Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

But he also felt his “first presentiments that something was rotten in this picture of perfection. Behind the light and the shadow, the trilling voices of the children, lurked a danger in which we were all complicit.” When he entered a tobacco shop to look at some pipes, he caught sight of someone spying on him through a curtain. “In the shopwoman’s smiling, unctuous manner there was something both disturbing and false,” he recalled. “I could hear muttered whisperings behind the curtain. My sense of apprehension was unused and rudimentary, since I had felt it so seldom, but in the eyes and furtive manner of this woman I felt, and shared, a nameless disquiet.” Nonetheless, Morris was quick to add, “Back in the sunlight I soon forgot it.”

Others were keen to overlook any disquieting signs, convinced that the key to international harmony was recognition of the notion that every country was free to choose its own path and that people everywhere have more in common than they realize. No one believed that more passionately than Donald B. Watt of Putney, Vermont, who in the summer of 1932 took his first small group of young Americans to Europe, launching the Experiment in International Living. The highly successful exchange program, which includes stays with local families, continues to operate today. As Watt put it, his aim was “to create a controlled human situation which would produce understanding and friendliness between people and different cultures in a limited period of time.”

Watt’s enthusiasm for “making friends out of ‘foreigners’” made him shrug off—and even mock—all those who warned him against taking his young idealistic travelers to Germany in the summer of 1933 for the second “Experiment” after Hitler had taken power. “From its war-like reputation, one would have expected Germany to have been most inhospitable toward a group interested in making peace,” Watt wrote. “Just the opposite materialized: the Nazi organizations made us feel most welcome… The picture which the [American] newspapers gave and what we actually saw in our families could scarcely have been more different.” Specifically on the subject of violence, he added, “The suggestion of personal danger to foreigners is no less laughable to those who spent the summer in that country than the thought of German courtesy failing.”

Watt did concede after the trip that there was an “excess of order” and “hypnosis of the masses” orchestrated by the Nazis. But the only real danger for a visiting foreigner, he felt, was not to be swept up by “the power of suggestion” of the constant saluting and “to use all his restraint if he does not wish to join the saluting throng.” Despite the widespread reports of beatings of visiting Americans who failed to join in the Nazi salutes, Watt maintained that his charges were free to do whatever they pleased. Living with German families, they began to understand that they had been victims of propaganda back in the United States. “All they had learned of Hitlerism in America was definitely unfavorable, but here they actually saw some good features of it,” Watt wrote.

Even when it came to Jews, he reported that everyone in his group concluded that “relatively few [were] roughly handled.” The main cause of anti-Semitism in Germany, he added, was the fact that “a large proportion of all business was in Jewish hands.” The young Americans were also impressed how Germans “are surmounting their relative poverty by a return to simple folk ways.” But the key takeaway, as Watt put it, was the one he had come searching for—and was determined to find no matter what happened. “Perhaps most important of all, we realized that the people whom we met were very much like us,” he concluded. “The Second Experiment in International Living was an interesting and successful demonstration of tolerance.”

The American social scientists who studied the new Germany were distinctly less Pollyannaish, but they were far from uniform in their judgments of the country’s New Order. Political scientist Frederick Schuman—who, like Dodd, taught at the University of Chicago—spent eight months in Germany in 1933. He had arranged his research trip before Hitler had come to power, but that event now changed both the nature of his stay and its purpose. “I journeyed toward a land I had already known and enjoyed as the home of music, philosophy, and Gemütlichkeit and as the birthplace of my Prussian and Hanoverian ancestors, now strangely transmuted into ‘Aryans’ and ‘Nordics,’” he wrote. “Upon my arrival in April of the year of the Nazi seizure of power I found the Reich in process of violent, if orderly, transition from parliamentary democracy to Fascism.”

Schuman made the focus of his research the newly triumphant Nazi movement, gathering materials for his 1935 book The Nazi Dictatorship: A Study in Social Pathology and the Politics of Fascism. Given the nature of his encounters, its analytical but highly critical tone was hardly surprising. “By the older German officials I was invariably received with courtesy and granted as much co-operation as was consistent with considerations of political and personal safety,” he recalled. “By the newer Nazi administrators I was invariably received with evasions and complex circumlocutions or, as in the case of Hanfstaengl, with gross and clownish discourtesy bred of psychic insecurity and conceit.”

While Schuman insisted he was interested in “explanation, not condemnation,” he left no doubt that any accurate picture of the new movement would inevitably be seen as partisan. “Like every form of highly emotionalized and subjectivized mass mysticism, National-socialism demands acceptance or rejection,” he wrote. “Objectivity is equivalent to rejection.” By the time he produced his book, he would offer a dire—and accurate—prediction about the likelihood of a new war inspired by “pathological hatreds, lusts, and longings for extinction.” His conclusion: “Fascism itself will be consumed by its war-mad sons. With it will perish the remnants of an age that has outlived its time.”

Columbia University sociologist Theodore Abel was also fascinated by events in Germany. When Hitler was appointed chancellor on January 30, Abel wrote in the private notebook where he regularly recorded his observations: “Germany wants to become a world power again, it wants to conquer[,] it wants an emperor. The danger of communism is great and it might come to civil war in Germany. All peace measures will go into the discard meanwhile…”

But Abel was far more restrained—even at times, complimentary—about Germany’s new rulers than Schuman; he also would later question some of Schuman’s findings. On February 2, he wrote: “Struck by Hitler’s manifesto appealing in noble terms to patriotism and setting forth as its goal reestablishment of unity of Germans who he claims are on the brink of dissolution.” He approvingly noted that Hitler had vowed to fight unemployment and boost agriculture, while at the same time emphasizing his commitment to peace and disarmament. “I consider it a noble document and while it sounds genuine I hope it is meant,” he wrote.

As for the means Hitler was using, Abel seemed willing to give him every benefit of the doubt. “Parliamentarianism and dictatorship are not, therefore, antithetical but means of solving problems, adequate for specific conditions,” he wrote on March 7. Even when the Nazis staged their burning of the books in May, Abel was intrigued rather than outraged. Calling the book-burning “a futile but a symbolic gesture,” he asserted: “I am impressed by the vitality and sweeping enthusiasm of the Hitler movement, its idealizations[,] its emotional fervor, its revolutionary aspects. They certainly are swayed by an idea, no matter how ludicrous it may seem to us who have no idea to live for. I envy the fascists, the nationalists, the communists, all those who are working for something to be realized.” This was a stunning admission about what could attract an American intellectual to the most radical movements of the time.