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CHAPTER 2

Hitler Takes Risks and America Legislates Itself into Neutrality: 1933—1937

The Third Reich and the New Deal, 1933–1934

Looking back on the first five years of the Nazi regime, Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, gave a direct and blunt answer to the often asked question, “Why did the Western powers let Hitler do what he wanted for so long?” On April 5, 1940, he told representatives of the German press,

Up to now we have succeeded in leaving the enemy in the dark concerning Germany’s real goals, just as before 1932 our domestic foes never saw where we were going or that our oath of legalism was just a trick. We wanted to come to power legally, but we did not want to use power legally…. They could have suppressed us. They could have arrested a couple of us in 1925 and that would have been that, the end. No, they let us through the danger zone. That’s exactly how it was in foreign policy too…. In 1933 a French premier ought to have said (and if I had been the French premier I would have said it): “The new Reich Chancellor is the man who wrote Mein Kampf, which says this and that. This man cannot be tolerated in our vicinity. Either he disappears or we march!” But they didn’t do it. They left us alone and let us slip through the risky zone, and we were able to sail around all dangerous reefs. And when we were done, and well armed, better than they, and then they started the war.¹

During the first few years Hitler took a rather cautious approach to foreign policy. He spoke of freedom and international peace while secretly preparing for rearmament and war. Hitler performed this deception so well that many people, inside and outside of Germany, fooled themselves about his real intentions. The new German government tried to establish cordial relations with the United States, and initially Roosevelt also adopted a wait-and-see attitude. On January 30, the day Hitler assumed power, the New York Times correspondent in Berlin reported that “Herr Hitler is reported to be in a more docile frame of mind.” Just one day later that same New York Times reporter opined that “Hitler Puts Aside Aim to be Dictator,” a form of wishful thinking that was also widely indulged in by conservative circles in Germany. Roosevelt reserved judgment, undoubtedly hoping that political experience would moderate the German leader. His selection of William E. Dodd, a professor of history at the University of Chicago who had received his Ph.D. from the University of Leipzig in 1900, as ambassador to Germany in 1933 was probably motivated by the president’s desire to use the liberal professor as a conduit to the moderate, old-school elements in German society and public life.² Dodd was a distinguished professor of history and an old-style liberal who believed that “he could have some influence in moderating the policies of the Nazi regime.”³ A Jeffersonian and a Wilsonian internationalist, he shared with FDR, whom he greatly admired, a faith in the basic decency of human nature and a universal desire on the part of people for democratic freedom. His view of Germany was an illusionary and romantic image of prewar Germany, commonly held by Americans of his generation. Dodd showed considerable sympathy for what Germans had gone through during the war and after, and deplored the humiliation the country had suffered as a result of the Versailles Treaty, political instability, and economic chaos. As he set off for Germany with his wife and two grown children, he was hopeful that he could play an important part in bolstering the forces of moderation, mistakenly believing that the Germans were by “nature more democratic than any other great race in Europe.”⁴ With blinders such as these, Dodd was in for a shock, and he quickly discovered just how brutal the new Nazi government really was. Instead of exercising his role as an objective diplomat, Dodd allowed himself to become so emotionally involved in what he saw that it undermined his diplomatic effectiveness. He took a visceral dislike to Hitler, confiding to his diary, “I have a sense of horror when I look at the man.”⁵ Hitler returned the compliment, calling Dodd an old imbecile (alter Trottel) whose bad German he could never really understand.⁶ Dodd’s good-looking daughter, Martha, became so intimately entangled with various Nazis that her father feared that her behavior might lead to a serious diplomatic scandal. Dodd had good reason to be concerned, but not in the way he thought. His daughter later married a Czech, became a Soviet agent, and chose to live behind the Iron Curtain after World War II. Hitler blamed the men of the Foreign Office for missing an opportunity to get to Dodd through his “accessible daughter.”⁷

Dodd served for four and a half years (1933–38), witnessing the excesses of the Nazi regime at close range and sending some rather telling accounts of what he saw to Washington. His correspondence with Roosevelt is particularly intriguing, for it reveals that both men, though slightly blinded by their liberal misconceptions of Germany, sensed very early on just what kind of threat Hitler represented to Europe and therefore potentially to the United States. FDR asked Dodd to accomplish three goals as ambassador: to press the Germans for repayment on all private American loans; to help moderate persecution of the Jews; and to influence trade arrangements on certain items in order to facilitate German debt payments to the United States.⁸ Dodd failed on all three counts, but this was hardly his fault. No American diplomat could have deflected Hitler from his single-minded goal, to expand German power. At the same time, Dodd was surely the odd man out in Berlin: a moderate academic who hated diplomatic niceties and lavish parties, who had great difficulty in conforming to the Washington bureaucracy, and who took a deep dislike to the people he was supposed to get along with. For this reason, Franklin Ford’s judgment of him was surely right: Dodd was “ineffectual as an ambassador less because he failed to achieve his aim of changing the Third Reich by example and persuasion than because that was the aim he set himself.”⁹ Once Dodd became fully aware of his failure, he became despondent and psychologically incapable of representing his country during the various grave crises into which the Nazis plunged Europe—the Röhm purge, German rearmament, the annexation of Austria, the Czech crises, and the Crystal Night pogrom against the Jews.

