Andrew Nagorski: Hitlerland

Wilson may have overstated the admiration for American troops, but he was right about the overall pro-American mood. As Kay Smith put it, “People are laying themselves out to be nice to Americans.” Truman bought a Borsalino felt hat with a large brim. This made him tower above most people on Unter den Linden and other streets he frequented, where he was instantly recognizable. “He became famous as ‘The American,’” Kay proudly recalled. “Germans greatly admired a tall fine physique.”

Americans, it seemed, were the good victors.

In part, the reason why the Americans emerged as the good victors was because they often reciprocated the Germans’ positive feelings about them. They also shared their exasperation with the French—the bad victors, in their eyes. In the immediate aftermath of World War I, Washington and Paris were frequently at odds over how to handle a defeated Germany. The United States and Britain were inclined to give the new government in Berlin enough leeway in terms of troop deployments to suppress uprisings from the left or the right, and the Americans, in particular, disapproved of what they perceived as France’s insistence on extracting exorbitant reparations. But the French protested any perceived violations of the Versailles Treaty—and quickly used them as an excuse to occupy more German territory, as they did by pushing across the Rhine after the Kapp Putsch, and then by occupying the industrialized Ruhr in 1923 as punishment for Germany’s failure to pay reparations.

“The French are the most militaristic nation in Europe… they have learned nothing by this war,” Kay Smith complained in a letter to her mother on March 12, 1920. “The next war Germany will not provoke. She wants England and America especially with her and she is making every effort to remodel herself to do so.” In another letter, she wrote, “France is terrified of another attack by Germany and her policy has been to crucify Germany as much as possible.”

As Wilson pointed out, the French only made things worse by following up their push across the Rhine that year with the stationing of Senegalese and other black troops in the Rhineland, triggering immediate reports of rapes and other violence. “A flame of resentment against France arose throughout Germany,” he wrote.

Those alarming allegations prompted the State Department to ask for an investigation by U.S. military officials. After looking into the charges, Major General Henry T. Allen, the commander of American troops in Germany, reported to Washington that the German press had deliberately distorted the record to play to racial prejudices and stir antipathy to France abroad, “especially in America, where the negro question is always capable of arousing feeling.” In his report to the State Department that was then relayed to Congress, he acknowledged that 66 sexual crimes had been reported to the French authorities, but he also pointed out that this had resulted in 28 convictions and 11 acquittals by French military courts—suggesting a serious effort to maintain discipline.

“The wholesale atrocities by French negro Colonial troops alleged in the German press, such as the alleged abductions, followed by rape, mutilation, murder and concealment of the bodies of the victims, are false and intended for political propaganda,” he concluded.

Such exaggerations, Allen added, were in part due to “the attitude of certain classes of German women toward the colored troops.” Noting that the postwar economic crisis had spawned widespread prostitution, he explained that “many German women of loose character have openly made advances to the colored soldiers.” Numerous love letters and photographs attested to that fact, he pointed out. In Ludwigshafen, he reported, patrols had to be sent “to drive away the German women from the barracks, where they were kissing the colored troops through the window gratings.”

Even more tellingly, Allen noted that there were several interracial marriages, including one with the daughter of a prominent Rhineland official. “The color line is not regarded either by the French or the Germans as we regard it in America: to keep the white race pure.” While he wasn’t denying that there were many documented cases of sexual assaults, Allen was convinced that it was the behavior of German women that had been the spark to “incite trouble.”

But many Americans in Germany had already made up their minds that it was France’s vindictive policies that were to blame for everything, not anything the Germans were doing. They saw Germany as the victimized party, which was in keeping with much of the local political rhetoric. “I am afraid that many of us who were on duty in Germany after World War I were taken in,” Chicago Tribune correspondent Sigrid Schultz wrote much later. “Inadvertently we supported the Germans in their sympathy drive.”

On January 29, 1921, Karl Henry von Wiegand, a star reporter for the Hearst publications, wrote to C. F. Bertelli, his Hearst colleague in Paris, venting his exasperation with the French. “Your French friends appear to be as insane as they have ever been since the close of the war.” Mentioning new demands by the French for reparations, he added, “Are the French never going to come to their senses, and see Europe as it actually is?” He concluded that many Americans and other Europeans “are getting rather weary of hearing France’s yowl about what France suffered in the war.”

Wiegand was a correspondent who already felt very much at home in Germany and the rest of Europe. Born in 1874 in Hesse, he came to the United States as a young boy, growing up on farms in Iowa where his German immigrant father struggled to make ends meet, losing two farms in the process. When his father was “a fair way to losing a third,” Karl, barely fourteen at the time, decided to make his own way in the world, never telling his siblings or his parents that he wasn’t coming back. “A cruel thing to do to a good father and the kindest of mothers,” he would write much later in notes for an autobiography that he never completed.

He claimed to have then worked on a ranch for Buffalo Bill—who at close range was less than the romantic hero of the frontier that he had imagined from reading dime novels. He made his way further west, eventually finding work at the Associated Press in San Francisco. There, he seized the opportunity to use his German and cover World War I for the rival United Press, happily leaving behind his desk job. Three months into that conflict, he scored an exclusive interview with Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, the son of the Kaiser, who famously told the American that he had warned his father the war was already lost. The subsequent headlines offered a huge boost to Wiegand’s early career. He ended up jumping again—this time to Hearst.

Like any good reporter, Wiegand recognized he had to offer his editors and readers a broad range of stories about the new Germany. While dutifully reporting on every political crisis, the continuing street battles and the economic shortages (“Food Shortage Alarms All Germany,” warned the headline of his May 23, 1922, story), he was also alert to other subjects that would titillate his readers—or, when it came to the racier ones that his editors might not allow, at least his colleagues.

That was particularly true when it came to postwar Germany’s growing reputation for sexual licentiousness. Wiegand kept up a running private correspondence with Bertelli in Paris on the subject. In one letter from 1921, Bertelli urged Wiegand to write more about cocaine and “the alleged degeneracy of the old burg.” Good stories on that subject, he added, will “get the whole of the American continent afire with indignation… and greedy longing!” Then, there was the usual banter about how Wiegand should research this story. “Incidentally you might discover in your night investigations (all for the good of the future generation, of course) some novel Venus… Be careful about taking the necessary measurements…”