an extremely childish thing to do,” it editorialized.
While Putzi would find it increasingly difficult in the next couple of years to convince Americans in Berlin that he was the reasonable face of the regime, he also was encountering problems with Hitler and his inner circle. The Nazi leader was contemptuous of Putzi’s assertions that he knew how to handle relations with the United States in order to prevent it from opposing Germany. When the Roosevelt Administration established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in November 1933, Hitler told him: “There you are, Hanfstaengl, your friends the Americans have teamed up with the Bolsheviks.” Earlier, Hitler had told him bluntly: “I see America from where I sit much more clearly than you have ever known it.”
Putzi would later claim that, in the first period of Hitler’s reign, he began to notice its absurdities and how detached from reality his entou rage was. Returning from his Harvard reunion to the aftermath of the Night of the Long Knives, the bloody purge of the SA leaders and assorted other targets of the Nazis, he was summoned to Heiligendamm, the Baltic Sea resort where Hitler, Goebbels and others were vacationing. “It was really like something out of Lewis Carroll, a mad hatter’s luncheon party,” he wrote. “With the whole of Germany groaning under this atmosphere of murder, fear and suspicion, there was Magda Goebbels doing the honors in an airy summer dress, with several other young women at the table, even one or two from the aristocratic families…”
It was around this time, Putzi added, that he came to realize that, once Hitler was ensconced in power, “the demon had entered into him.” But even with the benefit of hindsight, he blamed Goebbels and others for pushing Hitler to the point of no return, and admitted he continued to nurture the hope that he could moderate his excesses. Amid all the self-justification, Hanfstaengl’s real concern was much less policy than his own position. Putzi could see it was weakening rapidly. Others were openly criticizing and mocking him, and Hitler didn’t seem interested in doing anything about it. The invitations to play the piano for the Nazi leader were becoming less frequent.
When Truman and Kay Smith returned to Berlin in 1935, they visited Putzi in his small apartment, which was in back of the Chancellery. The living room was dominated by a large bust of Hitler and a grand piano, and Truman casually hung his hat on Hitler’s head as he walked in. “Putz hastily snatched it off,” Kay recalled, pointing out that he treated this as bad manners on Truman’s part, not something to joke about. Over coffee and cake, the old acquaintances caught up on their news. “It was plain that all was not rosy between Putz and Goebbels,” Kay continued. “Putz intimated that Goebbels was jealous of his… influence over Hitler and was keeping him away from Hitler.”
The jealousy factor was almost certainly overblown, since Hanfstaengl’s influence had been on the wane for some time. That was typical Putzi talk—making himself out to be more important than he was. But there was certainly truth in his assertion that Goebbels had no use for a competing propagandist, and there was increasing evidence that he wanted to cut him out of the inner circle completely.
Hanfstaengl claimed that he considered resigning, but that others talked him out of it. More likely, he clung to every shred of power and influence as long as possible, even when his foreign press office was unceremoniously moved further away from the Chancellery. For nearly two years, he wasn’t invited to any events with Hitler at all. At the end of the last luncheon he ever attended with him, Hitler asked him to go to the piano “to play that thing of yours.” When Putzi asked him what piece he meant, he said, “Your funeral march.” Hanfstaengl played it with, as he recalled, “a sense of foreboding.”
In 1936, Putzi felt that he lost another connection to Hitler when his wife, Helen, divorced him. She was the American woman who had possibly prevented Hitler from committing suicide after the Beer Hall Putsch, and who had been the object of his clumsy affection in those Munich days. Helen had long put up with her philandering husband but refused to join him in Berlin—and eventually decided to make their de facto separation permanent. Like Putzi, Helen would later claim that she had grown disaffected with Hitler and the Nazis, especially after the Night of the Long Knives. But even when discussing her feelings with John Toland in 1971, she never mentioned anything else she objected to, not even the Holocaust, and remained fascinated by her association with this historic figure. “Yes, he was extraordinary,” she declared. “After all, when you think of a man from very modest background, to put himself on the map so to speak, he was an extraordinary man. Yes, he was.”
