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CHAPTER 3

Hitler’s Year: 1938

The Annexation (Anschluss) of Austria

At the height of the Austrian crisis, on March 8, 1938, a famous American visitor came to call on Adolf Hitler at the Reich chancellery—the former president of the United States, Herbert Hoover, who had been chauffeured from Prague to Berlin in a private automobile. Hoover, by profession an engineer, was very impressed by what he saw on his way to Berlin: splendid new highways, new housing developments, and prosperous towns and villages.¹ In his hour-long conversation with Hitler, Hoover praised Germany’s economic prosperity and the prevailing mood of hopefulness throughout the nation. Although Hitler did most of the talking, he did not give the appearance of being a fanatic dictator. The conversation between the two statesmen was largely a “courteous exchange of opinion”;² it centered on housing, employment, investment, and agriculture. Hoover remarked that the American people took a great interest in the new German experiment, which was quite different from the American version (Hoover was alluding to Roosevelt’s New Deal). He admitted that democratic rule had imposed a much slower pace on rebuilding America than Germany. This remark about democracy prompted Hitler to say that he had been democratically elected and enjoyed the full support of the German people. Hoover replied that the restrictive measures accepted in Germany would not work in America because of the importance the American people attached to spiritual and intellectual freedom. Hitler then shifted the conversation to the danger of Communism, which Hoover also acknowledged to be a serious problem. Hitler had always had an intuitive sense that the best way of ingratiating himself with men of Hoover’s class—the professional and industrial elites—was to appeal to their fear of Communism. The broad middle, or what Germans called Mittelstand, regarded Communism as a deadlier threat than Fascism. Most middle-class Germans, in fact, saw National Socialism as an acceptable alternative to the failed democracy that they held responsible for the postwar crisis. Although disenchantment with democracy was not a political problem in America, fear of Communism was, especially at the height of the Depression and among members of big business and believers in free-enterprise capitalism.

Following Hoover’s meeting with Hitler, a minor controversy arose over whether the two statesmen had clashed over the nature of democracy versus totalitarianism, but the American ambassador, Hugh Wilson, who had accompanied Hoover on his visit to Hitler, formally corrected the record by advising the State Department that there had been nothing in the nature of a clash in the interview. That afternoon, Wilson hosted a luncheon for Hoover, which was attended by high-ranking German officials and three foreign ambassadors, at the hotel Esplanade. In the evening the Carl Schurz Society gave a dinner in Hoover’s honor. Hjalmar Schacht, Germany’s “economic wizard” who was credited (wrongly) with pulling Germany out of the Depression, praised Hoover’s political career and expressed regret that the president could not complete his great work. The next day, Hoover was feted in grand style by Hermann Goering on his opulent estate. When Hoover finally got back to his Berlin hotel suite, he was visited by prominent members of German finance and industry.

The Germans were courting Hoover because they believed that he represented an important voice in the Republican Party—the isolationist wing that included Robert Taft, Robert La Follette Jr., Hiram Johnson, Burton Wheeler, Arthur Vandenberg, and others. Among these isolationists—or better put, noninterventionists—there was considerable respect for German efficiency and order. Some of these men, notably Charles Lindbergh, had no problem turning a blind eye to the excesses of the Nazi regime as long as it did not threaten the economic interests of the United States. As John Lukacs put it, “before 1938 there were many Americans who were inclined favorably to the new Germany, in spite (or, in some ways, because) of the barrage of news propagated about the brutalities of Hitler’s regime, thinking that that kind of propaganda was greatly exaggerated, the product of special interests.”³ Much of this changed after Hitler’s actions in 1938, especially his assault on the Jews in November 1938, but even then prominent American isolationists still wanted cordial relations with Germany. Lindbergh, Taft, and other followers of the America First movement continued to oppose Roosevelt’s efforts to commit the United States to a more active role in European affairs. They did so even after France had been defeated in 1940, opposing aid to Britain because it was not in the interests of the United States. Hoover had no illusions about Hitler, but he did not believe that it was in the interests of the United States to involve itself in European conflicts. For his part, Hitler judged Hoover to be a political small fry who could be useful in neutralizing American interventionism.⁴

What is particularly noteworthy about Hoover’s visit with Hitler is that it took place on the very day that Hitler got word that the Austrian chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, planned to checkmate Hitler in the political game of chess between German and Austria by proposing a plebiscite to the Austrian people, asking them whether they supported the idea of an independent and Christian Austria. As this chapter discusses later, a yes vote on Austrian independence would have thwarted Hitler’s plan to annex his native Austria. None of this filtered through to Hoover and his entourage. Hitler, Goering, and other German officials who were privy to what was happening in Austria put on a good show of normality at the time of the Austrian crisis.