During the first two years of Nazi rule, U.S.-German relations were, if not warm, at least diplomatically correct. The State Department did not want to pick a fight with the new German government and hoped that Hitler would not last too long or would moderate his aggressive policies. The German Foreign Office, in turn, scrupulously tried to avoid any hostility with the United States. In April 1933 Roosevelt, concerned over German loan repayments, even invited Hitler to Washington; the führer sent Hjalmar Schacht, president of the Reich Bank, instead.¹⁰ In 1933 parallels were often drawn between the New Deal and National Socialist economic policies. John Cudahy, Roosevelt’s ambassador to Poland, stopped in Berlin before assuming his post in Warsaw and reported back to the president that the Nazis were harmless. His sense was that there was a new “patriotic buoyancy and unity in the new Germany.” As to the Brownshirts (SA), they merely represented an “outlet for the peculiar social need of a country which loves display and pageantry.”¹¹ He seemed to believe that the brownshirts were a kind of fraternal order, like the Elks in America. On the German side, the Völkische Beobachter, the official organ of the Nazi Party, commented positively on Roosevelt’s new book Looking Forward (1933), translated almost immediately into German, by admitting that many statements in this book could have been written by a National Socialist. The Beobachter even claimed that “Roosevelt has a good deal of understanding for National Socialist thought.”¹² Between 1933 and 1936, Hitler made no recorded anti-American remarks.¹³ In 1934 Roosevelt and Hitler actually exchanged cordial messages. In one of them Hitler praised the American president for the outstanding work he was doing in leading his country toward economic recovery. Hitler congratulated FDR on his “heroic efforts” on behalf of the American people and expressed his agreement with the president’s view that the “virtue of duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline should dominate the entire people.”¹⁴ Roosevelt remarked to Harold Ickes at the time, “What we are doing in this country are some of the things … that are being done under Hitler in Germany. But we are doing them in an orderly way.”¹⁵

In reviewing Hitler’s first year in office, American magazines drew two exaggerated images of Hitler, focusing on his Charlie Chaplin–like appearance on the one hand and his dictatorial megalomania on the other hand. Time magazine showed Hitler in a somewhat more favorable light by covering his generosity toward his former wartime comrade Ignaz Westenkirchner, who asked for Hitler’s help in rescuing him from depression-ridden America. Westenkirchner had immigrated with his family to Reading, Pennsylvania, after the war, but the Depression had left him unemployed, so he asked Hitler for help. Hitler not only sent tickets but also lined up a position for him as superintendent of a Nazi Party building in Munich. Time magazine quoted Westenkirchner as saying that Hitler was “a kind man” who deeply cared for the poor, raising them up without permitting the upper classes to be leveled.¹⁶ Time followed up the Westenkirchner rescue mission with another “kind Adolf” story several months later. This one involved Anton Karthausen, a German immigrant who was unable to make a living as a dressmaker in Brownsville, Texas. Hitler promptly responded with tickets that enabled the Karthausens to return to Germany. These repatriation efforts were good propaganda for the Germans; they were intended to show that Germans belonged back home and that America was not the land of opportunity it was rumored to be.

References to “kind Adolf” changed drastically in 1934. The bloody Röhm purge of 1934, along with Nazi attacks on the churches and party-sponsored book burnings, soured American public opinion of Germany because it revealed the brutal nature of the Nazi system. General Hugh Johnson, head of the National Recovery Administration, went on record in a public speech confessing that the Nazi blood purge made him “physically and very actively sick.” The only comparisons, he said, that came to mind, were the Pancho Villa ravages in Mexico and “among semi-civilized people or savages half drunk on sotol and marijuana. But that such a thing should happen in a country of some supposed culture passes comprehension.”¹⁷ The German chargé in Washington vigorously protested against such an intemperate outburst but was told that Johnson had merely expressed his personal opinions rather than that of the American government.

Nazi street violence, especially against Jews, caused great concern in the United States. As early as March 1934, the American Federation of Labor and the American Jewish Congress sponsored a mock trial of Hitler under the provocative title “The Case of Civilization against Hitlerism.” The event attracted a number of well-known personalities, including the mayor of New York, Fiorello La Guardia. Bainbridge Colby, Woodrow Wilson’s last secretary of state, presided over the meeting, which was held at Madison Square Garden and attracted an audience of twenty-two thousand people.¹⁸ By using the phrase “crime against civilization,” the sponsors of this mock trial, headed by Rabbi Stephen Wise, wished to avoid a purely partisan attack on Hitler and portrayed the sponsors as representatives of humanity who wanted to defend the civilized values of the Judeo-Christian heritage. The prosecution even made a pretense of judicial objectivity by inviting representatives of the German government. The Germans declined the honor, and vigorously protested to the State Department that the trial was a slander against the new German government and should be stopped. The State Department, while expressing some sympathy for the German complaint, pointed out that the trial was purely private in nature and was an expression of freedom of speech. When the trial convened, the court crier announced, “Hear ye! Hear ye! All those who have business before this court of civilization give your attention and ye shall be heard.” The charge was that “the Nazi government in Germany has not only destroyed the foundations of the German Republic, but, under penalty of death, torture, and economic extermination, and by process of progressive strangulation, has reduced and subjugated to abject slavery all sections of its population.”¹⁹ At the conclusion of the trial, a vote was taken by the audience, and Hitler was found guilty. Despite protests by Hans Luther, the German ambassador to Washington, the State Department was unable to prevent the trial from taking place. In Berlin, Foreign Minister von Neurath protested to Dodd, who regretted the proposed mock trial but said he could do nothing to prevent it. Although Hitler said nothing publicly, he did curse the Jews in an interview with Dodd, intimating that if the damned Jews in America did not stop their agitation he would “make an end of all Jews in Germany.”²⁰

German protest through diplomatic channels did no good. German American relations continued to be diplomatically correct, but in the field of public relations there were frequent flare-ups. Congressman Samuel Dickstein of New York, chairman of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, conducted investigations of Nazi agents active in the United States, and large department stores boycotted German goods all over America. The Communist Party in America also stirred up anti-German sentiments and sponsored anti-German demonstrations. On July 26, 1934, Communists boarded the German liner Bremen, beat up German sailors, and ripped off the swastika flag, hurling it into the river. A melee ensued that had to be broken up by the New York Police. American public opinion was turning against the Nazi regime, whereas the German public was much more favorable toward the United States.

