Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

In his letters and reports, Wilson repeatedly emphasized that Hitler enjoyed the active or passive support of most Germans and that it was wishful thinking to believe that his regime could collapse—or that the minority who opposed it could do anything to make that happen. But as Hitler increased the pressure on Czechoslovakia at the end of the summer, Beam, who had nurtured his contacts with conservative opponents of the Nazis, returned to the embassy with a report that raised the possibility that Wilson was wrong on that score. He had stumbled on what looked like nothing less than a plot to assassinate Hitler.

Among Beam’s acquaintances was Erwin Respondek, whom he described as “a valuable informant” passed along to him by Douglas Miller, the embassy’s commercial attaché, who had left Berlin in 1937. A Catholic economist who despised Hitler and his movement, Respondek had served in the Reichstag in the early 1930s, when the Center Party’s Heinrich Brüning was chancellor. Brüning’s attempts to ban the SA and the SS won him the enmity of the Nazis, and he fled the country in 1934. But Respondek could afford to stay in Berlin, since he was hardly a famous figure. While he was banned from politics, he continued to monitor information on the country’s economy and finances, passing reports along to both the American Embassy, through Miller, and Brüning. In the second week of September, when the crisis of Czechoslovakia was building to its climax, Beam was invited to a Herrenabend , a men’s evening, at Respondek’s house on the outskirts of Berlin.

It was a small gathering. Aside from Beam and his host, there was Professor Hermann Muckermann, a former Jesuit priest who wrote about science and Christian ethics, and ventured into the discussions about racial theories and eugenics. The other guest was a Luftwaffe colonel. Once Respondek’s wife served dinner and left the men alone, Respondek declared, “Let’s get down to business and talk about the matter we came here to discuss.” As Beam recalled, the talk then turned to Hitler’s apparent determination to seize the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. From the comments of both Respondek and the colonel, it appeared that they were part of a conspiracy against Hitler that included General Franz Halder, who had recently replaced General Ludwig Beck as the army’s chief of staff. Beck had sought assurances from Hitler that his plans for Czechoslovakia wouldn’t lead to a war, only to be dismissed. Now, if Respondek and the Luftwaffe colonel’s information was accurate, his successor and several other senior officers appeared to be contemplating a stunning act of resistance.

As Beam wrote, “The plan was to assassinate Hitler if he moved to the point of making war.” Muckermann was visibly nervous about that kind of talk, and around midnight he whispered to the young American: “Let’s get out of here fast.” Making their excuses, Beam drove Mucker-mann back to the city center, both of them breathing a sigh of relief as he did so.

Back at the embassy, Beam wrote a report for Wilson on what had transpired, showing it first to Truman Smith. The military attaché made light of Beam’s account, claiming that no such plot was conceivable in Hitler’s highly disciplined army. Beam submitted his report to Wilson anyway, and he believed that the ambassador passed it along to one of Hull’s advisors. But he never heard anything back either from Wilson or Washington.

After Britain’s Chamberlain and France’s Daladier acceded to Hitler’s demands for the Sudetenland later that month, Beam encountered Respondek again and inquired what had happened with the alleged Halder plot against the German leader. “He said that since Hitler had not gone to war, the coup had been abandoned,” Beam wrote later. This was consistent with what Halder and several other Wehrmacht (Army) officers claimed at the end of World War II. They were undoubtedly eager to play up their purported opposition to Hitler, and much of what they had to say was greeted with understandable skepticism by the victors, especially at the Nuremberg Trials. But Beam’s account indicates that they had at least seriously discussed the option of striking at Hitler then.

Once the German leader successfully pulled off the Munich Pact, however, the situation changed radically. France and Britain had caved to Hitler’s demands for the Sudetenland, marking the apogee of the policy of appeasement and setting the stage for the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia that would culminate in the German takeover of what was left of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939. As Field Marshal Erich von Manstein explained after the war: “We had watched Germany’s precarious course along the razor’s edge to date with close attention and were increasingly amazed at Hitler’s luck in attaining—hitherto without recourse to arms—all his overt and covert political aims. The man seemed to have an infallible instinct.”

But if Munich eliminated any chance of a revolt of Hitler’s military brass prior to World War II, Ambassador Wilson—like Britain’s Chamberlain and France’s Daladier, who had signed onto the ignominious pact—viewed the outcome there as a step toward sanity. In a letter that he wrote to Secretary Hull soon after, which for an unexplained reason he never mailed, Wilson drew a contrast between “the spontaneous outburst of joy, relief and hope for the future” that greeted news of the Munich Pact in Western Europe with the “rather reluctant appreciation given in the press of our country.”

His judgment on which reaction was more justified came through loud and clear. The British and the French, he wrote, “have perhaps a deeper knowledge and appreciation of the problems of Europe than the American people, remote from Europe, can have… it is far easier to be dogmatic in one’s judgments with a wide stretch of sea between our country and a possible enemy.” According to Beam, Wilson wrote to “his British colleague”—presumably that country’s ambassador in Berlin—about the “stout piece of work” he had done to help produce the Munich Pact.

Roosevelt had sounded a similar note when he had congratulated Chamberlain on the “peace” deal. But at the very least, there was a growing awareness in Washington that the pact had come at a very high price. Writing in his diary on September 28, Jay Pierrepont Moffat, the State Department’s chief of the Division of European Affairs, noted: “I do think the chances of preserving the peace have immeasurably improved but it likewise is difficult for me to see how this can be done except at the expense of Czechoslovakia.”

Beam, who returned to the United States on home leave in October, found Washington’s mood to be “completely different” from the one that was predominating in diplomatic circles in Berlin. “There was a general sense of outrage over the Austrian take-over, as high-lighted by the plight of resident Jews, as well as over the Nazis’ unopposed and clearly predestined subjugation of Czechoslovakia,” he recalled. At a meeting he attended with Hull, the secretary of state “vented his frustration in Biblical predictions of impending European disaster.”

It wasn’t just many Americans back home who took a different view. So did some of the Americans reporting from Germany, most notably Shirer, who was back in Berlin as Hitler pushed Europe to the brink. Sitting in the balcony just above Hitler as the dictator issued his demands in a speech on September 26, Shirer recorded in his diary: “He’s still got that nervous tic. All during his speech he kept cocking his shoulder, and the opposite leg from the knee down would bounce up. Audience couldn’t see it, but I could.” Shirer added that “for the first time in all the years I’ve observed him he seemed tonight to have completely lost control of himself.”