Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

Dodd had by no means shed all illusions about Hitler’s intentions. In early December, Sir Eric Phipps, his British counterpart in Berlin, dropped by his house to brief him on Hitler’s renewal of an earlier proposal to discuss a disarmament deal with France. Under its provisions, Germany would be able to maintain a 300,000-man army along with guns and “defensive airplanes.” Now, Hitler was adding that he would include a ten-year pledge not to go to war, and accept international supervision of German armaments and of its 2.5 million SA and SS troops. Dodd promised to cable a report summarizing this offer to Washington, and noted optimistically in his diary, “It looked to me like a real move towards disarmament…”

But if the ambassador continued to hold out hope that Hitler might prove to be more reasonable than his rhetoric and program indicated, he was hardly at ease in his company—and sensed that the German leader was equally ill at ease with him. On January 1, 1934, Berlin’s diplomatic corps gathered in the Presidential Palace to pay their respects to eighty-six-year-old President von Hindenburg. When Hitler showed up, he and Dodd exchanged New Year’s greetings. Then, seeking to find a seemingly neutral subject of conversation, the American told him that he had recently spent a few very pleasant days in Munich, where Hitler had spent part of the holidays. Dodd mentioned that he had met “a fine German historian”—a Professor Meyer who had studied with him in Leipzig. When Hitler indicated he had no idea who Meyer was, Dodd mentioned some other academics at Munich University. But, once again, Hitler didn’t display any signs of recognition, “leaving the impression that he had never had contacts with the people I knew and respected.”

“I was afraid he thought I was trying to embarrass him a little,” Dodd wrote in his diary. “I was not. There was, however, no diplomatic or political subject we could mention these touchy times.” Hanfstaengl, who had made a point of cultivating his ties with both the ambassador and his daughter Martha, would later claim that there was another reason for the awkwardness between the chancellor and the American envoy. “ Der gute Dodd, he can hardly speak German and made no sense at all,” Hitler told Putzi. In the eyes of Der Führer , Dodd’s earnestness left almost no impression. The German leader was only too happy to dismiss him as an inconsequential figure representing a country that was “hopelessly weak and could not interfere in any way with the realization of… [his] plans.”

Hanfstaengl shared his leader’s scorn for Dodd. “He was a modest little Southern history professor, who ran his embassy on a shoe-string and was probably trying to save money out of his pay,” he wrote in his postwar memoir. “At a time when it needed a robust millionaire to compete with the flamboyance of the Nazis, he teetered round self-effacingly as if he was still on a college campus.”

The notion that a flashier, wealthier envoy could have “competed” with the Nazis is, to put it mildly, a bizarre argument that says more about Hanfstaengl than it does about Dodd. Putzi still proudly strutted about town as Hitler’s propagandist, while Dodd was at least trying to push back against the Nazi tide—even if it was proving to be a futile effort.

In the first year of Hitler’s rule, there was at least one American visitor who had come to a quick judgment about what was happening and decided to issue a blunt warning to the Nazis. He was Sherwood Eddy, a Protestant missionary and YMCA national secretary who had traveled and taught in Asia, Russia and Germany, writing several books about his experiences and views. The Carl Schurz Society, named after a German-American politician and journalist who had served as a general in the Union Army during the Civil War and then become the first German-American elected to the U.S. Senate, was hosting a reception for the annual American Seminar in July 1933, and Eddy was the leader of the visiting delegation. In fact, as he pointed out to his hosts, this was his twelfth visit to Germany.

The continuation of such meetings was supposed to send a signal of reassurance that the new regime was committed to peace. At the reception, the German speakers praised Hitler’s recent Reichstag speech on international relations. According to reporter Bella Fromm, who as usual was present at such social events, they delivered a double-edged message: “Any possible concern in foreign countries as to the aggressive intentions of Germany should disappear. After all, the Führer principle is also represented in America under Roosevelt.”

Eddy responded with a polite profession of his love for Germany and delicately edged into the subject of the new regime. “I noted the unity of enthusiasm and zeal in what you call the ‘New Germany.’ I have always approved of enthusiasm and zeal.” But then he quickly made his point. “Besides my love for Germany, I have another, even stronger love in my heart: the love for humanity.” And that love, he continued, made him into a firm proponent of “impartial justice; freedom of speech, press, and assembly; fundamental moral and economic principles.” In case anyone didn’t get the point, he added, “These freedoms have to be accepted by all nations who claim cultural integrity.”

Eddy mentioned that he had upheld the same principles in Russia and refused to remain silent about the blatant violations of them there. “As a friend of Germany, I state that you are acting against the principles of justice,” he continued, making the Nazis in the audience “gasp in consternation,” as Fromm noted. “There is no room for a twofold justice, one for ‘Aryans’ and ‘Nordics,’ and another one for Social Democrats, Communists, Liberals, Jews, and Pacifists. Don’t say it’s your affair. It concerns the whole world when we in the United States conduct a lynching… The world is also concerned when you commit similar injustice.”

As he warmed to his topic, Eddy addressed the Germans even more bluntly: “In your country, injustice is committed every day, every hour. What are you doing to Catholics, Communists, Social Democrats, Jews? What atrocities are committed behind the wall of your horrible concentration camps? I see your papers.”

With that, Eddy held up that day’s edition of the Nazi daily Völkischer Beobachter with the headline “70,000 Jews Immigrated into Germany Within the Last 15 Years.” He called the statement not only wrong but “an instigation of youth, a kindling of race-hatred, a signal for cruel and wanton destruction.” Mentioning that he had heard the “Jew baiting” at meetings in Germany, he warned: “This must lead to a massacre… I am deeply worried about this country, which I love.”

Many of the foreigners in the audience applauded him. “The Nazis, pale, with rage, sat immobile, in cold silence,” Fromm recorded. But she wasn’t about to get the chance to write anything about this extraordinary performance by the visiting American missionary in her newspaper. Instead, another reporter plucked out the most innocuous parts of Eddy’s opening remarks and ended with his alleged pledge to urge friendly understanding for the new Germany in his home country. “I gasped when I read the piece,” Fromm wrote in her diary. But there was nothing she could do to set the public record straight.

In his clarity of vision and willingness to deliver his tough message, Eddy was unlike almost any other early American visitor to the “new Germany.” There were others who were troubled by the behavior of the Nazis, but very few who truly understood the sweeping nature of the transformation of the country and its people, and the danger this represented.

Often, American visitors would exhibit no more than a vague uneasiness. Future novelist Wright Morris, then only twenty-three, hopped a freighter from New York to Antwerp in October 1933, setting off to explore Europe. During his sojourn there, he briefly passed through Germany, checking into a youth hostel in Heidelberg. The dormer window of his room looked out on a park where blond children were playing, the weather was beautiful, and, as he walked about the city, he was keenly aware of its romantic tradition. “On the bridge over the Neckar I stood long and long, looking at the castle, my fancy on the Rhine maidens and the mists behind it,” he wrote in his travel memoir.