uniform. As Louis noted, nobody believed him; Putzi’s own account of that evening makes clear that his appearance in uniform was fully planned, although he never mentioned his lie. Nor did he mention what happened next. According to Lochner, he politely bowed and kissed the hand of Lilli Sobernheim. Her husband, Curt, then stated, with a look of professed innocence: “I believe, Dr. Hanfstaengl, we are somewhat related.”
Putzi was visibly startled. After all, a Jew was telling him that he was related to him. “How interesting! What do you mean?” he asked.
Sobernheim began explaining that a relative had married someone in Hanfstaengl’s family, and the two men retreated to a corner where they talked further. Lochner recalled that this had everyone chuckling since “it seemed like accusing someone of treason to tell a Nazi he was related to a Jew.”
As the evening progressed, the tension appeared to dissipate. Hanfstaengl even spent time chatting amicably with former Minister of Defense Wilhelm Groener, who had supported a ban on the SA during his term in office. “Only you unofficial people can stage a dinner like this,” Messersmith, the U.S. consul general, told Lochner. “There ought to be more like it. Maybe they would exert a good influence upon the Nazis.”
But as Hanfstaengl made the rounds of the parties hosted by diplomats and journalists during those early days of the new government, he charmed some of his hosts and alienated others. Messersmith soon concluded that he was “a court jester,” but one who “thought that his position as Hitler’s favorite and his uniform permitted him to do anything.” Since the consul general had become increasingly critical of the new regime, Hanfstaengl registered his displeasure by what was meant as a pointed put-down at an American Embassy dinner party. “Oh, so this is the famous Messersmith who knows everything that is going on and doesn’t like it,” he told him.
Putzi’s rudeness didn’t stop there. He began rubbing the leg of the woman seated next to him at the dinner table. As Lilian Mowrer pointed out later, “I knew he was crazy about women and could not keep his hands off them.” Most guests pretended not to notice Putzi’s antics, but Messer-smith bluntly and openly reprimanded him. The consul general reported with evident satisfaction that Putzi acted like “an exemplary guest” from that point on.
Later, Hanfstaengl would seek to take revenge by spreading rumors that Messersmith was Jewish. He had used the same tactics against Edgar Mowrer when the correspondent began reporting on attacks against Jews during those first months of the new regime, claiming that Mowrer was a “secret” Jew. Meeting with James G. McDonald, the visiting head of the New York–based Foreign Policy Association, Putzi declared: “Of course, he is a Jew and so is his wife”—and then proceeded to name other reporters who he claimed were Jews or served Jewish interests.
Mowrer’s friend Knickerbocker heard a group of Nazi leaders repeating this story. “Edgar a Jew? Of course!” he replied. Then referring to the revered general from World War I who had marched with Hitler in the Beer Hall Putsch, he added, “As Jewish as Ludendorff!”
Those kinds of personal battles were hardly surprising given the escalating political tensions from the moment that Hitler took power. According to Putzi, Hitler initially liked Knickerbocker, not for his reporting but for his excellent German, lively personality and red hair—although, of course, none of that would matter later when his dispatches became increasingly irritating to the Nazis. Knickerbocker was on hand for all the major events in early 1933, including “the greatest torchlight procession in its history” on January 30, when Hitler became chancellor.
“Hitler stationed himself at the window of the Chancellor’s palace and Hindenburg at another window,” Knickerbocker wrote. “From eight o’clock in the evening until midnight the thirty-five thousand Brownshirts of Berlin marched past and their flaming torches turned the streets into rivers of fire. The aged president stood in a bath of searchlights, the young Chancellor in another. All Berlin tried to reach them to cheer them and the music and the shouting brought many stout Teutons to tears.”
