Die Putzi Diaries (German Edition)

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There was - you know, of course, Charles Lindburgh comes through Germany, everyone has heard of that. But you also had people - even John F. Kennedy flits through Germany in His diary entries are not terribly revealing other than the fact that he's interested in the "bundle of fun" he picks up at the border.

But, yes, I tried to get a sense of those people who actually were there for longer and really observed things. Du Bois, for instance, not a name you normally associated with Germany, the black sociologist historian, but he spends six months on a fellowship in and ' And there are some fascinating insights about Germans, racial doctrine, the contrast with the United States, and, of course, the play off the '36 Olympics. So, you know, you have people like George Kennan who are associated with Russia who had - most people don't realize had spent one tour in Germany which happened to be those critical years right before World War II.

Well, there are a number of people who don't look great. And there are a number of people who I'd say have a very mixed record. And one thing I try to do in this book was not to be, sort of, rendering judgment on these characters. The whole point of the book, and the reason I wrote a book about this period, which I find fascinating - but I would never have written a straight history of the period, there have been so many very accomplished historians have done that and very effectively.

But if Hitlerland succeeds, it succeeds in the sense of putting the reader in the shoes of the Americans there at the time. Seeing things piecemeal, and then trying to figure out what was happening. What - and it inevitably raises the question, what would you have known, you, me, anybody else, if we had been there at the time.

It all seemed so clear in retrospect but it wasn't clear then. And the more I delved into this the more I felt I didn't want to pass rigid judgment on people. Of course there are people who are very prescient. There was a Consul General in Berlin called George Messersmith who was very, very outspoken, very courageous. There was a young military attache Truman Smith, who plays a very significant role in my book. Who I think was very perceptive, both about Hitler who he met as far back as , and about the German military build up.

And then there were people who clearly blew it. Dorothy Thompson most famously, she was the most famous American woman correspondent of that era. Very pioneering, very smart reporter in many ways, but she goes in and interviews Hitler in November of , for the first time. At that point Hitler's party is really on the rise. A lot of people are predicting he's going to take power. And she writes immediately after her interview, "I thought I was going to interview - to meet the future leader of Germany.

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Within 50 seconds I realized I was not, such was the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog. But what I find, what was interesting about that - and I also should add, that Dorothy Thompson later obviously radically revised her views and did some hard hitting reporting that got her expelled. But that even those mistakes of what I call the first drafts of history, that we as journalists always try to write, are revealing because they explain a lot about how Hitler fooled a lot of people. And why so many people did not take him seriously, whether they were journalists, diplomats or Germans themselves, or even many German Jews.

Sinclair Lewis, of course. Yes, in talking about famous people, there were many famous literary characters coming through Germany. Sinclair Lewis was one, he comes, he falls in love with Dorothy Thompson. Thomas Wolfe comes to Germany. He was very entranced by Germany.

He comes there a few times.

Hailed as a hero at first and then - and when he first comes in he really is pretty much oblivious to a lot of the - what's going on because he's just basking in his fame. By the next time he comes, a year later, he's much more aware and writes a very piercing novella, "I Have A Thing To Tell You," which becomes part of his - of a larger book later. And so, you know, you even have, like I came across an entry in one diary of another correspondent in , "Well, Hemmingway was just through town, and you know, I saw him on the street with Sinclair," Sinclair Lewis.

You know, Josephine Baker comes to town. She - in , we think of her always as Paris, you know, entertaining the audiences in Paris in Folies Bergere. But she hears about Berlin, this amazing party town in the '20s, and she decides to take her whole troupe to Berlin. And despite the fact there are already some Nazi protesters outside shouting racist slogans, inside the German audiences love her, she's the star of the show. She's invited to the after parties. She performs there often just in her loincloth.

And she says, "There's no freer, greater place than Berlin," which is something we tend to forget about Germany. Let's go back and recap your own life and experience. You were here for Booknotes in , how many books have you written? I'm now at the EastWest Institute which is a New York based think tank started in in cold war days. Now the Institute deals with all sorts of issues, China, cyber security, economic security issues.

I've been there for the last - almost four years since I left Newsweek. How many different places did you live writing for Newsweek and anybody else? Well, for Newsweek I was basically abroad for about 20 years. So what - how many places does that make? The kids are in their - they're all - and the last one just finished college about a year - let me get this right, about two years ago. And we now - and the other kids, the other three kids, are all married and have kids of their own as well.

