Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

The book was a huge success, eventually selling more than 300,000 copies, and stirring controversy as the American Communist Party and others on the far left embraced its message with particular enthusiasm. Lewis liked the praise, but was uneasy about the source. “There is no excuse for any one to swallow the Bolshevik claim to be the one defense against Fascism,” he wrote. But he had succeeded in his primary aim: convincing many of his countrymen that fascism was a threat that they should take seriously, wherever it manifested itself.

As new American correspondents came on the scene, they were prone to start from the premise that they were going to report from a bizarre, increasingly sinister but always intriguing place. Pierre Huss of the International News Service , whom Shirer characterized as “slick, debonair, ambitious, and on better terms with Nazi officials than almost any other,” came to call it both “Hitlerland” and “Naziland.” And, of course, no one was a more intriguing figure in that land than Adolf Hitler. Both the veteran Berlin correspondents and the new arrivals were always looking for opportunities to see him in person, trying to take the measure of the man and his movement. Reflecting on the eight years that he would spend in Berlin, right up until a month before the United States and Germany went to war in December 1941, Huss wrote: “You had to work hard and long, frequently taking your food and sleep on the wing to keep up with Hitler.”

In January 1935, Huss’s efforts to get an interview with Hitler paid off at just the right moment. The Nazi leader was in his Alpine chalet in Obersalzberg, waiting for the results of the plebiscite in the Saar, the territory that had been administered during the previous fifteen years by Britain and France under a League of Nations mandate. There was little doubt that the Saar’s inhabitants would vote as Hitler wanted them to, ensuring the return of the territory to Germany. Huss calculated he would find Der Führer in good spirits, which would make this an opportune time to meet him.

He wasn’t mistaken. Arriving at the chalet, he saw Hitler examining the returns, his eyes “alight with joy.” He was dressed in what Huss characterized as “his golf suit,” while Goering stood nearby in a huge white sweater, joining his boss in celebrating the outcome of the voting. Hitler promptly greeted his American guest by insisting that he join him on his regular walk in the mountains before lunch. As usual, he didn’t allow his bodyguards to accompany him, instead only taking along his white Hungarian shepherd dog, his walking stick made of knotted wood, and a Luger automatic pistol in his pocket.

With the dog leading the way through the snow, Hitler kept up a brisk pace that left Huss nearly out of breath as they reached the crest of a hill. Hitler told him it was good exercise, enjoying the fact that his guest was struggling a bit. Then he pointed down to the chalet that they had just left, which was surrounded by hills like the one they had just climbed. “A good rifle shot, aiming through telescopic sights, could easily pick me off from here while I am sitting on the porch or in that back room there,” he told Huss. He added that he was buying all the land in the area, closing it to outsiders “so [SS leader Heinrich] Himmler can quit worrying.” The road that Huss had traveled up the mountain would also be closed to all but authorized traffic.

Hitler next pointed in the direction of Salzburg, saying that Himmler and some army officers had claimed that “a few well-directed cannon shots from there some dark night could blow us out of bed.” With a forced laugh, he explained that he had told Himmler that he’d have to be patient since “I cannot just walk over the border and take a piece out of Austria.” He added, “I am a fatalist and all those things take care of themselves.”

Huss felt Hitler was taking a risk by walking in the hills alone, whatever measures were used to secure the area. He pointed to two woodcutters a couple of hundred yards ahead, indicating that they or someone else could attack him while he was out on one of his walks. At that point, Hitler told Huss to pack a hard snowball and throw it far. When Huss did so, Hitler pulled out his pistol and fired off a dead-on shot: the snowball burst apart in the air. Seeing Huss’s skeptical expression, he told him to throw a second snowball. Once again, his aim was perfect. “You see, I am not entirely defenseless,” he said—and went on to boast that the SS and Army brass considered him better than many of their best marksmen.

The amiable mood of their walk was broken when Huss ventured to suggest that Hitler would be courting a major conflict if he insisted on carrying out every part of his party’s 25-point program first proclaimed in 1920, including its call for a Greater Germany with new territory and colonies. Hitler abruptly stopped, and “like a flash he changed from the Bavarian alpine rambler to Adolf Hitler,” Huss recalled. Hitler shot back, “Sooner than give up one little point of my program, I’d go over to that tree and hang myself.” Although the Nazis had departed from several parts of their original program already, he insisted “it can only be fulfilled to the letter because it expresses the will of Germany.”

Huss’s conclusion about Hitler after his walk in the hills: “He is a fanatic, every inch of him, going into a passion or fury when the occasion demands.”

Veteran correspondents like Lochner and Wiegand worried that the fanaticism of Germany’s new rulers was impacting their ability to do their jobs. “Reporting from Germany ceased to be a pleasure when the Nazis seized power in 1933,” the AP bureau chief noted with typical under-statement. In a letter to William Randolph Hearst dated August 5, 1933, Wiegand told his boss that he had been warned “that in one way or another every effort allegedly will be made to persuade you to transfer me from Germany.” Mentioning the increased monitoring of cables, phones and mail, along with the sweeping crackdown on any freedom of expression inside Germany, he wrote: “It is no pleasure to a freedom-loving man to work in Germany these days… Hitler’s proud claim is that there is order and discipline in his Germany. So there also is in St. Quentin and Sing Sing.”

The Nazis realized that they often lost the propaganda war if they forced correspondents out, since those reporters then enjoyed the spotlight when they returned home. But that only prompted them to try new methods to compromise those they disliked. Supposedly anti-Nazi Germans started approaching correspondents with offers to provide secret military information. On more than one occasion, Sigrid Schultz threw men out of her Chicago Tribune office when they made such an offer and warned her colleagues to stay clear of them. In April 1935, she returned home one day to discover that an envelope with “important information” had been delivered in her absence by what sounded like one of the same men. Opening it, she saw the design for an airplane engine, which she promptly burned in her fireplace; she knew that, if found on her premises, this would be perfect incriminating evidence in a spy trial.

On her way back to the office, Schultz spotted three men, who looked familiar from her earlier encounters with the secret police, heading toward her home. Stepping in front of them, she told them not to bother going there since she had burned the envelope. As they stood speechless, she hailed a cab and loudly instructed the driver to take her to the American Embassy.

Schultz was convinced that Goering was behind that effort to set her up because they had had several tense exchanges earlier about the country’s expanding concentration camps. At a lavish lunch in the Adlon Hotel for him and his new bride, Emmy Sonnemann, on May 2, the feisty reporter told him quietly but firmly what happened, blaming his agents provocateurs. Startled, Goering kept saying, “You are imagining things.” When Schultz stuck to her story and added that she had informed the embassy of the details, he snapped angrily: “Schultz, I’ve always suspected it: you’ll never learn to show proper respect for state authorities. I suppose that is one of the characteristics of people from that crime-ridden city of Chicago.” An amused acquaintance in Goering’s Air Ministry later told her that around his offices she became known as “that dragon from Chicago.” But no more attempts were made to set her up.