Thursday, 6 August 1936
REICH WEATHER SERVICE FORECAST FOR BERLIN: Gradually settled conditions as westerly winds die down. Temperatures remain cool, and skies increasingly overcast. Possible light showers in the afternoon. Highs of 18°C.
The usual hustle and bustle is already underway on Kurfürstendamm when Thomas Wolfe draws back the curtains of his hotel room and opens the window. He loves it when the noise blows into the room like a breeze. Every city has its own sound. Berlin is different to New York, and New York different to Paris. Wolfe possesses a fine ear for urban acoustics, such as the sounds of the three trams that pass by the hotel every few minutes. As Wolfe stands at his window, watching the cream-colored tramcars, it occurs to him that they are almost silent. Every now and then sparks crackle on the wires above, but that’s it. The cars glide along the tracks as though part of a model railway set. There’s nothing like the din created by American streetcars. Everything works perfectly in Germany, he says to himself with a smile: “Even the little cobblestones that paved the space between the tracks were as clean and spotless as if each of them had just been gone over thoroughly with a whisk broom, and the strips of grass that bordered the tracks were as green and velvety as Oxford sward.”
If Wolfe leans only slightly out of his window, he can see the terrace of the Alte Klause, a popular watering hole and restaurant right next to Hotel am Zoo. He’ll be meeting Heinz Ledig there in the afternoon for a couple of drinks. The new day in Berlin can get underway. Wolfe takes a deep breath as if to inhale something of the big city. There’s a knock at his door. Wolfe shuts the window and calls out, “Come in!” It’s the same procedure every morning. After a couple of seconds the door opens, and a room waiter pushes a gently clinking service trolley into the room. “Good morning, sir!” he says. The young man speaks in the firm voice of someone who’s proud that he knows a couple of words of English, even though his German accent brings a smile to Wolfe’s face. Politely bowing, the waiter transfers a plate, a coffee cup, silverware, a serviette, a pot of hot chocolate, a basket of rolls and croissants, and butter and jam from the trolley to Wolfe’s table. The young man must have practiced these moves quite a lot: he always positions everything in exactly the same place. The serviette and silverware are in their appointed spot to the right of the plate, the bread basket is in the middle of the table, and next to it is the hot chocolate. It would never occur to him to place the rolls to the right of the plate or position the jam where the butter is supposed to go. The whole procedure only takes two minutes, and always concludes with a polite “If you please, sir.” The waiter leaves the room as unobtrusively as he had entered it. Just before he closes the door he says, “Dank you ferry much, sur,” which never ceases to amuse Wolfe.
He has finished breakfast and his morning toilet routine and is getting ready to leave the hotel, when he comes across the newspaper that Ledig gave him the day before in Café Bristol. Flipping through it, he finds the interview, but before he can start to decipher the German text, he can’t help but mutter “Sweinsgesicht.” He’s appalled: Thea Voelcker’s portrait makes his face look like a pig’s—and upset as he is, he doesn’t realize that his German now sounds as amusing as the waiter’s English a short while ago. In a foul mood, he makes his way over to the Alte Klause, where Ledig is already waiting for him. Normally Wolfe always has a friendly word for the lady at reception and the bellboy who holds the door open for him. But today he passes by in stony silence. America is not amused.
In front of the Alte Klause, Wolfe scans the people sitting on the terrace, locating Ledig after a few seconds. Wolfe asks him whether he’s seen Voelcker’s sketch. Before Ledig can answer, he blurts out that in the considered opinion of his mother, he’s the best-looking one in his family. How dare that blond woman depict him like that? He has no interest whatsoever in seeing the Valkyrie again. Gesticulating and cursing loudly, he drags Ledig by the hand in front of the reflecting glass of a shop window and asks: “Do I have a Sweinsgesicht?” Ledig would love to calm his friend down and reassure him that no, he doesn’t have a Sweinsgesicht. He’d love to agree that the sketch is a bad likeness and that the blond woman is a poor artist. Last but not least, he’d love to point out that they shouldn’t overdramatize the situation, that it’s only a drawing and that the interview, in which Wolfe cut a good figure, is the main thing. But Mr. Wolfe doesn’t want to hear any of this. Suddenly, he starts blaming the Gestapo: yes, he is convinced that Himmler or some other sinister figure must have forced Voelcker to depict him in such an unflattering fashion. You couldn’t put anything past the Nazis, Wolfe rants. Maybe they’re blackmailing Thea? Now Wolfe’s mood changes completely. Poor Thea, he wails. What have they done to her? Wolfe insists that she be invited to the party Rowohlt is throwing tomorrow in his honor. Ledig promises that she will be, shaking his head as he does. He’s used to Wolfe’s mood swings, but this rapid-fire back and forth is too much for him.
