Hitlerland by Nagorski Andrew

Author:Nagorski, Andrew [Nagorski, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Published: 2012-03-12T23:00:00+00:00

Truman Smith, who had been the first American official to meet Hitler, returned to Berlin in 1935 for a second tour, this time as the senior military attaché. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that he met the Nazi leader again, although he had observed him from afar on several occasions, including at the Olympics. At an official function at the Chancellery, Smith worked his way through the reception line and shook Hitler’s hand. Preparing to move on, he felt Hitler’s hand on his sleeve.

“Have I not seen you before?” Hitler asked.

“Yes, Mr. Chancellor, in Munich in 1922,” the startled attaché responded.

“Oh, yes, you introduced me to Hanfstaengl,” Hitler recalled.

It was a vivid demonstration that the German leader, like many skilled politicians, possessed an uncanny memory for significant faces and events in his life even after a long interval.

Returning to Berlin, Truman and his wife, Kay, were immediately struck by its transformation since the early 1920s. “Berlin was so familiar,” Kay wrote in her unpublished memoirs. “It was the same yet not the same. The streets, the buildings were all as I had known them. But now no more shabby fronts and broken fences. All was clean, freshly painted . . . It was as in a dream; all is familiar but changed . . . The crowds well dressed, the people looking well nourished, energetic.” Without any irony, she also observed: “Berlin was a very safe city at this time, as all the drunks, bums, homosexuals, etc. had been put in concentration camps.”

If such remarks betrayed her own prejudices, Kay wasn’t blind to what she characterized as “a certain tenseness” in the air, the product of a regime that was ready to target anyone. When she and Truman returned to the house one day, a servant told them that telephone repairmen had visited the house and insisted on “checking” their connections, despite her protestations that the phone was working well. After that, the Smiths made a habit of putting an overcoat over the phone to foil any listening devices, and postponing any sensitive conversations to when they took walks in the Grunewald, the forest on the outskirts of the city. The couple assumed that it wasn’t only the Nazis who could be spying on them. According to Kay, Truman tried to engineer the removal of an American secretary in his office, a longtime Berlin resident with strong leftist views who he suspected was giving information to the Russians.

Kay also pointed out parallels between the Nazis and the Communists. The Nazis, like the Communists, hoped to replace Christianity with another doctrine—what she identified as “the old Germanic religion,” but in reality was the idea that Nazism superseded all previous beliefs. According to one of Kay’s Catholic friends, a Nazi leader had ordered schoolchildren to replace the standard grace at meals with “Dear Jesus, stay away from us. We eat gladly without thee.” When Rochus von Rheinbabin, a German acquaintance from their first tour, arrived decked out in Nazi

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