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CHAPTER 1

Hitler’s Split Image of America

In February 1942, barely two months after he had declared war on the United States, Adolf Hitler praised America’s great industrial achievements, admitting that Germany would need some time to catch up. The Americans, he said, had shown the way in developing the most efficient methods of industrial production.¹ This was particularly true in the iron and coal industries, which formed the basis of modern industrial civilization. He also touted America’s superiority in the field of transportation, especially in the automobile industry. Hitler loved automobiles and saw in Henry Ford a great hero of the industrial age. His personal train that took him from Berlin to his retreat at Berchtesgaden and later to the various military headquarters was code named “Amerika.”

It was not just America’s achievements in technological or industrial fields that made it a major world power, but also its superior workforce drawn from highly skilled Nordic immigrants. The European continent, he believed, had given its “best blood” to the New World, thus providing the growth gene for its civilization. In his view, it was a tragedy that the South had lost the American Civil War because it was in the Confederate states that racial policies had been more strongly institutionalized than in the Northern states. Hitler made favorable references in both Mein Kampf and a second, unpublished book to various racial policies pursued by the U.S. government. For example, he spoke highly of immigration quotas, racial segregation laws, and sound eugenic measures that he thought were more advanced in America than in Germany.

Hitler believed that America’s strength rested on two pillars: its powerful industrial capacity and its creative Nordic stock.² On the one hand, as long as the United States preserved its Nordic blood, and even continued to replenish itself through European immigration, it would continue to be a major power in the world. If, on the other hand, America abandoned its racial policies, becoming an “international mishmash of peoples”³ it would quickly disintegrate as a unified nation. Until Hitler found himself seriously at odds with the United States in the late 1930s, he toned down grave doubts and prejudices he also harbored about “Amerika.”

This darker side of the American equation was an old European prejudice that multiethnic nations, lacking inner racial cohesion, could not function for long. Hitler doubted that the United States could fuse so many people of alien blood, because they were “stamped with their own national feeling or race instinct.”⁴ This was the accusation that America was a “mongrel nation,” as racially polluted as it was decadent and materialistic. Both prejudices were deeply rooted in European consciousness; and as Hitler came to blows with America, the negative stereotypes began to predominate. With the coming of World War II Hitler began to believe the worst stereotypes about America. In 1941 he told Mussolini, “I could not for anything in the world live in a country like the United States, where concepts of life are inspired by the most grasping materialism and which does not love any of the loftiest expressions of the human spirit such as music.”⁵ Just a few months later, at the same time that he grudgingly praised America’s industrial superiority, he also condemned the United States as a “degenerate and corrupt state,” adding, “I have the deepest revulsion and hate against Americanism. Every European state is closer to us. In its entire spiritual attitude it is a half judaized and negrified society. How could one expect such a state to endure if 80 percent of its taxed income is squandered, a land built entirely on the dollar?”⁶

From what sources did Hitler derive these split images of America? From the very moment America was settled by Europeans, two quite different perceptions of America developed: that of the real land experienced by its settlers, and that of the symbol it represented in the minds of foreigners who never set foot in America. The symbol of America, as it filtered down to the level of ordinary Europeans, was the construction of intellectuals—scientists, novelists, journalists, and philosophers. Much of what they said about a country they had never seen was a mixture of fantasy, wishful thinking, psychological projection, and ethnocentric prejudices. We all know the positive images that spoke of a “New World” as rich as it was enchanting, a world of unlimited opportunities for land-starved and oppressed peasants of Europe. To millions of Europeans, America was the dream the Old World—one steeped in sin and trouble—hoped for. The New World was going to be better; its resources and its open spaces beckoned the failures and adventurers of the Old World to another chance, offering them a refuge from their own past.

Hitler’s image of America was not substantially different from what most Germans thought of America. On the one hand, America appeared as a vast and immensely wealthy country offering unlimited opportunities to land-starved and poor Europeans who were still suffering oppression under the rule of their royal masters. America was the land of freedom and a haven for hardworking common people. This benign image of America, however, coexisted with the degeneracy theory of the eighteenth century. Following the Civil War, European intellectuals provided increasingly negative accounts of America. Two broad developments contributed to this change: rapid industrialization, which gave rise to a national obsession with the acquisition of material wealth, especially among the nouveaux riches; and America’s ongoing ethnic and racial conflicts. Many Europeans accused America of becoming a nation of soulless materialists, chasing the dollar and concealing its spiritual emptiness by worshipping size: enormous skyscrapers, mansions, tunnels, suspension bridges, luxury liners, and so on. Paradoxically, images of a land of conspicuous consumers and millionaires, lacking any spiritual depth, often represented precisely the qualities many Europeans themselves desired even as they roundly condemned them in the allegedly harried, dollar-chasing Yankee. Despite having fought a civil war over race and the way of life based on it, Americans continued to be deeply divided on racial issues. The rise of biological-racial ideologies, which rested on pseudoscientific and Social Darwinian doctrines, encouraged conflicting views about America’s racial dilemma. America’s ruling elite, and that included the Roosevelts, saw themselves on the one hand as advancing the progress of civilization through democracy and liberal reform; but on the other hand they also believed that superior civilization derived from English, Dutch, and northern European racial stocks.⁷ Theodore Roosevelt, for example, believed that both England and America owed their success to the Germanic stock, and in The Winning of the West, a colorful account of how the West was won according to Roosevelt, he celebrated the spread of the Anglo-Saxon races over “the world’s waste space” as the most striking feature of human history.⁸ The same sentiments can be found in Owen Wister’s novels, especially the widely acclaimed Virginian (1902). Wister’s cowboys are latter-day medieval heroes who give the Anglo-Saxon race a last chance to regain its virility on the western frontier. Wister was a Philadelphia patrician and a Harvard graduate. Theodore Roosevelt was a New York patrician and also a Harvard graduate. Both men, and others from similar social backgrounds, thought in terms of racial stocks, superior and inferior blood, and American exceptionalism. Such racially conscious elites were alarmed by the influx of “inferior breeds” from Eastern Europe and from Latin countries. They supported strong anti-immigration laws that discriminated against such groups particularly if they came from non-European civilizations. Pervasive fears periodically surfaced in such circles that the huge influx of East Europeans, especially Jews, was creating a mongrel nation in which the creative and dominant Teutonic racial stock would be diluted by inferior blood.

Hitler’s perception of America encompassed all of these prejudicial strains that had entered into the thinking of Americans themselves. The Roosevelts had absorbed the typical prejudices of their class; they saw themselves as the crème de la crème by virtue of their older bloodline. In bolstering their class biases they found support in a variety of intellectual sources: neo-Darwinism, muckraking social criticism, and romanticized versions of American history. Their sense of class exceptionalism, however, was not as strong as it appeared to be, for the Roosevelts, whether they came from the Oyster Bay (Theodore Roosevelt) or the Hyde Park (FDR) branch of the family, saw themselves displaced by the new and more aggressive class of entrepreneurs, the financial nouveaux riches, such as the Morgans, Goulds, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Fricks, and Carnegies. Possessing an older pedigree and a more modest form of wealth, they could understate and therefore accentuate their social superiority over more recent parvenus. They could also act as tribunes of the people, playing populists to the masses, which sometimes infuriated their own class, who despised them as class traitors.

Europeans did not distinguish between different types of rich Americans; they lumped them all into the same class. They envied rich and powerful Americans while publicly condemning them as vulgar and uncultured—a stereotypical reaction of the powerless. A whole mesh of contradictory attitudes of envy, resentment, and admiration produced the stereotypical image of America as a nation that had become too big for its britches, too wealthy and certainly too powerful for its own good. German critics of America, influenced by neoromantic and völkisch ideologies, saw America as an artificial creation rather than an organic growth. America, they said, had been mechanically produced through revolution and a written document conceived by abstract minds. As such, it lacked inner life and spiritual depth. As long as America was ruled by its superior Anglo-Saxon elite, it might avoid degenerating into a mongrel nation without any higher spiritual ideals. Voices were raised claiming that America’s hour had already passed and that the country was mired in materialism. One of Hitler’s countrymen, the Austrian novelist Ferdinand Kürnberger (1821–79) who had written a maudlin novel called Der Amerika-Müde (The Man Weary of America, 1855), referred to America as lacking any real moral, artistic, or religious life. Even the vaunted political values of freedom and equality were hollow, for Americans had shown themselves to be unworthy of such blessings.

