Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

It was no accident that Hanfstaengl had accompanied Hitler to his meeting with the American ambassador. This “half American” Harvard graduate, as he liked to characterize himself, was once again seen frequently in the Nazi leader’s entourage, particularly during his meetings with American journalists. After Hitler was released from prison in late 1924, Putzi and Helen had continued to see him fairly regularly for the next couple of years, but then their contacts tapered off during the period when his political appeal was waning.

Hitler was still clearly attracted to Helen. On one occasion when he was visiting the Hanfstaengls’ home and Putzi had gone out, Hitler sank down on his knees in front of her and began: “If only I had someone to look after me…” Helen was sitting on the sofa, she recalled later, and “here he was on his knees, with his head in your lap, he was almost like a little boy.” Was this a declaration of love, as Putzi would later write in his memoirs? Was he really in love with her? “I should say in a way he was,” Helen explained. “As far as he was in love with anyone, maybe I was one of the ones that perhaps he was in love with.”

All of Helen’s qualifiers were understandable. After all, she and her husband speculated, as American correspondents and others did, about Hitler’s sexuality. In his memoir, Putzi wrote: “I felt Hitler was a case of a man who was neither fish, flesh [he clearly meant “meat” here] nor fowl, neither fully homosexual nor fully heterosexual… I had formed the firm conviction that he was impotent, the repressed, masturbating type.”

Helen had asked Hitler once, “Why don’t you find a lovely wife and marry?” He replied that he could never marry because his life was dedicated to his country. But the evidence suggests that, whatever his sexual capabilities or proclivities, Hitler was at the very least attracted to several women during his life, with Helen perhaps the only one who was close to him in age. He routinely charmed older women, but whatever sexual longings he possessed seemed mostly focused on much younger ones.

As Putzi began to reengage with Hitler when the Nazis’ political fortunes rose in direct response to the economic crisis, he found that suppressing information was a big part of his role. And one of the biggest near scandals that needed to be contained surrounded the nature of Hitler’s relationship with his half-sister’s daughter Geli Raubal. By all accounts vivacious and flirtatious, Geli had come to Munich from Vienna as a teenager ostensibly to study. But soon she seemed fully preoccupied with her uncle, who was nearly twenty years her senior. She appeared at his side at cafés, restaurants, the opera and other public places. Then she moved into his spacious new apartment on Prinzregentenplatz, which was funded by his supporters. Although she had her own room there, rumors about the couple were rife in party circles.

Putzi dismissed Geli as “an empty-headed little slut” who basked in her uncle’s fame. Helen took a more charitable view. “I always had the feeling he was trying to run her life, tyrannizing her, that she was more or less oppressed,” she said, looking back at that period. Others—particularly Otto Strasser, the brother of Hitler’s main rival in the party—would later claim that Hitler forced Geli to arouse him by humiliating sexual practices since he was incapable of normal sex. Whatever transpired between them, Geli was found in her room, shot in the heart, on September 18, 1931, dead at age twenty-three; earlier, she and Hitler had been overheard having a loud argument. Officially, her death was ruled a suicide, but Putzi and other propagandists had to work hard to quell reports in leftist local papers that this was a possible cover-up. “The whole affair was hushed up and glossed over as much as possible,” he noted.

While Putzi was busy cultivating his ties to American correspondents, he certainly didn’t let them in on this story, whether it was the early party gossip and whispers about Hitler and Geli when they were parading around together or her suspicious death. Instead, he was eager to serve as the go-between for American reporters who wanted to interview Hitler, usually for the first time. Even as Hitler’s domestic drama was playing itself out behind the scenes, the Nazi leader was capitalizing on the growing popular discontent that was attracting new converts to his cause. To boost Hitler’s international stature, Putzi urged him to meet American reporters, particularly the most famous ones.

One of the most famous, of course, was Dorothy Thompson. While she was no longer living in Berlin, she wasn’t really settled with her husband Sinclair Lewis in New York either. Europe—in particular, Germany—kept pulling her back as she churned out lengthy pieces for the Saturday Evening Post and other publications. She had tried to meet Hitler as far back as the aftermath of the failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. Hearing that he had taken refuge at the Hanfstaengls’ place outside of Munich, she rushed to the house “of an American woman” only to learn from Helen that Hitler was already gone. She recalled meeting Helen in New York during World War I and claimed that even then she was “a German propagandist.” Following Hitler’s release from prison, Thompson made a few attempts to meet him but blamed her failure to do so on the fact that he was “lofty and remote from all foreigners.”

Like many American journalists, Thompson found Putzi Hanfstaengl to be the most colorful member of Hitler’s entourage. “Fussy. Amusing. The oddest imaginable press chief for a dictator,” she wrote. But also like many of her colleagues, she could mock him as “an immense, high-strung, incoherent clown.” To be sure, that didn’t prevent her from enlisting his help when Cosmopolitan gave her the assignment of interviewing Hitler in November 1931. Excited by that prospect, she checked into Berlin’s Adlon Hotel, where she ran into John Farrar of the New York publishing house Farrar & Rinehart. He promptly got her to commit to writing a quickie book about the Nazi leader if her interview went well. After all, it wasn’t just Cosmopolitan that was interested in figuring out whether this bizarre figure could become the leader of Germany and who he really was.

Thompson made full use of this opportunity, speedily turning out her short book, I Saw Hitler! , which made a big splash when it was published in 1932, just as its subject was figuring prominently in all the political stories flowing from Germany. In the foreword, she expressed no reservations about making sweeping judgments that others might consider more appropriate for historians—quite the contrary. “The times in which we live move too fast for the considered historian to record them for us,” she grandly proclaimed. “They move too quickly to permit the writing of long books about momentary phases. Ours is the age of the reporter.”

And Thompson wasn’t shy about revealing her emotions and snap judgments as she set up and conducted the interview. She briefly explained Hitler’s shift in tactics after he emerged from prison, abandoning talk of revolt and replacing it with a new strategy: “Gone ‘legal,’” she wrote. “No longer was there to be a march on Berlin. The people were to ‘awaken’ and Hitler’s movement was going to vote dictatorship in! In itself a fascinating idea. Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights. ” This would-be dictator, she added, already had his own army and “terrorizes the streets.”

Little wonder that Thompson was a popular writer: her vivid, succinct prose got right to the heart of the issue. She knew her readers wanted to know about Hitler’s strategy, but, more important, whether it was going to work. And she wasn’t going to disappoint them by equivocating.