The Austrian problem came to a head in early February 1938 when Hitler shook up his military, replacing recalcitrant commanders (Fritsch and Blomberg) with compliant ones (Keitel and Jodl); declared himself in personal command of Germany’s armed forces, and replaced the mild-mannered Konstantin von Neurath with the aggressive and unprincipled Joachim von Ribbentrop as foreign minister. The year 1938 was Hitler’s most successful year. That year witnessed one Hitlerean-inspired crisis after another: the annexation of Austria in March, the Czech crisis leading to the appeasement of Hitler in the summer and early autumn, and the horrors associated with the pogrom of German Jews in November. Austrians had strongly supported annexation with Germany in 1919, but the Allied powers decided to set aside their advocacy for democratic principles, because annexation of territories would strengthen rather than weaken postwar Germany. Hitler’s opening paragraphs in Mein Kampf made reference to his Austrian origins and his sincere conviction that “common blood belongs in a common Reich.”⁵ As in the cases of the Rhineland and the Saar, Hitler appealed to Wilsonian idealism as his ostensible modus operandi, arguing that he strongly believed in national self-determination for those Germans who had been separated from their fatherland by the Versailles treaty and were living as alien residents—marginalized, discriminated against, and disenfranchised—in Poland (Danzig and the Corridor), Czechoslovakia (the Sudetenland), France (the demilitarized Rhineland, the Saar, Alsace-Lorraine), Belgium (Moresnet, Eupen, Malmédy), and Denmark (northern sections of Schleswig). Hitler had the majority of German people behind him in demanding the return of these lost territories. It was particularly galling to the Germans, who were still filled with a powerful sense of mission and national destiny, that some of their eastern territories had been “stolen” by inferior people.⁶

The Saar and the Rhineland had already been reincorporated into the Reich, the former by popular plebiscite as promised at Versailles, and the latter by a bold and uncontested military operation in March 1936. In February 1938 Hitler had a personal meeting with the Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg at the Obersalzberg, and he berated the Austrian leader for resisting the Nazification of his country and its eventual incorporation into the Reich. Hitler demanded a series of concessions from Schuschnigg that amounted to an ultimatum.⁷ The Austrian government was to lift the ban on the Nazi Party, release all pro-Nazi agitators, and appoint the pro-Nazi Arthur Seyss-Inquart as minister of the interior with full authority to enforce the terms of these demands. Schuschnigg realized that if he signed the document outlining these demands he would sign away the independence of Austria. He temporized by telling the impatient dictator that, under the terms of the Austrian constitution, only the Austrian president had the legal power to ratify such an agreement. He then slipped down the mountain and headed back to Austria.

Schuschnigg realized that the day of reckoning had arrived. He remembered vividly how pro-German Austrians, supported by the Nazis, had assassinated the Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss in 1934. The reason they had not succeeded in carrying out their coup was that Mussolini, who considered Austria a buffer against a resurgent Reich, had mobilized his troops and threatened to intervene on behalf of Austria if the Nazis did not desist. That was 1934. In 1938, the diplomatic situation was different: neither Mussolini nor the Western powers were likely to lift a finger for Austria, though Hitler was not entirely sure of their reaction if he chose to move against Austria. He preferred to subvert the independence of Austria without provoking a military confrontation, hoping that harassment and intimidation would do the trick.⁸ In the end, Schuschnigg forced his hand by resorting to a desperate and fatal expedient: the plebiscite asking the Austrian people whether they favored an “independent and social Austria, a Christian and united Austria.” Hitler could not allow such a plebiscite to be held, for suppose the Austrian people voted for independence rather than German annexation? Hitler threatened Schuschnigg with military intervention if he did not call off the plebiscite. On March 9, the Austrian chancellor called off the plebiscite scheduled for March 13, 1938. The Nazis then engineered a hastily improvised coup in Austria, forcing Schuschnigg to resign. German troops marched into Austria without encountering any serious opposition. On March 14, Hitler entered Vienna, the city of his unhappy youth, in great triumph, to the Viennese shouting, “One People, One Reich, One Leader, and One Victory.”⁹ The Western powers did nothing, having resigned themselves to the inevitable. Mussolini took the whole thing “in a very friendly manner,” as the German ambassador to Italy reported. Hitler thanked him profusely, telling him that he would never forget him for his stance.¹⁰

