The classic expatriate idyll
On the face of it, Wyeth, like
numerous other American and British ex-soldiers of a literary or artistic bent,
was leading the classic expatriate idyll between the wars which has since
passed into legend, following the well-worn circuit from Paris to the Alps to
the Riviera to the Greek islands. The wrinkle in this picture is his time
each year in Bavaria, at the Schloss Salem and in the Bavarian resort town of
Berchtesgaden. What may not be evident
to every reader will be immediately
apparent to historians of interwar Germany. Schloss Salem Schule was the principal
training ground of the Nazi Youth movement, and Berchtesgaden was the summer
home of Adolf Hitler, Albert Speer, Hermann Goering, and several other top Nazi
officials. In addition, both locations had associations with the Windsors, the
English Royal family. Wyeth’s six-year
stint at these locations coincided both with Hitler’s assumption of the German Chancellorship,
and with Prince Philip’s enrollment at Salem.
One artist among so many Nazis
So why was Wyeth there? The Nazi
presence in Berchtesgaden, especially, would have been impossible to ignore. It
is conceivable that Wyeth was there for the same reason that so many German and
foreign tourists were flocking in, in increasing numbers, to stare at, and pay
homage to, Hitler. But nothing in what we know of Wyeth through his few letters
and through his family, suggests that he was in any way sympathetic to fascist
ideology.
The other possibility, that Wyeth
was an observer for British intelligence, using the personae of a plein air artist as a cover for spying
on Nazi activities, is a more plausible explanation. On the face of it, the
idea of Wyeth as an undercover agent may seem unlikely. He was more an aesthete
than an adventurer. According to Edmund Wilson, Wyeth attended literary
gatherings at the Charter Club in Princeton, but spent all his time playing
Debussy on the piano. He was never a natural mixer, and cultivated few
friendships. He was also a homosexual, which may have increased his natural reticence.
There was little of the dashing James Bond about him.
Wartime intelligence officer
But there was another side to John
Wyeth. As Division Interpreter on the
General Staff of the American 33rd Division during the war, Wyeth was
an experienced intelligence officer. He was one of a small number of officers
in G-2, the division intelligence section (the G-2 office is depicted in two of
Wyeth’s sonnets.). He would have been present at enemy interrogations, and
would have translated captured enemy documents. He was also entrusted with
delivering intelligence information from division headquarters to brigade and
battalion headquarters at the front.
After the Armistice, Wyeth served for almost a full year in Germany with
the Army of Occupation. Among its manifold responsibilities was the observation
of political activities, particularly of those groups who were struggling for
control of the government. The political intelligence gathered during this
period would form the basis for assessing the rise of the Nazis a decade later.
As an experienced intelligence officer, Wyeth would have had a role in this
work.
With this in mind, it is easy to see
the value Wyeth would have had as a knowledgeable observer for British or
American intelligence just as the Nazis were consolidating their power. Outside
of Berlin and Munich, the center of Nazi power was to be found in Bavaria, and
it was there, against a backdrop of Alpine splendour, that many of the Nazi’s
most secret deliberations took place.
British or American intelligence?
On the question of whether Wyeth
would have been working for the British, or for the Americans, one can only
speculate. I favor the British option for several reasons. First of all,
American intelligence between the wars was far less developed than the British,
and their concern was almost entirely with domestic “subversives,” which is to
say Bolshevik or Communist, rather than Fascist. Whatever presence American
Intelligence had in Europe between the wars was minor compared to the British
presence. Second, the Schule Schloss Salem, because of the Royal family’s connection
to it, as well as its key role in the development of Nazi ideology, would have
been of particular interest to the British. And third, because the 33rd
Division was under British command during the war, Wyeth’s intelligence work
would have known to British Intelligence from 1918 on. Wyeth spent time in
England after the war and, during the 1920’s, lived almost entirely in Europe. The
British would have had easier access to him than the Americans.
In many respects Wyeth had just the
qualities MI6 valued in an agent. The most important asset by far, of course, was
his two years’ experience in military intelligence and his fluency in German
and French.
In addition, Wyeth possessed
qualities which would have enabled him to move easily through the upper strata
of European society. He had an Ivy League education, was fluent in several
languages, was widely educated in the classics, history and the arts, and was
accomplished as a writer, painter and pianist.
