a feeling of great admiration for the German people.” As for Hitler, Lindbergh wrote in a letter to the banker Harry Davison, “he is undoubtedly a great man, and I believe he has done much for the German people.” While conceding that Hitler and the German people exhibited fanaticism, he added: “It is less than I expected…” And many of Hitler’s accomplishments would have been impossible “without some fanaticism.”
The event that would cement Lindbergh’s reputation as pro-Nazi took place on October 18, 1938, during the flyer’s third visit. Hugh Wilson, who had recently returned to Germany to take up the post of ambassador, hosted a stag dinner that included Goering and other German aviation officials and experts. When Goering arrived with his aides, he greeted Wilson and then, with the ambassador at his side, made straight for Lindbergh. Holding a small red box in his hand, the Luftwaffe chief made a short speech in German and awarded Lindbergh the Service Cross of the German Eagle, one of the highest decorations for civilians. As Wilson confirmed later in a letter to Lindbergh, both of them were caught by surprise by this award, which was given for his services to aviation. Truman Smith, who was also present, noted there was “no possibility” for Lindbergh to have turned down the decoration. “To have done so would have been a personal affront to Ambassador Wilson, his host for the evening, and to Minister Goering, who in a sense was a host in Germany,” he wrote.
Lindbergh’s subsequent vocal campaign to keep the United States out of the war in Europe, his involvement in the isolationist America First movement, and his conviction that the Soviet Union represented the real threat to European civilization—and that, in a war between those two powers, “a victory by Germany’s European people would be preferable to one by Russia’s semi-Asiatic Soviet Union”—only confirmed how well he had been played by the Nazis. His critics were right that he had become, in effect, an apologist for Hitler. Ironically, though, the flyer’s political blindness also allowed him to help Smith and his team gather more data on the Luftwaffe’s modernization and ambitions than any of their counterparts in other embassies. For his part, Lindbergh was pleased to be part of this effort; as he saw it, this information on Germany’s growing strength only bolstered his argument that the United States should avoid any new conflict with that country.
Not all of the intelligence Smith gathered was on target—and, by his own admission, he overlooked the early signs of German plans for rocketry. He also made some erroneous predictions about the degree of disaffection between the Nazis and the military, and certainly about “Hitler’s realistic and reticent foreign policy,” as he put it in 1937. But on balance, the regular air intelligence reports Smith sent to Washington demonstrated his team’s accomplishments. And Smith’s reputation as the best-informed attache in Berlin on the Luftwaffe was fully merited, something he always stressed was only thanks to the fact that Lindbergh had cooperated with him so extensively and opened so many doors.
At a reception at the British Embassy in 1938, Cardinal Pacelli, the Vatican secretary of state who had served earlier as the papal nuncio in Germany, sent an aide over to Smith asking him to join him. “I was astonished when… he quizzed me in perfect English as to the state of readiness of the Luftwaffe,” he recalled. “One of his questions that I remember distinctly was, what did we Americans think of Germany’s new two-motored fighter: the Messerschmitt 110.” A year later, Pacelli was elected pope and took the name Pius XII.
Of all the people Hitler surrounded himself with, Putzi Hanfstaengl was a special case—and he liked it that way. It wasn’t just the fact that his mother was an American or that he had gone to Harvard that made him different from most of the Nazi leader’s entourage. He would later explain to everyone and anyone that he had wanted to educate and civilize Hitler, but unfortunately he was thwarted at every turn by the radicals around him. “I could feel that the rabid extremists of the Party had got their claws into him again and the arguments of the more reasonable of us were constantly being countered,” he wrote in a typical passage of his memoir.
Note the wording: “the more reasonable of us.” What he really meant was that he was the only reasonable one. When John Toland, the Hitler biographer, interviewed Hanfstaengl in 1970, he asked him whether there were any intelligent men in Hitler’s circle. “No!” Putzi shouted.
