Hitlerland

his life while Papen only paid with a couple of teeth.”

On July 1, Dodd and his daughter Martha had made the point of driving by Papen’s residence. Martha spotted the young son of the vice chancellor standing behind the curtains, and he later told the Dodds that his family was grateful for this sign of solidarity at a time when no other diplomats dared to venture near their house. Ambassador Dodd also sent his card with a message: “I hope we may call on you soon.” According to Martha, her father had no sympathy for Papen, whom he viewed as “black with cowardice, devious with espionage and betrayal.” But this was his way of expressing his displeasure with the brutal methods of Germany’s new rulers.

At the Fourth of July party, the Dodd residence was festooned with red, white and blue flowers that artfully decorated the tables, along with small American flags. While the orchestra played American music, the American expats, both diplomats and journalists, mingled with the German guests. Martha and her brother Bill sardonically greeted the German arrivals with what had become the most frequently asked question since the Night of the Long Knives: “Lebst du noch?” Translation: “Are you still alive?” Some of the Nazis were visibly irritated.

At one point, the butler told Martha that Papen’s son, the one they had seen in the window three days earlier, had arrived. Visibly nervous, he talked with Ambassador Dodd, protesting how ludicrous were the charges that his father was somehow involved in a conspiracy with Rohm, Schleicher and the others against Hitler. A few days later, once his father was freed and out of immediate danger, the two Papens openly came to visit Dodd, prompting the American journalists to rush over for information about the politician who was still formally in Hitler’s government but had come so close to becoming one of his early victims. Despite Dodd’s personal misgivings about Papen, it was a way for the vice chancellor to demonstrate that he had American support. As Martha put it, this indicated “that the Germans were still respectful, and a bit awed by American public opinion at this time.”

Her father was reaching a different conclusion, even if he had contributed to Papen’s salvation so that he could go on serving his new masters. That same week a professor from the University of Berlin came to see him, ostensibly to discuss a lecture Dodd was supposed to give to the History Department on July 13. Given the tense situation, they agreed to call off the lecture. The German was despondent about the savagery the Nazis were arousing among his countrymen, stunned that they were capable of such barbaric behavior. He made a point of praising an editorial in London’s Times that described the Night of the Long Knives as a return to medieval practices. “Poor Germany, she cannot recover in decades to come. If I could go to any other of the greater countries, I would leave the university at once,” he declared.

In his diary entry of July 8, Dodd admitted to feeling a similar deepening pessimism. He hosted a visiting American delegation, but they had asked that no press be allowed to cover the event because they didn’t want to be attacked at home for their presence in Germany. Hitler’s killing spree had hardened hostility to the country in the United States and elsewhere. As for Germany itself, Dodd noted, “I can think of no country where the psychology is so abnormal as that which prevails here now.”

The ambassador was increasingly questioning the sense of his own mission. “My task here is to work for peace and better relations,” he wrote. “I do not see how anything can be done so long as Hitler, Goering and Goebbels are the directing heads of the country. Never have I heard or read of three more unfit men in high place.” Reading the diary at this point, you can almost hear Dodd sigh as he concluded, “Ought I to resign?”

On February 23, 1934, William Shirer, who was living with his Austrian wife, Tess, in Paris, turned thirty— but he wasn’t exactly thrilled by his situation. Back in 1925, he had left Cedar Rapids, Iowa, right after college and pursued the adventurous life of a young reporter eager to explore the world. He worked for the Chicago Tribune out of Paris, where he got to meet the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Isadora Duncan; he also snagged assignments that allowed him to wander all around Europe and as far afield as Afghanistan and India, where he befriended Mahatma Gandhi and contracted malaria and dysentery. In 1932, as the Depression worsened, he lost his job and he had a skiing accident that caused him to lose sight in one eye. He and Tess then tried to live off his savings in Spain while he worked on a novel and an early memoir, failing to publish either. When they returned to Paris, he got a job offer from the Paris edition of the New York Herald in January 1934. But as he noted in his diary on his birthday the following month, it was “the worst job I’ve ever had.”

