stretch them out all the way until 1988. Ferdinand Eberstadt, the most knowledgeable of the American experts about Germany’s finances, bluntly told Young right at the beginning of their deliberations with the French and others: “Hey, this thing’s a fake—it will bust up because they are playing politics and have no concern for economics.” German officials complained the payments were still too high, and Hitler and other opposition figures denounced the whole scheme.
The Wall Street crash of October 1929 changed everything. Although the German government formally approved the Young Plan in March 1930, allowing it to receive about $300 million in new American loans, the plan was effectively stillborn. Faced with the sudden drying up of foreign loans and the domestic credit market followed by mounting unemployment, the Socialist government collapsed that same month. A new minority coalition led by the Center Party’s Heinrich Bruning failed to win support for its economic program. Frustrated by the gridlock in the Reichstag, he called for new elections in September.
The stage was set for the return of the agitator from Munich.
Whale or Minnow?
Like so many Germans, Bella Fromm discovered that her life was turned upside down by World War I and its aftermath. Born into a well-to-do Bavarian Jewish family in 1890, she had worked for the Red Cross during the war. Her parents died early, leaving her with what looked like a healthy inheritance once the fighting stopped—certainly enough for her to live on after a brief unhappy marriage and continue doing volunteer social work. But then the hyperinflation of the early 1920s wiped out that cushion and she had to look for a paid job. “I’m going to have to start a new life,” she wrote in her diary on October 1, 1928. From age ten, she had kept a diary and now she decided to write for others, not just herself. She became a journalist for the Ullstein publishing house, covering the social and diplomatic scene in Berlin.
The cub reporter quickly proposed a novel approach to her job. “Let’s have society reports in the American manner,” she told her editor at the
In her diary entry of July 16, 1929, she described her experience at a Davis Cup match between Germany and Britain in Berlin’s Grunewald district, famous for its lush forest. William “Big Bill” Tilden, the American tennis champion, was there to watch Daniel Prenn, Germany’s top player, who was Jewish. He was playing the English star Bunny Austin. When Prenn won, Fromm noted, “‘Big Bill’ beamed, for Danny had gained his victory with a racket Tilden had brought him as a present from America.”
But Fromm heard a very different reaction from Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, who was a member of the Tennis Guild and would later serve as Germany’s last ambassador to Moscow before Hitler’s armies invaded the Soviet Union. “Of course, always those Jews!” he remarked.
“What do you mean?” Fromm asked angrily.
“The Jew would win of course,” he responded. But as Fromm recorded, at least “he had the grace to blush.”
Fromm had the last word. “He won for Germany. Would you have preferred to have the Englishman win?”
Perhaps precisely because of such contrasts between the Americans she met and her own countrymen, Fromm’s diary entries about Americans in Germany were almost always positive. On February 2, 1930, she went to the train station to observe the arrival of the new American ambassador to Germany, former Kentucky Senator Frederic M. Sackett. In her diary, Fromm wrote that he was “a gentle-looking man with, obviously, very good background.” As for his wife, she was “an attractive woman of great distinction.”
In a later entry that year, she marveled at how the Sacketts were showing what entertaining American-style was all about. “Even the international diplomats are stunned,” she wrote. “The Sacketts serve lobster at tea, an unheard-of luxury in Berlin.”
But Fromm also observed that the new ambassador was acutely aware of the economic crisis that Germany and other countries now faced following the Wall Street crash. She sat next to him at a dinner and opera recital hosted by the Czech legation, giving her the first opportunity to speak with him. “I like Berlin. It is inspiring,” he told her. “We are anxious in America to help Europe get out of the present crisis. We’d like to settle national differences at the green table instead of on the battlefield.”
It wasn’t just a newcomer like Sackett who liked Berlin and felt welcomed not only by Fromm but also by much of German officialdom, despite the renewed sense of crisis. On a visit to his Philadelphia home office in 1930, Knickerbocker was asked about the attitude of Germans toward American correspondents.
“Fortunately for us, we enjoy splendid prestige in Berlin,” he replied. “We are treated courteously and our questions are answered intelligently. Tea is served at the Foreign Office every Friday afternoon at 3 o’clock, being attended by correspondents from every important country in the world.” There, he continued, senior officials provided briefings and the newsmen made valuable contacts. He added, “Germany is the only European country, so far as I know, that has not expelled a correspondent since the World War.”
Asked which country was the most interesting in Europe for a correspondent, he replied: “Germany for the moment. I consider Berlin the most important capital in Europe. For the moment (please note that I emphasize the phrase) Germany and the Soviet Union are the most pacific countries in Europe. The Soviet can’t afford a war and Germany is sick of war. Yet we never know what may happen.”
As Germany’s economy began to unravel again, triggering new angst and unrest among a population that still had raw memories of the last crisis when so many lives and livelihoods were ruined, the Nazi movement began to gain traction. By the end of 1928, with its early signs of trouble ahead, the party boasted 108,000 dues- paying members; by the end of 1929, that number had jumped to 178,000. While Hitler was still considered a marginal political figure, he was drawing larger, more enthusiastic crowds and the party was making gains in local elections.
Not surprisingly, Wiegand was the first American correspondent to decide that it was worth interviewing the rabble rouser whom he and his colleagues had largely ignored for the past several years. After all, Wiegand had been the first American reporter to write about Hitler in the early 1920s, and he remembered well his rapid rise and apparent fall then. He also remembered his ability to play upon popular discontent—and, with that discontent growing, it was only logical to see whether Hitler could ride its wave again.
Wiegand hadn’t bothered to check on Hitler since his imprisonment following the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. But in December 1929, he traveled to Munich to meet him. “Now he is again active, and with a much larger following,” he reported in his article in the
Hitler focused his remarks on the threat of Bolshevism—and on his claim that his party was the only force capable of stopping it. “Germany is steadily, slowly, but surely slipping more and more into conditions of Communism,” he declared. Pointing to the litany of economic woes—particularly the growing number of bankruptcies and rising unemployment—and “disgust with the present party system in Germany and distrust of public officials,” Hitler warned that “all this tends to smooth the way to national destruction.”
“The public mind of the German people is in utter confusion,” he continued. “It is in this state of affairs that the National Socialists are raising the cry of home, country and nation against the slogan of internationalism of the Marxian Socialists.” The goal, as he explained it, was “to save Germany from being economically enslaved to foreign powers on the one hand and on the other hand from being utterly bolshevized and falling into disorganization and demoralization.”
Wiegand reminded Hitler of his earlier failed putsch and asked if he intended to try to depose the government by force again. “No, we have no thought of revolution,” he replied, insisting that support for his
