Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

Some Americans, it seemed, didn’t want to see what was really happening, even when it was happening to them.

There were other American visitors during those early days of Hitler’s rule who were keen to understand just how dramatically the situation had changed in Germany—and not to downplay the implications. James G. McDonald, the head of the Foreign Policy Association who would soon become the League of Nations’ high commissioner for refugees, was alarmed by what he heard from the moment he arrived in Berlin on March 29, 1933. That first day, Putzi Hanfstaengl painted “a terrifying account of Nazi plans,” McDonald recorded in his diary, and didn’t conceal what this would mean for Jews. “The Jews are the vampire sucking German blood,” Putzi told his American visitor with a laugh. “We shall not be strong until we have freed ourselves of them.”

Later, McDonald was so disturbed by Hanfstaengl’s vitriol that, unable to sleep, he walked around the Tiergarten. It was a beautiful night, the park was peaceful, with lovers scattered about, “and yet these ghastly hatreds breeding such shocking plans for heartless oppression of a whole section of the people,” he noted.

Making his rounds, McDonald found nothing to lessen his fears. At dinner with the Mowrers, he could see that both of them were “highly overwrought.” He wrote in his diary: “I have never seen them so tense. He could talk of little but terror and atrocities.” Since a waiter was hovering within earshot, they could not talk all that freely. When they met again several days later, Mowrer was even more scathing in his remarks. “To him the leaders are thugs, perverts, and sadists,” McDonald wrote. Separately, Knickerbocker reported to McDonald that he believed that the Nazis were already holding more than 40,000 political prisoners.

During the Jewish boycott, McDonald was chilled by the sight of an old Jew surrounded by a taunting crowd and, on another occasion, “laughing, jeering children making sport of a national shame.” Meeting German officials, he was struck how they refused to acknowledge that there could be anything wrong with what was happening. He was reminded of meetings he had in Moscow with militant Communists. “In each case the discussion was completely dogmatic”—in particular, when it came to their racial theories.

Two months before his visit to Berlin, McDonald had met with Henry Goldman of Goldman Sachs, who also was planning a trip to Germany. McDonald asked him then whether the intense anti-Semitism of Germany’s new government didn’t signal that something was wrong with the German people. Goldman, the son of the German-Jewish immigrant founder of the company, brushed off McDonald’s question. “No, there is no more anti-Semitism in Germany than in the United States,” he declared. McDonald considered Goldman a longtime “apologist for Germany,” but he was startled by how he looked when they met at the Adlon Hotel on April 8. “I saw that he was a broken old man,” McDonald noted.

Based on what he had seen and heard, Goldman had radically revised his views of Germany. “Mr. McDonald, I never would have believed that the worst of the fifteenth and sixteenth century would return in this twentieth century and of all places in Germany,” he said. When McDonald asked him how long he was staying, he replied: “Just as long as I can bear it.”

Later that same day, Hanfstaengl had arranged for McDonald to meet Hitler, giving him the opportunity to ask him directly about “the Jewish question.” As the American visitor entered his office, Hitler “sized me up from head to foot with glances obviously half suspicious,” McDonald recorded. But he appeared almost nonchalant in replying to his queries about his anti-Semitic policies.

“We are not primarily attacking the Jews, rather the Socialists and the Communists,” Hitler declared. “The United States has shut out such people. We did not do so. Therefore, we cannot be blamed if we now take measures against them. Besides, as to Jews, why should there be such a fuss when they are thrown out of places, when hundreds of thousands of Aryan Germans are on the streets? No, the world has no just ground for complaint.”

McDonald observed that Hitler had “the eyes of a fanatic, but he has in addition, I think, much more reserve and control and intelligence than most fanatics.”

That was what McDonald recorded of his encounter in his diary right afterward. Later, when he returned to the United States, he offered an additional description of what Hitler said. “His word to me was, ‘I will do the thing that the rest of the world would like to do. It doesn’t know how to get rid of the Jews. I will show them.’ ”

Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of Foreign Affairs who had visited Germany and charted its politics during the Weimar era, showed up in Berlin on Hitler’s birthday, April 20, 1933, less than two weeks after McDonald’s departure. That morning, on his way from the train station to the Adlon Hotel where he was staying, Armstrong saw groups of boisterous Brownshirts preparing for the festivities. By noon, a crowd was gathered on Pariser Platz in front of his hotel, but sleet and rain kept the enthusiasm level down, despite the attempt to stir up emotions with a loudspeaker that broadcast Nazi slogans.

Armstrong knew many officials and professors from the Weimar era, along with some of the diplomats and correspondents stationed in Berlin. He found that some of the British and American correspondents were wary of reporting all the stories of Nazi atrocities that were floating about, but they realized that it was enough to quote the statements of the Nazis themselves to convey the draconian nature of their new policies.

Among the American diplomats, he considered George Messersmith the most knowledgeable—and the most upset about what was happening on a daily basis. “He could hardly restrain himself when he talked about the Nazis, biting his cigar into two pieces and tossing them away in disgust as he catalogued his difficulties in trying to protect American citizens from molestation,” Armstrong recalled. Messersmith expressed his frustration at the powerlessness of government officials to restrain the Nazis; the militarism of the party activists, he continued, was making it increasingly unlikely that peace in Europe would last long.

Reconnecting with Germans he had known earlier, Armstrong heard a very dubious take on the new Hitler regime. Foreign Ministry officials like Hans Dieckhoff, who would later serve as the German ambassador to Washington, “were holding on to their offices and keeping quiet,” he noted. Their message to him was that the Nazis were “a flash in the pan,” and these officials insisted that they were trying to minimize the damage to German interests and foreign policy, waiting until a new government would take over. If Hitler did stay in power, they added, he could end up charting a more moderate course as he came to grips with the realities of the world. “They were not unintelligent men but I knew in my bones that they were wrong,” Armstrong wrote later.

Part of the reason for Armstrong’s pessimism was his realization that so many of the people he had consulted on previous visits—academic luminaries like agricultural expert Karl Brandt, economist Moritz Bonn and Ernst Jäckh, the founder of the Hochschule für Politik, some of whom had contributed articles to Foreign Affairs or worked closely with the Council on Foreign Relations, its parent organization—were nowhere to be found. “They had disappeared, I was told, and in any case it was better for them that I should not try to look them up,” he recalled. Many members of the intellectual elite in such fields as medicine, science and literature had already lost their jobs, and several had fled the country to avoid more serious persecution. “It was staggering to think of what the resulting intellectual vacuum would mean in a country bled white and defeated in a devastating war,” Armstrong later noted.