Hitler and America. Klaus P. Fischer

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