Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

Like McDonald, the visiting editor was determined to meet the man who was responsible for these dramatic changes, the new leader who was the focal point of all the speculation about the country’s future. As a first step, he went to meet Hjalmar Schacht, whom Hitler had reappointed to his old job as president of the Reichsbank as a reward for his support. It was a bizarre experience. Arriving at the Reichsbank, Armstrong was led to the big empty kitchen. Schacht was posing for a sculptor who was making a bust of him. Since the sculptor wanted to view him from an angle from below just as others would view the bust later, he had him seated on a chair placed on a large table. So while the sculptor worked and struggled, as Armstrong recalled, with shaping a likeness of his “screwed-up ugly face,” Schacht explained to Armstrong how the Nazis were going to correct the excesses of capitalism, providing a more stable, reliable economic system. He also promised to write an article for Foreign Affairs , which he did a year later.

Armstrong was bemused by what he considered to be this moralizing about capitalism from a man who had drummed up support of German capitalists for Hitler, but he wasn’t about to show it. His goal was to get the banker’s help in lining up an interview with Hitler. If that meant playing to Schacht’s “great vanity,” as Armstrong put it, he was happy to do so.

Those tactics worked. On April 27, a week after his arrival in Berlin, Putzi Hanfstaengl showed up at the Adlon to take him to his interview. Armstrong was startled to see Putzi in his new Nazi uniform, the one that he would wear that evening to the Lochners’ dinner party. As Armstrong recalled, “nothing matched” in the bizarre outfit: the tunic, shirt and breeches were all different shades of brown—“olive drab,” “yellowish brown” and “a rather sickly greenish brown.”

“Why, Putzi, I’ve never seen you in uniform before. How magnificent!” Armstrong declared.

Hanfstaengl took his compliment deadly seriously. “Yes, it is rather good, isn’t it?” he replied. “Don’t tell anyone, but it’s English stuff. That does make a difference.”

When he was escorted into Hitler’s office at the Chancellery, still filled with potted flowers that had been birthday gifts, the German leader greeted him with a handshake, motioned him to a table and, as Hanfstaengl and another aide looked on, quickly launched into an opening monologue stressing his commitment to peace. “His general appearance was insignificant,” Armstrong recalled, noting his large nose and small wrinkles about his eyes. But if those wrinkles made him appear inquisitive, that was totally misleading. “Although I had come from the West where his policies had aroused such fierce antagonism,” Armstrong pointed out, “he did not ask me a single question or by any remark or reference reveal that he was in the least concerned by what the world thought of him or of the position in which he had placed his country.” When Hitler spoke, he didn’t look at Armstrong, instead keeping his eyes “fixed on the upper distance, which made it seem as though he were in communication with God.”

Hitler’s presentation about Germany’s peaceful intentions quickly was transformed into his standard denunciation of the Versailles Treaty and of the “impossible and intolerable” border with Poland. He portrayed the eastern neighbor as a monster hovering over Germany. “Poland holds a naked knife in her teeth,” he said, clenching his teeth for added effect, “and looks at us menacingly.” Germany had been forced to disarm and was surrounded by such threatening neighbors, he insisted. The armies of France, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Belgium had fifty soldiers for every German soldier, he added, which meant that if there was any outbreak of fighting, the responsibility would clearly be theirs.

As Armstrong recalled, a lock of Hitler’s hair came down menacingly over his eye as he forcefully punctuated his argument with what he believed was irrefutable logic: “To say the contrary is to say that a toothless rabbit would start a battle with a tiger.”

Hitler had no problem combining his withering attacks on Poland, the most anti-Bolshevik country in the region, which had fought a war with Russia in 1920, with his thesis that the world’s key countries should unite to defend themselves against the threat of Bolshevism. “We are armed today with spears, bows and arrows and swords,” he continued. “Does that condition represent a danger to the peace of the world? Or does the danger of war come from the vast arms produced by Poland?” The only means to right those wrongs, he insisted, was for Germany to rearm. “We cannot and will not wait longer. The sine qua non of any agreement which Germany will join must be, at the very minimum, equality in arms.”

Armstrong tried to interject other questions during the rare moments when Hitler paused in his monologues, but the German leader had no interest in anything resembling a give-and-take. As Hitler escorted him to the door, Armstrong slipped in his barbed thanks for addressing him rather than the usual millions of Germans. The German leader missed the irony completely and declared he had enjoyed their “animated talk.”

On the way back to the Adlon, Hanfstaengl was effusive, claiming that Hitler was more open than he had ever been with a foreign visitor. “Wasn’t he lovely to you?” he asked rhetorically. Besides, he added, it was such a great compliment that he had escorted his guest to the door, which he normally didn’t do.

But Armstrong was feeling anything but “lovely” about the new Germany, which was so different than the country he had visited in the 1920s. Returning to New York, he quickly wrote a slim volume called Hitler’s Reich: The First Phase , which was published in July 1933. Its opening words offered a dramatic—and devastatingly accurate—description of the country’s brutal transformation:

A people has disappeared. Almost every German whose name the world knew as a master of government or business in the Republic of the past fourteen years is gone. There are exceptions; but the waves are swiftly cutting the sand from beneath them, and day by day, one by one, these last specimens of another age, another folk, topple over into the Nazi sea. So completely has the Republic been wiped out that the Nazis find it difficult to believe it ever existed…

Anyone who did not accept Hitler’s rule, pledging full allegiance to the man and his movement, wasn’t just wiped out: “It is pretended that he never was. His name is not mentioned, even in scorn. If one asks about him, a vague answer is given: ‘Oh, yes—but is he still alive? Maybe he is abroad. Or is he in a nursing home?’ This does not apply merely to Jews and communists, fled or imprisoned or detained ‘for their own protection’ in barbed-wire concentration camps…” Then he went on to mention several national, state and city officials who were also in the category of the persecuted, the broken or now in exile. “The men who ruled Germany in these fourteen years have been swept away, out of sight, out of mind, out (according to the program of Dr. Goebbels, propagandist-in-chief) of history.”

Armstrong neatly conveyed the strategy of the Nazis as they resurrected “Teutonic mysticism” and the notion of “the German super-man,” but had to explain why the superior warrior was defeated in the previous war. “Either he is not a super-man, or there is an alibi,” he wrote. “The alibi is furnished by the Jew, the traitor within the gates.”

Despite this stark portrait of the new Germany that he painted, Armstrong asked near the end of his book whether Hitler, “having given the German spirit an opportunity to purge itself of part of its store of resentment and hate and envy,” might chart a more moderate course, more like his predecessors who tried to redress their country’s grievances in a more patient, long-term manner. “The first phase of the revolution is over,” he concluded. “But we cannot pretend that as yet there is any real evidence to cause our fears to diminish, or that our questions can as yet be given any conclusive answers.”