The anti-Nazi demonstrations and boycotts in America, especially by Jewish organizations, confirmed Hitler’s stereotypes about Jews dominating public opinion in the United States. Although the American authorities were generally scrupulous in maintaining a neutral position during these anti-Nazi protests, there were exceptions that raised dark suspicions among the German diplomatic officials. Mayor La Guardia, as previously mentioned, made various insulting remarks about the Nazi regime and participated in anti-German agitation. Judge Louis Brodsky, who presided over the Bremen case, delivered a gratuitous injudicious outburst against the Nazi regime and its “brazen display of an emblem that is antithetical to American ideals.” The sight of the swastika, he opined, made the ship a pirate ship in the eyes of the rioters, who saw it as an atavistic throwback to the dark ages.²¹ The Nazi press had a field day with this and similar anti-German pronouncements in America, with the Völkische Beobachter denouncing the Bremen decision as “scandalous Jewish justice in New York.”²²

Extremist activities in America were followed almost immediately by similar reactions in Germany; the difference was that the extremists in America were merely a nuisance but in Germany they were in power. After becoming aware of just how unpopular anti-Jewish action in Germany was in the United States and elsewhere, Hitler increasingly looked at the German Jews under his control as hostages to be used as pawns in his relationship with the Western powers. The major stumbling blocks for relations between Germany and the United States, apart from the difference between their political systems, were disarmament and debt payments. Hitler disingenuously told the Western powers that he was perfectly willing not to arm (aufrüsten) if they disarmed (abrüsten). Although the German negotiator at Geneva, Rudolph Nadolny, was making some progress in gaining concessions from the Western powers, Hitler had no intention of negotiating seriously because he wanted to rearm as rapidly and as massively as he could get away with. Thus, on October 14, 1933, he withdrew from the Disarmament Conference and simultaneously terminated Germany’s membership in the League of Nations. In this he had the complete support of the German Foreign Office and of conservative nationalists whose revisionist plans coincided with Hitler’s long-range expansionist ideas. In order to soften the foreign impact of this bombshell, Hitler submitted his decision to the German people in a plebiscite. On November 12, the German electorate ratified Hitler’s actions by an overwhelming margin of 95.1 percent. There was very little that the Western powers, including the United States, could do about the German rejection of disarmament. Nor could the United States do much about German defaults on debt repayments.

On May 8, 1933, Hjalmar Schacht announced that the German government would stop payments on its foreign debts, which at the time amounted to about 5 billion dollars, of which nearly 2 billion dollars were held by Americans. That drastic step was regarded as necessary because of the Depression, but perhaps more so because the new Nazi government made rearmament its top priority. This meant finding enough money in the budget and experimenting with deficit spending, a step that represented a radical reversal of the conservative and deflationary policies of the Brüning government. As Hitler saw it, the key to his ambitious rearmament program, which at first had to be hidden from the Western powers, was to change the tight money policies of the Reichsbank. Thus, when Hitler asked the president of the Reichsbank, Hans Luther, to open the money spigot, the president told him that he could give him 100 million marks, the legal limit at the time. Hitler could not believe what he heard; he was thinking in terms of billions rather than piddling millions. Clearly, Luther had to go, preferably as far away from the Reichsbank as possible. He sent Luther to Washington, where he served as ambassador from 1933 to 1938. In Luther’s place, Hitler picked the wily Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, one of the most important financial experts during the inter-war period. Schacht’s parents had immigrated to the United States in the 1870s but returned to Germany to take advantage of the new opportunities opened up by the recent German unification. Schacht’s middle name, Horace Greeley, was chosen by his father, who greatly admired the well-known American abolitionist, social progressive, and failed presidential candidate, Horace Greeley. Schacht was by all accounts the most brilliant member of the Nazi regime. He had studied medicine, German philosophy, political science, and economics, receiving his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Berlin. When Hitler appointed him president of the Reichsbank and subsequently minister of economics, Schacht had already served his country in a variety of important posts. Initially, the stiff-collared and prickly Schacht, calling himself a National Socialist, supported Hitler and introduced him to prominent members of business and industry. Although he would ultimately break with Hitler over the brutal nature of the regime, he threw all his energy and talent behind the German effort to rearm on a large scale. To do so, Schacht invented an ingenious and surreptitious system called Mefo-Exchange (Mefo-Wechsel) by which the government converted “Mefo” bills, secured by a dummy corporation founded by the government and several private corporations, into a concealed form of money. By 1938 the government had used 12 billion Mefo bills to finance its rearmament program. The secretive nature of this financial scheme was indicative of how the Nazi regime tried to avoid its financial obligations to the Western powers, especially the United States.

Schacht’s mission was to find ways and means to renege on reparations payments and to obtain the necessary funds for massive rearmament. The very notion of subordinating most economic activities to rearmament was bound to alarm the democracies, once they got wind of it. It did not take Roosevelt very long to realize that the new German government was pursuing policies—trade discrimination, a managed economy, and autarky—that violated every principle of free enterprise capitalism.²³ Like Woodrow Wilson, Roosevelt was an internationalist who believed in free trade and low tariffs. Nations who traded freely and reduced tariffs were unlikely to go to war. The president’s secretary of state, Cordell Hull, was an even more passionate believer in reducing barriers to trade, and he was instrumental in getting Congress to pass the Reciprocal Trade Agreement Pact, which allowed the president to reduce tariff rates by as much as 50 percent, providing that the trade partners did likewise. Hull succeeded in negotiating pacts with twenty-one nations. The Germans rejected the American vision of a free-trade international economic system. Their aim was self-sufficiency (autarky) on the assumption that overdependence on international markets, especially when controlled by hostile powers, could lead to embargos or economic blockades, as in World War I. To make up for Germany’s lack of crucial resources (rubber, copper, base metals, minerals, oil), the Nazis invested in research and development of synthetic goods. Two major corporate giants, I. G. Farben and Wintershall, received lucrative government subsidies to develop synthetic substitutes for the armed forces.

