Hitlerland Page 3

  “The wholesale atrocities by French negro Colonial troops alleged in the German press, such as the alleged abductions, followed by rape, mutilation, murder and concealment of the bodies of the victims, are false and intended for political propaganda,” he concluded.

  Such exaggerations, Allen added, were in part due to “the attitude of certain classes of German women toward the colored troops.” Noting that the postwar economic crisis had spawned widespread prostitution, he explained that “many German women of loose character have openly made advances to the colored soldiers.” Numerous love letters and photographs attested to that fact, he pointed out. In Ludwigshafen, he reported, patrols had to be sent “to drive away the German women from the barracks, where they were kissing the colored troops through the window gratings.”

  Even more tellingly, Allen noted that there were several interracial marriages, including one with the daughter of a prominent Rhineland official. “The color line is not regarded either by the French or the Germans as we regard it in America: to keep the white race pure.” While he wasn’t denying that there were many documented cases of sexual assaults, Allen was convinced that it was the behavior of German women that had been the spark to “incite trouble.”

  But many Americans in Germany had already made up their minds that it was France’s vindictive policies that were to blame for everything, not anything the Germans were doing. They saw Germany as the victimized party, which was in keeping with much of the local political rhetoric. “I am afraid that many of us who were on duty in Germany after World War I were taken in,” Chicago Tribune correspondent Sigrid Schultz wrote much later. “Inadvertently we supported the Germans in their sympathy drive.”

  On January 29, 1921, Karl Henry von Wiegand, a star reporter for the Hearst publications, wrote to C. F. Bertelli, his Hearst colleague in Paris, venting his exasperation with the French. “Your French friends appear to be as insane as they have ever been since the close of the war.” Mentioning new demands by the French for reparations, he added, “Are the French never going to come to their senses, and see Europe as it actually is?” He concluded that many Americans and other Europeans “are getting rather weary of hearing France’s yowl about what France suffered in the war.”

  Wiegand was a correspondent who already felt very much at home in Germany and the rest of Europe. Born in 1874 in Hesse, he came to the United States as a young boy, growing up on farms in Iowa where his German immigrant father struggled to make ends meet, losing two farms in the process. When his father was “a fair way to losing a third,” Karl, barely fourteen at the time, decided to make his own way in the world, never telling his siblings or his parents that he wasn’t coming back. “A cruel thing to do to a good father and the kindest of mothers,” he would write much later in notes for an autobiography that he never completed.

  He claimed to have then worked on a ranch for Buffalo Bill—who at close range was less than the romantic hero of the frontier that he had imagined from reading dime novels. He made his way further west, eventually finding work at the Associated Press in San Francisco. There, he seized the opportunity to use his German and cover World War I for the rival United Press, happily leaving behind his desk job. Three months into that conflict, he scored an exclusive interview with Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, the son of the Kaiser, who famously told the American that he had warned his father the war was already lost. The subsequent headlines offered a huge boost to Wiegand’s early career. He ended up jumping again—this time to Hearst.

  Like any good reporter, Wiegand recognized he had to offer his editors and readers a broad range of stories about the new Germany. While dutifully reporting on every political crisis, the continuing street battles and the economic shortages (“Food Shortage Alarms All Germany,” warned the headline of his May 23, 1922, story), he was also alert to other subjects that would titillate his readers—or, when it came to the racier ones that his editors might not allow, at least his colleagues.

  That was particularly true when it came to postwar Germany’s growing reputation for sexual licentiousness. Wiegand kept up a running private correspondence with Bertelli in Paris on the subject. In one letter from 1921, Bertelli urged Wiegand to write more about cocaine and “the alleged degeneracy of the old burg.” Good stories on that subject, he added, will “get the whole of the American continent afire with indignation… and greedy longing!” Then, there was the usual banter about how Wiegand should research this story. “Incidentally you might discover in your night investigations (all for the good of the future generation, of course) some novel Venus… Be careful about taking the necessary measurements…”

  Back home, one of Wiegand’s readers concluded that the correspondent might be able to help him with a personal matter. “I am looking for a wife,” R. C. Bruchman wrote him on January 14, 1921, from Danville, Illinois. “I imagine there must be an awful lot of handsome good girls in Berlin who would make a fellow a mighty fine wife.” He enclosed $1.50, asking Wiegand to place an ad in a Berlin newspaper, saying that a thirty-five-year-old German-American gentleman “wants to marry girl 18 to 25 yrs. old.”