As if that wasn’t enough, Wolfe now wants to go to Potsdam with Ledig and his girlfriend. He’s never been to Potsdam, Wolfe says in a stentorian tone, and today’s the perfect day for a trip. So off they go. But the trip turns into a disaster. “He was in inner turmoil, and he took it out on us,” Heinz will recall. “He showed no interest in anything, and in the end he asked us why we had dragged him along to see all this austere royal Prussian pomp.”
Whenever the National Socialists want to impress a foreign guest, they put him up at the Hotel Eden. The establishment on the corner of Budapester Strasse and Nürnberger Strasse is one of the most luxurious and expensive places to reside in Berlin. The formal five o’clock tea on the rooftop terrace, where dance bands from Germany and abroad play their tunes, is legendary. There, waiters in white tuxedos serve tiny triangular cucumber sandwiches and opalescent cocktails. There’s a minigolf course on the terrace too. Dancing or playing minigolf high above the roofs of the surrounding houses is the height of cosmopolitan swank in the summer of 1936.
Sir Harry Channon and his wife, Lady Honor Guinness, who arrived at the Eden yesterday, have just left their suite. The couple are the guests of Hitler’s foreign policy adviser Joachim von Ribbentrop, who is sparing no effort to spoil them. Channon has even been assigned a personal aide-de-camp as well as a limousine with a ranking member of the SA for a chauffeur. Channon and his wife are very susceptible to such expressions of thoughtfulness.
Sir Henry—his nickname is “Chips”—is no ordinary visitor. Born in Chicago, he distanced himself from America at an early age and pledged his loyalty to the British Empire. He’s been a British citizen since mid-1933. In 1935 he was elected to the House of Commons. The Tory politician also dabbles in writing. His biography of the Wittelsbach dynasty, The Ludwigs of Bavaria, was even translated into German and garnered positive reviews. The aristocrat is a man of culture and education, and a polished, intelligent conversationalist, full of charm and wit. Some people dismiss Channon as a perfumed dandy and a lounge lizard—an impression that’s not entirely false. His marriage to Lady Guinness, twelve years his junior and from the Irish brewing dynasty, is probably nothing more than a smokescreen. It’s a safe bet that Sir Henry is homosexual.
“Chips” isn’t the only influential Englishman who’s accepted Ribbentrop’s invitation to the Olympic Games. Press magnate Harold Harmsworth, owner of the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror, his competitor Max Aitken, owner of the Evening Standard and the Daily Express, and the highly decorated General Francis Rodd have all taken up residence in the Eden. The presence of these Englishmen in the German capital reflects Hitler’s political ambition. The Führer dreams of an alliance between London and Berlin. Hitler not only wants to drive a wedge between the British and the French, he also hopes to gain the necessary leeway to carry out his plans for expansion in eastern Europe. The winds seem to be blowing in his favor. A number of British Conservatives are pleading, in the aftermath of the Depression and in the face of the crisis in Spain and the incipient civil war there, for a rapprochement with Germany. And one of the leading Germanophiles on the Thames is Sir Henry “Chips” Channon. It’s no wonder that Ribbentrop has rolled out the red carpet for him and his wife.
As a so-called appeaser, Channon is the polar opposite of Robert Vansittart. The 55-year-old Sir Robert, nicknamed “Van,” has served as permanent undersecretary of state for foreign affairs and is regarded as one of the most influential British diplomats. He is utterly mistrustful of the Third Reich. For many years, Vansittart has warned against Hitler, arguing that he is not a man to be trusted and that he will plunge Europe into war sooner or later. It is therefore considered a great coup that Ribbentrop has been able to lure Vansittart and his wife, Sarita, to the Berlin Olympics. No one had reckoned with that. Paris views the Vansittarts’ visit with great concern.
