Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

When Thompson finally arrived in Berlin, she headed straight to the Adlon Hotel, which felt “like home,” the smiling barman ready with his popular dry martinis. “Oh, I was so glad to be back!” she recalled. Everything was perfect in the hotel. “It was all the courtesy, all the cleanliness, all the exquisite order that was Germany.” But her journalistic colleagues warned her not to use the hotel phones, since they were monitored. So Thompson found a cheap saloon with a phone booth in the back, which she used to place calls to some of her German acquaintances.

The American reporter had lunch with a young woman who worked as a stenographer in a state bank. She had “eyes as candid as water,” Thompson noted. “When you look at her you know she never told a lie in her life.”

“Do you find it’s so bad here as the outside world seems to think?” the woman asked Thompson. When the reporter replied that she had come back to Germany to see the situation for herself, the woman explained that she hadn’t been a Nazi in the beginning, but that even in her bank conditions had changed since Hitler came to power. Overall, wages were lower than before, but the biggest cuts were among the directors and other senior staff. And regular staff felt that they were treated better, with fewer social distinctions. “It’s as though we all belonged to a big family,” she said. While there was talk of food rationing, she claimed everyone was willing to make sacrifices as long as they were employed.

Thompson asked her about the Night of the Long Knives. She professed it was “an awful shock” to learn that some of the Nazi leaders had been “acting dreadful” and were corrupt. “That is why Hitler had to execute them,” she concluded, as if that was a perfectly logical solution.

When Thompson pointed out that in the United States people were tried before they were punished, the German woman didn’t seem to understand her point. “It was funny,” Thompson mused. “I never met anyone in Germany except a few intellectuals, who minded that these people did not have a trial. It was as though they had forgotten that there ever had been such a thing as law.”

Thompson also met a Brownshirt she had known earlier. While admitting there were clashes within the Nazi movement and some of the SA leaders wanted to get rid of Goering or Goebbels, he insisted there was never any talk of undermining Hitler’s regime or of acting in any way against him. “Hitler sold us out,” he said. “There wasn’t any plot. No one was treasonable to Hitler.” He described how Nazi firing squads gunned down far more of his colleagues than reported, with the victims numbering about 300 instead of the 77 mentioned by Hitler.

Thompson also met Otto, a German journalist who had earlier been a staunch defender of free speech but who now “writes articles that free speech isn’t any good,” as she put it. Over coffee and plum cake, he calmly explained that revolutions aren’t made by pleasant people. “Revolutions need terrorists,” he said. “Afterward, when the revolutions succeed, the people who made them are in the way.” The Russians could send those who fell out of favor to Siberia, but in Germany “there was nothing to do but shoot them.” He admitted that shooting former Chancellor von Schleicher’s wife “made a bad impression abroad” and the cleanup was “not pretty.” But the result was a stronger Germany, he insisted. “I doubt if any revolution in history has been made with greater order. It is now consolidated. It will last for years.”

While listening to Otto, Thompson was thinking of some of the other murders on June 30. A music critic in Munich by the name of Willi Schmidt was shot because he was mistaken for a storm trooper with the same name who had already been shot earlier that same day. Dr. Erich Klausener, a Catholic leader, was killed for no reason that she could ascertain. He was cremated and his ashes were sent to his wife by registered post, according to an account she had read in a British newspaper. “I kept thinking how it must have been when the postman rang the bell,” she recalled, imagining a scene of the postman asking the unsuspecting widow to sign for the package and then tipping his hat. “They are awfully polite in Germany,” she observed. To Otto, she said aloud: “Yes, Germany is an orderly country.”

Thompson spent only ten days in Berlin. One day the porter called. “Good morning, madam, there is a gentleman here from the secret state police,” he announced. A young man in a trench coat that looked like the one Hitler wore came up with an order for her to leave the country within forty-eight hours. “In view of your numerous anti-German publications in the American press, the German authorities, for reasons of national self-respect, are unable to extend to you a further right of hospitality,” it read.

While other reporters had been pressured to leave, this was the first outright expulsion and it generated front-page stories back in the United States. “The general feeling of the foreign colony here over the incident is that Nazism has once again demonstrated its utter inability to understand any mentality but its own,” wrote Frederick Birchall, the New York Times ’s Berlin correspondent.

Several American and British correspondents came to see Thompson off to Paris, giving her American Beauty roses for her journey. As the train pulled out of the station, she leaned out of the window, clutching the roses, “a little tearful about such a demonstration of comradeship,” Birchall added.

In her own account, Thompson identified the real reason for her expulsion as “blasphemy.” As she explained, “My offense was to think that Hitler is just an ordinary man, after all. That is a crime against the reigning cult in Germany, which says Mr. Hitler is a Messiah sent by God to save the German people—an old Jewish idea.” Returning to New York in September, she had attained new supercelebrity status, with reporters rushing to get her views on the country that had given her the boot. “Germany has gone to war already and the rest of the world does not believe it,” she declared.

At about the same time, Shirer, the new arrival, was contrasting his new home with the city he had first visited in the 1920s. “I miss the old Berlin of the Republic, the care-free, emancipated, civilized air, the snubnosed young women with short-bobbed hair and the young men with either cropped or long hair—it made no difference—who sat up all night with you and discussed anything with intelligence and passion.” Instead, Shirer found a city where there were the constant shouts of “Heil Hitler,” Brownshirts and SS guards marching everywhere, and the endless clicking of heels, all of which grated on his nerves. Barely a week into the new assignment that he had been so anxious to get, Shirer admitted he was already “in the throes of a severe case of depression.”

Whether the correspondents were coming or going, they recognized that Germany had undergone a remarkably swift and chilling transformation. No one was casually writing off Hitler anymore.

Back in the United States, Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Thompson’s husband, drew heavily on his observations of Germany as he dashed off his new novel It Can’t Happen Here in two frantic months of writing. Published in 1935, it envisaged the coming to power of a fascist dictator in the United States. Like Hitler, Berzelius Windrip, Lewis’s antihero, claims to have all the answers to all the country’s economic problems, while proclaiming his people’s superiority. “My one ambition is to get all Americans to realize that they are, and must continue to be, the greatest Race on the face of this old Earth,” he declares. Once in power, he abolishes Congress and employs the Minute Men, his equivalent of the Brownshirts, to bash anyone who dares to resist.