Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

William Randolph Hearst took an active interest in Wiegand’s memos and letters about Hanfstaengl. The propagandist “probably likes to make a little money occasionally for news features,” he wrote Wiegand on November 20, 1934. “That is not a crime. The thing I think is unfortunate is the fact that he is such an extremist and may not be giving his boss the best advice on these religious situations. First the Jews were alienated, then the Catholics, and finally many Protestant sects.” Still, he urged his correspondent to be patient. “Do not be displeased with Dr. Hanfstaengl and others in the Government who seem antagonistic,” he wrote. “Give them good advice and try to guide them towards a greater liberality which will gain approval both at home and abroad.”

By then, many of the Berlin correspondents no longer nurtured those kinds of illusions. As for Putzi, the reporters who were new to Berlin were particularly scathing in their evaluation. Observing him at the Nuremberg party rally in September 1934, Shirer described him as “an immense, high-strung, incoherent clown who does not often fail to remind us that he is part American and graduated from Harvard.” But he admitted that many of the American and British correspondents “rather like him despite his clownish stupidity.”

When it came to Hanfstaengl’s postwar assertions that he had disagreed with the Nazis’ anti-Semitism, they were flatly contradicted by his behavior. On numerous occasions, he had lashed out at outspoken American diplomats and correspondents, like George Messersmith and Edgar Mowrer, by labeling them as Jews. Bella Fromm ran into Putzi at the entrance at the Dodds’ farewell party for Messersmith on May 12, 1934.

“I wonder why we were asked today,” Hanfstaengl told her. “All this excitement about Jews. Messersmith is one. So is Roosevelt. The party detests them.”

“Dr. Hanfstaengl, we’ve discussed this before,” the Jewish reporter replied. “You don’t have to put on that kind of an act with me.”

“All right,” he said. “Even if they are Aryan, you’d never know it from their actions.”

Putzi ended their exchange by offering her a fruit drop. “Have one. They are made especially for the Führer. ”

Fromm had enjoyed eating similar fruit drops as a child and she politely took one. Then, as she was about to put it in her mouth, she noticed the swastika on it. “Try as I would to make the hideous mark disappear, it remained leering at me until I had finished the drop,” she noted.

A month later, Hanfstaengl made a much-publicized visit to the United States to attend his twenty-fifth class reunion at Harvard. The news sparked heated controversy on and off campus. A committee of Jewish organizations argued that Americans should show “no discourtesy of any kind” toward him, but columnist Heywood Broun warned of “bloody riots” during his visit and called for his deportation as an undesirable alien. Noting that Broun was a class ahead of him at Harvard, Putzi dismissed his attacks as “class jealousy.” Talking to reporters who met him as he disembarked in New York, he was equally dismissive of questions about German Jews. “The situation of the Jew in Germany is fairly normal,” he said. When some Jewish reporters asked for five minutes to discuss the issue further, he brushed them off.

While protesters gathered a short distance from his ship and shouted “Down with Hitler,” the on-campus debate was conducted in more muted tones. Benjamin Halpern, a Jewish student, wrote a letter to the Harvard Crimson titled “Heil Hitler” questioning the initial decision by Elliott Carr Cutler, the chief marshal at the reunion, to ask Hanfstaengl to serve as his aide during the ceremonies. Seeing the backlash, Cutler backed off that idea and asked Hanfstaengl to come as an ordinary alumnus. Still, the Crimson appeared to reflect the prevailing view on campus about the whole affair. “To object to the presence of a Harvard man among other Harvard men in any capacity, on purely political grounds, is an extremely childish thing to do,” it editorialized.

While Putzi would find it increasingly difficult in the next couple of years to convince Americans in Berlin that he was the reasonable face of the regime, he also was encountering problems with Hitler and his inner circle. The Nazi leader was contemptuous of Putzi’s assertions that he knew how to handle relations with the United States in order to prevent it from opposing Germany. When the Roosevelt Administration established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in November 1933, Hitler told him: “There you are, Hanfstaengl, your friends the Americans have teamed up with the Bolsheviks.” Earlier, Hitler had told him bluntly: “I see America from where I sit much more clearly than you have ever known it.”

Putzi would later claim that, in the first period of Hitler’s reign, he began to notice its absurdities and how detached from reality his entou rage was. Returning from his Harvard reunion to the aftermath of the Night of the Long Knives, the bloody purge of the SA leaders and assorted other targets of the Nazis, he was summoned to Heiligendamm, the Baltic Sea resort where Hitler, Goebbels and others were vacationing. “It was really like something out of Lewis Carroll, a mad hatter’s luncheon party,” he wrote. “With the whole of Germany groaning under this atmosphere of murder, fear and suspicion, there was Magda Goebbels doing the honors in an airy summer dress, with several other young women at the table, even one or two from the aristocratic families…”

It was around this time, Putzi added, that he came to realize that, once Hitler was ensconced in power, “the demon had entered into him.” But even with the benefit of hindsight, he blamed Goebbels and others for pushing Hitler to the point of no return, and admitted he continued to nurture the hope that he could moderate his excesses. Amid all the self-justification, Hanfstaengl’s real concern was much less policy than his own position. Putzi could see it was weakening rapidly. Others were openly criticizing and mocking him, and Hitler didn’t seem interested in doing anything about it. The invitations to play the piano for the Nazi leader were becoming less frequent.

When Truman and Kay Smith returned to Berlin in 1935, they visited Putzi in his small apartment, which was in back of the Chancellery. The living room was dominated by a large bust of Hitler and a grand piano, and Truman casually hung his hat on Hitler’s head as he walked in. “Putz hastily snatched it off,” Kay recalled, pointing out that he treated this as bad manners on Truman’s part, not something to joke about. Over coffee and cake, the old acquaintances caught up on their news. “It was plain that all was not rosy between Putz and Goebbels,” Kay continued. “Putz intimated that Goebbels was jealous of his… influence over Hitler and was keeping him away from Hitler.”

The jealousy factor was almost certainly overblown, since Hanfstaengl’s influence had been on the wane for some time. That was typical Putzi talk—making himself out to be more important than he was. But there was certainly truth in his assertion that Goebbels had no use for a competing propagandist, and there was increasing evidence that he wanted to cut him out of the inner circle completely.

Hanfstaengl claimed that he considered resigning, but that others talked him out of it. More likely, he clung to every shred of power and influence as long as possible, even when his foreign press office was unceremoniously moved further away from the Chancellery. For nearly two years, he wasn’t invited to any events with Hitler at all. At the end of the last luncheon he ever attended with him, Hitler asked him to go to the piano “to play that thing of yours.” When Putzi asked him what piece he meant, he said, “Your funeral march.” Hanfstaengl played it with, as he recalled, “a sense of foreboding.”