Officially Lord and Lady Vansittart are on a private holiday. Cecil, her son from a previous marriage, is an absolute sports fanatic, Sarita states in an interview, and was particularly keen on coming to the German capital. What’s more, the trip is an opportunity for her to see her sister Frances, the wife of the British ambassador to Germany, Sir Eric Phipps. Whatever the reasons given, Van’s fourteen-day visit to Nazi Germany has enormous political significance. He may be officially on holiday, but the diplomat is meeting for personal talks with Hitler, German Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath, Rudolf Hess, Hermann Göring and Ribbentrop. Vansittart sees his counterparts from the German Foreign Ministry, receives entrepreneurs and journalists, visits the Olympic Stadium and attends numerous receptions and parties. The Vansittarts’ presence in Berlin is the political talk of the town.
This afternoon, Sir Robert is scheduled to meet Goebbels. The propaganda minister is initially skeptical about his visitor. “He was an overly nervous gentleman who was clever but not particularly energetic,” Goebbels will write in his diary. “We still have a lot of convincing to do with him, but without doubt he can be won over. I worked on him for an hour.” At the end of their meeting, Goebbels was sure, Vansittart had been “deeply impressed…I enlightened him.”
Hitler’s chief ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, claims to have been told extraordinary things by Vansittart: “Along with all Britons, he’s very angry about the Negroes from the United States, as they’re also putting the English to shame at the Olympics. I laughed and asked: ‘Why do you have these “racial prejudices”?’ With good reason Vansittart has always been and is still considered our enemy. Catholic and Francophile. Now, because of Spain, this smug gentleman seems to have some doubts about the wisdom of his views. I tried to get something out of his wife concerning rumors of Jewish ancestry. When she too bitterly complained about the black runners from the United States, I said that they represented a general danger for the USA: a pool of reserves for the Communists. And that the Jews would finance this black, Communist revolt. I was astonished when she answered: ‘You’re right.’ ”
Is this a case of trickery? Is Vansittart flattering his hosts? What is certain is that Sir Robert is genuinely impressed by what he sees in Berlin. The organization of the Games, the athletics field with its many newly constructed buildings, the athletic achievements of the German team, the brilliant receptions and the many expressions of regard, large and small, make quite an impression on the diplomat. “These tense, intense people are going to make us look like a C nation,” Vansittart writes in a confidential report. Of all the Nazi leaders, he gets along best with Goebbels. “I found much charm in him—a limping, eloquent, slip of a Jacobin, ‘quick as a whip,’ and often, I doubt not, as cutting,” opines the diplomat. Vansittart also believes that Goebbels is a calculating fellow and thus someone with whom Britain can negotiate. “My wife and I liked him and his wife at once.”
The Nazis are at great pains to portray their regime as peace-loving and reliable. This illusion is so seductive that Vansittart begins to question his original stance. Perhaps he’s been wrong about Hitler? What if the leaders of the Third Reich aren’t really warmongers? Vansittart is pensive—and in this respect what Goebbels and Rosenberg write about the visitor from Britain is true. The regime’s elaborate charm offensive seems to be paying off. But then there’s an incident that allows the British diplomat to see through the carefully constructed façade. Vansittart and Ribbentrop are having lunch. They chat, eat, drink and discuss the possibilities for future cooperation. But in the middle of the conversation, Ribbentrop seems to lose control of himself for a couple of minutes and blurts out what he really thinks. Vansittart will describe this moment as follows: “He remarked on one occasion that ‘if England doesn’t give Germany the possibility to live,’ then there would eventually be war between them, and one of them would be annihilated. I was wise enough not to ask him what he meant by it.”
EXCERPT FROM THE DAILY INSTRUCTIONS OF THE REICH PRESS CONFERENCE: “We urgently warn against burdening reports on the Olympic Games with racial perspectives.”
The Goebbelses have put their marital crisis behind them. Not for the first time, Adolf Hitler is the one who has mediated between them. “Afterward a long time with the Führer,” Goebbels writes in his diary. “He praises Magda a lot. He finds her enchanting, thinks she’s the best woman I could find anywhere.” Hitler’s concern is entirely selfish. He himself is a source of tension between the couple. The Goebbelses have a complicated triangular relationship with the Führer, in which private and public affairs are closely intermingled. When Hitler met Magda Goebbels in 1931, he seems to have fallen in love with her. After she married his paladin Goebbels, he was disappointed, which made the future propaganda minister fear for his future. “Poor Hitler!” he wrote in his diary. “I’m almost ashamed that I’m so happy. Hopefully, it won’t cloud our friendship.” But the very next day, Goebbels has been reassured: “He loves Magda. But he’s happy for me.” Goebbels concluded his diary entry with a telling sentence: “All three of us will be good to one another.” An arrangement is agreed. Hitler gives his blessing to Joseph and Magda’s marriage, and Goebbels allows his wife to have a platonic relationship with Hitler, which in turn brings the two men closer together. At the same time, Magda Goebbels slips into the role of the First Lady of the Third Reich. She offers Hitler advice and spends significant time alone with him. Goebbels, for his part, is completely dependent on Hitler. The Führer is not only the “boss,” as Goebbels calls him in his diaries, but the secret head of the family. Goebbels seems to realize this but idealizes his relationship to Hitler to the point of kitsch. “He is very charming with me,” Goebbels gushes on one occasion. “If I speak with him alone, he talks to me like a father. That’s the way I like him best.”
