Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

After the Nazis took power, they made a rule that a German officer could not visit the house of a foreigner unless he knew the foreigner previously. This meant most military attachés were effectively prevented from inviting German officers to their homes. But Smith was in a different category. When he and Kay held a party upon their return to Berlin, Kay recalled, “The other attachés were dumbfounded to find so many German officers at our reception. They were green with envy and Truman became their prime target in their attempt to get news.”

By comparison, Kay noted, the British and the French, who relied heavily on paid spies, “were remarkably bare of contacts.” That was true for most of the other attachés as well, making Truman a celebrity in their ranks. Only the Poles, she conceded, may have had better contacts than her husband.

Truman used everything he could to learn about the German military plans and deployments. Early in his second tour, German officers still wore insignia of their regiments on their shoulders. He carefully noted what units were represented, piecing together valuable information, even enlisting Kay and their young daughter Kätchen to help him in this task. “Katchen and I were coached to scrutinize their shoulders well and to describe their marks,” Kay wrote, omitting the umlaut that her daughter has always insisted belongs on her name. “Whenever we drove out in the car together she would take one side and I the other, our faces pressed against the window pane. It made an amusing game for us and we had the feeling of helping solve the riddle.”

Kätchen, who was born in 1924, still relishes similar memories. Her father suspected that their driver Robert was reporting on them, she recalled, so Truman took them out for drives in the country on Sundays when he had the day off. Kätchen would sit in the back with her dog, a chow called Tauila, and Truman would often ask her to be the lookout. “Don’t be too obvious, but turn your head and see if you can see a big building in there,” he told her on one occasion as they were driving on a road surrounded by woods. He was looking for signs that a new factory had been built to produce engines for the Luftwaffe.

When Kätchen traveled to The Hague by train with her friends the daughters of the Dutch ambassador, she observed the gun emplacements on the German side of the border with Holland—and promptly sent a postcard to her parents describing them. “People thought that he must have had spies in Berlin, but I was the only spy,” Kätchen laughed, thinking of herself at about age twelve taking on that role.

But there was one riddle Truman realized early he would have trouble solving. For all his contacts in the army, he had few contacts with the Luftwaffe—and no more knowledge “of air corps organization and tactics than did the average American infantry officer,” as he put it. He also had “negligible” knowledge of the technical side of air power. Captain Theodore Koenig, the assistant attaché who was supposed to monitor Germany’s growing air capabilities, was a capable officer, but Truman was worried that his small team was poorly equipped to do so, forced to rely on “their wits alone” to make up for their lack of resources.

The urgency of such tasks was underscored by Hitler’s push to reassert Germany’s power, which Truman took extremely seriously. When German troops reoccupied the Rhineland in March 1936, reversing the demilitarization that had been mandated by the Treaty of Versailles, he rushed home. “How fast can you and Katchen get away from here?” he asked Kay. Looking around the apartment, she replied that it would probably take movers three days to pack up their things. “Three days!” Truman replied. “Thirty minutes is all you will have if the French react as they must. The bombers will be here in half an hour. Pack two suitcases. Tell Robert to put enough cans of gas in the car to take you to France.” When Kay asked what he would do in that situation, he declared he would “stay with the embassy.” Kay did as she was told, but the French failed to respond at all to Hitler’s calculated gamble.

Two months later, Kay and Truman were having breakfast in their apartment when she pointed out a front-page story in the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune. It reported that Charles Lindbergh had visited an airplane factory in France. Over the next few days, Truman began wondering if the famous airman, whose transatlantic voyage had captured the imagination of people everywhere, couldn’t gain the same kind of access to German airplane factories as he did to French ones. He checked with aides to Luftwaffe Commander-in-Chief Goering, and they reacted as he had hoped they would, saying that they would be pleased to show Lindbergh their combat units and factories. Truman then wrote a letter to Lindbergh on May 25, relaying this invitation. Smith had never met Lindbergh before, but he didn’t hesitate to make a forceful case.

“I need hardly tell you that the present German air development is very imposing and on a scale which I believe is unmatched in the world,” he wrote. Pointing out that the Luftwaffe’s buildup had been shrouded in secrecy until recently, he added that the Germans had already demonstrated an increasing willingness to show more of what they were doing to Americans than to representatives of other countries. “General Goering has particularly exerted himself for friendly relations with the United States,” he continued, emphasizing that the invitation was extended directly by the Luftwaffe commander and his Air Ministry. “From a purely American point of view, I consider your visit here would be of high patriotic benefit,” Smith concluded. “I am certain they will go out of their way to show you even more than they will show us.”

Smith’s appeal to Lindbergh, who at that point was living with his wife, Anne, in England to escape the constant publicity about them in the United States following the kidnapping and murder of their son in 1932, would prove to be a fateful initiative. Lindbergh’s response that he would be “extremely interested in seeing some of the German developments in both civil and military aviation” led to a series of visits to Germany—and charges that the aviator was sympathetic to Hitler’s regime. But it would also prove to be just the kind of breakthrough in military intelligence-gathering that Smith had hoped for.

Smith was certainly aware that the Germans would seek to exploit Lind-bergh’s visit for propaganda purposes, and he hoped to keep the press away from the famous aviator as much as he could. But when the dates for the first visit were set for July 22 to August 1, 1936, that meant the last day coincided with the opening of the Olympics. The Germans insisted that Lindbergh attend the opening ceremonies as Goering’s special guest. Smith understood this would attract just the kind of publicity he was hoping to avoid, but there was nothing he could do to prevent it. Instead, he focused on getting the Germans to agree to a long list of airplane factories, research facilities and Luftwaffe units that Lindbergh would be allowed to inspect, accompanied by either Captain Koenig or him. That way, the American attachés would be able to both view these installations and make valuable new contacts.

When the Lindberghs flew to Berlin in a private plane, they were greeted by Air Ministry officials, Lufthansa executives, other representatives of German aviation and the American military attachés. Truman and Kay had offered to put them up in their apartment, and the two couples immediately struck up a friendship. “Colonel Smith is alive, questioning, and talks well,” Anne Morrow Lindbergh recorded in her diary. “She is observant, intelligent, and amusing.”

Anne’s diary entries reflected her newcomer’s credulity about the new Germany (“The neatness, order, trimness, cleanliness… No sense of poverty… The sense of festivity, flags hung out”), but also contained numerous wry asides. At their official greeting, “Everyone is in uniform; lots of clicking of heels. ‘Yah.’ Clipped speech. They hardly notice me; very few women.” When she is separated from Charles, who is driven off in an open car accompanied by German officers while she and Kay and Kätchen Smith “drive behind quietly” in a closed car, she notes: “Ah, yes—subservience of women in Germany!” And as for the formalities: “This raising of the arms business adds to the complications of life. It is done so often and takes so much room.”