Beyond Belief Read online

  In sum the picture that was drawn in the American press particularly during these early days was a confused one. There was the question of the truthfulness of the reports. Once it became clear that the reports were accurate—though there were those who would never accept them as completely accurate—there was the question of what this meant. Were these attacks actually being perpetrated and directed by the Nazi hierarchy, or had they been inspired by the Nazis’ extreme rhetoric? Was this the result of Nazi government policy, or was it simply an outgrowth of the chaos which often followed a revolutionary change in government? Were these events “boyish tricks” perpetrated by overzealous Nazi enthusiasts, or was this a reign of terror designed and controlled by those at the highest level of authority?

  Official Lines and Lies

  German authorities used a variety of tactics to reinforce American confusion. They followed a policy which the New York Evening Post’s Knickerbocker accurately described as “first, they never happened; second, they will be investigated; third they will never happen again.” In March 1933 a reporter asked Hitler’s foreign press chief, Ernst Hanfstaengl, if the reports “about alleged Jew baiting” were true. Hanfstaengl’s answer was entirely false but typical of the Germans’ tactics in dealing with news they did not wish to be reported. “A few minutes ago, . . . the Chancellor authorized me to tell you that these reports are every one of them base lies.” Hermann Goering also attacked those who had spoken these “horrible lies,” and declared that there were “no plundered, no broken up shops, no warehouses destroyed, robbed or interfered with.”19 Other German officials including Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath and Reichsbank President Hjlamar Schacht, who visited the United States, made a point of attacking the news reporters’ credibility. When German officials could not deny the reports, they disavowed responsibility for the outbreaks and blamed them on “all sorts of dark elements” intent on pursuing “their anti-governmental purposes.”20

  These protestations of innocence were continuously contradicted by both the recurring cycle of terror and the frequent predictions by Hitler and others in the Nazi hierarchy that the Jewish community in Germany would be “exterminated.” Some reporters tried to alert readers to this cycle of terror and the German duplicity in trying to disclaim responsibility for it. Edwin James, writing in the New York Times, pointed out that though the Germans claimed that “a few individual acts of violence have been grossly exaggerated,” the situation was severe enough for Hitler to have given “official orders” to stop the recurring violence. An Associated Press (AP) dispatch from Berlin in March also took note of the contradiction in Nazi claims. While Hitler instructed storm troopers to “remember their discipline [and] refrain from molesting business life,” Hermann Goering, who was described in the article as Hitler’s “confidential man,” was telling an audience that the police would never be used “as protective troops for Jewish merchants.” At the end of 1933 The Nation noted that this cyclical process continued unabated. Each time violence was reported, the German government “issues denials, punishes Jews for spreading atrocity stories, expels honest correspondents and continues to encourage the very violence and confiscation it is denying.”21Ultimately the reporters stationed in Germany grew so cynical about German disclaimers that when high-ranking officials vigorously denied a report, reporters became convinced that there was some truth to it.22

  In June 1933 the New York Times described the denial of the terror as “more shocking” than the terror itself.

  Even while Hitler [is denying] that such terror ever existed . . . and perfect calm reigns in Germany, the Collier reporter found the Jewish persecution in full swing and life in Berlin like sitting on the edge of a volcano.23

  During this early stage of Nazi rule American officials joined German authorities in shedding doubts on the press reports. In late March 1933 Secretary of State Cordell Hull pressured the press to adopt a “spirit of moderation” and suggested to reporters that conditions in Germany may not have been “accurately” and “authoritatively” reported. He believed that the “gravity” of the press reports was not borne out by the facts.24 Hull apparently was convinced that many of the reports regarding “terror and atrocities which have reached this country have been grossly exaggerated,” despite the fact that American officials in Germany were sending him news to the contrary. George Gordon, American Chargé d’Affaires in Germany, reported to Hull that “numberless sources” agreed that the Jews’ situation was “rapidly taking a turn for the worse.”25 The New York Times and New York Herald Tribune placed Hull’s denials on the front page under headlines which proclaimed the “end” of German violence against Jews. Actually Hull did not succeed in convincing everyone that the violence was “virtually terminated.” Newsweek observed that “no great improvement was evident” in German behavior.26

  Hull considered his claims that the severity of the situation had been exaggerated to be in America’s best interest. He told American officials stationed in Germany of his “fear that the continued dissemination of exaggerated reports may prejudice the friendly feelings between the peoples of the two countries and be of doubtful service to anyone.”27 His objective was to “try and calm down the situation created by a lot of extremists in Germany and inflamed by a lot of extremists in this country.”28Hull did not identify the American extremists to whom he was referring, but faulted the press for disseminating “exaggerated” stories.

  Rather than exaggerate, American correspondents actually made a concerted effort to modulate the tone of their reports so as not to be accused of fomenting hysteria. Their reports were balanced, reserved and tended toward moderation, not exaggeration. Still, they were often met with skepticism in this country. The task of covering Berlin and being sure that your editors and readers would believe what you were reporting was not an easy one.