The Lüdecke affair is now dead and buried. The first week of the Olympic Games is nearing its conclusion, and this evening Goebbels will be in the spotlight at a ceremonial reception at the State Opera. The propaganda minister is very satisfied with himself. Everything seems to have returned to normal. Nonetheless, in a few days, Joseph Goebbels will meet a woman who will completely derail his and Magda’s lives.
“Short sentences express more than long ones, and complex sentences are alien to the German language,” declares Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick in the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger newspaper. “Especially today, when a word is once more a word, a command is a command, and countless facts of our modern life have to be communicated and understood quickly, concisely and unambiguously, our language must be particularly transparent.” Frick was awarded his doctorate in law from Heidelberg University in 1901. Back then, a doctoral thesis wasn’t necessary to obtain the title.
There’s not a day of the Olympics that doesn’t feature a distinguished reception, a fashionable party or some other social event. Every representative of the Third Reich who’s anyone is hosting their own festivities during the Games. Frick invites guests to the Pergamon Museum, and Sports Leader Tschammer und Osten uses his official villa as a venue. Hitler is staging a number of receptions in the Chancellery, and Foreign Minister von Neurath is opening the doors of Charlottenburg Palace, while Berlin’s police president, Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorff, uses the Prussian parliament building. The coming days will feature private receptions hosted by Göring, Ribbentrop and Goebbels, but tonight everyone is heading to the State Opera, where the Reich government and the government of Prussia are holding an official function.
In the building, preparations for the event have been going on for weeks. A purpose-built, free-standing staircase now connects the vestibule with the stalls, and this has required parts of the opera house’s first and second balconies to be dismantled. Historical conservation standards are simply ignored. The loggias and boudoirs have been covered in cream-colored silk. The seating area for the audience has been raised and converted, along with the stage, into a huge banquet- and ballroom. Servants dressed in red tailcoats, knee breeches and powdered wigs are everywhere holding torches affixed to long staffs. “Foreigners are spoiled, indulged, flattered and fooled,” the journalist Bella Fromm writes in her diary. “The propaganda machinery is trying to give visitors a positive impression of the Third Reich using the Olympics as camouflage.” It’s a classic case of bread and circuses.
Göring, in his capacity as Prussian state premier, and Goebbels, representing the Reich government, greet the waves of people arriving, which include almost the entire diplomatic corps, representatives of the Nazi Party and government, and members of the German and International Olympic Committees as well as numerous artists and guests of honor. To avoid fighting over territory, the two hosts have claimed two impressive loggias directly across from one another, where they hold court with their respective entourages. The actress Jenny Jugo can be seen at Goebbels’s side, while her colleague Carola Höhn rubs shoulders with Göring. The actor Gustav Gründgens and the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler are clever enough to visit both loggias.
The evening begins with music. After a fanfare march, played by the band of Hitler’s house guard “Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler,” the Berlin Philharmonic plays—what else?—the prelude to Wagner’s Meistersinger. “Göring and I spoke,” writes Goebbels in his diary. “Three minutes each. I was in top form. Every sentence hit its mark.” Indeed, Goebbels’s short address is a masterpiece of demagoguery and manipulation. It isn’t easy for him to open his heart to foreign guests, Goebbels purrs, because a lot of people outside Germany treat whatever he says as propaganda. And yet propaganda is the furthest thing from his mind this evening. Germany, he says, has invited its guests to a “festival of joy and peace.” Goebbels adds: “My impression is that this festival is perhaps more important than many of the conferences that were held in the postwar period…We want to get to know and appreciate one another and build a bridge with which to unite the peoples of Europe.” Adolf Hitler’s Germany as a motor for peace in Europe? Goebbels is all aglow with his own verbal gymnastics, but he reveals his true intention in his diary that day: “It was a major feat of propaganda.”
