Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

It wasn’t just a newcomer like Sackett who liked Berlin and felt welcomed not only by Fromm but also by much of German officialdom, despite the renewed sense of crisis. On a visit to his Philadelphia home office in 1930, Knickerbocker was asked about the attitude of Germans toward American correspondents.

“Fortunately for us, we enjoy splendid prestige in Berlin,” he replied. “We are treated courteously and our questions are answered intelligently. Tea is served at the Foreign Office every Friday afternoon at 3 o’clock, being attended by correspondents from every important country in the world.” There, he continued, senior officials provided briefings and the newsmen made valuable contacts. He added, “Germany is the only European country, so far as I know, that has not expelled a correspondent since the World War.”

Asked which country was the most interesting in Europe for a correspondent, he replied: “Germany for the moment. I consider Berlin the most important capital in Europe. For the moment (please note that I emphasize the phrase) Germany and the Soviet Union are the most pacific countries in Europe. The Soviet can’t afford a war and Germany is sick of war. Yet we never know what may happen.”

As Germany’s economy began to unravel again, triggering new angst and unrest among a population that still had raw memories of the last crisis when so many lives and livelihoods were ruined, the Nazi movement began to gain traction. By the end of 1928, with its early signs of trouble ahead, the party boasted 108,000 dues-paying members; by the end of 1929, that number had jumped to 178,000. While Hitler was still considered a marginal political figure, he was drawing larger, more enthusiastic crowds and the party was making gains in local elections.

Not surprisingly, Wiegand was the first American correspondent to decide that it was worth interviewing the rabble rouser whom he and his colleagues had largely ignored for the past several years. After all, Wiegand had been the first American reporter to write about Hitler in the early 1920s, and he remembered well his rapid rise and apparent fall then. He also remembered his ability to play upon popular discontent—and, with that discontent growing, it was only logical to see whether Hitler could ride its wave again.

Wiegand hadn’t bothered to check on Hitler since his imprisonment following the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. But in December 1929, he traveled to Munich to meet him. “Now he is again active, and with a much larger following,” he reported in his article in the New York American that ran on January 5, 1930. Most of his dispatch consisted of lengthy quotes from his interview with Hitler, which were delivered “with that vigor of expression that is characteristic of him.”

Hitler focused his remarks on the threat of Bolshevism—and on his claim that his party was the only force capable of stopping it. “Germany is steadily, slowly, but surely slipping more and more into conditions of Communism,” he declared. Pointing to the litany of economic woes—particularly the growing number of bankruptcies and rising unemployment—and “disgust with the present party system in Germany and distrust of public officials,” Hitler warned that “all this tends to smooth the way to national destruction.”

“The public mind of the German people is in utter confusion,” he continued. “It is in this state of affairs that the National Socialists are raising the cry of home, country and nation against the slogan of internationalism of the Marxian Socialists.” The goal, as he explained it, was “to save Germany from being economically enslaved to foreign powers on the one hand and on the other hand from being utterly bolshevized and falling into disorganization and demoralization.”

Wiegand reminded Hitler of his earlier failed putsch and asked if he intended to try to depose the government by force again. “No, we have no thought of revolution,” he replied, insisting that support for his movement was growing so rapidly that “we have no need of other than legal methods.” He claimed that the party was supported at that moment by about 2.5 million Germans, and that this number would grow to about 4 million in another year.

When pressed on what kind of system of government he favored, Hitler was evasive. He called Germany’s parliamentary system with its multiplicity of feuding parties “an utter farce.” He indicated he saw some pluses in the American form of government, “where the president is something more than a rubber stamp and the cabinet cannot be overthrown from day to day.” That kind of system, he added, has “elements of stability” that Germany was sorely lacking. But his language suggested that this was hardly the ideal solution.

Instead of clarifying what he was for, Hitler dwelled on what he was against, including the Jews who had attained, as he put it, wildly disproportionate power and influence. “I am not for curtailing the rights of the Jews in Germany, but I insist that we others who are not Jews shall not have less rights than they,” he said. Any regulations about Jews, he claimed, would be no different from America’s immigration laws that required immigrants to submit to medical examinations to prove they were healthy before they would be admitted. “Germany has no such protective measures,” he complained. “Jewish influence expressed politically has prevented such measures being enacted. We are overrun by the elements that you reject in advance.”

Finally, Hitler told Wiegand he was open to “an entente or understanding” between Germany and England and the United States. But he saw “no hope” that France would change its hostile approach to Germany, allowing for a lessening of tensions between the two.

Although Hitler attempted to sound less strident than he did at his rallies, the message he delivered left little doubt that he remained a committed foe of Germany’s current system of government. Even if he no longer planned to march on Berlin, he wanted to see it come crashing down.

In the conclusion to his article, Wiegand noted that many people in Germany were surprised that Hitler was staging a political comeback. “Just how much of a factor he will be in coming difficulties in Germany, none seems to care to predict,” he wrote. But by giving Hitler and his views so much play, Wiegand was signaling that the Nazi leader should once again be taken seriously.

On one point, Hitler was right on target: many Germans were experiencing “utter confusion,” triggered both by the deteriorating economic situation and their growing anger at the squabbling among the politicians in Berlin as successive governments came and went. “The German people were sick of everything,” Edgar Mowrer wrote. “Treaty fulfillment had not led to national recovery. Russian Bolshevism was not attractive. War was still impossible. Yet the miserable present simply could not go on.”

Contempt for the current rulers cut across all social classes. Charles Thayer, who served in the U.S. Embassy in Berlin both before and after World War II, pointed out that it wasn’t just the far right, big businessmen and former military brass that had failed to support the Weimar Republic. “So had a majority of the professors—a most influential set in Germany, where academic degrees rank second only to military titles in establishing a person’s social position,” he wrote. “Most of them had openly sneered at the little Socialists of Weimar who seldom had a single ‘Dr.’ to put in front of their names.” Their students, he added, shared that contempt for a government that they held responsible for Germany’s humiliating losses of territory after World War I. And when their job prospects began to evaporate as the Depression settled in, “they flocked to the Nazis in droves.”