Another aspect of Amerika Müde (America weariness) was inspired by neoromantic and conservative traditionalists who associated America with the unfettered pursuit of modernity. This view consisted of a set of ideas and attitudes held by reactionaries who yearned for the restoration of the preindustrial way of life. They believed that venerable ancient traditions were being lost under the impact of rapid industrialization and its consequences: urbanism, the activation of the masses, the demythologizing of ancient customs and beliefs, the creation of new cultural forms of expression for a mass audience, and so forth. Fritz Stern, in examining the intellectual precursors of the Nazi mentality, referred to this antimodernism as the “politics of cultural despair,” while Jeffrey Herf termed it as “reactionary modernism.”⁹ Still others, especially during the Weimar period, called it “Amerikanismus,” for it was in America that the “new” seemed to have an automatic claim to authenticity. National Socialism has been seen by some historians as a reactionary movement because it wanted to suspend the ideas of 1789, which were associated with the democratic revolution and the decadent values allegedly stemming from mass democracy: cheap popular culture, decadent lifestyles, fast food, mass media sensationalism, and so forth. This is the sort of American cultural imperialism that was so roundly condemned by Adolf Halfeld in his influential book Amerika und der Amerikanismus (1928).¹⁰ Halfeld expressed a deep fear that Amerika would export its popular culture and sap the spiritual nature of the western world, leaving nothing in its wake except the promise of “eternal prosperity” and material comfort.¹¹

Hitler was not a reactionary antimodernist. He was a revolutionary modernist of quite a different kind who believed very strongly in “selective modernization” of the sort that called for rapid industrialization and the development of scientific know-how but without the resulting democratic vulgarization that Amerikanismus had allegedly unleashed on the Western world. Hitler’s vision of a new Europe involved a highly industrialized and Germanized continent run according to authoritarian and elitist notions. By contrast, America was depicted as an industrial, but not a political or cultural, example of how a real Volksgemeinschaft (community of the people) should function. Hitler saw Germany as providing a third way between the liberal-Western model of the Anglo-American world and the Communist Eastern model of the Soviet Union. In the halcyon days of the Nazi seizure of power, a variety of Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil) reactionaries undoubtedly tried to graft themselves onto the Nazi movement, but their actual influence remained insignificant. There was little that was genuinely reactionary about the Nazi movement. Rather, the opposite is the case: Nazism, not Communism, was the most dangerous and revolutionary movement of the twentieth century. Moreover, it was Hitler rather than Lenin or Stalin who was the greatest threat to the United States.

Hitler gave voice to a powerful political and social movement that challenged both Western democracy and Soviet-style Communism. It took the combined forces of Russia and the Western democracies—Britain and the United States, neither of which could have done it without the aid of the other—to defeat National Socialism. John Lukacs has pointed out that dismissing Hitler and National Socialism as aberrant elements neglects to explain the potent force that Nazism embodied—and not just for the Germans but for other nations in Europe as well.¹² In this connection, we should remember that in the 1930s Soviet-style Communism had few supporters outside the Soviet Union, and Western-style democracy was in retreat throughout Central Europe. Liberal parliamentary democracy was abandoned by the majority of the population in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Austria, Germany, Albania, Turkey, Poland, and the Baltic provinces. All of these countries, with minor exceptions, lacked a democratic tradition. This did not mean that they completely rejected democracy; what they rejected was Western parliamentary democracy. Modern populist nationalism, conversely, was regarded as a viable alternative. Hitler’s revolutionary significance was that he provided this “third way” by linking populist nationalism with a non-Marxist social welfare program that left most private property untouched. When asked whether he planned to nationalize industry he replied, “Why should I nationalize the industries? I will nationalize the people.” Hitler had no intention of socializing capital but intended to enlist it in creating a war industry that served the Nazi state.

So there have been multiple Americas, depending on the vision of the perceiver. This was especially true when that perceiver belonged to an intellectual class of critics who never set foot in America and confused the metaphorical symbol of “Amerika”—almost always negative—with the reality of life as experienced and written about by Americans themselves. A closer examination of the two split images of America—America-the-land-of-the-future and Amerika-the-nightmare-of-tomorrow—reveals that the first was embraced very strongly by ordinary working-class people in Europe, while the latter was persistently touted by Europe’s intellectual and political elites.

This point can be illustrated by numbers: Between 1820 and 1920, five and a half million Germans immigrated to the United States, and perhaps as many more would have emigrated if they had had the opportunity. Although a certain number (perhaps ranging between 2 percent and 10 percent) returned, the vast number remained and prospered in America.¹³ We can reasonably conclude from this pattern of mass exodus that those who left were disenchanted with their homeland and looked to America as the land of golden opportunity. This was also probably true of all other immigrants who came to America voluntarily. Moreover, there never was a period in American history when Americans left their country in massive numbers. There never was a period when a large number of Americans escaped from America to live, for example, in Communist countries such as the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, or Vietnam. When this author came to America in 1959, he was one of 260,686 new immigrants.¹⁴ While this new wave arrived in the United States, this author can think of only one well-known American who went the other way that year—to the Soviet Union, where he renounced his American citizenship and asked for political asylum. His name was Lee Harvey Oswald.

Why, if vast numbers of ordinary Europeans, Hispanics, and Asians, tried to come to America, did their intellectual elites back home strike increasingly hostile anti-American attitudes? One is tempted, in the first place, to attribute the differences between elite perceptions and those of the general public to economic or social conditions. The elites had a greater stake in society because they were invested in it, while the general population felt that they had nothing to lose by leaving. But in addition to this obvious socioeconomic explanation, public attitudes during the late nineteenth century were strongly shaped by a rising tide of nationalism throughout Europe. In Germany, heightened feelings of nationality led to German unification under Prussian rule; these feelings then served the imperial government as an integrative force by which domestic social tensions could be diffused and rechanneled into overseas aggression. The rise of xenophobic nationalism also brought with it increased anti-Americanism. The German imperial elites, and their mouthpieces in the press, big business, and education, saw themselves as conduits of a new German culture that they hoped to impose on Europe.

By 1900, Germany was not only a new economic colossus but also a cultural force to be reckoned with. Educated circles in Central and Eastern Europe assimilated distinctly German intellectual habits, ranging from philosophical idealism to neoromanticism to historicism. John Lukacs points out that the Germans had the potential to “rejuvenate old Europe, to extend the European age, and the primacy of Europe in the world for centuries to come,” but he added that they destroyed that prospect through their obsession with their own primacy in Europe.¹⁵ American students, intellectuals, businessmen, and politicians who traveled or studied in Germany before World War I all noticed this compulsive German sense of primacy and denounced it as one of the least desirable aspects of the German character. Both Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt commented on this overwrought or inflated German nationalism. Even before World War I, American elites’ opinion of Germany began to shift from favorable to highly negative. Many American critics believed that the Germans had abandoned social democracy for a Prussianized autocracy and militarism. World War I strengthened the image, and the rise of Nazism confirmed it.

German propaganda during World War I greatly embellished the stereotype of “degenerate Amerika.” The imperial government sponsored and encouraged elite opinion makers on all sides of the political spectrum to condemn Anglo-American civilization, as Werner Sombart put it in his wartime book Händler gegen Helden (Merchants against Heroes), as crassly materialistic, rationalistic, and spiritually empty. By contrast, German civilization was supposedly martial, romantic, idealistic, and heroic. A large number of German intellectuals, including Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, Thomas Mann, Friedrich Meinecke, Max Scheler, Friedrich Naumann, Walther Rathenau, and Adolf von Harnack, to name just a few, subscribed to what was called by Johann Plenge, a professor of sociology at the University of Münster, the “Ideas of 1914,” a fabric of theories that contrasted two visions of civilization—the Germanic and the Anglo-American. The men of 1914 claimed to speak for a more cultivated, disciplined, and heroic way of life than was to be found in the purely consumer culture of the Anglo-Americans. In opposition to the rootless philosophy of laissez-faire individualism, they proposed a Volksgemeinschaft, an organically rooted community of the people without class divisions, a society in which individuals performed their duties for the good of the whole. Their anti-American views would constitute the essential point of departure for right-wing as well as left-wing critiques of America in the interwar period.

The strands of anti-Americanism are complex and varied, some based on cultural nationalism, antimodernism, anti-Semitism, and antidemocracy. In Germany all of them converged in the Nazi period. As the world’s major engine of modernization, America caused cultural degeneration wherever its influence made itself felt. Behind the drive toward modernization were its chief agents—the Jews. This is why anti-Americanism usually involves anti-Semitism. The Jews who had taken up residence in the metropolis of Amerika were seen as the real embodiment of the capitalistic Moloch.¹⁶

The very name of America in such circles suggests everything that is “grotesque, obscene, monstrous, stultifying, stunted, leveling, deadening, deracinating, deforming, rootless, uncultured, and—always in quotation marks—“free.” As previously shown, this “metaphysical” America existed almost from the beginning of the nation, and it became entwined with an equally metaphysical opposite: America, the land of freedom and of the future. These opposite images created ambiguous perceptions of America, and those who saw the New World from afar did so with ambivalence. Adolf Hitler, like so many Germans, absorbed both images of America and never resolved them in his own mind. America, the progressive, technological society, coexisted in his mind with Amerika, the land of degeneration.