At first, the representatives of the new regime reached out to Americans to deliver messages of reassurance. “The Nazis will make no attempt to carry out any of their well-known demagogic reforms,” Hjalmar Schacht, the former president of the Reichsbank who would soon regain his old post, told Alfred Klieforth, the embassy’s first secretary, over dinner. Sackett, who would end his posting in Berlin in March, initially believed that the government was genuinely divided in its responsibilities, with the Nazis taking charge only of “the purely political and administrative departments” while others would continue to deal with the economy, finance and the remaining daily chores of government. He believed Papen, the vice-chancellor, was continuing to play a major role, along with Nationalist Party leader Alfred Hugenberg, who had been appointed minister of agriculture and economics. The ambassador described him as “practically economic dictator.”
But the next rapid sequence of events would dispel all such illusions about competing power brokers. On February 27, the Reichstag was set ablaze by Marinus van der Lubbe, a twenty-four-year-old Dutchman who had been a member of a Communist youth group. Suspicions were immediately aroused that the arsonist was “a dupe of the Nazis” and that he had been set up to provide them with an excuse for a massive crack-down. Subsequently, many historians have concluded that the Dutchman may have indeed acted alone. But whatever the case, Hitler seized on the opportunity to lash out against the Communists and other alleged conspirators, and to transform Germany into an absolute dictatorship.
Based on a hastily prepared emergency decree “For the Protection of People and State,” Hitler banned opposition publications and rallies, and ordered the arrests of thousands of Communists and Social Democrats, claiming they were plotting more attacks. SA troops wreaked havoc, breaking into homes, beating and torturing the victims they dragged out. With new elections scheduled for March 5, everything happened so fast that it ensured that opposition parties wouldn’t have a chance to mount effective campaigns.
On February 28, the day when Hitler had convinced the increasingly feeble President von Hindenburg to sign the emergency decree that suspended the key civil liberty sections of the Weimar constitution, Fromm attended a reception at Sackett’s residence. Everyone was abuzz with the latest speculation about how far the crackdown would go. It was then, according to Fromm, that Sackett revealed he had asked Washington to send him home. He was disappointed by the failure of American efforts to stabilize the German economy, the Jewish reporter wrote in her diary, and “deeply displeased with German domestic politics.”
Despite the Nazis’ rampage against their opponents, the party garnered only 43.9 percent of the votes in the March 5 elections. That made them the strongest party in the Reichstag but still not the majority party. They had to include Hugenberg’s Nationalists in the government to give them the majority they needed. But Hitler had no intention of allowing anything to slow him down. On March 23, he had the Reichstag approve the “enabling act,” effectively shifting all key powers from the legislative body to him. As chancellor, he would draft the laws that would be enacted by the cabinet—even, as the act specified, when they “might deviate from the constitution.” There would be no more restraints on his power.
Or on the attacks on anyone deemed a political opponent and on Jews. April 1 marked the official start of a boycott against Jewish businesses, allegedly as a response to slanderous campaigns against Germany by Jews abroad. Calling what happened next “a tragedy,” Knickerbocker reported: “The nation turned into a huge hunting party and for another fortnight all attention was absorbed in chasing the Jews.”
Dorothy Thompson, who was back on the continent but no longer living in Berlin, had arrived in the German capital on the night of the Reichstag fire and stayed long enough to witness some of the rampages that followed. When the Jewish boycott started on April 1, she wrote from Vienna to her husband Sinclair Lewis, who was back in New York: “It is really as bad as the most sensational papers report… the S.A. boys have simply turned into gangs and beat up people on the streets… and take socialists and communists & Jews into so-called ‘Braune Etagen’ [brown floors] where they are tortured. Italian fascism was a kindergarten compared to it.” She also despaired of “incredible (to me) docility” of the liberals and confessed she felt the urge to go around Berlin reciting the Gettysburg Address. And she was worried about her colleagues who were still stationed there, particularly Mowrer. “Edgar is constantly threatened, but has no intention of leaving Berlin & doesn’t think he is in actual danger.”
Thompson sent another letter to a friend in London, the pianist Harriet Cohen, who knew British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. She explained that she had seen many victims of Nazi violence with her own eyes. The SA thugs had gone “perfectly mad” as they hunted down new victims, she wrote. “They beat them with steel rods, knock their teeth out with revolver butts, break their arms… urinate on them, make them kneel and kiss the