These economic measures undoubtedly stimulated business and industry, while at the same time reducing unemployment. They also accelerated the development of an increasingly bloated, overmanaged, and centralized government. Furthermore, the Germans ran serious balance of trade deficits, exacerbated by the fact that they did not strengthen their export markets. Schacht countered Western free-trade agreements, which he denounced as discriminatory to Germany, with his “New Plan” that called for bilateralization of all trade and payment balances, import limitations and planning dependent on national priorities, and encouragement of exports based on barter.²⁴ Schacht’s New Plan also called for government regulation of imports and bilateral trade agreements with southeastern Europe.

The American response to these German economic policies was vocal opposition. Secretary of State Hull was particularly offended by Schacht’s deceptive strategy of evading debt payments, calling it a colossal fraud. When Schacht came to America in May 1933, President Roosevelt told Hull to receive Schacht but to pretend to be looking at certain papers, letting him stand there for a few minutes, thus hopefully putting him in his place.²⁵ What so riled both Roosevelt and Hull was that the Germans were not only defaulting on the interest on their foreign bonds that had been sold in the United States during the 1920s, but also profiting from these defaults and thereby financing their rearmament program. By defaulting to their American creditors, the Germans caused the value of the bonds to drop steeply in the American money market; the Germans then turned around and purchased the bonds at a fraction of their face value. They permitted their exporters to keep part of the dollars from their exports in America if they used them to purchase the bonds at low prices. The exporters could then sell the bonds to the German government for Reichsmarks, thus financing further exports. Hull estimated that 85–90 percent of these bonds were repurchased in America by Germany at a great loss to American investors. “In devilish fashion,” Hull noted in his diary, “the Germans tied in nonpayment of bond interest, depreciation of bond prices, redemption of bonds at their low prices, and subsidization of German exports and at the same time they were able to continue their enormous purchases of material that went into armaments.”²⁶ The historian Gerhard Weinberg did not exaggerate when he said that this amounted to forcing the American people to subsidize German rearmament.²⁷

German Rearmament and Aggression

The early skirmishes between the United States and the new Hitler regime, mostly over economic policies, subsided by the end of 1934. Hitler knew why. By the mid-1930s the United States gave every indication that it would avoid serious entanglements in the affairs of Europe and in the Far East. This isolationist mood manifested itself in 1934 when Congress passed the Johnson Act, which prohibited loans to nations that had defaulted on their financial obligations and set up the Nye Committee charged with investigating munitions makers who had allegedly dragged the country into World War I. There followed three neutrality acts in succession in 1935, 1936, and 1937. These acts prohibited the exports of arms, ammunition, and implements of war to belligerent countries. In cases of war between two or more foreign states, the president was required to proclaim the existence of such a state of war, at which time the exportations of arms became illegal. Violators, the act specified, would receive a fine of no more than $10,000 or imprisonment of no more than five years, or both. The act also contained provisions restricting travel by American citizens on belligerent ships during war.

When Germany revealed on May 9, 1935, that it had reestablished an air force and also reintroduced conscription, the United States hardly made a peep, choosing to stand on the sidelines. Roosevelt hoped that the allied defenders of Versailles would take more decisive action, but the will to resist Hitler was too feeble. The Western powers were concerned enough, however, to convene a conference on April 11 at Stresa on Lake Maggiore. Mussolini still maintained that he supported an independent Austria, which he saw as a buffer against an expanding Germany. He called for more decisive action against Hitler than empty resolutions by the League of Nations. No real action, however, resulted from the Stresa Conference because the Western powers were too divided in their foreign policy objectives. In June the British negotiated a naval agreement with the Germans that tacitly permitted the Germans to rearm by letting them build up their submarine fleet to be on par with the British, though limiting the German surface fleet to 35 percent of the British. Hitler was pleased with Ribbentrop for negotiating this favorable treaty, but he had no intention of honoring it in the long run because he wanted to build up a large navy that had complete parity with the British navy.²⁸ London signed the Naval Agreement of 1935 in order to stave off the sort of naval race that had poisoned Anglo-German relations in the late 1890s, but the French and the Italians, who had not been consulted, regarded the British action as a breach of the allied unity that they thought had been achieved at Stresa. Both powers would henceforth pursue a more independent path when it came to their own security concerns. In the same month that the British and the Germans negotiated their naval agreement, the United States Senate could not muster a two-thirds majority that would have enabled the United States to join the World Court at The Hague. The measure failed as a result of a furious public relations campaign that had been waged against the internationalist legislation by the Hearst newspapers, Detroit radio priest Charles Coughlin, and isolationist senators such as William E. Borah, Hiram W. Johnson, and Breckinridge Long. It was a bitter defeat for Roosevelt and showed what a vocal and determined minority could do in blocking a more interventionist foreign policy. In October 1935 Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, and by so doing outraged the civilized world except for Nazi Germany. Anxious appeals by the Ethiopians to the League of Nations produced only meaningless resolutions. When the British asked for an embargo, the French balked. Mussolini got what he wanted, and more: an open invitation of Nazi friendship. Thus began Il Duce’s fatal embrace with the German dictator.

Hitler became increasingly convinced by these events that the Western powers would do almost anything to avoid another war. With America in isolation and the Western powers indecisive and vacillating, he took his first major gamble, violating the Versailles treaty by reoccupying the Rhineland on March 7, 1936, justifying this step by saying that he was merely reoccupying German territory. The reaction by the allied powers was epitomized by Lord Lothian’s matter-of-fact observation that the Germans were “after all only going into their own back garden.”²⁹ The United States did not take a stand and justified its position by saying that it had not been a party to either the Versailles treaty or the Locarno Agreement of 1925.

