Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

If his listeners had any doubts about who he was really talking about, he quickly dispelled them. “I shall never make such a mistake,” he declared. “I know how to keep my hold on people after I have passed on. I shall be the Führer they look up at and go home to talk of and remember. My life shall not end in the mere form of death. It will, on the contrary, begin then.”

Standing at the rostrum of the Reichstag on July 19, Hitler was practically preening—not just for his Nazi followers but also for the diplomatic corps and foreign press in attendance. “It was Hitler triumphant, at the peak of his career, savoring to the full his victories,” Harsch wrote, calling it a scene that “no one present could ever forget.” The Nazi leader dispensed promotions and decorations for his generals, and theatrically picked up a small box he had placed on the corner of the Speaker’s desk occupied by Goering as the president of the Reichstag. Opening it to display a diamond-studded Grand Cross of the Order of the Iron Cross, he awarded it to his loyal follower, whom he also elevated to the rank of Reich marshal, a special rank above all field marshals.

Hitler then directed his words across the English Channel. He denounced Winston Churchill, who had replaced Chamberlain as prime minister at the same time as the Germans launched their invasion of the Low Countries, as a warmonger. But he also claimed that a peace deal was still possible. “I consider myself in a position to make this appeal since I am not the vanquished begging favors, but the victor speaking in the name of reason,” he declared. “I see no reason why this war must go on.”

The Reichstag erupted with applause. Harsch was standing beside Alexander Kirk, who, the reporter noted, displayed “a languid air.” A German Foreign Ministry official rushed up to the American chargé d’affaires. “Oh, Mr. Ambassador, isn’t it wonderful, now we can have peace,” he proclaimed. Kirk had no intention of falling into a diplomatic trap. He ostentatiously stifled a yawn with his hand, offering a nonreply. “I am hungry,” he said. “Where might I find food?”

By most accounts of the Americans in Berlin, ordinary Germans weren’t nearly as exultant as their leaders might have expected. On the day Paris fell, loudspeakers on Wilhelmplatz, flanked by Hitler’s Chancellery, the Propaganda Ministry and, close by, Goering’s Air Ministry, blared party songs. Harsch, who watched the scene, counted no more than a hundred or so people on the big square. An excited announcer declared that German troops were marching on the Place de la Concorde, followed by the playing of “Deutschland über Alles.” “The little groups of people put up their right arms in perfunctory Nazi salutes,” Harsch recalled. “The loud-speakers went silent. And everyone walked away. Not a sound of cheering. Not an exclamation of pleasure.”

But Harsch understood that the lack of jubilation didn’t signal the kind of breakdown in morale that many in the West had hoped for. “The loot of war of every description which poured into Germany from midsummer 1940 through the autumn months seemed a convincing argument to many Germans that war can be profitable and that a final victory would burden their bare tables and empty cupboards with the good things of the earth,” he wrote. This made the Nazis’ case better than the official propaganda. “Dr. Goebbels let Dutch cheese, Belgian laces and Parisian silks do his talking for him.”

To be sure, the sudden appearance of women in stockings in Berlin without multiple runs, along with the infusion of new supplies of food and clothing, didn’t last long. Rationing remained in place, and so did a stricter work regimen. Still, Harsch, Shirer and others pointed out that most ordinary Germans wanted peace—but, in the sense that their leaders did, which meant on Hitler’s terms. They wanted to avoid more fighting if possible, but they wanted victory in any case. Many Germans were elevated to much more senior positions in the occupied lands than they could have ever aspired to hold at home—and quickly became accustomed to their new status. “These Germans have not only acquired the actual means to wealth beyond their wildest dreams but have established themselves as privileged permanent residents in every sense,” Harsch explained.

Then, too, the successive German victories turned even some early skeptics into true believers. Schultz, the Chicago Tribune correspondent, told the story of the wife of a professor she knew who had been “a violent anti-Nazi.” After her son became a member of the Hitlerjugend, the Gestapo arrested him for homosexuality. The parents frantically appealed to Schultz for help, and the American suggested they get a good Nazi lawyer and prepare to offer big donations to the party. Schultz also arranged for one of her Nazi contacts to take a high party official to a lavish dinner to soften him up. Eventually, “by dint of perjury and bribes,” Schultz wrote, the boy was released, avoiding what the high party official described as the “inferno” of a concentration camp. The father also had to join the party to demonstrate his loyalty.

Nonetheless, when Germany invaded Norway, the mother came to Schultz all excited. “Maybe it was meant for us to go through Nazism—it has made us strong,” she told the American, who was startled by her transformation. “It has brought us great military victories, and it will bring us more.” Based on such experiences, Schultz concluded, “The lust for conquest is there, deep in the heart of the German woman.” In her 1944 book Germany Will Try It Again , she predicted that, once Germany lost the war, many of those women would be disillusioned “but not with Nazism—only with its failure.”

As one of the few women correspondents in Berlin, Schultz was particularly interested in Nazi policies about women and the family. While Nazis were undermining the security of the country and its people, she pointed out, they shrewdly won many women over by appealing to their emotions and insecurities.

From its early days, the Nazi Party made a show of raw virility. “I have seen the sex instinct deliberately aroused in many ways,” Schultz wrote. “At mass meetings, speeches dwelling on the copulative process of the Nazi male would send the Storm Troopers marching out of the hall all set for a demonstration. They never had to wait long for a partner. German women would wait outside the meeting places.” With Hitler intent on boosting the birth rate, newsstands displayed “books and magazines filled with nude men and women,” as the CBS newcomer Flannery observed. “It was plain that Nazi Germany planned all this to but one end.”

With more and more men serving far from home and, especially after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, dying there, the authorities stepped up their campaign for more births, whatever a woman’s marital status. “The word illegitimate must be blotted out of the German language,” Minister of Labor Robert Ley declared. Flannery reported that women who felt they needed more social respectability could legally take the name of a soldier who had died in battle. While Nazi propagandists claimed that unwed mothers were giving birth to children of “young German heroes,” Schultz pointed out that the real fathers were often “the married bosses of little secretaries, filing clerks and saleswomen.” This created a class of women “who clung to Nazism because the Nazi Party would protect their illegitimate children,” she added.

The American reporters began to notice a parallel trend: the disappearance of those who were deemed physically or mentally unfit. In a broadcast on December 11, 1940, Flannery mentioned a German claim that British bombers had hit a nursing home in southwestern Germany. When Hitler added in a speech that the British were targeting German hospitals, he concluded that all of this was a cover-up for “their murder of the insane, crippled, hopelessly ill, even aged.”