One of the greatest journalistic misapprehensions of all time was made by one of the greatest journalists of all time. In December 1931, the legendary American reporter Dorothy Thompson secured an interview with Adolf Hitler, whose National Socialist party had recently surged in the polls, bringing him from the fringe of German politics to the cusp of political power.
“When I walked into Adolf Hitler’s room, I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany,” Thompson recalled afterward. “In something like 50 seconds, I was quite sure he was not. It took just about that time to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog.” Within a year, Hitler was chancellor.
We have come to view Hitler’s path to the chancellorship, and ultimately to dictatorship, as inexorable, and Hitler himself as a demonic force of human nature who defied every law of political gravity—not as the man of “startling insignificance” Thompson encountered in the second-floor corner office of the Brown House, the Nazi Party headquarters in Munich, that day. But Thompson was hardly alone in her assessment. Much of the German press, most international correspondents, and many political observers—along with a majority of ordinary Germans—drew similar conclusions about the Nazi leader. Which brings up the question: How did so many reporters and other contemporary observers get Hitler so wrong?
Few public figures have provided as easy a target for ridicule and disparagement as Adolf Hitler. He was a high-school dropout, a failed artist, and a frontline soldier who never made it beyond the rank of corporal. He was a rabid anti-Semite who did not himself possess the Aryan credentials he demanded of his followers. His father had changed the family name from Schickelgruber. “Heil Schickelgruber!” was a running joke in the Weimar years. But even the name Hitler was cause for ridicule. Hitler can be translated as “man from the hut” and appears in various iterations: Hiedler, Hietler, Hüttler, Hittler, all of which convey a sense of quaint southern rusticism, especially to the north-German ear. “Hüttler? Hüttler?” the left-wing newspaper Vorwärts wrote in December 1932, spoofing Hitler’s name. “It sounds so funny.”
Even in Bavaria, where Hitler had launched his political career, he was more disdained than feared. In March 1922, when Hitler was circulating on the right-wing fringe of Munich’s beer-hall political scene, Bavaria’s state interior minister considered deporting him to his native Austria, only to be allegedly told by a Social Democratic colleague that the National Socialist leader was a “comical figure” who would soon “be hurtled back into the insignificance from which he originally came.”
To run for political office in Germany, Hitler needed to obtain German citizenship. His repeated attempts to do this were subjected to public ridicule. In 1930, after the Bavarians refused Hitler citizenship because of his felony conviction for his failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Wilhelm Frick, the first National Socialist to secure a senior post in government, arranged for Hitler to be appointed to a position that automatically conferred German citizenship—police commissioner in the little Thuringian village of Hildburghausen. Hitler traveled to this hinterland village, swore an oath, and signed an affidavit before recognizing, belatedly, the paltry nature of the position. Returning to Munich, Hitler burned his appointment papers and instructed Frick to do the same. But by then it was too late—journalists had gotten wind of this.
The opposition press had a field day. Hitler was hailed as the “Gendarme of Hildburghausen.” “We do not wish to disparage the honorable position of a gendarmerie commissioner,” the Berlin newspaper Vossische Zeitung editorialized, “but the absurdity lies in the outspoken peacock vanity of the ruler of the Brown House, as if he really wanted to command seven gendarmes and three police officers.” It got worse: “As of yesterday, all of Europe is laughing about Adolf Hitler,” reported Tempo, another Berlin paper. And the laughter wasn’t coming just from Europe: “The whole world is laughing about Gendarme Hitler,” the Social Democratic newspaper Das Volk reported. As The New York Times summed things up, Hitler’s fumbling attempt at this backwoods path to German citizenship and political power had generated “more merriment than indignation in political circles.”
Hitler’s second attempt at securing German citizenship was also facilitated by Wilhelm Frick. This effort—being appointed a mid-level civil servant in the state of Braunschweig—was successfully consummated, but it turned farcical nonetheless. As Hitler entered the room in Braunschweig where he was to take his oath of office, he reportedly tripped on the carpet, leaving his entourage frozen awkwardly in stiff-armed Nazi salutes while he stumbled headlong into the room. One observer compared it to “Napoleon appearing on the world stage in his underwear.” The newspaper Germania saw the scene as a “constitutional comedy” ready-made for the theater.
