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Waking to Danger Waking to Danger Americans and Nazi Germany, 1933–1941 ROBERT A. ROSENBAUM 2010 Contents Preface ix 1 Swastika Rising 1 2 The Peace Crusade 21 3 Friendless in America 39 4 Looking for Hitler 57 5 The Red Decade 77 6 Sheep among Wolves 91 7 The Bottom Line 111 8 The Search for Safety 129 9 News from Germany 153 10 The American Century 171 Notes 189 Bibliography 205 Index 215 Photo Essay Follows Page 110 vii Preface “One knows nothing of the history one has experienced,” reflected Victor Klemperer, a German diarist of the Nazi years.1 My earliest memory of an historic event is of the inauguration on March 4, 1933, of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which I read about in My Weekly Reader in second grade. At the time of Pearl Harbor, I was fif- teen and a sophomore in high school. My memories of the years between these two events are like islands in a dark and turbulent river—the history of which I knew nothing. In this little book, I revisit those islands while plumbing one of many currents in that dark stream: Americans’ diverse responses to Nazi Germany in the prewar years. It is also a journey into my own history—in a sense, a “researched reminiscence” perhaps worth sharing with younger generations. The 1930s were years when Americans struggled to define their country’s role in a dangerous world. Opinions were deeply divided and passionately held. Before the debate could be resolved, America was attacked. Under President Roosevelt, America entered World War II not only in self-defense but—contrary to the recent desires of many—as a champion of liberty against tyranny, of world order against anarchy. It was, as has often been observed, the last good war. R.A.R. ix CHAPTER 1 Swastika Rising From dusk to midnight on January 30, 1933, tens of thousands of jack- booted, brown-shirted storm troopers, flaming torches held high, drums beating, bands playing, paraded through Berlin. The “river of fire,” as one observer described it, passed thunderously through the Brandenberg Gate, then turned down the Wilhelmstrasse, past the Presidential Palace and the Reich Chancellery. From a window in the Presidential Palace, the aged Reich president, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, watched the seemingly endless pro- cession in bewilderment. Farther along, before the Reich Chancellery, the massed storm troopers raised their right arms and voices in salute to the slight figure in formal dress standing at a Chancellery window—their leader, newly appointed chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler. Hitler’s appointment that afternoon had surprised most people. He was, indeed, the leader of the largest party—the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP, or “Nazi”)—in the German parliament, the Reichstag, but in two recent elections, in July and November 1932, the number of seats held by the Nazis had fallen from 230 to 196, their pro- portion of the popular vote from 37 percent to 33. Disdained by some as a vulgar demagogue. Hitler nevertheless appealed to many others resentful of Germany’s treatment by its victori- ous enemies in the Treaty of Versailles after World War I and now of its devastation by the worldwide economic depression. His party’s name combined the two most potent ideologies of the day—nationalism and socialism. Nationalism, of course, burned in every German’s breast. By socialism, however, Hitler did not mean the Marxist “socialization of the means of production”—under Hitler, the “means of production” remained profitably in private hands—but a classless society in which 1 2 Waking to Danger advancement would be based on “personality” and “genius” rather than privilege. He promised a “national community” transcending the narrow interests of social classes, economic groups, and political parties. Repeat- edly, in his mesmerizing speeches, Hitler struck chords deeply resonant in the German psyche: blood and soil, betrayal and defeat, enemies within and without, the restoration of Germany as a great power. January 1933 was a time of crisis for Germany. A third of its workforce was unemployed. Streets and beer halls were battlegrounds for the para- military forces of the political parties of the right and the left: the Nazis’ SA (Sturmabteilung, Storm Troops) and SS (Schutzstaffel, Defense Echelon), the Nationalists’ Steel Helmets, the Social Democrats’ Reich Banner, the Communists’ Red Front. Parliamentary government was paralyzed; government was now conducted by presidential decrees. Masses of Germans were demoralized and despondent, hostile to the postwar Weimar Republic and receptive to an authoritarian alternative. After a succession of conservative presidential cabinets—cabinets not