A voice from the past, William Shirer, talks about American businessmen's warm feelings toward Nazi Germany

This week the blog Naked Capitalism, which is a well written and researched blog, had egg on it's face over publishing a phony Newsweek cover praising Mussolini. Where the blog had to admit its mistake, maybe people would not have been less likely to believe Newsweek would do this if it wasn't for the country's past.

This is what William Shirer, CBS correspondent to Nazi German and author of The Rise and Fall Of The Third Reich, wrote about American business' attitude was toward the Nazi's during the1936 winter games which was in Germany too.  Shirer would later go on the be black balled from the news business in the 1950s, when he returned to America, because as he said  a shaving cream company didn't like his politics (which was that of liberal Democrat). He eventually moved to Western Massachusetts and in 1993 he died in Boston at the age of 89.

Shirer wrote:

At Garmisch I became so alarmed at the way that some American businessmen were being taken in that I gave a luncheon for several of them and invited Douglas Miller, our commercial attache in Berlin and one of the best-informed men on Germany we had at the embassy, to talk to them. He got nowhere. The genial tycoons told him what the situation in Nazi Germany was. They liked it., they said. The streets were clean and peaceful. Law and Order, No strikes, no trouble-making unions. No agitators. No Commies. Miller, a patient man, could scarcely get a word in.



In Berlin a group of American businessmen - Norman Chandler, the conservative owner and publisher of the Los Angles Times, was one of them-invited me and Ralph Barnes of the New York Herald-Tribune to lunch in the Hotel Aldon bar. They were puzzled, they said, that the Germany they were seeing was quite different from what they had conceived from our reporting. They had never seen people so happy and content, and so enthusiastic about their leaders. They had talked to Goring, they said, and he had told them that we American correspondents in Berlin peddled nothing but lies about National Socialist Germany.

For an hour Barnes and I, tried our best to tell them the truth. "I don't think," I noted in my diary that night "that we convinced them."

I was rather puzzled that our American businessmen and our rich tended to sympathize with Fascist countries. I wonder if it was because the right-wing dictatorships claimed to be anti-Communist. (The play is still working in America in the 1980's, not only with our well-heeled men of affairs, but with our government.

William Shirer The Nightmare Years pgs: 207-208

Hitler at the Winter Games

LP: You would have to say that their are leading businessmen in America today that would say exactly the same thing.