Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

The nudists provided a rare lighter subject in an otherwise alarming drumbeat of stories. And nothing was more alarming than the question that Knickerbocker posed in the opening to his book The Boiling Point , based on his crisscrossing of the continent during the year after Hitler’s ascension and published in early 1934. “Europe is in uniform,” he wrote. “Will she go to war?”

Knickerbocker was one of the most astute young journalists of his time, someone whose reputation had already spread far beyond his readers in New York and Philadelphia. Running an interview with him on November 12, 1932, the Polish newspaper Express Poranny called him “the most talked about reporter in the world.” He didn’t pull his punches when reporting on Hitler’s brutal tactics at home, prompting angry protests from the Nazis who claimed he was spreading anti-German slanders. They pressured his editors to send him home early, but initially to no avail. There was little reason to think that Knickerbocker would be any less straightforward in trying to answer the question he was asking about the risk of war—a question that was on the minds of so many people on both sides of the Atlantic.

Yet his book opened with a stunning first chapter devoted to Danzig, the Baltic port with an overwhelmingly German population that had been designated a “Free City” by the League of Nations after World War I. Polish-German tensions over the status of the city, which was surrounded by Polish territory, looked like they could easily spark the next major conflict. Knickerbocker stated a contrary view right from the start:

DANZIG… Ten million lives of Europeans and Americans have been saved in this city of Danzig. That many lives were lost on the battlefields of 1914–1918. At least that many would be lost in the next war. That war was scheduled to begin in Danzig. Today it is evident that war is not going to begin here, and Hitler the Warmaker has become Hitler the Peacemaker as the Lord of Danzig.

For today Danzig is Nazi, and for the first time in thirteen years Danzig is at peace with the Poles. For the first time since the war Danzig has been eliminated from its number one place in the list of the probable seats of war.

As Knickerbocker explained, the Nazis won the city elections on May 28, 1933, sweeping into power “a tornado of Brownshirts that drove fear through the heart of every Pole and Jew in the city and made Europe hold its breath.” But while the Nazis quickly consolidated their hold on the city, Hermann Rauschning, the president of the Danzig Senate and Hitler’s lieutenant, immediately went to Warsaw and signed agreements on trade and rights for Polish citizens in the Baltic city. “The Poles were amazed, suspicious, but pleased,” Knickerbocker reported. Danzig and Warsaw played a friendly soccer match, and suddenly tensions eased all around. Hitler had ordered a truce for Danzig, he added, and it was working—at least so far.

What should readers make of this? “Its lesson for Europe is that Hitler can keep the peace if he wants to,” Knickerbocker wrote. But he warned that this could be merely a tactical truce to buy time for Hitler to rearm. Still, “it means peace in this corner of the European cockpit at least for years to come.”

But as Knickerbocker chronicled the other parts of his journey—through Central Europe, the Balkans and Western Europe—he emphasized the caveats as well as the cold calculations. Hitler doesn’t want war because his country wasn’t prepared for a new conflict, he maintained. “The odds are too great against Germany for anyone but a mad German to consider making war now against France and her allies,” he wrote. “Contrary to a considerable body of opinion abroad, it may be positively asserted that there are no madmen running Germany today.”

While he deplored the racial doctrines and terror tactics of the Nazis, he called them “masters of power politics.” Which meant that they were trying to change the balance of power before they would consider triggering a new war. The key, he warned, would be how soon Hitler would feel confident about winning an eventual conflict. Among the experts he consulted, the consensus was that the answer was five to ten years. Knickerbocker ascribed Europe’s pessimistic mood to the fact that the new arms race was already under way. Hitler was insisting over and over again that he wanted only peace. “It is the peace to make the world safe for armaments,” Knickerbocker wrote, ending on a far more ominous note than in his opening section. “Armaments have never kept the world safe from war.”

Hitler launched World War II by attacking Danzig only five years later, and Knickerbocker would certainly have liked the chance to pull back that opening chapter. Still, his book is instructive, including in that section. It demonstrates how much a highly critical journalist felt compelled to hedge his bets—even when, as the final chapters indicate, he shared much of the pessimism about where Hitler’s policies would ultimately lead.

Knickerbocker’s critical faculties were certainly still intact, which is much more than could be said about some other Americans living in Berlin. At about the same time that The Boiling Point appeared in print in early 1934, Sir Philip Gibbs, a famed British correspondent during World War I and later a novelist, visited the German capital. He, too, was asking the question whether Europe would go to war. Observing marches of the SA and the Hitlerjugend, along with the shouts of Heil Hitler , he admitted: “It was impossible not to be impressed by the splendour of that German youth… There was something stirring in the sight of this army of young men.” But he also felt a sense of apprehension. “This pride and discipline of youth could be so easily used by evil minds for sinister purpose, later on.”

There was little doubt in his mind that Hitler could be the one to push the country to disaster again. “He was the mesmerist who had put a spell on the German people so that they followed him blindly,” he noted. The German leader kept insisting he wanted peace, but this veteran journalist observed that every German magazine he picked up was full of pictures of soldiers in steel helmets and scenes from the last world conflagration.

Among the most notable meetings he had on his visit to Berlin was with an American woman who had been married to a German for a long time. At tea with her in the Fürstenhof Hotel, where he was staying, Gibbs came straight to the point. “Most people in England and everybody in France believe Germany is preparing for a new war,” he told her.

“But that is impossible! It’s ridiculous!” she replied with genuine astonishment. “Why should they believe such an absurdity?”

He recounted his observations about the militarism of the Nazis, their belief in racial dogmas and persecution of Jews, their crude anti-intellectual theories and all the talk in Mein Kampf and elsewhere about Germany’s expansive dreams. Men like Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg were preaching barbarism and the reign of instinct and biological force, he added.

“My German friends laugh at Rosenberg’s nonsense,” the American woman said. “As for all this marching and drilling, it means nothing as far as war is concerned. Germans like it, just like the English like football and cricket.”

She assured him she knew plenty of young Nazis. “They talk very freely to me, because I am the wife of a German and therefore, in their minds, German. They never talk of wanting war. On the contrary, they hate the idea of it.” They only talk about war, she continued, when discussing the possibility that they might be attacked by France and her allies. In that case, they would “naturally” defend the fatherland. “Wouldn’t any other nation feel the same?”