to some of Hitler’s speeches during the 1930s. Similarly, Hitler knew that Roosevelt was an extremely popular leader who represented a powerful industrial country whose interests were quite different from those of his own.
Since Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler came to power in the same year and the same month (January 1933) and died twelve years later, again in the same month (April 1945), it is important to understand what the American president knew about Germany and how this might have affected his decisions during his tenure of office. Unlike Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt was a patrician from a well-known and wealthy New York family. He presided over a democratic and pluralistic America, while the plebeian Adolf Hitler imposed a one-man dictatorship on the German people. Roosevelt revitalized a sagging democratic system by offering the American people a “New Deal,” which turned out to be a pragmatic approach to social democracy, while Hitler dismantled the democratic Weimar constitution in favor of a new, racial empire (Reich) that would last “a thousand years.” Roosevelt won and Hitler lost. There are several paradoxical twists and turns in this story. Democracy survived in America because Roosevelt was an uncommon man who came from the ranks of one of its older patrician families, a man who was completely secure and comfortable with his pedigree and harbored little resentment against the rivals he competed with on his way to the highest office in the land. By temperament cheerful and optimistic, he overcame the handicap of crippling polio on the very threshold of a promising political career. Despite being paralyzed from the waist down and unable to walk for the rest of his life, confined to a wheelchair or carried about like a Raggedy Andy, he became a better man: more sensitive, caring, and empathetic. Roosevelt had always been a good man, a bit arrogant and supercilious perhaps, a Groton and Harvard man who carved out a place for himself among America’s elite. But he had always possessed a good heart. Being a cripple did not deform his character; it strengthened it.
In a democratic age, both Hitler and Roosevelt skillfully connected with the feelings of ordinary people. Franklin Roosevelt was one of the great pioneers in cultivating popular support, a skill that came from his outgoing and charming temperament as well as from his role models, notably Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt (his cousin five times removed), and Woodrow Wilson. It was, in fact, from Teddy Roosevelt, who came from the Oyster Bay branch of the family, that he derived real practical insight into the craft of gaining and maintaining popular support. Theodore also encouraged his interest in history, with emphasis on the dramatic and heroic. There was no doubt in the minds of the Roosevelts that they were tribunes of the people, advancing the progress of democracy at home and abroad. Both saw the United States as the lever that was destined to move the world, for it was in America that civilization would reach its highest point. Their role was to serve as agents of democratic change, using the full range of their skills and social position to bring it about.
Adolf Hitler also assiduously cultivated the common touch. He, too, saw himself as an ordinary man who had been discovered miraculously by millions of Germans looking for a new kaiser. Hitler characterized his dictatorship as a German expression of the democratic spirit. The centerpiece of this claim was the Nazi practice of paying homage to the Volk (the people). The word Volk in German evokes all sorts of mystical connotations. Borrowing the meaning of the term from the romantics, who had made a cult of the Volk, the Nazis took it to mean the unique racial essence of Germandom (Deutschtum), which distinguished it from all other ethnic groups in the world. Each Volk, they believed, had acquired a unique character as a result of its relationship to its native soil and climate and its shared historical experiences. The unique worship of the Volk and what it symbolized was considered by these völkisch superpatriots as a form of religion that commanded Germans “to love the fatherland more passionately than laws and princes, fathers and mothers, wives and children.”59 A person must shed his individuality and give himself heart and soul to the Volk. Such zealous nationalism had deep roots in German romanticism and in late nineteenth-century racial doctrines, undergirding the fragile national fabric in the imperial period (1870–1918).
This German cult of the people was quite different from the American cult of the people, for it focused on the racial and ethnic characteristics of the German people, rather than on the equal rights enjoyed by the plurality of people who made up the United States. It was the difference between neoromantic nationalism, which celebrated ethnic, racial, and cultural qualities allegedly inhering in specific national groups—Germans, French, Italians, English—and the democratic rights of citizens of different ethnic groups who happened to live in a multiethnic society. In short, it was a clash between the universalist position of the Enlightenment, embodied in the principles of 1776 and 1789—the American and French revolutions, respectively—and the neoromantic appeal to some kind of primeval ethnicity or racial essence, which ranked tribalism higher than universal human rights. This is why the Nazis announced, appropriately on July 14, 1933 (Bastille Day), that the false democratic principles of 1789 had been suspended. Rights were seen to be rooted in each Volk, not in the laws of nature, nature’s god, or rationality.
What Hitler wanted was a populist state (völkischer Staat), to be based, of course, on coercion and terror, but also, and just as importantly, on popular support. Germans were to be forced into compliance with Nazi beliefs and institutions, by terror if necessary, but they were given enough freedom so that many of them supported the regime. Dictatorship was popular. People believed that they were free to do most of the things they had been doing before the Nazi takeover. Many historians have wrongly depicted Nazi Germany as an oppressive prison camp chock-full of sullen and unhappy victims. Looking at the Hitler regime from the outside and with full knowledge of its legacy, it is hard to believe that ordinary Germans who toed the party line—as did most Germans—would give their heart and soul to such a system.
The Nazi regime rested primarily on Adolf Hitler’s popularity, which in turn was based on his charisma and his superb skills in using the new technology of mass persuasion. Robert Gellately has correctly labeled Nazi Germany as a modern mass media society that was in the vanguard of modernity.60 Just because it did not replicate the modernist tendencies of the Western democracies, it was not, as some historians have claimed, a “reactionary modernist” society. Nazi officials were extraordinarily vigilant in monitoring the regime’s popularity, sending out thousands of agents to keep a careful watch on just about every popular expression. The reports we have from such surveillance activities clearly indicate that the regime, and particularly Adolf Hitler, was never in any serious danger of being overthrown by popular uprising. Franklin Roosevelt had always hoped that the German people would stage a popular revolution against the Nazi regime; he thought that if the German people really knew the facts they would not support such a cruel establishment.
How good was the president’s knowledge of Germany? In general terms, it can be said that Roosevelt was better informed about Germany than Hitler was about the United States. Roosevelt had spent six summers (1891–96) in Bad Nauheim, Germany, where his father, who had a heart condition, took his mineral bath cure and entrusted himself to the doctors of the local cardiac clinic. The Roosevelts always stayed at the hotel Villa Britannia, which catered to well-to-do Anglo-Americans. In 1891 Franklin, then nine years of age, began attending the small German elementary school (Volkschule) at Bad Nauheim, where his knowledge of German, which he had already been taught by his private German governess, improved greatly. He got along well with his schoolmates, noting in his diary, “I go to the public school with a lot of mickies … and we have German reading, German dictation, the history of Siegfried, and arithmetic … and I like it very much.”61 His German schoolmaster later remembered the young American boy very well, for he wore a blue sailor’s suit and quickly impressed him as “an unusually bright young fellow. He had such an engaging manner, and he was always so polite that he soon was one of the most popular children in the school.”62
Although Franklin enjoyed going to school in Germany during the summer months of 1891–96, he was often rankled by the superior air of German nationalism. On one occasion Franklin caricatured the German kaiser by drawing mustaches on top of his paper. His German teacher punished him by having him write the sentence “Ich muss brave sein”
