Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

Soon he was making the rounds with local trade union organizers, seeing what life was like in reality. While the jobless received unemployment and welfare benefits, they were hardly enough to relieve the misery. “You Americans have a bathroom in every apartment—is it not so?” one of his escorts named Hans asked him. He was showing Plotkin a building with 120 inhabitants and not a single bath. “They tell me that in New York every apartment has a toilet,” Hans added. “Come. I’ll show you what we have.” Leading Plotkin to the basement, he pushed open a door and lit a match so he could see a crude toilet made of wooden boards. “Do you know how many families use this toilet?” he asked. “Nine families. The pots in the rooms would choke you. Go to America and tell them you saw this.”

Visiting another tenement house with Hans, he observed one family’s diet: potatoes and herring or potatoes and margarine for the main meal, never any butter, and one pound of meat on Sundays for the four of them. The head of a district health department told Plotkin about the rapid spread of infectious diseases because of deteriorating sanitary conditions. Berlin’s bathhouses had lost two-thirds of their customers, he explained, since they could no longer afford their small fees; and even families with tubs were bathing in the same water to save heating costs.

Plotkin was also “fascinated by the ladies of the streets and their easy ways.” While he was drinking a beer at Alexanderplatz, a young woman approached him, asking whether he’d consider her for two marks—the equivalent of 50 cents. When he declined, she asked if he’d like one of her four friends at the next table. He turned her down again, but offered to buy her a beer and sausage. She eagerly agreed, but scoffed when he asked her about Wedding, a district known for its poverty. She complained that the women there weren’t professional because they would sell themselves “for a piece of bread.”

As they talked, the woman was startled to learn Plotkin had read Alfred Döblin’s recently published novel Berlin Alexanderplatz about the down-and-out life in the city. “Do you remember that Döblin said that time is a butcher and that all of us are running away from the butcher’s knife?” she asked. “Well, that’s me, and that’s all of us.”

Meeting German Jews, Plotkin found himself besieged by questions about how conditions were for Jews in America. “Do you have a fascist party in America?” someone asked. “No, not yet—we had the Ku Klux Klan for a while, but that’s over with for the present,” he replied, alluding to signs that its membership had peaked earlier.

“Then the Jews of America are fortunate,” one of the German Jews declared. “Here we are cursed with anti-Semitism, the most bitter anti-Semitism we have ever known.” When Plotkin declared that there was anti-Semitism in the United States, too, they scoffed at the notion that it could be at all comparable. “Do they ever throw Jews out of subway cars in New York?” they asked. “Do they ever come into stores belonging to Jews and tear up all the stock and break up all the fixtures?” They pointed out that boycotts and threats were a daily fact of life. “The majority of the Jews in Germany are being driven into no one knows what,” he quoted them as saying. “There is hardly a Friday night that we pray without trembling.”

Yet despite all the poverty and anti-Semitism he witnessed or heard about, Plotkin was dubious about Hitler’s chances of seizing power—or, if he did, how long he would be able to keep it. Many of the trade union leaders he met were convinced that his movement had already peaked. “Hitlerism is rapidly going to pieces,” one of them insisted to Plotkin, adding that the Communists were on the rise. “Whenever a Hitlerite leaves the Nazis, he goes straight to the Communists, they are growing in strength.”

Plotkin decided to see for himself what the Nazis represented. On December 16, 1932, he noticed posters advertising one of their rallies at the Sportpalast, with propagandist Joseph Goebbels as the featured speaker. He showed up an hour early, finding only a couple of thousand people in the hall which he estimated could hold 15,000. The young Nazis in uniforms looked disheartened. By the time the rally started, the hall contained more people, but there were still plenty of empty seats. The opening round of martial music was met with weak applause. “One felt as if the spirit had taken flight,” Plotkin noted in his diary. While he gave Goebbels high marks for “showmanship,” the evening proved anticlimactic. “So this was the famous menace to Germany and to the world,” he wrote. “I confess my disappointment… I had come to see a whale and found a minnow.”

Other American Jews who visited Germany in this period also weren’t sure how dangerous the Nazis, with their anti-Semitic tirades, really were. Norman Corwin, a young reporter from Massachusetts who would go on to become a highly successful writer, director and producer in radio’s golden age, took a European journey in 1931. In Heidelberg, he stayed at a pension where the owners were apolitical but their blond seventeen-year-old son was a committed Nazi. The boy was intrigued by Corwin, who was only four years older and probably the first American he’d met. He followed the visitor everywhere, in Corwin’s words, “like a faithful dog.”

As they walked around the city taking in the sights, Corwin told his companion about life in the United States, and the German teenager expounded on his views of his country’s future. The Nazis, he insisted, would restore Germany to its proper place in the world and rid it of “the pollution of the race.” Corwin listened, but it wasn’t until his last day, while they were up at the Heidelberg Castle, that he told the boy that he was Jewish. This was met with silence that neither of them broke during their walk back to the pension.

Corwin left Germany not nearly as troubled as he should have been by that encounter. Traveling in northern France, he tried to convince a young woman he met that her fears about a new war were unfounded. “We are beyond thinking of war as an instrument of political expediency,” he told her.

The American diplomats and journalists who were based in Berlin were increasingly curious about the man who led the movement that everyone was talking about. On Saturday, December 5, 1931, Ambassador Sack-ett met Hitler for the first and only time during his three-year posting. Carefully prearranged to avoid the appearance of an official meeting with an opposition figure, this first-ever encounter between a U.S. envoy and Hitler took place over tea in the home of Emil Georg von Stauss, a pro-Nazi director of the Deutsche Diskonto Bank. Sackett, who had only limited German, was accompanied by Alfred Klieforth, the embassy’s first secretary. Hitler was accompanied by Rudolf Hess, Hermann Goering and Putzi Hanfstaengl.

As the host, von Stauss introduced the topic of Germany’s “distressing” economic situation—and Hitler promptly took over by embarking on one of his trademark monologues. Sackett would note later that he spoke “as if he were addressing a large audience.” The Nazi leader claimed the country’s plight was caused by its loss of colonies and territory, and argued for a revision of the terms of the Versailles Treaty, including the return of the Polish Corridor. He denounced what he characterized as a vastly overarmed France and warned that its aggressive actions could prevent Germany from repaying its private debts, which he claimed it otherwise would do. And he insisted that the Nazis’ paramilitary units were only “for the purpose of keeping order within Germany and suppressing Communism.”

Writing to Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, Sackett indicated that the meeting had left him with distinctly cool feelings. “The impression I gained of Hitler is that of a fanatical crusader,” he reported. “He has a certain forcefulness and intensity which gives him a power of leadership among those classes that do not weigh his outpourings. His methods are those of an opportunist. While he talked vigorously, he never looked me in the eye.” Many Germans were turning to the Nazis “in despair that former political allegiances provide no relief from present intolerable conditions,” Sackett acknowledged. But he predicted that “if this man comes into power he must find himself shortly on the rocks, both of international and internal difficulties. He is certainly not the type from which statesmen evolve.”