One month after the Rechenberg memorandum made the rounds of various government agencies, Hitler’s company commander in World War I and his personal adjutant since 1935, Fritz Wiedemann, went to the United States on an extensive tour that took him from New York to Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.47 In New York he had to brave a horde of American reporters and Communist protesters. He also met with members of the German American Bund in Chicago and was not impressed by what he saw. He later advised Hitler not to meet with Kuhn when the German-American Bund leader visited Germany. Wiedemann gained a good impression of the size and strength of the United States, but he could not help but notice the widespread antipathy toward the Nazi regime. When he returned to Germany, he undoubtedly reported to Hitler what he had seen and heard in America. What did Hitler make of all this?
Some historians have found it tempting to let Hitler play the deluded ideologue who, in this case, uncritically accepted Rechenberg’s biases because they confirmed his own.48 Wiedemann’s trip to America, however, was not just an innocent vacation but more likely a fact-finding mission that Hitler encouraged Wiedemann to undertake. In his memoirs, Wiedemann conveniently omitted the details about his trip and why he was allowed, or perhaps even urged, to go to the United States. After all, the arrival of the führer’s former company commander in America caused tongues to wag, and rightly so. What was the nature of his trip? Ostensibly a private visit, but then why was the führer’s personal aide accompanied by embassy officials throughout his trip? And why did he meet with German-American Bundists? It is quite possible that Hitler sent Wiedemann to America to get another point of view of conditions there. When Wiedemann returned and supposedly told Hitler to reach an understanding with the United States, Hitler dismissed him from his post because, as Wiedemann claimed, he could not abide people in his inner circle who disagreed with his politics. What kind of politics? Was it Hitler’s views of the United States? If this is so, why did Hitler in the same breath appoint Wiedemann as consul general to San Francisco? Historians have followed John W. Wheeler-Bennett’s acerbic judgment that Wiedemann was another casualty among the moderates who stood in the way of Hitler’s aggressive foreign policy. With some sense of Greek justice, Wheeler-Bennett said, he “exiled Wiedemann to San Francisco, where, as consul general he could practice his own theories of amicability with the Americans.”49 What Wheeler-Bennett does not mention is that, after Wiedemann’s return from his tour to America, he let everyone know that he wanted an appointment as consul general to San Francisco. Hitler, he admitted, had heard of his request and obliged by offering him the post as a kind of consolation for replacing him as his personal aide. Perhaps so, but it is my suspicion that Wiedemann’s account contains too many omissions to be completely believed. It could very well be that Hitler sent Wiedemann to the United States not only because his adjutant wanted to go there but also because he was the right man to tell the führer what was really going on in America. Bella Fromm, the prominent columnist for the Vossische Zeitung, who had a good nose for what was really going on in Berlin, recorded in her diary that “it is common knowledge in Berlin that the real purpose of his [Wiedemann’s] appointment to San Francisco is to spread Nazi propaganda in America. Also, from the West he would be able to direct German and Japanese espionage activities, for which his previous Japanese contacts adequately fit him.”50 While in San Francisco, Wiedemann was joined by his mistress, the notorious but fascinating Stephanie von Hohenlohe, whom the FBI described as a German spy, “worse than ten thousand men,” reputedly “immoral, and capable of resorting to any means, even to bribery, to gain her ends.”51 Hohenlohe was an international high society matron with a flair for publicity. She was not a Mata Hari; in fact, her self-interest always trumped her loyalty to any nation. Although she was one-half Jewish, Hitler was much taken by her and greatly appreciated her social connections. Her relationship with Wiedemann was an on-and-off affair, as were so many of her liaisons with powerful men. The president told the Justice Department to have her deported. She managed to outwit them all.52
To summarize, Hitler was split about the United States; he wanted to hear the worst, but his political instincts told him that he could never underestimate the colossus across the ocean. It was best, therefore, to keep a tab on developments in America. In 1937 the United States was officially neutral, its military establishment was negligible, and its economy was worsening. Hitler’s most pressing concern was France and Britain, the two Western powers that could block his immediate designs on Austria and Czechoslovakia. Anyone who opposed him on this issue, especially cautious generals or timid diplomats, had to go. He made this position quite clear in his secret address to his military chiefs in November 1937 and acted on it in the new year. By that time Hitler had slipped through what Goebbels termed the “risky zone”; Roosevelt was beginning to stir behind his neutrality zone.
CHAPTER 3
Hitler’s Year: 1938
The Annexation (Anschluss) of Austria
At the height of the Austrian crisis, on March 8, 1938, a famous American visitor came to call on Adolf Hitler at the Reich chancellery—the former president of the United States, Herbert Hoover, who had been chauffeured from Prague to Berlin in a private automobile. Hoover, by profession an engineer, was very impressed by what he saw on his way to Berlin: splendid new highways, new housing developments, and prosperous towns and villages.1 In his hour-long conversation with Hitler, Hoover praised Germany’s economic prosperity and the prevailing mood of hopefulness throughout the nation. Although Hitler did most of the talking, he did not give the appearance of being a fanatic dictator. The conversation between the two statesmen was largely a “courteous exchange of opinion”;2 it centered on housing, employment, investment, and agriculture. Hoover remarked that the American people took a great interest in the new German experiment, which was quite different from the American version (Hoover was alluding to Roosevelt’s New Deal). He admitted that democratic rule had imposed a much slower pace on rebuilding America than Germany. This remark about democracy prompted Hitler to say that he had been democratically elected and enjoyed the full support of the German people. Hoover replied that the restrictive measures accepted in Germany would not work in America because of the importance the American people attached to spiritual and intellectual freedom. Hitler then shifted the conversation to the danger of Communism, which Hoover also acknowledged to be a serious problem. Hitler had always had an intuitive sense that the best way of ingratiating himself with men of Hoover’s class—the professional and industrial elites—was to appeal to their fear of Communism. The broad middle, or what Germans called Mittelstand, regarded Communism as a deadlier threat than Fascism. Most middle-class Germans, in fact, saw National Socialism as an acceptable alternative to the failed democracy that they held responsible for the postwar crisis. Although disenchantment with democracy was not a political problem in America, fear of Communism was, especially at the height of the Depression and among members of big business and believers in free-enterprise capitalism.
Following