“The wholesale atrocities by French negro Colonial troops alleged in the German press, such as the alleged abductions, followed by rape, mutilation, murder and concealment of the bodies of the victims, are false and intended for political propaganda,” he concluded.
Such exaggerations, Allen added, were in part due to “the attitude of certain classes of German women toward the colored troops.” Noting that the postwar economic crisis had spawned widespread prostitution, he explained that “many German women of loose character have openly made advances to the colored soldiers.” Numerous love letters and photographs attested to that fact, he pointed out. In Ludwigshafen, he reported, patrols had to be sent “to drive away the German women from the barracks, where they were kissing the colored troops through the window gratings.”
Even more tellingly, Allen noted that there were several interracial marriages, including one with the daughter of a prominent Rhineland official. “The color line is not regarded either by the French or the Germans as we regard it in America: to keep the white race pure.” While he wasn’t denying that there were many documented cases of sexual assaults, Allen was convinced that it was the behavior of German women that had been the spark to “incite trouble.”
But many Americans in Germany had already made up their minds that it was France’s vindictive policies that were to blame for everything, not anything the Germans were doing. They saw Germany as the victimized party, which was in keeping with much of the local political rhetoric. “I am afraid that many of us who were on duty in Germany after World War I were taken in,”
On January 29, 1921, Karl Henry von Wiegand, a star reporter for the Hearst publications, wrote to C. F. Bertelli, his Hearst colleague in Paris, venting his exasperation with the French. “Your French friends appear to be as insane as they have ever been since the close of the war.” Mentioning new demands by the French for reparations, he added, “Are the French never going to come to their senses, and see Europe as it actually is?” He concluded that many Americans and other Europeans “are getting rather weary of hearing France’s yowl about what France suffered in the war.”
Wiegand was a correspondent who already felt very much at home in Germany and the rest of Europe. Born in 1874 in Hesse, he came to the United States as a young boy, growing up on farms in Iowa where his German immigrant father struggled to make ends meet, losing two farms in the process. When his father was “a fair way to losing a third,” Karl, barely fourteen at the time, decided to make his own way in the world, never telling his siblings or his parents that he wasn’t coming back. “A cruel thing to do to a good father and the kindest of mothers,” he would write much later in notes for an autobiography that he never completed.
He claimed to have then worked on a ranch for Buffalo Bill—who at close range was less than the romantic hero of the frontier that he had imagined from reading dime novels. He made his way further west, eventually finding work at the Associated Press in San Francisco. There, he seized the opportunity to use his German and cover World War I for the rival United Press, happily leaving behind his desk job. Three months into that conflict, he scored an exclusive interview with Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, the son of the Kaiser, who famously told the American that he had warned his father the war was already lost. The subsequent headlines offered a huge boost to Wiegand’s early career. He ended up jumping again—this time to Hearst.
Like any good reporter, Wiegand recognized he had to offer his editors and readers a broad range of stories about the new Germany. While dutifully reporting on every political crisis, the continuing street battles and the economic shortages (“Food Shortage Alarms All Germany,” warned the headline of his May 23, 1922, story), he was also alert to other subjects that would titillate his readers—or, when it came to the racier ones that his editors might not allow, at least his colleagues.
That was particularly true when it came to postwar Germany’s growing reputation for sexual licentiousness. Wiegand kept up a running private correspondence with Bertelli in Paris on the subject. In one letter from 1921, Bertelli urged Wiegand to write more about cocaine and “the alleged degeneracy of the old burg.” Good stories on that subject, he added, will “get the whole of the American continent afire with indignation… and greedy longing!” Then, there was the usual banter about how Wiegand should research this story. “Incidentally you might discover in your night investigations (all for the good of the future generation, of course) some novel Venus… Be careful about taking the necessary measurements…”
Back home, one of Wiegand’s readers concluded that the correspondent might be able to help him with a personal matter. “I am looking for a wife,” R. C. Bruchman wrote him on January 14, 1921, from Danville, Illinois. “I imagine there must be an awful lot of handsome good girls in Berlin who would make a fellow a mighty fine wife.” He enclosed $1.50, asking Wiegand to place an ad in a Berlin newspaper, saying that a thirty-five-year-old German-American gentleman “wants to marry girl 18 to 25 yrs. old.”
An amused Wiegand agreed to the request, noting this was the first time he had been asked to act as a matrimonial agent. “As there are at least a million more women in Germany than men, you ought to have quite a lot to pick from, and I have no doubt you will get many answers,” he wrote back. “It is indeed all too true that many refined and educated German girls of formerly well to do families are today facing want.”
Wiegand also participated in the diplomatic party scene in Berlin, occasionally writing features about it, especially when Americans played starring roles. “Houghton Girls Make Berlin Debut” proclaimed his
At a ball in honor of their daughter and a niece, the Houghtons welcomed “four hundred members of the diplomatic set and high German officialdom, and many representative Americans,” Wiegand reported. This “brilliant fete,” he added, was a huge boost to American prestige. Presumably, the outfits of the daughter (“a gown of silver brocade cloth”) and niece (“a gold-banded net over a novel gold cloth”) all contributed to the success of the evening—as did the fact that the two young women also carried “enormous rose-colored feather fans.” So, too, did an American jazz band that supplied the music, while “a moving picture machine added color by flashing alternate shades on the dancing throng.” All this a half a century before the disco era.
While Wiegand enjoyed such stories, he knew that his editors wanted him to keep explaining Germany’s turbulent political scene as well—a charge he took very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that he became the first American correspondent to interview a local agitator in Munich who was beginning to make his name as a fiery orator. That agitator’s name was Adolf Hitler.
Wiegand declared that he had first met Hitler in 1921, but he only began taking him seriously enough to feature him prominently in his reports a year later. Given the proliferation of extremists in Bavaria at the time, that was hardly surprising. Every encounter with a radical of the right or the left hardly merited a separate story or even a mention in print. But by November 1922, following Benito Mussolini’s power grab in Italy, there was a growing sense that the right was on the rise throughout Europe, providing the perfect peg for a feature about the leader of the German “Fascisti.”
“Hitler Styled Mussolini of Teuton Crisis,” proclaimed the headline of Wiegand’s story datelined November 12, 1922, in the
While denouncing the terms of the Versailles Treaty, Hitler insisted that he wanted reconciliation with France. The idea of war, he told Wiegand, “would be suicidal, if it were not idiocy.” As for domestic policy, he called on Germans to work two extra hours a day to pay off reparations and free them of their debts. He denied any intention to restore the monarchy or push separatism for Bavaria, and he attacked the Marxists head-on. “True socialism is the welfare of all the people, and not of one class at the expense of others. Therefore we oppose class warfare,” he declared.
But for American readers who hadn’t heard of this new politician, what probably registered the most in