“Hitler Appointed Civil Servant,” declared the headline of a Vorwärts article, which noted that if Hitler failed in his electoral bid for the presidency, he could safely withdraw to Braunschweig, with his annual salary of 5,238 Reichmarks (about $27,350 today), and serve out his time as a “diligent” public servant until his mandatory retirement, at age 65, in 1954.
Hitler acquired German citizenship on Friday, February 26, 1932. The following day he announced his candidacy for president, setting the stage for a battle with Paul von Hindenberg, the 84-year-old field marshal and incumbent German president. One campaign poster showed Hindenburg as Atlas bearing the world on his shoulders alongside a diminutive caricature of Hitler jumping up and down in his brown shirt and screaming, “Ich bin noch viel starker!”—“I am so much stronger!” In April, Hindenburg crushed Hitler by 6 million votes. Hitler had his chief legal counsel, Hans Frank, go to court to have the election results overturned, claiming that there had been irregularities by state officials and that Hitler had been unfairly disadvantaged by not being permitted to speak on the radio. The presiding judge chided Frank for wasting the court’s time and dismissed the case, observing that 6 million votes was too large a margin for any of Hitler’s claims to have made a difference.
Undeterred, Hitler made a bid for the chancellorship in August of that year, after Reichstag elections the preceding month in which the National Socialists won 37 percent of the vote. Arguing that this gave his party the largest share of a potential conservative coalition, Hitler demanded absolute power. Hindenburg rejected the idea out of hand, telling Hitler that he would never entrust the chancellorship to a man who was so divisive, hate-filled, and unwilling to compromise. Konrad Heiden, a regular contributor to Frankfurter Zeitung, was one of the most astute political observers of the day. “The entire German nation watched as Hitler ascended the stairs to power,” Heiden later wrote. “The entire nation watched as Hitler went flying back down those same stairs.”
In the highly polarized media landscape of the Weimar Republic, Hitler could expect little accommodation in the Social Democratic Vorwärts or the Communist newspaper, Die Rote Fahne, or even in centrist newspapers such as Vossische Zeitung and Frankfurter Zeitung. But the 1,600 conservative newspapers controlled by the right-wing media mogul Alfred Hugenberg provided at best backhanded support. Although Hugenberg’s papers praised Hitler for his belligerent nationalism and his desire to destroy democracy, they lamented his refusal to enter into a coalition government as politically misguided. Hitler dismissed the critique, saying he did not need the “golden rain” of Hugenberg’s media empire.
Hitler found favorable media coverage restricted to reprints of his speeches in the Volkischer Beobachter, the Nazi Party paper published in Munich, and Der Angriff, the Nazi Party paper published in Berlin. To extend his reach, Hitler leased Lufthansa passenger planes and crisscrossed the country, speaking at as many as five rallies in a single day, covering an estimated 40,000 miles in the course of campaigning in the various national elections of 1932. And to break out of the National Socialist echo chamber, Hitler had earlier tried turning to the foreign press.
For help with this, he relied on Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, who had attended Harvard in the early 1900s and called on the connections he had made there for help in establishing a presence for the führer in the international press. In December 1931, Hanfstaengl had stage-managed an international press conference for Hitler at the Hotel Kaiserhof, across the street from the chancellery. “Adolf Hitler sat in Berlin giving press interviews as though he were already Chief of State,” Time magazine reported. Hanfstaengl scheduled a second press conference for the following week, expressly for British and American journalists. The event was canceled amid concerns that the government would conduct a police raid to prevent a repeat of the previous week’s presumptuous affront. As a substitute, Hanfstaengl arranged for a live broadcast with CBS radio, during which Hitler would address the American people. But that address, in turn, was scuttled when the German postmaster general denied Hitler access to the necessary state-owned radio cables. Paris-Midi wrote of “les tribulations héroï-comiques” of Hitler’s efforts to reach the broader public. (Hitler’s planned speech finally reached an American audience when William Randolph Hearst’s New York American published it, on December 13, 1931.)
Hanfstaengl also arranged the interview with Dorothy Thompson. During the interview, the chain-smoking Thompson observed Hitler’s rants with bemused detachment. After the interview, Hitler said, “Don’t ever bring me anyone like that again, Hanfstaengl!” Thompson, who would subsequently be banished from Germany—and who incidentally was married to the Nobel laureate Sinclair Lewis, who four years later would publish It Can’t Happen Here, a novel about the rise of a fascist dictator in America—went on to describe that encounter for Cosmopolitan. “He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure,” she wrote. “He is the very prototype of the Little Man.”