  The Ordeal of American Reporters in Germany

  Throughout the 1930s American reporters felt sustained pressure both from readers and editorial boards, who wanted them to substantiate their information, and from the Nazis, who denied the veracity of their reports. The Nazis repeatedly accused reporters of lying and admitted doing so. In 1933, after most leading German communists and socialists had been arrested, at a luncheon given by the Foreign Press Association in Berlin for Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief told the reporters that he was glad the foreign press was in Germany. They were wonderful scapegoats on whom to blame problems, “now that there was no [political] opposition” in Germany. In a letter to his daughter Betty at the University of Chicago, AP reporter Louis Lochner described problems the Berlin bureau faced in covering politically significant events such as the Reichstag fire trial. (The Reichstag was burned on February 27, 1933. The man accused of setting the fire was charged as a communist, was tried in the fall of 1933, and executed in January 1934.) If the foreign correspondents depended on German press reports, they only heard what pleased the Nazis. A correspondent who tried to present what Lochner described as a “fair picture of the trial, objectively giving what is said on both sides,” was immediately branded by the German press as a Greuelhetzer (atrocity monger).29 And as the decade wore on, the atmosphere the American reporters worked in became worse.

  In May of 1933 Messersmith reported to the Secretary of State that ever since the Nazis’ rise to power, the situation of “a number of the American correspondents in Berlin has not been easy.” Because of the Nazi determination not to allow “undesirable news [to reach] . . . the outside world through the foreign correspondents,” the press was often censored.30*

  Even when there was no overt censorship, the reporters stationed in Germany had to walk a “dangerous and difficult path” in order to avoid being prevented from sending their reports, thrown out of the country, or even thrown in Nazi prisons. The Nazis would “punish” reporters they deemed guilty of sending “atrocity stories” by banning their papers from Germany and preventing them from using the German mails, as was done to the Manchester Gu
ardian in April 1933. Reporters’ lives were further complicated by an elaborate spy system that placed Nazi sources in their offices and homes. In Germany Will Try Again, the Chicago Tribune’s veteran Berlin correspondent Sigrid Schultz described how her maid became a “servant in the Gestapo system,” keeping tabs on her mail, telephone conversations, and visitors. Certain reporters, including the Chicago Daily News’s Edgar Mowrer, had SS men stationed outside their home as a means of limiting their freedom of movement.32 The Nazis, anxious to get Mowrer out of Germany, first tried to pressure him to resign his position as president of the prestigious Association of Foreign Correspondents in Berlin. When his colleagues refused to accept his resignation, the Nazis left him alone for a few months. But in August German embassy officials began to urge Secretary of State Hull to “facilitate or encourage” Mowrer’s departure from Germany. After some consideration, the State Department decided that it would not be “appropriate” to approach the Chicago Daily News and suggest Mowrer’s removal. German officials in Washington then went straight to Frank Knox, the paper’s publisher, and with a combination of “argument and veiled threats” convinced him to pull Mowrer out of Berlin. Earlier in 1933 the Germans had tried to do the same thing to H. R. Knickerbocker, but his paper had refused to recall him. In Mowrer’s case it appears that Knox, who had visited Nazi Germany earlier that year, was genuinely concerned about his safety and feared that the Nazis would use the forthcoming party rally which was held annually at Nuremberg to inflict bodily harm on him.33

  William Shirer, who reported from Berlin for Universal Service and for International News Service (INS), the chief Hearst wire service, before joining CBS, described his experience in Berlin as “walking a real, if ill defined, line.” The line was real for every correspondent, and any one of them who strayed too far on what the Nazis considered the wrong side of it faced outright expulsion or even jail. S. Miles Bouton, the Berlin correspondent for the Baltimore Times for over a decade, was instructed by the German Foreign Office in March 1934 to “change his style of reporting or leave the country.” He chose to do the latter. Howard K. Smith has recalled another tactic of the Nazis: they would “entrap” certain reporters by making sure that they broke some obscure law or regulation. One common maneuver was to informally tell the reporters that a certain bank was offering a particularly high rate of exchange as a service to correspondents. Reporters would use the bank freely until suddenly one would be arrested and informed that he or she was breaking a little-known law regarding exchange rates. Other reporters were sent incriminating documents and then accused of spying. Sometimes the arrest was random, as in the case of Richard C. Hottelet of the United Press, who was arrested shortly after the beginning of the German invasion of Russian-occupied Poland and held for several months prior to being exchanged for some Germans being held in the United States. Hottelet believes that this arrest had little to do with what he wrote but was in retaliation for the arrest of certain German reporters in America on charges of espionage. Howard K. Smith believes Hottelet was arrested in order to intimidate the other American reporters still in Germany.34

  Expulsion was not a badge of honor for foreign correspondents. They were quite anxious to avoid it because they were never “sure [their] newspapers would understand” or forgive them if they were forced to leave.35 G. E. R. Gedye, whose dispatches from Vienna appeared in the New York Times and London Daily Telegraph, described the price a foreign correspondent had to pay for the freedom to cover an exciting and controversial beat: “keep out of politics. It is a necessary price, but on occasions it is a hard one to pay . . . . When I failed to pay the price . . . [I] had no excuse to offer my newspaper if I . . . got into a mess.”36As it happened, shortly after the Nazi occupation of Austria in 1938, Gedye was ejected from the country because of his dispatches. In his autobiography AP’s Louis Lochner summarized the orders he and his colleagues received from their superiors as orders “to tell no untruth, but to report only as much of the truth without distorting the picture, as would enable us to remain at our posts.” Ejection was, according to Lochner, “the one thing our superiors did NOT want.”37*