After not seeing Helen for a long time, Hitler once asked an acquaintance of hers what had happened to her. When he learned she had divorced Putzi, he declared, “Oh, fine, fine. I’ll send a telegram congratulating her.” Then, he added, “Oh no, that won’t do.” Helen, who provided this account, was visibly pleased that Germany’s leader was still thinking about her even after he had attained absolute power. She returned to the United States in 1938, where she spent the war years; still, Hitler appeared to hold a special place in her memory until the end of her life.
Seeing how tenuous his position had become, Putzi began smuggling out gold and platinum objects to London. He claimed he also helped some of the victims of the Nazis, winning the release of the daughter of a German-American couple who had been put in a concentration camp in Saxony for criticizing the regime. Above all, though, he kept looking nervously over his shoulder, often sleeping at friends’ apartments and keeping a valid passport with visas to several countries in his pocket.
According to Putzi’s dramatic account, he was in his Munich apartment on February 8, 1937, when the phone rang. The Chancellery was requesting that he report urgently to Berlin. A special plane was waiting to take him there. Putzi was delighted that he might be returned to favor. Although the special plane never materialized, he caught a Lufthansa flight to Berlin, where he reported to the Chancellery. There, he was told he was to fly immediately to Spain to help German correspondents who were covering the civil war. Putzi couldn’t understand the urgency, and complained that this could at least wait till he celebrated his fiftieth birthday two days later. But the officials insisted he stick with the plan, and one of them assured him that, if he did well in Spain, he would be back in Hitler’s good graces. They knew that this was what Putzi still craved.
Informed that he was on a secret mission that would last five or six weeks, Putzi was rushed to Staaken Airfield where he was to board a military plane. Along the way, one of his escorts told him that he would use the name of August Lehman and would pose as a painter and interior decorator in Spain. A cameraman recorded their trip to the airport. By this point, Hanfstaengl was deeply suspicious, and he became even more alarmed when Colonel Kastner, the commandant at the airfield, handed him a parachute, ordering him to put it on.
Once aloft, the pilot, who introduced himself as Captain Frodel, called him up to the copilot’s seat. He had recognized who “August Lehman” really was and asked him what instructions he had. When Putzi told him he was to report to a general in Salamanca, Frodel offered him some chilling news. “Herr Hanfstaengl, I have no orders to take you to Salamanca,” he said. “My instructions are to drop you over the Red lines between Barcelona and Madrid.”
Putzi was stunned. “That is a death sentence,” he protested. “Who gave you such orders?”
Frodel told him he received them right before he took off, and they were signed by Goering. When Putzi protested further, Frodel added, “I was told that you had volunteered for this mission.”
As Hanfstaengl described it, the rest of this episode played out like a thriller, without the pyrotechnics. After only about half an hour, one of the engines made a noise and Frodel turned it off. Casting Putzi a meaningful look, the pilot told him that there was something wrong. “I shall have to put down and have it seen to,” he said.
They landed at a quiet airfield near Leipzig, where the mechanics had already left for the day. Over drinks in the canteen, Frodel announced that a car would be ready soon to take them into town since there was no hope of getting the plane repaired until the next day. After ordering another round of drinks, Putzi said his stomach was bothering him and slipped out. It was dark, and he quickly made his way to the road near the airfield, and, meeting a peasant woman, discovered that there was a train station nearby. From there, he took a train to Leipzig, where he spent the night before hopping a morning train to Munich. He spent only about an hour in his hometown before boarding a third train, this time to Zurich. It was his fiftieth birthday when he arrived there, and he wouldn’t return to Germany until after the war.
Did the top Nazis really concoct such an elaborate plan to arrange the death of someone who had been so eager to serve Hitler for so long? Goering wrote to Hanfstaengl later that the whole affair was “a harmless joke” aimed at getting him to reconsider “some rather over-audacious utterances you have made,” and he would be perfectly safe if he returned to Germany. David Marwell, currently the director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, extensively researched this incident in Germany and concluded that the entire scheme was indeed “an elaborate hoax”; its purpose, he maintained, was to humiliate Hanfstaengl rather than to kill him. But Putzi always remained convinced that he had narrowly escaped a death plot.
