Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

Even before the debate about whether Hitler could truly take power was settled by his dramatic ascension, Americans in Germany were split about what such a development would mean. Were Hitler’s speeches and Mein Kampf a true indication of what Nazi rule would look like, or were they merely tools for his emotional campaign? If the latter, it would be logical to believe that, once in power, Hitler would tone down his rhetoric, moderate his program and seek accommodation with many of those he had been denouncing at home and abroad.

Among the correspondents covering Germany, no one had a longer track record than S. Miles Bouton of the Baltimore Sun. He had arrived in Germany in 1911, working at first for the Associated Press. He had covered World War I, written the book And the Kaiser Abdicates , married a German woman and left no doubt that he considered himself the preeminent authority on the country. “It requires no great skill at reading between the lines to discover that I have no very high opinion of the quality of the reporting done from Germany for the American press,” he declared in an interview for his own newspaper on a visit to the United States in 1925. He claimed he wasn’t blaming his fellow correspondents but only their editors, who were guided by their prejudices. Nonetheless, he was scathing about those colleagues. “Some of them are, it is true, much less well informed about the situation there than they might be.”

A well-informed correspondent, he emphasized both before the Nazis took power and after, would have no doubt who was to blame for what went wrong in Germany. Speaking to the Rockford, Illinois, Women’s Club in March 1935, he pointed out that he had denounced the Versailles Treaty from the beginning. “Read that treaty and understand the things that are happening today,” he said. “The allies heaped oppressions, humiliations, and exactions upon Germany.”

Bouton had first encountered Hitler in September 1923 before the Beer Hall Putsch that made the Nazi leader famous. At the party headquarters, he was met by a young man who began explaining how Hitler would restore Germany’s honor, saving it from the Communists and the Jews. “It was several minutes before it occurred to me that this was Hitler, talking about himself in the third person,” Bouton recalled in an unpublished manuscript. “I had never before met and have never since met a man who so completely identified himself with his supposed mission.”

When Hitler’s party regained momentum once the Depression hit, Bouton was at first skeptical of its chances, reporting in 1930 that it “does not come into consideration at all as a government party.” (In 1935, he would claim to have been much more prescient, telling his audience at the University of Georgia: “For the last five years of the Republic I prophesied time and again that Hitler and the National Socialists would come to power.”) But in March 1932, he reported that the strong second-place finish by Hitler in the presidential election “represents a remarkable personal triumph, and it becomes the more astounding when one considers the circumstances in which it was gained.” From there, he launched into an account of what he characterized as the story that his American colleagues had routinely failed to report: it was about “the methods used by both the Reich and the state governments against Hitler, since these methods make a mockery of all protestations by the men in power that they believe in democracy.”

In other words, the real story that needed to be reported from Germany was not about the brutal methods and ideology of the Nazis but the attempts by the Weimar government to muzzle them, forbidding them to broadcast their message on the radio, suppressing their party newspapers, and banning some of their leaders from speaking in public, as happened to Hitler after he emerged from prison. He scornfully referred to all the talk of the “menace of Hitlerism” that was “disturbing the peace of mind of the outside world in general and of America in particular.” Americans, he added, saw Hitler as “a mere rabble-rouser and shallow demagogue.” Quoting Dorothy Thompson’s description of Hitler as “the very prototype of the Little Man,” he declared that his extensive experience in Germany had taught him to be hesitant about making such judgments about both Hitler and his followers, who were dismissed as “a strange collection of heavy doctrinaires and helpless neurotics.”

“I am pretty sure that these confident critics are wrong,” he wrote. “There are probably few if any Americans in Germany who have as wide a circle of German friends and acquaintances as I have.” Those acquaintances, he added, were highly educated—“for the greater part academicians, professional men of high standing, high government officials, etc.” At least 80 percent of them had voted for Hitler, he claimed. Of the others, 10 percent refused to vote for Hindenburg, and the remaining 10 percent were Jews. “Even some of them would have voted for Hitler had it not been for the anti-Semitic plank in his platform.”

At the end of his long article, he tossed in what he called “one more significant fact.” Many of his German friends had American wives who “without any exception are more ardent Hitlerites than their German husbands.” His interpretation of this phenomenon: “Theirs is the American brand of patriotism, the brand which has happily made Marxism and internationalism unthinkable in our country.” His message: Germans supported Hitler for the same “patriotic” reasons, and American readers shouldn’t be swayed by the anti-Nazi accounts of his colleagues in the American press corps.

Some of those colleagues had come to their own conclusions about why Bouton was offering such contrarian views. Writing on December 11, 1932, to his daughter Betty, who was a student at the University of Chicago, the AP’s Lochner recounted an incident triggered by a photograph of Chancellor von Papen and a few journalists, including Lochner and Bouton, that ran in the Nazi weekly Illustrierter Beobachter. The caption read: “Von Papen und die jüdische Weltpresse” (Von Papen and the Jewish world press). “That they put me down as one of the Chosen People doesn’t matter much, but the unkindest cut was that Miles Bouton, of all people—he who himself is an ardent Nazi—should have been put down as ‘Sally Bouton-Knopf.’ The whole American colony is laughing about it,” Lochner wrote.

Lochner explained that the Nazi publication listed Bouton’s first name as Sally “as that is a favorite Jewish name” and that they had translated Bouton as Knopf (German for “button”) and hyphenated his last name. “Miles nearly hit the roof,” Lochner added with evident glee. “He was furious—all the more so as he had travelled around with Hitler in an airplane. We both protested not because we were called Jews—we both have very dear friends among the Jews and neither of us are anti-Semitic—but because from the whole ideology of the Nazis it is evident they meant to insult us by calling us Jews.”

Lochner reported that he heard Hitler was furious about this “boner” by the Nazi weekly, and several Nazi leaders called him to say they were “ashamed” that someone from their camp had played such a dirty trick on them. Lochner wrote to the editor of the weekly demanding he print a retraction. “He did—but in a way that makes the readers think we objected to being called Jews, when our point was that we objected to being insulted by the Nazis,” he reported to his daughter. Nonetheless, Lochner was pleased that the Nazis had made Bouton squirm. “We’ve had lots of fun,” he concluded.

No issue crystallized the question of Hitler’s intentions more than what Nazi rule would mean for the Jews. A correspondent like Edgar Mowrer, who was Bouton’s polar opposite when it came to his assumptions about the party and what it represented, had covered the attacks of Brownshirts on “foreigners and Jews,” in some cases going out in armored police cars. His wife Lilian recalled anxiously waiting for hours until he returned from “the front.” The young thugs wearing heavy leather boots and carrying revolvers were “always insolent and swaggering,” she added, and they would gather at a number of cafés and beer houses, hanging huge swastika flags outside. The owners of these establishments had no choice but to tolerate “these invasions.”