Hitlerland

with the Smiths, Kay found Putzi boisterous to the point where she had to keep him in check. At a dinner party the two couples attended, he played the piano magnificently, she noted. “He might have been a concert pianist had he wished to concentrate on that but… he did not work very hard at anything.” When they returned to the Smiths’ apartment on Olivaer Platz, he swung back into action. With a bottle of cognac at his side, he banged out “Harvard, Fair Harvard,” at the same time declaring, “Ah, there’s nothing like Wagner.”

Both Truman and Helen slipped off to their respective bedrooms to go to sleep, but Kay only managed to stop Putzi after four in the morning. Kay recalled that it felt like she had barely fallen asleep when she heard the piano again. Throwing on some clothes, she got him to stop, since Truman and Helen were still sleeping. To keep him from returning to the piano, she convinced Putzi to accompany her on a walk through the nearly empty Tiergarten in the cold early morning hours, telling him that he had to give his wife and her husband some time to rest.

“Ah, the little Helene is always exhausted,” he told her.

“I don’t wonder. You are an exhausting person,” Kay responded. Once Helen finally left Putzi more than a decade later, Kay observed that she had found him “too exhausting.”

But when Helen was new to Germany, she shared many of the same feelings as her husband. She was struck by the economic misery of the postwar period and the political turmoil. “What wonder that in all this chaos a man like A.H. should successfully attract the attention of desperate Germany,” she wrote in her precise handwriting. “His plans for the renaissance of the country sounded ideal for most citizens…”

Among the new American reporters in Germany at that time, there was far from universal agreement that Hitler was a force to be reckoned with. One of the best known was Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker, a red-haired, hard-charging Texan who had already worked in Moscow before moving to Berlin in 1923, although he was only twenty-five when he arrived in the German capital. During the ten years that he was based there, H. R. Knickerbocker, as his byline usually read, published six books in German, wrote regular columns for German newspapers, while still attending to his primary duties initially as a reporter for the International News Service and then for the Philadelphia Public Ledger and the New York Evening Post. As John Gunther, another famous itinerant correspondent and author of that era, recalled, he became “a definite public character in German political life.”

When Knickerbocker first saw Hitler in August 1923, rallying his supporters at the Cirkus Krone in Munich, his reaction was one of comic disbelief. “The first impression he makes on any non-German is that he looks silly… I broke out laughing,” Knickerbocker recalled. “Even if you had never heard of him you would be bound to say, ‘He looks like a caricature of himself.’” He noted not just the mustache and the lock of hair, but also “the expression of his face, and especially the blank stare of his eyes, and the foolish set of his mouth in repose… Other times he clamps his lips together so tightly and juts out his jaw with such determination that again he looks silly, as though he were putting on an act.”

There was something else that also gave Knickerbocker and many of his colleagues pause. “He is softly fat about the hips and this gives his figure a curiously female appearance,” he wrote. “It is possible that the strongly feminine element in Hitler’s character is one of the reasons for his violence.”

By contrast, Putzi Hanfstaengl was in full agreement with his wife about Hitler’s appeal, taking him very seriously. He quickly joined Hitler’s entourage and began regularly playing the piano for him, especially after the Nazi leader’s frequent run-ins with the police, who were increasingly monitoring his activities. The first time Putzi played, he tried out a Bach fugue, but Hitler didn’t show any interest. Then, he launched into the prelude of Richard Wagner’s Meistersinger and he suddenly had Hitler’s full attention. “He knew the thing absolutely by heart and could whistle every note of it in a curious penetrating vibrato, but completely in tune,” Putzi recalled. Hitler started marching up and down, waving his arms as if he were conducting. “This music affected him physically and by the time I had crashed through the finale he was in splendid spirits, all his worries gone, and raring to get to grips with the public prosecutor.”