  In What About Germany?, written immediately after his return from Germany in 1942, Lochner described how even though he would “write a story, discuss every word of it in a staff conference, revamp and modify it” in order to avoid any challenge from Nazi officials, he would still “leave the office with the uneasy feeling that we would be called to the Wilhelmstrasse the next morning and chided for our ‘Offense’ if not threatened with ejection.” Howard K. Smith recalled how, once a story was published in America, if a local consul discovered that it contained “something objectionable,” he would report to officials in Berlin, who in turn would call in the reporter and mete out punishment ranging from a “polite wrist-slap to banishment from Germany.” Percy Knauth and C. Brooks Peters, both of whom worked for the New York Times Berlin bureau, described how they would periodically be called to the Foreign Office or Propaganda Ministry to be “chewed out” for something they included in a dispatch. Sigrid Schultz was summoned to the Gestapo and berated several times for stories that the Germans said were “insulting.” Another tactic used by the Nazis was to refuse to grant a reporter a reentry visa after he or she had completed a vacation or assignment outside of Germany. They did this to Otto Tolischus and tried to do it to Schultz.39

  The Views of Others

  Correspondents knew that there was little help they could expect from Washington if they got into trouble. When State Department officials, such as Undersecretary of State William Phillips, visited Berlin, they made it quite clear to the reporters that Washington would take no action if the Nazis expelled or arrested reporters. A number of reporters, including Mowrer, Knickerbocker, and Shirer, considered Consul General George Messersmith, Commercial Attaché Douglas Miller, and Consul Raymond Geist not only good sources of information about the Nazis, but among the few diplomats likely to come to a correspondent’s aid in case of difficulty with the regime. Even Ambassador William Dodd, a fierce anti-Nazi, was not always willing to aid a reporter who had problems with Nazi officials.40

  When reporters were able to bypass the censorship and explicitly describe conditions, they still had to contend with other obstacles, most notably the concerted German effort to discredit stories critical of the Reich, on the one hand, and the American skepticism that these stories just could not be true, on the other. When Edgar Ansel Mowrer, the Berlin correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, reported in March 1933 that Germany had become an “insane asylum,” even his brother who served as the paper’s correspondent in Paris thought he was “breaking under the strain.” Allen Dulles of the State Department visited Berlin and told Mowrer that he “was taking the German situation too seriously.” Frank Knox, the publisher of the Chicago Daily News, was also convinced that Mowrer was exaggerating. Knox changed his mind when he visited Germany in 1933 and saw the situation first hand.41

  The Germans further complicated the reporters’ task by repeatedly charging that they were not telling the truth. Various sources—both diplomats and visiting American journalists—defended the integrity of the journalists. American embassy officials in Berlin assured Washington that the correspondents stationed there included some of the most respected and accomplished individuals in their field. Their reports were considered by those familiar with the situation in Germany as “more truthful and less sensational” than those of many European newspapers.42 The Manchester Guardian believed that American and British reporters had understated, rather than inflated, the facts about the “terror,” not because they doubted its existence, but because so much of it was hidden and difficult to document. Indicative of the care exerted by the New York Times was the fact that for over two months in 1933 it refused to publish a story on Jews’ being subjected to various indignities until it could obtain independent confirmation.43 Edgar Mowrer, accused by Dulles and his own brother of exaggerating the severity of developments, was al
so one of those who actually underplayed the German terror. His wife recalled how he often chose not to tell the story of concentration camp victims who returned to their homes with “horrible wounds” because he feared it would further exacerbate their situation.44

  Mowrer was not alone in adopting this policy. At the end of March 1933 Consul George Messersmith wrote to Secretary of State Cordell Hull that “American correspondents in Berlin have brought to my attention cases of maltreatment of all sorts of persons of various nationalities which they have personally investigated and found correct but which more recently they have not been able to publish” because of fear of the consequences to themselves and the victims. Messersmith expressed his “confidence” in these correspondents and their reports.45 Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of Foreign Affairs, who was in Germany in 1933, described American and British correspondents as having “kept their heads in trying circumstances.” Armstrong was particularly impressed by the fact that reporters sent their papers “documented accounts of specific acts of violence” and statements by Nazi leaders “explaining and justifying” this behavior. Many years later he recalled how correspondents would avoid trying to interpret events for their readers because the obvious interpretations seemed so outlandish, and instead would simply quote statements by Nazi leaders. These leaders often admitted that the events had happened just as the reporters had claimed. Ambassador Dodd’s daughter, Martha, acknowledged that while reporters occasionally chased down “stories that were clearly implausible,” the portrait they painted of Nazi Germany represented an “accurate picture of what was happening there.”46