In the United States, 1936 was an election year. The Democratic platform echoed the prevailing isolationist sentiment by declaring that, “We shall continue to observe a true neutrality in the disputes of others,” and the president, in one of his few foreign policy statements that year, said on August 14, 1936, in Chautauqua, New York, “We shun political commitments which might entangle us in foreign wars; we avoid connection with the political activities of the League of Nations…. I hate war. I have passed unnumbered hours, I shall pass unnumbered hours, thinking and planning how war may be kept from this Nation.”³⁰ This “I hate war speech” was typical of Roosevelt’s sleight-of-hand approach because, while it roundly condemned war, it did not recommend ostrichlike isolation either, as is evident in the caveat, “We are not isolationists except in so far as we seek to isolate ourselves completely from war. Yet we must remember that so long as war exists on earth there will be some danger that even the Nation which most ardently desires peace may be drawn into war.”³¹

At the time when Roosevelt was making these remarks about peace, the Germans were hosting the peaceful Olympic Games in Berlin (August 1–16, 1936). The games were a propaganda triumph for the Nazis. Anti-Jewish activities temporarily ceased all over Germany and the international community was impressed by how successfully the games had been managed by the Nazis. Hitler had by then restored economic prosperity and political confidence, and he was about to embark on three years of remarkable diplomatic triumphs. At the very time when the eyes of the world were focused on the Olympic Games in Berlin, Adolf Hitler composed a top secret memorandum in his aerie at Obersalzberg on economic strategy and rearmament. The document, which was greatly at odds with the Olympic spirit of peace and international goodwill, reflected Hitler’s impatience with the slow pace of German rearmament and his insistence that the German economy must be ready for war within four years. Hitler’s memorandum bluntly stated, “We are overpopulated and cannot feed ourselves from our own resources…. The German armed forces must be operational within four years. The German economy must be fit for war within four years.”³²

While Hitler had war on his mind, Roosevelt thought of peace. In the spring of 1937 he sprang a novel idea on the German ambassador, Hans Luther. Why not establish a new and simple policy for rearmament that specified that no nation should manufacture armaments heavier than a man could carry on his shoulders? If followed, this policy should go a long way in preventing aggression. Luther passed along Roosevelt’s brainstorm, and so did Ambassador Davies, who stopped in Berlin before going back to Moscow. Davies later claimed that he saw Schacht, who allegedly told him that the president’s plan was “so simple as to be the expression of a genius.”³³ It was “absolutely the solution.” The ingenious plan, however, fell on stony ground with the führer.

While Hitler was composing his readiness for “war in four years” memorandum at Obersalzberg, the spirit of peace prevailing at the Olympic Games could not gloss over the fact that bloody civil war was breaking out in Spain. The United States promptly announced a policy of strict nonintervention, prohibiting arms shipments to any of the warring factions. The Germans, however, openly aided Franco and his anti-Republican forces, and when the German pocket battleship Deutschland was attacked by the Republicans in May 1937, the Germans shelled the Spanish town and harbor of Almeria. German and Italian aid to Franco increased substantially over time. Hitler dispatched various forces to Spain, including the Condor Air Legion, a tank battalion and technical advisors. The Condor Air Legion later distinguished itself by pulverizing the Spanish town of Guernica and its civilian population, thus giving the world a preview of terror bombing from the air.

The Fascist powers were gathering and threatening the Western powers in 1936 and 1937. The groundwork was being set for the Rome-Berlin Axis, and when Franco finally prevailed in 1939, France, one of the few remaining democracies on the continent, found itself encircled by three Fascist powers—Spain, Italy, and Germany. On November 25, 1936, Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, which was designed to monitor and counter Soviet-backed support to international Communist parties.

In 1937 Japan attacked China, an event that signaled the opening round of World War II. The Japanese had been on the move since 1931 when they invaded Manchuria and set up the puppet state of Manchukuo, a move that was condemned by the League of Nations. Japan promptly left the League and proceeded to exploit Manchuria’s resources for the Japanese war economy.

Behind the scenes, Hitler was not idle either in preparing his expansionist agenda. The tone of his public speeches also began to change as he cast off his pretensions for peace in favor of belligerent diatribes. In September 1937 Hitler and Mussolini consolidated their growing friendship, culminating in a spectacular state visit by Il Duce to Germany in late September and Italy’s adherence to the Anti-Comintern Pact. The Nazis dazzled Il Duce with an awesome display of military might. The result was the beginning of the “brutal friendship” between the two dictators.

Across the ocean, Roosevelt was carefully monitoring the aggressive words and actions of the Fascist nations. On October 5, 1937, the president gave a speech in Chicago, subsequently termed the “Quarantine speech,” in which he condemned the creeping “reign of terror and international lawlessness,” evidenced by the bombing of civilian populations, sinking of ships, and wanton acts of violence committed without a declaration of war. He reminded the American people that they were not immune from such international aggression, warning, “Let no one imagine that America will escape, that it may expect mercy, that this Western Hemisphere will not be attacked, and that it will continue tranquilly and peacefully to carry on the ethics and arts of civilization.”³⁴ It has been thought that the president primarily had the Japanese in mind, for he made the speech shortly after the Japanese had attacked China. The German diplomats in Washington, however, wondered whether the president’s message was not also aimed at them. Ambassador Dieckhoff, who had replaced Luther, immediately asked for clarification about the aggressors Roosevelt had in mind. Sumner Welles, the American Under-Secretary of State, told him that the gist of the president’s speech had been the promotion of peace. If any aggressor had been referred to, it was the Japanese rather than the Germans or Italians. Welles then added a most revealing comment, which must have jumped out at Dieckhoff. It was a prophetic warning that “if a world conflict should break out in which Great Britain becomes involved, the United States will be thrown, either at the beginning of the conflict or soon thereafter, on the British side of the scale.”³⁵ Hitler took Roosevelt’s Quarantine speech just as seriously as Dieckhoff did. According to his adjutant Nicolaus von Below, Hitler saw the speech as a turning point in American foreign policy.³⁶ Hitler was offended by Roosevelt’s remark that 90 percent of the world’s population was threatened by 10 percent of aggressive nations and that he seemed to think that Germany was one of these aggressive nations. He attributed FDR’s sudden interest in foreign policy to his failed economic remedies, as evidenced by the increased unemployment in the U.S. workforce. Hitler suspected that Roosevelt was looking to rearmament as a way out of the recent economic downturn in the U.S. economy—the depression within a depression, as some critics of FDR have called it. Hitler said that FDR needed to get congressional approval for large rearmament appropriations and to get it he would incite the American public against so-called aggressor nations, notably headed by Germany.

