Before Goebbels became Hitler’s megaphone, another man shaped the Nazi leader’s image, speeches, and rise to power. Discover the fascinating, troubling story of the insider who later helped the Allies—and ask yourself: could history have taken a different turn?
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0:00 - Ernst Amstengel, Hitler’s Publicist
3:36 - Amstengel’s Early Life and Return to Munich
7:54 - From Hitler’s Admirer to Nazi Collaborator
12:52 - Churchill, Hitler, and the Reichstag Fire
15:34 - Amstengel Falls Out of Favor and Flees
19:25 - A Wartime Informant and Complicated Legacy
Subscribe for more history stories.
Comment what you liked most about the video.
#History #WorldWarII #Germany #Biography #Documentary
👉 This channel was created in collaboration with https://www.youtube.com/@dentrolastoria
0:00 - Ernst Amstengel, Hitler’s Publicist
3:36 - Amstengel’s Early Life and Return to Munich
7:54 - From Hitler’s Admirer to Nazi Collaborator
12:52 - Churchill, Hitler, and the Reichstag Fire
15:34 - Amstengel Falls Out of Favor and Flees
19:25 - A Wartime Informant and Complicated Legacy
Category
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LearningTranscript
00:00Our story today is very interesting. It's the story of a man who came before Joseph Goebbels,
00:07because many people mistakenly think that it was only Goebbels who was Hitler's megaphone.
00:14The man whom the dictator relied on for his public image, for his speeches, for control of the media,
00:20to establish himself as a figure on the public stage. It wasn't always like that. In fact,
00:26in the early years, in the years of the Alterkampfer, the old fighters, there was another man before
00:31Goebbels. At the very time when Goebbels was critical of Hitler, and had even gone so far as to ask
00:40for
00:40his replacement at the head of the National Socialist Party. This man, a publisher, who had
00:46also lived in America, and who would later become a key figure in the fight against Nazism, was named
00:53Ernst Amstengel, a man whose name should be kept in mind to truly understand the darkest side of
01:00Nazism. In the spring of 42, we are in America, in Washington, the capital, at the White House.
01:07A dossier arrives, a dossier of 68 pages, addressed to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The United
01:16States of America have been at war for a few months, first with Imperial Japan, and then with
01:21the Rome-Berlin Axis. And those 68 pages, that dossier, are an extremely interesting read for
01:28President Roosevelt's staff. It's a dossier about Adolf Hitler, the dictator in Berlin who is
01:34dominating, tyrannizing all of continental Europe. It's a detailed dossier that presents little-known
01:40aspects of Hitler himself, psychological profiles, and even details about his private life. That dossier
01:47was written by a man, a German, who was recently handed over by the British to the Americans.
01:54That man is Ernst Amstengel, and he has just returned from several years of captivity, since he
02:01was interned along with other German citizens in September 1939, while he was in Great Britain.
02:07Amstengel wrote that dossier to help the United States, the Allies, in their war. He is against Germany
02:14because no one better than him really knows the darkest sides of Adolf Hitler. And perhaps for
02:21this very reason, a few years earlier, Hitler himself, through Goebbels and Goering, had decided
02:27to sideline Amstengel, to frighten him, to persuade him to be more cautious, until Amstengel himself
02:33escaped to Switzerland. And after securing the release of his son, Egon, he moved to Great Britain,
02:40where he was eventually arrested. But why all of this? For what reason did Ernst Amstengel represent
02:47a danger to Hitler, to Nazism, to the Nazi system? Because Amstengel, from 1921 until 1934,
02:58was probably the man closest to Hitler, the one who handled his public relations in every field.
03:05Of course, he had initially refused to publish Mein Kampf, but the speeches were Hitler's speeches.
