Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

Huss stayed in Berlin for the International News Service until November 1941, and he, too, wrote a book about his experiences when he returned home. Entitled The Foe We Face , it was published in 1942 when the United States was already in the war. Shortly before his departure from Berlin—only a month before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that would prompt Hitler to declare war on the United States—Huss interviewed Hitler for the last time.

Their meeting took place at Wolf’s Lair, the headquarters for the Eastern Front. As Huss followed Hitler’s erratic steps on a path in the woods, the Nazi leader eerily enacted the scene that Shirer had conjured up earlier in his characterization of the German people. Spotting a squirrel, Hitler pulled out a bag of hazelnuts from his coat pocket. “Quietly, and with a half-smile on his pinkish face,” Huss wrote, he approached it, holding out some nuts. Unafraid, the squirrel jumped up into his hand—to Hitler’s delight. Once it had gathered the nuts and scampered off, he said: “ Ja , if the world would only mind its own business like this little squirrel.”

While Hitler boasted to Huss that he would outlast “your President Roosevelt” and “this crazy man Churchill,” and that Stalin’s Red Army was already “practically smashed,” Huss detected more than contempt in Hitler’s repeated mentions of “Herr Roosevelt—and his Jews.” He complained bitterly that the American president “wants to run the world and rob us all of a place in the sun… Every time I reached forth my hand he slapped it down.” He blamed Roosevelt for conspiring to keep Britain in the war and, as he became more incensed about his alleged misdeeds, Huss felt “that just for that second an icy chill had crept between us.”

It was then that Huss claimed he understood what triggered Hitler’s denunciations. “Mighty Hitler of the Nazi Reich and the New Order Europe basically and by instinct fears President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States of America,” he wrote. Which was why, Huss added, “like a tiger at bay, he wants to spring and land the knockout blow to paralyze the power of the man and the land he fears more than anything else in the world.”

While Huss’s account may have been colored by his desire to bolster the morale of his countrymen at this early stage of their involvement in the war, he was correct in his analysis about Hitler’s primary motive. As he did when he invaded the Soviet Union, Hitler was gambling that another escalation was the only path left to victory.

During the late months of 1941, George Kennan monitored the progress of Hitler’s armies in the Soviet Union on a large map of that country in his office, comparing what was happening then to Napoleon’s Russian campaign in 1812. “The similarities in timing and geography were often striking,” he observed. Despite the signs that the German drive to take Moscow was faltering, he wasn’t yet sure about the outcome. But he noted the parallel steady deterioration of relations between Germany and the United States, and his sense “that things were now out of control—not only out of our control (we, after all, in our poor overworked embassy, had never at any time had any influence on the course of events) but out of everyone’s control.”

Kennan and other Westerners did not know yet that the battle for Moscow would result in the first defeat of Hitler’s army. It was a titanic struggle, the biggest battle of World War II and of all time, involving 7 million troops. The combined losses of both sides—those killed, taken prisoner or severely wounded—were 2.5 million, of which nearly 2 million were on the Soviet side. German troops had reached the outskirts of Moscow, a direct result of Stalin’s grievous miscalculations, starting with his refusal to believe that Germany would invade his country.

But the Soviet capital was ultimately saved because Hitler committed even bigger mistakes, refusing to listen to his generals who wanted him to push directly to the Soviet capital. He ordered a diversion south to take Kiev, insisting that it was vital to seize control of the agricultural riches and raw materials of the Ukraine first. By the time his troops resumed their drive on Moscow, they were caught in heavy autumn rains that turned Russian dirt roads into swamps, and then by swiftly plummeting temperatures. Since Hitler had firmly believed that Moscow would be quickly overrun, most of the German troops had not even been issued winter uniforms. All of which meant that, as the Soviet writer Vasily Grossman wrote, “General Mud and General Cold” dramatically slowed and weakened the invaders.

Taking full advantage of his good fortune, Stalin rushed in troop reinforcements from the Soviet Far East. On December 6, the day before Pearl Harbor, his forces launched their first major counteroffensive, pushing back those German troops who had made it closest to the capital.

Like other foreigners, American diplomats and journalists based in Moscow had been evacuated to the Volga city of Kuibyshev back in October when it looked like the city would fall to the Germans. Without direct reporting from those observers, most of the world was slow to recognize that the Soviet counteroffensive was the beginning of a huge turnabout on the Eastern Front. But Hitler—who had only recently been confidently expounding on his vision of how the conquered Soviet territories would make Germany an economic powerhouse—had come to recognize that his troops would not be able to take the Soviet capital that winter. Still, he continued to hope that they would do so later, and his propagandists insisted that this change of plans only reflected a temporary setback.

On Sunday evening, December 7, Kennan picked up a weak but audible shortwave news broadcast from the United States about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He called Leland Morris, the chargé d’affaires, who was already asleep, and several other embassy officers, and arranged to meet them for a late night meeting at the embassy. While Pearl Harbor did not automatically trigger a state of war with the United States, and Hitler would in fact wait until he addressed the Reichstag four days later to issue his declaration of war, the American diplomats in Berlin had to assume their mission was coming to an end.

There was no evidence that Hitler remembered Putzi Hanfstaengl’s warnings that it would be fatal to end up on the opposing side of the Americans in another global conflict. Instead, the Nazi leader immediately convinced himself that Japan’s attack was the best news possible since it would mean that the United States would be completely preoccupied by the war in the Pacific, with little energy or resources left to aid Britain and the Soviet Union. The day after Pearl Harbor, he declared: “We can’t lose the war at all. We now have an ally which has never been conquered in 3,000 years.”

The leader who was most genuinely pleased by the consequences of Pearl Harbor was Churchill. In a transatlantic phone call on that fateful day, Roosevelt uttered the words that the British prime minister had wanted to hear: “We are all in the same boat now.” As Churchill would tell Congress on December 26, “To me the best tidings of all is that the United States, united as never before, have drawn the sword for freedom and cast away the scabbard.”

Kennan noted that during the four days of “excruciating uncertainty” as he and his colleagues waited for Hitler to address the Reichstag, the embassy was methodically cut off from the outside world. The telegraph office no longer accepted its telegrams, and, by Tuesday, the embassy’s phones stopped functioning. “We were now on our own,” he pointed out. Figuring they had to prepare for the worst, the diplomats began burning their codes and classified correspondence on Tuesday night. The sudden rash of small fires, which spewed ashes over nearby buildings, prompted a German building inspector to warn the embassy that it was endangering the neighborhood.