The big stories seemed to be happening elsewhere—in Germany, Russia, Italy, where strong leaders were all in command. France was buffeted by strikes and unrest, but looked rudderless by comparison. “The Paris that I came to in 1925 at the tender age of twenty-one and loved, as you love a woman, is no longer the Paris that I will find day after tomorrow,” he wrote right before his return in January 1934.

On June 30, he excitedly recorded in his diary that the phone lines to Berlin were down for several hours. “And what a story!” he exclaimed. He cited the reports of the arrest of Rohm by Hitler in person, and the shooting of several SA leaders. “The French are pleased. They think this is the beginning of the end of the Nazis,” he continued.

While Shirer didn’t record any judgment of his own, he realized that the biggest story of his life was unfolding nearby. “Wish I could get a post in Berlin,” he concluded. “It’s a story I’d like to cover.” Two weeks later, after more details about the breadth and brutality of the purge had come to light, Shirer added: “One had almost forgotten how strong sadism and masochism are in the German people.”

In his largely forgotten novel The Traitor that he wrote after the war, Shirer expounded on his feelings at the time. His protagonist, the aspiring American journalist Oliver Knight, discusses his plans to go to Europe with his college instructor. The instructor tells him that Paris would be great fun, but he would be just “another young American in Paris,” likely to spend endless hours with wine and women, “babbling about a Europe you were woefully ignorant of.” Besides, France is “too static,” he continued, and “nothing very world-shattering is likely to come out of France in our time.”

Not so with the Germans, the instructor continued. Despite Bach, Beethoven, Schiller and Goethe, their culture was “a mere veneer so thin that their barbarism—the pagan barbarism of the German forests—is continually threatening to break through and engulf them.” The big story was developing in Germany, his instructor insisted, and any young man who wanted to make his mark in journalism should go there, not Paris. To be sure, Shirer wrote his novel with the benefit of hindsight, but it undoubtedly reflected his gut feelings in 1934. He desperately longed to get to Berlin.

On August 2, President von Hindenburg died at the age of eighty-six. Once considered a towering figure, he had looked largely irrelevant and impotent once Hitler had become chancellor. “Who can be president now? What will Hitler do?” Shirer asked in his diary when he heard the news. The next day he knew the answer: Hitler had announced he would take over all presidential powers along with his current ones, and the Army would be required to swear an oath of “unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Fuhrer of the German Reich and people, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces.” It wasn’t an oath to serve the country; it was deliberately fashioned as an oath to serve one man whose power was now unquestioned and unlimited.

Shirer was impressed with the sheer audacity of such a move. “The man is resourceful,” he wrote in his diary on August 4. Hitler also announced that a plebiscite would be held on August 19 to approve his seizure of all political and military powers. He justified his actions in large part by the alleged plot against him and the Army that he claimed triggered the June 30 crackdown. After attending a meeting of the American Chamber of Commerce in Berlin, Fromm noted in her diary: “Nobody believes that Hitler’s life was endangered or that a counterrevolution was planned.”

But on August 3, Knickerbocker, the veteran correspondent who had been so perceptive in many of his earlier dispatches, reported that Rohm’s Brownshirts had planned “what would have been the most extraordinary massacre in modern political history.” Its supposed victims: the leaders of the Reichswehr, including the chiefs of the General Staff—which, according to Knickerbocker, was why the generals were willing to accept “a one-time corporal” as their commander-in-chief and swear a personal oath to him. While Knickerbocker indicated he was relaying a version of events from Berlin sources, presumably top Nazi officials, he didn’t include anything to suggest he was skeptical of this interpretation.

Wiegand, the Hearst correspondent, didn’t comment on Hitler’s claims but offered a more critical view of his power grab on the same day. Noting that “Hitler has attained a position quite without parallel in any country in the world,” he added: “Until yesterday it was possible to say he was the instrument of the Reichswehr. Today the