As early as the government had decreed that a radio be developed that people could afford. Now even my family had one and I stayed glued to it when it brought familiar music or detective stories. March I am to see the head nurse. What now I learned budgeting early. in Hitler's 'Year Reich'
Table of contents
- Hitler becomes fuhrer - HISTORY
- William Dodd: The U.S. Ambassador In Hitler's Berlin
- Berlin's Darkest History
Once in power, he eliminated all opposition and launched an ambitious program of world domination and elimination of the Jews, paralleling ideas he advanced in his book, Mein Kampf. How a political leader was able to manipulate the political system in a democracy and obtain autocratic power. Two of his siblings died from diphtheria when they were children, and one died shortly after birth. Young Adolf was showered with love and affection by his mother. When Adolf was three years old, the family moved to Passau, along the Inn River on the German side of the border. A brother, Edmond, was born two years later.
The family moved once more in to the farm community of Hafeld, 30 miles southwest of Linz. Following another family move, Adolf lived for six months across from a large Benedictine monastery. He did not do well there. Adolf himself suffered from lung infections, and he quit school at the age of 16, partially the result of ill health and partially the result of poor school work.
In , Adolf was permitted to visit Vienna, but he was unable to gain admission to a prestigious art school. His mother developed terminal breast cancer and was treated by Dr. Edward Bloch, a Jewish doctor who served the poor. After an operation and excruciatingly painful and expensive treatments with a dangerous drug, she died on December 21, Virtually penniless by , he wandered Vienna as a transient, sleeping in bars, flophouses, and shelters for the homeless, including, ironically, those financed by Jewish philanthropists.
It was during this period that he developed his prejudices about Jews, his interest in politics, and debating skills. In May , Hitler, seeking to avoid military service, left Vienna for Munich, the capital of Bavaria, following a windfall received from an aunt who was dying.
In January, the police came to his door bearing a draft notice from the Austrian government. The document threatened a year in prison and a fine if he was found guilty of leaving his native land with the intent of evading conscription. Hitler was arrested on the spot and taken to the Austrian Consulate.
He was caught up in the patriotism of the time, and submitted a petition to enlist in the Bavarian army. Hitler narrowly escaped death in battle several times, and was eventually awarded two Iron Crosses for bravery. He rose to the rank of lance corporal but no further. In October , he was wounded by an enemy shell and evacuated to a Berlin area hospital.
After recovering, and serving a total of four years in the trenches, he was temporarily blinded by a mustard gas attack in Belgium in October Communist-inspired insurrections shook Germany while Hitler was recovering from his injuries. Some Jews were leaders of these abortive revolutions, and this inspired hatred of Jews as well as Communists.
On November 9th, the Kaiser abdicated and the Socialists gained control of the government. Anarchy was more the rule in the cities. The Free Corps was a paramilitary organization composed of vigilante war veterans who banded together to fight the growing Communist insurgency which was taking over Germany. The Free Corps crushed this insurgency. With the loss of the war, the German monarchy came to an end and a republic was proclaimed. A constitution was written providing for a President with broad political and military power and a parliamentary democracy. A national election was held to elect deputies to the National Assembly.
The centrist parties swept to victory. The result was what is known as the Weimar Republic. On June 28, , the German government ratified the Treaty of Versailles. Under the terms of the treaty which ended hostilities in the War, Germany had to pay reparations for all civilian damages caused by the war. Germany also lost her colonies and large portions of German territory.
A mile strip on the right bank of the Rhine was demilitarized. Limits were placed on German armaments and military strength. The terms of the treaty were humiliating to most Germans, and condemnation of its terms undermined the government and served as a rallying cry for those who like Hitler believed Germany was ultimately destined for greatness. At the time, it was comprised of only a handful of members. He saw this party as a vehicle to reach his political ends. Hitler built up the party, converting it from a de facto discussion group to an actual political party.