Roosevelt’s first forceful pronouncement in foreign affairs was prompted by a growing worldwide danger to American interests both in the Pacific and in Europe. He viewed these threats as analogous to an epidemic: “When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease.”³⁷ How he proposed to quarantine the aggression the president did not explain.

Roosevelt, acutely aware of the gathering storm, was groping for a new policy to replace neutrality. As happened several times in his administration on matters relating to foreign affairs, the president took the easy way out by letting things drift, hoping that events abroad would galvanize the American people to the point of demanding more aggressive measures against the Fascist powers. In his Quarantine speech, the president did not name the international lawbreakers, though it was obvious to his listeners that he had Japan, Germany, and Italy in mind. The Quarantine speech was not Roosevelt’s signal to abandon neutrality, as Charles Beard and other revisionists seemed to think, but a shift in his thinking about international aggression. At this point he was starting to realize that the American people needed to be educated about the threat from abroad, a reeducation that would not be easy because isolationist feelings were still very strong. On October 16, 1937, he sent his old headmaster at Groton, Endicott Peabody, a telegram thanking him for his support of the Quarantine speech and confessing, “As you know, I am fighting against a public psychology of long-standing—a psychology which comes very close to saying, ‘Peace at any price.’”³⁸

This is what Roosevelt wanted to change, but he lacked an active policy to do it. Off the record, Roosevelt called Hitler an international gangster who would have to be stopped sooner or later. But who would stop him? Here Roosevelt’s intentions became murky. He was simply not the sort of man who wanted to rush into action without painstaking thought about the risks involved for the American people. Those who argue that he could hardly wait to horn in on the conflicts brewing in Europe or Asia, or perhaps that he even conspired to create incidents to justify intervention, do not understand the president’s essential style. The notion of giving aid and comfort short of war to the victims of totalitarianism became Roosevelt’s guiding policy until the fall of France. Roosevelt’s conception of national self-interest could be measured in geopolitical lines of defensive zones. In the Pacific it was the Philippines, Australia, India, and the oil-rich Dutch Indies. Next came French Indochina and Chiang Kai-shek’s China, both of which Roosevelt saw as bulwarks against Japanese expansion.

In Europe, Roosevelt’s first line of defense was Britain and France, the democratic allies of World War I. In the back of his mind there was the Soviet Union, an international pariah but an important potential ally against the mounting threat of Nazi Germany. In 1933 the Roosevelt administration formally recognized the Soviet Union and established full diplomatic relations with that Communist country. From the beginning of his presidency to the very end, Roosevelt took a somewhat benign view of the Soviet Union, did not seem overly perturbed by Soviet espionage in America, and courted and propped up the Soviet Union when it seemed on the verge of collapse in 1941.³⁹ He made no intellectual connection about the equivalence of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union despite repeated warnings by his diplomats.

In 1937 Roosevelt recognized that events in Europe and Asia were beginning to be dangerous, and that ways and means had to be found to support the democracies, even if that meant chipping away—deceitfully, if necessary—at the wall of neutrality Congress had built since the early 1930s. While the American president talked of peace, the German dictator talked of aggression and war. Hitler’s timing was very good. By 1938 Germany had rearmed and was both militarily and psychologically at least as strong as the Western democracies. World War I had changed the traditional great power constellation, leaving a vacuum that Hitler was quick to exploit. Of the five major European powers before the war—Italy, Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, and Britain—only France and Britain had remained great powers. Weakened by revolution and civil war, Russia had fallen into the hands of the Bolsheviks, who were as suspicious of the democracies as they were of the Fascist states. The multiethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire had collapsed, and out of its scattered pieces emerged new national states such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. Italy was torn by socioeconomic conflicts and felt cheated of the fruits of victory, and Germany was defeated and humiliated. As to the United States, Americans had shown no inclination to assume the imperialist mantle that would have been necessary to keep the peace in Europe. If the United States had ratified the Versailles treaty, joined the League of Nations, and linked with the French and the British, Hitler—perhaps—could have been stopped. America’s wartime idealism turned out to be little more than an ideological justification for fighting the war; it had little effect in waging peace. This would have required a long-range commitment that Americans were not willing to make in 1919.

Hitler knew this. By themselves, Britain and France would not be able to prevent Germany from regaining great-power status. In fact, the leaders of the Weimar Republic, notably Gustav Stresemann, had already liberated Germany from the most crippling restrictions of the Versailles treaty; they had also, by default, if not complicity, allowed antidemocratic institutions a free pass. Hitler then inherited authoritarian and militaristic institutions: the armed forces, the courts, the civil service, and the school system. Hitler would bend these institutions to his will by Nazifying them. Germany had been the most powerful country on the continent in 1914, and the talents of its people enjoyed worldwide respect and envy. The war did not destroy the German potential for European supremacy, nor did it put a damper on the German obsession with gaining continental hegemony. Hitler merely gave voice to what the majority of Germans believed about themselves and their role in Europe. He believed, as they did, that Germany had never been defeated, had, in fact, been betrayed by allied promises of a just peace, and therefore had little choice but to shake off the shackles of Versailles to recoup its place among the great powers. What Hitler brought to the national atmosphere of self-pity and humiliation was a genius for tapping into that mood and converting it into a political mass movement that thrived on anger and revenge. Hitler also gave that movement an ugly racist and Judeophobic direction. He convinced all too many Germans that the Aryan race, being at the apex of biological and cultural evolution, was destined to dominate the world; and because Germany was the Urquelle (primal source) of Aryan strength, it was inevitable that the Germans would conquer Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals.⁴⁰ The geography lesson Hitler gave the Germans was to link space and race. A people’s greatness did not lie in limiting itself to its own territorial boundaries but in expansion and conquest. This vision was the diametrical opposite of Roosevelt’s belief in peaceful coexistence, free markets, and democratic self-government. For Hitler, a nation’s greatness depended, in the first place, on producing a healthy racial stock and encouraging its members to reproduce prodigiously. In the second place, it meant weeding out inferior racial types through appropriate eugenic measures: preventive medicine, sterilization of people with hereditary or mental illnesses, hygienic institutes, and strict segregation of inferior breeds such as Jews and gypsies.

