Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

Welles knew Berlin from an earlier era. Arriving on the morning of March 1, he got an immediate introduction to the new Berlin as he was driven from the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof to the Adlon Hotel. Along Unter den Linden, the city’s premier boulevard, armed guards stood watch as Polish prisoners shoveled snow from the streets. On the same day, he met with Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, accompanied by Alexander Kirk. The chargé d’affaires had been cut off from direct contacts at that level because of the Nazi regime’s irritation that Roosevelt had ordered Ambassador Wilson back to Washington after Kristallnacht, so Kirk was pleased to get in the door. But the meeting was a complete disappointment.

Welles suffered through three hours of “pomposity and absurdity” and “an amazing conglomeration of misinformation and deliberate lies,” he recalled. The foreign minister, he wrote, had “a very stupid mind.” Because he didn’t want to do anything that might jeopardize his appointment with Hitler the next day, the envoy from Washington offered only the most cautious responses to Ribbentrop’s propagandistic monologue.

At eleven the next morning, Welles was escorted into Hitler’s new Chancellery, which he considered “a monstrous edifice” with the feel of a modern factory. Hitler was cordial but formal as he met him, and he struck Welles as taller than he expected. “He had in real life none of the ludicrous features so often shown in his photographs,” Welles noted. “He seemed in excellent physical condition and in good training… He was dignified, both in speech and in movement.”

But if Welles may have been unduly impressed by the contrast between Hitler in real life and the numerous caricatures of him in the West—certainly “excellent physical condition” wasn’t a term even his aides employed—the American diplomat was coolly analytical about his message. The German leader claimed to want peace with England and to have spread German rule only where it was absolutely necessary. “I did not want this war,” he insisted. “It has been forced upon me against my will. It is a waste of my time. My life should have been spent in constructing and not in destroying.”

Predictably, those protestations were accompanied by new threats. Hitler warned against trying to make a distinction between the Nazis and the German people, insisting that he had “the support of every German.” Then he added: “I can see no hope for the establishment of any lasting peace until the will of England and France to destroy Germany is itself destroyed. I feel that there is no way by which the will to destroy Germany can itself be destroyed except through a complete German victory.”

Winding up, Hitler once again claimed that he only wanted “lasting peace.” But if anything, his entire performance had the opposite effect upon his guest. “I remember thinking to myself as I got into the car that it was only too tragically plain that all decisions had already been made,” Welles recalled. “The best that could be hoped for was delay, for what little that might be worth.”

Some Americans still refused to accept that verdict. In particular, James D. Mooney, the president of the General Motors Overseas Corporation, had hopes that a wider war could be averted. In October 1939, Otto Dietrich, Hitler’s press chief, asked AP bureau chief Lochner to help set up a meeting with Mooney, who oversaw GM’s plants in Germany and all around the globe. The purpose, he said, was to see if the United States could help defuse the conflict between Germany and England and France. Clearly, the other aim was to keep the Americans out of the war. Lochner, who had been a peace activist during World War I, agreed to do so—although he expressed surprise that Dietrich had turned to him since he was familiar with “my uncompromising anti-Nazi views.”

On October 19, Mooney met with Goering, who dangled the vision of an accord between his country and the United States, Britain and France. In Paris, Mooney reported his conversation to American Ambassador William Bullitt, who was dismissive of the whole idea that Mooney should be involved in any search for a negotiated solution. Roosevelt met Mooney in the White House on December 22 and the businessman took his willingness to hear him out as a signal that he could continue his quest on an unofficial basis.

On March 4, 1940, two days after Hitler met Welles, Mooney was ushered into the Chancellery for his own face-to-face meeting with Hitler. Evidently, the Nazis still believed that he might play the mediation role they had suggested to him. Treating him with the utmost seriousness, Hitler told Mooney that Germany was willing to respect England’s world power status so long as Germany was respected in a similar way. He claimed that this could be the basis for a peace agreement with Roosevelt, which could then lead to arms reductions and new international trade. After more meetings with German officials, Mooney sent five messages to Roosevelt about his talks. In a letter dated April 2, the president thanked him for them, writing that they had been of “real value” to him.

But Mooney failed to get in to see Roosevelt personally to follow up. He was convinced that presidential aide Harry Hopkins and others, who saw him as trying to push a policy of appeasement, blocked him at every turn. Recognizing that he wasn’t going to influence the course of events, Mooney wrote Roosevelt a letter tinged with frustration, expressing his regret that he hadn’t had “the opportunity to present to you some of the arguments for getting back on the course that you and I believed in last winter.” He added, “I still hope before general hostilities break out again against England—and it is beginning to look as though this may happen very soon… that I may be able to interest you in taking a position for peace.”

Interestingly, Lochner, who had tried to help Mooney at every turn, apparently had hoped the same thing. The AP bureau chief was indeed anti-Nazi, but he remained a peace activist at heart—even after the invasion of Poland.

Welles had been exactly right: the decisions were already made. Hitler’s armies attacked Denmark and Norway in April and then invaded Holland, Belgium and France in May, rolling up victories at a pace that startled even the American correspondents and diplomats in Berlin who had been the most prescient about Germany’s intentions. After listening to Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop proclaim on April 9 that it was Britain that was guilty of “the most flagrant violation of a neutral country” and Germany’s forces were merely protecting their latest victims, Shirer confessed: “I was stunned. I shouldn’t have been—after so many years in Hitlerland—but I was.”

Denmark surrendered on the same day as the German troops appeared. Harsch flew to Copenhagen in a German transport plane and reported at the end of the day: “I never dreamed that I should ever see such heartache in a people.” He found the Danes “crushed, physically and mentally.” Broadcasting from Berlin, Shirer reported that the Germans had expected the Norwegians to fold just as quickly—but they were wrong on that count. The Norwegians fought back on land and sea, aided by Britain’s Royal Navy and troops from both Britain and France. On April 14, Shirer wrote a thought in his diary that he could never get past the censor for his broadcast: “Hitler is sowing something in Europe that one day will destroy not only him but his nation.”

After Hitler launched the invasion of the Low Countries on May 10, not waiting for an end to the fighting in Norway, “the German steamroller,” as Shirer called it, looked to be unstoppable. And the German authorities were confident enough to permit American correspondents to join German troops on the march in Belgium on May 20. “It’s been dream of every newsman in Berlin ever since 5/10 when Reich’s gigantic offensive via Holland, Belgium began to see Hitler’s amazing, awe inspiring armed forces in action,” Lochner, one of the first three correspondents to do so, reported to New York that day.