“As you see, I have succeeded,” he declared. “Germany has for a long time not been as quiet as now. Even the Communists and the Nazis are behaving. The longer this quiet continues, the more certain is the present government to reestablish internal peace.” Lochner later observed that it was “sophomoric” for Schleicher to mistake the normal Christmas lull in Germany as a sign of better times.
New reports of fissures in the Nazi movement, combined with the dip in their support in the November 6 elections, had led others to nurture such illusions as well. American Ambassador Sackett was more worried about the fact that the third-place Communists had increased their number of seats in the Reichstag, since he viewed the left as more dangerous than the far right. To counter the Communist threat, he argued, “it was obviously important at the moment to have a strongly centralized more or less military Government.” While Sackett had warned Washington that Hitler appeared determined to “rule alone” and that he and Goebbels “are past adepts at twisting events to suit their fancies and purposes, and indefatigable spellbinders,” he still sounded somewhat dismissive of the Nazi leader, calling him “one of the biggest show-men since P. T. Barnum.”
Abraham Plotkin, the Jewish-American labor organizer who had arrived in Berlin in November, continued going to political rallies to figure out for himself what the Nazis represented. He saw Goebbels perform for the second time in early January. The Nazi propagandist stirred little emotion at first but then fired up the crowd by blaming Jews for the murder of a young Nazi. This prompted Plotkin to reflect in his diary that day about the possible parallels to the Ku Klux Klan back in his home country. The Klan had looked to be ascendant in the mid- 1920s, controlling several governorships, he wrote, but then abruptly the movement had collapsed politically. “I am told that in Germany it will not be so easy for the Hitlerites to collapse, but it strikes me that any movement that depends on the intensity of emotion such as I saw tonight must either win power quickly or its foundations of hatred and feeling will collapse,” he wrote.
The following day, Plotkin returned to the same theme. “The Nazi meetings are dispirited, as if beaten and know it,” he noted. But he added a cautionary note: “The only disquieting factor is the number of killings that are political in their origin.” Three days later, he attended another Nazi rally, where Goebbels once again denounced “the bloody Jews,” whipping up the crowd to such frenzy that Plotkin thought for a moment that it would “run out of his control.” But when the rally was over, the American was struck by the sight of the young Nazi troops in uniform waiting for their orders “like a bunch of schoolboys, and like a bunch of schoolboys bought hot dogs when the hot-dog men started to circulate among them.” The wording of this diary entry suggests he found it hard to believe that these young men eating hot dogs could be truly dangerous.
Even with the mounting reports of violence by just such young men, some wealthy German Jews didn’t seem all that disturbed by the Nazis either. Edgar Mowrer recalled a dinner at the end of 1932 in the home of “a banker named Arnholt.” Mowrer probably misspelled his host’s name; if so, the banker in question may have been Hans Arnhold, who was forced to flee Germany after Hitler’s takeover (his villa now serves as the home of the American Academy in Berlin). In any case, all the men around the dinner table except Mowrer were Jews.
Over coffee, several of them boasted that they had given money to the Nazis at the urging of non-Jews like Hjalmar Schacht and Fritz Thyssen. Although Schacht had served as the currency commissioner in the critical year 1923, when he was credited with ending hyperinflation, and then as president of the Reichsbank until 1930, he had become an increasingly vocal supporter of the Nazis; so had industrialist Thyssen.
Mowrer didn’t hide his surprise, prompting his host to ask what he was thinking. “Merely wondering how the People of Israel have managed to survive so many thousands of years when they obviously have a strong suicidal urge,” the American responded.
“But you don’t take this fellow seriously,” his host inquired.
“Unfortunately I do—and so should you.”
“Just talk,” the banker declared, and all the others nodded in agreement. As Mowrer noted, they “thought me incapable of understanding the German soul.”
Schacht, who had once aligned himself with the democratic forces of the Weimar Republic, wasn’t about “just talk.” Shortly before Christmas, Mowrer ran into him and asked politely about his plans for the holidays. “I am going to Munich to talk with Adolf Hitler,” he declared.
“You too, my fine Democrat!” Mowrer responded, abandoning any pretense of politeness.
“
“Granted. But tell me what you expect from Hitler in words of one syllable and I’ll try to understand.”
“Germany will have no peace until we bring Hitler to power.”
Three weeks later, Mowrer met Schacht again, and asked him how his conversation went with the Nazi leader. “Brilliantly,” the German banker replied. “I’ve got that man right in my pocket.”
As Mowrer recalled in his memoirs, “From that moment I expected the worst.”
He wasn’t the only one. Bella Fromm, the Jewish social reporter, found herself seated next to Wiegand at a dinner party in Berlin on December 8. The Hearst correspondent wasn’t living full-time in Berlin then, but had a knack for appearing on scene “whenever a political melodrama is about to sweep the stage,” Fromm noted in her diary.
“When are the National Socialists going to seize the government?” she asked him bluntly, using the old journalistic ploy of asking a question in a way that implied she knew the score already.
Wiegand looked taken aback but offered a crisp response: “It won’t be long now.”
And what would that mean? “Hitler intends to abolish the treaty of Versailles,” the American correspondent continued, drawing upon his past meetings with Hitler. “He wants to unite all Germans. He has no desire for the return of colonies if he finds a way for new
On December 22, Fromm attended a reception hosted by American Consul General George Messersmith, who had been stationed in the German capital for the past two years and monitored the Nazi movement. While Ambassador Sackett was increasingly convinced that the Schleicher government had successfully contained the Nazi threat, Messersmith took a different view. “The German government had better act quickly, and strongly,” he said at the reception. “It’s really upsetting to find so many people of importance in the National Socialist party. There are going to be fireworks here pretty soon, unless I’m badly mistaken.”
Fromm added this final line to her diary entry that night: “I do not think that my friend Messersmith is mistaken.”
At an “intimate” dinner for twelve guests hosted by Chancellor von Schleicher and his wife six days later, on December 28, Fromm was able to relay Wiegand’s prediction of a Nazi takeover directly to the man currently in charge. Schleicher laughed it off. “You journalists are all alike,” he told her. “You make a living out of professional pessimism.”
Fromm pointed out that these views were widely held, not just by her and Wiegand. And that everyone knew that Papen and others were “trying to bring the National Socialists to power.”
“I think I can hold them off,” Schleicher insisted.
Referring to the aging President von Hindenburg, Fromm cautioned, “As long as the Old Gentleman sticks to you.”
Later the two of them were briefly alone in Schleicher’s study. The chancellor once again talked about bringing Gregor Strasser into his government. Fromm was hardly reassured. While Strasser represented the left wing of the Nazi Party, he shared the anti-Semitic views of the rest of the leadership. “What about the church and Jew-phobia of the party?” she asked.
“You ought to know me better than that, Bella,” Schleicher replied. “All that will be dropped entirely.”
Once again, Fromm added a line of commentary to her diary entry of that night. “The National Socialist Party is not in the habit of dropping anything that suits its purposes,” she wrote. “They scuttle men quicker than they scuttle doctrines.”
But even during the fateful month of January 1933, Americans in Berlin were hearing constant reassurances that Hitler and his movement were fading as a threat. Chancellor von Schleicher, they believed, really knew both what he was up against and how to outplay his opponents. On January 22, Abraham Plotkin met with Martin Plettl, the president of the German Clothing Workers’ Union, in a packed Berlin restaurant. Plettl explained to the