Hanfstaengl would also claim that his misgivings about Hitler’s leadership grew steadily. “It would be reasonable to ask why, in view of all my misgivings about the character and intentions of Hitler and his circle, I continued for so long in association with them,” he wrote. His answer: “I was an idealistic National-Socialist, I make no bones about it.”
While many Americans in Berlin, especially the correspondents who relied on him to gain access to Hitler, viewed Hanfstaengl as a highly useful contact—and some, like the AP’s Lochner, considered him to be a friend— others were more suspicious and antagonistic. Even Wiegand, the veteran Hearst correspondent who had often taken advantage of Hanfstaengl’s interventions to get to his boss, found himself in tense exchanges with Putzi after Hitler came to power. In a memo dated October 23, 1933, Wiegand wrote that Hanfstaengl complained to him that Hitler was holding him responsible for the fact that the American correspondent was now “one of my most bitter opponents.” There were also tensions over money; from Wiegand’s correspondence, it’s clear Putzi had taken fees for articles he may have either contributed or helped on in the past, although he wanted to return some of the money after Hitler came to power.
William Randolph Hearst took an active interest in Wiegand’s memos and letters about Hanfstaengl. The propagandist “probably likes to make a little money occasionally for news features,” he wrote Wiegand on November 20, 1934. “That is not a crime. The thing I think is unfortunate is the fact that he is such an extremist and may not be giving his boss the best advice on these religious situations. First the Jews were alienated, then the Catholics, and finally many Protestant sects.” Still, he urged his correspondent to be patient. “Do not be displeased with Dr. Hanfstaengl and others in the Government who seem antagonistic,” he wrote. “Give them good advice and try to guide them towards a greater liberality which will gain approval both at home and abroad.”
By then, many of the Berlin correspondents no longer nurtured those kinds of illusions. As for Putzi, the reporters who were new to Berlin were particularly scathing in their evaluation. Observing him at the Nuremberg party rally in September 1934, Shirer described him as “an immense, high-strung, incoherent clown who does not often fail to remind us that he is part American and graduated from Harvard.” But he admitted that many of the American and British correspondents “rather like him despite his clownish stupidity.”
When it came to Hanfstaengl’s postwar assertions that he had disagreed with the Nazis’ anti-Semitism, they were flatly contradicted by his behavior. On numerous occasions, he had lashed out at outspoken American diplomats and correspondents, like George Messersmith and Edgar Mowrer, by labeling them as Jews. Bella Fromm ran into Putzi at the entrance at the Dodds’ farewell party for Messersmith on May 12, 1934.
“I wonder why we were asked today,” Hanfstaengl told her. “All this excitement about Jews. Messersmith is one. So is Roosevelt. The party detests them.”
“Dr. Hanfstaengl, we’ve discussed this before,” the Jewish reporter replied. “You don’t have to put on that kind of an act with me.”
“All right,” he said. “Even if they are Aryan, you’d never know it from their actions.”
Putzi ended their exchange by offering her a fruit drop. “Have one. They are made especially for the
Fromm had enjoyed eating similar fruit drops as a child and she politely took one. Then, as she was about to put it in her mouth, she noticed the swastika on it. “Try as I would to make the hideous mark disappear, it remained leering at me until I had finished the drop,” she noted.
A month later, Hanfstaengl made a much-publicized visit to the United States to attend his twenty-fifth class reunion at Harvard. The news sparked heated controversy on and off campus. A committee of Jewish organizations argued that Americans should show “no discourtesy of any kind” toward him, but columnist Heywood Broun warned of “bloody riots” during his visit and called for his deportation as an undesirable alien. Noting that Broun was a class ahead of him at Harvard, Putzi dismissed his attacks as “class jealousy.” Talking to reporters who met him as he disembarked in New York, he was equally dismissive of questions about German Jews. “The situation of the Jew in Germany is fairly normal,” he said. When some Jewish reporters asked for five minutes to discuss the issue further, he brushed them off.
While protesters gathered a short distance from his ship and shouted “Down with Hitler,” the on-campus debate was conducted in more muted tones. Benjamin Halpern, a Jewish student, wrote a letter to the