03:11He wrote them for him. He was always the one who organized public events. He also arranged interviews
03:18with the German and international press. And sometimes, he even acted as a translator,
03:24mastering English perfectly. In certain cases, Amstengel had even offered to serve as Hitler's direct,
03:29unofficial envoy to European politicians. Maybe for this very reason, Hitler eventually feared him.
03:36But who was Ernst Amstengel? For his friends, he was Putsi. It was an affectionate nickname. He was
03:43Bavarian. He was born in Munich on February 2nd, 1887, the son of an art publisher, Edgar Amstengel.
03:53His mother, the other hand, was an American of German descent, Catherine Wilhelmina Heine.
03:58She was the daughter of Wilhelm Heine, who was a cousin of the Union Army General in the American
04:06Civil War, John Sedgwick. The godfather of Little Putsi at his baptism was Duke Ernst II.
04:12The Amstengel family was an important family, a family held in high regard within both German society
04:20and American society. After all, with such relatives and such friendships, it was easy to see how
04:29little Putsi, the future Ernst Amstengel, would find the road to success wide open for him. And that's
04:36how it was. After a childhood in Germany, he moved to the United States and attended Harvard, where he
04:42would meet Walter Lippmann and John Reed. Amstengel, besides being an extremely intelligent
04:48person, was also a very talented pianist. He wrote songs, he wrote hymns. And during his time at
04:56Harvard, he met Friedrich Hollander, a Jewish composer, future nightclub owner, and also an
05:03influential figure in early 20th century German society. Having become friends, Amstengel and
05:10Hollander lost touch with each other at the outbreak of the Great War, the First World War. At that time,
05:16Amstengel was in New York and asked for help from the then German military attache at the German
05:22embassy, Franz von Papen, another man who would go on to play a major role in the 20th century
05:28to return secretly to Germany. Amstengel was refused. Von Papen, who was an extremely pragmatic man,
05:36preferred not to follow up on that unusual request. He preferred not to immediately damage the standing
05:42of Imperial Germany in the eyes of the United States, which remained neutral for at least the
05:47first three years of the war. When in 1917, the United States decided to enter the conflict
05:54on the side of the allies of the Entente Cordiale, the American branch of the Amstengel company
06:01was confiscated. Amstengel still had enough money to continue living decently and also to plan for
06:07the future. On February 11, 1920, in Long Island, he married Helene Elise Adelaide Niemeyer, another
06:17German who was born and raised in the United States. From his marriage with Helene, Ernst Amstengel
06:23would have two children, Edgern Ludwig, who would later, as an adult, enlist in the United States
06:30Air Force. Another daughter, Ertha, would die at only five years old, following meningitis. In 1922,
06:39Ernst Amstengel, after already making trips to Munich to reconnect with his homeland, to see firsthand
06:47the possibilities for Germany's recovery, which had closed the Imperial chapter and had begun a difficult
06:54recovery under the Republic, as we were saying, Ernst Amstengel had finally decided to return. He had
07:03reconnected with old friends, starting with Hollander, who at that time, after managing the cabaret in
07:09Berlin, had also returned to Munich. Hollander and Amstengel had become partners for a short period
07:17in a nightclub right in Munich, a nightclub where Friedrich Hollander's wife, Blandina Ebbinger,
07:24used to perform. She performed by singing songs, strictly satirical and anti-militarist,
07:31written by Hollander himself. Hollander's cabaret was the evening meeting point for the intelligentsia,
07:37the intellectuals of Munich, the upper middle class, the big industrialists, the former military men.