  An amused Wiegand agreed to the request, noting this was the first time he had been asked to act as a matrimonial agent. “As there are at least a million more women in Germany than men, you ought to have quite a lot to pick from, and I have no doubt you will get many answers,” he wrote back. “It is indeed all too true that many refined and educated German girls of formerly well to do families are today facing want.”

  Wiegand also participated in the diplomatic party scene in Berlin, occasionally writing features about it, especially when Americans played starring roles. “Houghton Girls Make Berlin Debut” proclaimed his Washington Times story datelined December 30, 1922. The subheadline explained: “Brilliant Assemblage Gives Daughters of U.S. Envoy Welcome to Society.” Alanson B. Houghton, an industrialist-turned-Republican-congressman-turned-diplomat, was Washington’s first postwar envoy to Berlin. He was deeply troubled by the overall situation he found there, repeatedly warning Washington that Germany’s economic plight and political unrest could prove to be highly dangerous for the whole continent. But this didn’t prevent him from putting on some of Berlin’s most lavish parties, which Wiegand wrote up enthusiastically.

  At a ball in honor of their daughter and a niece, the Houghtons welcomed “four hundred members of the diplomatic set and high German officialdom, and many representative Americans,” Wiegand reported. This “brilliant fete,” he added, was a huge boost to American prestige. Presumably, the outfits of the daughter (“a gown of silver brocade cloth”) and niece (“a gold-banded net over a novel gold cloth”) all contributed to the success of the evening—as did the fact that the two young women also carried “enormous rose-colored feather fans.” So, too, did an American jazz band that supplied the music, while “a moving picture machine added color by flashing alternate shades on the dancing throng.” All this a half a century before the disco era.

  While Wiegand enjoyed such stories, he knew that his editors wanted him to keep explaining Germany’s turbulent political scene as well—a charge he took very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that he became the first American correspondent to interview a local agitator in Munich who was beginning to make his name as a fiery orator. That agitator’s name was Adolf Hitler.

  Wiegand declared that he had first met Hitler in 1921, but he only began taking him seriously enough to feature him prominently in his reports a year later. Given the proliferation of extremists in Bavaria at the time, that was hardly surprising. Every encounter with a radical of the right or the left hardly merited a separate story or even a mention in print. But by November 1922, following Benito Mussolini’s power grab in Italy, there was a growing sense that the right was on the rise throughout Europe, providing the perfect peg for a feature about the leader of the German “Fascisti.”

  “Hitler Styled Mussolini of Teuton Crisis,” proclaimed the headline of Wiegand’s story datelined Novem
ber 12, 1922, in the New York American, one of the Hearst papers. “The shadow of the Fascisti is arising in Germany,” Wiegand wrote. Explaining that Hitler—“leader of the movement which is causing no less uneasiness in Communist and Socialist circles than in Government quarters in Berlin and Munich”—had spelled out his program to him that day, the writer offered a summary that would leave the average reader confused about the true nature of this new political movement.

  While denouncing the terms of the Versailles Treaty, Hitler insisted that he wanted reconciliation with France. The idea of war, he told Wiegand, “would be suicidal, if it were not idiocy.” As for domestic policy, he called on Germans to work two extra hours a day to pay off reparations and free them of their debts. He denied any intention to restore the monarchy or push separatism for Bavaria, and he attacked the Marxists head-on. “True socialism is the welfare of all the people, and not of one class at the expense of others. Therefore we oppose class warfare,” he declared.

