were not pretty girls in short skirts but handsome young men bellowing through bullhorns.
Hanfstaengl was marooned in America during World War I and did not return to his humiliated and defeated country until 1921, entering the University of Munich to work on his Ph.D. in history. In 1922 he heard Hitler speak and, like Lüdecke, became a dedicated follower. Again like Lüdecke, he gave freely to the party and used his social connections to give Hitler an entrée into business and society circles. Hitler was a frequent guest at the Hanfstaengls, showing particular fondness for Putzi’s American wife, Helene. In moments of stress for the führer, Hanfstaengl was at Hitler’s beck and call, playing the piano and entertaining him with funny anecdotes. Hanfstaengl knew a great deal about Hitler’s private life, including his chief’s disturbing personality traits and obsessions. Later he told American intelligence all he knew about Hitler and his inner circle for, like Lüdecke, he would become persona non grata to Hitler and his top henchmen. Hanfstaengl was given to indiscretions; he did not like the direction the movement was taking in the mid-1930s, and he denounced the creeping police terror and the insidious militarism of the regime. Although he served briefly in Hitler’s government after the seizure of power in 1933, Hanfstaengl became increasingly disenchanted with the Nazi regime and fled for his life after the Nazis played a cruel hoax on him by telling him that he had been singled out for a secret mission to Spain in which he would be flown to Salamanca to make contact with Franco’s forces and help the local German agents establish better relations with the Spanish Fascists. It was a cruel joke, for Goering, who devised the scheme, planned to dump Hanfstaengl by parachute over hostile Communist territory between Madrid and Barcelona. If the prank had succeeded, he would probably have been shot as a spy. The pilot who had been assigned to take Hanfstaengl to Spain revealed the plot to him, and Hanfstaengl managed to persuade the pilot to land the plane on the pretext of engine problems, a ruse that enabled Hanfstaengl to slip away.25 Putzi fled the country with his son, Egon (he had recently divorced his wife, Helene), not to return until after the defeat of the Nazis.
But the story does not end here. In the papers of Franklin Roosevelt at Hyde Park there are more than four hundred pages of material relating to Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl. This extensive file dates from the summer of 1942 through early 1945; it includes reports that Hanfstaengl sent to President Roosevelt about a variety of subjects pertaining to the Nazi regime. It turns out that after Hanfstaengl’s escape, first to Switzerland and then to France and England, Hanfstaengl was interned by the British after the war began. In 1942, however, Franklin Roosevelt interceded with the British and had Hanfstaengl brought to the United States, setting him up in an old-fashioned villa at Bush Hill in Virginia. It was here, under close government surveillance that Hanfstaengl churned out a series of reports under the code name “S-Project,” the “S” standing for “Sedgwick,” the maiden name of Hanfstaengl’s American-born mother.26
As for Lüdecke, he too fell out with the Nazis. Having left Germany after Hitler’s failed Putsch, he spent some eleven years in the United States pursuing various dubious business ventures and promoting Germany’s brand of National Socialism, mostly among German Americans. This proved to be a signal failure, as Lüdecke himself admitted that Americans were not ready to accept a völkisch movement along German lines because America was an immigration society whose German element was steadily being assimilated.27 He also blamed the Jews for exercising inordinate power in America and for imposing their materialistic stamp on American thinking, citing with approval Werner Sombart’s infamous anti-Semitic statement that “Americanism is nothing less … than the Jewish spirit distilled.”28 Lüdecke married an American librarian, Mildred Coulter, who was working for the Detroit News. Hitler’s accession to power brought him back to Germany and, he hoped, a place in the rising party, but being by nature an intriguer, he chose the wrong party leaders to intrigue with: Alfred Rosenberg, Ernst Röhm, and Gregor Strasser. He also resumed his infighting with Hanfstaengl, who had accused him of blackmail and extortion. After the Nazi takeover, Lüdecke committed several serious political blunders and was placed in “protective custody,” spent time in several concentration camps, and, with Röhm’s help, made a sensational getaway that ultimately led him back to the United States. After arriving in New York, he heard news of the murder of Röhm and Gregor Strasser. Four years later, he published his colorful account of his years in the Nazi movement under the title I Knew Hitler, dedicating the book to Röhm, Strasser, and many other Nazis who were “betrayed, murdered, and traduced in their graves.”
On several occasions Hitler invited the globe-trotting popular author Colin Ross (1885–1945) for lunch to pick his brain about the United States. We have documentary evidence, gleaned from the notes taken by Walther Hewel of the Foreign Office, that Hitler was very impressed by Ross’s views of America. Ross told the führer that he was working on several plans that could bring about better relations with the United States. This was at the time of the “phony war” (March 1940) when Hitler was still receptive to proposals about how the United States could be kept out of the war and how he could counteract British propaganda in America. Hitler was galvanized by what he heard and ordered the Foreign Office to give Ross any assistance he required in his important work. He remarked to Hewel that “Colin Ross is a very clever man, who certainly has many right ideas.”29
Who was Colin Ross? Educated, middle-class Germans in the interwar period turned to two world travelers: the pro-German Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, whose writings Hitler had carefully read, and the Austrian-German world traveler Colin Ross. The English name is misleading, for Ross’s first name was probably given to him by his parents because of a remote Scotsman in the family tree. Ross was by training an engineer, but he dabbled in many fields, including history, geography, economics, and philosophy. He received his training from the Technical University of Berlin and Munich and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Heidelberg. In 1902 he paid his first visit to the United States as a member of a scientific team representing the German Museum of Natural Science. During this visit he developed a fascination with Chicago, calling it “the wildest and most wicked city in the world—die tollste und übelste Stadt in der Welt.” He later took his family to the city of Al Capone and penned some telling stories that captured the ambience of this gangster-ridden metropolis. That same year Ross went to the Balkans to report for the Münchener Illustrierte. In 1913 he went to Mexico to cover the civil war that radical Mexican factions were waging against each other, reporting to his German readers from Pancho Villa’s headquarters. During World War I, Ross served as a war correspondent, and after the German defeat he embarked on a series of globe-trotting trips that took him—to use the title of one of his books—From Chicago to Chang King.
His visits to America with his family—with kit and caboodle (mit Kind und Kegel), as he called it—stretched over several years and were recounted in his best-selling travel books, notably Amerikas Schicksalsstunde (1935), Die Westliche Hemisphäre (1942), and Unser Amerika (1942). In these “Amerika” books, Ross admitted to a love-hate affair with the United States—but more love than hate. “If I were not a German,” he confessed, “I would want to be an American.”30 He saw in America a dynamic Western idea, a striving toward humanism, freedom, and progress. The pall of depression that hung over America in the 1930s convinced Ross that America’s dynamism had been arrested by two factors: the selfish interest of a small, moneyed elite, and the decline of the Anglo-Saxon ruling class. In his book Unser Amerika (Our America), Ross propounded the popular right-wing view of German nationalists that the strength of America depended on the creativity of the original Anglo-Saxon, Germanic element in America, and that unchecked immigration had “diluted” the better part of the American people. Such views were not original. In 1916 the respected natural scientist Madison Grant had voiced this fear in a book called The Passing of the Great Race, in which he bemoaned the weakening of the genetic pool through intermarriages between the old colonial stock and new immigrants with non-Anglo-Saxon genes. This prejudice was also shared by Hitler, who attributed the entrepreneurial strength of America to the Nordic race and the sound immigration laws the United States had put in place to exclude non-Nordic people. As long as America remained an Anglo-Saxon–Teutonic state, it would continue
