correspondent who had covered Germany since World War I, produced a major two-part article that encouraged exactly those kinds of illusions.
Writing in the April and May 1939 editions of
Wiegand’s first installment in the April issue described how Hitler had become “a veritable human meteor streaking the dark political skies of Europe—an ill omen to millions, a sign to other millions.” Like a meteor, Hitler “is being consumed by fires of his own being,” including “his unbelievably deep hatred for the Jews” and “his insatiable greed for ruthless power.” But Wiegand was also clearly in awe of what this strange figure he had first met in Munich had achieved. “Measuring his personal achievements, future historians may record Adolf Hitler as the political genius of this era, perhaps of this century,” he wrote. Nonetheless, he indicated that Hitler was acutely conscious that a climax was coming soon and his own life could be cut short. As a result, his actions were marked by “a fever of impatience, haste, hurry, drive,” which is “a state of mind in which any man may stumble.”
In his second installment in the May issue, however, Wiegand delivered an oddly reassuring message to his American readers: “Adolf Hitler is no physical menace to the United States except (1) in an agreement or alliance with Great Britain; (2) in the event that England should turn Fascist, or (3) if Nazi Germany should conquer England. The probability of any of these eventualities is remote.”
Hitler had demonstrated his own near psychic qualities by predicting that neither Britain nor France would fight to save Czechoslovakia, he added. When it came to what the German leader would do next, Wiegand declared that he was no prophet—but that didn’t prevent him from making a sweeping prediction. “Hitler has achieved without war what no other man has accomplished for centuries,” he wrote. “As I know Der Fuhrer, he will not in his senses stake those achievements and his unique place in history on the uncertain gamble of a deliberately planned aggressive war.”
Suddenly, just as war was looming, Wiegand was sounding less like a seasoned correspondent and more like one of those naive American visitors to Germany that Howard K. Smith had written about—stuck in stage-one or stage-two thinking about what Hitler and his movement truly represented.
“On Our Island”
On April 20, 1939, AP bureau chief Lochner dutifully set out to observe the lavish celebration of Hitler’s fiftieth birthday. “I sat for four hours in the reviewing stand watching the biggest military display in German history,” he wrote his daughter and son back in Chicago on April 26. “You can imagine how a pacifist like myself falls for that stuff!” Among the troops on parade was Wolfgang Wosseng, who had worked as an “office boy” for Lochner and was then called up as a Potsdam grenadier. While everyone else was wildly cheering, Lochner couldn’t help thinking that Wosseng could be forced to shoot at similar young men in different uniforms very soon. “If that parade is a sample, I tell you the next war will be more terrible than anything the world has known,” he continued in his letter. “The war of 1914 will have been child’s play compared to this.”
Unlike Wiegand, Lochner was far from convinced that Hitler would stop with the easy conquests, avoiding the fatal step that would trigger a new conflagration. “I fear the Germans make one big mistake: they completely underestimate the potential forces arrayed against them,” he explained to his children. Warning that it is always dangerous to underestimate one’s opponents, he added: “Queer that the top leaders in Germany should repeat that mistake of 1914–1918! Remember how they used to scoff at the possibility that America could ship troops across the ocean? Now they drill into the German people that England is decrepit and won’t fight; that France is torn with domestic strife; that the U.S.A. is a big bag of wind, etc., etc. A great pity!”
But Hitler and his entourage weren’t the only ones to indulge in wishful thinking. The reports by Truman Smith and others in the U.S. Embassy in Berlin about the rapidly growing strength of the German military were often greeted with skepticism in Washington, and the authors viewed as alarmists. Still, there was a realization that war was a growing possibility. By early summer, Moffat, the State Department’s Chief of the Division of European Affairs, put the chances of a new conflict at 50-50.
For American correspondents and officials, the key question was how well prepared were the countries Germany was most likely to attack—first of all, Poland. Knickerbocker, the former Berlin correspondent who was still traveling around Europe, recalled that everyone wanted to know whether the Poles could hold out long enough for the French to mobilize an offensive and come to their rescue. “Optimistic Poles said they could hold out for three years; pessimistic Poles said one year,” he wrote. “The French thought the Poles could hold out for six months.”
On August 18, Moffat noted in his diary: “The Polish ambassador called. He had little to offer other than to reiterate the belief of his Government that German strength was overrated… He said that the German army was not the army of 1914. The officers had insufficient training and had not been allowed to remain long enough with the same units of troops. The best generals had been liquidated, and the remaining generals were merely ‘Party hacks.’ !! The German people did not want to fight, and it would be suicidal to start a war when conditions were already so bad that people were being rationed as to foodstuffs.”
Moffat concluded, “The whole conversation represented a point of view of unreasonable optimism and still more unreasoning underrating of one’s opponent, that, if typical of Polish mentality in general, causes me to feel considerable foreboding.”
As he continued to cover the unfolding drama in Europe for CBS, Shirer was beyond foreboding. He was deeply pessimistic. Even his good friend John Gunther, the former
Returning to Berlin in early August, Shirer found his darkening mood turning into open anger. On the train from Basel, he observed that the passengers “looked clean and decent, the kind that made us like Germans, as people, before the Nazis.” In a discussion with someone he identified as Captain D—“a World War officer of proved patriotism”—Shirer recorded that the German, who had earlier professed to be against a new war, “became violent today at the very mention of the Poles and the British,” taking his cue from Hitler’s attacks on both. His diary entry on August 9 chronicles their heated exchange:
He thundered: “Why do the English butt in on Danzig and threaten war over the return of a German city? Why do the Poles [sic] provoke us? Haven’t we the right to a German city like Danzig?”
“Have you the right to a Czech city like Prague?” I asked. Silence. No answer. That vacant stare you get on Germans.
“Why didn’t the Poles accept the generous offer of the Fuhrer?” he began again.
“Because they feared another Sudetenland, Captain.”
“You mean they don’t trust the Fuhrer?”
“Not much since March 15,” I said, looking carefully around before I spoke such blasphemy to see I was not being overheard. Again the vacant German stare.
March 15, 1939, was the date when German troops had marched into Prague and Hitler declared, “Czechoslovakia has ceased to exist!”
