, he became “
a definite public character
in German political life.”