Hanfstaengl also introduced Hitler to Harvard marching songs, explaining how the music and the cheerleaders were used to whip up the crowds to the point of “hysterical enthusiasm.” He played Sousa marches, and then some of his own improvisations that added the marching beat of American tunes to German ones. “That is it, Hanfstaengl, that is what we need for the movement, marvelous,” Hitler exclaimed, prancing about the room like a drum majorette. Putzi would later write several marches that were used by the Brownshirts, including the one they played when they marched through the Brandenburg Gate on the day Hitler took power in 1933. “Rah, rah, rah! became Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil! but that is the origin of it and I suppose I must take my share of the blame,” Putzi wrote in his autobiography. In fact, this sounded like a case of scarcely concealed pride of authorship.

Putzi contributed to Hitler’s movement in other ways, too. After selling his share of the family art gallery in New York to a partner, he put up $1,000 to turn the four-page Nazi propaganda weekly Volkischer Beobachter into a daily. Hitler complained that regular newspapers ignored him and believed that such a transformation could help overcome that problem. Aside from providing the funding, Putzi hired a cartoonist to design a new masthead. He also claimed credit for thinking up its slogan Arbeit und Brot, work and bread. Although Putzi told Hitler that the $1,000 was a no-interest loan, he would never get it back.

As part of Hitler’s circle of advisors, Putzi tried to act on his initial impulse to explain more of the world to this young firebrand—particularly the growing importance of the United States. Pointing out that it was America’s entry into World War I that determined the final outcome, he told Hitler, “If there is another war it must be inevitably won by the side which America joins.” All this, he continued, made it vital for Hitler to advocate a policy of friendship with the United States. While Hitler conceded his point, he didn’t really seem to register it. Putzi concluded that his ideas about America were “wildly superficial.” The only American who interested him then was Henry Ford, since he saw him as a fellow anti-Semite who might be tapped for funds. He was equally interested in the Ku Klux Klan. “He seemed to think it was a political movement similar to his own,” Putzi noted.

By the fall of 1923, Hitler was openly calling for a revolt against the government. Inflation had turned into hyperinflation, and Putzi recalled that when he pushed his way into the Burgerbraukeller on November 8, the night of what would go down in history as the beginning of the Beer Hall Putsch, the price for the three beers he ordered was 3 billion marks. He handed one to Hitler, who took a sip even though he already considered himself a nondrinker. With three top Bavarian officials sitting at the speaker’s platform, Hitler—wearing his Iron Cross over his trench coat and grasping a whip—ordered his Brownshirts to seize control of the hall. “Quiet!” he shouted. When the crowd continued to talk in the general confusion that followed, he jumped on a chair and fired a shot into the air. “The national revolution has broken out. The hall is surrounded!” he proclaimed.

Even greater confusion followed. Hitler marched the Bavarian officials out to a side room, telling them he wouldn’t accept anything but their support for his putsch. He would reward them with top positions, he vowed; if they refused, the alternative would be grim, he warned. “Gentlemen, not one of us shall leave this hall alive! There are three of you, and I have four bullets. That will be enough for all of us if I fail.” By some accounts, he held a pistol to his head as he said so. No one seemed impressed, and General Ludendorff, who had arrived late but dressed in his full Imperial Army uniform, allowed the Bavarian officials to slip away after supposedly securing their assurances that they were on the plotters’ side.

Hanfstaengl held an impromptu press conference, telling foreign correspondents that a new government had been formed. Cabling from Berlin, Wiegand accepted that version of events as fact and ran with it. “REBELS IN COUP SEIZE BAVARIAN RULE, BEGIN ARMED MARCH AGAINST BERLIN” proclaimed the giant two-line headline across the front page of the San Francisco Examiner in its November 9, 1923, edition over his story. He reported that after “the long expected coup,” Hitler’s storm troopers were in control of key communications in Munich and had cut off contact with Berlin, Ludendorff had taken charge of the army, and Hitler had proclaimed the end of the republic.

In reality, Hitler and Ludendorff had lost control of events as soon as the Bavarian officials had left the beer hall. Overnight, the officials made arrangements to put down the rebellion. Although they had largely tolerated Hitler’s movement up till then and sympathized with some of its aims, they weren’t about to let him dictate to them. By the time Hitler and Ludendorff had ordered their troops to march from the Burgerbraukeller to the center of the city around noon on November 9, the state police was lined up to stop them, with two machine guns at the