Finally, Hitler believed that to limit a growing people like the Germans to a small, limited space was to doom them to permanent vassalage to larger nations such as Russia, the United States, and China. This is why Hitler demanded living space (Lebensraum) for the German people in Eastern Europe. The vast spaces of Russia would be for Germany what the Wild West had been for the United States. Germany’s excess population would settle these areas and provide the fatherland with a permanent breadbasket, plus oil and other necessary materials for further industrialization. Hitler believed that making a geographically small nation into a world power could only be accomplished through the mobilization of all its resources by an all-powerful government. This task also required instilling warlike and aggressive habits into its people. Hitler wanted to breed a hard, callous, and obedient people who would do the bidding of the government. It was particularly the young that he expected to become as “swift as greyhounds and as hard as Krupp steel.” In his vulgarized Nietzschean perception, he wanted young people to delight in war and conquest. The chief educational goal of National Socialism was to teach all Germans the habit of being brutal with a clear conscience.

These views, and how Hitler wanted them translated into policy, were discussed in a secret conference on November 5, 1937, with his military and diplomatic chiefs—Werner von Blomberg, Werner von Fritsch, Erich Raeder, Hermann Goering, and Konstantin von Neurath.⁴¹ Hitler spoke at length, telling his chiefs about his plans to strengthen the German racial community by expanding its territories into Eastern Europe. He indicated that Germany could not solve its economic problems without territorial expansion and conquest. His immediate objective, he said, was the annexation of Austria and the destruction of Czechoslovakia in order to secure Germany’s eastern and southern flanks. The minutes of the conference were kept by Colonel Friedrich Hossbach and were later introduced as evidence at Nuremberg of Germany’s premeditated decision to wage a “war of aggression” on the world. This claim goes too far. The so-called Hossbach memorandum was more in the nature of a “testing of the waters” with his military chiefs than a blueprint for aggression. In fact, judging by their cautious, if not downright alarmed, responses, Hitler knew that he had to shake up his high command in order to get what he called obedient generals who would do his bidding like “mad dogs.”

The Deterioration of German-American Relations

Toward the end of 1937, two apparently unrelated events revealed just how unfriendly relations between Germany and the United States had become. The first event centered on the sale of American helium to Germany. In May, the German Zeppelin airship Hindenburg had exploded at Lake hurst, New Jersey, probably as a result of static electricity and the highly flammable hydrogen the Germans had used in fueling the huge dirigible. If the Zeppelin Company had used nonflammable helium, which at the time was the exclusive monopoly of the United States, this disaster might have been avoided. Following the Lakehurst disaster, the Germans halted further construction of their hydrogen-fueled dirigibles and waited for U.S. deliveries of the nonflammable helium. In September 1937 Congress passed the Helium Act, authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to sell helium to foreign countries, with the proviso that the helium would not be put to military use. The Zeppelin Company promptly ordered 17,900,000 cubic feet of helium.

What happened next illustrates how low the relationship between Germany and the United States had sunk by late 1937 to early 1938, for the politics of helium went on for six months. When German tankers arrived in Houston to pick up the helium, a hitch developed. Although the navy had no objection to the transfer of the helium, the secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, did. Ickes refused to sign the contract for the sale of the helium, arguing that the Nazis should be punished for their aggressive actions. He specifically mentioned the “rape of Austria” as one of the reasons for denying the sale. The State Department deplored Ickes’s independent-minded action; in fact, Ambassador Wilson, Dodd’s successor in Berlin, warned that the denial of helium to a German company that was simply engaged in overseas passenger transportation was not only discriminatory but also would lead to further deterioration of relations with Germany. The president and his entire cabinet, however, eventually gave in to Ickes, especially after the U.S. solicitor general, Robert H. Jackson, ruled that the president had no authority over the matter and that Ickes’s negative vote was enough to block the sale.

Hitler played a minor role in the helium affair. He told Wiedemann that he had never liked Zeppelins, calling them “laughable blood sausages—lächerliche Blutwürste.”⁴² He said that they served no useful military purpose because they were slow and vulnerable. He was glad, he said, that he had not followed Goebbels’s advice to name the LZ.129 Zeppelin that exploded at Lakehurst the Adolf Hitler.43 Having the Adolf Hitler explode in America would have been harder to bear than the destruction of the Hindenburg. It goes without saying that Hitler suspected sabotage of the airship, as did most Germans in May 1937. According to Wiedemann, Hitler did plan to use some of the helium for military balloons (Fesselballons), which would, of course, have served military purposes.⁴⁴ Perhaps Harold Ickes was right after all.

