It was the spring of 1934.

Only a few days after celebrating the victory of 12-year-old Sarah Wilson of Gray in the National Spelling Championship – the only time a Maine contestant has ever won – the Pine Tree State turned its attention to a primary election.

In Maine’s most populous county, Cumberland, the primary featured a nine-way race for its four at-large seats in the state senate. Earning one of the four berths with a strong second-place finish was Max Pinansky.

At 46, the Portland attorney had already won acclaim as Maine’s first Jewish judge, having recently finished up a term presiding over the busiest court in Maine, the municipal court in Maine’s largest city. Father of eight children, Pinansky had also been elected to three terms on the city’s school board.

Election returns that came in the evening of the June 18 primary showed the highly popular and accessible Pinansky doing well not just in his Portland home turf but also in the county’s more rural towns, including Standish, Baldwin and Freeport.

Just two days later, Pinansky was off to Massachusetts to attend his 25th college reunion at Harvard. There, the center of attention was the university’s most controversial alumnus, Pinansky’s classmate, “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, a close protégé of and foreign press chief for Adolf Hitler. Even though he had no official role in the festivities, Hanfstaengl was greeted by 2,000 protesters and an array of leaflets and banners. One recited, “Give Hanfstaengl a degree, Master of Torture, drive out the Nazi butcher.”

Amidst this furor over the Fuhrer’s protege comes Max Pinansky. Fresh from a political campaign in which he had extended an enthusiastic greeting to thousands of Maine voters, strangers, foe and friend alike, Pinansky did the same with Hanfstaengl, offering an invigorating handshake before the eyes of a crowd focused on Hanfstaengl’s every move in the alumni march at Harvard’s football stadium. Pinansky continued his association with his highly ridiculed classmate by marching beside him as the procession proceeded from the stadium to the baseball field.

Afternoon newspapers throughout the country played up the encounter of the two men with photographs of the day’s most conspicuous handshake, proclaiming a burying-the-hatchet theme.

Lost to the din of spectator frenzy was the conversation Pinansky conducted with Hansfstaengl. In it, according to a New York Times report the following day, Pinansky tried unsuccessfully to prevail upon Hanfstaengl to release a statement on the condition of Jews in Germany. Moreover, Pinansky’s overture – only 17 months after the advent of Hitler’s regime – came at a time long before many nefarious Nazi atrocities.

The Hanfstaengl-Pinansky handshake did more than capture the attention of the American news media. It also caught the interest of Putzi’s boss, who was not amused when a few weeks later he was shown the news photos and then berated him with the question, “What sort of propaganda is that for the Party when the foreign press chief fraternizes with a Jew?”

Hanfstaengl also felt for a time that his own life was at risk when Hitler told him, “You ought to have been there,” a comment Hanfstaengl briefly interpreted as a reference to Hitler’s recent execution of some 150 SA leaders on the “Night of the Long Knives.” Though this impression was soon dispelled when he and the Fuhrer resumed cordial relations, it demonstrated the personal peril in which Hanfstaengl believed his encounter with Pinansky had placed him.

The episode received scant notice in the Maine media, and Pinansky would go on to win election to the state Senate seat for which he had been nominated two days before his approach to the Nazi leader.

In Augusta, Pinansky pursued a moderate to liberal agenda and was an impassioned speaker on a number of issues. His favorite was a bill that would have proclaimed as state policy the principle of equal funding for all public school students in Maine, one that would seek to ensure the same per pupil spending in Eastport as in Falmouth. In a debate that foreshadowed the ambivalence of our current decade, Pinansky was overruled in a 17-12 vote by those who asserted that putting such a policy on the books might create an unrealistic future assumption that the state would provide the necessary funding, something that a Depression-plagued Maine was not equipped to do.

Though sometimes touted as a contender for the Blaine House, Pinansky retired from elective political office after his term in the Senate. He remained a prominent civic leader, and several of his children went on to become lawyers, including Irving, who was not only at the top of his class at Harvard Law but was also one of its youngest graduates, before joining one of Boston’s most prestigious law firms.

Hanfstaengl would eventually part company with Hitler, fleeing Germany in 1937. After a time in Great Britain, in 1942 he was brought to America. For the next two years, he drew upon his close knowledge of Hitler to provide U.S. authorities with a detailed profile of the German leader and regular interpretations of German military activities.

After the war, Hanfstaengl returned to Germany, where he sold art in an old family gallery business. He would live long enough to return to one more Harvard reunion, his 65th in 1974, a year before his death at 88. A rendezvous there with one of the few, if not only, Mainer ever to have come to the personal attention of Adolf Hitler, was rendered impossible by Max Pinansky’s death in 1951 at the age of 63.

Paul H. Mills is a Farmington attorney well-known for his analyses and historical understanding of Maine’s political scene. He can be reached by e-mail: [email protected].