Hitlerland

Germany’s defeat, humiliation, inflation and internal disorders had brought home to most citizens the folly of again seeking European hegemony.”

While correspondents like Schultz and Mowrer, and diplomats like Kennan and several of his colleagues, were hardly innocents abroad—they had studied and worked elsewhere in Europe—many of the Americans who were in Germany in this period were both very young and very inexperienced. This, of course, colored their perceptions and influenced their reactions. They were alternately charmed, shocked and mesmerized by Germany’s combination of old world rigidity and new, postwar world extremism, whether in political or sexual behavior.

As a result of their country’s peculiar role, Americans in Germany were in a special position. Although the United States had joined in the fighting in World War I, it was only in its later stages. Most Americans were far from eager to be dragged into a new European conflict, which accounted for the strength of isolationist sentiments back home. Americans in Germany were put in a different category than the other winners of World War I: they were seen as almost neutral, far less vengeful than the French, in particular, and, in general, more willing to give the defeated Germans the benefit of the doubt. As observers, they could stand a bit outside and above the continental rivalries.

Like Americans everywhere, they also tended to live a privileged existence, observing the material deprivations and growing violence but usually sheltered from them personally. They socialized extensively with each other, celebrated Thanksgiving and other holidays, and enjoyed the trappings of the expat lifestyle while monitoring the bigger events that swirled all around them. Louis Lochner, who reported for the Associated Press throughout this period, made casual mention of life in “the American colony,” and the “enviable camaraderie” among the American correspondents, “even among those who are one anothers’ [sic] fiercest competitors.”

To be sure, tensions erupted between those who came to radically differing views of Hitler and the Nazis, and what their military buildup signified. Then, too, there were the personal jealousies and resentments. The American Embassy in Berlin was a much leaner outpost than embassies are nowadays, and the small, overworked staffs and their spouses were often feuding about both their political views and petty grievances. There also were fissures between the politically appointed ambassadors and the professional foreign service staffers and military attaches. Throw in the perceived scandalous behavior of an ambassador’s daughter and you have a recipe for real drama. All of this could happen in any diplomatic outpost, but in Berlin it was magnified by the unrelenting tensions that accompanied Hitler’s reign.

The American correspondents, by contrast, were far more numerous than they are today—reaching a peak of about fifty in Berlin in the mid-1930s. Those were the days when wire services, newspaper chains and dailies from a wide array of American cities across the country, not just from New York and Washington, fielded correspondents overseas, giving them remarkable free rein to pursue their stories. And radio broadcasters soon joined that mix.

As a Newsweek foreign correspondent in the 1980s and 1990s, I felt I was living in what, especially from the perspective of today’s cutbacks in the media business, looks like the golden era of journalism. But my predecessors in Berlin lived far more largely. Mowrer, for instance, set up a new office for the Chicago Daily News right above the “Kranzler Corner,” a famous cafe at the prestigious downtown intersection of Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden. It boasted a second-floor reception center for American visitors, who could come by to chat, read American newspapers and even dictate to the office secretary on occasion. This was more than a news bureau; it was almost a small diplomatic mission.

There were plenty of Americans, including several who bore household names, who dropped in to see what this new Germany was all about—the likes of writers Thomas Wolfe and Sinclair Lewis, architect Philip Johnson, broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, former President Herbert Hoover, the black sociologist and historian W. E. B. DuBois and, of course, aviator Charles Lindbergh. Somewhat surprisingly, it was no great feat for Americans and other foreigners to enter and explore this curious, darkening world. “One thing one forgets is how easy it was to travel around Germany then,” recalls historian Robert Conquest, who traveled all over Europe in 1938 with some fellow Oxford University students and dropped in on Germany as well. “It was far easier than in postwar communist countries.”

I always have been drawn to this period of history, seeking to understand how Hitler and his followers could have gained total control of Germany as quickly as they did, with all the ensuing devastating consequences. This had a direct impact on my family’s history as it did on millions of others’. My parents grew up in Poland, and my father fought in the Polish Army before escaping to the West to join up with Polish forces under British command. After the war, I was born in Edinburgh. My parents then sailed for the United States, where they started a new life as political refugees. That’s why I grew up as an American instead of a Pole.

As a foreign correspondent who did two tours in Germany—the first one in Bonn during the last years of the Cold War, and the second in Berlin in the late 1990s—I often wrote about how Germans dealt with the legacy of the Nazi past. But I have to admit I knew very little about the Americans who worked in Berlin in those dramatic times. There were exceptions, of course. My colleagues and I all knew about William Shirer, the author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and that the Adlon Hotel, which was rebuilt and reopened after German unification, had been the hangout for Shirer, Dorothy Thompson and other star journalists of the time. But I can’t say I had delved much into their personal histories.

When I began to do so for this book, I realized there was a rich vein of stories that not only provided insights into what it was like to work or travel in Germany in the midst of these seismic events but also offered a unique perspective on them. Through their experiences, I felt I was reliving this heavily dissected era with an intensity and immediacy that is often lacking elsewhere. Whenever possible, I drew on firsthand accounts— whether in memoirs, notes, correspondence or interviews with the occasional still living witness—to share that perspective with readers.

Some of these tales were published but long forgotten, while I found others in unpublished manuscripts and letters in various archives and libraries, or sometimes provided by the children of the authors. In the case of the young diplomat Jacob Beam, for example, who served in the U.S. Embassy in Berlin in the second half of the 1930s, his son Alex—a good friend from my Moscow days, when we both were stationed there as correspondents—provided me with a copy of his unpublished manuscript. Some of the most colorful details about life in Germany came from the unpublished writings of Katharine (Kay) Smith, the wife of Captain Truman Smith, who was still a junior military attache when he became the first American official to meet Hitler.

It’s important to keep in mind that this is history as seen by eyewitnesses without the benefit of knowing where these events would lead. The Wannsee Conference that formalized elaborate plans for the Holocaust was still off in the future—January 20, 1942, to be exact. The German Army was only beginning to encounter its first serious setbacks on the Eastern Front as the remaining Americans in Germany were on their way out, following Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war against the United States. To be sure, the Americans had ample opportunity to witness or hear about the widespread persecution of the Jews and anyone else deemed an enemy of the new regime, along with Hitler’s string of first conquests and the early reports of mass killings. Some of these Americans demonstrated remarkable courage and prescience, while others stood back and averted their gaze, or, in a few cases, collaborated outright with the new regime.

But most of this book focuses on the perspectives and experiences of this special group of Americans during the run-up to the war and the Holocaust. As someone who has been privileged to report on more recent major events such as the collapse of the Soviet empire and the liberation of Central Europe, I understand how difficult it can be to sort out what is happening during a period of historic upheaval, and to make the right moral calls on how to behave in those circumstances. When you’re in the center of a whirlwind, daily life can continue with deceptive normality at times, even when the abnormalities, absurdities and injustices are all too apparent.

Instead of rushing to pass judgment on the Americans who found themselves in Hitler’s Germany, I have focused on telling their stories—and, wherever possible, letting those stories speak for themselves. The assessments of the Americans, where they were right or wrong, and where their moral compasses were on target or completely missing, should flow from their experiences, not from our knowledge based on the luxury of hindsight.