![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/hitlerland-small_01.png\" "\\"hitlerland")
<\/a>Hindsight is easy, but foresight is difficult. That\u2019s true throughout history, but perhaps nowhere more so than in the reactions of Americans in Germany in the 1920s and \u201930s to Adolph Hitler\u2019s nascent \u201cthousand-year reich.\u201d<\/p>\nU.S. Ambassador William E. Dodd realized what Hitler was about, even if his warning fell on deaf ears at the U.S. State Department. Erik Larson well told Dodd\u2019s story last year in his book, \u201cIn the Garden of Beasts,\u201d which should be required reading for those who would understand Hitler\u2019s Germany. (It\u2019s reviewed in an earlier post on this blog by Paul O\u2019Connor; just use the search function.)<\/p>\n
William Shirer, a correspondent who would later pen the seminal \u201cRise and Fall of the Third Reich,\u201d also had the necessary foresight to see what was coming, as did journalist Dorothy Thompson and others. But that was not true of everyone.<\/p>\n
Take, for instance, the Harvard University grad with German lineage and an American wife; he became an early aide to the Fuehrer. Others were blind, some \u2013 Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh come to mind \u2013 were apologists, and a few were out-and-out propagandists. Six of those were later indicted in the U.S. for treason.<\/p>\n
How Americans in Germany responded to Hitler\u2019s rise is the subject of Andrew Nagorski\u2019s book, and it\u2019s a good expansion of Larson\u2019s earlier work. It\u2019s not as novelistic in concept \u2013 indeed, that would probably have been impossible. But Nagorski tells the whole story from Hitler\u2019s attempted \u201cBeer Hall Putsch\u201d coup attempt in 1923 to the expulsion of captive American journalists and diplomats in 1942.<\/p>\n
Unless you\u2019re an astute student of the era, you\u2019ll find some new stories here, like the American woman who kept Hitler from a suicide attempt when the authorities closed in after the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich.<\/p>\n
That woman was Helene Niemeyer Hanfstaengl, whose husband Ernst, or \u201cPutzi,\u201d had graduated from Harvard, returned to Germany and then latched onto a job basically explaining Hitler to foreigners, particularly the press. Hanfstaengl was \u201cmonumentally vain,\u201d even after he was almost dispatched by Hitler in the \u201930s. Thompson called him \u201cthe oddest imaginable press chief for a dictator\u201d and \u201can immense, high-strung incoherent clown.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hanfstaengl stories are rife both here and in Larson\u2019s earlier work, but he\u2019s really a sideshow. Americans visiting Germany in the \u201920s and \u201930s included all sorts of famous names: Howard K. Smith, later of ABC News; Thomas Wolfe, the North Carolina author; newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst; Richard Helms, who would later lead the CIA; athlete Jesse Owens, famed for his victories at the 1936 Berlin Olympics; and even the black sociologist W.E.B. DuBois.<\/p>\n
Indeed, duBois\u2019s report of his travels may explain some of the early-on American confusion about Nazi Germany. DuBois wrote, \u201cI have been treated with uniform courtesy and consideration. It would have been impossible for me to have spent a similarly long time in any part of the United States without some, if not frequent, cases of personal insult or discrimination.\u201d<\/p>\n
Besides Dodd and Shirer, the heroes, if you will, of this tale are usually the journalists, now mostly part of history, who could help their reluctant countrymen understand the nature of Nazi Germany as it eliminated political opponents, instilled hatred of the Jews and readied the German military machine for its world conquest.<\/p>\n
Just a few of those, in addition to Shirer, Smith and Thompson, are Louis Lochner of the Associated Press, Edgar Mowrer of the Chicago Daily News<\/em>, radio broadcaster H.V. Kaltenborn, and Karl von Wiegand of Hearst newspapers, the first newsman to interview and write about Hitler.<\/p>\n These people were \u201clucky to be able to observe firsthand the unfolding of a terrifying chapter of the modern era,\u201d says Nagorski, a former longtime Newsweek<\/em> correspondent who is now the vice president of New York\u2019s East-West Institute.<\/p>\n They were even luckier to be Americans, which meant they could observe what was happening from a protected vantage point. Says Nagorski, \u201cThey were truly privileged eyewitnesses to history.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Would we recognize evil if we saw it walking around? Tom Dillon, a veteran newsman himself, takes a look at a book about American journalists and others who witnessed firsthand the rise of Hitler\u2019s Nazi Germany. By Tom Dillon HITLERLAND: AMERICAN EYEWITNESSES TO THE NAZI RISE TO POWER. By Andrew Nagorski. Simon and Schuster, 2012. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[360,359,247],"class_list":["post-953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","tag-20th-century-journalism","tag-hitler","tag-nazi-germany"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=953"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/953\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":957,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/953\/revisions\/957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}