Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

In January 1940, as a bitter cold winter set in, the Americans flooded the tennis court in the back of the embassy, turning it into an ice-skating rink. But for all their amenities, including shipments of warm winter clothes from Denmark, they were in close enough contact with life around them to dismiss reports back home about the desperate conditions of most Germans and the possibility that this could bring down the Nazi regime.

To be sure, the privations of the war were making themselves felt, and Kennan was struck by the “unmistakable inner detachment of the people from the pretentious purposes of the regime.” But he also remarked on “the way life went on, as best it could, under the growing difficulties of wartime discipline.” Russell reported a similar lack of enthusiasm for the war, adding: “But here Germany was, right before my eyes, working and living and going strong.” In other words, the speculation back in the United States that the Germans were prepared to rise up in revolt was nothing more than wishful thinking.

As the embassy staffers arranged the paperwork for numerous Americans who had surfaced to make arrangements to return home in those first months of the war, their island felt lonelier than before. And they weren’t completely immune to the deteriorating living conditions. By January, hot water was usually no longer available in their apartments, prompting the embassy to put in two tin bathtubs on the building’s upper floor, one for women and one for men.

Late in January, Russell was invited to lunch at the apartment of Consul Richard Stratton, where he met Jane Dyer, whose brother was also working at the embassy. She was up for a visit from Rome, where she was studying music, but her real home was Alabama. “I never expected to be so far away from home in my life,” she proclaimed in a husky voice with a thick southern accent that instantly charmed Russell, who had grown up in neighboring Mississippi. After lunch, they played records, and Russell danced with her. All of which made for a lovely afternoon. Toward the end of it, Dyer asked: “Is Germany really at war? I mean, I haven’t seen anything to remind me of war. Everything is the same as it always was.”

It was Stratton who replied. “You don’t feel anything yet. Just like those children playing out in the street. They don’t feel the war either—yet. But the time will come when war will come home to all of us—to Americans, Russians, Africans, children and unborn babies. I think so, anyway.”

The party was over, and Dyer and Russell pondered his words in silence.

William Russell had announced his plans to leave Berlin during that first winter of the war. His supervisors in the consular section offered to try to get him a raise and a new title, but he knew that he was at a disadvantage because he had been hired directly by the embassy after he had studied German at the University of Berlin. The foreign service liked to reward those who rose through the normal channels, starting in Washington and then going to their first assignments abroad. Besides, he wanted to try his luck as a writer, and he already had penned much of the manuscript of the book that he would publish in 1941 with the title Berlin Embassy. It was a vivid account of his experiences there, providing Americans with the kind of personal insights that were often missing from news reports.

On April 10, 1940, three days before his scheduled departure, Russell was sitting in his parked car in the back of the embassy with a German girlfriend. “We had not gone there to spoon, but to listen to the automobile radio,” the young clerk recalled somewhat defensively. The morning newspapers had been filled with what he called the “sickening news” that German troops had moved into Denmark and Norway. On the radio, Goebbels was reading the ultimatums that were delivered to the Nazis’ next victims, claiming that Germany had “no territorial ambitions” against them and that “neither of these two countries will be used as a base for operations against the enemy.”

Russell started to make a sarcastic comment, but then he saw that his girlfriend had tears in her eyes. “That hateful damn liar!” she exclaimed. “That hateful damn liar!”

For Russell, this was one of the final reminders that not all Germans were marching in lockstep behind Hitler. Before driving off three days later, he said good-bye to a long list of acquaintances from his three-year sojourn in Berlin—“Americans, Germans, Nazis, anti-Nazis, rich, poor, intellectuals, bums,” as he put it. Reaching Innsbruck, he was summoned to Gestapo headquarters ostensibly for questioning about his car’s papers. They also searched his car, leaving his manuscript strewn about—but still intact.

He drove on to Italy. At the border, a fat customs official couldn’t have been friendlier as he stamped his passport. “Now, why do you want to leave Germany, young man? You liked our country, didn’t you?” When Russell reflexively assented, he added: “You come back when we have peace, eh?”

Germany had been exciting, even pleasant at times, for the young man from Mississippi, but Russell found it hard to imagine a peaceful continent anytime soon. When he was sitting in his car with his girlfriend in Berlin, he had concluded that Hitler “had embarked on a course from which there could be no turning back.” Looking back at the steep hills behind him as he crossed into Italy, he was stripped of all illusions. “Not a gun to be seen, not a building, not a soldier,” he wrote. “Yet I knew those woods were teeming with soldiers, bristling with guns.”

Many American officials had come to much the same conclusion even before the Germans occupied Denmark and Norway. But there was still often far too much wishful thinking about Germany in the United States, particularly when it came to imagining that internal discontent spurred by shortages might topple Hitler’s regime and limit its military reach. Jacob Beam visited Washington during that first winter of the war and indicated that he had been treated like a social pariah for warning about how powerful Germany had become. “The last thing Washington upper circles wanted to be told was the truth, that Hitler controlled the world’s most efficient war machine,” his friend Joseph Harsch concluded.

The young diplomat told Harsch and other American reporters that they hadn’t succeeded in conveying to their readers the extent of Germany’s frightening might. “Jake Beam found himself being accused of being pro-Nazi when he tried to tell people in Washington that the German tanks were not immobilized from lack of oil and grease,” Harsch added. Like Truman Smith, the military attaché who had concluded his final tour in Berlin in April 1939 after providing a steady stream of incisive intelligence reports about Germany’s rapid militarization, Beam learned that bad news was often greeted with suspicion about the motives of the person who delivered it.

Smith, of course, had been the first American diplomat to meet Hitler, back in 1922. At the beginning of March 1940, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles was the last one to do so. He went to Europe on what he described as a fact-finding mission, without the power to negotiate—or, more important, to threaten the use of force if Hitler didn’t back down. “Only one thing could have deflected Hitler from his purpose: the sure knowledge that the power of the United States would be directed against him if he attempted to carry out his intention of conquering the world by force,” Welles wrote in his memoir. Facing strong pressure from isolationists to stay out of the war in Europe, the Roosevelt Administration wasn’t about to let its envoy suggest anything like that.