In the United States, Roosevelt was not greatly surprised, though the rapidity of Hitler’s annexation caught his administration off-balance. Newspaper headlines and editorials claimed that Austria was “murdered” or “raped.” Such indignant reactions were generally prompted by the brutal treatment Nazi officials meted out to the Jews, especially in Vienna. American papers generalized what happened to the Austrian Jews to the whole of Austria, claiming that the country had “been made over into a hell of hate, prejudice, vicious cruelty, and sadism.”¹¹ Allied statesmen on both sides of the ocean had been caught napping. At the suggestion of the Under-Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, Roosevelt had planned an international conference to settle the potentially explosive issues in Europe. Scheduled for January 22, 1938, the conference never got beyond the planning stage outlined to Roosevelt in Welles’s memorandum, because the British, notably Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his intimate adviser Horace Wilson, did not like the plan, calling it “wooly rubbish.”¹² Chamberlain cabled Roosevelt that the American plan would hurt the British efforts to reach a settlement with Germany and Italy. The major reasons why nothing came of the joint effort by the United States and Britain to draw up a program of international conduct that would preserve the peace were the warlike attitudes of the Fascist powers and the discrepancy between rhetoric and action that characterized the divided democracies. The British subtext in the interwar period was that the United States had chosen to sit on a moral high horse, lecturing the world about international peace, disarmament, and free markets, but did so ensconced behind the safety of two oceans and a paper wall of neutrality acts. The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, was later blamed by opponents of Hitler for not following up on Roosevelt’s proposal to draw up standards of international conduct to preserve the world peace. Instead, Chamberlain and the appeasers decided to deal with Hitler on their own, without the participation of the United States. They were frustrated by American lectures on international conduct, suspecting that these lectures would not be backed up by military commitments.

Hitler also became convinced that he had nothing to fear from the Americans—at least not yet. Historians who have argued that Hitler paid no attention to the United States and ignored the dire warnings of his diplomats in Washington, notably Dieckhoff and Thomsen, miss the point concerning Hitler’s intentions and the timing he thought they required. He knew all along that behind Britain stood the United States, and he did not want to go to war with either in the first place. But should Britain enter a European war, when would the United States be able to intervene militarily? Throughout the 1930s Hitler’s America “experts,” whether foreign office personnel or self-appointed pundits, reported that the people of the United States were still facing economic hardships that made them loath to get involved in the affairs of Europe. But the old-style diplomats—Dieckhoff, Weizsäcker, and Neurath—warned that the United States was potentially a grave danger to Germany. They also agreed that it would take the United States at least two years to rearm massively before it could challenge the Reich. As previously mentioned, Hitler took a jaundiced view of the German Foreign Office, which he saw as one of the last strongholds of the old conservative elites; he called them pin-striped snobs and rarely bothered to read any of their reports, except when they were specifically earmarked by his trustworthy advisors. From time to time, Hitler made reference to specific reports he received from Washington, or from unusual sources he trusted or agreed with. The same was true of Roosevelt, who frequently bypassed regular government channels, dispatching trusted friends or business contacts to foreign capitals to sound out people and find out what was really going on. These informal observers were often no better than the “experts,” picking up irrelevant gossip, reporting rumors, or plainly misjudging people and events.

Czechoslovakia and Appeasement at Munich

With Austria in his pocket, Hitler had not only acquired more territory and 7 million more people, but had also gained direct access to the whole of southeastern Europe. From Vienna it was only a stone’s throw to Czechoslovakia and the Balkans. His next target, in fact, was the small democratic state of Czechoslovakia, where more than 3.5 million frustrated Germans, called Sudeten Germans, had been living under Czechoslovak control since 1919. Hitler’s strategy was to use the Sudeten Germans, most of whom lived in the mountainous territory between Bohemia and Silesia, as a battering ram against the fragile new Republic, just as he would later use the Slovaks to foster irreparable separatism that made the Republic ripe for German picking. Telling his military chiefs in March that he intended to smash the Czech state in the near future, he whipped up such a frenzy of war hysteria that the Western powers, headed chiefly by Great Britain, bullied the Czechs into making concessions but stopped short of creating a Sudeten state within a state. The infuriated führer was ready to strike, though some of his generals, especially Ludwig Beck, were so alarmed by the prospect of another war with the Western powers that they seriously planned to topple the dictator and try him in front of the Volksgericht (People’s Court).