And our kids are scattered in Juno, L. Who was he, we've got some video to show in a moment, but tell us who he was before we show it. William Shirer, at the time of when I'm writing this story is just - he's just turned 30, he's in Paris. He's been a writer for various publications in the United States.

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He is desperate to go to what he thinks is the next big story, which is Germany. He says, "You know, I'm dying of boredom in Paris. But, in fact, it goes to show, once again, that as a journalist your instinct is always to go to that next big story. He could see that it was happening in Germany. He goes there, is an incredibly energetic, perceptive, correspondent. And he stays in Germany or in Vienna right through the beginning of the war. He writes, at the time, his - he publishes his Berlin Diaries after he leaves Berlin, which comes out in , which has a huge impact in the United States because the writing is wonderful.

And it's very vivid. And it really brought home what was happening in Germany. Of course, much later, long after the war, he produces the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The book that he's most famous for, which is still, I think, one of the most authoritative studies of that period despite all the subsequent books that have followed. Did you check to see, by chance, how many of those books have sold, the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich?

I would assume it's - we're talking, you know, millions of copies. Buried amid the debris of the Third Reich, the demagogue who caused so many deaths was himself perishable. The architect of so much evil was, after all, only a man. Adolf Hitler is dead. The Third Reich he built, which lasted so short a time, 12 years, but which in its calculated butchery of human life and the human spirit, surpassed anything this earth has seen, is now but a painful memory. How did it happen that an ancient and cultured people, steeped in Christianity, cultivated in the arts and sciences, preeminent in modern technology, who gave us Luther and Kant and Beethoven, Grita and Einstein, collapse into savage barbarism in the mid-twentieth century?

To seek the answers we must follow the Germans and the rise of their strange leader through the turbulent years between and What was his posture? What was he writing about Hitler and the Germans when he was there? Well, first of all, he was speaking - his thoughts, which you could see from his diaries, are very clear. While other people in their correspondence and diaries are often wondering, is Hitler for real? The big question for many people was not whether Hitler was, you know, was he essentially a demagogue or not, everyone knew he was a demagogue.

But does he mean this stuff? Even whether or not you've read Mein Kampf that could he really believe these things he's writing about Jews and others, and the business about taking over the Soviet Union, and conquering the Slavic lands? And Shirer, from the very beginning takes it completely seriously. And he gets as much of that into his writing as possible, and then his broadcasting, although broadcasting later becomes a problem because it's heavily censored.

I should - as a small aside, I thought, you know, that clip was wonderful.

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I also - I suppose I owe Shirer a debt because, you know, my interest in this was for all sorts of reasons. But of course, I also read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, not- as a young college student, and it influenced me greatly. But the book's title I should say, in part, is due to Shirer and a couple of other journalists.

This is not - Hitlerland is not made up by me. Hitlerland was a term that Shirer and a few of his colleagues used informally among themselves about the country they were covering. No, it's actually - I think it's in Dortmund or somewhere, it looks like a Nuremberg rally.

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And, again, it's supposed to convey - which it instantly conveys the idea of the premise of the book is that you're getting a different angle on these familiar events. You think you know about them. I thought I knew about them. But until I wrote it and did the research for Hitlerland I had no idea about the experiences of many - of the people who were essentially my predecessors, those correspondents or diplomats in Berlin.

And despite all the time I had spent in Germany I hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about, what would it have been like to have been a correspondent there in the '20s and '30s? And, you know, how would you have operated? What would you have noticed or not noticed much less how would you have acted? Putzi Hanfstaengl, one of the - of course one of the most notorious characters, I'd say, in the book.

His full name is Ernst Hanfstaengl. He was - he called himself a half American. His father was from a very distinguished Bavarian art family, his - of art dealers. His mother was from a family, the Sedgwick family in Boston, a born and bred American family. Her father, so Putzi's grandfather, had been a Civil War general. He, in fact, had even carried - helped carry Lincoln's coffin. He goes to Harvard class of He even is invited to the White House by Teddy Junior because Putzi is a very colorful character, a very tall guy, very entertaining, plays the piano wonderfully.

