When Woodrow Wilson, a Progressive, succeeded in getting his declaration of war from Congress in April 1917, he made it clear that he wanted to make the world safe from the autocratic rulers of the German Empire. His assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin Roosevelt, agreed with this wartime image of a brutal militaristic Germany ruled by Prussian Junkers. Serving in Wilson’s government, Roosevelt strengthened this image of a split Germany; he believed that the war was a moral clash between diametrically opposed ideologies and cultural assumptions—Prussian militarism versus democratic freedom. World War I, in his estimation, was a necessary crusade against German aggression, but the Germans had not learned their lesson. On his last visit to Germany in 1919, still in his capacity as assistant secretary of the navy, he was surprised to learn that the Germans did not think that they had really been defeated. On an inspection tour near Koblenz, then under American occupation, he saw the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein, which overlooked the Rhine. He expected to see the Stars and Stripes fluttering from the castle and asked why the American flag was not there. The answer from the American commanding officer was that flying the American flag would upset the German people. Roosevelt was angry, and after returning to Paris he interceded with General Pershing and managed to reverse the matter.72 Subsequent developments in Germany under Hitler convinced him that the Germans should have been made to recognize that they had lost the war. If they had, World War II might have been avoided.
Adolf Hitler was an extreme believer in the idea that the German army had been stabbed in the back by internal subversives—pacifists, social democrats, Communists, and Jews. For Hitler, the war had never really ended. The humiliating peace treaty had been imposed on his country by trickery and deceit. Roosevelt, conversely, followed popular opinion in America at the time of the armistice in November 1918 and demanded that Germany be forced to surrender unconditionally. He backed the peace treaty and expected the United States to play a leading role in the League of Nations. This did not happen. But Roosevelt never lost his belief in internationalism, viewing America’s withdrawal into isolation as a temporary waning of the crusading spirit. However, he did appear to have taken Wilson’s failure to heart: if he ever assumed national leadership, he would avoid Wilson’s mistake.73 The Germans, in his view, had not learned their lesson, and the rise of Hitler was a result of this. Yet, as a politician, he had to respect the prevailing mood of isolationists and appeasers, knowing full well that Hitler would take advantage of them.
Roosevelt was right about Hitler; he was also right about the German obsession with continental domination. He disliked the Germans personally, finding them, on average, arrogant, annoyingly militaristic, narrow-minded, and authoritarian. He acknowledged their virtues of hard work, managerial talent, and high cultural achievements. These qualities actually worried him in the late 1930s, because he was not sure that he could mold the great majority of Americans in resisting a wholly militarized people like the Germans or the Japanese. How Roosevelt became increasingly aware of Hitler’s intentions, and how Hitler responded to the American challenge to his long-range plans, is the subject of the following chapters.
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