07:44They all gathered there to laugh, joke, drink in the nightclub, trying to forget the difficulties of
07:51a Germany starting over and to turn the page. But while people were toasting with champagne in
07:56Hollander's nightclub, in the beer halls of Munich, another kind of Germany was taking root,
08:02the one that would become Nazi Germany. While people were having fun in Hollander's nightclub,
08:08in the beer halls, people were talking politics, politics that was growing increasingly hardline
08:14and aggressive. Hollander, and especially Amstengel, had not missed this detail. Both of them had
08:21eventually decided to go and take a look, to listen. These speeches, so strange, that sometimes even made
08:28it into the newspapers. Speeches about a dark complexion former Austrian corporal, a man named
08:34Adolf Hitler. And on one of those evenings, when Amstengel and Hollander went to the beer hall,
08:40on one of those evenings, their friendship ended. Hollander was shocked to hear Hitler talk about the
08:45need to exterminate the Jews. He, as a Jew, had already heard so much about the persecution of his
08:52people, but never in such a violent, determined, and organized way. Amstengel, on the other hand,
08:59seemed deaf to the complaints of his old friend, and was fascinated by Hitler's personality. Fascinated
09:06to the point of soon offering himself as an outside collaborator with the Nazi party, in order to reach
09:13the most distinguished, influential, and wealthy circles of Bavarian society at the time. It didn't
09:21matter that at the same time, the United States Embassy in Berlin, through an officer, Truman Smith,
09:28had contacted Amstengel, asking him to act as an infiltrator within the Nazi party to gather
09:35information. To write reports, Amstengel was not at all interested in any of that. On the contrary,
09:41he was interested in riding the wave of Nazism, that dark wave that was rising more and more,
09:47and was clashing in the streets of Munich and Bavaria with the red wave of the communists and
09:52the unionists. Violence was the order of the day, but also, and above all, the rallies on the opposite
09:58side. Amstengel had chosen Hitler, and chosen him to the point of becoming a sort of protector for him
10:04within Bavarian high society. He would invite him to dinners attended by the most prominent names
10:09of local society. He financed him under the pretense of advancing him royalties for future
10:16publications. He had gone so far as to protect Hitler. After the failure of the Berger-Brau-Keller
10:22putsch, which we've already talked about, when Hitler, wounded, had taken refuge in his house,
10:28even threatening to shoot himself in the temple to avoid being captured by the Bavarian police.
10:34Amstengel, who had left his wife Helene to deal with the police about handing over Hitler,
10:40preferred to leave Munich shortly after, to avoid getting himself implicated as well. But in the end,
10:46he was not affected by the judicial investigations. He was able to return home without any problems.
10:54Amstengel believed in Hitler. He had seen his oratory skills, his ability to influence the masses,
11:00what Hitler was able to do to a crowd of people. In two and a half hours of uninterrupted speech,
11:06it could never be repeated, not even in 10,000 years, he said to some of his friends.
11:12Hitler is capable of creating a sort of hysterical rhapsody that can hypnotize entire masses.
11:19Amstengel was right when he described Hitler as a kind of living, unknown soldier for Germany.
11:24Hitler's speeches, which he himself had written for him, once he got out of prison after the trial and
11:32conviction for the failed Munich Putsch, would have an impact on German society. They would have an
11:37impact to the point that little by little, more and more, many votes would go to the National Socialist
11:46German Workers' Party. Amstengel himself, even though he didn't want to directly publish
11:51Hitler's Mein Kampf, since, after all, his publishing house mainly dealt with art books,
11:57had helped finance the release of that book. To finance the production of the Fulkischer
12:03Biobachter, the People's Observer, the newspaper of the Nazi Party itself. The relationship between
12:10Amstengel and Hitler became increasingly close, to the point that Hitler himself became the godfather
12:17of Egon, Amstengel's son. Amstengel himself even composed marches, both for the SA and for the
12:25Hitlerjugend, the Hitler Youth. They were actually marches he had copied from his own earlier work at
12:32Harvard. It was a sort of self-plagiarism. Amstengel even claimed to have invented himself the
12:38Zieg Heil chant, which would become so popular within the ranks of the Nazis. That desire to repeat
12:44over and over again, hail to victory, was supposedly his idea, but Amstengel didn't stop there.
