"Hitlerland" by Andrew Nagorski

Above: "Hitlerland. American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power." Andrew Nagorski. 327 Pages.

Sheds a lot of light on the period between the wars... how such a seemingly inconsequential man could rise to power cornering the minds of so many to evil intent.

I completed reading this book today.

On 08 May 2016, I visited the Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremburg, Germany. During the late 1930's, after Hitler's rise to power as Chancellor of Germany, Nazi Party rallies, including over 3 million people, were held at the Nuremburg Rally Grounds.

Standing in the vast open space, surrounded by concrete butresses, monuments, sculptures, and review stand, I tried to channel, as best I could, the sights and sounds of those rallies. I had seen film clips, movies etc. I marveled at the power of one individual, Adolf Hitler, able to excite so many people into such a frenzy of adulation.

Today, the Rally Grounds is a venue for rock concerts. The Rolling Stones, Metallica and many others can now claim they "sang.... today where Hitler talked."

Hitler. What an amazing figure. From 1914 to 1918 he fought as a corporal in WWI. All accounts show him to have been a good and loyal soldier. He was injured on two occasions and came back from hospitalization to continue the fight. His performance reports say, to the effect, "he was a good soldier, but was not promoted because he showed no qualities of leadership."

What? No qualities of leadership? The guy who had 3 million Nazis yelling and screaming in these Rally Grounds?

What an incredible, impossible story.

Two years after the end of the war, young Hitler, blaming weak German leaders and Jews for Germany prematurely giving up a necessary fight that "should have continued," joined a workers' party movement. Hitler's and his workers party's aim was to protest economic hardship imposed on Germany by the victorious allies and the seeming weakness of the new Democratic Weimar German government to redress the "wrongs" perpetrated on Germany by the unfair Treaty of Versailles (which "of course" had at its roots the machinations of European Jewry).

Three years after the war, Hitler had become the chief spokesman for his workers' party, later to become the National Socialist Party. Only three years after the war, the corporal who had no leadership ability, was giving speeches to anxious and rabid followers ten thousand strong. Standing by Hitler's side during this early period of Nazi-ism, also supporting the workers' movement, was top German general, Eric Ludendorf, who at war's end, was second in command to Paul Von Hindenburg. Amazing. The Corporal and the General.

In his book, Andrew Nagorski, former European Newsweek correspondent, amasses the memoirs, private letters, recollections, and published accounts of Americans, diplomats, press, celebrities and luminaries to describe how Americans in Germany during the interwar period reacted to the rise to power of Adolf Hitler.

One memorable case: Howard K. Smith, an idealistic, young seeker of the truth about Hitler, and recent graduate of Tulane University, hired himself out as a deckhand on a cargo ship crossing the Atlantic. His destination was Gemany. Smith, who in the 1970's was one of America's premier television news readers (ABC News), was hired in Germany as a junior reporter by United Press International, for whom he worked in Germany for six years.

Smith articulated an interesting framework to understand how Hitler was viewed by other Americans stationed in Germany during the interwar period. Curious Americans wanted to know: "Was Nazi Germany a good thing or a bad thing?"

Smith developed a theory about how Americans and othere foreigners tended to evolve in their thinking about Germany. He broke the process into four stages.

Stage One - Nazi Germany was overwhelmingly attractive. Smith: "Germany was clean, it was neat, a truly handsome land. Its big cities were cleaner than big cities ought, by custom to be...The impression was one of order, cleanliness and prosperity - and this has been of immense propaganda value to the Nazis."

Stage Two - The most noticeable characteristic of Nazi German was "uniforms and guns," the amazing extent to which Germany, even in the mid-'30's, was prepared for war. Most American observers at the time saw the phenomenon as downright exciting. Smith noted that he watched from a window in Nuremberg "a broad undulating river of ten, twenty thousand men in uniform, stamping in unison down the cobble-stone streets, flooding the the valley between the houses with a marching song so loud the windows rattled, and so compelling your very heart adopted to its military rhythm.

Stage Three - Realization that that beyond the excitement of the marching and singing, "you began to grasp that what was happening was that young humans, millions of them, were being trained to act merely upon reflexes. All this drilling was aimed at teaching them to kill as a reflex. On terse commands which altered their personalities more neatly than Doctor Jeckyll became Mr. Hyde, they were learning to smash, crush, destroy, wreck."

Stage Four - This level was characterized by "a strange, stark terror." Those who reached stage four were often overcome with alarm that the rest of the world had no idea what was rising to confront them; they also feared that the unsuspecting outsiders would be no mach for the dark forces unleashed in Germany.

Surprisingly, many resident Americans in Germany never got beyond stage two... even late in the game. Nagorski tells the story about how people reacted to Hitler and Nazi's, anecdote by anecdote. He fits those stories into the framework outlined by Howard K. Smith.

Two of the most fascinating characters resident in Germany during the interwar period was Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstaengl and his wife Katherine Sedgwick Hanfsaengle. Putzi, "half American," was born of a German father and an American wife. He went to Harvard and developed many American friendships, all the while learning much about the ways of Americans. Post graduation, he was a regular at the Harvard Club in New York City, where he met FDR, then a young New York State Senator. While at Harvard, he met his American wife Katherine.

During WWI, Hanfstaengl felt the pull of allegiance to Germany, where he as born. Before US entry into the war in late 1917, Hanfstaengl would work on pro-German causes and was under watch by US authorities.

Hanfstaengl and his wife decided to return to Germany in 1921. There he found Germany a "political madhouse." In 1922 Putzi got a call from his Harvard classmate, Truman Smith, who had just been assigned as a junior officer to the US embassy in Berlin. Smith and his wife Kay visited Putzi and Katherine in Bavaria.

Thus began a round of introductions which resulted in Smith being the first American to interview Adolf Hitler. Hitler saw Putzi's utility in facilitating connections to upper level America and made Putzi one of his top PR people. Hitler also took a liking (always platonic, purportedly) to Katherine Hanfstaengl.

One fascinating anecdote. After Hitler's failed Munich Beer Hall Putch in 1928, he raced, alone at night, to the Hanfstaengl home. Only Katherine was there, but she let the flustered and bedraggled Hitler in to hide. There, so the story goes, Hitler pulled out his revolver and pointed it at his head. Katherine grabbled the gun and calmed him down. How the world could have gone a different direction but for this one event... if its true!

There are many other stories. Sinclair Lews and Dorothy Thompson, one of the first American female foreign correspondents with celebrity status, were in inter war Berlin together. They romanced and married during their German years.

The book is a long string of anecdotes ending with the US press corps and the embassy staff being sequestered in a country hotel for several months after the US and Germany declared war on one another in 1941.

There are many anecdotes involving Goering, Himmler, Hess et al and even Hitler himself. Most American who met Hitler were flummoxed by him. He didn't look them in the eye. He could be pleasant on a one on one the one hand, but triggered into, say, talk about the Jews, he would shift into oratory mode, seemingly even forgetting that he was having a conversation with some one.

Fascinating, well crafted, well sequenced book. Sheds a lot of light on the period between the wars... how such a seemingly inconsequential man could rise to power cornering the minds of so many to evil intent.