That same month, Harold Callender, a correspondent for The New York Times, also interviewed Hitler in his Brown House office, in Munich. Like Thompson, Callender watched with amusement as Hitler “rose from his chair, walked about the room, sat upon the table, but was never at rest,” making “nervous gestures” and all the time speaking with rhetorical fury, only occasionally “checking his rapid flow of speech to make sure his words were carefully noted.”
In response to Callender’s question about whether the National Socialists would seek power by democratic means or if he planned to “do away with parliamentary government,” Hitler replied that he planned to win power via constitutionally approved means—and then to revise the constitution and the entire structure of government in a way that “suits our purposes and will give us the power to conquer communism and the pest of Marxism. The present State, with its present constitution, is not in a position to do this.” Later in the interview, Hitler said, “Democratic theories and admonitions do not suffice to resist a force which is motivated not by belief in democracy but by bloody brutality.” If America had as many Communists and “Social Democratic Marxists” in its midst as Germany did, he went on, it would surely adopt the militarized approach of the National Socialists toward stamping them out. Though he declined to explicitly admit that anti-Semitism was “a fundamental part of his party’s platform,” he averred that “the attitude of the National Socialist movement to every inhabitant of this country is determined by that inhabitant’s attitude toward Germany.”
(It should be noted that Callender’s reporting has aged better than the Times’ first article on Hitler, which in 1922 had asserted that “several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers.”)
On August 7, 1932, Hanfstaengl organized a press gaggle at Hitler’s alpine retreat on the Obersalzberg for the CBS-radio announcer H. V. Kaltenborn (who recalled Hanfstaengl as “one of my best friends” from Harvard; they’d taken a famous course on Goethe’s Faustus there together), the Associated Press Berlin bureau chief Louis Lochner, and the Hearst reporter Karl von Wiegand. Hitler subjected them to the usual diatribe and bluster. “That man is hopeless,” Wiegand said afterward. “Ask him a question and you get a speech. This whole trip was a waste of time.”
Hitler did find some sympathetic journalists. One was Sefton “Tom” Delmer, a reporter for the Daily Express, the British paper owned by the Hitler admirer Lord Beaverbrook. Delmer delivered just the sort of fawning coverage Hitler wanted. Delmer, who had attended President Hindenburg’s 80th birthday celebration and covered the launch of a zeppelin, concluded that “both of these great days faded into nothingness compared with the spontaneous and unprepared demonstration that greeted the smiling, bare-headed Herr Hitler” in early April 1932, when Hitler arrived in central Berlin to find “120,000 fanatical Berliners were waiting to hear him speak.”
Hitler rewarded Delmer for his adulatory journalism, inviting him to dinner and providing him with his direct telephone number (50-1-05-07). He also brought Delmer with him on the campaign trail. “Tomorrow morning at six o’clock I shall be in Herr Hitler’s airplane, the only newspaper representative to accompany the Fascist leader”—Delmer meant Fascist as a compliment—“on the whirlwind with which he is winding up his campaign in the presidential election,” he reported in spring 1932.
Later that year, as Hitler endured another deluge of press ridicule, he turned again to Delmer for a boost. In the November elections, the National Socialists had lost 34 Reichstag seats, and Hindenburg once again rebuffed Hitler in his quest for the chancellorship. “It was most amusing to see old Hindy take Adolf out for a ride” and “put him in a beautiful hole,” Lochner noted for the Associated Press. “Hitler had been knocking on the door to power since 1923,” Konrad Heiden observed, in the Frankfürter Zeitung, but was apparently destined to spend his political career knocking on doors he would never enter.
On the evening of November 27, 1932, Hitler summoned Delmer for an interview in the Hotel Elephant in Weimar. “Not more than four months from now and the Presidential Cabinet will have fallen and our day will have come,” Hitler told Delmer, who passed this assurance on to his Daily Express readers. “This was the challenging statement made to me tonight, in an exclusive interview, by Adolf Hitler,” Delmer reported, “whom all the world believes to be in the depths of despair after the defeat of his latest bid for power, but who is in reality radiant with confidence that the hour of his supreme triumph is at hand.”