12:51When, in August 1932, Winston Churchill was in Munich, Bavaria, staying at the Hotel Regina,
13:01Amstengel introduced himself to him with credentials signed by the Nazi Party,
13:06claiming he could easily arrange a meeting with Hitler. Amstengel was convinced that the conservative
13:11politicians of Europe, who until then had looked with suspicion at the rise of Nazism,
13:16would change their minds. That is, once those politicians had met Hitler in person,
13:22it must be said that Churchill initially did not have excessive prejudices against Hitler.
13:26Also because he knew little about his past, apart from his wartime experiences,
13:32and above all about his character, his behavior, and his psyche. But there was no meeting between
13:39Churchill and Hitler for a simple reason. During that conversation with Amstengel,
13:45Churchill was extremely frightened. What troubled Churchill was Amstengel's answer to a question,
13:52why does Hitler have this deep hatred toward the Jews? Why does he want to persecute them so
13:58harshly as he claims in his speeches? Why does he want to set himself against human beings? Not for
14:05social reasons, but only because of their birth, their origin, their essence? How can anyone have
14:12any control over their origins, when they never choose how or to whom they're born? Amstengel had
14:19replied that this was Germany's destiny, that it was what Germany itself had decided was useful for
14:25itself, through a herald named Adolf Hitler. For this reason, Churchill refused to meet Hitler,
14:32and Hitler himself no longer visited the Regina Hotel, until Churchill left to return home.
14:39Perhaps it was a missed opportunity, certainly a turning point in our contemporary history.
14:45The last spark of fame for Ernst Amstengel would have been the Reichstag fire. He himself would have
14:52been the one to alert the members of the Nazi party about the flames rising from the dome of the
14:57building
14:58while he was staying at Goering's official residence. More than a few people suspected that Amstengel
15:04himself was behind the Reichstag fire. He had noticed how acts of extreme violence, especially against
15:14nationalist national symbols, were met with very, very aggressive reactions from the public.
15:21The fact is that after that fire, Hitler had a free hand to get what he wanted, full powers, the
15:29ability to bypass
15:30the Weimar Constitution, and to start the dictatorial phase. But just when the road to success was finally clear,
15:38problems began for Ernst Amstengel. His disagreements, his controversies with Goebbels were decisive.
15:46Goebbels now aspired to have full control over public opinion in the Reich, and above all, full control
15:54over what would be said in public and the messages Hitler would put out. For this reason, in 1934,
16:02Amstengel began his downward trajectory. He basically fell out of favor, to the point that his wife,
16:08Helene, two years later, in 1936, filed for divorce. Helene was a fervent Nazi. Amstengel had become a
16:17disillusioned Nazi, a Nazi who no longer believed in Hitler, and above all, was no longer considered
16:24necessary by Hitler himself. Despite the fact that Amstengel had previously helped cover up several
16:30scandals. From the mysterious death of Geli, Hitler's favorite niece, the young niece about
16:39whom there were persistent rumors of some sort of forbidden love with her uncle, to the suicide
16:45attempt of Eva Braun, the Fuhrer's new official lover. The fact is that after his divorce from Helene,
16:51Amstengel disappeared from public life. In 1937, he was also the victim of a cruel prank organized by
16:59Goering and Goebbels, who had an order delivered to him, signed by Hitler himself, to board a plane
17:06to go to Spain as a liaison officer with Francisco Franco's nationalists. Even worse, according to the
17:14instructions in the letter, Amstengel was supposed to parachute, despite having no experience at all,
17:20behind the nationalist lines. The prank was exactly this. The plane would never actually go to Spain.
17:27It would just fly around the skies of Germany, with Amstengel on board, growing more and more worried,
17:35fearing he would be dropped into the Republican zone and lynched by the Republicans themselves.
17:41Since he was still wearing the SA uniform he had boarded with, the plane eventually landed in Leipzig,
17:48claiming an engine failure. As soon as he touched down, Amstengel immediately asked to speak with
17:55Hitler. Hitler mocked him, telling him that he, Amstengel, had been too defeatist, too negative,
18:03about the fighting spirit of the Condor Legion that had gone to Spain.