Hitler’s Knowledge of America

The consensus concerning Hitler’s image of America still holds that he was abysmally ignorant and badly informed about conditions in America.¹⁷ There is little truth in this judgment. Hitler’s view of America was not as uninformed as many of his biographers and historians have written. He read widely, if often indiscriminately. His basic intelligence was definitely above average. He was an autodidact who had immersed himself in a wide variety of geopolitical, military, artistic, and technological sources. His knowledge of geography was excellent and he impressed Arnold Toynbee with his mastery of history. Hitler left school at sixteen and never made it beyond the fourth form of secondary school (Realschule). By contrast, Roosevelt received a degree from Harvard, attended Columbia University law school, and passed the New York bar examination. Hitler had to repeat the first grade of Realschule in Linz and was dismissed from school for repeated poor performance. He then attended one more year of Realschule in Steyr, where he failed several subjects and was only promoted after he retook the examination. Hitler also twice failed his entrance examination to the Academy of Arts in Vienna. Yet Hitler’s failures should not blind us to his quick intelligence, stupendous memory, and other abilities. He was, as one of his teachers, Dr. Eduard Hümer, testified at his trial in 1923, definitely talented but lacking in discipline and was “notoriously cantankerous, willful, arrogant, and irascible.”¹⁸

Hitler’s reading habits were haphazard. He took from books mostly those elements that could be made to fit his convictions. He was not unwilling to learn new things, but he took shortcuts to knowledge by reading biased pamphlets and newspapers or by listening to eccentric “experts.” Hitler did not like bureaucrats, especially those who ran the German Foreign Office. He did not trust them, and he did not read their reports. As he put it, in one of his typical outbursts against diplomats, “What did our diplomats report before the Great War? Nothing! And during the War? Nothing! It’s the same with others [bureaucrats]. Public offices must be reformed from the ground up. I received better insights from people like Colin Ross and others who have traveled around.”¹⁹ His reference to Colin Ross, the popular German globetrotter and travel guide, is important because it was to people like him rather than government experts that he lent an ear. Apart from inherited stereotypes shared by many Germans, Hitler’s information about America was gained from conversations he had with Germans who had traveled to the United States or lived there for an extended period of time. Of Hitler’s sources of information about the United States there are at least six that can be documented with some degree of accuracy. The first, which can be traced back to Hitler’s childhood, were the western novels written by Karl May (1842–1912). Other information about America came from Ernst (“Putzi”) Hanfstaengl, Kurt Lüdecke, Colin Ross, Friedrich Bötticher, and Fritz Wiedemann. The novelist Karl May did not set foot in the New World until he had already written his western stories and enjoyed wide popular acclaim as an “expert” on world affairs. Hanfstaengl was a scion of a well-known Munich family, a Harvard graduate, and an early Hitler follower. Lüdecke, a shadowy “businessman,” paid several extended visits to America and hoped to educate the führer on conditions there. Ross was a best-selling journalist who wrote travel books on America, the Western Hemisphere, and the Far East. Bötticher was Hitler’s only military attaché who reported from the German embassy in Washington, D.C. Finally, Fritz Wiedemann was Hitler’s superior in World War I, his personal adjutant, and later German consul to San Francisco. To what extent was Hitler influenced by their judgment of the United States?

In the spring of 1912, an eccentric young wastrel, down on his luck and living in a Home for the Homeless in Vienna, borrowed a good pair of shoes from an acquaintance in order to attend a much-advertised lecture by Karl May, titled “Upward into the Empire of Noble Humanity—Empor ins Reich der Edelmenschen.”²⁰ When the young man, Adolf Hitler, arrived at the packed auditorium, holding close to three thousand spectators, he was thrilled to see his favorite childhood author, a man who had only recently caused considerable scandal when it was discovered that he had spent jail time for theft and fraud as a young man and, even more scandalous, had never visited any of the countries he described in such detail in his novels and travel accounts. All of this made no difference to young Hitler, who vehemently defended Karl May against charges by his compatriots at the Home for the Homeless that his idol was a fraud. Those who were making such accusations, Hitler said, forgot that May was a great writer. As far as he was concerned, May’s accusers were nothing but “hyenas and goons.”

Interestingly enough, May’s lecture was dedicated to the peace movement associated with the pacifist Bertha von Suttner, to whom he had dedicated his recent book Peace on Earth, and who sat in the first row of the Sofiensaal on that evening of March 22, 1912. May was really a utopian progressive who dreamt of an empire of peace and justice that would nourish a higher and nobler type of human being, an Edelmensch who would redeem the human race from its bondage to violence, greed, and oppression. He even referred to himself as a spiritual aviator soaring higher and higher into the Promised Land.²¹ Those who attended that night thought they would be treated to recitations of May’s adventure stories or a travelogue taking them to faraway lands; instead, the famous writer waxed philosophical about noble humans. In the end, it made little difference. May received an enthusiastic reaction from the audience that included Hitler.

The fact is that May, who died just two weeks after this lecture, was already a national, even European, icon, and people saw in his works whatever they wanted to see in them. This explains the remarkable reaction to May’s stories by so many well-known people of very different backgrounds and beliefs—Albert Einstein, Albert Schweitzer, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, and many others. As to his effect on perceptions of America, Karl May merely reinforced previously existing images and stereotypes, formed by white Europeans who would have agreed with Theodore Roosevelt’s triumphalist account of civilized whites settling the American West and conquering the Indians. If one wanted to make a fine western omelet, a few eggs necessarily had to be broken. The red Indian, in the eyes of many whites, was not a man but an animal, and therefore expendable. To others, he was human and therefore worthy of being converted to Christianity and civilized. To still others, he was a noble savage, to be left alone and displayed like a museum piece behind the glass of the reservation or ghetto display case. All these strands contributed to the stereotypes Europeans held regarding America. Karl May was no exception, nor was one of his greatest admirers, Adolf Hitler.

Adolf Hitler was even more caught up in the “May cult” than most young Germans of his time. In 1942 he recalled that as a young boy he had read Karl May with a flashlight under his blanket at night or in the moonlight with a large magnifying glass. A friend of his, Fritz Seidl, allegedly told him that the Last of the Mohicans and other Leatherstocking novels were nothing compared to the Karl May stories. So Hitler began to read May, first The Ride through the Desert and then Winnetou and other American westerns.²² Hitler claimed that May stimulated his interest in geography and history. In the figure of the Apache chief Winnetou, whom he commended to German soldiers as a role model, he found an early example of heroic leadership. As chancellor Hitler had a special place reserved in his library for the vellum-bound books of Karl May. He even found enough time to reread May, some seventy volumes in all. In 1944, despite the shortage of paper, he ordered 300,000 copies of May’s books to be printed and distributed among the troops as exemplary military field literature. The Russians, he told his entourage at führer headquarters, fight like Indians, hiding behind trees and bridges and then jumping out for the kill. Presumably, Old Shatterhand, the hero of May’s western novels, the man who could hit a target at 1,500 feet and kill a grizzly bear with his fist, would lead his fellow cowboys against the Russian savages and kill them. What Hitler took away from May was decidedly different from what Schweitzer and Einstein saw in these popular stories. While Einstein and Schweitzer loved the adventure stories and May’s emphasis on Christian values, especially peace and goodwill, Hitler embraced the less savory aspects of these stories.

In this respect, it is useful to read May through Hitler’s eyes, especially the Winnetou and Shatterhand stories. As previously mentioned, Old Shatterhand is the heroic protagonist in these western novels. He is really a German American named Karl who joins a team hired by the railroads to survey the Arizona territory. The railroad bosses, who are described as greedy and conniving men, willfully violate the rights of the Indians. Led by their chief Winnetou, the Indians captured Karl’s surveying team, forcing Karl, or Shatterhand, to prove himself in mortal combat with Winnetou’s father. Shatterhand defeats old Winnetou but spares his life. This act of Christian mercy impresses young Winnetou, who suggests to Karl that they become blood brothers. They actually become more than blood brothers; they become self-appointed justices of the peace, meting out punishment to outlaws and shady businessmen who steal land from the Indians. Winnetou is eventually murdered by greedy Yankees searching for buried Indian treasure.

Karl May saw Winnetou as a noble savage, the neoromantic prototype who, though acting on raw instinct, also possesses a pure heart as yet unspoiled by greedy “civilized” motives. Hitler’s perception of May’s stories was quite different. He had little use for May’s moral message about the brotherhood of man or according intrinsic respect to Indian customs, language, or artifacts. His conception of the Edelmensch (noble man) was the vulgarized Nietzschean notion of the blond beast of prey that conquers vast spaces and subjugates or even exterminates inferior races. Hitler conceived of Shatterhand and his white trappers as Germanic Siegfrieds in cowboy hats and boots set against the landscape of the western frontier. As Hitler’s concepts of race and space developed after World War I, May’s frontier image shifted in Hitler’s mind from America to the even vaster space of Russia, where Germany’s wild frontier beckoned. The savage Indian now becomes the subhuman Slav, the American frontier the Eurasian land mass extending to the Urals and beyond. Karl May was, despite some of his harsh critics such as Klaus Mann, a gentle mythmaker; Hitler was a brutal mythmaker without a moral conscience.

Specifically, what did Hitler think he could learn from Karl May’s cowboys and Indians? In his table talks he insisted that every German officer should carry May’s Indian books (Indianerbücher) with him because this was how they would learn to attack the Russians, who fight just like Indians. Officers, he insisted, could learn something about strategic thinking from Karl May; if they did, they would behave more heroically and less cautiously than they did at the present time. Hitler believed that May’s heroes were endowed with “muscles of iron and sinews of steel.”²³ These heroes, of course, are white Germans, noble and warlike, and their leader Old Shatterhand possesses the kind of qualities a future heroic German leader (führer) ought to have. He should be hard (hart) but God-fearing, versatile and creative, and strictly puritanical in his habits. Old Shatterhand does not drink or gamble. In whatever he does he is better than anyone else. His friends as well as his adversaries are constantly amazed by his vast knowledge, which he uses to shame the experts. Moreover, Shatterhand possesses supernatural, paranormal qualities that enable him to foresee future occurrences. He is surrounded by some supernatural aura. His followers know it too, for they obey him instinctively and offer him their lives, and he in return is willing to sacrifice for them. It is important to point out that Karl May’s Wild West heroes are of Germanic origin, another reason why Hitler was drawn to these stories.