With a cosmopolitan New York upbringing, his long acquaintance with
individuals the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson, his extensive
travels throughout Europe, he could have held his own conversationally in almost
any company.
Another of Wyeth’s assets in the
eyes of British Intelligence may well have been his homosexuality. Never mind
that it was still illegal in England and elsewhere. To the pragmatic MI6 recruiter,
a homosexual was a man with years of experience leading a surreptitious life
and thus a man with all the right instincts. Leading a double life, undercover,
was almost inconceivably difficult, as no amount of training could prepare you
for all the little unforeseen situations that could trip you up. In the end, it
was more a matter of instinct than training, and the social sensitivity to read
the most subtle interpersonal signs—a talent not often found in the
heterosexual male.
If Wyeth were a paid observer for MI6,
it would explain how he was able to support a more comfortable lifestyle than
his circumstances should have allowed him. According to his family, he had
little apparent means of support while he was pursuing his avocations as poet
and painter between the wars. His prosperous older brother, the successful Palm
Beach architect Marion Sims Wyeth, periodically sent his younger brother checks
to help “tide him over.” During Wyeth’s six years in Rapallo, he apparently lived
with his sister, Florence Sims McLean, her husband John, and their twelve-year-old
daughter Jane. But he gave that up when he decided to live in Paris part of the
year to attend the Académie Moderne and
spend the rest of each year in Bavaria, with side trips to Cyprus and the Greek
islands.
While at Schule Schloss Salem, Wyeth
stayed in the Gasthof zum Schwanen on the old monastery grounds of the school,
the finest hotel in the vicinity. It would have been the first choice of
visitors to the Schule, including Nazi officials and party members.
The
particulars of Wyeth’s living situation in Berchtesgaden, on the other hand,
are unknown, but in his letter to Mr Merck, he wrote that he “was domiciled”
there for six years, which sounds rather as though someone might have been financing
his situation. In both Bavarian
locations, not to mention his terms of study in Paris and travels to the Greek
islands—however frugally he might have managed his affairs—it is difficult to
see how he could have maintained himself for six years without some more
reliable means of income. However he managed to subsist—indeed, to thrive—for
six years, he never revealed those means to his family. The likeliest
explanation (again, without evidence)
is that he was subsidized by MI6.
Schule Schloss Salem
The Headmaster of Schule Schloss
Salem, Kurt Hahn, was
sympathetic to the Nazi cause, but considered Hitler an extremist. Hahn was
also part Jewish, and soon gained the enmity of the SS. In the summer of 1933, he fled to England,
and established a similar school in Scotland, where the Windsors sent many of
their sons. Hahn later worked in the Foreign Office of the British government,
where he urged appeasement with the moderate faction of the Nazi party.
Schloss
Salem was at first valued by Hitler as a bridge to Britain's ruling elite, and
he shielded it from the more extreme elements of the Nazi party. But after
October 1933, when Hitler removed Germany from the League of Nations, and a
year after Wyeth’s arrival there, the school was taken over by the Hitler
Youth.
Prince
Philip of the House of Windsor (future husband of the current Queen) spent a
year at Schloss Salem beginning in that same fall of 1933. With events
deteriorating so rapidly, he remained only long enough to finish the term, after
which he was removed by his family and brought back to England.
After
Philip's departure, Schule Schloss Salem began playing an ever more prominent
role in the doctrinal education of Nazi youth.
Among important Nazi officials who visited the school (in some cases
repeatedly), was Baldur Von Schirach, leader of the Youth of the German Reich;
Bernhardt Rust, Education Minister for the Reich, who introduced a Nazi
National Curriculum; and Hans von Tschammer-Osten, the "Reich Sports
Leader", who controlled all sports activities in Germany.
In
his letter, Wyeth referred to Schule Schloss Salem as the finest school in
Germany. Certainly it attracted an elite clientele. In addition to young Prince
Philip, the son of Thomas Mann and the nephew of Rudolf Hess were students there.
