Andrew Nagorski: Hitlerland

Back home, one of Wiegand’s readers concluded that the correspondent might be able to help him with a personal matter. “I am looking for a wife,” R. C. Bruchman wrote him on January 14, 1921, from Danville, Illinois. “I imagine there must be an awful lot of handsome good girls in Berlin who would make a fellow a mighty fine wife.” He enclosed $1.50, asking Wiegand to place an ad in a Berlin newspaper, saying that a thirty-five-year-old German-American gentleman “wants to marry girl 18 to 25 yrs. old.”

An amused Wiegand agreed to the request, noting this was the first time he had been asked to act as a matrimonial agent. “As there are at least a million more women in Germany than men, you ought to have quite a lot to pick from, and I have no doubt you will get many answers,” he wrote back. “It is indeed all too true that many refined and educated German girls of formerly well to do families are today facing want.”

Wiegand also participated in the diplomatic party scene in Berlin, occasionally writing features about it, especially when Americans played starring roles. “Houghton Girls Make Berlin Debut” proclaimed his Washington Times story datelined December 30, 1922. The subheadline explained: “Brilliant Assemblage Gives Daughters of U.S. Envoy Welcome to Society.” Alanson B. Houghton, an industrialist-turned-Republican-congressman-turned-diplomat, was Washington’s first postwar envoy to Berlin. He was deeply troubled by the overall situation he found there, repeatedly warning Washington that Germany’s economic plight and political unrest could prove to be highly dangerous for the whole continent. But this didn’t prevent him from putting on some of Berlin’s most lavish parties, which Wiegand wrote up enthusiastically.

At a ball in honor of their daughter and a niece, the Houghtons welcomed “four hundred members of the diplomatic set and high German officialdom, and many representative Americans,” Wiegand reported. This “brilliant fete,” he added, was a huge boost to American prestige. Presumably, the outfits of the daughter (“a gown of silver brocade cloth”) and niece (“a gold-banded net over a novel gold cloth”) all contributed to the success of the evening—as did the fact that the two young women also carried “enormous rose-colored feather fans.” So, too, did an American jazz band that supplied the music, while “a moving picture machine added color by flashing alternate shades on the dancing throng.” All this a half a century before the disco era.

While Wiegand enjoyed such stories, he knew that his editors wanted him to keep explaining Germany’s turbulent political scene as well—a charge he took very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that he became the first American correspondent to interview a local agitator in Munich who was beginning to make his name as a fiery orator. That agitator’s name was Adolf Hitler.

Wiegand declared that he had first met Hitler in 1921, but he only began taking him seriously enough to feature him prominently in his reports a year later. Given the proliferation of extremists in Bavaria at the time, that was hardly surprising. Every encounter with a radical of the right or the left hardly merited a separate story or even a mention in print. But by November 1922, following Benito Mussolini’s power grab in Italy, there was a growing sense that the right was on the rise throughout Europe, providing the perfect peg for a feature about the leader of the German “Fascisti.”

“Hitler Styled Mussolini of Teuton Crisis,” proclaimed the headline of Wiegand’s story datelined November 12, 1922, in the New York American , one of the Hearst papers. “The shadow of the Fascisti is arising in Germany,” Wiegand wrote. Explaining that Hitler—“leader of the movement which is causing no less uneasiness in Communist and Socialist circles than in Government quarters in Berlin and Munich”—had spelled out his program to him that day, the writer offered a summary that would leave the average reader confused about the true nature of this new political movement.

While denouncing the terms of the Versailles Treaty, Hitler insisted that he wanted reconciliation with France. The idea of war, he told Wiegand, “would be suicidal, if it were not idiocy.” As for domestic policy, he called on Germans to work two extra hours a day to pay off reparations and free them of their debts. He denied any intention to restore the monarchy or push separatism for Bavaria, and he attacked the Marxists head-on. “True socialism is the welfare of all the people, and not of one class at the expense of others. Therefore we oppose class warfare,” he declared.

But for American readers who hadn’t heard of this new politician, what probably registered the most in Wiegand’s article was his personal description of Hitler. Calling him “a man of the people” who had served in the trenches of World War I and afterward worked as a carpenter-turned-master builder (almost certainly an exaggerated description of Hitler’s early days as a handyman), Wiegand described him as “a magnetic speaker having also exceptional organizing genius.” He then spelled out the key characteristics of “the German Mussolini,” as he promptly dubbed him:

“Aged thirty-four, medium tall, wiry, slender, dark hair, cropped toothbrush mustache, eyes that seem at times to spurt fire, straight nose, finely chiseled features with a complexion so remarkably delicate that many a woman would be proud to possess it, and possessing a bearing that creates an impression of dynamic energy well under control…

“That is Hitler—one of the most interesting characters I have met in many months.

“With apostolic fervor and gifted with convincing oratory and a magnetism which is drawing him followers even out of the inner communistic and socialistic circles, Hitler has the earmarks of a leader. Whether it be merely a band or a great movement, only the future will tell.

“He believes firmly that his mission is to arouse and save Germany from its internal foes…”

Wiegand concluded his article by reporting: “The Bavarian Fascisti, like the Italians, are working secretly in the Reichswehr and the police, and there is fear that Hitler may one day proclaim himself dictator of Bavaria.”

Even before he filed that story, Wiegand had been telling Ambassador Houghton in Berlin about the disarray in the southern part of the country, and warning that General Erich Ludendorff might be planning to topple the government and impose a right-wing dictatorship. Ludendorff had led the German war effort in its latter stages and, after a brief exile, had returned to Germany and taken up with Hitler and other agitators in Munich. Instead of accepting responsibility for Germany’s military defeat, he blamed Socialists, leftists and Jews, laying the groundwork for what would become known as the “stab-in-the-back” theory.

Houghton decided that he needed more information about what was happening in the south. “Something is brewing in Bavaria and no one seems to know exactly what it is,” he wrote in his diary. “Probably it will result in nothing definite, but too much is at stake to permit us to run any danger.” To check out the situation, he turned to his young assistant military attaché, Captain Smith. At the same time that Wiegand was filing his first story about Hitler, Smith was preparing to follow in his footsteps—and to become the first American official to meet the future leader of Nazi Germany.

Smith would later point out that most foreign diplomats in Berlin at the time had written off the National Socialists as “being without significance and its leader, Adolf Hitler, as an uneducated madman.” Houghton, by contrast, “seems to have had, even at this early date, a premonition that the movement and its leader might play an important role in the disturbed Germany of the early twenties.” The ambassador and the embassy’s military attaché Lieutenant Colonel Edward Davis, Smith’s immediate superior, urged the captain to “try to make personal contact with Hitler himself and form an estimate of his character, personality, abilities, and weaknesses.”