fighting, only making things worse. Wilson pointed out that “traces of undernourishment and children’s diseases, especially rickets, were found on every hand.”
Katharine Smith, or Kay as she was generally known, took notice of the poverty all around her right from the moment she and her husband, Captain Truman Smith, arrived in Berlin in June 1920 to take up his post as an assistant military attache. Like many Americans, the young, physically incongruous couple—she was twenty and only 5 feet tall, while he was twenty-six and an imposing 6 feet 4 inches—first moved into the famed Adlon Hotel. The hotel’s facade was pockmarked by bullets, and even the lobby bore a few similar telling holes, but overall, Kay reported, “the interior was quite luxurious, the desk clerks very polite, the crowded lobby full of foreigners.” Nonetheless, Kay only had to step outside on her first day there to see how insulated that world was.
Deciding to go for a walk, she made sure she was fashionably decked out first. “I put on a beige and blue figured voile dress, a beige coat with beige fox collar and wore, as had been the custom at home, beige suede pumps, beige stockings and a dark blue hat,” she scrupulously recorded. She left the hotel and walked down Unter den Linden, pausing to admire a china display in a shop window. Suddenly, she heard murmuring behind her and turned around to see a group of shabbily dressed people, two rows deep, staring at her and whispering to each other. “I must have looked to them as if I had come from Mars!” she recalled.
One of the people asked her something she didn’t quite understand, and she replied that she was an American. “Ah!” came the response. When she stepped forward, the crowd quickly made way for her and she rushed back to the hotel, where she changed from her “most inappropriate” outfit into plain dark clothes. “It had been a strange and instructive experience,” she concluded.
So was the experience of moving into an apartment. First, there was the battle with fleas, which were still common all over the city. Then, when she hired a housemaid, she was taken aback by one of their early conversations. The maid was holding a plate with the remains of an egg that Truman had not finished, and she asked Kay whether she could eat it. “Eat that cold smeared egg!” Kay replied in astonishment. “Why?” The maid explained that she hadn’t tasted an egg since the war began. When Kay told her to eat as many eggs as she wanted, it was the maid’s turn to be shocked. In other households, servants weren’t supposed to eat the same food as their employers—and food was often kept under lock and key.
As keen a social observer as Kay quickly proved to be, Truman focused just as intensely in those early days on Germany’s political prospects, not just the military part of his job. That was hardly surprising given his impressive credentials. He was a 1915 Yale graduate (two noted classmates were Dean Acheson and Archibald MacLeish), a World War I infantry veteran decorated with a Silver Star for bravery, and an avid student of the German language and German politics and history. Like Wilson, he had served in Germany already—as a political advisor to the U.S. Army in Coblenz from March 1919 until his transfer to Berlin in June 1920—and he would return to Germany in the 1930s when Hitler was in power. His daughter Katchen is convinced that he would have become a history professor if his graduate studies at Columbia University hadn’t been cut short by what turned into a thirty-year military career.
For those early postwar arrivals like the Wilsons and the Smiths, the plunging German mark meant that everything was increasingly cheap—as long as the foreigners spent their money quickly right after exchanging it. “With the end of the war in victory for them everything was hilarious and life in leisure times was a mad scramble for amusement,” Wilson wrote. And there were plenty of foreigners who could revel in each other’s company, even if the American diplomatic presence was small by today’s standards. “All of the embassies had big staffs, all entertained lavishly, and the Allied Governments maintained commissions of control comprising hundreds of foreign officers and their wives,” Wilson added. “Allied uniforms were common on the streets of Berlin.”
Kay Smith’s letters to her mother and her unpublished memoirs describe an endless whirl of those diplomatic parties and social events. For a masked ball in 1921 hosted by Wilson and his wife Kate along with another American colleague, the invitation read in part:
The Americans weren’t enjoying their special status in Berlin just because they were foreigners with access to what stable currencies could buy. They also recognized quickly that their enemies in the last war were affording them an unexpectedly warm welcome. “The Germans, then, in 1920, wanted to be friends with the world, but particularly they wanted to make friends with the Americans,” Wilson wrote. “Curiously enough, the warrior instinct showed in this respect. One of the sources of this almost pathetic friendship was their desire to express the admiration they felt for the stupendous effort of the United States in 1917 and 1918, for the magnificent spirit and dash of our soldiers…”
Wilson may have overstated the admiration for American troops, but he was right about the overall pro- American mood. As Kay Smith put it, “People are laying themselves out to be nice to Americans.” Truman bought a Borsalino felt hat with a large brim. This made him tower above most people on Unter den Linden and other streets he frequented, where he was instantly recognizable. “He became famous as ‘The American,’” Kay proudly recalled. “Germans greatly admired a tall fine physique.”
Americans, it seemed, were the good victors.
In part, the reason why the Americans emerged as the good victors was because they often reciprocated the Germans’ positive feelings about them. They also shared their exasperation with the French—the bad victors, in their eyes. In the immediate aftermath of World War I, Washington and Paris were frequently at odds over how to handle a defeated Germany. The United States and Britain were inclined to give the new government in Berlin enough leeway in terms of troop deployments to suppress uprisings from the left or the right, and the Americans, in particular, disapproved of what they perceived as France’s insistence on extracting exorbitant reparations. But the French protested any perceived violations of the Versailles Treaty—and quickly used them as an excuse to occupy more German territory, as they did by pushing across the Rhine after the Kapp Putsch, and then by occupying the industrialized Ruhr in 1923 as punishment for Germany’s failure to pay reparations.
“The French are the most militaristic nation in Europe… they have learned nothing by this war,” Kay Smith complained in a letter to her mother on March 12, 1920. “The next war Germany will not provoke. She wants England and America especially with her and she is making every effort to remodel herself to do so.” In another letter, she wrote, “France is terrified of another attack by Germany and her policy has been to crucify Germany as much as possible.”
As Wilson pointed out, the French only made things worse by following up their push across the Rhine that year with the stationing of Senegalese and other black troops in the Rhineland, triggering immediate reports of rapes and other violence. “A flame of resentment against France arose throughout Germany,” he wrote.
Those alarming allegations prompted the State Department to ask for an investigation by U.S. military officials. After looking into the charges, Major General Henry T. Allen, the commander of American troops in Germany, reported to Washington that the German press had deliberately distorted the record to play to racial prejudices and stir antipathy to France abroad, “especially in America, where the negro question is always capable of arousing feeling.” In his report to the State Department that was then relayed to Congress, he acknowledged that 66 sexual crimes had been reported to the French authorities, but he also pointed out that this had resulted in 28 convictions and 11 acquittals by French military courts—suggesting a serious effort to maintain discipline.