  But for American readers who hadn’t heard of this new politician, what probably registered the most in Wiegand’s article was his personal description of Hitler. Calling him “a man of the people” who had served in the trenches of World War I and afterward worked as a carpenter-turned-master builder (almost certainly an exaggerated description of Hitler’s early days as a handyman), Wiegand described him as “a magnetic speaker having also exceptional organizing genius.” He then spelled out the key characteristics of “the German Mussolini,” as he promptly dubbed him:

  “Aged thirty-four, medium tall, wiry, slender, dark hair, cropped toothbrush mustache, eyes that seem at times to spurt fire, straight nose, finely chiseled features with a complexion so remarkably delicate that many a woman would be proud to possess it, and possessing a bearing that creates an impression of dynamic energy well under control…

  “That is Hitler—one of the most interesting characters I have met in many months.

  “With apostolic fervor and gifted with convincing oratory and a magnetism which is drawing him followers even out of the inner communistic and socialistic circles, Hitler has the earmarks of a leader. Whether it be merely a band or a great movement, only the future will tell.

  “He believes firmly that his mission is to arouse and save Germany from its internal foes…”

  Wiegand concluded his article by reporting: “The Bavarian Fascisti, like the Italians, are working secretly in the Reichswehr and the police, and there is fear that Hitler may one day proclaim himself dictator of Bavaria.”

  Even before he filed that story, Wiegand had been telling Ambassador Houghton in Berlin about the disarray in the southern part of the country, and warning that General Erich Ludendorff might be planning to topple the government and impose a right-wing dictatorship. Ludendorff had led the German war effort in its latter stages and, after a brief exile, had returned to Germany and taken up with Hitler and other agitators in Munich. Instead of accepting responsibility for Germany’s military defeat, he blamed Socialists, leftists and Jews, laying the groundwork for what would become known as the “stab-in-the-back” theory.

  Houghton decided that he needed more information about what was happening in the south. “Something is brewing in Bavaria and no one seems to know exactly what it is,” he wrote in his diary. “Probably it will result in nothing definite, but too much is at stake to permit us to run any danger.” To check out the situation, he turned to his young assistant military attaché, Captain Smith. At the same time that Wiegand was filing his first story about Hitler, Smith was preparing to follow in his footsteps—and to become the first American official to meet the future leader of Nazi Germany.

  Smith would later point out that most foreign diplomats in Berlin at the time had written off the National Socialists as “being without significance and its leader, Adolf Hitler, as an uneducated madman.” Houghton, by contrast, “seems to have had, even at this early date, a premonition that the movement and its leader might play an important role in the disturbed Germany of the early twenties.” The ambassador and the embassy’s military attaché Lieutenant Colonel Edward Davis, Smith’s immediate superior, urged the captain to “try to make personal contact with Hitler himself and form an estimate of his character, personality, abilities, and weaknesses.”

  Arriving in Munich on November 15, Smith had a clear-cut set of questions to address based on the hot topics of conversation among diplomats in Berlin. First, in light of the open hostility of “the reactionary government in Munich” to “the moderately leftist Reich government in Berlin,” was there a danger that Bavaria would declare itself independent? Second, was there a danger of another Communist revolt in Bavaria (a “Bavarian Soviet Republic” was briefly proclaimed in 1919)? And, third, “Did the possibility exist that Hitler’s National Socialists were strong enough to seize power in Bavaria?” He was also supposed to check on the loyalty of the 7th Division of the Reichswehr, as the Army was called, and on the significance of the sporadic incidents between the Bavarians and the Allied Military Control commissions, which were still operating in Germany following that country’s defeat.

  Smith set out to fulfill his assignment by meeting as many people as possible, recording his discussions and impressions in his notebooks. In typical military style, he referred to himself in the third person in these notes.

