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