With the assistance of party staff, Hitler drafted a party program consisting of twenty-five points. This platform was presented at a public meeting on February 24, , with over 2, eager participants. After hecklers were forcibly removed by Hitler supporters armed with rubber truncheons and whips, Hitler electrified the audience with his masterful demagoguery. Jews were the principal target of his diatribe. Among the 25 points were revoking the Versailles Treaty, confiscating war profits, expropriating land without compensation for use by the state, revoking civil rights for Jews, and expelling those Jews who had emigrated into Germany after the war began.
The following day, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were published in the local anti-Semitic newspaper. A local newspaper which appealed to anti-Semites was on the verge of bankruptcy, and Hitler raised funds to purchase it for the party. In January , French and Belgian troops marched into Germany to settle a reparations dispute. Germans resented this occupation, which also had an adverse effect on the economy. The Nazi party began drawing thousands of new members, many of whom were victims of hyper-inflation and found comfort in blaming the Jews for this trouble. The price of an egg, for example, had inflated to 30 million times its original price in just 10 years.
Economic upheaval generally breeds political upheaval, and Germany in the s was no exception. The Bavarian government defied the Weimar Republic, accusing it of being too far left. Hitler endorsed the fall of the Weimar Republic, and declared at a public rally on October 30, that he was prepared to march on Berlin to rid the government of the Communists and the Jews. On November 8, , Hitler held a rally at a Munich beer hall and proclaimed a revolution.
This putsch was resisted and put down by the police, after more than a dozen were killed in the fighting. Hitler suffered a broken and dislocated arm in the melee, was arrested, and was imprisoned at Landsberg. He received a five-year sentence. Hitler served only nine months of his five-year term.
While in prison, he wrote the first volume of Mein Kampf. The job remained open for months as candidates were summarily rejected. In early June , Roosevelt's commerce secretary suggested an alternative: William Dodd, a professor at the University of Chicago who spoke German and received his graduate degree in Germany. Roosevelt offered Dodd the job, who accepted and went to Berlin with his wife, son and daughter. Roosevelt emphasized that Dodd needed to be a model of American values in Nazi Germany. But there was a less official mandate, too. It's a detailed portrait of the man who served for four years as the ambassador to Germany before resigning — after repeatedly clashing with both Nazi Party officials and the State Department.
What would that have been like as this darkness fell over Germany?
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Adolf Hitler right with his foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in When Hitler became the chancellor of Germany in , Larson says, many diplomats in the U. State Department — including Dodd — assumed he wouldn't be in office for very long.
Hitler becomes fuhrer - HISTORY
I think diplomats around the world But Hitler stayed in office for 12 more years, serving as the head of the Nazi Party until he took his own life in Ambassador Dodd met with him twice in , noting later how unhinged Hitler seemed, Larson says. Hitler again completely loses it. He says all of the criticism of Germany is coming from Jews and he is going to make an end to them. Because, my God, who could possibly even think about something like that? Who could act on something like that? Remember, this is early.
This is very early in the march toward the Holocaust. But in , things changed. Between June 30 and July 2, the Nazis carried out a series of political executions in a weekend known as the "night of the long knives. And what the State Department said was, 'Look, we don't really care about this, we care about Germany's debt. Can you please start working on getting Germany to pay back its debt to American creditors? It was almost as though, back in America, they wrote this off as some weekend excursion of the Nazis — not a big deal, not something to worry about.
While Dodd was navigating Berlin's diplomatic channels, Larson says, his daughter, Martha, was also immersing herself in Berlin. The year-old was recently divorced, and she hit the party circuit and started to have affairs — including one with the first head of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. She sees these glittering cafes, she sees the street life, the trams, the cars, the whole thing. And she wonders, right away, at the contrast between what the press back home is reporting and what she's experiencing. But Martha starts to change her mind, when she sees storm troopers marching a girl through the streets with a placard around her neck that says, "I offered myself to a Jew.
In her memoir, Martha described once walking into Diels' office and seeing the floor littered with recording devices he was using to listen in on telephone conversations.