This did not happen for three reasons. During the Czech crisis in the summer of 1938, Hitler took another important step to protect himself from possible opposition from the traditionalists in the German army. Ostensibly to clarify the relationship between the elite guard or “defense squad” (Schutzstaffel or SS) and the regular Wehrmacht, he authorized a top-secret decree on August 17, 1938, that made the two SS Verfügungstruppen (Reserve Troops), hitherto subject to the regular army, independent armed forces at the disposal of the führer.¹³ Also, at the time of the Czech crisis, two regiments had grown up around Hitler’s personal body guard, the Leibstandarte SS “Adolf Hitler.” The decree of August 17, 1938, essentially turned these troops into Hitler’s private army and police force, whose soldiers were told that they owed personal loyalty and “blind obedience” to the führer. During World War II these Verfügungstruppen, renamed the Waffen-SS, were the most feared soldiers of Nazi Germany.

The traditionalists in the army, some of whom would later become resisters, had good reasons to worry, because their control was slipping as the army became increasingly Nazified. At the time of the Czech crisis, they still might have been able to take steps to remove Hitler, but their means of control were being steadily eroded by the wily führer, who never trusted them, and by the weaknesses of the Allies. Whether the SS, including its armed regiments, the police (Gestapo, Kripo, Security Service or SD), and the brown-shirted storm troopers, could have prevented an army coup in 1938 is debatable, for that would have required a concerted and unified opposition. Only a small group of vocal resisters around Colonel General Ludwig Beck and General Erwin von Witzleben, however, were willing to take active steps in the summer of 1938. The rest were fence-sitters. All of them knew that opposition to the Nazi regime would have to be conducted against the will of the German people. Hitler was immensely popular, a second major reason why the military opposition that briefly gathered in the summer of 1938 never got off the ground.

A third and most decisive reason why Hitler was not stopped in 1938 was that the Western powers blinked and agreed to appease Hitler. The Western betrayal of Czechoslovakia is a sordid and tragic story, which justifies W. H. Auden’s characterization of the 1930s as a “low and dishonest decade.” The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, visiting the dictator in his lair at Berchtesgaden on September 15, was so impressed by Herr Hitler’s seriousness over the Sudetenland that he made up his mind to pressure the Czechs to give it up. After bringing the Czechs into line, Chamberlain met Hitler again, this time at Bad Godesberg on the Rhine. Hitler told the stunned prime minister that their earlier agreement was no longer of any use because of Czech provocations. Hitler now demanded an immediate Czech withdrawal from the Sudetenland or he would send in his army to expel them. By October 1, he warned Chamberlain, he would occupy the Sudetenland. Chamberlain flew back to London, horrified by the prospect of war, and in his radio address to the British people he called on them to keep calm and work for the defense of their country. There were no Churchill-like exhortations to stand up to Hitler; instead, Chamberlain wondered aloud whether it was fair for a small nation—the reference was obviously to Czechoslovakia—to involve the whole British Empire in a war simply on its account. He answered, “If we are to fight it must be on larger issues than that.”¹⁴ The prime minister was hoping for a last-minute miracle that would avert war. This came in the form of a conciliatory message from Hitler, who gave assurances that he did not have designs on all of Czechoslovakia. He hoped that Chamberlain would continue to pursue his negotiations and bring the government in Prague to see reason at the very last hour. Hitler knew his man. Chamberlain then appealed to Mussolini for help in brokering a settlement. Il Duce was only too willing to oblige, partly because Italy was unprepared for war and partly because he did not think that Czechoslovakia was worth another world war.

