Page 197 - Was Hitler a Riddle?

184 The American Diplomats

to the american ambassador, were designed simply to insult and annoy
Jews. He could not resist ridiculing one of them: “the procedure of an-
noying Jews, the thoroughness of which reflects creditably upon German
inventiveness and attention to detail, has been carried in Berlin to the point
of withdrawing low license numbers from Jewish automobile owners who
are now being given plates higher than the number ia 300,000.” it was
considerably milder than the law proposed by streicher, who called for the
cancellation of all licenses held by Jews. 100
repressive measures against Jews were often enacted on the initiative
of local officials, which, the embassy noted, demonstrated the intensity of
anti-semitic feelings among lower-level officials. the Völkischer Beobachter
of august 19, 1937, “gleefully” reported that a judge at the local court in
remscheid, a city in North rhine–Westphalia, had ruled that the debts
incurred by a woman in Jewish stores were not the legal responsibility of
her husband. the ruling was intended to discourage women from patron-
izing such stores and thus to reduce “marital strife” in the family when the
husband tended to be more scrupulous than his wife in following the Nazi
Party line against dealing with Jews. 101

a misstep

among the hundreds of dispatches sent to Washington by diplomats
throughout Germany during the 1930s, some differences in emphasis can be
detected, but what is much more striking is the degree of agreement about
the undemocratic and barbaric nature of Nazism. One diplomat, however,
struck a discordant note, and his report merits discussion precisely because
it was so atypical. the experience of this diplomat, Vice Consul Ware ad-
ams, took an ironic twist that may have eventually raised doubts in his mind
about the soundness of his favorable assessment of Nazism.
adams was a young Foreign service officer whose assignment to Ber-
lin was probably his first, which may account for his naïveté. in the fall
of 1936, he joined a group of representatives from Holland, Portugal, and
switzerland that the Nazis took on an inspection of a penal colony at Papen-
burg in the ems-Moorland, an area close to the dutch border. the group
spent three days, always in the company of German officials, on a tour of
the colony, which consisted of six prison camps that housed about fifty-
five hundred men. Of these, thirty-five hundred were serving “penitentiary
sentences” for serious offenses, and about two thousand were serving “or-