From 1932 to 1938, Wyeth appears to
have travelled an annual circuit around Europe which allowed him to indulge his
new-found passion for landscape painting. He spent each winter and spring in
Paris at the Académie
Moderne,
studying painting under Jean Marchand, then spent the summer at Berchtesgaden
in Bavaria and, finally, the autumn at the Schule Schloss Salem on the grounds
of the old Cistercian monastery north of Salem. Also, at some point during each
of these yearly circuits, Wyeth found time to visit Cyprus and Greece for more
painting.
 |
| Wyeth, in traditional Bavarian dress, painting en plein air outside of Berchtesgaden, Bavaria, summer 1937. |
Berchtesgaden
Just a few months after Wyeth
arrived in Bavaria (early summer, 1932), Hitler assumed the Chancellorship of
Germany. Soon thereafter he purchased a small chalet in the mountain resort of
Obersalzberg, immediately above Berchtesgaden where Wyeth had taken up
residence. Over the next two years he had
the chalet renovated and enlarged, and dubbed the Berghof (“Mountain
Court”). Under the direction of his
deputy, Martin Bormann, who oversaw the renovations of the Berghof, the entire
Obersalzberg resort was taken over and its native residents either bought out
or evicted. Neighboring farms and
properties were bought up until the entire compound comprised nearly ten square
kilometers. Barracks were constructed
for SS guards, garages, a guesthouse for visiting dignitaries, footpaths and
roads, heavy fencing, walls and gates. High-level Nazis, including Hermann
Goering, Albert Speer, Heinrich Himmler, and Bormann himself, built lavish
houses within the perimeter.
Berchtesgaden and Obersalzberg had always attracted tourists, but once Hitler and his entourage arrived, the crowds swelled. The renovations at Obersalzberg were designed, in part, to keep them at bay. If Wyeth’s assignment was to report on developments at Obersalzberg, and the traffic in and out, he would need a number of high, elevated vantages, and a convincing cover (“landscape artist”) to explain his presence in such places. Wyeth was tall (6 ft.), slender, with light brown hair and blue eyes, dressed as a native Bavarian and spoke fluent German. As a hiker and painter with a taste for Alpine scenery, he would have been just one of many.
Had
Wyeth remained in Bavaria continuously for six years, he might have eventually attracted
attention, but by timing his arrivals and departures to coincide with the
tourist season at Berchtesgaden, and the fall term at Schloss Salem, he would
have found it easier to remain inconspicuous.
To
repeat, this is all just conjecture. I have been unable to find much
information on how such agents or observers were actually deployed in the
field. The primary histories of British Intelligence in Germany between the
wars all deal with activities at the highest level, and offer next to nothing
on individual observers.
One
source which does offer a certain amount of insight into intelligence gathering
by an individual observer is the biography of C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Chasing Lost Time, by Jean Findlay.
There are numerous parallels between Scott Moncrieff and Wyeth. Both were
intelligence officers during the war, both were poets and translators, both
were Catholic and both were homosexual.
Moreover, both lived in Rapallo, Italy, for a time (Scott Moncrieff in
1924, and Wyeth by 1926), and both knew Max Beerbohm. It is not difficult to imagine that their
social circles overlapped.
During
the war, British intelligence had about a hundred agents in the field in
Italy. Immediately after the war, this
number was greatly reduced, but by the early ‘20s the rise of fascist movements
in Italy made it clear that more agents would have to be recruited.
Scott
Moncrieff’s duties included keeping an eye on railway terminals and shipping
ports, and sending in reports on what he observed. The entire arrangement was
surprisingly casual. Scott Moncrieff was not told where or when to travel, and
his movements were not interfered with in any way. He was simply asked to report on what he saw
wherever he happened to be.
This
raises the possibility that Wyeth may have begun his intelligence work while
still in Italy. His decision to begin
studies in Paris in 1932 was the result of a chance encounter with the English
painter Duncan Grant in Cassis-sur-Mer on the French Riviera in May of that
year. Grant urged him to study painting at the Académie Moderne
in Paris and gave him a letter of introduction to the French artist Jean
Marchand. Wyeth immediately returned to Rapallo, settled his affairs, and moved
to Paris. Then, sometime during the summer, after a short initial term of study
with Marchand, Wyeth moved to Berchtesgaden.
 |
| Berchtesgaden in the 1930s |
~~~~~
Excerpted from the chapter "Poet, Painter, Spy: Did John Allan Wyeth report on Nazi Activities for British Intelligence during the 1930s?" in the book Before the Clangor of the Gun: The First World War Poetry of John Allan Wyeth by BJ Omanson (Monongahela Books, 2019).
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