dependent upon a parliamentary majority—had collapsed in the preced- ing months, a clique of power brokers persuaded President Hindenburg to grant Hitler’s demand for the chancellorship but in a cabinet domi- nated by reliable conservatives. Hindenburg distrusted Hitler—a rabble- rouser, a common Austrian who had served in the German army during the war but as a mere corporal. Reluctantly, he accepted the assurances of his advisers that Hitler and two Nazi colleagues would be restrained by eight other cabinet members and “tamed” by responsibility. Shortly after noon on January 30, Hindenburg met with Hitler and his new cabinet. Hitler promised to uphold the constitution and return eventually to parliamentary government. The president nodded appro- val and closed the interview. “And now, gentlemen, forward with God,” he said.1 In bitter despair, General Erich Ludendorff, who had been Hinden- burg’s chief of staff during World War I and a onetime National Socialist member of the Reichstag, wrote to the president: “You have delivered up our holy German Fatherland to one of the greatest demagogues of all time. I solemnly prophesy that this accursed man will cast our Reich into the abyss and bring our nation to inconceivable misery. Future genera- tions will damn you in your grave for what you have done.”2 *** Hitler was not an impressive figure. Time magazine described him as “this pudgy, stoop-shouldered, toothbrush-mustached but magnetic little man.”3 American journalist Dorothy Thompson, who had interviewed Hitler in 1932, reported: “When finally I walked into Adolph Hitler’s salon in the Kaiserhof Hotel [in Berlin], I was convinced that I was meeting the future Swastika Rising 3 dictator of Germany. In something less than fifty seconds I was quite sure that I was not. “It took just about that time to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog. “He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a carica- ture, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man. “A lock of lank hair falls over an insignificant and slightly retreating forehead. The back head is shallow. The face is broad in the cheek-bones. The nose is large, but badly shaped and without character. His move- ments are awkward, almost undignified and most un-martial. There is in his face no trace of any inner conflict or self-discipline. “And yet he is not without a certain charm. But it is the soft, almost feminine charm of the Austrian! When he talks it is with a broad Austrian dialect. “The eyes alone are notable. Dark gray and hyperthyroid—they have the peculiar shine which often distinguishes geniuses, alcoholics, and hysterics.”4 Ordinary Germans viewed Hitler differently. They had been longing for a hero to lead them out of their humiliation and despair. In 1931, Lutheran pastor Martin Niemo¨ller had asked, in a radio broadcast, “Where is the leader? When will he come? Our seeking and willing, our calling and striving fail to bring him. When he comes, he will come as a present, as a gift of God.”5 After an election rally in 1932, a Hamburg school teacher recorded her impressions of the man already universally called “The Fu¨hrer [leader]”: “There stood Hitler in a simple black coat and looked over the crowd, waiting—a forest of swastika pennants swished up, the jubilation of this moment was given vent in a roaring salute. ... “His voice was hoarse after all his speaking during the previous days. When the speech was over, there was roaring enthusiasm and applause. Hitler saluted, gave his thanks, the Horst Wessel song sounded out across the course. Hitler was helped into his coat. Then he went. “How many look up to him with touching faith! As their helper, their saviour, their deliverer from unbearable distress—to him who rescues the Prussian prince, the scholar, the clergyman, the farmer, the worker, the unemployed, who rescues them from the parties back into the nation.”6 Leni Riefenstahl, who later made classic propaganda films for the Nazis, recalled her first view of Hitler, also in 1932: “Hitler appeared, very late. The spectators jumped from their seats, shouting wildly for several minutes: ‘Heil, Heil, Heil!’ I was too far away to see Hitler’s face but, after the shouts died down, I heard his voice: ‘Fellow Germans!’ 4 Waking to Danger “That very same instant I had an almost apocalyptic vision that I was never able to forget. It seemed as if the earth’s surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the earth. I felt quite paralyzed.”7 In 1934, American correspondent William L. Shirer encountered Hitler in Nuremberg. “Like a Roman emperor,” he wrote in his diary, “Hitler rode into this medieval town at sundown today past solid phalanxes of wildly cheering Nazis.
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