Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

One reason for those complaints may have been that the war often seemed to be a distant abstraction, despite the sightings of British bombers targeting nearby Frankfurt or Stuttgart. In Berlin, the war and Nazi terror had been a daily reality; in Bad Nauheim, the Americans were largely cut off from the outside world and left to focus only on themselves.

By the time the arrangements were made for the release of the Germans at the Greenbrier and the Americans in Bad Nauheim, Kennan’s irritation with the countrymen under his charge had reached its peak. The Americans were taken to Frankfurt, and from there boarded two special trains for Lisbon. As they chugged through Spain, Kennan noted that they had to lock the compartments “to keep the more exuberant members of our party (primarily the journalists) from disappearing into the crowded, chaotic stations in search of liquor and then getting left behind.”

When they reached a small Portuguese border station, Kennan got off the train to meet Ted Rousseau, the assistant naval attaché from the U.S. Embassy in Lisbon, leaving everyone else locked up in the train. Upon hearing that breakfast was available at the station, he exacted payback for the months of complaints he had endured about the food in Bad Nauheim. At the breakfast buffet, he ate alone, stuffing himself with eggs. As he confessed in his memoir, this was especially satisfying because he was “leaving the rest of them to nurse their empty bellies over the remaining six or seven hours of rail journey.”

Kennan had another reason to be bitter. The State Department had informed the Americans who had spent five months in Bad Nauheim that they would not be paid for that period. “We had not, you see, been working,” as Kennan acidly observed. Then there was the initial news that many of the Americans would not be boarding the ship from Lisbon since those spaces would be given to Jewish refugees. Kennan blamed congressmen who were anxious to please their constituents by bringing over the refugees, considering the fates of these noncitizens “more important than what happened to us.” In this respect, he, too, appeared to have little concern for the broader context of the times—especially for the plight of European Jews.

Kennan and Morris managed to get the State Department to reconsider both of those directives. But their anger only grew when, upon arriving in Lisbon, a new telegram ordered several of the diplomats to report for duty the very next day in Portugal instead of going home. “The department obviously had not the faintest idea of the condition, nervous and physical, in which these people found themselves, and had not bothered to use its imagination,” Kennan wrote. At that moment, he found himself defending the same people who had tested his patience in Bad Nauheim.

Whether the Americans who reached Lisbon stayed on for new assignments in Europe or, as most did on May 22, boarded the Drottningholm, a white Swedish ship that had the word diplomat painted in large dark letters on both of its sides to assure safe passage to New York, they knew that fortune had smiled upon them. As they reemerged into the larger world—a world at war because of the course of events in Nazi Germany, the country they had called their temporary home—they began to put their personal experiences in perspective again. “Yes, for us there was an end to the pall of the Geheime Staatspolizei [Gestapo],” Thuermer recalled. “We were lucky. We happened to be foreigners, American foreigners.”

That is a fitting epithet for most of the Americans who lived in Germany during this period. They were lucky to be able to observe firsthand the unfolding of a terrifying chapter of the modern era; they were even luckier to be Americans, which meant they could do so from a protected vantage point. They were truly privileged eyewitnesses to history.

Early in his political career, long before he became the all-powerful ruler of the Third Reich who was the target of assassination plots, Adolf Hitler narrowly escaped death. On November 9, 1923, when he and General Ludendorff led their followers in the final act of the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, they were met by a hail of machine-gun fire from the police. One of the bullets struck down Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, a close confidant of the Nazi leader; the two men had been marching arm-in-arm, and a slight difference in the trajectory of that bullet would have changed the course of history.

That was pure chance, but what happened the next day was something else. It is impossible to know whether Hitler was really about to shoot himself when he picked up his revolver in Helen Hanfstaengl’s house as the police were arriving to arrest him. But by grabbing the gun away from him and berating him for even thinking of such a thing, the American wife of Hitler’s propagandist Putzi Hanfstaengl may have played as pivotal a role as chance had the day before. If so, this was a clear case of the wrong person appearing at the wrong time.

All of which raises the biggest “what if” question of history: without Hitler, what would have happened to Germany after World War I? The Americans who lived through the collapse of the Weimar Republic, Hitler’s rise to power and the Nazi era did not explicitly address that question, which can never have a definitive answer. But the common thread that runs through so many of the Americans’ accounts is their fascination with Hitler. Their experiences and observations strongly suggest that, without Hitler, the Nazis never would have succeeded in their drive for absolute power. The country still might have embarked on an authoritarian course, possibly a military dictatorship. But whatever might have emerged would not have been on the terrifying scale of the Third Reich, with all its terrifying consequences.

Even those Americans who initially dismissed the Nazi leader as a clownish figure came to recognize that he possessed an uncanny ability to mesmerize his followers and attract new ones. He knew how to tap into his countrymen’s worst instincts by playing on their fears, resentments and prejudices more masterfully than anyone else. He possessed a combination of peculiar personal qualities and oratorical skills that fueled his movement’s rise. No other leading Nazi was as effective a mobilizing force as he was. Not Goering, not Goebbels, not his early rival Gregor Strasser. They, too, would have tried to exploit their countrymen’s anger and confusion following their defeat in World War I and the successive economic crises, but without the same results.

As the less than noble ending to their saga makes clear, the Americans in Hitler’s Germany were prone to all the normal human failings, including a certain amount of self-centered pettiness during a time of epic tragedy. Many were superficial in their observations, some were deliberately blind, and a few became Nazi apologists. But most of the Americans came to understand what was happening around them, even if they often found it hard to grasp the full implications. This was hardly surprising. After all, they came from a country that was democratic and pragmatic and were plunged into a society undergoing a horrific transformation in the name of a demented ideology.

Among the journalists, William Shirer stood out in terms of his ability to discern the meaning of events as they happened, avoiding the trap of wishful thinking. Little wonder that his Berlin Diary , published in 1941, propelled him to initial fame, and that he cemented his reputation as a distinguished author with The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. First published in 1960, this masterful account was an immediate bestseller and continues to be essential reading for anyone trying to understand Hitler’s Germany.

Shirer was far from alone, however. Edgar Mowrer and Sigrid Schultz also were journalists who were rarely fooled. Consul General George Messersmith stood out among the American diplomats for the same reason, and for his passion and courage. Truman Smith, the first American official to meet Hitler, proved to be both an astute political observer and a remarkably able military attaché, taking the measure of Germany’s rapidly growing military might. Many others served in the Berlin embassy with distinction, including young staffers like William Russell and Jacob Beam.