If Karl May influenced Hitler’s image of America, Wilhelm Emil Eber, commonly called “Elk” Eber, probably helped shape his visual image of the American West. Eber was a German painter who had spent some time in the United States, where he became a passionate admirer of Indian culture. In 1929 Eber was initiated into the Sioux tribe, adopting the name of Hehaka Ska, the Lakota name for elk. Like Hitler, Eber was a Karl May enthusiast, and he admired the bravery of American Indians. Hitler was impressed by Eber for several reasons. Eber had been an early follower of the Nazi movement, participating in the 1923 coup against the Bavarian government. Hitler prized Eber’s artistic talents and the subject matter of his paintings and drawings. Most of Eber’s works deal with either Indian or war-related subjects. During World War I, Eber had been a war propagandist (Kriegsmaler) who depicted the heroic deeds of German soldiers. Hitler acquired several of these war portraits, one of them called the Last Hand Grenade, which depicted a fatigued but determined German soldier who is about to toss his last grenade at the enemy. But Hitler also liked Eber’s Indian paintings, especially the most famous of them, called Custer’s Last Battle, which can now be found in the Karl May museum in Radebeul near Dresden. Eber may have slightly romanticized the Indians, but his technical depiction of them was true to life, as his knowledge of Indian mores and artifacts was extensive. Hitler did not like the Indians as much as Eber did; he thought they were racially inferior to the Germans. What he did like about them was their tribal solidarity, warlike nature, and bravery in battle. In this sense, Eber visually reinforced Hitler’s image of the American frontier that he had derived from Karl May.

It was not only Karl May’s stories and Eber’s paintings that drew Hitler to America. He was also impressed by the industrial capacity of the United States, and on several occasions he even held up American industry as the model Germany should emulate. He attributed America’s industrial superiority to the availability of more abundant resources and its modern plant equipment, which allowed U.S. manufacturers to outproduce and undercut European competitors, higher U.S. wages notwithstanding. It would be years, he thought, before Europeans could compete with America. As an example of advanced industrial manufacture, Hitler always mentioned the competitive edge of the American automobile industry. Hitler loved automobiles and enjoyed being driven all over Germany. Henry Ford was one of his great heroes, especially after he learned that the American car tycoon was also anti-Semitic. In 1923 and 1924, Hitler dispatched one of his financial supporters, Kurt Lüdecke, to Italy and the United States in an effort to persuade Mussolini and Henry Ford to provide funds for the struggling Nazi Party. In both cases Lüdecke failed, but Hitler continued to rely on the footloose young businessman for advice on foreign countries, especially the United States. Once, on a long drive from Munich to Berlin in 1932, Hitler asked Lüdecke to talk to him about America. He was delighted to hear that as a boy Lüdecke had also devoured Karl May stories. Hitler asked Lüdecke about Roosevelt, the American financial crisis, the probability of radical change in America, and Prohibition.²⁴ Lecturing Hitler about the United States from the back seat of his car may not have been very productive, but Hitler allegedly listened very carefully, as he always did when the topic of the United States came up. During this particular trip, Hitler and Lüdecke made several disparaging comments about another of Hitler’s corps of America experts, Ernst (Putzi) Hanfstaengl, who, like Lüdecke, had given crucial financial support to the fledgling Nazi Party. Hanfstaengl was a burly giant of a man who had a fondness for good food and music, and a wide circle of friends. His mother came from a well-known New England family, the Sedgwicks. His grandfather had established a flourishing art and photography business in Munich, and his father had set up a branch of the family business on Fifth Avenue in New York. In order to learn the business and eventually take over the American branch, Hanfstaengl was sent to Harvard University, where he made a number of friends, including T. S. Eliot, Walter Lippman, Hendrick von Loon, Hans von Kaltenborn, Robert Benchley, and John Reed. Hanfstaengl also became a close friend of Franklin Roosevelt, then a rising senator from New York. Through Theodore Roosevelt’s eldest son, Hanfstaengl received an invitation to the White House in 1908, where he displayed his prowess on the piano. His piano playing actually endeared him to the Harvard football team—he played for them to pep them up before their games. Later, after joining Hitler’s entourage, he convinced the führer to apply American entertainment and advertising techniques to politics, especially the practice of using cheerleaders to whip up the enthusiasm of crowds, though in Germany the cheerleaders were not pretty girls in short skirts but handsome young men bellowing through bullhorns.

Hanfstaengl was marooned in America during World War I and did not return to his humiliated and defeated country until 1921, entering the University of Munich to work on his Ph.D. in history. In 1922 he heard Hitler speak and, like Lüdecke, became a dedicated follower. Again like Lüdecke, he gave freely to the party and used his social connections to give Hitler an entrée into business and society circles. Hitler was a frequent guest at the Hanfstaengls, showing particular fondness for Putzi’s American wife, Helene. In moments of stress for the führer, Hanfstaengl was at Hitler’s beck and call, playing the piano and entertaining him with funny anecdotes. Hanfstaengl knew a great deal about Hitler’s private life, including his chief’s disturbing personality traits and obsessions. Later he told American intelligence all he knew about Hitler and his inner circle for, like Lüdecke, he would become persona non grata to Hitler and his top henchmen. Hanfstaengl was given to indiscretions; he did not like the direction the movement was taking in the mid-1930s, and he denounced the creeping police terror and the insidious militarism of the regime. Although he served briefly in Hitler’s government after the seizure of power in 1933, Hanfstaengl became increasingly disenchanted with the Nazi regime and fled for his life after the Nazis played a cruel hoax on him by telling him that he had been singled out for a secret mission to Spain in which he would be flown to Salamanca to make contact with Franco’s forces and help the local German agents establish better relations with the Spanish Fascists. It was a cruel joke, for Goering, who devised the scheme, planned to dump Hanfstaengl by parachute over hostile Communist territory between Madrid and Barcelona. If the prank had succeeded, he would probably have been shot as a spy. The pilot who had been assigned to take Hanfstaengl to Spain revealed the plot to him, and Hanfstaengl managed to persuade the pilot to land the plane on the pretext of engine problems, a ruse that enabled Hanfstaengl to slip away.²⁵ Putzi fled the country with his son, Egon (he had recently divorced his wife, Helene), not to return until after the defeat of the Nazis.

But the story does not end here. In the papers of Franklin Roosevelt at Hyde Park there are more than four hundred pages of material relating to Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl. This extensive file dates from the summer of 1942 through early 1945; it includes reports that Hanfstaengl sent to President Roosevelt about a variety of subjects pertaining to the Nazi regime. It turns out that after Hanfstaengl’s escape, first to Switzerland and then to France and England, Hanfstaengl was interned by the British after the war began. In 1942, however, Franklin Roosevelt interceded with the British and had Hanfstaengl brought to the United States, setting him up in an old-fashioned villa at Bush Hill in Virginia. It was here, under close government surveillance that Hanfstaengl churned out a series of reports under the code name “S-Project,” the “S” standing for “Sedgwick,” the maiden name of Hanfstaengl’s American-born mother.²⁶

As for Lüdecke, he too fell out with the Nazis. Having left Germany after Hitler’s failed Putsch, he spent some eleven years in the United States pursuing various dubious business ventures and promoting Germany’s brand of National Socialism, mostly among German Americans. This proved to be a signal failure, as Lüdecke himself admitted that Americans were not ready to accept a völkisch movement along German lines because America was an immigration society whose German element was steadily being assimilated.²⁷ He also blamed the Jews for exercising inordinate power in America and for imposing their materialistic stamp on American thinking, citing with approval Werner Sombart’s infamous anti-Semitic statement that “Americanism is nothing less … than the Jewish spirit distilled.”²⁸ Lüdecke married an American librarian, Mildred Coulter, who was working for the Detroit News. Hitler’s accession to power brought him back to Germany and, he hoped, a place in the rising party, but being by nature an intriguer, he chose the wrong party leaders to intrigue with: Alfred Rosenberg, Ernst Röhm, and Gregor Strasser. He also resumed his infighting with Hanfstaengl, who had accused him of blackmail and extortion. After the Nazi takeover, Lüdecke committed several serious political blunders and was placed in “protective custody,” spent time in several concentration camps, and, with Röhm’s help, made a sensational getaway that ultimately led him back to the United States. After arriving in New York, he heard news of the murder of Röhm and Gregor Strasser. Four years later, he published his colorful account of his years in the Nazi movement under the title I Knew Hitler, dedicating the book to Röhm, Strasser, and many other Nazis who were “betrayed, murdered, and traduced in their graves.”

On several occasions Hitler invited the globe-trotting popular author Colin Ross (1885–1945) for lunch to pick his brain about the United States. We have documentary evidence, gleaned from the notes taken by Walther Hewel of the Foreign Office, that Hitler was very impressed by Ross’s views of America. Ross told the führer that he was working on several plans that could bring about better relations with the United States. This was at the time of the “phony war” (March 1940) when Hitler was still receptive to proposals about how the United States could be kept out of the war and how he could counteract British propaganda in America. Hitler was galvanized by what he heard and ordered the Foreign Office to give Ross any assistance he required in his important work. He remarked to Hewel that “Colin Ross is a very clever man, who certainly has many right ideas.”²⁹

Who was Colin Ross? Educated, middle-class Germans in the interwar period turned to two world travelers: the pro-German Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, whose writings Hitler had carefully read, and the Austrian-German world traveler Colin Ross. The English name is misleading, for Ross’s first name was probably given to him by his parents because of a remote Scotsman in the family tree. Ross was by training an engineer, but he dabbled in many fields, including history, geography, economics, and philosophy. He received his training from the Technical University of Berlin and Munich and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Heidelberg. In 1902 he paid his first visit to the United States as a member of a scientific team representing the German Museum of Natural Science. During this visit he developed a fascination with Chicago, calling it “the wildest and most wicked city in the world—die tollste und übelste Stadt in der Welt.” He later took his family to the city of Al Capone and penned some telling stories that captured the ambience of this gangster-ridden metropolis. That same year Ross went to the Balkans to report for the Münchener Illustrierte. In 1913 he went to Mexico to cover the civil war that radical Mexican factions were waging against each other, reporting to his German readers from Pancho Villa’s headquarters. During World War I, Ross served as a war correspondent, and after the German defeat he embarked on a series of globe-trotting trips that took him—to use the title of one of his books—From Chicago to Chang King.

