In Terese Svoboda’s latest book, Hitler and My Mother-in-Law, the novelist and poet takes on the little-known life of her husband’s mother, Patricia Lochridge, a Zelig-like figure who was the only female American journalist to cover both the Pacific and Atlantic theaters of World War II. The title of the book refers to a lost 1945 photo of Lochridge at the age of 29, standing beside a pile of what the U.S. military claimed were Hitler’s ashes. Lochridge often told the story of how the military used her to verify Hitler’s death. Svoboda and her husband, Steve, remember seeing the photo in Lochridge’s home in Hawaii in 1980. After Lochridge died, they searched her archives and their own, but as hard as they tried, they could not find it again.
Lochridge was a polio survivor who walked with a slight limp. Svoboda theorizes that her experience with the debilitating illness might be the key to understanding her powerful personality. Sometimes having had a brush with a serious disability or with death causes fearlessness. But just as Svoboda finds it hard to pin down so many of the details of Lochridge’s stories, some family members—including her brother—claim she may never have had polio at all. Why would she lie about having polio? For the same reason F.D.R. pretended not to be paralyzed—to not show weakness.
After a stint at The Mexico Ledger, a local newspaper based in Mexico, Missouri, Lochridge got her real start in journalism when she became the first woman hired to work in news by CBS Radio, in 1939. In 1943, Woman’s Home Companion sent her out as a war correspondent, first to the Pacific, then to Europe. In April of 1945, she arrived in Dachau with the photojournalist Lee Miller on the day the camp was liberated by U.S. forces. When the town’s male citizens were forced by the U.S. Army to tour the death camp, Lochridge observed that the townspeople displayed little contrition or even awareness of the atrocities. In interviews, the citizens insisted that Hitler could not have known about the camp because “he would never have permitted such suffering.”
In a note to her editor about her subsequent article, “Are Germans Human?,” for Woman’s Home Companion, Lochridge wrote: “I was physically sick from what I had seen first in the camp and then in the townspeople—their utter indifference and selfishness. I felt totally incapable of translating this to our readers. I hope somehow it got across.”
Lochridge made two trips to Berlin over the course of the war, the second about five weeks after Hitler’s suicide. “I wasn’t there at the time they burned the bodies,” she said in a 1995 interview for the book The Women Who Wrote the War, by Nancy Caldwell Sorel. “I was told they were [burned] and shown a not very large area, maybe ten feet or so, big enough to hold a funeral pyre.” Later in the interview, she was asked, “At one time you told me the reason [the U.S. military] had asked you to come up there was in part to verify Hitler’s death in order to prevent any resurgence of neo-Nazism after he died.”
“Well, that’s true,” she said, and nothing more.
According to Svoboda, Lochridge also claimed to have danced with Hermann Göring, the head of the Gestapo, shortly after he was taken into custody by the U.S. Army in May of 1945. Svoboda is not quite certain how the dance took place, nor why her mother-in-law would boast of dancing with the Nazi war criminal, but she believes her.
In June of 1945, while embedded with the 101st Airborne Division as a journalist, Lochridge was appointed the temporary mayor of postwar Berchtesgaden—the home of Hitler’s idyllic Alpine retreat, known as “the Eagle’s Nest.” For her brief service (General Patton shortened her planned tenure from a week to a single day after she ordered banks to open), Lochridge was allegedly told she could pick any painting she wanted from Göring’s hoard of looted art. She selected Lucas Cranach’s Renaissance masterpiece Cupid Complaining to Venus.
After the war, Lochridge moved to New York and married a lieutenant colonel and embarked upon a new career in public relations. A few years later, she left her husband for an old boyfriend and former military censor, Dickson Hartwell, the married head of P.R. at UNICEF.
Hartwell and Lochridge had been married for less than a year when he had the idea that she should apply for his UNICEF job without revealing her sex or their relationship. She took his job and soon distinguished herself by collecting the art for UNICEF’s greeting cards. She talked the dying Henri Matisse into creating a card for her. She even managed to acquire a Chagall.
In 1963, Hartwell—an alcoholic who frequently beat the couple’s four sons—was told by his doctor to quit drinking or he would die. In response, Hartwell sold the Cranach for $33,000 to E. & A. Silberman Galleries, who in turn sold it to the National Gallery that same year. (In 2007, new archival research revealed the painting may have been in Hitler’s own collection during the war, presumably looted from a displaced or murdered Jewish family—but despite its 60 years in the museum’s possession, no one has come forward to claim it.)
Hartwell used the money from the sale to buy The Arizonian, a weekly newspaper based in Scottsdale, and then proceeded to run the newspaper into the ground. Lochridge divorced him but eventually took him back.
In 1971, Lochridge and Hartwell moved from Arizona to Hawaii. Hartwell died in 1981, and Lochridge in 1998, at the age of 82. Her paramour at the time, a journalist who had worked with Hartwell during the war, had his eyes on her Chagall. After her death, however, the “Chagall” was found to be a print cut out of an art magazine.
Was Lochridge a liar? Perhaps she felt guilty about taking the Cranach and that clouded her story; she had nothing to gain but an interesting tale from asserting that she danced with Göring, and she never claimed the Chagall to be any more than a print taken from a portfolio (despite her paramour’s hopes). The truth about Lochridge, as with so much else, is various and hard to determine. But Svoboda is tenacious in her quest to uncover it in this memoir, and the result is worth sticking around for.
Deborah Scroggins is the author of Emma’s War and Wanted Women
