army is his weapon. Fear, not freedom, promises to rule the voters Aug. 19.”
Within days of Hindenburg’s death and Hitler’s quick moves to consolidate all power in his hands, Shirer got his wish: he received a call from one of the bosses at Hearst’s Universal News Service, who offered him a job as its correspondent in Berlin. Elated, Shirer immediately agreed. “Must brush up my German,” he wrote in his diary. On August 25, he and Tess took a train from Paris, arriving at Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof at about ten in the evening. As soon as Shirer stepped off the train, two plainclothesmen grabbed him and demanded to know if he was “Herr So-and-So,” as Shirer recalled, since he didn’t catch the name they kept repeating. “I had expected to meet the secret police sooner or later, but not quite so soon,” he wrote. After examining his passport, the plainclothesmen finally let him go. As he thought of the new chapter that was about to begin for him, Shirer ended his first Berlin diary entry that evening with what he admitted was a bad pun: “I’m going from bad to Hearst.”
That same morning, another foreign correspondent, far more famous at the time than Shirer, had boarded a train to go in the opposite direction, from Berlin to Paris. Dorothy Thompson had the distinction of exiting Nazi Germany for the last time because she had been presented with an expulsion order. Thompson, or Mrs. Sinclair Lewis as she was known because of her novelist husband, had gone to Austria after the murder of Chancellor Dollfuss on July 25, eager to cover what the Nazis were up to there. In early August, she decided to drive from Austria through Munich up to Berlin, reacquainting herself with her old stomping grounds, stopping in towns and villages along the way to get a sense of the popular mood. She may have badly misjudged Hitler when she interviewed him in late 1931, but she was now intent on discovering what he was doing to Germany.
Thompson wasn’t exactly sure when she crossed into Germany since no border guard stopped her, but then she noted the sudden appearance of houses decked out in Nazi flags. Along the road, she saw a Storm Trooper wearing a black armband, which she assumed was in honor of Hindenburg. But when she asked him, the SA man said it was “for Rohm.” Thompson also noticed the election banners everywhere in preparation for the plebiscite that coming Sunday to affirm Hitler’s power grab following Hindenburg’s death. Compared to other countries where voters chose between competing candidates, “in Germany Hitler made himself President and it was a law, and then people voted, whether they liked the law or not,” she wrote later. “If they liked it, that meant he was President; and if they didn’t, that meant he was President anyhow.”
Thompson found the roads in Germany clogged with cars, motorcycles and bicycles, almost all driven by young men. “I was in a procession of young men,” she recalled. “I had the feeling that there were only young men in Germany, thousands and thousands of young men, all very strong and healthy, and all working furiously to get somewhere.” Then there were the election posters that Thompson described as “sentimental, evangelical,” proclaiming “We are with thee, dear leader.”
In Garmisch, an American visitor from Chicago told Thompson that he had been in Oberammergau, the Bavarian village famed for its Passion Plays. “These people are all crazy,” he said. “This is not a revolution, it’s a revival. They think Hitler is God.” During the scene in the Passion Play when Judas received his thirty pieces of silver, a woman sitting next to him declared: “That is Rohm, who betrayed the Leader.”
In the Bavarian town of Murnau, a Hitler Youth camp filled with “beautiful children,” as Thompson put it, sported a huge banner proclaiming WE WERE BORN TO DIE FOR GERMANY. When she arrived in Munich, Thompson had letters of introduction to people she hadn’t met before. “I went to see them but they wouldn’t talk,” she reported. “They were frightened to death; you could see that.”
At another stop, she met a Catholic priest who was willing to talk. “The Nazi Revolution is the greatest blow to Catholicism since Martin Luther,” he told her. “But it is also a blow to all Christianity… In the Nazi outlook nationalism is elevated to a mystic religion, and the state claims not only the bodies of the people but the souls. Force, and not goodness, is the measure of all things.” Who would win in this struggle between Christianity and the Nazis, she inquired. “They are getting the children,” the priest replied. “That is their program—to get the children.” In other words, the Nazis were aiming to replace Christianity with their own “mystic religion,” and they were well on their way to doing so.