What came next was the notorious Four-Power Munich Conference (September 28–29) between Germany, Italy, Britain, and France that made appeasement a household word.¹⁵ For Hitler, Munich was another personal triumph and a validation of his risk-taking, aggressive foreign policy. Although Hitler received the Sudetenland, he was dissatisfied because, as he later said, he should have pushed the appeasers into making even greater concessions. German troops marched into the designated areas, annexing sixteen thousand square miles of Czech territory, including its richest industrial sites and superb fortifications. President Benes resigned in favor of Dr. Emil Hacha, a more compliant figure who further appeased the Nazis by renouncing the Czech alliance with Russia and surrendering the Teschen district to Poland and the Carpathian Ukraine to Hungary. The end of Czechoslovakia was in sight. Chamberlain and his appeasers may have breathed a sigh of relief, proclaiming peace in our time, but Hitler had clearly triumphed on all fronts: seizing the Sudetenland, excluding Russia from the European alliance system, isolating Poland, and diffusing the gathering resistance against him within the German High Command. General Jodl pointedly declared that the genius of the führer had once more triumphed, which, he said, ought to convert the “incredulous, the weak, and the doubters.”¹⁶ But Churchill described the Munich agreement as an act of abject surrender, “a disaster of the first magnitude” that had befallen Great Britain and France. He compared Hitler’s method of negotiating to a series of extortions. At Berchtesgaden, Godesberg, and Munich, he said, “one pound was demanded at the pistol’s point. When it was given two pounds were demanded at the pistol’s point. Finally the dictator consented to take one pound, seventeen shillings and sixpence and promises of good will for the future.” He added prophetically that “you will find that in a period of time which may be measured by years, but may be measured only in months, Czechoslovakia will be engulfed in the Nazi regime.”¹⁷

Throughout this first Czech crisis, Roosevelt’s administration stood on the sidelines and watched events unfold without knowing what to do about it. On September 26, Roosevelt had sent a brief message to Hitler, Benes, and the prime ministers of Great Britain and France, but his note did not contain an offer of mediation. With an eye to the isolationists, he chose not to take sides in the dispute. This was good news to Hitler, who had not ignored Roosevelt’s movements; in fact, he decided to answer the president’s telegram and its “lofty intentions” about finding peaceful solutions for the future good of humanity. He reminded the president that Germany had laid down its arms in 1918 in hopes that peace would be conducted according to Woodrow Wilson’s ideals. In creating the new state of Czechoslovakia, Hitler pointed out, the peacemakers willfully ignored the rights of the Sudeten Germans, making a mockery of Wilson’s principles of national self-determination. Furthermore, he accused Prague of making every effort to violate the basic rights of the Sudeten Germans. Hitler claimed that 214,000 persecuted Sudeten Germans had fled across the border into Germany. If the president objectively reviewed the history of the Sudeten Germans, he would realize that the German government had been more than patient, and willing to find a peaceful solution to a problem that Germany did not create. The fault, he said, rested with Czechoslovakia rather than Germany.¹⁸ Roosevelt sent a second appeal to Hitler on September 28, but it was not answered. The fact is that the Americans were indecisive and inactive; the spirit of appeasement was as strong on their part as it was among the English and the French. It cannot be overemphasized that they acquiesced in appeasement over the heads of the Czechs, who were not even invited to Munich—an egregious betrayal of the fragile democratic Republic. But then neither Chamberlain nor Édouard Daladier wanted to fight another world war, and certainly not over a territorially flawed state. Roosevelt’s diplomats basically felt the same way. Ambassador Wilson, who had replaced Dodd in Berlin, sympathized with the Sudeten Germans and hoped that the Czechs would make concessions rather than jeopardize peace. Ambassador Joseph Kennedy was much more vocal and pro-German, favoring appeasement at almost any price, confessing, “I can’t for the life of me understand why anybody would want to go to war to save the Czechs.”¹⁹ Roosevelt’s ambassador to Prague, Wilbur J. Carr, had just assumed his new post, had never served abroad, and knew next to nothing about the country he was sent to.

Since there was no official or even unofficial U.S. response to appeasement, some historians have concluded that Roosevelt was on the side of the appeasers in the fall of 1938. This is misleading. The president did send a two-word telegram to Chamberlain after he learned that the British prime minister was going to attend the Munich conference: it said, “Good Man.”²⁰ Trying to prevent war was hardly appeasement, but giving Hitler everything he wanted was. It was Chamberlain, not Roosevelt, who appeased Hitler without calling his bluff. Roosevelt had a sinking feeling that the Munich settlement had not really settled anything and that peace through fear was unlikely to endure.²¹ If he knew that, why did he remain on the sidelines, limiting himself to sending appeals to the dictator? The president’s small-stick approach to international relations was prompted by several causes, such as isolationism, fear of another devastating world war, the president’s banking on the British and the French as his first line of defense, domestic blows to the New Deal, and so forth. Some historians have pointed to a kind of “What’s the use” attitude on the part of the president in 1938—for it should be remembered that Roosevelt saw himself as a lame duck, wondering what to do after his retirement from the presidency.²² At the time of the conference at Munich, Roosevelt was still in this indecisive mood, letting things drift until new outrages by Hitler and the Japanese later roused him to renewed efforts, sending ineffective appeals abroad and encouraging more effective military preparedness at home. Like Chamberlain and Daladier, he resigned himself to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia.