He's invited to play the piano in the White House. And eventually is playing the piano for Hitler because what happens is after he graduates from Harvard, he runs the family art business in - on Fifth Avenue in New York. He meets an American woman whose parents came from Germany but she's a born and bred New Yorker, her name is Helen. And in , as a married couple, they move to Munich. And there, very soon, he meets Hitler. He becomes one of Hitler's earliest propagandists.

And interestingly enough, because of his whole American background, the connecting point for many Americans who want to meet Hitler once Hitler begins to rise in prominence. So, his story, which is told throughout this book, is one which intersects with so many of the Americans.

And what I found also fascinating about the research in the book is you get often - you get certain scenes where someone would say, "I saw Putzi. He came to my house. This is right after Hitler takes power. And he said he's got British tailoring. And then you get the description of that same scene from somebody else who saw Putzi that day, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of Foreign Affairs.

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And so, you begin to triangulate and see, you know, that these stories not only intersect but they reinforce each other. And that's - you know, it's one of the great fun parts of being kind of the amateur historian, journalist. And in discovering these stories, setting these scenes, which tell you a great deal about, you know the atmosphere of the times. And here's Putzi, who actually is playing Harvard marching songs for Hitler in the early days. And Hitler is saying, "Wow. Those are great, they have a great beat we should use them at our rallies. You know, it's the kind of thing if you thought about it, kind of in a novel or a movie script, you'd say, that's too - yes, that's too crazy to imagine.

But this was - nothing was too absurd in this situation. Helen was an attractive woman who very quickly became very friendly with Hitler as well. In fact, Hitler was coming over to their house in the early '20s when he was still a local figure, not a national figure. And he was clearly attracted to Helen. Now, I won't say, you know, what the nature of this attraction was, it's hard to say. Helen believed that he was sort of in awe of her in many ways. The subject of Hitler's sexual proclivities is a very long subject and there are many theories.

There was nothing I don't think sexual between them. But he was - he liked being in her company. And most significantly in there's the beer hall putsch. Hitler tries to seize power in Munich, and the Nazis are fired upon by the police. Hitler is injured his shoulder is dislocated. Several Nazi's are killed including his aide who he was marching arm-in-arm with.

And he seeks refuge in Helen's house. Putzi has already fled to Austria. And the next morning he's in the house and Helen knows that - gets a call from her mother-in-law saying, "The police are coming to your house next. They're going - they're looking for Hitler. They're going to arrest him. And Helen at that point is convinced, in her own mind that he's thinking of shooting himself. And she grabs that gun from him, think about the implications of that? If he had gone through with it, if - we can't know whether he would have gone through with that, whether she was right. But the idea that an American woman may have saved Hitler in from suicide and from - and in effect doomed the world to what followed, is a rather a staggering thought.

He was then arrested in Helen's house in He was brought to trial in early He was sentenced to five years in prison for this attempted putsch. But he made - he was treated very lightly by the authorities. Both by the judge, who allowed him to just basically use the trial as this staging ground to be able to tell the world about his theories, and first time, get really major media attention.

And this was also the first time that many correspondents saw him. And then he goes to prison and out of that five years he only spends 11 months in prison. And he is treated very generously by the authorities. He's treated almost like a hero there. There's a lot of popular sentiment that supports him. He dictates Mein Kampf during his time in prison. He has visitors all the time people are sending him flowers. Now, you have to recall the early '20s in Germany were a time of, not only had Germany been defeated in World War I, losing a couple million men, it was very demoralized.

There had been this period of hyper inflation, people's savings wiped out. This sense of total collapse and Hitler had played upon that and the Wiemar politicians, the new democracy that had been - that was created was proving to be very ineffective at the time. So, Hitler was able to benefit immensely from his prison time. You sent me back to Mein Kampf, and by the way, it's available free of charge on Google, you can get And it just reminded me, I mean I hadn't read it for a few years, of this obsession with Jews.

What - did you find anything in your research that told you why? And what did he say in Mein Kampf about Jews? Well, I mean, basically the language about Jews is always vermin, lice, this sort of language. The scourge, that they - of course, the stab in the back theory that somehow Germany lost World War I because the Jewish politicians stabbed the military in the back. All of which, you know, is a very convenient excuse for what happened. You know, it's a classic scapegoating. In terms of, why the Jews? For instance, Helen Hanfstaengl talked about Hitler, even in those early days, coming over to her house and playing with her son Egon, who was a few years old, and being very, very charming.

