Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

In a 1937 updated edition of his famous book Germany Puts the Clock Back , Edgar Mowrer, the Chicago Daily News correspondent who had been forced to leave Germany in 1933, chronicled Hitler’s increasingly aggressive behavior, including moving troops into the demilitarized Rhineland, his repudiation of the Versailles Treaty and all its restrictions on a new military buildup, and Germany and Italy’s direct aid for the fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War. “A brief calendar of the first four years of Hitler reads like a hymn of victory from a Prussian historian or war poet,” he wrote.

By the end of 1938 and early 1939, the calendar was much fuller and the hymn soaring to new heights, extolling triumph after triumph. Austria had been annexed and Czechoslovakia carved up. To support the Nationalists against the Republicans in Spain’s civil war, Hitler had dispatched troops and his newest fighter planes to that country, using the conflict there as a testing ground for his latest weaponry and offsetting Stalin’s support for the Republican side. In March 1939, Hitler had demanded the Baltic port of Memel—or, as it is called today, Klaipeda—from Lithuania, and that tiny country quickly capitulated. Nothing, it seemed, stood in the way of more German victories. When the Spanish Civil War ended with the Nationalists triumphant, Beam watched from the windows of the U.S. Embassy the April victory parade of the German troops returning from there. He admitted it was “an awesome sight.”

While Roosevelt still insisted he wanted to do everything to ensure the peace, by early 1939 he was beginning to make preparations for an alternative scenario. In his State of the Union address on January 4, he stressed that there were “many methods short of war, but stronger and more effective than mere words, of bringing home to aggressor governments the aggregate sentiments of our own people.” Specifically, that meant upping military expenditures, which he promptly did by submitting a budget request with a 30 percent overall increase to $1.3 billion, not including an additional $500 million for acquiring new military aircraft.

For a while, the administration had considered sending Wilson back to his post in Berlin, but that idea was scuttled when Hitler took over what was left of Czechoslovakia in March. In the internal discussions in the State Department, Messersmith—the former consul general in Berlin—“his eyes aglow, favored any move directed against the Nazis,” Moffat recorded in his diary. The two men were friends, but they frequently engaged in verbal jousts. “George, I wonder if you know what you are doing,” Moffat told him on one occasion. “You are helping us into this war which is coming on.” Messersmith replied by insisting that it was impossible for Hitler and the Western democracies to coexist.

Many of his colleagues were more cautious, and Roosevelt was still inclined to offer what he hoped would be seen as an olive branch. On April 14, he sent an appeal to Hitler and Mussolini that they pledge not to attack thirty-one countries in Europe and the Middle East—including the most likely next target, Poland—for at least ten years.

The president wasn’t optimistic about the chances for success, but he was still stung by the mocking response from Berlin. On April 28, Hitler addressed the Reichstag, but he was focused on his audience abroad. Representing the U.S. Embassy, Beam witnessed his delivery, which the German leader had prepared for by first asking several of the thirty-one states whether they feared a German attack. “The great majority had replied in the negative which enabled Hitler to read out their names slowly, with an air of false drama,” the young diplomat recalled. “It was a beautifully-acted farce which provoked loud laughter.”

Beam didn’t overlook the “particularly chilling nature” of the speech, despite that bit of theater. Poland wasn’t one of the countries that Hitler had asked for its opinion, and he proceeded to denounce that country’s refusal to accede to his demands for Danzig. He also castigated the British for taking Poland’s side in this dispute. He renounced both the 1934 German-Polish nonaggression pact, which was supposed to ensure peace between those neighbors for ten years, and the 1935 Naval Agreement with Britain, which limited the German Navy to 35 percent of the tonnage of the British fleet. As Beam put it, Hitler was performing “as the world’s then most powerful head of state”—and he clearly meant for everyone to understand that.

Despite Hitler’s increasingly belligerent tone, there were still plenty of Americans who wanted to believe he was no threat to them. It was hardly surprising that those who desperately wanted to keep their country out of another global conflagration should feel that way, and some American envoys could be counted among them. Shortly after the Munich Pact, Joseph Kennedy, the American ambassador in London, had floated the idea that democracies and dictatorships “could advantageously bend their energies toward solving common problems by an attempt to re-establish good relations on a world basis.” But it was surprising when Wiegand, Hearst’s veteran correspondent who had covered Germany since World War I, produced a major two-part article that encouraged exactly those kinds of illusions.

Writing in the April and May 1939 editions of Cosmopolitan , Wiegand offered a lengthy profile of Hitler, examining his personality and politics. The magazine claimed the author was “the undisputed dean of American foreign correspondents and one of the greatest reporters of our time,” citing as evidence Wiegand’s early contacts with Hitler, dating back to 1921. In particular, it explained how the correspondent was “more than a little psychic himself” to recognize so early that Hitler had to be taken seriously. “It takes genius to know genius,” it declared, with no trace of irony. “And a genius indeed is Karl von Wiegand.”

Wiegand’s first installment in the April issue described how Hitler had become “a veritable human meteor streaking the dark political skies of Europe—an ill omen to millions, a sign to other millions.” Like a meteor, Hitler “is being consumed by fires of his own being,” including “his unbelievably deep hatred for the Jews” and “his insatiable greed for ruthless power.” But Wiegand was also clearly in awe of what this strange figure he had first met in Munich had achieved. “Measuring his personal achievements, future historians may record Adolf Hitler as the political genius of this era, perhaps of this century,” he wrote. Nonetheless, he indicated that Hitler was acutely conscious that a climax was coming soon and his own life could be cut short. As a result, his actions were marked by “a fever of impatience, haste, hurry, drive,” which is “a state of mind in which any man may stumble.”

In his second installment in the May issue, however, Wiegand delivered an oddly reassuring message to his American readers: “Adolf Hitler is no physical menace to the United States except (1) in an agreement or alliance with Great Britain; (2) in the event that England should turn Fascist, or (3) if Nazi Germany should conquer England. The probability of any of these eventualities is remote.”

Hitler had demonstrated his own near psychic qualities by predicting that neither Britain nor France would fight to save Czechoslovakia, he added. When it came to what the German leader would do next, Wiegand declared that he was no prophet—but that didn’t prevent him from making a sweeping prediction. “Hitler has achieved without war what no other man has accomplished for centuries,” he wrote. “As I know Der Führer, he will not in his senses stake those achievements and his unique place in history on the uncertain gamble of a deliberately planned aggressive war.”