Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

In his largely forgotten novel The Traitor that he wrote after the war, Shirer expounded on his feelings at the time. His protagonist, the aspiring American journalist Oliver Knight, discusses his plans to go to Europe with his college instructor. The instructor tells him that Paris would be great fun, but he would be just “another young American in Paris,” likely to spend endless hours with wine and women, “babbling about a Europe you were woefully ignorant of.” Besides, France is “too static,” he continued, and “nothing very world-shattering is likely to come out of France in our time.”

Not so with the Germans, the instructor continued. Despite Bach, Beethoven, Schiller and Goethe, their culture was “a mere veneer so thin that their barbarism—the pagan barbarism of the German forests—is continually threatening to break through and engulf them.” The big story was developing in Germany, his instructor insisted, and any young man who wanted to make his mark in journalism should go there, not Paris. To be sure, Shirer wrote his novel with the benefit of hindsight, but it undoubtedly reflected his gut feelings in 1934. He desperately longed to get to Berlin.

On August 2, President von Hindenburg died at the age of eighty-six. Once considered a towering figure, he had looked largely irrelevant and impotent once Hitler had become chancellor. “Who can be president now? What will Hitler do?” Shirer asked in his diary when he heard the news. The next day he knew the answer: Hitler had announced he would take over all presidential powers along with his current ones, and the Army would be required to swear an oath of “unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces.” It wasn’t an oath to serve the country; it was deliberately fashioned as an oath to serve one man whose power was now unquestioned and unlimited.

Shirer was impressed with the sheer audacity of such a move. “The man is resourceful,” he wrote in his diary on August 4. Hitler also announced that a plebiscite would be held on August 19 to approve his seizure of all political and military powers. He justified his actions in large part by the alleged plot against him and the Army that he claimed triggered the June 30 crackdown. After attending a meeting of the American Chamber of Commerce in Berlin, Fromm noted in her diary: “Nobody believes that Hitler’s life was endangered or that a counterrevolution was planned.”

But on August 3, Knickerbocker, the veteran correspondent who had been so perceptive in many of his earlier dispatches, reported that Röhm’s Brownshirts had planned “what would have been the most extraordinary massacre in modern political history.” Its supposed victims: the leaders of the Reichswehr, including the chiefs of the General Staff—which, according to Knickerbocker, was why the generals were willing to accept “a one-time corporal” as their commander-in-chief and swear a personal oath to him. While Knickerbocker indicated he was relaying a version of events from Berlin sources, presumably top Nazi officials, he didn’t include anything to suggest he was skeptical of this interpretation.

Wiegand, the Hearst correspondent, didn’t comment on Hitler’s claims but offered a more critical view of his power grab on the same day. Noting that “Hitler has attained a position quite without parallel in any country in the world,” he added: “Until yesterday it was possible to say he was the instrument of the Reichswehr. Today the army is his weapon. Fear, not freedom, promises to rule the voters Aug. 19.”

Within days of Hindenburg’s death and Hitler’s quick moves to consolidate all power in his hands, Shirer got his wish: he received a call from one of the bosses at Hearst’s Universal News Service, who offered him a job as its correspondent in Berlin. Elated, Shirer immediately agreed. “Must brush up my German,” he wrote in his diary. On August 25, he and Tess took a train from Paris, arriving at Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof at about ten in the evening. As soon as Shirer stepped off the train, two plainclothesmen grabbed him and demanded to know if he was “Herr So-and-So,” as Shirer recalled, since he didn’t catch the name they kept repeating. “I had expected to meet the secret police sooner or later, but not quite so soon,” he wrote. After examining his passport, the plainclothesmen finally let him go. As he thought of the new chapter that was about to begin for him, Shirer ended his first Berlin diary entry that evening with what he admitted was a bad pun: “I’m going from bad to Hearst.”

That same morning, another foreign correspondent, far more famous at the time than Shirer, had boarded a train to go in the opposite direction, from Berlin to Paris. Dorothy Thompson had the distinction of exiting Nazi Germany for the last time because she had been presented with an expulsion order. Thompson, or Mrs. Sinclair Lewis as she was known because of her novelist husband, had gone to Austria after the murder of Chancellor Dollfuss on July 25, eager to cover what the Nazis were up to there. In early August, she decided to drive from Austria through Munich up to Berlin, reacquainting herself with her old stomping grounds, stopping in towns and villages along the way to get a sense of the popular mood. She may have badly misjudged Hitler when she interviewed him in late 1931, but she was now intent on discovering what he was doing to Germany.

Thompson wasn’t exactly sure when she crossed into Germany since no border guard stopped her, but then she noted the sudden appearance of houses decked out in Nazi flags. Along the road, she saw a Storm Trooper wearing a black armband, which she assumed was in honor of Hindenburg. But when she asked him, the SA man said it was “for Röhm.” Thompson also noticed the election banners everywhere in preparation for the plebiscite that coming Sunday to affirm Hitler’s power grab following Hindenburg’s death. Compared to other countries where voters chose between competing candidates, “in Germany Hitler made himself President and it was a law, and then people voted, whether they liked the law or not,” she wrote later. “If they liked it, that meant he was President; and if they didn’t, that meant he was President anyhow.”

Thompson found the roads in Germany clogged with cars, motorcycles and bicycles, almost all driven by young men. “I was in a procession of young men,” she recalled. “I had the feeling that there were only young men in Germany, thousands and thousands of young men, all very strong and healthy, and all working furiously to get somewhere.” Then there were the election posters that Thompson described as “sentimental, evangelical,” proclaiming “We are with thee, dear leader.”

In Garmisch, an American visitor from Chicago told Thompson that he had been in Oberammergau, the Bavarian village famed for its Passion Plays. “These people are all crazy,” he said. “This is not a revolution, it’s a revival. They think Hitler is God.” During the scene in the Passion Play when Judas received his thirty pieces of silver, a woman sitting next to him declared: “That is Röhm, who betrayed the Leader.”

In the Bavarian town of Murnau, a Hitler Youth camp filled with “beautiful children,” as Thompson put it, sported a huge banner proclaiming WE WERE BORN TO DIE FOR GERMANY. When she arrived in Munich, Thompson had letters of introduction to people she hadn’t met before. “I went to see them but they wouldn’t talk,” she reported. “They were frightened to death; you could see that.”

At another stop, she met a Catholic priest who was willing to talk. “The Nazi Revolution is the greatest blow to Catholicism since Martin Luther,” he told her. “But it is also a blow to all Christianity… In the Nazi outlook nationalism is elevated to a mystic religion, and the state claims not only the bodies of the people but the souls. Force, and not goodness, is the measure of all things.” Who would win in this struggle between Christianity and the Nazis, she inquired. “They are getting the children,” the priest replied. “That is their program—to get the children.” In other words, the Nazis were aiming to replace Christianity with their own “mystic religion,” and they were well on their way to doing so.