His visits to America with his family—with kit and caboodle (mit Kind und Kegel), as he called it—stretched over several years and were recounted in his best-selling travel books, notably Amerikas Schicksalsstunde (1935), Die Westliche Hemisphäre (1942), and Unser Amerika (1942). In these “Amerika” books, Ross admitted to a love-hate affair with the United States—but more love than hate. “If I were not a German,” he confessed, “I would want to be an American.”³⁰ He saw in America a dynamic Western idea, a striving toward humanism, freedom, and progress. The pall of depression that hung over America in the 1930s convinced Ross that America’s dynamism had been arrested by two factors: the selfish interest of a small, moneyed elite, and the decline of the Anglo-Saxon ruling class. In his book Unser Amerika (Our America), Ross propounded the popular right-wing view of German nationalists that the strength of America depended on the creativity of the original Anglo-Saxon, Germanic element in America, and that unchecked immigration had “diluted” the better part of the American people. Such views were not original. In 1916 the respected natural scientist Madison Grant had voiced this fear in a book called The Passing of the Great Race, in which he bemoaned the weakening of the genetic pool through intermarriages between the old colonial stock and new immigrants with non-Anglo-Saxon genes. This prejudice was also shared by Hitler, who attributed the entrepreneurial strength of America to the Nordic race and the sound immigration laws the United States had put in place to exclude non-Nordic people. As long as America remained an Anglo-Saxon–Teutonic state, it would continue to be a leader in the Western Hemisphere; but if it pursued multiethnic and multicultural policies, it would disintegrate into a tangle of unassimilated nationalities.

Ross was not a racist or an anti-Semite, though his many remarks about the power and influence of Jews in America led Hitler to believe that he was. Ross’s critique of the continuing effects of slavery and the mistreatment of black people was often incisive and unvarnished, as were his colorful descriptions of the excesses of popular culture in America. In his Schicksalsstunde there is a prescient chapter called “God or the Devil’s Country,” in which Ross sketches out the extremes in American culture. In a chapter titled “The Phenomenon Ballyhoo,” Ross captures the extremes of the Roaring Twenties—ranging from riotous living and gangsterism to the wonderful generosity and helpfulness (Hilfsbereitschaft) of its people.³¹ Crass contrasts, he noted, were part of America: for example, Al Capone and Mae West next to Charles Lindbergh and Franklin Roosevelt. One of the keys to the American extremes, according to Ross, was “the phenomenon of the ballyhoo,” which manifested itself in mass media sensationalism, which, in turn, stemmed from a fondness for turning what is normal or important into something abnormal or trivial. Americans, he held, were easily swayed by mass media advertising and were prone to believe the unbelievable. No people in the world were so obsessed with mouthwashes, deodorants, facial creams, or patent medicines than Americans. In his judgment, the phenomenon had reached epidemic proportions. The same was true of the endless preoccupation with violence and crime and a disturbing tendency to cheer for outlaws and gangsters. The country, he said, was ricocheting from one public scandal to another. Today it is the Lindbergh kidnapping, tomorrow a demented actor, a deadly boxer, a Florida real estate shyster, or even a New Deal chiseler.

All this, of course, was said just as well, and more humorously, by H. L. Mencken. Ross’s picture of popular culture in America was superficially true, but what it lacked was cultural perspective. If Americans were gullible consumers of prepackaged news, so were the Germans, even more so under state-controlled Nazi news agencies. That Americans lacked civil courage (Zivilcourage) is debatable; that Germans lacked it is indisputable.

In 1935 Ross visited Washington and took a tour of the White House, accompanied by his well-known American guide. Suddenly, he tells us, he found himself, along with a throng of journalists, in the Oval Office, standing right in front of the president’s massive desk.³² A press conference was underway. Ross was astonished at how friendly and informal it was. The president treated the occasion like a brotherly meeting between friendly advisers, joking and fielding questions. As the president answered all sorts of questions, Ross considered this remarkable and smiling man—the fact, for example, that he was a cripple but that no one paid any attention to that fact. The famous smile, Ross seemed to think, had something inscrutable about it, a bit like a Confucian sage. It was more of a mask, concealing a painful awareness that there is much suffering in the world and that the best way of addressing this fact of life was to soldier on and keep on smiling. Ross thought that FDR was a pragmatist, whose New Deal was not a revolution but a series of emergency measures that did not undermine capitalism but propped it up for the foreseeable future. As to Roosevelt’s foreign policy, Ross became convinced that in the name of freedom and American national self-interest, America would eventually intervene in Europe and discard its neutrality. He noticed an increasingly hostile anti-German mood, which he attributed to the reaction of the Jewish-controlled press to events in Germany.

Hitler was surely impressed when Ross confirmed his own prejudices about Jewish money controlling American public opinion. Writing in 1942, Ross toed the party line when he condemned the uninhibited anti-German hysteria in America as the machination of a few Jewish plutocrats.³³ Roosevelt now became a danger to world peace, a schemer who would, under the cover of protecting the Western Hemisphere, extend American power and influence around the world. The Hyde Park tribune of the people had turned into the “Sun King,” an accusation, of course, that many anti-Roosevelt Republicans had been making for years.³⁴

Ross warned that the United States would enter the war in order to protect and continue dominating the Western Hemisphere, while at the same time reserving the right to be the world’s moral referee. He claimed that another reason Roosevelt would plunge into war was to solve the economic depression that his New Deal policies had failed to address successfully. By the time Ross’s last book, The Western Hemisphere, appeared in print, Germany was at war with America.

As previously mentioned, Hitler did not like diplomats. Most of them lived well and rarely got out to talk to ordinary people. They moved in closed circles, and the less they knew, the more they talked or wrote stupid reports. Hitler made a few exceptions to his rule that diplomats were of little use. One was his own military attaché in Washington, Lieutenant General Friedrich von Bötticher.³⁵ He believed that Bötticher was giving him accurate information on what Washington was planning; he also felt that his attaché really understood the American mentality, so he read his reports with great interest. Bötticher was able to look behind the scenes and provide sound judgments about Americans and their views.³⁶

Between 1933 and 1941, Bötticher was Germany’s only military attaché in the United States.³⁷ A military attaché was a quaint custom of a bygone age, when diplomatic embassies housed military officers who had specific orders from their governments to “observe, judge, and report on foreign military events and economy, organizations, developments, personalities, material, perhaps even military thought as well.”³⁸ The attaché was to be the soul of discretion and maintain a strictly objective attitude. He was expected to establish close contact with military personnel in the host country and to abstain from any espionage activity. The ideal was to promote peaceful relations with the host country. This was the instruction Bötticher received from his commander in chief, President Paul von Hindenburg, when he left Germany for the United States in March 1933. Although a general in the German army, Bötticher reported to the German ambassador to Washington, Hans Luther, and to his senior political advisor, Dr. Hans Heinrich Dieckhoff, and his later replacement, Hans Thomsen. All of these America experts were competent men who spoke English fluently and had a good understanding of U.S. history. Bötticher was an expert on the American Civil War; he had also written books on Frederick the Great and Alfred von Schlieffen.

Bötticher approached his position in Washington with the utmost seriousness because he knew that the United States had been the single most important factor in the defeat of Germany in 1918. Much nonsense has been written about Bötticher by historians who have mentioned him as a tunnel-visioned Prussian staff officer who got just about everything wrong on the United States. David Brinkley, in his book Washington Goes to War (1988), depicted Bötticher as a short, heavy, and bullnecked Prussian officer who appeared in public bedecked in ribbons and medals, wearing, of course, a monocle. This stereotype of the arrogant Prussian officer astride the world in his polished jackboots still seems compelling to those weaned on Hollywood war movies. In Bötticher’s case, the reality was otherwise. He was not a Prussian but a descendent of a cosmopolitan family of Baltic and English lineage. His mother came from the English Yorkshire seaport of Hull, while his father hailed from the Kurland (now Latvia). On both sides of the family, his ancestors came from solid commercial backgrounds. In the 1850s his mother, who was then married to a man called Hermann Anton Wippermann, immigrated to Davenport, Iowa, but she returned to Germany after a few years of disappointment and disillusion with the United States. After her first husband died, she married Walter Bötticher, a Dresden physician who had a patent of nobility, hence the aristocratic “von” in the family name. Friedrich Bötticher was born in 1881, grew up in a loving and cosmopolitan home, and learned to speak English at his mother’s knee. He received an excellent classical education and superb military training, serving with distinction on the Great General Staff during World War I. While in later years he put on some weight, he was never bullnecked, nor did he ever wear a monocle.

