Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

“Just talk,” the banker declared, and all the others nodded in agreement. As Mowrer noted, they “thought me incapable of understanding the German soul.”

Schacht, who had once aligned himself with the democratic forces of the Weimar Republic, wasn’t about “just talk.” Shortly before Christmas, Mowrer ran into him and asked politely about his plans for the holidays. “I am going to Munich to talk with Adolf Hitler,” he declared.

“You too, my fine Democrat!” Mowrer responded, abandoning any pretense of politeness.

“ Ach , you understand nothing. You are a stupid American,” Schacht shot back.

“Granted. But tell me what you expect from Hitler in words of one syllable and I’ll try to understand.”

“Germany will have no peace until we bring Hitler to power.”

Three weeks later, Mowrer met Schacht again, and asked him how his conversation went with the Nazi leader. “Brilliantly,” the German banker replied. “I’ve got that man right in my pocket.”

As Mowrer recalled in his memoirs, “From that moment I expected the worst.”

He wasn’t the only one. Bella Fromm, the Jewish social reporter, found herself seated next to Wiegand at a dinner party in Berlin on December 8. The Hearst correspondent wasn’t living full-time in Berlin then, but had a knack for appearing on scene “whenever a political melodrama is about to sweep the stage,” Fromm noted in her diary.

“When are the National Socialists going to seize the government?” she asked him bluntly, using the old journalistic ploy of asking a question in a way that implied she knew the score already.

Wiegand looked taken aback but offered a crisp response: “It won’t be long now.”

And what would that mean? “Hitler intends to abolish the treaty of Versailles,” the American correspondent continued, drawing upon his past meetings with Hitler. “He wants to unite all Germans. He has no desire for the return of colonies if he finds a way for new Lebensraum [living space] within Central Europe, to install all the regained German subjects. One of Hitler’s early associates, Professor Karl von Haushofer, has been studying the Lebensraum problem for years. He has persuaded Hitler that an expansion to the east, peaceful or by force, is an inevitable necessity.”

On December 22, Fromm attended a reception hosted by American Consul General George Messersmith, who had been stationed in the German capital for the past two years and monitored the Nazi movement. While Ambassador Sackett was increasingly convinced that the Schleicher government had successfully contained the Nazi threat, Messersmith took a different view. “The German government had better act quickly, and strongly,” he said at the reception. “It’s really upsetting to find so many people of importance in the National Socialist party. There are going to be fireworks here pretty soon, unless I’m badly mistaken.”

Fromm added this final line to her diary entry that night: “I do not think that my friend Messersmith is mistaken.”

At an “intimate” dinner for twelve guests hosted by Chancellor von Schleicher and his wife six days later, on December 28, Fromm was able to relay Wiegand’s prediction of a Nazi takeover directly to the man currently in charge. Schleicher laughed it off. “You journalists are all alike,” he told her. “You make a living out of professional pessimism.”

Fromm pointed out that these views were widely held, not just by her and Wiegand. And that everyone knew that Papen and others were “trying to bring the National Socialists to power.”

“I think I can hold them off,” Schleicher insisted.

Referring to the aging President von Hindenburg, Fromm cautioned, “As long as the Old Gentleman sticks to you.”

Later the two of them were briefly alone in Schleicher’s study. The chancellor once again talked about bringing Gregor Strasser into his government. Fromm was hardly reassured. While Strasser represented the left wing of the Nazi Party, he shared the anti-Semitic views of the rest of the leadership. “What about the church and Jew-phobia of the party?” she asked.

“You ought to know me better than that, Bella,” Schleicher replied. “All that will be dropped entirely.”

Once again, Fromm added a line of commentary to her diary entry of that night. “The National Socialist Party is not in the habit of dropping anything that suits its purposes,” she wrote. “They scuttle men quicker than they scuttle doctrines.”

But even during the fateful month of January 1933, Americans in Berlin were hearing constant reassurances that Hitler and his movement were fading as a threat. Chancellor von Schleicher, they believed, really knew both what he was up against and how to outplay his opponents. On January 22, Abraham Plotkin met with Martin Plettl, the president of the German Clothing Workers’ Union, in a packed Berlin restaurant. Plettl explained to the American labor organizer that Hitler was “dancing between four masters and any one of the four of them may break him.” The four: two camps of industrialists, and two camps within the Nazi Party. As a result, Plettl maintained, Hitler was facing a choice of either accepting a position within the current government or allowing his party rival Strasser to do so. “Hitler will lose either way,” he insisted.

Plettl’s reasoning was that Schleicher was probably using Hitler “as a cat’s paw.” And “Hitler on the downgrade, supplying Schleicher with provocative means for eliminating the Communists, will clear the roads for Schleicher in the coming elections.” When Plotkin indicated he was skeptical, Plettl argued that it was a strategy that could easily work, allowing Schleicher to use the Nazis to destroy the Communists but prompting deeper fissures within the party itself as some leaders would be compromised by joining a coalition government. Hitler’s party would no longer be a pure opposition force, and its base of support would weaken.

But the previous chancellor, Papen, had by that time already effectively undercut his successor. On January 4, he met with Hitler in Cologne at the home of banker Kurt von Schröder. The two politicians worked out a deal to oust Schleicher, with Papen assigned the task of winning the support of President von Hindenburg. Even when word of their meeting leaked out, Schleicher professed himself “in no way alarmed by the alleged plot against him.” Neither were the top diplomats at the American Embassy, who believed that the meeting was mostly focused on dealing with the Nazis’ ailing finances. The “rapidly increasing” party debt, chargé d’affaires George Gordon reported, was threatening to undermine the movement. Its financial backers, he added, were both trying to solve that problem and encouraging Hitler to participate in the government, not topple it.

In the last few days of January, those interpretations were proven grievously wrong. Facing a growing political revolt fanned by Papen, Schleicher asked Hindenburg for his support so that he could dissolve the Reichstag. The president refused, triggering the resignation of the Schleicher government. Next, he turned to Papen to negotiate a new arrangement with the political parties. This gave Papen the green light to do what he had been advocating all along. On January 30, Hindenburg formally asked Hitler to form a new government, appointing him chancellor and Papen as vice chancellor. While Ambassador Sackett reported this “sudden and unexpected triumph” for the Nazis, the AP’s Louis Lochner indicated that Papen remained convinced that he had truly outsmarted the new chancellor. “We have hired Hitler,” he told his friends. In other words, Lochner concluded, Papen was still convinced that he would be “in the driver’s seat.”