GERMANY PUTS THE CLOCK BACK
By Edgar Ansel Mowrer (1933)
Describing the new freedoms in Weimar Germany after World War I that triggered political chaos and an explosion of "sexual exuberance" of every variety, Edgar Ansel Mowrer noted: "It is hard to conceive a much more tolerant society." Because readers now know what came next, Mowrer's observation startles. But what is most striking about his book, written in late 1932 and rushed into print just as Hitler took power in January 1933, is that the Chicago Daily News correspondent foresaw the Nazi leader's successand Germany's subsequent forced march to disasterlong before most of his colleagues and the world did. Mowrer, who reported from Berlin for a full decade, wasn't fooled by Hitler's bizarre appearance and mannerisms, which caused so many others to dismiss him. The Nazi leader was "the most effective orator in Germany, the hardest working politician in Europe," who had convinced his countrymen that his apocalyptic vision would be their salvation, he wrote. "A little man had taken the measure of still smaller men." As Mowrer was free to reveal in his memoirs only much later, he also spent this period warning Jews: "Get out, and fast"even providing those who listened with a map of the border between Germany and Czechoslovakia. Little wonder that Mowrer, who received the Pulitzer Prize for his prescient reporting on Hitler's rise, was driven out of Germany in September 1933.
HITLER'S REICH: THE FIRST PHASE
By Hamilton Fish Armstrong (1933)
'A people has disappeared. Almost every German whose name the world knew as a master of government or business in the Republic of the past fourteen years is gone . . . one by one, these last specimens of another age, another folk, topple over into the Nazi sea." Those opening words convey the chilling message of this slim, powerful volume produced by the editor of Foreign Affairs after his visit to Germany and interview with Hitler in April 1933. Armstrong had maintained extensive contacts with a broad range of senior figures in Weimar Germany, but most were nowhere to be found. Hitler had been in power only since the end of January, but already the sole qualification for any serious position was whether the person was a Nazi. "If he was not, he was wiped out," Armstrong wrote. "Proud to be ignorant" young Nazis accepted the explanation that "the German super-man" only lost World War I because of "the Jew, the traitor within the gates."
BERLIN DIARY
By William Shirer (1941)
He is best known for his 1960 must-read epic, "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." But William Shirer, who reported from Berlin for Hearst's Universal News Service and CBS from 1934 to 1940, displayed far more of his raw emotions in these brilliantly crafted diary entries, published soon after his return to the United States. At first, he was perplexed by the adulation of Hitler shown by his followers, "their faces transformed into something positively inhuman." But soon Shirer came to grudgingly admireand fearHitler's ability to whip up their mystical fervor. The journalist pondered the lack of "balance" in the German people, who swung from one extreme to the other, and he deplored the weak response in Europe and elsewhere. While many Americans still believed they could keep out of the next global conflagration, Shirer had no such illusions. The contest between tyranny and democracy, he concluded in one of his last entries from Berlin, "is as inevitable as that of two planets hurtling inexorably through the heavens towards each other."
BERLIN EMBASSY
By William Russell (1941)
William Russell was a clerk in the consular section of the U.S. Embassy in Berlin when Hitler's armies invaded Poland, launching World War II. The Mississippi native, still in his early 20s, had studied German at the University of Berlin. With the other remaining Americans, he lived "isolated in our island" in the German capital, as he put it in this near-elegiac account, penned mostly before his departure in the spring of 1940. A highly social young man, he broke through that isolation to maintain contacts with an array of German friendsyet he hoped that Allied bombers would hit their country hard. He despaired for the Jews who beseeched the embassy for visas that would allow them to escape. Washington's strict quota system meant that most were turned away. His account, early in the book, of prying loose one visa for a desperate Jew makes for a dramatic opener but only underscores the tragedy of so many others.
GERMANY WILL TRY IT AGAIN
By Sigrid Schultz (1944)
The longest-serving American correspondent in Berlin, who witnessed all of the 1920s and 1930s there, Sigrid Schultz of the Chicago Tribune was as knowledgeable as she was feistyeven in the presence of Nazi bigwigs. Written after she returned to the United States, her book is full of tantalizing stories. When she discovered that the Gestapo had planted incriminating documents to frame her, she burned the papers and then confronted Hermann Goering at a lavish lunch, declaring that he had orchestrated the incident. This kind of behavior prompted officials at Goering's Air Ministry to refer to her as "that dragon from Chicago." Her anger was also directed against the German people for following Hitler, and she scorned those of her countrymen who refused to believe the early warnings that she and other correspondents had issued about Hitler's intentions: "Many of those who branded us killjoys or cranks have since seen their sons go off to battle."
