was planning a trip to Germany. McDonald asked him then whether the intense anti-Semitism of Germany’s new government didn’t signal that something was wrong with the German people. Goldman, the son of the German- Jewish immigrant founder of the company, brushed off McDonald’s question. “No, there is no more anti-Semitism in Germany than in the United States,” he declared. McDonald considered Goldman a longtime “apologist for Germany,” but he was startled by how he looked when they met at the Adlon Hotel on April 8. “I saw that he was a broken old man,” McDonald noted.
Based on what he had seen and heard, Goldman had radically revised his views of Germany. “Mr. McDonald, I never would have believed that the worst of the fifteenth and sixteenth century would return in this twentieth century and of all places in Germany,” he said. When McDonald asked him how long he was staying, he replied: “Just as long as I can bear it.”
Later that same day, Hanfstaengl had arranged for McDonald to meet Hitler, giving him the opportunity to ask him directly about “the Jewish question.” As the American visitor entered his office, Hitler “sized me up from head to foot with glances obviously half suspicious,” McDonald recorded. But he appeared almost nonchalant in replying to his queries about his anti-Semitic policies.
“We are not primarily attacking the Jews, rather the Socialists and the Communists,” Hitler declared. “The United States has shut out such people. We did not do so. Therefore, we cannot be blamed if we now take measures against them. Besides, as to Jews, why should there be such a fuss when they are thrown out of places, when hundreds of thousands of Aryan Germans are on the streets? No, the world has no just ground for complaint.”
McDonald observed that Hitler had “the eyes of a fanatic, but he has in addition, I think, much more reserve and control and intelligence than most fanatics.”
That was what McDonald recorded of his encounter in his diary right afterward. Later, when he returned to the United States, he offered an additional description of what Hitler said. “His word to me was, ‘I will do the thing that the rest of the world would like to do. It doesn’t know how to get rid of the Jews. I will show them.’ ”
“Get Out, and Fast”
Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of
Armstrong knew many officials and professors from the Weimar era, along with some of the diplomats and correspondents stationed in Berlin. He found that some of the British and American correspondents were wary of reporting all the stories of Nazi atrocities that were floating about, but they realized that it was enough to quote the statements of the Nazis themselves to convey the draconian nature of their new policies.
Among the American diplomats, he considered George Messersmith the most knowledgeable—and the most upset about what was happening on a daily basis. “He could hardly restrain himself when he talked about the Nazis, biting his cigar into two pieces and tossing them away in disgust as he catalogued his difficulties in trying to protect American citizens from molestation,” Armstrong recalled. Messersmith expressed his frustration at the powerlessness of government officials to restrain the Nazis; the militarism of the party activists, he continued, was making it increasingly unlikely that peace in Europe would last long.
Reconnecting with Germans he had known earlier, Armstrong heard a very dubious take on the new Hitler regime. Foreign Ministry officials like Hans Dieckhoff, who would later serve as the German ambassador to Washington, “were holding on to their offices and keeping quiet,” he noted. Their message to him was that the Nazis were “a flash in the pan,” and these officials insisted that they were trying to minimize the damage to German interests and foreign policy, waiting until a new government would take over. If Hitler did stay in power, they added, he could end up charting a more moderate course as he came to grips with the realities of the world. “They were not unintelligent men but I knew in my bones that they were wrong,” Armstrong wrote later.
Part of the reason for Armstrong’s pessimism was his realization that so many of the people he had consulted on previous visits—academic luminaries like agricultural expert Karl Brandt, economist Moritz Bonn and Ernst Jackh, the founder of the Hochschule fur Politik, some of whom had contributed articles to
Like McDonald, the visiting editor was determined to meet the man who was responsible for these dramatic changes, the new leader who was the focal point of all the speculation about the country’s future. As a first step, he went to meet Hjalmar Schacht, whom Hitler had reappointed to his old job as president of the Reichsbank as a reward for his support. It was a bizarre experience. Arriving at the Reichsbank, Armstrong was led to the big empty kitchen. Schacht was posing for a sculptor who was making a bust of him. Since the sculptor wanted to view him from an angle from below just as others would view the bust later, he had him seated on a chair placed on a large table. So while the sculptor worked and struggled, as Armstrong recalled, with shaping a likeness of his “screwed-up ugly face,” Schacht explained to Armstrong how the Nazis were going to correct the excesses of capitalism, providing a more stable, reliable economic system. He also promised to write an article for
Armstrong was bemused by what he considered to be this moralizing about capitalism from a man who had drummed up support of German capitalists for Hitler, but he wasn’t about to show it. His goal was to get the banker’s help in lining up an interview with Hitler. If that meant playing to Schacht’s “great vanity,” as Armstrong put it, he was happy to do so.
Those tactics worked. On April 27, a week after his arrival in Berlin, Putzi Hanfstaengl showed up at the Adlon to take him to his interview. Armstrong was startled to see Putzi in his new Nazi uniform, the one that he would wear that evening to the Lochners’ dinner party. As Armstrong recalled, “nothing matched” in the bizarre outfit: the tunic, shirt and breeches were all different shades of brown—“olive drab,” “yellowish brown” and “a rather sickly greenish brown.”
“Why, Putzi, I’ve never seen you in uniform before. How magnificent!” Armstrong declared.
Hanfstaengl took his compliment deadly seriously. “Yes, it is rather good, isn’t it?” he replied. “Don’t tell anyone, but it’s English stuff. That does make a difference.”
When he was escorted into Hitler’s office at the Chancellery, still filled with potted flowers that had been birthday gifts, the German leader greeted him with a handshake, motioned him to a table and, as Hanfstaengl and another aide looked on, quickly launched into an opening monologue stressing his commitment to peace. “His general appearance was insignificant,” Armstrong recalled, noting his large nose and small wrinkles about his eyes. But if those wrinkles made him appear inquisitive, that was totally misleading. “Although I had come from the West where his policies had aroused such fierce antagonism,” Armstrong pointed out, “he did not ask me a single question or by any remark or reference reveal that he was in the least concerned by what the world thought of him or of the position in which he had placed his country.” When Hitler spoke, he didn’t look at Armstrong, instead keeping his eyes “fixed on the upper distance, which made it seem as though he were in communication with God.”
Hitler’s presentation about Germany’s peaceful intentions quickly was transformed into his standard denunciation of the Versailles Treaty and of the “impossible and intolerable” border with Poland. He portrayed the eastern neighbor as a monster hovering over Germany. “Poland holds a naked knife in her teeth,” he said, clenching his teeth for added effect, “and looks at us menacingly.” Germany had been forced to disarm and was