Upon his arrival in Washington, Bötticher tried hard to get along with the German diplomatic staff, for technically speaking he was subordinate to the ambassador and his senior staff (Dieckhoff and Thomsen). He adjusted well to the Washington social scene, and his wife and three children also adapted quickly to American life. While in Washington he became a regular fixture among high-ranking American military men in the War Department, with whom he exchanged ideas and information and made close contacts. In his efforts to gain insight into American military preparedness, Bötticher was assisted by a first-rate technical advisor, Peter Riedel, a daredevil glider pilot who held several world records. The Bötticher-Riedel partnership yielded some very fruitful insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the American military establishment. By invitation of the War Department, they inspected all sorts of plants scattered across the country and pored over U.S. government statistics and reports. Bötticher had daily contact with the highest-ranking officers of the War College and the War Department. He found the company of U.S. officers quite congenial; his U.S. counterparts were openly anti-Semitic, favored restrictive immigration laws, and supported better U.S.-German relations. General Douglas MacArthur was on friendly terms with Bötticher and allegedly told him in 1933 that he agreed with Hitler’s policy of seeking military parity with France and Britain.³⁹

What Bötticher did not understand was that the relatively small circle of officers he met was not representative of the whole U.S. military establishment. The men he was particularly close to, notably Lieutenant Colonel Truman Smith, were anti-Roosevelt and anti-New Dealers. Some of them were also anglophobic. Bötticher thought he knew them better than he really did. All his U.S. military contacts were of no use when, after the outbreak of war, secret joint military staff meetings were held between British and American military officials to discuss methods of defeating Germany. Bötticher had no inkling that such plans were afoot. On the other hand, he never had any illusions about America’s military capacity, making it clear on numerous occasions, “I warn against overestimating the weaknesses and underestimating American efficiency and the American determination to perform.”⁴⁰

In February 1939, Bötticher returned to Germany to attend the annual attaché conference, during which he was invited, along with others, for lunch with the führer. As he sat to the right of Hitler, the dictator turned to ask him about President Roosevelt’s alleged Jewishness, claiming that he had reliable evidence that the American president was indeed Jewish. He told Bötticher that he might reveal this little tidbit to the rest of the world. Bötticher responded by telling Hitler that such evidence was patently false and that revealing it was politically very unwise. Hitler then abruptly turned away from him and spoke not another word to him during the luncheon.⁴¹ What Hitler really wanted from Bötticher was neither confirmation of Roosevelt’s Jewishness nor his attaché’s knowledge of American life and culture. What he wanted to know was America’s military capacity. This is why Bötticher was so important. What could Bötticher tell Hitler about the time the United States would need to mobilize its forces and gear up its industrial system so that it could seriously challenge the Reich? If war broke out in Europe, when—not how or on what side—would the United States intervene? It was all about timing. Hitler needed to keep the United States out of the war that he knew would happen because he wanted it to happen. In the initial stages of the war, he wanted to keep the United States at arm’s length. This could be done through a variety of tactics: scrupulously avoiding hostile encounters with the United States; encouraging American isolationism; diverting America’s attention elsewhere, such as the Pacific; discouraging the United States through alliances with other Fascist powers (Italy and Japan); and so forth. In this sense, Bötticher’s thinking ran parallel to Hitler’s, for both wanted to keep America out of a potential conflict with Germany. The difference between them was that Bötticher did not want war with America at all, whereas Hitler had no qualms about engaging the United States eventually. Hitler fully expected the United States to enter the war against Germany in the long run, but it was the short run that he was concerned about. How long could he keep the United States at bay? If he could keep America out of the European war until Germany had conquered the continent, the United States could no longer defeat Germany. Bötticher’s critics may have been right in saying that he sent flawed reports that misjudged the political situation in America. All Hitler wanted from Bötticher were accurate military projections. Bötticher obliged and did so accurately, telling his führer that America could not seriously challenge the Reich for at least two years after the commencement of hostilities in Europe, if then.⁴² Bötticher had the figures in black and white. In 1939 American troop strength was less than 200,000, and the country had mobilized less than 10 percent of its industrial capacity. At the time of Pearl Harbor the picture was not much better.

Besides Karl May, Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, Kurt Lüdecke, Colin Ross, and Friedrich von Bötticher, Hitler also picked up scraps of information about America from party members who had visited the United States and who usually told him what he wanted to hear, namely that the country was decadent, mired in depression, and militarily unprepared. This negative image was the party line, but Hitler was too shrewd to swallow his own propaganda. He was willing to learn from the people he trusted. The problem was that he relied too heavily on unorthodox “experts” of the sort just mentioned, bypassing the professionals, especially those in the Foreign Office, whom he did not trust. His former superior and adjutant of the List regiment in World War I, Fritz Wiedemann, visited the United States in 1937 and returned from his tour with a healthy respect for the United States. In his Memoirs he pointed out that, among party members, knowledge of America was abysmal. Hitler shared many misconceptions about America with his party cronies and encouraged the dissemination of negative reports about the United States. When a well-known woman journalist embarked on her visit to America, according to Wiedemann, she remembered her chief editor sending her off by saying, “Don’t forget to send us only negative reports.” “But suppose the weather is beautiful? Am I not allowed to report this?” “No,” said the editor, “even the weather has to be bad.”⁴³ Wiedemann pointed out, however, that the Americans often contributed to the negative stereotype of their country by exporting countless gangster films that gave a wholly misleading impression of the United States. Hitler watched many American gangster films, but he also amused himself with big musical productions from Hollywood. At times Hitler seemed to believe that the majority of Americans lived more like the Okies depicted in Grapes of Wrath, a movie he saw on several occasions. King Kong, we are told, was his favorite movie. Wiedemann probably had little success in correcting Hitler’s misconceptions. When he came back from his visit, whose purpose was not entirely clear, he tried to set Hitler straight on America, just as Lüdecke, Hanfstaengl, and Ross claimed to have done.⁴⁴ Knowing that Hitler liked art and architecture, Wiedemann gave him thirty illustrated books about American buildings and bridges of all sorts. Hitler purportedly was very happy to receive them; he perused the books and then remarked that Germany would build even more monumental marvels. After looking at the Golden Gate Bridge, Hitler promised to build an even more colossal one over the Elbe River in Hamburg—a bridge perhaps not as long; the width of the Elbe did not permit it—but much wider so that it could accommodate more traffic running in both directions. He told Wiedemann that he would build huge skyscrapers in Hamburg.

One day, between Christmas and New Year’s Day 1938, the führer took Wiedemann aside: “Well, tell me some more about your impressions of America.”⁴⁵ Wiedemann proceeded to take Hitler on an imaginary tour of the Empire State Building, all the way to the top, describing the panoramic view of New York and its incredible forest of skyscrapers at dusk. After recounting the gradually setting sun and how the surrounding buildings disappeared in the gray haze of twilight, he invited the führer to descend to street level in the elevator and then, amid the traffic noise of the city, experience the magic of witnessing the largest skyscraper in the world light up, from the bottom to the top, like a draping pearl necklace. What had previously appeared as a dark and powerful mountain dissolved into a shimmering filigree of light. Wiedemann told his boss that he hoped he would someday have the opportunity of showing him in person the setting sun from the Empire State Building.⁴⁶

Wiedemann wanted to use Hitler’s receptive attitude about America to convince him that Germany should participate in the 1939 World’s Exhibition in New York. Hitler declared himself in agreement with the plan as long as the cost was right. Walter Funk, the Reich economic minister, who happened to be staying down the mountain at Berchtesgaden at the time, eagerly supported the project. Coincidentally, Hitler was hosting the actor Emil Jannings, who had starred along with Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel. The actor and his wife joined Hitler, Wiedemann, and Funk in an informal conversation in which each person told something about America. The drift of the conversation, as Wiedemann remembered it, was positively American friendly (amerikafreundlich). The harmony did not last; before long, Hitler was upset that the view of the German pavilion was partially blocked by another building. “It is an outrage (Unveschämtheit) to offer us such a spot.” Funk’s interjection that the contract had already been negotiated left the führer cold: “I don’t care, gentlemen,” he said, “see to it that you get out of this business.”⁴⁷ He then stormed out and left his guests sitting there.

What, if anything, should Hitler have learned from his America experts? What he actually learned from them is, of course, another question. Judging from his writings and speeches, Hitler was well aware of the potential threat of U.S. intervention in European affairs, and he said so in several passages in Mein Kampf. In his second (unpublished) book, discovered after World War II by the historian Gerhard Weinberg, Hitler referred to the “hegemonic position” of the United States, warning that the United States would shift its expansionist energy from the Western Hemisphere to the entire globe.

