In 1935 Ross visited Washington and took a tour of the White House, accompanied by his well-known American guide. Suddenly, he tells us, he found himself, along with a throng of journalists, in the Oval Office, standing right in front of the president’s massive desk.32 A press conference was underway. Ross was astonished at how friendly and informal it was. The president treated the occasion like a brotherly meeting between friendly advisers, joking and fielding questions. As the president answered all sorts of questions, Ross considered this remarkable and smiling man—the fact, for example, that he was a cripple but that no one paid any attention to that fact. The famous smile, Ross seemed to think, had something inscrutable about it, a bit like a Confucian sage. It was more of a mask, concealing a painful awareness that there is much suffering in the world and that the best way of addressing this fact of life was to soldier on and keep on smiling. Ross thought that FDR was a pragmatist, whose New Deal was not a revolution but a series of emergency measures that did not undermine capitalism but propped it up for the foreseeable future. As to Roosevelt’s foreign policy, Ross became convinced that in the name of freedom and American national self-interest, America would eventually intervene in Europe and discard its neutrality. He noticed an increasingly hostile anti-German mood, which he attributed to the reaction of the Jewish-controlled press to events in Germany.
Hitler was surely impressed when Ross confirmed his own prejudices about Jewish money controlling American public opinion. Writing in 1942, Ross toed the party line when he condemned the uninhibited anti-German hysteria in America as the machination of a few Jewish plutocrats.33 Roosevelt now became a danger to world peace, a schemer who would, under the cover of protecting the Western Hemisphere, extend American power and influence around the world. The Hyde Park tribune of the people had turned into the “Sun King,” an accusation, of course, that many anti-Roosevelt Republicans had been making for years.34
Ross warned that the United States would enter the war in order to protect and continue dominating the Western Hemisphere, while at the same time reserving the right to be the world’s moral referee. He claimed that another reason Roosevelt would plunge into war was to solve the economic depression that his New Deal policies had failed to address successfully. By the time Ross’s last book, The Western Hemisphere, appeared in print, Germany was at war with America.
As previously mentioned, Hitler did not like diplomats. Most of them lived well and rarely got out to talk to ordinary people. They moved in closed circles, and the less they knew, the more they talked or wrote stupid reports. Hitler made a few exceptions to his rule that diplomats were of little use. One was his own military attaché in Washington, Lieutenant General Friedrich von Bötticher.35 He believed that Bötticher was giving him accurate information on what Washington was planning; he also felt that his attaché really understood the American mentality, so he read his reports with great interest. Bötticher was able to look behind the scenes and provide sound judgments about Americans and their views.36
Between 1933 and 1941, Bötticher was Germany’s only military attaché in the United States.37 A military attaché was a quaint custom of a bygone age, when diplomatic embassies housed military officers who had specific orders from their governments to “observe, judge, and report on foreign military events and economy, organizations, developments, personalities, material, perhaps even military thought as well.”38 The attaché was to be the soul of discretion and maintain a strictly objective attitude. He was expected to establish close contact with military personnel in the host country and to abstain from any espionage activity. The ideal was to promote peaceful relations with the host country. This was the instruction Bötticher received from his commander in chief, President Paul von Hindenburg, when he left Germany for the United States in March 1933. Although a general in the German army, Bötticher reported to the German ambassador to Washington, Hans Luther, and to his senior political advisor, Dr. Hans Heinrich Dieckhoff, and his later replacement, Hans Thomsen. All of these America experts were competent men who spoke English fluently and had a good understanding of U.S. history. Bötticher was an expert on the American Civil War; he had also written books on Frederick the Great and Alfred von Schlieffen.
Bötticher approached his position in Washington with the utmost seriousness because he knew that the United States had been the single most important factor in the defeat of Germany in 1918. Much nonsense has been written about Bötticher by historians who have mentioned him as a tunnel-visioned Prussian staff officer who got just about everything wrong on the United States. David Brinkley, in his book Washington Goes to War (1988), depicted Bötticher as a short, heavy, and bullnecked Prussian officer who appeared in public bedecked in ribbons and medals, wearing, of course, a monocle. This stereotype of the arrogant Prussian officer astride the world in his polished jackboots still seems compelling to those weaned on Hollywood war movies. In Bötticher’s case, the reality was otherwise. He was not a Prussian but a descendent of a cosmopolitan family of Baltic and English lineage. His mother came from the English Yorkshire seaport of Hull, while his father hailed from the Kurland (now Latvia). On both sides of the family, his ancestors came from solid commercial backgrounds. In the 1850s his mother, who was then married to a man called Hermann Anton Wippermann, immigrated to Davenport, Iowa, but she returned to Germany after a few years of disappointment and disillusion with the United States. After her first husband died, she married Walter Bötticher, a Dresden physician who had a patent of nobility, hence the aristocratic “von” in the family name. Friedrich Bötticher was born in 1881, grew up in a loving and cosmopolitan home, and learned to speak English at his mother’s knee. He received an excellent classical education and superb military training, serving with distinction on the Great General Staff during World War I. While in later years he put on some weight, he was never bullnecked, nor did he ever wear a monocle.
Upon his arrival in Washington, Bötticher tried hard to get along with the German diplomatic staff, for technically speaking he was subordinate to the ambassador and his senior staff (Dieckhoff and Thomsen). He adjusted well to the Washington social scene, and his wife and three children also adapted quickly to American life. While in Washington he became a regular fixture among high-ranking American military men in the War Department, with whom he exchanged ideas and information and made close contacts. In his efforts to gain insight into American military preparedness, Bötticher was assisted by a first-rate technical advisor, Peter Riedel, a daredevil glider pilot who held several world records. The Bötticher-Riedel partnership yielded some very fruitful insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the American military establishment. By invitation of the War Department, they inspected all sorts of plants scattered across the country and pored over U.S. government statistics and reports. Bötticher had daily contact with the highest-ranking officers of the War College and the War Department. He found the company of U.S. officers quite congenial; his U.S. counterparts were openly anti-Semitic, favored restrictive immigration laws, and supported better U.S.-German relations. General Douglas MacArthur was on friendly terms with Bötticher and allegedly told him in 1933 that he agreed with Hitler’s policy of seeking military parity with France and Britain.39
What Bötticher did not understand was that the relatively small circle of officers he met was not representative of the whole U.S. military establishment. The men he was particularly close to, notably Lieutenant Colonel Truman Smith, were anti-Roosevelt and anti-New Dealers. Some of them were also anglophobic. Bötticher thought he knew them better than he really did. All his U.S. military contacts were of no use when, after the outbreak of war, secret joint military staff meetings were held between British and American military officials to discuss methods of defeating Germany. Bötticher had no inkling that such plans were afoot. On the other hand, he never had any illusions about America’s military capacity, making it clear on numerous occasions, “I warn against overestimating the weaknesses and underestimating American efficiency and the American determination to perform.”40
In February 1939, Bötticher returned to Germany to attend the annual attaché conference, during which he was invited, along with others, for lunch with the führer. As he sat to the right of Hitler, the dictator turned to ask him about President Roosevelt’s