Hitler’s confident bluster belied the precariousness of his position: He was at that moment in the midst of one of the toughest internal party struggles of his political career, one that led to still more press mockery.
As the party hard-liners Hermann Goering, Joseph Goebbels, and Ernst Röhm pressed for a rule-or-ruin strategy, Hitler’s more moderate lieutenants, including Gregor Strasser and Wilhelm Frick, felt the time had come for compromise and coalition building. When Strasser arranged for Hitler to meet with Kurt von Schleicher, the ultimate power broker in Berlin, to discuss potentially joining a coalition government, Hitler boarded an overnight train in Munich, only to be intercepted en route, in the town of Jena, by Göring, who boarded the train to wake Hitler at 6 o’clock in the morning and escort him off, before driving him to Weimar. Strasser and Frick were left waiting for Hitler on the platform in Berlin.
The opposition press made the most of this episode. A cartoon in Vorwärts shows a befuddled Hitler in his nightshirt, with tousled hair and spindly legs covered with protruding hairs, being led away by Göring. A newspaper headline in the same publication described “Hitler as You’ve Never Seen Him,” a satirical reference to a recently published book of photographs by his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. The incident was dubbed Hitler’s Unterhosenszene—his “underwear scene.” A taunting rhyme made the rounds, which can be translated as “Hitler’s chancellorship is now sunk / Frick and Strasser are in a funk.” One commentator observed dryly that Hitler’s lieutenants looked so clueless only because Hitler was so clueless. To read press coverage like this was to conclude that Hitler was politically finished.
But Hitler seemed outwardly not to be bothered by the cacophony of derision and ridicule. “I have endured so much persecution and so many personal attacks during the 13 years of my struggle for Germany,” Hitler explained to then-Chancellor Fritz von Papen, who himself had previously issued scathing condemnations of the Nazi leader, “that I have learned to put the great cause I serve above myself.” The only thing that filled him with bitterness, Hitler told Papen, who was seeking a rapprochement with him, was watching establishment politicians squander the “hope, belief and trust” that the common man had placed in the country’s leadership.
While awaiting trial and execution at Nuremberg for his role in Nazi atrocities, the Hitler attorney Hans Frank observed that it had been this alleged commitment to the common man and a “greater cause” that bonded the führer to his followers. “If one is to be brutally honest, one has to admit,” Frank explained, that Hitler “said aloud what was in the minds of most people and gave clear expression to what everyone was experiencing along with a plan to address the hopes and suffering of the people.”
Frederic Sackett, the U.S. ambassador to Germany from 1930 to 1933, confirmed Frank’s assessment that the bond between Hitler and his political base seemed infrangible, no matter how ridiculous he appeared to the reporters who covered him. “The expectation frequently voiced here that failure of his policies would result in large and immediate losses of following for Hitler,” Shackett reported to the State Department, “does not take into account the blindness of great sections of his adherents.”
Hans Prinzhorn, a German psychiatrist and art historian, put this in different terms. After attending one of his beer-hall rallies, Prinzhorn observed how Hitler manipulated the crowd by dramatically modulating his voice, first rising to a “demagogic register” before falling silent, then continuing to speak in a subdued tone, “as if nothing had happened.” Prinzhorn also noted that Hitler limited himself to a small number of tropes that he repeated incessantly: the “treason of Versailles,” the danger of “Jewish influences,” his vow that “heads will roll” once he was in power.
According to Prinzhorn, Hitler’s calculated and mesmerizing combination of volume, rhythm, modulation, and repetition induced the suspension of logic and reason in rally attendees, generating an emotional response in his followers that rendered him nearly impervious to rational attack by political opponents and probing reporters. “They keep thinking they’ve hit on a crucial point when they say that Hitler’s speeches are meaningless and empty,” Prinzhorn observed of reporters. “But intellectual judgments of the Hitler experience miss the point entirely.” Ambassador Sackett called Hitler “one of the biggest showmen since P. T. Barnum,” an “indefatigable spellbinder” with an uncanny capacity for “twisting events” to suit his “fancies and purposes.”