But then he'd suddenly go off on a rant about Jews. And she would say what many people have said since, that somehow it could be traced back to his time in Vienna when he was relative - he was a non-successful artist. He had tried to get in, he didn't get accepted into a fine arts school and been rejected, that's another what if in history. But that he had developed a raging hatred of Jews by then. How you explain that I'm not sure there's any simple answer. But it certainly fuelled his thinking, fuelled Mein Kampf.

And someone like Dorothy Thompson when she interviewed Hitler, one very perceptive comment which she made was, "Take away the anti-Semitism and the whole case he makes collapses. By the way, how many countries ban that now from being bought or read or Well, Germany still has the ban, that's the primary one because it's the copyright that belongs to the Bavarian authorities and they haven't lifted it.

Unfortunately I think it expires in another year or two. So, even in Germany it will be available. I'm not sure how many other countries still ban it. My feeling is it makes no sense to ban it. First of all, if anybody who tries to read, and if you picked it up recently, you're reminded of this. It is a turgid treck, you know, it's hundreds of pages of Hitler just ranting. And it's - this is not going to turn someone onto the Nazis.

Die Putzi Diaries by Urlacher Max | Book

In fact, I describe a scene in my book where Otto Strasser, who is one of the early Nazis who later broke with Hitler, describes a Nuremberg party rally where he and a few buddies are having dinner at a restaurant. And each of - and admits to each other, "Well, we never read all of Mein Kampf. We couldn't get through it. Here's some video of a famous American that you read about, it's - let's watch and then you can explain this. France has now been defeated, and despite the propaganda and confusion of recent months, it is now obvious that England is losing the war.

And I have been forced to the conclusion that we cannot win this war for England regardless of how much assistance we send. That is why the America First Committee has been formed. Are we operating under a government by representation or are we operating under a government by subterfuge?

Charles Lindberg is most famous for exactly that, that sort of thing that you just - that clip you just saw. And, of course, for his solo flight across the Atlantic that made him, you know, the biggest celebrity of his era, the kidnapping and murder of his son. But then in relationship to Germany all of us have heard the story of Lindbergh, his sympathy, his apparent sympathy for a lot of what was going on in Germany.

And then his very fervent efforts to keep America out of the war at all costs. But, the part of the Lindbergh story that I focus on in Hitlerland is a different one. And that is something, again, I had not realized was that the origins of his visits to Germany was not the fact that, say the Germans invited him because they thought he sympathized with them or that he went there because he sympathized with them initially.

It's because this young - this military attache, Truman Smith, who had been in Germany in the early '20s, first met Hitler, then comes back as a senior attache in '35 is - has got very good sources within the Wehrmacht, the German army, and learning about how it's building up.

But he doesn't know much about the Luftwaffe, the air force. And he realizes that Lindbergh is in France and in England traveling around as a celebrity. And he comes up with the idea, if I can get Hermann Goring's Air Ministry to invite Lindbergh to Germany, Goring who loves to show off, will want to show this famous man everything. And that's exactly what happens. He comes to Germany.

Yes, he is used by the Germans for propaganda purposes in many ways. But he also gets to see the air fields, the new planes, and he knows those - he knows a lot about aviation of course. And he brings the military attaches with him, or debriefs them, and provides some very good intelligence. Now, his motive was probably to convince the Americans that, look, this is such a powerful country, you don't want to mess with them. But, regardless of the motive, there's real intelligence here. And there's also then these amazing stories of the lunch that Goring holds for Lindbergh where Lindbergh at one point asks Goring, "I hear you have a pet lion.

Can I see him"? And Lindbergh says, "Yes, come on in. Now Goring's a big man in a white uniform, the lion jumps up on his lap, the various dinner guests, including Truman - the lunch guests, including Truman Smith, the Lindberghs are there, and suddenly the lion gets nervous and just lets loose. The uniform turns bright yellow, Goring goes flying out of the room changes and - yes, this is the kind of thing that, you know, again, which are these episodes which are incredible to learn about.

And again, hear about from different sources. And, in fact, Truman Smith's daughter, who is still alive I discovered. After I talked to her at great length, the next day she called me and said, "By the way, did I show you this photo on my refrigerator"? And I said, "No, what photo on my refrigerator"? This is amidst all these tragic events there is just a sense of a bit of a theatre of the absurd here.

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