  Upon his arrival, he first went to the U.S. Consulate, where he met with Robert Murphy, the acting consul. Since the consulate had reopened in 1921, the four consular officers assigned there had been overwhelmed with paperwork, issuing on average about four hundred visas a day. “It seemed to us that the whole of Bavaria wanted to emigrate,” Murphy recalled. But the consular officers also attempted to monitor the turbulent local politics, trying to get a fix on Hitler and other radicals. “It was a welcome relief from those chores to transform ourselves into political reporters for the benefit of the State Department,” Murphy noted.

  Murphy told Smith that the new Bavarian Minister President Eugen von Knilling was weak and easily manipulated by right-wing politicians. Then their conversation turned to Hitler and the Nazis. Smith summarized Murphy’s views: “The National Socialists are increasing their strength rapidly. Hitler, their leader, is of Austrian origin and a pure and simple adventurer. Nevertheless, he is a real character and is exploiting all latent discontent to increase his party’s strength.”

  Murphy also passed along a rumor that Hitler had “a shady past” and may have misappropriated government funds in Austria. In Germany, he now commanded 40,000 men—“largely roughnecks but devoted to their leader.” While some reports had suggested he might have up to 200,000 men, Murphy pointed out that even his smaller force could prove effective if well led. “Hitler thoroughly understands the Bavarian psychology. Whether he is big enough to take the lead in a German national movement is another question; probably not.” Noting that the National Socialists were not working together with “the other monarchist groups,” he added that the Bavarian government was permitting the Nazis “to do what they want.” Still, Murphy confessed that it was difficult to assess all the competing groups. “All these nationalist societies are so mixed up among themselves that it is hard to keep them distinct.”

  That was only the beginning of Smith’s rounds, where he asked everyone he met about Hitler. General Kress von Kressenstein, the artillery commander of the 7th Division, hadn’t met Hitler, but he called his nationalist movement a “healthy drift away from socialism.” The general had the impression that the man was “an oratorical genius,” but he felt that “Hitler was not as radical as his speeches made him out.” He was anti-Semitic in “a healthy sense,” Kressenstein continued, since he wanted to keep Jews out of government positions. Barring some mistake, he predicted to Smith, his movement had “a great future before it.” He added that the National Socialists favored “an evolutionary development, not a revolutionary one.”

  Friedrich Trefz, the chief editor of the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, concurred that the National Soc
ialists were a growing force. “Hitler was a marvelous speaker. None better,” Smith recorded him as saying. Trefz told Smith he had gone to a Nazi meeting and sat between a general and a Communist; both had come out of simple curiosity—and, afterward, both signed up as party members. Trefz’s conclusion: “The National Socialists present no immediate danger to the government. The ground is fertile, however, and the party will grow.”

  Finally, Smith made it to the informal headquarters of the Nazis at Georgenstrasse 42. There, he first met with Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, an early confidant of Hitler. He claimed that the party had 35,000 members in Munich, 200,000 sympathizers and a “militarily organized” underground, armed with clubs and pistols. As for the party’s anti-Semitism, he assured his American visitor that it was “purely for propaganda.”

  In the midst of the conversation, there was a sudden flurry of activity. The National Socialists had been planning to hold a meeting in Regensburg that evening, but the Reich Ministry of Railroads had just denied them permission for a special train to transport Hitler’s men. Scheubner-Richter explained that the Regensburg event had been postponed but that Hitler would be reviewing his troops, the Brownshirts, nearby. Smith was invited to watch this in the company of party ideologist Alfred Rosenberg.

  “A remarkable sight indeed,” Smith noted. “Twelve hundred of the toughest roughnecks I have ever seen in my life pass in review before Hitler at the goosestep under the old Reichflag wearing red armbands with Hakenkreuzen (swastikas).”

  Addressing his followers, Hitler explained that while the German government had stopped them from getting to Regensburg that day, the National Socialists would “clean up the town” the following week. In his notebook, Smith added: “He then shouts, ‘Death to the Jews’ etc. and etc. There was frantic cheering. I never saw such a sight in my life.” Afterward, Smith was briefly introduced to Hitler, who promised to talk with him two days later.