July 1933, and Eddy was the leader of the visiting delegation. In fact, as he pointed out to his hosts, this was his twelfth visit to Germany.
The continuation of such meetings was supposed to send a signal of reassurance that the new regime was committed to peace. At the reception, the German speakers praised Hitler’s recent Reichstag speech on international relations. According to reporter Bella Fromm, who as usual was present at such social events, they delivered a double-edged message: “Any possible concern in foreign countries as to the aggressive intentions of Germany should disappear. After all, the
Eddy responded with a polite profession of his love for Germany and delicately edged into the subject of the new regime. “I noted the unity of enthusiasm and zeal in what you call the ‘New Germany.’ I have always approved of enthusiasm and zeal.” But then he quickly made his point. “Besides my love for Germany, I have another, even stronger love in my heart: the love for humanity.” And that love, he continued, made him into a firm proponent of “impartial justice; freedom of speech, press, and assembly; fundamental moral and economic principles.” In case anyone didn’t get the point, he added, “These freedoms have to be accepted by all nations who claim cultural integrity.”
Eddy mentioned that he had upheld the same principles in Russia and refused to remain silent about the blatant violations of them there. “As a friend of Germany, I state that you are acting against the principles of justice,” he continued, making the Nazis in the audience “gasp in consternation,” as Fromm noted. “There is no room for a twofold justice, one for ‘Aryans’ and ‘Nordics,’ and another one for Social Democrats, Communists, Liberals, Jews, and Pacifists. Don’t say it’s your affair. It concerns the whole world when we in the United States conduct a lynching… The world is also concerned when you commit similar injustice.”
As he warmed to his topic, Eddy addressed the Germans even more bluntly: “In your country, injustice is committed every day, every hour. What are you doing to Catholics, Communists, Social Democrats, Jews? What atrocities are committed behind the wall of your horrible concentration camps? I see your papers.”
With that, Eddy held up that day’s edition of the Nazi daily
Many of the foreigners in the audience applauded him. “The Nazis, pale, with rage, sat immobile, in cold silence,” Fromm recorded. But she wasn’t about to get the chance to write anything about this extraordinary performance by the visiting American missionary in her newspaper. Instead, another reporter plucked out the most innocuous parts of Eddy’s opening remarks and ended with his alleged pledge to urge friendly understanding for the new Germany in his home country. “I gasped when I read the piece,” Fromm wrote in her diary. But there was nothing she could do to set the public record straight.
In his clarity of vision and willingness to deliver his tough message, Eddy was unlike almost any other early American visitor to the “new Germany.” There were others who were troubled by the behavior of the Nazis, but very few who truly understood the sweeping nature of the transformation of the country and its people, and the danger this represented.
Often, American visitors would exhibit no more than a vague uneasiness. Future novelist Wright Morris, then only twenty-three, hopped a freighter from New York to Antwerp in October 1933, setting off to explore Europe. During his sojourn there, he briefly passed through Germany, checking into a youth hostel in Heidelberg. The dormer window of his room looked out on a park where blond children were playing, the weather was beautiful, and, as he walked about the city, he was keenly aware of its romantic tradition. “On the bridge over the Neckar I stood long and long, looking at the castle, my fancy on the Rhine maidens and the mists behind it,” he wrote in his travel memoir.
But he also felt his “first presentiments that something was rotten in this picture of perfection. Behind the light and the shadow, the trilling voices of the children, lurked a danger in which we were all complicit.” When he entered a tobacco shop to look at some pipes, he caught sight of someone spying on him through a curtain. “In the shopwoman’s smiling, unctuous manner there was something both disturbing and false,” he recalled. “I could hear muttered whisperings behind the curtain. My sense of apprehension was unused and rudimentary, since I had felt it so seldom, but in the eyes and furtive manner of this woman I felt, and shared, a nameless disquiet.” Nonetheless, Morris was quick to add, “Back in the sunlight I soon forgot it.”
Others were keen to overlook any disquieting signs, convinced that the key to international harmony was recognition of the notion that every country was free to choose its own path and that people everywhere have more in common than they realize. No one believed that more passionately than Donald B. Watt of Putney, Vermont, who in the summer of 1932 took his first small group of young Americans to Europe, launching the Experiment in International Living. The highly successful exchange program, which includes stays with local families, continues to operate today. As Watt put it, his aim was “to create a controlled human situation which would produce understanding and friendliness between people and different cultures in a limited period of time.”
Watt’s enthusiasm for “making friends out of ‘foreigners’” made him shrug off—and even mock—all those who warned him against taking his young idealistic travelers to Germany in the summer of 1933 for the second “Experiment” after Hitler had taken power. “From its war-like reputation, one would have expected Germany to have been most inhospitable toward a group interested in making peace,” Watt wrote. “Just the opposite materialized: the Nazi organizations made us feel most welcome… The picture which the [American] newspapers gave and what we actually saw in our families could scarcely have been more different.” Specifically on the subject of violence, he added, “The suggestion of personal danger to foreigners is no less laughable to those who spent the summer in that country than the thought of German courtesy failing.”
Watt did concede after the trip that there was an “excess of order” and “hypnosis of the masses” orchestrated by the Nazis. But the only real danger for a visiting foreigner, he felt, was not to be swept up by “the power of suggestion” of the constant saluting and “to use all his restraint if he does not wish to join the saluting throng.” Despite the widespread reports of beatings of visiting Americans who failed to join in the Nazi salutes, Watt maintained that his charges were free to do whatever they pleased. Living with German families, they began to understand that they had been victims of propaganda back in the United States. “All they had learned of Hitlerism in America was definitely unfavorable, but here they actually saw some good features of it,” Watt wrote.
Even when it came to Jews, he reported that everyone in his group concluded that “relatively few [were] roughly handled.” The main cause of anti-Semitism in Germany, he added, was the fact that “a large proportion of all business was in Jewish hands.” The young Americans were also impressed how Germans “are surmounting their relative poverty by a return to simple folk ways.” But the key takeaway, as Watt put it, was the one he had come searching for—and was determined to find no matter what happened. “Perhaps most important of all, we realized that the people whom we met were very much like us,” he concluded. “The Second Experiment in International Living was an interesting and successful demonstration of tolerance.”
The American social scientists who studied the new Germany were distinctly less Pollyannaish, but they were far from uniform in their judgments of the country’s New Order. Political scientist Frederick Schuman—who, like Dodd, taught at the University of Chicago—spent eight months in Germany in 1933. He had arranged his research trip before Hitler had come to power, but that event now changed both the nature of his stay and its purpose. “I journeyed toward a land I had already known and enjoyed as the home of music, philosophy, and
Schuman made the focus of his research the newly triumphant Nazi movement, gathering materials for his 1935 book