When Thompson finally arrived in Berlin, she headed straight to the Adlon Hotel, which felt “like home,” the smiling barman ready with his popular dry martinis. “Oh, I was so glad to be back!” she recalled. Everything was perfect in the hotel. “It was all the courtesy, all the cleanliness, all the exquisite order that was Germany.” But her journalistic colleagues warned her not to use the hotel phones, since they were monitored. So Thompson found a cheap saloon with a phone booth in the back, which she used to place calls to some of her German acquaintances.
The American reporter had lunch with a young woman who worked as a stenographer in a state bank. She had “eyes as candid as water,” Thompson noted. “When you look at her you know she never told a lie in her life.”
“Do you find it’s so bad here as the outside world seems to think?” the woman asked Thompson. When the reporter replied that she had come back to Germany to see the situation for herself, the woman explained that she hadn’t been a Nazi in the beginning, but that even in her bank conditions had changed since Hitler came to power. Overall, wages were lower than before, but the biggest cuts were among the directors and other senior staff. And regular staff felt that they were treated better, with fewer social distinctions. “It’s as though we all belonged to a big family,” she said. While there was talk of food rationing, she claimed everyone was willing to make sacrifices as long as they were employed.
Thompson asked her about the Night of the Long Knives. She professed it was “an awful shock” to learn that some of the Nazi leaders had been “acting dreadful” and were corrupt. “That is why Hitler had to execute them,” she concluded, as if that was a perfectly logical solution.
When Thompson pointed out that in the United States people were tried before they were punished, the German woman didn’t seem to understand her point. “It was funny,” Thompson mused. “I never met anyone in Germany except a few intellectuals, who minded that these people did not have a trial. It was as though they had forgotten that there ever had been such a thing as law.”
Thompson also met a Brownshirt she had known earlier. While admitting there were clashes within the Nazi movement and some of the SA leaders wanted to get rid of Goering or Goebbels, he insisted there was never any talk of undermining Hitler’s regime or of acting in any way against him. “Hitler sold us out,” he said. “There wasn’t any plot. No one was treasonable to Hitler.” He described how Nazi firing squads gunned down far more of his colleagues than reported, with the victims numbering about 300 instead of the 77 mentioned by Hitler.
Thompson also met Otto, a German journalist who had earlier been a staunch defender of free speech but who now “writes articles that free speech isn’t any good,” as she put it. Over coffee and plum cake, he calmly explained that revolutions aren’t made by pleasant people. “Revolutions need terrorists,” he said. “Afterward, when the revolutions succeed, the people who made them are in the way.” The Russians could send those who fell out of favor to Siberia, but in Germany “there was nothing to do but shoot them.” He admitted that shooting former Chancellor von Schleicher’s wife “made a bad impression abroad” and the cleanup was “not pretty.” But the result was a stronger Germany, he insisted. “I doubt if any revolution in history has been made with greater order. It is now consolidated. It will last for years.”
While listening to Otto, Thompson was thinking of some of the other murders on June 30. A music critic in Munich by the name of Willi Schmidt was shot because he was mistaken for a storm trooper with the same name who had already been shot earlier that same day. Dr. Erich Klausener, a Catholic leader, was killed for no reason that she could ascertain. He was cremated and his ashes were sent to his wife by registered post, according to an account she had read in a British newspaper. “I kept thinking how it must have been when the postman rang the bell,” she recalled, imagining a scene of the postman asking the unsuspecting widow to sign for the package and then tipping his hat. “They are awfully polite in Germany,” she observed. To Otto, she said aloud: “Yes, Germany is an orderly country.”
Thompson spent only ten days in Berlin. One day the porter called. “Good morning, madam, there is a gentleman here from the secret state police,” he announced. A young man in a trench coat that looked like the one Hitler wore came up with an order for her to leave the country within forty-eight hours. “In view of your numerous anti-German publications in the American press, the German authorities, for reasons of national self-respect, are unable to extend to you a further right of hospitality,” it read.
While other reporters had been pressured to leave, this was the first outright expulsion and it generated front-page stories back in the United States. “The general feeling of the foreign colony here over the incident is that Nazism has once again demonstrated its utter inability to understand any mentality but its own,” wrote Frederick Birchall, the