His experts all agreed that Germany should do everything possible to avoid a war with the United States. Hanfstaengl claimed that he warned Hitler repeatedly that Germany could not afford to antagonize the United States, and reminded him of what had happened in World War I. In the early 1920s he said to Hitler, “Well now, you have just fought in the war. We very nearly won in 1917 when Russia collapsed. Why, then, did we finally lose it?” “Because the Americans came in,” responded Hitler. “If you recognize that we are agreed and that is all you need to know.”⁴⁸ A decade later Lüdecke said that Hitler was very receptive to the idea of winning the goodwill of the American people. Even when he touched upon the anti-Nazi propaganda in the United States, which branded Hitler as a megalomaniac, Hitler waved him off: “Not credible.” “He already wanted to hear no more of that.”⁴⁹

The goodwill of the American people was of interest to Hitler because he knew that they were strongly isolationist in the postwar period. It was in Germany’s interest to encourage this isolationism, but if this should fail, he wanted enough time to keep America out of the war until all of Eurasia was his. This is why, with the outbreak of war, Bötticher’s reports appear to have influenced his war plans.⁵⁰ There is evidence that Bötticher’s reports about America’s military preparedness had a strong bearing on his timetable. What Hitler wanted to know from his military attaché, as previously mentioned, was how soon America could militarily intervene in Europe. The technical information Bötticher supplied was excellent but lacked political context—that is, sound knowledge of how American democracy really functioned. When Hitler said that he liked Bötticher’s reports because they demonstrated a real insight into the American mentality, he meant that he liked them because they reflected his own stereotypes of America. Neither Hitler nor Bötticher understood the American mentality, just as they failed to understand the psychology of other nationalities. What both did understand were the military strengths and weaknesses of other nations. Their cultural and political ignorance, combined with a German tendency to overestimate their own superiority, made them less intelligent about the potential of their enemies.

From all the available evidence, it appears that Hitler’s image of America was generally positive until the mid-1930s—the time when he became aware of the fact that the United States would oppose his expansion. By the spring of 1938, he realized that Roosevelt might be a determined supporter of the Western democracies. Hitler’s pronouncements, both private and public, became more anti-American; yet his view of the world was substantially cast in stone by the late 1920s. As previously argued, Hitler’s picture of America (Amerikabild) was and would remain split: positive and negative stereotypes alternated, even though, when America once more tipped the scales of war, he found emotional satisfaction in his abusive rants against “the society that was “half judaized and half negrified.“⁵¹ Hanfstaengl was right when he observed that Hitler was really not anti-American; there were many things about America that he admired. He marveled at its size and material wealth, and he was impressed and envious of its industrial power. When visitors touted America’s astounding technical achievements, he would always reply defensively and boastfully that he would build bigger highways, better automobiles, taller skyscrapers, and sturdier, more modern housing developments for German workers. In short, Hitler was envious of the United States, an envy that contained as much admiration as it did contempt. Whether Americans were decadent or not was important to him only in connection with their ability or inability to resist German power. One historian, James Compton, claims that Hitler had mental blocks to any realistic attitude toward America.⁵² While this may have been true about many aspects of American life and culture, which Hitler, like many Europeans, saw in terms of popular stereotypes, it was decidedly untrue when it came to a fairly realistic understanding of American economic power. As will be seen, Hitler put up with frequent American violations of neutrality and gave repeated orders to his military chiefs not to engage the Americans in a conflict and, when attacked, to make sure that the first shot was fired by the Americans. Even after he declared war on the United States and gave Joseph Goebbels carte blanche to unleash anti-American propaganda on the German public, he did not want this to be so overdone so as to make America, and Americans, look like a negligible power. In the spring of 1942 he ordered the German press to engage in a broad polemic against America that highlighted the enemy’s cultural deficiencies. The press, he ordered, should expose America’s distasteful worship of film stars, addiction to sensationalism, grotesque female boxing, mud wrestling, and gangsters. It would be entirely false, however, Hitler insisted, to ridicule America’s technological progress. The press instead should emphasize that Germany was building better roads and faster automobiles, and that its scientists were making greater strides in discovering synthetic products that would ensure the triumph of German economic power in the world.⁵³

The German ambassador to Italy, Ulrich von Hassell, observed that Hitler and the Americans spoke such an entirely different language that an understanding between them was almost impossible.⁵⁴ Yet there were all too many Americans who shared Hitler’s racial and anti-Semitic views. After all, the United States practiced segregationist, anti-immigration, and anti-Semitic policies. Hitler spoke a language that resonated with more Americans than is commonly admitted by historians. “Lots of people out here [in America],” a telegram to the White House read, “think Hitler is alright. We’d just as soon have him as Roosevelt.”⁵⁵ Another read, “Many persons who detest the mention even of Hitler’s name, are in favor of Hitler’s manner of dealing with the Jews.”⁵⁶ Right-wing critics of Roosevelt, such as Fritz Kuhn, Father Charles Coughlin, and William Dudley Pelley, to name just a few pro-Fascists, ceaselessly inveighed against the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy that had allegedly insinuated itself into the highest government circles, including the White House. The Germans also found numerous right-wing fellow travelers and subsidized their anti-Roosevelt and isolationist campaigns.

America’s greatest hero of the 1920s, aviator Charles Lindbergh, had considerable influence among isolationists and admired the Nazi military, especially its air force. The “Lone Eagle” was a member of the America First Committee and made prominent radio broadcasts and speeches opposing Roosevelt’s anti-Nazi policies. He also accepted the highest decoration given by the Nazis to a foreigner—the Service Cross of the German Eagle with Star, later prompting Roosevelt to tell Henry Morgenthau: “If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this—I am absolutely convinced that Lindbergh is a Nazi.”⁵⁷ Lindbergh was not a Nazi, but he was impressed by Germany’s technological progress and its growing military power, and he warned the American people to stay out of European conflicts. There were many critics of Roosevelt’s internationalism who agreed with Lindbergh’s sentiments.

Roosevelt’s Image of Germany

Hitler and Roosevelt, coming as they did from entirely different worlds, spoke a different political language, but they understood each other as being implacable enemies. Roosevelt never thought Hitler was a Charlie Chaplin caricature but believed him to be a deadly threat to the United States. He read Hitler’s Mein Kampf in the original German, something very few statesmen in the prewar period were able to do.⁵⁸ He also listened to some of Hitler’s speeches during the 1930s. Similarly, Hitler knew that Roosevelt was an extremely popular leader who represented a powerful industrial country whose interests were quite different from those of his own.

Since Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler came to power in the same year and the same month (January 1933) and died twelve years later, again in the same month (April 1945), it is important to understand what the American president knew about Germany and how this might have affected his decisions during his tenure of office. Unlike Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt was a patrician from a well-known and wealthy New York family. He presided over a democratic and pluralistic America, while the plebeian Adolf Hitler imposed a one-man dictatorship on the German people. Roosevelt revitalized a sagging democratic system by offering the American people a “New Deal,” which turned out to be a pragmatic approach to social democracy, while Hitler dismantled the democratic Weimar constitution in favor of a new, racial empire (Reich) that would last “a thousand years.” Roosevelt won and Hitler lost. There are several paradoxical twists and turns in this story. Democracy survived in America because Roosevelt was an uncommon man who came from the ranks of one of its older patrician families, a man who was completely secure and comfortable with his pedigree and harbored little resentment against the rivals he competed with on his way to the highest office in the land. By temperament cheerful and optimistic, he overcame the handicap of crippling polio on the very threshold of a promising political career. Despite being paralyzed from the waist down and unable to walk for the rest of his life, confined to a wheelchair or carried about like a Raggedy Andy, he became a better man: more sensitive, caring, and empathetic. Roosevelt had always been a good man, a bit arrogant and supercilious perhaps, a Groton and Harvard man who carved out a place for himself among America’s elite. But he had always possessed a good heart. Being a cripple did not deform his character; it strengthened it.

In a democratic age, both Hitler and Roosevelt skillfully connected with the feelings of ordinary people. Franklin Roosevelt was one of the great pioneers in cultivating popular support, a skill that came from his outgoing and charming temperament as well as from his role models, notably Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt (his cousin five times removed), and Woodrow Wilson. It was, in fact, from Teddy Roosevelt, who came from the Oyster Bay branch of the family, that he derived real practical insight into the craft of gaining and maintaining popular support. Theodore also encouraged his interest in history, with emphasis on the dramatic and heroic. There was no doubt in the minds of the Roosevelts that they were tribunes of the people, advancing the progress of democracy at home and abroad. Both saw the United States as the lever that was destined to move the world, for it was in America that civilization would reach its highest point. Their role was to serve as agents of democratic change, using the full range of their skills and social position to bring it about.

Adolf Hitler also assiduously cultivated the common touch. He, too, saw himself as an ordinary man who had been discovered miraculously by millions of Germans looking for a new kaiser. Hitler characterized his dictatorship as a German expression of the democratic spirit. The centerpiece of this claim was the Nazi practice of paying homage to the Volk (the people). The word Volk in German evokes all sorts of mystical connotations. Borrowing the meaning of the term from the romantics, who had made a cult of the Volk, the Nazis took it to mean the unique racial essence of Germandom (Deutschtum), which distinguished it from all other ethnic groups in the world. Each Volk, they believed, had acquired a unique character as a result of its relationship to its native soil and climate and its shared historical experiences. The unique worship of the Volk and what it symbolized was considered by these völkisch superpatriots as a form of religion that commanded Germans “to love the fatherland more passionately than laws and princes, fathers and mothers, wives and children.”⁵⁹ A person must shed his individuality and give himself heart and soul to the Volk. Such zealous nationalism had deep roots in German romanticism and in late nineteenth-century racial doctrines, undergirding the fragile national fabric in the imperial period (1870–1918).

