Hitler and America. Klaus P. Fischer

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