Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

Flannery learned of a young man in Leipzig who had become suspicious of a proliferation of death notices that contained the phrase “After weeks of uncertainty we received the unbelievable news of his death and cremation.” The young man called on some of the families, discovering that in each case the dead person had been confined to an institution. Flannery inquired about all those death notices with identical wording, but Nazi officials denied that any murders were taking place. Indirect confirmation came in another form: subsequent death notices avoided such telltale phrases.

When Flannery was first assigned to Berlin in October 1940, he was hardly a fervent anti-Nazi. “I was one of those people who were known as ‘open-minded,’ who did not believe that Nazi Germany was necessarily a threat to the United States, who believed it was at least possible that we might do business with Hitler,” he recalled. After his first couple of months in Hitlerland, he was becoming far less “open-minded.”

While Flannery and many of his colleagues found it increasingly difficult to hide their growing abhorrence of Nazi practices, a few Americans lived in Berlin apart from their fellow countrymen for the opposite reason: they had signed up to work for German radio’s English-language broadcasts. They served as the Nazis’ American propagandists.

In some cases, they appeared to be motivated by little more than opportunism. Edward Delaney was a failed actor who had bounced around various stage- and film-related jobs in Australia and South Africa, and also done a public relations stint for MGM based in Chicago. Casting about for something new, he went to Berlin in the summer of 1939 and met with Hans Schirmer of the Foreign Ministry. According to Delaney, Schirmer explained he was looking for someone who could broadcast “human interest” material about Germany “to counteract much adverse criticism by those who, for the most part, knew little or nothing about conditions in that part of Europe.”

Delaney claimed that he was assured his job would not be connected to Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, but it was a flimsy distinction. The American left little doubt why he jumped at the opportunity. “The remuneration he [Schirmer] mentioned was acceptable,” he recalled. Soon he was denouncing the British for “wanton, premeditated murder” and Roosevelt for pushing the United States toward war. Later, he would justify his actions on the grounds that he was a de facto spokesman for America’s isolationist movement and a pioneer in warning about the dangers of Communism as opposed to Nazism. Shirer delivered his verdict on Delaney in his diary on September 26, 1940: “He has a diseased hatred for Jews, but otherwise is a mild fellow and broadcasts the cruder type of Nazi propaganda without questioning.”

In his brief remarks about the American propagandists, Shirer called Frederick Kaltenbach “probably the best of the lot, actually believing in National Socialism with a sincere fanaticism and continually fighting the Nazi Party hacks when they don’t agree with him.” (Kaltenbach should not be confused with Hans V. Kaltenborn, the famous American radio broadcaster who had often visited Germany and interviewed Hitler.) In part, Shirer’s postwar novel The Traitor is based on Kaltenbach’s story, although his main character also shares the traits of some of the other American propagandists. The novel is much less compelling than Shirer’s nonfiction, particularly The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich , but it provides intriguing testimony to his grim fascination with those Americans who had gone to the other side.

Born in Dubuque, Iowa, in 1895, Kaltenbach was the son of a German butcher who had immigrated to the United States. As a teenager, he felt the pull of his father’s country of origin—and, along with his brother Adolph, he traveled around Germany just as World War I broke out in 1914. Although the German police arrested them on suspicion of spying on more than one occasion, Kaltenbach titled his diary chronicling their adventures Through the Fatherland on Bycycles. He would tell his Nazi employers later that this trip made him feel “swept by a powerful emotion” that led him to love both Germany and America, prompting him to want to promote good relations between the two.

Back in Iowa, he became a teacher at Dubuque High School, but he was fired in 1933 after he set up a “hiking club” that was almost a straight copy of the Hitlerjugend, complete with brown shirts for uniforms. Following that episode, Kaltenbach returned to Germany, where he immediately became entranced by the country’s new rulers. On June 25, 1933, he sent a postcard to his family back home showing Hitler in uniform, his swastika armband prominently displayed, looking into the distance in what is meant to be a commanding pose. The caption read: “Reichskanzler ADOLF HITLER.” Kaltenbach’s handwriting was scrunched to squeeze into the small space, but his terse phrases conveyed his growing infatuation.

Dear Folks:

Here I am in the midst of things—Hot stuff, see all, hear all. About to view the Changing of the Guard. You should see the uniformed Nazi soldiers. Enjoying the night life too. Hotel costs me 65 cents per. Can get meals for 1 Mark. Sandwiches and drinks at automat for 2.5 cents. Shall see palaces, museums-zoo-movies-attend Nazi celebrations Spreewald-Potsdam-May go to Danzig-

Kaltenbach was one of the first Americans to work for German radio during the Third Reich. In his broadcasts addressed to “Dear Harry,” which stood for his supposed friends in Iowa, he urged his countrymen to open their eyes to the virtues of Hitler’s Germany.

By contrast, Douglas Chandler was a latecomer among the Americans working for German radio, starting his broadcasts as “Paul Revere” in the spring of 1941. But he more than made up for that with his vitriol. “Roosevelt, himself an off-spring of Spanish Jews, is a mere tool of the Jewish conspiracy against all Nordic Aryans,” he declared. As a freelance journalist who had bounced around the continent with his wife, Laura, and two daughters, he had met up with Hanfstaengl and other Nazi propagandists in the early days of the new regime. In Berlin, he also visited U.S. military attaché Truman Smith and his wife, Kay, since they had known each other in New York in the mid-1920s. Kay claimed that Chandler had suffered a “nervous breakdown” after his initial career in finance collapsed along with the stock market in 1929.

Kätchen, the Smiths’ daughter, still remembers a lunchtime visit of the Chandlers. She was struck by the appearances of their two young girls with “ponytails and dirndls, looking more German than the Germans.” Chandler told Kay he was thinking of getting German citizenship for himself and his family since he felt the United States was turning socialist. “I told him he was a great fool,” Kay recalled. It was a tense encounter, and later, when the Smiths were back in Washington, she heard “Paul Revere” on the radio and instantly recognized the voice of Douglas Chandler.

Delaney, Kaltenbach and Chandler were three of the six Americans indicted in absentia for treason by a Washington, D.C., grand jury on July 26, 1943. A few months earlier, Delaney had left Berlin and his propaganda work behind, and moved to Slovakia, then Prague. At the end of the war, he was detained by the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps, released, detained and then released again. When he finally returned to the United States, he was arrested again but his indictment was dismissed, and for the rest of his life he claimed he had been persecuted because of his anti-Communist views. Kaltenbach wasn’t so lucky. Captured by the Red Army on July 14, 1945, he died in a Soviet camp in eastern Germany in October.