This German cult of the people was quite different from the American cult of the people, for it focused on the racial and ethnic characteristics of the German people, rather than on the equal rights enjoyed by the plurality of people who made up the United States. It was the difference between neoromantic nationalism, which celebrated ethnic, racial, and cultural qualities allegedly inhering in specific national groups—Germans, French, Italians, English—and the democratic rights of citizens of different ethnic groups who happened to live in a multiethnic society. In short, it was a clash between the universalist position of the Enlightenment, embodied in the principles of 1776 and 1789—the American and French revolutions, respectively—and the neoromantic appeal to some kind of primeval ethnicity or racial essence, which ranked tribalism higher than universal human rights. This is why the Nazis announced, appropriately on July 14, 1933 (Bastille Day), that the false democratic principles of 1789 had been suspended. Rights were seen to be rooted in each Volk, not in the laws of nature, nature’s god, or rationality.

What Hitler wanted was a populist state (völkischer Staat), to be based, of course, on coercion and terror, but also, and just as importantly, on popular support. Germans were to be forced into compliance with Nazi beliefs and institutions, by terror if necessary, but they were given enough freedom so that many of them supported the regime. Dictatorship was popular. People believed that they were free to do most of the things they had been doing before the Nazi takeover. Many historians have wrongly depicted Nazi Germany as an oppressive prison camp chock-full of sullen and unhappy victims. Looking at the Hitler regime from the outside and with full knowledge of its legacy, it is hard to believe that ordinary Germans who toed the party line—as did most Germans—would give their heart and soul to such a system.

The Nazi regime rested primarily on Adolf Hitler’s popularity, which in turn was based on his charisma and his superb skills in using the new technology of mass persuasion. Robert Gellately has correctly labeled Nazi Germany as a modern mass media society that was in the vanguard of modernity.⁶⁰ Just because it did not replicate the modernist tendencies of the Western democracies, it was not, as some historians have claimed, a “reactionary modernist” society. Nazi officials were extraordinarily vigilant in monitoring the regime’s popularity, sending out thousands of agents to keep a careful watch on just about every popular expression. The reports we have from such surveillance activities clearly indicate that the regime, and particularly Adolf Hitler, was never in any serious danger of being overthrown by popular uprising. Franklin Roosevelt had always hoped that the German people would stage a popular revolution against the Nazi regime; he thought that if the German people really knew the facts they would not support such a cruel establishment.

How good was the president’s knowledge of Germany? In general terms, it can be said that Roosevelt was better informed about Germany than Hitler was about the United States. Roosevelt had spent six summers (1891–96) in Bad Nauheim, Germany, where his father, who had a heart condition, took his mineral bath cure and entrusted himself to the doctors of the local cardiac clinic. The Roosevelts always stayed at the hotel Villa Britannia, which catered to well-to-do Anglo-Americans. In 1891 Franklin, then nine years of age, began attending the small German elementary school (Volkschule) at Bad Nauheim, where his knowledge of German, which he had already been taught by his private German governess, improved greatly. He got along well with his schoolmates, noting in his diary, “I go to the public school with a lot of mickies … and we have German reading, German dictation, the history of Siegfried, and arithmetic … and I like it very much.”⁶¹ His German schoolmaster later remembered the young American boy very well, for he wore a blue sailor’s suit and quickly impressed him as “an unusually bright young fellow. He had such an engaging manner, and he was always so polite that he soon was one of the most popular children in the school.”⁶²

Although Franklin enjoyed going to school in Germany during the summer months of 1891–96, he was often rankled by the superior air of German nationalism. On one occasion Franklin caricatured the German kaiser by drawing mustaches on top of his paper. His German teacher punished him by having him write the sentence “Ich muss brave sein” (I must be good) three hundred times.⁶³ Franklin probably sensed the growing regimentation of German life under the Kaiser; he would later often comment on it. The habit of discipline and obedience, which was second nature to many Germans, seemed insufferable to liberally minded Americans. Germany had too many petty rules and arrogant officials; its people were annoyingly provincial and ethnocentric. What made the Roosevelts especially prickly were officious Germans in uniform who overstepped their authority. Even among the children there was much talk about German superiority over all other nationalities. Americans were often described as a barbarian people who cared only about money.

One of Franklin Roosevelt’s secretaries, Grace Tully, later wrote that the President’s view of Germany was “bound up in his mind with his own trips to Germany,”⁶⁴ a judgment that is confirmed by the fact that when he talked about Germany or the Germans he would frequently draw upon his personal, prewar visits to Germany. He took swimming lessons near Bad Nauheim and traveled extensively. In the summer of 1896 he went on a bicycle tour with his tutor, and when they got themselves in trouble with the law—for picking cherries from trees, taking their bicycles into railroad stations, and entering Strassburg, a fortified city, at nightfall on their bicycles—young Roosevelt spoke enough German to talk himself out of jail. He did have to pay a five-mark fine for running over a goose, however.⁶⁵ That summer he bicycled from Bad Nauheim to Baden-Baden, Strassburg, Frankfurt, and Wiesbaden. Upon his return, his parents took him to Bayreuth, where he listened raptly to four Wagnerian operas—Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung. His mother said that he was “most attentive and rapt during the long acts and always sorry to leave, never for a moment bored or tired.”⁶⁶ The Wagner cult was at its greatest height at the time. Both Roosevelt and Hitler were introduced to it at the age of fourteen.⁶⁷

Roosevelt’s later reminiscences of Germany shifted focus with the times. In 1939 he claimed that he was neutral, not really pro-British or pro-French. He said at the time that he did not know Great Britain and France as a boy but he did know Germany. If anything, he added, “I looked upon the Germany that I knew with far more friendliness than I did on Great Britain or France.”⁶⁸ After returning from Yalta in February 1944, he remarked that he had witnessed the rapid militarization of Germany decades before, giving the impression that even in the pre–World War I era he had recognized that Germany would be the future rival of the United States.⁶⁹ What he took away from his personal experience, and later his studies at Harvard, was the recognition that Germany was the most advanced industrial and technological society on the Continent. Writing in the Harvard Crimson in 1903 and 1904, he spoke with great admiration of German culture and technical efficiency.⁷⁰ There was one major blind spot in his thinking: the misconception that conservative and reactionary Prussian Junkers ruled Germany. He still believed this during the 1930s. Being a liberal Progressive, he was especially influenced as a student by the Harvard historian Silas McVane, who taught English and European history in the liberal Progressive mold. The modern age, according to this view, represented the triumph of liberal democratic ideals and institutions, with the United States leading by example. Nondemocratic societies were seen to be on the losing side of history. Germany was no exception. Already it possessed a strong liberal and democratic element in progressive labor and its advanced liberal intellectuals. These liberal forces, it was hoped, would eventually batter down the reactionary Prussian wall propped up by militarists and big industrialists. Professor McVane taught his students a model of a split Germany, “drawn in two opposite directions by two conflicting tendencies. The one is monarchical, bureaucratic, and militaristic, springing from the Prussian government … the other tendency is democratic, springing from the new populations of the great cities and manufacturing districts, but now beginning to extend to the rural sections and to affect even the Conservatives.”⁷¹

When Woodrow Wilson, a Progressive, succeeded in getting his declaration of war from Congress in April 1917, he made it clear that he wanted to make the world safe from the autocratic rulers of the German Empire. His assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin Roosevelt, agreed with this wartime image of a brutal militaristic Germany ruled by Prussian Junkers. Serving in Wilson’s government, Roosevelt strengthened this image of a split Germany; he believed that the war was a moral clash between diametrically opposed ideologies and cultural assumptions—Prussian militarism versus democratic freedom. World War I, in his estimation, was a necessary crusade against German aggression, but the Germans had not learned their lesson. On his last visit to Germany in 1919, still in his capacity as assistant secretary of the navy, he was surprised to learn that the Germans did not think that they had really been defeated. On an inspection tour near Koblenz, then under American occupation, he saw the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein, which overlooked the Rhine. He expected to see the Stars and Stripes fluttering from the castle and asked why the American flag was not there. The answer from the American commanding officer was that flying the American flag would upset the German people. Roosevelt was angry, and after returning to Paris he interceded with General Pershing and managed to reverse the matter.⁷² Subsequent developments in Germany under Hitler convinced him that the Germans should have been made to recognize that they had lost the war. If they had, World War II might have been avoided.

Adolf Hitler was an extreme believer in the idea that the German army had been stabbed in the back by internal subversives—pacifists, social democrats, Communists, and Jews. For Hitler, the war had never really ended. The humiliating peace treaty had been imposed on his country by trickery and deceit. Roosevelt, conversely, followed popular opinion in America at the time of the armistice in November 1918 and demanded that Germany be forced to surrender unconditionally. He backed the peace treaty and expected the United States to play a leading role in the League of Nations. This did not happen. But Roosevelt never lost his belief in internationalism, viewing America’s withdrawal into isolation as a temporary waning of the crusading spirit. However, he did appear to have taken Wilson’s failure to heart: if he ever assumed national leadership, he would avoid Wilson’s mistake.⁷³ The Germans, in his view, had not learned their lesson, and the rise of Hitler was a result of this. Yet, as a politician, he had to respect the prevailing mood of isolationists and appeasers, knowing full well that Hitler would take advantage of them.

Roosevelt was right about Hitler; he was also right about the German obsession with continental domination. He disliked the Germans personally, finding them, on average, arrogant, annoyingly militaristic, narrow-minded, and authoritarian. He acknowledged their virtues of hard work, managerial talent, and high cultural achievements. These qualities actually worried him in the late 1930s, because he was not sure that he could mold the great majority of Americans in resisting a wholly militarized people like the Germans or the Japanese. How Roosevelt became increasingly aware of Hitler’s intentions, and how Hitler responded to the American challenge to his long-range plans, is the subject of the following chapters.