The second event that revealed the growing rift between Germany and the United States was not so much an event as it was a sign in the form of a memorandum. In mid-October 1937 the chief of the German Chancellery forwarded a memorandum to the Foreign Office with a note that said, “It is sent to you by his personal order.”⁴⁵ The author of the memorandum, titled “Roosevelt’s America: A Danger,” was Baron Bernhard G. Rechenberg, a man who was no stranger to the Foreign Office. Rechenberg had been a director of the Reich’s foreign trade office in Hamburg, a post he quit under a financial cloud in 1924. He then went to the United States with his wife and children and made a living as a dairy farmer. He also became a propagandist for the Nazi cause in America, and after Hitler consolidated his dictatorship in 1934, Rechenberg decided to return to Germany. His ten years in America seemed to have left him none the wiser about the United States, for his lengthy memorandum was an overwrought warning that Roosevelt was about to plunge his country into a world catastrophe. Drawing on anti-Semitic and anti-American prejudices, Rechenberg claimed that Roosevelt was a terrible danger on two counts: he was a Jew and a Communist who would bring about “the fulfillment of the Communist Manifesto.”⁴⁶ If not stopped, Roosevelt would pave the way toward the bolshevization of North America and the eventual globalization of the Communist menace. Members of the Foreign Office were scornful of this document; they denounced it not only as pure fantasy, as Ambassador Dieckhoff labeled it, but also as a complete distortion of American society. The diplomats undoubtedly hoped that Hitler would not take it as seriously as the comments accompanying the memorandum seemed to indicate. Ambassador Dieckhoff in Washington, who had received a copy of Rechenberg’s memorandum, wrote to Weizsäcker in Berlin that Germany could ill afford a conflict with the United States—a country that had grown much stronger since World War I, economic problems notwithstanding.

One month after the Rechenberg memorandum made the rounds of various government agencies, Hitler’s company commander in World War I and his personal adjutant since 1935, Fritz Wiedemann, went to the United States on an extensive tour that took him from New York to Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.⁴⁷ In New York he had to brave a horde of American reporters and Communist protesters. He also met with members of the German American Bund in Chicago and was not impressed by what he saw. He later advised Hitler not to meet with Kuhn when the German-American Bund leader visited Germany. Wiedemann gained a good impression of the size and strength of the United States, but he could not help but notice the widespread antipathy toward the Nazi regime. When he returned to Germany, he undoubtedly reported to Hitler what he had seen and heard in America. What did Hitler make of all this?

Some historians have found it tempting to let Hitler play the deluded ideologue who, in this case, uncritically accepted Rechenberg’s biases because they confirmed his own.⁴⁸ Wiedemann’s trip to America, however, was not just an innocent vacation but more likely a fact-finding mission that Hitler encouraged Wiedemann to undertake. In his memoirs, Wiedemann conveniently omitted the details about his trip and why he was allowed, or perhaps even urged, to go to the United States. After all, the arrival of the führer’s former company commander in America caused tongues to wag, and rightly so. What was the nature of his trip? Ostensibly a private visit, but then why was the führer’s personal aide accompanied by embassy officials throughout his trip? And why did he meet with German-American Bundists? It is quite possible that Hitler sent Wiedemann to America to get another point of view of conditions there. When Wiedemann returned and supposedly told Hitler to reach an understanding with the United States, Hitler dismissed him from his post because, as Wiedemann claimed, he could not abide people in his inner circle who disagreed with his politics. What kind of politics? Was it Hitler’s views of the United States? If this is so, why did Hitler in the same breath appoint Wiedemann as consul general to San Francisco? Historians have followed John W. Wheeler-Bennett’s acerbic judgment that Wiedemann was another casualty among the moderates who stood in the way of Hitler’s aggressive foreign policy. With some sense of Greek justice, Wheeler-Bennett said, he “exiled Wiedemann to San Francisco, where, as consul general he could practice his own theories of amicability with the Americans.”⁴⁹ What Wheeler-Bennett does not mention is that, after Wiedemann’s return from his tour to America, he let everyone know that he wanted an appointment as consul general to San Francisco. Hitler, he admitted, had heard of his request and obliged by offering him the post as a kind of consolation for replacing him as his personal aide. Perhaps so, but it is my suspicion that Wiedemann’s account contains too many omissions to be completely believed. It could very well be that Hitler sent Wiedemann to the United States not only because his adjutant wanted to go there but also because he was the right man to tell the führer what was really going on in America. Bella Fromm, the prominent columnist for the Vossische Zeitung, who had a good nose for what was really going on in Berlin, recorded in her diary that “it is common knowledge in Berlin that the real purpose of his [Wiedemann’s] appointment to San Francisco is to spread Nazi propaganda in America. Also, from the West he would be able to direct German and Japanese espionage activities, for which his previous Japanese contacts adequately fit him.”⁵⁰ While in San Francisco, Wiedemann was joined by his mistress, the notorious but fascinating Stephanie von Hohenlohe, whom the FBI described as a German spy, “worse than ten thousand men,” reputedly “immoral, and capable of resorting to any means, even to bribery, to gain her ends.”⁵¹ Hohenlohe was an international high society matron with a flair for publicity. She was not a Mata Hari; in fact, her self-interest always trumped her loyalty to any nation. Although she was one-half Jewish, Hitler was much taken by her and greatly appreciated her social connections. Her relationship with Wiedemann was an on-and-off affair, as were so many of her liaisons with powerful men. The president told the Justice Department to have her deported. She managed to outwit them all.⁵²

To summarize, Hitler was split about the United States; he wanted to hear the worst, but his political instincts told him that he could never underestimate the colossus across the ocean. It was best, therefore, to keep a tab on developments in America. In 1937 the United States was officially neutral, its military establishment was negligible, and its economy was worsening. Hitler’s most pressing concern was France and Britain, the two Western powers that could block his immediate designs on Austria and Czechoslovakia. Anyone who opposed him on this issue, especially cautious generals or timid diplomats, had to go. He made this position quite clear in his secret address to his military chiefs in November 1937 and acted on it in the new year. By that time Hitler had slipped through what Goebbels termed the “risky zone”; Roosevelt was beginning to stir behind his neutrality zone.