And Hitler himself? The Reich chancellor doesn’t attend the reception hosted by his government. Like everything else during the Olympics, his absence too is calculated: it is supposed to reinforce the image of the Führer who labors tirelessly and the faithful patriarch who doesn’t care for leisure-time amusements and social events. Hitler’s popularity reaches its zenith in the summer of 1936, penetrating deep even into the working classes. Willy Brandt, later chancellor of West Germany, who has traveled in secret from his Norwegian exile to Berlin, asks: “Why can’t we admit that even people who used to vote left are impressed?”
In terms of foreign policy, up to the summer of 1936 Hitler’s regime has been characterized by risk, political provocation and blackmail. In mid-October 1933, Germany announced it was quitting the League of Nations and the Geneva Convention, signaling the start of a massive rearmament initiative. Less than two years later, in mid-March 1935, Hitler introduced universal conscription, violating one of the most important provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. Instead of the agreed-upon 10,000 men, the reconstituted Wehrmacht will have a strength of 550,000 soldiers. In March 1936, Hitler achieved his greatest coup to date as he sent troops into the demilitarized Rhineland, calling this violation of international agreement a “restoration of the national honor and sovereignty of the Reich.” The treaties of Versailles and Locarno both forbade Germany from stationing troops in the Rhineland, which was conceived as a buffer zone with France. According to the agreements, a German violation of this provision would be regarded as a hostile act and a disruption of world peace. In other words, the German government has given the rest of Europe a casus belli.
Hitler wagered everything on a single card in the spring of 1936, and he was correspondingly nervous. “The 48 hours after the troops marched into the Rhineland were the tensest time in my life,” he will admit years later. How would Paris react? Would the result be war? Hitler later says: “If the French had pushed forward into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs. The military forces at our disposal would not have sufficed to put up even moderate resistance.” But nothing happened. London and Paris exchanged notes of protest—and that was the end of it. Hitler has exposed the indecision of the Western European powers. He has humiliated them, leading them around by the nose in the political arena. A few weeks later, at the Berlin Olympics, he’s putting forward what is presumably his best face. Following up provocations and broken promises with gestures of reserve and reliability was typical of the early years of the Nazi dictatorship. Thus the sporting festival in Berlin is the icing on the cake of the violation of international law in the Rhineland.
The Olympics are the high point of Hitler’s massive hypocrisy. Despite the crass contempt he has displayed for agreements in the preceding months, he’s able to assume the mantle of the peace-loving statesman. But the dictator puts down his true intentions in a memorandum sometime in August 1936. We don’t know precisely when it was composed, but it’s possible that Hitler is formulating his monstrous plans at the same time as Goebbels is pompously invoking peace between nations in the State Opera. In any case, Hitler already sees war with the Soviet Union as inevitable. Germany, he believes, is “overpopulated” and needs “living space.” The top-secret memorandum concludes with some ominous words: “I hereby define the following tasks: (1) The German army must be ready for deployment within four years. (2) The German economy must be capable of war within four years.” In three years, the Second World War will begin.
DAILY REPORT OF THE STATE POLICE OFFICE, BERLIN: “At 10:10 p.m. a Communist Party propaganda flyer measuring 3 × 8 centimeters was discovered stuck to the telephone booth on the corner of Kantstrasse and Wielandstrasse in the Charlottenburg district. In addition, an Olympic telephone directory was torn off. Flyer removed. No culprit located.”
That evening Thomas Wolfe, Heinz Ledig and his girlfriend are still in Potsdam. They’ve left Sanssouci Palace and have settled down in a rustic restaurant. The three of them are devouring a platter of hearty sausage specialities, drinking beer and laughing. Wolfe’s mood has apparently improved. “Still,” Ledig will recall, “on the way back to the train station he stopped in front of shop windows and the reflective surfaces of advertisements for minutes at a time. Pensive and irritated, his neck comically stretched, he compared his powerful, handsome head with the ‘Sweinsgesicht’ with which the lady illustrator had contradicted his mother’s opinion.”
EXCERPT FROM THE BERLINER LOKAL-ANZEIGER: “Olympics spectator from Denmark, in her thirties, widow, medium build, fashionable, domestic, nice home, seeks to marry a well-situated cosmopolitan man of similar age who lives in Berlin. Serious, personal answers only.”
The publisher Ernst Rowohlt loves hearty German food. “Suddenly beads of sweat appeared on his forehead of the sort he would get after consuming several plates of pork belly with carrots.” Credit 7