Hanfstaengl, Ernst and Helene Ernst, b. February 2, 1887; Munich, Bavaria d. November 6, 1975; Munich, Bavaria

A wealthy German American couple who befriended Adolf Hitler and supported his National Socialist German Worker’s Party (NSDAP). Ernst and Helene Hanfstaengl both enjoyed family ties to the United States.

Ernst entered Harvard University in 1905 in preparation for assuming the man­agement of the New York office. An indif­ferent student, Ernst nevertheless made a name for himself at Harvard, where he was affectionately known as “Hanfy” and praised for his boisterous piano playing. He graduated in 1909 and two years later began to run the family firm in New York. He resumed his Harvard ties by attending the Harvard Club, meeting Franklin D. Roosevelt, among others, during visits there. Ernst was still in New York when World War I began. His Harvard connec­tions allowed him to stay in business until the last months of the war, when the U.S. government finally liquidated his enter­prise. In 1919 he met Helene Niemeyer, the American-born daughter of Johann and Elina Niemeyer, German immigrants who had arrived in the United States in the 1880s. Ernst and Helene married on Feb­ruary 11, 1920, and produced a son, Egon, one year later. Egon’s birth encouraged Ernst to return with his young family to Germany in July 1921.

The Hanfstaengls made their home in Munich, and it was there in November 1922 that Ernst first encountered Adolf Hitler. Their initial meeting came about after Warren Delano Robbins, an old Har­vard classmate and American diplomat in Germany, asked Ernst to help Captain Truman Smith, an American military at­tache, prepare a report on the Bavarian po­litical situation. Captain Smith had Ernst attend in his place a speech by Hitler on the night of November 21. Hitler’s per­formance enraptured Ernst, who saw in Hitler the man who could restore Ger­many to greatness. After the speech, Ernst introduced himself to Hitler and said that he would like to discuss some of the ideas that Hitler had spoken on. He attended more of Hitler’s speeches and was soon meeting with him on a regular basis. In January 1923 Ernst introduced Helene to Hitler, who was quite taken with Helene’s beauty and soon became a frequent guest at the Hanfstaengl home, were he enjoyed relaxing with Helene, playing uncle to Egon, and listening to Ernst’s piano rendi­tions of Wagner’s operas.

Ernst became one of Hitler’s closest as­sociates, a constant companion who en­dured countless hours listening to the Nazi leader’s monologues on politics, race, art, and culture. He also acted as an informal press officer for Hitler, who was impressed by Ernst’s family background, Harvard ed­ucation, and foreign connections. Ernst tried to widen Hitler’s perspective on for­eign relations by emphasizing the impor­tance of the United States in world affairs. He argued that America’s industrial and military might had been the decisive factor in Germany’s defeat in World War I, and he warned Hitler against fighting the United States in a future world conflict. Hitler, while fascinated by American tech­nological progress, largely ignored Ernst’s views on the United States, which he be­lieved was an inherently weak country due to race mixing and corruption by Jews.

Hitler’s relationship with the Hanf- staengls was especially close in 1923.

During the next five years, the Hanf- staengls concentrated on their own affairs, while Hitler built the NSDAP into a na­tional movement. In 1930, however, Hitler recalled Ernst to serve as his principal liai­son to the foreign press, who were clamor­ing to report on Hitler in the wake of the Nazis’ spectacular electoral success. Hitler formally recognized Ernst’s position in 1932 by making him foreign press chief of the NSDAP. In the wake of Hitler’s as­sumption of power in 1933, Ernst enjoyed a brief period in the limelight as he stood for numberless press interviews, attended and hosted diplomatic galas, and engaged in seemingly limitless self-promotion. Keen to see a cordial relationship between the Third Reich and the United States, Ernst met regularly with American re­porters and arranged a meeting between Hitler and the American ambassador, William E. Dodd, whose daughter, Martha, Ernst befriended. In June 1934 Ernst made a well-publicized trip to Amer­ica, where he attended his class reunion at Harvard.

Horrified by the purge of the Storm Troopers (SA) on June 30, 1934, and the growing influence at Hitler’s court of Joseph Goebbels, whose control of the Nazi media threatened his own position as foreign press chief, Ernst became estranged from Hitler and the Nazi hierarchy by the end of 1934. This professional collapse was matched in private by the breakup of his marriage to Helene, which ended in di­vorce in 1936.

On February 8, 1937, Ernst was sur­prised by news that Hitler wanted him to undertake a secret diplomatic mission to Spain, the successful completion of which he was led to believe would repair his rela­tionship with the fuhrer. Two days later, in­stead of going to Spain, Ernst ended up fleeing Germany for Switzerland, after con­vincing himself that the “mission” to Spain was an elaborate ruse to murder him. After being reunited with Egon in Zurich, Ernst

Ernst Franz Hanfstaengl, German author, composer, art expert, and aide to Hitler. Here he is with his wife, Helene, and their two children. (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munchen)

left Switzerland in March 1937 for Britain, where he spent the next two years trying to negotiate his safe return to Germany, hop­ing for reconciliation with Hitler, whose recognition he still craved, despite his exile. This hope would never be realized and Ernst still resided in Britain when that country declared war against Germany on September 3, 1939.

Interned by the British as an enemy alien after the outbreak of war, Ernst re­mained in Britain until June 1940, when he was transferred to a detention camp in Canada. It was in Canada that Ernst learned that Egon, who was an American citizen studying at Harvard, had joined the U.S. Army in February 1941. Faced with his son’s obvious stand against Germany, Ernst decided to move toward a final break with the Nazis by actively supporting the Allied cause, which he fully embraced once Hitler declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941. By the end of the year he had agreed to write a series of magazine articles on Hitler and the Nazis. More im­portantly, Ernst’s potential usefulness to the Americans as a weapon in their bud­ding psychological war against Germany was apparent to a number of key American officials, including President Roosevelt, who remembered “Hanfy” from their old days at the Harvard Club.

Canada in June 1942. Now under the re­laxed custody of the Americans, Ernst agreed to join the “S-Project” (the “S” was for Ernst’s Sedgwick name), an unofficial intelligence operation run by the White House that employed Ernst as an analyst and interpreter of Nazi radio broadcasts. Ernst also wrote a series of interpretive re­ports on Hitler, the Nazi leadership, and public opinion in wartime Germany. De­spite the unique insights offered by these papers, the S-Project produced little useful intelligence. The British, who never trusted Ernst, put enough pressure on the Ameri­cans to end the operation in the fall of 1944. Ernst returned to British intern­ment, where he remained until the end of the war. Released from a repatriation camp in Germany in 1946, Ernst reestablished his home in Munich, where he published his memoirs in 1957 and died on Novem­ber 6, 1975.

Boyd Murphree

See also Antisemitism

References and Further Reading

Conradi, Peter. Hitler’s Piano Player: The Rise and Fall of Ernst Hanfstaengl, Confidant of Hitler, Ally ofFDR New York: Carol and Graf, 2004.

Hanfstaengl, Ernst. Hitler: The Missing Years. New York: Arcade, 1994, 1957.

Marwell, David George. Unwanted Exile: A Biography of Ernst “Putzi ” Hanfstaengl. PhD dissertation. State University of New York at Binghamton, 1988.

Toland, John. Adolf Hitler. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976.