Martha returned to the U. The State Department replaced him with Hugh Wilson, a "classic old-school diplomat," Larson says, who was "wholly the opposite of Dodd. That changed Hugh Wilson. Even he got the point. Dodd himself exhibited aspects like that, as well. For example, there's one astonishing moment where Dodd writes to the State Department to complain that [his office] in Berlin has too many Jews on his staff and this is interfering with his ability to deal with the Nazis.
And his receptionist was ardently anti-Nazi, and this caused all kinds of problems with visitors from the Nazi regime. For example, after my book The Devil in the White City , people often ask if I had nightmares [and] wasn't I horrified by the nature of that serial killer? And my answer was always, 'I always wear two hats. The one that says, 'this is horrific,' and the other part that says, 'this is great stuff. I found myself entering a low-grade depression.
There's something so relentless and foul about Hitler and his people, and the way things progressed from year to year. It just got to me in the strangest way. It troubled me that we had these reports of torture of detainees, we had people jailed at Guantanamo Bay who couldn't even talk to their lawyers and couldn't see the evidence against them — sort of fundamental bedrock civil liberties things. Look, I don't care what your party is.
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I went to public school on Long Island, and it seemed every year we were being taught that you had a right to a fair trial and a right to confront your accuser. So it's this kind of vague feeling I had in the background which was, 'What was that like to experience a real extreme version of that?
So it made me wonder what allows a culture to slip its moorings. The telephone call that forever changed the lives of the Dodd family of Chicago came at noon on Thursday, June 8, , as William E. Dodd sat at his desk at the University of Chicago. Now chairman of the history department, Dodd had been a professor at the university since , recognized nationally for his work on the American South and for a biography of Woodrow Wilson. He was sixty-four years old, trim, five feet eight inches tall, with blue-gray eyes and light brown hair.
Though his face at rest tended to impart severity, he in fact had a sense of humor that was lively, dry, and easily ignited. He had a wife, Martha, known universally as Mattie, and two children, both in their twenties. His daughter, also named Martha, was twenty-four years old; his son, William Jr. By all counts they were a happy family and a close one.
Not rich by any means, but well off, despite the economic depression then gripping the nation. They lived in a large house at Blackstone Avenue in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, a few blocks from the university. Dodd also owned — and every summer tended — a small farm in Round Hill, Virginia, which, according to a county survey, had He made coffee in a Maxwell House can atop his old wood-burning stove. His wife was not as fond of the place and was more than happy to let him spend time there by himself while the rest of the family remained behind in Chicago.
Dodd named the farm Stoneleigh, because of all the rocks strewn across its expanse, and spoke of it the way other men spoke of first loves.
William Dodd: The U.S. Ambassador In Hitler's Berlin
Over the preceding several months there had been talk among his friends that one day a call like this might come. It was the precise nature of the call that startled Dodd, and troubled him. For some time now, Dodd had been unhappy in his position at the university. Though he loved teaching history, he loved writing it more, and for years he had been working on what he expected would be the definitive recounting of early southern history, a four-volume series that he called The Rise and Fall of the Old South, but time and again he had found his progress stymied by the routine demands of his job.
Only the first volume was near completion, and he was of an age when he feared he would be buried alongside the unfinished remainder.
Berlin's Darkest History
He had negotiated a reduced schedule with his department, but as is so often the case with such artificial ententes, it did not work in the manner he had hoped. Staff departures and financial pressures within the university associated with the Depression had left him working just as hard as ever, dealing with university officials, preparing lectures, and confronting the engulfing needs of graduate students.
In a letter to the university's Department of Buildings and Grounds dated October 31, , he pleaded for heat in his office on Sundays so he could have at least one day to devote to uninterrupted writing. To a friend he described his position as "embarrassing. What had kept him from advancing at a faster clip, he complained to his wife, was the fact that he had not grown up in a life of privilege and instead had been compelled to work hard for all that he achieved, unlike others in his field who had advanced more quickly.
And indeed, he had reached his position in life the hard way. Born on October 21, , at his parents' home in the tiny hamlet of Clayton, North Carolina, Dodd entered the bottom stratum of white southern society, which still adhered to the class conventions of the antebellum era.