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