interview and in
American readers probably found Thompson’s descriptions and conclusions reassuring. After all, the message was that, in all likelihood, Hitler would never make it to the top—and, if he did, it would be only for a brief, ineffective moment. When
“Who is this Mrs. Lewis anyway?” Hitler asked. Ludecke explained that she was Dorothy Thompson, the correspondent Putzi had brought to him. “
But Hitler seemed more amused than irritated by Thompson’s conclusions, much to the disappointment of Ludecke. In fact, he had good reason to welcome and encourage any coverage that downplayed the threat he represented—and he usually did so with Americans when Hanfstaengl was the facilitator, taking advantage of his American and, on occasion, Harvard ties.
One of Putzi’s classmates and best friends at Harvard was Hans V. Kaltenborn, who would become a nationally famous radio broadcaster. The son of German immigrants who had settled in Milwaukee, he learned German at home, and in college he became the vice president of the Deutscher Verein, the German Union, while Putzi served as its president. In the 1920s, Kaltenborn visited Europe often and, in Germany, Hanfstaengl arranged for him to meet various Nazis. But he hadn’t met Hitler, since he was rarely willing to spend much time waiting around for a possible interview. As Kaltenborn recalled, though, Putzi “felt that any newspaper correspondent or radio commentator should be willing to waste at least a week in prayerful hope that the Fuhrer might condescend to receive him.”
But on August 16, 1932, while he was visiting Berlin, Kaltenborn received a telegram from his old classmate, who was in Munich, informing him that an interview was arranged for the next day in Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s Alpine retreat. Louis Lochner, the Associated Press bureau chief in Berlin, called him to let him know he had received a similar telegram so they would be going together. The two took the night train to Munich, and Putzi met them at the station. Both journalists were disappointed to learn from him that Wiegand, the Hearst correspondent, would also be included. The session felt less and less exclusive.
Putzi had arranged for Hitler’s car and driver to take them to Berchtesgaden. Once they arrived, they were treated to lunch on the terrace of a little hotel, while Putzi went over to Hitler’s “Swiss chalet,” as Kalten-born called it. Wiegand had argued that he had to have a separate interview, and the two other journalists were pleased when Putzi managed to arrange this. They were even happier when the Hearst correspondent angrily returned from a mere fifteen minutes with Hitler. “That man is hopeless,” he told them. “He gets worse every time I see him. I get nothing out of him. Ask him a question and he makes a speech. This whole trip has been a waste of time.”
Kaltenborn took that as a lesson and decided that he would confront Hitler immediately about his feelings about the Jews. “Unlike Lochner, I wasn’t stationed in Germany and did not need to be discreet to escape expulsion,” he noted later. They walked over to Hitler’s house, and their host, dressed all in black, including his tie, came out to meet them. Hitler’s laundry, hung out by his half-sister Angela, was fluttering in the breeze, the view of the Bavarian Alps was majestic, and despite a few Nazi guards stationed on the paths outside, “everything suggested peace,” Kaltenborn noted. But he also felt an atmosphere of “latent hostility” when Putzi whispered to Hitler who they were.
As soon as they sat down, Kaltenborn fired off his first question: “Why does your anti-Semitism make no distinction between the Jews that flooded into Germany during the postwar period and the many fine Jewish families that have been German for generations?”
“All Jews are foreigners,” Hitler shouted back. “Who are you to ask me how I deal with foreigners. You Americans admit no foreigner unless he has good money, good physique, and good morals. Who are you to talk about who should be allowed in Germany?”
From then on, Kaltenborn continued tossing in as pointed questions as possible, while Lochner focused on more tactical queries about Hitler’s next political moves. As Kaltenborn noted, Hitler didn’t really answer his questions, no more than the first one, since “he has no capacity for logical consecutive thought.” As usual, he denounced the parliamentary system that, he argued, “has never functioned in Europe,” and called for authoritarian rule. He expected to take power, he maintained, but with the support of the German people. “A dictatorship is justified once the people declare their confidence in one man and ask him to rule,” he insisted.
Kaltenborn was as interested in Hitler’s behavior as in his answers. At one point, Hitler’s wolfhound came to the porch and approached his master. Instead of petting him, Hitler sternly commanded “
The interview lasted forty-five minutes, and Kaltenborn emerged distinctly unimpressed with the man everyone was talking about. But the conclusion he drew was startling. “After meeting Hitler I myself felt almost reassured,” he recalled. “I could not see how a man of his type, a plebeian Austrian of limited mentality, could ever gain the allegiance of a majority of Germans.” He arrived at that judgment despite the fact that the Nazis had already garnered more votes and more Reichstag seats than any other party.
Yet Kaltenborn deserves credit for honestly admitting that he was no prophet. Many others would have been tempted to airbrush their memories; he didn’t. “Most people who met Adolf Hitler before he came to power in January, 1933 were apt to underestimate him,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I was no exception.”
“I Will Show Them”
There were those who saw what was coming, those who were blind to it until the very last moment and those who continued to insist that the fears about Hitler and the Nazis had been blown out of all proportion, dismissing all the evidence to the contrary. That was true of Germans; it was also true for Americans who lived and worked in their midst.
There was also a special category of German politicians: those who believed that they could outmaneuver and outsmart Hitler. On June 1, 1932, Franz von Papen, the newly appointed chancellor, took the AP’s Louis Lochner aside at a lunch in the Reich Chancellery, assuring him that he knew how to more effectively contain the Nazis than his predecessor had. His strategy, he explained, would be to loosen rather than tighten the restrictions on them. “I’ll give the Hitlerites enough freedom to show them up in all their absurdity,” he told the American reporter.
After he was replaced as chancellor by General Kurt von Schleicher, who had served as his defense minister, Papen began promoting a new approach. In his dealings with the octogenarian President von Hindenburg—who according to Lochner and others was increasingly “senile”—he argued that the best way to keep Hitler under control would be to appoint him chancellor.
Schleicher was pursuing a different policy toward the Nazis, trying to split them by luring Gregor Strasser, the head of the “socialist” faction within the party, into his government as vice-chancellor. Although that maneuver failed, the chancellor would prove to be as naive in his own way as Papen. After taking power in early December, he quickly convinced himself that he had managed to usher in a new era of