“The country is getting tired of the Nazis,” The New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize–winning correspondent Fred Birchall reported in November 1932. Hitler’s “high water mark,” Birchall declared, had been the July Reichstag election when the National Socialists had won 37 percent of the seats. The German ambassador to Washington, D.C., affirmed this. Hitler, he told the U.S. State Department, had reached “the high point of his career,” and had damaged himself “irreparably” through continuous personal attacks on the revered President Hindenburg, his refusal to join a coalition government, and his public support for storm troopers who had savagely kicked to death a Polish immigrant in front of his mother. Hitler “had disgusted people with his defense of the murderers,” the ambassador said. Die Weltbühne, a weekly magazine, wrote, “Adolphus is the man of missed opportunities: 1932 opened a path to tremendous things. He stumbled. He fell.”
On January 24, 1933, Vorwärts published a cartoon, captioned “The New Hamlet,” which reflected the widely held view that Hitler’s political demise was at hand. Hitler stands in the graveyard of his political movement, surrounded by broken swastika headstones, pondering an effigy of his own head.
Less than a week later, Hitler was chancellor.
To return to the question: How could Dorothy Thompson and so many other experienced journalists and political observers have gotten Hitler and their assessment of the historical moment so wrong? If they did, they weren’t any more off the mark than Hitler himself. In December 1932, Hitler’s movement was bankrupt financially, politically, ideologically. The party coffers were drained, the National Socialist movement tens of millions of Reichsmarks in debt. Even the loyalist ranks were plagued with infighting. Word among Hitler’s closest associates was that he had badly misplayed his cards. Hitler told Goebbels that he was contemplating suicide. Only an unlikely series of backroom deals and a frantic weekend of subterfuge in January 1933 rescued Hitler from the political brink and vaulted him to power.
The ridiculous “Little Man” that Thompson and many others had dismissed in previous years was the same person who became chancellor in 1933. The man hadn’t changed. The circumstances had. What remained consistent throughout was the demagogic emotional hold on his followers that Hans Prinzhorn had described.
From the vantage point of the present, Hitler’s rise seems overdetermined, and in some ways it was. But to have imagined in advance the series of events that brought such an unlikely figure to power would have required unusual powers of clairvoyance. As it happens, one of the few people to foresee Hitler’s ascendance was a self-proclaimed clairvoyant. Born to Jewish parents in Vienna, Herschel-Chaim Steinschneider ran a wildly popular Berlin venue called Palace of the Occult, and he held séances for Berlin’s fashionable set. Writing under the pseudonym Erik Jan Hanussen, Steinschneider published a March 1932 front-page story in the Berliner Wochenschau called “Hitler’s Future,” which predicted that Hitler would be chancellor within the year. Hitler met Steinschneider several times in the course of 1932 and reportedly invited him to his suite at the Hotel Kaiserhof in January 1933 to hold a séance. “I see victory for you,” Steinschneider told Hitler. “It cannot be stopped.” That a Jewish showman and occultist was providing spiritual guidance to the leader of the National Socialist movement was more fodder for mockery by the opposition press. “Hitler’s lucky star appears to be fading, but the cautious astrologists continue to wave the swastika banner, because one never knows,” Vorwärts reported on December 28, 1932. Vorwärts also wondered about Steinschneider’s Jewish parents, “who could never have dreamed that their son would become the promoter of an anti-Semitic Führer.”
Although Hitler’s political struggles, and the general perception of him as a figure of ridicule, almost led him to suicide in late 1932, he was well accustomed to overcoming mockery. It fueled his ambition. Not long ago, while researching my most recent book, I listened to an audio recording Hitler had produced in the summer of 1932, in advance of the Reichstag elections, part of his effort to reach beyond the audience who read the critical mainstream press. The two-disc set is titled “Hitler’s Appeal to the Nation” and is emblazoned with a swastika that spins at 78 rpm. The recording was intended to be played at rallies across the country, and sold in bookstores, music shops, and newspaper kiosks for 1.6 Reichmarks (about $8 today). Hitler speaks in a notably measured tone—no ranting, no raving, no “Sieg heil!” choruses in the background. Still, despite the moderated tone, his seething, grievance-laden political message and his simmering mendacity penetrate through the hissing and crackling recording of the eight-and-a-half-minute address.
“Thirteen years ago we National Socialists were derided and disdained by our opponents,” Hitler says. “No one is laughing now.”
The post ‘No One Is Laughing Now’ appeared first on The Atlantic.