18:09And he deserved a little lesson. A lesson that Amstengel himself understood would be just a
18:15prelude to something worse. Amstengel knew what had happened to so many others. Others who had supported
18:22Nazism and had been eliminated, Rome, Strasser, others who had used Nazism and ended up pushed aside,
18:29others who had opposed Nazism. That was the case for someone we've mentioned before, Fritz Gerlach.
18:35You can find the video on the channel. And they had disappeared, killed in the first concentration camps.
18:41For this reason, in 1938, Ernst Amstengel decided to escape, reach Switzerland, from there fly to
18:52Great Britain, together with his son Egon, who, with an excuse, had managed to reach his father
18:57in Switzerland. But his stay in Great Britain would not have been exactly pleasant. At the outbreak of
19:03the Second World War, Amstengel was considered dangerous and interned first in Great Britain,
19:08then in Canada, in a prison camp for potentially dangerous individuals. Only in 1942, with the
19:16entry of the United States into the war, Amstengel was free to return to America and to offer to work
19:23with the Roosevelt administration. In that 68-page dossier, Amstengel poured out everything he
19:30personally knew about Hitler, including his notes on the dictator's schizophrenia, his obsessions,
19:38and his darkest secrets, starting precisely with Gailey's death. For this reason, President Franklin
19:46Delano Roosevelt himself ordered that Amstengel become part of a new unit for studying the Nazis,
19:52with Henry Murray, director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic, and Walter Charles Langer,
19:57psychoanalyst. He worked on a project that would result in an even more extensive dossier,
20:04Analysis of the Personality of Adolf Hitler, one of the first documents produced by the Office of
20:10Strategic Services, the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1944, Amstengel returned to
20:18Great Britain, lived in London for two years, until he returned to Germany, a devastated Germany. A
20:26Germany radically changed. His old friend and former partner, Friedrich Hollander, had escaped. He had
20:32escaped because he didn't want to live under the Nazi jackboot, because he feared for his life. His wife,
20:38Blandina Ebbinger, had left him long ago, and she too had left after the first threats and the first
20:43violence from the Nazis. In 1933, Hollander had left to Paris and then to the United States,
20:50where he would become a successful person in the film industry. Amstengel did not have that kind of
20:58success. After the war, he wrote a book, Hitler, The Missing Years, based on his experience as a PR,
21:05as a public relations expert for Hitler himself. A controversial book considered extremely interesting,
21:11but also dangerous for what it described, going far beyond Hitler's personality, but about the
21:17entire German society. In 1974, Amstengel attended his last alumni meeting at Harvard on November 6th,
21:271975. He passed away in Munich, taking with him the memory of the man who helped create the myth of
21:36Hitler, without whom Hitler probably would not have come to power so quickly. The man who wrote the
21:42most incendiary speeches, who organized the most impressive parades, who helped spread Mein Kampf,
21:49and then the Fulkischer Beobachter. We know that the course of history has twists, it has turning points.
21:58Well, probably Ernst Amstengel was exactly that, a turning point. If it hadn't been for him,
22:05if he hadn't supported Hitler in that way, we probably wouldn't have had that Nazi regime,
22:11or at least not such a rapid rise of Nazism. Ernst Amstengel tried to redeem himself during the war,
22:19by helping the Allied war effort, but it was an attempt to make amends for what he had done before.
22:25And today we can ask ourselves, if the ancients used to say that, if Cleopatra's nose had been
22:30shorter, the face of the world would not have been the same. So if Ernst Amstengel had followed the
22:37advice of his old friend Friedrich Hollander, and hadn't followed Hitler, would the history of Europe,
22:42the history of the 20th century, have been the same? If you want, you can try to give an answer
22:48yourselves.
23:00I'll see you next time.