Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

Shirer had been hoping all along that the Czechs would fight, even if the British and the French wanted to convince them otherwise. “For if they do, then there’s a European war, and Hitler can’t win it,” he wrote in his diary on September 19. When the appeasement deal was struck, Shirer was practically sickened by the cheers for peace—“a curious commentary on this sick, decadent continent,” he wrote. And he observed the physical change in the German leader. “How different Hitler at two this morning… I noticed his swagger. The tic was gone!”

Shirer understood that Hitler had been allowed to score a victory that, far from ensuring “peace for our time” as Chamberlain famously claimed, would have disastrous consequences. His gloom only deepened for another reason: Max Jordan of NBC managed to air the text of the Munich Pact an hour before Shirer did. For the CBS man, this amounted, in his own words, to “one of the worst beatings I’ve ever taken.”

Angus Thuermer was another young American who was eager to explore Hitler’s Germany, arriving there in 1938. After he graduated from the University of Illinois, his father had suggested that he should spend six months studying German in Berlin, and then six months studying French in Paris. “He was giving me an extra year of college,” Thuermer recalled, looking back at that life-changing experience more than seven decades later. But instead of going on to France, he stayed in Germany, not only studying the language but also picking up work from American correspondents there. Soon, he was offered a full-time job for the Associated Press, working under bureau chief Louis Lochner right up until the United States entered World War II in December 1941.

While he was still living in Hegel Haus, a dormitory for foreign students in Berlin, in late 1938, Thuermer took a trip to Munich, eager to see the Nazis’ annual observance of “The Ninth of November”—the anniversary of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch when sixteen members of the movement were killed. Arriving in that city, Thuermer met a young American missionary who spoke fluent German and managed to convince an SS man to admit the two of them to the VIP grandstand so that they could see how the “martyrs” were honored. (The SS man didn’t know the American was a missionary.) As a result, Thuermer had a clear view of the procession of Nazi luminaries, which included Goebbels, Hess, Himmler, Goering and Hitler.

“Loose as the formation was, in the midst of his Brownshirt chums, Hitler, the Leader, walked just slightly apart,” Thuermer wrote in his unpublished memoir. “By his stature, his gait, the cut of his jib, a sailor would say, he was not impressive. If I had not known for whom to look, I might have passed him by in a general glance over the group.”

But the ceremony itself was solemn and, for the party faithful, moving. A man carried “the Blood Banner” in front of the leaders. “The configuration was reminiscent of the acolyte carrying the cross up the nave of the church,” Thuermer noted. Every 50 yards or so, there was a 20-foot-high bright red temporary obelisk bearing the name of one of “the fallen.” When they reached Königsplatz, two white stone mausoleums, each containing eight bronze coffins, were flanked by hundreds of motionless SS men. As a speaker called out the names on the coffins, the SS men answered in unison “Hier!” The ceremony ended with the “Horst Wessel Song,” the Nazi anthem that, as Thuermer put it, was “a genuine rouser.”

It included the words: “Comrades shot by the red front and reactionaries march in spirit in our ranks.”

Once the ceremony was over, Thuermer bought himself a third-class ticket and boarded the overnight train to Berlin, stowing his bicycle in the baggage car. Lulled to sleep in the train, he had no idea what was happening that night around the country. Arriving in the capital, he retrieved his bike and rode from the station to Hegel Haus, hoping to make it in time to get a cheap breakfast there. Suddenly, he heard “the smash and tinkle of breaking glass.” Applying his hand brake, he saw a shattered show window just ahead of him. Unbeknownst to him, he was witnessing part of what would be called Kristallnacht. Although most of the violence had taken place during the early morning hours, he saw thugs with Nazi armbands still smashing shop windows, and someone inside the store breaking a grand piano to pieces. He saw a typewriter come flying out of another window and land on Unter den Linden—“one of the great avenues of Western Europe.”

After a brief stop at Hegel Haus, Thuermer and a Dutch student rode their bicycles around the city to see more. Down one street, they saw smoke from a burning synagogue, but they decided not to risk getting closer, fearing they would be arrested. “I was seeing, eye-witnessing an unreal frenzy… it was the n-th power of what I had seen at Nazi rallies,” he recalled. “That was sound. This was fury.” Since Jewish shops had the names of their owners written in white paint on the front window, they were easy to spot. Thuermer saw one shop with a new sign announcing THIS SHOP IS BEING PURCHASED BY AN ARYAN. Later that same day, the sign was changed to this HAS BEEN PURCHASED BY AN ARYAN. The unmistakable message: it should no longer be targeted.

Eager to see as much as possible, Thuermer and an English student took buses to other parts of the city. While they stopped to observe the spectacle, the locals were doing just the opposite at first. “The citizens were just walking along staring straight ahead, pretending they didn’t know what was happening,” he said. By the afternoon, though, crowds were no longer pretending; they watched the destruction in the areas with the most Jewish shops. Some of those who were continuing to smash at will were boys in their teens; others were grown men. Very few police were in sight. As Thuermer observed, “Those who were there were uncharacteristically unobtrusive, obviously following orders not to interfere with the rowdy Brownshirts.”

Thuermer offered two possible explanations for the lack of any opposition to this orgy of anti-Semitic violence: most Germans, by this time, “believed in it all” when it came to Nazi ideology; or they were too frightened to say anything. “By the autumn of 1938 everyone knew what happened to opponents of the regime,” he wrote.

Other Americans also witnessed Kristallnacht and felt its consequences. Charles Thayer, a diplomat assigned to the Berlin consulate, heard horror stories from all around the city. One of his friends witnessed how Nazis threw a small boy from a second-floor window into a mob below. “His leg broken, the boy tried to crawl on hands and knees through the forest of kicking black boots until my friend plunged into the mob and rescued him,” he recounted. While synagogues burned, the thugs ransacked Jewish-owned department stores. At Wertheim, they pushed grand pianos off the gallery level so that they would smash to pieces on the main floor six floors down.

As the violence continued for two days, the American consulate’s staff had to duck in and out of the building through the fire escape in the back because, in the front, panicked Jews blocked the entrance as they tried to get in. “All day long Kempinskis, Wertheims, Rosenthals, some of the oldest and most famous names in Berlin, trembled in front of our desks, pleading for visas or passports—anything to save them from the madness that had seized the city,” Thayer recalled. His small apartment, he added, “was crammed with Jewish families seeking refuge until the storm subsided.”

Thayer appeared to be more generous than Thuermer in his assessment of the reaction of ordinary Berliners to those events, explaining that “the many Berliners who were neither Nazis nor Jews stood by looking aghast and ashamed but helpless at the sordid spectacle.” Still, after the war he confessed that he had a less forgiving attitude than that. During the heavy Allied bombing raids on German cities, especially those with historic Old Towns like Hamburg, he wondered whether the destruction was really necessary. “But for Berlin I seldom felt a qualm,” he wrote.