Abandoned and betrayed, the Czechs had little choice but to let go of the Sudetenland. During this first Czech crisis, Hitler gave solemn promises that this would be the last territorial demand he would make; he even swore to God that he would fulfill this promise! He also went on record that he only wanted Germans and not Czechs, giving the false impression that he would not grab the rest of Czechoslovakia.²³ But since it had all been so easy at Munich, with the British and the French “acting like little worms” rather than real men of action, his intention to dismember the whole of Czechoslovakia was greatly strengthened. It was just a matter of timing, and of neutralizing the democracies—Britain, France, and, more remotely, the United States.

Kristallnacht

On November 7, 1938, a secretary in the German embassy in Paris, Ernst vom Rath, was fatally shot by a seventeen-year-old Polish refugee named Herschel Grynszpan, acting in response to the mistreatment of his family and seventeen thousand others by the Nazi government. In March 1938, Poland had passed a law specifying that Polish nationals who had resided outside Poland for a period of five years would be stripped of their citizenship. The law was specifically aimed at about fifty thousand Polish Jews who had been residing in Germany, and whom the Polish government did not want to return to Poland. Grynszpan’s parents, who had emigrated from Poland and had lived in Hanover since 1914, automatically became stateless. The German government regarded the Polish law as a provocation designed to dump their Jews permanently in Germany. In response, the Gestapo rounded up some seventeen thousand Polish Jews and transported them to the Polish border, but since the Polish authorities refused to accept them, they were herded into camps where they lived under deplorable conditions. Young Grynszpan wanted to send a message of protest through his desperate deed.

The Nazis were quick to retaliate. On November 9, the day the Nazi leadership celebrated the anniversary of the 1923 beer hall Putsch (coup) in Munich, Ernst vom Rath died in Paris. News of his death was conveyed to Hitler while he was eating dinner with his “old fighters” (alte Kämpfer) in the Old Town Hall in Munich. The evidence indicates that Hitler authorized a proposal by Goebbels to set in motion “spontaneous demonstrations” against the Jews throughout Germany, slyly suggesting that the storm troopers “should be allowed to have a fling.”²⁴ Hitler then playacted his typical script of fading into the background to immunize himself in case the pogrom should backfire. The result was an orchestrated nationwide pogrom later referred to as Kristallnacht (Crystal Night), after the glass shards from the shattered windows of Jewish businesses that littered the streets of Germany. The actions of party functionaries, storm troopers, and incited mobs produced widespread devastation of property and many injuries and deaths. It is estimated that 267 synagogues were burned to the ground and their contents looted or defiled. More than 7,500 businesses were vandalized, and 91 Jews were killed, while others in despair committed suicide.²⁵ These crimes were perpetrated openly and blatantly because they were sponsored by the government. The police were helpless because orders had been given that the führer did not want them to interfere except when German lives and property were directly involved—and he did not regard German Jews as Germans.

The American reaction to Kristallnacht was one of outrage. The German ambassador in Washington, Hans Dieckhoff, cabled Berlin and said that the public in America was incensed by the violence in Germany. Close to one thousand editorials condemning the pogrom were published in newspapers all over the United States. The American Legion and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) denounced the violence in Germany. Dorothy Thompson, the first American reporter expelled from Germany for her critical articles on the Nazi regime, made an emotional plea on behalf of Herschel Grynszpan on a nationwide CBS radio program, asking, “Who is on trial in this case?” She answered, “I say we are all on trial. I say the men in Munich are on trial, who signed a pact without one word of protection for helpless minorities…. The Nazi government has announced that if any Jews anywhere in the world protest at anything that is happening further oppressive measures will be taken. They are holding every Jew in Germany as a hostage.”²⁶ Roosevelt told the press that “I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth-century civilization.”²⁷ He then recalled Ambassador Hugh Wilson from Berlin, a significant diplomatic protest that let the Nazis know that the United States condemned such anti-Jewish violence. Wilson was replaced by a chargé d’affaires, Alexander Kirk. Though diplomatic relations were not discontinued, Roosevelt showed his displeasure with Nazi mistreatments of Jews by downgrading the Berlin position to the chargé level.²⁸ The Germans retaliated by recalling ambassador Dieckhoff, and it looked as though diplomatic relations between the United States and Germany might be broken altogether. This did not happen, but the two sides were now steadily sliding down the slippery slope to open conflict.