sensed the growing regimentation of German life under the Kaiser; he would later often comment on it. The habit of discipline and obedience, which was second nature to many Germans, seemed insufferable to liberally minded Americans. Germany had too many petty rules and arrogant officials; its people were annoyingly provincial and ethnocentric. What made the Roosevelts especially prickly were officious Germans in uniform who overstepped their authority. Even among the children there was much talk about German superiority over all other nationalities. Americans were often described as a barbarian people who cared only about money.
One of Franklin Roosevelt’s secretaries, Grace Tully, later wrote that the President’s view of Germany was “bound up in his mind with his own trips to Germany,”64 a judgment that is confirmed by the fact that when he talked about Germany or the Germans he would frequently draw upon his personal, prewar visits to Germany. He took swimming lessons near Bad Nauheim and traveled extensively. In the summer of 1896 he went on a bicycle tour with his tutor, and when they got themselves in trouble with the law—for picking cherries from trees, taking their bicycles into railroad stations, and entering Strassburg, a fortified city, at nightfall on their bicycles—young Roosevelt spoke enough German to talk himself out of jail. He did have to pay a five-mark fine for running over a goose, however.65 That summer he bicycled from Bad Nauheim to Baden-Baden, Strassburg, Frankfurt, and Wiesbaden. Upon his return, his parents took him to Bayreuth, where he listened raptly to four Wagnerian operas—Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung. His mother said that he was “most attentive and rapt during the long acts and always sorry to leave, never for a moment bored or tired.”66 The Wagner cult was at its greatest height at the time. Both Roosevelt and Hitler were introduced to it at the age of fourteen.67
Roosevelt’s later reminiscences of Germany shifted focus with the times. In 1939 he claimed that he was neutral, not really pro-British or pro-French. He said at the time that he did not know Great Britain and France as a boy but he did know Germany. If anything, he added, “I looked upon the Germany that I knew with far more friendliness than I did on Great Britain or France.”68 After returning from Yalta in February 1944, he remarked that he had witnessed the rapid militarization of Germany decades before, giving the impression that even in the pre–World War I era he had recognized that Germany would be the future rival of the United States.69 What he took away from his personal experience, and later his studies at Harvard, was the recognition that Germany was the most advanced industrial and technological society on the Continent. Writing in the Harvard Crimson in 1903 and 1904, he spoke with great admiration of German culture and technical efficiency.70 There was one major blind spot in his thinking: the misconception that conservative and reactionary Prussian Junkers ruled Germany. He still believed this during the 1930s. Being a liberal Progressive, he was especially influenced as a student by the Harvard historian Silas McVane, who taught English and European history in the liberal Progressive mold. The modern age, according to this view, represented the triumph of liberal democratic ideals and institutions, with the United States leading by example. Nondemocratic societies were seen to be on the losing side of history. Germany was no exception. Already it possessed a strong liberal and democratic element in progressive labor and its advanced liberal intellectuals. These liberal forces, it was hoped, would eventually batter down the reactionary Prussian wall propped up by militarists and big industrialists. Professor McVane taught his students a model of a split Germany, “drawn in two opposite directions by two conflicting tendencies. The one is monarchical, bureaucratic, and militaristic, springing from the Prussian government … the other tendency is democratic, springing from the new populations of the great cities and manufacturing districts, but now beginning to extend to the rural sections and to affect even the Conservatives.”71
When Woodrow Wilson, a Progressive, succeeded in getting his declaration of war from Congress in April 1917, he made it clear that he wanted to make the world safe from the autocratic rulers of the German Empire. His assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin Roosevelt, agreed with this wartime image of a brutal militaristic Germany ruled by Prussian Junkers. Serving in Wilson’s government, Roosevelt strengthened this image of a split Germany; he believed that the war was a moral clash between diametrically opposed ideologies and cultural assumptions—Prussian militarism versus democratic freedom. World War I, in his estimation, was a necessary crusade against German aggression, but the Germans had not learned their lesson. On his last visit to Germany in 1919, still in his capacity as assistant secretary of the navy, he was surprised to learn that the Germans did not think that they had really been defeated. On an inspection tour near Koblenz, then under American occupation, he saw the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein, which overlooked the Rhine. He expected to see the Stars and Stripes fluttering from the castle and asked why the American flag was not there. The answer from the American commanding officer was that flying the American flag would upset the German people. Roosevelt was angry, and after returning to Paris he interceded with General Pershing and managed to reverse the matter.72 Subsequent developments in Germany under Hitler convinced him that the Germans should have been made to recognize that they had lost the war. If they had, World War II might have been avoided.
Adolf Hitler was an extreme believer in the idea that the German army had been stabbed in the back by internal subversives—pacifists, social democrats, Communists, and Jews. For Hitler, the war had never really ended. The humiliating peace treaty had been imposed on his country by trickery and deceit. Roosevelt, conversely, followed popular opinion in America at the time of the armistice in November 1918 and demanded that Germany be forced to surrender unconditionally. He backed the peace treaty and expected the United States to play a leading role in the League of Nations. This did not happen. But Roosevelt never lost his belief in internationalism, viewing America’s withdrawal into isolation as a temporary waning of the crusading spirit. However, he did appear to have taken Wilson’s failure to heart: if he ever assumed national leadership, he would avoid Wilson’s mistake.73 The Germans, in his view, had not learned their lesson, and the rise of Hitler was a result of this. Yet, as a politician, he had to respect the prevailing mood of isolationists and appeasers, knowing full well that Hitler would take advantage of them.
Roosevelt was right about Hitler; he was also right about the German obsession with continental domination. He disliked the Germans personally, finding them, on average, arrogant, annoyingly militaristic, narrow-minded, and authoritarian. He acknowledged their virtues of hard work, managerial talent, and high cultural achievements. These qualities actually worried him in the late 1930s, because he was not sure that he could mold the great majority of Americans in resisting a wholly militarized people like the Germans or the Japanese. How Roosevelt became increasingly aware of Hitler’s intentions, and how Hitler responded to the American challenge to his long-range plans, is the subject of the following chapters.
CHAPTER 2
Hitler Takes Risks and America Legislates Itself into Neutrality: 1933—1937
The Third Reich and the New Deal, 1933–1934
Looking back on the first five years of the Nazi regime, Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, gave a direct and blunt answer to the often asked question, “Why did the Western powers let Hitler do what he wanted for so long?” On April 5, 1940, he told representatives of the German press,
Up to now we have succeeded in leaving the enemy in the dark concerning Germany’s real goals, just as before 1932 our domestic foes never saw where we were going or that our oath of legalism was just a trick. We wanted to come to power legally, but we did not want to use power legally…. They could have suppressed us. They could have arrested a couple of us in 1925 and that would have been that, the end. No, they let us through the danger zone. That’s exactly how it was in foreign policy too…. In 1933 a French premier ought to have said (and if I had been the French premier I would have said it): “The new Reich Chancellor is the man who wrote Mein Kampf, which says this and that. This man cannot be tolerated in our vicinity. Either he disappears or we march!” But
